Sing like a pirate day
Filed Under Uncategorized
It seems like the Talk Like A Pirate crew messed up by picking a day in September. February 29 is a much better choice. I guess they were willing to sacrifice G&S coolness in favor of quantity (to keep up with the ninjas, one presumes).
Following a little bit of the money
Filed Under Politics
FundRace: Find out if your neighbors are evil! And celebrities! Some of them are evil, too!
And find out where the evil people live. Um…yeah. I like transparency, but isn’t it funny how it always looks like this and doesn’t extend to, say, our energy policy?
And no, I’m not sending money to anybody. I did in 2004, and we all know how that went. Call me superstitious.
Also, it warms my heart to know Viggo Mortensen donated money to Kucinich, who is completely unelectable (and even if he weren’t I’d have more than a few reservations). But he’s a Democrat who’s not moderate-to-right, and I therefore approve of his campaign lasting a while. (Extra points to Mark “doesn’t know how to hedge his bets” Ruffalo for sending money to Gravel, too. But, no offense to the talented and not unattractive Mr. Ruffalo, there are reasons why the LotR movies have re-watch value.)
Ghost Hound
Filed Under Anime
Ghost Hound is our current bedtime viewing. It’s started using J-horror tropes effectively; I don’t think I’ve seen that before in anime. (Which is not to say it hasn’t been done. Or even that I’m surprised not to’ve encountered it: I watch a fair bit of anime, but not that much.) While some of the tropes are the same, the techniques diverge a bit, to generally good effect. “Creepy” is difficult to capture in animation, I think, but there have been moments when Ghost Hound hits creepy.
And holds it. When watching live action horror, I’m trained to anticipate certain tricks: abrupt cuts, sudden unnatural movement within or into the frame, stuff like that. And, of course, part of the creepiness comes from the anticipation. But the same sort of tricks wouldn’t really work in anime. The scenes are unnaturally still anyway, so a lot of the “you are there” cues just aren’t present. But part of my brain is still primed for the camera to cut away. The fact that it doesn’t is doubly effective. First, the live action ghost or monster or whatever is often primarily scary because of the rapidity of the cut (plus the minor key music); flashing from one sparsely-animated scene to another sparsely-animated scene wouldn’t have the same punch. (And, well, it’s easier to dismiss an obviously drawn monster as not very scary than an expensive CG or makeup job; at least it is for me.) But more importantly, there’s no quick release of tension. In horror movies, once we see the monster it’s all downhill. (Or down the gullet, for some of the less fortunate characters.)
Because Ghost Hound doesn’t go for the jump, there’s no post-jump relief. The creepiness gradually fades, but it doesn’t end. I like that.
I tired of cranberry
Filed Under Website
Thus I decided to burn eyeballs with orange. Orange isn’t the new pink. Orange is too subversive to be the new pink, or the anti-pink. Goths “go pink” (yawn) they don’t “go orange.”
I was feeling left out in the facelift department: Whatever changes every other day, Christa just got a new home. I don’t like fixed width, and, most importantly, I was bored this afternoon. Funny how many website changes boil down to that.
|
Permalink | Trackback |
3 Comments
The obligatory post-Oscar movie post
Filed Under Movies
Didn’t watch the Oscars. Somehow survived.
Did watch Spiderwick. As a matinée, with kids in the audience, which is the best way to watch a movie for kids. (Still no competition with the Shrek experience, when an adorable little girl sitting in front of us turned to her mother and whispered: “I know Shrek’s not real. It’s a costume.” But it was fun to hear the occasional aside clarifying some plot point from the books, or narrating what happened on screen.)
The New York Times has a cool infographic of box office receipts from the past 20-plus years. It’s a fun way to waste some of your valuable web surfing time.
How’s your nationality-dar?
Filed Under Books
The other week I was reading Who Is Conrad Hirst? and I couldn’t help noticing the multiple instances of characters instantly cataloged by their nationality. I don’t think I could do that, not without more substantial cues or context.
Is it just because I’m a Stupid American™? That may be some of it, but I don’t think I can differentiate from a Texan and a Floridian at ten paces. So it’s not just cultural myopia. Or maybe it is cultural myopia, applicable to my own country as well as others’.
Admittedly, I live in the suburbs and they’re, well, the suburbs. But it’s not a completely undifferentiated population; plus, I’ve been in more cosmopolitan environments, and I don’t think I ever had the knack for pegging someone’s country of origin. Or is my sample set hopelessly skewed again? Maybe “college student” trumps all other identity cues.
What about you guys (Stupid American™ or otherwise)? Is your nationality-dar accurate? Middling? Nonexistent? Unconfirmed?
Pants
Filed Under Anime
I am unreasonably pleased that some of the girls in Gunslinger Girl wear pants. Literally, not just metaphorically. There’s nothing wrong with skirts, but all skirts, all the time, for all female characters, always looks off.
|
Permalink | Trackback |
5 Comments
Lobster sex
Filed Under Lobsters
So, you’ve heard the one about the woman who tortured a lobster she was using as a sex toy, unfortunately prompting it to defecate mud shrimp eggs which hatched and made like Aliens, except with sea monkeys instead of Giger? Well, if not, now you have.
Needless to say, Snopes heard the tale, and offers a rather perfunctory debunking. Intrepid reporter Dan Savage eviscerates the story more thoroughly.
Oddly, neither of them mentions one of the least believable details: the idea that an emergency responder would vomit at the sight of mud shrimp.
“Lobsters” by Charles Stross
The first chapter of Charles Stross’s Accelerando originally appeared in Asimov’s as a story titled “Lobsters.” It does, indeed, involve lobsters.
The novel is available as a free e-book, distributed under a Creative Commons license, as well as in not-free electronic and dead tree formats.
Accelerando excerpt:
Moche lobster
Filed Under Lobsters
The Moche people of Peru inhabited coastal valleys. They were primarily farmers, cleverly diverted rivers to irrigate their crops. Perhaps due to the proximity and importance of water, their deity (a charming fellow known as the Decapitator) was sometimes depicted as a sea monster.
Not having developed television or a written language, the Moche had a lot of time on their hands. Based upon surviving pottery, they were pioneers of masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, and anal sex, in between more ritualized sessions of vaginal sex for purposes of procreation. Animals were also depicted in art; the lobster sculpture below dates to about 200 CE.
Human sacrifices may have appeased the Decapitator and encouraged rainfall…at least, until the sixth century. Thirty years of floods, followed by thirty years of drought, did not bring about the collapse of Moche civilization, but it did incite social unrest from which the Moche could not recover.
The lobster sculpture (which I can’t help thinking might, depending on scale, double as a sex toy) currently lives in Lima’s Larco Museum. The museum boasts an impressive collection of pre-Columbian art. It was also among the first museums to include its entire collection in an electronic catalog.