One question I (surprisingly) get asked quite often is why I don’t write for *insert fandom I enjoy here*. It’s not necessarily that I don’t want to write for some other series, I just can’t. It’s just how my brain works. It takes a long time for me to get comfortable enough in writing any given fandom, and once I feel like I can write competent fic, I stick with it. Trying to take on two series at once? No way, it just doesn’t work for me. To be perfectly honest, I don’t feel comfortable enough to do so. I’ll constantly question characterization, or feel that I just haven’t done enough research on a particular character or don’t have a decent enough grasp on a character’s personality.

It’s not just the “oh, big scary new fandom!” thing - even fandoms I’ve been in for years and have seen or read the series numerous times and have done a lot of meta discussion on (Gundam Wing, for example), I don’t think I have a good grasp on the characters at all.

I’m a one-big-fandom at a time person (ie, I can only handle being super active in one fandom at a time, but might dabble in others). When I’m active in that one fandom, I cannot write for anything else that isn’t completely stupid and silly and intentionally disregards all characterization and such. The only problem I see with this is that I tend to stay in fandoms for a ridiculously long time (coming on my 7th Tenipuri anniversary, soon), which sort of kills off any inspiration to write for other fandoms - even ones I want to write for.

“But you draw for other series, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?” No, not really. I’m more of a visual learner. I can look at the character and say “Ok, this is what s/he is, there’s nothing more to it.” It’s hard to fuck up characterization when drawing. You don’t have to question whether this person would say that, or just how delicate the relationship between character A and character B is. You don’t have to worry about dub characterization versus sub characterization. You just do it and hopefully have fun doing it.

In essence, I don’t write for anything that isn’t second nature to me by now. You can give me just about any character in Tenipuri and I can write them. Actual plot and content might be a bit questionable, but the characters would be the characters. Give me Gundam Wing, a series I’ve adored since I was a little girl, and have previously written fic for? No way. I’d constantly be re-watching certain episodes, or checking various manga scenes, and questioning whether or not, say, Quatre (without the Zero System) would go tell someone to fuck off and die.

For me, I don’t care if people loved/hated some fic of mine. If I don’t like it, I think it’s complete shit. One of these days maybe I’ll get over my own insecurities. Until then, Tennis is my game.

And to make this post not completely pointless, downloads in the form of music. For all Dragonball GT sucked and/or was complete epic fail, it has some of the best music of the franchise. x3

Wands - Sabitsuita Machine Gun De Ima Wo Uchi Nukou (Dragon Ball GT) (19)
DEEN - Hitorijanai (Dragon Ball GT) (20)

So while the rest of the world is going batshit over the US presidential election, I’m more interested in the fact that there is no Heroes on tonight. “Political apathy” is one way to put it, but then, no one in my family is politically active or really cares in the least. I wasn’t raised to follow all the asshattery, and quite honestly I know jack shit about how politics work. I’m nearly 23, and I’m not registered to vote, nor do I have plans to register any time soon. I never even voted in things like student body elections in school - none of it ever made any difference to me.

I don’t have television. I don’t have a newspaper subscription (and there’s no way in hell I’m walking out to buy it every day), and unless someone links me to an article of interest, I don’t check out the news online. 90% of what I see/hear/read regarding this election are from second or third-hand sources, and we all know how much the story changes from person to person. The few interviews/debates I have seen (through being at Dad’s, or in a hotel somewhere) gave me very, very little hope. Ms. Palin is still an idiot, and Mr. McCain is still a skeezy old man who would probably die in office anyway (leaving us with a president who doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground). GJ on trying to rope in Hillary’s supporters by choosing the least intelligent eligible woman you could find, McCain. I’m not against having a woman in office, I’m against having (more) idiots in office.

…In general, politics just leave a bad taste in my mouth, and thus I avoid them at all cost. I’ll be happy when this is all over and people stop shoving their political (and/or poli-religious) views down my throat. The only proposition out of the ones I know about that I have any interest in is prop 8. No on prop 8 = good. If you’re so worried about things like a man marrying another man might make people want to marry their goat, then propose to make marrying anything that isn’t human illegal. And “teaching gay-ness to children”? WTF is that? You’re gay by your own preference, not because someone around you is gay. If the latter were true, my high school would’ve had a much larger population of gay students, given that one of the guidance counselors (mine) was openly lesbian and headed the US (United Sexualities - a LGBT “club” that also had several perfectly heterosexual members among its ranks). I certainly don’t prefer the wimmins because gayness was “taught” to me.

Really now. This country has bigger things to worry about than whether or not a gay couple should be allowed to marry/adopt/foster. Being gay does not mean you are a pedophile, nor does it mean you’ll be any less of a good parents.

Bah.

All over the place post is all over the place.

That said, Menclave has my Gundams \0/

In attempt to get myself pumped up for this (and to give me something to do), I finally took advantage of WP’s import/export feature and imported all of the archives from 2003-2005 over to this blog. Reading through some of them made me stop and think “Wow, I was a really retarded teenager.”

It’ll take some time to go through and rename posts and fix categories, but I shall persevere (somehow). To some extent it’s kind of amusing (”Wow, once upon a time I actually did chapter and episode summaries!”). If I had any sense of dignity I’d probably delete them and disassociate myself with my own teenage stupidity, but at the same time it shows me how much I have (or haven’t, lol) grown and changed in the past ~6 years.

And while I’m on the subject of change, need new theme. We shall see how unlazy I get, because although I adore Donghae’s stupid face, these colours just aren’t doing it for me.

Things that got changed in the not-so-distant past:

Ukepile.com got a new layout, and I’ve moved all of my song romanisations over there (they’re still posted here, but I’ll be keeping them over there so I have a complete list for my own reference more than anything.

Rhythmic High was split into three separate sites: RH:GUNDAM for all of my Gundam works, RH:TENNIS for all of my Tenipuri works, and the main site for everything else.

And now to go obsessively refresh Menclave for my Gundam 00 fix. XD;

First post from new laptop, horrah. I’d been toying with the idea of getting a Mac laptop since last semester when my financial aid check came, but put it off in favour of Genki pbs, Higamyu photosets and Yaoicon. However, the end of December brought Hiku getting a new laptop and was selling her older (mid-2005) laptop and needless to say, I asked her to hold onto it for me until I could pay her in January. After a few weeks of trying to decide how we wanted to deal with her getting it to me without having to worry about it getting damaged, we ended up deciding we’d both just drive to Santa Rosa and hang out for a bit. Sasu came with her and gave me easily $100 worth of Copic Sketch markers she had extras of, plus some other stuff that we had ordered together and she was going to send to me anyway. They didn’t get to stay very long, but fun times were had.

Needless to say, I’m now the owner of an iBook G4 with OSX Tiger (tiny and cute!). While I grew up using a Mac (We still have our first computer in storage - I can’t remember what model it is off the top of my head, but it has a whopping 500mb hard drive and 5 mb of RAM. XD), and all of the computers I ever used at school were Macs (I was a freshman in high school when the original candy-shell iBooks came out), I haven’t really touched one since I was 17. So, naturally, it’s taking a while for my Windows-ingrained brain to get used to Macs and Mac shortcuts again. Not to mention all this newfangled stuff they’ve added to Mac OS since the last time I’ve used one. XD Now, if I can figure out how to get php properly set up for local use (not that I’ve tried very hard to set it up, lulz), life will be good. At the very least, it gives me a handful of machines to check designs and coding on. This cute little Mac laptop w/OSX on a 1028×768 res with Firefox, Safari and Opera installed, my desktop with WinXP on 1280×1024 with Firefox, IE and Opera installed, and mum’s laptop (that I like to use for the fact S is allowing her to leech his wireless - asshole won’t give me the password, so still stuck with dialup for my comps >_>) with Vista on a 1280×800 (+her lower-res-than-my-account’s res) with Firefox and IE. Plenty of options, really!

Also, iTunes. I hate iTunes. I don’t know why, it just irritates the hell out of me. There’s a reason I do not have it on my desktop even though S is like HEY GET ITUNES IT’S AWESOME. Any ideas on a Mac-equivalent of WinAmp, raise your hand XD;

School has been keeping me pretty busy, which is kind of sad when you consider how poorly I’m doing right now. Really need to get myself caught up and get my ducks in a row if I want to pass any classes this semester. Too much stress, really. Not having my license is making me all sorts of askdjf;alksdjfjsdalf if only for the fact that it would be so much cheaper to drive to school rather than pay $20 a week for cabs to school ($10 two times a week). The $2-$3 given to a classmate for rides home is easily swingable but >_O’ Hurrr now if only I didn’t hate driving with every bone in my body. Though I probably should try to go get that soon (damn you family not helping with uhhh a usable car and someone actually being home on a day the DMV is open so I can take my test again >EEE), permit kind of expires (again) sometime in April >>;;

Enough of that. This time next week I’ll be in… snowy, freezing-ass Burlington, Vermont visiting with my Leah over spring break. Leaving on Friday, returning home to California on the 30th. We have plans. Plans that involve sitting on our asses watching Kane & Genki dvds on big screen, spazzflailing over Rikkaimyu Genki!Kirihara and Kane!Sanada, and watching Power Rangers. May be watching some Gintama, for people will be happy if we do and start fangirling it. With Tenipuri manga finally being over (NICE COP-OUT, KONOMI.), it may be time to find a new fandom. Except the part where I still ♥ Tenipuri with all my ickle heart. …:D;

Other fandom news involves writing for balls_it_up, in which I wrote the single most awful fic I have ever written. XD; Which fic, however, I am not yet allowed. Writing mojo is finally starting to come back, if the few pieces I’ve started recently are any indication.

On the subject of fannish stuff, new fanlistings!
[+] Narugami aka Narukami/Thor {Matantei Loki Ragnarok}
[+] Heimdall {Matantei Loki Ragnarok}
[+] Seles {Apocripha/0 - Game/Manga}
[+] Platina Pastenr {Apocripha/0 - Game}
[+] Schwarz {Weiss Kreuz}
[+] My Friend Flicka {Book - Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka}
[+] Green Grass of Wyoming {Book - Mary O’Hara’s Green Grass of Wyoming}

Upcoming fanlistings:
[-] Thunderhead {Book by Mary O’Hara}
[-] The Horse-Tamer {Book by Walter Farley}
[-] Nakagauchi Masataka {Musician}
[-] Four Rooms {Film}
[-] 0 no Soukoushi {Manga by Kaori Yuki}
[-] Fairy Cube {Manga by Kaori Yuki}
[-] Psycho Knocker {Manga by Kaori Yuki}

I certainly have my work cut out for me XD;

Mmmm. Since my last post, Rhythmic High has also been updated with quite a bit of artwork and fic from the past year.

I think that may be about it, except for one thing: Downloads!

[=] Oliver & Company Soundtrack (32.31 mb, .rar)
[=] The Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack. (54.99 mb, .rar)

Er, enjoy. XD Need to find myself some free to so that I may make a new layout for this poor neglected place.

January marked a few things: A new year, a new school year, and my 22nd birthday. \0/ Year thus far has been spent doing basically the same things I do anyway. XD;

Back to school with what will hopefully be my last full-time semester until Uni, as except for math and a couple of other subjects I’ve already got what I need to transfer \0/ Goals for this semester include not sucking as much as I did last semester, oops.

Subjects -> Beginning Algebra (math deficiency whaaat), Ecology (Lecture + Lab), US History through 1750 & Critical Thinking in Literature. More classes than last semester, fewer units (…on less than last semester, hur). Good thing though being that I only have classes three days a week and I have four days off in a row >> Bad news being that including fandomy-writing I have to write roughly 35,000 words by the end of the month 8D

Fandomy stuff ->

[+] FL collective moved to Pure Rhythm.

[+] The following fanlistings have moved to new URLs in the past few weeks: Series: Whistle!, Character: Satou Shigeki, Character: Mizuno Tatsuya, Relationship: Kaku Eishi (Yeong-sa), Sanada Kazuma & Wakana Yuhto (U-14’s), Character Group: Nittle Grasper, Character: Ukai Noriko, Character: Farfarello (Jei), Character: Naoe Nagi, Character: Tsukiyono Omi (Takatori Mamoru), Relationship: Naoe Nagi & Tsukyiono Omi, Relationship: Hidaka Ken & Tsukiyono Omi, Character Group: Jyousei Shounan Gakuen, Character Group: Yamabuki Chuugakkou, Relationship: Kurobane Harukaze & Amane Hikaru, &Relationship: Momoshiro Takeshi & Kaidou Kaoru.

[+] New Fanlistings! Actor: Kanesaki Kentarou and Character: Narugami/Thor.

[+] Ficstuff! Lazy at writing lately (sort-of).
[»] Jokers Wild; Ace in the Hole | Yagyuu/Niou, Yanagi/Kirihara | PG-13/R for the most part, NC-17 overall | 12,915 words | Part 1 | Part 2 | Complete | Written for Shikishi @ Santa Smex on LJ.

Lots of travel planned this year. Vermont over Spring Break (March) to visit Leah, a trip to San Francisco to hang out with Roll on her way home from Japan in April (not really “travel” since SF is only two hours away, but hey! It’s Roll! And not Roll on the opposite side of country! Exciting times!) Will be doing the Artist Alley at Fanime come the end of May, as well. Actually, that few weeks will be crazy, for it is final exams, then Fanime, then coming home for maybe a day (if I come home at all and don’t just stay at K’s), then hopping over the pond to London for two weeks to play with Pez & Liz & Unni~ Tarundoru-cakes and Higa’s Adventures In Cooking! Then it’s home until August, wherein flying to Baltimore for Otakon and playing with Roll & Moffit again, as well as my Rue and a couple of my West Coast kids I play with anyway. \0/ September rounds it off nicely with back to school and Yaoicon, after which I hibernate until May. XD;

I need a job if I’m going to want to afford all of this >.>;;;;

Flee time, for things to do~

« Older Posts — Newer Posts »