I Me Mine, I Me Mine, I Me Mine

This is a good kind of insane.

Catching up to something I should've done a while ago, I join others in pimping...

Stupid And Insane Defenders Against Chaos, Onezumi Hartstein's one-artist effort to do H.P. Lovecraftian horror. And be funny.

She's done a bunch of comics before about these characters, and is now retelling things from the start (the revised comic starts here) in the acme of "For Those Who Came In Late..." recapping. (And she answers questions more directly on this page.)

She's on LiveJournal, by the way, as onezumi; we met at Pi-Con last month. She drew the cover art for the Pi-Con booklet. She also posts more general stuff at Onezumiverse. Say hi to her! Read her stuff!

P.S. to onezumi: I didn't get around to checking the site until recently, then my decrepit home computer refused to load it so I couldn't check it out when I finally tried. The library computer, it's finally letting me see more. Hallelujiah!

It was in 2000, four years before I heard of LiveJournal so this never got blogged, but it was in 2000 that I saw my first full episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This year I've finally started watching the series on DVD, and today I caught up to what I'd seen, the Season 4 finale "Restless." I saw it as a rerun right before Season 5 started. I'd been aware of the show, but stuck in Hermiston which had no WB station for the show's first four years, but by September 2000 I was back at my parents' place in Dundee, preparing to move to Portland, and I had access.

And I got my first taste with a moody, dream-logicked mood piece of mood. (For those who haven't seen it, the four major characters fall asleep at a video-watching party, and the pissed-off ancient spirit of the first Slayer -- who they'd accidentally summoned in the season's big finale one episode before -- starts stalking them in their dreams.) Seeing it now, I notice some directing and editing tricks Joss Whedon used later for Serenity's more mind-of-River moments, when we're seeing things as River Tam sees them. It's dream-logic done well, and that is so hard to achieve. Some of the imagery and lines stayed with me, dream-logic-appreciating me, for the next eight years: Buffy suddenly in the desert instead of the sandbox, or Xander's line about casting spells. (Whedon in the commentary says he kept the line, even though it's in Willow's dream and not Xander's, because it made him laugh. But I can imagine Willow imagining Xander saying it, because she knew Xander would react that way to her having a girlfriend, so I can justify don't mind the line. Plus, it made me laugh.)

I'm now 40th in line to borrow Buffy Season 5 from the library, so I won't watch that season for a while. I saw a good chunk of that season when it was first broadcast -- yes, I've seen "The Body" -- but when I finally get the DVDs, I'll see it in the context of the preceding four seasons. I expect I'll go "Oh, now I get it" many times. And in the meantime, I'll also watch Angel; I'm getting Season 1 of it soon, and I think it'll be even more up my alley.