cry havoc

omg, wtf is up with all the hoods on fantasy covers? I'd seen reviewers complaining but I figured, oh, it can't be that bad. omfg, it's worse. who started this trend? someone find that person and punch them. please.

( Quick reviews for: The Thousand Names, The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea, The Siren Depths, The Tainted City, The Wall of Night, The Briar King, The Magpie Lord, A Case of Possession, Too Many Fairy Princes, Traitor's Blade, The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension )

Now reading:
The Red Wolf Conspiracy - Robert Redick
The Innocent Mage - Karen Miller
Throne of the Crescent Moon - Saladin Ahmed

Up next:
The Killing Moon - NK Jemisin
Sword of Fire and Sea - Erin Hoffman
The War with the Mein - David Anthony Durham

In the past year, I've watched a lot less anime and a lot more live action. Except not English-speaking: Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Mongolia, and a few shows from the Middle East, where there's subtitles. Not saying I watched the movies/tv all the way through, just that I've at least done my best to give everything a half-hour before moving on.

Then I got netflix. After I'd watched the few big-name movies I'd been curious about, I went through a slew of documentaries and was mostly unimpressed at the level of non-information. I mean, when National Geographic is giving Wikipedia a run for the money on lack o' detail and glossing, that's pretty sad. I was even less impressed with netflix's inability to warn me when a movie was dubbed or subtitled; there are only three or four Asian movies on netflix that I don't have or haven't already seen. But a few I hadn't saved, wouldn't mind rewatching, but the unhappy discovery that netflix has the dubbed version, oh, that's like nails on a blackboard. At least warn me, people.

Finally a few weekends ago, out of sheer boredom and having exhausted most everything else of any interest at the site, I dug into television shows. Some of my dwircle has talked about Once Upon a Time, and barring re-watching Xena, I figured, what the hell.

My god, that show is so white.

( Myth vs fairy tale, or, someone else's myth is NOT your fairy tale. See also, Mulan. )

Related: I stumbled over a post about how Why Sleepy Hollow is both the Silliest and Most Important Show on TV Right Now. Maybe it's time to see if that's on netflix, instead, because I sure as hell can't stomach any more of OUaT, as much as I like the original premise.

That said, I definitely recommend the linked article, especially when it gets into the moralistic representations of PoC onscreen. (I think there could be an argument for the same in fiction.) But worth additional contemplation, now that I have more time on my hands, having tossed to the side yet another promising but ultimately one-note, one-color story.

Thanks to marymac's suggestion, I ended up watching various documentaries from the Volvo Ocean Race. The best are the most recent, which include in-port, mid-race, mid-break interviews with each boat's skippers, navigators, crewmen, and so on. You don't get any idea of what's coming, but you do get a lot of really interesting reflection on what decisions they made in that leg of the race, what influenced those decisions, how they made those decisions, and so on. Plus, the narration is somewhat subdued, and there's not as much a sense of the teams being pestered to interview while on the water, which undoubtedly could get annoying. (No, I do NOT have time to explain what that is, I'm busy FIXING it! and so on.)

The 2005/6 race seems to just have an hour's documentary, which is like ten-something months to cram into one hour. You get a lot of highlights. Okay, more like you get a sense of how insane these people are, because most of the highlights consist of "and then their bowsprit broke" or "and then their main mast came down" or "and then they discovered a massive crack in their hull" or "and then they RAN OVER A WHALE AND LOST THEIR RUDDER" and there's no need to make this stuff dramatic. It comes that way out of the box.

The 2008/9 documentary seems to be a more as-it-happens format, but it has a lot of padding from pre-race clips. I really don't need a shot of some guy walking along the shore with his wife with voiceover about his dog dying. I get enough of that shit watching the Olympics. Plus, the narrator seems to have graduated from the Robin Leach school of narration. Not only does he talk like a bootleg version of Leach, he's just as dramatic about it. Quit the "but little did they know!" and the "but more was to come!" and "they had no idea what lay in wait!" Dude, when bowsprits break and sails go ripping along 120' of seamline, and this kind of catastrophic shit is considered one of the race's features, the tension is already there. No need to amp it more. Please.

A'course, the truly annoying part is that the 2008/9 narrator teases but then doesn't explain. Like, "little did they know..." and idyllic shot, then "...that THIS would happen!" and then a video of... something happening. I'm not sure. It's not explained. It's just several minutes of the boat going at a crazy angle and the boom swinging around, and... hey, narrator? A LITTLE HELP HERE, PLEASE. Someone tell me what I'm watching. At least the 2010/11 documentaries pretty consistently put voice-overs from the skipper or person-on-watch, explaining what you're seeing, to some degree.

Serious, this race? Shit happens. Constantly. Like nightmare material, extreme-panic, holy-crap-we're-all-going-to-die shit. I don't need some Robin Leach knock-off telling me for the nth time that these teams are experiencing LIFE AT THE EXTREME. Their fricking MAST just splintered and they're a thousand miles from the nearest solid land. They just missed a goddamn ICEBERG by a foot and a half. Unless someone wrote the 2008/9 documentaries for the total cabbages in the audience, it's pretty much OBVIOUS that we're not dealing with just a trip to the goddamn supermarket here.

The 2008/9 videos are totally inconsistent on subtitles, too. We've got one guy who talks softly and kind of mumbles, and no subtitles. We get the guy who speaks with an American middle-class accent... and subtitles. The guy who I still can't tell if he's speaking Spanish or English, and no subtitles. And then one episode won't subtitle anyone, and the next one subtitles every other person. Plus that year's version has bad editing and unoriginal music, though at least they quit it with the car-commercial jump-cuts and slow/fast crap after a few episodes. The production values on the 2011/12 version are substantially higher and the narrator is a more laid-back. I mean, it says something when you're watching a freaking youtube television documentary and you think, where can I get this soundtrack? Naturally there doesn't appear to be available OSTs on the Volvo Ocean Race site. Figures. Probably a bunch of generic soundtrack music from one of those warehouse companies, but still, whomever went through and found the music had an incredible ear for what to use, when, and blending it from one mood to the next.

I do wish the videos would have more infographics on what's happening. A simple CGI showing where the break occurred, or how, or whatever, would be really helpful. The extent of Volvo's visual info appears to be crazy-ass low-budget CGI of the little boats scudding across computerized water, with trails showing their paths. Not nearly as useful as knowing wtf-just-happened-there, especially when the skipper is speaking heavily-accented English so I'm ostensibly getting an explanation... that I can't understand even if I did know the jargon.

Last! Today's protip: don't bother with Google's on-the-fly subtitles, unless you're slightly tipsy and need the entertainment. Google doing on-the-fly of someone who speaks American english is iffy, but of someone speaking with non-American accent? Utter hilarious uselessness ensues.

Okay, it's not quite questionable taste theater, and it's not glvalentine's usual cinematic stomping grounds, but some of these really need the snark liek woah. Since the esteemed madame isn't doing it, I might as well. I have screenshot power and I'm not afraid to use it.

First up: the decently good. Possibly even better than good, if you overlook the commentary prompted by the Yang clan's armor, which apparently looked too much like samurai armor for audience tastes. I'm not sure why, since the Yang family was Han/Song dynasty, so ranged from the late 900s to about 1040 CE. Which I'd take to mean that it's actually that samurai armor looks a lot like Chinese armor, not the other way around, but it's a tetchy subject all the same. Other than that, though, The Young Warriors is more historical with notes of wuxia, than full-blown wuxia. You can tell, too, because the costumes are fairly decent. Unfortunately, I didn't bother d/ling, so I've been watching on youtube, but hopefully it's enough to get the gist.

For starters, the older brothers are more subdued, with dad the most somber of all. The younger you go, the brighter the colors, unless you're a woman, in which case you also get bright colors. Plus, makes it easy to pick out the focal points onscreen: fifth brother's in brighter orange, and eighth brother is in purple/maroon. Mom's on the left, and Dad in deep brownish-red is to the left, behind her.



( Costumes! Or attempted facsimiles, at least: 75% images, 25% text, 90% snark. )

I've been on a recent tear through a slew of non-European-inflected high/epic fantasy, and I'm starting to wonder if it's just me. Am I finding the cultural mixes in some stories to be awkward or badly-done because I know too much (or even only a little more than nothing!), or is it because I'm not fluent enough in the cultures to be comfortable with mixing them up?

In a three-way tie for most egregious, there's Shea Godfrey's Nightshade, which has this visual within the first few paragraphs. The numbers are me, counting the ways.

Jessa walked straight among them, a dark green sari[1] wrapped about her lower body in turns of silk and draped forward over her left shoulder with a long-sleeved golden choli[2] blouse beneath it. She wore a burka[3] that covered her head and face, though it was not quite long enough to hide the ends of her hair[4].

The men lounged upon the dais. The raised platform curved about the head of the vast oval room like a horseshoe and closed in on the wide aisle that led to the throne at its deepest point, the Jade Throne[5], which was the seat of all power within the land of Lyoness[6]. ... Jade was the province of the throne and these were the chairs for the sons of King Abdul-Majid[7] de Bharjah of Lyoness.

This was my brain's reaction as I read:
1, 2. Ah, okay, an Indian-inflected setting.
3. Why a burka? Wouldn't you just pull the end of the sari to drape over your head? Or maybe this is Pakistani-inflected, with a Muslim touch?
4. There is something really wrong with this burka. It's missing like, the rest of it. Or her hair is past her ankles. Wait, does the author actually mean she's wearing a chadri? That would make more sense.
5. Uhm, like the Jade Emperor? China's in here, now? Or Guatemala. (Mayans being the other major culture that had jade mining and prized the rocks highly.) Unless the author's thinking serpentine, which isn't jade, but gets mistaken for it often -- and serpentine was prized in the middle east.
6. ...Except for the French-styled name, whut.
7. Looking pretty middle-eastern, there.

I'm not saying I have an issue with middle-eastern-inflected stories, even if it sounds like name-dropping on Indian and Chinese. (I'll let it go with only a mention of the author portraying a quasi-middle-eastern family -- with their chained dogs two inches away from outright dog-fighting -- as barbaric and cruel. I think the only adjective missing here was 'swarthy'. Hello, typecasting 101.) Regardless, maybe if I didn't know there's a difference between a burka and a chadri, or didn't realize that not everyone east of the Tiber dresses like Gandhi extras, maybe I wouldn't be bothered. Or maybe if I knew costume and dress far better than the smatterings I do know, I wouldn't be under the impression that these things don't mix.

( But then there's a different type of egregious; four of those, and two less so, behind the cut. )

But still, I could forgive a lot more, I think, if the names weren't so atrocious.

For reasons I won't go into here, decided I wanted to lie on the sofa and be lazy and watch something. Preferably something where at most I could hit the remote, instead of getting up and changing disks or whatever. (I'm talking about the computer-as-tv, since I don't have tv.)

Three episodes into Valkyria Chronicles (which I hadn't seen before) and all I can think is: I had no idea Arakawa was even more unconventional than I'd already thought her: all the FMA military women are in, well, military uniform. This show puts the women in miniskirts, and with over-the-knee stockings. (Do the male animators not realize how often you have to pull up your socks, when they're over the knee? And that there's a reason garters were invented?)

Screw this. I'm gonna (re)watch me some Kuroshitsuji, which may not be quite as awesome as the manga (yes, I am CAUGHT UP NOW and YES that was a MOMENT OF CROWNING AWESOME the likes of which is rivaled by only a few other instances ever, like one-hand-counting amount, so I just reread several times to make it feel like it happened more) -- but still, there are no military women in miniskirts.

Granted, the female characters in Valkyria are shooting and driving tanks and throwing grenades, but still. It's hard to take that seriously when they're also wearing miniskirts while the men get, y'know, real uniforms.

Le sigh.

[Note: get a drink and have a seat. This is almost up to my usual levels of longwindedness, but this time, I do have a point! Other than the one on the top of my head.]

I came across an insightful comment the other day while researching, and the comment resonated with me strongly in light of the requirements compiling I was tackling at the same time.

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." -- blue_beetle

Think about that for a bit, but first I want to run past everyone some of the thoughts bouncing in my head as a result of researching Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard, and various other (past and present) bookmarking applications. One particular journal entry (from 2008) compares Delicious and Diigo, though I'll rephrase some of the author's conclusions, since I think he got his main summary backwards. Here's the basis of his argument, thought:

Delicious, an original web 2.0 company, still has “user-generated” as its core raison d’être. Diigo has the later-stage web 2.0 philosophy of being a “social network”.

In essence (and to undo the backwards of his summary): Delicious is grounded in using content to find users, while Diigo emphasizes using users to find content. Somehow, I'm not surprised that so far, of the folks replying to my informal poll, that most of you have indicated that you follow the content and then, as a secondary step, discover like-minded users -- seeing how many of you have said you preferred old!delicious and don't like or care for the diigo approach.

Granted, these two things (users, content) are intertwined: you find a tag you want to follow, you start seeing the same names pop up, you realize the same people are marking things you're also liking, and you may switch your focus from the tag to the user, in hopes they'll lead you to even better stuff.

Here's the crux, though: what is the actual product?

This shit ain't free, y'know. Servers and storage and developers and designers don't just grow on trees. It's got to be paid for, either in cash or in kind or in stock or in some way, but usually cash since most landlords & mortgage companies don't accept vegetables, these days. If you see a product that you can consume, and it's free, someone paid for it. Maybe not you, but someone: NSTaaFL, after all.

( Let me step back here, to the days when I first found an investor, wrote a business plan, and opened a bookstore... and other commentary about the dot-com and post-dot-com business models. )

More thoughts later. For now, it's your turn.

1. We went back again last night, and I finally had bibimbap. Omg, so gooooooood. I think this is what they meant in high school when they said IT ONLY TAKES ONCE AND YOU'RE AN ADDICT.

2. Book-searches last night, taking the recs from all ya'll, and firecat's suggestion to read up on 50books_poc and then went browsing through Amazon on top of that. Apparently, if you're going to set a book in Asia, especially the Far East, then you have to have "dragon" in the title. It's like naming a Chinese restaurant: two from column A, one from column B: lion, golden, palace, peking, etc. Except in this case it's dragon + generic verb or noun that'd be used in any other thriller/suspense. Add a "The" and you're set. Strangely, this also appears to apply to espionage/thriller works set in Indonesia, Indochina, Malaysia, and Singapore, but not works set in Japan (which get "sword" and "chrysanthemum" and "samurai" instead). I haven't found any Western-written espionage/thriller works set in Korea, though, so no idea whether the pattern, or what pattern, holds there. Still, it got pretty annoying after the twelfth title. Sheesh.

3. Now reading The Skull Mantra, which is well-written but so freaking bleak. (Not to mention awfully, ahem, pointed -- not critical per se, just plain pointed -- about China's role in Tibet and PRC politics in general, enough that I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Yes, I know it's a totalitarian system, but it just feels... something feels off to know such criticism is coming from an outsider, if that makes sense.) I figured get the depressing one out of the way, and then start on the rest. Maybe I should go ahead & reserve the next batch now, so it'll be ready by the time I finish this batch in the next day or so.

4. Local friend, invaluable resource for finding good spoons. Yay.

1. I really hope that wasn't supposed to be authentic Korean food, because if so, bibimbap has about as much taste as rice and vegetables. When the biggest flavor is coming from tofu, I'd say there's something wrong with the picture.

ETA2: I have been reassured I could not possibly have been eating the Real Thing, and I have also been taunted with several mouthwatering recipes. Fortunately, my step-dad spent a lot of time in Korea and knows his Korean food, so maybe when I'm home visiting I'll finagle him into getting us lunch from his favorite little Korean diner. So no fear, I will not remain ignorant forever!

2. It's really fucking hot out there, so I categorically refused to wear black interview slacks. I wore jeans. I did not wear short-sleeves or open-toed shoes, however. I do have my standards.

3. I talked to the recruiter before the interview, and told her that this would be a pointless exercise on my end. Why couldn't I see the work environment? What information could I possibly get from a single person in a restaurant that would give me any idea of whether I would want to work there? Her response: "Actually, that's a really good question."

4. If I do end up taking this contract, the first words out of my mouth may possibly be: "for the love of all that's holy, do not put someone else through that, or at least take the fucking hint when they say they can't make it for lunchtime."

5. The high point: walking to the address and passing a guy on a big fat low Harley. He starts up the engine and immediately the car alarms go off on the little hatchbacks fore and aft of him. And me, my inner 18-yr-old just thought that was awesome.

6. Do I want this contract? Let me put it this way: I have bills to pay, so I wouldn't turn it down. But it's nowhere near the top of my list, either.

7. If that really was authentic Korean food, then I am the victim of a massive PR conspiracy or something.

[Also: apparently when this town says a place has "atmosphere", what that really means is, "we don't have a big television but it'll still be so damn loud you'll need to yell at your lunch partner". Why can't I ever find out these local translations before the fact?]

I've watched Kichise Michiko in Bloody Monday and BOSS, and... bloody hell. I don't know whether it's the characters she chooses, or what, but the second the actress appears onscreen, I start fast-forwarding. She's just so smug. Strangely, it doesn't make me hate the character. It just makes me bored with her characters. There are some characters who simply never get taken down a notch like they deserve -- it seems to be a treatment endemic to television script-writing -- so I've learned not to hold out hope. Instead, I just want the other characters to stop paying attention to her. Then maybe the character will take the hint, or maybe the actress will start picking characters that don't make you want to smack that smug smile off her face.

Honestly, sometimes I don't know what I'd do without a fast-forward button.

---

Also: sometimes I cannot resist the urge to laugh, when looking at home storage ideas that other people have come up with. A way to store eighty-seven pairs of shoes? A way to store twenty-two lipsticks and thirty-four teeny jars of eyeshadow? We only have TWO FEET and ONE FACE. What the hell do you need eighty-seven pairs of shoes for? And don't even get me started on the notion of having an entire makeup counter stored in your bathroom vanity.

Seomday, I'm going to see an online house tour where the person throws open her closet and says, "here is where I store my six pairs of shoes." Or the woman-renovator opens her bathroom door and says, "here is the small five-by-five box where I keep ALL my makeup." That, I would really appreciate.

Maybe I just need to start a movement, or something.