And again...

     ...today is basically the same as yesterday, only I'm even more tired, plus I'm worried about the big thunderstorm that's supposed to roll through town tomorrow, so I pretty much only booted up the laptop to see if it needed charging.

    I'll do a real post tomorrow.

    I hope.

    (Maybe the whole "post every day" thing was a bad idea after all?)

Taxes

     Spent half the day working on my taxes.  (A bit late in the game for it, but...)

    Didn't finish because I didn't have one of the numbers I needed for the state taxes.  I shudder to think what the state is going to soak me for considering how much the federal government wants.  It's not that it's a huge amount, but for someone unemployed like me...ugh.

    I am just not in the mood to blog today. :<

    Maybe tomorrow I'll start on my multi-post rant about some of the maddening mistakes people make over and over and over and over again when they're writing Trojan War pieces to post on AO3.

    I'm not up to it today, though.

Thermae Romae (Primae et Novae)

    Not too long ago, I logged into Netflix and found that the "we're promoting this today" product was a new anime, Thermae Romae Novae.  My reaction, of course, was "huh, really?  That's a weird choice to give a sequel to.  Didn't realize anyone even remembered that show..."

    Then I let the trailer play and I was like "wait, it's a remake?"

    Naturally, I added it to my watch list and just left myself a mental note to get to it later.

    So, I watched the first episode last night.  It's a weird mix of "clearly a lot of research went into this" and "why the *^%^& would they do that?!"  (Warning, this discussion will have some "spoilers" for the first episode, but...is this really the kind of show where there even is such a thing as a "spoiler"?  I mean, the premise is "the Roman who bathed through time," you know?  It's not about story so much as the humorous reactions of an ancient Roman bathmaker in modern day Japanese bathhouses.)

    I mean, right from the start, it's a little weird in the opening credits to have music based on Italian opera and visuals based on Greek vases.  (Sort of.  More the figures and the poses but less so the actual art style and not the coloration at all.  Hard to explain properly, esp. without having the visuals right in front of me.  (I've only seen it the once, after all!))

    Then we get the introductory sequence of "welcome to Ancient Rome" and the fly-over of the city, and I'm thinking that it looks pretty darn good.  The city looks about like it should, and the animation quality is good.

    And then we get a series of short scenes to further introduce the Roman people as a whole.

    Including a party-goer throwing up (either from too much wine or to make room for the next course, most likely) while his fellow-partiers call him back over...

    ...and the fellow partiers are lying on their stomachs on featureless couches.

    On.

    Their.

    Stomachs.

    I'll pause here a moment to let you fully take that in.

    The weird thing is, that's not the first time I've seen someone so completely misunderstand how reclining at the table worked.

    And the other was also Japanese pop culture, so I suspect there's some "classic" Japanese history text that made that mistake and generations of Japanese students have just absorbed it.  (Or maybe it comes from that movie about Cleopatra that Tezuka made?  I don't know much about that movie...)  Anyway, the other place was in a cute little manga called NG Life, by Mizuho Kusanagi, about a man from Pompeii who was reincarnated in modern-day Japan but still remembers his life as a Roman.  (It had a lot of other mistakes in it, esp. regarding the social role of gladiators, but it was still cute.)

    In both cases, it's hard for me to understand how no one with editorial oversight didn't look it up online and realize that the reclining position should look like this:

    I mean, that took me maybe five, ten minutes to get.  (Took me longer than necessary 'cause I was trying to get those Etruscan tomb frescoes showing all the young men at a symposium, only then it turned out the pictures weren't all that good at showing what I wanted...)  The pictures are, in order from top to bottom, an Etruscan sarcophagus, a panel from a Roman sarcophagus, a Greek vase (the reclining figure is on the lower tier), and a fresco from Pompeii.  (All the pictures above are from Wikimedia Commons, and you can click the pictures to go to the page with the full-size images and photographer credits.)  And that Etruscan sarcophagus is one of the most famous works of Etruscan sculpture of all time--one of the main things you think of when someone says "Etruscan art"--so there's not a lot of excuse for not knowing what it looks like.

    Moving on, after that absurdity left, then we had the bulk of the first episode following our protagonist, Lucius, as a child.  And there were still some little inaccuracies (I thought for a while that everyone was wearing these odd seashell necklaces until I realized they were supposed to be cloth pouches to hold their money, which is inaccurate in that you wouldn't wear that outside your clothes where the thieves can see it! (also inaccurate in that a child would not be carrying money with him unless he was specifically on an errand to buy something)) and the streets didn't have anywhere near enough people on them, but mostly it was looking good.  (There were still a lot of cultural awkwardnesses, of course.  I don't think bullies would have acted the same way in Ancient Rome that they did in mid-century Japan, you know?  I mean, I admit to ignorance about how the urban middle to lower class boys bullied each other in Rome, but...I don't think that was it.  And Lucius was on an errand to bring lunch to his grandfather, but I'm not so sure lunch was even a thing in antiquity.  I need to look that up; I had sudden panic as I was preparing my latest novel for release on itch.io as I realized that it was probably grotesquely inaccurate to have people eating a midday meal in the Late Bronze Age.  But I'm not sure when lunch, as we think of it, started happening.  I feel like for most of human history it was two meals a day:  one in the morning and one in the evening.  But I need to research that...)

    And we got through this prefatory material pretty smoothly, and then we get Lucius as a grown man, freshly returned from studying in Athens...so he can be a better bathmaker.  Of course, Athens was not exactly known for its baths.  That was a Roman thing.  It was known for its architecture, though, and Romans loved the cache they got from having studied in Greece (esp. for rhetoric or poetry), so that wasn't too big a deal...

    ...but then Lucius stops to pay his respects to his father and grandfather, represented by these little full-figure statuettes standing where the household gods should be.

    That is a huge "no."

    Yes, Romans did keep statues of their deceased family members--male ones, at least--but they tended to be busts, and they were pretty much only brought out for funerals.

    They were not the equivalent of the Buddhist altar you often see in homes in anime and manga (I won't speculate on how accurate that is to Japanese reality, because how would I know?), and they certainly weren't kept in place of the household gods.

    Very, very awkward.

    Then Lucius goes to the baths, where he runs into one of the bullies who was picking on him at the beginning of the episode.  The bully having grown out of being a bully and wanting to apologize for his earlier behavior felt a little forced in an era so far before psychological counselling, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen, so I'm okay with that.

    I'm much less okay with him using the "thumbs up" gesture in such a modern way.

    Specifically, after the bully-turned-butcher apologizes, Lucius asks if he'll give him a discount next time he visits his butcher's shop.  And the guy gives him a thumbs up.

    That.

    Is.

    So.

    Wrong.

    Firstly, at some point since the gladiatorial games went the way of the dinosaurs, people forgot what the signals meant.  Thumbs down actually meant "put your sword away," as in "let your opponent live."  So, the thumbs up was "kill the guy!"  Therefore, what in the heck would it even mean in this context?

    I can't even imagine.

    Either way, a gesture associated with the brutal fighting in the coliseums would be entirely inappropriate and unnatural in a friendly conversation inside a bath.

    So...yeah.

    Basic reaction to the first episode is "they got so much right that the things they got wrong really jump out at me, screaming and yelling and waving their arms."

    I still plan on watching the rest, of course, but I think it's going to be a "one episode a week" thing to build up my strength again.  (Thankfully, while I'm moderately knowledgeable about it, and used to be pretty good at the language, Ancient Rome doesn't mean the same thing to me that Ancient Greece does, so it's not as big a problem as it could be...)

    Anyway, today I decided to pop the DVD in the player and rewatch the first episode of the original anime (which was from 2012, so I guess this was sort of a 10th anniversary thing?) to see how it compared.

    And I very quickly understood why they wanted to do a new one.

    The first one wasn't really...well...animated.  It was more like sprites sliding around, and lip-flap animations when someone was talking.  I mean, they were much better lip flap animations that you get in most visual novels, but...the difference between that and the lavish animation in the Netflix anime is mind-blowing.  (The original also didn't spend as long setting the scene and just plain showing Rome, so it had less time to make mistakes.  Though the conclusion of the episode made some pretty massive mistakes, in that the Romans did know how to make glass bottles, and also had pottery wheels, so whether those clunky bottles were supposed to be badly made glass or badly made pottery, either way it was wrong.)

    To give you an idea of the difference, visually...

    Here's the promotional images for the two versions side by side.

    Huh...actually, that's not so informative.  You can't really understand what I'm talking about without seeing a clip of the original and then watching the trailer for the new one.  (The main thing you can see here is that in the original, Lucius is blond, which would actually have been pretty unusual for a Roman.)

    Honestly, I think the original was made super on-the-cheap as a promotional thing for the live-action movie, as the teaser poster for it was on the wall when Lucius arrived in Japan in the first episode.  I can't even imagine how this would work extended into a single, movie-length story.  And with everyone being Japanese, I would think it would kind of squash some of the fish-out-of-water when Lucius arrives in the present, since his original basic reaction of "these people look like no one I've ever seen before" would kind of not work if everyone involved is of the same ethnicity.

    That being said, I think a live-action take on this could be really cool (in small chunks only), if you did it right:  get together an appropriate cross-section of humanity for the Rome sequences (keeping in mind that Rome in the time of Hadrian would actually be pretty diverse, due to the spread of the Roman empire and slaves being brought in from all quarters of the empire and then freed, not to mention free people moving to Rome for better opportunities, plus just plain tourism) and have them all speaking in Latin, then the stuff in Japan is of course in Japanese and featuring only Japanese people.  If I were a teacher at a college, I would so try to get the Classics and the Drama departments together to do something like that.  Just to see it, you know?

    (The world should now be very grateful that I do not teach....but if anyone does make a video like what I just described and posts it to YouTube, please let me know, okay?  I want to see it...)

"Creative, Not Famous" - A Reaction

 

    Ooh, copy-pasting an image works!  Sweet!

    *ahem*

    Right, so I'm calling this a "reaction" rather than a "review," because a review ought to be more thorough and stuff.

    Creative, Not Famous:  The Small Potato Manifesto by Ayun Halliday is...actually, let me quote the Kickstarter page, so I won't make a hash of explaining what it is.  (Ugh, pun totally not intended...)

What is a small potato? They're someone whose focus is making cool, meaningful work and living a creative life rather than achieving wealth or celebrity! This book is from small potatoes to small potatoes. 

Inside you’ll find:

• Quotes and advice from 37 creative small potato just like you, including actors, artists, writers, comedians, clowns, musicians, photographers, videographers, mimes, singers, cartoonists, zinesters, and more
• The kind of friendly, collegial wisdom, encouragement, and practical advice that soothes your soul as you try to make art and pay the bills
• A manifesto for small potatoes that builds as you read
• Adorable potato illustrations!

    So, yeah, there you have it.  It's both about the lifestyle and attitude towards your own art you have to have if you're a small potato, but it's also advice about how to live that life, and without having to sacrifice everything else in your life.

    A lot of it's geared towards the performative arts (including playwrights), and most of the rest is about visual artists, so a lot of it didn't really connect for me.  But it was still entertaining, and there was a lot of information that was useful, too.

    ...

    Y'know, I felt like I had more to say than that.

    ...

    Ugh.  I've been away from this too long; I don't remember how to write a book review. 😩

    .....

    Oh well, I guess I'll just get to the one idiotic thing I really wanted to say.

    The whole time I was reading this book, I was suffering from...well, for most of the time, I couldn't figure out what the problem was.  I was like "this seems like food poisoning, but I haven't had meat for a couple of days, so it can't be food poisoning!"

    Then this morning--the same morning I finished reading this--I realized what it was.  It really was food poisoning...caused by under-cooked potatoes.

    The irony is almost palpable, y'know?

Thinking of shaking things up...

     So, I've been reading a book about...uh, it's complicated, actually.  I'll post a review of it later.  Kind of a cross between self-help and an artist's lifestyle how-to?  (Wait, are those actually different?)

    *cough*

    To start over:

    One of the chapters talked about making habits to help with artistic productivity.  And my habits have been pretty all over the place lately.  (Even though I've been doing a lot of work since taking up game devving...)

    So, I was thinking I might try taking up daily blog entries, like I did on my old blog when I first started it.  Probably just mindless drivel, maybe even reflecting on my daily life (or maybe not; my life's pretty dull), or going back to what became my standby on the old blog:  Greek mythology.

    But first I wanted to start with this, 'cause it seemed fun.  Someone made this thing that lets you rank fan fiction tropes, and you can even control what the tiers are named.  So I played around with the tier rank titles and then ranked the tropes thusly:

    My yellow tier having such a long title doesn't make it flow too well, but...

    Enh.  It could be worse, yeah?

IWSG - Free Plot Point!

 

    Okay, dumb post title, but accurate.  Because I came up with a cool idea for one small aspect of a murder mystery.

    Only I don't write murder mysteries, and have zero interest in trying my hand at one (I don't even like reading/watching them!), so I thought I'd just share this small plot point.

    So, it's basically the "why" of a murder, without the who or the how.  Because whoever actually did it has zero connections to the victim--or rather, the victim is probably someone who seems like no one would ever want to kill them.  (Or maybe they seem like the ideal murder victim, hated by tons of people, but everyone with a motive also has an alibi.)

    What's going on is that there's this talk show where the host often gives out gifts to one or more members of the audience.  Things like new cars.  And some criminal organization (could be the mob, could be a spy ring, or anything else you can think of) uses those new cars as mules to get contraband from someone who's infiltrated the television studio to a courier that will take the item, whatever it is, to whoever it's supposed to get it in the end.  Only there was a mishap at the studio, and a car that was supposed to go to someone working for the organization went to a regular audience member, and when someone went to retrieve the item inside the car, things went wrong, and the audience member (or a member of their family? or a neighbor? or an employee?) ended up dead.

    All of this would be super-hard for a detective to figure out with just the murder victim, since the killer would likely have left very few clues, so it would make a good twist for a murder mystery, I'd think.  *shrug*  Just thought I'd put it out here in case anyone can make use of it.

    (I apologize if it's already been done.  As I said, I don't care for the genre, and therefore have little experience with it.)

    I know this isn't really related to insecurity as a writer, but...I mean, I'm sort of in a permanent state of "meh, I suck, but I enjoy writing anyway," so there really isn't any insecurity, 'cause I am actually quite secure, it's just a case of having some insecurity about if it's better to put my awful stuff out there or to just write for myself, which is not really something easy to deal with, and not something anyone else can help with, either.

    But on the other hand, it's supportive towards any mystery writers in the group who happen to see it and could use the idea, right?

IWSG - March 2

    

    OMG, I totally forgot to pre-write this month's post! :O

    Fortunately, I actually have an answer to the monthly question (which is good, 'cause I don't have much to talk about on my own initiative aside from the usual complaining).

March 2 question - Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not?

    Yup, I have definitely been conflicted about writing individual scenes of a story.  Not sure if I've ever been conflicted about a whole story, but individual scenes, for sure.

    Typically, these scenes involve things I don't want to have happen in a story--character deaths, mostly--and the only thing to do is just to force my way through it.

    Sometimes I've found it's indicative of something bigger than just "don't make me kill my darlings!"  Like, the first time I wrote a Velvet Goldmine fanfic, the story as I had planned it out involved Curt showing up drunk to Arthur's apartment (don't worry about who the characters are; I just thought it would be easier than "character A" and "character B" in telling the story here), and they get in an argument, and Curt calls Arthur something particularly offensive.  Just a basic insult, really, and one that Curt used several times in the movie, but it's a word that just bothers me for some reason, which I have only personally used like twice in my life, both times to exceptionally awful strangers who could not hear me.  I had a huge amount of trouble writing that scene and made it upset Arthur terribly (too much, in fact), and spent hours looking at the IMDB pages for the actors as a way of putting it off.  I did eventually write it, but it was rather agonizing to do so.  The ironic part of all this is that one of the first things I did in the second draft was to cut that scene, because it should never have been there in the first place, because things should have gone differently in an earlier scene, thus preventing that one from going that way at all.  (Curt still showed up drunk at Arthur's apartment in the second draft, but there was no fight, because they'd already had a sober mini-argument on the subject, which was 95% a misunderstanding in the first place.)

    Because of that, I've started to interpret my own personal conflicted feelings about a scene as my subconscious telling my conscious mind that there's a better way.  The project I had been working on for a game jam this February had a similar situation:  there was a pretty ordinary-seeming sequence that I had put in the chapter I was working on, and every time I started trying to write it, I just couldn't motivate myself to write it, to the extent that it was clearly that I just plan didn't want to write it.  The situation was this:  a young warrior was serving in the palace guards, and his boyfriend kind of accidentally ended up in a relationship with the king's eldest daughter, and when she found out her boyfriend was much more in love with another man than he was with her, she decided to get the other man killed, and after an attempt to kill him with booby-traps in the forest (it almost made sense in context), she decided to hire some mercenaries to pretend they were invading the kingdom, and then made sure he was put in charge of the troops sent out to drive them off, so that they could kill him.  The basic situation--young man leads a small force to deal with invaders--is something I've written before, and while I'm not good at nor particularly enjoy writing combat scenes, there was nothing about it that should have been causing me so much anxiety to write.  Given that, I decided to step back and analyze the situation, figure out why it was bothering me so much, and if that was an indicator that maybe I just shouldn't include the scene.

    As a result of that, I realized that yeah, there was something deeply wrong with the scenario.  Several things, in fact.  In many other times and places, a princess hiring a band of mercenaries just to off her romantic rival would work fine, maybe even seem normal (in a particularly twisted way).  But this story was set in Late Bronze Age Greece (because it's me writing it, lol), so there are two major things standing in the way of a princess hiring mercenaries.  First, money hasn't been invented yet, so how is she paying them?  Second, her culture's writing is quite honestly one of the most awkward and unwieldy systems of writing ever developed by mankind (not only are the letters too complex and sometimes hard to tell apart from each other, they also don't fit the Greek language very well), and thus was only used by highly trained scribes, and was frankly not well-suited for sending clandestine instructions regarding things like the intended targets of assassinations.  (Though if the tale of Bellerophon is as old as its telling in the Iliad suggests, then that writing system might well have been used for it anyway, but...uh, actually, yeah, I guarantee it was, even if Homer invented that wrinkle in Bellerophon's story.  Humans are terrible creatures who will always find a way to use anything to cause death and destruction.)    Oh, actually, a third--if slightly less convincing--problem with it was that this princess (and heir to the throne!) was completely okay with having large numbers of her subjects killed just to get rid of one man.  Not necessarily something that a king of that time period--or any other, unfortunately--would bat an eye at, but a teenage girl probably should have had at least some hesitance to do something that callous. Anyway, due to my analysis of the situation I decided to cut that scenario, and only have her make two attempts to kill him in that chapter, instead of three.

    And then, wouldn't you know it, I also took a further step back and realized that the whole script was total garbage and that no one would want to play the game (especially since I was making the graphics myself by tracing over photos of ancient frescoes and then trying somehow to tweak them to make them do what I wanted) that resulted, so I cancelled the whole project. 😅

    So, yeah, long story short, I've come to see my own conflicted feelings as being a reason to re-analyze what I'm trying to write and see if maybe I shouldn't be writing it.

    Sometimes I feel conflicted for different reasons, though.  I ended up still joining that game jam (which was actually about mentally unstable characters who frequently employ violence because of their romantic feelings) with a different, much simpler game.  Simpler, but much more risque, to the point where I felt super-conflicted about releasing it, because it was so unlike me to write something like that, and I worried about how people would react to the content in it.  (Though, really, it's tame compared to pretty much everything else in its genre...)  I spent like two days fretting about releasing it, and then a further two days fretting after releasing it, and when I finally got the nerve up to go to look and see what the reaction to it was, it's been getting way more hits and downloads than anything else I've ever released.  (Like, it's been up for four days and has almost surpassed the number of downloads of the big game I released last August, which is still my most popular title, having more than double the number of the next most popular.)  So, in that case, my conflicted feelings were just nerves, and I'm glad I didn't assume them to be "I shouldn't be doing this, throw it all away!"

    Hmmm....

    I feel like I have spent this whole post driveling nonsense.

    But I'm not sure if I can see a way to bring it all around to make sense.

    Honestly, my brain's still not recovered from the whole should-I-shouldn't-I about releasing the game, not to mention the freaking out after having released it.

    *shrug*

    Anyway, I'm planning on getting back to working on an actual novel soon.  I just have to finish writing a fairy tale first, but then I'm going to finally do the next draft of one of my YAish novels. :D