An entry with almost nothing but cheerful things in it
For fun, I pulled out a couple of old tarot-reading books--I collect tarot decks for the artwork--and played a little game I've done with another project once before: try to fit all the characters in a story, and some events if you have to, into the Major Arcana. If you have a lot of characters and/or want to get really fancy, you can start in on the Minor Arcana as well (which are actually more suited to events than the Major).
The fun part is trying to go by the meanings of the cards, not just the imagery, although I immediately went to "The Empress" on my list and wrote in Queen Victoria. The World is the British empire; the Chariot is the steam locomotive (with two tracks instead of two horses, because I are smart), and so on. I was overly excited to realize that I had an actual magician character who fit the Magician, who is traditionally pictured with roses and lilies, and who in my series actually is friends with... a Rose and a Lilly. Hand to God, I'm not making this up. I am struggling with the High Priestess a bit, although I think I know who it might be, and I have way too many possibilities for the Moon. The really exciting thing, though, was figuring out the Star, because it helped me clarify the role of a certain character (one you haven't met yet) in the two series. Which, ideally, is the purpose of the tarot-for-writers game in the first place.
Interestingly, Rose Hannah turned out to fit Strength the best--in part for a reason I can't reveal yet, but will turn up in the second volume, the one with a side trip to the Paris catacombs. And West was so completely Justice that it was almost funny: “When this card appears it ask us to identify what we did wrong and to claim our own mistakes - and perhaps to apologize for something we have done.”
Headlines you don't see every day: Pa. farm discovers a 4-legged chicken; court says $32,000 is too much to fondle bosom. To be fair, they did charge for ten separate fondling occasions.
anoneknewmoose: "A site called Bitacle.org is reposting LJ posts from the RSS feeds including, in my case, f-locked posts, and there have been cases of other LJ uses reposting peoples' writing found on Bitacle." Uh. That's not good. Does Livejournal know about this? Maybe there's some kind of crawler they can block.
Oprah: My lawyers overreacted.
Dolphin may get prosthetic tail. Awwww.
Acrobat Panda.
New images from Order of the Phoenix. Okay, now Harry's hair isn't shaggy enough.
Find 50 Dark Movies on the M&Ms site. AHHHHHHHH. This is deeply embarrassing if you fancy yourself a movie buff. Apparently in my universe, there are movies called The Juggler, Death in a Fence, Killer Butterflies, Crazy Apes, A Bunch of Losers Fighting Over Who Gets to Be Zero, The Child Snatcher, Tied-Up Guy in a Bear Hat, When Planets Collide, Dancing in Blood, I Told You to Stop for Directions, and Bastard Fish. Clues: if there are a number of things, count them; it might help. Try to think of "dark" movie titles and then go look for those--there were a couple of movies I knew automatically would be in the picture, because they're 1) well-known and 2) easy to draw. Burton, Shyamalan, Lynch, Hitchcock and Gilliam are all represented at least once. Some recent Japanese horror remakes are in there as well as some classics from the '70s. Sling Blade and Big Fish are not correct answers. They're not all horror movies; some of them I would term thrillers, and loosely at that. (Here's a wallpaper version of the full painting, if you'd like to study it. You have to open the flash site to get the fill-in blanks.) I managed to solve it in about nineteen minutes, but only with Google-fu cheating on three answers ("OH, WHATEVER, MOVIE GAME").
ETA: Okay, I was bored. I made icons.
