MILES to GO || before I sleep

I blame it on obabscribbler yet again-- this time not for any kind of plotbunny, but for getting me into watching Fandom!Secrets. The latest's 102 mentions the necessity of Caruso shades when reading OHSHC. I LOL'd.

The anime/manga store in the Metreon (which no longer has its AMC sign outside, even though it's still AMC-affiliated INSIDE, right down to those butt-ugly polo shirts and too-high navy blue pants... shit, at least the people at the Metreon have a variety of food to choose from! At the 1000, I had to choose between sandwiches or concession crap... ANYWAY!) "Kamikaze Pop" went out of business changed locations with no current ETA at their next location, wherever it may be. So I managed to grab a bunch of Arina Tanemura manga for only $39 (8 volumes-- not bad!). I realized that I like the Full Moon anime better than the manga (the manga seems very stilted, and I have a hard time with any manga that has a auditory medium as its focal point-- it's hard to imagine a singer through manga). I also like Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne better than Full Moon, even though KKJ was tragically shorter. And I won't read Gentleman's Alliance+, because... well, the plot just didn't grab me. I'm glad Tanemura-sensei's art's improved so much over the years, but I like her older stuff much more than her newer titles, even if it is FMoS that got me into her works in the first place.

CURRENT PROJECTS
* New layout for "The Firefly Room," the Secret Society Girl fanlisting. I need to get more content, keep it up to date, and whore it out over on the author's blog. Maybe I can get the ladies over at TFL to make it the fanlisting for the whole series (which is what I intended in the first place, when I made it back before the third book came out; the fourth book is coming out next summer). I've got the layout made and everything, but my problem is that I've never skinned a website before and the tutorial I read (over at Tutorialtastic) confused the heck out of me. I posted on the CodeGrrl forums where Tutorialtastic help is, but there's been no reply yet. Maybe because my own post was so addled.... Basically I need to figure out how to get the style-switcher to work. Places like Sailor Music make it look so easy. ;_;

* The Star Ocean 3/Till The End of Time shrine. I'm still working my way through the two biggest parts, the Gemity page and the Dictionary. I need to fiddle with the table CSS so I can use them for maps and grids rather than make images in Photoshop, which takes much longer and causes the page to load slower.

* Website design and layout for my GWS 350OL (Intersections of Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality) class. Everyone in my group has pretty much unanimously voted on a website instead of a blog, claiming that a website will be "more organized." Well, sure, maybe, but it's more work for me! Ugh, I just want this project to be so fantabulous (like any other project I've taken on where I build some sort of site) so it makes up for the fact that I couldn't turn in an Autoethnography paper. Problem is, we need to figure out how to organize the site (it's not automatic, folks!)-- and I need to figure out a suitable design. Helpz? Our topic is "Gay Rights," and we're covering a lot of ground with issues on the California Supreme Court decision, Prop 8, etc. (I don't want to be horribly stereotypical and do a RAINBOW, even though there are tasteful ways of incorporating multiple colors into a site design... something like the iTunes posters wouldn't be bad, but I don't know if it's "serious" enough. Same goes for pink triangles.)

* Organization of my FFX, FFX-2 playlist in iTunes. Turns out I was missing a bunch of songs from the 4-disc original soundtrack (the Tokyopop one I bought ages ago is called the "Official Soundtrack," and hardly has any of the good songs), so I imported them. Now to make sure they all have the right titles (I'm aiming for the English-translated ones, not romanized or literal titles, e.g. not "Warping to a Different Dimension," but "The Sending"), the right artist/composers, and that I've noted which ones are equivalent to which tracks on the Official Soundtrack, because I'm anal retentive like that. :P

* Need new icons. Lots of fandoms. Also: more LULz.

* The usual: studying for quizzes, homework, taking notes, watching CSI: Season 1 (srsly, whoever heard of a DVD boxed set coming with a) no subtitles/closed captions and b) no scene selections!? I'm pissed, CBS! Even though it was a great value, this is just stupid) , attempting to work on WDKY26 but getting sidetracked by other ideas and such

COMPLETED PROJECTS WHATEVER
* Got my copy of "Star Ocean: First Departure" for the PSP! I don't own a PSP (yet)! Whoo-hoo!

* Finished Astrology, Blood Types, and Yu-Gi-Oh! I don't like it as much as the others, because even though I raised issues dealing with the character, it didn't seem as indepth. Is that because he's not as major a character as the others I've covered so far? Also, I feel like I put it out there on a crutch, even though lots of people said it was indepth and good and everything. But I felt like without my proper research book and software for generating natal charts, it just wasn't as good. :(

Do you know the bathtub analogy about how one's brain works? An idea pops into your head, but there's others. They all pop, bubbling up and disappearing as quickly as they come. So my bubbles recently went something like this:

Christmas... Christmas pictures to show... oh look, that Sailor Christmas I made with the Sailor X 2 Generator from SailorGalleries.com ... crap, no PlayFKiss on here. What? No PlayFKiss or DirectKiss for Mac? Damn... ooh, UltraKiss! Kinda slow, but it works. Ooh, new updates on the SailorGalleries site... not for the generator KiSS doll, but oh well. Ooh look, this artwork by RainbowMoon is nice... hey, who's that? She's new. Oh, a fan-senshi. They're all right. Hey waitasec, I've seen that glyph before. Who IS she?

Here's the fanart that started it (or rather, ended it). Another fanart site calls her "Persephone," but I've never known Persephone to have a glyph of her own. Planets and moons, yes, but I don't think there *is* a planet/moon/asteroid named Persephone (please correct me if I'm wrong). But that sigil on her head- I *HAVE* seen that before, but I can't remember what it's called! I know it's not Vesta, Juno, Pallas, or Ceres, nor is it Chiron. And I know all the other planetary symbols, including the "alternates" for Uranus and Pluto, the "lost planets" and the few moons of various planets that have symbols. So what the heck is that one!? Can anyone tell me? (And show me another site that backs it up?)

This artist has some killer fanart of TONS of fan-senshi, including "remixes" of the Witches 5 as Senshi, the next (several) generation(s) of Sailor Senshi AFTER Sailor Chibi Moon, the Opposito Senshi from the Another Story RPG (with new names, but generally the same uniform), among others.

ETA: Linked to the right fanart, since SailorGalleries has been a bit restructured. Now everything is on SailorMoonFanart.Net.

Saw "Snakes on a Plane" with Erin on Friday evening... even if I dropped out of the cult-following a few months ago, it was still fabulous fun, and I loved it. It was very much deserving of the R-rating, especially at the beginning of the movie, but it managed to be both suspenseful and unpredictable-- great, considering how many people judge the movie by its title (or its poster). And the band that won the fan contest to have their music video in the end credits-- that song was DAMN good! It's actually sort of stuck in my head! Erin said the band reminded her of the Black Eyed Peas.

What was fabulous was when EVERYONE in the theatre (and this was a big theatre, but not sold out by any means) -except Erin, who had no freaking clue what was going on- said The Line in unison "I've had it with these motherfuckin' snakes on this motherfuckin' plane!" Yes, even me. It was fab. Absolutely fab. And of course everyone started cheering afterward.

( Spoilers, of course )

And now for something completely different...

I really would have thought that the damn "pink is for girls" concept would have DIED by now. First off, I, a self-respecting woman, HATE PINK. Especially cotton candy pink, Chibiusa pink, hot pink, or any derivative thereof. The closest I can come is maybe a deep rose color that I wear for blush or lip gloss. But then you have the freakin' PINK Razr. -_-; But hey, guys are wearing pink now... it looks weird to me, especially seeing ripped black guys wearing those AE pink polos, but whatever. Personally, I just don't like the color. But, to each their own.

Last night I got to cleaning my room, and of course I found tons of notes for fanfics, including WDKY. I had to go back and check to make sure that I'd made the changes I indicated on paper; I also had to add some "references" to the WDKY References page. Unfortunately I haven't been keeping up with the Changelog (the thing that I use to track all the updates I make to chapters, and what specific changes I make), but I can pretty much guess based on what I've added to the Reference log. I have random references in a lot of places, but at least I'm not Cassie Claire in this respect; I keep track of everything, and invent my own convoluted plot twists and references. I just wish there was a way to get Snakes on a Plane in there somehow. *snicker joke* Well anyway, I uploaded the new version of the References page to the old Darkness Rising (at some point, it will be under the new masthead of Epiphany, running eFiction 3.0), and later on tonight, I'll be updating Chapters 11 and 14 for some minor tweaks on all sites.

More fanfic-wise, I actually got inspired for a Sailor Moon fic. This kind of makes me feel better, considering how unsure I've been re: Only 16. Having a good idea (and getting started on it) would mean I have something to replace Only 16 in terms of Sailor Moon fics under my name; this would also be something dramatic and long, so it wouldn't feel like I'm shafting Only 16 into the oblivion (even though that's where it belongs). Actually, I thought of a way to combine this Very Good Idea with one that I wanted to do for sm_monthly (I never got past Chapter 1 of it, unfortunately, because WDKY has been keeping me on my toes; I don't want to get too distracted. I've already stopped reading the 200 days of Sailormoon posts at AFSM, and I'm backlogged by about 310 posts!). But I don't think I will, just because it would complicate things too much.

Finally, it looks like the next 2 people up for the Astrology, Blood Types, and Yu-Gi-Oh! feature on playthedamncard are...
* Ryou Bakura
* Katsuya Jounouchi
I'll try and get started on some of that now. Yesterday I bought myself the 2nd edition (2001) edition of Parker's Astrology, one of my favorite books on astrology. I've also been using Astrology Source to calculate things like midhavens/medium coeli, imum coeli, decantes, desendants, and other fun things. Takes all the hard calculating out of the game, so I can do more "character exploration." I have the book with me today at work (actually spent the first few hours of work reading it, because my phone was broken and I was on "standby"), and since all the old sites I used are on the previous posts, I shouldn't have any problem constructing Ryou's profile. I'll have to add things (like his Mystical Card number) later on, and I can always include new things each time-- numerology, tarot... ^_^ It's all related! Go ahead and read the last 2 posts on Yuugi Mutou and Seto Kaiba, and tell me what you think!