coprime

I've signed up for comment_bingo again! Had a blast last time, and it definitely helped encourage me to comment. So signing up again was a no-brainer, haha, and maybe this time I can get multiple bingos. :D

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Edited July 7, 2023 to add:


Many thanks to svgurl for the banner and for running comment_bingo.

Is it wrong that I always get incredibly excited whenever I find a Firefox extension that fixes some niggly behavior to how I like it? Today, it's the ability to permanently sort my bookmarks -- and I can specify which folders I want to sort and how! -- thanks to SortPlaces. Now if only there was an extension so I could easily create duplicate bookmarks (ideally with also telling me when I was about to do so), my day would be made.

The Best of the Spirit - Will Eisner
I figured something labelled "The Best of" would make for a good introduction to one of the most influential comics ever, and I was right! This was amazing. Just incredibly innovating and imaginative and good even when compared to current-day stuff. Not that everything today is good, but The Spirit manages to be unique even when compared to sixty years worth of comics. My favorite thing about The Spirit is the same thing I love about Mushishi. All the stories are focused on people in them, rather than on Eisner's cool idea or neat art or some other bell and whistle that exists to show off and doesn't actually help tell the story. (Something that is, sadly, not as common as I would like.)

God Save the Queen - Mike Carey
This was a gift from a friend, and she got it for me because I really like Lucifer, a different title by Mike Carey. And those sorts of reads are always a bit of a crapshoot, so it was nice that I did enjoy this, mostly because of the art. (Drug use, which isn't something I like to read about generally, features heavily, and I found the heroine unlikable until about two-thirds of the way into the story.) All the pages are painted by John Bolton and are surprisingly realistic yet pretty. I have a feeling that his art is an example of photo referencing done right, but I can't find anything to confirm that he does that. In any case, the art has a slight static quality due to the fact that it's painted and referenced, but it grew on me quickly as I read.

Mushishi v6 - Yuki Urushibara
Finally, a volume with stories that weren't made into episodes for the anime! Because, okay, I adored revisiting the stories as each volume came out, but having completely new material to read is wonderful. "The Chirping Shell" I found charming, and I dare others to find the idea of seashells chirping like birds anything other than charming. "The Hand that Pets the Night" was a surprisingly creepy horror story (surprising because I rarely classify Mushishi stories as horror). "Under the Snow" was nicely uplifting even as it dealt with sibling grief, although I had to reread a few scenes because I didn't realize they were flashbacks the first time. And "Banquet in the Farthest Field" was a neat exploration of the lives of mushishi.

Eeee, my story! It is wonderful and perfect and I love it lots and lots! Symbiotic Nature was written just for me, and it has Tanyuu and Ginko and musings about the nature of mushi and humans and how those two worlds interect. It's everything I could have hoped for.

If my Yuletide author is stalking my journal, I tried to leave a comment about how much I love your story, but when I hit submit I got the angry Yuletide snowman. So I have no clue if it went through or not. (If it didn't, I can tell you that it was not substantially different than the above paragraph. If it did, you can confirm this for yourself.) And since I was planning on writing a more detailed comment for you anways when it's not 3am, I'm going to hold off on trying to resubmit.

And now, as it is 3am and I have to be social with about 30 family members tomorrow, I am off to bed.

Hrm, I've been feeling the need for new icons but haven't done anything about it because I like to use icons I make myself. But I suck a lot at using Photoshop or doing anything more complicated than cropping and resizing. And what I've been wanting as icons -- colorized images from the Mushishi manga -- is way more complicated than anything I'd previously attempted.

But then I found a tutorial on icon_tutorial that looked helpful! And managed to produce this!



I am rather impressed by it but don't know if it's any good or if I should do more to it. Maybe I'll have an opinion after I sleep on it.

ETA: Now that I'm looking at it again, the colors are a little muddy. So I think I'm going to color the ground and the background and maybe sharpen it or up the saturation.

ETA2: After playing a bit more, I've managed to create this:



I wish the color in the background was obvious, but at least it isn't so muddy.