elwen: (Default)
I have almost defeated the plague! Or at least enough to go back to work tomorrow. Kinda sucks to have three work days down the drain like that, but given the number of other people I've seen who are sick, I think I did good in staying home and not exposing my co-workers. I needed to work harder next month anyway -- now I just need to work extra, extra hard.

Anyway, some linkage:

Dangerous Wands - Harry Potter and Dangerous Minds. Who would think? It's pretty awesome.

They're going to promote Vampire Knight "at select Twilight conventions nationwide." - LOLZ. It's probably an insult to Vampire Knight, but I kind of got annoyed by its crazy, angsty plot, so I don't think their levels are that different. I think the Edward fangirls might like Kaname, even though personally I hate Kaname but think Edward is okay. Never got far enough to know what Jacob is like, so I can't compare him to Zero. Do non-anime fangirls like the same kind of tormented prettyboys? Oh, I guess I'm forgetting the whole cast of Night Class prettyboys. Maybe they are on to something with this marketing strategy after all.

D:

Oct. 20th, 2007 01:38 am
elwen: (fandom: . . . what?!)
I don't care about Dumbledore being gay, but how could JKR say that Neville married Hannah?! What about Luna?? :(

[Links stolen from flist: here and here. There are probably stories about it everywhere by now.]

Well, actually... )

The End.

Jul. 29th, 2007 05:00 pm
elwen: (reading)
Finally done with the book. My brain has way too much information it needs to process at the moment. In the past 36 hours, I have: Interviewed with nine different firms. Watched the Simpsons Movie. Read the latter half of Harry Potter 7.

The first thing will need an entry to itself, but I guess I can squeeze Simpsons comments here, because I don't really have many: basically, it was hilarious and very true to the spirit of the TV show. Some secondary characters that I like didn't get any screentime, but that's kind of inevitable. It did a good job of weaving stories for all of the Simpsons family members, I thought. Other characters were more limited to brief humorous cameos, but hey, that's what the Simpsons is all about, and I enjoyed them a lot. So yeah. If you're a fan, definitely go see, but I'm sure you didn't need me to tell you that.

Now, on to the real subject of this entry. Don't expect this to be in any way comprehensive or in chronological order.

Cut for disjointed commentary. ...oh, and spoilers, I guess, if there's anyone left to be spoiled. )

I'm sure I'll come up with more to say later, but for now I think I'll leave it at that, and start switching my brain back into thinking-about-law-firms mode so I can get those thoughts down, too.

In conclusion, though, I think it's definitely my favorite of the books. Just so many powerful moments. And, I felt, it fit together better than some of the others.

So, let's get cracking, shall we, [livejournal.com profile] nendil? >=D
elwen: (reading)
Ugh, I should so be in bed. I'm totally going to end up being sleep-deprived at my interviews on Saturday, which would suck. But . . . well, I'm sure you can guess why I'm still up, and I just had to post and say:

Dude, I never knew I shared my birthday with James Potter.

Unfortunately, there'll probably be no more of the book for me until I get back Saturday night. Tomorrow is reserved for killing trees (read: printing ten copies each of resume, writing sample, references, and transcripts). Then Friday I really do need to make myself sleep properly.

I'm sure I won't feel so bad tomorrow. For some reason when I'm not holding the book, I get this strange reluctance to go back, an unwillingness to find out what happens and realize that it's all over. Once I start reading, of course, I have trouble stopping, but . . . well, I'm the sentimental type who doesn't want things to end. (Wow, how very un-J of me.)

Yeah, I'm rambling now. G'night.

OotP.

Jul. 22nd, 2007 05:51 pm
elwen: (Default)
Finally went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. As most of you have already seen it, and I am too busy (with book seven as well as the Motion From Hell noticed for this Friday) to write much more, here are some brief disjointed comments again.

[Re: the book, I'm on Chapter 9, but my pace will probably slow down drastically until after next Saturday, so don't expect anything out of me on that front.]

Spoilers, as always. )

Hawt.

Jul. 12th, 2007 11:15 pm
elwen: (fandom: . . . what?!)
My Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom is:
Lord Voldemort goes on a hot date with Helga Hufflepuff on a broomstick
Get your Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom


In other news, no idea when I'm going to go watch the movie. Probably not until after next Friday. :(
elwen: (reading)
This awesome article about translating the Harry Potter books was posted on [livejournal.com profile] japanese, and I wanted to share.

I can relate to a lot of the things they mentioned. Although it sounds hypocritical, I think the approach of adjusting the names is better for HP. I never thought about it before, but a lot of the names are subtly evocative of certain things, and that probably does change if you're in a language that uses different sounds. It's kind of like how they really did have to change most of the Pokémon's names, because a lot of them were onomatopoetic or punny. But of course, I would never change the names in anything I was translating.

Then there's the issue of literal translation vs. something the readers will understand, when it comes to folk songs and the like. With anime and manga, the issue probably comes up most with proverbs. I'm always amazed at how I, and a lot of other people on translation forums, apparently, can rattle off English equivalents to so many Japanese sayings. [Lately, I keep running into ja no michi wa hebi (literally: "snakes on the path of snakes", approximately), but everyone uses "set a thief to catch a thief". I don't even know what that means.]

But I'm sure glad I don't have to deal with any of the "uniquely" HP problems. This was probably my favorite line in the article:

Tom Marvolo Riddle may be an anagram of "I am Lord Voldemort"; but it's not an anagram of "Je suis Voldemort", so in France he's Tom Elvis Jedusor.

XD

And then there's the part about the initials RAB becoming RAZ when they changed Sirius' last name to Zwartz. :o

I guess it depends on the work whether you should translate the "spirit" or the words. I usually like things to be literalist, but I was really excited to hear about the Lord of the Rings translation and how they'd "translated" names like Strider and Gollum that have meaning beyond their individual syllables. Or maybe I just like them translating the "spirit" when the work was originally in English and I know what that "spirit" is, whereas I translate Japanese literally because I don't know the language well enough to even grasp the "spirit"? I mean, I can tell that, say, Ginban Kaleidoscope, Kouga Ninpou Chou, and Scrapped Princess are all written in different tones, but I'm sure there are lots of subtleties that fly over my head. For example, I thought I was getting along fine in comprehending Scrapped Princess, and then Yuuma turned to look at the forest and I was lost for two paragraphs of what I assume was description (and hopefully not exposition).
elwen: (bad fandom bad!)
[The ex post facto subject is from a comment by Neuroretardant in response to an article about fansubs on ComiPress.]

Two links from [livejournal.com profile] kalquessa I wanted to pass along...

Thinking Fourth Dimensionally, a short and amusing Hermione fic. Please be warned that close examination of the site banner may cause you to run away in terror. I'd like to think of myself as pretty open-minded when it comes to ships, but the teacher/student Harry Potter pairings make me squeamish.

[As you will soon figure out, linking to the fic was just an excuse for me to blather aimlessly about shipping for a post.]

I mean, I've read some hundreds of thousands of words of this guy's Lina/Xelloss epic, Absolution, in spite of being a devoted Xelloss/Filia shipper. [Not to mention, although I wouldn't say I ship them, I tend to shy away from anything that's not Lina/Gourry and Zelgadis/Amelia.] But the fic does argue a reasonably convincing case for Lina/Xelloss, and doesn't just pretend Gourry doesn't exist, as I'd imagine a good number of such fics do.

When I was composing this entry in my head, I was going to say that my ships are so canon it's boring, but thinking about it more, I guess that's not really true. For the most part I don't like mushy romantic pairings [with notable exceptions like Haruka/Michiru and Arc/Kukuru], so I tend to go for pairings that are hinted at but never quite happen in the actual series, like Ryouga/Ukyou, Amarant/Freya, and ShinKumi. [ZOMG SHINKUMI OTP SQUEE!] Tension makes things interesting, after all.

Though to be honest, I tend to fangirl characters much more than ships, and I tend to like the loners anyway. I doubt I'd ship Amarant/Freya if it wasn't for a few amazing authors, notably Guardian with her snarky!Amarant and wussy!Fratley. Otherwise I might have thought Freya/Fratley kind of cute. My introduction to Xelloss/Filia similarly began as a Xelloss obsession, which partly explains why I put up with Absolution.

Anyhow, the other link was to the Fandom Biography of Ms. Scribe, which gave me more than an entire day of enjoyment and drama. Since then, I've had random moments in which I felt that my life was suddenly devoid of anything interesting, like I needed a good flamewar, or maybe some fandom wank. It really is quite amazing some of the things she orchestrated, but I can't believe how sloppy she was in other respects. Mixing accounts? Not keeping your sockpuppets' stories straight? What's up with that? My first thought was that she should have played some online mafia first. That would have taught her to proofread her posts to avoid inconsistences and to carefully disassociate herself from her scum buddies. Then again, usually in online mafia, your scum buddies are real, other people. [Although a friend did joke once about signing up multiple accounts for the same game; I don't think it would have worked.]

Actually, I also had quite a bit of fun with just the first chapter of the biography, which is just a background of the HP fandom. There was so much melodrama. But now that I think about it, it's not so different from my own experiences in other fandoms. I remember a rather lengthy exchange I had with one close-minded guy over gay acceptance in one Sailor Moon list... I guess it must have started with Haruka/Michiru, but I don't remember it being even remotely on-topic afterwards. Also, at first I thought it was crazy that shipping wars would be so impassioned, and then I remembered the Subaru x Seishirou versus Subaru x Kamui wars that raged through the X fandom way back when. There were cliques and webrings and fansites, and it got pretty nasty with the exclusion and the insults. I remember one argument that SxS was incredibly dark and violent and evil, and supporting it made you a bad person, whereas Subaru and Kamui could heal each other from all the horribleness, or something like that. Yeah. [I was still wary of the whole thing when I posted my SxK Winamp skin, hence the disclaimers on the site and in the readme.]

...ah, now I really do feel like my life is so boring these days. But I don't have the time to enter or keep up with any fandoms, and I generally arrived to all of them late anyhow.

Yeah, just some pointless rambling from me. Trying to clear out my head of comments I want to make and my bookmarks of links I want to post about.

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