12-02-2004 I've been fascinated with the mentality behind trans-gender themes since I began watching Ranma 1/2 a few years ago. It's a more common theme in Anime and Manga than any more Western material. I'm not sure why this is, although the US' prudish culture might have something to do with it. newRanma was almost entirely rotated about the theme of Ranma's trans-gender curse. Gabriel's primary conflict is with her confusion about her gender.In the same vein as those stories, Mallory Morgan is about to discover a new kind of magic in Parallel Pixy. I'm intending this story to focus much more on fantasy and come across as much lighter in tone than my earlier stories. The first chapter is somewhat sad in tone, but I hope to lighten it with the second.
12-01-2004 Chapter 4 of 'Gabriel' is up. I've got chapters five and six, but they're super-extremely rough.
Every time I see a headline like this one, I feel like crying. Yet another school district is attacking science curriculum by policy. In this case, Christian-centric creationism is going to be given equal or greater voice with established theories about Darwinistic natrual selection.
Why don't we also give equal voice to Odin slashing the World Tree Yggdrasl? Or Slaying Ymir and creating the nine worlds? We could also instruct small Christian school-children about Marduk slaying the World Serpent Tiamat, and crafting manking out of the blood of her husband. Or How about Pangu hatching from the Cosmic Egg?
Sadly, Americans have the idea now that 'Fair' means that every angle-- or at least the angles you like-- on a situation is given equal representation, despite solid evidence to the contrary. We have 'Fair and Balanced' Fox News to thank for that.
11-24-2004 I've placed a new opinion piece on the Goodies Page, An Argument for Data Encryption. Guess what that's about. There are some links to free encryption software at the end.
I've been watching a few new anime. Most of them are somewhat okay. Some are real losers. Some, like DearS, are *amazing*. Most Anime that are based on Japanese romance-sim games are real dogs. Boring and repetitive. It's the same cute girl with 4 different hair colors and a unique traumatic back-story. Even if they manage to avoid that, they end up being jerky. Twelve individual plots to cover each character with very little relationship between the plots. DearS has a fairly deep plot. Even played for humor, with some throw-away fanservice characters, it's a really intriguing sci-fi story. Fanservice. Oh yes. It's been piled on thick and heavy for this story, in XXL Fanboy proportions.
2004 - The Year of Living Stressfully
What an absolutely suck-tastic ass-reaming of a year this has been.
Before I begin, let me indicate to you, my reader, that I have a genetic disease. I inherited it from my mother, who inherited it from her own mother. It's called 'Make a Fucking Mountain Out of a Molehill' Disease. My brother has a more severe case than I do. He's so busy inflating the bullshit that he's made up that he doesn't have time to inflate the real shit that's happening to him.
Me, I get beat on, hammered, ground against the stone of life, and then don't let it go like I'm supposed to. It gets worse and worse. The little things build up. The asshat drivers on the freeway who can't comprehend that cellphones are for talking and steeringwheels are for driving and not vice-versa. The marijuana-addled counter jockey at Arby's who can't quite grasp the profound entirety of 'No Mustard Please'. Some moron who's talking about shit he has no clue about. And getting paid more for it than I do for doing my job for which I am reasonably highly skilled.
That kinda crap conglomerates. It accumulates in my craw, and I have to work to release it. I have to make myself let go of the day to day stressors that so many other people just blow off.
Then shit like this happens.
What a fan-fucking-tastic way to start a year. When I'm busy gnashing my teeth over all the 'might have happeneds' and 'what ifs' that surround such an intrusion into real life, working to eliminate those minor stresses doesn't even register. They just start boiling up like a big 'ol pot of extra-spicy creole style Gumbo.
On top of dealing with the actual disaster, I then had to deal with the realities surrounding the disaster, like moving out of a place where the shoddy maintenance caused fires. Getting all the mail and services switched over.
Do I sue? Do I demand compensation? Do I bend over and just take it like well-behaved choir boy?
Eventually, I ended up taking it like a boxer, shot for shot, punch for punch. No lawyers were involved, but I did get a number of concessions-- in writing-- from the apartment people in exchange for the trouble they caused me. I and my family packed up and moved to the apartment we'd rather have had in the first place for less total rent.
It's amazingly easy to lease an apartment in the dead of winter. Why? Because moving in cold and snow SUCKS BIG HAIRY DONKEY TESTICLES.
I put literally my all into moving, unable to comfortably rest simply because of the 'might have been' horrors that kept passing before my eyes whenever I tried to rest. The pain of sore, oxygen starved muscles that comes with lifting heavy furniture and boxes over and over again isn't much to deal with when you 're thinking to yourself, 'Not another night in that fucking death trap!'
So I got sick. Really fucking sick. Coughing up black goo sick. Not only had I written a lot of checks on my body that were going to bounce at the First National Bank of Reality, I had already completely obliterated my already piss-poor resistances standing around all night in my boxers watching firemen kick my chimney down in weather cold enough that they had to keep deicing the firehose.
By the time February rolls around I'm out: several thousand dollars in moving expenses, several hundred dollars in medical expenses, most of my 'Paid Time Off' for the year-- we don't get real sick leave or vacation leave any more-- and am still up to my armpits in boxes that I simply haven't had time to unpack yet.
THEN the various family deaths that always seem to happen around the end of winter started raining down hard and heavy. Except this time, they hit closer to home than usual. My wife's grandfather died. Several of her older aunts and uncles went up to the big RV park in the sky. Her cat died.
Twinkie was almost 22 years old. My wife had the cat since she was a six years old. It was, in every way that really mattered, a part of her. I realized when I married the woman I was getting the cat in the bargain. She and I were both crushed. Even though the cat died of old age, it was still extremely traumatic for us. I know it seems heartless to spend more time on the cat than the old man, but the old man never curled up next to me on the bed and purred in my ear when I wasn't feeling good. When my wife was sexually molested as a child, the cat gracefully allowed her to cry into her fur for as long as was necessary. The old man simply called her a liar.
All this time the real world slings and arrows were building up, my 'Make a Mountain' syndrome was still in full effect, magnifying every wrong, illuminating every minor injustice.
I began to really resent the Iraq war effort. I posted on my website here a comment that seemed reasonable to me. I pleaded with American soliders to 'neither kill nor allow themselves to be killed if they didn't have to.'
I discovered then just how wrong I was about Americans being all full of love and righteousness.
A person I'd have conversations with before about my fanfiction contacted me and threatened me. I'd had very good, productive discussions with him in the past. I knew vaguely that he was a military officer of some kind, but hadn't really every questioned it his rank or position. It never seemed necessary. Well my 'friend' threatened me. He told me that if I didn't take down the wording on my page, he'd do everything in his power to have military charges brought against me and send me to Guantanamo Bay with the rest of the war criminals. I was being treasonous in his words. I was being a 'Tokyo Rose', aiding and providing comfort to the enemy, encouraging soldiers to disobey their orders.
It's wartime, after all. Free speech is only for those who aren't at war.
I caved like a craven coward. I deleted the text.
I should have contacted whatever law enforcement agencies or local branches of armed services to seek some restitution and protection from this whackjob, but I didn't. The thoughts going through my head were 'Is it worth my time to fight this? Do I really want to end up on whatever black lists this will put me? Do I want to put my wife and family through the hell they'll be exposed to if this asscock decides to really persecute me?
At the time, I simply thought it wasn't worth it. I've been regretting that decision since. It's a black mark. I gave up my freedom because someone louder than I was shouted at me and threatened me. I'm ashamed that I behaved so cravenly.
The funny thing is, ever since, I've had other people who claimed to be military types threaten me for stating that the war in Iraq is a crock. I haven't felt a second of remorse for flipping them the bird and telling them to bite me. Maybe it will turn around to bite me in the ass. Maybe one of them really will be a military person and can manage to pull enough strings to make life hard for me for saying what I think is right and just.
Y'know how the evangelical, super-conservative, howling angry Christians make life difficult for other people who'd like to be Christians, but don't want to be associated with the nutjob types?
These ass-monkeys are doing the same thing for you military types. I know and am related to people who have or are serving their country in the Armed Forces. Most of them joined because they genuinely wanted to aid their country and to serve the goals of freedom, liberty, and justice. They're marines, or soldiers, or sailors, or airmen to protect the rest of us, watering the garden of liberty with their own patriotic blood.
That doesn't mean that some of them aren't just there because it gives them a fat chubby to be part of the biggest gang on the block. Now that they're 'in charge', they can do anything they want, say anything they want, and behave any way they want, decency, ethics, or freedom be damned. See: Abu Gharib.
These guys are giving their reputation to the rest of you and it's not a good reputation. I have to watch myself so I don't say 'all military people are assholes' or something similar. It's oh, so deceptively easy to hate. Seductively easy. People invite it.
Enough of that tangent. Fast forward through all the work-related shit that's involved in having your company bought out twice, and 'reorganized' twice. I fucking work for Dilbert now. That sucked up most of my spring, summer, and fall.
Stupidity in the media. Lingering problems associated with the fire/move earlier in the year. Debts. Overtime. Lingering illness. The Elections. Oh jeebus, the elections.
George Crackead Bush and his band of loyalist cronies proved that you can indeed run a popular election on fear, hate, greed, and under-the-table money. He's elevated fascism to an artform. The majority of people in this country voted for a greater national debt, more powerful corporations, oil interests, ruining the environment, hatred of gays, increasing conservative Christianity's influence in government, surrendering civil rights in the name of pursuing terrorists, and otherwise in the face of common sense.
I love my country. I dearly love the concepts of Freedom, Liberty, and Justice for All. I think the Bill of Rights is one of the most beautiful pieces of text ever to grace paper.
I fucking hate my countrymen right now. I know what it's like to roll over. I just watched each and every one of you ass-lickers do the same damned thing. You rolled over and got your belly scratched while the master's got the castrating shears in his other hand.
Damn you. Damn you all for being so weak and gutless.
Unlike the pansies who bitch and moan and say things like "I'm going to Canada, I don't wanna live in the United States anymore", I'm telling all you fascist neocon sons of bitches to get the fuck up out of MY country. If you wanna be some place where religion reigns supreme, where women, and gays, and people who aren't the majority race get told to 'shut the fuck up', then you need to check out this place. I really beleive you'd like it there. You'd fit right in.
Meanwhile, back in my own personal world, the things that I've learned to enjoy doing to escape from all the crap have become less and less fulfilling. I started taking so much shit over my writings here and the anime fanfiction I posted that it started not being any fun to write any more.
I let the anus-faces who repeatedly insult or deride me for not writing the way they would get to me. I started feeling so much pressure to try to please everyone that my real outlet valve, my writing, closed up. I forgot that I was writing to please myself and started taking everything everyone sent me as honest constructive criticism rather than immature rantings and cock shaking that 80% of it really was. If I ask for advice and then don't take it, I'm being wasteful. I'm a prick for ignoring people, wasting their time and effort. If I don't ask for advice, then I'm being arrogant.
So... The Clan is dead. At least for the time being. It's so far away from the story I wanted to tell that I'm not sure how to go back and fix it. Every time I go back to it, I feel like I'm treading old tired ground. It makes me angry and upset to try to go back and rework my story because I keep hearing all those voices telling me how much they hate vampires or that Ranma would never behave that way or that this particular story concept is really stupid. Ranma's Apartment is probably in the same boat. I have a lot of time between me and the end of the last story to have much more than apathy towards it. I had fun writing them, but I'm not going to do something that I don't want to and call it 'fun'.
I ignored the deriding voices and made 'NewRanma' and 'Hidden in Darkness' work well. They were satisfying to write. I enjoyed writing them. Even if nobody else in the world likes them, I can look at them and think, "Wow, I wrote a story that I would really enjoy reading."
I know that there are people who wanted to finish the story, and who were really enjoying it. To you guys, I'm sorry. I failed you and I failed myself by letting it get so badly out of control. I'm not gonna lie about it to you or to myself. Thriving solely on attention and the approval of others is a self deception. I'm not gonna do it any more. Ever, I hope.
So here I am after almost a year of utter shit. I've got a couple choices right now. Roll over and pretend like it's no big deal and that it's all gonna magicaly get better soon, or buckle down and learn to deal with.
I gotta let the little hurts and minor mole hills go away. I gotta dump the stress. I gotta quit internalizing all the shit that gets to me.
So, it's time for some changes.I wanna make updating and adding to this website something that's entertainment rather than a chore. I'm gonna burrow in under the shit and the molehiles and start digging tunnels.
First of all, I'm going to retire the Rant Page and the Fansub Review Page. You're all still quite welcome to go to either page and read what I've written, but neither page is gonna see regular updates any time in the near future.
There are a lot of other people who have whole sites dedicated to fansubbbing and reviewing various fansubs. I'm not gonna make a huge deal out of trying to provide helpful reviews since there are already so many out there. If I see a title-- any title, not necessarily anime-- that particularly intrigues me, I'll mention it here, on the front page.
Same with the rants. If I concentrate on finding negatives so that I can write regular thousand word essays, I'm going to find nothing but negatives that I can write thousand word essays on. I'm done with that. If I see a spade, I'm gonna call it a spade. If I see a diamond, I'm going to call it a diamond.
I'm also going to assume a new, rather fanciful, nom-de-plume for the purposes of writing here or publishing my art here. Yeah, my name's still around various places on the site, especially on the artwork, but I hope to have it all airbrushed away soon. It's also out and about several other places. Those who've been coming here a while and know my name won't really care. Those who hated my site and never came back after the first time don't have any reason to care. New assholes who decide to try to make my life a living hell because I said something that hurt their guaranteed sense of neocon WASP superiority are going to have to take it out on a fictional psuedonym so that it doesn't necessarily roll downhill and cause my family stress.
I'm also working on newer stories, original fiction. I know I haven't updated 'Gabriel' in a while, but it's not because the material isn't there. It's just not ready. Rather than let it languish, I'm going put up some extremely rough draft copies of the whole first 'story arc'. We're also going to see some 'Paralell Pixy', which is in the same vein as 'Gabriel', but more fantastic in tone. Again in very rough draft stages.
So watch for the changes, and be patient with me. Mabe a little reinvention will do me good.
News 01-02-04 Thanks to everyone who wrote in asking if I was okay after I posted a link to pictures detailing my 'RL Problems'. Yes, I'm okay. You can read about what happened here. No, it's not a big deal right now, but it was a serious hassle when it happened.
Back to top