So the ever-resourceful pigtail78, found out some info about Tieria and Allelujah's seiyuu character singles, and made a couple of posts about them.

Firstly, Tieria's single is called Ideas/Elephant.

...ELEPHANT.

WTF, Sunrise?

See, the unfortunate thing is, when I think of "elephant", the first song that comes to mind is this one. By Missy Elliot. Which features elephants in the chorus.

(Video not quite safe for work, watch at own discretion)




... I, for one, would love to see Tieria put his thang down flip it and reverse it.

*ahem*



But otherwise, I'm quite looking forward to hearing what Allelujah's character single sounds like!

The thing is, I've always had the silly notion that

• Hallelujah raps like a gangsta, and


• Allelujah sings good opera.

Yes, I know I'm insane. Bear with me.

A couple of days ago, I discovered that I had a MUCC album that I hadn't gotten the time to listen to yet. I put it on, and I got to this song. A pop-rock song with rapping! And falsetto singing!

I thought, "Mmm, knowing Sunrise's predilection for making character singles sound like pop music, here's hoping that Allelujah's single sounds something like this."

It's fucken' awesome. And I say this as someone who hates, hates, hates pop music.



Wonder if Yocchin can sing like this

Okay. So. Vitas. Fucken amazing Latvian-born Russian pop opera singer. Attempting to sing his Opera #2 is how I discovered that I have a separate head range in the whistle register that upsets my dogs when I sing it. This is a dude who can reach notes that sound like dolphins would use them to echolate, or as I said when I first watched the linked video: "My god, that man is a a walking, piano-playing whistling kettle".

Anyway, as pigtail87 and I were discussing Allelujah's combined Russian/Chinese heritage the other day, I confessed that ever since I decided that Sergei was Alle's father somewhere early season 1, I've been wanting to do fanart of Alle in a hat and a scarf, standing one of the domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, singing Opera #2 (because in my head, Alle is a Russian countertenor who can totally sing operatic notes that would shatter glass in a hundred-foot radius).

Several digs on YouTube later, she found this amazing, hilarious video and showed it to me: a Taiwanese professional singer covering Opera #2 by dubbing it in a mixture of gibberish, Chinese, and Hokkien:



I COULD NOT STOP LAUGHING. Especially when he started singing "OMG cannot hear lyrics" in Hokkien.

(See, if you want to make a Singaporean laugh until their sides ache, all you'd have to do is to dub over everything in Hokkien. I found this out after thurisaz83 and I were discussing Gundam dubbed in Cantonese, and I said, "Screw Cantonese, I want to hear b00bies dubbed in Hokkien." And then we tried translating a few choice phrases into Hokkien *coughIAMGUNDAMcough*. We took several minutes to catch our breaths after that.)

Anyway, fucking amazing video, as I said. I am incredibly impressed that he not only managed to hit every single note on key, he managed to do so while playing the acoustic guitar accompaniment. Fuck. Watch it and be wowed too.

While we're at it, here's the original live performance of Opera #2 that introduced me to the wonder that is Vitas back in 2006. This time with Russian and Chinese subs (not the nuclear sort).

The Chinese subs aren't all that accurate, though. I was under the impression that "Plachet opyat nado mnoy" means "it cries once again about me", and not "I cry once again", Jesus Christ, cases, people, cases.

Also: Il dolce suono. You know the opera song featured in the Fifth Element, one of my favorite cinematic sequences ever? Yes. That song. He covered it, which is something I only discovered the day before. Although the techno arrangement is different and sounds a bit like something Sarah Brightman would do. (I still prefer the version in the Fifth Element, though. The sopranista had a lot better control of her voice.)


...aaaaand that's your dose of utter randomness from yours truly for today.

I made this for the St. Patrick's Day post for stupidsexystrip, but I figured that I'd share it with everybody here too. I wouldn't have done it in traditional media, except that I thought I wouldn't have a working scanner, so I desperately inked it with manga pens, filled in watercolors, and took pictures of it with my digital camera.

Then Dad came home with a replacement scanner. D'oh!




I wanted to do the monochrome shading in Copic, but my warm gray #1 died halfway through Tieria's hair, so I was forced to improvise by brush-painting diluted manga ink. It was a wonderful technique to play with, except that I forgot about how manga ink, unlike watercolors, is PERMANENT, and once I slop down the brush there's no turning back.

I like the effect, though; definitely something worth experimenting with in the future.

For the record, I wore my green Edgar Allen Poe t-shirt from Threadless to work today.

100 word fic.

#6: Greenwaves

The light fades into a sea of green stretching over the horizon. The breeze brings familiar smells, the sound of laughter.

"What bothers me," he says to Allelujah, "is how he said he would face judgement after everything was over. What do you think that meant?"

A long pause, then: "I'd like to think he's happy, wherever he is. He was that sort of person."

"That's true." And their fingers touch, brief and unseen.

He walks over springy grass towards his family. As he approaches Amy smiles, takes his hand; somewhere within him his heart soars. “Welcome home, brother.”

Inspired by this song:

Lyrics

So it's not weird enough that my mom, neither being Christian nor the sort who listens to classical music, randomly burst into Handel's Messiah chorus right after lunch. While switching tracks on my iTunes, I noticed something bizarre.

At first, I thought the iTunes store window was just displaying the chart for "fuckweird, nobody actually listens to this sort of stuff" music, based on what I was playing. But no, guess what song tops the chart of the most downloaded-song on the whole of iTunes today:




Yes, it's an amazing song. It's one of my favorites ever.

But it's also, you know, fifty-seven-and-a-half years old.

WHAT?

( Even odder... )

I don't know whether to be amused, or creeped out. Possibly both.

Good day at work. Managed to sort-of clear my email to-do list, and get started on reading most of the scripts I was supposed to. Have to rework series pitch, though, since the original proposal was deemed unsuitable for, ahem, educational purposes. Not that kids wouldn't enjoy it: parents wouldn't buy it. Oopsy doops.

The First Office Potluck was good stuff, plenty of pasta and Mediterrenean-inspired foods. With my digital camera and slap-dash photography skills I became the Unofficial Lensperson for the event. I went overboard, snapped over a hundred shots, and killed my camera battery to the point where it was slowing down the lens shutter. Add that to low lighting and by the end of the shoot everything turned up as motion blurs on the screen. I do fail at photography, I do, I do!








FANDOM TO DO LIST OF THE WEEK:

1. Prep and upload the next Epic Gunpla Theater ep.


2. Overhaul LJ user profile.


3. Finish up Tieria postcard art and post it.


4. Lock down tracklist for (H)allelujah fanmix and plan artwork for the cover.


5. Start drawing up more storyboards for b00bies webcomic michanu and I are planning. (YES WE ARE AND IT WILL BE EPIC. She is an awesome artist.)

I bet that's way more than I can chew. We'll see how much of it I get done by the end of the week.


J-Rock of the day: RENTRER EN SOI -- ANIMA MUNDI [Lyrics]
Lovely, drifty song about the world and transcendence and drowning in it. Endorphin song. Puts you in a nice, contemplative mood. Go listen, I like.

I planned to post a 'YELLO NEW AWESOME FRIENDS" introductory entry last night for the folks I met during the capslock_dn friending orgy. I did, I really did, I had the outline all planned out and everything.

Then I went for a 7PM postwork meeting which basically told me I had to revise the series proposal I'd submitted, and, furthermore the deadline for submission to the broadcaster was 6PM the next day. Cue, flail. Cue, epic flail.

In conclusion? Not as planned, folks, NOT AS PLANNED.

So I got the proposal re-done last night and this morning, and now I realize I have approximately two hours to finish reading the journal paper I have to discuss during the lab meeting. The same journal paper which had me writing "絶望！！！” and "I am in despair! The incomprehensibility of this paper has left me in despair!" all over it halfway through, at which point I gave up reading it and went to draw L/Light porn instead.

I was supposed to finish reading the paper last night, but I looked at the paper, looked at my proposal, said, "Ah fuck this" and went to do the proposal instead. Obviously, I know where my priorities lie.

And guess what? I'm still running an experiment at the moment. Oh, flail, flail, flail.

You know, the thing about starting experiments at 7AM in the morning when the rest of the institute are still at home asleep is that I tend to sing. Loudly and shamelessly. Which is how I discovered, to my amazement, that I can actually hit every single note in this song:

Vitas -- Opera #2 
(download it and listen to it now. It's awesome. Also, in Russian. Which just adds to the awesome.)

The first time I heard it, I thought: "Holy schmoly. Let's not talk about a man being able to sing that high--how can anything human actually hit those whistling kettle notes?!"

Well, apparently it's possible. I can do it. I'm almost scared of myself now. I'm tempted to dig up my old PotO tape now just to see if I can match Sarah Brightman's pitch, because it is that high.

If my experiment fails this time, I'll know it's because my yeast cells were too traumatized by my singing while I centrifuged them.

(And also, my diaphragm fucking hurts. I haven't used it this much for more than a year now. ITAI DESU YO.)

Alright. Incubation time up. Run-run-running off to do experiments now. And then maybe try to read the Paper Of Despair. Friendlist catchup will have to wait. In the meantime, here's a disturbingly hot celebrity mashup thrown my way by groovy:


Jarensen Adalecki

I'd so totally hit that.

~~June

こんにちわ！　わたし　は　JUNE　です。　わたし　は　シンガポール　じん　です。　わたし　は　けんきゅしゃ　です！

This is my idea of bliss: sitting at my (horrifically cluttered) desk, developing a treatment for an animation series, while streaming the Tokyo Live Earth concert on MSN waiting for abingdon boys school to come on. Because they are awesome. I heard bits of their latest single off their website yesterday and I was all, "Okay, this thing needs to arrive in my mailbox, like, now."

Yesterday's Japanese lesson was fun. We learnt how to ask people for their occupation (o shigoto wa nan desuka?), and one of the jobs on the chart was, of all things, "research worker" (kenkyusha). Complete with a cutesy little drawing of someone pipetting something into a testtube. I think my sense was very impressed to have a reasearch worker in her class, because almost everyone else was either a student (gakusei) or cubicle rat company employee (kaishain).

My sense doesn't know who BUCK-TICK are, though. When she asked me what sort of music I listened to I told her that I actually listened to some Japanese music, "some" meaning "a lot, almost all the time". So she asked me which artistes I liked, and I went, all chirpily, "BUCK-TICK!" And she didn't know who they were, asking if they were a new band, a young band.

"Er, no. They've been around since 1985."

I shall go to class early next week and stick RENDEVOUS into the hi-fi. So she'll know who they are.

I have art to post. And hopefully a SPN crack drabble of DOOM, provided I manage to convince my lazyass ass to write it. Fingers crossed, everyone?

I leave you with these words of wisdom:

gakusei --> student
gakuto --> GACKT
shigoto --> job
gakutoshigoto --> GacktJOB

If you didn't get it... you didn't get it. That's the way it is. Sorry.

~~June

Oh my god.

So I was checking my mail today, and I saw that CDJapan had sent me an artiste alert, meaning that one of the bands that I'd flagged had something up for preorder. I opened the email, and squeeeee! It's BUCK-TICK and their long-awaited new album is finally being released!

Then I noticed the email was a lot longer than it should have been for just a single item.

And it turns out that, in celebration of their 20th anniversary, BUCK-TICK are releasing twelve of their earlier albums as cardboard sleeve reissues. Like, twelve of their earlier albums that I only have thanks to the awesomeness of the Internets.

Did I get them all? Are you insane? Does it look like I have pockets as deep as the Pacific Ocean?

I just ordered myself ¥18,000 worth of albums, is all.




...it's a good thing I have till September to starve myself in order to pay for them.

~~June


But OMG BUCK-TICK SQUEEEEEE.

Death Note + The Killers == FANCRACK.

This began life as a line out of a Keane song ("Everything's Changing"), got mutated into a Killers thing, and will probably end up as a longer MTV-style comic strip. Fear.

There ain't no motive for this crime, insanity is a friend of mine.


( The Kiras -- Somebody Told Me )

~~June

When I got home yesterday I found a brown parcel from CDJapan waiting for me on my bed. I let out a squee and said, "The new BUCK-TICK single has arrived!"

"So that's what it was," my sister remarked as I started ripping into the packing tape. "You know, Mom said 'Not another craze again. First it was Croatian, then it was Russian, and now it's this Japanese stuff.' "

"Shut up," I grumbled, and pulled out the single, packed in a pretty shiny pink box. I proceeded to glory over it for the next couple of hours.

So even mom has noticed that I go through fantastical, transient obsessions. There were the two years I was learning Croatian and getting packages from the country all the time, then the short six months I was trying my hand at the Russian language and getting the occasional package from Russia. Then I disappeared into the SPN fandom for a year and quit the language learning, culture-eating stuff.

Now I'm up to it again--learning the language, listening to the music, and--one up!--watching the TV shows and reading the books (albeit translated). I've kept you guys out of the loop because being busy has rid me of my habit of posting obsessively to LJ since the start of 2007, but just let it be known that since March I've picked up approximately 3 anime/manga-ish obsessions, and my collection of Japanese rock music has swollen from one album and three tracks to a massive 9 gigabyte folder containing 1,615 songs.[1][2]

Sacred droppings.

Suffice to say, in between my 55-hour work week, my writing job and my new obsessions, I've completely neglected my other fandoms. I've completely stopped writing and making fannish SPN stuff: I have a mind-warping, 25,000 word SPN fic that will probably never see the light of day because I stopped at the three-quarter mark and can't get going further. I have two SPN art pieces that are halfway through digital colors and I'm not sure when those will be done. All that might be forgivable if not for the fact that I have not watched the last three episodes of season 2. I keep telling myself that it's because I'm scared, for I know it will hurt and I don't want to hurt, but I'm beginning to think that I'm just making excuses for sheer lack of motivation.

No, I haven't watched the finales for any of the other TV series I follow, either. It's been weeks. I have the episodes on disk. I completely F-A-I-L at being a fangirl.

Each time I find myself falling into the sway of other fandoms I fear of a mass defriending on my LJ, because I expect people to say "WTF is this woman on about now? She's stopped talking about X-and-X. I don't get this shit, it's boring, BYE". But I've been through many fannish phases--from B5 to LOTR to the Balkans to LOST to O-Zone to Supernatural--and although there was fallout at every stage, the weird thing was that people tended to stick around. Weirder yet, some even followed me into the new fandoms--and proceeded to blame it all on me. Guilty as charged.

So: following precedence, I shall now proceed to indunate you with my fangirlishness. Heya folks! Want to know what I'm currently into?

Vampire Hunter D
This isn't so much 'obsession' as it is 'running interest'. I believe I already made a post about this. It started with an anime movie, went into books (so far 6 and a half, in English), and my sister and I have since made our mom go through the Mandarin translation of book #7, because we're Evil Like That. The 17-odd books in the series are slowly being translated into English as I speak, and there is a manga adaptation slated to be released in both English and Japanese in the months and years to come, so I expect this, ahem, interest to run on for a while more at least.

Trinity Blood
Hot Catholic priests! Gay Moldovan vampires! Random mentions of Zagreb! I read the scanslation of the manga adaptation's first volume about two years ago and didn't think much of it except for "ooh, pretty art". Then earlier this year I found, bought and read local translations of the later volumes: first in English, then in frikken' Mandarin. The point where it turned into an obsession was the point at which I found the anime adaptation in bookstore. The addictiveness of the anime, its thick plot and completely open, "WTF WAS THAT?" ending basically doomed my sister and I to scouring online fansites for filling-in and then getting sucked by our navels into the fandom. I've spent about five hundred dollars or thereabouts in the last few months on this little obsession of mine. OH DEAR.

If nothing else, this series ought to be credited for introducing me to the awesomeness that is BUCK-TICK (and J-Rock in general), as well as getting me into the habit of reading manga in Mandarin Chinese.

I planned to do a TB fangirl-post somewhere back in April with an offer to rip and mail the anime to anybody who wanted it. I still intend to do it, probably somewhere in the coming weeks. I still have a draft of that post somewhere.

Death Note
This is my big, big, big, big obsession of the moment. I've read all 12 volumes of the manga in Chinese, bought the 13th companion volume, watched both live-action films, and I'm currently procuring/watching the anime adaptation. "Yowza" doesn't even begin to cover it. I bought the first volume of the manga on a whim, mostly because I was intrigued by the incredible art of the series. It took me about a month to get through that first volume because it was so wordy and I ended up putting it aside for two weeks after the first couple of chapters, but after that--it was a nonstop, headlong, OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? rush to the end.

It doesn't help that the series is really popular locally. And that the online fandom is FULL OF CRACK (like, after watching some crossover Flash animations on DeviantArt my sister spent the car trip to a birthday celebration Sorting the series' characters into their Hogwarts houses. Seriously, WTF).

Of course, the fact that the series contains a substantial amount of not-very-subtly veiled boyslash is absolutely no help at all.

I'm definitely chronicling my fall into this twisted dogpile of a fandom at some point. Keep your eyes peeled.

Visual Kei
Does this count as a fandom? Yes, if the thousands of VK songs I have on my computer are anything to go by. Visual kei is a subset of the Japanese rock genre which involves band members dressing in fantastic costumes, dyeing their hair, painting their faces and generally giving the impression that they are women. Then they make angsty, hard rock music about nightmares and vampires and blood and outer space and actually, basically anything that doesn't have "happy fluffy puppies and sunshine" written on it. VK is noisy and bizarre and twisted, and I love it. My favorite bands in particular:

• RENTRER EN SOI. Just pronouncing the band name is fun enough (hohn-trey hohn-swah, even though they say "rentiru en soi" or something in Japanese. Dudes, it's in French). I promised somersaulter a post of their discography somewhere in April. I have not forgotten: just procrastinated. It's coming, sooner or later. ReS have a new album out in a couple of months which I'm all excited about, although judging by their recent singles they seem to be drifting out of VK into the Dir en Grey-type screamo metalcore schtick. Which I do not like-- if I wanted a construction site being piped through my ears, I have better means of doing so. My fingers are crossed for something otherwise.


• MUCC (ムック). Honestly MUCC aren't VK; just honest-to-goodness rockers who know a good melody when they hear one. They're popular enough to have their albums sold in some stores locally, one of which (Gokusai) I managed to pick up for a pretty good price. I have their entire discography as well, but I'm not uploading that. Because... yeah, I can't be arsed to. Too Much Work.


• BUCK-TICK. BT, BT, BT. There are no words that begin to describe how awesome these guys are. I'm going to save all my gushing for the discography post, which spans the 20 years of BT's illustrious career, and includes 25 albums (I COUNTED). I'm done with uploading the albums already, but I still have to sort out the single releases and the promotional videos that I have. And then I have to review them all. "It might take a while" is a mild understatement. But it's coming. I'm working on it.

So. Now you know what to expect on my LJ in the coming weeks. Don't worry, though-- I haven't given up on all my other fandoms yet. At the very least, I have a SPN fried nerds comic planned for the weekend. And maybe I'll get around to finishing those art pieces and that fic. Er. Eventually.

You may now proceed to tell me that I am full of it/myself/crack. I promise my feelings will not be hurt.


~~June

[1] For comparison's sake, my entire folder of English music-- which includes stuff I have ripped off CDs, as well-- comes up to 3.5GB, with about 1,100 songs. My folder of music in all other languages--Croatian/Serbian, Russian, Romanian-- comes up to 2.8GB with 750 songs. I took three years to compile all of those. My Japanese music folder took three months.
[2]serabut-- I promised to send you my Japanese music collection, and I will, once the Gackt albums I ordered Monday night arrive and I have ripped them. I will now be sending two and a half DVDs worth of music, instead of one. OH DEAR. (That's provided I don't download another 4GB worth of music in the time it takes for the Gackt to arrive. Again... OH DEAR.)

You know the deal. Take media player, put playlist on shuffle, first twenty songs that come up, add "in my pants" to end of title.

Sufjan Stevens - The Winter Solstice In My Pants
Muse - Apocalypse Please In My Pants
Casey Stratton - Cellophane In My Pants
Eminem - Cleaning Out My Closet In My Pants
Don Davis - Trinity Definitely In My Pants (...)
BUCK-TICK - Speed In My Pants
Radiohead - There There (The Boney King Of Nowhere In My Pants) [THANK YOU, THOM YORKE :P]
Peter Gabriel - No Way Out In My Pants
Schwarz Stein - the alternation of generations -increase- in my pants (WHAAAAT?!)
Hugh Grant - Don't Write Me Off In My Pants
Rentrer en Soi - INTO THE SKY IN MY PANTS
Motorcycle - As the rush comes in my pants (....)
Dar Williams - Bought And Sold In My Pants (HAHAHAHAHAH)
Thom Yorke - And It Rained All Night In My Pants (Again.... THANK YOU, THOM YORKE :P]
Darkwood Dub - Supernova In My Pants
D'espairsRay - LOST SCENE IN MY PANTS
Snow Patrol - The Finish Line In My Pants
POD - Sleeping Awake In My Pants
Enya - Lothlórien In My Pants (Oh god NO)
Linkin Park - Easier To Run In My Pants

I also liked:
Al Green - Ain't no sunshine in my pants (.... as it should be)
Black Sabbath - Paranoid In My Pants
Sufjan Stevens - O Come, O Come Emmanuel In My Pants (O WRONG! O WRONNNNG!!)
Helium Vola - Omnis mundi creatura... IN MY PANTS
Bijelo Dugme - Hajdemo u planine u moje pants.
Enya - May It Be In My Pants (XD!)
Madonna - What It Feels Like for a Girl In My Pants

Heh.

~~June

In the absence of anything concrete to post, I give you music!

This, the album currently feeding my musical kinks, is a Japanese goth rock album by Malice Mizer, which, according to Wikipedia, used to be part of the visual kei scene, which I take to mean "all the band members dressed up like real-life anime characters and got away with it".



Tracklisting:

1. "〜de merveilles" – 1:07
2. "Syunikiss〜二度目の哀悼〜" [Syunikiss—Nidome no aitō—] – 4:14
3. "ヴェル・エール ～空白の瞬間の中で～" [BEL AIR —Kūhaku no toki no naka de—] – 5:34
4. "ILLUMINATI" – 5:12
5. "Brise" – 5:03
6. "エーゲ〜過ぎ去りし風と共に〜" [Aegean—Sugisarishi kaze to tomoni—] – 4:58
7. "au revoir" – 4:54
8. "Ju te veux" – 4:37
9. "S-CONSCIOUS" – 3:20
10. "Le ciel" – 5:00
11. "月下の夜想曲" [Gekka no yasōkyoku] – 3:45
12. "Bois de merveilles" – 1:55

I got this album from (I believe) andarielle about a year ago. I thought, how can you go wrong with a band with a name like MALICE MIZER? And even though this was before a certain fandom introduced me to the goodness that is hard rock, and before my work led me on a path to appreciating Japanese-language stuff, I loved the album instantly, for its schizophrenic range of genres with gothic leanings. ILLUMINATI is a tour de force, and the opening bars of Syunikiss appealed to me so much I made it my mobile ringtone for quite a while.

The album is best described as gothic rock, and although several songs (particularly the slower ones) have a slight Jpop-ish feel to them, the music tends to be hugely influenced by classical European music (19th century French, according to Wikipedia). I've been listening to it on endless repeat since this morning. It never gets old. In a nutshell: awesome.

I reccomend this album if you like: The Arcade Fire, My Chemical Romance, Maroon 5, Muse, Laibach, Rialto, Carpark North. If richly-layered, quirky and melodic rock is your bag o' tricks, then this one's for you.

Here, have a music video:


The incredibly awesome, psychedelic music video for Bel Air (second track on the disc). The lead singer looks like a girl is so pretty, bozemoj. He is also disturbingly hot (And his name is GACKT. Don't ask me how to pronounce it-- it's not like I have a clue, either).

I'm actually looking for their Bara no seidou album (which is USD55 on Amazon-- is my chain being yanked?! That costs more than an entire season of SPN on DVD), so if anybody has it, or knows where I can get it at a decent price, please, oblige me. Great gratitude will result.

Yes, I listen to strange music. Remind me to do that music post with Bosnian hair metal sometime soon, alright?

~~June

(No, seriously, tell me what you think of it. I'd love to know. I'm a nosey parker Like That.)

For the record, I am not dead. Just staying offline desperately ficwriting-- I want to get this monster fic out of my system ASAP, preferably by the end of the week. I'm at 15K words and no signs of slowing. End product will probably be between 25K-30K words, which, for maybe about 2 weeks of writing, is some kind of record for me (I'm a notoriously slow writer). Oh god somebody help me.

(I get the sinking feeling that the fic would be a lot shorter if I didn't keep trying to kill people off. Which I am doing a lot. I think I'm in a mood for masochistic angst.)

(Anybody want to read snippets of what I have so far? I can post them.)

My complete and utter lack of a life worth talking about is also a reason for the LJ silence you hear from me. Oh, except for the part where my sprained right wrist has deteriorated to a stage where I have to wear a wrist brace to stop it from hurting. I had to skip salsa class this week because I can't bend my lead hand. Bah humbug.

I've been sleeping three hours a day for the past whole week and I can feel myself crashing out. I woke this morning with a headache and neck pain. Had to take pills. TGIF.

On the upside, new and pleasing music: Black Holes and Revelations by Muse. The lead singer sounds a lot like Thom Yorke (which I realized because I also bought The Eraser at the same time, and I play the albums back-to-back), but the music has all the raw human passion that Radiohead so carefully excises from its songs. It's basically Radiohead, The Multiple Personality Disorder Version. My favorite song on the album, "Knights of Cydonia" is like Thom Yorke singing a Queen song. It's incredible. Even though I'm totally lame for not noticing that Cydonia was a Mars reference.

Music!
Sufjan Stevens -- Chicago (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version) (.m4a, 5.8MB, YSI)
Muse -- Knights of Cydonia (.mp3, 14.3MB, YSI)
Bijelo Dugme -- Bitanga i princeza (.mp3, 5.3MB, YSI) [It's Bosnian mullet rock from the 70s! Run for your lives!]


Videos!
Furry Happy Monsters: R.E.M. on Sesame Street. Michael Stipe on happy juice + Peter Buck swinging his butt playing the banjo + bipolar disorder muppet monsters == PURE, UTTER CRACK. Seriously. Banjos. Everything is better with banjos. Link courtesy of nwhyte. It also totally brings to mind...
Mark Llama, Gerbil Farmer: Hooray for helium! Hooray for gerbils! Hooray for Mark Llama's Helium Gerbil Farm!
World Of Warcraft Hardware Store Music Video: I don't even play WoW, but I this fan-made music video for Weird Al's "Hardware Store" rocks like a rocking thing (how eloquent of me). They've got allen wrenches, gerbil feeders, toilet seats, electric heaters, air compressors, brass connectors... all the things you need to set up a good helium gerbil farm.

Requests!
Does anyone have the following things? I'd love to have them.

Music video for Losing My Religion
Spread Your Wings by Queen
Over The Hills And Far Away by Led Zepplin


Ugh. Headache meds always screw up the contrast on my vision so that everything looks too bright. Including this computer screen. Eye. Pain. Brain. Hurt. Think I'm going to go get some labwork done right now.

So, how has everyone been?

~~June

(Also, I realize I have neither posted pictures of myself with my new haircut, nor the not-quite review of The Dresden Files I wanted to do. God damn but I am LAME.)