Petronia

1) ( FFXII gameplay notes for story purposes; I might continue the Larsa fic. )

I like how plausible the gameplay is. People write fic all the time about fighting random encounters in FFXII. No one ever writes fic about fighting random encounters in FFVII, because it would just come off as completely retarded. Midgar is filled with, what? Killer robot dogs? Evil houses on legs?

2) mullenkamp is recording and uploading Vagrant Story cutscenes, if you ever felt an urge to watch/re-watch the thing. ( Some parts are unexpectedly... poignant, after FFXII. )

3) As seen on fabulous_papaya: flOw for PS3 (the O stands for Oxycontin). Your wasted time guaranteed or... actually you don't even have to pay for it.

I don't find it as relaxing as advertised, precisely because it taps into what I assume are primal brain-stem urges. Eating protozoa? Running away from jellyfish? Serious business, j0. XD

There is also Cloud, where your job is apparently to move clouds around. I am totally on this, right now.

Now my parents are onto a Spring and Autumn period drama (read: I have trouble picking up plot threads on the fly the way I usually do because the characters' mindset is too long-ago, like Renault's Ancient Greece). Pretty sure this is what paleaswater was talking about, unless there's another one this season that's like IN YR DAILY CHINESE HISTORY LESSON, DEPLOYING BL FICTION PLOT TWISTS. >_> Could always go upstairs and check the back of the DVD box but that involves walking which is just silly.

The production values and acting in these TV series keep getting better and better... I wish someone would sub them, they'd be fun for the Rome crowd I think. (In English that is, they're always subbed in Chinese as it's a bit like watching Shakespeare only not as readily comprehensible. XD;)

( A note on the FFXII Ultimanias. )

( At one point I realized you could rhyme 'moogle' with 'asshole'......yeah pretty much. )

Balthier the Moogle belongs to coloredink (adopted by fandom at large), the rest belongs to The Modern Lovers, I'll be in my trailer if you need me. >_>

Opinions plz:

1) ( Is the Dark in Vagrant Story just... the same thing as Mist, or what? )

2) ( Does this look like Basch and Ashe to you? )

Indiepop Capital of the North: Amy Millan confirms to Brendan Murphy in this week's Hour that she, Emily Haines and Feist are thinking of recording an album together. So uh, in the event that you care, stay on top of that one. XD

Thank God for Youtube (VG Edition): I keep watching other people's gaming clips. Not just cutscenes for reference but boss battles and combos and such (and not just FF, either). It's lame but I can't stop for some reason. XD; (......The new JoJo game. I just remembered. Ohshi how much will I get fired if I get on Youtube right now.)

I really like the FFXIII protag's character design. She looks somewhat like a female version of Cloud[1] and a lot like a cyberpunk version of Beatrix. ON THAT BAD ASS LIKE WHITE ON RICE Y/Y. If Shiva can be a motorcycle then Save The Queen can be a gunblade.

Also she wears a cape. A++ Nomura-san...... ( Cut for tangent. )

The following is just for Kristin really: Final Fantasy character classes, not that this helps necessarily - jobs and tropes have imperfect overlap, and every new installment in the series remixes what came before. XD; ( For instance... this is severely non-interesting to anyone except me, I don't know why I'm writing it down. )

...No really why on earth did I write all that. orz I had a whole long thing on Vagrant Story but now it'll have to wait.


[1] Not that Cloud isn't a trap when he wants to be.

[2] Edited to note: Edgar is also TWINS. Um. I guess someone in charge of FFXII really digs Edgar? THAT'S OKAY SO DO I.

EDIT -- Oh and for the three of you who've missed it, the first issue of imaginarybeasts is up! The publication will have an entirely different "house style" from bb_shousetsu, I suspect. XD

Uploaded that Alec Campion DJ Mix to fst, where... it is enthusiastically received. I'm baffled but gratified. XD (Also, still waiting on that Richard-in-PotS mix, guys. I have a retarded joke planned re: my OTP being The Knife/José Gonzalez.)

DJ mixes aside my best (if not my only) FSTs have always been for novels, or series I experienced primarily as novels: Good Omens, Mirage of Blaze, Yukikaze, The Etched City. This is telling because I find it difficult going on impossible to produce fanfiction for books written in English. I run up against authorial prose. It's not a sense of inadequacy, just that I perceive the task to be reproduction, not translation, and I'm a translator. My entire writing process resides in the metaphor-space delineated by the work of recreating images in prose, or prose in music, or the cadences of Japanese in those of English - I'm always trying to explain something. As I see it dancing about architecture isn't futile, if I were a choreographer I'd take it up as a creative challenge. XD

I pronounce the leaked Arcade Fire album rather good! Not as much with the epic as the first (or maybe just that one sees them coming the second time around - "Intervention" is still brill though), more a low-bitrate Starlight Mints, dusty drinking-hole-for-ghosts vibe. Last Plane to Jakarta distinguishes between albums with "wet" and "dry" landscapes; Neon Bible is so dry it makes me want to sneeze. I hear the backlash is starting, or something, to which I say good since it allows me to continue pretending they're just another middling-successful quirky Montreal musical outfit. XD Which they are, in everything except the middling. I'm not and never have been dedicated enough to swing tickets to one of their small-venue shows, but they sound so local I get cognitive dissonance.

Like "Ocean of Noise", which is sort of like Southern All Stars taped in a barn haunted by the spectre of Martin Hannett. Surf pop album filler is a totally Montreal thing, either by way of French chanson influence or hankering for what we haven't got, or both.

I forgot to mention that last week I went for drinks with some colleagues after work. It was at a bar off Square Victoria I'd only been to once, on the terrasse. It turned out the interior was packed, wall-to-wall standing room, with suits and blond girls in tweed miniskirts from Marketing, swishing glasses of wine and trying to pick each other up. There was a DJ; he played (quite good) progressive house. Nobody danced of course. The whole thing was only funny because it was real, if it had been parody it would've been too heavy-handed.

In other news, I ordered the FFXII Ultimanias Sunday night because sororial unit wanted them, and they arrived Wednesday morning. These things are the size of fantasy novel omnibuses in trade paperback, what the hell, I thought they'd be large and thin like English strategy guides. There's the entire bestiary in Japanese, everything a townsperson might ever say to one's party, how to defeat Yiazmat using a single party member with beginner licenses, no quickenings, and the PS2 controller tied behind one's back, etc. So far I have been baffled by the following:

1) The capital of Rozarria is called "Topaz Valley". Not in katakana or anything, just... it's a valley. Made out of topaz (or was that amber?). Like Silicon Valley is made out of silicon. So if you were, say, a princess of the Second Margrace Dynasty, you would be... a valley girl? I think.

2) That one picture of Ashe and Basch stripped down for the Fun Phon Coast. GEEBUS, WARN ME PEOPLE WILL YOU.

1) I have just discovered by reading the singles charts on Wikipedia that "Otoko no Sekai (Mandom: The Lovers of the World)" is a song, by country singer Jerry Wallace (but released in Japan only). It was the theme of a TV ad starring Charles Bronson and went to Oricon #1 in 1970. P2P searches are left as an exercise for the reader.

I'm backlogged by 3-4 chapters though I've kept up with spoilers. My problem is I just want it to be the endgame, now. XD; I mean, the way I see it, options for the last boss of this series come down to:

A) The President of the United States
B) The Second Coming of Christ
C) The President of the United States absorbs the parts of the Corpus Christi, grows six wings and the Spear of Longinus, and we have to defeat him standing on the torch of the Statue of Liberty while he buzzes around annoyingly in circles. Luckily, both Johnny and Gyro have long-range projectile weapons.

I would be lying if I said C) were not my favorite option. And no, I don't think it's going to be Diego - structurally speaking Diego is basically, yanno, Seifer.

2) I see people going back and forth with this, and I just want to say: why not streamline and go for the FFXII/Phoenix Wright crossover? No jury trials in Archades either amirite.

3) It fell out sororial unit is reading Vlad Taltos, and I'm reading Amber. Halfway through the second book, I'll have more constructive comments to make but first of all, DOES THIS REMIND ANYONE ELSE OF KATAMARI DAMACY? With the King, and all the little princes, and the running and running and shifting Stuff around until you get a whole new world to play with okay please tell me I'm not the first person in the universe to think this.

( FFXII tardery, technical not spoilerish )

FMA (now up to episode 38): the comments seem equally divided between "you ain't seen nothin' yet" and "stop watching now". XD I was pretty flummoxed is all, and not certain of understanding - the cast is numerous and the focus of action not always clear, let alone allegiances. There's a lot of running in circles (and yet somehow Ed and Al's inquiry advances?). Too the relentless emotional hammering is sometimes effective and sometimes chain-jerk. I do like Izumi a lot though. T and I intend to keep watching to the end, after which I'll probably read the manga, but really it's for the compulsive quality of the thing.

GetBackers: read the chapter summaries on getbackers, which helpfully begin where the last tankoubon left off. *CRIES*!! But I guess ( spoilers )

Am uploading music, so stay tuned. ♥

Too under the weather to go out so staying home and gaming, but sororial unit is still at the piano so I'm writing an LJ entry instead. :P In any case I am wending my way toward certain tombs and very iya da about it. With Vagrant Story I would drag my feet when in the overcity unwilling to go back downstairs because overcity Lea Monde is a sleepy little medieval French town that is lovely to wander through, even if it is overrun with the Cardinal's men trying to stick you with pointy objects. Now that I have a proper world map and blue desert skies at my disposal I am doubly IYA DAAAA.

( Okay anyhow this is the FFXII-to-date post. I'll start with the characters and hope I'll remember everything else I wanted to say as I go along. )

...These character notes seem to get more flippant the further I get down the list. ^^; O and I am incubating one of my inevitable Invisible City Postcards about Ashley Riot at the Muthru Bazaar. Because empires and religions rise and fall, but bazaars last forever.

I was going to write a long and spurious ship rating post for FFXII like I did last night for FMA, but then I got through the cutscene-o-rama with Punjabi Lando [1] and decided I had to digest that, so I went and read all the game mechanics FAQs on weapon stats, quickenings, bazaar goods etc. instead. I really wish I hadn't because now I have much more to worry about. XD;

However then I started thinking about applying the same modelling technique to fandom. That is, I was merely being precious last evening but then I figured, you could actually do something with this. XD

NOTA BENE: the following all relates to "passive" popularity, i.e. what proportion of people you could expect to like your pairing (or at least agree to entertain the idea), not what proportion of people are likely to write/draw for it. That introduces a whole slew of other factors (ex. size of fandom, how "difficult" the series/characters are to fic for, etc.), and besides I believe this last is random starting condition + power rule anyway. XD Similarly, the "wank" rating is a measure of how much tinder the warehouse contains, not whether anyone is going to light a match.

NOTA BENE 2: the following is pretty much bullshit, but IMO not more so than many economic models.

( Canonicity )

( Moe )

( Personality/Meta )

( Controversialness )

( The formulas )

( Sample calculations )

EDIT, ABOUT AN HOUR LATER -- I think I'm going to change this so as to put the PPa + PPb term in WPab instead of (or perhaps in addition to) sum(PP) in WPt. That is if both pairings are very popular in the fandom it's much more likely there will be wank between them than if both are fringe ships, for example R/H vs. H/H is likely to cause wank, Ron/Luna vs. Ron/Tonks, not so much.

( So the new formula is: )

Going by this WP(Ban/Ginji, Ban/Akabane) = 77.562, WP(Roy/Ed, Ed/Winry) = 87.85, and WP(SxS, SxK) = 83.9. Out of curiosity I did WP(Ron/Luna, Ron/Tonks), and it gave 18.146. My instinct is that WPab is logarithmic but I wouldn't be able to prove that mathematically. XD

EDIT 2 -- figured out how to shift the curve in the above formula to account for the 60/40 effect. $(PPa - PPb) should be something like larger(||PPa - PPb| - 2|, 0.2)? Will crunch more numbers when I have the gumption, or better yet you can do it for me. XD



[1] All the mooglecraft tech support gets outsourced to Bhujerba these days OH GOD I'M SORRY I'LL JUST BE OVER HERE [2]

[2] And anyhow it's not as funny as "How come you always see a Hume guy with a Viera girl and never the other way around?" Thanks a million, fabulous_papaya!