ojuzu

You know, I used to be really into war history and horror stories and tragedies. Not a super-duper fan, exactly, but I really found them interesting and enjoyed them a lot. Just a few years ago. And now I can't handle any of that stuff at all, or at any rate not much and not for long.

That's how it goes, I guess.



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Can I just say how much I love that Holmes & Watson take the subway everywhere, and will never, ever stoop to using taxis even when carrying around super-expensive things? Because I do.

also Holmes I don't think that's the kind of painting you should be carrying around rolled up tight like that you'll crack the paint

"Your Honor, it's true, we abetted in grand larceny—" Sometimes I feel like Elementary is basically Friendship and Hijinks, The Show. Like, you know how I always want fic that is just about the characters hanging out having character development and doing wacky things? This show is starting to be that fic.

I feel like Holmes is going to be putting up billboards proclaiming Joan's greatness any day now SHE SOLVED MURDERS SHE SAVED MY LIFE SEE EVERYONE JOAN IS AMAZING LOOK LOOK LOOK and then he will pretend that he needed the billboards to catch a killer because he is like that.

I like that even though Joan's mother is portrayed as being pretty, well, 'normal' (kind of traditional maybe) and she thinks Holmes is kind of a weirdo and doesn't agree with her daughter's career choices—she wants Joan to be happy. And not in a 'this is kind of okay' way, but in a way where Joan can really get the chance to enjoy herself.

I really enjoyed this episode overall (more heist-y and less gory than usual, too) and I hope we get to see more of Joan's family in the future!



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Today was the first time in a year that a dude said something that could be construed as hitting on me and I was flattered rather than creeped out! (Literally a year, hah, since the only other time that has ever happened to me was at the JLPT last December.) I think it's because I know he's completely unserious. Finally, someone I could potentially have a vaguely-flirtatious friendship with! Like, you do not know how much I have been wanting someone to play-flirt with who gets that we are headed due PLATONIC. He already knows that I am a lesbian (close enough), so this can pretty much only go in a positive direction. :D

As opposed to the last dude who said I was pretty, whom I have had continuously-pushed-back dinner plans with for a while now and then the other day he said something vaguely flirt-y and I got instant DNW feelings. Boo. Maybe I need to wear a sign.



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I have realized that when I want do things—not necessarily everything, but definitely career-like things—it's not because I feel a calling for them or even because I think they particularly need to be done. It's because someone else is doing them wrong.



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This evening I broke a decoration off my new purse, got blisters, lost: all the keys to my apartment (one to the entryway, one to the door, and the keycard that lets you get into both the courtyard and the actual building), the key to my house back in the U.S., my metro card, about RMB150 + change, and the birthday present from my aunt & cousin that I kept them all in.

I did have a pretty great night though! Erica invited me out for drinks & dancing, and we ended up dragging about two-thirds of the building with us. We did some bar-hopping with little to no actual drinking, mostly because everyone was way too busy playing loud but fun games. I finally learned how to play that one game! The one where you clap your hands, snap your fingers, and slap the table while saying something-something ei! You(singular, now) start off with a nonsense word and then it develops into someone's name, and whoever's name it is has to catch you and say 'ei!' with you the first time you do it, or they owe the group a forfeit. and later on Erica showed us one where you sit in a circle and send a table-slap around in rhythm, which sounds very simple but once you've done it all the way around and learned how to turn it everyone crosses their arms over everyone else's and suddenly it seems super complicated.

And also there was (eventually) live music and dancing! I am super awful at dancing, music doesn't make me want to move. Which is maybe a sign that I should be at a different school. I had a talk with one of the older students about that, and ended up deciding that I don't really have that passion everyone says you need for music. Well, I mostly knew that already. I feel about music about the same way I feel about writing, which is that it's awesome and I'm not terrible at it and I like to do it sometimes, and also now and then someone gets it wrong enough that I have to try & do it right.

(Which reminds me: I think classical music should come with photosets. Because photosets are cool. Pop music has lyrics and/or music videos, which sort of help direct the tone of the listener's thoughts. But I generally have no idea how to feel about any given classical piece until I've listened to it a lot of times, and a lot of the times the only pre-listening direction you get is from the title. Which really doesn't help much a lot of the time. Movie scores are great that way though, when you watch a great scene with great music and you have a ton of FEELINGS they come back every time you hear it again. So basically what I'm saying here is that I feel music should always be supplemented with other media, and some genres have still not figured this out. And I want to make a thing, a photoset + original music thing, and be like LOOK EVERYBODY THIS IS COOL YOU SHOULD DO IT.)

But everybody says you have to have ~talent or ~passion for music, and I . . . don't? I mean, my ~passion in life is basically not being a dick to people. I liked my violin teacher back home mostly b/c she seemed a lot like me, hah. Kind of laid-back and not SRS BZNS w/r/t music (or basically anything). I could be like her, maybe, but I'm definitely not cut out to be a virtuoso or anything like that.

...actually I think I will end up copping out of everything and just being an ~artiste who sticks things together and pretends they mean something. But also with a real job, like ...teaching or sth. --I might be a bit more like my mother, career-wise, than I'm comfortable with, haha.

Anyway, the purse still looks alright, I can probably get at least another keycard tomorrow, the metro card only had 5 yuan on it, 150 yuan is not that much money all considered, and now I can buy myself a similar keychainey thing that is not zebra-striped. I was actually pretty ticked off about losing the change, because I promised myself I'd buy laundry tokens this weekend, but when I came back home I discovered I'd dumped most of the change out on my bed.

So that happened!



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Elementary episode five:

Yay, Joan gets to explain a deduction! She is a baby investigator and she is Learning Things. (Sherlock is also Learning Things, but these are mostly along the lines of learning to respect people's boundaries.)

"--failed Sapphic dalliance—fingers crossed for the last one--" me too, Holmes, me too. Maybe they can pick it up again later.

I love how he just yells "WATSOOOON! 'S FOR YOU!" It's just cute for some reason. And I think he's called her Joan before—she, at least, has called him both 'Sherlock' and 'Holmes'—so I like the possibility here that they are comfortable using both first and last names for each other. Because while I enjoy the closeness of 'Joan' and 'Sherlock', I also have a fondness for the old-school feel of 'Holmes' and 'Watson'.

I also like that Holmes isn't manipulating her back into medicine; he thinks she was a great doctor, and might be a great doctor again, but he's not trying to shove her back into her old career. Because that is her decision and he recognizes that. Boundaries!


Can we talk about how much this version of Holmes likes working with the police? It's been so long since I read the original stories I don't remember if that Holmes enjoyed working with them very much (though obviously he dealt with a lot of cases outside of their purview), but BBC's Sherlock quite obviously hates the police as an institution and wants to do everything by himself. Private sector, woooo. But Elementary's Holmes really likes the police, and not just Lestrade Gregson. He likes working with a group of people who have authority over him, who can tell him to back off when they think he needs to or give him access not whenever he wants but when he really does need it.

I know I keep comparing him to BBC's Sherlock, but honestly it's hard not to, especially when the reasons Elementary's Sherlock are different from BBC's are the exact reasons I like him. (For example. BBC Sherlock: Total dick. Brilliant, with flashes of actual human feeling towards John, but a terrible person and the absolute epitome of Privileged White Dude. Helps people more by accident than anything. Elementary Sherlock: A jerk sometimes, because he's deliberately pushing people away b/c he thinks he doesn't deserve having them around. Smart, observant, but not infallible and no-one thinks he is. Likes working with other people and helping them. Poor impulse control, but getting better. Frequently apologizes after he's been a jerk. Likes working for the public sector. Clever, but I just don't get that feeling of Amazing White Genius that lots of similar characters give me.

I think the main difference here is that Elementary's Sherlock is not a racist sexist classist douchebag, and that is the reason I like him.)

Like, just read this essay-thing and just try to tell me that all the problems raised in it are not the ones Elementary is completely lacking.



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Episode four of Elementary:

Holmes is super on point in this one! I adore his thoughts on bankers (gosh, I wonder if he has thoughts on colonialism -- remember that "if you want to dress like a criminal, dress like your dad" quote about all the horrible things white men in suits have gotten away with for hundreds of years? this reminds me of that a lot) and I love that he is taking the opportunity to spend as much rich-people money as nicely as he can.

I keep comparing this show to BBC Sherlock in my head -- with all the shit BBClock fans talked about it from the get-go, it's hard not to -- and Elementary comes up a thousand light years on top every time. BBC Sherlock is a white guy in a suit, from inherited wealth, who shows no compassion whatsoever for anybody without money or as much privilege as he himself has. And this is so, so obvious a difference right here in this scene I'm watching at the moment -- Holmes just sent a not-well-off couple a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine, because right now he has the ability and an extra-strong inclination to use lots of money to make other people happy. In this situation, BBC's Sherlock would blow it on something for himself or John that he'd break in half a day.


"No, 'we' are both not equally aware of my feelings." With one phrase, this show elevates itself above virtually anything else on television today. I am so ridiculously tired of people pretending they understand someone better than that person does themselves, and especially when it is a dude and a lady. So fucking tired of people making others' decisions for them. Guess what, world? Joan Watson is also really fucking tired of this.

ETA: Holmes' accent is pretty bad but not totally awful, he sounds like some of the first-year Hanyu students here, which does fit with the 'not as well as I would like' part of the equation.

ETA2: She ended their date with a HANDSHAKE. How much do I love you, Joan Watson? MORE THAN MANY THINGS.

ETA3: I forgot to mention how much I want a long, involved college!AU in which Joan and Sherlock live next door to each other in a dorm and have hilarious shenanigans. Because I want it a lot.

Also aaaaa thank you Sherlock for persuading her to check if her instincts were right and then advising her to forget about that Aaron dude and his dickishness so she can get her rest. You are a good friend sometimes, and Joan is good enough at telling you when you're not that it's almost like you're a good friend to her all the time.



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I finally watched (the first episode of) Elementary! I was super-excited for it before it even aired, but the first episode came out approximately 12 hours before I had to be on a plane & on my way to Shanghai, so I was a little busy and since then I just hadn't found time. I actually have even less time right now, since I am one weekend away from midterms I have not adequately studied for, but OH WELL. Having watched one episode, my enthusiasm has not been dampened in the slightest since we first heard the premise.


JOAN WATSON YOU ARE THE COOLEST, I want you to keep doing exactly what you are doing for ever. Sherlock Holmes also thinks you are super cool and he wants to hang out and solve crimes together and be buddies! Please do this. For always. xoxo, me.

I would also like to add that the first episode manages to be just as cinematically eye-catching as BBC Sherlock while also being about 600000x more awesome, less racist, less sexist, and less homophobic. (why 600000? because '6' is pronounced 'liu' in putonghua.) and also the mystery was a great deal harder to figure out but was also a lot more plausible, bbc sherlock's cases were super ridiculous.

I wonder if Joan ever uses Sherlock to predict things so she can bet on them and win large amounts of money? because that is what I would do since he's proven that he can accurately predict baseball scores. Actually, please someone write an AU (possibly set in the heydays of American gambling?) where the crime-solving is a sideline hobby and their real method of income is finding people who are willing to bet Joan ridiculous sums of money.

aaaa he held her coat so cute crime-solving bffs I love yooooouuuuu



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So I kind of . . . totally disappeared for a while there! My apologies. Normal service should resume shortly, though possibly not until after midterms.

I keep wishing I'd signed up for Kaleidoscope, but I know I didn't have enough energy or time. With this in mind, I should definitely not sign up for Yuletide, as that is way more stressful and I like the people running Yuletide a lot less. But they let Utena in as a fandom this year, so maybe I have to. HELP. (edit: FUCK THEY HAVE THE MIDDLEMAN NOW I REALLY DO HAVE TO.)

The actual point of this post: There is a prompt-fest for whatever the hell you please going on, and everyone should get right on that and tell all their friends about it too. Right now it's pretty western-television-centric, but if you're into that at all a lot of the prompts are great. There's at least one Korrasami fic already! And, um, I may have posted a couple of prompts for The Middleman. As you do.*


*Incidentally, I have discovered that when I say 'Middleman' out loud, it comes out like this: ~MIDDLEMAN~!



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So I pretty much never do this, because I almost always write short things, but, um. Would any of you be willing/have the time to beta/bounce ideas back and forth about this Harry Potter fic I've started writing? It has Ginny, and Dean, and Hermione, and I think Luna + some original characters, and it's about a) the symbolic rituals people make for themselves, b) the ways you go quietly mad when you feel like you're not doing anything, c) trying to help institute wide-spread social change without really having any idea what you're doing, and possibly d) something that may or may not be totally off-the-wall and belong in a different fic but ties in nicely with b).



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There are things I miss about my house and hometown—six-story library a fifteen-minute walk from my house, a kitchen that works, stores that have clothes which fit me, a vacuum cleaner, a keyboard in my room, an easily-accessed washing machine, high-speed internet, my friends—but I'm less and less sure that I want to go back there. I don't think I'm good enough at the violin to stay here, but I think I might want to. On some level, I don't want to go back and live in that lovely house where everything is great except me; I think I want to take what I have here and build something that works. I love these people, I love this city, I love going to a music school and hearing people singing or playing all the time.

I am totally a homebody. But, um. I think this dinky dorm room with inadequate facilities at a school I only sort of like in a country where I can't really speak the language might be home?



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I still haven't figured out the postal system here, so these might be a while in coming, but here goes:



(No actual ponies will be provided.)

Poems (or postcard-length letters) in Japanese or Chinese are great, because I have super awesome handwriting when it come to hanzi/kanji, and I love having an excuse to show people.



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1. I have internet at home now! One of the girls upstairs is sharing hers, for a quite reasonable price. THANK YOU, LADY FROM UPSTAIRS WHOSE NAME I DO NOT KNOW. YOU HAVE GREATLY IMPROVED MY LIFE FOR THE LOW, LOW PRICE OF 150 YUAN.

2. Despite my mediocre knowledge of Chinese, I have made friends with a girl from my class! And possibly her friend as well! We had dinner together and it was very fun. It was ridiculously great to hear people speaking Japanese again; I'm quite out of practice but it feels like coming home. And it looks like we're going to trade English practice for Japanese practice, with explanations of terms in three languages altogether.

3. There is a nice young man downstairs who lived in Chicago for eight years and has really excellent sideburns. (What? There are some things you just notice, okay.*)


* Especially if you come from ISU, the land of extremely questionable facial hair.



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I have successfully arrived! I'm super tired, though. How do all those other people manage to sleep on planes?

If anyone wants pictures, I made a new & separate Tumblr. just-the-middleman, for photos of Shanghai, text posts about school, and various reblogs of The Middleman-related things. At least in theory. (My family is DELIGHTED that I finally have a blog I'm willing to show them.)

Is there a way to copy large amounts of text from one's laptop to one's iPhone without using the Internet? Our dorm doesn't have wireless, so I'm working off my phone for the time being.

(I'm super sad I haven't gotten to watch Elementary, though!)



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I remember someone (terajk?) wanting to know about stories where siblings were the primary members of the family, and their parents present but not doing as much of the emotional/financial lifting. And I remembered reading some things like that, mostly older sister/younger brother pairs in which the brother is a main character and the sister is kind of flighty. One of these pairs is in Yoshinaga Fumi's manga Flower of Life, and their interactions are so much fun! Even though a lot of the focus is on the brother and his classmates, the sister is a great character and you get the feeling that, while they are on good terms with their father, they are definitely the ones with the most solid relationship in their family. The manga also focuses on a lot of characters with different body types and very different personalities, so I highly recommend it. It's three volumes long, and the translation I have is by DMP.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Shanghai (well, for Toronto and then Shanghai). It still doesn't seem like something that's really going to happen.


I hate hotel rooms. No kitchen, sometimes no internet, nothing but a bland room for sleeping in. Actually, I hate hotels for the same reason I love universities and cities -- I like things that show their history.



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I got into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music! So so so excited. I can now look forward to a school year of Chinese-learning, music, and intense envy that everyone else around me is better at those things than I am. :D :D :D Of course, the main reason I applied to that school is because I feel like I haven't been concentrating hard enough on music, and there's nothing like feelings of intense envy to make you concentrate—and/or pretend you had no interest in the subject in the first place, but since it's a MUSIC SCHOOL I doubt that will fly. --And another one of the reasons I applied there was because sometimes music schools let their students in free to student concerts. So. yes.

Oh god, I'm going to be a real college student. It's terrifying.



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I don't know if I've framed it in these terms before, but one of the plots I am super in favor of are crossovers between dark serious fandoms and light happy bouncy fandoms, where rather than the light happy bouncy fandom characters being torn apart by wild beasts or otherwise being absorbed into the grimdarkness aura the grimdark characters suddenly start playing guitar together or something and everything turns out better than expected. Oh, you thought there was going to be a brutal final battle where everyone's favorite characters die? SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKER. GARDENING.


I hate that trope -- you know the one -- in grimdark shows where the girly-girl always dies, and the nice one always dies, and strength is based exclusively on how many people you can kill.* (*cough* Gantz *cough*) Fuck that. I want the nice characters to be the ones who keep themselves alive. I wanna see the big dark-and-gritty showdown that is just someone going up to the big bad and getting them to sit down and talk about their feelings. I want hard problems to have happy endings that are not based on violence.

Maybe this is just a reaction to the difficulty of writing dark-and-gritty/not-dark-and-gritty crossovers, idk. But for real, I just want happy crossover things where the happy fandoms suck the grimdark out of the gritty fandoms and suddenly everything is FLOWERS.


*Looking at myself now, I can see that I've sort of kept away from learning 'survival skills' on purpose, to prove I can get on well enough without being able to fight.



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I love, I adore the idea of plot without conflict. You don't have to fight all the time! It's okay! You can just hang out and do stuff and everything will be fabulous, nobody has to worry about winning or losing or anything like that. There doesn't have to be any kind of epic struggle, or any struggle at all. Not in the pure one thing vs. something else sense. Like, idk, most of Natsume Yuujinchou. It's most emphatically not any sort of battle manga, of course, but most importantly it's really just a story about people learning to deal with the world and each other. Which is another of my favorite kinds of stories, because I feel like in some ways that's the big meta-narrative, the Real Story of everyone's lives. Good vs. Evil is untrue and overplayed; it's the story everyone wants to think is true, so they can feel all validated that they're right and good and amazing and someone else is bad and evil and wrong. Or even that right and good don't mean all that much compared to that one thing that's important to you, fuck everybody else.

But that kind of story, I feel, is not the kind that actually needs to be told. The story of people growing and changing and just learning how to deal with the world and the people around them, though, is not just a good story it is THE story. Because that is the essence of people's lives. Everybody has to deal with learning how to interact with people, finding out the difference between what they think and what actually is. Everybody has to deal with, well, life. And I'm pretty sure that's a hell of a lot more important than a bunch of dudes fighting each other because somebody just felt like destroying the world.

(In summary: fuck Supernatural, seriously, that show is like the perfect example of everything that is wrong with the currently popular style of Western storytelling.)

(and also Natsume Yuujinchou and Azumanga Daioh are fucking amazing, okay, and so is Ashita no Ousama.)

(and also also: Gokusen, despite being primarily about Yankumi beating people up, is surprisingly non-conflict-oriented in its main plot. the main plot is: Yankumi teaches students and bonds with them and they become close and help each other and also Shin has a giant crush on her.)



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Okay, so I finally translated some more of that Utena audio drama! I also made a transcript of the first half if anyone wants it, though I'm pretty sure some of it is wrong because my Japanese is not super good.

( In which Utena attends a student council meeting and interesting (read: hilarious) things happen.Collapse )



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Reading " 'her secret, defenseless self' – strong female characters", my own reaction to this trope:

Secretly defenseless outwardly strong ladies is not a new trope, and it is not a good one. MEMO: ladies are never secretly defenseless. their secret inner core is made of steel and adamant, not squishy stuff. There is no room to be secretly defenseless in a society that presumes you are without defenses from the beginning. When you strip away the tough outer shell, inside you find . . . more toughness. Women are made of ice and knives, women are not secretly sweet vulnerable flowers they are monsters. just like everyone.


(Example: Neon Genesis Evangelion's Asuka. Her tough facade is there to cover up a ton of problems, but when you get past it she will not cry on your shoulder, she will FUCK YOU UP because she is fucked up and she's angry you can see that. Real vulnerability is not something she accepts, and I think that goes for most people who act like that.)

--

Whenever I'm reading a dudeslash fic and some awful drama goes down, I always say to myself "This wouldn't happen if you were ladies!" and I've only recently worked out that I say this not because ladies are better or because ladies don't have drama, but rather because the people who write ladyslash fic are not the kind of people who put up with stupid drama when they could be writing about cool things instead.

What I mean to say here is that you never see the "lack of communication causes AWFUL LOVE TRIANGLE MISUNDERSTANDING" plot in ladyslash fic.



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