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You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February 2007.
I finally got another scene done for One Hundred Days Chapter 15. It’s not even that this scene was giving me trouble, just that it wound up being a bit on the long side and I had trouble getting motivated to actually write. Unfortunately, the next scene is looking like it might be a little rough also, but we’ll see.
Current Status: 9 of 22 scenes written
Current Length: 70.0 KB, 12059 words by OpenOffice’s count
This is… kind of shaping up to be a rather long chapter. I really shouldn’t be surprised.
By request, a return to simpler anime… with airplanes.
So, the My-HIME DVDs have little short extras added after each episode, which weren’t part of the TV broadcast. And let me say:
- The extra after the first episode on DVD 2 is absolutely horrid. Even for a series as lowbrow as My-HIME, it stands out as a fairly disgusting display. It left me embarrassed not only to be watching the show, not only to be an anime fan, but to be a member of the same species as the people who made it. Worst. Fanservice. Ever.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
…I’m having my first problems with comment spam. There’d been a couple of isolated incidents before, but now there’s a continuous stream of spam comments attempting to get through. So, I finally got around to installing Akismet to hopefully automatically deal with that stuff.
Also, sometime this evening or tomorrow I will be upgrading Wordpress and the Tarski theme again, so this blog will be briefly down. Then, if I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll attempt to install a couple more plugins to add the ability to preview a comment before posting it and to “subscribe” to a comment thread.
I was literally just thinking that it was a little odd that no one had licensed The Third and pondering downloading the series beyond the three or four episodes I watched when it first came out.
Only to go to AnimeOnDVD, note the sight redesign, and find the link to the page announcing its licensing and not much else, not even the identity of the licensor. (Which seems to be a trend and is a little annoying.)
Just an odd little coincidence presented for your amusement or boredom, as the case may be.
Work on One Hundred Days has been slow to non-existent lately. I’ve gotten one more scene done since the last status report, but that’s about it.
I did write a short, unrelated snippet of story as a reaction to Naruto Chapter 342 called Softness. For something written in about an hour with no planning, I’m pretty happy with it.
So, this weekend I finally got around to watching this DVD, which I’d picked up around the time it came out but never got around to watching. I also roped my friend into watching it with me by the clever strategy of putting it in the DVD player while he was in the room.
Steven Den Beste writes about writing (20070215.1620):
I started trying to write about [DRM], but… it didn’t flow. I was having to struggle with it. I know the signs; it means I was trying to force it, and the result sucked. Maybe if I let it cook a bit longer it’ll come out. And maybe not.
This goes for my writing as well, which is why progress has been slow of late. I tried to force a scene, and unsurprisingly it didn’t work and the result was crap that meshed poorly with canon. Today I got around to rewatching a few episodes to get a better grasp of how Tayuya fights and managed to rewrite the scene more decently.
I’m still not totally happy with some of the stuff; writing a Hyuuga versus genjutsu-user is kind of tough without either trivializing the fight or underpowering the Byakugan. The fact that there’s no canonical basis for how the Byakugan might interact with sound-based genjutsu (even more so such genjutsu that then creates a visible image in the victim’s mind like Tayuya’s) doesn’t help. When the chapter is released to the FFML, I’ll see what that bunch thinks and adjust if necessary.
Current status: 7 scenes of 22 total written.
Current length: 49.0 KB, 8400 words by OpenOffice’s count.
It’s not looking like it’ll get done by the end of the month, but stranger things have happened.
Not much to say on this week’s chapter; most of the stuff I would whine about I’ve already whined about before. The Shikamaru scenes that made up the bulk of the chapter were nicely done, and it seems like my prediction as to the nature of the next arc will be correct. Just one thought:
- It’s kind of amusing to watch how Kishimoto (understandably) struggles to avoid definitively establishing Naruto, Sasuke, or Sakura as having killed someone, despite in the context of the world it not only being okay but expected for them to kill.
- And of course, because in context it would be silly otherwise, all those characters have shown themselves not only willing to kill but actually have tried to kill people over the course of the manga. Which makes it all the more amusing how things never work out that they land a killing blow.
Okay, so it was one-and-a-half thoughts. I rounded down, all right?