Procrastination is My Drug of Choice: Buffy and Veronika Decides to Die Icons

[red_satin_doll]

This is what I do when I have at least three meta and two fics unfinished on my harddrive, whilst my lovely beta 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 .)

1. 2.


3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

7.  8. 9.


10. 11. 12.


13. 14. 15.


16. 17.

Comments

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

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.

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?

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

Recommending Lovecraft to novices is a bit tricky, since, well, he wasn't a very good writer. Not to mention that he had some rather unpalatable opinions about race that show up occasionally. What he did better than anyone else at the time, though, was come up with ideas; he created this entire shared 'verse in which the horror comes from people gradually discovering that they're just tiny little cogs in a world that's much older and much more populated than we think - and that we are as ants to most things in it.(Basically, the BtVS backstory - once demon roamed the earth and they still wait underground - is pure Lovecraft, if a bit tamed.) 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...

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.

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the recs! I'm sure I can go to the library as I don't read ebooks (we all remember "libraries", right? those big building with lots of books?*lol*)

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.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

I read a lot of horror when I was younger, but in recent years I've become really bad at following the genre. When I say Lovecraft isn't a very good writer, that comes mostly from re-reading him a few years ago and realising that while he's great at setting a scene and coming up with an idea, he tends to repeat himself a lot and try to dodge out of actually describing things - "mere words cannot do justice to the horror which befell me as I gazed upon the unmentionable" yada yada yada. Still very much worth reading, though. Stephen King once noted that the worst part about writing horror is that the more you build something up, the more disappointed people will always be once you show it - if you show someone a door, promise that what's behind them will scare them witless, and then open the door to show a 50-foot insect, some part of the reader will always go "Phew, at least it's not a 500-foot insect." Lovecraft got a lot of mileage out of being vague, but sometimes you just want to shake him and yell "JUST TELL ME ALREADY."

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.

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

Life's too short to only read great books.

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.