Meddle not in the affairs of dragons*

First go at Ony10, MT runs in and the fearless holy pally follows close behind, ready to holy shock any damage spikes till she can stop near the wall and properly start healing. Afraid to run too close to the whelps' cave, she runs too close to Ony, gets one-shotted by god know what pointy end. *sigh* Battle rez by one of the druids (got to love a helpful drood) and back to keeping the MT alive (/sob over the remaining mana). A few minutes in and poor holy palla gets blown up by an exploding big add... (should teach me to stay away from those...) Wipe soon after.

RL: Ok, that was actually not bad till the end of phase 2, just need to take care of the little details.

OT: Yeah, and maybe Kel could stop dropping dead every other minute:P

Me: Oi! I don't drop dead every other minute!

OT: Oh really? Learn to dance Kel :P

Me: >.>

(We did get her down, though, and with no deaths to report! And one day, I will also be able to live through the stupid Heigan dance!)

*for thou art crunchy, and good with ketchup

80 reasons why

Here be dragons.

 

I finally got my pally to 80 :D. I rushed home after work yesterday cause I knew that with my xp at 53% (a mix of PvP and Violet Hold runs the night before), I could definitely get that extra mile to 80. I started by running Violet Hold (tank) and  Halls of Stone (healer) with a couple of guildies (pugged the other spots), and quested the rest of the way. It would have been faster just doing Alterac till I leveled, instead of questing, but I didn't want to lvl in a battleground, cause I wanted to make sure I had the availability to screenshot my jump to 80. I hadn't thought of what I wanted to do once I got there, but I'm the sentimental sort of fool who wanted to do something special to commemorate properly. My friends were doing Utgarde Pinnacle when I leveled, so I was on my own and decided that my first act as 80 would be to run Deadmines, which may seem silly, granted, but fact is it remains, to this day, my favorite instance.

Back when I first started playing, when I was a (far more) clueless low level human rogue, the Deadmines was my first instance. I was in probably three failed pugs before I could actually finish it and kill VanCleef. And I loved every second of it! I never got to do the Deadmines on Kelsier at the appropriate level, since her early lvls were done in Kalimdor, and I do regret not having taken the trouble to get her to Westfall sooner. So yeah, I think it was fitting that I chose to celebrate 80 with VanCleef. (Also, who'd have thought he'd decorate for Halloween???)

 

Celebrating on VanCleef’s deck. VanCleef himself seems less than cheerful. 

 

In the meantime, my mates were out of Utgarde, and having been deserted by their healer, wanted me to join them for Violet Hold on heroic. It's nothing short of adorable that they had enough faith in me to think I could actually heal an heroic on my gear. So, despite telling them that they were duly warned that the odds of that were slim and they should remember I had pointed out as much when we were all lying dead on the floor, I joined them in Dalaran to give it a try.

Now, it would've been epic if we had actually managed to finish the damn thing and it would make for a far more awesome conclusion to this post. But alas, we weren't. We started off well enough, I could actually manage the damage far better than I thought I'd be able to, but then, evil dude showed up. And we wiped. Three freaking times on the same dude. I have run Violet Hold on normal 4 times, only got him once, but yesterday we got him three times in a freaking row. Before the run I was afraid we'd get the void boss what's-his-name, cause he sucks, but compared to this one he's a kitten. A fluffy, cute, cuddly kitten. Who can kill you. But you know, cutely. The other dude and his crappy balls of lightning or whatever is just plain evil.

This the dude. Evil looking bastard, innit?

So at 2 a.m. we finally called it quits, vowing eternal hate for said dude, and planning sweet dreams of revenge. But despite those mishaps and a slightly scandalous repair bill, it was fun :). So now I'll PvP my way into half decent gear to help royally kick that dude's ass :D.

land ahoy

 

At long last I'm almost finished with the stupid thesis that's been haunting me for the past year. I cannot begin to describe the joyous sense of impeding, absolute and long-awaited freedom. I mean, it's not like I've been a slave to work, that's obviously not the case or it wouldn't have taken me a whole year to finish the damn thing. But the thing about work one know one has to do is that even when one is not doing it, it's always there in the back of one's mind, nagging and pestering and making one feel guilty for all the time not dedicated to it.

Sure, had I finished in March as I was suppose to originally, I'd have spared myself half a year of this agony, but paraphrasing the other dude, we're all mice here and the best of our plans tend to go, well, askew. When I was in grade school, we often had to do roman numerals as homework over the holidays. I always left it for the last day, despairing over the time I didn't have to finish all the numbers up to a thousand, that would have been so much easier to do two a day or whatnot. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson, but I suppose there are always aspects of one's life where one never really stops being six.

So it's an understatement to say how relieved I am that I'm almost at the beach. Sure, I could still drown on my way there, but the odds are looking good. My head is starting to fill with all the things I want to do once I'm safely out of the ocean.

I want to get home and just be home, no need to worry about all the work I still have to do after the 8 hours of work I've already done.

I want to clean my house, not just dust and vacuum, but real house cleaning the kind that's only done once a year, with everything out of the shelves, furniture out of the way, little piles of things one thinks one might and should get rid of but that one never does, cause we "might need it at some point".

I want to curl up in my couch with a blanket and a book (cause sure, it's still warm in September, but give it another month and that blanket will start to look really cozy), and just read my heart out till I can no longer keep my eyes open and have to drag myself to bed.

I want to drown in unread mangas and 800 pages long novels and have the time to enjoy them without feeling I'm wasting time.

I want to welcome the beginning of the new series season with the time to enjoy it. I want to do a Buffy marathon over the weekend and maybe throw in some Firefly and Dollhouse for good measure. I want to finish watching Oz and I want to watch all the other series I have but never got around to watching.

I want to play WoW and not worry that it's taking three hours to go through Scholomance. I want to get my pally to 80 sometime next month, and my priest to 80 before Christmas. I want to try Halo and Sims 3.

I want to spend a Saturday in Ikea, mourning over all the cool things I want but cannot afford, and getting other stuff that I probably don't really need, but they're just too awesome to pass.

I want to go to the movies and the theatre at least every other week. Or you know, not do it, but being able to if I want to. I want to go out on Friday night and know that it doesn't matter if I'm not able to so much as lift my head on Saturday, cause you know, got nothing particularly important or urgent that needs doing.

I want weekends to be real weekends, with no schedules and no rules, just a world of free time to do whatever the hell I want, be it watching terrible Saturday afternoon movies that are airing for the 11th time this year, or going out and visiting all the places in Lisbon that I always planned to visit but in 5 years never took the time to. I want to sleep in on weekends, or at least past 9 o'clock for a change.

I want to go more often to my parent's for the weekend, even when I don't particularly feel like it. I want to go back to my genealogy project and do field trips with my grandfather to talk to toothless old ladies who were already old when he was young.

I want to get another cat, cause Dea is getting bored and spoiled with no company all day and there's just so many times I can throw a ball for her to go fetch before my arm starts cramping. I want the time to watch with some amusement and mild terror while she tries to murder said cat before finally giving in to the fact that she's no longer an "only child".

I want to curl up in my couch with a bucket of ice cream and my remote control and just spend a quiet evening enjoying the fact that I got 50 channels I never really watch.

These are the things I wanna do, and even if it turns out I don't, I want the possibility of them, I want the knowledge that if I wanted to do them, I could, even if I don't. I'm almost at the beach and it feels awesome and even if the reality of it proves to be less shiny and full of awesomeness than the picture in my head, I just want to get out of the water.

WoWed

With one exception, none of my friends plays World of Warcraft, which is unfortunate in that I have no one to talk to about it that'd care to listen (well, my in-game friends, but that seems rather redundant...), so you must bear with me Internet, while I tell you all about my shiny new hobby.

I started playing cause someone gave me a 10-day free pass to try it, that I then let sit inside a drawer for quite a few months. After I moved to my new place and got a decent Internet connection, I decided I might as well give it a try. I didn't know anything about the classes or races, so I just went with something that looked cool. I knew I didn't want a ranged class, and warrior seemed lacking in subtlety, so I went with a human rogue, cause it just seemed right. And yeah, I totally picked Alliance cause the toons are prettier, I'm very shallow that way. (Didn't have TBC, had I only known about blood elves...)

I played for a couple of months, moved from trial to full-install, got a guild, got my rogue up to 51, but I was starting to lose interest. Which was fine, I had other things to occupy my time with, like, I dunno, write my masters thesis and work and stuff. And then I made a fatal mistake, a mistake that haunts me to this day. I rerolled. Yep. I decided I was sick of being a rogue and I wanted something a bit cooler, something that was a bit harder to kill, maybe something that could even heal.

So I rolled a Paladin, cause one of my in-game friends was a pally and it just seemed like a pretty awesome class. By then I had installed TBC, so I got a Draenei instead of a Human, so I wouldn't have to repeat the low lvl human quests (Also, draeneis are sooo pretty... lol).

And let me tell you, I'm in love with my pally. Such a cool class. I decided to go with Holy cause after a DPS class I liked the idea of being a healer, but even with lower armor and dps than a prot or a ret pally, such great survivability! I didn't even die till my 20s.

I also started playing the game differently. At first I was focusing on my quests and on lvling and such, without much else. But I was now discovering all the other aspects of the game that truly make WoW so incredibly addictive.

In many ways, it's a world that behaves like a small-scale society. It has its own language (after four months, I'm still coming across acronyms I don't know), its own rules (some obvious, some not so much), even its own economy. I was a pretty poor rogue, I always sold everything to vendors and so never could put together much gold in a timely manner. Now I've discovered the true gold machine the Auction House can be.

At first, I had decided for skinning and leatherworking as professions for my pally (might sound counter-intuitive, for a plate-wearing class, but I figured they'd be easy and cheap to lvl), but I decided to switch leatherworking for enchanting, cause I though it'd be more fun. I was right. Ridiculously expensive and hard to lvl, but so much fun! I kept skinning cause raw materials sell pretty well in the auction house and I wanted to keep a steady income.

In the meantime, I met some pretty great guys and started playing with them on a regular basis, which just made it that much more fun. It's easy to solo with a pally, far more so than with a rogue, since we're pretty hard to kill, but the only way to play a healer up to its full potential is in a group. Besides, there's no comparing playing alone with playing with others. As an added bonus, since I don't need to find some random group for dungeons anymore, I've been doing them far more frequently.

And sure, the basic notion of quests and the good vs. evil battle is interesting in and of itself. I mean, I killed a dragon on the weekend, a huge, green, mythological elite beast who was trying to have me for dinner. That's pretty cool. But it's also no different from any other game in the genre. What makes WoW so incredibly addictive, in my opinion, is that it does indeed create "an imaginary social environment", in which one has this awesome cool powers and runs around defeating fiends with like-minded individuals who are also pretty cool themselves.

In a very real sense, it grants a very easy sense of accomplishment. It happens far more than on a single-player game precisely because we’re playing with other people, making the issue, in large measure, one of peer validation. I mean, it’s hard not too gloat just a little bit when someone has something nice to say about my healing in a group, or when someone whispers me wd or n1 in a battleground (actually didn’t know that last one at the time, had to google it afterwards, ty random shadow priest, whoever you were). Even if it is only a game, even if it has no true impact in real life. But it’s what makes it such an effective form of escapism and, ultimately, such a huge black hole that will keep sucking one in.

Thank god I’m almost done with the thesis.

LiveJournal Tags: WoW,gaming

The Name of The Wind

 

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.

You may have heard of me.

 

When I bought The Name of The Wind I was simply having one of those days. You know, the sort of days when It’s just feels warm and cozy to spoil oneself with a little treat. It doesn’t really matter what, just one of many ways in which we indulge in inconsequential little luxuries. I had never heard of the book or the author, I just picked it up at Fnac, put it back down, and failing to find anything else that caught my eye, shrugged and picked it up again. I started reading soon after I got home, simply because I didn’t particularly feel like doing anything else. After the first chapter I was hooked. I won’t detail the plot, plenty of sources for that on this big wide world that is the web. I will simply say that it had been a while since I had loved a book quite this much.

As a teen, most of what I read was fantasy, mixed with some historical novels. When I went to college, I started reading other stuff as well, so those first genres were sort of more in the background (also, and sort of ironically, since I’m an English lit major, I feel like I somewhat read a lot less than before). Now, it’s not that I dislike literary fiction, there’s plenty of it that does suit my taste. However, much of it, specially contemporary literary fiction, I just find boring, stuffy and unbelievably pretentious (which I’m sure not all of it is, just goes to show we’re none of us without some prejudices).

But thing is, I love genre fiction, specially fantasy. It’s where I feel at home. And Rothfuss’s novel reminded me exactly why. I even began doing something I hadn’t done in years, which is reading in bed, before going to sleep.

Now, as for the novel itself, I have nothing but praise for it. Some have said it’s too long, I disagree. While it’s just short of 700 pages, it never drags and none of it is felt as unnecessary. I love the characters. It takes skill to make you love a character that hardly makes an appearance, but even that he accomplishes. The story world, for all it’s magical undertones, remains so incredibly reasonable that one can’t help but buying into it.

The author tells a compelling story, but much of what makes it such a good read, is the way in which he tells it. Rothfuss’s writing is clever, witty, and in many places just simply lovely.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the second volume.

twilight

My favorite time of day. Some cultures believe dusk, when it’s not yet night but it’s no longer day either, is the time when the barrier between this world and the Otherworld is thinner and one might attempt to cross to the other side. Me, I just like the pretty colors and the fact that the workday is over. But if I ever find myself suddenly on the other margin, strait-jacket or not, I think I’ll just enjoy the ride.

não, nem em mim

There are days - lately it's the only sort of days there is - when coming home is just good for wearing me down. There's just too much drama. I don't do drama. I just want people to deal with their issues and leave me the hell alone. I realise how selfish that is. But there's just so much helping one can do before wanting to yell at the other person that they should start to fucking help themselves a bit too.

I could be home right now, my warm little sanctum of orderly rooms and cozy quiteness. There are people who dislike being on their own. I love it, no one to put up with but myself and the occasional stray pigeon from across the street. Instead, here I am, stuck with people who, while I do love, I can neither like nor respect on many an occasion.

I don't bother people with my problems, I see very little reason why I should be bothered with theirs. And yes, I do realise how selfish and childish that last sentence was, but I have neither the skills nor the maturity to deal with this and given the option not to, that's what I'm going with.

Not that things will ever change. There'll be more banging and shouting, and someone - I have a sneaky suspicion I know who - will bow their heads once again and things will go back to the way they were. Just a little worse, but a bearable worse, for there are very few things in life one can't really live with.

100 Best Movie Lines in 200 Seconds

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon

Don’t I wish?

Wake Up Call (The Guild S01E01)

 

Awesome web show with Dr. Horrible’s female lead, Felicia Day. Check out more episodes here.

Remote Viewing: Save Dollhouse PSA2

 

To redeem myself (seppuku sounded painful...) from the fact that I forgot to add Dollhouse to the Series I'm Currently Watching list. Shame on me. Shame, shame on me.

Also, for international fans who wish to watch Dollhouse (or TSCC, for that matter), online on the Fox site, or Hulu site, thus adding to the official viewing numbers, here’s a link on how to do that (And it really works. Take THAT, region restrictions!).

new skin

Decided I was sick and tired of the old one. I wanted something a bit roomier, and less emoish. Tried to find something I liked, but the world of blog skins is populated mostly by 14 year-olds with a hello kitty fetish, so I ended up picking a blogger standard skin and tweaking it some. It’s pretty simple, which is what I was going for, I think the old one was a bit cramped. It isn’t quite the way I want it yet, but it’s a work in progress, lol. It’s funny that it turned out to be quite different from what I had in mind. And for some reason, the older posts, before I started using Live Writer show up with a freakishly large font. I wonder why. Oh well.

girl power

One comes across the most interesting trolls over at the IMDB boards. Lately, some idiot at the Dollhouse board as been ranting to anyone who will hear, about how characters the likes of Echo or Buffy are nothing more than unrealistic fembots, that can only be liked by masochistic males who get their kicks out of seeing some skinny girl beating the living crap out of dudes twice their size. The woman is an idiot, and a wordy one at that, but she gave me the idea of making this post, so it isn’t a total loss. I, for one, happen to like skinny girls who can beat the living crap out of dudes twice their size. And so this is my list of top seven ass-kicking female characters in television, in no particular order. Note that this may not always be a physical ass per se, but rather a metaphorical one (or as the theater lady would put it, the idea of an ass).

 

Buffy (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer)

Buffy: "It's my first day! I was afraid that I was gonna be behind in all my classes, that I wouldn't make any friends, that I would have last month's hair. I didn't think there'd be vampires on campus."

Many years and a large cult following after it began, I think people new to the Buffyverse tend to miss how deeply ironic the whole show is. We’re talking about a show whose main character is called Buffy, so you think people would take the hint. Whedon took the the brainless cheerleader, the blonde valley girl who always got killed off first in horror movies, and he had her battle the forces of darkness. And despite the alarming frequency with which Buffy got killed, every week she was back to fight something bigger and scarier. And as her tombstone read, she saved the world. A lot.

 

Xena (Xena, Warrior Princess)

Ares: "Sometimes the best man for the job is a woman."

One could think that the scanty outfit would undermine the empowerment message. One would be wrong. Two years before Buffy, villain turned hero Xena was already bumping heads (mortal, and on occasion immortal) in a world of ancient monsters and less than reasonable deities. And granted, the props and special effects are less than believable and the whole thing screams 90s, but in this list, she’s still the most bad ass of them all. 

 

  

River Tam (Firefly)

River: “Also, I could kill you with my brain”

It’s easy to suspect that, most of the time, River isn’t all there. That’s bound to happen when an underground government agency plays pin the tail on the donkey with one’s brain. But as far as little psychic killing machines go, she just lends an air of effortless grace to the whole thing.

 

 

Zoe Washburne (Firefly)

Alliance Commander: "You fought with Captain Reynolds in the war?"

Zoe: "Fought with a lot of people in the war."

Alliance Commander: "And your husband?"

Zoe: "Fight with him sometimes, too."

It’s no accident that four out of seven are Whedonverse characters. Dear old Joss just has a knack for creating strong female characters. Zoe, Mal’s second in command, is dependable, sensible and steady as a rock. She knows how to get things done and if, in the process, she has to twist some arms, well, that’s all in a day’s work. Plus, it takes someone extra grounded to put up with all the crazy going around in that ship.

 

  

Cameron (Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles)

Cameron: "Goodbye, bird. There's a 51% chance I wouldn't have killed you"

While it may just seem like I want an excuse to post Summer Glau photographs (and who knows where my twisted brain may take me), one can’t talk about ass-kicking women and not mention Cameron. Now, she actually is a fembot, so the crazy lady wasn’t all off. She’s a cyborg sent back from the future to help protect the future leader of humanity in the war against the machines. Sounds familiar? And despite, or perhaps because of, a complete lack of understanding of human emotions, Cameron still manages to draw together a much larger fan base than all the other characters put together. And I’ll be royally pissed off if Fox doesn’t renew TSCC. *shakes imaginary fist* On the other hand, if they don’t, maybe Glau can drift over to Dollhouse, which would be rather nice. If they don’t cancel that too, that is. Damn you, Fox executives. *shakes imaginary fist, once again*

 

 

Adelle DeWitt (Dollhouse)

Dominic: "You played a good hand, ma'am."

Adelle: "I played a very bad hand very well. There is a distinction."

At first glance, one could mistake Ms DeWitt for yet another stuffy British character. But one would not be mistaken for long. For all her high-class act and flawless accent, there’s more to Adelle than meets the eye. The CEO of an underground, possibly (and most likely) evil organization, Adelle is ruthless and efficient, and wears power as if it were a mantle. But still waters run deep, as we’ve had good cause to learn, and like the Dollhouse itself, one is left to wonder how much still lies beneath the surface. Also, there’s something unbelievably hot about a woman who can take a bullet without so much as flinching.

 

 

Veronica Mars (Veronica Mars)

Veronica: “Well, actually, despite popular opinion you really can't beat the truth out of someone.”

Clever, sharp-tongued and witty, Veronica isn’t a Whedon character, but she might as well have been. Seen as uncompromising by some and as downright bitchy by others, this headstrong blond will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of something, and if she must step on some toes along the way, tough luck. Queen of sardonic smiles and sly remarks, Veronica puts a new twist in Sherlock-type characters.

As Vampiras Lésbicas de Sodoma

 

http://www.companhiateatraldochiado.pt/

http://asvampiraslesbicasdesodoma.blogspot.com/

thoughts

“That’s why what Takumi says never wavers. He probably understands more than anyone that people’s feelings change easily, that what you see is a house of cards. That nothing’s sure and nothing lasts forever.”

“Now it’s a tale from long, long ago. Everyone has forgotten their first memories. Their first promise. (…)

That first promise… At what point did it become a curse? When did it change into a burden? Those days that were so happy. The days that were so hard to part with. There was supposed to be love there. Time passed. People changed. And it became nothing but pain.”

home sweet home

So this post is kind of late. Like, almost a year late… But I just got the cable that lets me take the stupid pictures out of my stupid cell, so I’m blaming it on that. But Ines, you may say, couldn’t you have bought the aforementioned cable like a year ago, when the post would have been fresh news? And I’ll reply, sure, random person asking awkward yet relevant questions, but *insert convoluted yet totally logical explanation here*.

 

2004

 

So this is my old place. It was an old, cramped house filled with locked rooms, where old-fashioned furniture was preyed on by spiders and dust (and annoying Spaniards, on occasion…). The first floor was actually the ground floor and the ground floor was actually a half-basement, where my room was. I don’t know to this day how I never broke my neck on those stairs and every so often the bathroom would go crazy and flood that whole part of the basement. My room was like 3 by 4 meters, tops. First time I entered it, I must say I was less than impressed with the whole thing. I totally miss it now. It was home, my first home away from home. For three whole years. The basement was always cool, even in Summer, and in winter my room was so tiny that with a heater in it, it still felt like Summer. There were shelves all around the window, which gave it a very academic feel. If I was home during the day, every so often there’d be some cat or other peeping inside (cause the window was at the floor level, since it was a basement).

None of it exists anymore, the house is being rebuilt.

 

2008

 

 

 

This is my new place (well, it was new one year ago…). My very own newly renovated, three-bedroom, sun-lit (cause that’s the funny thing about basements, even if they’re only half so…), couch bearing, movement-allowing little corner of awesomeness (Is she gloating? Yes, she is). There was this period of time, like a month, between my decision to get my own place and the time where I could actually do it, that was like torture. Cause it was the end of the semester, and there was this whole end-of-the-semestery things I had to do (papers, and exams and whatnot). And time allows people to think and get panicky about stupid things, like, I’m not mature enough for this shit. Talking to people, and getting things done, and visiting places, and worrying about furniture and money and movers. All very “grown-up” stuff. Good thing one can always count on one’s good friends to keep one cheerful and confident. lol.

The first time I set foot in this house (the second house I visited, the first I actually stepped into), I knew this was it. The location was perfect, the price was amazing and it was way bigger than I ever thought I’d get. Best find ever. It’s funny how houses work. At first, even after it was furnished and had all my stuff in it, the whole place just seemed distant to me. Uninhabited. Foreign. It takes living in to make a place our own. It’s more than just stuff. It’s not something I can explain, nor something I had thought about before, but there it is.

Of course, like everything in life, there are little glitches, little things that are less than perfect. Like, I know that sooner or later I’m gonna break my neck on the stupid building stairs. And walking all the way up to the fourth floor is less than ideal. And there’s this crazy woman on the building across from mine who makes it her life mission to feed and pet all the pigeons in the neighborhood (fondly known as crazy pigeon lady), thus attracting the filthy things to hers and all the other balconies around (I swear, one of these days…). But all in all, I’m counting my blessings.  

And despite greatly exaggerated rumors of impeding and inevitable doom, it’s been almost a year :)

funny story

It’s a funny thing, really. People ask me what I do and after I tell them, the inevitable question follows: and do you like it? And they always seem to think I’m joking when I flatly reply, I like that I get paid. Thing is, it’s true enough. It’s something I do, in large measure, because someone is paying me to do it. I don’t hate it (though sometimes I do loathe it), and there isn’t anything I’d rather be doing, short of being a secret undercover agent working for a small but picturesque country somewhere nice in western Europe.

It may not be very poetic, but there you have it. I’m a practical person, I realize that while there are exceptions to this, most people don’t have jobs because it fills their hearts. People have jobs because bills don’t pay themselves. I don’t need a job that makes me happy, I need a job that pays for the things that do. But sometimes, just sometimes, when I’m sitting on my computer at work, just doing some random piece of translation, there are these little moments, seemingly unimportant, when I realize, for that split second, that I completely, totally and without a doubt, love my job.

Funny how that works.

Maria-sama ga Miteru

    

The Red Rose Family                   The White Rose Family          

The Yellow Rose Family

Just finished watching the 12th episode of the fourth season of Marimite (just one more episode to go). It’s a new experience watching anime as it airs. I usually download (did I say download? I mean legally obtain by completely legal means which are legally performed by me) finished series and watch the whole thing, but after waiting so long for the fourth season, I just thought I’d watch it as soon as the fansubbers released the episodes. And let me tell you, those guys don’t disappoint. The episodes air on Saturdays in Japan, and Sunday morning the fansubbed version is already being distributed.

This series is a long-time favorite of mine, the very best the shojo genre has to offer. The story is set in an all-girl Catholic school in Tokyo, called Lillian, which has this thing called the Soeur system, in which an older student acknowledges a younger student as her petite soeur, promising to guide and help her during her school life. The student council is called the Yamayurikai and its representatives are called the Roses: Rosa Chinensis (Red), Rosa Gigantea (White) and Rosa Foetida (Yellow). While the student body representatives are elected each year, usually the en boutons (the Roses’ petite soeurs) are the ones elected to be the next Roses. The story is pretty much character-driven, exploring the relationships between the characters, so there isn’t much of an ongoing arc, or ultimate goal to be attained.

When I first started watching this series, it kind of reminded me of Enid Blyton’s boarding school series (even though Lillian isn’t a boarding school). Now I can’t really see the similarity anymore. While the school setting is an obvious thing both stories have in common, Marimite’s real strength is character development, which is sorely lacking in Blyton’s novels. And it naturally lacks that wholesome, English-centric, kind-of-though-never-quite xenophobic feel dear old Enid was so keen on. And of course, the yuri element is completely absent from Blyton’s stories (at least, as intended by the author, though I’m sure there must be many fanfiction writers out there who beg to differ).

The fourth season is most likely the last Marimite season, as there isn't all that much material left from the novels to make a fifth, which is unfortunate (OVA, anyone?). One can only hope that at some point in the not so far future, the novels will get translated into English or that I ever learn enough Japanese to read them in the original (but really, how likely is that?). There are online translations of the novels, naturally, but despite my high respect for all the fans who took the trouble of translating them so that others could read them, I’m the kind of stupid purist who thinks that if it can’t give you paper cuts, it doesn't really qualify as a book. So I guess I’ll just have to comfort myself with anime re-runs for the time being.

Hi, I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC: Wolverine and Watchmen

Watchmen

 

Went to watch Watchmen tonight (which is a stupid alliteration, but there you have it) and I’m just too wired up for sleep, so I’ll leave a quick comment while it’s all still fresh in my head. The movie is amazing!!! I’m in awe! The story is exciting and original, the dialogue is sharp, the special effects are through the roof. I cannot wait to get my hands on the graphic novel (stupid postman and his stupid delays). The characters are fabulous (even if Silk Spectre does get a wee bit on my nerves) and I’m absolutely in love with Rorschach (and also with that gorgeous brunette superhero who dies in the opening credits, such a shame). I spent the whole movie thinking it was Javier Bardem playing The Comedian just to realize afterwards it was actually Jeffrey Dean Morgan (I swear, those two could be twins!). I even think Adrian is pretty adorable, in a sort of mischievous boy sort of way. And somehow, Dr. Manhattan kind of reminds me of Dexter.

The movie is amazingly violent, in a pretty gory and graphic sort of way. There’s a scene where Rorschach opens some guy’s head with an axe, and some dude two rows down from where I was sitting just went “Oh my god!”, picked up his stuff and left the room. Which is kind of a funny reaction to get from a grown man, but I can’t claim to have seen that scene through either. lol. Despite that, there are some scenes, like when Silk Spectre and Nite Owl kick the crap out of a bunch of inmates during a prison riot, that my mind just kept thinking “that’s so freaking awesome”. Some people in the IMDB boards were complaining how some parents were taking their ten-year-olds and such to watch the movie and now I get why the complaining. I cannot begin to imagine how a child could sit through most of that, and my mind goes to funny places when I imagine how uncomfortable the parents must’ve felt when they realized the movie was a pretty big stretch from Spiderman.

I love how the story unfolds but mostly I love the moral grayness of the whole thing. Traditionally, American superheroes are white knights, paladins for all that’s good and pure and fluffy. And Watchmen just puts such a great twist on the whole notion.

I swear to god I’ll beat the postman to a pulp with a shovel if the book doesn’t arrive tomorrow. 

Doppelgänger

 

“This close I could see that he was not, in fact, me; not quite, and I felt a small wave of gratitude at that realization. Hurray – I was someone else. I was not completely crazy yet. Seriously antisocial, of course, and somewhat sporadically homicidal, nothing wrong with that. But not crazy. There was somebody else, and he was not me.” – Darkly Dreaming Dexter

 Sometimes I really wish I could meet someone like me. Same tastes and opinions, same world view, same sort of personality. I really like me, knowing someone like me would totally rock. And then the reality of it hits me. Two of me could never function together. No way in hell. We’d push all the wrong buttons in each other and there’d be like zero communication. We wouldn’t be able to stand each other after five minutes and we’d be at each other’s throats after ten. Which is really unfortunate. I’d really like another me.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Let me start with the warning that this post will contain SPOILERS, so anyone not wishing to be spoiled should stop reading right about now.

*******************

What is a writer slash director slash producer slash occasional lyricist to do while the writer's strike is bringing Hollywood to a screeching halt? Why, bring a bunch of actors together and put on an Internet-three-acts-forty-minutes-kind-a-good-versus-slightly-evil-musical-extravaganza, naturally! Which is exactly why Joss Whedon rocks.

Word!

The story is pretty simple, really. It’s your run of the mill boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, girl falls in love with boy’s arch-nemesis, boy tries to kill said arch-nemesis in order to enter the evil league of evil - run by a horse with a temper - boy ends up killing girl in the process and is accepted by said league thus proving that he does have a pHd in horribleness. All the while singing their way through the plot.

The series (for such it is, even if it only amounts to forty minutes) is adorable and laugh-out-loud funny. It has that quirky, tongue-in-cheek humour Whedon is best known for. Granted, it’s less funny when he decides to kill off Penny, the female lead, in the last act, but we’re talking about the man who killed off Buffy not once, not twice, but at least three times that I can think of. (Also, the same cold-hearted bastard who killed off Wash! For shame, Mr. Whedon, for shame!…).

Neil Patrick Harris is simply adorable in the title role. One just wants to take him home and feed him, or something. He has this whole nerdy, cute and vulnerable yet - at the end of the day - undeniably evil thing going on. Also, NPH has such a great comedic timing, he’s perfect for the part. As for Nathan Fillion, he’s simply hysterical playing Captain Hammer, the cocky arrogant super-hero. He’s just so damned funny in his completely over-the-top performance as Dr. Horrible’s arch-nemesis. Felicia Day is pretty good as Penny, but she ends up being overshadowed by the male leads, simply because their characters are way more interesting than hers (and also, cause Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris are totally awesome. Too bad, Ms Day.). But to be fair, Penny, as a character, can be pretty annoying. She’s all sweet-tempered and doe-eyed, which is why I can totally forgive Joss Whedon for killing her off.

I totally recommend the show! And if you’ve read this far without having watched it, shame on you :P.

Movie Spoilers: Oscar Edition

And the Oscar goes to

It's amazing how every year they try to convince an unsespecting audience that this year for sure, the Academy Awards will be shorter than ever before. And every year they fail miserably in that respect. This year's cerimony was just under four hours. But what four hours! I must admit I was doubtful when they announced Hugh Jackman as host, but I was very hapily surprised. More than surprised, I'm in awe of the man. lol.

There weren't many surprises regarding the winners. Ledger won Best Supporting Actor, as was expected (and quite deservedly too, in fact it's shameful that The Dark Knight wasn't nominated for any other major categories), Slumdog Millionaire won Best Director and Best Motion Picture (aggravating as I find the fact...), Wall-e got Best Animated Picture and Winslet got Best Actress.

I wasn't expecting Penélope Cruz to win Best Supporting Actress, but I must say I'm glad she did. She was fabulous in Vicky Christina Barcelona as the completely psychotic Maria Helena. I loved her speech too, emotional without being over the top.

I also never thought Sean Penn would win Best Actor. I think he was great in Milk, but I always thought the Academy would favour Mickey Rourke (what with the big fuss about his come back and all). But I love the fact that the Oscar went to Penn, for his fabulous speech, if for nothing else. I mean, you gotta love a man who starts a speech with "Thank you. You commie, homo-loving sons-of-guns." lol. And I just find it hilarious that despite his totallly kick-ass speech he forgot to thank his wife. Milk also won Best Original Script, with Dustin Lance Black making a beautiful and heartfelt speech. With both these wins for Milk (and with two winning speeches so incredibly political) the American conservatives must be sharpening up the knives. I hope those two lads can duck.

I love that they got five previous winners to present the acting awards and I simply adored the Tribute to musical (well, you know me, musicals o'gal).

Oh, and I must also say I think Anne Hathaway makes for a lovely Nixon. lol. Who knew she could sing?

All in all, totally worth staying up till 5 a.m. watching.

milk

I went to watch Milk yesterday. T was right, it is a movie that deserves being watched in a big screen. I didn't expect to enjoy it half as much. I have a new found respect for Sean Penn, he's nothing short of brilliant in the role. I also loved Emile Hirsch as Cleve and James Franco as Scott. Franco and Penn have great chemestry and they make for a pretty believable (and totally adorable) on-screen couple. The story never drags and there are a lot of truly moving moments, without it ever getting sappy or overly dramatic. Despite the tragic ending that we know is coming, i'ts a movie about hope and about making a difference, and it leaves one with a lighter heart.

I was also pretty surprised at the crowd in the room. There were a lot of older people (and by older I mean elderly, grandparenty ppl) and they even laughed at the jokes and everything. In the scene where Dan White, after saying that society can't live without the family, asks "Can two men reproduce?", to which Harvey Milk replies "No, but god knows we keep trying", the whole room craked up laughing. Who knew? I don't know what the bishops' assembly is rambling on about. After yesterday, I've gained new faith in the Portuguese society.

Let's see how long that holds up... lol

noisy streets

There are few things in life more boring than translation theory. And as it so happens, at the moment I can think of none. But once in a blue moon, one comes across something genuinely interesting, something that after one thinks about it should have been self-evident to begin with, but seems novel just cause one never took the trouble to really think about it.

At a very basic level, any act of human communication is an act of translation. We receive the message, decode it and codify it again in a way that makes sense to our world view. In life, as in translation in the more traditional sense, there's never such a thing as perfect undertanding because no two people share the same knowledge base or experiment reality in the exact same way. Misinformation occurs not just because natural languages can (and often do) create ambiguity but because the speaker and the recipient have each a completely different set of expectations, basic knowledge and world view.

We're all standing at different corners trying to get the message amidst all the noise and chaos. So much is lost between what is said and what is received and so much gained that was never intended by the original source.

It's quite amazing that we can communicate at all. lol

No wonder the world is so fucked up.

small world

Two posts ago I started the post with a quote from the movie Velvet Goldmine. What I didn't realise then was that the movie was actually quoting from a letter from Oscar Wilde to a certain Harry Marillier (which, in my defense, is a rather obscure reference, lol). Wilde's precise words are:

"There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous".

Just thought it funny, I almost fell off my chair when I came to that passage of the letter. lol

...

randomness

This is probably my most random post ever. lol. But who knows? Maybe I'm a romantic at heart! (not!...) But if I were a romantic at heart, this would be my top five fictional romantic couples, in no particular order. (Turns out I can only think of four, but top four fictional romantic couples doesn't have such a nice ring to it...)



Heathcliff and Catherine, Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff : Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

Heathcliff, always one for drama. lol. Someone once said this was like the common-man version of kings and queens at war. And I believe they were right. Catherine and Heathcliff take turns trying to break each other's heart, and as the saying goes, if one tries hard enough... A love made in heaven it may have been, but it consumed them both. No one could ever convey dispair like Emily, though. Too bad the Brontes died childless, those must've been some awesome genes...




Tobias Beecher and Chris Keller, Oz

Logan: Tobias Beecher.
Keller: What about him?
Logan: I don't know, you tell me.
Keller: We sing in the choir together.

Oh, what to say about these two crazy kids? Well, there was that time Beecher stabbed Keller, and that time Keller broke Beecher's arms and legs, and even that time Beecher thought Keller had killed his son. But one's heart just melts every time Keller calls Beecher "Toby". What can I say? I'm such a softy. lol.




Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, The Lion in Winter

Henry: We have a hundred barons we should look the loving couple for.
Eleanor ( Smiling): Can you read love in that?
Henry: And permanent affection.

These two are no young lovers. They're hard-seasoned warriors, always trying to gain the upper-hand. But despite Henry's mistresses and despite Eleanor being kept locked away for way over a decade, there's a cumplicity there, a deep understanding of each other's character, of all the strengths and, naturally, of all the weaknesses. They're family, and as in the best of families, they can't stand each other, but they can't live without one another either.




Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, Gone With the Wind

Rhett Butler: I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'll never understand or forgive myself. (...) There's one thing I do know... and that is that I love you, Scarlett. In spite of you and me and the whole silly world going to pieces around us, I love you. Because we're alike. Bad lots, both of us. Selfish and shrewd. But able to look things in the eyes as we call them by their right names.

The first time I watched Gone With the Wind, I just happened to catch it on television. I had never read the book and I knew nothing of the story, so I never saw that end coming. It was a hard blow, at 3 a.m. lol. But I love these two. Rhett, well, he's dark, tall and handome, as Ms Mitchell intended him to be, ready to sway every woman off her feet, in a way only befitting the golden age of Hollywood. And Scarlett, well, she's adorably brattish and self-centered, and amazingly catty. She's sly, manipulative and stubborn and will stop at nothing to get her way. And it's just unbelieveably entertaining watching these two trying to get the best of the other till all that's left are ahses.



(One might think I might have squeezed at least one healthy relationship in there, but what can I say? I'm kind of twisted that way. lol)

Paradise Kiss

[Miwako and Arashi]



"For once there was an unknown land, full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land at which it is a joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous".

Velvet Goldmine


I started a new manga by Ai Yazawa. I had avoided Paradise Kiss for some time now, cause it's only five volumes long, and for some reason I prefer longer series. But new Nana volumes take forever to be released and I needed a little Yazawa fix. lol. I loved the first volume! The series is more light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek than Nana, which is a more serious manga. ParaKiss is about a bookish over-achiever who stumbles upon a fashion studio run by a bunch of fashion majors from Yazawa School for the Arts, known for it's, huh, unusual students. They end up convincing her to model for them at the upcoming school festival. The title of the series comes from the brand name of the clothes they make.

As in Nana, Yazawa departs from a simple principle and progressively weaves more and more threads into the story pattern. The characters are fabulous, specially the supporting cast (I like Yukari, the heroine, well enough, but she can't hold a candle to either of the Nanas). There's Miwako, sweet and funny, Arashi, hot-headed and sharp-tongued, Isabella, the drag queen mother figure (or as they put it in the character description, "just your average guy who dresses like a woman and has dreams of being a pattern designer"), and George, the fashion mastermind behind Paradise Kiss, claimed to have a twisted personality by his former-model mother (and so far, boy, is that accurate!...).

The best praise I can give to this manga is this: my sister, for reasons beyond my understanding, is incredibly prejudiced against manga (one of many charming traits she shares with Bee :P, lol). The other day, to shut me up, she read the first volume of Paradise Kiss. She started it during the commercials of a movie we were watching. She never finished watching the movie. Ten minutes after giving me a dry "It was ok" about the book, she asked me if I had the second volume. lol

Kids these days...

karma

There are defining moment's in one's life. Little things, little episodes that set the tone to who one is to become. And it's just plain wrong when they come back to haunt you ten years past. I like structural paralellisms as much as the next person, but I think they belong in literature, not in life.

I do not want to become a little bit harder every time I hit a wall. I thought I had grown out of that. I may not be one to trust humanity, but I do have faith in it.

And besides, I'm blessed with this weird sense of humor that allows me to appreciate the poetic justice of it. At this very moment, there's a lady up there with a mocking smile on her lips, sentencing quietly: what goes around, comes around. The hateful bitch. But I guess that if that's all that comes around from what went around, I should count my blessings.

So while I may not be genuinely happy for you - I will never be that good or selfless a person - I can put on a good face.

I don't belive one can change much past a certain point, not on a fundamental level, anyway. The core of me, the things that define me as a person, they are what they are, and they're unlikely ever to change. But that is not to say the whole of me will never change again. Human beings are not rocks, we do change, adapt and grow.

I don't make new year resolutions. I know better than to think I'll keep them.

Ne te quaesiveris extra

Paraphrasing Higgins, I'm an ordinary woman, who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance to live exactly as she likes, and do precisely what she wants.

How is that too much to ask? lol

All the things that I am (and there's so many of them) are in direct oposition to each other. Not just a little oposition, but undeniable, flat-out oposition. So are all the things that I want, together with all the things that I like. If I were a character in a teen book, I'd no doubt fill many pages with angsty rantings about all my many contradictions. Thankfully for all involved, that is not the case.

Paraphrasing someone else, in some other movie, I know who I am and I know what I like, and there ain't nothing gonna change that.

It's still odd, though. Most people go through periods in their lives when they're filled with doubts about their many oddities. And the most outlandish the oddities, the bigger the worrying and the doubting. But I guess that when it comes down to it, I'm just too laid back to care very deeply about anything at all. I guess it's one of the reasons why I never have nightmares. lol (True story though, I've never, ever had a nightmare). It may be a very great flaw, but as Gaskell put it, "love me as I am, (...) for I shall never be better".

Therefore, if I too am the Devil's child, then I must live from the Devil. I know well enough where Bartleby's "I'd prefer not to" landed him, but I know too that within the limits of the things we must do, there's plenty of space to simply be. Without pretence. There's space for one's likes and wants and even for one's whims.

I could not live in a world where one could not indulge in whims.

...

"If a man and a woman are just objects of desire to each other, can they really be bound by love?"

Maybe a better quote would be Austen's one about the "strange unsuitableness which often existed between husband and wife".

But I digress. I just think it's a doomed relationship, that in which one of the participants is a bully and the other a doormat. There's just too much of an inbalance of power, and let's face it, all human relationships are relations of power. Granted, there are some more balanced than others, but if the scales go to much in one direction, it's just a car crash waiting to happen.

I just find it amazing how people let it get to that point. How they didn't stop somewhere along the way, took a step back, took a hard look at the whole picture and just jumped out or at the very least found a steadier centre. While they still could. It's just so scary that one get's so entwined in one's life that one gets to a point where there's no way out.

No one should be harmless. One should have enough feistiness in themselves to fight back, or at the very least to hit back. Not just pretend or threaten to. That's worse than doing nothing.

I'll say this much: all things considered, it's a real wonder I didn't turn out to be way more screwed up than I did.

Nana

I read the two latest Nana volumes over the weekend. While Xmas shopping, I had found volume 13 in Fnac and bought it, despite the fact that I didn't have no. 12 yet (which for some weird reason isn't available on the UK, so I had to order it from the US), which led to two weeks of frustration with the book just sitting on my shelf, taunting me. I had forgotten how much I like this series.

But funnily enough, it took me forever to decide to start reading this series. I had seen great reviews for it everywhere, but for some reason the drawings just didn't appeal to me and even the storyline didn't speak to me all that much. Drawing-wise, I just found it too sharp and smallish and odd, much different from the Kaori Yuki-like stuff I usually go for. Story-wise, what did I care about Tokyo's underground punk scene?

But one day, in Fnac (one of those days when one feels like buying something just for the sake of it) I found volume one. I browsed it (the early volumes are only rated Older Teen, so they're not shrink-wrapped) and though I was still not so sure, I bought it. I read it on the bus going home for the weekend, and the moment I got home, I went online and ordered the following two volumes.

I don't know what I was thinking before, right now I love the artwork. Ai Yazawa has an amazing eye for detail, and everything is just so exquisitely drawn. I love the characters, even though they're one more messed up than the other. The real advantage of a series is that there's just so much more room for character development, and I think Yazawa handles it superbly. The story is engaging and moving, without ever getting sappy. And let me just say what a joy it is to read a shoujo manga where the main relationship isn't a romantic one (though I'm sure many fans would dispute that, and god knows there's enough slash possibility to make many a fanfiction writer happy).

I think the work speaks for itself, so if you're into manga I highly recommend you give it a try, and if not, one should always strive to expand one's horizons :P

on human stupidity

Men are idiots. Men in love more so than the rest.

I think I run the very serious risk of finishing my dissertation completely loathing Oscar Wilde. Which is unfortunate, I'm rather fond of the fellow, even if he has been dead this past century or so.

But it's just so infuriating. There he was, a brilliant man by all accounts, with a comfortable life, critical success and the means to enjoy it. And he goes and throws it all away over an over-indulged, selfish, spoiled, undeserving brat. And in such a careless, idiotic way too. It was a train wreck waiting to happen. From the very beginning. Accusing Queensberry of libel was unnecessary, dangerous, stupid and suicidal. And for what? Bosie? The boy was a joke. And a dangerous one at that.

The man who claimed he gave adoration to no one but himself should have known better. Extravagantly, madly, absurdly could lead only to ruin. He had written the end to that book, he should have seen it coming miles away. How could he have missed that Bosie was playing Dorian to his Basil?

It was weak and stupid and weak.

For every strength a weakness, fair enough, I only wish his had been something other than a stuck up pretty boy.

Life Support

E porque hoje é do Dia Mundial de Luta Contra a SIDA...

100 Movie Spoilers in 5 Minutes

This is just hilarious!...

thicker than water

Lately, as part of my family history project, I've been going through my paternal grandfather's old files and stuff. I know heaps of stuff about my mother's side of the family, I was raised in much closer proximity with them, and my maternal grandfather is also very interested in our origins, so there's a lot to go on. I can go back five generations on my mother's side, with stories and anecdotes about practically every member of my family back to my great-great-great-grandparents (and pictures of the lot of them too, to sweeten the pot).

But I know very little about my father’s side of the family. I know my great-grandparent’s name, but that's about it. And I was never as close to my paternal grandparents, specially my grandfather. We used to visit them once a month, cause they lived in a different town. He called me “Dona neta”.

We didn’t have much to say to one another: my grandfather, as my dad after him, had no clue about how to communicate with a child. And I, well, I was a kid, what the heck did I know? But we got along fine regardless. I was his second grand-child and the first girl after a generation that had only seen the birth of boys. All was well with the world.

Every year on Christmas, my grandpa would insist with my grandma that they buy us, me and my brother and sister, toys besides the clothes, a far more sensible present in her eyes. So I was still getting Barbie dolls when I was 14, which silly as it may sound, was actually rather sweet.

When my grandfather died, his sons (my dad and uncles) recorded all the content of his computer (my granddad was very interested in computers and the Internet) to CDs, a set to each son, which may dad now let me copy for myself. So I've been going through the files, and pictures, finding the most curious things. There’s even a doc file on our family origins since my great-grandparents, with a special mention of where to ask for birth and marriage certificates for each individual.

And pictures.

Lots of pictures.

As I look at some of my grandfather as a young man, I wish I could have known that person. There’s so many things I’d like to know, so many stories I’d like to hear. There’s so much I’d like to ask, but he’s dead and I can't and it sucks. Now that I'm old enough to have a relationship with him he's gone and it does majorly suck.

Murphy law at it’s finest.

coda

I'm so cynical about so many things, I thought I had lost the ability to be disappointed in people.

Guess I was wrong.

Don't think I'll be thanking you for the revelation, though.

on the virtues of lying

For lack of anything better to do (cause I have no thesis to write or anything…) the other night I indulged in the latest trashy show devised by the cunning and inventive minds behind the sic programming grid. I don’t know what the thing is called, truth something or other, but that’s beside the point.


The premise for the show is as follows: some poor idiot allows him or herself to be attached to a polygraph and is asked fifty questions in a previous untelevised session. From those 21 (I think) are selected for him or her to be asked on the broadcast session. S/he must then answer truthfully to the questions in order to gain the money prize. Each question will get him/her closer to the top prize. The contestant my quit at any time before being asked a question and take home the money s/he made up to that point, but if s/he's caught in what the polygraph considers to be a lie, s/he will leave with nothing.


The questions start out harmless enough, and grow more and more intimate or embarrassing or scandalous, or a mix of the three, all of which must be answered truthfully under the close observation of his/her unsuspecting family.

Charming, innit?

The poor bastard of yesterday’s show came across as a cocky, mindless, arrogant, violent idiot. Which mind, for all that I or anyone knows, he is, but it got me wondering: just how well would any of us do strapped to a lie detector? We all lie. All the time. And I'll call anyone a liar who says they don't.

We are taught as children not to tell lies by our parents. And for one very practical reason too: as any figure of authority, they want to know what we're up to, in order to better control us. Of course, these are also the same people who will teach us that for lack of anything nice to say, we ought to keep our mouths shut. Why, isn’t that lying by omission?

Growing up, we learn that, pragmatically, communicating is as much about lying as about telling the truth. Adults know this instinctively. And I don't mean big, outrageous lies, I mean the little every day ones, the ones we most likely don't even notice we're telling, cause they're so much a part of the way in which we relate to others. White lies, little fibs, euphemisms, omissions. We lie to our parents, to our friends, to ourselves.

And paraphrasing House, the reason why we all lie is because it works.

To spare other people’s feelings, to spare our own.

We lie to protect others and ourselves. No human society could last long in a world where everyone told the truth, the absolute truth and nothing but the truth. It's just not the way we’re wired. And it’s a naïve fool who thinks otherwise.

So no, I didn’t like the person who was answering the questions yesterday. I judge him to be, by my standards, a rotten excuse for a human being. However, I also realise how unfair an assessment that is.

We all try to seem better people than any of us actually is. We are none of us without something of petty and reproachable in our characters, and we'd none of us look good under a microscope.

Well, maybe Ghandi.

kallisti

As for the reflections of the men, there was a great deal of rage in them. Perchance they might be formulated thus: "If I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned--if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous. If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men's fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble. The whole affair is absurd. . . . But, no, she cannot mean to drown me. She dare not drown me. She cannot drown me. Not after all this work." Afterward the man might have had an impulse to shake his fist at the clouds: "Just you drown me, now, and then hear what I call you!"

(…)

During this dismal night, it may be remarked that a man would conclude that it was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him, despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still --

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.

Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself."

The Open Boat, Stephen Crane

People come and go so strangely here...

`Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. `Come, it's pleased so far,' thought Alice, and she went on. `Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

`I don't much care where--' said Alice.

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'

Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. `What sort of people live about here?'

`In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, `lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw, `lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'

`But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Random quote of the week

In a bait shop.

Guy Threepwood: Why is that bait over there free?

Salty old Cur: Well, that bait is nearly expired, I need to get rid of it before it goes bad.

Guy Threepwood: How does bait go bad?

Salty old Cur: Oh, the usual ways... it falls in with the wrong crowd, starts rebelling against authority, begins dating bait of loose virtue... and before you know it, the bait's gone bad!



Escape from Monkey Island

Home

So it wasn't a very long search. Two days. Two houses. Not very long indeed. One was a total deathtrap, the other was love at first sight. Perfect in almost every way. Just like Mary Poppins. lol.

Despite a whole bunch of stuff, I always thought I was very lucky. In a born under a lucky star kind of sense. Like in the end, everythings comes through. Eventually, all works out for the best. Always.

Maybe it's a dangerous illusion, but paraphrasing Kushner, we are all entitled to our dangerous illusions every now and then.

But just because I sometimes have my head in the clouds, does not mean I don't have my feet firmly in the ground too. I'm not a child, and I'm not a fool, and I *will* show you that I can do it.

Just you watch.

*Defying Gravity

Wicked

I finally listened to the whole Wicked soundtrack. I hadn't realized that Kristin Chenoweth played Galinda. I knew her from playing Marian in the new version of The Music Man (she's the only good thing in an otherwise terrible movie), and from playing Lily St. Regis in the 1999 version of Annie, but somehow it didn't register with me that she was on this. I was just interested in the musical cause Elphaba is played by Idina Menzel, who plays Maureen in Rent (otherwise known as Titania's darlingest darling of them all :P). I really liked the soundtrack, I think it will join the list of musical soundtracks I listen to obsessively along with Avenue Q and Rent. lol.

I'm too lazy to actually write an elaborate review, and if anyone wants to know the plot, that's why God invented the Wikipedia, so I'll just leave here the lyrics to the beginning of the song What Is This Feeling, cause it always makes me giggle (well, it's an inner giggle, I'm really not a giggling sort of person, lol). The song is sung by Galinda (think Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde) and Elphaba, who just became roomates at school and who are writing a letter to their respective parents (father in Elphaba's case) to tell them about it.
GALINDA:(spoken) Dearest darlingest Momsie and Popsicle:

ELPHABA:(spoken) My dear Father:

BOTH: There's been some confusion Over rooming here at Shiz.

ELPHABA:But of course, I'll care for Nessa.

GALINDA: But of course, I'll rise above it.

BOTH:For I know that's how you'd want me to respond!
(Spoken:) Yes,
There's been some confusion
For you see, my roommate is:

GALINDA:Unusually and exceedingly peculiarAnd altogether quite impossible to describe.

(pause)

ELPHABA:Blonde!

Sorta vacations

coda

a tree is a tree is a tree - or tigers and stripes

"The flower said, "I wish I was a tree"
The tree said, "I wish I could be
A different kind of tree"
The cat wished that it was a bee
The turtle wished that it could fly
Really high into the sky
Over rooftops and then dive
Deep into the sea"

Nana

I almost didn't watch this movie yesterday. It's two hours long, and I have difficulty commiting to that kind of time. lol. I'm that sort of lazy.

Good thing movie-fan-me kicked lazy-me in the ass and I ended up watching the movie.

It tells the story of two very different girls named Nana who meet in a train by chance. Through a series of events, they end up being roommates. The story is mostly told from the first Nana's point of view (from now on refered to as Hachi).

Hachi is a cutesy type of character. She's sweet and nice, and moves to Tokyo to be with her boyfriend, to whom she wants nothing more than to play the role of the dutiful wife. She's annoyingly sweet and mild, she wants to please everyone, and is just the sort of character that makes every feminist bone in my body wanna screech. The reason the other Nana nicknames her Hachi is exactly because of her puppy-like personality. But in spite of all that, one can't help liking Hachi. The same reasons that make her appalingly annoying are the ones that make her endearing and charming (and also, Aoi Miyazaki does such a fantastic job playing her).

As for the other Nana, there just aren't enought words for me to describe her. I love her. If I were the type to have crushes on fictional movie characters, I'd be totally head over heels with her. While Hachi is soft and sweet, this Nana is strong and independent and proud. She knows what she wants and goes out to get it. While the first Nana is a chatterbox, this one is quiet and reserved. She's very protective of Hachi, but then the opposite is also true.

Both characters have amazing chemestry and the actresses play wonderfully off each other. The supporting cast is also great. The movie is amazingly sad at times, but overall it's a very heartwarming tale of friendship between two people who couldn't be more different.

I vividly reccomend it.

Vividly as in I will beat you with a stick if you don't go out and watch it right now :P

Juno

I finally watched Juno. I didn't really know what to expect when I watched this movie, cause of all the mixed reviews. Cause there was this real Juno craze around the time it came out and around the oscars, with critics everywhere praising it to the skys. But I've also since then read some less enthusiastic reviews, and my sister who saw it earlier this week said it was ok, but not all that great. So I wasn't expecting too much.

Maybe because of that I loved it. It's a really, really nice movie. It's funny and lighthearted and cute, without being sappy. The dialogue is great, and I didn't find the story predictable. Ellen Page is great playing Juno, the quircky and quick-mouthed mother to be. And I almost fell off my chair when I saw that J. K. Simmons was playing the dad. I was like, oh cool, what's Schillinger doing here? lol.

I also really liked the soundtrack. Which is something really unusual for me to even pay attention to. Unless I'm watching a musical, movie soundtracks just pass right by me, I'm just not of those people who are even listening to it. It's just there. Background noise. But I really liked this one.

So, to wrap it up, it's no work of art, it won't be in the louvre any time soon, but it does what it sets out to do, and excels at it. Watch the movie, you won't regret it.

Evil manipulative bastards post

I always tend to like the same type of characters in fiction. My favorite type of character is always the morally ambiguous, caustic, clever, manipulative type. They're always the ones pulling the strings, and they can't be outsmarted (which when one thinks about it, it's quite a safe type of character to like, cause they (almost) always come out on top).

So this is a list of characters that fit the prototype, in no particular order.



Ootori Kyoya - Ouran High School Host Club

Haruhi on Kyoya: "Behold, the power of the shadow king"

Kyoya fits the type perfectly. He's your typical straight A, hard-working student, but besides that he's also a cunning, slightly evil guy, who'll do what he must to get things done his way. Kyoya always sees every angle, and plays people and events in a way that will suit his needs. His cold demeanor and sarcastic ways are just the icing on top of the cake.



Ryan O'Reily - Oz

O'Reily:"I'm like the Lord of the Fucking Dance. I got moves."

Ryan was one character I didn't much care for at first. Not that I disliked him, I just didn't care enough to like or dislike him. But he definitely grows on you. I mean, one must admire how amazingly cynical he can be, always playing everyone against everyone without seeming too, and always managing to stay on the good side of those in power. It takes skill. lol.




Chris Keller - Oz

Keller:"Oh, are we speaking? I thought we were trying to fuck with each other."

I loooove Keller. He's just one twisted, sick dude. Seriously. While O'Reily manipulates people because he wants something out of them, Chris just likes to mess with their heads. Seriously mess with their heads. But it takes real skill to be able to read people well enough to just know exactly where to plunge the knife. And then twist. Slowly.




Eleanor of Aquitaine - The Lion in Winter

Eleanor: "Henry? I have a confession to make. I don't much like our children."

Eleanor is such a wonderful character! She's always scheming and plotting, scheming and plotting. She's all power and grace and wit. She's so charming and feminine and yet so absolutely ruthless. She's really quite the (fictional) woman. Granted, Henry also does his share of plotting and scheming in this play, but Eleanor just does it so much better. Unlike him, she has no real power, so she's subtler, and in a way crueler and colder in her actions.




The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont - Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Valmont: "Why do you suppose we only feel compelled to chase the ones who run away?"
Merteuil: "Immaturity?"

(Quote from the movie rather than the book)

I was never one for epistolary novels, they bore me to tears, but these two are just so adorably devious that one can't help being enthralled by their crazy shenanigans. Basically they're rich, idle and bored, so they use other people as their playthings, something they pull off marvelously. They too are experts at manipulating others to do as they like (and betting on it, lol). Both come to tragic ends, alas, so one might think that they're not all that clever, but I blame that more on Laclo's need to bring his tale to a moral ending, than on any fault of the characters themselves.


And since this post is already of a considerable size, I'm bringing this evil manipulative bastards post - part 1 to and end, and just the leave the rest of the list for a possible second edition. lol

The Tango Maureen - Rent

This is been cheerful musicals week. lol. Granted, the adjective cheerful applies to Rent and Avenue Q in totally different ways, but since most of the people who read this don't know either musical fully, or at all, I guess it's all the same to you :P

Now, I thought of posting La Vie Boheme, cause if one knows only one song from Rent, that ought to be it, but it's a far bigger song, so I thought I might as well start small. lol

So I chose the Tango Maureen cause I love Mark and Joanne (who, despite what you say, Titania, dearest, is a far more interesting character than Maureen :P).

(And yes, I do realise that posting youtube videos is a very lazy way of keeping a blog going :P)