laceblade

The current week-long Black Friday sale that Sentai is holding is BANANAS, like so bananas that I am making a Dreamwidth post to alert random people to the fact that SO MANY SERIES are available for like literally $4.99 and EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT IT. Here is a link to the first page of the sale; series are in alphabetical order.

Yes, so many things are streaming & digital now, but having just watch a significant portion of my Crunchyroll queue get wiped out when Funimation broke off, I have more faith in discs that I can hold in my hand than subscriptions. (To be clear, I do still have and use subscriptions! But consider them ephemeral.)


Stuff I'm buying or already own & recommend:
Chihayafuru ($4.99 per 2-cour set)
CLAMP School Detectives ($4.99 for 2 cour)
K-On! & K-On!! ($4.99 per cour)
Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi - ($4.99 for 1 cour)
Penguindrum - ($4.99 each for 2 cour)
Princess Tutu ($3.99!!!, 2 cour)
Shirobako (EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH SHIROBAKO IMO!!!) ($4.99 per cour, 2 cours)
Tari Tari ($4.99, 1 cour)
Yozakura Quartet ($4.99, 1 cour)

Stuff I'm considering buying based on what I've heard/am curious enough & it's cheap enough - lmk if you like it?!
AKB0048
Coffee Samurai / Hoshizora Kiseki [double feature] ($1.99) [Getting]
Flying Witch ($4.99, 1 cour) [Getting]
The Garden of Words ($3.99, movie) [Getting]
Glassslip ($4.99, 1 cour)
Hakukoi - various seasons & movies ($2.99-$4.99 ea) [Not getting! Watched first two eps; kind of thing I'd watch once but never again]
Maria Holic
Non Non Biyori ($4.00 per cour, 2 cour) [Getting]
Patlabor ($2.99 per movie; $10.99 for 7-ep OVA; $4.99 per cour for 4 cour, + 1 cour of 'New Files')
Sakura Wars ($2.99, 2 cour) [Getting]
Stella Women's Academy High School Division Class C3 ($4.99, 1 cour) [Getting]

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Did anyone else see the Hibike!/Sound! Euphonium movie, "Liz and the Blue Bird," in theaters? IT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD, I cried and it was so great to emote in a room full of people about a show I'd only watched by myself. I miss that part of Anime Club, and it was a great way to spend a week night.

I do wish that these special anime events, where Crunchyroll/whomever the fuck teams up with a theater chain to show something niche on 1-3 specific dates around the country, would be held in normal theater seating instead of the more expensive recliner seating, BUT. If it's all that's available, I have no choice but to luxuriate, right?

Series that I wish were on sale: Sound! Euphonium; Hanasaku Iroha

Growstuff.org is now in "soft launch." As a non-tech person, I'm led to believe that means, "we're not totally done yet!"
It's fun to be on a new site! The forums where people discuss the website itself are very friendly and helpful. I am confident that once I have plants around, I'll be able to ask questions about really basic things (idk what it means when something "goes to seed," for example, stuff like that), & people won't laugh at me, I don't think!

While you cannot yet add people as friends, the # of users is still pretty low, so it's easy to find other people's accounts under the "Members" tab. I am ribbonknight there.
I am a little sad that I can't add my non-food crops/plants (yet). So far, I've only been successful in maintaining non-food plants, like my spider plants & my rabbit foot fern and my peace lily.
During the summer, too, my red runner bean plant last year was my most successful in terms of how big it got/how long it stayed alive/how pretty the blooms were. But it literally only produced one bean.

I'd like to grow some flowers and other non-food plants on my balcony this year, if possible. I want to talk about my non-food plants, too. BUT. That is why I have this Dreamwidth blog, I suppose.
Anyway. Growstuff still seems like it will be valuable.

I'd like to do an inventory of the seeds I still have in my closet & blog about them here.

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I'd like to link to an article with a pretty banal headline ("Pope Francis doesn't represent all Catholics"), but I ended up feeling motivated & proud by the end.
I'd like to quote it for my own posterity. & preface it with...I really do understand why people do leave/have left the Catholic Church/Christianity/organized religion, in general. I don't mean to quote it to chide or shame other people, but rather sort of as a summation of why I stay. (Or how I wish I behaved - I haven't been "active" in a way I feel good about since high school, when we shook up our local parish at least a little bit. I would like to do that again.)

Since then, the story of the church has been punctuated by people who consulted their conscience first and their popes later. Francis of Assisi assembled his community of barefoot wanderers before going to Pope Innocent III to seek approval. In more recent times, Dorothy Day didn’t need a pope’s permission before opening a house of hospitality for the poor and resistance against war. The Community of Sant’Egidio, founded in Italy in the late 1960s, has fought HIV/AIDS and negotiated peace treaties around the world on its own terms. Yet, in honor of this witness, Benedict XVI made a habit of visiting Sant’Egidio’s ministries in Rome. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is seeking Dorothy Day’s cause for sainthood. And now, almost eight hundred years after Francis’ death, a pope has named himself after him.

Each of these Catholic heroes had a certain respect for the papacy, but they didn’t let that get in the way of living out the gospel for themselves. They took inspiration from the words of church authorities, but more importantly they took action on their own—in creative, authentic, and Christian fashion. “In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit,” Cardinal John Newman said more than a century ago. If what we expect from the church is what we expect from the aged and insulated man who happens to hold the office of Peter, there is little reason to expect much.

...

What the church needs is more committed and courageous souls in it, not fewer. It needs souls who are too busy organizing communities of radical living and prayer, and working for justice among the oppressed, and composing new hymns, to worry all that much about whom the Spirit and the cardinals might choose as pope. It needs souls willing to undertake new forms of thought and action capable of making what Catholics see as God’s good news a reality in our time—forms that will influence and inspire popes of the future, even if the present ones don’t yet get it.

Umm, I have a thread in a love meme, if you're into that.

ETA: If you're leaving a comment for me, please reply to the top-most Anonymous comment there, which has "laceblade" as a subject line.
If you just click "Post a new comment," then I will have multiple threads & I need not suck up this entire love meme!

Dear Friends,

Help me decide my life.

Should I participate in megaflare_ff? [Megaflare is a Big Bang for Final Fantasy video games.]

Fic commitments can be made for one of these four levels:
Flare - 5,000 words
Ultima - 10,000 words
Mega Flare - 20,000 words
Giga Flare - 40,000 words




If "Yes," should I work on the FF VII Inception AU in earnest? (haven't touched it in....a couple months?) Or something different?

(If FFVII Inception AU, I think I'd lean toward the latter two word counts. D: )


I am insecure fanperson, ;_;
One day, I will make these decisions for myself!

Next week starts Three Weeks for Dreamwidth.

For those who don't know about it, it basically means, "Post a lot, contribute to the comms you're part of, and make new friends, celebrate dreamwidth, yay."

SO.

If there are things you want me to write about, leave a comment and tell me what you want to hear.
I'm not guaranteeing that I'll write everything (if I don't have the spoons), but even if I don't get to it next week, maybe I will in TEH FUTURES.

I wasn't going to post anything about this whole 'piracy of copyrighted material' debate, but let's just say: We in anime fandom are not new to the discussion!


If you think buying an e-book is bad, check this out.

The production company for Fractale, an anime series currently airing in Japan, was having the series simulcasted in the U.S. by distribution company Funimation.

After airing one single episode, Fractale's production company pulled Fractale away from Funimation, stating that silmucasts would not return until Funimation ended illegal copies of the show on the Internet. ALL ILLEGAL FANSUBS MADE FROM THE SHOW. EVER. EVEN THOSE MADE BY JAPANESE PEOPLE.


It is very.....WTF.

Nightschool, vol. 1 and 2 by Svetlana Chmavoka
Volume 1 was a reread for me. It held up well, and I look forward to reading more of this series.

Her Majesty's Dog, vol. 2 and 3 by Mick Takeuchi
Not as good as volume 1, but still good.

20th Century Boys, vol. 3 and 4 by Naoki Urasawa
I continue to have so much love for this series.

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper (3 of 5 in The Dark is Rising)
I like this book the least out of the three I've read so far, but I'm still looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Why Buffy Matters by Rhonda Wilcox
Great academic analysis of Buffy, I ate this up. I didn't care for the introduction much, but I'm glad I kept reading.
Massive spoilers through the end of the series, so I would not read this book unless you've seen it all, or don't care about spoilers.

Critiques: For a book that had the goal of explaining why Buffy as a whole is important to society, the author focused mainly on analyzing it in order to prove that the show is "art." A lot of the things she chose to focus on were references in events to episodes that are repeated throughout different essays, to the point that the repetition became annoying.
Also, the author focused on the most artistic episodes in the entire series, aside from "Surprise"/"Innocence" (which are good episodes, but not stylistically different from the rest of the series), she wrote about "The Zeppo," "Restless," "The Body," and "Once More, With Feeling." I guess if my goal was to argue that an entire TV show is artistic (and I'm not sure why the argument needs to be made in the first place), I would use "mundane" episodes to prove my point.

Despite my critiques, I liked the things that Wilcox analyzed and expanded on. Visual cues/framing devices have to be extremely blatant for me to pick up on them (ie, Revolutionary Girl Utena), so now there will be things for me to look for. I am really eager to continue my re-watch of Buffy (I left off after finishing Season 3 a couple of months ago).

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Baccano! ep. 1-3 (of 16)
This is a re-watch for me, first-time viewing for the Boyfriend. Boyfriend finds the show a little pretentious [We're telling the plot in a non-linear fashion, Audience! We're so clever!], and I'd say I'm inclined to agree with him. It's a fun show, and I still love Isaac/Miria, but I think I've decided it's one that I don't want to own.

CLAMP School Detectives, ep. 1-5 (of 26)
A ridiculous opening sequence! CLAMP School Detectives is like Burn Notice, except that instead of an ex-spy, they're three fourth graders who try to help women in trouble. I don't think I'll finish this show, as there's not a lot of emotional growth/etc. Still, I liked the manga (my write-up is here), and it was nice to see the anime version.

Burn Notice, 3.1-3.2
It seems like these seasons start out a little slow for me? I like this season's antagonist more than I liked season two's, I think.

Robotech, ep. 1-4
I'm not really sure how to describe this show. It's so cheesy, and I hate all of the characters thus far. BUT post-apocalyptic futures IN SPACE will carry me far. I'm in it for the long haul, as the DVDs I have are from the middle part of the series. As I said, I dislike all of the characters for far, but the one I dislike the most is Minmei.

"High Society"
Didn't like this movie much, aside from Louis Armstrong. Lots of awful dialogue, especially the misogyny of Grace Kelly's love interests.

"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"
The subtitles didn't work on the DVD we rented from the library, so thank God this movie had a good English dub. I kind of loved this movie, aside from a couple of needlessly long crying / running/panting scenes. It's about what a high school girl would do if she had the ability to leap through time. I thought that the protagonist was maturing emotionally, but that turned out to not be the case.
I was kind of hoping for a Donnie Darko ending, but I loved this anyway.

"Freedom Writers"
My mom wanted me to watch this movie. I know that it's all "nice white lady blows the minds of kids of color with uplifting and simple phrases," but I did like the fact that the kids told their stories in their own voices throughout the movie, and that it showed the outright racism of teachers/administrators in schools. Better than I expected, but not great.

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Google Wave
I unexpectedly received an invite from my friend nylorac15. I'm a little wary about Google Wave - I think that for simple chatting, I'd much prefer Google Chat. I don't want people to watch me type as a type! In most cases, that would be very bad. I self-censor, but I need a little bit of time before I hit "Enter." Wave seems to remove this safety net.

What kinds of things might Google Wave be used for? I can only think of fannish-related activities: epic writing of fanfic between multiple parties, collaborative real-time WisCon panel write-ups, etc. Outside of fandom, I really can't come up with any uses for the technology. Let me know, Internet. Wikipedia is vague, and I'm not watching Google's hour-long video. I've got shit to do.

I need to figure out a way to have the contacts list not contain everyone I've ever Gmailed in my entire life. :[ It seems like the only way to delete people from the list is to delete them from my Gmail contacts list FOREVER, and that sucks. How come there isn't more control, as there is with Google Chat?

Not sure how many of you are at Archive of Our Own, but I am laceblade over there.

And sometimes, the comments make no fucking sense. [Read the one by "Smokers Anonymous."]

Apparently I'm worthy of the caliber of text used in creepy religious brochures. WHERE DO THESE PEOPLE COME FROM?

OMG YOU GUYS!

Bookcloseouts.com has cheap Tokyopop manga! 99 cents per volume! THAT SHIT IS 90% OFF!!

They have RG Veda! And The Queen's Knight! And hopefully other things I want, too!


Does anybody know if any of the light novels are any good? I see they have "Scrapped Princess," for example. The anime was okay and I'm wondering if Tokyopop's light novels are good, or just poorly translated and bad-ish.