September's coming soon

...Livejournal's servers have been moved to Russia, which yeeeeah means that a lot of people aren't at all sure about their privacy any longer.

So IDK. I'll probably be backing up my old LJ to DW and my ficjournal for sure, and I don't know about this one - I don't exactly post very personal stuff here, once every other month at best. I'll probably be moving my reviews over to DW, and see about the rest. I mean, I did want this one to be the private one while the DW one was the more fandom blog-oriented bit, there's always that to consider as well.

Happy new year, folks :/

My fandom engagement lately has been reblogging Detective Conan stuff on tumblr and lurking in some Ace Attorney places. But what with AA6 being out in Japan, I've resolved to stay away from the AA crowd until the game is out because apparently something SHOCKING WORTHY OF CAPSLOCK happens (my theories: a) The title "Spirit of Justice" is literal or, or b) Rayfa is Apollo's dad).

The weirdest replacement seems to Elfquest, and - get this - on Facebook. Brought there by listening to this podcast, and good God:

I never before realised how much bullshit info I've unconciously remebered from Elfquest. The podcast hosts clearly see themselves as über-nerds on the EQ scale, yet half the time they're debating things that I myself did. Like the pressing question about how closely related Teir and Ember are anyway since nevermind Ember being second cousin to Teir's father, he is Two-Spear's grandson and yeah oh wait Ember would be descended from Skyfire, right. (also, wouldn't there be like five or six generations between that split anyway?)

Who would ever have thunk, but then again - this would mark the first time I'm ever more than briefly involved in a western fandom. It's also an old one, since most of the people still sticking around are people who were Elfquest readers in the eighties and nineties.

Yeah, it's... not fully surprising that the action is all on FB, huh.

My never too exciting flist has stayed empty for a month now, which I'll just take to mean that LJ is dead for good. But in the spirit of keeping personal count, hey:

Life has been pretty exciting lately by my standards, which means that I've got a year of leave for going off to study and have applied at a lot of places, but not in Germany yet. Current estimates suggest a gigantic workload at least the first term there, plus somehow aquiring an internship for teaching German in Germany. Well! The first hurdle should be to call the lady in charge and hope she's forgotten that I e-mailed her two months ago whereupon she directed me to someone else, and then I dawdled so long with contacting HER that she'd quit by the time she got around to reply to me.

I've also submitted an essay to an anthology on video games. I don't expect it'll make the final selection, but I'm personally more than satisfied with it, and that, really, is enough for me.

More pressing, being in the choir and in band is not entirely healthy use of my time. I quasi-willingly put myself in charge of arranging one concert and accidentally ended up on the committee for another one, and thanks to weekends alloted to practicing, this past three days were the first I've had fully free since easter break - and they will get their revenge by taking up the better part of today AND tomorrow afternoon doing the second concert. But after that! When it's just Marching Band Season ending in two weeks, and then the final choir concert of the season in a month, and less than two months until school is out and all the teachers can rejoice!

(no, I should never have kids, looking at how taxing I find it just to pursue my own hobbies)

It's not my deadline for telling my boss about taking a year off for the purpose of studying and asking to please keep my job.

It's not the deadline for applying for the local university-

not the deadline for the university in Germany.

It's not the huge concert the band will be giving in medio April

and it isn't the choir concert, not the day I'll be moving out of my flat of five years, not going to visit my sister in the UK.




The most important date this spring is going to be the Euro release of Fire Emblem Fates.

So today I helped a colleague living next door to me heap snow off of her roof, which was kind of fun because I like climbing things and ladders are good. I also got to jump off the roof like some other kid, ha. Then she brought me along to visit her mother, which was surprisingly nice, seeing that said mother is eighty. Turns out she was a lot more up-to-date than my OWN grandmother, six years her senior.

Then I've spent the evening transfering old anime to my shiny new 4TB external HDD and torrenting Lady Oscar subbed, because woooow that is an experience an ocean away from the godawful German dub I've got on BD. Tomorrow, I'll be doing boring work things and digitalising my DVD collection, because there will probably come a day when I won't have a functional DVD player around. Yes, I am absolutely convinced that even as I will lack the physical player, I'll somehow be lugging around software to play video formats from the digital stone age. Leave me with my delusions.

I, uh, might've just spent a lot of money on getting the entire 2003 FMA on blu-ray, including what will be the fourth copy of "Conquerer of Shambala". I'd complain about the great unfairness of NA getting the BR and Europe having none, but that isn't the case, and my one big issue would just be that German dubbing in general is so shit. None of this would be an issue if it hadn't been that the only thing Vic Mignona ever did to me was being cast as Edward Elric's English voice - suffice it to say that I seriously cannot watch FMA in any language but Japanese.

And, um, even more money might or might not have been spent on the 24-episode woefully out of print "Toward the Terra", because goddman Keiko Takemiya.

Like any person with some sense of quality, my sister dropped Free! after episode five.

Like any person who somehow continued watching it after the stranded island fiasco, I've finally had the chance to sit her down and make her watch episode seven and onwards.

We made a bit of fun of, but mostly we didn't, and that, I think, should be the strongest clue that it really does get better.

So as some might remember from way back when, I have CRAMPS. Not bad ones, I think, just... bad enought to incapacitate me for a few hours every month if I apply my painkillers incorrectly. They used to be for one intense hour just as my period began, an hour that was occasionally known to make me pass out before it was over. Then I used the pill for a few years for the purpose of controlling my periods because that hour was THAT bad, and after I quit, my cramps had changed.

These days, I can expect maybe four or five hours of less intense pain, but still bad enough to not make me useful for much more than curl up in bed and moan. I've learned to identify them early on so that I can take the painkillers, and interestingly, my body is so attuned to this that if it starts at night, I wake up just as it is starting. So that's good.

Except last night, I didn't. Instead, I woke up three hours after going to bed in the middle of the show. Going back to sleep didn't happen; the painkillers didn't help. In the end, relief came through the barley-and-buckwheat heat pack that I made earlier this week, which - possibly because it's softer and more moldable - worked a lot better than my hot water bottle does.

And that's why I lost two precious hours of sleep, and that's my life.

I'm seriously considering going to the US for one singular reason that's probably never going to make it overseas

Last time, I wrote up a long essay on Apollo and Phoenix and a lot of theories about Apollo's part in the game.

This time, the only thing I can really must is an intense hope that Athena is still a part of the Anything Agency.