I have held back no water in its season

Okay, so here's the thing. I suck at keeping up multiple journals when I have to copy posts over by hand. Really, I need a way to do it automatically, and, being on a Mac, the options are pretty much zero.

So I set up a WordPress installation, instead, and ported over all my good-enough-for-public fandom entries.

Those who want to ditch LJ can find me at http://www.branchandroot.net/journal/

I may well see if I can convert this journal into a feed, somehow, so that GJ people can follow me from the comfort of their own fpages.

Meanwhile, since I can only crosspost to one journal at a time, the WordPress journal crossposts to my LJ. *shrugs* Until there's a place everyone can move, that can handle the influx, we're kind of stuck with it. Eh.

Standalone. Hiruma reflects on his team.

Introspective with Romance, I-2

( Waiting for Dragonflies )

Abe and Mihashi are the cutest. Things. Ever. Haruna really has no chance, poor schmuck.

Also, what is it about shaking fingers in this country? I mean, I hate knuckle crushers as much as the next thin-boned person, but honestly. Shaking fingers makes me feel like both parties are trying to dispose of something distasteful without touching it.

Norming session has come and gone, and it's good to know I'm still holding up my usual demanding standards: in the lower half of any grade split, just the way it should be.

Have also been reminded that, yes, I am quite an aggressive person, relatively speaking. *sighs* I mean, honestly, you'd think the freaking professors would have learned how to speak up in discussion, wouldn't you?

The yard is being eaten by weeds. It's much harder to keep them down when I have work with deadlines demanding attention.

*wistful look at fandom_flies* New journal system soon? Please?

Tools v Transformation. Tools is fairly obvious, as nearly all of them use weapons of some sort.

The transformative aspect comes in two stages: the bloodlines and the tailed spirits. The bloodlines (which, if this is a post-apocalyptic world, are likely mutations) are the basis of power, but also of danger. Witness Haku's persecution, the insanity that more or less runs in the Uchiha, the rigidity and life-denial of the Hyuuga.

The tailed spirits are a far more intense expression in the same pattern. They are, themselves, used as weapons, and confer great power; but they seem to have a strong tendency to destroy anyone they dwell within.

So, I've just blown through all of HanaKimi manga in two days.

By which, you may infer that I really liked it. Goodness it's adorable. Of course, one of the things I liked best was that, in this case, the "girl disguises herself as a boy to attend an all-boy's school and hijinks ensue" plot is predicated, not on her wanting to do boy-things, but on her wanting to get to know a particular boy.

And once she has, then there's not as much stopping her from switching back. It won't ruin her academic career or mean the end of a sport she loves. So the ending is poignant--heck, it made me cry--but in a good way.

Besides, Mizuki is a scrappy little thing, and doesn't just fall down in a heap of Maidenly Rescue Needing at the drop of a hat. She fights, even if she doesn't always win on her own.

Also, I desperately want them to make an anime of this, preferably with the drama cd voice cast, because Morikubo Shoutarou has got to be the /perfect/ voice for Nakatsu.

...and, I must admit, I understand why Becky squees so much over Umeda and Akiha. They are just the perfect couple. In a snarky, maladjusted, wow-these-guys-have-issues sort of way. I am deeply tempted to write fic to get them together properly, since their plot thread was not really tied up.

Kairi thinks:

Riku is silver and beautiful, and his eyes watch dreams. She thinks they speak to him, now, too; the distance in the tilt of his head is calmer than it used to be, when he was straining to read their lips.

She does not tell this to Sora. Sora would demand that Riku's dreams give him back to them. Sora's dreams only ever make him more where he is.

Sora's dreams live in his heart. Riku's live in the sky.

Initial reaction: Okay, this looks promising...

Later reaction: You expect me to pay for this piece of crap?

Which is a little unfair. MacJournal is not designed to be an LJ-clone client. It's designed to be a piece of journaling software unto itself with the incidental ability to send entries to a blog also.

The problem is that it's that incidental function I want!

MacJournal is good at making and managing a journal on your computer. You can make as many journals, within the app, as you want and move or copy entries between them.

It also has the ability to link a blog (blogger, lj, anything Atom based) to each journal and easily upload single or multiple entries to that blog.

Unfortunately, it only has the ability to link one blog to each journal. Once the journal is created and the blog-link established, you can send entries from any journal to any blog, which is nice. But I would have to make a journal for every account I have and associate the blog account information with each one before I could actually write my entries and cross-post them to all my accounts.

Now, I could do this. But the real kicker?

It has no capacity for finding or choosing user icons.

It may be silly, but that's the real deal-breaker for me. I could go ahead and do the slog-work of setting up all my accounts individually with little more than some nasty grumbling. But my icons are important to me. Those are my moods.

So here I sit, waiting, once again, for someone to write a multi-account LJ-clone client for Mac. And, in the meantime, setting up bookmarks straight to my IJ and GJ post-an-entry pages, in my browser's bookmark bar.

*collapses in a heap* Okay! Everything about the new wordpress site, except the credits statements, is done. And the credits only affect the footer, so I can mess with them later.

But! Comments are spiffy, with threading and replies and readable plaintext email and LJ icons and editing. Editing that will not displace the page anchors as the page loads, which was a bit of a pain to manage. I have tweaked three different plugins to make them play nicely together, and I'm damn proud of myself.

Pages are up, categories are made, css is wrangled, and I think this puppy is ready to go.

Though I've decided we need a new word. The word for that feeling you get when, after days of wrestling with one stubborn bit of code, after going over it with a fine-toothed comb, after placing a help request on the support forums, you suddenly look again at your style sheet and realize it was all because of one missing curly brace two lines up. That feeling. *sighs*

Well, anyway, The new Ink Burns is up and running!

Now I just have to upload all the fic.

Some thoughts on the shape of violence in anime, kind of an outline:

Anime directed at children and young adults often involve a good deal of explicit violence, and even killing. But it is notable that the focal character(s), the one that the watchers are supposed to identify with, rarely kills. Allied characters may kill, but the pov character doesn't.

Consider Yu Yu Hakusho. It's a fight anime, the characters do nothing but fight, all the livelong day, against people who often want to kill them. But Yuusuke and Kuwabara never kill their opponents. They beat the living snot out of each other, but it's Honorable Fights. When there is a truly loathsome character who begs to be killed, he often is. But it's Kurama or Hiei who does it.

Consider Romeo x Juliet. Juliet goes out and rescues citizens from armed guards; she fights capably; but she does not kill. In fact, a character point is made of her distaste for killing. When the plot demands that someone die for the viewers' emotional satisfaction, she is provided with an ally who has no qualms about killing, and is shown to do so against her wishes.

Consider Rurouni Kenshin. Again, a character point is made of Kenshin's desire to never have to kill again. He spends the whole story fighting in deadly earnest with swords, but when an enemy character dies it's by their own hand or an ally's hand or by happenstance.

Consider Digimon. Most enemy characters are cleansed or incarcerated, rather than killed. When the Final Boss characters are destroyed, they are presented, not as individuals, but as elemental forces to be dispersed. And even Final Boss characters are only so dispersed if they are digimon; human characters are never killed.

There are exceptions, to be sure. The Gundam series is a prime one. Even there, though, the focal characters are rarely shown killing, and, when they are, are often presented to us as temporarily insane.

Shows directed at adults have more varied approaches to violence and death, but the moral of shows directed at young viewers is remarkably clear and unified: manly, bloody brawls and finely finessed duels for justice are well and good, but killing makes you morally ambiguous and probably outcast.

*scream of triumph* YES!

The plugin is running, the patch now works, and my wordpress has email notifications of replies to comments!

Take that, LJ, you fuckers! I am taking my fic out of here and you can suck on it!

Maybe I'll celebrate by exercising some expensive paid perks, like a voice post or maxing out my Scrapbook.

Okay, so here's the deal. I will be mirroring posts at my LJ, my GJ and at my IJ. I dearly hope that I can find a nice piece of software for Macs that will let me do this without a lot of horsing around.

I will also be including fic posts on my IJ and GJ.

As soon as I get my Fic Site v2.0 up and running, these posts will be links directly to the fic site, which will have tags and comment subscriptions and threaded comments and hopefully *crosses fingers* email notification of replies to your comments. All the bells and whistles.

Independent of any social networking site, too, and therefore not subject to idiotic witch-hunts. ^_^V

*goes back to fiddling with her plug-ins*

Well, I guess it's for real. LJ clearly doesn't want fandom around, not without pruning off all the inconvenient parts, and I'm not prepared to let some corporate outsider say what stays and what goes.

So. Welcome to my journal! For the moment, this will probably be largely a fanfic journal, but that may change; we'll see. The fanfic posts will, in any case, always be unlocked and tagged for ease of finding.

This journal is entirely free to friend. Anyone who flames me will, of course, be booted out and banned, but polite debate is welcome. I'm sure you all know the drill.

Though I have to admit to a strong urge to redesign IJ's user interface. With my browser styles, if nothing else.