Wooohooo!!! [link]
For the Emperor!

You guys HAVE to check this out:
[link]

Phewwww... it's about 1 year since I last updated this journal. Mustn't have posted much in this time. Well, with the fact that I'm in a middle of a PhD, moreover one that hardly seems to go anywhere, this isn't surprising. And this is probably not going to improve in a near future, as I have added a new time consuming hobby to the long list of parasites that gnaw at my free time like rabbits at supasaiyajins: I have started to collect a WH40K Eldar army, so I can beat the hell out of my lil bro's Tau army (though the reverse is more likely).
Anyway, I'll have some stuff to add soon if I can force myself to install my scanner's drivers on this new laptop. A Vista laptop alas. Vista, which steadfastly refuses to let my tablet work properly. If there was something like justice, then the Microsoft bastards would feel every second of their pitiful lives in their flesh the sum of the tortures they inflict on the world's PC users. And oh God would it hurt!

But the real reason that motivated me to post a new journal entry is my recent reading of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. In years of browsing Elfwood and then DA, I have very often come in contact with artwork related to this piece of literature or to the genre that it spawned, some sort of mixture of fantasy, pseudo-philosophy, neopaganism with strong feminist undertones. Being some sort of metalhead, I have also often come upon lyrics that bore the mark of her influence. I must say I have always felt uneasy about this whole genre. Now, to make things clear: I am a convinced feminist, I have a strong fascination for fantastic themes, medieval stuff, Celtic mythology, and I am not anymore the staunch supporter of everything Christian I used to be. My conceptions are also very ecumenical, in that I believe that if there is a God (pure supposition), then what matters is not the name one gives him but how one serves him (or Mankind, because serving God and Mankind are the same to me). So, I should have liked the book.
Actually, I didn't completely dislike it. I liked some of the themes developed. I agreed with many ideas. I liked Taliesin, Kevin, Lancelet, even Morgaine at times. I found the idea of depicting things from consistently female POVs very interesting. There was also obviously quite enough sex to keep a modern young man reading through the whole thing ^^ But I felt through the whole reading a bit like when I read nationalists writing about the supposed origins of their nation: this book seems to me to be truly revisionist, and not just for the story's purpose and in order to better convey a feminist message. This is fantasy, perhaps also metaphor, alright, but I think that behind this, MZB truly believes that Christianism is the way she sees it, that the religions that preceded were so much wiser (the Native American syndrome?), that the ideas of new-age style oriental meditation and druidism were virtually identical, and so on... This is also substantiated by the afterword given by one of her friends, in which she mentions the spiritual circle they were part of.
I don't really know how to put it: I like fantasy as a whole, but I hate it when people mistake it for reality. It's OK to create worlds. And it is also OK to shape one's spiritual beliefs, but then always in concordance with reality. Like, I think that many of the old theories about the soul or reincarnation are nonsense now that we have a better understanding of what a mind is and how it builds during an individual's life. But mixing reality with fiction in this way, shaping one's belief about what is real according not to facts but to one's own desires and prejudices, this is very wrong to me.
So yeah, those are my thoughts about the book. I also thought that it was morally very ambiguous, in a very disturbing way. So, to cut it short, an interesting, very though provoking read, but in a very disturbing way.

And... that was it. Wow, what a rant! K, back to work, c u in 9 months.

Well, for the few of you reading my journals, I'm not dead, just overwhelmed with work: starting a PhD is not something to be taken lightly, especially when on top of that you've got courses to give at the same time. So haven't done much art in the last semester, just a WH 40K fanart that I wanted to finish but probably won't cause the pose is too boring, I may post it in scraps one of those days.
Anyway, here's a gallery I stumbled upon recently that I really think you guys should check out: [link]