Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

Upon closer inspection, it was probably just Ron's big-ass revolver. Speaking of his weapons, I find it odd that they feature him holding up the big stone fist and saying, "five-fingered Molly" or some such, considering that when he's using it (I've only seen the end of the first one and none of the comics, so I don't know whether it's a gauntlet, a metamorphosis, or what) it only has four fingers (counting the thumb). It also seems unusual to use "boy" for a muscular 6-ft.-1-in. superhero with that much facial hair. Judging by the CLIX, that's because the "baby" is the size of a grade-schooler.

The pilot flew the chopper over campus as I laid down fire with my eight-round-cylinder-fed LEGO grenade launcher, with two plug-in six-rounders attached.

Apparently I had the post-apocalyptic eishi-chō ability to use a really long, heavy weapon without anything supporting the muzzle end. (Meanwhile, I still haven't gotten around to watching the last episode.) I also overlooked the fact that the two smaller launchers were plugged into chambers in the main one, which would prevent the cylinder from rotating properly. Anyway, this was brought on from some movie trailer or CM (don't remember which one) that I saw where someone was using a six-rounder that actually exists in real life—and perhaps too much playing with LEGOs.

I was playing a game starring Mario, Luigi, and Koopa, set in a house that was much too big for them (like the stage in SUPER MARIO LAND 2, only 3-D). Bowser [Koopa]'s goal was apparently to jump up and down on tables to punch holes in them so they'd sink. A female player or character also questioned why Luigi, despite being the younger brother, had a larger and bushier mustache.

I was Sano from Ruro-Ken, and I was staying at a modern gym for training. For some reason, I couldn't find the men's locker room, until I realized that it was one of the places through which I'd rampaged looking for it.

Edit (2008.06.25): Apparently old habits die hard. I haven't been interested in such video games since before I grew a brain, after all. I don't know where they would've gotten the idea to give a generic dog name to a turtle—perhaps he's supposed to be a rock star (as his courses' BGMs in MARIO KART games suggest). Of course, even in countries where they voice the "é" as in the original French, it wouldn't be that way, but we all know that American translators are crazy Germans.

Edit (2008.06.26): Maybe it wasn't all because of that crazy American video game I bought from arifyn; this may also have contributed.

We were hanging out at some nature museum on a forested planet during the reign of Emperor (A.) Skywalker.

Though it was just this morning, I remember virtually nothing about this one after doing all that work on the previous two.

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.

In my adventures, I discovered the Word of Power that could destroy all existence: "Th." Of course, it was only valid if voiced starting in the 12th tone and glissandoed to the 13th, but it was still dangerous knowledge.

This was of course an upshot from researching the name of the protagonist of another (than the one I mentioned*) short story I happened to think up on Wiktionary. I am aware that, having never learned a language where tone is particularly important, I have no idea how to pronounce it, but that's true for pretty much anyone saying a name from a language he doesn't know. (I chose which pronunciation to use for each character just for variety, and I couldn't even post the "ǔ" correctly in the table because it only allows ASCII characters.) It's also related to fantasy's concept of Words of Power, as seen in such media as Project Artificer, Book of Vile Darkness, and a classic example of Rich Burlew claiming that Wizards are idiots because he changed the rules to make less sense.

*As you can see, I'm planning to post follow-up thoughts on the first one and an introduction to the second.

I was going to the store and saw a big display for the latest MY OTOME series, which caught me off guard, since I normally would have heard of it through my usual sources much earlier (if I even encountered it in America at all, which I haven't for these series). I also overheard someone talking about how Ms. Armitage has her own TV show accompanying every episode (although it was only a DVD extra for one disc in the original series), as well as her own HP you can visit and her own phone number you can call to get her telling you she can't talk now because she's busy having guts and stuff.

We had an alliance of kami-tsukai from the two R.O.Ds, like in THE TV. I was Ms. Readman, which meant it was a pain in the ass because I had to speak in a high-pitched voice and always use polite forms.

Of course, from what little I remember, I was talking to Ms. King, which means that I'd be using even politer forms if I were myself. Also, if I were really Ms. Readman, neither of those things would be difficult. . . .

We were house-sitting for arifyn's parents, but not in any house I've known them as inhabiting. For some reason, there were numerous spiders infesting books in the building (despite the fact that books don't have empty space in them when closed), and I got in trouble when Mother got back and found that I had turned on all the lights to scare them away. Then we had to shovel snow in the yard. Also, there was an evil dictator at a war crimes court, and (unlike in the U.S., where trials are not allowed to be filmed and thus are reenacted from transcripts) he was displayed live on the multi-faceted side of a big-ass office building.

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. . . .

As was the case with Spanish back when I thought I knew it, I'm planning also to publish official Japanese versions of my projects. (Of course, as I've noted here, my first one might be a bit heavy on the English even in the Japanese version.) I'm far from fluent, of course, but this way I can provide translations that are much truer to the author's intent than most. The expanded exposure this should provide would also give me a chance to come into contact with people who are fluent, which means I could have a chance to actually learn the language, and perhaps impose on someone to correct my work. (I think I'd have more trouble bothering to make the rest of the appropriate site bilingual to cater to these people.)

Another thing that I've pondered at times is that, since I'm going to have to learn to draw anyway, it would be really nifty if someday I could get one of my works published in my belovèd YuriHime S (not the main Comic YuriHime, as I don't imagine I'll ever manage to write works appropriately feminine or comedic for there—with Ms.? Natsuneko's work there, I might have hope, but it's nothing compared to Picard's, as I'll note later). If I did manage to achieve widespread popularity as noted above, they might let me do it cold turkey, but the more likely way is through the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō （「大正」ではなくて「大賞」） or other yomi-kiri (the comic equivalent of a pilot episode). The problem with that is that, as I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't think of many good one-shot ideas lately, as I'm so absorbed in crafting intricate webs of full-sized projects. (Even Project Cow Level, which was pre-planned to be a short, simple "practice" project, is expected to run to about one graphic novel's worth.)

And yet, oddly enough, I happened to think of an interesting one-shot idea yesterday. Although it relies on a lot of tropes, it has a major setting element that I haven't seen used for this before, and unlike some, the premise is distinctly yuri, not just a romance that happens to be between two ladies. (Oddly enough, the unusual setting for a yuri story may have caused me to have a dream last night about sleeping with a man (don't remember for sure). If so, at least I was the seme. . . .) Of course, as a short story, it doesn't have much to reveal without actually writing it, and I'd rather keep the good parts to myself just to avoid anyone else stealing them. (Yes, that's my delusions of grandeur talking again.)

If this somehow did come to pass, there's the problem that the format only allows 400 characters of commentary, much less than I'd normally use. I'd probably put most of it (and the official English translation) on the Web as a supplement to the published part, as Ms. Miyahara does. For the actual printed version, I'm thinking the essentials are along the lines of 「男で申し訳御座いません。いつか必ずレディーにもよろこんで頂けるまんがを描ける様になりますから、今は違った味でがまんして下さいませな。」 (although I haven't bothered to boot up Word to get a character count).

The "chigatta aji" bit overlaps with the question of how predisposed these Japanese folks will be to publishing stuff by some American git. I can't do much about that, but I might consider working in a more Japanese style than my own. For some reason, it seems to be coming out with a larger-than-usual proportion of pseudo-comical elements despite the fact that I don't have a sense of humor (perhaps to make up for the fact that romance is an alien concept to me), so it'll be an outlier in my portfolio in more ways than one (hey, more dovetailing with the post subject).

By the way, in the excessively megalomaniacal mōsō situation that I actually got to do a serial, Project AnthraXX seems at this point as if it would actually be palatable. Of course, it would be helluva Webcomic time in a quarterly mook. . . .

Fortunately, I managed to find my MARIO KARTridge. Unfortunately, I was munching on my old Skaven miniatures.

It's too bad I lost that Game Pak; it's pretty pointless, but can be entertaining (more so than METROID) for a moment every once in a while. I probably wouldn't have lost it if the purpose-made DS case had a place to put DS cartridges in it. . . .

They were going to visit the mystical hermit, who lived in the forest just beyond the chain-link fence at the edge of the abandoned playground. Fortunately, he was willing to meet them halfway, but he didn't look particularly mystical in the synthetic-material winter jacket. He also spotted me spying on them from above.

For some reason, when I fly, I can hover just fine, but when I move I have to swoop, like the annoying cape-flying in SUPER MARIO WORLD. Apparently that's the wrong kind, which explains why I haven't manifested dragon disciple powers (or even sorcery) so far.