Freckles & Doubt

All-day curriculum advice, 8.30-4. Short on sleep from jo's game last night. Two snarl-ups with the advisor schedule, one the result of some admin assistant randomly circulating last year's timetable to her dept, possibly as some kind of surrealist statement. Venue double-booking. Headache. Cramps. Overkill at the gym yesterday, so sore arms. Nonetheless, this wasn't actually a bad day - I'm dead, and planning to send the EL out for takeout while I veg in front of X-Files all evening, but fundamentally I still enjoy students and like making their lives better.

In further mitigation, we seriously kicked butt in jo's game, more than making up for the nobbling we underwent last time. Memo to self: red-hot sandstorms are really efficient. Four of us completely incapacitated an army of 100, a third of them magicians, without actually killing any of them. Score one for my new policy of wilful reasonableness.

Also, Seed. Flash game for selectively breeding plants. Fiddle with it for a bit, then paste in the code from Elizabeth Bear's Goth dahlia, and feel inadequate.

Slightly surreal day: I woke up at about 6am in a sort of Thurberesque fog - something "kept going 'clong!' off in that direction..." and I lay awake blearily thinking, "They say the forest wizards bounce things off the moon." Either that, or an extremely obsessive person was dropping small metal weights off the roof of the hospital at irregular intervals.

The fogginess persisted through most of the day, lending a particular piquancy to the pile of marking through which I am currently wading. (Someone mentioned the "clocks and swords" of Star Wars, and I had to sharply head myself back from a sort of notional steampunk space opera for the basic spelling error to sink in). I'm also a bit post-glandular again, which means I spent jo's game this evening clutching my throat at intervals while trying to follow the extremely intense and technical discussion of telepathic magical tactics. (Have you ever noticed how completely impossible it is to discuss magic, particularly the telepathic kind, without resorting to metaphor and analogy?)

I am happy to note, however, that Pajiba, my favourite movie review site, has published a rhapsody to the Evil Dead trilogy, which includes Army of Darkness, the perfect goofy late-night drunken comedy/horror movie that - shock! - jo has never seen. This Will Be Rectified, just as soon as I've tracked down a DVD copy and beaten my credit card into submission. In other words, not anytime soon.

Last Night I Dreamed: the usual epic quest adventure, this time with a donkey, through a barren, mountainous kingdom. We took refuge in the encampment of a bunch of bootleg film-makers, who proceeded to pose us in beautiful Victorian gowns for the purpose of extremely decorous movies with obscene puns for titles. When the war swept over the encampment we escaped with the donkey through a tunnel under the mountains.

• ...seeing a newspaper billboard with the headline "RANGERS LOOT CRASHED HELICOPTER" makes me think vaguely, "But I thought rangers had to be a Good alignment"? (Obviously, because I'm hopelessly D&D imprinted and have no truck with Third Ed. My first ever character was a half-elven Ranger. Does that make me a bad person?)
• ... the phrase "make this story more accessible to today's audience and introduce a new generation to her work", applied to the filming of Susan Cooper's amazing, incredible, brilliant YA Arthurian fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising, gives me a cold, sinking feeling? Will Stanton has "a bit more drama to deal with than in the book"? Additional special effects sequences involving snakes? A love interest? And the death-knell of adaptations: Will Stanton is now American. Not even the presence of Christopher Ecclestone can save this - it's going to be Earthsea all over again. Those of you who share my fondness for Cooper's dark, edgy, perfectly-balanced and beautifully controlled narratives may wish to join me in shunning this film like the plague-pit it is almost certain to be. I could cry. This is such an atmospheric novel, and so many of its events and elements would translate beautifully to screen in the hands of a half-way decent director, preferably British. The current director may claim that "the spine and spirit of the story remain", but he lies. It'll be gutted and its back broken, and then they'll make it dance. To hip-hop. Gah.
• ...the universe has to follow a post-glandular Bad Day of exhaustion and nausea by hitting me with a flat tyre on the way home? Three days before payday, which means I can't afford to have the damned thing fixed until Friday? Dramatically flat, too - loud "crump" noise and instantaneous bumpy limping from my poor Mermaid. On the upside, not only was it not actually raining at the time (a near miracle given the current weather), but an extremely nice man stopped and said "need a hand?" about two and a half seconds after I'd stomped round from the driver's side to survey the corpse and give vent to a heartfelt "Bollocks!" I'm perfectly capable of changing a wheel, but the initial nut-loosening bit tends to be a bit beyond my strength, particularly given my gimpy arm and current state of health. Yay chivalrous men.

Now I shall console myself by ignoring the pile of marking currently demanding my attention, and re-reading The Dark Is Rising while mentally plotting how I'd film it. Tchah. Amateurs.

Hmmm. Something's wrong. I did Christmas shopping for an hour and half this morning, and not only was the Waterfront more or less civilised, I'm pretty much under control. This can't be right: I fear the cosmic wossnames may be poised to strike randomly. Also, what's with the quietness this year? People are not in buying frenzy mode. I approve.

New web comic discovery, courtesy of Schedule5: DM of the Rings. Horribly funny, in that rife-with-D&D-in-jokes fashion. Now I want to play D&D again. Memo to self: re-import bumpycat.

So, I wander into the library this morning to return a monumental pile of 15 books, the invariable result of combining the happy academic five-month, 30 book limit with my disorganised tendency to forget I have them and, panic-stricken, renew great swathes of them all at once. Apart from the shooting pains in my shoulder from the weight of the carrier bag, I am conscious of a happy, superior glow, on account of the fact that the combined metaphorical weight of these tomes is equally dragging, covering as it does such joyous subjects as structuralism, semiotics, postmodernism, feminism and the more pretentious upper reaches of folklore. As the last bit of Saussure, Barthes or Calvino slides into the gaping maw of the book return slot, I feel smugly academic, peacably at one with my environment - for once, the Genuine Academic Article.

Then the d8 falls out of the bottom of the carrier bag and, with impeccable timing, bounces gracefully down several stairs with a loud "tick tick tick", as of an unexploded bomb, to lie on the landing like a plastic pastel octahedron of Incriminatory Geek Doom in a girly shade of green. A circle of students stops to peer at it, curiously. It is a bizarre object which clearly has no place in the Halls of Learning.

Chastened, I scurry down the steps, snatch it up, and shuffle off, clutching around me the tattered remnants of my thoroughly blown cover.

I did this day slay that damned animation entry, she says with satisfaction, dancing on its recumbent corpse with becoming cartoon glee. Tomorrow, Disney, which entails tackling all the notes I've made and rendering into reasonably sensible English such cryptic comments as "cnsmrist pdigm", "nstalgic manip" and "bltant fklc pervsion", interspersed with the occasional "aargh!" and "bugger!" (Actually, in retrospect "bltant fklc pervsion" looks rude, and probably is). Writing on Disney is a process the upshot of which is a strange mixture of loathing, frustration and vindictive satisfaction: I abominate what they stand for, but there's a perverse pleasure in identifying and labelling their manifold iniquities with sadistic (or possibly masochistic), surgical precision.

Somewhat predictably, I have entirely failed to summon the necessary willpower not to write LARPs, and have been gently exhorting myself through the actual academic work by allowing myself brief excursions into the Wild West. *fires off six-shooter contentedly*. This would be the LARP we started writing, lo, these many years ago, before jo actually buggered off overseas - in fact, the current character sheet I'm writing (in a laconic Western drawl) was started in the year 2000. I figure that's quite enough self-denial to be going on with.

Tomorrow I plan to toddle off and watch the recent SciFi Channel version of Earthsea, courtesy of Mike. By all accounts it's a shockingly bad adaptation denounced roundly by Le Guin herself, but I shall fortify myself with Mike's excellent wine, and stave off the actual ritual suicide by planning the vindictive blog entry with which I shall subsequently edify the faithful, always supposing that my own lower intestine hasn't leapt up and throttled me in a praiseworthy attempt to save my sanity. Reviewing as an extreme sport, the new craze.

Strange Narrative Decisions, #1. David* recently procured me (cheapcheap!) an evil bootleg copy** of Howl's Moving Castle. It's a lovely movie, but actually not as all-embracingly wonderful as I'd hoped, given its genesis as the bastard offspring of my favourite anime director and one of my favourite fantasy authors. It's currently sitting a bit behind my other Miyazaki favourites, which are My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away with a side bet on Princess Mononoke. (Good heavens, they're all the folkloric ones, how utterly predictable and very not strange at all. And I should add, for the record, that in terms of these rankings there are whole swathes of Miyazaki I haven't seen, and won't see until July when my long-suffering mother hauls the latest Amazon pantechnicon of DVDs out from the UK on my behalf. Including Howl's Moving Castle, so I decline to feel guilty about the bootlegging).

Anyway. Lovely film, the usual visual splendours and whimsical detail, the classic Miyazaki gentleness and studied pace. Very attractive Howl (yum, in fact), very appealing Sophie, very cute Calcifer and (particularly) castle. And I love what he's done with the scarecrow. I suspect what's marring my enjoyment, though, is my extreme familiarity with the Diana Wynne Jones novel, and consequent response to this as an adaptation. There are some weird narrative choices here. The war theme that's a minor background to the novel moves right to the forefront, which works OK, and is very Miyazaki in the Nausicaa mode. I can also see why he's chosen to reinterpret the heartlessness of Howl as a very visual monstrosity, although I lament the loss of the sappy Howl girl-chasing. There are some strange character conflations and reversals, though: I can't work out why he's cut back the effectiveness of the Witch of the Waste and removed that epic (and extremely visually dramatic) conflict between her/her fire demon and Howl. I would have thought it would be very easy to infuse the nasty war scenario with the fire demon theme, they're very related, particularly given how strongly the war is conceptualised in terms of fiery destruction. And Sophie loses all her witch powers, which are central to the book. Annoying.

Cute dog, though. It huffles.

Strange Narrative Decisions, #2. Ursula Vernon's blog currently features a very funny discussion of apocryphal Bible books as fanfic. This made me laugh a lot, although it's remotely possible that the mere concept of Jesus/Harry Potter crossover fanfic has scarred me for life.

Strange Narrative Decisions, #3. I have to dash off now and dig out the necessary weird assortment of props preparatory to running our enormous, complicated, plot-ridden, highly political Arabian Nights LARP this evening, for a bunch of relatively inexperienced CLAW players. There may well be frustrated artistic rantage on areas not entirely unconnected to this blog in the morning...

* the other bass, not the d@vid or Lara's one. We rejoice in an elegant sufficiency of Davids.
** In fact, I actually typed "an evil bootlet copy" there, conjuring fascinating mental images of petite footwear with lots of steampunky protrusions, and claw-like mechanical feet.

Today's Worthless Word is "nebulochaotic", which means hazily confused, and thus handily delineates my state of mind at the moment. It sounds as though it should have something to do with clouds, of which, as I may have said already, I approve.

(Good lord. My insane cat just ricocheted through my study at a rate of knots, which I suspect is a response to the cool night air. Ah, the thunder of little hooves. It would all be a better illustration of feline grace if she could refrain from actually bouncing off the doorframe.)

This weekend was enlivened by several disappearances, viz. the driver's window in my car, vanishing down into the door with an audible crunch, and my Evil Landlord from my Falkenstein campaign on four hour's notice, citing general lack of enjoyment of roleplaying as a cause. The resulting irritation levels have been assuaged by (a) my nice new mechanic, whose guys not only fixed rusted bits of interior door mechanism while I waited, but cleaned the bird-crap off the window, (b) the rest of my players stoutly declaring that they wanted to continue playing despite my recurring attacks of DM self-loathing, and (c) the presence in the house of Charles Stross's Iron Sunrise (fun), and the next two Patrick O'Brian novels. I would not have believed that I could derive so much enjoyment from hordes of men dashing around various bits of ocean doing highly technical things to sails and ropes and, occasionally, each other.

Progress on the encyclopedia entries: um, yes. Not as such.

God, it's December. LJ has a happy Christmas doodle on its standard header, and the radio and bloody supermarkets are playing schmaltzy Christmas carols and lame Band Aid warm fuzzies. Granny Weatherwax nothing, at this time of year I channel my inner Scrooge. Am I the only person who has an overwhelming desire to spend Christmas either curled up under my bed muttering "Bah, Humbug!" at intervals, or taking me a large axe and slaying six in a tinsel-bedecked mall?

Also, is it just me, or is KFM suddenly playing ridiculous amounts of ads with American accents? I was playing the radio while engaged in the recent round of boring administrative scut-work, and I swear one ad in five is eschewing Souf Effrican accents in favour of the standard, recognisable accent of the good ol' US of A. This suggests that globalisation and cultural hegemony is reaching a new and horrifying phrase. I don't really like the SA accent when recorded, its flattened vowels become horribly unattractive, but I can't say I'm into having Americanisation touted as the logical response. The logical response should be South African actors learning to speak properly. (And I swear, the subject line was from the first page of Omar Khayyam I opened. Too weird).

I slept until 10.30am this morning, a rare occurrence, and a de facto celebration of Saturday's happy lack of an Army of Reconstruction right outside my window. Last night was also late, given as we were playing my Falkenstein game at wolverine_nun's place until 11ish at least. The session was enlivened by a sudden geyser disaster halfway through, but fortunately turned out not to be too serious. The thundering cascade of hot water in the courtyard outside was somewhat disturbing, though. In-game, Khoi-boi's character is trying desperately to dig himself out of the several deep pits into which he has fallen, since shooting an English Count, even non-fatally, is somewhat problematical not only socially, but legally, and is in addition getting him into deep shit with his sorcerous order. Money for jam for a DM: as long as characters are choosing to burgle the bedchambers of aristocratic ladies and attempting to off the outraged husband when discovered, I don't have to do much...

Really interesting article on a case of plagiarism, nicked from Neil Gaiman's blog (but attributed, therefore not plagiarised), here. Honestly, it's bad enough when the students do it.

I seem destined never to get far in a meme, which is possibly a good thing... wytchfynder initially pointed me to the Random Question Meme, which randomly generates a bunch of questions about one's friends list which one can then answer with suitable verve and wit. I'm a little terrified. The first question I got was:

What would happen if you were to date wytchfynder?
God. Screams, explosions, innocent bystanders running for the exits... I suspect the best place from which to view the results would be the next universe.

But I persevered, and the next one was:
Is pinkthulhu a pansy or a wuss?
at which point I decided that the damned thing was not only unpleasantly personal in its questions, but darned well rigged. An impression, may I add, not at all reduced by a question further down:

strawberryfrog is in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. What now?
Good grief, random generator. Nothing happens, of course. Life goes on. Strawberryfrog lives perpetually in a maze of twisty passages, it's his preferred mode of mental functioning.

So I gave up. Meme, schmeme.

In other news, my Falkenstein game have rescued their dwarf, managing not to blow up the Zeppelin in the process, which is good, because while a dwarf could survive the fire, I doubt he'd survive the concussion. The hob, left back home, had to cope with a cascading ferret plague from the Mysterious Inter-dimensional Trunk in the attic, totally ruining its (the hob's) evening of tartan sock-darning. I seem to have incautiously given the party their own unmarked four-horse carriage, and a Universal Key that magically opens pretty much any lock. I confidently expect mayhem to result. Then again, mayhem always results. As I pointed out this evening, it doesn't really much matter what action I describe or statement I make about the game, it'll pretty much inevitably disintegrate immediately into anarchic arguing.

I love my players. They do all the work.

Rubble update: the Army of Reconstruction have created a large slab of concrete, during which process they spread their large pile of gravel merrily around, causing the automatic gate to hit a stone and leap off its track when I tried to close it. The Evil Landlord is away this weekend, which mean I'm the one who has to water the bloody slab daily to set the concrete, which is low and horrible, given that I'd rather be putting the water on the (desecrated) garden. These are trying times.