A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

For my birthday, not one, but TWO people independently decided that I would enjoy a review of the awesomely bad YA novel Crazy Beautiful, in which the hero has hooks for hands and never lets you forget it:

Gee, if I'd known spilling my orange juice was this effective, I'd have spilled it in Dad's direction every day when I was younger. Then maybe he'd have made time to do things with me like, I don't know, play catch in the yard. Not that I'm complaining or playing the neglected child card. I'll never do that. I know what I've done. I know who's responsible for everything in my life, past, present, and future. Still, a little catch would have been fun, when I still had hands.

rushthatspeaks: In conclusion: this book is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. I am not managing to tell you about half of it. You should all read it. It is a real treasure, a thing of great rarity and magnificence, and I could not remotely have put it down. It is the worst book I have read in at least a decade. I wish I could really manage to communicate its essence to you, but criticism can only go so far.

coraa: While these two are being kept apart by... um... by I don't even know what, we wander through a couple of subplots.

Best birthday ever!

Also, sartorias took me to Huntington Gardens for tea and strolling. Photos below (by me - I hope she'll post her own at some point - except for the one of me.)

( Click for pics of me, a lizard, beautiful gardens, and the Yuletide bush )

flemmings, thank you so, so much! What a fantastic surprise!

She sent me a random grab bag of Gundam Wing doujinshi! EEEEEEEEE!!! yhlee, we can play show-and-tell on Saturday!

PS: I'm just as happy that, as per the card, the "long-haired, dewey-eyed, twelve-year-old Duo ones were not included. Thanks for that, too!

rilina_fic wrote me "Transit," a story about Trowa, and bad coffee and hope and the price of war. It's bittersweet and beautiful and it made me cry. It might have been written just for me-- oh wait, it was written just for me! I have the best friends ever.

Thank you so, so much! (And thank you, springgreen, for betaing and keeping the secret.) Now you can post it so other people can read it too.

ETA: Here it is. Spoilers for the entire series Gundam Wing, but not for the movie.

Courtesy of sho_sunaga (who also did the frame and added text, of which I think the part I could read says "very [something] sexy??"), a photo of me. In The Outfit. Eating a chestnut cream pastry.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v280/telophase14/070831_18570001-0003.jpg

I am sitting in a manga kissaten (manga cafe), side by side with telophase, bravecows, and sho_sunaga, all of us typing away on our respective LJs. It is a great moment in the history of geekdom, especially since it is the culmination of a day which also included manga-shopping, doujinshi-shopping, and a dinner in which we regaled each other with tales of how we discovered slash, fic, and fandom.

Meeting bravecows and sho_sunaga was definitely one of the best bits of Worldcon for me. I think some of you know the former already, but the latter is newish to LJ; she is a Japanese fan who is into manga, SGA, Supernatural, Sentinel, Star Trek,, and fic.

Today, after a brief stop at an English used bookshop, Good Day Books in Ebisu (where Stephanie was briefly trapped in the elevator), we met up at the statue of Hachiko the loyal dog at Shibuya station, along with approximately one thousand others attempting to meet friends at the same coordinates.

We went to a bookshop, where I bought several copies of Saiyuki Gaiden 3 and was irritated that many of sho_sunaga's favorite manga have not yet been translated into English, and where telophase bravecows bought bilingual Tale of Genji manga.

Then we went to Mandarake, a massive doujinshi shop, where bravecows talked me into buying a mysterious doujinshi with the subtitle "The love between an animal and a plant," from the RPS section-- I think it might be Russell Crowe/Paul Bethany. telophase made an astonishing find, detailed on her LJ.

Then we proceeded to an izakaya, where I had a lychee soda, and we all had a fantastic appetizer of Vietnamese/Japanese/California spring roll sushi-ish thingies, before proceeding to sashimi, fried chicken wings, soup with noodles and cabbage, and oyakodon (chicken and egg over rice). It turns out that me and both had original Trek as one of our first fandoms, and discovered slash when searching for it online. bravecows, the baby of the group, began with Hanson fic at the tender age of ten!

sho_sunaga showed us some downloaded manga she can read on her cellphone (which also connects to the internet.) When it gets to the rape scene, the phone vibrates!