The Garden of Discordia

I am a little bit amazed that the Wikipedia entry on the German town Idar-Oberstein does not mention what I find to be the most interesting thing of this little place anywhere. Say, under Entertainment, that would be quite fitting.

Idar-Oberstein, you see, is a town that specializes in gemstones - selling, buying and cutting them. And I for one count walking through an adorable little German town that has semi-precious stones laid down in the pavement on the more scenic routes as pretty big entertainment. I also recall a small plaza, where the vehicle stopping poles that are generally made of decorated iron (if you want to be pictoresque) or concrete (if you want to be cheap but effective) where topped with large chunks of raw agathe, amethyst and similar...

Anyway. If you are the kind of geek who find it interesting to visit an otherwise sleepy village to look at more precious stones than you can shake a stick at; because, yes, they are sold almost everywhere, in both little one-man stores and the diamond traders high-rise building, Idar-Oberstein is absolutely worth a stop.

I have also found something I most definitely intend to read: This 1977 biography of a chemical compound salesmen, with the alluring title "Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide?"

So life continues to be a bit stressful but we're getting there. I found a room to let in central Berlin :3 Friend's gonna check out that it's legit, but then it is mine moahahahah~

Am also tackling the mess at home, slowly, piece by piece and my cough is finally starting to clear up (though it still comes back now and then). Am trying to read through all my unread books (impossible project ;_; ) but keep getting distracted by re-reading that amazing manga, Monster. Otoh what I am currently reading is The Shock Doctrine and I need to take it in nibbles or I'll just break. Humanity is evil, yo.

Aaaand I just bought my flight ticket. Oh my gawd, I'm going to Germany soon!!!!

Lordy lord, I am ill. Spent almost a week knocked out with a cold and tried to go to work today, which paid off with epic coughing and me having to leave after about half the day -_-

I'm trying to finish off my to-read shelf before Germany (luuulz, good luck with that) and began by finishing Started Early, Took my Dog by Kate Atkinson. It was basically the only thing in the entire Zurich Airport bookstore that looked remotely interesting that I had not already read (well, xcept the magazines then. We took Die Zeit and The Economist too).

It was odd for a crime mystery, but plenty more interesting than Connoly (or Koontz, whom I made a mistake to buy on a vacation a while ago. Bleh).

Here's a review from NY Times - I'm always so bad at spelling names of characters, so I have to check them up online.

I didn't realize that this book was a part of a series until oh, halfway through? Because Tracy Waterhouse, ex-cop who has become a mall security chief, appears much more as the main character than the PI Jackson Brody who makes his fourth appearance in this book.

Anyway, it's about Tracy buying something to change her life and Jackson looking for the biological parents for his client (an adopted woman in New Zeeland) and the people who get caught up in this and what happens to them.

But it's much less a novel about stuff happening, than it is about people remembering and forgetting. Tilly, the old actress who is suffering from dementia was one of the most vibrant characters in the book, despite the fact that she's slowly fading away in the narrativ and the mystery identities becomes less important as the book goes on.

The end is a bit vague, but it's a quite good ride there. If I'm ever standing around in an airport again, wondering what the heck to read since I've already ploughed all of King and Grisham's works, I'll keep an eye out for this author.

Michael Connely - The Threat : - (or worse)
Deon Meyer - Devils Peak : ++
Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Station : meh, but made me laugh some times

We're leaving for the airport soon, just gotta fix some stuffs online, but I thought I'd jot down what books I've read during the week. Although Devils Peak was less beach-reading and more "late night reading while the neighbours have a party with live guitar music and far too loud flamenco song, dammit". It's an South African criminal novel, quite depressing, but asks many interesting questions and contains thoughts. The kind of thoughts that hang around in your head and talk to other thoughts and give birth to new thoughts - that's good books, that do that.

Hollywood Station was about some cops in LAPD and contained not much thinkyness at all, except maybe some justified or not, idk, info about the increased control over the police force by bureocracy. But it had two cops nicknamed Flotsam and Jetsam (because they surfed, dont'cha know) and an ex-chief of police who had been lovingly named "Lord Voldemort" and I was amused

Connely was b-o-r-i-n-g and way too simplistic.

Am at lanjelin's, waiting for her, lampadari and the others to finish watching their K-Drama before we continue to my parent's house to celebrate midsummer.

But that's neither here nor there for this post, really, as I mainly wanted to share this link to the From Eroica with Love side-story that I managed to grab from this site. There's a whole bunch of links there, but everything from Rapidshare seems to be too old :/

However, if you scroll down there's a working link to "Der Freischütz", a pure spy-thriller with Klaus in the starring role. Good and more serious then the main story (although also a bit less fabulous crack, what with no Dorian...)

In return, if anyone has working links to the scanlations for volume 16-19 with the "Emperor Waltz" story I would appreciated it muchly! With Eroica's publisher, CMX, having closed down the chances of anyone ever translating the rest of this series is pretty much nil.

is over and everything most things went fine!!

And some things messed up and others went splendidly and all in all, we made us a GREAT CON \o/

(and the cupcakes? They were not a lie)

Picshures at my Facebook, or that of "Blyg Tenta-kun" our mascot and you can see some if you check Twitter for @blygswe and more will come except everyone in the staff is kinda ded today

Okay, wow, that was good.

I just read myself up to date with One Piece and it's getting really, really good again. I felt that Impel Down dragged, then came the emotionally exhausting and gut-punchingly good big fight at Marines HQ then Oda went on his first vacation in years and after that? Well, let's just say that plenty of SPOILERS happened, but the story soon picked up again with a really intense pace. Now we've had a longer story/flashback sequence recently which was also good as in seriously so (and it contains loads of info about the world, maaaaan I want to have time to write some meta about this) but there was also a few really annoying characters. Except, of course, Oda is the master so he made me care about them and like them in only a few chapters.

And what's happening now feels like it will really have a great impact in all the threads of world politics that have been revealed over time. This part contains callbacks way back to East Blue and it's all really, really well done.

One Piece - it's love.

Have mail-ordered some stuff for BLYG. Now keeping fingers crossed that they turn up in time!

Today everyone else were all UPPCON! AHMAGAWD IT'S UPPCON AGAIN!!!

This is the orange elephant in Swedish anime fandom. You plan your cons around it, heck, I'm pretty sure a lot of the anime kids plan their yearly budgets around it... And for the first time in approximately five years, I'm not responsible for anything karaoke-related! Or anything else for that matter, I'm just going there to work at the Nerdy Bookstore's table and have fun in my free time ^_^

But despite being so busy for The Big Con (or moving), several people took the time to fix things for Our Cute Lil' Con recently, which I have just collected and sent to our webmaster.

For instance, my little pet-project at BLYG:
( Discussions, lectures and workshops: Ho-Yay, queerness in shojo-manga, homoromanticism in EGL & much more! )

Gotta tell you, I'm pretty psyched and proud. It's gonna be so much fun!

& now off to bed and tomorrow off to Uppsala and the eleventh (my tenth!) UPPCON!!!

Ohhh~ That was different. Good, but different.

So since my hair iss full of hairdye, I thought I'd actually *le gasp* watch some series. First I was going to catch up on the Doctor Who episode I still haven't seen, but everyone says it's pretty boring and I already have my weekly dose of pirates... so I took down the BBC Sherlock pilot instead.

First reaction: Hahaha! Anderson has a beard!
Second reaction: Um, wait, that's how the apartment looks? ...glad they changed it.
Third reaction: Okay, parts of this make a lot more sense than the "finished" versions. ( Some spoilers go here )

Generally, I found the filming and settings a lot less pretty. That moody feeling wasn't quite there, so I'm glad they seem to have re-shot so many things. Also, no Big Brother, and he is of course sorely missed.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who has finished downloading, so maybe I'll give that one a shot too a bit later.