The Tyranny of Socks

Shinjuku Shark, by Arimasa Osawa (trans. by Andrew Clare)

Detective Samejima is the "Shinjuku Shark." He is hated by both the yakuza and his fellow detectives because he plays outside the rules. Samejima believes in justice, and refuses to let politics sway him. While Samejima is on the hunt for a man who makes unique, speciality guns, the rest of the police force is hunting for a cop killer.

This took me forever to read (I started back in January, after finishing the first book in my Expand Horizons Project, Detective Inspector Huss). Shinjuku Shark is a long running and extremely popular series in Japan, but I have a hard time understanding why. A lot of my issues with the book may very well stem from the translation, which is flat and stilted. After Samejima is nearly castrated, raped, and shot in the head, his girlfriend only says "wow, that's no fun."

There are a few writing quirks that can't be blamed on the translation. Osawa has the habit of introducing every new character by describing their hair and clothes. He also tends to explicitly point out things that should be obvious: "blah blah blah," said Samejima, referring to something that happened two pages ago. There was one scene that made me think of Fanficrants: Samejima actually lists his girlfriend measurements (her nickname, by the way, is "rocket tits").

Several of the characters (suspects and their friends) are gay. While gay = villain is a tired trope, I thought it interesting that Samejima doesn't come off as judgmental towards gay men.

Shinjuku Shark was interesting as my first Japanese novel, but it's not a series that I'm remotely interested in following any further.

trascendenza has announced ladiesbigbang ! !

The challenge rules are SO COOL: many, many DOs that make for happy participants, and only a few DON'Ts, none of them arbitrary. The coolest thing, imo, is that primary submissions are not limited to fic.

So a primary submission of a vid collection might be complemented by, for example, a meta essay on some aspect of the work, or fic inspired by it. And co-creations are welcome! RPF is welcome! Crossovers/multifandom treatments! I love the range of conversation and creativity it encourages.

If you think you might have some bandwidth midyear, check it out.

Randomosity:

- seriously, how adorable is Taye Diggs with his baby?



There's also a clip of an interview with him over here, which is adorable. :D

- Health Canada moves to allow caffeine in non-cola soft drinks. D: So much that's wrong with this!! seriously, I can't imagine a worse idea. We need to get kids away from soft drinks period, not put caffeine into them to get them even more addicted. *facepalms* And I don't know if it'll even be that widely publicised, which means that parents won't even realise unless they're analysing the ingredients carefully.

...I say as I drink my venti dark cherry mocha from starbucks. -facepalms- Oops? :P

This is random, but any of you on my flist who haven't, yet, should check out Legend Of The Seeker! It's an awesome show with fabulous, strong women, humour, scenery that can't be beat, and it's crack-filled. (It comes from the people who made Xena and Hercules, what else would you expect? It's in danger of getting cancelled, but this gives me hope!

The sun was out but now it's gone in again :( I am so ready for summer. Or spring. -g-

I started reading Paul Tremblay's The Little Sleep on my train ride this afternoon, even though I only got about four hours of sleep last night and had planned to nap. OMG SO GOOD. The prose is fantastic and I really like the narrator, Mark Genevich, a PI who has narcolepsy. He's a fantastically unreliable narrator, because even he can't trust his perceptions - he falls asleep mid-conversation, loses time, and has hypnogogic hallucinations, so he can't always tell what's real and what was just some sort of half-waking dream. I'm in the middle somewhere and if it the second half is as good as the first half has been, I might have a new book to add to my favorites list. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but it's hard, because so far, it really is amazing.

Why did I only get four hours of sleep last night (or four whores, as originally typed, which I think would be explanation enough)? Because I decided to make hot cross buns last night at about 10 pm. Stress baking, late baking, a gift to bring to my parents' house for dinner today - all of the above, probably.

( hot cross buns! ) even though I'm not a huge hot cross bun fan (my parents are, which is why I made them), they tasted good when we finally cut into them. So, yet another baking triumph. They weren't hard to make, but the two rises did make the process fairly lengthy for a late night project.

I see LJ still hasn't fixed whatever's wrong with scrapbook, so hopefully these pictures post as they preview. Stupid technology.

I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to do a grain pie for Easter this year, since I'm the only person who likes it, apparently.

***

Finding a parking space nearby in the city is a lot like finding a job: Sure, you can keep going and circling that block...or you can go and grab the first one that comes up and is relatively close to your door, if definitely not right in front of it.

Pretty sure it says a lot about me that I took that one first parking space.

I forgot to do one of these posts last Saturday, didn't I.

The plane trees are in leaf, with green creeping up last year's long twigs left for the first time on the knobby main branches. Ordinarily, those twigs are cropped in winter---hence the knobs---but this year the trees look like trees. Bizarre.

LiveJournal people, I will still read you as I have been, but there will almost certainly come a point when I pull up everything public as feeds and shrug about missing your locked posts (the ones to which I'd otherwise have access). It is not pleasant that the "Log In" link in the nav ribbon leads to a page where I have to wait for an advertisement to attempt to run; it is not pleasant that the mobile site is now full of advertising; it's a bit depressing to see which ads get matched up (often offensively) with which content keywords. There is ad-supported content and then there is Web annoyance, and it is impossible for me to remain logged in always in order that I seem to LJ like a good citizen who need not see irritatingly placed ad overlays. Anyway, if/when that point comes, I'll post about it; that point will also be the end of my LJ cross-posts. We're not there quite yet. (Tick me off with one more aggravating change, LJ. I dare you.) If you don't like DW, /the stack/ generates a friendly feed, which you can read on LJ if desired, and comment there is simple. Nearly everyone seems to comment at DW, which is totally fine but amuses me....

I posted elsewhere on Thursday as part of a global blogging day for the discipline in which I work. Spring allergies haven't felled me but are doing their best. *dozes* Drinking water is delicious.

the stack

Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Push | Cassie, Pop Girl | PG13
Every Watcher alive saw her own death. A Yuletide gift for custardpringle.

( Read more... )

life, death (present, future)
Push | Pop Girl | PG13
This is her gift. A Yuletide treat for custardpringle.

( Read more... )

I'm horrible at crossposting to multiple sites, so I haven't provided much content to drama_llamas. I'm attempting to kick-start the comm again, and will be posting there more often--I just posted a few You're Beautiful and Mei-chan fics there.

See also: pge and skipbeat.

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I'm trying to spice things up with the DW version of 100_women. I want to add a few more tables for people to choose from. I'm thinking of creating four tables with 50 prompts each, and people can mix and match the tables that most appeal to them.

That's. . . a lot of prompts to think of! So, even if you're not remotely interested in participating in the community, I'd be more than grateful to anyone who wants to suggest a few prompts.

The existing table lays beneath the ( cut )

( click here for funky body paint and some deeply stupid villagers )

So that was more emotionally powerful than I remember, although marred by some fairly stupid logistics that made the plot weaker than it should have been. It would have worked better if the Bursa were living in the only inhabitable valley in the area, or had some other constraint that made them unable to move further from the Stargate.

What's up next? Oh, "Enigma". That's the Tollan and NID and Sam's cat, right? Pfeh.

I fly down to Cancun in the morning, for a week of sun and sand and surf. I'm bringing my laptop, but don't expect to use it much.

Have fun, and I'll see you on the 27th.

OK, I just snagged the above icon from winterfish here. I uploaded it to Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Insanejournal, and Journalfen a minute or so ago. The Livejournal page has just finished loading, whereas the other three loaded nearly instantly. What up, LJ?

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In other news, while I have commented on this, I think I have failed to mention this in an actual post, but The Good Wife is awesome. Amazing, complex characters, some of whom I don't like but still appreciate, especially including many women. And the women pass the Bechdel Test on a regular basis. I love it. Now for those of you who are lawyers and/or law students *waves at goldy_dollar*, I have no idea how much the legal aspects of this show are realistic or would annoy people who actually know about such things. However, I do think that the show is enjoyable even if one has to close their eyes, plug their ears and go "lalalala" during the lawyer bits. :-D There's enough going on besides the courtroom stuff.

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In other other news, I'm not sure why I'm still watching FlashForward. I'm still not finding any of the characters particularly engaging, which is usually what kills a show for me (the ONLY reason I'm still watching 24 is Jack Bauer and Chloe O'Brian, although I admit to not having gotten around to watching the last couple of episodes yet). And yet, I'm still watching it. I suppose the mystery is still keeping me around.

ETA: OK, I've got to correct at least a little of the above, after seeing all of last night's new FlashForward. I really like Janis. ( Spoilers for the episode )

I feel like I am so behind on everything. I was out of the office yesterday at the City Council budget hearings (our government at work is a scary, scary thing in many ways), and I spent a couple of hours this morning sorting out my mailbox as a result. And that's not even talking about fannish stuff.

I got a full night's sleep last night, but I had a hard time staying awake all day. What's up with that?

Then I went to the dentist. yay? I don't actually mind the dentist (I don't mind my PCP either, except for the schlep out to see him, which is why I haven't gone in, uh, 18 months or so - I really need to just suck it up and switch to a doctor in Manhattan, but I really like him; I've been going to him for 10 or 15 years now and I do not like change, especially change while I am going to be in my underwear under a paper robe), but I just want to go to SLEEP. And I didn't even see the actual dentist, just the hygienist. Apparently the enamel on one of my back right molars is chipped? She asked if I grind my teeth, but I'm not aware of doing so (no headaches or jaw aches in the morning), so she said we'd check on it again in six months. Yay?

I just had a long, draining conversation with my sister and brother-in-law, which was upsetting but in a way less angry way than I was afraid of and involved a lot of "If someone had just TOLD ME..." on my part, which I guess is part of the problem in the first place (in more ways than one). I'm not really comfortable saying more in an unlocked post, but I kind of want to curl up in bed and never come out, but that isn't going to work, unfortunately. I have to go out there tomorrow for family St. Patrick's Day dinner and also cake for my sister's birthday. Sigh.

I wish I had something fannish to say. I wish I could get back into a regular writing groove, but right now I'm as sharp as an overcooked noodle, so I think it's time for more BSG and then bed.

***

I've been slowly reading danah boyd's talk about privacy and publicity from SXSW over the last couple of days, and I'm really struck by this bit here:

Finally, I want to come back to what I keep raising briefly but not properly addressing. Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized. Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy.

Which is, I think, relevant to a lot of debates in and around fandom the last few years. Just because the information is out there doesn't mean it's okay to publicize it. If I let slip that I work at X organization in a comment thread somewhere, you are not justified in telling the world about that, if it's clear from the rest of my public engagement that I do not want the world to know where I work.

[W]hen we argue that there's nothing wrong with making something that happens in public more public, we are basically arguing that we have the right to sick the paparazzi on everyone, to turn anyone into a public figure.

Why is this so hard to understand? (This is mostly a rhetorical question, because the answer is that people choose not to understand it when it suits their personal or political agendas to do so.)

Later on in the essay, she has a great section on privilege and publicity, as well. [B]ecause technology allows us to speak up in public doesn't mean that everyone is comfortable doing so or, for that matter, will be heard.

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In other news, it's apparently vaznetti's birthday today, and since she is AWESOME, I will post a rec for Blessings Against the Thunder, which is her splendid SPN/Firefly crossover fusion series, in which the Winchesters fly around the Alliance universe fighting demons and goblins, and Zoe Washburne finds a man fighting off ghosts in a graveyard. It's an unfinished WIP, but there's quite a number of stories in it, and it's really just wonderful.

rez_lo has a bunch of other recommendations for Vanzetti's work, as well.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY VANZETTI!

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Tomorrow is the first day of spring and it's OMG WARM outside. I slept with the window open last night! Simply remarkable. So I will have to eat lunch outside today, I believe. Yay sunlight and warm spring days!

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Oh, and ( one last thought about The Good Wife )

It's vaznetti's birthday! Can Spring be far behind?

I lack immediate offerings of a celebratory nature, I am very sorry to say. In fact, I am invigilating a midterm as I type this. (The students are so bleary-eyed I want to give them all a hug and a cup of coffee.)

So: this is a rec post, which is really more of a present to myself, until I can write another Sue Your Flist (which was a total blast last time) or other ficlet featuring the character and fandom of the Birthday Girl's choice.

vaznetti was among the first established fic writers I connected with as a newbie Alias fan, and no one could have been kinder (though her fic was intimidatingly good). She's insightful, poetic, and focuses on the characters with a kind of ruthlessness that I find absolutely convincing. (Go here for a comprehensive list of her fic.) Her crossovers are stunning. Here are some of my favorites.

SPN x Alias. The nameless dead, Isis and Nepthys, and The language of the strong to the weak.
Variously, John Winchester, Julian Sark, Irina Derevko, and Bela Talbot in a gorgeously written series of scenes set in Hell.

BtVS x HP. Memorial Inscriptions.
Hermione Granger, Dawn Summers, and Babylonian numerology. At Yale. There is nothing about this fic that is not totally, totally to love.

SPN x XF. Like love we seldom keep.
John Winchester, Marita Covarrubias, Alex Krycek, and Ow. Ow. This fic makes all kinds of sense.

XF x Alias. Free and easy ways to save the planet. In case I've given you the mistaken impression that vaznetti isn't also hilarious, when the fancy strikes her: Alex Krycek and Arvin Sloane. Enough said.

So you know fatema, yes? Academic juggernaut, teacher extraordinaire, fangirl of utter awesomeness? She posted a request for recs this morning: SFF recs for stories that her students might enjoy, because they have had little exposure to the genre, but what they've seen, they loved.

Her students are young Bangladeshi women reading and speaking English as an acquired language. I wondered whether there might be a way to get some of the better current SFF into their hands free of charge.

And since a lot of the better SFF tends to be published by small, independent organizations, I wondered whether it would be possible to get it into those young Bangladeshi women's hands by finding a way to make sure the small, independent organizations get paid for sending it so that they can continue to publish.

AND! I know that there are people on LJ who might have very good ideas on how make this happen. Can anyone suggest a next step?

Obligatory cred note: ( Cut for sidebar stuff )

So! Suggestions/strategies for getting good SFF to a crowd of young Bangladeshi women lucky enough to have fatema as their teacher?