that sweet, sad thought has faded now

FRIENDING POLICY

I am friend free. You want to give me access or subscribe? Go right ahead. If I think you're interesting or that we share interests or, I dunno, if it's the third Tuesday of the month and the sky has miraculously turned green, I will return the favor.

REQUEST POLICY

My actual policy is over here. In summary, REQUESTS ARE ALWAYS OPEN.

WARNINGS

ONE: In this journal you will find a crazed Final Fantasy fan. I can honestly say I've played at least an hour of all of them and all the way through most of them. I've been in Final Fantasy VII fandom since before Advent Children. I will be quite honest: not much pisses me off more than someone claiming to be a fan of FFVII who hasn't played the original game, and if you write fic, yes, I judge you. (Yeah, I went there.)

TWO: My interests go like this: YURI > HET > > > YAOI. I don't empathize well with men and male bodies really don't interest me. I have a total of exactly four slash pairings and do not generally seek out slash. Final Fantasy slash especially is just... boring to me.

THREE: Hard-line feminist toeing the line of misandry. Not gonna lie: I border on radical feminism and I Do Not Like Men. I have my reasons. Go ahead and ask, if you want to know. I'm not sensitive about the topic.

Dear everyone:

HA HA HA DISREGARD MY PREVIOUS POST I [INSERT ACTIVITY HERE].

Also, I am the biggest moron on this side of the planet (....well, second-biggest, Sarah Palin is pretty damn dumb).

---

In other news, recent meta has sharpened my appetite for dealing with the Shadowsverse crew. They are all a bunch of assholes, except for Corentin and Cazgo (one of whom has her own issues involving her demon semi-fiance and the other of whom works very, very hard to seem like a brainless surferdude goofball), and I love them anyway (except for Dereth, who somehow manages to play the "abusive dad," "clueless ex," and "that's CAPTAIN rigid tightass to you" cards all at once--no, don't ask me to explain).

kaigou's recent post (for a value of "recent" that includes "in the past six months") has gotten me thinking about white/black~bright/dark~right-hand/left-hand symbolism, and the way I use it in Shadowsverse.

To drop into TV Tropes parlance, Shadowsverse itself is a trainwreck of three tropes: Dark Is Not Evil, Light Is Not Good, and Good Is Not Nice. There is very specific color symbolism: black magicians and white mgicians, one is "evil," and one is "good." Thanks to the color symbolism, the 'verse may read as a Pointed Look at racism, especially since all the major recurring characters are PoCs. But the truth is, Shadowsverse is, at its core, about religion.

But the major points of the 'verse have always been: A) "people" as a rule are roughly the same on the good/evil scale, B) good and evil get a lot murkier when you're riding the high horse of a cause or religion, and C) people atop the high horses of causes/religions tend to do more harm than good.

It's my angry "Seven years in Christian schooling SD:LKHSG:HGH I HATE CHRISTIANS WILL THEY ALL PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP" screed, in book form. Because if there was one thing I saw, over and over and over, repeated ad nauseum by not only students but teachers, professors, chapel speakers, parents, was the complete and total erasure of other faiths, other creeds. The people on the "right-hand" path couldn't fucking get the idea through their heads that the the rest of the world followed a separate path, and they could scream themselves hoarse and never change a thing, nor have any right to.

And at some point, I started formulating a world where the left-hand path was in control and always had been, where the right-hand path was shown to be just as vicious, just as hurtful, just as destructive as the left-hand path at its worst.

But thanks to kaigou's post, I'm starting to wonder: am I derailing or co-opting racial discussion by using deliberate colour symbolism to make a different point? Or does the implied point that "black/dark/left-hand" and "white/light/right-hand" are ultimately nothing more than labels make it permissible?

In general, I don't get very sentimental. Sentimentality is for people who are not me.

But every time the opening notes of Uematsu Nobuo - Opening ~ Bombing Mission (also known as the FFVII opening theme) start to play, I get swamped in nostalgia and my eyes start to water.

The very first time I ever watched my (pirated, pre-release) sub of Advent Children, I bawled at the very first scene.

THIS SERVING OF TMI BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE BLACK MAGES - OPENING ~ BOMBING MISSION

Seriously, I am so angry I feel like my eyeballs are sizzling in my skull.

I actively wish harm on this woman. And her husband. I wish their son had been "a block of fetal tissue." I wish she had nearly lost her life to due to her complicated pregnancy.

At the very least, I wish she would fucking 'fess up and admit that she didn't fucking have a choice, because there is no such fucking choice in the Philippines. Any sort of premature termination of a pregnancy is strictly outlawed except when the mother is in clear and present immediate danger. No, not even in cases of incest or rape.

Translation? No doctor in the Philippines would ever have said, "Yeah, that's not a baby, let's just scrape that out." ON PAIN OF LOSS OF LICENSE AND SIX YEARS IN PRISON.

Oh, and there's not much in the way of contraception or specialized neonatal/postnatal care. Not even in Manila. So if they hadn't wanted a baby, or darling Timmy had had birth defects, they'd have been SOL.

I love the country my family is from, but it is fucked up and I will not pretend it isn't.

(Then again, my views on abortion may be somewhat skewed: in the Meiji Era [which is where nearly all of my mental time has been invested as of late thanks to re~search~], women would simply kill infants they couldn't [or didn't want to] care for. Infants. Newborns. It wasn't even a crime, just a sad necessity. Abortion seems a hell of a lot better than that, to me.)

Oh dear god the headache is back

DEAR EVERYONE:

Oh god Arkham Asylum Scarecrow level. AAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Moved from bitchy to exhaustion. People are exhausting. Video games are exhausting. Anime is exhausting. WoW is exhausting. C&C is exhausting.

I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for five zillion years.

I just realized

I may have to work Saturday

I believe the correct southern turn of phrase is "Son of a bitch! Jesus H monkey balls-licking motherfucking Christ damn it to goddamn hell."

Oh god. I'm looking forward to doing things on WoW all day. I FINALLY GET HOME, twelve hours later, and there is an update /sob.

FML.

Okay, fuck it. Today is officially over. I am going to take my meds and play Suikoden IV until I fall asleep.

(Where in the hell has this complete absence of patience come from?)

FIFTEEN HOURS

FIFTEEN

FIFTEEN HOURS IN THIRTY DEGREE WEATHER WITH NO POWER

Fifteen

And snowed in for twelve of those hours

I am ready to go stir crazy

I think I need a good long ( cut for keyboard smash )

The power is back on, now, of course. (Otherwise I wouldn't be posting, and you would have heard on the news about that crazy woman in Dayton, TN who, like, walked into a Krystal's and killed everyone with hot grease). I need a bath. And videogames. And hideous gifs. Particularly hideous Twilight-related gifs, because part of me wants to app Alice from Twilight into CnC. (The rest of me wants to app Kika from Suikoden IV. Or Sigurd.)

Okay. The squares have been filled. Tags are made, ideas are posted. I'm laying my clothes out, taking a shower, and going to bed.

Three distinct kinds of tired. God, I can't wait until tomorrow is over.

Not my finest moment, but I'm tired, cranky, and fucking irritated at myself for friending sterling in the first place. Also I do not like the inherent wankiness of following someone to their goddamn personal journal.

I have banned sterling and brutal_priestess from commenting on my journal, and I now disallow anon commenting on DW.

Suffice to say I have run right the fuck out of patience.

There are many, many things I'm willing to tolerate. But I have had it up to fucking here.

OH GOD OH GOD AY

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME

OH GOD

/GOES OFF TO REPLAY SUIKODEN IV

Okay so aymiah tagged me for the five things meme:

MISAO
Not actually my baby! My baby is Yuffie Kisaragi, but a Misao is fine too! I've been part of RK fandom off and on since '02 or '03, and Misao has been among my favorites since my first watch-through. I didn't actually sit down and watch the full series as a deliberate "I AM GOING WATCH THIS ANIME" until... god, '06? I was a freshman in college. And I liked Sano and Saitou and then this GIRL appeared on screen and I went WHO IS THAT OMG and then I read the manga and I still loved her and uh so THERE. That's the story.
WRITING
Definitely my favorite thing to do. I would like to eventually write lots and make lots of money off it. A day without anything worked on, writing wise, is a day wasted.
FINAL FANTASY
My other favorite thing to do. I am huge, huge final fantasy nerd, to the point of listening to remixes of Final Fantasy music, having Opinions on the pronunciation of Tidus's name, shipping Cecil/Rosa like crazy, and having Weird Theories about how Squall-Rinoa-Seifer is just Cecil-Rosa-Kain in different clothes. I am passing familiar with all of them, save III and V, and VI is the only one I've made no effort to play (I associate it with douchebags).
SARUMAN BOOB CANNON
Oh god where do I even start. A long long time ago--back in late '04/early '05--there was this sequence of roleplays done, using the cast of and following the storyline of Suikoden IV. Except it was insane and cracky and just IDEK start here and just poke around it, okay, it had jokes like "Sigurd has weak ankles and Hervey likes to set him on fire," and then the interests lists were CRAZY. One of those interests was the "Saruman Boob Cannon." It is named for a plot point in Suikoden IV that is used to destroy AN ENTIRE ISLAND--except it's this statue of Saruman holding this, like, orb thing. Hence, Saruman Boob Cannon. I listed it as an interest because A) hilarity and B) as a sign of affection for thehighseas. Also oh god now I want to go replay Suikoden IV.
KAKURENBO OAV
Let me explain. I first saw this at AWA a couple of years ago--possibly my first or second AWA? And when it was over the lovely Sherry and I looked at each other with, for serious, this expression: O_O and we were both like "What the hell was that?" "I think we just saw the Japanese short film's answer to THE MATRIX." "That was so cool! I have to get my hands on it!" But we didn't ever get our hands on it until, oh, two years ago? Three years ago? That Halloween when I was still dating xorle. And it was one of the things we stayed up all night to watch, and it was still awesome, and I just associate it with some of the best times in my life.

Four in the morning and I'm wide awake

HOLY SHIT YOU GAIZ THERE'S AN RPG BASED OFF THE KAKURENBO OAV HOLY SHIT

I LOVED THAT ANIME

IT WAS FREAKY AS FUCK

AND IT REMINDS ME OF SHERRY

My seven o'clock goal--on overtime--is 137 bills total.

Guess what I reached at 6:20? That's right, baby, forty minutes early~

7 PM 23 January 2007.


T-minus fifty five hours, roughly.

If I could go back in time three years to this exact minute, she was alive.