Which Element Represents You?
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kefkafanatic @ mental insanity
This is where old rants go to die, and where you can read their corpses.
...as it were.
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Yes, that's right, I've joined the insanity. I heard about it on Monday, thought of an idea on the way home, and started writing on Wednesday. (It would have been Tuesday, but Cybium's floppy drive was screwed.)
My target is 3 500 words a day, which will give a few spare, and preferably 4 000, just for extra buffering. I wrote 3 506 yesterday, and have 5 205 now, so I'm staying on target. I hope I still feel like writing tonight, though.
The blurb on the front page isn't too encouraging, unfortunately, but I can see that it's true. After this block of exposition is finished, I have very little idea of what the hell is going to happen. Ah, well. Deal with it when I get to it, I guess.
Oh, and this is me. And I guess I might as well put my novel-in-progress up, too. Just don't expect it to finish at a convenient point.
Fanart finished! No, wait, I wrote the chapter, so it probably counts as official art as long as I sanction it. Anyway, it's in the fiction section now.
Have been reading a couple of webcomics, trying to get all the way through archives, for the last couple of weeks. Finally finished. I'm sort of annoyed, though, because Exploitation Now finished about a month before I started reading it, and I thought that here was one webcomic that I wouldn't have to bookmark and check. Then I get up to the end, and find that the writer started a new comic while I'd been reading the old one. How inconsiderate. Sort of.
Apart from that...well, nothing much. Writing Crossed Swords, downloading FF music (still), occasionally studying...the usual. Except for the studying, of course. An interesting sidenote: people seem to be actually updating less than usual during exam period, contrary to the usual laws of distraction. The mailing list's pretty dead, too. Maybe there's something in the water.
Oh, and we got singlets. Next update will probably be more interesting.
Tch. No sooner do I name a character than I find out someone already has that name. I suppose I could just blame it on my subconscious, but this has happened before. I named Keri before I'd heard of Keri(the other one), Zandar before I'd heard of Xander, and Gen before I'd heard of Jen. (I'm holding out hopes for Xylienne, though.) Of course, I still haven't actually used Gen, so I guess copyright infringement is out of the question.
In other news, Real Life has "Megatokyo: THE GAME" coming out in 2006. Presumably it's half dating-sim, half FPS. Can't wait.
Mitsurugi helped with the drawing, though I changed Jun's pose 'twixt plan and draft. Should be finished soon. Drawing is quick; it's figuring out how to draw that's the time-consuming part.
Speaking of which, that post I made a while back about my "definition by context" (Go find it! The archives are split now; it'll be easy! ...oh, wait, they're still large blocks of migraine-inducing green, aren't they? Never mind.) seems to apply to a wider section of my consciousness than I posited. It's easy for me to look at a few examples of an engineering problem, for example, and apply the methods used in them to a similar problem. Of course, that doesn't mean I necessarily understand the principles behind it...for that I generally have to read the entire textbook over a few times.
Of course, that means that my originality is composed of a munge of several sources. And I'm fairly sure that's a paraphrase.
This goes the other way as well, though. In nearly everyone I know, everything I read or play, I see something of myself, or of what I could be. Maybe that's why I don't like to hate people, though I suspect there are other, better reasons. I might say that an overactive imagination breeds tolerance, but I won't, because its provably false.
...I was going to say something else, but given the current length of this entry, it can wait 'til next time. Au revoir, people.
Oblivion Redux. The future is now.
Right. There's a new filk in the fiction section (which now has its own folder, and is tidied to boot) and a new rant in the rants section (ditto, and it's been split). Granted, the presence of a new rant is less than surprising, but the symmetry's still there.
I've been thinking about trying to draw a Jun/Aki scene, but getting the proper pose for Jun is proving difficult. I may have to fire up Soul Calibur and use Mitsurugi as a starting point.
Nothing much else to say, except that I should go on study break more often. Boredom can do amazing things.
Which Element Represents You?
created by kefkafanatic @ mental insanity
So I took the element test. And then I retook it, because I haven't noticed my fury being like searing fire recently, and my room isn't that messy. I prefer this one, though wind has its points. One of them being that it's almost impossible for me to get answering anywhere near truthfully; I got light before wind, for cryin' out loud.
I also read back through my rants a few minutes ago, and found that I'm generally happier with the quality of the earlier ones than the later ones. There are a few possible reasons for this, but I think the most probable one is that I was writing for myself in the early days, not for others. I can't really put my finger on how the entries have changed since then, but there is something different now.
In any case, I think I'll pretend that no-one's reading this for a while, at least while I'm writing it. Maybe it won't please everyone else as much (though I'm not too sure about that), but it'll sure make me a lot happier.
Well. Time to go. Have fun during the study break, all, and good luck with your studying.
...heh. Sorry. Couldn't keep a straight face there.
Well, it's official; this web page exists. I'm now listed on Google, and so far have one hit from it. Ironically, it was a search for "FF8 ENDING THEME MP3".
Also, remember when I said I'd updated the fiction page? That was a half-truth, because while I updated my local page, I apparently forgot to upload it. That should be corrected now.
More later, probably.
Well, now. I happened to glance at the Underdogs front page the other day, and what should I see but an interview with the creator of The Fool's Errand? Unsurprisingly, I went to have a look at this. The highlights:
In other news, I finally watched A Beautiful Mind recently, and thought it was quite good. It got me thinking about how incredible it is that a mind can simply summon up artificial images and superimpose them on reality such that it cannot consciously tell the difference. Does schizophrenia actually alter the information received from the optic nerve, or is it something in the deeper structures of the brain? If we could understand how it works, we'd be one step closer to creating a true virtual reality. Albeit an incredibly dangerous one, of course.
Also, I have more of the FF8 soundtrack (and some of FF7). Yay me.
And the last piece of news is that Oliver is evil, though I'm not sure that the other players in his campaign have realised it yet. Wait, that sounds stupid; of course they know he's evil, but they might not know how he's being evil in this case. The next few sessions should be interesting...
Well, the UCC team lost again last night. Good thing I'm serene and can take pleasure from little things like walking in the still night under a full moon (to the sound of a song about an assassination, but hey), or I might have walked into my EPM lecture this morning with a gun and shot on sight.
OK, that was in bad taste. Rather unlikely, too, since I don't have a gun and don't even particularly dislike Chris Croft. Besides, I'd probably arrive before almost everyone else, and it doesn't have quite the same impact unless you can slam open the door first. But I stray from my original point, which was that it makes a good segue (or at least it did before I interrupted it with pedantry), because I really do wonder about the reasons that people do things like that incident at Monash.
Don't give me that line about the student being mad, and so not having to have a reason. The type of person who is rational enough to walk to a particular classroom before starting a rampage has to have some sort of justification for what he does. Oh, it might not be understandable for the rest of us, and it might even be totally illogical, but it's there, even if it's just to reduce the grade average.
But I suspect that the rampaging madman gets more sympathy than the terrorists behind the Bali bombing. Why? Because while we have no idea what a madman is thinking, we think we know why the terrorists destroy innocent lives. We say that they hate our freedom, hate our privileges.
But if that were the case, every Western nation would have been bombed to hell fifty years ago. Terrorists are becoming more and more prevalent, and there must be some reason to explain it.
I think that the people who are behind these attacks are afraid. With the rise of global communication and multinational corporations, cultures are starting to clash as never before. America's foreign policy hasn't exactly helped matters, as they continually install rulers loyal to them. But the biggest threat may be that the very existence of our culture threatens their way of life.
They may not hate our culture per se. But they'll do their damnedest to make sure that it doesn't invade their country, and if that means that they must portray all Westerners as "infidel scum", they'll do it. Now, invading adjacent countries will probably exascerbate these concerns, with some legitimacy. I don't see a full-scale war as an optimal outcome here.
As far what we should do...I really have no idea. But I'll bet that the argument above was analysed more thoroughly than 90% of the letters sent to the paper, or even the releases from the government. (To be fair, though, a reasonable argument from a member of the Government probably wouldn't be reported by the press.)
My point? If we want to stop the attacks on our culture, we must first understand the attackers. And I don't think many people are trying to do that at the moment.
Right. I'll get off my soapbox now, and just mention that I finally found a complete FF8 soundtrack in mp3 format. The ending theme rocks. Thank you for your time.
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