Nook of the Eight Paths

LOL FATTY. :D

I've straightened most everything out now and also actually tagged all my entries, plus fixed some old image links that no longer worked, etc. etc. etc.

It's all very satisfying. ;_;

I yearn for more cat manga; unfortunately, both Fuku Fuku and Chi's Sweet Home are done by the same scanlators, and they seem to be rather backed up just now. :(

MY GOD I'M A TOTAL MORON. 8D

I was just twiddling around with LJ Sec trying to move around some old entries, but accidentally ended up deleting all my public entries. (I'M NOT ENTIRELY SURE MYSELF HOW THIS HAPPENED. :D) Hence I'm trying to transfer everything back from the JF copy of this account. (It unfortunately won't restore comments (;_;) but such is life.) HENCE FLOODING YOUR FLISTS FOR A SECOND A SECOND AGO. (sry about that. /o\)

Anyhow, I've put all old entries back, but I'll have to just make them private for a few days, then restore them. Since LJ unfortunately doesn't observe backdating on flists. >:( (This shit always happens to me when I try to get organized in any way, I think it's a sign.)

This meme has been going around and it looked like fun. Anyhow, there's a possibility that there are people on my flist with whom I share fandoms that I was hithertofore unaware of having shared. With them.

a. Post a list of 15 fandoms.
b. Have your friends list guess your favorite character from each one.
c. When guessed, bold the line, include the character name, and write a sentence about why you like that character.

1. Bleach Hirako Shinji. Because all sorts of things are wrong with Soul Society, so you have to love the people who break its rules best--especially when they do it with this kind of ~*~style~*~.
2. Death Note Mello. He's the reason I kept reading through the second half--if you're going to cheer for the bad guy (and everyone in this series is, to some degree, a bad guy), it's so much more fun when he stands on the side of anarchy and not on the side of order.
3. Hikaru no Go Hikaru. He goes from being a thoughtless punk kid like any other to the sort of person who can cry openly over the records of old Go games because they were so beautifully played.
4. Claymore Jean. She turns into a monster without losing her mind, she's loyal and devoted and honorable to the end and, really, the classic strong silent knight.
5. Monster Inspector Lunge. I love him even more than L: he's fixated and obsessed by his work to the exclusion of everything else (and he's clearly written by someone who read Les Miserables Y HALO THAR JAVERT) and in the end actually manages to wrench his mind out of the linear rut of reasoning he built for himself and to solve his case. (Also to kick ass while doing it.)
6. Princess Tutu Ahiru. THERE IS NO QUESTION: the duck who saves the world.
7. Moyashimon Hasegawa. I love her best of a very lovable cast: she doesn't take shit from anyone and she's strong-willed and impulsive and she has a good heart. <3
8. Harry Potter Dumbledore. After seven books of plot twists and turns, his character hung together the best and most interestingly for me--besides, I love arrogant young twerps who win a conscience the hard way.
9. Simoun Neviril. She reminds me a bit of Anthy, who was my favorite from Utena: both of them seem so polite and proper and contained and too willing to do what they're told; they're also seething with repressed -everything-.
10. Oniisama E Miya-sama. SO CRAZY and a bit of a sociopath and a magnificent bastard, but hey, she just loves perfection and quality and beauty so much--by the end of the story, though, she's really learned, repented, and ~*~moved on from the aesthetic to the ethical~*~ (another brilliant jerk who wins a conscience the hard way, basically).
11. Babylon 5 Marcus. SUCH A SWEETIE he's like one of these saintly young things with 'beautiful souls' from a Dostoyevsky novel--if they also had a sense of humour, sang Gilbert and Sullivan songs, and could beat people up with a Minbari staff. :D
12. Battlestar Galactica Two answers: Boomer and Tigh, my two favorite unsuspecting toasters. :D BSG and Carnivale have a common preoccupation with what you are as opposed to who you want to be, fate and free will, and my favorite characters in both of them are the ones who have to worry about that question most: I started watching BSG for Starbuck and kept watching for Boomer (and then BAWWWWWWWW'd shamelessly at the beginning of the second season when *spoiler*). As for Tigh, he's the sort of unhappy crusty old S.O.B. I already couldn't help but like (also hopelessly devoted to Adama) and now that *spoiler*, well, he's even more interesting.
13. Deep Space Nine Odo. I love pretty much everyone on DS9, but angst-and-guilt-ridden defectors from the other side get me every time.
14. Avatar Have to have two answers: Iroh and Zuko. Because they have all the best moments in the series together, and everything that I love about Avatar shows up most between the two of them: Iroh is the sweetest wisest mentor in the world and Zuko, well, is highly fallible (not to say adorably full of fail) and really needs someone to show him the right way to go. (I loved the second season dearly.)
15. Carnivale Brother Justin. He's one seriously evil motherfucker (unfortunately for him, he was fated to be) but through most of the first season he still managed to hold on tenaciously to that small bit of good in himself.

NB: Chi's Sweet Home would of course be on the list if the answer weren't so obvious.



NB#2: YOU SHOULD STILL WATCH MOYASHIMON

I just now heard one phrase of the third movement that someone had lifted for a soundtrack; maybe less, enough to remind me of it, though, because I used to deafen my family with this all through tenth grade. But since then it's been a while; Dvorak really does sound like nothing else. <3 Have the New World Symphony:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/kay88h
http://www.sendspace.com/file/efdhp3
http://www.sendspace.com/file/z50xix
http://www.sendspace.com/file/m9uwrf

LOL EASILY AMUSED BY ANIMATED GIFS (And yet the little squeaky shoe from Roger Rabbit made me cry as a child. ;_; But that wasn't played for comedy--anyhow, in this case, the rabbit eventually got away I DON'T CARE IF THEY SHOWED IT OR NOT, THE RABBIT GETS AWAY.)

Here's another piece of Handel duet for singer and trumpet from the same CD as last time, and...just the last movement of the Trout quintet because I'm an accessory to the debasement of high culture like that.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/6s5v40

http://www.sendspace.com/file/j79a7q

I has flat tire. >:( Just coming back in the front gate with my bicycle this morning I snagged it hard on a bit of garden edging. BAH. That was extremely stupid of me. (And now I must look up 'changing bicycle tires' on the internets because I actually have no idea what you do in a situation like this.)

The weather here is unbelievably beautiful right now, though. Texas has its moments of perfect weather, around this time of year; it's still even chilly in the mornings. Which is nice, because you don't feel so much like you're right on the brink of an inevitable spring-to-summer slide into hundred degree days. (Although you are.)

Here's the Barber adagio that everyone knows, something off a Wynton Marsalis/Kathleen Battle baroque duet CD I've had since forever but haven't listened to in a while, and a Dvorak serenade that everyone knows, but which like everything Dvorak is still awesome. :D \o/ I've played the first and part of the last before (and so am sentimental about them both) . . .but not the second of course, ah. . .on account of being neither a singer nor a trumpet player.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/s9z9bb

http://www.sendspace.com/file/7zg0kb

http://www.sendspace.com/file/3x1qz3
http://www.sendspace.com/file/9l9bca
http://www.sendspace.com/file/505jkb
http://www.sendspace.com/file/m2lfkr
http://www.sendspace.com/file/6691v3

http://www.onemanga.com/Chiis_Sweet_Home/1/

Chi's Sweet Home was originally a manga, you know. :D

EVERY SINGLE EPISODE OF 'COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG'.

I'M EXCITED. ARE YOU EXCITED?

. . .although in the case of each of these characters, age them back about five years or so and it would be (both were girls and both chose at 17 to be guys) Which is to say, it's Anubituf and Guragief smut from Simoun, on the command chair of the Arcus Prima (which seems to be made of solid stone--no, I didn't design it, it looks that way in the anime D:).

( NOWHERE NEAR WORKSAFE )

The 5th and 6th episodes of Chi's Sweet Home are out and subbed, here and here.

(As you may gather from the icon, I spent this evening poking Virtual Dub and Imageready until they worked AHAHAHA ANIMATED GIFS LOOK IT MOVES i found a tutorial here :D :D :D)

Also; our oak trees are shedding oak apples all over the place. That is to say--

About a week ago I found something lying outside on the ground about the size of a golf ball and glossy green enough that I first took it for some sort of plastic toy. Especially since it was the only such thing there. But then after last night/this morning's huge windstorm that set the tornado alarms off, there were little hollow apple green balls in various sizes all over the yard, some with the remainder of the original oak leaf still attached. And I looked up 'oak apple' on the internets just now, and found that, yes, that is in fact what an oak apple is and that is what it looks like.

Since I'd already suspected that these things had things living in them, though, it made it difficult to walk comfortably around the yard today. You don't really want to be crushing thousands of small living things at every step if you can avoid it. (Even if you haven't just recently gone to see 'Horton hears a who' and don't suffer from recurring dreams about carrying handfuls of tiny animals through Indiana Jones type perilous mazes with pits of open flame and bottomless chasms. . .spending all your early summers working for a bird sanctuary and then later for a vet fucks just a little bit with your head like that.)

And then here's a Vivaldi concerto for several instruments with lots of scrapey resonant double stops in the strings. (RV 540, if you want to know) :D

http://www.sendspace.com/file/6gyvdp
http://www.sendspace.com/file/363fjx
http://www.sendspace.com/file/csrv8h

For the IJ porn battle here. (I'd meant to get in a Simoun prompt or two as well, but those will have to be finished for another time--I've never drawn /d/ before and I'd hate not to finish it. >:)) Also, if you haven't yet read Claymore, do it! There are interestingly designed monsters, beautifully done fight scenes, and most importantly a whole cast of kickass women. :D

Anyhow: the prompt asked for Clare/Jean, warmth. And since the Claymores are supposedly nearly impervious to cold. . . (Also I took some license given that they say the Claymores are human heads on the bodies of monsters, essentially, and also I always did wonder just what it was that gang of robbers saw when Teresa took off her clothes, such that they turned around and wouldn't touch her. :3)

( Could almost be worksafe )

Someone has uploaded all or nearly all of the episodes of Are You Being Served and Grace and Favour. (STFU, I know it's corny but I grew up on PBS and Mrs. Slocombe's pussy will never get old.) All to be found here.

And speaking of pussies *groan*, Chi's Sweet Home is painfully cute (mostly in a good way), and is on You Tube now as well. An anime in three minute episodes about a cat. No, really. Four episodes have been subbed so far; all four are here.

Additionally, people are now posting fic/art to fill the prompts over here and here; there's already been some excellent Medicine Seller/Kayo, some Akira/Hikaru, and Rangiku/Nanao posted. (Among many, many, many other things.) It closes early Monday, so if you're going to write or draw something for any of the given prompt, that is the time by which to have done it. :D

Well, this was quite a surprise; I don't know how they choose Daily Deviations, but it was certainly nice of whoever did.

And anyone who hasn't been over to the IJ Porn Battle should check it out--they're currently accepting prompts, and prompts can be filled by both art and fic. There's some good stuff for, among many other things, and just off the top of my head--BSG, Babylon 5, Bleach, Claymore, DS9, Loveless, Mononoke, Monster, Oniisama E, and Simoun--I'm going to try to fill one or two prompts for some small fandoms next weekend (I understand the deadline for filling prompts is Monday the 7th.)

And speaking of Simoun--I just recently finished watching it: it's a yuri/shoujo ai series, and it's pretty good. In large part because it's set in a world in which everyone is female until they turn 17 and choose a final sex, and so there are various scenes in which grey-haired wrinkled old men reminisce about those times back in the day when they, too, used to fly around through the air in giant robots wearing midriff-bearing spandex. :D And one m/m couple that used to be an f/f couple. And a male mechanic with large breasts. And the canon couples of all gender combinations are all pretty cool. It's fun, and has a good (largely non-depressing and non-soggily angsty) ending.

Aw, it's been a while since I drew Hiyori and Hirako--I did miss them. :D Hirako with his crazy long hair and captain's robes (being annoying/begging to be thrown through a wall :P), and Hiyori being a 12th division mad scientist as we now know she was.

I almost couldn't decide which end of it should go up.

( SFW. )

http://www.mangashare.com/dl/Bleach_-108/622/

GOD I LOVE IT SO MUCH (haha, Hirako has a whole stack of records and I do love Kubo's design for a record player there). Hirako, Love, and Kensei all look fabulous in captains' robes (heh--I do love that first two-page spread--Hirako's so skinny in those voluminous robes--not to mention LOLOL long hair) and. . .well, Shunsui definitely has a type. (There seems to be a reason Lisa looks so much like Nanao. :3) And Hiyori! &hearts And I'm profoundly curious about this promoted lady captain--I wonder if we either will meet her or have met her. :) And Urahara looks like a complete dork, and Aizen looks like a bit of a dork, and. . .well, anyhow. If Bleach is your fandom as well as mine, there's the link and you know what to do.

It was a seriously gorgeous day out today. And the three newest buildings in the Dallas Arts District are really, really, starting to take shape. One by Koolhaas, another by Foster, and the last an interesting design for a new building for the Arts Magnet school.

Anyhoo. More of the same OCs as the last three times I did draw OCs. Half an effort at including time in a drawing/half just trying to practice faces. And I suppose I just enjoy making the younger of the two repeatedly embarrass himself lusting after someone much older and more self-possessed than he is. (Although said older/self-possessed person will eventually give in and not just hold him at arm's length and laugh. I'm sure. :3)

( Worksafe. )