4D Space

I figured I should make one of these things in case anyone stumbles on my LJ and goes "WHAT I'M LOST" after seeing my long lost of (mostly derp and anime/game title) tags.

If you're just looking for my fic, the fic post tag is what you're looking for (the 'fanfiction' tag also contains me talking about fic, reccing, ranting, etc.).

It's mostly going to be Megaten-related fic, but I write off and on for whatever I'm in at the moment. If you're looking for my Kingdom Hearts fic, a couple more Berserk fics, most of my other fic, and all the shit I wrote from the time I was twelve until now (in other words, varying degrees of eye-gouging to crap to mediocre), you want my Fanfiction.net account. (If I wrote it in the last year or so I will vouch for it; otherwise, I make no guarantees.)

I'm also pretty active on various kink memes, so anon!me looks forward to seeing requests from anon!you on that front. :P

Anyway, with that out of the way, I guess I should mention that I don't lock anything, fic or otherwise, so you don't have to friend me to see the porn. Enjoy (or not)!

People always say things they don't mean.

I thought I was starting to get it, but I so fail at divining Japanese peoples' intentions.

For example. Every exchange student had two Japanese students assigned to them at the beginning of the year to help them out with school life and stuff. I meet both of mine (separately) once a week at lunch and chat with them. I absolutely cannot figure out whether they actually enjoy hanging out with me or are doing it out of a sense of obligation, and if it's the latter what I should do about it.

For example, there was a big Halloween shinding at a bar that the exchange students put on, and I invited both of them to it. One flat refused about as I expected (I gather she's not a partier) and the other one waffled a lot and said maybe I'm not allowed or am busy and idk well I'll text you. I figured this was code for no, and sure enough she never texted. It was kinda late notice, though, so she might have legitimately not been able to go.

But anyway today she kinda tossed off 'we should go shopping, it seems like we only meet at school, you know?' and I was siezed with indecision. Does not setting a solid date mean she doesn't actually mean her offer, or does it mean the ball is in my park and if I'm down with the idea I'll suggest when we go? I've been thrown enough I-don't-really-mean-it offers that I tend to assume most 'well we should do X sometime' offers are empty, but I really have no idea this time.

AGHHHH WHY CAN'T YOU JUST SAY WHAT YOU MEAN

I might just commit the social faux pas of asking flat-out, 'okay is this a Japanese offer that you're not actually going to follow up on or do you really mean it' but idk if I'd even get a straight answer on that or if it's ragingly offensive to ask that.

WHY SO DIFFICULT, JAPAN

Finished scanlating a doujinshi, yay. It was more porn than talk and the translation was a snap, but you do get tired of editing in vowel sounds into twelve different bubbles on every page after a while. XP

I started working on this long Moyashimon Sawaki/Kei anthology. Katie, you said you wanted to scan the rest? I went and checked and I've scanned up to what I'm calling page 36 - this page.

( Blah plah P2, P3 )

This is the greatest thing to hit the internet all year, I swear.

I laughed until I cried, seriously.

The school cultural festival is going on right now so we get a week off school. I went on Saturday and it was pretty mehhh. There's music and food and that's about it. I tried stuff from a bunch of different booths and it was alright. I should probably have booked some kind of cool trip or something in this time but I just ended up playing P3P and spending too much time in net cafes. Anyway.

There are many things in Japan that remind me of anime. Eventually I figure it's going to wear off and I'll stop relating things in Japan to anime I've seen, but hooo boy sometimes I have to restrain my fangirlisms.

( FOR EXAMPLE: )

I bought it.

( What everybody cares about: the S-links )

I'm not exaggerating. It's a Japanese Linguistics class. Now I've taken a few linguistics classes before so I figured I'd be doing a lot of review, but whatever. That's not the problem. The problem is when I ask questions that the teacher can't answer.

Bottom flipping line of linguistics: unless you're doing historical linguistics, you study the language as it is NOW, not how it was 100 years ago. Saying that 'ti' is not a valid sound in Japanese when young people every day use the word 'paatii' is bullshit, sorry. And whether something is a loan word from English or what the teacher describes as a 'native Japanese word' (even if it came from Chinese) is not a valid base for formulating any phonological rule. Historical origin isn't relevant to the information people access when they speak. It's a cocking lexical property. Do you think any given native speaker could draw up a list of words and say what language they came from? No! It's as moronic as asking an English speaker which words came from German and which came from French. It's something you learn after the fact when you're educated and is not part of your knowledge of the language.

Two months into the class and the teacher asks his students, "So tell me what a morpheme is" and the reply came, "Uhhh, a word that morphs" and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

HE PRINTS CLASS HANDOUTS OFF WIKIPEDIA FOR CHRIST'S SAKE

And get this get this

He's the Dean of the University. I shit you not, you can't make this stuff up.

I don't care who's cock I have to suck to drop this class late in the game, I am out out out

I finally got my paws on it. When I went to Midori before they didn't have it - maybe shipping was delayed because of the typhoon or idk, so I checked this game store about a week later and they were all out. Book-off didn't have it either. I went to Osaka on the weekend and bought it at a bookstore there only to return to find they now had it at Midori.

OTL

But anyway I love how they sell videogames at bookstores.

So Strange Journey.

S-s-s-so many kanji, omigod. I have never attempted to read anything so kanji-dense as this. Which isn't saying much. But sob, I was looking stuff up nonstop. I'm not used to seeing them all tiny and squished, either, I mean, some of the more complex characters just look like mush at first. But I can handle it, barely. So I looked them all up, wrote them all down, drilled myself, and I'm gonna go read the opening storyline again. Idk if there's a better way to remember kanji, but this usually works for me. But the vocab and kanji barrier is so hiiiiiigh agh. Forget actually playing the game, I never got past the opening story.

It looks pretty sweet, though, I gotta say. I'll only say one thing about it, though, at the beginning the captain of your little fleet is like "Okay guys, I know the situation looks grim, but we have the best equipment out there, so if we just ~co-operate~ and ~stick together~ we'll find our missing comrades and go home!"

As soon as he said that I was like... this means by the end of the game the entire crew's going to betray me and then die, doesn't it. If I'm lucky I won't have to kill them myself (wouldn't bet on it).

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

is the most vapid, moronic, mindless thing ever. Talk shows, quiz shows, animal shows, bad dramas, advertisements that you wouldn't understand even if they were in English.

I love it.

I'm not a TV-watcher - I grew up mostly without a TV. If someone else is watching, I'll watch too, but I'll never turn it on myself. But goddammit, maybe it's just because I have to concentrate to get stuff that I find it really engaging. I could watch loops of the same ads over and over. Rather than be annoying, watching the same ad two or ten times is like... vocabulary re-enforcement. And the whiplash-fast rate at which they talk in ads gives you an ear for listening the way nothing else does. Comedy and ads are about as fast-talking as you can get, and that's most of what's on TV.

I love how in comedy shows they subtitle half of the dialogue (in Japanese). I don't really get why they do it. I think it's just a punchline thing, but considering my listening is balls it helps me a lot to see it all written out.

My host mother loves animal shows, so I end up watching a lot of those. I also like quiz shows - though in my case, it's less trying to answer the question and more trying to understand the question. :P When I can actually answer the question (rarely), even better! I especially love kanji quiz shows - they do things like throw out weird kanji and ask you to find the reading, or show you a part of a kanji and make you guess what it is, or write as many as you can with 馬 in it or something. Usually the early questions are simple enough for even me to get, and then they get to the point where everyone's sitting there going uhhhhh and then somebody just guesses.

I suppose I end up learning some fairly useless information from this kind of show - how often am I ever going to need to remember how to write 鎌鼬? Never, I'm sure. When that one came up, I asked my host mother what it meant and she's like, 'never mind, you don't need to remember that, most Japanese people couldn't even write that' but I went 'teeeelll meeee' and she caved and now I know how to write 'kamaitachi' while I fail to remember any number of actually useful compounds. Oh well.

Anyway, conversely, I absolutely. Hate. J-pop.

Okay, I have the odd guilty pleasure song, I admit it. And it's hard to be a weeaboo without having a soft spot for some vapid anime theme song. But having to listen to this crap all the time - walk into a ramen shop or stand outside a CD store or in a bookstore or whatever and they're playing the umpteenth Japanese equivalent of Britney Spears and NSync and I want to plug up my ears with knives to block out the awful, tweeny-bopper sound.

And apparently music - and I say that in the loosest sense of the word - that in the west would at least be confined to the 14-year-old subgroup is beloved by the entire country. My more-than-middle-aged host mother unabashedly loves Arashi. And this is normal. NORMAL. UGHHHHH how can people listen to this crap, I'll take Enka over this any day of the week.

And apparently I am like the only goddamn exchange student with a hate-on for J-pop. Everybody ~loves~ this garbage. And it IS garbage. I simply cannot differentiate between all these ridiculously similar-sounding bands and idols. I used to have a thing for jrock which I thankfully outgrew when I realized that nearly every single band loses any vestiges of originality they had as soon as they sign onto a label.

I don't have any particular love for western pop, but J-pop is like... the armpit of music everywhere, I'm sorry.

Before I enrage the entire internet, I will say that I like... B'z, I guess, The Yellow Monkey, Mucc's older stuff, I still kinda like Dir en Grey. But I'm having serious trouble finding Japanese music that I like, agh.

Addendum: the following words are hereby banned from all jpop lyrics forever: tsubasa, dakishimeru, sora, yume, shinjiru, anything involving running towards tomorrow and just the word ashita in general, any words that budding weeaboos use in fanfiction titles because indeed they are in every j-pop song ever

This is probably what you'd call the inevitable "3rd-year university student has a freakout when they realize they have to Do Something With Their Education" crisis that comes hand in hand with the looming declaration of major (which I awesomely get to put off until I get back to Canada, but still). Up until now I've pretty much been following the 'take courses I like and fuck the rest' methodology, which is well. Fun. But not all that practical.

While I still do have a certain amount of stars in my eyes about maybe one day I could ~translate videogames~ I'm not so naive as to believe those jobs are many or easy to get or pay all that well. Maybe I should think about. Practical things.

Shit.

I was originally planning to minor in English. I mean, it was my best subject in highschool. Then I found I hated it. So then I tried Linguistics. I hate that too. Japanese language and culture classes are the only classes I've taken that don't make me want to spit nails.

I've toyed with the idea of teaching, but I just don't like any of the teachable subjects. Maybe I should take more French - French Immersion teachers are in demand, I think. Oh man, I can just imagine this scene unfolding ten years from now as I run into my old French Immersion teacher from highschool - so, what are you doing these days? Well, I became a French Immersion teacher. But French was your worst class! Zing.

ESL is supposed to be a pretty decent schtick, but I'd still need more English AND more Linguistics requirements, AHAHAHA oh man.

Or I can take option three and prolong my education for at least another six or seven years, wind up with a PHD and still no real job. XD

SO HOW'S THAT THESIS GOING THERE BRO

I came to school early precisely with the intention of studying and then somehow ended up on the internet instead. I don't know how it happened, really.

Not having the internet at home was really a blessing in disguise. I realized that there were basically two reasons I had a disaster sleep schedule for the last few years: 1) I was working until past midnight half the week and 2) the internet. The internet cajoles me into staying up all night diddling away at LJ or looking at stupid macros or on Youtube.

I'm getting up early in the morning and going to bed before midnight every day for the first time since... tenth grade. And I am LOVING IT. Yeah, occasionally I'l go out and party all night or stay up late really into some game or sth, but that's a bi-weekly sort of occasion that doesn't end up screwing up my sleep cycle for a week. It's absolutely fucking awesome.

I started playing Innocent Sin this weekend. Last time I tried starting it I dropped it in like an hour because I'd just done with Eternal Punishment and couldn't stand more of the same, but it's worn off my now and I'm enjoying it.

But seriously. As much as I love the plot and characters, EP and IS are practically the same game in different packaging. Same dungeons, same monsters, same battles, same music. And people complained about P3 and P4 being similar - they're a vast improvement! I hate to trash on the golden duo here, but it's absolutely cheap and it gets dull when you end up playing the same game twice. And it's not even like DDS where they were short games to begin with and they even mixed up the battles a little with Berserk form and a new skill map, not to mention that the setting is completely different. No. It's the same damn thing all over again.

And hey, I get that that's the point, plot-wise, but gameplay wise it makes for a hella repetitive experience. And if IS is as long as EP was, I'm probably going to be losing my nut and going "END ALREADY" by the end.

Oh well. I guess I like EP more based on the characters, I guess, I just can't do without Ulala and Baofu and Katsuya. I squealed a little upon entering the police station and having Katsuya chew out poor Tatsuya for no good reason. Ulala has been referenced multiple times by Maya (who holy shit is incredibly talkative this time XD) but Baofu has yet to be alluded to, sigh.

One of my teachers just informed me that I'm strong in writing but my conversation is weak (I know that already...) and particularly that my speech is too masculine. Possibly this means I should lay off the yakuza flicks and the seinen manga?

I'm not going around saying 'ore blah blah blah da ze' which is basically the most macho thing I can think of. I don't really know how to separate stuff that's less blatantly masculine. I know I tend to forget honorifics and say sake instead of osake and the like, which I probably shouldn't do. I'm probably also not as polite as I should be and slip out of keigo a lot. And I decidedly don't say anything very feminine like throwing in -wa, and I think ne and no can be girly sounding in certain situations?

Pfff I guess it doesn't matter all that much, and it might even be a tone thing, I'm just terrible with tone in general, though pretty much all the gaijin are.

Too complicated. I should probably aim for gramatically correct and worry about this stuff later. Though on a semi-related note, I do enjoy learning new slang and especially kansai-ben. My new favourite words include:

kimoi (kimochi warui, a great all-purpose word for gross or unpleasant in some way, drag it out as kimooooi for added awesomeness)
akan (dame, no good, kansai-ben)
nan ya nen (like... wtf, kansai style)

One day I shall master kansai-ben and become mecha kakkoii.

I went out for karaoke with some peeps for the first time last Friday and I still have people asking me if I have a cold because my voice is so croaky.

Apparently some people do this every week.

The exchange students tend to have like a big party every week where everyone and their dog is invited and we went bowling and later to karaoke. I know most of the other exchange students' faces, but after being introduced to at least seven or eight new Japanese girls I can safely say I can not tell them apart. I hate to say it, but I'm terrible with faces to begin with and Asians all look the same to me.It takes me like a couple weeks to be able to pick their faces out. And then I'm going to feel horribly guilty for forgetting their names, I just know it. Erk. Hopefully I'll meet at least a few of them at the next exchange student dig?

Anyway, after bowling about eight of us went for all-night karaoke - thankfully the group's taste leaned towards the rock side of things, but there was some J-pop moments in there, and even some Enka wut. I spent the latter part of the Evening chatting up with a couple of rather hilarious boys from Kangaku, one of whom said it was okay if I called him Takoyaki-chan. And if you've ever heard that all Japanese people are quiet and well-mannered and polite well, it's all lies. XD Loud on the train, foul-mouthed, tsk tsk tsk boys. Clearly this is a sign of the deterioration of youth in Japan.

As I really haven't been online much lately, I looked at my flist the other day and realized I totally have no idea who half of you are. And a few people friended me in the last couple months for reasons I really can't recall and I just friended them back. >_>;; Sorry. So uh, if you think I don't know who you are, uhhhh, ~GIVE ME YOUR FAVOURITE QUOTE~ or something like "My TRUE GOAL has always been the RESSURRECTION of the DEMON VALMAR" or "Your room LJ was empty, LIKE YOUR SOUL Jack!" or "I LOOOOVE them balls!!" Or something less retarded.

If you think I should know who you are by now, feel free to humiliate me mercilessly or link me to something interesting or tell me all the amazingly exciting things I've been missing in the world of the interwebs.

In other news, Homunculous is an awesome manga and you should read it now.

I'm probably going to be switching to another homestay. Basically, my host mother is a huge bitch to the other girl staying with us (there's two of us in one homestay) for no good reason. She keeps going on about how a girl of my 'level' is rare for white people (nice backhanded compliment there) but Angel's Asian so her supposed poor behaviour is a mark of a 'low-level' family, wtf. Like being born in Hong Kong makes you attuned to every nuance of Japanese culture, right. Even if the lectures I personally get are mild (see:half-hour long rant on how not folding the corner of the toilet paper into a triangle means your family is 'low-level', theme much?), I really don't feel comfortable living with that kind of person.

The CIEC office was more helpful than I expected (I was really expecting something typically Japanese like 'Well she's been going through a tough time with her divorce so why don't you consider her feelings and try a bit harder to get along') but not so... My host mother is originally from Korea and they figured that her not being a native speaker might cause problems in my learning Japanese. I really can't tell how fluent she is (lol I'm not exactly the best judge of that), so I suppose that's valid enough, but a niggling voice in the back of my mind says that the reason they're letting me move is just because she's a single Korean woman. The CIEC lady made a comment about not getting to 'experience living with a real Japanese family' that really rubbed me the wrong way, even though Angel said the same thing. I just... agh, I don't want to deal with this crap.

I'm skeeved off by my host mother's racist behaviour and only get out of her house because of the CIEC's racial bias, lol irony. I looked it up in Japanese: hiniku. The composite kanji mean 'pelt' and 'meat', making me wonder what the hell a pelt and meat have to do with irony. I'm sure there's a story there. :/

I went to the Tokyo Gameshow for the weekend with some friends - I took a bunch of pictures (the Okami display looked pretty sweet, I will say) but like the lazy bum I am you're only going to get one.

( Here. )

Of course anyone who frequents capslock_mgs will have seen this already, but my picture's better, dammit!!11 Also amusing was the booth babe who was explaining co-op controls who demanded the participants answer every question with "YES BOSS!" as she explained the details of the "mission" on the "battlefield" and monologued about trusting your companions. Ahaha man the MGS display was definitely my favourite for her alone.

Tragically nobody I went with cared about MGS at all and I was abandoned upon entrance as everyone rushed to the FFXIII display. Seriously, Sqeenix DOMINATED that place. The tickets for FFXIII were sold out by like 11AM on both days. I managed to get in a few minutes, but I didn't have time to play the entire demo before I was booted out. I admit to being interested. ;_; Dammit, FF, why can't I quit you?!

Anyway, me not having buddies willing to wait an hour in line for Peace Walker meant I didn't get to play the co-op demo, sigh. No lovepack for me. Oh well, the solo one was interesting enough. Gergh, PW can not come out in English soon enough. I wants it. I also want Ocelot in it. Seriously, watching the trailer multiple times, I was just like, "Where the fuck is Ocelot?" I mean I'm sure I'll grow to love all the new characters well enough that I'll cry like a bitch when they inevitably die, but WHERE THE FUCK IS OCELOT?! It ain't MGS without Ocelot!!1

Notables: Ghost Trick looks interesting. It's basically a puzzle game, and it's pretty unique, though again, I didn't get through the entire demo before getting booted off.

My interest is also piqued by End of Eternity - the plot looks like whatever, but the demo was kinda fun and the battles remind me of the lovechild of Valkyrie Profile 2 and Legend of Dragoon but in a good way except with guns and extra flashy stuff. I actually had a bit of a hard time figuring out some of the movement controls - encounters aren't random and battlegrounds aren't flat like in VP2, but you have a similar style of only moving so much before you hit the enemy's turn, and enemies move as you do and then pause when you do. The upper added level on battlefields you can vault over if you have enough momentum, I think... I didn't quite figure out how much of a running start you need. Most of the attacking involves timed shots like in LoD except faster and more of them, and taking and receiving damage fluctuates depending on certain factors I didn't quite catch. It's a very pseudo-action RPG, I guess, sort of in the vein of VP2 or Eternal Sonata, which is to be expected considering it's Tri-Ace. Anyway, I'll probably end up buying it.

My brain hurts.

Okay, first of all, I swear buying a cellphone requires a set of vocabulary that you never hear outside of the cellphone store. I had a lot of trouble at the bank and the city hall for the same reasons - nowhere else does my failure at Japanese shine so brightly as at those three places. I mean, I didn't learn how to say, for example, 'account' and 'withdraw' in class, and I certainly never learned it from watching anime. You only ever say that crap when you go to the bank. So a bunch of us went together and were like, "OKAY GUYS who has an electronic dictionary, how do you say 'withdraw'?" Otherwise you end up making silly hand motions at the teller and say shit like, "okane wo toru? dasu? nantoka?" and then they look at you like you're speaking in tongues. I dare you to find a way to say "I want to open an account" without knowing the word for 'account.' Actually, I'm fairly sure there's a word that specifically refers to opening an account that I have since forgotten. Anyway.

Of course I had the bright idea of going to the cellphone store (docomo was my choice) alone. I was already informed somewhat of the various deals at the various stores, and I know how to say 'contract' and 'prepaid' and that's about it. In the end it worked out, I mean, I just had to get the dude to rephrase everything and explain key words. I still end up feeling moronic, though, I mean, I don't normally have this much trouble dealing with conversation at a normal pace. But DAMN. I want like... a list of vocab for this shit. ;_;

Anyway, so I got a rather sweet phone. I also managed to change the settings to English after fumbling with it in Japanese for about an hour (too many kanji for me, sob), but that doesn't really make much easier to understand. I've been messing with it all night and I still can't figure out how to upload music from my computer (though I know you can and I have an SD card). My host mother has the exact same model and I got her to help me with some things, but she admitted that she couldn't figure out half of it either. >_>;; It took me literally hours of fumbling just to figure out how to send and receive texts and save people in my address book. HOURS. FFFFF

I did, however, manage to dip my toes into the cellphone game store. I've figured it out, I think: you buy points from a given company that you can spend on their games and then you send them a text requesting the game and then they mail you the link to play it. I managed to download FFVII: Before Crisis Sh-shut up I can like the Complication if I want but I'm too tired to bother navigating Namco's page to get Xenosaga: Pied Piper as of yet. I've been wanting to play that forever. Reading the translated script filled me with looonging.

Ughhhhhhh I fail at Japanese so hard. Today has been humbling. Very humbling.

You know when you haven't checked your email in forever and you know there's going to be a gigantic mound of messages and that just makes you want to check it even less? Yeah.

Or maybe that's just me. Anyway.

Man, one thing I love that I can get away with in Japan is deliberately mishearing things. I had my host mother going for a full three minutes. She was asking if I needed to fill the air in my bike tires, saying 'kuuki' a couple of times and I'm like, "Cookie? Cookie?" "No, kuuki." "Cookie?" "Kuuki." "Cookie?"

I mean, try pulling that shit in English and it's always, "Stop shitting around, Jen," but in Japanese they always believe that you genuinely got it wrong. You can string them along foreveerrr.
( So what did I do today )

I have a whole bunch of pictures and crap from my bike trip but I'm really too lazy to upload them right now. Too much work.

Today, in a ramen shop, for the first time since I got to Japan, I was not offered a fork.

AGH, THANK YOU.

You know, you'd think that after having a short, if simplistic conversation with a convenience store cashier in Japanese they'd realize that yes, if you went to all the trouble to learn that much Japanese you probably know how to use chopsticks. BUT NO. Every single damn time they either ask if you want a fork or just HAND you one, something that really grinds my gears.

Using chopsticks really isn't that hard! I was under the impression that pretty much everyone under 50 can use them. I just can't understand how no one in Japan seems to realize how patronizing it is to be handed a fork for Japanese food. I get that they're just trying to be helpful, but REALLY.

The selfsame ramen shop dude who didn't offer me a fork also did not tell me I was very good at Japanese, which I also appreciated. I think I shall go back there.

I've been informed that these two things are the gripes of every foreigner ever in Japan. I suppose I'll just have to suck it up. Here, let me balance off this whining by listing some Japanese things that I like:

-Takoyaki
-Chocopan
-Those weird gel fruit cup things
-Vending machines everywhere
-Adorable uniforms in general (Little scoolchildren with yellow hats and station employees with hats and gloves are my favourites), but man I went into this cafe\bakery the other day and the waitresses actually had uniform dresses, kinda like the ones from that Phoenix Wright case with the cafe. So. Damn. Cute.

Uhh anyway my bike odyssey continues, went from Sakai to Gose to Nara and today I'm still in Kyoto. Looks like I'll be camping later.