Floria Tosca's Symposium

floriachick@yahoo.com — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:59:32 GMT

Fille du Regiment was fun, and it was great to see horitsu_kami again, but every time Marie started singing about how she was born on the battlefield or some such thing I kept having MGS flashbacks.
I also now have a couple of pet mice. This should be an interesting experience, because I've had hamsters, gerbils, and guinea pigs before, and my mom's kept rats, but mice are new to us. They're so tiny that in a weird way it's kind of intimidating. I don't want to accidentally squash them.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:46:39 GMT

The thing about Ultimate Showdowns of Ultimate destiny, or even smaller "character from fandom A vs character from fandom B" battles, is that you have to decide which universe's rules are going to apply. And this doesn't just apply to things like what sort of magic or phlebotinum works. For instance, being Lawful Good is a lot less fatal on the Discworld than in Westeros (as long as you stay away from the Lawful Stupid side of things), even allowing for the series' drastically different body counts.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:15:46 GMT

Have decided that my NaNo won't be "gritty social realism about coal miners" after all. Of course, in my case, "gritty social realism" would probably translate to something like: "The epic saga of a ruggedly handsome, charismatic union organizer who is secretly dying of some horrible lung disease or another and is secretly in love with his best friend."

floriachick@yahoo.com — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:26:11 GMT

It always amuses me when an ingredients label has "natural __ flavor" on it, when the flavor in question is of something that's a composite product. Okay, so natural orange flavor would, logically, come from oranges, but what about "natural gingerbread flavor" or "natural fruit punch flavor"? I'd imagine they'd probably be made by putting a bunch of preexisting flavors together (here's your ginger extract, and here's your quintessence of molasses, and so on), but I keep picturing the manufacturers putting a bunch of gingerbread or fruit punch into a giant still.
(I have heard Monstera deliciosa described as having a "mixed tropical fruit" flavor, but from what I know about the plant, it needs a warm climate and isn't terribly productive even then, so turning it into extract would probably not be the highest and best use.)

floriachick@yahoo.com — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:06:11 GMT

I'll be doing NaNo again this year, and I have about six hours to decide whether I should do:
A. "Metal Gear Solid in a Pink Bishoujo Ghetto, only it will probably wind up being more like one of those quirky slice of life series because I'm not that confident in my ability to write action"
B. More stuff with Valeriya, or some of the other characters in her universe
C. One of my other ideas (Canadian girl-band, vaguely Eva-ish mecha thing, JRPGish epic fantasy novel, retired rat-person supersoldier turned detective)
D. Gritty social realism about coal miners

floriachick@yahoo.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:34:15 GMT

The problem with writing any characters that are strongly inspired by preexisting ones is that you can fall into a sort of adaptational Uncanny Valley - where your OC has enough traits (at least superficial ones) in common with their source of inspiration that you can tell who they're based on, but are different enough in some aspect of their personality, concept, or mannerisms that they seem like a *really OOC* version of the source character.
I'm probably overthinking things, but those adaptations that latch onto the most obvious traits of a character or work while ignoring or misinterpreting what make it interesting in the first place can be so exquisitely awful that I'm a bit wary about this whole issue.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:39:32 GMT

I have some writing up here at armsandthewoman. It's part of a larger project, and currently consists mostly of Valeriya being snarky and some establishment of the setting.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:03:52 GMT

If wikipedia is to be believed, Takarazuka's going to do a production of Casablanca. I don't know much about it, but the prospect of Rick Blaine being played by a butch Japanese girl just strikes me as having the potential to be ridiculously hot.
They've also done Rosenkavalier, which does not particularly surprise me, given what the original opera is like.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:29:23 GMT

Apparently there's a modern-day gay porn adaptation of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" out there - I wonder if the plot part is any good. There's a lot of really dumb erotica in the world, but the premise seems promising.
My mom's been reading diet books, and people in my family have the habit of sharing interesting bits of what we read with anyone in the vicinity, so I've been learning about all the different theories and practices of weight loss out there. Reading about the Drinking Man's Diet was rather impressive in a "Wow, it certainly does take all kinds" sort of way, since I wouldn't eat like that if you paid me.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have such a horrible palate for alcohol, because booze nerds seem to enjoy themselves so much geeking out over all the little details of vintage and variety and peculiarities of flavor, and to me it all tastes more or less like cleaning fluid.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:52:03 GMT

Last night I dreamed that I was in charge of supervising a bunch of little kids (I think they were around six years old) as they played Team Fortress 2 - which in their case meant dressing up as the Scout, Heavy, et cetera and running around assaulting each other with Nerf weapons. My job was to help them put together their costumes, find safe toy weapons appropriate to the various characters, and keep the little rascals from killing each other. I know I found a foam bat for the Scout and a bow and velcro-tipped arrows (that would stick to the clothes of people who got shot) for the Sniper.

And the earth brought forth tomatoes abundantly

floriachick@yahoo.com — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:59:47 GMT

Which have come up and gone into our garden, and into our flower bed, and into our bean patch, and among our square crimson velvet peas, and between our broccoli, and through our anti-weed mulch, and among our lettuces, and yea, even a few where we actually planted them. (But none in our kneading-troughs yet. Just in heaps on the counter.)
Anybody want some?

floriachick@yahoo.com — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 06:46:33 GMT

In a weird way, Madlax reminds me as much of MGS as Escape From New York did, albeit in non-overlapping ways. There's a supertalented mercenary teamed up with a computer scientist to fight a powerful secret conspiracy and have homoerotic subtext, there's a glamorous sniper woman who has a weird sort of stalker with a crush/worthy opponent thing going on towards the mercenary, there's a gray-haired teenage ninja, the omniscient conspiracy of vagueness has a male operative who, it turns out, is really only in it for the sake of his own agenda - you get the idea.
It also has a higher trippiness quotient than anything I've ever read/watched, short of House of Leaves, although Madlax's brand of weirdness doesn't involve much in the way of postmodernism or playing with the fourth wall, but makes up for it with more psychological/supernatural ominousness.

In the grim dark future of the 20th century, there is only MANservice

floriachick@yahoo.com — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:56:08 GMT

Watched "Escape From New York" yesterday with pukingtoreador. I enjoyed it, and it wasn't quite what I expected (slower paced, and less of an over the top testosterone fest). It was nice that the major female character wasn't there to have awkwardly written sexual tension with Plissken or get raped and murdered by the bad guys just to show how evil they were and give the protagonist the incentive to kill a whole mess of people. Kurt Russell was very manly and stubbly and monocular, as promised, but I didn't find Plissken that compelling a character. He was interesting enough within the context of the movie, but not really the sort of character who inspires a desire in me to find out what other fans think he eats for breakfast. Compared to Solid Snake (I'm thinking of him as he is in MGS1, as that's the incarnation I'm most familiar with), who is my only other reference point for this particular archetype, Plissken came across as rather less sympathetic. This probably fits into the concept of moe somehow - Snake, for all his cranky-manly-man-in-his-thirties-ness, has it (at least if you like socially inept male tsundere), while Plissken doesn't.

Well, thank heavens that's over

floriachick@yahoo.com — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:38:45 GMT

The weather kami have been with us. The heat wave finally broke in early August, which was nice in its way (you could do things outdoors in the afternoon without a parasol and bottle of Gatorade), but also meant a return to default Western Washington weather patterns. A little rain isn't a bad thing, considering how dry it was in June and July, but we had Vacation Bible School this week (my mother got drafted as the Bible story lady, and I got drafted as her assistant), and keeping large groups of 3-5 year olds in a confined space for three hours with no breaks to run around is the sort of thing likely to end badly. But fortunately, however uninspiring the weather was the rest of the day, it always cleared up (or at least was not actively precipitating) for the preschool recess. This may very well have preserved the last vestiges of what passes for my sanity.
Preschoolers are a fun age group, but they are vastly easier to work with in small groups with a familiar routine. And even then, it can take it out of you.

Now that this is over, I'm free to sleep in again and spend my time pondering questions like "What is Chava's favorite philosophical school?" (I've currently decided on the Stoics, but that's mostly because I have the greatest familiarity with Classical philosophy, and she's too cranky to be an Epicurean and not mystical enough for Platonism) rather than "How likely is that kid to take a flying leap off of the piece of playground equipment she's currently climbing and fall on her face?"

floriachick@yahoo.com — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:52:00 GMT

Watched "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" (or, more accurately, "The chain-smoking biseinen who only develops much of a personality beyond "amoral laconic badass" in the last hour, the Revolver Ocelot reverse-Expy who's less gay but even more of a creep, and the chatty Mexican guy who, despite being treated with some of the conventions of a comic relief character, was really pretty darn badass") this evening. It was interesting, and impressive for what it was, but not really my usual taste in entertainment. I think I prefer stories where at least a few of the characters actually like each other. Some of the music was awesome, though.
Among other things, I saw the story as a sort of deconstruction of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, given that everyone of importance seems to have at least a trace of it, and it really just causes everybody a whole lot of trouble.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 07:51:48 GMT

There comes a time in the creative process when a writer has to decide "is my protagonist a clone or not?" Or maybe this is only true for me, Hideo Kojima, and the fine people at Marvel Comics, but it's still something relevant to my current situation.
I need to resolve Chava's origin story to settle the following:
* What exactly Lilith's feeling so ill-used about
* Whether it would make sense to use the "Where do babies come from? -Secret government laboratories" joke
* Identity and gender of the other parent
* How much like each other Chava, her mom/genetic progenitor, and her sibling(s) look
* How many evil (or not) twins/genetically identical siblings Chava has, and the probability of more popping up
* What sort of shape she's going to be in when she hits her forties
* If Chava and Lilith weren't made behind Christine's back, how did the twins wind up being raised separately by people who weren't her? I don't have Chris's personality that well fleshed out yet, but I do know that, if at all possible, she'd want to maintain some kind of relationship with her own kids, even if they often wound up being cared for by other people while Chris gallivanted around the globe shooting people and taking in adorable, ever so slightly homicidal war orphans.
* A few things about the timeline - since the twins were born around 1980, if Chris had them the conventional way, she'd have been born in the late thirties at the earliest, but she can be older if they came from a refrigerated DNA sample.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:27:14 GMT

The current hot weather is making my mom and I wish that we'd planted more marginal warm-season crops this year. However, if we'd planted sweet corn and miniature cantalopes, it might be sixty-five degrees and raining (not that that sounds so bad right now). Nature can be contrary that way.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:24:15 GMT

I expected that home leg waxing was not for the faint of heart, but I also expected the darn stuff to work! I'm considering running off to a radical feminist commune or making sure that, in the future, nothing in my wardrobe has an above-the-knee hemline, just to keep from having to go through that again. (I think this is the reason why I only register as "soft androgyne" on the online butch-femme test despite my long hair and fondness for skirts. "Femme" proper, at least conventionally, tends to involve a bit more personal maintenance.)
On the bright side, my cake turned out well, and I got to go swimming today.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:22:01 GMT

I spent the day so far looking at home leg-waxing kit reviews online and making the filling and frosting for homemade Lord and Lady Baltimore cakes. I feel like an anthropomorphic personification of women's magazines.
I haven't eaten any of the cake yet, except for scraps that were left in the pan when I unmolded the layers, but it should be tasty. As long as nobody winds up getting salmonella from the frosting or insulin shock from the whole production, we should be good.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:52:33 GMT

I've been curious about basil's potential as a sweet spice for a while, because of its clove and licorice overtones, and because there are plenty of conventional "sweet" spices that are also used in savory things. However, I didn't want to risk ruining an entire cake by making it taste like spaghetti sauce, so I made a simple cornstarch and milk pudding with fresh sweet basil and cinnamon basil leaves steeped in the milk (and left in the mixture for part of its cooking time, but removed before it thickened up too much). I'd considered adding some cloves and lemon as well, but the basil flavor passed into the milk really well and it didn't seem to be necessary. I don't know how well it'll turn out once it chills, but from what I tasted during the cooking process, it's surprisingly tasty. Compared to eating the whole fresh leaves, the sweeter aromatic elements get brought out a lot more, but the sharper aspects of the flavor don't go away completely.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:31:22 GMT

I have two ideas for MGS-spinoff games.

* Guns and Genomes: the High Tech, Magical-Realist Postmodern Spy Drama RPG - for all those people who want Hideo Kojima to stop messing around with cyborg ninjas and create a Cobra Unit game already, here's a tabletop RPG where the party is a Quirky Miniboss Squad. There are three potential settings (World War II, Cold War, or early 21st century), in which DMs can send players on missions of adventure, intrigue, blowing stuff up, and philosophical monologizing. Also, psychics can get a power that lets them read other people's character sheets, and a character who dies of anything less instantaneous than disintegration gets a free round after their health completely runs out in which they can't perform physical actions, but are still conscious and able to talk. (Psychics and people with sufficiently high social stats could probably abuse this.) And you can take Exhibitionism as a character flaw.

* Gears of Moe - for those of you who find yourselves wishing that MGS was more like Touhou Project. "Sweet Snake" and company gave me the basic idea, but one of pukingtoreador's housemates commenting that she preferred cute games when Metal Gear came up in conversation also has something to do with it. In practice, this would involve things like Sweet Snake having a post-boss-battle tea party with Mantis (who would probably be some variation on a less frilly than usual gothic-lolita Dark Magical Girl, although she might keep the gas mask) and listening to her wax misanthropic and talk about her father issues over a cup of Earl Grey.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:58:30 GMT

The problem with writing female characters who originated as expies of preexisting male characters (this is a case of "strongly inspired by," not a genderswap AU, although admittedly the lines can get a little fuzzy), is that sometimes it feels weird to write them as doing anything particularly feminine or strongly associated with women, particularly in the early stages of writing when they haven't established their own distinctive personalities as strongly. For instance, given her personality and the age she would have been at the time, I don't find it implausible that Lilith (resident self-proclaimed Evil Twin in my weird MGS-pastiche-meets-Bee Train WIP thing) was a Hole fan in the early to mid nineties. The problem is, my brain keeps bringing up the image of some hypothetical ffrants poster demanding the brain bleach for having been exposed to Liquid Snake in a babydoll dress and combat boots. So yeah. Mental associations are weird things.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:54:26 GMT

I know that writing to create a particular audience reaction is kind of a chancy affair - if the author takes this too personally, it can lead to things like derailing a perfectly interesting set of character dynamics because the fans are liking the wrong people in the wrong ways - but lately I found myself with two original story ideas whose raison d'etre is "mess with the expectations of the audience." I blame tvtropes and Hideo Kojima.

Idea Number One (tropes: Women In Refrigerators, Sissy Villain, Bishonen, Foe Yay) - the androgynous, flamboyant, scenery-chewing evil prettyboy (although how much time can he have to devote to evildoing when he spends so much of it stalking the hero and flirtatiously taunting him) turns out to be the hero's presumed dead semi-girlfriend in disguise. Her reason for doing this probably has something to do with being annoyed with how he's more interested in avenging her "death" than he ever was in her as a person when they were together.

Idea Number Two (Designated Hero, Designated Villain, Perspective Flip, Moral Dissonance, Start of Darkness, Jerk Sue) - epic fantasy with an extra dose of Dark and Gritty. You have the Chosen One, an inexplicably charismatic macho asshole whose main distinguishing feature is his tendency to make multipage speeches about Why He's Right And Everyone Opposing Him Sucks that are treated by his listeners as if he were the second coming of Demosthenes and Oscar Wilde combined (but more manly and heterosexual). He is, needless to say, ridiculously powerful, and shows an unusual lack of regret, or even the most stoic, understated sort of emotional distress, about his many Shoot the Dog incidents. He and his allies consider any enemies not converted by his awesome charisma to be complete monsters, never mind that they're no more ruthless than he can be and some of them have much more character development. Of course, he inevitably triumphs.
Then we get to the next book in the trilogy, and discover that Our Hero has become the new Dark Lord.

floriachick@yahoo.com — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:35:27 GMT

Despite its usefulness in other areas, the internet is being remarkably unhelpful about telling me how and where an American-born thirteen year old who's just moved to Quebec can get some help with her French, or if she's expected to pick it up from her surroundings. (She's at about the "plume de ma tante" level when her family moves to Montreal, which isn't really sufficient for book reports.)

On the bright side, I have learned some interesting things about Esperanto profanity! (Thank you, wikipedia.)

floriachick@yahoo.com — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:08:15 GMT

Next time I get to a comic book store, I'm going to look for some Ted Kord Blue Beetle. I like what I've heard about him via fannish osmosis, and Nite Owl II was one of my favorite characters in Watchmen, so it's certainly worth a try.

If wikipedia is to be believed, at one point Kurt Russell was considered to play Dan Dreiberg (presumably not for the adaptation that actually made it to the screen, given the age issues.) Maybe Kurt Russell is a more versatile actor than I'm giving him credit for, but - the mind, it boggles.