do not mistake muted for not-as-annoyed (just very tired)

Yes, I'm amused by the reports of those generous souls who took it upon themselves to suffer through the movie release for that sparkly-vampire story. All quite amusing. What is far from amusing is this tendency on the part of several reviewers to identify the sparkly-emo-vampire as gay.

Gay is not synonymous with 'stupid' or with 'lame'. This character is emo, stalkerish, and cardboard, but not homosexual. Anyone with two verbs and a noun to string together could at least put out the effort to find a more appropriate -- let alone colorful -- adjective to throw in the pot.

First off, the character is obsessed with a chick, so even if he shows latent homosexual tendencies (beats me, haven't read the book nor will I ever, ever see the movie), he's still obsessed-with-chick. It's probably a reasonable conclusion to say that he's at least predominantly heterosexual.

But more importantly, gay means the noun described likes the same gender. It does not mean the noun is strange, lame, freakish, twisted, stupid, or dresses up in bad 80s new-wave and smears its lipstick. Or even that it sparkles.

I have real trouble giving anyone the benefit of the doubt who complains about a story's typecasting women, and in the process of doing so, typecasts some other minority instead. Doesn't make it right, and it sure doesn't make it funny, and it sure as hell doesn't impress me.

Word choice, people. Learn it, live it, and get on with it.

iconifornication strikes again: mo no no ke

This batch, mostly the original pilot/short from Ayakashi -- the "bake neko" story -- and the first arc of the Mo No No Ke series. I'm not sure if there are actually spoilers in here, because if you don't know the story, I doubt the images will explain much. For that matter, you may have seen the episodes once or twice and still not be sure what it means, which does make visual spoilers rather... easy to ignore. It's all confusing.

to view, skip over to this post instead

(I found a much better generator, and at the same time broke down & went with photobucket because I'm too lazy to bother uploading this to my own site, and hey, it's easy enough and free, so whatever. On the plus side, this means now the files are actually named more helpfully -- I can never remember who to credit unless the name is in the file, personally, so I thought that might be better for other folks if they're as absentminded as me.)