Listen to the Rain

I kind of exist adjacent to most fandom endeavors. Despite my long presence on Dreamwidth and Livejournal before it, I've never really participated in any fandom communities. I have a fanfiction.net account and have used it to read maybe half a dozen stories ever, and I have an AO3 account and have used it to post a single story and haven't read anything on that site at all. Of the stories I have read, some of them aren't on fanfiction.net--like the old classic Children of an Elder God that I read while it was updating at university. On fanfiction.net I read Aeon Natum Engel--you can see my interests here, in the intersection of cosmic horror and giant robots--and...I think that's all I can remember? I have a bunch of stories I turned into ebooks with the intention of reading them and then just never did. Part of it is that I'm not at all interested in romance in fanfiction. I found one Stargate/Cthulhu crossover fanfic, an area I had thought would be ripe with potential, and never ended up reading it because 1) it was abandoned 2) it was Stargate: Atlantis and 3) it was mostly slash. The only part I remember is that the nanoswarm cloud in the original Stargate: Atlantis was turned into a rogue shoggoth in the fic. I read a relatively short fic about what if Harry Potter were raised by the Culture (which I really appreciated because it did not assume that the Culture Minds automatically understood magic, they were baffled how an owl traveled thousand of light years from Earth to poof into a room on an Orbital) which ran about nine chapters before it petered out.

I have read a lot of Let's Plays, and some of them approach fanfiction by using video games to tell a story. I read the Final Fantasy VIII Altimate Rewrite, which was very good but also never finished. I read a long narrative let's play of Morrowind that was originally hosted at morningstarlady until it was purged and moved to Dreamwidth, which was then hosted at lady_morningstar until it was locked and limited to access only, and is now seemingly being remade (again!) using models from The Sims at aeronwen. I only got partway through the previous version (they were very long), but I think they never finished as well. You can probably see where the source of me being leery of reading fanfiction comes from, here.

I guess the most fanfiction I've ever read, now that I think about it, are the stories set in The Night Land. I read every single story on that site and keep thinking about buying the books, especially after the untimely death of its maintainer.

The reason I brought all this time is because last night I thought "I wonder if that old Sailor Moon website I found back in the day is still around..." and it turns out it wasn't, but it's still available on the Wayback Machine. Sailor Moon Expanded ran from the late 90s through the early 00s and...well, I have to admit that while there's a ton of fanfics I've never read any of them. At the time, 2010, I had never seen a single episode of Sailor Moon, and wouldn't watch any until Sailor Moon Crystal came out several years later. The part that drew me in was the meticulously-expanded bestiary, maps, and cultural information on the Dark Kingdom and the Silver Millennium, which was envisioned as a magic-based solar-system-wide confederacy that ended with the sealing of magic after Queen Beryl attacked the moon. Or, as I described it at the time, "The war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts when the Unseelie Court wanted summon Cthulhu."

The other reason is A Dark, Distorted Mirror, a Babylon 5 AU fanfic that assumes that the inciting event of most of the plots in the early series--the Earth-Minbari War, a war where the vastly-technologically-superior Minbari curbstomped the humans for two years, only losing a single capital ship in all that time, until on the very moment of victory as they annihilated Earth's last defensive fleet before suddenly ceasing fire and surrendering--did not end with a treaty. As a result, Earth was glassed, most of humanity was killed, and the series is much less hopeful in tone. I did actually make it through the entire first book but tapped out when I had four more books of around 200K words each left, around the size of a doorstopper fantasy book. That one is still online and is finished, though, so maybe I should go back and read it.

I apply to fanfiction nowadays the same principle I apply to fantasy series--once the author finishes it, maybe I'll read it.

If anyone has any recommendations for finished, good Cthulhu crossover fic, I'm all ears. I had a lot of hope for Aeon Natum Engel until the author blew it up with a "rocks fall, everyone dies" sudden ending. They then declared they were going to re-write the entire thing better and higher quality, and I read the first chapter of Aeon Entelechy Evangelion and, when I saw how overwrite and baroque it was, I said to myself "This will never be finished" and stopped reading. And, well...it was never finished.

I don't speak Hebrew, I can just read the text and know the meaning of a few words thanks to knowing the prayers. But a couple nights ago while we were lying in bed, sashagee turns to me and shows me a picture on her phone from a webcomic, with a woman in fashionable clothes portentously saying:

הגדול‎ הנחש
ha-naḥash ha-gadol

and asked me what it was. I could read it, and while I knew that "ha-gadol" means "the great," I had to look up what the first word meant. It should have come to me immediately, though, because it's a rather infamous word:

וְהַנָּחָשׁ הָיָה עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה יְה אֱלֹהִים; וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל-הָאִשָּׁה, אַף כִּי-אָמַר אֱלֹהִים לֹא תֹאכְלוּ מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן
v'ha-naḥash hayah arum mikol ḥayat ha-sadeh asher asah YHWH elohim, v'yomer el ha-isha, af ki amar elohim lo toḥlu mikol eitz ha-gan
"Now the serpent was the most crafty of all the beasts the LORD G-d had made, and he said to the woman, G-d has said you shall not eat of every tree in the Garden."
-Genesis 3:1

It means "The Great Serpent."

I might start reading the comic sashagee is reading, honestly. It's called The Last Bloodline and from what she said it's extremely Vampire: the Masquerade. All vampires descend back to an original vampire cursed by (a) god--Artemis in this case--and live throughout the world in different groups based on animals. She mentioned they were tied to specific animals, though the only ones I remember is that the Korean vampires are frog-themed and the Ghanaian vampires are locust-themed, and that they call themselves the Children of Lilith (בני לילין b'nei lilim I assume). She reads a lot of Webtoons. Maybe this one will be my in.

Oh, I almost forgot--hilariously she said that there were several comments saying that the Hebrew was backwards, and it had obviously been edited before she saw it. If I had seen the original version I would have been trying to read לודגה שחנה lodgah shaḥanah and would have gotten nowhere.

I've been trying to find a way to buy ebooks in Japanese for a while. At first I was using Ebookjapan.com, but they were bought out by Yahoo and their new reading app is only available on the Japanese iTunes store. It's possible to read purchases online, but that requires an internet connection and means that my usual way of reading ebook manga--on my iPad, on the train--wouldn't work unless I tethered my phone to it. And there's no way to download it using the internet.

Alright, lesson learned. Don't buy anything that's defective by design. But, I can't buy Japanese kindle books from outside Japan. What to do? Well:

1. Make a Japanese Amazon account.
   
2. Attach a US credit card. This works just fine--they'll take your money no matter where it's from.
   
3. Activate a VPN. I use the one run by the University of Tsukuba.
   
4. Buy a Kindle manga. This would have been impossible from overseas, but the VPN turns the "We cannot sell you this content" notice into the option to buy.
   
5. Download the manga after logging into Kindle with the Amazon.jp account. I did this on a separate computer from my main Amazon account, in a separate Firefox container, so there's no association.
   
6. Using Calibre and DeDRM Tools, unlock the manga.
   
7. In Calibre, convert it to PDF, the better to take notes on it for words I don't know.
   
8. Enjoy ebook manga that I now truly own.

I bought the first volume of Fruits Basket yesterday using this method, so tonight I'm going to try again and see if it still works. If it does--and I don't see why wouldn't--I'll buy more Fruits Basket, Peach Girl, Death Note, and BLAME! to practice my Japanese. And I can lend them out to other people, if they want.

Maybe they'll cut off my account at some point for whatever reason, but who cares? I own my purchases. It's mine and they can't take it from me. It's on my iPad in PDF right now.

Now to just get good enough at Japanese to read it without constantly looking things up.

I read an extremely weird surrealist manga recently for an Anime Chicago manga meeting and took extensive notes for the discussion. Here they are:

( This book is very odd )

Last night I washed the rice and filled the rice cooker with water, but didn't start it. A few days ago, I washed the rice, but didn't fill the rice cooker or start it. Does that mean in a few days I'll wash the rice, fill the rice cooker, and close the lid but not start it?

Kind of disappointed in myself. Twice in a week is huge for me.

On Friday lisekatevans and I went to the Chicago Art Institute, where she is a member and could thus get me in without me having to pay $25. We went to the arms and armor exhibit, newly out after years in the Institute's storage, and later to the Japanese art section and the room that usually has folding screens, where there was an exhibition of Japanese pottery instead. There were even some Japanese people there getting a tour, though I couldn't quite make out what they were saying. Sadly, the room with the prints and drawings was closed for renovation, and we ran out of time after seeing the Japanese art. We ended with snacks and drinks at the Drawing Room in the Chicago Athletics Association and then she went off to prep for a performance and I went home.

On Sunday, lisekatevans came over for dinner and cookie baking, and it broke down that I made dinner and she did most of the baking while I cleaned up the dinner preparation. I made Hainenese Chicken Rice (and also learned there's kanji for it: 海南鶏飯), which has never come out quite right in the past. We had it when I went to Singapore for a week in 2010--I wrote about it here and I'm still annoyed that my posting habits fell off by so much while I lived in Japan because it deserved more written about it--and schoolpsychnerd and I made sporadic attempts to replicate it in the past that never quite turned out right.

It was a lot closer this time, though, thanks to slow-cooking the chicken and then using the water there as the water for the rice in the rice cooker. That also meant it took seven hours to cook, but I think the results were very good:

( Read more... )
I now have enough leftovers to last into next week.

I started reading Elfquest, literally decades after first learning about it in the pages of Dragon Magazine but not having an easy way to get a hold of it. I like it a lot, but I keep having to shove down the thought about how cliche everything is. It is cliche, but only because it came out in the 70s and a lot of later fantasy was influenced by it. I know I've seen that art style before but it's almost certainly from someone who was influenced by Wendy Pini's art, and psychic animal companions and involuntary lifebonds are very important in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar books where I first encountered them. Half the time it feels like a warm bath due to how familiar everything is and the other half the time I have remind myself that this was innovative when it came out. I'm not very far in, but I like it a lot so far.

After a week of sleeping more peacefully, I woke up early this morning with nightmares again. More dreams about zombies. I don't know if it's worry that my friends will suddenly turn on me, or an urban-dweller's anxieties about living among thousands of people that I don't know and could be dangerous, or just a bad dream. Regardless, I wish it wouldn't wake me up at 5 a.m.

Haven't had a great week and I'm not sure why. It might just be post-con blues, it might be something else. My therapist pointed out that seeking an immediately-proximate cause for something isn't always helpful, and she's right. It doesn't stop me from trying, though.

After watching the trailer for the Apocalypse expansion for Stellaris--it hit me right in the same place that the Earth Alliance president's speech Babylon 5's Battle of the Line does--I noticed that Stellaris was on sale and I immediately went out and bought it. I found a mod that allows space elves, so the Holy Ayleid Empire is currently expanding across the stars. I've only played for a couple hours so I don't have much of an opinion on it yet, but it seems fun. The people who told me to buy it were right.

I also finished another coding project! It's not super special, but I'm happy because I started breaking all the Javascript out into its own functions rather than trying to stuff everything into a single on-load function, which made it a lot easier to see what was going on. I also used a name-based track and CSS classes to dynamically change the backgrounds based on weather type and time of day with six lines of code and a bunch of CSS classes, rather than a giant switch statement or a massive if/else chain. Next time I'm going to see if I can do the whole thing without any JQuery at all. I should at least know how to write an XMLHttpRequest.

I just finished reading Locke & Key #1, after already reading Nutmeg #1 and Monstress #2 this month. I think the thing that always scared me away from Western comics is that 1) I'm neutral on superheroes as a concept and 2) I don't know where to start. With manga it's easy--start at the beginning. If I wanted to read about the X-men, where is the beginning? How much backstory am I missing? Listening to Jay & Miles X-plain the X-men especially makes me think that there are dozens of issues of backstory I'd need to appreciate what was going on, and that impression is always why I stayed away. But there are plenty of non-manga comics that follow a similar format, just like a lot of Western TV now has the same format as an anime series with a limited, self-contained run instead of just continuing until the money runs out or the creators get bored. I slept on Western comics for a long time, but I was just looking in the wrong places.

Tonight is another episode of Starlight Radio Dreams, so I'm going there later and getting fish and chips while I watch an episode of olde timey radio theatre. Other than that, I have no plans this weekend except maybe going to see Prometheus Bound on Sunday. Probably just stay in, play games, and study Japanese/coding. Maybe beat Shadowrun: Hong Kong and write about it. We'll see what else comes up.

So what am I doing in these, the last days of the American republic?

This Friday is another of schoolpsychnerd's and my Shabbat dinners. After the turning of the year, we decided that once a month we'd invite a handful of people over, eat dinner, and then discuss whatever that week's parshah is. This week it's Emor, Leviticus 21:1-24:23. We've tended to get really good discussion out of even the more "the lamps shall be made of beaten gold" parashot, and Emor has a lot of material in it. Some of it especially discussion-worthy, like the ban on people with disfiguring injuries from giving offerings to G-d. I don't find this to be as jarring as some people, because I don't have a universalist concept of G-d, but there's good commentary on it out there I've found that I'll try to bring up during he discussion.

I just went and found a bunch of Legend of Zelda icons and added them. Since I'm only using half my icon space, and since I'm on a quest to play through every Legend of Zelda game, I might as well. And maybe I need a Legend of Zelda tag, too... Hmm.

(done)

Speaking of which, I ordered a copy of the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time manga in Japanese! I've learned that the best way to get me to actually study is to make it an accompaniment to something I already want do--hence playing all these video games in Japanese--and when I idly posted about whether I should read it, kelley.christensen1 mentioned that she had fond memories of reading it as a teenager. That's enough of a recommendation for something I already wanted to do anyway, and now it's in the to-read pile.

We bought tickets for faylynne's wedding next month. Due to waiting so long because we needed to figure out schoolpsychnerd's summer program schedule, they were more expensive than I was hoping. I was expecting $750 and it was closer to $900. Fortunately, my sister lives in Portland and has offered to put us up, so we don't need to also pay for a hotel. schoolpsychnerd promised to cook for her to pay for our keep. Delicious!

We didn't do much of anything last weekend, or at least I didn't, and I'm looking forward to more of the same next weekend. Majora's Mask is longer than I thought, especially since I'm trying to get all the masks, so while I thought I would be finished already I won't be done until tomorrow at the absolute earliest. Probably more like Saturday.

I hope everyone else's weeks are going well!

Edit: It turns out that schoolpsychnerd has strep! The doctor said she's cleared for Friday, though, so she'll stay home from work tomorrow and then Shabbat dinner will continue as scheduled.

I woke up at 7:30 a.m. and decided not to go back to sleep, since we would be traveling today back to Tokyo for to last phase of our trip. schoolpsychnerd and I lay around in bed for a couple hours, packed up our souvenirs and clothes, and headed out to find some breakfast. schoolpsychnerd's initial idea of Cafe du Monde turned out to be a dud because the one in Kyoto Station only sold drinks, but we found a small Italian restaurant in the dining area that had a morning set with panini and coffee or tea. Mozzarella, tomato, and pesto panini is exactly what I wanted to start the day.

After that, everyone assembled, we reserved our Shinkansen tickets, schoolpsychnerd and I bought ekiben from a small shop in the station, and we got on the bullet train for Tokyo.



I spent the Shinkansen ride catching up on RSS feeds and listening to podcasts, and after two-and-a-half hours we were back in Tokyo. We got on the Yamanote Line and all got off at our destinations--this time, we were staying near separate stops--and walked back to the Sakura Hotel, arriving about five minutes after check-in time. We got our rooms, put some laundry in the provided laundry machines, and settled down to let it run, though we did go to the conbini to get some snacks since several other people had gotten food and we probably weren't going to eat until later.

Once out laundry was done, we put it away or hung it as befit its level of dryness and wandered out to find Otome Road. "Otome" (乙女, "little girl, maiden") is slang for female anime and manga fans, and there's a part of Ikebukuro dedicated to them the way that Akibahara is dedicated to male fans.

Well, more to tourists looking for electronics now, but the historical connection is there.

We went east through Ikebukuro Station and into the shopping streets past it, and after navigating past a few pachinko parlors and under an overpass, we found it:



schoolpsychnerd dived into the capsule machine and won a Sailor Moon keychain on her first try, and then we entered the shop. It turned out that the main Animate shop had moved and this was the cosplay annex, for all your costuming needs. Cosplay in Japan doesn't have the same do-it-yourself impetus that it does in America, so there were pre-made costumes for a variety of characters. And pre-styled Sailor Moon wigs. Imagine a market big enough to support that niche.

The store was pretty neat but there was basically no way for us to get anything back to America without ruining it, so after a quick look, we checked the internet for where the main store had moved to--about 300 meters away--and walked there. It was a gigantic shrine to all things nerd, with a correspondingly large population of shoppers which schoolpsychnerd was happy to see were indeed mostly women, and we looked a bit around the first floor.



Unfortunately, the crowds also meant there was a giant line for the elevator, and we pledged to come back during a less busy time and went back to Ikebukuro Station.

During Tokyo rush hour. Oops.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. The station was packed and so was the incoming train, but nearly everyone got off at Ikebukuro. We even got seats! And then fifteen minutes later, we arrived in Akihabara and met up with the others.



tastee_wheat wanted to check out a hobby shop called TamTam a bit off the main drag and, hoping for Japanese tabletop RPGs, I went with her. It had an extensive collection of model kits, model trains, replica military gear, and basically everything I'm not really interested in. After casing the joint, I told tastee_wheat that I was going to head back and went off to find the others.

After dodging the maids and "schoolgirls" handing out fliers, I found everyone else at Kotobukiya, a hobby shop closer to Akihabara Station. It wasn't just entirely animu and mango stuff, though--there was an entire floor devoted to superheroes and Star Wars. schoolpsychnerd bought a Captain America towel, and would have bought a Black Widow statue if she hadn't been worried about transporting it back to America.

We were going to go to Super Potato, famous retro game store, afterward, but Google lied to us and it actually closed at 8 p.m., so instead we wandered around in search of dinner. After a couple of false starts, including one restaurant I'm almost positive turned us away for being foreign, we found a place called Tsuki no Shizuku with izakaya-style small dishes and a touchscreen ordering system. They also had green tea tiramisu.



Full of food for only ¥1919 each, we went on to the Sega Arcade building, which in the way of modern Japanese arcades had almost no racing or fighting games and was overly full of UFO catchers, card-based games, and Gundam battle pods. Okay, admittedly the last one there is pretty amazing, but at ¥500 a play it's not super practical for more than a play or two.

Instead, I challenged aaron.hosek to Taikō no Tatsujin:



Unfortunately I ended up with battle damage on my hand, because the "1812 Overture" on hard is many more drum strikes than someone who doesn't actually play the drums at all is used to. That didn't prevent me from coming within 2% of my friend's score, though!

Despite a thorough search I hadn't found any danmaku games and some of the others were getting tired, so we called an early night. Early for Tokyo, anyway. We got back at 11:30 and it looked like the part of Ikebukuro we're staying in was just coming alive. But not us.

Steps taken: 14669

marianlh's post about the cutest little rust monster reminded me of the webcomic Dark Places and how sad I was that by the time I had discovered it, it had stopped updating. Late in its run, though, there was an expository page that really caught my attention:



That comic really got my imagination firing, combined with Exalted setting elements and some concepts from the Avernum series of games, and it mixed into (I like to think) a great campaign pitch.

So, take that comic as the backstory, but replace the dwarves with the Mountain Folk (with artisans removed). The Fair Folk are obviously the Fair Folk from Exalted, who swept in from Faerie, threw down the kingdoms of men, and reigned in madness from their thrones of bone and crystal and shadows until they were overthrown. Subsequently, humanity grew more and more xenophobic and paranoid, eventually developing into the Empire from Avernum. With the discovery of the great caves far below the surface of the world, below even the furthest reaches that the Mountain Folk dare to go, the Empire had a place to dump its malcontents, its Faerie cultists, its political dissidents, and anyone else that the Imperial power structure thought were a threat to the survival of humanity. Player characters being notorious malcontents and threats, the game would start with them being dumped through the portal into Avernum.

PCs would be god- and elemental-blooded (descended from various spirits), fae-blooded (descended from the Lords of Madness and their human slaves), ghost-blooded, demon-blooded, and Mountain Folk exiles, who are exactly the kind of people who wouldn't fit in on the topside unless they slot into some highly-specific roles in society that suitable PCs probably don't come from. Put them down in Avernum, which has the standard D&D-esque paradigm of a society on the edge, with civilization as precarious points of light in the midst of a vast, unexplored wilderness filled with dangerous monsters and mysterious terrain, and let the adventures roll in.

I finished reading Nausicaa last night. The ending was a bit odd in comparison to the rest of it ("Killing is bad, except those guys. They all need to die so we can live." What?), but overall it was quite well done.

I also recently found the Japanese edition of the old NES RPG Crystalis, titled "Godslayer: Haruka no Tenkū no Sonata" ("Godslayer, Sonata of Distant Heaven"). It's even more based on Nausicaa than I remembered. I mean, I knew it had the direct homage in the poisonous fungal forest filled with insects, and the remnants of the old pre-destruction world who are working to save the new world from behind the scenes. But, for example, in Crystalis, the first little girl you talk to says, "Welcome to Leaf, the Village of Wind." In Godslayer, she says, "ここはかぜのたにのむら" ("This place is the Village of the Valley of the Wind") to you. That's a bit more direct. I wonder what other things I find as I go through the game?

The hilarious part is that the save system didn't work, so when I hit "Continue" I started from the beginning without going through the intro, so I never picked a name, so everyone is calling me "データーなし," which is pretty much the equivalent of saying, "Hello, [insert name here]." I giggle every time one of the NPCs addresses me.

(that's "Happy new year")

Now that I'm no longer puking my guts out, I can actually post! I had food poisoning (or something) on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'm not sure how it could have been food poisoning, since I've been on vacation with my family and have been eating all the same things they've been. It could have been the flu or something, but no one else got it. Oh well--at least I'm over it now, except for some latent stomach unsettledness that props up when eating. I was able to eat curry just fine a couple days ago, though, so I think I'm pretty close to normal.

It is perhaps a mark of my geekdom that I view the ability to read the note in this PA strip as evidence of my progress in Japanese.

And now, off to play Ōkami and FFXII.