indigozeal

[Error: unknown template qotd]I'm not the biggest Harry Potter fan, but bookwise, I'll be one of those odd folks who'll stump for Chamber of Secrets. It's short enough to be focused; it features a well-paced mystery that gives a good sense of growing menace yet balances well with the school material; it has an intriguing idea for a villain, one who provides a strong parallel/counterpoint to Harry; and it stands alone well as a book, with a good, unifying theme (on how choice and not circumstance defines a person) that provides a satisfying dramatic finish.

By the way, this is an odd Easter question. Unless it's related to this.
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[Error: unknown template qotd]My favorite disastrous group experience was when my high school government class assigned us to rewrite the U.S. Constitution, and the other members decided to forget about specifying anything about the main branches of government, states' rights, or term limits in favor of hashing out, class by class & substance by substance, exactly what drugs should be legalized.
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[Error: unknown template qotd]If you asked me this not too long ago, I'd be amazed at what I'm about to say, but: no. Though I work in translation, my degree's in a laboratory science - geology, actually - and I had planned eventually to go on to get a Master's in paleontology. I originally chose geology because I've had an interest in minerals ever since I was a kid; the discipline seemed to be the perfect synthesis of research, science, and the outdoors; and the region of the U.S. where I'd like to live (go back to, actually) is big in the field, so I could do significant work in the field near home. As I worked through the major, though, I was just horribly turned off by the type of the people the field seemed to attract - cliquish & petty; unwilling to work together on anything; and just so childish. (The capper came when I had trouble finding a professor to partner with for a project and was told that while my grades were excellent, no one wanted to work with me because I didn't go to department mixers. I didn't go to the mixers because I was busy trying to help my mother cope with the aftereffects of a serious stroke, but this evidently was no excuse.) Maybe it was just the folks at my school, but the experience soured me on the field. Getting a degree was a big fixation for me for a good while, but once I got my geology Bachelor's, I had just had it.

I've learned the Japanese language completely on my own initiative, save for one class that wasn't essential to my education. Thanks to the Internet, I can work in the field from anywhere, meaning that I'm not place-bound by my job; I'm judged by the quality of my work, not by social politics; and I earn more in translation - while working at home, in a job where I can to an extent set my own hours - than I would in an entry-level geology job. And it's just such fulfilling work for me: learning about a variety of fields; helping people out; giving texts new audiences. While there are seminars I could attend, there's not much I could learn through formal university education that I couldn't with practical experience. I am done with school - and, man, is it a relief.
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Why not. Let's do this. Let's be baldly commercial.

The role of Ghaleon's BFF is already filled. Besides, I want Ghaleon to have a better class of friend than me. Rena from Lunar Strolling School, likewise, already has a famed BFF, and she and I think I'd be a little sedentary for her.

Oddly, you know, I'm almost disposed to pick Luca from The After Years. Bright, personable, can-do attitude, intriguing hobby, with an airship and walking, talking dolls and all the best toys. Also worth consideration is St. Germant from Animamundi, who's such a nice, sweet fellow, or Angelique's Lumiale - a calm and nice person with whom you can spend a quiet afternoon.

This is one of those questions where it's intriguing to check out other folks' responses. Someone said Travis from No More Heroes, but I dunno. I don't think you'd be doing much with hhim besides staying at home and listening to him talk about his favorite porn movies. Then you get your head sliced off and thrown through Travis's window in the sequel.

Kevin Ryman! Someone remembers Outbreak, joy. Kevin'd be good for a certain type of person. I can't imagine getting along with him, but if you're on his wavelength, he'd be a great friend.

Rydia, yes. No reason given, and no reason necessary. Atrus from Myst, because "the man can write worlds" - best reason of any.

"The frog from Frogger"? What the heck, person? I've actually seen multiple people pick Silver Star's Alex/Arhes here; guys, he's a largely-mute JRPG protagonist! He barely has a personality! Multiple people also picked the 7-up logo from Cool Spot, which...??? Perhaps the most unique and charming pick was the knight from Joust: "There is something...mesmerizing about that plucky bastard and his bird fighting off pterodactyls."
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I'll use this space instead to gripe about how I really don't care much for poetry. I'm more with this person in her reaction to some offerings from a university magazine: "Amateur pirouettes on a page, terribly proud of themselves." Most poems seem borne of the author's notion that their thoughts will

become
PROFOUND
if they are
punctuated
and
s p a c e d
eccentricly.

Moreover, most "great" English-language poems are written in the overdone late-19th-century British style, choked with doilies and ornamentation. The ratio of verbiage to actual sentiment is very high. At the risk of sounding like a narrow-minded Nipponophile, I prefer haiku to this overly-gilded approach - a quiet metaphor of imagery that invites the reader to complete the picture.

(Regarding English works, I'm more partial to those that pay attention to rhythm in their structure - "The Raven," for example, as trite a choice as that may be.)

A family member is very fond of Robert Frost, but everything he's written that's not "The Road Not Taken" strikes me as greeting-card pap, the kind of stuff that New York City people who've moved upstate would write to show that, look, they have a place in the backwoods five whole miles from a McDonald's and are Country Folk now. I was brought to the Frost museum once and now, upon mention of Frost, can't ever forget the story of his wife, who was just as accomplished and promising a poet as Robert was in their university days but was forced to give up her career in favor of her husband's.

Back to haiku: early, way early in my Japanese studies, I bought a book of haiku translated in the '40's or maybe it was the '60's. The translations were vivid enough to communicate the beauty of the originals, but one affectation marred things: the author made every first and third line rhyme, "because," he said, "quite simply, I like it." Basho's considered the grand master of the form, but I remember that his work didn't impress me as much as another, supposedly "lesser" poet considered to be second fiddle to Basho, but danged if I can remember his name now.

I did spend $30 at a time when I was making very paltry money on a book of Japanese death poems. I still haven't read it.
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This topic can't be broached without complaining about "frozen dairy dessert." Several of Breyers' flavors are so labeled because they don't contain enough cream to meet the FDA's definition of ice cream. In what way, though? Did Breyers just substitute milk? I'm fine with ice milk. I fear, though, that product's a huge hunk of tara gum they studded with cookie dough.

About flavors: I've never liked chocolate ice cream that much. It's thick and chokingly, chalkishly rich for a dessert that should be light, clean, and cool. I should love peach - peaches 'n' ice cream should be an ideal marriage - but they invariably get the cheapest vanilla on hand for the base, which ruins the whole experience. Mint chocolate chip and cookies 'n' cream are hard to screw up, but with the faux-chocolate bits they're substituting for real chocolate nowadays, corporations are doing their level best.

Many stands up here have their own version of an Almond Joy ice cream that has been reliably good. One local stand sells natural homemade strawberry soft serve, which in recent years has looked better than it's tasted, but it's hard to hold a grudge against bright pink soft serve. Dairy Queen several years ago had a Blizzard that combined strawberries, bananas, and Vienna Fingers that's yet to be topped, though this isn't really an ice cream flavor. A local brand of hard serve once offered a black raspberry flavor with mini chocolate Reese's-like cups filled with blackberry syrup that was pleasantly fruity instead of fructosey-fake. Though I usually favor chocolate and caramel over fruit flavors in my sweets, I tend to avoid ice-cream flavors with chocolate and caramel in combination, as they (the ice-cream flavors, I mean) can get rather indistinguishable and, as Lore Sjöberg notes, fairly pore-choking.

(Interesting experiments: the strawberry soft-serve place sells ginger hard serve, which is a pleasing hybrid of fruit and spice - not a mainstay, but a flavor you'd like to revisit once in a while. Dairy Queen, again, offered a "cotton candy" Blizzard that was, quite logically, just ice cream with crystalline sugar mixed in, a combination that was at once intriguing and off-putting but never off-putting enough to make you actually stop eating. They also once had a raspberry Blizzard which was plain soft-serve mixed with extremely sour raspberry...I don't know if "syrup"'s the right word, as I'm hesitant to associate the name of an actual food product with this flavor substance. The pink was radioactive, and the taste barely less so.)
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Hey, Writer's Block tourists, you can skip this one: I don't get how people can misinterpret the plot of Lunar: The Silver Star so badly. There're a couple NPCs in Marke to explicitly hit the clueless over the head with a two-by-four ("Wow! So Ghaleon'd burned his creme brulee all along!" "If Ghaleon'd burned his creme brulee all along, why was he mad that Althena blew up the kitchen? He must've been known that Dyne'd just put in new countertops!"), there isn't one bit of surprise or shock in that meeting atop Myght's lab, there's always considerable emphasis both pre- and post-revelation on the injustice of being used and tossed aside, not simply killed... To say nothing of the plain bad storytelling involved - it makes no sense for the villain to be acting on misinformation and never once come to terms with his mistake.

TSS had an original conflict and motivation for its villain that fostered nuanced characterization on which the series - the good parts of the series that dealt with the matter - consequently built. It's something of which to be proud, and yet we're choosing to bury it for an idiotic oops-my-bad plotline. I just don't get it.
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With all the conventionally respectable music to which I listen, the first thing that's coming to mind is from Jem's (well, the Misfits') "Universal Appeal." Yeah, yeah, but: "In my own mind's eye, I am the sky, so why should I be shy?" I'm sorry, that's poetry, man.
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Below is a response to an old Writer's Block question on which I narrowly missed the deadline. I can't access the entry anymore, so in an attempt to reconsctruct the question:

What's your main source for news?

Previously, my main source of info was TV news, but I got rid of cable six months ago. Even the slacker's ideal of watching Daily Show/Colbert Report had fallen by the wayside long previous after I caught a particularly nasty "Better Know Your Districts" segment, where the representative was honestly trying to answer questions and Colbert just kept tripping over every inadvertent word slip he made.

I used to click a link on the bottom news bar of Bing if I saw a term that grabbed my interest, but it turned out that their bubbling of my demographic meant that I was getting nothing but celebrity pregnancy stories. I dropped Bing altogether in favor of DuckDuckGo after learning more about their tracking/bubbling practices, so the net doesn't push much news my way.

I do check Shakesville, but the blog had to buckle down on comm rules to ferret out trolls, and it's consequently become a bit of an echo chamber on matters down even to everyone's taste in cinema. It's still useful information-wise but requires discernment.

I don't like where I'm living right now, so I feel no need to be connected to the local community. The quality of the newspaper writing is horrific up here anyhow. I glance at the front page through the vending machine at the post office, I'll take a glance if a copy's around and I have some time, but that's it. Time? The New Yorker? I'll pop in once in a while, but their Very Serious Person bias, as Krugman would say, is frustrating. (Yes, of course Krugman and Shakesville are built on bias - but they realize that they're taking a side on the issues and therefore make an effort at arguing their cases. Time etc. assume that their viewpoint is the neutral baseline and present their bias as unassailable fact, above need for argument or evidence. Additionally, if you read, say, Time's Techland blog or the New Yorker's book blog, you realize that some of the reporters at these prestigious institutions are shockingly, deeply ignorant in their chosen fields.)

So, in brief: I hear about news stories if the boards on which I lurk or Shakesville or Paul Krugman mention them. This seems ignorant - and I sound like a left-wing version of a Fox News devotee at times here in my denunciation of mainstream media - but I don't feel like I'm missing all that much by not being plugged in. The masses are powerless now anyhow, right? The recession will end when the corporations get better and not the workers? So it makes little difference whether I'm up-to-the-second on the latest outrages.
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With all the recent unpleasantness, let's turn our attention to a frothier topic.

My favorite candy is perhaps Haribo gummies, but I can't have them anymore due to the gelatin. I can't think of any other candies to which I'm so instantly partial; I like the clean taste of the filling of Mars bars, and Snickers makes a dark-chocolate version of the bar now that really highlights the flavors of the ingredients rather than clumping them into one ball of sweetness. Most anything Storck makes is worthwhile particularly its Mamba line); ditto Lindt, to a lesser extent.

Dessertwise, I like peach pie greatly, even though I don't eat it often (and will probably have to make it myself from now on due to my no-eggs issue). Peach is an underused flavor, I think; it's not overly sweet and "direct," as The Cat Who...'s Mountclemens would say, as strawberry can be and raspberry usually is; peach opts for delicate flavor over ascorbic acid.

I'm also partial to chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. Chocolate on chocolate is too rich for me, and vanilla on vanilla often too tasteless or (with imitation vanilla) cheap-tasting.

You'd think whoopie pies would be a giant hunk of awesome, but lemme tell ya: the filling is a gritty, lardy turn-off, a mouthful of plastic shortening instead of a creamy taste of vanilla, and they're about 1,000 calories per serving. Suzy-Qs, the Hostess knockoff, are actually superior to most authentic whoopie pie specimens on balance.

I used always to opt for German chocolate cake when I went to the diner when I was a kid. I still like it, but the caramel just doesn't have the same hold over me now.

I've never tried pavlova. Probably never will now, with the egg issue.

Oh! Ice cream! Ice cream is one thing Maine does well - not five miles from me, I have a stand that serves strawberry soft serve, an outlet for a local hard-serve manufacturer, and a couple locations that in any other city would make for standout town ice cream stands. There's also a "48 flavors of soft serve" offered by many smaller outlets throughout the state. It's not quality - I think it's just mix-in powder - but the novelty of having a peach (good), blueberry (good), or licorice (tastes like Robitussin) cone trumps quality. I have to try the watermelon before the season's out.

Of course, that's in summer and not in fall through spring, when they all are Closed for the Season like half the state. Then you have to choose among the packaged stuff from Haagen-Dazs (too expensive), Ben & Jerry's (too expensive and unimaginative since the Unilever buyout), Breyers (too artificial since the Unilever buyout - why is that company bound and determined to ruin ice cream?), and everything else (blech). I used to get cartons of the local hard-serve manufacturer's stuff till I read the label and discovered that their product was packed with more guar gum and its ilk than even Unilever's ice cream. Still, I probably eat more ice cream than any other food listed here.

Eh, this was a waste of a post, and not an uptick for the better.
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I suppose I should answer, it being the national Day of Remembrance, even though I don't have a particularly memorable story. My mother called me up first thing in the morning with the news that something was going on in New York City, and I turned on the TV and saw the waterfront engulfed in smoke.

I was living in Montana at the time, so I was decidedly removed from the focus of events (my father, though, works not far from NYC and knew at least one guy who didn't get out of the towers). I did, however, live close to my city's downtown, and I walked to the post office that day after the main body of news ended just to get some human contact; usually, at least some shoppers can be found filtering in and out of the stores and streets. That day, though, there was just utterly no one, no one out at all, nothing except empty canyons of steel and the sky blank grey overhead.
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I taught myself Japanese to N1-level. That's it. Not much good has happened to me.

I'm looking at other folks' answers, which aren't as heavily "my kids" or "my spouse"-laden as I suspected. I remember in high school being counseled not to write in my college admissions essays about death or divorce, as those topics are so yesterday for admissions officers. I thought that was incredibly assholish, and here I am, screening for displays of affection towards family members.

There are some interesting responses. "Getting to be the first person in my family to go to College" - can't argue with that. "I'd be a twin, but my mother miscarried my sibling. It could have been me that died instead" - hmmmm in many aspects. "Would you ask a cloud about vastness? A Fish about water? Blood runs through my veins! Is this not miraculous enough? All else is wonder built upon wonder!" - you look at this and think it's mockable, but this is actually a pretty awesome answer.

Also: "Probably this peanut butter cookie. It has chocolate chips ON TOP of the cookie, like they were trying to make a chocolate chip cookie but failed amazingly. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm pretty sure it's good. Edible, at the very least. My family is pretty good too, but there is no way of confirming their deliciousness that isn't illegal."
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Reminds me of an old Letterman Top Ten List of the most useless superpowers, where #7 or whatever was "super sense of smell." Looking at everyone else's answers, I'm surprised this isn't a rout.

I'm also surprised at how many are willing to give up their sense of sight, as that's the one sense without which I couldn't live. Text-translation work, reading, video games - too much of what I do and enjoy would be hampered by, say, loss of hearing but impossible without sight. And isn't sight for humans as uniquely sensitive and fine-tuned as smell is for so many other animals? Isn't it our forte, physically? I don't understand picking sight as the most expendable sense.
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I was wondering what the "DOM-2" show was that seems the near-unaminous choice of the Russian respondents to this question, and Wikipedia lists it as some sort of dating-big-prize competition-Habitat for Humanity hybrid. The current season is apparently taking place in the "City of Fat Stu." Russian LJers, I think you're lying.

Anyhow, about the question: most every good show that survives past its first season lingers on for diminishing returns and is cancelled way after its prime. The X-Files was particularly remarkable in how it sank through increasingly dire circles of hell in its later years - Weaker Scripts, Bad Set Relocation, Outright Bad Scripts, Weaker Male Lead, Outright Bad Female Lead, Complete Incoherence, Total Implosion in an Utterly Apathetic Second Movie. It's enough to make one grateful that Eerie, Indiana and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. survived for only a single season of greatness.

As for stuff that's on now: the Bravo flagship reality shows are remarkable in how brazenly they're fixed, aren't they? It's not so much that they've gotten steadily worse over the years, but anyone who kept watching after the particularly egregious drama-over-talent victories of Hosea and Leanne deserved what they got.
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I find it significant that this question was posed a couple days after the release of Transformers 3. (Which I actually did go see at an old-time independent theater with handpainted murals and balcony seating, where evening admission and a medium popcorn, medium soda, and box of candy came to a grand total of $12, and there was even ice water in the lobby, making the experience far better than the movie deserved.)
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With profound relief.
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I'm reminded of a tale in Dava Sobel's otherwise excellent The Planets of an acquaintance who was gifted a vial of moon dust by her then-boyfriend, a NASA scientist. Sobel asks to see it, but the friend can't comply: she instead confesses that she ate it.

Ate it. To up and eat earth from this celestial body outside of pica affliction alone is bad enough.

Sobel ends with marveling at how mundane her friend's life post-lunar ingestion turned out - not exactly a surprise considering the woman's decision-making capabilities. If some random civilian did get a free trip to the moon, however, I imagine it'd be someone like her.
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I'd like to be Outer Space, but I'm afraid I'm just Raw Umber.
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A small, untroubled world.
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Maman died today, which I've seen chosen in a few entries so far, but which bears special significance to me for a unique reason. The translation of The Stranger I read used "Mother," and when I first saw the "Maman" translation, I was faintly contemptuous; it looked wrong. It wasn't wrong, of course - "Maman" is manifestly the right selection for what it says about the character. Upon reflection, the incident was my introduction into the delicacies of word choice in translation.

The line itself, though, is enough. It should be evocative, emotional - wet, as the Japanese say. Instead, it just hangs there, empty.
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Entries tagged with writer's block

Writer's block: Harry, Harry, Harry...

In retrospect, that was kind of predictable.

"Answer for question 4196."? That's not a very catchy title.

Writer's Block: ONTD Games Giveaway

Writer's Block: Poetry Break

Writer's Block: Frozen delights

Writer's Block: Riddle me this

Writer's Block: “We built this city on rock and roll”

Writer's Block: We Interrupt This Broadcast

Writer's Block: Sweet tooth

Writer's Block: 9/11

Writer's Block: It happened one night

Writer's Block: The state of perception

Writer's Block: Jumped the shark

Writer's Block: What's been seen can’t be unseen

Writer's Block: Say goodbye to Kansas, Dorothy

Writer's Block: See you on the dark side

Writer's Block: Color me curious

Writer's Block: Homeword bound

Writer's Block: The start of something wonderful