Freaks and Geeks

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

As Puel would say, "Let you entertain me..."
.

Bored, in Pittsburgh, on a Saturday night. And so, memelet time.

In the comments, start a conversation with one of the characters I write. You can do this in or out of character on your own (please indicate which). Let's see how long we can keep it up and how many threads we can get going!

ETA: Also, feel free to butt in to other people's conversations, as necessary.

.

Civic participation!
Hey, I finally got around to calling my Congressman and telling him (well, his voicemail) to vote for the damn health care bill. I've been meaning to do that for weeks, and really feel like I should have done it sooner.

Day of Destiny 2010
maiji: omg the time is neaarring lol
orang: yes
orang: Lol
orang: yes
maiji: go orange
maiji: go squirrel
orang: We can do it
maiji: yaaay
maiji: this is it lol
maiji: the final dungeon
maiji: hahaha
orang: The final boss
orang: 2nd form
orang: or 3rd
maiji: damn it lol
orang: depending o nthe game
maiji: no saves
maiji: haha
orang: We just got through the whole final dungeon without saving
maiji: lol
maiji: aaahhhhh
maiji: okay
maiji: 1 minute before silence
maiji: good luck!
maiji: see you at 8:01
maiji: or 8:02
maiji: lol
orang: Lol
orang: GO SQUIRREL
orang: SEE YOU
maiji: GO ORANGE
maiji: BYEBYE

lol, it sounds like we were heading into two tunnels in a cave or something.

DID THE ORANGE AND THE SQUIRREL SLAY THE TIME MONSTER?? TILL NEXT TIME!!! lol

Current Mood: AHHHHHH

April is the month of Script Frenzy, a NaNoWriMo knockoff calling for a 100-page stage play, screenplay, or graphic novel in 30 days. I almost feel guilty for considering it, since I haven't touched my NaNo story since early December, yet the challenge is calling to me. I've barely dabbled in scripts in my life, but I love plays and movies in general. (Graphic novels not so much, but maybe next year if I cut back on perfectionism in drawing.)

In contrast to Chris Baty's NaNo advice, the Script Frenzy site strongly recommends that you have a story in mind when you begin. I wracked my brains a while on what kind of long story I could plan without getting boring, hackneyed, or ludicrous. Then I realized that I was under no obligation to be fully original. Not only are many classic movies based on books and other media, but even Shakespeare tended to lift from folklore.

So what could I work from that wasn't already done to death? Moreover, what such story did I want to retell? Well, my rather religious mind turned to the Bible, specifically the Old Testament. Almost at once, Jacob popped into focus. Not only does he take up the better part of 11 chapters of Genesis before Joseph (who already has two musicals) snags the spotlight, but he's one of the most interesting OT characters in himself. Being a habitual jerk doesn't stop him from getting blessed by God and slowly reforming.

Furthermore, there are parts of the Jacob story that left me puzzled or anxious for more details. I intend to read multiple translations and commentaries for ideas, but it shouldn't be too objectionable for me to fill in some blanks, possibly with a warning up front that my version doesn't insist on its own veracity. The only real liberties I'd take with the scripture are deviations from direct quotations; after all, translations vary. Characters shouldn't sound stilted to modern audiences. I'd stick closer with the words from God, tho.

I just looked over the chapters to make sure there was enough material to fill a few hours. I probably shouldn't have worried, considering the brief bases of some hit films.

The main question left to answer before I begin is, which format will I choose? A stage play is the more obvious choice, since I've read far more of them, but a screenplay might take less effort to fill the page quota.

For Where Our Nation's Banner May Be Planted, All Other Local Banners Are Defied
.

My

hetaliaremix fill has been sitting around, done, for the past few weeks, and I've been itching to be a dork and post it. I want

ghostofthemotif to know that I had an incredible time on this fic, and thank her so much for writing the original!

Title: For Where Our Nation’s Banner May Be Planted, All Other Local Banners are Defied
Author: Mithrigil, after

ghostofthemotif
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England and Japan
Rating: PG-13. As if Gilbert and Sullivan could get more raunchy than that!
Words: 5000
Warning: I get to wank about opera! Also, given the time period and characters, standard warning about racism and sensitive imperialist topics.
Summary: A remix of The Full Monty, backdating the locale and style to 1908. So instead of “Japan doesn’t know what Monty Python is,” we have “Japan doesn’t know what Savoy Opera is”, and in both cases hilarity, tension—and acculturation—ensue.

( They meet accidentally on the curb, hands clashing together as they attempt to hail the same black hansom. )

That was the smallest plane I have ever been on.
.

Which is to say, I am in Pittsburgh until Monday.

.

My face in the fire in the reptile house.
Add to previous: also, I need to buy new pants. REI is apparently unable to procure zippers that continue to satisfy their design objective — by which I mean not spontaneously disintegrating — for a reasonable length of time. Which is a shame, because they make decent (if expensive) pants otherwise. So, my main shorts are zipperless, the convertible adventure pants are zipperless, I still haven't lost enough weight to make any of the old shorts fit.

Also also, I hate air travel. My undergrad CS department is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its founding late this April, and I'm going to this thing. I'm going by plane, because I have neither the time nor the patience for ground transport, and I actually can afford it. Sort of. If I'd bought tickets last week (I think it was), all would be fine, but I noticed that the price dropped from one day to the next, and I was like “hm…”, and then got sidetracked, and now they've sold out. So now I can pay twice as much, or there are any other number of “exciting” options, of which the least bad seems to be a flight back early Monday morning. This probably means that I'd get to spend a night hanging around the Cleveland airport; insert Cleveland joke here. This is probably worth the several hundred dollars it would cost to get a better-timed flight. Or, depending on ground transport, I could maybe spend the night hanging around Oberlin and not sleeping. Hm.

This entry was originally posted at http://jld.dreamwidth.org/23138.html and has

comment(s). You can comment there using OpenID.

That Original Character meme, and origfic excerpts!
.

Origfic meme, cribbed from

ivory_and_horn! Oh god this is kind of ridiculously long, for a meme. But that’s in part because I am sharing excerpts from DHC, LT, Chessmen, Rabbit, and SMEAR.

( And here I thought Puel was tl;dr... )

.

Burn me a fire in the reptile house.
How have things been going, one might ask?

Well, there's been work on the house, which has caused no small amount of turmoil, and which is currently stalled on regulatory issues, and may remain so for weeks. Regulatory issues which surfaced after the kitchen had been gutted. Imagine my joy. IMAGINE MY GODDAMN JOY. Ahem. But things have been stopgapped into a state where they're sort of usable as of earlier today, so I guess that's something.

The bicycle has problems which I think I'm going to deal with by getting a new bike. That way, I can try to do stuff to the old bike — as apparently no mechanic in their right mind wants to work on Shimano gearboxes, perhaps even including those at shops that sell them — without winding up bikeless when-not-if it goes horribly wrong. Upon which I'd need to get a new rear wheel built. Which gives me options — I could remake it as a 3-speed-with-coaster-brake like it is now, or I could go completely insane and learn to ride fixed-gear, or…. The bike budget is somewhat larger than it was ~1600 miles ago[%]. And said new bike is such that it's what I'd have gotten if it had come out a year earlier, so I guess that's something.

And then there's the really fun part, which is that I have some dental work that is suggesting it needs to be done sooner rather than later. (As in, one of the two teeth that I'm missing part of is now more missing as of earlier today, and then there's a toothache over on the other side that portends ill, and I figure I have a few dozen cavities I don't know about at this point.) As the previous parenthetical suggests, I've been avoiding dental care these last few years because, on top of the usual reasons one might[*], I'm not insured for it. There's this thing where I can get a slight discount at certain dentists, but that's all. I see from the price lists that it'll be painfully expensive but not mortgage-your-immortal-soul expensive, so I guess that's something.

Hey, local people: suggestions for dentists?

[*] One of the teeth-with-a-missing-part, which first lost that part when I was 7 and playing around on a metal bike rack (thread tie!), had its third repair (not counting the one that was clearly done wrong and broke inside of a month) fail in 2006, when I was still covered. That one, I seem to recall, was a certain amount of “I know I need to, but my job is making me crazy and I cannot deal”.

[%] Meaning that I could also go the route of building from parts, but I don't think I'm advanced enough for that.

This entry was originally posted at http://jld.dreamwidth.org/22911.html and has

comment(s). You can comment there using OpenID.

Fuck yeah. FUCK YEAH!
( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Current Music: Blind Guardian - Beyond the Realms of Death

MAAAHH CAAAKE
I diiiiid it~ I baked my first cake~ It's really more like a brownie, but oh well. Thanks to my mom for helping me out with calculating measurements and for my sis for letting me use her tools XDDD

Photos~

It's pretty yummy and chewy :D :D :D :D And the frosting has cream cheese so it's great tasting~

Happy early birthday to my dad!

Current Mood: FULL TIME ADULT ASSISTANTTT

Advice for prospective cat owners: Make sure you have someplace semi-distant, like a basement, to lock the cat away when you go to bed. Even the best-behaved cat I've known has had a conflicting sleep schedule and refused to stay quiet through the night.

Molly was staying at my suite while my parents' house was being renovated. I'm not sure I got any sleep on Sunday night, and the only sign that I did on Monday was when I looked at the clock and saw that I was going to be about two hours late for work. Good thing I had no new assignment waiting for me, and I think only my office mate even noticed. Also a good thing that the renovation ended sooner than projected, so Molly could go home last night. I still woke up later than usual today, but by hustling, I was only fashionably late to the office.

Always fat
Earlier today, I ran across this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/03/shaming-the-obese/37539/

Since last June, I've lost something like 50 pounds. I work out five times per week; I do yoga, a lot. I'm pretty sure I'm in the best shape of my life. There is a longer post I want to write about all of that. It's been a strange year, health-wise.

What the blogpost reminded me of is that I have this recurring nightmare that despite all of this, one day I'll go in to see a doctor who hasn't read my history, and they'll start in on me about my weight anyway, even though I'm now at the top end of normal BMI for my height. See, I've had bad experiences with doctors about my weight. They've had this tendency to ascribe absolutely anything and everything to needing to lose weight, and at least once, it's caused them to miss something that was actually wrong - it turns out that my back pain wasn't the result of being heavy, but the result of a serious congenital deformity. And they didn't believe me enough to even bother with an x-ray until I lost weight. So, I cringed when I read of a study that lent evidence to my impression that doctors were taking my concerns less seriously simply because I was overweight. The dehumanization can be subtle, but it's very real, and I've experienced it. It's not about doctors saying "you should lose weight" - that's part of their job - but about them turning your size in the most salient thing about you, and making all kinds of implicit assumptions about your character based on it.

But now that I'm not really overweight anymore - something I'm still afraid to say out loud, for fear that I'll jinx it somehow - I still have a complex left over from fighting an uphill battle against being treated like an object of disgust. Try second-guessing yourself to death, wondering whether nothing is wrong, or your doctor is giving you the blow-off because, subconsciously, they find your body gross. That's what I've dealt with my whole adult life. Thus my nightmare, I think: I have this terror that no matter how hard I've worked, and no matter how my body actually looks right now, all I'll ever be, to doctors, myself, or anyone else, is fat.

Edit: From the comments section, something that really struck home with me:

I had a moment of shock last month, when I realized how deeply the anti-fat messages run, when I had a sinus infection.

My husband was pressuring me to go to the doctor about it. (I literally couldn't go for the first two weeks I was sick, because of Snowmageddon DC.) Eventually I burst out with, "They'll just tell me it's my own fault, for being fat, and send me home." Because that's my experience with doctors. Everything I've ever gone for, no matter what the cause or symptoms or my family history: "Lose weight."

I lost 50 pounds over two years -- I'd now consider myself 10-20 heavier than I'd like to be, but in the "acceptably fat" range of society -- and the problems didn't get better. Fancy that. But I did go to the doctor, got told I had all the classic symptoms of a sinus infection, and had 10 days' worth of amoxicillin. So at least I'm learning. ;)

In general Ta-Nehisi's comments section is good, by blogospheric standards. Read as much of it as you dare.

Sora no Woto - Sounds of the Skies
You know, I have neither the time nor inclination to ever do an "anime blog"--there are too many people already doing it and too few anime that interest me enough to write about at length on a regular basis (in fact it's been months since I talked much about any specific anime, now that I think about it). But every now and then, the latest round of recycled concepts and archetypes in Japanese animation contains something that grabs my attention.

Noel, Kanata, and Kureha survey the war-torn wasteland.

In this case, I'm referring to Sora no Woto ("sound [or note] of [the] sky" pluralized however you like). I'll admit the character designs might have wound up being enough for me to check this show out (I did like K-ON as funny, cute fluff), but what really sealed the deal for me was reading things like "reminiscent of Haibane Renmei." SNW is an interesting experiment of a show with a, uh, degree of genre dissonance. It's cute girls doing cute things... but unlike any other show of which the same can be said, SNW's girls are soldiers in a post-apocalyptic alternate-timeline future Europe. Or, to quote tvtropes, "Japanese girls wearing German uniforms exploring a Japanese music school in a Spanish town full of French people celebrating Chinese New Years in Switzerland, shooting South African owls while piloting multi-legged, talking, demon slaying, cloakable, AMAZING GRACE SINGING, 500mm coil gun firing "son of the god of fire" supertanks from the future."

Overlooking the dead ocean.

It sounds weird, and kind of is, but it mostly works, actually. The story opens on a simple premise: some war-related disaster has ravaged the world, destroyed life in the seas, and now the remnants of humanity, in an uneasy and untrusting peace, are trying to pick up the pieces. The main character, Kanata, is a young girl who has joined the military because she wants to learn to play music, and she is assigned to an all-girl tank crew at a border outpost. Technology and education seem to have been casualties from the warfare leading up to the point in time when the series starts out; Kanata cannot even read music, the city has no electricity, and the girls' spidertank isn't even functional. Now, maybe you're rolling your eyes like I was at this point, with protests of "Teen Girl Squad!" (the bright-eyed newbie, the tsundere, the quiet one, the motherly one, and the cool one everyone admires), but I was able to set that little detail aside at the start (and by episode 9, which is as far as I've gotten, it looks like there are multiple possible reasons as to why this group is assembled like it is--story-related reasons beyond the obvious archetypal character pool, I mean), and after accepting that the show was going to use an over-used cast formula, I was able to begin enjoying the cast, to an extent, and, even more so, enjoying the setting. The story does several things that don't really make sense in a modern context, but you have to remember that the show's context isn't modern, so at least for me that makes certain things easier to accept.

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

As one fanmade image aptly indicates, I expected SNW to just be moe in fatigues, and for the first few episodes it seemed like that might be the case, which I didn't really mind, because that's the main reason why I gave the show a shot. I kinda knowingly laughed my way through the first couple episodes, correctly predicting when the main cast had all been introduced, and making a mental checklist of every moe trope I could spot (there are many!). But it's been hinting at something more; something you wouldn't expect from the character designs. Episode 7 in particular came as a real surprise--I won't spoil anything, but to make an exaggerated example, it's like you're watching Porco Rosso and all of a sudden you condense Grave of the Fireflies into a 15 minute segment and slip that in. It was jarring, but in a good way--in a "wow, this show really needed that" way. I have to give kudos to SNW for taking that step out of the moe comfort zone. The series has gotten its feet wet (with blood, one might say), and now that it's made that move, I hope they follow through on that (episode 8 was no a good indication of plans to do so, but episode 9 sort of was), because SNW has been carefully developing its characters with far more effort than most shows bother to develop these types of archetypes. Facts and details and rumors trickle one after another to help build the characters without dumping loads of information on you all at once and pains are taken to explain, for example, why the "motherly" character is motherly, rather than just hand-waving that aside with a canned personality.

Gigantic hellcrows tried to destroy earth and lost to nuclear superiorty?

Gigantic hellcrows tried to destroy earth and lost to nuclear superiorty?

SNW's setting is just so interesting! It just oozes an atmosphere of mystery, history, and myth and is illustrated with such beauty and attention to detail that it soon eclipsed the characters as my main reason for watching. As often as shenanigans do occur in the show, the humor is generally muted--SNW is cute and has funny moments, but it's not a comedy--it feels more like an exercise in world building and character development that just relies on some tried-and-true anime elements to maybe help appeal to a wider base (and I guess it worked on me!). Right from the get-go, we see hints at something alien (pictured right) that may play an important roll later on... or maybe just be one more of the many elements of atmosphere left to the viewer's imagination. This is where I see the comparison to Haibane Renmei; SNW's world, as much as you can trace it to a real place (see end of post), just has this ability to draw you in, make you curious, make you wish you could run around and explore it for yourself, almost maybe even live there. The story gives you some basics stright-out, but a lot of the world building is done subtly, with visuals designed to be recognizable yet enriched by time--it's like every piece of background art has its own story, and I love that kind of thing.

Heavy backpack is heavy @_@;

As much as I'm enjoying the show, SNW still does have a few strikes, or at least points of concern, against it. For one, make no mistake--while SNW does address war and its indirect and direct effects on people, 7 out of the first 9 episodes have been very much slice of life; albeit soldier life instead of highschool life or romantic life, but still moe-tastic slice of life. The pacing pretty is good, but it's not setting out to be an action show. If you hate moe in any of its forms, you will probably not like this show. If you enjoy or can tollerate a cute, slice-of-life foundation, you might enjoy SNW both for its use of that foundation as well as what it builds on top of it. As I've been saying, there's more to this story than the character designs might indicate, but you'll still need to be able to get over that initial hurdle of accepting the premise and art style.

DOLPHINS ARE SCARY AND EAT PEOPLE!

Another thing is that the show overdoes it on the dramatics sometimes. While I think the dissonance between "cute girls" and "horrors of war" is an effective element of the show's storytelling, there's another type of dissonance that is kind of bothersome--namely, how big a deal the cast makes out of rather pedestrian incidents, as if the war and state of the world aren't worth worrying about when you could spend time on a typical "get sick episode" or something. This is somewhat related to my last point of contention, which is that SNW has too much dialog. Kanata, with her constant "uwaaaa~!"ing, is an offender here, but not the only one--there have been several scenes in the show where I felt that would have been just as, if not more, effective had there been less (or no) dialog (usually this offending "dialog" is just vocalized thoughts, but I've yet to really notice a time when the visuals didn't sufficiently convey the mood). This isn't a problem unique to SNW, but considering how candid the dialog is about plot points, it stands out more to me.

Wouldn't it be fun to go explore this countryside?

Wouldn't it be fun to go explore this countryside?

Came for the (assumed) genre, got hooked on the setting, and now I'm sticking it out for the story. Sora no Woto is, if nothing else, an interesting experiment that seems to be trying to break the moe mold (moeld?). After the half-way point, I'm not sure where this show will end--its "cute girls being cute" aspect gives a good justification for a happy ending while its "well, they are soldiers in active duty" aspect gives good justification for an, at best, bitter-sweet ending. SNW hasn't been what I expected it to be; it kind of took me by surprise, twice, and I'm hoping that it can do so again (or, if not, can at least run some more in the direction it took with episode 7). The second coming of anime? Nah. (That job is taken, thank you very much.) The next stage in the evolution of slice-of-life? Maybe? An unexpected yet effective mixture of genres with pretty art and music? You bet.

I think it's worth checking out, though it still has some time to pull an all-too-common last-minute anime fail in regards to the ending, but I won't know until I get there myself. But even if I don't like the ending, that won't change the fact that the show so far has been very interesting... Though perhaps some of my enthusiasm stems not so much from how "good" the show may be to someone who doesn't share my taste in anime, but from how much it's exceeded my expectations--well, you can judge for yourself! Several groups are fansubbing this show and it's also on crunchyroll (I think), so go check it out of this piques your interest.

TL;DR? Cute girls in olive drab, post-apocalyptic setting, pretty art, not what you might expect, spidertanks, and owls!

Interesting links:
* Screencap Gallery
* Real Life vs Screencap Comparisons
* Official Site Location Hunts #1, #2
* Episode Charts - Contain lots of interesting facts and speculation with tons of spoilers--highly suggest you not look at these until watching the related episode(s)

How Librarians Can Save the World
Cross posted from my FB page...yep, still embarrassed that I've got one. Anyway, bonus Deadwood setting!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124316231&ps=cprs

Hijinks at work.
.

So on Mondays, my studio is mostly warehouse. They're renovating it, as a repair shop in the back, storage space for the instruments in the middle, and two lesson rooms in the front. Except right now, it's only one lesson room, large and cavernous and not sound-proofed and with an electric piano and no carpet and grime on the walls. I can hear the music, WBLI, from the bar next door. It's not safe and I don't feel safe in it. Honestly, the only advantage of the place is that I can steal the bar's Internet, like I'm doing now.

There is also only one electrical outlet in the wall, with two ports. The electric piano is plugged into one; my computer usually occupies the other plug, even during on-time, since they didn't give me a clock (or a mirror, or anything else I asked for), never mind that I kind of need those to teach.

Today, they also gave me a space heater, though, since outside it continues to be brutal and there is fuckall heating in this warehouse, and sometimes they have compassion. So I decide, hey, once my computer is done recharging, I'll unplug it and plug the space heater in. I do just that, and then realize, I have no clock. So then I think, well, I'll use my cell phone! ...and my cell phone is probably back at the apartment, because it sure as hell isn't in my purse.

I call douchewafflery. I can have a piano and heat, or a piano and a clock, or a clock and heat, but not all three.

(Upon complaining of this, one of the desk workers gave me a powerstrip! I hope it stays. I want to be warm and punctual and productive.)

.

Long Overdue
Life has been life lately. Imagine that. :D

Lack of recent substantial posts can be attributed to a combination of a few things, foremost of which include being busier at work (and working more hours), Spellbound, and a little else of note actually happening. I'm so boring. D: The last few weeks I've been doing a lot of 10 hour days (when combining both jobs) and they kinda wear me out, you know?

Someone at work left for another job and I've been shouldered with his project (not completely unfairly, though, because it's both something I was already helping with and something I'm capable of doing), which means I've had stuff to do lately. This is generally a good thing in my book, though I still can't shake the feeling that I'm really letting myself stagnate at this job. I might actually have a couple leads for other opportunities, but there are still too many unknowns in this department for me to say any more right now. I took this job because I was losing my other one, and it's not so bad that I've gotten to the point where I'm ready to actively look for something else, but if something else did come along, I have a feeling I'd be out of here in a flash... I guess I still haven't really decided what I want to do with my career, but I think I've decided I don't want to spend it at this kind of job.

Anyway, enough about that.

Spellbound was pretty cool and I want to find some time to write up some thoughts on it in a seperate post because I think it deserves that. As has been the case for all the Eternity writing tournament games I've participated in, it was a grueling 2.5 week period, but a rewarding one.

I've hardly been doing any gaming lately; even my time spent on FFXI has dried up considerably (except on weekends) and I'm still not sure how I'm going to react to the upcoming changes to the game. There's been some hints of drama in my Dynamis shell this month, too, which is a shame since I haven't really noticed any since joining like almost a year ago and we've become such a successful shell thanks to the efforts of our members and the leadership team (which I'm part of). I was also considering quitting Salvage (I actually already quit once, the group I mentioned before--I'm doing it with a better group now), but this last week our group beat the last mega boss chariot we'd yet to topple, so with that success fresh in our wake, I think I'll stick around. Still, my enthusiasm for doing anything outside of endgame is really flagging, and if they don't reduce the EXP curve from 60-75, I might just give up on my plans to level some other jobs (namely thief, scholar, red mage, and paladin, in that order). Maybe it's time to hop onto WoW with TK and revist that on the days I don't have events in FFXI.

Still haven't finished that ME1 replay. Still haven't started on ME2. ;_;

I have been playing a lot of Touhou Hisoutensoku lately, though, both because I really like it and because it's easy to play when I only have a few minutes (but it's also equaly easy to sink hours into). I'm not sure if I'd call myself "good" at the game (Dry still beats me two out of three games in netplay and Kyo crushed me last time we played), but I do enjoy it. While the game has its own quirks to learn, it's less technical than most 2D fighting games, which is something that I think helped me get into it. That and the spellcard system it uses which adds customizability to the characters and variety to the matches. My history with 2D fighting games is... very brief (1st: Smash Bros (lol, does that even count?), 2nd: Melty Blood (introduced by Seril and Helmar at AX05), 3rd: Touhou SWR & Hisoutensoku). I never played Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, MvC, or those other games when I was a kid, so maybe that's one reason why I like Hisoutensoku so much.

Initially, my maids-with-cutting-tools affinity carried over from Melty Blood (where I main Kohaku) and I played Sakuya (pictured above) at first, but after I started playing Alice (pictured right), something just kinda clicked and she's become my main character. She's totally a zoning and trapping mid-to-long range character (with a terrible close range game), which is unlike any other fighting game characters I've ever put effort into, but for some reason I feel most at home with Alice out of the handfull of characters in Hisoutensoku that I don't suck with (Marisa, Alice, Sakuya, Meiling, and Tenshi). If anyone's interested, you can check out the post over on RI for how to get set up.

I've been meaning to spend more time with books lately (and piano and writing and Japanese practice) but I'm really have a hard time finding the time for everything and that gets frustrating sometimes. For now, though, I'd better get back to work; lunchtime soon and I'll be working while I eat again as usual. Maybe I can sneak in an entry about Spellbound and my favorite anime of the new season some time soon.

Over and out.

Current Mood: busy

poor decisions
Argh, I was so tired after I got back home from the library and picking stuff up (and spending all morning on housework and homework lol) that I had a headache and wanted to take a nap. I then made the mistake of deciding to read MW while lying in bed.* BIG MISTAKE. Now I'm wide awake because my brain is in the equivalent mood of PUNCHING ITSELF IN THE FACE (in a good way, where you can't stop thinking about the plot and the characters and the events and et cetera over and over, and I need to do something to make it stop, and lying in bed staring blankly isn't one of those somethings). It's kind of funny to compare it to a lot of shounen ai or yaoi manga out there, even the ones that equally try to ramp up the violence/drama/shock value/heavily religious overtones and have intricate, well-thought out plot beyond just "oh look, hawt smex" ... and then to watch a master comics storyteller beat them all into the ground with a work from the late 70s that has an arguably "less appealing"/more retro or cartoonish art style, and add political conspiracies, science fiction, medical and historical references ... Go Osamu Tezuka, continue decimating with your awesomeness.

* That summary doesn't do justice to the book (it makes a lot of stuff sound like it happened out of nowhere lol), but then again most summaries don't.

OKAY YESTERDAAAYYY Joanna and I went out for Not Really Doodle Day. We went downtown to go shopping for materials for our selling art display and other artsy stuff like taking pictures of architecture. Now imagine a little squirrel and orange with inside-out umbrellas being blown about the city, and wet bags of stuff flying everywhere, and you have a pretty good idea of how it transpired lol. But we got a lot done! I might post some of my photos later, although most of them were pictures of discarded broken umbrellas that we ran across throughout our trip (including two that were sticking out of garbage cans). I thought it was amusing to document this. I'm still sad I didn't take a picture of the first one we saw that was splayed all over the sidewalk just outside my condo :{

Last but not least, nemi posted this and I thought it was too awesome not to share. Some of these matchups are just too, uh, apt.

Current Mood: aaaahhhhhhh

An old thought.
Friday nights used to be our big thing, didn't they? I called them "Guys' Night In" because it was usually just you, me, and

darkken (for whom it was actually morning) all having a Mexican standoff chat about whatever was on our minds. Often as not, I was the first one to go to bed, but I could count on times like that to keep me going to sleep content.

To what extent have I changed, that you can't talk to me anymore?

Thinking back to what I went through two years ago, I can't imagine a time where I felt so crushingly alone. So beaten down. I'd never been so deeply hurt, and more than anything I just wanted to go somewhere and be alone for a long time. Y'know, the typical response to that kind of thing. Find a private little sanctum and bleed for a while.

I also distinctly remember thinking "advice is useless to me" and "I don't have any real friends."

But of course I did. I had a lot of real friends to see me through that, pull me out of my little bubble of despair. Not even with advice - just with the simple truths I took for granted that I had friends who still cared.

My old friend Tenken was one of them.

Thing is, that's in the past. I've healed. I've fallen in love with a kind, intelligent, sweet, adult woman. I have a bit of a tighter grip on my future. I don't have any great pains, you could say - so...more often, I just find myself wishing I had my old friend Nick to talk to.

About anything. Because I could always talk with you about anything - anything that made the two of us laugh or think. They weren't always deep-set issues of life, but how much of what people talk about really is? It isn't the content; it's the context. Those talks we had count for personal growth.

I guess that's why I've really missed you: though you're older than I am, I feel like I've become the man I am alongside you. I met you back when I was 16. I'm 24 today. That's a third of my current life. Can you imagine the kind of person I'd be if I hadn't known you for that long? I try not to.

Any greatness I ever achieve can trace one of its threads back to the fact that you are my friend.

I'm on Invisible more often than not these days, but you should still send me an IM sometime; you are not obligated to be brimming with conversational topics when we talk. I don't think anybody is.

If you don't have anything to say, maybe I do. And maybe you'll have something to say about that.

Hey, maybe you can finally tell me if I got Nicolai right, eh?

I won't pretend to understand why you've done what you've done. But I've never had to pretend to be your friend, Nick - and that hasn't changed either. I don't anticipate that it ever will.

Current Mood: tired