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.

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.

"Your lawyer?"

"His pastor."

( Frank discussion of sexuality )

Also, when I was looking up details for the post subject (as you can see, I couldn't find one of the names, so I kept it from the misquoted source), I happened to read a bunch of complaints about that episode on the site. People were outraged that NBC was willing to depict a fictional Christian sect as extremist fanatics. At least one registered user said that he was going to boycott the show because of it. In the 18th season, you're boycotting a show because of portrayal of guest charas in one episode? Is it so offensive to suggest that it's possible for self-proclaimed Christians to be zealots? (I guess that means that—just like the Holocaust—the Spanish Inquisition, the KKK, and so on are only myths.) But it's all right to have an episode where a Muslim guy beats an ADA within an inch of her life to prevent her from prosecuting the man who raped his sister?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's true that the Bible doesn't specifically state that you must kill those who sleep with Muslims. (Apparently the prophets didn't predict that part. I think Sean was actually talking about how adultery is against one of the Ten Commandments.) As far as I've heard, nor does it specifically say that you have to lynch black guys, or prevent gays from practicing their beliefs, or persecute any other innocents.

On that subject, I was surprised by this (coincidentally, also at NBC, since that was the first hit that seemed to have the more common wording). However, it sounds as if the people who are willing to admit that they're not on the only path are the more casual practitioners, not choir boys and ordained clergy.

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.

Since Thursday was my one night off, I stopped by the other side of town yesterday. Unfortunately, I had not realized that it was the release date of 4th-Edition D&D, so the clerk at the desk immediately asked me, "Have you gotten your books yet?" I made the mistake of telling the truth: that I had gotten a better deal elsewhere, which of course didn't make him and Carlos happy. They made fun of me for the fact that my copies hadn't been delivered yet. I neglected to mention (as a comeback, one of my principal weak points) the fact that, as over the last few months the Wizards have revealed more of their master plan to tell repeat customers to go to hell (as mentioned here), I wouldn't be buying them at all if I weren't intending to use them to save more than the money I paid for them.

Due to the fact that 4th Edition is trying its darnedest not to be D&D, there's also the problem of the theoretical chance of publishing my campaign setting. I have no intention of retconning it to the point of being 4th-Edition-friendly, so the only chance I would have of using the d20 System or something similar is if someone else ends up producing the books and allowing them, such as the Pathfinder RPG. The reason for this is that the d20 System requires you to note on each book that it requires the 3rd-Edition or v.3.5 Player's Handbook, which Wizards will obviously be discontinuing if they haven't already. The Pathfinder RPG is designed to allow people to continue to use v.3.5-compatible materials, so it would work with that, but I don't know whether they'll allow me to actually tell people to use it. I could instead use the OGL, but that would require publishing my own basic materials. Since this was designed as a D&D setting, that would mean either (a) repeating pretty much the same stuff that's in the Player's Handbooks and Pathfinder RPG or (b) changing the setting so that those have something original worth printing as well. The latter means completely reworking the setting, which may be a good thing considering that it's not very original so far, but it defeats the purpose of publishing something I've already developed if I have to go back and start from the ground up. Of course, the chances that I'll ever have the resources (money and name recognition) to do this are rather slim.

By the way, on the topic of the subject line, DUNKIN' DONUTS® CMs have nifty tunes, but the first two* have really dumb lyrics. The "doing stuff" one is pretty self-explanatory (as is the issue with this one, the one for which it's not the creators who are stupid), but as Ms. Maelwaedd noted, it's an odd strategy to tell customers, "We understand your idiocy and provide for it!" The thing about this is, as with every spoken language except English (as far as I know), French and Italian have simple, consistent rules for how every word is pronounced. (lokodraucarn once tried to defend his mispronunciation of "coup de grâce" by saying, "I took German and Russian! No silent letters!" Yeah (again, a very belated comeback), I took Spanish and Japanese. That doesn't stop me using an American English dictionary. When I play a game where I have to vocalize a term often, it makes sense to know how to pronounce it and what it means.) A more common problem is trying to figure out which language the word is, but that's often easy, too.

*As usual, I tried looking for the videos to illustrate, but apparently now Google™ Video BETA doesn't index them anymore and instead has hardcore pornography openly displayed. (YouTube had both.) I never got that before.

PayPal™ just informed me that my account has been hacked. I've been pooh-poohing the CMs (see subject line) because I didn't think such a thing was too dangerous since you can see any transactions on your bank statement. I also didn't expect the perpetrator would be stupid enough to buy something from somewhere that sends you automatic email confirmation. Still, the fact that I don't seem to have any way of prosecuting the culprit or getting my money back is somewhat irksome.

On a similar note to the second-to-last sentence way back here:



I find it rather ironic that the man is so much uglier than the troll.

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. . . .

Who wins?

Notes: These were the most adversarial-looking images I found in appropriate resolutions. I chose to flip the former (forgetting that I'd left some text in) so they'd look a little more like they were facing off, in case the latter had asymmetrical tattoos. As with its predecessor, I hope the image itself doesn't take up much in the way of bandwidth.

For some time, I'd been planning on making a helluva tough fancomic (a one-shot along the lines of Darths & Droids) to hone my layout skillz, but it turned out that my image-editing skillz weren't up to the task (as you can see by the crudely pasted-in text in this one). The chief problems were appropriate panel spacing and word bubbles. I imagine both of these will be solved in comics I draw myself, the former because I'm planning on using graph paper, and the latter because I can draw them myself.

Since it's difficult to predict whether or not I'll have a chance to use the computer on a Sunday, this post is post-dated. Please note that this may mess with the sequence of your friends page.

Anyway, this is a little something to which blitzcon linked me a while back.

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.

Typing of which, it turns out that all the years (just barely "all" rather than "both") since I developed the project, I was mistaken in thinking it was a "tower." That scuppers my connection to the Tower of Babel. Of course, the reference to the gargantuan folk of that particular residence hall ends up being worthless, because upon closer inspection, Alighieri seems to have invented the part about Nimrod & Co. being giants himself (since I didn't find it anywhere else, and it's so mentioned in His Majesty's article).

P.S. Hmm, I always wondered where Ms. Yuki got the name "Etemenanki."