Miscellanea Exotica

So, it's about 7pm, and it just kind of randomly occurred to me that: dude, I live in Pittsburgh. We have the Carnegie Library system, which kicks all kinds of ass. They must do some great book sale for the holidays, right?

So I trundled over to the library website, and discovered that they do indeed have a big book sale for the holidays.

It was today.

It's all about timing, I tell you.

*slams head against desk*

And now, I must proceed to bake a cake. I suppose I could have done it earlier today, but that would have meant delaying my gratification with regards to my marathon Skyrim session.

I gloriously fail at time management. \o/

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan

Revan: hero, traitor, conqueror, villain, savior. A Jedi who left Coruscant to defeat Mandalorians—and returned a disciple of the dark side, bent on destroying the Republic. The Jedi Council gave Revan his life back, but the price of redemption was high. His memories have been erased. All that’s left are nightmares—and deep, abiding fear.

What exactly happened beyond the Outer Rim? Revan can’t quite remember, yet can’t entirely forget. Somehow he stumbled across a terrible secret that threatens the very existence of the Republic. With no idea what it is, or how to stop it, Revan may very well fail, for he’s never faced a more powerful and diabolic enemy. But only death can stop him from trying.

Fuck them. Revan was the Dark Lady of the Sith. She and Bastila and the (female!) Exile are out past the Outer Rim making beautiful music together. So there -- that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Also: screw George Lucas and his "there are no gay people in the GFFA;" Revan and Bastila were totally getting it on at the end of KotOR I.

Must. Play. SW:KotOR/II. These are not the droids I'm looking for....

Okay, now, that was disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. I don't think those were actually the Steelers. I've heard about the Steelers. They have an awesome defense, and a really good quarterback. I didn't see either of those. Hopefully, the real Steelers will decide to show up next week.

Did we have to be humiliated by the freakin' Ravens?

At least someone managed to pants one of the Ravens. That was the highlight of the game, as far as I was concerned.

I dropped a computer on my toe, this morning. It's not broken, but a fair amount of skin got ripped off. A lot of the skin is still attached, and it's grey. I nearly passed out and did throw up when I tried to move it. It might be a good idea, actually, to go to an emergency room for this.

I have no health insurance, and not so much as a single sick day from work. I've cleaned it, put some Neosporin on it, and wrapped it like a frickin' mummy. And now I'm going to work and hoping for the best.

...Sometimes, life really sucks.

May I just say that being a real live adult, with a real live office job sucks giant donkey dong?

Work has been keeping me busy, and I've been spending a lot more time reading actual honest-to-god books. Which would be a good thing if only I would just read the ones I've already got and wouldn't insist on going out and buying new ones.

I've noticed an odd trend, though, you see. The authors that I am currently crazy for?

Ursula LeGuin
Patrica McKillip
Elizabeth Bear
Kelly Link
Genevieve Valentine
Catherynne Valente

I have no idea if it means anything or not, but it used to be I read primarily male authors. Suddenly, I'm leaning heavily toward female authors. I will have to give this more thought.

However, if I can recommend only one thing that I've read so far this year? I'd recommend Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It's a children's book, yes; but it's the sort that a child will read and love, and when she goes back to it years and years later, she'll have an entirely different experience of the book, and quite likely an improved experience. As an adult, I love it for just what it is.

I decided to skip everything and jump straight to the finale. My reaction is short and does not even require a spoiler cut.

1. Jensen was prettier than usual.
2. Jared was hotter than a thousand burning suns.
3. Sam was the awesomest awesome that ever awesomed.
4. I still don't give a fuck about the angels.

So, yeah. Status quo, basically. My original plan was to fast-forward through every scene that didn't have Sam in it. I decided against this. Does it count as spoilery, given my utter indifference, at this point, to every character other than Sam and Dean and mostly Sam, that I wish I had just gone ahead and done that? I don't think I would have missed anything except Jensen being pretty. It is a genuine shame that he is 100% not my type.

Will go back and watch skipped episodes some other time.

Been busy lately. But I seem to recall that April is National Poetry Month, or some such thing. Figured I'd do something to mark the occasion before the month ends.

I like poetry. I like a lot of poetry. Mostly older stuff. Because, as someone -- I don't know who, but someone who clearly knows what he's talking about -- once said, you can have poetry that doesn't rhyme, but in much the same way that you can play tennis without a net: it's much easier but not nearly as fun.

My favorite poem, much like my favorite song, varies based on my mood; but the one that I've come back to repeatedly for several years now is "Five Smooth Stones," by Stella Benson. It's kind of a deeply cynical poem, and I don't really agree with most of the cynicism, but it's lovely and sad and bleakly hopeful. And it's either that one, or "The Dangerous World" by Naomi Replansky, in which someone watches their lover and is struck by the lover's mortality, or else an excerpt from Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," in which Venus curses love.

It's been pointed out to me that I tend to like sorta sad, morbid poetry. Mostly to do with death and love. But mostly not the happy kind of love. Go figure.

( Five Smooth Stones )

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I've been looking for the Supernatural anime ever since it was released. I'm very much out of the loop when it comes to finding anime downloads, though, and it's not showing up in any of my usual haunts. So I was reduced to watching a very bad raw copy on YouTube. It's been a number of years since I watched anime with any sort of regularity; still and all, I remember enough Japanese to make out the very edges of what the characters are saying. To whit:

( Some bits that were amusing, or that I understood unusually clearly )

And that's as far as I got before the terrible quality of the video and my own frustration left me very susceptible to distraction, and I ended up going and reading fleshflutter's Rule 26 instead, when I got the notification that it had been updated. Which was another exercise in frustration -- I always forget how much I hate reading WIPs.

Anyway

I love languages. I'm not especially good at any other than English, but I love poking and prodding at them. Since Japanese is one of the foreign languages I know best -- which speaks mostly to my total ignorance of other languages rather than any particular talent for Japanese -- I like being able to dissect some of the subtleties that you get in that language but that don't translate at all into English.

Like, for instance, I was a little startled to discover that both Sam and Dean, in the anime, refer to their father as "oyaji." Insofar as I've ever seen the word translated as anything other than just "Dad," it's been along the lines of "Pops," or "the Old Man." Kind of slang-y and just a bit disrespectful. I mean, on the one hand, it makes a certain amount of sense for Dean, with his overall irreverent attitude. Still, what with his absolute devotion to John, I would have given even odds (if I'd thought about it at all) of him using freaking "chichi-ue" ("honored father"). Sam, meanwhile, I can kinda understand the irreverence, given his relationship with John, but Sam tends to use a slightly more formal, more normalized mode of speech than Dean. You can actually hear this in the anime, with Dean displaying a lower-class accent, while Sam has a more standard accent. Anyway, I would have expected Sam just to use "otousan" (the very standard, normal "dad").

One wonders if either of the boys uses "oyaji" to John's face, however. I doubt it. Although, maybe Sam. Just to be rebellious.

Less surprising were the pronouns they chose for the boys. Dean, naturally, is an "ore." As if he'd be anything else, "ore" being the way a macho young man refers to himself. Sam, meanwhile, predictably, is a "boku," which is a much milder, though still informally masculine, way of referring to oneself. He's not quite uptight enough to refer to himself as "watashi," and I'd be pissed at the implication that he was if they'd gone with that. That being said, when/if the anime gets to the events of late S3, S4, I'd be very interested to see if Sam switches to "ore." Sam post-Mystery Spot, pre-Lucifer Rising seems like an "ore" kind of guy to me. Ditto for Robo!Sam. And I'd bet good money that for S5, and post resouling, he'd go back to "boku." I'd like to see that. And I'd like to see them make a big deal about the changing pronouns. A subtlety that of course would not survive the translation, but I'd sure as hell appreciate it.

It'd be like that one scene in Please Save my Earth, where eight-year-old Rin, who is, at the same time, thirty-something-year-old Shion doesn't know whether to refer to himself as "boku," like the child does, or "ore," like the adult. When he changed pronouns, it marked an extreme change in tone -- at the time, he was declaring his love for his teenage neighbor, Alice. Using "boku," what you had was a confession of innocent love from a child to an almost-adult. When he switched to "ore," it became a very adult declaration of a very adult kind of love. It killed me that there was no indication of that change in tone in either translation, the sub or the dub, because it was brilliant and creepy.

These are the toys I love to play with.

And now I am going to go distract myself from the fact that I really, really want to read more of Rule 26, but there is no more, and probably won't be for another month or two. (fleshfultter is currently signed up for Big Bang again... which does not give me high hopes for how quickly Rule 26 is going to get updated, at least until after May.) I want to know how this can end well! With Jared and Jensen living happily ever after, and Dr. Nekrotic dying a fiery, agonizing death. Except how it'd be very hard for both of those things to happen. (Or maybe Jared sticking around to act as Nekrotic's conscience, so no more planets get burned up? Except Nekrotic needs to burn for all of that.... Goddammit, I didn't mean to get so invested!!)