| *shamelessly ganks from tripoverhercats* |
[01 Dec 2009|12:52pm] |
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music |
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16. Harry Gregson-Williams - The Pilgram Road |
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So, have been playing an online pet game called Howrse, and it has a reward system where sponsoring someone into the game is part of the achievement process.
So, if anyone would like to give it a try, please use this link:
http://www.howrse.com/?parrain=artimusdin
and it will credit me as your sponsor. To start with you get one horse or pony (your choice in the color or breed) and you raise, train, sell, compete and breed them. As you go along in the game you can open your own stable to board horses and hold various jobs.
Or you can just register, twiddle around for a day and then ignore it and it'll still give me the credit for a sponsored player. (you can only have one account, so if you already have one, don't jepordize your karma)
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| DONE! |
[30 Nov 2009|05:03pm] |
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mood |
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 ecstatic |
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music |
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Murry Head - One Night in Bancock |
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It has been a slog. I spent more days behind the quota than ahead of it. The first fifteen thousand words or more could be cut off and nothing of substance would be lost. The story has no end because the plot barely started to congeal before it fell apart. But I'm okay with all that because I kept writing anyway. And I do love Apollonia, Marcus, Abraham, Ersilia, and Muriel and I think they could get together into something with a real plot at some point. Maybe next year even. :D
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| The Great Squash Dilemma |
[29 Nov 2009|06:42pm] |
So the last time I went home to visit the parents, I came back to town with two squash.
One of these squash was, I kid you not, substantially larger than my fifteen-pound cat. The neighbors and I ate just the neck of the monstersquash in a huuuuuuge vat of soup... leaving over 3/4 of it left for future use. It's now occupying a sizable chunk of my freezer. I haven't even opened the second squash yet.
I went home again for Thanksgiving.
I came home with four more squash (three pumpkins and an acorn).
Now my Christmas prayer goes like this:
"Oh please oh please oh please, let there only be six squash coming back next time. Because I'm clearly caught in either an arithmetic or an exponential progression, and I am just not mentally prepared to deal with sixteen more squash..."
Has anybody got any easy, low-fiddly non-dessert recipes for pumpkins/squash? Between low-carb and low-fat restrictions, pumpkin pies/breads/cakes are kind of out of the question, and I've made a bunch of soup and a bunch of curry and am trying to figure out what else to do that's mass-squash-using (ravioli's way too fiddly to use that much squash with, and my freezer would explode...)
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[28 Nov 2009|05:16pm] |
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music |
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20. Amy Grant - breath of heaven (mary's song) |
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... I don't suppose anyone has a copy of the Grinch song that they'd be willing to share? I thought I had a copy, but apparently I don't. Am v. sad about that.
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| Anime rec: Piano no Mori |
[18 Nov 2009|10:08pm] |
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The Piano Forest (Piano no Mori) (Perfect World of Kai) (2007) #
Genres: drama, tournament. Themes: music, piano.
Status: OVA (101 min)
Anime Start/End Chapter: Starts at Vol 1, Chap 1. Ends at Vol 6, Chap 41.
Director: Masayuki Kojima
Summary: Amamiya Shuuhei transfers to Moriwaki elementary filled with hope and ambition. But it doesn't take long before he gets picked on by the class bullies, and gets involved in a dare to play the mysterious piano in the forest. Igniting his meeting with an equally enigmatic child that goes by the name of Ichinose Kai, who seems to be the only one capable getting sound out of the thought to be broken piano.
Found: saw it shared in some anime comm and thought the summary looked intriguing.
Manga BU page.
Mangaka: Isshiki Makoto
Genre: Comedy Drama Seinen Slice of Life
Status: 17 Volumes (Ongoing), scanlation ongoing.
Summary: from KEFI: A tranquil tale about two boys from very different upbringings. On one hand you have Kai, born as the son of a prostitute, who's been playing the abandoned piano in the forest near his home ever since he was young. And on the other you have Syuhei, practically breast-fed by the piano as the son of a family of prestigious pianists. Yet it is their common bond with the piano that eventually intertwines their paths in life.
Download: I've watched it at Youtube. |
My notes: I must say it at the very beginning that contrary to my usual way of getting familiar with a new animanga, I haven't read the manga this time. I only watched the anime, so please take into account that everything I'll be saying is only about the anime.
This is a pleasant story: while not action/adventure, it has enough plot to keep your attention, especially around the climax. The boys are likeable. Kai's pretty wild and brash but also kind and has this inner purity and honesty that sometimes accompany raw talent and that influence people around him. I liked his practical reasons for learning things. He can't read score; he plays what he has heard. Once he found that he couldn't reproduce a particular piece of Chopin's, he plays scales to learn to play this particular piece, not because one must learn scales first, nor to become a good pianist in general. And so on. I absolutely adored his literal-mindedness about Mozart. The crowd of Mozarts made me laugh every time they appeared. In other words, Kai is lovely and very refreshing. Shuuhei is a bit more boring because he's very straight-laced for a boy his age and he plays the piano for all the wrong reasons, but doesn't it often happen this way? The two boys meet and gradually change each other. The best about their relationship, as for me, was the ways it didn't go. I can't say much more here but I liked how the dramatic side of it was downplayed rather than milked for all it's worth. It makes Piano no Mori a soothing story.
I think animation and drawing are good. I hear that the main problem people have with the manga is the drawing style. Am not able to say anything about that yet but I can't see what's not to like in the anime, if to speak of the visual side. It's neither cheap nor banal, and it's the only anime so far where a character playing the piano didn't make me cringe.
This leads me to why I give it only one star if I like everything. Not quite everything, as it turns out. You see, it's piano this and piano that, piano this and piano that. In more coherent speak, the story is fine and lovely but, I don't know, very narrow. Not unlike Hikaru no Go. But HnG was much more emotionally affecting and the story was much bigger than just about Go in the end. It sort of turned me inside out, made me live it for months. Here somehow I didn't have the impression that the story is bigger than the main theme. Pleasant? Yes. Interesting? Yes, enough. Can I relate? Nope. Apart from that, I repeat, it's a lovely story. I doubt you'd regret spending 1.5 hours on it, so give it a try!
*Sorry if you have seen some (a lot) of this post before. I accidentally posted the draft :/
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