YANovCon 2023

I went to YANovCon this year again. It's always so inspiring to hear the writers talk. They have amazing stories, and it also makes me want to write (I took some notes of the highlights, and typed them up here so I could catch up later. And then the website decided to wipe out every word on the post. I'll see what I can remember since the event happened a few weeks ago). 

This year's theme was how family shapes your identity. The authors had a lot of touching personal stories. Like how one of them as a teenager finally told his mom that he was gay. His mom stormed out of the restaurant, left him there and didn't talk to him for months. And today, she'd leading pride parades. Even if things start off bad, people can change for the better and learn to accept.

I always love getting to talk to the authors after. Even if it's just a few words. Bill Konigsberg signed his book for me. James Brandon gave me writing encouragement. And I think it was Sarah Kuhn who I started talking to about Turning Red, because we liked how they did Ming, the mom. Sarah Kuhn been talking about the portrayal of tiger moms, and how they deserved to have proper character - not just be stereotypes. Ming is a amazing example of that.

Though she's kinda the main antagonist in the movie, I like her a lot. She can be quirky, and she really does care. Even if it's not manifesting in a great way. 

(I had all these author names written down before. I think these are the right people!)

I love movie soundtracks. I listen to them all the time. 

Sometimes the music on the official soundtrack includes bits of dialogue. Sometimes this works, if it fits into the songs. But sometimes there's just random dialogue, which totally distracts from the music. I wonder what the deal is.

Well, I'm officially pissed off at this blog website. It randomly decided to delete all of the text from one of my blog drafts. It would not let me undo the delete. Then it saved it as an empty document within about a second.  So all of the notes I took during a writing event (which I carefully typed in a draft) are gone. Now I don't remember what half of them were. 

What the hell, blog company? Now I'm afraid to save any drafts for posts.Even better, I can't find any way to report it, or contact the blog staff at all. 

I wonder how much I'll be able to scrape back together. Not much.

All the Same Babies

In recently found two cute web comics about Mewtwo and baby Mewtwos. 

I've had my own baby Mewtwo character for a very long time. Over ten years. And there's no way I'm the first. 

(This picture is from 2012)

I've noticed some very strange similarities between my Mewtwo characters and these two series. For example, my baby Mewtwo is supposed to get two little sisters: twins. I posted a picture of them on DA (pause while I look up the date) in 2017. Though they haven't actually appeared in my fanfic yet, because they haven't been born yet. But one of the series has two babies (also yet to be born in the main series, oddly enough, that have the exact same two names. 

And the other series has Mewtwo wearing the same outfit I made for him.

Do I think they copied me? I highly doubt it. Not many people look at my art page @_@ 

Though to be fair, the names for the twins are pretty straight forward. And the Mewtwo outfit is similar to one he wore in his second movie. But it is a pair of really bizarre coincidences.

Matching the Voices

Audio books have an interesting relationship with accents. A lot of the time, the reader doesn't bother to match the accent of a character. Which is fine. The reader can have a good reading voice, but may not want to risk butchering the accent of another country. Sometimes the reader is from the same place where the book is set, which adds a nice authenticity. 

What does bother me is when they use blatantly wrong accents. 

Usually if a reader does use accents for different characters, it's just European accents. But I just listened to an audio book where he did good accents from around the world! Not just European, but from South America and Africa, etc. I was definitely impressed (though I honestly didn't care about the rest of the book).

 

Another photo dump!

Snow leopard - flehmen (aka stink face)

Lion

Meerkat Christmas party

Chunky winter grizzly bear

It's all in Their Head

When I was watching the bonus features on The Chronicles of Narnia, they said something that caught me off guard. People sometimes read The Chronicles of Narnia as though it were all made up by the kids.

I never once thought that while reading the books. It feels like an almost condescending view of the kids. Acting as though they just made it all up. Look how upset Lucy is when she's accused of that? And then someone else ends up denying Narnia in the last book (which always makes me angry). It sort of stops being a fantasy if you read it like that. It's not a real world - it's just a story kids are telling each other. It means that none of the stakes really matter. Because all of those characters are imaginary.

But it's not uncommon for this to happen in movies and books- to have a story that isn't actually happening. The Wizard of Oz film takes place in a dream. Which is odd, because that was not the case in the book. Dorothy really went to Oz. The movie Mirrormask did something different. It was a dream, but the protagonist knew it was a dream. She found meaning in it despite knowing that it wasn't real.

Then you get things like Calvin and Hobbes. It seems obvious that Hobbes isn't really alive and walking around - Calvin only imagines him that way. But then again, Calvin does things with Hobbes which doesn't seem possible if he were really on his own. So, is Hobbes alive or not? And yeah, I may be over-reading this one.

But The Life of Pi addresses this directly. Do you trust the kids to tell the true story? Or do want the easier explanation - that he just made it all up.

How to Skip Work

So, in Harry Potter,  Fred and George make "skiving snack boxes." These are full of treats that do different things. For example, one type will give you a bloody nose. This lets you get out of class. Then once you're out of class, you eat the other end of the treat, and it cures your nose. There are various maladies you can get, like fever or vomiting.

So imagine my surprise when I went to clock in at work and saw a Skiving snack box on the table. I guess some people wanted to get out of work.