I blame Youko: I now want to eat Italian food. Risotto, italian sausage, antipasti, etc. Also cannoli. There should be more internationalization of dessert.

Meaningless pretension of the day: someone should write a tongue in cheek essay on the structuralist significance of the Saiunkoku founding myth. (Eh, I wonder… this doesn’t really work because the Immortals do really exist so it can’t be a case of existence preceding essence, as it were, but has anyone written a fantasy novel from an anthropological perspective in the Levi-Strauss vein? Maybe they have, I am not that knowledgeable about anthro.)

LJicon gravatars now working. If you comment as username@livejournal it’ll feature your default icon.

Speaking of Saiunkoku, I have finished reading book eight not using the dictionary, which means I skipped a lot of the hard words. I tend to feel that the consequences of the events were a lot more interesting than the events themselves, because of Offstage Villainy. Anyway, will put up a post on it as soon as I finish going through it w/ dictionary.