I came across this LaZiza stuff being sold for 50 cents in a store, so I checked it out.
I liked it. I didn’t realise until after I’d drunk it that it was supposed to be a kind of BEER substitute; I swear, I thought it was POP. It’s a very good, apple-flavoured beverage. If you see it, I highly reccommend it. I can’t believe, though, that they thought they could sell this stuff in America with Arabic writing on the label.
Watts Martin, whom I just mentioned but forgot to provide a link for, has an interesting post on his site on the current state of writing in furry fandom, which memeset I thought I should help spread.
Watts was the first of the “superstar” furry writers; his stories were all you heard about in the early days of the fandom, after the artists. A collection of his writing, “Why Coyotes Howl“, was published last year by Sofawolf Press. He also edits the currently-in-flux “Claw & Quill” webzine.
On behalf of the United States of America, I’d like to welcome our ten newest states. Welcome to America! Now give us the oil and we won’t beat your ass. Okay, maybe we’ll beat your ass anyway. Muah-hahahahah chumps.
What? What’d you say?
Bitches!
NOW look what you made us do! Why’d you make us hit you like that?
I wasn’t actually staying at the hotel during the con, so I kinda feel like I missed a bunch, and I certainly missed the drunken wandering through the hallways at all hours. I ran into Eric Elliott, one of the Guests of Honour exactly once. There was much eating though, and some really good conversations (especially with Watts Martin, and some discussion of possible collaboration with fabulous, FABULOUS illustrator Susan Van Camp), and the shopping was great as usual, so I guess it was good overall.
The fursuiters had a huge march through the main halls, and there were hundreds of them. The first furry convention I went to, ConFurence III, had about 350 attendees. It looked like there were that many in fursuits this time. Amazing. My friends and I realised that we’re so used to seeing fursuits walking around furry conventions, we don’t even notice them anymore unless they’re of an exceptional design. A decade ago, seeing just one was an event.
I never take any pictures, because furry conventions are such a media-oriented event that pages of photos usually turn up on websites anyway (not to mention the DVDs), but this time I decided to share with you the top five quotes of the con. All identifying utterances have been removed, in case it was something *I* said:
#5: “This…can only end badly.”
#4: “Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood.”
#3: (The following exchange) “Who is *that*?”
“I dunno…’Painfully Cute’ is what I’d call it.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m kinda with that.”
“Which part, the cute or the pain?”
“Yes.”
#2: (TIE) A: “Welllll…that was educational, but not in the way I’d hoped.”
B: “Uh! Uh! Ah! AH! AAAAAAAGGGGHH! Check THAT out!”
#1: “I got enough tiger -u— to last ALL YEAR!”
Oh, I did manage to score a pint of Jack Daniel’s, so I guess everything works out in the end…
I imagine, based on my previous knowledge of Javanese shadow plays, that we were treated to a rather truncated version of this well-known excerpt from the Mahabharata (the part where the five Pandawa brothers get bored with being in exile, and help a king, their grandfather, fight a war), although at nearly three hours, it was tough to tell.
The shadow puppet mastery of Sigit Adji Sabdoprijono (currently a professor-in-residence at University of Michigan) is irrefutable. People were encouraged to have a peek behind the screen to see him at work, and throughout the play the crowd watching him was large (I had a gander myself, and this was an artist at work, I’m telling you). The problem was that all of the English narration was done before the start of the play, leaving a bewildered audience of 1100-plus trying desperately to figure out what was going on (Except for the Indonesians in the audience, of course, who could follow the native-language narrative just fine). I lost the thread around the halfway point, so when one of the characters pulled out a pistol and shot another, the only way I could tell it was a good guy shooting a bad guy was that I remembered that all of the bad guys came from the right side of the screen.
It has been 15 years since the last full-on Wayang Kulit was staged in SE Michigan, so I do feel priviledged to have seen this one. Let’s hope next time an English narrative is added, or at least a libretto is provided, so that the intricate, hypnotic world of the shadow play is more fully opened to us Yankee swine.
How droll. I kill me.
Anyway, I said ‘accent aigu’ there, which is wrong. I should have said ‘accent circonflex’. Vive la Langue.
I know that’s spelled wrong: there should be an accent over the second ‘e’ in ‘dessinees’, but while there’s plenty of tutorials on how to get the most use out of WordPress, I didn’t seem to come across one telling me how to add non-English characters.
Anyhow: while moving some records around in an attempt to make some space in which to walk in my record area, I uncovered some comic books I bought while in Europe. European comic books are very different from the ones we get over here: 48 pages, full colour throughout, and hardbound. In Europe, comic books are Art.
I tried to find links for these, but most the searches came up blank, so I’ll just write about them.
“Les Trois Cheveux Blancs” by Hausman and Yann seemed to be an allegory about hunting, told in twin tales of a redhead struggling to get out of a podunk village, and her pet vixen.
“L’Anti-Jole” (accent aigu over the ‘o’, for you Francophones), by Cabaness, was apparently an allegory on French colonialism; I didn’t realise that when I bought it, I thought it was a surrealist freakout with furries.
While also not surrealist, Tramber’s “Pas de Cadeau a Gromago” nonetheless contains many references to Dali, as it collects the futuristic adventures of a couple of part-time crooks.
“Les Lumieres de Amalou” is a huge, sprawling work, something like 300 pages, about a chase for a magician’s diary in a steampunk world populated by both humans and anthropomorphic animals. It cost me 60 Euros, and as I look at it now I realise I didn’t finish reading it. I’ll rectify that after I finish ‘Moby Dick’.
I never even started Crisse’s “Atalante”, so I can’t even tell you what it’s about, except that it takes place in a world based on Greek mythology.
Along with all the French comics, I found, wrapped in Sinterklaas gift paper (meaning I got them in either the Netherlands or northern Belgium, and that I probably got them on the tour where the ‘Infamous Nijmegen Sinterklaas Incident’ ocurred), two volumes of one of my favourite furry comics, Sokal’s “Canardo”. I haven’t read them yet, but I will before bed tonight. Okay, ‘read’ is a relative term here, as these are in Dutch, and while I CAN read French, Dutch is, alas, not one of my strong points.
Since i know there will be questions, I should probably point interested parties at this, which was the inspiration for what became the ‘Infamous Nijmegen Sinterklaas Incident’. The smart ones amongst you will be able to figure out what happened just by listening…
I had trouble figuring out where to file this post: Uncategorised? Reviews? In the end, after mentioning the Nijmegen incident, I realised where it had to go…
In addition to my wibbling on about homemade music and movies, here’s a link to some homebrew videogames, courtesy Stanford U’s CS 248 class finals: write a playable videogame. I’m gonna be blowing a few gazillion CPU cycles on ‘Formula Inverse‘, myself…
So I’m trying to set the store up today (a Byzantine process which has involved more than my fair share of screwing around with variables and config files, which we all know I DON’T LIKE TO DO, Linux coders), and I call PayPal because I wanted them to confirm the ability to sell my MP3 files for less than a dollar. After a couple of internal phone calls on the part of the extremely helpful rep Kathy (not being sarcastic here), I’m told that I can indeed institute micropayments. However, Paypal takes TEN CENTS of the price as their cut. “You might want to charge 60 cents” said Kathy. “I thought about it already” I said. After a moment, Kathy said, “You might as well sell them for a dollar.” This set me off on my rant about how selling one song for a dollar is ridiculous, like selling grapes for a dime each.
But there’s no choice. If I’m going to sell my music at what I believe to be a fair price to you, the buyer, I’m forced to give PayPal 10 of the 50 cents I’m charging. AND THEN, they take their own sweet time about verifying the transaction, like maybe two days if they’re feeling magnanimous. AND THEN, they don’t do direct deposit; I have to put the money in my bank account MYSELF. Unbelieveable. And they’re the only game in town. Western Union can’t seem to compete, somehow.
In the end, everything was resolved, and now it’s all up to The Guru to put everything together and get this thing up and running.
