Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: sick
  • Music: School of Rock, "School of Rock."

Too tired (and too sick) for content; have some links.

I have been home, dead of sick, for two days. We're talking "deep, rasping chest cough, I sound like a Batman villain, spent eleven hours on the couch yesterday, watched all of The Number 23 because changing the channel seemed too much like work" levels of sick. (PS: Maybe the number-obsessed OCD girl shouldn't watch movies about being driven to increasing levels of paranoia by numbers when she's already sick. Luckily for me, the movie made no damn sense, and just triggered nice little daydreams about prime factors and pi. What? I don't judge what helps you feel better.) So here is some stuff from my link file that I have been unable to find context for.

First off, no matter how bad a cover your book gets, it will never win the bad cover lottery. That prize has already been claimed by this not-safe-for-work edition of The Princess Bride. What is that I don't even. Flesh-snakes are attacking her lady bits with the intent to burrow their way into the promised land. Presumably the promised land has a cover that makes sense. Also, I do not remember Buttercup using a falcon as a cunning hat. Maybe somebody was hitting the cold meds a little too hard when they approved this one? I don't know.

The next time I go to the UK, I am totally visiting Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, which promises me "bespoke and everyday items for the living, dead, and undead," and is the only shop I've ever seen that was polite enough to request that angry mobs douse their torches before entering. Hell, forget visiting; I want to live there.

This is Alton Brown's Fanifesto. It makes me happy, even as I am sad that it needed to exist.

Disney Princesses have their issues, and I am the last person to pretend that they don't, but they have their good sides, too. This is a lovely collection of moments to illustrate that. (And while I'm pointing you at Princesses, why not swing by Amy Mebberson's Tumblr? Her weekly "Pocket Princesses" cartoons are a real treat.)

Finally, for now, cuckoos are in a biological arms race to continue their egg parasitism ways. So maybe there's hope for humanity. If the cuckoos don't figure out a better way...

I'm going back to bed.
Tags: brief notes, geekiness, medical fu, state of the blonde, utterly exhausted
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  • 79 comments

autographedcat

March 20 2012, 03:44:38 UTC 5 years ago

The artist for that Princess Bride cover didn't have access to Goldman's manuscript, so he was working from S. Morgenstern's original book, in which Buttercup, berift without her beloved Westley, seeks the aid of the Swamp Witch, who agrees to help her in exchange for her voice. Buttercup agrees, but before the contract can be finalised, the Swamp Witch is arrested by Disney Time police and never seen again. Buttercup spends a brief few years in Witness protection in Savannah, Georgia, as a woman named Jenny, and tries to forget her true love by having a fitful affair with a dimwitted, whitman's sampler philosopher and shrimp baron named Forrest. But the whole thing doesn't work out, and she goes back to Florin, with no one the wiser because time passes differently when you travel by magic wardrobe, as every schoolboy knows. It is on her way home that she encounters Vizzini, Fezzek, and Inigo.

This entire chapter, some 419 pages, was cut by Goldman in favour of skipping to the kidnap scene in the first place.

[1] In the far future, Disney has managed not only to extend copyright indefinitely into the future, but also retroactively into the past, in order to prosecute infringement tht existed prior to Disney's ownership of the property in the first place. And wasn't the Grimm Brother's estate surprised?

maverick_weirdo

March 20 2012, 04:21:29 UTC 5 years ago Edited:  March 20 2012, 04:29:00 UTC

Retroactive copyright became necessary after the invention of time travel. The landmark case involved a group of fanfic writers going back to the 1970's to try and establish their own vision of "Harry Potter" as cannon.

(Ironically the Princess Bride cover mentioned earlier became instead the cover of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in that history.)