Trip-blogging behind cut: ( Read More... )

Links:
The Paris Hilton Memorial Fellowship: short story by Rachel Shukert.
Television, Gin, and Social Surplus: article on participatory culture. via Meta no Tame
The Ironic Urban Landscape of Death Note, or, Kira the Pop Sensation: meta in comments by the author of A Tithe to Hell.
A Tithe to Hell: loooong L/Light fanfic with the most canonically perfect beginning and ending EVER, and a gooey fanon middle.

A heartwarming story of love and weed and friendship (not in that order), now with added political commentary. XD Entertaining, but far from the standard of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. The tramp across the South has been done, inbred son locked up in the basement and all. You'd think every trip through the Alabama woods ended with the infiltration of a KKK campfire gathering from the way these movies go. I spent first movie going: OMG, I know those people! OMG, I've been to that place! OMG, unicorn! There are unicorns in this movie too, but the urge to bring out the buddy comedy checklist was overwhelming.

Highlights: the Head Goon from Homeland Security, definitely. Totally over-the-top moronic swagger and a roomful of smarter people who are too afraid to contradict him. The sad thing is that this is not even really an exaggeration. -_-; In other places it felt like the kid gloves were on, which was a bit disappointing. Infamously, Bush a Bush impersonator puts in an appearance as a plot device regular guy who skips work to get high toward the end of the movie. There could have been a bit more indictment there. Also, the “regular guy you can share a few beers with (or in this case get high with)” image is a lie: while it’s (remotely) possible that Bush smokes, he doesn’t drink. The president is a teetotaler, he gave up alcohol when he took up religion.

In conclusion, probably a movie you want to watch high. That must be why I could smell weed the whole time…

I didn't manage to write up a post for this round, but I did manage some comments on Tari's (excellent) discussion post:
One
Two
Three

Also written for this round:
A review of The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis.

Inspired by Sabina's:

subdee.muxtape.com/

Theme is WALL OF SOUND. Who needs dynamics when there's volume! (orz)

The mix also represents a sort of alternate reality where Pete and Carl got back together not very long after their split in 2004, and the relationship quickly devolved into a codependent mess of accusations and counter-accusations.

So it's a good thing that, like, this isn't what actually happened. Right?!!

COMPLETED INDEBTED TO LLAMA_SAMA FOR MOST OF THESE SONGS: see post here. One song (”Ash Gray Sunday”) is from jokersama, and a few more I burned from CD — I'm having trouble getting into the external harddrive with most of my music on it, woe.

PS: If the music doesn't play, try opening the page in Internet Explorer.

PPS: For more on Carl&Pete and their special brand of heartwarming crazy, see this comment thread.

I plead sleep debt, your honor. (I can't stay up to watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report anymore! *sob*)

Reborn: worldserpent posted about the many many many faults of Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, and why she was entertained by it anyway. A few weeks ago lacewood made a similar, but much less forgiving post, but then went on to BECOME A FAN ANYWAY WTF. This is seriously the last time I anti-recommend anything, obviously such tactics have either none or an opposing effect -_-;.

April Fools: I liked this one at the Reborn! comm (haha, it was pages before anyone got the joke, stupid manga obviously attracts lots of stupid fans kidding, kidding, the joke was kind of niche and the community is extremely popular, so lots of people probably commented in the first rush before anyone picked up on it). There was also this one on the Loveless comm, which was AWESOME. XD

Linkblogging: supacat's post on JE. I'm not much of a fan of the source material, but I like reading the commentary. From that post, annnimeee's Nobuta wo Produce fic “Youthful Love, WHICH IS LOVE, seriously.

More fic recs!

• c_elisa, For the Kingdom of Heaven: X-men, Beast POV on a controversial mutant “cure”.
• mithrigil, Spires of Granite, Eyes of Black: Twelve Kingdoms, Rakushun on pilgrimage to Mt. Houzan.
• vanilla_klise, Mushi ex Machina: the best Modern!AU Mushishi fic ever. See also the psuedocanon fic A Wandering Song + everything the author has ever written.
• xparrot, On the Wings of Imagination and With Healing in His Wings: Stargate Atlantis & Dragonriders of Pern. I forget who recced this. Google says that this crossover is not the first, but it might be the first with Sheppard as a sarcastic bronze dragon bonded to a reluctant McKay. On a related note, afrai has been running a “give me two characters, and I will write you a story where one of them is a dragon soul-bonded to the other” challenge on her ficjournal, and the results have been very entertaining so far. XD

Work was hell today. I hate style handbooks. WHO CARES WHETHER THE PERIOD COMES BEFORE OR AFTER THE PARENTHESIS IN AN MLA-STYLE CITATION, I CERTAINLY DON'T.

This was written a looooooong time ago, for kinked. (Which is dead now I guess.) I never posted it, because 1) original fiction LOL, and 2) it's unfinished. Though 2) is sort of academic since even if I'd gotten to where I originally planned to end the piece (with the narrator looking up and noticing the pretty lights on the ceiling), there still wouldn't have been any point or plot. This was just supposed to be a writing exercise, and I could easily have finished it before deadline, only I guess I was reluctant to because I (unexpectedly) really liked the characters and I wanted to give them a real plot. ^^; But I never did, and so here we are today.

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Thus ended my (brief) foray into origfic.

An anonymous commentator pointed out that as much as Now: Zero resembles Death Note, it resembles the Death Note pilot chapter even more:

sub-divided.livejournal.com/131007.html?thread=1459903#t1459903

So the question is, does one of these translations of J.G. Ballard's work into Japanese contain the short story “Now: Zero”? Does anyone know?

EDIT: Yes.

…at least in Japan.

Irwin and I were the two best players in 4th grade Band, but the gap widened fairly quickly. XD

The credit for this goes to emblem, who found it. I'm just the person who had to immediately order it from amazon and pay the extra $2 for it to be delivered overnight.

…The package I mentioned in my last post was J.G. Ballard's The Venus Hunters, a short story collection which combines stories from 1967's The Overloaded Man with stories from 1969, 1976, and 1978. Now: Zero is the first story in the collection; it's eleven pages long. Genre-wise, it's a horror story told from the first-person perspective of that creepy guy at your office who doesn't say anything when you mistreat him, but who secretly keeps a record of every abuse (real or imagined) he's ever suffered at your hands, and who you'd be afraid was going to murder you in your sleep if you didn't know for a fact that he was a total coward and would never dare.

Yes, all that in just eleven pages. ^^; Though I might be projecting some of it. In any case, Now: Zero takes that person, and gives him an old notebook that seems entirely ordinary, except that the day after he, in a fit of sudden rage, writes down the name and fantasized death of his boss at the office, his boss dies at the time and in the manner specified in the notebook.

Wait! It gets better. You see, not only does the main character in this story possess a Death Notebook (you see what I did there? XD), he also determines (through trial-and-error: no instructions for this one, I'm afraid) that there are several conditions, or rules, under which the notebook operates. The first is that the manner of death must be feasible. For instance, he determines that whatever the “militarists” of the country say about the ever-present threat of nuclear attack, it is not feasible for every inhabitant of a disliked neighboring town to suddenly drop dead at noon.

The second rule is that only the events surrounding a death can be controlled by the notebook. He can't, for instance, change the weather, or effect the stock market. (However, it doesn't seem to occur to him that he can accomplish many more things besides death by including those things as a condition of death. If Ohba read this story (and I really think he did — you'll see why in a moment), this may have been one of the points that set him off thinking about how much more could have been done with the premise, and wouldn't it be interesting if…? But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Spoilers for Now: Zero & implied spoilers for Death Note:
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The only review of this story I found online described it as “inconsequential,” ahaha. I can sort of see why. Despite a very strong beginning, Now: Zero doesn't quite succeed as a horror story — that is, while you're reading it, you are profoundly horrified, but once you've gotten to the end…once you've reached the last line…once the moment has passed…reality once again asserts itself (STRONGLY, in this case). The horror doesn't linger, like it does in truly great horror stories. Now: Zero combines truly excellent ideas with great writing, but just misses coming together in a really effective way.

It's of such situations that fanfiction is born, as they say. XD

Background on JG Ballard: I hadn't heard of him, but he's apparently been very influential (he's cited as the forebear of cyberpunk!). emblem has been reading some of his stuff and her report is that it's weird. His stories are apparently heavily laced with a feeling of impending doom, which sometimes arrives by the end of the story. One of the websites I was reading observes that Ballard was an alcoholic and that this is reflected in his characters' relationships, which are generally “pleasant in the morning, argumentative in the afternoon, and abusive at night.”

Ballard is 77 now. Growing up, he spent two years in a Japanese interment camp in Shanghai. He wrote a novel about it, later made into an Oscar-winning film which was directed by Steven Speilberg, written by Tom Stoppard, and starred John Malcovich and Christian Bale (who debuted). *_* <-- wants to see this so bad.

EDIT: See this for a way in which this story is *not* like Death Note.
EDIT2: See this comment for similarities between the story and the Death Note pilot.
EDIT3: “Now: Zero” was published in Japanese. Recently, in fact. Apparently, the connection between it and Death Note is not unknown to Japanese fans. ^^; There go my dreams of groundbreaking investigative journalism.

MOAR LJ FAIL LINKS
seperis.livejournal.com/583653.html
community.livejournal.com/sf_drama/612153.html
msilverstar.insanejournal.com/37790.html

The third link is from worldserpent, the first is from I Forget. The second came up in a google search. In order: funny comments from users responding to the LJ “news” post, babelfish translation of the more straightforward Russian news post (warning: link is full of xenophobia and bad soviet jokes), roundup of responses by the Advisory Board.

REACTIONS TO (JUMP) MANGA
Warning: links point to recent manga chapters. The chapter number is in the URL after the series title if you want to avoid spoilers.

www.onemanga.com/Naruto/392/14/
THAT WILL NEVER STOP BEING DISTURBING NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES IT HAPPENS AHHHHH. (On the other hand, this will never stop being cool.)
www.onemanga.com/Bleach/314/
Aizen Explains it All. XD The evil plan makes a surprising amount of sense! And I'm surprisingly excited for the result:
It looks like the next major plot arc will be a battle between Aizen & co. (including fellow defectors and the Arrancar not defeated by Our Heroes) and the Captains and Co Captains who didn't come to Hueco Mundo. Of course, knowing Shounen Jump's editors, they'll probably insist on bringing Ichigo & co. back for the Final Boss Fight, but I in a strange way I hope they don't — or at least, that they don't for a long while. I want to see the fighting carried on by the secondary characters~! And not just by the other shinigami, but also by Ichigo's other friends who haven't developed supernatural abilities yet, the Papas, Yoruichi and Urahara, etc. (Don Kanonji! ♥) Kubo Tite feels the same way, I'm sure. XD It wouldn't surprise me AT ALL to learn that he was inspired to create this plot twist by boredom with the main heroes/desire to go back to drawing some of his favorite characters.
www.onemanga.com/Hunter_X_Hunter/272/
Hunter x Hunter is doing some interesting things with the passage of time which would be incredibly cool if they weren't so incredibly FRUSTRATING. XD; They'll be cool in the volume release, I guess.

OTHER
Waiting for a certain package from amazon. emblem knows what I'm talking about.