red_satin_doll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
red_satin_doll) wrote2013-07-31 05:07 pm
red_satin_doll) wrote2013-07-31 05:07 pm
Procrastination is My Drug of Choice: Buffy and Veronika Decides to Die Icons
This is what I do when I have at least three meta and two fics unfinished on my harddrive, whilst my lovely beta ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lanoyee waits patiently so she can actually beta. (Beta is both a noun and a verb, right?) I don't have Photoshop, only the simply editing suite on Photobucket to play with, so no claims to art here. (If you're looking for art, try terragram_icons ; they just posted a fun set of buffyverse quote icons. Or comlodge's award-winning icons. Or...anyone who is not me.)
Anyhoo...The first two are from Veronika Decides to Die (a movie I don't recommend due to what I consider it's unethical and misguided "solution" to depression: "Veronika just needs to care about someone else and she'll feel all better! And lying to her about her health condition and manipulating two mentally ill people in order to cure them is TOTALLY worth the risk!" Sorry, NO. But damn, it's got some pretty visuals.) The rest are of my girl Buffy Summers, of course, or Buffy and Dawn.
You know the drill: Comments and feedback are always welcome; proper credit is a must. All for the taking, just let me know.
(ETA: Speaking of proper credit *ahem*, original screencaps and promo images for Veronika sourced from smg-online.org and LadyMason.com .)
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lanoyee waits patiently so she can actually beta. (Beta is both a noun and a verb, right?) I don't have Photoshop, only the simply editing suite on Photobucket to play with, so no claims to art here. (If you're looking for art, try terragram_icons ; they just posted a fun set of buffyverse quote icons. Or comlodge's award-winning icons. Or...anyone who is not me.)Sample Icons: 
Anyhoo...The first two are from Veronika Decides to Die (a movie I don't recommend due to what I consider it's unethical and misguided "solution" to depression: "Veronika just needs to care about someone else and she'll feel all better! And lying to her about her health condition and manipulating two mentally ill people in order to cure them is TOTALLY worth the risk!" Sorry, NO. But damn, it's got some pretty visuals.) The rest are of my girl Buffy Summers, of course, or Buffy and Dawn.
You know the drill: Comments and feedback are always welcome; proper credit is a must. All for the taking, just let me know.
(ETA: Speaking of proper credit *ahem*, original screencaps and promo images for Veronika sourced from smg-online.org and LadyMason.com .)
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no subject
I can't imagine you having an endless supply of icons. Me, I'd love to have more than 15 but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for the pleasure.
But since you're using one of mine, why not? :)
I am? Which one is that? (I've nabbed some things online that didn't have the makers name attached, so if I have, let me know and I'll correct that asap.)
He essentially writes bad self-help books disguised as bad novels.
And he's apparently quite popular? Then again so is John Grisham so no accounting for taste.
That attitude of "you just need to think you way into a better life" strikes me as a post-Christianity, new age, modern era twist on the same old bullshit of if you live a clean life and think good thoughts God will bless you. We keep trying to find a way to make sense of chaos, to preserve the illusion of control over our lives, and explain why some people have good fortune and others don't.
Or, we use it as a way of self-flagellating: "I'd have gotten that job if I'd only thought more positively." (And never mind that 100 other people were up for the same position, or that the interviewer was having a bad day and you happened to remind him of his mother, etc.)
This is why one of my favorite books of the bible is the Book of Job; the message is basically that we can't know why things happen the way they do. It's actually quite sophisticated and not at all like the simplified version handed to me in Sunday School.
And at least Buffy did get professional help in s7, even if he was evil... ;)
*lol* I keep forgetting about Holden.
no subject
Oh, I thought you knew - the "Buffy has to do this" one. It's from a little series of false identity icons I made here.
Yeah, Coelho is ridiculously popular, which says more than I want to know about the publishing industry... say what you will about the likes of EL James, at least she doesn't present herself as a deep philosopher for spouting things that would make a hospital greeting card maker feel cheap.
That attitude of "you just need to think you way into a better life" strikes me as a post-Christianity, new age, modern era twist on the same old bullshit of if you live a clean life and think good thoughts God will bless you.
Yeah. I recently re-read Voltaire's Candide, which is still a depressingly hilarious send-up of that whole mindset, and has lost absolutely zero relevance 250 years after it was written...
(I have a children's bible somewhere that's absolutely hilarious in how it simplifies the story. Job is essentially boiled down to "Job was a rich man who had bad luck and lost his family. Then God gave him a new one. Isn't God nice?" It also skips Revelation entirely, which means the Bible ends with "And then Paul and his friends took a boat ride to Malta. The end.")
no subject
*facepalm* I'd never seen that post; I found it god knows where floating around the internet. Ugh. I'll add proper credit now, and thank you belatedly! It's one of my favorites - when "extremely pissed" is the mood of the moment.
I recently re-read Voltaire's Candide, which is still a depressingly hilarious send-up of that whole mindset, and has lost absolutely zero relevance 250 years after it was written...
And if THAT isn't depressing I don't know what is. "The American Myth of Success: From Horatio Alger to Norman Vincent Peale" by RIchard Weiss (1969) is also extremely relevant.
plu ca change...
I don't have that children's bible anymore but it sounds exactly like yours. It ends at - kind of nowhere.
For years I thought Job was about a man who refused to rail or curse or denounce God, he just sat in the ashes suffering silently - until I actually read the book and discovered that Job actually does demand to know why God is torturing him. He's not denouncing God but he demands to know what he did to deserve this. And God's response is basically "You human man not know my ways." I love The book of Job - it reads like a Hebrew morality play (complete with chorus); I can actually imagine it being staged and I wonder if it was designed to be so. It reminds me of Greek or even Shakespearean drama. It's a great piece of literature in it's own right and the first book of the bible that doesn't feel like someone's lying to me. Just humans trying to make the best of things.
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I haven't read Job in years, but I really like that interpretation. To be honest, I always found it one of the creepiest books of the Bible - not because I (as a Lovecraft fan) have a problem with the idea of gods playing dice with human lives, but that people expected me to find comfort in the belief in a god who might at any moment kill my entire family (or hell, kill me) just to win an argument with Satan. That pretty much makes God a monster. But look at it from that angle, and it's basically the same moral as Candide: The world isn't fair, if there is a master plan it's not on your side, just worry about what you can do and plant your garden.
(And this would be where I'd use my Illyria icon if I still had room for it...)
no subject
Yes, that was my exact take-away from it. I found it interesting - but confusing at first, because the "chorus" of people lecturing to Job basically repeated (ad nauseum) messages from the previous books of the bible about belief in God and that Job MUST have sinned and needed to confess it; IOW, they sounded like the Old Prophets, Moses and Isiah and so forth; so I though at first they were 'the authors voice' so to speak, until I realized something quite different was afoot.
Now I'll have to re-read it and Candide and see if my impression is correct. I'm amused by the notion that it's really one of the great underrated and overlooked pieces of Western literature. I want bragging rights, damnit!
BTW - I've never read Lovecraft; what starting point would you recommend to a novice?
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Anyway, recommendations are also tricky since he almost exclusively wrote short stories with a few novellas interspersed. I'd say the best recommendation is to find a story collection that includes "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Color Out of Space", "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness" (novella), "The Nameless City", "Rats in the Walls", "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs", "The Dunwich Horror", "Pickman's Model" and a bunch of others and dive in. If you read e-books, his works are all in the public domain so you should be able to find them for free on gutenberg.org and other sites.
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Something that's really awesome - and important = to me is how many people in this fandom are so well-read. Mostly I've been reading nonfiction for the last 20 years so I have huge gaps in a lot of areas. "horror" is a genre that's never appealed to me, so I have to read what other people say about the tropes in btvs early seasons to actually know the tropes exist.
Recommending Lovecraft to novices is a bit tricky, since, well, he wasn't a very good writer.
OT, did you ever read the Celestine Prophecy? that was all the rage among new age types including a lot of my friends back in the '90's, huge best seller - and I could barely get through chapter one. Just give me the freaking ideas and spare me the lousy prose and hackneyed "adventure story" please.
The horror in Lovecraft isn't that you might get eaten, the horror is in that huge gaping chasm between what we think we know and control, and the realisation that we know NOTHING and our entire well-ordered man-on-top philosophy is maddeningly naive...
I remember you mentioned Lovecraft in your comments re: Mabus_101's "(meme)metapsychosis" (the Buffybot story) and that sounds very much in line with what you're saying here. Christ on a crumpet that is the BEST Buffybot story ever.
no subject
OT, did you ever read the Celestine Prophecy?
The title sounds familiar, but I don't think I ever read it. I generally try to stay away from books that are obviously crap, though I try to regularly read a really bad novel - partly because when something becomes as successful as, say, The Alchemist or Left Behind, I get curious about what people see in them; and partly because I need to recalibrate my reading skills sometimes. Life's too short to only read great books. :)
And yeah, I still have nightmares about that story.
no subject
Heh, my motto's the opposite. (But then I'll waste time on crappy fanfic. Because it's right here at home and I don't have to hunt for it, of course.) The biggest disappointment for me of course is always the books that start out really promising, then just fall apart later or can't maintain the initial premise. Sort of like Veronika, actually.
And yeah, I still have nightmares about that story.
Right? I did not see that shit coming.
I want to rec it in a post sometime but I have to be careful not to say the wrong thing or you spoil the whole effect. Which is the exact opposite of what I'm talking about above. I think that "nailing the landing" is one of the hardest things to do in writing (fiction or nonfiction, or at least it is for me, so it's a skill I envy and need to work harder on.) He's got another story or two I sometimes want to mention in the context of a meta idea but then I realize I'll ruin the entire damn thing.