Saturday, March 30, 2002
Ladies and gentlemen, Columbus Ohio has my number.
Boyfriend and I went to the local Neat-o Anime Junk Store tonight. It's a little tiny cramped storefront on the north side; they also run a webstore and attend every convention between here and the dark side of the moon.
So I went in, and we were almost the only customers there (unusual). One of the cute little fanboyim who owns the store was bored, so he kept talking to us; the conversation went as follows:
(I pick up a box set of Yami no Matsuei trading cards. Mmm, gay.)
OWNER: Oh, Yami no Matsuei! We have the artbooks, you know!
(He picks them up and shows me.)
OWNER: Character Book and Sketch Book, see?
(I grin goofily and stretch out my hands.)
ME: Oooh! Gimme!
(He does so. I hug them to my chest briefly, put them aside to be purchased, and flop down on the floor to peruse the rest of their artbooks. He eyes me knowingly for a moment, then says:)
OWNER: ... we carry yaoi doujinshi, you know.
(Pause. My heart beats three times while I stare blindly at the artbooks and digest what I've just been told. Then I lift my head and give him a bright-eyed stare.)
ME: Really?
OWNER: Sure! They're in the back. Let me go dig those out for you.
(Two minutes later he comes out with, yes, a pile of wrapped and stickered yaoi doujinshi. Real, honest-to-god fan-made amateur smut comics from Japan. I breathe a prayer of thanks to whichever gods of lust were watching over me.)
OWNER: Here you go! You can look at them over there!
(I race over to the counter and paw through the stack. The only other customer in the store, a pudgy little teenaged Asian boy, promptly gains an interest in me and yaoi in general. I barely notice.)
Loads and loads of Saiyuuki yaoi. One Sorata x Arashi X doujinshi, sadly misfiled. One Zack x Cloud doujinshi where Cloud looks about twelve, ick. A bunch of FFX yaoi, ick ick ick stop having sex with Auron, people. A few other random series. All just beautifully drawn and toned.
Unfortunately, none of the fandoms I really follow, except Final Fantasy, and none of the good pairings from that. Alas. I didn't buy any, but I let the shop owner know that I was, in fact, highly interested and told him in no uncertain terms that I was an RPG fangirl. Let's see what comes of that.
I don't know if their website lists the yaoi djs on it. But by god, I'm gonna go find out. Anime Palace, I kiss your feet, and if you would like to earn raving metric assloads of my money, you're on the right track. Two words: PlayStation RPGs, guys.
Boyfriend and I had an enthusiastic and highly surreal conversation about yaoi after we left the shop, too. I think I've been dragged out of the closet.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 09:31 PM EST
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Friday, March 29, 2002
So I'm typing this on my brand-new, overpowered, and somewhat confusing OSX computer. I went up three resolution sizes and my icons are still the size of my thumb. I have da power!
Anyway, god knows what'll break next, or when I'll be updating next. I've sacrificed the requisite amount of blood to the gods of computer setup, so at least I know the computer likes me.
For the record: my last computer, a friendly little blueberry iMac, was named 'Lunatic Pandora'. I was playing FF8 at the time, and the icon for the hard drive did look kind of like Lunatic Pandora, so.
This computer's name is 'The Great And Terrible Oz'. Because it scares me.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 04:37 PM EST
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Tuesday, March 26, 2002
A year and a half ago, when we moved into our current townhouse, we were still getting mail from the previous residents. No big deal, it happens to all of us, they just forgot to forward their mail. Right?
Six of them?
That's right. For the first eight months or so, we got mail -- medical bills, car repair bills, that sort of thing -- for six entirely different couples/people. And at first I was sympathetic, if a bit suspicious. There are only two bedrooms, after all, they couldn't all have been living here at the same time.
I would write 'PLEASE FORWARD' on the envelopes and put them back in the mailbox, and wherever they ended up, it wasn't with me. After about six months, I got tired of it, and just threw the envelopes away. Eventually, they petered out.
Today, when we came home from dinner, there was a private investigator on our front porch. Looking for a seventh person (this one with a Japanese name) who used to live in our townhouse.
What I want to know is, who exactly used to live here, and what the hell were they doing? Did this basement used to house a con-man with seven different identities? What the hell?
... if I pull the plaster off the walls will I find sacks of stolen money stashed there?
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:23 PM EST
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Saturday, March 23, 2002
In my never-ending quest to kill myself with food as soon as humanly possible, today I resurrected one of my favorite college pastimes.
You get a can of your favorite soft drink (Dr Pepper works best, in my opinion, but that's because I'm an insane Pepperhead who was incontrovertibly warped by the 'I'm A Pepper' commercials in the late 70s) and pour it over ice.
Then you bite both ends off a cherry Twizzler and use it as a straw.
Every few sips, you pull out the Twizzler, eat it, and bite yourself off another Twizzler straw. Repeat until you're out of Twizzlers, out of soda, or in sugar shock.
And people have the nerve to claim my blog serves no useful purpose.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:57 PM EST
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Friday, March 22, 2002
You know, reading back over my various rantings about fanfiction, I notice that I seem to subscribe to two radically different schools of thought.
School No.1: Moon-Sturgeon
Ninety percent of everything is crap, except for fanfiction, where the percentage is closer to ninety-nine point five percent. I hate most fanfiction, I hate your fanfiction, and here's why. Beware of italics tags and flying spittle.
(Occurs: when Mooncalf is hypercaffeinated and ranty, writing at four thousand words a minute)
School No.2: Hippy-Dippy Happy-Crappy-Calf
You have the right to write whatever the hell you want and splash it all over the web, and I'm damn proud of you for caring enough about your fandom to do it, no matter how amateurish your attempt! Maybe I don't like your stuff, but why should you care? My opinion shouldn't matter to you!
(Occurs: when Mooncalf is calm and focused, writing slowly but with purpose)
At first glance, they look kind of incompatible, really. But they're not. What you get when you put them both together is vaguely Voltairean in nature:
I may personally hate your fic to pieces and rant about it endlessly, but I will defend to the bitter end your right to write and display your fic however you see fit.
I try -- I don't always succeed, but I try -- never to say that something 'sucks'. What I try to say is that I don't like it. Because (and I've said this before, a million years ago) there is a definite and measureable difference between 'things I hate' and 'things that suck'. I like a whole bunch of really suck-ass things, and I hate a bunch of completely inoffensive things; that is my prerogative as a human being, a fundamentally irrational creature, and a weblogger.
As long as I do not try to use my opinions and my tastes to legislate upon you your rights, then they remain my opinions, and I am entitled to those. We both have rights here, on the web. Rights and wrongs.
They can still hurt you, these opinions. They can hurt your feelings, they can hurt your reputation, they can hurt your bandwidth. It's power, of a sort. All power invites abuse. As long as I use my power to abuse concepts instead of individuals, I may sympathize with the pain I caused you but I will never be sorry.
You know, I think this turned out to be five or six miniature musings instead of one longish coherent statement. Um.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 05:04 AM EST
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Tuesday, March 19, 2002
Okay, I have some new fanfiction rants. And, apparently, italics tags to spare. Bear with me. Warning: ranty and opinionated!
You see this? You see it?! It's called a 'word'! It's free! You may use a hundred, a thousand, or a fucking million of them, and no one's going to charge you for it!
All it costs you is time and hard drive space and bandwidth and possibly two more sheets of paper to add descriptions of decent length! To add action scenes that read like action and not like a teenaged girl saying, 'okay, so this happened and then this happened'!
A handful of completely free vocabulary grants your fic mood and timing and characterization. If you don't care enough about your fic to spend a single hour of your life tuning its sound, why do you write?
You see this? You see it?! It's called a 'word'! But of course you knew that, there are approximately five thousand excess words currently dripping from your fic like a gallon of maple syrup on two pancakes!
I'm so happy that you have a large vocabulary! But there's really no need to use every single word that you like in every fic! You're young, you're prolific, you're talented, surely you can write another fic later to use some of the other ones? You shove your large vocabulary in my face with such vehemence -- are you compensating for something?
You probably have some wonderful ideas in there somewhere, but I can't find them! You've drowned them! They're dead! In some alternate more enlightened universe that's a crime, you know! Murder of an innocent idea! Criminal misuse of adjectives!
You see this? You see it?! It's called a 'word'! Not a 'wodr', you idiot! Use your spellchecker! That's what it's there for!
You see this? You see it?! It's called a 'word'! If you persist in calling it an 'ichigo', you pompous little 'otaku' who doesn't speak more than thirty words of Japanese, I will hunt you down and drop my copy of the OED on your head!
English is a precise and complex language, and one which can be used beautifully and poetically! If you cannot write with precision and beauty in English, Japanese cannot save you or your fic!
Ten Japanese buzzwords do nothing to add to the 'mood' or 'verisimilitude' of your fic, because you are not Japanese, you do not think like a Japanese person, you do not act like a Japanese person, and you never will!
Replace the Japanese words with their English equivalents, because no matter what you think there are equivalents, get rid of the stupid 'glossary' at the end of your fic, and learn to use your native tongue instead of trying to impress people with your misused Japanese terms! 'Koibito' means 'dear one' but 'koi' means 'goldfish', for the love of Pete!
*gasp*gasp*wheeze*pant* Okay. I'm calm. I'm calm.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:26 PM EST
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I've always thought of 'Walk Like A Man' (by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons) as being, ironically enough, an Ashton Anchors song.
I was looking at a picture of Ashton on some random website one day when the song came on my mp3 player, and I was struck square in the forehead with the mental image of Ashton bopping down the road and singing the song in a really terrible off-key soprano while everyone around him winced, covered their ears, and skittered away. Walk like a man, sing like a girl, Ashton. No woman's worth crawling on the earth indeed.
It just screams 'Ashton' to me, and it always will. One of these days I'll draw that picture.
But that's mostly just random, and beside the point. Now then.
My mp3 player uses Winamp skins, and I've collected a lot of them. Nowadays I keep the skin selection set to 'Random'. Sometimes it pulls a particularly meaningful or funny combination of song/skin, and then I have to stop, point, and laugh. And sometimes, tell my friends about it, if it's particularly good/bad.
Today, it played 'Walk Like A Man'. And pulled my skin of Faris, from FF5.
Suffice it to say that I neatly coated my monitor in a fine spray of Dr. Pepper.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 02:28 AM EST
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Sunday, March 17, 2002
It's done! It's done! mooncalf has been moved! Five days of work but it's done, it's done, it's... *gasp*wheeze*THUD*
(Ahem. Please to be updating your link and bookmarks as soon as possible! Thank you! Now, I go collapse.)
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 02:16 AM EST
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Saturday, March 16, 2002
So it's about 5:30 in the morning, and I'm huddled in front of my computer, cold, tired, lonely, and half-dazed, bulling my way through yet another of a seemingly endless series of HTML pages for my site revamp and screwing up as often as I do something right.
And a slow and kind of sad song starts playing on the CD that I'm listening to, and by the end of it I'm in a thorough funk, the kind that starts with 'boy, this is pointless' and winds up being a fear-induced reassessment of my entire life and where it's going.
You know how it goes.
And then I realize that, you know, two hours ago I ate a miniscule handful of taffy on an empty stomach and maybe right now a snack would be nice. So I put on a jacket and went to the local fastfoodery and got far too much grease at the drive-through and came home and devoured it all.
Now I feel fine. Happy, even. Still cold and tired and a bit lonely, but... hey. Grease!
I love food. It's so good to me.
I promise to stop being random and blog properly after this damn revamp is finished.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 07:04 AM EST
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Friday, March 15, 2002
For those of you who are interested, the license plates that currently grace my blog were generated here.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 02:20 AM EST
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Tuesday, March 12, 2002
I love my city. I really do.
One of the reasons I love Columbus is CD101, the local alternative/new/weirdshit radio station. And when I say 'alternative', I mean it. They play the strangest crap ever.
Okay, now an admission: I really know jack and shit about music. But when I hear a song that I like (for whatever reason) I'll go to the ends of the earth to track it down. So tonight, in the car on the way home from dinner, CD101 starts playing... this song. This... ironic progressive-pop song. This...
I nearly died laughing. By the end of the song I was completely and utterly in love. And then the DJ comes on and tells me that the song is by a local artist by the name of Scott (completely mangled phlegmy noise).
Local artist. Scott. Name of the song is pretty easy to guess from the lyrics.
I went out on the Web. In five minutes I had his full name, the name of the song, and... an mp3. God, I love the Web.
Anyway. The song is called 'Popular', the artist's name is Scott Gorsuch, and if you'd like to hear the mp3, go here. (You can also get his song 'Tangerine', which is also nifty. And then you are honorbound to order his CD 'Purple' here. Like I'm going to do.)
I've made an effort to transcribe the lyrics to 'Popular', although I probably got a few words wrong; I hereby cut the journal entry to spare the uninterested. Click on the comments link below to view them --
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:15 PM EST
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This be a test of the brand-new Mooncalf Noises, in its new home, now with sixty percent more white. I will continue to tweak and twibble at the blog over the next couple of days as I settle in; that being said, if you discover anything that is horribly broken, please note it in the 'comments' section of this entry, and I'll jump all over it like a pitbull on Viagra.
There will be nothing more of import said here, save: please update your links and bookmarks as soon as you can.
Thank you very much!
... now, to move the rest of my freakin' site.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 03:52 AM EST
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Saturday, March 9, 2002
To Her Coy Mail Server
(with apologies to Andrew Marvell, who's really much better at this sort of stuff)
Had I but world enough, and time,
This email coyness were no crime.
I should sit down and think of a way
To make you transmit that which I say.
Alas, to the clouds of email heaven
You've been gone. Since the stroke of seven.
Since early this morning I complain
And yet does the network error reign.
Think: any ISP chould I choose.
And yet, you continue to refuse!
My silicon empire ought to grow
Faster than thought, and yet: you're slow!
A hundred nanos should email take
Before I start my game of Quake.
The Trash's a fine and private place,
But not for email, which longs to race.
Thus, though I cannot make the Sun
Reboot, yet still, I ask you: run!
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 11:02 PM EST
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Thursday, March 7, 2002
For those very few of you who may be concerned: my summer con schedule.
Unfortunately, I won't be going to Anime Expo this year. Instead of doing the west coast, I'll be doing the east coast. I'll be attending Shoujocon (July 19-21, East Brunswick, NJ) and Otakon (July 26-28, Baltimore, MD).
There's still a chance that I'll also attend Anime North (May 24-26, Toronto, Canada), but I'm not certain. If I do go to Anime North, I'll decide closer to time and probably just register at the door.
We now return you to the blog already in progress:
... grapevines.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 10:20 PM EST
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Tuesday, March 5, 2002
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I lived in beautiful calm quiet small town Indiana. And while small town life didn't quite kill me, it sure as hell tried.
From here, looking back, it's easy to laugh at that year in a small town as my 'lost year' and let it go. But I really did come perilously close to mental problems, for many reasons. But that is, fortunately, only tangential to my story.
You see, Smalltown, Indiana was a corporate town. This little town of approximately 30,000 residents were overwhelmingly the employees and support network of a major engineering corporation I'll call Bobbins.
If you lived in Smalltown, you either worked for Bobbins, you worked for a company that did contract work for Bobbins, you worked in one of the service industries that supported the Bobbins employees, you were in school preparing to go work at Bobbins, or you were a retired Bobbins employee waiting peacefully to die.
I'm exaggerating a bit, you know. I think there was a cardboard-box factory, too.
But it was a town where there was little to do besides work, eat, and sleep. Teenagers cruised the main road and drank stolen beer in the mall parking lot. Children roamed the residential streets in packs and occasionally kicked sports equipment at passing cars. Adults watched TV and went to church. And everybody got a year older every three hundred and sixty-five days or so, and life went on.
There is, however, one good thing that Smalltown did for me, before I fled. Some lone deejay, perhaps someone as ill-suited to Smalltown life as I was, introduced me to the music of Dar Williams, now one of my favorite artists. And, also, to the very sense of irony I hadn't realized I'd been missing all that year.
Boyfriend and I were driving home one day, and all of a sudden, one of the dinky-shit radio stations started playing 'Are You Out There'. We listened fascinated all the way through, and then the deejay in question quickly said her name and moved on.
'Are You Out There', of course, is a paean to a deejay who helps his listeners realize the shallowness of small-town corporate life, before he gets fired for being too radical. Or at least, that's how I always read it.
Self-referential irony? I'd sure like to think so.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 10:48 PM EST
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Saturday, March 2, 2002
Of The Awefull Battle Of The Boys And The Slashfangirls
(Together With Some Account Of The Participation Of The Trolls And The Newbies, And The Intervention Of The Great Moderator, And A Great Big Honking Apology To The Memory Of T.S. Eliot)
The fanboys and fangirls, as everyone knows,
Are lecherous passionate RPG foes;
It is always the same, wherever one goes.
And the Trolls and the Newbies, whatever they say,
Are more than happy to join in the fray,
Their only reason their voice to display...
And they
scream flame growl hiss
scream flame GROWL HISS
Until they have drowned out the whole BBS!
Now on the occasion of which I shall speak,
There'd been no flame war for almost a week
(But don't make the mistake of thinking them meek!)
The Volunteer Mod couldn't take any more
(I don't know the reason, but most people think
That the last stupid flamewar drove her to drink)
And so no one at all was holding the floor
When the first slashfangirl slipped through the door.
Her first post was simple, her second said more,
And then up spoke a fanboy, an acknowledged boor,
And they
scream flame growl hiss
scream flame GROWL HISS
Until they had drowned out the whole BBS!
Now all those fanboys, they travel in packs
And support each other if their argument lacks,
And so all the fanboys, they leapt to the boor's aid
And the slashfangirl they did loudly upbraid,
And promptly ignored all the points that she made.
And together they started to troll and to flame
So that no single fanboy would absorb all the blame.
But a terrible row is what slashfangirls like!
And as soon as the fanboys had called one a dyke,
Out they all poured to make posts by the ton
And start a battle that just couldn't be won.
With their brave warcry 'don't like it, don't look'
They made each poor thread the length of a book...
Then the Trolls and the Newbies entered the fray,
Some posting by night, some posting by day
Joined in
To the din
With a
scream flame growl hiss
scream flame GROWL HISS
Until they had drowned out the whole BBS!
Their insults were as sharp as gladiator's trident
Their flames, they were roasting, their voices were strident
And some of the regulars were so badly annoyed
They abandoned the board that they once enjoyed
When suddenly, and better sooner than later,
Up from HTML stalked... the Great Moderator.
His answer was lengthy and vicious and long,
He made a great post and his points, they were strong.
He silenced the fanboys and fangirls alike
In one great swooping unmerciful strike.
And those who were left in the harsh glare of morning
Gazed over the rubble, and boy, they took warning.
The Moderator yawned and he went back to sleep...
And the boys and slashfangirls, they scattered. Like sheep.
And when Volunteer Mod returned, clutching her head,
There wasn't a single one left in the thread.
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 12:32 AM EST
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Friday, March 1, 2002
(Ahem.)
Today, March the first, Anno Domini two thousand and two, is the second anniversary of the opening of my main site, conveniently named 'mooncalf'. Funny, that.
Happy birthday to my site, la la la, wow, two years, whoda thunk it. Off to light a candle and eat a piece of cake!
Posted by Mie Tsukikoushi @ 01:02 AM EST
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