It's called 'suspension of disbelief'

Christ, if this headache doesn't let up, I am going to CUT someone. (We're at four days and counting. Bleh. D: )

So, anyways, I have been reading a metric ton of horror manga, and I will present the results of my research to you so you can make educated horror decisions!

( cut for reviews/recs )

Where am I getting these manga? Well, the unlicensed manga are available at Manga Traders (you just have to make a free account). I've actually bought all the licensed Junji Ito manga I could find - and I think it's totally worth the money.

I've got a few others I haven't finished reading yet, but I've been sitting on this post for a week, so might as well post it now!

ETA: NEW DOUJINSHI ADDED, WHERE DID THEY COME FROM


The problem with being in fandom forever is that you tend to...accumulate things. In my case, I spent many years collecting doujinshi and now, like five or ten years later, I find this really annoying when I need to move. I have a large number of doujinshi that I will NEVER SELL, because (usually) they are so messed up that they bring me great joy just to know they exist.

But I also have a shitton of things I need to get rid of.

Ideally, I'd like to sell them for like $2 apiece plus cost of shipping, but if you're like, OH, I WOULD TOTALLY TAKE ALL OF OBSCURE SERIES DOUJINSHI X OFF YOUR HANDS BUT I GOTS NO EXTRA CASH...just PM me and we'll talk. If you want names and cover scans and so on, let me know - I'm just throwing up this sale post quick because I'm in the middle of moving and everything is a total mess around here. I am more than happy to provide more details, just ask!

NOT DOUJINSHI:

KOF Zillions / KOF 2000 comics - I have like 28 of these. Shit, I will give them all to you for $50. The art is by Andy Seto, and I get the impression that these were semi-official? They are in Chinese, though. Please, someone give these a home!

DOUJINSHI:

The problem when you ask people to go to ComiCon and "get stuff that looks interesting in series X, Y, or Z," well, you are going to end up with bizarre pornography half of the time. Mature content will be marked!

SEMI-OBSCURE SERIES:


• Fatal Frame 2 and 3:
  • TWO NC-17 doujinshi. Really beautiful, but holy cow. ($4 for both)
  • A small FF2 book, clean, about the twins.

GENSO SUIKODEN:

• Suiko 3: Geddoe-centric book, some Geddoe/Duke, some Flame Champion stuff.
• Suiko 3: Mostly about Geddoe and Hugo.


• Official Genso Suikogaiden pencilboard with this image.. ($5)
  
• Suiko3: gen fanbook - it has Aila and Lucia cameos, even.
  
• Suiko 3: Another Geddoe-centric book! I seem to have had a theme going.

JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURES: An amazingly cracked-out Vanilla Ice-centric book. He wears a maid outfit at one point.

DIGITAL DEVIL SAGA AVATAR TUNER:

• One NC-17 Heat/Serph book. Heat wears a nurse's uniform at several points. Porny, porny porn.
  
• One Heat/Seraph book - but clean. (Yes, I do mean Seraph)
  
• One Roald/Roland-centric book - serious.
  
• Another really NC-17 Heat/Serph book.

VAGRANT STORY: One essentially gen, beautifully drawn book full of short stories and gags.

SORCEROUS STABBER ORPHEN: Two gen gag books.

LEGEND OF BASARA: One gen doujinshi - the art is AMAZINGLY close to canon art.

PEACEMAKER KUROGANE: Two books, mostly about Tetsu and Susumu.

KING OF FIGHTERS:

• One clean Kyo/Iori - "kimi no todokimasu you ni"
• A nauseatingly adorable Kyo/Iori book - "Romantist" - by the circle AZURE. Here's an idea of the general art quality.
• Another adorable Iori/Kyo book by Azure - "Hallelujah."

Another KOF 2000 gag book.

SENGOKU MUSOU / SAMURAI WARRIORS: A "Masamune Love" book which means the poor dude gets humiliated. It's pretty funny, though.

PERSONA 2:

• A Tatsuya/Jun book - "Nakayoshi"
• A mostly gen P2:IS cast gag book - "I'm your medicine"(Hina-TV)

HOUSHIN ENGI: A single book by Sannasubi Shinjuku-Nishiguchi

BUCK-TICK: No, seriously!

BOOGIEPOP PHANTOM: 2 gen fanbooks - "the king of trouble 2" and "the king of trouble 3"

DIGI CHARAT: Two gag books - very nice art.

ETA: DEVIL SUMMONER KUZUNOHA RAIDOU: Two NC-17 Raido/Narumi or Raidou/Narumi (in that order) books. Please, someone take these, for the love of god!

OKAMI: Three super-adorable books, mostly gen, but some stuff about Waka and Ammy.


NOT-SO-OBSCURE SERIES:

NARUTO:

• I have a series of several serious, angsty, fairly dark Kakashi/Iruka books by Sannasubi Shinjuku-Nishiguchi - "Poison," "Invisible," "Liquor," "Water," "Caffeine." They're fundamentally a series about an emotionally abusive relationship, and there's some adult content. Art's nice.
• THE OROCHIMARU - lolll it's basically gag, but
  
• Specialist - KakaIru by Katakura Kei/Avant Garden. Really, quite nice art.
• Kibun ha ippai ippai -again, by Sannasubi-sensei. Mostly gag about how Sasuke's stupid.
• Iruka a la mode - Sannasubi-sensei, mostly making Iruka suffer because it's hilarious.

LOVELESS: I have a small OFFICIAL extra furoku - it's a 26-page story by the official artist, with some fanart by Minekura Kazuya, now that I'm looking at it.

RUROUNI KENSHIN:

• Aoshi the Diagram - gen about Aoshi.
• Jouji no Jouji - hilarious Saitou/Aoshi by Sannasubi Shinjuku-Nishiguchi.
• Kairakutsushin - see above.

FF7: A single hard R book about Cloud losing his shit - there's a funny gag story at the end about Sephiroth and Zack and their dirty daydreams, though.

SLAYERS: "Players," a fairly cute illustration book, and "Final Project," a...Xellos/Lina book? Where the hell did I get this?

IF YOU WANT THESE: Comment here, PM me either here or at livejournal. Price is $2 apiece, but if you're like "Man, I would take every single one of those naruto books off your hands, but I can't afford that," I can just make it cost of shipping for that number of books, probably. I just want these out of my hair at zero-sum or better! But I would rather not do that if you just want one book, you know? XD;

Feel free to pass this link around - the more the merrier!

While I was re-shelving my bound copies of Strand Magazine (I have 1891-1894 and 1901-1904 - the Holmes years, of course), I was idly flipping through them and was amused at the sorts of articles in there. There are articles about "Amusing Artists of America/Australia", various stories of different genres, accounts of foreign lands, caricatures, engraved portraits of celebrities, natural history articles...and the following from sometime in late 1901, around the time The Hound of the Baskervilles was being serialized:

"An Hour With A Bird-Doctor."
Page 1
Page 2-3
Page 4

Interesting to see how avian vets worked back then, and what kind of pet birds the Brits had back then!

Or if you just want to see some serious Victorian mustache-action, the pictures are worth it for that reason too.

Courtesy of my itunes shuffle:

I Monster - Lust For A Vampyr
Blockhead - Insomniac Olympics
Clark - New Year Storm
Meat Beat Manifesto - 1979

Took down the tree today in an attempt to work through the hangover. It sort of worked, but I'm not so sure it wasn't the orange juice and Twilight Zone either.

Ha! I made a small batch of sea-salt ice cream because I could not stand playing this stupid fucking game (the new DS game, that is) anymore without any idea of what they were shoveling in their mouth every five minutes.

I'd sort of thought it'd be like a citrus popsicle, only salty...but actually it's sort of like French vanilla or vanilla custard ice cream, with a hint of salt in the sweetness. Which is surprisingly not bad at all.



Like so. (Recipe from The Geeky Chef) I'm not the sort of douche who has popsicle molds yet, and I halved the recipe anyways.

So let me tell you about this game, which I am playing when I have an hour to kill at work. My playing of Persona got derailed by five weeks at work which made me want to fling myself in front of a train, the hours were so bad. I'll get back to that later.

IN THE MEANTIME:

( Read more... )

Yeah so...I guess I'm going to keep plugging on. A Moogle in an apocalypse hoodie is pretty damn cute. I honestly confess to not giving much of a crap about Axel and Roxas's tortured backstory or whatever when I played KH2 (other than to think the memory-loss thing was interesting and that Axel was basically made ridiculously likable), but I guess those two twits are growing on me.

Like mold.

First of all:


The remains of a raspberry pomegranate sorbet I made. I can't even remember what I did - a pint of raspberries, half a cup of pomegranate juice, something, something, put in ice cream machine.

But now:

BLUEBERRY COCONUT LIME ICE CREAM

( cut for recipe )



Yeaaaaaaaaaaaah

I have been trying to figure out why Narumi is so popular in megaten fandom. He largely exists for comic relief, doesn't really seem to drive the plot along - hell, Tae is better at making discoveries than he is - and sort of comes across as the sort of chaperone who would totally let his underage ward get drunk and streak down the streets of Kyoto. Even the detecting sessions were mostly, "DID YOU READ THE TEXT ON YOUR SCREEN FIVE MINUTES AGO Y/N."

When I played Raidou 1, I kept on expecting that he would eventually be outed as a secret badass - I mean, there had to be a reason that the Yatagarasu left the Protector of the Capital(tm) with him while he trained, right?

But, well, not really. He's an ex-spy, but...as I recall, nothing more than that. I think he gets beaten up once near the end of the game, but as I recall doesn't do anything major to help Raidou or the plot out. Does he?

And in Raidou 2, he gets butter on his pants, ( cut for maybe-spoilers )

I seriously don't mind the dude, all bitching aside, but I am perplexed by the overwhelming love for him otherwise!

But then I figured out what I had initially thought was going to be Narumi's deal, and who fandom seems to actually want Narumi to be like:



THIS MOTHERFUCKER

NASH LATKJE

FO' REALS

I think I wanted to use this as a fannish blog, eh?

Okay, first off, Kojima has finally explained his NONSENSE CODE from the teaser flash sites:

( Read more... )
DID YOU RIKE IT??

...bitch

In other belated tl;dr news, I feel like I totally played a different game of Persona 4 than about half of the internets. My interpretations of Kanji, Naoto, and Yosuke seem to be wildly different than most other reviews that I've read, and a lot of those reviews are angry at ATLUS's scenario writers for uh, not handling queer issues correctly or something.

( cut for my thoughts on ya...er...actually, yes, sort of on yaoi )

Soooo in short I feel totally at odds with most of the discussions of Persona 4 out there. Oh well!

At midnight, the folks at Quirk — who brought you the best-selling Jane Austen mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — announced that they’re back with the next book in the series, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which goes on sale Sept. 15 (complete with 15 illustrations — we’ve brought you two of them — and a readers’ discussion guide). Quirk editor Jason Rekulak, the creator of the series ("I just thought it would be really funny to desecrate a classic work of literature") recently said that he didn’t want to go out there "with the one-millionth vampire novel that’s going to be published this year." P&P&Z’s Seth Grahame Smith did not write this sequel, since he recently left the franchise and signed a hefty contract with Grand Central for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter...

The Jane Austen aficionados, who can be a tough bunch, seemed to like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

I feel like people who really love Austen get it. Her novels are so strong, so cleverly constructed, so smart and dry, they really lend themselves to over-the-top violence.

Okay, what kind of creatures can we look forward to in the book?

A giant rampaging mutant lobster. Octopi with glittering tentacles. And pirates — I couldn’t resist pirates. I studied pirate lore, from R.L. Stevenson to Pirates of the Caribbean.

(more at the source)

HONEST ABE'S GONNA SPLIT VAMPIRE SKULLS LIKE HE SPLITS RAILS