(no subject)
Recently I have been making some time in my very busy internet-and-Destiny schedule to do some reading of books! Well, re-reading, actually. I had a sudden yearning to re-read some Discworld books, specifically, but couldn't find our copies, which I suspect are either in boxes still or were taken by my sister. Instead, I have been making do with a motley assortment of things that caught my eye:
* Midnight Blue, which I remembered from reading as a kid involved traveling through the sky in a hot air balloon and ending up in a magic, mysterious land. Well, the hot air balloon and traveling to the other side of the sky were correct, but the magic, mysterious land was pretty much just slightly alternate reality Wales. Or perhaps rural England; it was a bit vague on the details. I feel that this is a rather serious failure of imagination when it comes lands on the other side of the sky, but ah well, it's still a decent story plot-wise. Just a lot less mysterious than it was in my memories.
* The Wild Magic quartet by Tamora Pierce, which has not aged very well, but Rikash is still the best. ♥
* Hearts in Atlantis, which I love even if I have slightly less patience for Boomer nostalgia now. (Probably still more patience than I should have, but then, I've had a thing about nostalgia in general since forever; it gets to me for some reason.) I really do need to read more about Vietnam, whether fiction or non-, that isn't so friggin' US-centric, though. Somewhere I have a book I read in college, but I remember basically nothing about it and am not sure where it is (possibly also packed away in a box), so that's probably not an ideal place to start... Anyway, the first story, with Ted and the low men before the war/protest stuff, is still a great story. Ted. ;o; And I guess I'll always have a weird 2edgy4u spot in my heart for the low men, which I cannot explain even to myself except as some kind of horror aesthetics thing.
Anyway, having finished that, I am starting on a partial re-read of the Dark Tower series. I was thinking about going for the whole shebang, since it's been a while, but my copy of the sixth book wasn't with the rest of the series and just looking at Wizard and Glass made me want to cry, so I'll do what we all did in those long years before Wizard and Glass and pretend it's a trilogy with the worst possible cliffhanger ending. XD And maybe read the first bit of Wizard and Glass for the conclusion of that, and if I really feel like continuing then I'll keep going...
... but first I apparently felt a need to wallow in some nostalgia of my own and I spent an hour wandering through my dA gallery and have seven tabs of old RP logs about Mister Jack open if I have the courage to keep reading. Ah, you know how it goes with these things. You laugh, you cry, you say, "What the fuck kind of shirt is that supposed to be I can't even, oh God his eyes are so far apart whyyyyyyyyyy, how could I type like that with a straight face (IT WAS THE EARLY 2000S AND EVERYONE WAS DOING IT, I SWEAR, YOU CAN LOOK AT THE COMMENTS FOR PROOF), what was I thinking when I wrote this?" And, very occasionally, you can look at something and go, "Huh, that's not too bad." And even some of the bad stuff (MISTER JACK, oh Lord, that burn-and-dodge - even if it was on purpose there had to have been a better way of going for that effect) still has the seeds of something I could rework and do better, with more nuance and skill...
So now I'm actually thinking about reposting a few things to my tumblr as a sort of back-up/general sharing thing (appropriately tagged as "shit I drew what feels like a million years ago"). Definitely none of the Mister Jack stuff, haha, but that Na-chan as Clytemnestra pic, maybe. And the black-and-white Josh and Shalohim picture, and "Always Going Home," and maybe a couple of others. They're not really good, probably (just better than the rest of the crap I was drawing), but it's something, that I could look back and find these pieces that I still really liked, and see how much my art changed from the truly dreadful things I started off posting. I don't know if I'm ever going to pick up drawing again as seriously as I did when I was in college (so much fic to write - so much), but it'd be nice to at least get back in the habit of sketching more.
And I think I might start with a redesign of Mister Jack. XD
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://hokuton-punch.dreamwidth.org/1074152.html .
* Midnight Blue, which I remembered from reading as a kid involved traveling through the sky in a hot air balloon and ending up in a magic, mysterious land. Well, the hot air balloon and traveling to the other side of the sky were correct, but the magic, mysterious land was pretty much just slightly alternate reality Wales. Or perhaps rural England; it was a bit vague on the details. I feel that this is a rather serious failure of imagination when it comes lands on the other side of the sky, but ah well, it's still a decent story plot-wise. Just a lot less mysterious than it was in my memories.
* The Wild Magic quartet by Tamora Pierce, which has not aged very well, but Rikash is still the best. ♥
* Hearts in Atlantis, which I love even if I have slightly less patience for Boomer nostalgia now. (Probably still more patience than I should have, but then, I've had a thing about nostalgia in general since forever; it gets to me for some reason.) I really do need to read more about Vietnam, whether fiction or non-, that isn't so friggin' US-centric, though. Somewhere I have a book I read in college, but I remember basically nothing about it and am not sure where it is (possibly also packed away in a box), so that's probably not an ideal place to start... Anyway, the first story, with Ted and the low men before the war/protest stuff, is still a great story. Ted. ;o; And I guess I'll always have a weird 2edgy4u spot in my heart for the low men, which I cannot explain even to myself except as some kind of horror aesthetics thing.
Anyway, having finished that, I am starting on a partial re-read of the Dark Tower series. I was thinking about going for the whole shebang, since it's been a while, but my copy of the sixth book wasn't with the rest of the series and just looking at Wizard and Glass made me want to cry, so I'll do what we all did in those long years before Wizard and Glass and pretend it's a trilogy with the worst possible cliffhanger ending. XD And maybe read the first bit of Wizard and Glass for the conclusion of that, and if I really feel like continuing then I'll keep going...
... but first I apparently felt a need to wallow in some nostalgia of my own and I spent an hour wandering through my dA gallery and have seven tabs of old RP logs about Mister Jack open if I have the courage to keep reading. Ah, you know how it goes with these things. You laugh, you cry, you say, "What the fuck kind of shirt is that supposed to be I can't even, oh God his eyes are so far apart whyyyyyyyyyy, how could I type like that with a straight face (IT WAS THE EARLY 2000S AND EVERYONE WAS DOING IT, I SWEAR, YOU CAN LOOK AT THE COMMENTS FOR PROOF), what was I thinking when I wrote this?" And, very occasionally, you can look at something and go, "Huh, that's not too bad." And even some of the bad stuff (MISTER JACK, oh Lord, that burn-and-dodge - even if it was on purpose there had to have been a better way of going for that effect) still has the seeds of something I could rework and do better, with more nuance and skill...
So now I'm actually thinking about reposting a few things to my tumblr as a sort of back-up/general sharing thing (appropriately tagged as "shit I drew what feels like a million years ago"). Definitely none of the Mister Jack stuff, haha, but that Na-chan as Clytemnestra pic, maybe. And the black-and-white Josh and Shalohim picture, and "Always Going Home," and maybe a couple of others. They're not really good, probably (just better than the rest of the crap I was drawing), but it's something, that I could look back and find these pieces that I still really liked, and see how much my art changed from the truly dreadful things I started off posting. I don't know if I'm ever going to pick up drawing again as seriously as I did when I was in college (so much fic to write - so much), but it'd be nice to at least get back in the habit of sketching more.
And I think I might start with a redesign of Mister Jack. XD
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://hokuton-punch.dreamwidth.org/1074152.html .