Where's My Cow?

Is That My Cow?

It Goes "Mooeee!"

It Is An Otaku!

That Is Not My Cow!

According to anime, from whence I get all my wordly knowledge, it is considered a Good Omen if you dream about certain things as your first nocturnal imaginings of the New Year. The list, obtained from my handiest source (Lucky Star, natch), goes, in order: Mount Fuji, a hawk, an eggplant. Miwiki Miyuki adds a fan (as in a cooling device, rather than an obsessive), tobacco, and a blind man. You do not have to dream these in sequence or frequency, although the more items you dream of, the luckier you will be.

That said, I am uncertain what the year will bring when my first dream of 2009 involves a samurai dwarf king with a jazz band.

Because I have nothing remotely resembling a social life, I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day itself fighting snow monsters and rescuing disturbing infants.

I didn't really take notice of the ruling on cartoon depictions of questionable acts involving underage characters, mainly because we had just encountered another one a few months prior, and that's still going on.

In any case, I really only noticed it after Neil Gaiman pointed out that the ruling, at least as described in the article, would give fictional characters the same rights as Real Life human beings, a situation shared by the average corporation. (Yes, I know about the differences between the concept of a Legal/Juristic Person and a Human Being. Still doesn't make it any less amusing.)

No longer can we maim, murder, and otherwise mutilate our fictional creations, which is one reason why I'm not too concerned over this, since the bizarre precedent is likely to get overturned in (relatively) short order. In the meantime, the possibilities are endless. Apart from the obvious link back to a familiar issue, of course.

I know that I'm supposed to be working on all sorts of posts right now, but after hammering away at my NaNoWriMo for the whole month, and especially this past week, I've been too drained to think of much of anything. (No, really. You try writing ten thousand words of story in one day and see what that leaves your brain as.)

The problem I face, however, is that now that I don't have to work on the specific story for NaNoWriMo, I am assaulted by plot ideas for other stories, fanfics of various familiar series. The primary one I'd like to start on is yet another Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha original character tale, which sends me back to my old nemeses of Poor Canon Logic and Vague Background Information. Somewhat more relaxing is a random idea I had for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, or rather its genderbent version, which will probably not survive more than a single scene without collapsing under its own triviality.

People keep asking me why I write fanfics. The answer I always give is that it's an addiction: rather than being addicted to nicotine or caffeine or the Internet, I pretty much have to write. It's that, or my head asplode.

I am spending my downtime browsing the various HCGs I've collected over the years, and carefully removing all the H parts. Possibly this defeats the purpose somewhat, but I like the artstyle for some of the games, and it saves me from having to trawl imageboards for suitable pictures every time I want to talk about something not directed at a specific anime.

It's another sign of how my view of the world is off-center, I suppose. I like pics of cute anime girls (or at least cute anime people who look like girls), and seeing them in various ero-scenes just feels more than a little tacky.

A little late for Halloween, at least from my time zone. I've been spending the last few hours preparing for the month-long mad rush for fifty thousand words that is NaNoWriMo. I pretty much had to, considering I am going into this with almost no preparation whatsoever.

One wonders what the moe-fied anthropomorphic personification of Writers' Block would look like.

As a heads-up, I feel obliged to remind everyone with literary aspirations (and pretensions) of National Novel Writing Month. This is largely because I shall be participating (again), which implies a change in the posting regularity (or lack thereof) of this blog.

This year, I will be writing about a girl (pictured above, as run through 3D Custom Girl; I don't think I used any custom parts, but you'll probably have to update to SP2r1 if you want the linked character save file) who gains special powers and has to interact with her male childhood friend, who's a non-threatening and wimpy sort. There will be other girls present, and they will not be all that impressed with the guy at first, but they will soon accept him as a friend. There will be a highly implausible uberplot behind it, involving lots of magic and goofy tricksters with dark pasts and darker ambitions.

Let the deluge of cliches wash over you. Let it pass over and through you; when it is gone, only you will remain.

This is not the first year I've encountered a certain problem inherent in my story idea: despite the cliche-storm it is (always easiest to copy existing plots when going for quantity, as I've discovered over previous NaNoWriMos), I can't seem to classify it neatly in one of the provided genres on the NaNo forums. I don't have to, but when someone asks me "so what's your NaNo about?" I find myself at a loss.

So we have magic, which would make it Fantasy. It's set in the present day, which shifts it into the subset of Urban Fantasy. The magic is important, but it's more a means to an end than the theme of the story, akin to the mysterious hyperspace mallets that Akane popularized (at least among the Western fandom) from Ranma 1/2: it's there and it's used, but nobody really cares about how it works, and life would go on just the same without it, albeit probably with less collateral damage.

There is a smidgen of Romance, it being a harem comedy, but I've already decided that the guy will not get any of the girls, and he's not even going to try, especially since all the girls will have blasted him magically at one point or another in the story. Emphasis on comedy, not so much on romance.

It will be Humourous (or at least I will try), but that's just the way I write, and it's certainly not going to be a Parody or Satire. No, not even of the harem comedy generic plot; I actually like it too much to deconstruct it more than a token amount.

The whole thing, as generic though it may be in the world of anime, doesn't seem to have a suitable equivalent genre in the "normal" world. I can say "Magical Girl Harem Comedy", but I'm not sure where such a thing will fit on the hypothetical bookshelves. Actually, I'm sure it'll be tossed into the "SF&F" section fairly quickly, but still.

This may all be filed under Idle Musings anyway. My real worry is that during the month of November, I will spend far too much time making characters in 3D Custom Girl than writing about them.

That, or I'll be thoroughly irradiated.

I've been spending my time recently cleaning up my computer to hopefully forestall the inevitable complete FUBAR that happens quite consistently every year or so. I'm not due for another one until next year, but preventation is allegedly better than the cure and all that. Incidentally, this is one reason why I've not been updating as often, since it's hard to wax humourous about anime when even being at the computer sends me into guilt trips on what I Should Be Doing with regards to defragging or whatnot.

One of the annoying parts of this is that I had set my Non-Unicode Language option to Japanese. (If anyone's wondering and if it matters, I'm running WinXP Home. I update only when that little popup balloon tells me to.) This is necessary to play my various visual novels collected over many years, since for the most part they're not translated into English (fan patches or otherwise). This, apparently, plays utter havoc with the various Deep Applications needed for, say, my (nVidia) video card, my (Lexmark) printer, or my (Nero) DVD-burning. The details and long, involved, and arcane; I do not fully understand it myself. But suffice to say, I have been trying to convince various applications that I am not in Japan, and I am not in the US. Instead, I am in Singapore, and regional restrictions are my bane.

This entire post was prompted after the fourth system restart necessary when switching to Non-Unicode Japanese to Non-Unicode English (US) and back. This is what I have to deal with, people.

You may have noticed a disturbing lack of substantial posts in recent times. While I'm not going to regale you with excuses, I'll just reiterate that this does not, in any way, mean that I'm giving up on this blog. This is because I am thoroughly and frighteningly stubborn, even after it is made abundantly clear that something is a Bad Idea.

A part of it is that I've not actually been watching a lot of bloggable anime, which is a distinct case from watching anime period. I watch quite a lot of Hidamari Sketch x365, for example, but I can't find anything to say about it.

And while I enjoy the recent anime seasons, it's more a kind of passive enjoyment. Nothing has quite managed to fire up my Burning Blogger Spirit, or whatever equivalent imagery there may be. I just watch, enjoy, and… that's it. My brain runs empty on inspiration. This overall apathy is why I end up making plenty of bad comics.

Maybe I just need more sleep, or something. Trying to keep the hours normal people do isn't all it's cracked up to be.

On the upside, my fever has gone down. On the downside, my whole body aches for no discernable reason, like a full-body carpal. I do not think anyone really wants to witness the somewhat unique chains of logic which come unbidden to my drug-addled mind.

Hopefully I shall be back at full vocabulary capacity by next week. In the meantime, to prevent this from being a mere litany of complaints, have a picture of Magical Nurse Lyrical Nanoha, the ultimate in Kill Or Cure.