I Am Completely Serious

Time and money permitting, I am probably going to Japan for my friend Mo's wedding in April. (She hadn't even met this guy last time I talked to her in person; these are the perils of living an ocean away from somebody.) She has informed me on no uncertain terms that I cannot show up at this particular formal event in khakis and a button-down shirt; I probably need to get a dress of some description. I have not owned one since, I think, grade school? I no longer have the intense philosophical objections to such garments that I did in high school, but this is still going to be kind of a project. I have been looking at this site.

Also time and money permitting, I'd like to travel for a week either before or after. I'd really like to go to Kyoto, but would need to figure out some way to do it at least semi-cheaply.

My dwarves are engraving this absolutely everywhere:

"Engraved on the floor is a superiorly designed image of Thefin Oniontame the human and Ecano Rightspower the Renowned Robustness the cyclops by Iton Oltarurdim. Ecano Rightspower the Renowned Robustness is striking down Thefin Oniontame. The artwork relates to the killing of the human Thefin Oniontame by the cyclops Ecano Rightspower the Renowned Robustness in The Swamps of Wiping in 66."

(You will henceforth refer to me as Ecano Rightspower the Renowned Robustness.) This is clearly at least one of my engravers' favorite story. And there have been a couple of figurines, too.

I've also found several engravings and a figurine of another human, "Ura Trickscottage," being killed by a hydra a few years earlier. The dwarves are at peace with the nearest human civilization; maybe there's some other one they don't like? I sold the figurines to the last human caravan, who seemed happy enough to take them.

Also:

"This is a finely-craft chert figurine of Mafol Futeredye. The item is a finely-designed image of Mafol Futuredye the dwarf and oysters in chert by Cog Reglocun. Mafol Futuredye is surrounded by the oysters. Mafol Futuredye looks terrified."

OH GOD NOT OYSTERS

Check out my latest embark site!



( Conveniently located next to hell! This'll make it really easy to train up my militia! )

Edit: The worldgen data:

( Read more... )

Here is the site in question. It's only classed as "Wilderness." When I tried to reclaim it just now it was full of fishpeople, with all the demons gone. The FPS was still so bad it was unusable; very sad.

This Cul de Sac comic prefigured I Want My Hat Back by three years!

Today, I once again help people who've arrived at this blog by way of search queries involving the word "manga." Also books and porn this time, though.


manga possession male to female blonde goddess

I think that you want either Global Garden or La Chevaliere d'Eon, but those terms do not perfectly describe either one.

freud manga

If you want a manga that has Freud in it, maybe Afterschool Charisma? If you want a manga that is Freudian, just, you know, get a copy of Shounen Jump.

manga characters shouting

Bleach is basically just people shouting stuff now, right? Read Bleach.

manga that have clone

A, A' - Clones as a metaphor for grief.
Global Garden - Clones as a metaphor for grief, and possibly incest.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle - Clones that like fly through dimensions and don't have souls and there's wings and time travel and you lose an eye doing that. (They are still a metaphor for grief.)

novel telepathic spaceship cat

Anne McCaffrey has much to answer for.

perfunctory frivolity :)

:)

shota torture gore

Go away.

yaoi manga half brothers fuck each other

The worst thing about this query is that I'm almost certain I've encountered a manga which fits its specifications.

shoujo with tragic past

Is this a trick question? All of it. All of the shoujo.


Two Bonus Queries!


elena most annoying character nalini singh

You know, I'm worried about your priorities if your primary problem with a book in which the hero threatens to kill a baby is the heroine.

what kind of girl lays eggs?

Nanami isn't that kind of girl!

Over the past year, I've made a lot of long, grumpy posts about books/video games/etc that have disappointed me. (I've even got two sitting on the desktop unfinished right now.) I have written relatively few positive posts about stuff I like. My resolution is that for every discrete media item I take the time to thrash at, I will also talk about something that was good.

(I'm not going as far as "expend as many words on positivity as negativity," because I am a jerk and that is impossible. Perhaps it will be my son who finally brings balance to the force.)

To get started, I have recently read and liked these shounen manga which have "x" in their titles for no good reason:

Hayate x Blade, by Shizuru Hayashiya - A comedy shounen manga about a private girls' school with mandatory swordfights. The girls have to fight in pairs and get a gradually-increasing amount of money for each fight they win. The Kind-Hearted-Idiot-Type title character, Hayate, needs the money to save an indebted orphanage (of course!), while her partner Ayana, the Short-Tempered-Straight-Man, wants to redeem herself for having hurt her original partner.

Every plotline goes like this:

* Two girls are having problems with their relationship! Oh noes!

* Hayate tries to fix this in improbable and counterproductive ways. She hits on Ayana, Ayana hits her.

* Fight scene! "NOW I'LL SHOW YOU MY TRUE POWER" etc

* Hayate's plans have failed, but the girls probably work it out anyway.

The manga with the most similar tone is probably Ouran High School Host Club: it fulfills all the parameters of its genre, but it's always self-aware and never takes itself too seriously. It's gotten slightly darker as the series has progressed - little piles of angst have accumulated in every corner at this point - but Hayashiya has too much sense of perspective to let things get too heavy.

Hunter x Hunter, by Yoshihiro Togashi - So you know how at the end of Yu Yu Hakusho, Yusuke, Kurama, and Hiei go into the demon world where everything's all brutal and decadent and better-drawn? And there's no longer any standard shounen-manga black-and-white moral conflict - just people with conflicting loyalties doing battle and betraying each other in increasingly baroque ways? (And Mukuro!) And then it ends really suddenly without quite resolving in a satisfying way. (And Mukuro gets -ed over.)

Hunter x Hunter is essentially Togashi trying for a re-do of that last arc. Its protagonists, Gon and Killua, are two adorable little martial artist kids who are not exactly sociopaths. They care about their friends, and Gon has kind of an abstract allegiance to the idea of not murdering anyone without a really good reason. But he'll do just about anything else. There's not a lot separating them from the mass-murdering villains - and there's dialog making this explicit. They're just on different sides, is all.

There are no innocents in this series. At one point a character becomes bodyguard to a defenseless young woman; she turns out to be a rapacious collector of black-market human body parts, and is never in any physical danger against which she needs protection. The cast consists almost exclusively of people who would be villains or, at best, the morally-gray rival in any other series. Hunter x Hunter a bizarre mutant species of shounen manga, in which the essential phrase, "I'll protect you!" is never once uttered. It's refreshingly honest.

HxH has been one of my favorite manga since I was in high school. I am currently engaged in probably my tenth re-read of the York Shin Auction storyline, which satisfyingly combines nearly every shounen manga element I like. My only serious problem with it is Togashi's inevitably weird treatment of his female characters.

because I am an idiot! Paying for International Express would have been ridiculously expensive, so I didn't do it; I just sent the package normal priority. Mee and Conan are accustomed to my doofusitude in such matters.

It's now Christmas morning in Japan. An hour ago I got an email from Mee saying, "Thank you for your present!" In English, even.

I said, "Mom? What do you think's the fastest a box could possibly get from here to Japan? Because Mee says -"

Mom: "Oh, surely not. She can't have gotten it already."

"Yeah, I don't know how she could have! The delivery estimate was like, early January! I guess she knows I'm sending it because I asked her to confirm her address, and she's just saying thank you in advance?"

Mere moments after we had this exchange, Mee sent another email. It contained this photograph:



THEIR PRESENTS ARE THERE

THEY HAVE ARRIVED IN YUKIGUNI

HOW DID THAT HAPPEN

There are only two possibilities I can think of, and they may both be true at once:

1) The woman I dealt with at the post office upgraded the package to Express out of consideration for the pain my doofusitude might cause Mee and Conan. I know her, we talked for a while the day I mailed the stuff, and she is definitely very familiar with my habit of mailing gifts to Japan in a less-than-timely manner.

2) Random unrelated people at USPS and Japan Post recognized it as a gift for children due to the picture I made for the label:



and thus decided to rush it along. (I drew them both as characters from the books I got them; Mee is Mee, and Conan is the bear whose hat is gone.) Also, in addressing the envelope I referred to Conan as "Coconuts." And I'm pretty sure I told the complete and unvarnished truth on the customs declaration, that being "2 books and 2 origami penguins." Was their present given special treatment... on grounds of cuteness?

Regardless of what actually happened, I clearly need to go by the post office and thank the person next week. This is badass.

The official Ruby on Rails tutorial should not require you to work your way through three suggested solutions in a stackoverflow thread just to install everything it wants you to install.

You know what happened when I installed Python on this computer? Python was installed. And everything was fine.

If two individuals give one another Amazon gift cards of equal value, has an exchange of gifts taken place?