I hasten to assure one and all that I have not suddenly become some sort of tech guru, but merely that after eighteen straight hours of investigative file rearrangement, I caved and bought a new hard disk, reinstalling Windows XP, for the purpose of. Before anyone suggests it, I have indeed entertained the notion of switching operating systems, but always I return to the consideration that Windows XP is the only OS upon which City of Heroes may run without complaint or workaround. (Yes, I am aware of WINE and Boot Camp. Even so.)

Currently my old hard disk stands in digital and physical quarantine, as I cannot be bothered any more with trying to figure out which of the DLLs removed by that overzealous anti-Trojan utility are legitimately innocent, and which are truly pestilent. My files, which I have ascertained to be free from taint, I have transferred to another hard disk, roomier and separate from the Operating System disk. In theory, this should protect my data should Windows decide to Nice Boat on me again. Nevertheless, I have had far too many hard disks crash on me to be entirely sanguine about this state of affairs.

So it goes.

Download Day 2008 has been confirmed to be June 17th. Participate in the attempt to set a world record for most downloads in 24 hours, and there may be a foxgirl for you. No, not really.

And I had, in hindsight, somewhat irresponsible and unreliable faith in the ability of anti-virus Trojan removal not to completely screw up Windows.

As of this moment, as I am posting on a library computer (which explains the lack of an illustrative header picture), I have what is essentially an expensive doorstop that was once a personal computer. As far as I believe, the data is still intact, but gated by an operating system clamouring for missing DLLs and refusing to boot up further.

I cannot even use a Linux liveboot CD to transfer my files, since apparently there is that odd but insurmountable difference between NTFS and FAT file systems.

In effect, I will not be able to update this blog, or my Livejournal (which this post shall be crossposted to, assuming that doesn’t go wrong as well), until I get the computer fixed. The hardware is all fine, but that is small comfort if I cannot recover all my files, collected over the years.

Any advice on the matter will likely go unread, as I cannot check my email or comments either, at least not in time. All my efforts shall be bent towards reviving my computer, and I shall not rest until it is once again functional.

This is one reason why, despite my habit of naming my computers (and peripherals), I do not christen them with names of characters I really like. This is a policy borne from experience, considering that I seem to have a schedule of something catastrophic happening to my computer(s) more or less annually.

Amazingly, artwork from and of Kanokon is not exactly plentiful, among the usual imageboards. I suspect that this is at least partly due to the phenomenon known more or less as “too easy”.

The best estimate available for the release of Firefox 3 is “late June”, which is a worryingly vague timeline to spread about as part of an attempt to obtain a world record for the most downloads in one day. I am concerned about the amount of advance warning we shall have, although I admit that I’m not sure how much warning we’ll actually need to click on a link.

In any case, when the time comes, download Firefox 3 to get a kitsune girl in your bed. Or maybe not.

In slightly more anime-related news, the popular vote winners for the Anime Blog Awards have been announced. No surprises were in evidence, at least by my expectations.

Updates from here on out shall remain as (ir)regular as ever, but with substantially less content. I shall be off wrestling with infernal, or possibly even abyssal, pinatas of XP present in Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. I still do not, as yet, have a group to share these treasures with, but as with window shopping, there is surely no harm in looking.

All the little angels rise up, rise up
All the little angels rise up high
How do they rise up, rise up, rise up
How do they rise up, rise up high

So one of the things I’ve been doing recently is trying to convert various anime characters to the HERO System, which has a reputation for extreme customizability. The upside is that you can make anything you want; the downside is that you can make anything you want.

How the system works is that it has a number of actual power effects, and then we tack on all sorts of variations and modifiers to it, then we add in what the power actually is. For example, any ranged attack which isn’t a bullet or something obviously designed to kill is an Energy Blast. (Those which are designed to kill or injure are Ranged Killing Attacks.) It can be an actual blast of energy, it can be fire, or ice, or rubber bullets, it’s all Energy Blast. The specifics are pasted(e on yay) onto the basic Energy Blast, which gives the HERO System the customizability so vaunted.

It also gives the HERO System the Deep Complexity so very much complained about. You will need a calculator for this, as well as several pages of notes on what your newly-designed power does, in great detail, along with how it interacts with other powers. The GM will need to be highly intelligent, level-headed, and quite possibly psychic, both telepathically and precognitively. For the rulebooks themselves place an enormous onus on the GM to veto, ex cathedra, any creative use of the rules which appear to be done for the sole purpose of munchkinning, while simultaneously allowing the very same thing if wielded responsibly by the hands of a dedicated roleplayer.

It is a narrow, some might add microscopically so, line to tread. With great power, etc.

My most recent attempt at converting a known fictional character to the HERO System involved the infamous Nanoha Takamichi of the titular Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha trilogy of anime, a lady who has had her unofficial nickname (not worksafe, since it’s Danbooru) apply as fittingly as a well-worn glove (+5 Enhancement). Those unfamiliar with the character in question have questioned my need for a 600 Active Point Starlight Breaker, since surely no character would have such a powerful attack, would they?

Little do they know.

I’ve already given up on statting Lina Inverse, because I’m not sure what kind of damage is needed to level a mountain. Which, if I remember my Slayers correctly, Lina did. Twice.

Finally, yes, I know that I haven’t had a Card Captor Sakura episode summary for some time. Let’s just say that the more people nag at me to do one, the less motivation I have. Whenever I read a “why aren’t you working on a CCS episode summary?” comment, my desire to actually do so drops to about zero.

One of my (many) failings is that I tend to obsess over things. When I get something new, I immerse myself as deeply into it as I am capable of. Now, this may not last, especially if the work in question is Not To My Tastes, but since I generally pre-filter my entertainment through intense scrutiny of reviews and what few fellows who share my opinions I can muster, I often find that by the time I think to myself “this is pretty fun, but I probably should take a break around now“, the authorities may well have already declared me legally dead.

Right now, the obsession of the moment dictates that I cannot look at a withered, leafless tree without getting the urge to paint a circle around it.

There’s no real reason why I picked this random manga scan. Well, not so random, since I like Negima, I find Sayo pretty cute, and I am quite fascinated by the ability to spin pens (possibly since seeing Momiji Ookura in action, so to speak, in the manga version of Prism Palette). Nevertheless, this is Random in the sense that I found this page posted somewhere for no apparent reason, bereft of its fellow chapter pages, and I have no other Random images handy to go with this off-topic post. Needless to say, I shall be buying the volume whenever Del Rey sees fit to release it in English, as I have done for the seventeen volumes of Negima thus far.

Crunch time over in the set of dimensions known collectively as Real Life means that I’ve been taking what amounts to an enforced break from anime, and indeed all leisure activities. As of this writing, I can see the as yet unopened cases containing the long-sought Playstation 2 game discs of Okami and Final Fantasy XII. The temptation is strong, but I shall resist.

I had expected some sort of withdrawal symptoms, but oddly enough, with a bit of mental jiggling, I can transition to a veneer of Normality with a minimum of fuss, provided I am allowed to keep a small but significant amount of brain runtime to thinking about anime. Not any anime in specific, but just anime in general; tropes, concepts, and example images. The merest thought of an original character in full meganekko mode can settle my mind into hanyaa~n mode, which I seem to be able to do a good job of bottling up inside, seeing as nobody has been creeped out by my vapid expression as of yet.

At least the weekend is near, and with it some vague respite. Although judging from the pile of backlogged Obligations I have to other hobby interests, mostly in the prose-writing field, it might be a while before I can come up with anything substantial for this blog. Not, of course, that anyone might have expected differently.

You may have noticed something different about the blog.

The story behind the change is that somehow, for some reason, this blog was hacked, and while I can find nothing altered as such, it was deemed best that I upgrade both my Wordpress installation and my password security. After making absolutely sure that there was no upper limit on the character limit for the password, I have some confidence now that this new password will be hell to crack. Along those lines, it will also be hell to enter without typoing.

Moe Check is now running on Wordpress 2.5, and since I tend to be caught up in the dizzy flurry of upgrading, I also picked up a new theme, this one called Mandigo. I have yet to truly customize it, since that would require me to limber up my miniscule talent in image editing and actual design sense, but I assure you that this will be one of my priorities in the coming days. Tomoyo shall return to the header image, never you fear.

This blog is best viewed in a resolution 1024 pixels wide. I was trying to find the best colour scheme under Mandigo’s included options that best exemplified “pink”, but the pinkest of the lot was listed as “purple”, with the actual “pink” looking somewhat rouge. Mayhaps I perceive it differently from most other people.

I wonder if it says something about me that the only reason I’m playing Pokemon Diamond at all is because I think Dawn (or Hikari, if you want the Japanese name) is very, very cute.

It’s the hat, I think. I don’t know what she’s like in the actual anime, being that I don’t have a source for it, but just looking at the fanart makes her seem so adorable.

Of course, I tend to treat games as a significant collection of plot and dialogue interspersed with irritating but sadly unavoidable gameplay, so this is not unusual. I suppose what I’m really looking for when I buy a game is an interactive CG movie, preferably anime-style with cute girls.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been updating all that much lately.

Or rather, to be more specific, I’ve been following the same Two Posts Per Week schedule which I had set for myself when I started this blog, but these posts seldom have any true substance. Instead, I seem to be making up ramblings extempore which have only the most marginal relationship to anime, and the subset of fandom which involves blogging about it.

This sort of thing happens in cycles. Sometimes I am brimful of brilliant ideas which I cannot wait to share with the world at large, and I trumpet these thoughts out in the space allotted to me here on this blog. At other times, I have nothing to say other than a simple “mrph”.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on my Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha fanfic. Most of the time spent on this endeavour is on discussion with other fans, rather than actual writing. I had been burned badly on this very fanfic, where an ill-explained piece of canon was slightly better explained in an out-of-series source, which nevertheless struck down the edifice of theory I had so carefully constructed and built my story around. And so I make sure that everything I intend to put into the story does not contradict canon, which is no mean task when canon itself contradicts common sense. (Seriously, it’s a mess.)

All this came to a head when I took a look at the calendar, and realized that it’s Wednesday. I’m supposed to write my Two Posts Per Week, and I haven’t even started on picking the topic. Well, a Card Captor Sakura episode summary always seems to go down well. I found the disc and popped it into the drive.

About ten minutes into the episode, I found myself looking at the clock. I was considering leaving it for tomorrow, but no, I’d mess up the screenshot order and I’d have to start all over again. I was trying to psych myself into a less melancholic mood, without much success, which boded ill for the actual episode summary, since I’d probably fill it with forced and unfunny jokes.

And then I realized something: I was watching my favourite anime ever, in order to comment on it as I have done many times before, all for the sake of a hobby blog, and I was not enjoying myself. I was forcing myself through it. Haven’t I heard about this from other, more experienced bloggers before?

This is burnout!

Yes, I actually said that out loud to myself. It was that startling of a revelation. I didn’t have anything compelling enough in the world of Anime Suitable For Blogging that I immersed myself in the far more interesting world of fanfiction, and when I had to pull myself away to discharge my obligations onto this blog, it was akin to being separated from a favourite toy. It may be an immature reaction, but one can hardly expect me to approach the responsibility of the blog with anything resembling good grace.

Besides, this is a blog about Japanese cartoons and the cute girls therein. I think I’m entitled to be immature, if only for the sake of consistency.

I’m not sure what I should be doing to solve this conundrum. I could bring my fanfictional ramblings into this blog: after all, it’s an anime fanfic. I also seem to remember a few conversations over on #AnimeBlogger which were unexpectedly encouraging about the discussion of fanfiction on anime blogs, possibly for variety. However, fanfiction also appears to be something of an Acceptable Target for jibes and barbs serious enough to leave wounds.

I could also just grab random screenshots from random anime, and give them incredibly discreet one-line captions with painfully understated jokes, just so that it would be as obvious as SCREAMING IN YOUR FACE, except approached from the other side.

The choice is yours. Unless I don’t get any responses at all, in which case I’ll just run head-first into a wall or something until another idea pops out.