Aside Archives - Page 7 of 31 - deus ex magical girl

The Magical Pumpkin

This is your annual reminder that we know next to nothing about Samhain or its relationship to Halloween, that all Halloween customs have supposedly Christian origins just as convincing as their supposed pagan origins, and that none of this should matter anyway because every agricultural society has harvest festivals and cultural borrowing is the norm.

Anyway, in our last episode, I mentioned that the magical girls and I purchased pumpkins for carving. I planned to create a magical girl-themed Jack-O’-Lantern; I wanted such a theme both so I could display it on this blog and also just on principle. However, my main magical girl hadn’t carved a Jack-O’-Lantern before, so she wanted a more traditional one.

Since I’m not a master pumpkin carver and was not working with any fancy tools, I wanted a simple pattern.

I chose this:

Now, I already know what you’re thinking: It looks simple at a glance, but it actually has a lot of small, delicate details and very little to hold the construction together.

At first, I was doing pretty well and thought I would get this right, but I eventually made some wrong moves. I lost the area below her arm, so I had to reattach it with toothpicks, but my biggest mistake was carving the moon out last, thinking I should do the delicate work first. I ended up with this:

Damaged pumpkin. — The hole in the pumpkin represents the hole in my life.

That’s the magical girl diligently working on her own in the background there. She was also laughing at me.

If carved correctly, the design has delicate spots that leave large parts of the image supported by tiny bits of the pumpkin’s rind. I broke through a couple by applying too much pressure. The result was what you see here: I shattered the entire image like an eighth-century iconoclast.

Broken like my life. — On the plus side, that’s a delicious Old Fashioned Cocktail.

My wife, who judiciously wanted a simpler, more classic design, was entirely successful in her carving endeavor. She and the other magical girl who can never leave her worked diligently, and now their Jack-O’-Lantern, made from a stencil my wife chose because it made her giggle, adorns the top of the post. I don’t have any tea candles to show it in all its glory, but I’ll undoubtedly display it lit up at a later date.

At the Pumpkin Patch

Yesterday, I, the magical girl, and magical girl 2 went to a local seasonal attraction, the misnamed “Pumpkin Patch.” I guess I was actually expecting a field of pumpkins growing on the vine, but it was actually a square of grass with pumpkins on pallets. Nonetheless, its creators had brought in lots of props and some kiddie games and such, so it made for some fun photo opportunities.

We ended up purchasing two pumpkins. The magical girl wanted to carve a traditional Jack-O’Lantern, but I wanted to use a stencil and carve a magical girl-themed pumpkin I can display on the blog.

So, anyway, we have our pumpkins. The question is when we’ll be able to find the time to carve them. I’m also contemplating turning their insides into pumpkin pie, but since these are large ones with probably stringy insides, that might be a bad idea. I’m sure we can bake the seeds, though.

An Update to My Hate

I recently completed a small project I’ve been meaning to get to for a while: I went through all the posts in my hyperbolic but half-serious series of essays, “Why I hate Cardcaptor Sakura” to make improvements and corrections. I’d like to do this with several of my posts, but that particular series brings in most of the site’s traffic, so it got priority.

If you’ve read those essays already, there’s no reason to re-visit them unless you happen to be a masochist. WordPress has been through some updates since I wrote them, and I’ve learned more about writing for the web, so I went back to improve HTML semantics, add headings, clean out dead links, and insert additional links to make it easier to move from one essay to another. I also corrected typos and grammatical errors when I found them and occasionally rephrased a sentence to remove ambiguity, but the content is still the same.

On my list of things to do is to sit down with the Clear Card Arc, a sequel to Sakura that appeared about the same time I wrote those essays. I haven’t got to it yet because, though I exaggerated in the essays for the sake of entertainment, I mostly meant what I said: I don’t particularly enjoy Cardcaptor Sakura, so I’ve put off the task of slogging through more of it.

I have no timeline for when I might get around to the sequel; I have a bad habit of starting blog projects and then losing track of them when I get interested in other blog projects, so I should probably make fewer promises.

The Old Fashioned

To prove that we (or I, rather) live in a solipsistic universe and that the rest of you don’t exist, I recently learned of the existence of the Old Fashioned, a simple cocktail that lays claim (truly or not) to being the original cocktail. I thought it sounded really good and have been wanting one, and then I saw that a lot of people on my social media feeds were drinking them.

I needed to join in, so I bought a bottle of aromatic bitters and tried a few experiments.

The Old Fashioned pictured here is simple: I made it with brown sugar doused in bitters and dissolved in a spoonful of water. Then I added two shots of Maker’s Mark and some orange peel, and stirred with ice.

I’m quite pleased with the result: The bourbon still stands out, but the bit of water, flavoring, and sweetener takes away the “burn” typical of neat or on-the-rocks whiskey.

This may become my go-to drink.

‘Jake and the Dynamo’ 2 Preview

Jake and the Dynamo (remember that book?) is still unavailable as of this writing since the unfortunate out-of-businessing of my publisher. I have no known date for a re-release, but I am seriously considering self-publishing within the next few months and also releasing volume 2 the same way. Volume 3 is also underway, though I’ve set it aside for the moment for another writing project. In any case, here is a preview.

It had been a Sunday afternoon in early spring. The weather was at last warming up, so Marionette’s drafty attic was comfortable again after a terrible winter. Although her joints didn’t stiffen up in cold as readily as a human’s did, and though she couldn’t suffer frostbite or pneumonia, she could still feel miserable. She had spent much of the winter warming her fingers over a small cast-iron stove and painting a few strokes at a time before needing to warm her fingers again.

Now down to shirtsleeves and green boyshorts, she spent a lazy Sunday lying in her cot. The paint-flecked bedclothes were in a tangled mess, partly over her and partly under.

Kasumi Sugihara, down to a sports bra and boxers, lay beside her and smoked a cigarette. In her magical form, she was Card Collector Kasumi, but for the moment, she was merely an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl. She and Marionette had wiled away the late morning and much of the afternoon reading magazines, talking about TV dramas, discussing battle tactics, and gossiping about which boys they hated.

Marionette held, balanced on her stomach, a crystal Pontarlier glass of milky absinthe louche. She gazed at it for half a minute, raised her head, and took a sip. A faintly bitter scent of blended herbs met her olfactory sensors, and then the drink slipped smoothly down her synthetic throat.

Continue reading “‘Jake and the Dynamo’ 2 Preview”

Some Updates

I’m working on a story for an anthology project I caught wind of. I don’t know yet if the anthology will actually appear or not, but if it doesn’t, I’ll submit somewhere else.

I’m also much distracted from both the blog and my other project because my wife is having a baby. Soon, we’ll have two magical girls instead of just one running around this place.

Speaking of magical girls, it seems like it’s been a long time since I sat down and reviewed one of those, but that should change in the near future if I can get through what I’m currently watching.

Netflix Pisses Off Pretty Much Everybody with ‘Cuties’

As you can see from the meme collage at the head of this post, the streaming service Netflix absolutely loves it some dirty, sexy kids. In the last couple of days, this fact has become apparent not just to the few edgelords talking about it on /pol/, but to everybody, as Netflix has advertised its acquisition of a French movie called Cuties, which made it big at Sundance.

What’s remarkable is that, although Cuties has a handful of defenders, this is one case where almost everyone seems to be pissed off. The left-right divide, over this one film, has evaporated: Everyone is angry. For a brief moment, our fractured nation is united in mutual offendedness and outrage. Maybe now we can begin to heal.

What sparked the controversy is the poster Netflix chose to advertise the film—a poster notably different from the original French version, which Netflix apparently created on the unwise assumption that it would appeal more to American audiences. The poster has so outraged some that I have even seen an individual I admire and respect begging people not to share it, even to criticize. Because I don’t think we can talk about this without depicting, in some fashion, what we are talking about, I’ve decided to share the poster, but only after the break. Consider yourself warned.

This movie, Cuties in English and Mignonnes in French, is about a group of eleven-year-old girls who dance. That brief description sounds inoccuous, even charming, but wait until I tell you that the film achieved an NC-17 rating and will be rated TV-MA when it appears on Netflix next month. As you likely know, NC-17 is the rating that replaced X; this is an X-rated film about eleven-year-olds.

After the break comes the poster, and then I will discuss how Netflix chose to describe the movie, what people are mad about, and so forth.

Continue reading “Netflix Pisses Off Pretty Much Everybody with ‘Cuties’”

Anime Maru: ‘Magical Girl Recruitment Down’

I stumbled upon this recently, a satirical article from Anime Maru reporting that talking animal mascots have had a hard time recruiting new magical girls because of the increasingly dark tone of new magical girl anime.

I repost it mostly because I myself am a little tired of the dark turn in the genre since Puella Magi Madoka Magica and am ready for earnestly made but lighter fare.

With such challenges, many magical girl recruiting mascots have been forced to turn to drastic measures. It has been reported some are even going to alternative realities for recruiting, framing the opportunities they offer as isekei.

[More …]

Sorry, Maintenance Day …

I’m behind on some reviews, but I’m also behind on some site maintenance, so I’m working on cleaning out dead links, deleting superfluous plugins, that kind of thing. I’m also making sure that the pages with essays and posts are up to date.

Thanks to my real job, I’ve learned a lot about HTML over the last couple of years and can now see a lot of things I’ve done wrong, so I’m going back and repairing mistakes and improving the internal links.

I do have some reviews coming up. I was unable to get to them over the weekend, and a lightning storm shut me down early yesterday. Should have some interesting stuff up in the near future, though.

One thing I’m trying to figure out: Every time I link Crunchyroll, WordPress thinks the link is broken and strikes it out. I don’t know what’s causing this, and since I link that site frequently (considering my blog’s focus and all), it’s kind of annoying. Crunchyroll is pretty good about keeping its pages live even when it removes content, so pretty much none of those links should actually be dead, but go figure. Anyway, if you see me link Crunchyroll and the link has a strikethrough, it’s probably actually a good link. Just FYI.

‘Cleopatra in Space’ Final Volume and Television Series

A few years ago, I was reading and reviewing Cleopatra in Space, a junior graphic novel from Mike Maihack. I lost track of the series after I last changed jobs and towns, but since I reviewed volume 4, Maihack has released two subsequent volumes. The most recent volume, Queen of the Nile, is apparently the finale.

Also, there is a new animated series based on it, streaming on a service called Peacock. I can say nothing about it because I had not heard of Peacock, or this show, before just now.

I admit the clunky animation and pop music in the preview don’t give me high hopes: