tozka posted: how to download old icons that are being held hostage by photobucket

Ever since Photobucket started charging for 3rd party image hosting, all of the old icons and graphics from pre-2017 fandom have been mutilated with a huge watermark across the middle of them.

Probably all my Finnish followers know that the Moomin franchise recently got a new TV adaptation. The first episode of the show was broadcast in Finnish and Swedish this Monday, so it got me into a rather Moomin mood.

Despite always having loved the Moomins, I had never read Tove Jansson's books. That is, until today.

I read the first one this afternoon (it was very short), and I'm over halfway through the second one. It's a shame I never read them when I was younger, but then again, I might not have really understood or even liked them that much as a kid. I'm truly enjoying reading them now, though.

‘Must you be so poetic?’ said Sniff. ‘When we were in the valley you only talked about how wonderful other places were.’

‘That was different,’ said Moomintroll.

‘But it’s true,’ said Snufkin. ‘We’re all like that. You must go on a long journey before you can really find out how wonderful home is.’

At first Moominmamma was frightened, too, but then she calmed down: ‘I think it's a very small creature. Wait, and I'll shine a light on it. Everything looks worse in the dark, you know.’

I definitely recommend the Moomin books to anyone who wants to read adorable, creative, and exciting stories about wondrous creatures and adventures. And so far there's seems to be deeper themes to these books as well, which is something that I really appreciate when it comes to children's books. And the comics, which I have only briefly looked at, are totally worth a read as well. To my knowledge both the books and the comics deal with quite dark issues.

In my honest opinion, the new series show seems okay, once you get past the odd look of the 3D animation. The background sceneries are especially breathtaking. I just wish they had gone with a more traditional 2D style. The English version will be broadcast around Easter, and its voice actor cast includes stars such as Taron Egerton, Rosamund Pike, Matt Berry and Richard Ayoade.

It's definitely worth a look!

I want to get interested in reading published books again, because I'm still contemplating what I want to do as my career and literature has sort of always been there in the background, tempting me and calling my name and whatnot. I don't have a problem with reading per say, but I mostly read fanfiction these days. I used to read a lot when I was in middle school and high school, but then I just sort of... lost interest in reading published books, because fanfiction was just more up my alley. The tagging system on AO3 makes it so easy to find stories I know I'll actually enjoy.

I decided I should start chipping away at my reading list, or at least try to get more educated about "the classics" in some other way, if possible. This led to me watching John Green's Crash Course on Literature.

This afternoon I watched the two videos on J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Now, I've had this book on my hella long reading list for ages since I know it's an American classic, but I've never really been in the mood to read it. But the videos aroused my interest, so I downloaded the ebook and started reading.

And to my surprise, once I started reading, I couldn't stop. The only breaks I took were because I wanted to bake some bread from a recipe I had found few days earlier, but that only took couple of short breaks. The recipe required almost 3 hours of just waiting around for the dough to rise and it to bake in the oven, so I managed to read the whole book in one evening.

I actually really enjoyed the book and found myself heavily empathizing with the main character. I also highlighted some passages which I found especially good, so I thought I'd share two of them with y'all.

First this:

I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.

And then another one:

“All right, name something else. Name something you’d like to be. Like a scientist. Or a lawyer or something.”

“I couldn’t be a scientist. I’m no good in science.”

“Well, a lawyer - like Daddy and all.”

“Lawyers are all right, I guess - but it doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “I mean they’re all right if they go around saving innocent guys’ lives all the time, and like that, but you don’t do that kind of stuff if you’re a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys’ lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn’t.”

That's about it. I don't really have any analysis or anything for these bits, I just really liked them.

What ended up happening after I read the books is that I realized how short most published books actually are. I've been thinking that they're really long because that's how they felt when I was a kid, but these days I regularly consume like 400,000 word long fanfiction in almost one sitting. Bolstered by this realization, I ended up making a new account on GoodReads and set myself a challenge of reading 50 books in 2019.

Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to eat some of that bread.

 Last week I shared kore's post about not needing something worth to say in order to post on Dreamwidth and muccamukk's post about dogpiling. Afterwards, these two posts stayed in the back of my mind and I came to a somewhat unpleasant realization.

 I agree with the point that Dreamwidth, like any other platform, is what the users make of it. But despite this, I also constantly feel like I need to be be eloquent in the text that I produce. These feelings often culminate to the point where I will often refrain from writing a post or a comment, because I feel like everyone else has already said what I wanted to (usually better), and I feel like I don't have a single original thing to add to the conversation.

 In order to dig deep and explain the cause for these feelings, I wanted to share some of my history on the internet, and list some of the things which cause me anxiety when taking part in discussions, sharing headcanons, or even when writing fanfiction.

( Read more... )

So I went to Japan for a month, and had a really lovely time. I saw not one, but two Takarazuka musicals (they were beyond awesome), and spent most of my budget on trying out Japanese food and snacks. However, the highlight of the trip was probably our day in Universal Studios Japan, where we spent the whole day in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Another thing I absolutely loved about Japan are all the second hand book stores. And the books are cheap. Of course, being unable to resist such stores selling cheap manga and books, I ended up returning with enough Japanese reading for years and years. Unfortunately the trip also came with a side of a really miserable cold.

Now it's been nearly three weeks since I came back, and I think I'm finally starting to get used to Finland and my apartment. And of course, I've been going to lectures again. I somehow managed to pass our Japanese exam on the first try, despite being sick with the cold and therefore unable to study for it at all. Small miracles, huh.

Even though I had a really cool start for the new year in Japan of all places, my mood for this year has pretty much been "perpetually exhausted". Eddie Brock is mood for 2019. This damned winter darkness just leeches all life from me, and our course we recently found out that our course load effectively doubles for the spring. Ugh. There goes all my plans for writing more fanfiction this year.

What about everyone else? How has your new year started? I was without my laptop for 30 days and thus didn't really keep up Dreamwidth much, so I feel kind of out of the loop. What are peeps talking about here these days?

Now, if you excuse me, I'll go sleep for a week.

It's finally here!! Bioware announced their next Dragon Age project!

We’ve gathered our strongest team yet and are venturing forth on the most epic quest ever!

• Matthew Goldman, Creative Director