Onward through the fog

Gods preserve me from bookstores. WEE. Loot for today:

The Elephant Vanishes, a book of Haruki Murakami short stories. Murakami is a surrealist fiction author very popular in Japan these days, and I've read the titular story in translation as well as begun reading TV People in the original. I'm still torn on whether I should've just taken the plunge and bought a Japanese collection online.

Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies, a very well-written and hilarious modern grammar book that I just picked up on impulse. Crap I always wanted to know but didn't know where to look up- and would probably have been unmotivated to do so even if I had. This is actually fun to read.

And the big one, the one I actually went into the bookstore to find: Kodansha's Effective Japanese Usage Dictionary. A Japanese grammar book that's almost as heavy- and expensive- as the new Compact Nelson. Yes, really. It's gorgeous, something like 800 pages of small-print, heavily detailed explanations on when to use 気持ち and when to use 気分, or what exactly is the difference between ぜひ and どうか and なんとか and どうぞ。*fangirls*

Oh yes! In a different bookstore I picked up a small thing, Sanseido's Daily Concise English-Japanese Dictionary. It's pocketsize, likely full of words that I would mostly already know if I were going J-E, but I'm weak on E-J and it's tiny and cute and pretty and howww do you get 650 pages in a 1cm thick book? HOW. I LOVE Japanese fine-page books. They display a mastery of paper that's just never a priority in this country.

I also grabbed two boxes of pens and some Easter candy for the house, and a few CDs besides. There was a Lain soundtrack in the used music store for $7, how could I resist? Plus they had Mystery Bags for a buck each, five CDs per, so I tried my luck. Anybody ever heard of Dropbox, Uberzone, Keysha Cole, Leadfoot, or Eliza Carthy? I'll have to pop 'em in later.

Woot, moodtheme. I wish I could edit the Nami one! But apparently Livejournal does not WANT me to edit. FINE. I'll just use the NEW one. So there.

This might be one of the dorkier things I've ever said, but you really do learn a good bit about a character by making a mood theme of them. All of Luffy's sad faces come from one scene. ONE. Angry and happy don't have enough SLOTS for all the variations, but in 140-odd episodes and six movies, I've seen him be sad once.

I should clean out my usericons. So many I don't use. Who uses 100 icons anyway? How do they scroll through the whole list every time they make a post?

Heeheeheehee.

I watched that eight times last night, and then tonight I sat down and did it. First try.

XD Ahh, it's the little things.

Hey, giffers?

Is there any way to resize ( this (cut for bandwidth) ) to journal size so that it looks rather less crappy than this?

So I was busily making THIS icon, but then I opened the upload screen while this song, Orange Range's heavy metal, comes on. And there's Luffy, as shown, headbanging to the music.

It's official. I'm addicted to One Piece icons.