Talking About Stuff I've Seen Recently
Oct. 28th, 2024 07:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elyusionHello, person reading this. I hope you’re doing well. :3
To whom it may concern: I have decided I have succeeded in acclimating myself to Dreamwidth, and therefore no longer have a need to force myself to do weekly journals. Thus, I will no longer write such posts every weekend, only when something actually interesting happens. Some things I wanted to include in those posts have been put in a separate post category. Because I love making tables and lists, I have made a table with a suggestion for a type of post to make every day of the week. I don’t have to post every day or anything, but if I’m up for writing I already have ideas down. And “today” (since it’s 3 AM it’s Monday, but lets pretend it’s Sunday) is Review/Reaction Sunday. So let’s talk about things I’ve checked out recently! ^__^
Warning: Serious Yapping Ahead
Home to Harlem (book)
Home to Harlem is the 1928 debut novel of Claude McKay, of Harlem Renaissance fame. For some reason I went into it expecting something dramatic, but nothing ever happens. It’s like a slice of life, which I didn’t know novels can do. Is that embarrassing? Even when something serious happens, the consequences aren’t awful. Towards the end I expected the protagonist to die, for his girlfriend to die, for them to break up, but none of that happens. Honestly, it’s kind of nice.
In this book McKay writes out the characters’ accents phonetically. I wonder if many people at the time took issue with it. I can see how it’s problematic to do such a thing (and the white characters don’t have their accents spelled out like that, nor does the educated immigrant), but I found it fascinating from a linguistics standpoint and was using it as well as vocabulary differences to compare their variant of AAVE (~1919, Northeast) to my own (2024, Deep South, influenced by many outside sources). The characters are also all very much individuals with heart, and I don’t think their thick accents take that away from them.
I’m very curious about the clothes women wore. The book didn’t do a good job at describing them – which is fine, his contemporary audience would have a good starting point to imagine from. I need to look into what prostitutes wore in the late 1910s. Um… that point may not be necessary for a review of a book. Look, I’m no critic. I’m just talking to talk since I have thoughts and not anyone I really want to directly express them to, to be honest.
But anyways. I liked the book. It felt… nice. That’s how I felt when I finished it. It was nice. It was like season 1 of a TV show, and not a very dramatic show. I mean, I’ve seen this elsewhere too, but I did feel sad when a character said God exists but he doesn’t care about black people. That always makes me feel bad… Being so downtrodden that you’re not atheist, but believe God exists and hates your people… But the book was chill enough besides that, I swear; was honestly just about human relationships among black vagabonds, centered around Harlem.
And by the way, I read it because I had an idea last year for a thing set in the 1920s, so since then I’ve been reading black literature from then to get a feel for their life and manner of speech. The book was set near the end of WW1, but whatever, close enough.
Mirabella y el hechizo del dragón (book)
Mirabella y el hechizo del dragón, published 2020, is the Spanish translation by Vanesa Pérez-Sauquillo of Mirabelle Gets up to Mischief by Harriet Muncaster. Amazon says it’s for ages 5-7… But it’s 128 pages! So it should be for 7-10 year olds, right? Right?? Ugh. Loathe as I am to say it, this is the best I can do right now… I want to read some magical realism or something, but every time I pick up a critically acclaimed Spanish novel – or even short story – there’s too many words I don’t know. If you can’t go 3 sentences without finding a new word you don’t know, a book is too hard for you. After lots of downgrading, this is where I landed.
Now, I’m ashamed that my Spanish level is this low, but I’m not ashamed about the book itself. I actually love kid lit. And I think this book was fun and cool with cute illustrations, and something I wish I had when I was little. Well, I wouldn’t have been allowed to check this series out because it contains witchcraft, but I probably would have read it in the library without taking it home. If you like magical, maybe Halloween-y childish stuff or have a baby goth/creep/weirdo/etc. in your family, I do recommend this book – and the rest of the series is probably great too. I will be looking into this.
In this series, which is apparently a Gaiden series for another called Isadora Moon, the protagonist is the daughter of a witch mom and fairy dad. She takes after her mom and her little brother takes after her dad, and she (Mirabella/Mirabelle) likes to get a little silly. Even though her dad told her to embrace her fairy side and be on her best behavior at a fairy gathering, she goes off into the woods alone and brews a potion anyways. Mischief ensues. In her defense, your honor: she’s just a girl.
The book has questions at the end that maybe I’ll fill out for another post. Or I’ll keep my answers to myself. Or I’ll post them on LangCorrect. We’ll see.
Rain (webcomic)
Rain is a webcomic that began in 2010 by Jocelyn Samara DiDomenick. I have a feeling the comic is probably more well-known than I know, but if you’ve never heard of it: it’s a teen drama about titular character Rain, a trans girl, and the friends she makes after moving and transferring to a new Catholic school. Nearly the entire cast is queer. (I do not like that word, but it’s the most succinct choice here, so I’ll suck it up. You’re welcome.) They probably don’t majority consider themselves inherently queer, so I’ll add separately that there’s intersex characters too.
Rain felt educational, like it was for teaching cishet endosex people about so-and-so identity, but it’s not just that. If it was a ~45-chapter long PSA that “queer people exist and here’s what their identities mean” I would’ve closed the tab of boredom so fast. There’s a story here! And I don’t know about you, but I sure love when people have drama and issues and feelings. I cared for many of the characters – and there’s a lot of characters – and loved seeing them and their relationships grow. I would’ve loved seeing their college lives and adult lives and middle-aged lives too, but webcomics that are updated weekly honestly seem like they kick the creator’s ass to make and have super frequent hiatuses. I’d rather them end in a satisfying way sooner than later.
I loved the art style too. It’s adorable and made me feel nostalgic. It’s a good comic to binge. I wish high school was real and not a made up TV thing.
(I also think the dragon HRT arc after the official end of the story should be a different webpage or something, but hey, I’m not DiDomenick’s boss. Giving me tonal whiplash so bad I’m typing this sideways is her right as a comic artist.)
[Chris took a snack break from writing here]
[Chris then proceeded to forget he was ever writing this and was about to start drawing until he realized]
Fushigi no Kuni no Angelique (video game)
Fushigi no Kuni no Angelique, 1996, Koei’s development team Ruby Party, Playstation version. If I had to play this game on a console I wouldn’t be here right now typing this. My brains would be all over the floor. Pardon my French.
The movement is slow, the quiz game requires knowledge of (besides 70s-90s Japanese pop culture, shoujo manga, and fandom) the contents of Angelique side materials, the Columns-like game sucks balls and has music that makes me want to eat sheet metal, the music except for the “boss battle” music is repetitive, Clavis' map sprite still has that big ass forehead, etc.
Pros are the CGs are cute and I like talking to the characters I’ve grown to love. If I didn’t give a shit about them already this game would be so ?????? And I was honestly going to give it a 2.5/5 on Backloggd until I beat it and saw the ending cutscene. I’m weak to animated cutscenes. 3/5 game. Wuv you Clavis. The animation style in Special and Fushigi no Kuni is so cute… Going to look into the character designer or key animator or whoever is responsible for the animations there looking so cute. I just beat this game mere hours ago, by the way.
Can't believe I almost forgot to mention this: the slide puzzle game was funsies. I want to play more side puzzles now. It's wack that the puzzle doesn't give you more than half a second to see the picture before it shuffles the tiles - most of the pictures I'd never seen or paid attention to before so I had to spend a few precious seconds figuring out which tile is most likely to be the top left one. After that it's pretty much smooth sailing. ... After I learned how to do slide puzzles. You see, at first I was like "doing a slide puzzle in 5 minutes of a picture I've never seen? This game is BULLSHIT," but I looked it up: turns out there's a strategy to these things. And now I can do any slide puzzle waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster than I used to be able to. Now I'm a slide puzzle fiend. I need more... I need more... Might fuck around and learn how to solve Rubik's Cubes too, I dunno................
Angelique: Seichi Yori Ai wo Komete (anime)
Angelique: Seichi Yori Ai wo Komete is a 3-episode OVA from 2001 that is way better than Angelique’s first OVA, Shiroi Tsubasa no Memoire. Shiroi Tsubasa sucks. Considering the plot you think it’d be a bit more action-packed, but nothing ever happens. I love action and I’d love to see my boys fighting (outside of Tenkuu no Requiem, the JRPG ever), but whatever. This is about Seichi Yori. No Shiroi Tsubasa. Forget Shiroi Tsubasa.
Seichi Yori is funny!! So funny and cute. They’re so silly. This show(?) focuses on Olivie, Charlie, and The Youngsters. I think this finally convinced me to like The Young’ns. Randy and Zephel fight a normal amount instead of an annoying contrived amount, which I like. The animation itself wasn’t amazing, but it was pleasant. Like when Olivie danced with Marcel and Charles it was fun to watch, and there’s other fun moments too – I made one into a GIF; I’d love to do so again but I’m kind of a busy guy. Also, the opening sequence looks so nice. I like it. It’s cool. Good OVA. I may have only laughed so much because Angelique is making me lose my mind and I care these losers so much. It has shots of Olivie in the bath tub by the way.
You may think “isn’t Clavis your favorite? Talk about him,” but bro was barely in the OVA. I could be mad, but the few moments he had were amusing enough to satisfy me. I know that Clavis is that one bloke who does fuck all, plus he isn’t chatty, so it’s probably hard to find a way to involve him in the plot. Kinda like Goemon (Ishikawa XIII) except they throw me some nice bones to prevent my anger.
It'd be fun to try to sub this, but I should check to see if no one else has done so.
I think that’s been all for this past week. Hasta la vista!
To whom it may concern: I have decided I have succeeded in acclimating myself to Dreamwidth, and therefore no longer have a need to force myself to do weekly journals. Thus, I will no longer write such posts every weekend, only when something actually interesting happens. Some things I wanted to include in those posts have been put in a separate post category. Because I love making tables and lists, I have made a table with a suggestion for a type of post to make every day of the week. I don’t have to post every day or anything, but if I’m up for writing I already have ideas down. And “today” (since it’s 3 AM it’s Monday, but lets pretend it’s Sunday) is Review/Reaction Sunday. So let’s talk about things I’ve checked out recently! ^__^
Warning: Serious Yapping Ahead
Home to Harlem (book)
Home to Harlem is the 1928 debut novel of Claude McKay, of Harlem Renaissance fame. For some reason I went into it expecting something dramatic, but nothing ever happens. It’s like a slice of life, which I didn’t know novels can do. Is that embarrassing? Even when something serious happens, the consequences aren’t awful. Towards the end I expected the protagonist to die, for his girlfriend to die, for them to break up, but none of that happens. Honestly, it’s kind of nice.
In this book McKay writes out the characters’ accents phonetically. I wonder if many people at the time took issue with it. I can see how it’s problematic to do such a thing (and the white characters don’t have their accents spelled out like that, nor does the educated immigrant), but I found it fascinating from a linguistics standpoint and was using it as well as vocabulary differences to compare their variant of AAVE (~1919, Northeast) to my own (2024, Deep South, influenced by many outside sources). The characters are also all very much individuals with heart, and I don’t think their thick accents take that away from them.
I’m very curious about the clothes women wore. The book didn’t do a good job at describing them – which is fine, his contemporary audience would have a good starting point to imagine from. I need to look into what prostitutes wore in the late 1910s. Um… that point may not be necessary for a review of a book. Look, I’m no critic. I’m just talking to talk since I have thoughts and not anyone I really want to directly express them to, to be honest.
But anyways. I liked the book. It felt… nice. That’s how I felt when I finished it. It was nice. It was like season 1 of a TV show, and not a very dramatic show. I mean, I’ve seen this elsewhere too, but I did feel sad when a character said God exists but he doesn’t care about black people. That always makes me feel bad… Being so downtrodden that you’re not atheist, but believe God exists and hates your people… But the book was chill enough besides that, I swear; was honestly just about human relationships among black vagabonds, centered around Harlem.
And by the way, I read it because I had an idea last year for a thing set in the 1920s, so since then I’ve been reading black literature from then to get a feel for their life and manner of speech. The book was set near the end of WW1, but whatever, close enough.
Mirabella y el hechizo del dragón (book)
Mirabella y el hechizo del dragón, published 2020, is the Spanish translation by Vanesa Pérez-Sauquillo of Mirabelle Gets up to Mischief by Harriet Muncaster. Amazon says it’s for ages 5-7… But it’s 128 pages! So it should be for 7-10 year olds, right? Right?? Ugh. Loathe as I am to say it, this is the best I can do right now… I want to read some magical realism or something, but every time I pick up a critically acclaimed Spanish novel – or even short story – there’s too many words I don’t know. If you can’t go 3 sentences without finding a new word you don’t know, a book is too hard for you. After lots of downgrading, this is where I landed.
Now, I’m ashamed that my Spanish level is this low, but I’m not ashamed about the book itself. I actually love kid lit. And I think this book was fun and cool with cute illustrations, and something I wish I had when I was little. Well, I wouldn’t have been allowed to check this series out because it contains witchcraft, but I probably would have read it in the library without taking it home. If you like magical, maybe Halloween-y childish stuff or have a baby goth/creep/weirdo/etc. in your family, I do recommend this book – and the rest of the series is probably great too. I will be looking into this.
In this series, which is apparently a Gaiden series for another called Isadora Moon, the protagonist is the daughter of a witch mom and fairy dad. She takes after her mom and her little brother takes after her dad, and she (Mirabella/Mirabelle) likes to get a little silly. Even though her dad told her to embrace her fairy side and be on her best behavior at a fairy gathering, she goes off into the woods alone and brews a potion anyways. Mischief ensues. In her defense, your honor: she’s just a girl.
The book has questions at the end that maybe I’ll fill out for another post. Or I’ll keep my answers to myself. Or I’ll post them on LangCorrect. We’ll see.
Rain (webcomic)
Rain is a webcomic that began in 2010 by Jocelyn Samara DiDomenick. I have a feeling the comic is probably more well-known than I know, but if you’ve never heard of it: it’s a teen drama about titular character Rain, a trans girl, and the friends she makes after moving and transferring to a new Catholic school. Nearly the entire cast is queer. (I do not like that word, but it’s the most succinct choice here, so I’ll suck it up. You’re welcome.) They probably don’t majority consider themselves inherently queer, so I’ll add separately that there’s intersex characters too.
Rain felt educational, like it was for teaching cishet endosex people about so-and-so identity, but it’s not just that. If it was a ~45-chapter long PSA that “queer people exist and here’s what their identities mean” I would’ve closed the tab of boredom so fast. There’s a story here! And I don’t know about you, but I sure love when people have drama and issues and feelings. I cared for many of the characters – and there’s a lot of characters – and loved seeing them and their relationships grow. I would’ve loved seeing their college lives and adult lives and middle-aged lives too, but webcomics that are updated weekly honestly seem like they kick the creator’s ass to make and have super frequent hiatuses. I’d rather them end in a satisfying way sooner than later.
I loved the art style too. It’s adorable and made me feel nostalgic. It’s a good comic to binge. I wish high school was real and not a made up TV thing.
(I also think the dragon HRT arc after the official end of the story should be a different webpage or something, but hey, I’m not DiDomenick’s boss. Giving me tonal whiplash so bad I’m typing this sideways is her right as a comic artist.)
[Chris took a snack break from writing here]
[Chris then proceeded to forget he was ever writing this and was about to start drawing until he realized]
Fushigi no Kuni no Angelique (video game)
Fushigi no Kuni no Angelique, 1996, Koei’s development team Ruby Party, Playstation version. If I had to play this game on a console I wouldn’t be here right now typing this. My brains would be all over the floor. Pardon my French.
The movement is slow, the quiz game requires knowledge of (besides 70s-90s Japanese pop culture, shoujo manga, and fandom) the contents of Angelique side materials, the Columns-like game sucks balls and has music that makes me want to eat sheet metal, the music except for the “boss battle” music is repetitive, Clavis' map sprite still has that big ass forehead, etc.
Pros are the CGs are cute and I like talking to the characters I’ve grown to love. If I didn’t give a shit about them already this game would be so ?????? And I was honestly going to give it a 2.5/5 on Backloggd until I beat it and saw the ending cutscene. I’m weak to animated cutscenes. 3/5 game. Wuv you Clavis. The animation style in Special and Fushigi no Kuni is so cute… Going to look into the character designer or key animator or whoever is responsible for the animations there looking so cute. I just beat this game mere hours ago, by the way.
Can't believe I almost forgot to mention this: the slide puzzle game was funsies. I want to play more side puzzles now. It's wack that the puzzle doesn't give you more than half a second to see the picture before it shuffles the tiles - most of the pictures I'd never seen or paid attention to before so I had to spend a few precious seconds figuring out which tile is most likely to be the top left one. After that it's pretty much smooth sailing. ... After I learned how to do slide puzzles. You see, at first I was like "doing a slide puzzle in 5 minutes of a picture I've never seen? This game is BULLSHIT," but I looked it up: turns out there's a strategy to these things. And now I can do any slide puzzle waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster than I used to be able to. Now I'm a slide puzzle fiend. I need more... I need more... Might fuck around and learn how to solve Rubik's Cubes too, I dunno................
Angelique: Seichi Yori Ai wo Komete (anime)
Angelique: Seichi Yori Ai wo Komete is a 3-episode OVA from 2001 that is way better than Angelique’s first OVA, Shiroi Tsubasa no Memoire. Shiroi Tsubasa sucks. Considering the plot you think it’d be a bit more action-packed, but nothing ever happens. I love action and I’d love to see my boys fighting (outside of Tenkuu no Requiem, the JRPG ever), but whatever. This is about Seichi Yori. No Shiroi Tsubasa. Forget Shiroi Tsubasa.
Seichi Yori is funny!! So funny and cute. They’re so silly. This show(?) focuses on Olivie, Charlie, and The Youngsters. I think this finally convinced me to like The Young’ns. Randy and Zephel fight a normal amount instead of an annoying contrived amount, which I like. The animation itself wasn’t amazing, but it was pleasant. Like when Olivie danced with Marcel and Charles it was fun to watch, and there’s other fun moments too – I made one into a GIF; I’d love to do so again but I’m kind of a busy guy. Also, the opening sequence looks so nice. I like it. It’s cool. Good OVA. I may have only laughed so much because Angelique is making me lose my mind and I care these losers so much. It has shots of Olivie in the bath tub by the way.
You may think “isn’t Clavis your favorite? Talk about him,” but bro was barely in the OVA. I could be mad, but the few moments he had were amusing enough to satisfy me. I know that Clavis is that one bloke who does fuck all, plus he isn’t chatty, so it’s probably hard to find a way to involve him in the plot. Kinda like Goemon (Ishikawa XIII) except they throw me some nice bones to prevent my anger.
It'd be fun to try to sub this, but I should check to see if no one else has done so.
I think that’s been all for this past week. Hasta la vista!
