Book 16, 2024

I don't want to blow your mind, but "The Year of the Hare" by Arto Paasilinna is /not/ a telephone translation from Finnish to another language and then a translation from that language into English. There is no linguistic middleman!

I've only read one of Paasilinna's novels before (a later one, "The Howling Miller" because that's the extent of Paasilinna's fiction that's been translated into English) and "The Year of the Hare" is … lighter, for lack of a better word.

It IS about a man who just decides he's done with living within the confines of society after he and a friend hit a rabbit with a car. Vatanen ditches the car and follows the injured rabbit. He leaves his job and wife to tend to the rabbit and adopts an itinerant lifestyle, living off his savings and what he can make doing casual, unskilled labour, traveling from place to place with no particular goals. He's accompanied by the rabbit throughout, which he is immediately devoted to, but the novel is incredibly unsentimental for 'novel about a man who abandons modern life to travel the country with a rabbit'. The rabbit is never named, simply referred to as the Hare throughout.

The premise would be pastoral from an English author at the turn of the century and while Paasilinna's writing does contain an appreciation for nature and simplicity and a life without constant demands and distractions, just as much of the novel's tone is from how low-key irritated Vatanen is with his wife and his job and his friend and his boss and how they can't seem to understand /that/ he's doing this, let alone the why of his actions. There are several points in the novel where they conspire to trap Vatanen and drag him back to urban life and obligations. It's not the angry, escalating confrontation between the outsider and society in "The Howling Miller", it's just one man who wants people to stop bothering him so he can sleep in barns and find nice greens for his rabbit friend.

Maybe the novel's almost dry? Wikipedia has it categorized as a satirical novel and I … don't think it is, but maybe it's recognizably satire if you're reading it in Finnish in the 1970s? The vein of social criticism isn't presented in such a way that I'd say it's a satirical novel. It's picaresque, but one doesn't necessarily equal the other. It might be interesting to compare it with something like "Candide". That's primarily what I'm reminded of, looking back on my experience with it.

So maybe that undercuts my 'it's not a satirical novel' feelings.

Really, the important thing to know is that there is a scene where the rabbit poops in a lady's soup.

Barbie Wen Kexing plus accessories [in/sp]

Tagged by @hazelhound to share three facts about myself recently and, as I am a profoundly boring person, I hemmed and hawed over this, fearing any attempts would lead to self-depreciation. Nevertheless:

1) I missed the death of Polonius in a 2000 production of Hamlet starring Paul Gross because I had to rush out and throw up violently right in front of a janitor on the theatre carpet.

2) I grew up attending the United Church of Canada every Sunday from around age 4 until I moved out at 19, where my church family included the father of Canadian alternative rock star Bif Naked (he was a missionary, dentist, sang in the choir alongside my mother, social justice advocate, doubted that the resurrection of Jesus was a literal thing that happened, and played Santa for the kids after the Christmas pageant).

3) I studied shotokan karate from ages 8 to 16 and obtained my brown belt and still have the dojo kun memorized.

Going to throw this out to let's say @nicht-alles-gold @gyobaku and @cheerfulspinster

[ID: Eight screencaps from Taskmaster. Susan Wokoma says, "So one day, I was with my childhood friend Aurora. She's very arts-and-crafty. She calls her parents by their first name." Greg Davies says with a grimace, "Pull yourself together, Aurora." Susan continues, "And so, we decided to walk along the Walworth Road, and each find a leaf which we covered in sticky-backed plastic, and, uh... I decided to name my childhood pet Le Fleur, and that is a true story and I feel a bit sick." The studio screen shows a neatly laminated green leaf. End ID.]

When I was a kid, maybe 14 or so (which is, you know, 20+ years ago), I belonged to a Yahoo! mailing list for an anime called Gundam Wing. It was mostly populated by other teens, of varying ages, as it was started by a teen and her friends. Eventually it migrated, when Yahoo! groups started as forums, and even branched off into non-GW related stuff in a second forum.

One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.

I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.

I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.

I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered.  When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.

She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.

I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.

And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think… I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.

So I guess, like, if you’re here and you’re 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or whatever, I want you here in fandom with me, still. Your presence here is a comfort. It is hope. It is a reminder that life will continue to be fun, even as I get older, myself. And if you’re younger and you have this sort of elder in your groups, I hope that they are like Steel. I hope they are kind and patient and supportive, and that knowing them gives you hope for your own future. I hope in twenty years you look back and remember them fondly.

Book 15, 2024

There's something about an older paperback fantasy trilogy that can feel so ballsy when considering the current state of fantasy publishing, although maybe the main thing is how they can easily fit into a jacket pocket.

Patricia A. McKillip's "The Riddle-Master of Hed" is fascinating in the reminder of what a lie the gritty adultification of the fantasy genre is (we all know the direction I am looking in).

One of those loosely Celtic fantasies, "The Riddle-Master of Hed" is much like the later works of McKillip's that I've read in that McKillip has no interest in infodumping or taking the time to explain the world to the reader. Pick it up from context clues, you're here for a /story/. Let the first line of the wikipedia plot summary act as an example:

"The titular Riddle-Master is Morgon, the Prince of Hed, a small, simple island populated by farmers and swineherds. The prince, inexplicably, has three stars on his forehead."

What's a Riddle-Master? OBVIOUSLY IT IS SOMEONE WHO IS REALLY GOOD AT RIDDLES AND KNOWS THE SORT OF THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW TO ANSWER RIDDLES. What are riddles? MOTHERFUCKER YOU KNOW WHAT RIDDLES ARE. It doesn't take long to pick up that a Riddle-Master is a highly educated scholar, a fantasy philosopher, and Morgon's a really good one. You learn that "Prince" doesn't mean "Son of a King", it's a title in and of itself that involves a spiritual connection to the land he's prince of (Hed). The stars? THEY'RE INEXPLICABLE you and Morgon know they're probably some kind of omen or mark of Chosen Oneness because you've read a book before and so has Morgon, they're just a signifier.

Before the start of the book, Morgon won a riddle-game with a curse ghost king and now has technically won the hand of the second most beautiful woman in the world but he's kind of embarrassed about the whole thing. Deth, a wandering harpist and messenger of the High One (God?), jostles Morgon into leaving Hed to pursue this and thus begins a novel that is entirely a Hero Trying to Refuse the Call. Morgon just wants to Go Home; this man has no great longing for something more than his little farm island and pigs and beer and maybe doing riddles but in a casual way, not in a inadvertently uncovering the secrets of the universe way.

There is a shipwreck, there are shapeshifters, there is amnesia and mysterious relic cities from when there were Sorcerers, people with pasts too long for their ages, foresty warrior women, dreams full of hidden knowledge, a legendary sword, an unplayable harp. It's a series of fantasy incidents that seem to only be connected by the fact that they keep happening to Morgon.

As I have also found with McKillip's writing, there's a dreamy, soft quality to everything that pulls you along gently. "The Riddle-Master of Hed" is not a page-turner, it's almost cozy.

And terrible things happen. The ending is startlingly bleak without fanfare. If you read "The Riddle-Master of Hed" as a standalone novel, it would be like playing a videogame with bad end possibilities and then leaving it there. It doesn't feel like a cliffhanger, possibly because of the quiet quality of McKillip's prose, possibly because of the fairytale elements in the style of McKillip's storytelling.

My only real complaint? One of the land rulers Morgon encounters in his journey is called the Morgol. Ms. McKillip, please, don't give me Morgon and the Morgol in the same book. Don't do that to me.

Tatiana Blass, Penelope, wife of Odysseus 

Orange bag! 🍊

Tonight on Anime Girls' Night we hit the episode of Monster where you finally hear the entire Nameless Monster story and Tenma's attempted assassination of Johan with the library fire.

One of the live action anime adaptations that's brought up is Guillermo del Toro's interest in doing Monster and how unnecessary it would be, because there's nothing really to adapt, it's in many ways a straightforward mystery thriller that just happens to have been a serialized comic. It's probably the least cartoony of Urasawa's work, with very few characters occupying that extreme Tezuka Star System area.

But the same could be said about how unnecessary it was to adapt the manga into an anime. It's probably one of the most faithful anime adaptations I've seen. None of the little story nooks are dropped, you could compare panels with screenshots and find little deviation.

I was riveted by tonight's episode. Unlike the recent adaptation of Pluto, Monster is a workmanlike anime. It's no big budget years in the making series of mini-movies. But I was enraptured and then tense, holding my breath in the final moments, even though there's no actual narrative tension for me as a viewer.

The Nameless Monster section was done with animation just different enough from the regular narrative to be striking, given enough motion that the Nameless Monster looks a bit flipbook in his animation. The choices of what to animate and how, instead of just leaving it as static illustrations, walks a line between funny and unsettling that doesn't leave you feeling horrified when you reach the final line, but simply ... weird. The subtle wrongness of the book is conveyed while also being fully 'yeah that sounds like a kid's picture book'. The repeated elements are key there, as is the dedication to what you know would be a full page where the only text is the eating sounds.

The part of the episode in the library builds dread and tension with very little action but well-timed cuts between Tenma hidden with his sniper rifle, Johan in the wings, and Schuwald before the audience. A large portion of the episode is Tenma not shooting but it's effective as hell.

As everything goes to hell, something about the animation on Schuwald's pale blind eyes evokes the techniques used at the beginning of the episode for the storybook, seeming to tremble, the only mobile part of his stunned face.

I love 83 chapter sm, especially this moment😭💖

Bear Selfies Captured By Camera Traps

Hey all, I have been trying to think of something I could do to help those suffering in Gaza, and have decided to raffle off some prints and custom art to raise money for relief organizations.

The charities I’ve chosen are HEAL Palestine (I’ve specifically linked their Mental Health fund, but donations to any of their funds are great): https://healpalestine.app.neoncrm.com/campaigns/gaza-mental-health-campaign

and Gaza Kinder Relief: https://inara.org/gkr/

If you donate any amount to either of these organizations, you’ll have a chance to win a print of your choice. One person will also receive a custom colored-pencil sketch. I don’t do custom art very often, so if you’ve been wishing for something specific done by me, this is a rare chance!

Reply to this post to tell me you’ve entered, and dm me a screenshot of your donation confirmation. I’ll be randomly choosing 5 people at the end of the month (May 1st) to receive the prints and 1 for the custom original!

tsomd + textposts (43/?)

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I've started reading "The Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh", one of the four Chinese classics and very, very, very loosely the inspiration for Suikoden, so ...

Which one are you?