Icon meme + five worst books ever
This is my Taiwan icon! I made it from this picture, which I took when rachelmanija and I visited the Long Shan temple in Taipei with my family last year. I just love how the old temple is now right next to a shiny office building, and in the original picture, you can see reflections of ugly Taipei buildings. All the same, I love the ugly buildings and their bathroom-tiled exteriors!
One of my absolute favorite scenes from the anime Honey & Clover, in which artist Hagu thinks about art as an infinite number of boxes, all filled with ideas, stretching out to the horizon, simultaneously excited and saddened by the fact that she will never be able to open all of them in the space of a life time. Oh Hagu, I love you.
It's Fuu from Samurai Champloo being all woeful! Except she's still in a happy pink kimono, so she's not too woeful. This is my "woe" icon, obviously, but for woeful things that aren't too dire. I think the shot is from Fuu, Mugen and Jin mutually moping because they don't have enough money for food. Also, I secretly love this icon because rachelmanija said once that Fuu reminded her of me.
Goku from Saiyuki! rilina made this icon, and it is an icon of joy! I really should use it more often -- it captures what I love most about Goku, his enthusiasm for life. Unsurprisingly, like Fuu, he is a big food appreciator. I think Goku is the anime/manga character I most want to be like right now. Except for the whole berserk killer thing...
One of the first icons I ever made! The picture is actually of the ex's desk; I think you can see a corner of calligraphy reading "Nihon" on the wall, a set of sake cups, a speaker (the giant black blob), and the top of a Chinese-esque box. Mostly I just applied a billion filters to the thing and then had fun with squares, as that was back when I was first learning how to use Photoshop.
And since Rachel asked, my five worst books ever!
In no particular order:
RL Stine - I can't remember which book this is, since there are so many with increasingly implausible and silly deaths. But the book had a character dying via a piece of dough placed in his/her mouth. The dough rose and miraculously acquired enough force to suffocate the person or to cause death via dough in the brain. I swear, I am not making this up.
Barbara Hambly, the Dragonsbane sequels - I think I may have blocked out how truly terrible these were from my mind. This is particularly sad, because I love Dragonsbane, but the sequels reverse a key decision in the original book (I think) and then begin to incorporate incoherent dimension- and/or time-travel. Other elements that I may or may not be remembering correctly: squalid details about homeless, addicted people in an alternate dystopic earth and how John either saves them or becomes one of them. Mely notes that there is also demonic mother-son incest, which I managed to scrub out of my memory.
Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin - So, there's the "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending, and then there's Slammerkin, in which rocks (metaphorically) fall, everyone dies; you sell your virginity for a red ribbon, get gang raped, then thrown out of the house; you abort your misbegotten gang rape child with a stick; and your best prostitute friend freezes to death on the street and you briefly think of burying her and instead pry a bottle of gin from her cold, dead fingers. The best thing? This is just the first hundred pages! It gets worse (spoilers)!
Robin Schone, Awaken, My Love - I cannot believe I actually finished this. Here's the original post. First, there is the gratuitous detailing of historical squalor. If two people are going to have sex later, I really do not want to know about how unclean they are when they pee, nor do I want details about bad breath, bad teeth, greasy hair, and dirty clothing. I do not mind these things, but when paired with descriptions of bulging tumescences and yonis and chakras and other nonsense blindly taken from the Kama Sutra, they are ridiculously funny. Also, the heroine's husband has apparently never heard of sex, masturbation, or orgasms, and he is supposedly a perfectly normal guy.
The hero's wife is frigid, so he rapes her into submission! We get entirely too detailed descriptions on dryness and tearing, zero remorse from the hero, and no sympathy from the author. Clearly, the hero's wife deserved it for being frigid, for having one leg be shorter than the other, and for being raped by her uncle when she was a child.
I still cannot believe I finished this. All I have to say is that it was before I started throwing books at walls.
And now, I can't think of a fifth, as they were either so bad that I never finished them, or mind-numbingly mediocre. Instead, I list: Piers Anthony, especially the Adept series and its gratuitous virtual sex (IIRC); Robert Jordan, with his notions of how women act; Anne McCaffrey's Freedom series; Anne Bishop's penis-shaped breadsticks; and the Beatrice Small book I started and never finished because it was just that bad in every possible aspect.