Slime Mansion

H-hey guys! Um, so the conventions the past three weeks have been fantastic, and it was wonderful seeing old fans of the comic in person! It really motivated me to work really hard this month to get a buffer of comic pages going on to ensure punctual updates for the rest of the summer!

...Except there is the minor complication of my laptop being in the repair shop right now. >_o I should've mentioned something sooner but augh no updates for like three whole weeks right after I said I'd resume updates == my eternal SHAME. But in any case, while working on prints at A-Kon, my laptop started to just freeze up completely and the fan would start going off right afterwards. It survived through the con all right because I managed to finish my prints before it really started going haywire, but since I've been back every time I tried to turn it on it'd freeze before I could even get past the log-in page.

So now the laptop's being fixed and I'm not entirely sure when I'll get it back. In the meantime I'll try to pencil and ink more comic pages? But to tide you over for now, I started updating my deviantArt gallery! Granted most of the stuff I'm uploading is already on my website, but eventually I'll get around to uploading some of the new fan art prints that I did for the conventions. :D

I'm hoping that I get my laptop back by next Thursday's update so I could put something up, so check back then!

Tomorrow we register for our Fall semester classes finally, except that after spending a good hour or so trying to figure out how the freaking hell class scheduling works at Waseda, I threw the syllabus book aside and had a smoke drank tea.

... I'M JUST JOKING, GUYS. I didn't smoke just now. Really. ...Although to be honest, I did end up following up on my suggestion from the last entry to give it a shot. 8D() It was a few nights ago when apparently I was "comically plastered", as David put it, and I appear to have a few e-mails in my Sent folder that offer the ugly proof. :( Apologies for my obnoxious drunken revelry? Anyway, so I had like three puffs of these menthols, and I'm pleased to say I didn't keel over coughing my kidneys out like a noob! However, I am not pleased to report the stinging bite it had in my throat, so I suppose this puts a short end to my assimilation into Japanese society, as far as tabacco consumption goes. (Progress down the Alcohol Consumption route of assimilation TBA.)

What else is going on... Ah, yes: I gots a cell phone! I-I don't quite understand it completely yet though, partly because I got a completely Japanese cell phone rather than one with an English language option, because I'm vain and I needed to have the only black model they offered, so that it could match with my black DS Lite. D8 (And they go so well together too, trying to figure out how to change my wallpaper settings on my cell phone while using my DS to translate what the crap all the kanji mean. OTP!!) In any case, I get unlimited text messaging between AU customers, and like 1500 e-mails or something, SO, if you are ever bored, I suppose you are welcome to zap a buzz into my pants at: slimu [at] ezweb.ne.jp.

Today, I slept and then I slept some more and then I played video games (Tokyo Game Show came and went and I did not attend; more on that later) and then I went to eat SQUID INK PASTA that stained my mouth and then everybody laughed and laughed at my grossness. No wonder Japanese people commit suicide. D8 (Incidentally, the squid ink pasta wasn't that spectacular either; it wasn't offensive or anything, but I guess I have no incentive to eat it ever again, really. Particularly because it actually had squid in it; if it was just the pasta with the ink sauce and like some broccoli or meatballs or something, it would've been spectacular. But for now, I've decided from here on out that I am not a fan of squid.) After that we went to light fireworks and cause ruckuses, and stuff--be proud of me, for I turned down alcohol TWICE tonight, and instead had an apple juice!!

Yesterday was the Autumnal Equinox, and as such, many people were visiting their family's graves in the cemetary outside my window. Since I'm getting free rent from the temple for this apartment (ssscore), I was obligated to help them out for a few hours (which is why I could not attend the Tokyo Game Show; I was supposed to work both Saturday and Sunday originally, but they cancelled my schedule for Sunday since they were getting less customers, but by the time I got the memo it was too late to head out for the show. Oh well). I originally thought they were just going to have me conduct manual labour or something, but I ended up staying in the lobby for the majority of the time serving tea and cleaning back up the cups.

By which I mean, KEIGO MUTHERFUCKERS!!!

Did you know that I am completely gay for keigo? :( Did I mention last year on the plane ride to Japan via All Nippon Airways, there was a rather dashing male flight attendant wearing a nice uniform vest and tie, sporting a commercial-worthy smile, who spoke keigo at me despite my obvious lack of proficiency in it? I think I developed a very mild crush. (The female flight attendants were pretty nice too, but they spoke English at me for the most part after they noticed how incompetent I was in my broken responses, but Mr. Dashing went all out the whole way through. Long sigh! I wouldn't mind being a Japanese male flight attendant for a day...)

So I was actually assigned to just clean up the cups from the tables while this girl (Ushio-san) served it, but it got so hectic during the day that eventually our jobs became intertwined. It started out with just me giving out candy to some children, but sometimes there would be like three separate parties coming in to sit down, so the job of server unofficially transferred to me as well. They told me that just saying "Douzo" would be fine, but eff that; I had a male flight attendant fantasy to fulfill!!

Basically, what I mean to say is, お茶を召し上がってください 8D

Blackout since yesterday, 4:38PM.

Casualties: one beautiful fish, some food, a good night's rest.

EDISON, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN US >:O!!!

I'm sitting here at Panera Bread and it's been about 23 hours since the electricity went out on my half of the street. Once it went out my little brother and I trucked ourselves over to Panera Bread for a few hours thinking everything would be peachy by the time we got back a few hours later. BUT NO. It was still out. So THEN my mom came back from work so we went to go out to eat again in hopes that it will turn back on after that. BUT STILL NO. T_T

So we tried making the best of the situation by taking a little stroll around the neighbourhood since it wasn't so sufferable outside the house as it is inside, when I saw the dad of one of my old high school friends pull into his driveway. So I ran up to him to greet him, and he was just like, "Oh hey," and turns around to leave. So I was a little shocked and tried to push on a conversation or something, and he's just like. "What." And I was just like, "Oh, uh, well, it's just been a while since we've talked-" and he was like "Yeah." Suffice to say, I took the hint and let him go.

=____=

It was...mortifying. A total loss-of-innocence moment that you find in teen-wangst novels. He'd always been one of the nicest people I know and would always take a few minutes to have a little chat, even if it was just mindless smalltalk, but this time it was just like. SHUN.

After that we went home and eventually tried going to sleep, but without any fans in the house and it being, quite literally, the hottest day of the year so far, everybody pretty much migrated around the house at least three times looking for the ideal place to sleep. I tried climbing into my car and opening all the windows to sleep in there, but after noticing that I got three bugbites at once on my right foot, I decided that that was a no-go. Eventually we all crashed in the living room with just a screen door between us and the backyard. 9_9

...ONLY TO BE WOKEN UP A FEW HOURS LATER BY THE GODDAMN LOUDEST THUNDER OF MY LIFE. T__T It was like 7 or 8AM and the claps were loud enough to set off the alarm on my mom's car. And then it started pouring so we had to close the windows and doors and crap (I had to go outside and close the cracks I left open in my car =_=) so it wouldn't get wet. And of course it was the kind of shower that just makes things more humid and unbearable so none of us could really sleep very well after that.

AAAAAAAAARRRRHGGHGLGHHH!!

Like, I know this is not quite so bad as being marched off to concentration camps and all, but *sigh* still. :( I guess I may as well get used to it though, since I'll be staying in a shack in Taiwan for a month. kfls;djfshdfoka;jf

I guess I haven't made a real entry here, in, what, two months? Stuff has happened but it'd be lame of me to go over them one by one, so right now I'm deciding whether I should choose a topic to bitch about, a topic to squeal about, or just ask my LJ friends list for more favors, kind of like how I do in every other entry I make these days. ;D()

...

Uh...

Let's talk about movies?

This is gonna be a bit difficult for some of you to choke down, but stay with me here, guys: I didn't see the first Pirates movie until two weeks ago. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm out of the loop. ...Furthermore, I only watched the last hour and a half of it, lawl. ;D Was at a friend's apartment at like 1AM and they were like, "hay let's watch Pirates!!" because they had just watched the second movie on its opening night or something, but I was like "dude I stink, I'm going home to take a shower," so I did that and by the time I got back zombie skeletons were invading the ship or something. I don't know!

Anyway, it was enjoyable. Everybody was a dick though, but whatever. ...I guess that's all I have to say about it.

Fast-forward a little to YESTERDAY when I saw Pirates 2 with Amanda at the theatre!! ...It was also enjoyable? But I think I might dislike pretty much the whole main cast. >_o Jack's a jerk, Elizabeth's mean, Will's bland, and everybody else doesn't matter. Oh, and Elizabeth made a shitty boy. ;o Characters I DO like though is the guy whose eye kept falling out (well, once a movie at least), and wtf NORRINGTON? Dude. Like. First movie I thought he was a total douchebag. And I thought he was a douchebag in this movie too, butlike. an attractive douchebag? :9

...which kind of goes to show how shallow I am. D: If you're hot and scruffy and abused and neglected then it's okay to be a tool!! <3

But I don't know. Maybe part of the reason for my total indifference towards the movies in general was maybe all the fangirling going on on my LJ friends list that I pretty much knew everything about the movies without having watched them before? (I had pretty much resolved to not ever bother watching the movie because it didn't interest me--not a fan of Johnny Depp, and he's kind of UGLY and REPULSIVE as Jack Sparrow anyway--so I didn't think that reading any spoilers would ruin me for anything. ;o) ...But that's not necessarily true because most of the crap I read about it either had no spoilers, or they didn't make sense to me so I just kind of didn't compute them into my long-term memory. The only thing that really stuck out was probably all the people mentioning the "An undead monkey!" line, and then me finally watching that part of the movie and just being like, "...oh. kay."

Umm. Also I'm retarded and fob because I can't understand piratespeak or whatever. During the first movie I had to ask for the subtitles to be turned on because the accents and crap weren't translating into anything coherent in my head. () (it might have just been a problem with the volume though, but whoknows.) And the Voodoo Lady in this movie was even worse--halfway through her scene I just kind of gave up on trying to comprehend what she was trying to say--I figure anything important she said would've been repeated back in proper English anyway. (And I was RIGHT >:o)

Well, despite all my Mnegh-ness about the movie, I really did find it enjoyable. XD()() I guess people normally wouldn't write long paragraphs about middle-ground movies, but since I watch so few movies I figured it was okay. >P Oh! I like compasses. I think I might be a bit of a dork for them. :( Remember that scene in Pocahontas? Towards the end where the compass arrow was spinning and spinning until it came to an abrupt stop pointing East towards the sun??

...Uh. I was gonna say that it was totally hot, but now I'm kind of confused by it. () Isn't the arrow supposed to point north?? What's it doing pointing east towards the rising sun? >O Or am I just not remember the scene right?

Anyway, I also watched The Memoirs of a Geisha today with . It was also enjoyable! :>() It was pretty to look at, but considering my mind's more on Pirates at the moment even though I watched it last night, I guess it didn't make a lasting impression on me, although this might also be due to all the fangirling/whining people did about this movie when it first came out. () That and the movie Hero made a bigger impact as far as visual orgasms goes for me. :>()

And I'm gonna feel like a total tool of AZN pride for saying this, but MAN it was so obvious that the cast wasn't Japanese! >O And they didn't even really try to at least make them look Japanese; like, Michelle Yeoh basically had the same hair she did in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (and wtf don't even get me started on the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon female reunion, or how Ziyi Zhang has become, like, the only "authentic" Asian actress that America knows about??), and Gong Li looked practically identical to Maggie Cheung in her role in Hero, both hairstyles being distinctly Chinese to me. I don't know, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but none of the hairstyles in that movie looked like they actually fit the place or era at all. >_o

...Oh Jesus, I just whined about hairstyles, huh? Dammit.

Okaybye.

When I get caught up with my 9-pages-a-week schedule (I'm, like, three days behind _-_), Laura and I are going to celebrate by eating at a semi-expensive restaurant, even though we won't be able to pay for it! (We've got many celebrations involving semi-expensive restaurants planned. None of which involve telling my mum about it. ;D)

I'll probably have to do a bit of shopping for some long-sleeved shirts (there's a surprisingly small number of them in my possesion...) and a warm heavy coat in the near future as well. (BTW thanks to everybody who gave me input on what to wear for Japan! :D) Mum doesn't want to go shopping for them yet though, because we won't know if I'm accepted until early-to-mid April. But too bad it's southern California where it's hard enough to come across a good coat even in winter, let alone halfway through spring, and if I don't manage to get coat with a fur-trimmed collar, I-. I just won't know what to do with myself XO!!!!!!!!

...Umm I agree with Rachel on the notion that the cast of Final Fantasy XII look like they all belong in gay porn. (The chicks would be the supporting lesbian characters.) Vaan makes me uncomfortable just looking at him (and I don't mean that in a good way), Balflear wears sandals?? and fruit-loop jewellery, Larsa is jailbait, period. And I can't tell whether Ashe or Penelo is the man in their illicit relationship because they're both pretty dykey; versatile?? On that note, why have Final Fantasy character designs lately been so...offensive? o_o() It started out with FF9 just being weird, but not so weird in the same way as FFX, where I wanted to stab my eye out when I first saw Tidus' costume; I'm told that the designs get more tolerable after you play through the game and either like the characters enough to forgive the, uh, unconventional outfits, or you just get used to it? _-_()

Speaking of which, on a whim I bought a new copy of Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter from eBay. Did I mention I used to have Breath of Fire III, but I gave it to Rachel and forgot about it and flipped out one day about not being able to find it, only to have her inform me that it was in her possession when I went to whine about it to her? Heehee, that was cool. So I ended up buying both III and IV off eBay. And now I've got V as well, yay! (I don't plan on getting I or II though, because they don't count. ;o) I don't know why I feel such loyalty to the series! Well, besides III being my first RPG, next to Super Mario RPG. And the series having some of the gorgeous art ever O_O!! (IV and after only; this includes the redone cover art for I, II and III. :3) Unngghgh I lurrrve it so muchhh >3<!

Oh, uh, anyway, Dragon Quarter is for Playstation 2. which I don't have. ;D()() So now that makes three PS2 games in my possession (the other two being FFX and Katamari Damacy), which I'll never be able to play because it's too late to get a PS2 but PS3 is going to cost 50 bajillion dollars!! :< (I actually have a pretty big list of PS2 games I plan to buy if I do get a PS3 though. Not that I'll have the money for any of it.)

I saved this entry as a draft in Semagic last night thinking I might have something more worthwhile to type today. It turns out I didn't.

ああ、忙しい、忙しい。。。