Fortress of Perpetual Midnight

先書いたブログは『Memories』の事もおしえてくれました。みじかい事意外は何ももんく言えません。こんな小さな作品の為だけにちゃんと作られた世界です。

いつも思うが、私には日本のゲームは使いにくいです。（げんいんはかんがえ方の違いでしょうか？）だが、この場合、ふつう見ぬポイントが沢山あります。

※セーブデータにノートを書く事が出来ます。（ふつうはどこまで進んでいる事と主人公に付けた名前以外ではんべつ出来ません。）

※「まだ読んでいない所まで進む」コマンドがあります。（これは全ルートを読む事にべんりです。）

※CGだけではなく、立ち絵のアルバムもあります。（こちらはあとでネタにするつもりです。）

※声は付いていないので、お母様が家にいらっしゃってもプレイ出来ます。（いや、こちらは私せんようのポイントですが。）

私の絵が進めれば小ツをいくつかこのゲームエンジンを使ってビジュアルノベルにした方がかんたんかもしれません。

I've had an idea for some more æsthetic elements in my works. It's posted on the wiki because it's going to be useful in an ongoing manner. I currently only have a few ideas; assuming it works for non-members, discussion there would be preferable, but here would also work. I should also add my current Laws of Projectics to the "behind the scenes" section.

I've often thought that the Discovery Channel and JEOPARDY! may be colluding to synchronize episodes with certain trivia in them on the same day (in the former case, generally with reruns of CA$H CAB), but trying to gauge that with such a broad range of topics would be a statistical nightmare. But, more surprisingly, holy air cannon, Grantman! Admittedly, it's one day off, but I don't generally get to use the computer on Sundays. The DM (like Trebek) works quite a ways in advance, and I sincerely doubt that he has an inside man in the American TV industry. Amusingly enough, they also played the second Bond episode of MYTHBUSTERS on Saturday, although sadly not the one where they test the item whose use was cut from the movie just to prove the DM wrong. Incidentally, Bond is one of the film franchises where they couldn't get the rights to the footage, so they had to use their own graphics to illustrate (although I find the MATRIX bit more amusing, considering that both stars were crew for the film in question). In this case, for some reason, they decided to give Jaws a mustache.

Back to Chekov: I, too, really prefer to organize things well enough to use this principle. There are, of course, exceptions. Red herrings I generally use for actually legitimate story points (unlike crime shows*, where they're there to throw viewers off course, make things realistic, and take up time). However, I do make heavy use of oblique references to other things, which help flesh things out.

*I noticed an interesting exception the other day, on which I will expand later.

I still haven't gotten around to typing the second part of my thoughts about the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō, but I have posted some blurbs for the shorts. I'd appreciate it if anyone is actually interested in reading any of them. "Diamond in the Rough" is the one of which I almost got all the way through the rough draft (because I thought of it first, not because it's at the bottom of the list), but I haven't gotten around to finishing it or making all the changes I've thought up since then. That's the trouble with momentum, I guess. I also see that I'm really bad at writing prose (since I mostly only read dialogue).

arifyn mentioned that he's not reading much of my stuff in Japanese because it's a pain in the ass with the Chinese characters. That means that I can draw the line above reading English and below looking things up (as it's just cut-and-paste online). I thought that BABEL FISH might be useful to at least give you a general idea of what I'm saying, but it turns out it was even worse than I thought, to the point of ignoring white space and changing the names of the title characters in the draft I posted earlier to "thin D," "beer tris," and "thornback me" (which, though amusing, doesn't get people to read it).

In general, one expects that through continuing exposure to some element, one would become accustomed or desensitized to it. So it's somewhat disturbing that the more I interact with human beings, the more I learn to hate and fear them. (I'll hopefully elaborate on that later.) This is making life difficult enough that, time and again, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to give up.

One interesting thing that I've noticed is that I don't remember ever having seen Japanese people do this. It may be because of how little experience therein, but statistically speaking, I should have found at least one flame in the fora, blogs, wiki talk pages, and personal messages by now if it's anywhere near as bad as people conversing in English—and that's the sort of thing that I remember. It almost seems like it's true that Japanese people are ridiculously polite to strangers. Of course, it may simply be that my unfamiliarity with the language makes it more difficult for me to read how they mean things, but that still means it's less hurtful to me and may help me build up a bit of confidence (and practice my language skills and build contacts*). The one obvious way to do this is Yuri na Hibi's place for sharing information. I have a few older comics that I didn't find introduced there, so I'm thinking of asking if there's interest in me posting about them.

First, of course, I really should type the second installment of that stuff I promised Ms. darkenez0_o I'd post. This has been hugely delayed due to the fact that I find it difficult to schedule a couple of hours to work on a single blog post these days. The agreement didn't state the extent of what I'd type, but I'm planning to try to catch up with the current issue and call it quits, as from that point on, it'd be easy enough for anyone who can play the subject to buy them and read them herself.

*My therapist even suggested that I talk about getting people to draw my shorts. for me, but I'm a long way away from having anyone that friendly yet.

Someone else also complains (admittedly in jest) about the fact that they make laws that aren't supposed to be followed. If you drive at or below the speed limit, you're a roadblock, and if there's one thing experience teaches me (about which I really should post), it's that you can't trust any man to act rationally even about the slightest things. And, of course, if they expected us to follow the laws, they wouldn't allow the police to drive well over the speed limit and make random U-turns all the time (not just when actually chasing someone or get to a crime scene, when they're supposed to use the lights on the roofs).

They also had an interview with a couple of Oscar-nominee/winners. The oldest significant memory I have of Downey is when my brother and I were watching one* of those movie CMs where they list and show a bunch of stars at the end. When they said and showed, "Robert Downey Jr.," we both said, "as Al Pacino?" The hair and the lines around his eyes did it.

Anyway, the comment about blackface relates to yellowface (which I had just looked up the other day, don't remember in what context), which segues to something I coincidentally (only noticed because I happened to see it mentioned on the front page right before I left work) found in the paper. I guessed what it was from the blurb, but was somewhat amused by the fact that they gave that headline, considering the fact that it was about English society (which they didn't even mention). Still, when I looked it up, I found here that, despite the fact that the play itself makes no attempt at having anything to do with Japan (as exemplified by how I searched for the URL with the word that I thought I could spell the same way and that would be in the article, which happened to be "poo"), Gilbert actually tried to put accurate Japanese elements in the production. (Incidentally, this section is also interesting, particularly the fact that they didn't argue against one bit being sexist. . . .) My mother also disagrees with the description of Peterson as "fluent," although I don't know on what bases she makes that claim. (Considering that I had only taken two years, which doesn't get so far as to actually learn much of any Japanese, I wouldn't have known the difference when I had the chance to observe for myself.) In any case, I don't see any need to go to it, as there probably won't be anyone I would recognize except Peterson himself, and even if I do get to speak a bit of Japanese with him, I'd also have to let him régale his current students with tales of how entertaining I am.

*I don't remember what it was. I thought it was Zodiac, but the pictures don't look right (particularly the ones with glasses, which would have prevented us from getting that impression). I remember the shot was of him sitting in what looked a room in a home, looking at a three-quarter angle. Does anyone happen to have any idea what that would have been?

You probably haven't noticed that I've added a bunch more ideas to my shorts since the last time I actually announced one (although I have obliquely mentioned ones that I didn't announce in the previous two posts with the tag). I'm considering moving the list to Google Docs so that you don't have to join to look at it. (Wikispaces doesn't seem to have as good a system for editing databases.) Incidentally, with this many ("¿Oro?" being rather long), I could probably even make up an entire graphic novel doohicky (thus meaning that people would actually be able to get copies after the mook sells out), if I could get someone to publish it.

On the topic of publication, I finally got around to examining the latest rules for the Ichijinsha Comic Taishō. An older version can be found here; as it appears to be the same other than the facts that the money amounts have changed and the newer version has added typos, I'll refer directly to the categories there:

受賞者特典 (Prizes): There are two overall prizes (the special one and the regular one), which both include publication of the winning entry and a contract for a serial. That would be damned nifty, but unfortunately, as I've mentioned, I don't currently have one that looks good even for S, much less the one that has a category in the contest. As this section is not specific to category, I imagine the judges' choices would be colored by which magazine/mook would benefit from it (for instance, not likely that they'd give both prizes to one in the same category). Below those two are the top prizes for the four magazine/mooks. Each includes publication of the winning entry and the winner's next story. All of the above are interesting in that they give you a contract to publish stuff that the judges haven't seen (or that you haven't even written) yet; I suppose there has to be a balance between the guarantee and the exit clauses in the contract depending on how good these works are. Also, it appears that they don't have to give away these prizes unless there are worthy entries, as only two of the six had winners this year. There are lower prizes that don't give you contracts, but still give you a patron editor for your continuing work; these ones are apparently not limited in minimum or maximum number of winners, as there were twenty-four winners between four categories and three levels of success, not covering all combinations of the two.

応募資格 (Entry Qualifications): You can't enter if you've previously published something through ID, but I imagine if you have, you have a step up on getting your other stuff published without having to enter a contest. Also, it's interesting that the work you submit is only forbidden from having been published professionally, so in theory, you could submit something you've already sold as a dōjinshi. Of course, I'd probably lose money trying to sell those while living in America, so the more pertinent point to me is that I could, for instance, post the works on the Web first. There is of course the chance that someone else would see my works and steal ideas. My social worker suggests that I look a bit into international copyright law, but for now, I think that I should be pretty safe just pointing out to the authorities (in this case, the judges) and having them take that into account.

応募規定 (Entry Specifications): Some stuff about ink type, paper size, file format, et cetera. I don't think I'd ever heard of MO before, despite all the Japanese stuff I read. Apparently you have to send in the text as a separate piece from the actual laid-out manuscript. One thing I find unusual is that you're free to choose the length of the story, although obviously the judges are going to take whether or not it's worth the space into account (for instance, a greater number of pages than the mook itself would probably be a bad idea).

必要記入事項 (Required Included Information): A bunch of stuff to write on the back of page 1

結果発表 (Announcement of Results): When the winners will be published. I'm not going to make this deadline, so the current one is irrelevant.

原稿返却 (Manuscript Return): As usual, you have to add an SASE if you want your stuff back. Of course, this isn't important if you send a digital copy.

諸権利 (Various Rights): ID gets all rights to publish the work, so if you've published it as an amateur as noted above, you'll probably have to take it down. (I'd also want to give daily_yuri gift illustrations to convince people not to distribute bootlegs. This would be a lot easier if I could get a compilation out quickly at least in Japan, so they actually have a legal way of getting the stuff if they miss the mook.) It's also interesting that they reserve the rights for screening and performance, which means that they have considered the possibility of making adaptations of the works in other media. One point that sticks out is the fact that they get the rights to the entries for all prizes, including the ones that aren't high enough that they get contracts for publication. I haven't seen any of those published so far, so I hope they don't just sit on them. They don't keep the ones that don't win as with RPG Superstar, which puts me in the odd position of hoping I win either one of the top six prizes or nothing at all. I also notice that it only says they get the rights to the work itself. I hope they don't want ownership of specific content, as in particular I'm using overlapping settings with some of my projects. Ms. Eiki has sold a spin-off that she couldn't get published about the same characters as her pro works as a dōjinshi, but she didn't get there through the contest, so she's likely to have different terms.

This is long enough for the moment, so I'll talk more about general concerns for the contest later. I should look over the non-contest submission guidelines, too.

A recent few that I haven't noted:

1. I thought of a nifty conversion for the Ork Warboss from Black Reach (not BLEACH Rack) that I bought on impulse. It's too bad it was a dream, because I like nifty conversions, and at present I don't know of any real use for that miniature. Still, it is nice that they allow me to buy things that aren't normally available without buying a bunch of other stuff that I don't want, particularly now that the source has cracked down on such practices.

2. Ms. Sōryū and Shinji had finished a fight, so they decided to take a shower in a nearby waterfall. (Yeah, I imagine that L.C.L stuff is pretty unpleasant. Then again, I don't even like water.) Ms. Sōryū ended up falling asleep before getting dressed, so Shinji tried to kiss her. Fortunately, he was interrupted by their mascot chara, who appeared to be an unidentified creature from somewhere in Class Carnivora. This mascot was similar to a figurine of wondrous power, except that its figurine form was the same size as its living form and was mutable. In this case, it did its job by transforming into a loud gramophone. The shower scene may have come from the fact that I had just decided to use such neta in one of my shorts, but why did I have to throw in a bloody man? At least his conduct was less repulsive than the scenes where Ms. Sōryū was sleeping at the beginning and end of END. (Speaking of which, I'm still not sure whether END was one movie or two like GRAY SIDE and BLUE SIDE, as it's from back when I had no reliable sources.) Sadly, from a series like Eva, it doesn't seem too far out of character for her to strip in front of him even when she's awake.

3. In the first episode (probably of CSI: MIAMI or some such, judging by the content and continuity), the husband got kicked out of the mansion. In the sequel, he decided to infiltrate and rob it. This was probably inspired by an episode from Sunday, but I don't remember much, including whether or not it was actually after I watched it. . . .

4. As Tony Stark (not Tony Stark), I was a member of an élite team of commandos, their MVP due to the fact that I was the only one who could hover and fire highly miniaturized explosives, which I used to effect during a skirmish in an abandoned factory. Unfortunately, when dealing with non-laser-sword diplomacy, continuity errors ensued, as I couldn't remember whether my mask retracted to the front (as with the knights of the Northlands in Project Artificer) or rear.

The subject line is another plug for my constantly expanding line of shorts (on which I'll comment further in another post). The theme for the titles is somewhat troublesome due to the fixed number of choices.

A) People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blogs & replace any question that they dislike with a new question formulated by themselves.
Sadly, it's more interesting to answer other people's questions than ones I've specifically chosen to answer. I could have made up some questions in expectation of people I'm tagging, but

B) Tag 8 people to do this quiz & those who are tagged cannot refuse. These people must state who they were tagged by & cannot tag the person whom they were tagged by. Continue this game by sending it to other people.
I was tagged. Really. See here for details. (Interestingly, I also typed "Avalon" into another field in a form I was filling out at the same time as I was getting to this.) In terms of my tags, I considered whether I should tag people to galvanize those who don't post or to get more out of those who do, but decided that the latter would be less misanthropic. I'm looking at you, arifyn, aseop_, bladeforge, blitzcon, Ms. darkenez0_o, Ms. Maelwaedd, Ms. oneirotsai (despite the fact that you're tentatively not having an LJ anymore), and phoenix_talon. (Wow, I really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel by that criterion to get eight.)

1. What are your nicknames?
Some call me "Mike," and my pen name is "Mikael Wai-Am Wong." I haven't been called "Mikey" for a decade or two, as far as I know. I guess that means you can guess what my real given name is, but that's a far cry from identity theft. (Hell, my legal name is four words.) Interestingly enough, when I was a child, I went through a phase where I required people to call me only by my full first name, which only caused my friends to try to make me angry by calling me be an abbreviation. I don't know why I wanted that. Interestingly enough, my brother now makes the same demand of others, despite the fact that he's 21 and has no way of knowing that I once did it.

2. What do you do before bedtime?
Get home from work, take drugs, eat a bit

3. What fandom(s) are you most into at the moment?
I don't really do much with fandom. I have a couple of fan works listed as starter projects, but neither is terribly important to me.

4. What is your favorite scent?
I've commented on this earlier, so I'll just say that I don't have one.

5. What video[ ]games are you playing at the moment?
I've just finished ~an epic~ (and haven't gotten around to posting my corrections to the faulty information I gave), and I've been slacking on most of my training, so just Brain Age² at the moment.

6. What do you eat the most?
Probably frozen peas

7. What's your favorite pair of socks?
I don't differentiate between the socks that I wear, not even to put them in pairs.

8. What was your first big fandom?
The only time I really paid any attention to any fan community was with Slayers.

9. Is there anything that has made you happy in the past few days?
I've read some amusing stuff (to be noted in a later post and had some interesting ideas. Also, anytime work stops is nice.

10. Do you have a good body-image?
No, but I don't care about that anyway. I have a policy of wearing trousers when I go to public places.

11. Is being tagged fun?
As I've noted before, I find memes amusing to do. They're also an excuse to tell people things about myself, despite the fact that they're not interested.

12. What websites do you visit daily?
This has not changed since last time I was asked, except that I've started using My Yahoo! but haven't managed to get it to be routine yet.

13. What city, country would you most want to live in if not where you are now?
Currently, I'm working on trying to get to Bellevue, USA.

14. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
See above for notes on whether or not I was tagged. In that semi-hypothetical situation, I would say that I don't know her, but she seems like a good person who is perhaps a bit trusting of strangers and not easily creeped out.

15. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head?
That's already a field in LJ posts for that.

16. What’s your favorite item of clothing?
My black shirt. It's too bad I can't find more of those.

17. What's better: to give or to receive?
To receive, although it's somewhat irritating when I get something I don't want.

18. What would you do if you see $100 lying on the ground?
That depends a lot on the rest of the situation. In general, if there's no obvious dropper present, I would probably turn it in to whatever authorities have jurisdiction (the police, a building lost and found, et cetera).

19. What items could you not go without during the day?
"Can" is a hyperbole in most cases. I have kept living for 24 hours without pretty much anything at one point or another, but I'm the worst for wear without my glasses, drugs, and nourishment.

20. What should you be doing right now?
Typing more posts I've been asked to post, following up on jobs, working on projects and other such stuff

21. Do you always use conditioner when washing your hair?
Yes. It's included in the shampoo.

Anything I haven't bothered to fill in is noted by an ellipsis or a broken link. If you remind me, I may remember to fix those. Cut-and-paste errors should also be identified and stamped out.

Since I've started posting all of my ridiculously long backlog of stuff to post here, I've received no more requests. Toward this end, I've started moving it from here to here, where it's easier to organize into separate pages so you can find anything specific if necessary. For my first chunk, I made a page for the kansō, so if there's a title there that actually interests you, you can ask for it. Even this section is still ridiculously long, so I'm considering partitioning further. The problem with that is, of course, that I don't have a good way to decide what subcategories to make. I've often used in which medium the work is, but should I base it on which medium it was originally (as I do with my image files) or which medium I've personally perused, and what about posts that include works from different media? I've also considered the yuri factor, which is the only relatively concrete criterion I know that may be related to whether or not any of the people here would be interested in reading, but I'm not sure what categories to make on that scale (perhaps something about whether they're actual romantic feelings, whether the main character is the recipient or holder, et cetera), and again, it might be difficult to categorize posts about multiple works. Of course, the other categories of posts would be even more difficult, as you probably can't even tell what I'm talkin' 'bout from my notes.

Meanwhile, my procrastination on what I actually did have requested has reached epic proportions. I looked up the stuff for the next post long ago, but I just haven't gotten around to allocating a block of time to type the massive wad of text. That's the story of pretty much everything in my backlog, of course.

Although I haven't gotten around to the full post (and likely never will), I've put a condensed version of my complaints about certain big businesses on my résumé. I've been haphazardly updating various things on the wiki; you can even subscribe to various RSS feeds if you care. (Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any way to subscribe by category, just individual pages or the entire wiki.)

When thinking about 4th Edition for a later post, I happened to run across this. When I found it, it was at 355 posts and counting, so I'm too lazy to read it all, but the first page linked this. DM has been linking this wiki quite a bit lately, but apparently he only uses reputable sections, because the first paragraph here makes me say "What the hell?" The talk page points out that defining this as an individual phenomenon is pretty arbitrary and that this is encouraged here, but the first sentence, as far as I can tell, completely fabricates a new definition for a Japanese word. . . .

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.