GetBackers translation note, pedantic

So recently I figured out where "Rouran" was. My mother was watching a drama set in the Han Dynasty, and one of the female characters was a princess of Loulan. So I said, where's Loulan? And was told it was an old name for Xinjiang, which upon research was half right. It's a ruined city that lies in Xinjiang, between Kazakstan and Mongolia. (map)

Loulan, capital of the Loulan (Kroraina) Kingdom, was a small, prosperous commercial city on the famous Silk Road about 2,000 years ago... until it was mysteriously swallowed by the desert.

There's controversy over what happened to the Loulan civilisation, I think, similar to that over the Minoans. I suppose the GB backstory is that they picked up and left when the desert encroached, becoming the Chinese equivalent of the Romany. XD Or, well, any one of the nomadic tribes of the region: they were Caucasian, like the Uighurs or the Kazakhs, not ethnic Chinese.

The sense of major accomplishment in which I'm currently basking derives from the fact that I know what language Emishi's attacks come in now. The "robu no ruu" whatever furigana that bore no resemblance to the character pronunciations in Japanese or Chinese? Mongolian. It actually starts off "lop nur", like the name of the lake - it means "wandering", which in the case of the lake is due to the fact that it's not so much a lake as patches of salt marshes that expand and shrink. In the case of Emishi I suppose it means "wandering hither and to, pleasing only myself". The Chinese characters used to write that part of the attack are 彷徨 (pang2huang2), which actually has more the sense of "wandering about in circles like a headless chicken" but maybe the meaning's shifted a bit in Japanese. Or, yanno, Emishi.

Once again I don't know if I want to shake Aoki Yuuya's hand or beat him with a baseball bat.

Jpop fic. No, seriously. XD

Hilariously, after having spent about an hour today explaining to Sai why I have trouble taking popslash seriously as fanfiction as opposed to original fiction, I decide to edit and release the Lead fic I wrote for niche. Furthermore it is classic non-slashy popslash in the sense of being all about mediated existence versus "reality", fame, authenticity of talent etc. Ha ha! XD;; ...I don't read wFL fic, really, so I have no idea what the fanon is, but I did watch (and was somewhat intrigued) by the Kamachi movie in which Lead starred, so I wrote around that.

Changes have been made, of course.

( Two-Way: Twist and Shout )

Sonic babble

This morning I dreamt that one of the Japanese indie bands on fabulous_papaya's Interstellar Travel FST was actually a blobular alien creature with five heads and trumpet-like appendages, and sang in harmony by taking its heads off and waving them about like the Beastie Boys in that one episode of Futurama. I'm going to construe that as a sign that I should get cracking on my own March FST instead of listening to said Interstellar Travel FST over and over and trying to turn it into an extended remix, for value of "remix" equals "tacking songs onto the end to fill the CD".

Amused to see that t3h O-Zone is virally infesting my flist, like, again. XD I keep playing the Eurobeat remix because I'm fascinated with the... arrangement? Orchestration? Like a lot of Eurobeat it's essentially classical, there's nothing about it that wasn't done first 300 years ago. No blues scale. Take the 40-second intro, space out the timpani, slow it down by half and errr get a real string orchestra to play it, and it would sound like an allegretto out of one of Mozart's comic operas. I find that when I listen to it I start making that orchestra-conductor baton-beat gesture with my hand. The corollary, I suppose, is that if you took a Mozart allegretto and played it really fast on cheesy synths, it would sound like "Dragostea Din Tei". ...I'd say "people should do this," but I suspect that's pretty much how it is done.