Fic post from my archive.

Breaking of the Day: Omake

Because I really couldn't resist. Toward the end of Tsuna's investiture as the Tenth Boss, Xanxus puts in an appearance. Humor, I-2

Xanxus stopped in the middle of the room, feet spread, and glared at him. "I hate your fucking guts," he declared.

Tsuna considered this blunt, frontal statement of the obvious for a moment and relaxed. "I know," he agreed, quietly.

Fic post from my archive.

Breaking of the Day

Tsuna gets taken off to Italy to get better acquainted with the Vongola. While he's there, he has to come to some kind of terms with Xanxus. Kind of, sort of, mental Tsuna/Xanxus. Drama, I-4, some spoilers

"I can't believe you told Kaa-san this was overseas study," Tsuna grumbled as he was frog-marched to his doom.

Well, all right, not really frog-marched, his dad had his hands in his pockets and Reborn wasn't tall enough, but the effect was the same.

"It is overseas," his dad said, cheerily. "And it's definitely higher education."

*waves to all her LJ friends* Hey, just wanted to make sure people knew, rss feed journals don't send comments.

So, if anyone comments on branchandrootij, or similar, I won't see those comments unless I happen to go look at the feed journal in person (which I don't unless someone mentions it). Feeds aren't associated with anyone, so there are no notifications.

Personally, I think LJ would do a lot better to see about sending notifications to the source of the feed, instead of uglifying the user info page, but that's just me. *grins*

So if you want to comment so I can see it, click on the url at the top of the entry and leave the comment here on IJ. (See also OpenID commenting so you can get notifications of replies to your comments over here.)

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

So, I was thinking about Hibari and Mukuro, and their philosophical or symbolic furniture, and figured I’d better scribble it all down before it got away.

Poking at the way Hibari changes over time, it seems to me that he’s got two major influences in what we might call his philosophy or mind-set: Naturalist and Traditional. These are my own terms for them, of course.

The Naturalist aspect is the ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, carnivore/herbivore, survival of the fittest or at least rule of the strongest gig that is his stronger influence earlier on. For a high-profile example of how this philosophy manifests in modern Japan, look up Fukuzawa Yukichi.

The Traditional aspect shows up in his devotion to the school, tendency to wear his school uniform exclusively, and later in his design of his Foundation, and tendency to wear kimono at home. All of these suggest an investment in the values of form and conformity, and, as time goes on, in the aesthetics of wabi and iki.

Pause for translation: Both of those are pretty broad concepts, and Hibari is nothing if not selective in how he adopts Traditional ideas, so let me gloss the aspect of wabi he seems most engaged with as “the beauty of imperfections that arise from a thing being what it is” (e.g. liking a corny anthem because, well, it’s the school anthem and those are pretty much supposed to be corny). I would not say he’s much into the “humility” aspect, for example. Iki is usually translated as “refinement”, which is fine as far as it goes. Getting into the further connotations, I’d say Hibari is most engaged with the aspects of simplicity and what we might call “perfection of manner”, witness the classically sparse arrangement of his future quarters.

These things don’t actually contradict each other, provided we assume Hibari is at the top of the food chain, which Hibari clearly does assume.

And then we have Mukuro. Mukuro draws on the concept of Samsara, Buddhist flavor, the cycle of reincarnation through the Six Realms. To have been through this cycle is not an unusual thing to claim, but remembering each life and being able to draw on the nature of each realm certainly is. Despite having all those strengths at his beck and call, of course, Mukuro is clearly not enlightened, has not escaped the cycle. Indeed, based on his current life’s emotions and actions, he’s probably bound straight for Hell again.

The human state is, however, supposed to be the one from which enlightenment can be best achieved, and I find it very interesting that, after his fight with Tsuna, Mukuro starts using a new signature illusion: lotus flowers. Those are one of the prime symbols of enlightenment. An illusion of a lotus has some rather curious connotations, too. On the one hand, Buddhism does suggest that the world around us is, indeed, illusion, from a spiritual point of view. The illusion of the lotus could be the very purest expression of this, showing that all the symbols of this world we use to explain enlightenment are inadequate. It could just as well be the ultimate symbol of Mukuro’s denial of enlightenment.

I suspect we won’t be able to resolve the ambiguity until we find out what Mukuro’s new agenda really is.

Put your music player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first song is the title.

(Created last night while trying to do one last nanowrimo update, but I forgot they now check your time zone - none of that "you've got till 8am GMT" any more... Oh well. 30K+ words in November, that's not bad at all.)

Pay no mind to her, she only wants to play

If you want me
If I were a carpenter
Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey
So blue lonesome too but still true
Smile your little smile, take some tea with me awhile

In Europe and America there's
An old cowboy went riding out one dark and windy day
I chase your every footstep
The wind blows hard across the Texas plains
Oh, I could have worked on a research staff

If you can't say you love me say you hate me
At the end of the day you're another day older
Come over to the window, my little darling,
Ten years ago, on a cold dark night
You could have your choice of guys in town

I'm going to steal me a silver stallion
I learned the truth at seventeen
A man is walking on the moon, with his eyes turned up toward space
Just a kiss just a kiss
Riding on the City of New Orleans.


( Song titles/singers )

I met helenraven for lunch - she operates without a mobile phone, so we met at the hotel and walked to an Italian place not far from there: she left for a movie: and I met afrai shortly afterwards in a Starbucks. She is as lovely in person as she is in print, and we walked down to Charing Cross and looked in bookshops and I bought a new Robin McKinley and we ate Japanese food and found a Caffe Nero and had coffee, and it was altogether a very social, very nice day.

I never took any photographs. Well, two.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

*staring at the info book translations*

Okay. So, when the KHR info book came out, the timeline set ‘current time’ in the middle of Our Hero’s second year of Namimori Middle school, and their ages are given as (for the most part) 14.  To be more precise, 13/14, given Kyoko’s age.

This… actually does match up.  I kept seeing their ages set at 15, and was wondering how on earth they could be first and second years in middle school and still be 15; that’s the age for a high school first year.

But, no, it looks like the times are not screwed up, and, indeed, these characters are middle school students.

And, theoretically, Hibari’s age is unknown, but it doesn’t seem in character for him to stay in middle school when he should properly be in the high school range, so he’s probably only a year older than they are, if that, and this is going to make my futurefic for Dino/Hibari a bit more difficult to set.

*makes small ‘argh’ sounds*

...that was the most genderfucky experience I have ever had in my life.

I'm feeling tremendously happy for multiple reasons:

1. I can get online at my hotel! At the little desk conveniently provided!
2. MY LAPTOP WORKS. (Admittedly, the nice repairperson warned me, the power connector should be considered on its last legs, may give out at any time, and as of next week I need to start pricing new laptops.)
3. I wrote nearly 400 words of my wrimowrimo story this morning: I am only 600+ words off being able to post part 3 of the current section.
4. I just had a really lovely day with ruthi in which we wandered around Burrough Market, bought CHEESE and other lovely things, and then had a really tremendously gorgeous lunch at Imli's.
5. I just drank a nice cup of freshly-brewed coffee and ate a cappuchino-flavour cream puff that we were both too full to eat for dessert after Imli's.
6. I am about to go out and hench for World AIDS Day with the London convent. This should be fun, and if it's not, I can always escape early, go back to my hotel room, and wrimowrimo some more.
7. The window in my hotel room opens! I'd taken for granted it didn't, because they usually don't, and last night was rather stuffy, but it does. Fresh air is cheering.

Oh, and tomorrow I get to meet up with first Helen Raven and then afrai. So that will be good. And Monday night dinner with the Maenad. Two lawyers in two days, can I cope? Probably. I believe they're both nice lawyers.

Our house was just broken into. While I was here.

I heard the doorbell ring, and figured it was a delivery and I'd get a few more winks before getting up to see. And then there was some noise from downstairs and I wondered if the cat was getting rowdy. And then I thought I heard some steps (old wood floor you know, it creaks) and turned over, wondering, so I saw a hand open the bedroom door. Quite abruptly. So I said "what?!" like any sensible person. And the hand vanished, and the steps booked it downstairs, and by the time I got my bathrobe on and my walking stick in hand, the burglar was gone.

With my ipod nano and the dock. But nothing else.

And I know how he got in. The cat door was opened, and I checked, it's possible to reach from there to the lock on the back door, which was open. If I take the key out of the deadbolt, that will fix the problem, which makes me feel better.

But I'm still kind of freaking out bigtime here.

The soup isn't purple. One of the vegetables that went into it is purple. The others were potatoes, parsnips, and onions.

The soup is actually the ugliest green I have seen in my long experience of making vegetable soups.

I hope it's tasty.

I'm going to Surichi Too for lunch.

...hello.

Everything, from the sublime to the ridiculous...

1. Dell. Because the big laptop I got from them for work has a LAN connection that is completely disturbed: I normally don't use it to go online at home at all, because it switches back and forth between "now connected" and "a network cable is unplugged" several times a minute.

2. Hewlett-Packard. Because the neat laptop I got from them 18 months ago is in the shop being repaired for a power-connector problem, which is why I have to use my Dell POS instead.

3. Beanscene. Because if they would actually provide WiFi that, you know, worked reliably, instead of a WiFi that just hovers around the "we swear we've got it" level, I could sit in their big empty-ish cafe on Victoria Quay and work, quite happily. And buy their expensive coffee as the price of doing so. I have written to them pointing this out: they do not respond.

4. The British judicial system, which comes up with a measured response like this to a man who raped his daughters:

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was given 25 life sentences yesterday. He will serve a minimum of 19 years and six months in prison.

He fathered nine children with his daughters, two of whom died at birth. The other 10 pregnancies were miscarried or terminated.

The British man pleaded guilty last month to 25 counts of rape, dating from the early 1980s and continuing until this year when the terrified women finally sought help. The Guardian

In what universe does raping your daughters for three decades and getting 25 life imprisonment sentences add up to a minimum of 19 years six months? In principle I believe in rehabilitation and I do not believe in the death penalty, but I also believe you can say that there are people who are too dangerous to ever be let out of jail - and someone who spent 30 years torturing his daughters, only letting up when he made them pregnant and only for the duration of their pregnancies, is such a person.

5. Childline.

The court heard that in 1988 suspicions were raised at the victims' school due to their injuries but these were blamed on bullying. One of the women was asked by a doctor if her father was the father of her children, but she denied it. The girls called Childline, the court was told, and asked for a guarantee that their children would not be taken away, but hung up when this assurance could not be given.

One of my co-workers made two dozen lemon cupcakes yesterday, and brought twelve of them into work. I ate two, and regretted the second: sugar overdose.

*yawn*

I am boring. Good night.

Fic post from my archive.

The Beauty of Obligation

Filling in missing scenes of Hibari's training with Dino, and how it might have convinced him to Tsuna's side. Drama, I-3

And just who did Cavallone think he was, to judge Kyouya's skill? He wouldn't even fight properly, all avoidance and evasion.

Still. The fact that he could evade and avoid spoke its own language, and a far more convincing one than the flowery nonsense about frogs and wells. As long as Cavallone showed up, Kyouya would fight him.

Now if he could just make the man fight seriously.

>_> ...^_^;;

Mah eggz, lets me show them to you....



Blah blah, silly internet game, blah blah clicking on the eggs in my profile will help them grow up big and strong and able to eat knights on a weekly basis blah blah yes I feel ridiculous but they're so CUTE when they hatch blah blah.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled evening.

[Posted from my other fandom journal.]

Another of the structural points that interests me is the way the characters win or lose. In the Mukuro arc, this is fairly straightforward, though there are some instances where losing is not a final thing, especially in Ken’s case. The ring battles start out looking equally simple and definitive but, after the Guardians’ matches are done with, takes a sharp left turn away from that built-up expectation. Once Xanxus’ overall plan is revealed, the structure of the previous fights breaks down into an impending free-for all, driven by passion and conviction and blood on the ground right then and there.

And then Amano cuts it off, leaving audience expectation without sure direction.

We appear to return to the strict (and rather sadistic) structure the Cervello have imparted to previous battles, for a time and, within that structure, Tsuna wins. Almost. The almost turns out to be critical and, despite having beaten Xanxus, having proven himself stronger, Tsuna and his side wind up losing by the numbers. Xanxus Guardians make it to the scene sooner, and the rings go to him.

And then we get another twist.

Xanxus’ prize rejects him and Tsuna wins by default. Only not, because, of course, he has already proven that he has the peculiarly Vongola strengths. It’s a marvelous tangle of mixed messages, and paves the way for the demi-redemption of the Varia. Audience expectation has been destabilized repeatedly, leaving Amano more elbow room to do unusual things without instant resistance–at least, not resistance because of her own narrative momentum. In this case, she uses that room to inject some sympathy for the previously quite unsympathetic Varia and Xanxus (see post re Villains) and, in the next arc, to rehabilitate them to an extent, presenting them as allies.

Given Mukuro’s appearance as Tsuna’s Guardian, it’s pretty safe to say this is a maneuver Amano likes.

The fact that she seems to be using the win-only-not/lose-only-not tactic again with Irie only increases my suspicion that it will wind up being used for Byakuran. But what most interests me about the whole pattern is that it allows for something we rarely see in the shounen-fight genre, which is the heros really losing–not just a motivational loss, but a “you lost the big stakes” loss. So far, this has not translated into an overall narrative loss, but only due to a personal failing in the winner, not any effort on the part of Tsuna and Family. That’s unusual enough to catch my attention, and pretty convincingly presents Tsuna as simultaneously increasing greatly in power and still in need of further build-up.

It also supports her less redemptive than usual redemptions. It’s a classic genre move to have opponents be rehabilitated or enlightened or otherwise saved by losing to the hero. The characters are generally engaged in explicit trial by combat already, and the winner has demonstrated the superiority of his side’s philosophy, as well as fighting skills. Amano has done this once, with Mukuro, but the ring battles do not resolve by combat, which leaves Xanxus and the Varia in an ambiguous position, defeated but not vanquished and, to all appearances, not redeemed either. This marches well with her approach to villains in general, providing a wide enough spectrum of despicable-ness to make characters who act very dubiously still palatable to the audience. Already pre-conditioned to accept ambiguous behavior, we are less likely to kick when frankly psychotic killers are presented as viable allies.

I will be very interested to see just how far Amano carries this, and whether the ambiguities will be resolved by the end or left as they are.

Possible things wrong with my laptop:

1. Problem with transformer: about £60.
2. Problem with power connector on motherboard: about £150. (Or, 1/3 of the cost of a new laptop.)
3. Problem with battery: about £130. (Ditto, though about £20 less ARGH - also, if that's the problem, I can still use my laptop until I get a new battery by removing the battery and letting the poor confused thing know it's OK to run on wall power.)

Problem with me: I stare at the costs involved and the cost of going to London and think I need a laptop a lot more than I need a long weekend in London.

A lot more.

Well....so, I haven't gotten Persona 2 to work on my PS1 or PS2. My conclusion is that it IS the hardware I'm using. The PS2s I've had have always had issue with the black or blue-backed PS1 games. And I think that the game is just one of those old PS1 games that doesn't work well with the late-model PS1s. At least not the one I've got. And the game disc itself will work in emulation, soooo.... I hope that too many other folks don't have this problem, because my solution has all kinds of hassles with it.

Yeah, Atlus, you don't win any points for selling me a game that can't work on TWO systems that it should...but will work on an emulator. -_-

I have gotten it to work on my PC using the ePSXe emulator. It's not ideal (foremost because oh god, I hate playing games with a keyboard...yes I know I could get a gamepad, but I refuse to go buy one just for this game), and I think you need a good deal of RAM to pull it off (on my computer, running Firefox and the emulator at the same time made the game sluggish, because Firefox is a memory hog....god I wish FF would fix that. I thought FF3 was supposed to fix the memory problems?)

But yeah, anyway! If anyone gets their hands on a copy of P2 and wants to know how I set it up, just drop me a comment or email. Suffice to say that those two pages I linked to had all the software that I needed to make it work. (I'm leery of posting it here because, y'know, technically illegal to use emulation.) :P

In actual game news, though, I'm liking what I've played of P2. I am...slowly getting over Maya's character design (red hearts...on your brown shirt...RIGHT ON YOUR BOOBS WTF NOT PROFESSIONAL AT ALL UNLESS YOU'RE A HOOKER). But I'm kind of liking the crunchy complex demon encounter system. You can battle, or you can negotiate. And the negotiation is much more complex than in Nocturne. Multiple moods to handle, multiple outcomes....it's pretty neat! :)

So, I saw that Persona 2 was one of the black-finish PS1 games. Those didn't play in my old PS2, and they still don't in my new-to-me PS2 I bought here not too long ago. That's fine. I've got a bitty PS1 backup system that I use for things like Vagrant Story (also a black disk). That's fine!

....except Persona 2 doesn't want to play in that, either. :((((((( It spins, the system still plays Vagrant Story...but it's like there's nothing on the disc to read. I don't know if it's some weirdness between the late-model PS1s and the original PS1 coding on the disc, or if the game's defective.

Gonna see if I can get a PS1 emulator going on my computer....

Atlus...so cruel....

Anyone who got a Persona 2 from the reprint tried to play it yet? Success? Or same problem I'm having? :(((