Tonight the music seems so loud
Jul. 8th, 2025 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
viridian5dine:Post a song from the year you turned 12
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A Perfect Circle's "Delicious," a song about the schadenfreude of leopards eating the faces of those who voted them into power, came up on my Shuffle today, and it hurt to think A Perfect Circle's 2018 Eat the Elephant album is so relevant again in 2025.
Recent reading
Jul. 7th, 2025 08:41 pmtroisoiseauxI'm approximately three-quarters through Dune and things have gotten really weird. (Jessica + the Water of Life ritual????) Also, oddly, this audiobook keeps slipping back and forth between using a full cast of different voice actors for the different characters and having a single narrator Doing Voices for all the characters, which has a very odd effect when it changes from scene to scene and the main narrator has a completely different way of reading, e.g., Count Fenring's verbal tic than the other, specific voice actor does. It has also introduced more of a soundscape, including (in a move so cliche it was accidentally funny) ambiguously exotic flute music when Paul's Fremen love interest
In Praise of a Classic Text: Understanding Comics - Part I
Jul. 7th, 2025 06:54 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
fanhackers_feedI debated writing this post, because I tend to assume everyone knows Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics - but then again, it’s not often cited as a classic fan studies text, though it absolutely is, and a key. Not only is it a fantastic theoretical and practical explainer of the art form of comics in general - and so is a crucial text to comics fandom, as well as all kind of fan art - but I think it is useful for fandom broadly because of its description of storytelling technique and, even more specifically, its understanding of identification.
McCloud argues (for example on the page below the cut) that readers identify more strongly with a more roughly-sketched face - in its most basic form, a smiley face - than with a fully-fleshed out, realistic or photorealistic portrait. In other words, we all see ourselves in a smiley face - or, for example - in somebody simply drawn like Charlie Brown - whereas if we see a very specifically drawn person, McCloud says we see the other–another, one who is not-me.
I believe this and I think it has a couple of interesting implications for fandom.
Interesting Implication the First: There is a way in which fan art tends to create a kind of quick, cartoonish iconography for popular fannish characters that can–not rival, it’s not a competition!–but provide a very different kind of fannish pleasure than a very realistically drawn image. To be an old, and draw on an old fannish frames of reference like Stargate Atlantis, there is a way in which John Sheppard is represented by a particular flip of upswept messy black hair that makes him - (hear me out!) - look different from actor Joe Flanagan; similarly, Rodney McKay is characterized by his sandy brown hair, heart shaped <strike>ass</strike> face, and slash of a mouth. See chkc’s wonderful chibi McShep below:
Chibi Mcshep - 2010-05-02 - Uniform (0 words) by chkc
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay
Additional Tags: Fanart, Chibi
Summary:
John smooches Rodney while in uniform.
I would argue that a fanartist working in a mode like this makes Sheppard more rather than less real–in a way, the further Sheppard gets from Flanagan, the realer he is, and the closer he is to the John Sheppard who took up a lot of real estate in my mind for a while there. Who is NOT Joe Flanigan, and who can disappear for me if he looks too much LIKE Joe Flanigan. (Similarly: Han Solo is not Harrison Ford! Misha is not Cas! Etc. ) YMMV of course, and certainly there is wonderful realistic art, but I think that fan art serves a lot of different purposes, and there’s something wonderful about more iconographic art…
Next week: Interesting Implication the Second!
more of the same
Jul. 7th, 2025 02:36 pmchefxhWe figured out that Catalunya is about the size of New Jersey and Spain the size of Texas. (Someone had asked me, and I struggled for a comparison.)
Such a beautiful thing to throw away
Jul. 7th, 2025 03:47 amviridian5
I didn't go to look during the last week of June to see if Bloomingdale's did something for Pride like they'd done in previous years, but when I rode by June 22 and July 4 I didn't see any LGBTQIA+-related thing. I don't know if it was apathy or cowardice.I've put up a ton of stuff on my Flickr since I last mentioned it: a lot of window displays (33 photos), some cemetery photos from May, a graduation photo, and a shot of hydrangea.
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I've been doing a lot of driving lately and working in a new-to-me fandom and have been getting so bunnied. It's been a long time since I've been spinning at this output. The night of July 4th, I got and wrote down a 600-word piece. And 1870 words on a WIP.
2025/103: Hemlock and Silver — T Kingfisher
Jul. 7th, 2025 08:34 amtamaranth
I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife. [opening line]
A new T Kingfisher novel is always a delight, and Hemlock and Silver -- a dark and occasionally horrific riff on 'Snow White' -- has brought me great joy, right from that opening line.
( Read more... )
"One Reason We Don’t Get Bruno Drunk" [Encanto gen]
Jul. 7th, 2025 12:05 amviridian5RATING: PG-13.
SUMMARY: It’s a funny story! Drunk Bruno swears it is!
NOTES: Bruno’s language is saltier when he’s drunk with the “adults” than it is in my other fics.
Thank you to
akira17 for beta.+++
I've been watching My Instant Death Ability is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me! [Sokushi Cheat ga Saikyou sugite, Isekai no Yatsura ga Marude Aite ni Naranain Desu ga]. A school bus from Japan arrives in another world ruled by a sage who kills the adults and claims the students will train as sages. But one student, Takatou Yogiri, already has a power....
The massive body count would usually bother me, but so many of the characters are such murderous a-holes that I'm often saying, "Die," along with Takatou. Sometimes even before him. It's self-defense every time. Sane people who heard about someone who could kill people instantly would not mess with the guy, especially when he just wants them to leave him and his companion alone as they travel, but these folks are determined to poke the bear, often while giving some long arrogant speech. This show could be used as an illustration for "fuck around, find out."
I don't entirely like the show but find it weirdly entertaining?