Petronia

Yeah, the whole "ask me for an essay" bit was sort of irresponsible considering I probably won't have time to write essays. XD; Have expanded on some of the shorter ones in comments, though - and there's the following.

( Snippety McCut )

I won't be able to finish all the mix CDs, of course. ^^; I got 25 requests and will have 5-6 ready to go tonight - I won't be able to mail them until Tuesday, though, since I have to buy bubble mailers and make it to the post office. 10-12 should be manageable but after that it gets dicey since they still have to wend their way through the snail mail network. Will probably start on cards for the rest. Anyone else for cards? Post is here. Don't assume I have your address! ^^;

Also on the announcements front, getbacksubrosa's guessing deadline is in three days. Don't forget to submit your guesses - only a few people have done so thus far. I'll post to the comm too but I figure this is the only way I'm reaching GB-fan flisters who don't have it friended (I know there's a few :O).

( Wednesday: Montreal Contemporary Art Museum )

( Wednesday night: GAMMA 256 )

( Friday: McGill case competition )

( Friday night: MBA winter party )

1) Hahaha speaking of ethnographic techno, someone finally did it: they made a mnml version of the Ghost In The Shell theme. Vinyl bootleg, biyatches! I'm listening to a rip now and it's ace - kind of Cadenza-style.

2) The signup for getbacksubrosa ends tomorrow! Have about a dozen people on the list right now, looking for more, so pass it on. ♥ Emails will go out Friday.

3) WWNPHD? I'm taking this as conclusive proof I'm not imagining the zeitgeist's recurring theme.

4) Yesterday I went to a talk given by the legendary Mr. Schulich, He Whose Name Is On The Science Library (didn't get to thank him for that before he left, as I'd dorkily wanted to do - though he'll never know why he's a legendary in-joke XD;). Bought a copy of his book for 15$. It's shiny - as in, the cover is gold foil - and basically a collection of salient but randomly ordered aphorisms. The talk was along the same lines.

5) Had another presentation skills workshop. I have to kvetch about this, because while IMO the course content is urgent and key, when it comes to watching classmates give Powerpoint presentations on completely random topics, there are few places and times worse than huddled in a corner of an echoingly empty classroom, with the AC permanently stuck at Sub-Polar, from 6PM to 9PM, on a Tuesday when you've had four hours of sleep. It got pretty gruesome toward the end: there were giggle attacks, and one girl presented on the Spinning Right Or Left Brain? Ballerina. I was so tired I seriously considered giving mine on the topic of JKR Sez Dumbledore Is Gay. Instead I talked about Green Life Montreal and went over the time limit by five minutes. The instructor said I shouldn't have made all the Dumbledore jokes at the beginning but at 8PM anything to get a few lulz from the audience amirite.

6) I wrote more on the Accounting midterm paper to argue why I should get marks back than I did to answer the questions themselves. SAD.

7) I didn't talk much about SSBB this round (no news is good news XD). Now that you're all read the issue, figure that a couple of weeks after the concert I finally scored a copy of Patrick Wolf's Lycanthropy on the wild internets, and sat down to play it through while editing the next submission in the queue. GUESS WHICH ONE.

8) More music to come!

Earlier than I'd expected - was given an estimated ship date near the end of September. It's red and black and very slight for its class, but I didn't name it Ed. XD Pictures and review that is actually informative, not going to bother myself ahaha.

Vista seems wretchedly slow, more so than on my sister's XPS, but I haven't finished setting up. Will probably have to disable a bunch of crap.

***

FMA progress: finished volume 14 last night, now it will have to wait until I can order the missing volume 15 (semester-start liquidity crunch). The idea of following the story at a rate of three tankoubon per year seems mildly insane - what if the X-Files had shown one new episode a month? More of the Conspiracy(tm) would fall out of the sieve that passes for my current brain than would enter it. But I've never been very good at serialization.

I horribly miss the JoJo fandom but there's not much I can do at this point other than make the occasional WTF-face over SBR and write vastly extrapolated fic. D: Should make a poll specifically for JoJo fic. Or just finish summarizing Stone Ocean, finally, since scanlations for that seem to be going nowhere. Hmm.

...Maybe I should fall back on Occam's Razor and call the GB challenge comm getbacksubrosa?

***

OH AND ALSO I'm going to Bebel Gilberto + Forro in the Dark on Saturday. This could only be awesome!

Not-quite final wordcount for SSBB August issue: 225,000
Not-quite final wordcount for SSBB special issue: 83,000

Or, well over 300,000 words. Erin and I were joking that October ought to be M-I-N-I-M-A-L Month but really: I was wracking my brains for a formal rather than thematic challenge and this could be it. Something like, for this issue only each person is allowed to contribute up to two stories of between 0 and 3,500 words each. (Although the sex scene requirement remains as-is. XD) One of the blind_go rounds was along said lines.

***

Regardless of whether I post this stuff here or at carnet it must be getting boring. XD Uh... there's other stuff I want to talk about! For some reason I really want to organize that GetBackers fic-guessing challenge although this is utter insanity what with b-school and part-time jobs and SSBB and WIPs. OTOH I never actually guess in these challenges, so it would be very basic: you sign up, I email you a pseud, you send me your story with the pseud in the subject line, I post your story under the pseud. A victim collaborator will be found to compile and rank the guesses. No editing, no deadline extensions, no graphic design, no search-replacing smart quotes. Compared to SSBB it looks like a cakewalk. XD

Suggestions re: comm names and time frame?

Through Bonds of Words and Bonds of Action, by reversedhymnal [GetBackers, Kazuki/Toshiki/Juubei]

Thinking about it the whole Toshiki thing was a rotten trick on the part of A&A. At least when Amon was introduced, everyone who'd fixated on the cuteness of Shido/Madoka was happy they had someone to slash with Emishi. With Toshiki it was like, you do realize anyone who is liable to give a shit about Fuuga ships Kazuki/Juubei already, right? (Exaggeration: I know all of three people who like Toshiki! And they are pretty vocal about it. But OTPers just hated the whole setup from beginning to end.)

Prince of Tennis pulled this too. I'm thinking of InuKai, which one could argue was/is the real cool-kids pairing of the series - always the minority interest but the sexiest fic, bar none. Then 3,000,000 chapters into the manga, Konomi in his infinite wisdom provides one with Data Pair, which is so perfect one could weep, especially given that it contradicts what everyone-who-cares has been shipping hardcore forever.** GOOD JOB DUDE, THANKS A BUNCH, CARRY ON.

Anyway this has nothing to do with the fic (which is cute bondage pr0n), I've just been carrying this rant inside me for years and it decided spontaneously to break into the light of day. XD;


** Except one person I know, guess she's lucky.

( 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. ♥

Amazon Japan package arrived tonight. The route it took is a saga unto itself I really don't have the gumption to get into. =_=

* GetBackers 37, with the postcards
* New Petshop of Horrors 3
* Ono Natsume, La Quinta Camera
* Hoshino Lily, Nurse ga oshigoto <-- of course U.S. Customs had to open the shipment that had this in. =_= It's too hardcore for me, which is saying something.

Hamster!Ginji sleeping on snake!Ban fanart at the back of volume 34. XDDD (Ayamine: "O I know what that is, that was in the news! Gohan-chan, right ♥")

This I have to say, volume 34 >>>> the preceding several volumes taken together in terms of interest.

( Questions answered, more questions asked, speculation runs rampant )

Yup, that's all for the volume. I don't know when Ginji will get to do something again. =_=

Head for the relevant questions on the fortuitous ramble meme if you want the GetBackers manga spoilers I've been garnering. XD (If you're spoiler averse assume every comment thread is nuclear, BTW, I haven't been bothering to grey out.)

What I didn't write because it wasn't relevant to anyone's request: the backstory with Eris has come out. I think it must be in volume 34. It's - eh, it's about as simple as your most reasonable simple hypothesis, really, what's interesting is the role of the Miroku. XD You might have FF8 crossover fanart urges. Unless that's just me. Reading Ayamine-sensei's Journey to Mangaka-dom on his blog was so inspiring that I've started drawing again (I haven't since Europe), though all I ever draw these days are Orihime and Rukia. XD I should learn the knack of the boys, I figure once I can draw Ichigo / Renji / Byakuya / Ishida the world is pretty much my oyster insofar as LOLZ go.

(I got the doujinshi package last night, chirachira - good fandom things always come in threes. ♥ I think the major reason I'm so blasé about doujinshi is that I'm not willing to pay for anything that's not better than I could do for myself** - the fact that I would never actually spend the time/money/effort to make a doujinshi or even sketch one out doesn't come into the equation, for some reason. But the Honey Canon really is adorable.)

I still haven't done the Initial D requests, which are one request really, but I have to go to dinner. XD;;


** Good thing for me fanfiction is free. O SNAP I WENT THERE. (This applies to all walks of life, actually. If I ever learnt a proper music mixing software... I dunno.)