Rynling R&D

I didn't want to pay actual money for Haruki Murakami's book of essays about t-shirts, so I got it from the library.

Not ten pages in, Murakami talks about how much he loves America, and then he makes a joke about how fat Americans are. I guess, if you don't have the slim and sexually charged body of a preadolescent twelve-year-old girl, you have a weak character and there's something wrong with you.

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Idk, there are a lot of male film critics talking about how brilliant Everything Everywhere All at Once is, and there are a lot of women being very quiet. And that's how I feel about the Murakami t-shirt book, namely, that it's probably best not to talk about everything that's going on there.

I got in touch with an artist about the Demon King commission. Maybe this is embarrassing to admit, but I labored over that email all weekend. I also spent an actually embarrassingly long time on a sketchy mock-up of the composition, which taught me that what I want is definitely beyond my own skill level... for now. I'm starting to understand where I need to be in order to draw illustrations myself instead of commissioning other artists, but I'm not sure how to get there. Anyway, this is a slightly edited version of how I described the story:

The Demon King is set in a postapocalyptic world filled with monsters. Ceres is queen who needs to be pragmatic and slightly evil in order to keep her kingdom from collapsing, while Ananth is a wizard who wants to recover a relic that will reverse the apocalypse but destroy the kingdom in the process. Ceres manipulates Ananth for political purposes, and Ananth allows Ceres to manipulate him so that he can eventually betray her. The story is essentially about how much people are willing to sacrifice to protect what they love.

Idk, I'm thinking about scraping the comedy elements of this story altogether. No great loss.

The artist said she'd accept the commission but that she currently has a backlog, which is fair. I therefore took the money I budgeted for this commission and used it for (this), a custom bookshelf illustration from (this artist). The theme of the books I asked him to illustrate is "Japanese suspense novels by female writers." If you're curious, these are the titles:

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Idk man, I just love stories. I love art.

I absolutely love how healthy and *real* the friendship between Geralt and Jaskier feels in the Hexer
https://ruusverd-fandom-blog.tumblr.com/post/618674826549379072/i-think-my-favorite-thing-about-the-hexerthe

Geralt and Jaskier in the Hexer feel like two people who are genuinely best friends. They’re clearly ecstatic to see each other whenever they meet, big smiles, big hugs, but they’re not excessively anxious or mopey when they part ways, just somewhat sad. They’re each functional as individuals, their lives don’t revolve exclusively around each other.

Jaskier doesn’t see Geralt as a legendary hero for him to exploit for inspiration, neither does he treat Geralt like a bumbling idiot who needs Jaskier to manage his life for him. He sees Geralt as a truely good man who has been forced into a difficult, violent life against his will and above all just wants to be normal. Similarly, Geralt openly enjoys and admires Jaskier’s music and poetry and says Jaskier is “wise,” but he neither structures all his actions around Jaskier’s approval nor treats him like a unwanted burden.

While rewriting The Demon King, I realized that the friendship between Ananth and Marlowe needs to be strong from the beginning. It will become more real the more they interact with one another, but it needs to be clear from the onset that they actually like each other.

I haven't read the Witcher novels. I hear they're good, though.

It's so good it's so good it's so good.

https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/pixels-of-you_9781419749575/

I got the physical edition in the mail, read it, and cried a lot. I'm now re-reading the digital version in order to take screencaps, and I'm crying even more. It's so beautiful, and so good.

Pixels of You is about a human/AI romance between artists. They're initially rivals, in that the human takes retro long-exposure photos of models that the AI finds objectifying, while the AI takes close-up photos of plants and flowers that the human finds too "safe." The human's relationship with a cybernetic implant turns out to be extremely complicated, while the AI's explanation for why she's interested in plants is something I've been trying to express about my own art for almost two years now.

Okay stop, hold on, I have to go get some tissues...

...all right, we're good. Anyway, being able to write about Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota's newest project as a professional comics reviewer is a dream come true. I have a review due by the end of the weekend, and I will do my best.

lord of the rings is wholeheartedly earnest in its dedication to portraying hope and love and faith and loyalty and courage, and that is what makes it feel like home to so many of us. it’s true to itself. it doesn’t pretend to be cool and care less. it cares, a lot, and that is a rare, beautiful thing.

https://southfarthing.tumblr.com/post/671057084479143936/caffeineheroes-tolkien-knew-we-wouldve-all

This is another wholesome Tolkien post. I don't think sincerity is actually all that rare (Stephen King, for example, is full-on tits-out sincere on every page), but I understand the appeal and transformative potential of happy endings.

In my last post, I mentioned being twenty years old and dating another twenty-year-old who was physically and verbally abusive. That relationship was complicated, and we were both kids. I hope that, as an adult, he's happy and healthy and living his best life. Still, he used to love Lord of the Rings, and the message he took away from it is that things that didn't fit into his worldview were "evil" and thus undeserving of understanding or compassion. I don't think that message is necessarily in the books, in which "difference" is treated with much more nuance, but it's definitely in the Peter Jackson movies.

The Demon King is not sincere, mainly because all of the characters are grown adults who somehow have to live with themselves and the shitty decisions they've made. Still, I want the ending to be happy, and I want it to be happy for everyone. There is no "you've done this one bad thing, and now you're evil and inhuman forever." I want people do the right thing when it's important, and for love to win in the end. After all, what good is time travel if you can't exploit it to get the best ending?

The first fifty pages of this book are somewhat interesting in terms of where the idea for Final Fantasy VII came from, but the rest of the book is corporate gossip. There’s a lot of hinting at things but not explaining them. For example, why were there so many errors in the original English translation? Because the circumstances were bad. How were they “bad,” exactly? No one will say.

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All things considered, I still think this is a cool book, but the Polygon article includes most of the good stuff and has the added benefit of being free.

I was telling my husband that I want to go on a class trip like the kids in World End Syndrome, and he said that, when he was in high school, they took a class trip to go hiking to see Roman ruins. Unfortunately, the ruins were in contested territory, and the trip was canceled because war broke out in the middle of the night.

Two years later, they took a class trip to the desert to hike along a ravine to see a giant meteor crater, and that trip was canceled because it coincided with the biannual rainfall. There was a flash flood in the ravine, and everyone had to spend the night running back to the buses.

My husband told me that, while they were running for their lives, their servants were carrying their bags behind them. I was like, “Servants, you say.” He was like, “The people who work for the bus company.” I was like, “Porters? The bus drivers?” He was like, “Yes, the servants.”

A friend recently recommended the essay collection Funny in Farsi, which I just started reading this past weekend. The author talks about how her mother had a servant when they lived in Iran, by which I think she meant a woman whom her mother paid to work part-time as a babysitter. I mean, I guess technically that’s what a “servant” is, but still. I find the term amusing.

Funny in Farsi is great, by the way. The tone is very close to David Sedaris, and the essays are chill and relatable (and not about tragedy and suffering). The collection opens with what’s probably the best essay about Disneyland I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something, given that I’ve read all sorts of stories about Disneyland murders and gangs and urban legends.

My husband tells me he went to Disney World in Orlando with his family when he was a kid. His father, who used to be a journalist, used his press credentials to get free passes, and their family didn’t have to pay for anything. Unfortunately, my husband’s father snapped on the second day in the park and made everyone go back to the hotel so that he could sit alone next to the pool and eat a bucket of KFC, which is uncannily close to the ending of the Disneyland essay in Funny in Farsi.

I keep telling my husband that he should write autobiographical essays, but he always answers that he hates writing. Which is fair. I kind of hate writing too.

I saw this book referenced in an academic paper about urban legends, and I was like, “Sweet! An entire academic book about urban legends!” It was published in 1984, which I thought made it even more interesting. Like, what sort of shenanigans were people getting up to before the internet?

I’m about halfway through the book, and I think maybe it’s not for me.

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In conclusion, I guess it used to be way easier to get tenure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Because I don’t follow people who post half-naked selfies on social media, I did not know that Rax King is primarily famous for posting half-naked selfies on social media. I feel tricked, because I genuinely came to this book thinking it would be a collection of essays on popular culture, which is what the reviews and interviews I read led me to believe. Instead, it’s a collection of essays recounting the author’s sad heterosexual sex life.

I don’t care about bad sex with shitty men. I’ve been there, and it’s not that interesting.

What I really care about is The Cheesecake Factory. I have never eaten there, and I will probably never eat there, and it’s exotic and mysterious to me. Did you know that the guy who owns it belongs to some sort of weird sex cult? Which happens to be a different sex cult than the one associated with the owners of the Celestial Seasonings tea brand, which is also mysterious and exotic to me as someone who lives in America but doesn’t know much about the sort of suburban American culture that people who grew up here take for granted.

I’m interested in what the fuck is “Guy Fieri,” not college boys who text you to come over for sex and then, when you show up in a cute outfit, make you spend an hour watching idiotic YouTube videos with their clueless roommate before you give up and go home. Like, did you sleep with a 45-year-old college professor who was cheating on his wife? Good for you, but I’d like to hear more about Jersey Shore and all the other American reality television shows that everyone except me seems to have watched.

I’m also kind of confused about the logistics. If Rax King is only 28 years old, and if she was a full-time student with a part-time job before jumping immediately into a full-time job while also freelancing and doing social media, where did she find the time for so many hundreds of sex partners while also keeping up with tv shows with hundreds of episodes? Does she have sex with multiple people at once while Netflix plays in the background?

Or is this just the life of people who don’t play video games? Idk, I love sex a whole lot, but if you offered me a choice between spending three hundred hours finding all the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild and three hundred hours of getting dicked down by an anonymous procession of disgusting men who only care about their own orgasms, I’d much rather play video games.

It seems like I’m judging, but I’m really not. Rax King is living her best life, and that’s great. I’m just not interested in reading about the sex she’s having, and I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to read the essays on American culture that I was promised.

YA fiction features child protagonists because it is intended to be consumed by children
https://fairy-anon-godmother.tumblr.com/post/659446115962322945/ok-heres-the-thing-ya-fiction-features-child

Don’t get me wrong, sticking with YA fiction as an adult is fine! The genre is easy, fun, features delightful adventures, and can offer a very relaxing and comforting escape. But when you find yourself recognizing that ‘kids’ handling large adventures means the adults around them have failed, take that as a sign that you’ve matured. The YA protagonists won’t, they’re going to stay young.

Good points all around.

Although I personally find YA fiction difficult to read, I don't have anything against it. Rather, I get frustrated when I see people attempting to apply an analytical tone to YA media that's more appropriate to adult media. It's equally frustrating when people treat adult media like YA fiction.

Despite its faults, I think the Harry Potter series holds up well to varying types of analysis, but the whole "taking YA fiction seriously" business got a little out of hand when people starting treating the Twilight books as something other than the YA power fantasies they are. I'm not saying that YA fiction shouldn't be analyzed, but I think it's important for these stories to be analyzed in an appropriate context.