Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

The other night, I noticed that I had a tennen tate-roll (just one, on the right). This reminded me, I don't know where the stereotype that such a 'do is sported by rich ladies (as exemplified by the source for the subject line, which applies just as well to me as to Ms. Azumano; also includes three-point ellipses, which are somewhat half-assed according to the Yuri Dōjō in a recent issue) originated. The only support that comes to mind is Ms. Daitokuji from PROJECT "A" KO, which was itself a parody (in her case, of a character from the original Macross, if memory serves; I never saw it anyway).

Closer to my heart is the much more commonly obvious trope of the character with a lot of melanin in the skin but not in the hair. (I call it a trope because it doesn't seem to appear in real life, except where darker hair has gone gray/white or has been artificially changed. I've never encountered any accounts of such localized albinism. It's probably also popular because of the abstraction needed to differentiate characters when all but one human race in the real world seem to have the-same-colored hair, a point that the Japanese unsurprisingly have a tradition of stylistically avoiding. Incidentally, I also have found myself unable to find reference information about races' physical characteristics on Wikipedia, which makes it difficult for me to check the authenticity of my work. On example that I don't plan to use but that has bothered me for a while: I don't recall having ever seen a man of American descent with facial hair. Is this genetic or cultural?) As far back in time as I've traced it (through idle thought, not actual research, as I don't know any good places to look for such information on Japanese media), there are two main possibilities:

1. Ms. "Storm" Munroe of Ame-comi fame. As Watsuki's liner notes often illustrate, these are well known in Japan (although not enough that she influenced him to use a similar character design in Ruro-Ken, even though, despite the fact that all but five of the characters in the 28 books are native Japanese, he goes quite far in variety, including at least a 1,000% range in height of grown men; maybe he was just too lazy to cut all that tone). Unless we can find someone way back there who was so direct about his influences, it would be pretty impossible to pin this one down.

2. The Dark Elves from Lodoss-tō Senki (an island whose name, despite the official Romanization, is spelled exactly the same as "Rhodes"). In case you were living under a rock in the '80s as I was, this series was a thinly veiled retelling of a Basic D&D campaign, as illustrated by the fact that the starting lineup consisted of six of the seven classes from the original "blue box" (excluding only the one that was stolen entirely from Tolkien's creation). Even back in those days, there was already the policy that the dark-skinned subraces of the good peoples are the evil ones, but D&D avoided some flak by saying the drow were actually black-skinned, not a human skin tone. Whether it's because they hadn't made that point yet or because of creative differences, that safety was not present in Lodoss, so (other than the being evil part) it translates just fine to humans in versions of the real world. This one could be easily confirmed or denied by asking someone who's actually watched the major Japanese animation and read Japanese comics from before that whether or not there were any examples then, but I don't think I know any such person.

By the way, in one of the extra stories from Sapphism, Ms. Lee (Ley?) tries to talk Ms. Yang down by telling her that her loss would devastate all the dark-skin fetishists. Of the examples given, I recognized only Akamatsu (no doubt due to my lack of attention to mainstream stuff), but all were called "-Sensei," so I imagine the other two are of the same ilk. But from what I've read of Akamatsu's, he's less so than I am: no major character in his first work, one who starts ranking at fifth-most-important then is displaced further by new ones in his second. As if it's not maniac enough already, my taste is mostly restricted to the illustrated versions, as in real life I'm more narcissistic, preferring my own two races (now that I've been out of high school long enough to break down my prejudice against non-white blood). I feel as if I don't much like real-world African features, which is a hell of a generalization considering that they're thought to be the oldest and thus now most diverse human race. (The aforementioned Ms. Munroe looks good, particularly with the 'do in the third movie.) I don't seem to have any such preconception about ladies of South Asian or American descent, probably because I don't see as much of them in American TV and movies.

In terms of more general tropes, is there some name for the one where the hero thinks up a clever plan but keeps it a secret from his friends in order to maintain audience suspense? I'd look around on the eponymous wiki, but from what I've seen it just seems to be a bunch of people typing whatever they feel like typing, so I'm not bothering to learn how to find things there.

Some other points about "Spaghetti Western（仮）" that I neglected to mention:

*Although I'm told that "Hispanic" is technically not a race but an ethnic group that includes both blacks and whites, I plan to make them all a tan tone to emphasize the difference from the outsider protagonist. For the same reason, I'm also tempted to have them speak Kansai dialect (mostly because of the "sai"), in which I'm even less fluent than standard. It might be more logical to give them stereotypical rural accents (using the copula verb "da" after verbs and adjectives and the emphasis particle "be"), but that always annoys me because it sounds like bad grammar.

*Also, since it's set in a Spanish-speaking area, I can hardly resist using the first-person pronoun 「予」 ("yo"). Unfortunately, I only know one character who uses it, so I don't have much on which to base the speech patterns. (He's an emperor, so it may not even be appropriate for anyone in the setting.) I've commented before on all the new first-person pronouns I encountered when I first read that series, but I never saw any of them again, except the one that's used by two characters therein, which turned out to be all over the place.

As you may have noticed, I made a tag and a database for my shorts.

Expanding on my comments on the first one, I'm not sure why I claimed that I would learn better, as that doesn't seem plausible. Also, I likely misremembered the character limit. In yuri shimai (which I've been rereading for other stuff), at least, it was far dinkier than 400. I may just end up posting all my comments on the Web and just say 「こちらではスペースが足りませんので、下のURLへどうぞ」 or some such.

Meanwhile, the fact that I've been using plurals should tell you that I've thought of another one, even if you can't access the database. I just thought I might make a spaghetti Western for the hell of it, and it happened to be in relation to the YuriHime Bumon that I thought up an actual story for that genre. (At this rate, I oughta call it "Project Ichijinsha Taishō" or something.) Of course, I've barely even seen any Westerns (probably less than the number of space Westerns), and I'd require a hell of a lot of research to make it historically accurate. This is also my only chance to use 19th-century firearms, so the ideas I can only use there bring more clutter to the plot.

Incidentally, it's interesting that Clint's famous line is not actually from a Western, just from a character who acts like he's in one. It doesn't seem to be listed on Wikiquote, but as you can see here, the line is completely changed in Japanese. Fortunately, I was planning on wording the official translations to convey my messages and to sound good, not to be exact translations of the English (or vice versa).

Also, it occurred to me that even Project AnthraXX has much more focus on male characters than anything published in YuriHime Comics (unless you count the one with the transsexual), so maybe that wouldn't be such a good place for it either. Maddie's Maids might work, but considering it takes place after the events of AnthraXX, there's no need to be thinking much on that anytime soon.

1. You get three strikes, but you're not out. What do you call this phenomenon?


2. What size is the engine in this kart?




3. THE SIMPSONS : FUTURAMA :: LEGO : LEGO

In what way?


4. What fictional character seems to have a penchant for four-letter words that begin with "lan"?

We were hiding out in some Japanese school.

I remember almost nothing from this one, but it was a combination of Raki☆Sta (particularly the bit starting here) and another school series. (It's been so long, I've forgotten what the latter was.) I've never even read or watched the former, but it's one of the ones blitzcon told me he was going to show me long, long ago (but not early enough that I could actually get the videos), so I've been breaking my usual rule in its case. Consequently, most of my knowledge of it is from Ms.?† Maitake's illustrations and comics (although I haven't actually been reading the posts since I haven't even started the series yet), which is undoubtedly skewing my preconceptions of its content.

†You may remember that I fouled up a while back and that I later decided not to worry about it. I neglected to mention that Ms.? Maitake replied the very next day and pointed out that it was clearly stated on the site that duplicating things without permission was prohibited, which rather scuppered a post I'd made.

Meanwhile, when I contacted her/him to ask whether I could post direct links to individual posts, I decided to ask about her/his gender so I could address her/him less awkwardly, but she/he declined to say. (Japanese writers/illustrators sometimes take PNs that would suggest genders different from their own, but I've never seen anything proving that any have made false claims about this. Then again, nor do I have any proof that any Japanese comic writer/illustrator has ever been captured on camera (with the exception of Akamatsu, whose mug I do not fondly remember seeing, particularly considering that he's actually married to a lady who's more than 13 years his junior now), so that's hard to say with certainty, either. You can take this into account for my generalizations in the next paragraph.) I would tend to assume that she/he's a man like me due to the demographics (?) of what she/he seems to find interesting, but that's a bit of a disservice to Ms. Hayashiya, Ms. oneirotsai, and many others. Of course, in English, there aren't any honorifics‡ except title prefixes, so it doesn't make much difference; in Japanese, I've just been using speech patterns somewhere in-between.

I do find it interesting that I see ladies who draw stuff aimed at male audiences all the time (with Ms. Takahashi being the classic example), but never confirmed examples of men drawing stuff for ladies. (The fact that ladies draw lots of yuri, yet I never hear about men drawing much yaoi, is less surprising.) The closest I've seen is Fujieda, who has been suppressing his style (judging by Iono Sama Fanatics, his only independent work I've read) in various YuriHime Comics mooks (and of course the compilations), but although they always use feminine second-person pronouns, the content of even the main series is more moe than shōjo, so he's still a bit short of Jack Nicholson.

‡In my research for Projects Abdiel and Homuncupunk, I was surprised to find that in modern English, the one language I've encountered that has almost no ways of showing respect, we have retained the plural/formal singular objective from the early modern variety as our sole (before conjugation) second-person pronoun.

What cartoon character greets people two-thirds as enthusiastically as Fat Albert?

For some reason, the Waffen-SS of the Last Battalion were not a military group but an urban gang, and it was up to us Ninja Turtles to deal with them. The Hauptsturmführer's work was easy to identify, as there weren't many others running around with Broomhandle Mausers these days.† Oddly enough, Dok‡ wasn't actually doing anything evil, just researching at a local library.

†It had been replaced as a service pistol even by WWII, although some officers (such as him) still had personal ones. As the only confirmed Werwolfes are him and Ms. Rip-Van, we don't know anything about how they're spawned, so for all we know he may have been a soldier for decades before that. Interestingly enough, the powers they are seen to have seem to relate to firearms: Ms. Rip-Van's dancing musket ball and the Hauptsturmführer's ability to make two long-barreled Mausers look like one normal piece when holstered （笑）. (Speaking of extensible barrels, DM had to make a similar excuse so that typical slugthrower rifles (exemplified by the Czerka Adventurer) can double as BAW E-5 Droid Blaster Carbines due to the changes he's made to the plot.) Tangentially, I'm also amused by the fact that humans like Walter can chop up people with mono-wire, while vampires (there's one who shows up later on, not to spoil anything by saying where) can chop up skyscrapers. There's also the fact that Walter is a gunsmith, yet he fights exclusively with mono-wire. (I've thought of a logical reason for that, but that's ( a spoiler for Book 9. ))

Admittedly, there are Mauser variants chambered in modern calibers, so his work might not be identifiable by the ammo and brass left at the scene if he uses one of those. However, each firearm has a distinct pattern of marks that it leaves on each bullet from the rifling in the barrel. I think I may have heard that it's possible to determine the model as well, but I failed to find confirmation on that; still, they would be able to tell that all of the rounds came from the same two weapons, making it easier to link it to a specific person.

‡Since they're German, I assumed it was an abbreviation of the German word. I don't know whether they use such an affectionate term in German, but I don't imagine Hirano does either. (The dwarf is known as "Chef.") Using German words can lead to some odd things; this one is the same as an Ork word, and "Death Korps" is a bit of a false friend. . . .

I've a lot of short little posts to type, yet I don't even get around to them:

*The primaries (running out of time, dammit!)
*A couple of movies I watched lately
*Holidays
*News items
*Vocab

I'm not sure about where to draw the line on how much to put in a post (particularly with the kansō): enough to take a significant chunk out of my backlog, or little enough that I actually type them and get them out of the way? (Although I've been thinking about this ever since I started getting swamped, it actually came to mind now because I found that PENGUIN GIRL FOUЯTEEN had been animated when I wasn't looking and it's in 11-minute episodes, so I may actually manage to watch it, unlike the last half-dozen series I downloaded.) Either way, I doubt I'll ever get caught up with all of it. Maybe I should work more on prioritizing or something.

David Morgan-Mar recently posted about Webcomic time and RPG time, both concepts with which I'm quite familiar. The former is of course just as prevalent in other media, including print comics. For instance, in Nana-Misu, the characters have passed through seasonal events several times (including, for instance, two Valentines) but still seem to be the same year in school as they were when they started. In a more extreme example, Ramma 1/2 ran for nine years without any of the characters aging. Less dramatically, STRANGERS IN PARADISE strongly shows the author's changes in style and purpose over the 14 years of writing and drawing, while the characters only aged about eight years. Also amusingly, the kaki-oroshi in CHIBI DEVIL! 2 shows Ms. Satō and Ms. Tōdō in their high school uniforms, despite the fact that the former graduated a couple of years ago in the show, meaning it must have been earlier than that in the original source material (which is confirmed if you look at the publication date of the compilation).

All of this explains why I'm very vague about the temporal setting of Projects AnthraXX and Maddie's Maids, which are set in an approximation of the real world. I'd like them to be generally contemporary, but I don't know whether circumstances will allow me to release them correspondingly (if at all).

Apparently the part that I forgot was about his claim that mushrooms did not affect whether or not I could break blocks. He's a young whippersnapper with no respect for the old ways, after all. The night after that was about Lord Carnarvon (or perhaps Indiana Jones) suffering the Curse of King Tut, as well as something about TRANSFORMERS.

1. Pick 10 of your favorite movies [TV shows]
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie [TV show].
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Fill in the film title once it's guessed.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions.

I've altered this as little as possible to make it viable; it also includes shows that I used to like, to fill out the numbers. (I wanted quotes that I remembered, so that narrowed the list quite a bit.) I also randomized the order by a method that's a tribute to one of the shows. Also, one was from an episode that I just saw the other day.

1. "Pathetic human race. Arranging their knowledge by category just made it easier to absorb. Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands! Ha ha ha ha!" ( blitzcon )

2. "I've spent my whole life stickin' it to the man. If I do this, I'll be the man. I don't think I can be the man." ( phoenix_talon )

3. "IT'S ALIVE, ALIVE! I've always wanted to say that." ( phoenix_talon )

4. "Don't touch that dial. And, if your TV has a dial, go buy a new one."

5. "What's the matter? Teacher's pet got cold feet? Anytime, pretty boy!"

6. "This oven door has run off with your wife, so you decide to gear-up and get even."

7. "Urge to kill... fading... fading... fading - rising! Fading... fading... gone." ( phoenix_talon )

8. "I let him think for a while 'cause I knew he had the answer. I knew it was a good answer, and he was going to tell it to me. 'Cause when you ask a question, you expect an answer. That's the way it works... question, answer, answer, question. If he gave the answer, I'd have to come up with the question. That would be Jeopardy[!]. That's wrong."

9. "Now calm down son, listen to daddy. It's just a bad dream. I promise you, Senator Thurmond is not in your closet. That's a good boy. Yes, okay you go back to bed now."

10. "There are over 13,000 cabs in New York City, but there is only one that pays you." ( Ms. mizuno_youko )

If I wouldn't put off these dinky ones, I wouldn't be so backed up. . . .

The land of this particular MMORPG had the peculiarity that powerful spells were performed through rituals including singing particular tunes. I was playing a diminutive furbolg rogue by the name of Boo-Boo, learning under a more experienced character known as Yogi. For some reason, when he demonstrated a spell, he turned into Minnie Mouse.

Although I don't comment on journals of people I don't know, I do read them regularly (except the parts about cooking). The former (along with her posts on lililicious and daily_yuri, where I don't even read the comments anymore because of the negative ones) is an excellent source of all sorts of yuri- and lesbianism-related information. (Although I didn't need the part about Hiper Radio!! because she told me about her source (which has RSS), it was good to hear about the fact that only a very small part of the audio file was relevant—and which part that is.) The latter contains interesting essays on the travails of an artist. Although I avoid art like the plague, I think this sort of thing is relevant to anyone in a creative field.

The few things I have in common with these people also mean that they occasionally remind me about things that I've forgotten, such as:

*I should reread the good parts of Lens no Mukō sometime. Apparently I don't remember much of anything about it. I'm very bad about remembering details (particularly in such non-flashy stories as these) from only going through them once. That was the reason that draskireis threatened to kill me once. . . .

*There was a regular character named "Redd Herring" in A PUP NAMED Scooby-Doo. As you may have noticed, I have a reason for the name for almost every character I create (both because I'm bad at making them up and because I love allusions and trivia), but rarely in such a heavy-handed (?) manner. Of course, that may have something to do with the fact that almost everything I ever make bottoms out at PG-13.