Everything is Korra and nothing hurts, except homework which I have a lot of because classes resume in about twenty-eight hours.

More thoughts forthcoming at some point.

(I LOVE LIN. AND TENZIN'S ENTIRE FAMILY.)

I'm sorry I haven't really been saying or doing much on here of late! I'm extremely busy.

In other news, I have no idea how to finish a question when none of the examples had a remotely similar sentence structure, film at eleven.

I'm really burnt out tonight. As long as I finish everything I'll do just fine, but that doesn't really help when the problem is that I'm being assigned some of the most unbelievably time-consuming language work imaginable to pound into my head things like the fact that 'koto ni natteiru' indicates a socially imposed demand but 'koto ni natta' indicates a necessity imposed by some specified or unspecified outside force. I'm grateful for it, but I'm getting deep muscle pain and have no idea why even though I have no other symptoms of illness and I'm starting to find it hard to confine my thoughts to one language.

Taitei, watakushi no kangae between English and Japanese wo ukimasu kara, chotto taihen na language usage wo tsukai, tomodachi ni confused saserareteshimaimasu. And yes that is a reasonable example of how my thoughts sound these days.

There's a lot of so-bad-it's-amazing yuri in the winter anime season, and I've been falling ever deeper in love with the church I've been going to the past year and a half or so as I move towards confirmation and possibly even postulancy (!).

What's been going on with you guys?

I am back at my university!

On Tuesday, I start Japanese Popular Culture, Spiritual Autobiography, and Introduction to LGBTQ Affairs! (I start Intensive Intermediate Japanese II to-morrow but that's a given.) I'm sorry I've not been much in evidence of late.

Despite some trepidation about my new Japanese textbook and the fact that the LGBTQ class will very probably end up quite tendentious and argumentative, I have to say I am looking forward to this semester.

Hit me with LGBTQ-studies stuff. I want to get into this~

What are our thoughts on Magic Knight Rayearth?

What did you do in 2011 that you'd never done before?
Improved my Japanese; went to a French-speaking country; went to the Deep South; volunteered to be a Lay Eucharistic Visitor (but wasn't needed to do it).

Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't think I made any resolutions last year. My resolution for this year is for 2012 to be substantively similar to the last five months or so of 2011.

Did anyone close to you give birth?
No.

Did anyone close to you die?
No.

What places did you visit?
New York, Boston, Alabama, Quebec, and Cape Cod (i.e. my family), in that order! On the way to Quebec I also passed through Vermont, where I grew up. Quebec was brilliant and I would love to go back.

( More under cut )

Everybody.

THERE IS AN EDITION OF THE BIBLE ILLUSTRATED BY SALVADOR DALI.

I now know what my life has been lacking all this time. Hint 1: It's not sex. Hint 2: I mention it in this very post.

Merry Christmas!

Since I'm in a somewhat pensive and thoughtful mood I'll link to this Umberto Eco essay about Christmas (it's unfortunate that the essay is in a right-wing British rag like the Telegraph, especially considering that Eco is firmly in the mainline [culturally-]Christian-Socialist centre-left of Italian politics himself). I'm having A Very Postmodern Christmas anyway, since I got AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF THE PRAGUE CEMETERY, a Vienna Teng album, a Warren Zevon album, and a book of bloodbath-y lesbian historical stories by Yoshiya Nobuko (among other things), as well as playing with my young cousins and their new kittens and tending my aunt and uncle's fireplace.

I've been on Cape Cod for two days now and I'm remembering how much I love being here and how it was silly of me not to visit my aunt's house for two and a half years. Things are less hectic than they were yesterday, obviously. Some of my cousins have drifted off from then. Over the past few days I've seen the end of Penguindrum and been to a church in South Yarmouth that I hadn't been to before, which were worryingly not-dissimilar experiences. I have a specific, minor-to-moderate problem with Penguindrum, which to people who have seen it and know me well should not be surprising, but given who made the show I'm more than willing to assume a good-faith dropping of the ball; it's definitely up there with Madoka, Eden of the East, and Spice and Wolf among the best television anime of the past few years.

The church was nice. It's St David's, a Cape-style building with mostly unpainted wood architecture and designs. The service was mostly fairly standard, old-ish Christmas fare; it wasn't quite as lovely as Lessons and Carols at Grace in Amherst with its mediaeval and baroque focus was. I guess I'd go again if I find myself again on Cape Cod on a holiday or important Sunday.

My uncle's dog is Galactus, and the new cats in my family are adorable.

How was everybody else's holiday?

I'm enjoying Kajiura Yuki's ongoing years-long musical exploration of her (or someone's close to her, or somebody whose perspective she's trying to compose from) spiritually-violent-seeming inner life. I'm not sure if I'm justified in reading a conversion experience into some of these Kalafina lyrics she's been coming out with the past few years or if she always had these traits and they're just becoming more pronounced artistically. Whatever it is, I like it.

So I have made a thread at the holiday love meme which you should all use to make me happy~

Speaking of things that make me happy, SOMEBODY DID 'PUELLA MAGI AMELIA MAGICA' FANART. 'Puella Magi Amelia Magica', for those of you who don't know or remember it, is a very short Doctor Who/Puella Magi Madoka Magica crossover oneshot that biichan made me write. I forget how long it took me to write but it couldn't have been more than an hour or so, since the elapsed time between 'Dare you to write it.' and 'Fic: Puella Magi Amelia Magica' seems to have been about eighty-two minutes. And somebody did fanart for this. AND CALLED ME TALENTED EVEN THOUGH SHE'S MORE TALENTED THAN I AM AND I WAS A FAN OF HER 'WOMEN OF JAPANESE HORROR' SERIES EVEN BEFORE THIS.

Ahem. Sorry. It's just that I feel appreciated.

Speaking of Madoka and Doctor Who, you all need to watch this:



'I am the Doctor' is the best song ever written. It is the 'Veni, Creator Spiritus' of our generation, you cannot deny.

Also I watched Madoka and Noir with my friends from the Philosophy Club, of all clubs, recently, and they loved them. One of my friends insisted on reading Kyouko's lines out loud in a Brooklyn accent.

Should I get a tumblr?

SO MANY FINAL PROJECTS

How is everybody?

Pick a number and I will talk about:

01. My sexual orientation.
02. What I'm really bad at.
03. The one person whose arms I'd like to be in.
04. My best first date.
05. A description of my self-esteem.
06. Who my best friends are.
07. My favourite book.
08. Biggest turn-offs.
09. A description of my best friend.
10. My favourite animal.
11. Someone I miss.
12. The reason behind my last break-up.
13. What I did yesterday.
14. My greatest achievements.
15. My favourite songs right now.
16. A description of my last kiss.
17. What I find attractive.
18. All of the pets I've ever owned.
19. My favourite ice cream flavour.
20. The one place I wish I was right now.
21. The most cruel thing anyone has ever said to me.
22. All of the places I've lived.
23. Qualities that make me more likely to love a person.
24. My future plans.
25. One of my internal conflicts.
26. What I'm doing tomorrow.
27. My life's aspirations.
28. My most embarrassing moment.
29. Two of my insecurities.
30. What I would do if I won the lottery.
31. What I love most about myself.
32. My biggest pet peeves.
33. What musical artists I've seen live.
34. How many kids I would like to have.
35. My idea of a perfect date.
36. What I'm really excellent at.
37. My most traumatic experience.
38. Where I would like to live.
39. The nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.
40. Whether I like where I live now.
41. What I can hear right now.
42. My relationship with my siblings.
43. What's currently worrying me the most.
44. Something I've repeatedly wished for.
45. My relationship with my parents.
46. What I dislike most about myself.

Watching Simoun, one of the characters one will come across is Yun, who among most people who have seen the show seems to engender a tremendous amount of affection and respect. It's interesting that this should be the case for a character who was created essentially to plug a gap in a minor aspect of the plot of an early episode and ended up with a storyline most of which was intended for somebody else (which is lucky, since if Rodoreamon had in fact ended up with what became Yun's storyline as well as what became her own she probably would have to an extent dominated the show). It's especially interesting for a person whose decision-making process, one of the things that people seem to admire the most about her, is so removed from normal modern Western secular sane-person standards.

People have referred to Yun as deontologically inclined, which makes a certain degree of sense; she definitely believes in absolute moral laws and attempts to act accordingly, and spends a lot of the show in the classic deontological despair of conflicting absolutes (pacifism versus remembrance of and respect for the dead). The problem is that while it may correlate closely to this, formal deontological conceptions are almost certainly not why Yun cares. If one asked Yun (and Yun is smart, probably the smartest character in the show other than Dominura and maybe Limone when she's older) she would probably articulate some form of Divine-command morality and describe her watchword as whatever equivalent her religion has of the Christian concept of 'grace' (and there is very obviously an equivalent there that informs what she does).

This becomes deontological in practise, because Yun unlike many of the other characters is entirely willing and indeed eager to take her faith's strictures seriously and follow them to their end points, regardless of convenience. It is meet and right to pay respects to those who died in the service of God, so she opposes what she sees as the desecration of the corpse of a religious suicide bomber from an enemy country. Even so, even if one can forgive and pay respects to the people involved, violence, battle, and murder are always wrong, so her ideal end for the war in which she is fighting in order to pay respects to her dead friends does not involve her own happiness--indeed, it involves her death, which she sees as the only natural or acceptable outcome. She believes so strongly in her religion's eschatological concept, the Eternal Maiden, that when she happens upon a person who has tried to embody the Eternal Maiden, failed, and undergone severe punishment for it, she completely accepts her, completely forgives her, and tells her that she is beautiful before taking on that role for herself. Not even the existing fact that this eschaton has fallen and pursuing it in this particular way (other characters pursue the same ideal with greater success) leads to theoretically endless suffering will prevent Yun from admiring, loving, and wanting to save and forgive and free a person who has striven for what she believes is the right end to the world.

To an extent there are elements of conscious performance in Yun's behaviour: It's more than possible that she sees herself not so much as an agent as an instrument by which an Agent works in the world. Divine commands for her work on a partially reciprocal basis: Yearning for death as the natural end of remembering the already-dead, taking on the liminal role of the failed, 'stuck' Eternal Maiden as appropriation of her predecessor's failure, accepting the proprietorship of the relics of a transcendent martyr to symbolise the incompleteness and loneliness of her own martyrhood and to accept a role as a bridge between the world or the real (Rodoreamon, who is still alive and takes a position of what seems to be political power--interestingly, this is technically under Yun, though I cannot imagine Yun being particularly active as a temporal theocrat) and the otherworld or the superreal (Mamiina, and the braid that seems to dissolve into or fuse with the sacred water and light of the Blue Spring). It is undeniable that to an extent, in some ways a very great one, Yun is a fanatic and, indeed, a fundamentalist--but she knows exactly what faith, horrific and necessary, demands of her, in her complete lack of complacency with herself. She tries for quite some time to put up a complete cordon sanitaire between herself and the world, which she is most comfortable dealing with in the abstract. Even her grammar is deliberately rough and shocking. In the end this falls. Since she is able to do the will of her God and change the world even if only in small ways (see icon keyword), she finally finds a place where she can be.

For the truly faithful, for the truly fanatical in the sense of carrying Divine love into the world regardless of the cost or situation, that's balm of Gilead enough for a renewed eternity of aching.

Should I do Yun meta?

Here is a meme!

I love living here.

So, I think it's time I pick up Skip-Beat again, since I left off after the Christmas chapters with the expectation of picking it up again in a few weeks and never in fact did.

Apparently Kyoko has been getting even more awesome roles recently.

SO! Does anybody think that the most recent ~55 chapters are a good use of my time around now?

I'm a lot happier with things now that I've realised that, in practise of desire for sociosexual contact if not in theoretical attraction, I'm asexual and hence my opinions about sex can be not only moralised (which I'm not going to stop doing, but only because I believe that everything has moral aspects, not because of anything unique to it), but...'identity-ised', as well. It's a lot easier both on me and on other people to look at it this way. I still do have a fairly 'sex-negative' (in a world in which I was the only moral actor I'd use the term 'love-positive', but as it is, while that term works for how I perceive myself, I can tell that it's unfair to other people in much the same way that 'sex-positive' feels to me somewhat unfair) moral compass which is far from relativistic and, hence, tends towards friction with the society that I keep, which while absolutely wonderful in most other ways is also full of people who take a line on this that I find highly problematic. I freely admit that all of this has been and continues to be the case. But I'm recognising that while I genuinely do hold these beliefs it isn't why I care; I care for a reason that's actually harder to explain but drives less of a wedge between me and other people once they do understand: Because, to use an analogy that I picked up from I-remember-not-where, it's as if everybody's life revolves around the maintenance and care of pet elephants which everybody is supposed to spontaneously accrue during puberty, and I didn't get the right kind, or mine is stunted and can't walk on its own, or I genuinely feel no desire to go through the steps of sharing my elephant with anybody else even though for most people sharing of elephants is objectively important and seems to be absolutely fascinating, or it looks more like a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus than like an elephant. But I like animals in general, and I feel like a lot of people are mistreating their elephants, even though it becomes awkward to talk or write about since I know that there's a perspective there that I lack.

(Er, sorry if anybody has trouble trudging through those sentences.)

I don't know; have I gone entirely off the reservation here? I just want to make sure I have not in fact been driven insane on the nails of my own inborn asceticism or something.

(Something weird happened with my journal so I've had to do this post twice. I don't know what exactly but the formatting was odd.)

Okay so.

I've been out of the loop.

Anything I should do to prepare my ass before watching the last two episodes of Doctor Who season fnarg+1?

So I feel kind of bad for not being around too much lately.

What's been going on with everyone? How are we?

So this is happening:

THE ANON OR NOT LOVE MEME

For a little while now I've been having this idea for an Avatar fic in which Hama and Kanna awaken Aang about a half-century before canon. It would be a taut political story (based on the idea that fifty fewer years of total war equals fifty more years of usable political infrastructure and two generations that haven't yet been decimated) featuring such characters as Toph's grandmother or great-aunt or somebody of that sort of capacity, Decrepit!Sozin and DesperatelyWaitingForHisFatherToDieAlready!Azulon, young adult Iroh and baby Ozai, a Bumi who's in his fifties or sixties and just getting started in the Order of the White Lotus, some previous generation of Kyoshi Warriors, maybe a prior Earth King, and so on and so forth.

So, does this idea sound interesting to anybody? I'd probably start writing it around early September, when I get back from my family's road trip and knock off an original short story idea that I have.

So, a while back news broke that Sam Raimi, he of among other things The Evil Dead and Xena: Warrior Princess fame, had bought the rights to Noir for purposes of hot live-action-adaptation action. Naturally, since I fucking love The Evil Dead and know that Xena is supposed to be really gay, I was...trepid, certainly, but cautiously excited about this concept. It was either going to be brain-breakingly horrible or fucking awesome, and I trusted the man who made Bruce Campbell a star.

But

But!

WORSE THAN I FEARED IT COULD POSSIBLY BE DOES NOT EVEN BEGIN TO DESCRIBE THIS SHIT.

So. Altena is gone. Chloe is gone (or warped into an unrecognisable straight caricature of herself called Alice, it's not really clear where in the development process that came in). Mireille is (1) straight, (2) ten years older than Kirika, (3) MARRIED, and (4) apparently involved with at least a few men who aren't the bullshit generic male lead she's married to. Also she has Altena's backstory for some reason even though there's no Altena. Kirika is also straight. Milosh, remember him? That weary old Foreign Legion vet who just wanted to forget and paint pictures and who befriended Kirika because he liked her watercolours? Well here he is her age and her boyfriend, to whom she loses her virginity and who she then kills in a jealous rage (Kirika is a lot more of a nutcase than she is in the real version). The whole thing is set in the sixties, God only knows why exactly. The Soldats have been completely changed; they replaced the white terrorists with their own weird cult in the Pyrenees with brown terrorists from the Middle East (CLASSY). The script excerpts in general (you have to pay for them in that link, but they were posted on 4chan) are absolutely awful, like a cross between All-Star Batman and Robin-era Frank Miller and one of the more unwatchable Roger Moore 007 flicks.

As somebody on /u/ said:

'The core concept of Noir is how two women who are essentially completely alone and only barely connected to society manage to find some glimmer of light in their otherwise utterly dark lives....I may even go so far as to suggest that shit like this is going to destroy what made Noir Noir.'

I am not a happy camper about this fuckery.