LookingLand

socks ~ !



the weather is turning and i had a long day of on and off fighting with the Reconstruction project (and mostly winning, so it's all good), but i thought i should take a little break and work on something else for a while just to get my energy back up.

i could have washed dishes or sorted the laundry or cleaned the bathroom, but that'd be boring, so i tried to watch Lost (everyone and their mother has recommended it to me). i settled in with a frosty Coke and popcorn, put on the pilot, and enjoyed all the way up to where they shoot the polar bear in the second episode.

i wasn't bothered by the polar bear. i was strangely bothered by most of the behavior of the survivors. of course it's a tv show and we have to expedite the shock and horror and move onto monsters and adventure and mystery and all of that, but...i dunno. the expedition leading to the polar bear sorta did it in for me. first of all, they take shannon, who's totally useless physically ~ and they do it knowing there's a people-eating critter in the jungle. of course, she speaks French, so that makes it okay. secondly, they are on a hunt for water (allegedly), but don't appear to have any means for carrying water. what are they going to do, find it, drink some, then come back and say: yep, there's water! likewise, it just rained. does nobody think to maybe set something up to catch rainwater? they are equally careless salvaging stuff from the cockpit and...wait a minute...there's a man-eating critter snacking on the pilot, but they decide to run from the cockpit instead of stay inside where it might actually be safe? oy vey!

anyway, i was perfectly okay just flowing with all that nonsense until Sawyer pulled out the gun and had his little contretemps with Sayid. instantly i hated Sawyer as a character and dreaded the thought of suffering through untold number of episodes of this guy making trouble for no real reason at all. i took a desultory stab at finishing through the third episode, but it's over for me. i don't like any of the characters enough to stick with it. Hurley and Claire were about as interesting as it got, and i guess Jack was okay, but i didn't like the actor playing him. the rest of them were just cardboard to me.

the show is well put together, but doesn't do it for me, alas. i might give it another go when winter gets dark and cold and there's nothing else to watch. eh.

anyway, so i gave up on that and started digitally painting paper dolls (naturally). and above are some adorable socks to prove it.

hope everyone is still enjoying their weekend!

: D

I'm running a little late today, but I haven't forgotten about Millennium Monday! Blasting through season two, we're headed for big transitions in the show. Check out Fourth Horseman Press Millennial Abyss, as always, for details, more pictures, and other cool stuff. To read more about the episodes from my own meager perspective, ( click the cut-link! )

I'll try not to miss next week! Too bad there's only one more season to go!

: D

Welcome once again to Millennium Monday! Lost yet another week and I've got lots of episodes to cover, so we'll press onward! And, as always, check out Fourth Horseman Press Millennial Abyss for details, pictures, and cool trivia about the series. We're beginning season two in today's post, so ( click to read all about it! )

More to come next week!

: D

Welcome to Millennium Monday! Lost another week (I'm so bad!) so I am still catching up. As always, I refer you all to the Fourth Horseman Press Millennial Abyss for more details, etc. These comments will wrap up the first season and then next week I can start in on the second season, which I actually finished this weekend (I've been savoring the show, knowing it's finite!). ( Click to read final notes to the first season! )

More next week!

: D

Welcome to Millennium Monday. Lost a week back there since I was out of town, so I have a lot to catch up on. Hopefully I can do so with relative competence. My memory is not so good these days, so I'm relying on Fourth Horseman Press Millennial Abyss to jog me on the details. ( Click to read all about it! )

More next week!

: D

So my dear pen pal of twenty years, utter_scoundrel, sent me the complete TV series of Millennium for Christmas and I hunkered down to start watching it this weekend (and subsequently did little else ~ ha!). For those of you who may not know the show, it ran in the late 90s (heading for the millennium), and was Chris Carter's (of X-files fame) second child. I think the show probably suffered from Carter overkill (X-files was heading for rocky shores with much of its fan base ~ including me at the time). After three seasons, the show was canceled.

Which means you have to suffer through three seasons of me yabbering about it. I promise I'll try to keep it painless.

I'm not going to belabor the plot points of these episodes because there's a ton of information out there about the show and its particulars, especially at the Fourth Horseman Press Millennial Abyss site. What's mostly here is brief impressions from a first watch, but they will have spoilers and since this seems like a great show to pick up between other shows (just as I am doing, I guess), I'll put the comments under a cut and you can read or not. ( And away we go! )

More next week! If you watched the series and remember it, I would love to hear your thoughts!

: D

in reading news: last night i finished reading s. weir mitchell's When All the Woods Are Green (such a nice title). i couldn't find any substantial synopsis of the book online. only a single sentence: a family in the Canadian woods. then i read the book and realized that's about all the synopsis it deserves.

this book was an appalling 400+ pages. and i finished it. it was an endless prattle from start to finish between some hoighty campers who considered themselves terribly droll. about 150 pages in there was the hint that the story might be about a murder. then, about 300 pages in there was a bear attack and that almost got interesting. fifty pages later a child's gravestone was stolen and wow what a great plot that might have made. but the characters continued to talk about fly fishing and ancient greek poets and i don't even know what ~ witty nonsense, only it wasn't terribly witty, mostly just nonsense. and then in the last twenty pages of the book, the murderer made her move, shot a guy and only wounded him in the shoulder, and the last ten pages were endless denouement about the guy and the girl finally getting together to live happily ever after.

ye gads what a turd of a book. i've never thought mitchell was a "great" writer, but up until now i had at least enjoyed his stories. this was a waste of a good premise (the stolen grave, rolling rich campers for their money, hunting bears), as well as some perfectly good characters (nerdy ned lyndsey, who got almost no book time after the first few chapters and oliver ellet who was adorable but completely pointless), and had the most annoying heroine in the history of literature (whiny, stuck-up rose lyndsey). blarghhhh.

in writing news: i have spent most of the day working on various projects and have settled in to the writing this evening, though with some unease. it's very hard to cope with a protagonist who is a racist. i never used to let this bother me because i used to avoid the presence of scenarios in which the fact would come up. but clearly i can't write an epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction without addressing the issue. so i've been doing a lot of reading and trying to get some perspective on the exact kind of racist i'm writing about. and it's hard because characters in books are allowed to have flaws, but i have such a low tolerance for racists myself it's hard to permit such a flaw (and especially seeing the degree to which it manifests). and besides, character flaws are usually pc. archie bunker would never fly today. today, it's okay if your character is misanthropic ~ as long as they treat everyone equally bad. but you can't have a character who hates jews or black people or homosexuals. it's too easy to judge.

and today i was idly shopping around online for some perspectives and wound up watching the first part of Goodbye Uncle Tom, which is a heinous film. what is it about me that reads a review in which a film is declared shocking and exploitative and i immediately have to see it ~ i did the same thing with Soldier Blue and i was pretty grossed out about it. i am dead certain i will have nightmares after watching only 40 minutes of Goodbye Uncle Tom, which is ludicrous and offensive in turns. i don't know quite what to make of it, but much of the truth of what it portrays is revolting enough to make me queasy.

America doesn't like picking at its scabs. boy does it have some doozies.



painting of a Richmond slave auction
by english artist Lefevre James Cranstone (1862).
Richmond sold an average of 10,000 slaves a year
in the 30 years preceding the Civil War
you see pictures like this and everything looks so cheery and clean and colorful! then you take a real hard look at what this business was really about (i mean really look at it), and the suffering and indignity of it all can really overwhelm you. it's hard then, as a writer, trying to find ways of making a character blind enough to the humanity of slaves as some vile, egregious justification for their own lack of empathy. merg.

okay, not so cheery a thought on which to end this post. i hope everyone is having a less gruesome weekend!

: D

just wanted to stop in and give my two thumbs up to the Dark Knight.

this is a movie in which the evil bad guy is genuinely scary, nobody is safe from the treachery, and heroes show what it takes to be heroes: they make enormous thankless sacrifices (and this movie has sooo many heroes in it aside from the guy in the cape).


it felt long to me, but only because of its roller-coaster pacing: lots of ups and downs. every time you thought it was winding up to the climax, there was another edge of the seat grabbing conflict around the bend.

this is very different from Batman Begins, but diverges in good ways to make this an extension of the Gotham world rather than just a sequel. and the emotions are very real: these aren't just comic book characters prancing around in costumes. very dark, very intense, but very good overall, with an ensemble cast who's so good, you wish each of them could have a movie all their own.

edit: spoilers in the comments!

i decided to splurge a little on myself and got the HBO series John Adams. i am only a little more than halfway through it, but i love it. i read some super-negative reviews, but obviously these were from people grinding axes because the complaints about it being nothing but a bunch of people sitting around talking are unfounded (yes, there's talking, but a whole bunch of stuff happens too!). also, complaints about the film style are mostly unfounded as well. yes, there is some creative camera angling, but for the most part it works (a few scenes stand out as sort of awkward for the tilt perhaps).

my single complaint is that sometimes context is wholly lacking (and for an audience of ill-educated americans and foreign viewers, this can be deadly). if you don't know much about american history, there's a whole lot here that will probably frustrate you. there has been at least one point at which i had to pause the dvd to look up what the hell was going on because there was no exposition to explain the scene. the performances are great. laura linney is a scene stealer in the best way and paul giamatti is fabulously cloying and nebbish as the title character (that adams fella was a dweeb in his time ~ which is not to say that he wasn't brilliant, but he certainly made his own bed politically).

so it's flawed, but i think very enjoyable. naturally i wish they showed more of the actual war, but the story is about john adams, not George Washington (when are they ever going to make a respectable movie about George Washington?)



ooo snow. a movie with snow.
it automatically gets thumbs up for that.
oh, and in case i didn't indicate enough: George Washington is just the coolest ever (both in the series and in real life).

it was update day thursday, but i didn't blog that day. i'm barely getting by week to week, and second-guessing myself every step of the way. i redid thursday's "page" twice and it still came out middling, and then rewrote this post half a dozen times, which also does not bode well. i keep reminding myself that i started out with this story just to find a style, practice drawing, and get the hang of the week-to-week posting thing ~ to see what the schedule will be like. i figure i have a dozen or so more pages to do before this story is over and then maybe i can get some perspective.

if i struggle through it.

msmcguire made a post the other day that best captures my feelings on the matter. yeah. same-o. and off i go to wrangle with dragons.

happy sattidy all!

: D

i can't stop singing this song. worse, i don't actually know the words.

: o p


jamie campbell-bower (currently fashionable for singing said tune) has a really interesting face. from some angles he's super girlie, but he's also sort of got this weird boyish middleground look about him. i would totally cast him as Hollis in my dreams.

funny, looking back at that post, i can't recall if i wrote all those things about Hollis because i was being deliberately coy or if i was just brainstorming ideas for the character. i mean, it's a fair description of Hollis, i guess (but now i am being deliberately coy). i seem to have a good number of characters who aren't who they appear to be. hmmmm.

it's update day: it's monday, and therefore Reconstruction has posted! i'm also registered over at top web comics, so if you also feel like voting for me, you can click the vote link at the bottom of the page. i'm not crazy about those sorts of popularity things, but i like the idea of posting extra artwork or whatnot as "vote incentives" ~ mostly because the extras can be fun. not that i, er, have any extras there for you to see if you vote. i think i like the idea more than i like executing it. hahahahahaha.

anyway, there you have it and there it is.

happy Monday and welcome to March, all!

: D