A quick book rec...

...cut and pasted from a comment I left in another post:

Oh - The best book on fashion advice I've ever read is The Triumph of Individual Style, which does the remarkable thing of saying "If you've got a large butt and want to minimize it, do this. If you've got a large butt and want to feature it, do this." It doesn't subscribe to the idea that every other fashion book out there does, which is that there is One Ideal Figure and that people who don't match it should try to dress in ways to create the illusion of it.

I note the one bad review and the comment agreeing with it, on Amazon are both from fashion designers who don't understand that a rectangular-shaped woman might not want to create a waist, that she might want to emphasize the beauty of the form she's got, instead of aspiring to a form she doesn't have. They also complain about the dated-ness of the illustrations, which is understandable since the book was originally published in the early 1990s, but they seem incapable of reading the text and applying the principles to modern styles, like all good fashion designers ought to be able to do, IM-not-so-HO.

There's lots of illustrations from paintings of beautiful women of all body shapes and types in recent centuries illustrating the principles they're talking about, too.

ETA: Just changed the link to the correct one - it was going to a pic of Cloud from FInal Fantasy VII, from a previous comment wherein I was describing what my hair is currently doing. XD

RAISED BY PIGEONS!!

If you weren't satisfied by my coy review of Hikkatsu!! Strike a Blow to Vivify volume 2, then meganbmoore has a blow-by-blow summary here. Warning: spoilers abound.

(no subject)

The current round of springkink has been going up since Friday. (I have nothing in it this round, due to that whole "lack of time" thing.) But one of today's offerings is a short Saiyuki reincarnation fic. That's a LotR crossover. XD

http://community.livejournal.com/springkink/453053.html

(no subject)

I organized my cookbooks by color today. The result is enjoyably silly, and I'm quite tempted to do that for the rest of my books.

I've already been living with a wonky filing system, as when bitpig and mundeemo helped me unpack when I moved here, mundeemo put the books together in subject order by what she could guess of their subjects from the title. Which resulted in an organization that tickled me so much I left it. (for example, The Mummy at the Dining Room Table, a book on weird psychological stuff, is shelved next to Bob Brier's book on Egyptian mummies and Thomas Hoving's Making the Mummies Dance, about the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

I'm a visual person and tend to remember what the book looks like, so it's not that bad to find stuff, and the times I do forget what a book looked like and have to scan shelves to find it result in me finding books I'd forgotten I had (The Triumph of Individual Style being a case in point).

The United States which is cooked imperfectly

Picking up on something in a post by yhlee, I just translated the first two sections of "Matsu--", my Yuletide story, into Italian and back again. XD

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