Not in the spirit

[foxinthestars]

I don't know if I'm going to do Yuletide this year. Maybe it's starting up too soon after Parallels or maybe I'm just not in the mood, but nominations are open and I'm just like "meh." I'll see. Maybe I'll just write treats...

Also, I'm no longer wrangling Ao3 tags for Kuroko's Basketball. I may just not be in the mood; with Tag Wrangling I'm having a "god, I am so sick of doing this" phase. KnB was the most active and complex (ie, troublesome) thing I had and I was really starting to dread every new permutation of two-syllable name fragments, plus I haven't kept up on canon like I should, so I thought I can weather the doldrums easier if I cut back there. (Second most active-and-complicated thing is the Super Sentai series, but somehow it's harder for me to stay mad at Super Sentai.)

And on a happier note, that last box from my mini-buying-spree did arrive, I just hadn't posted about it, so here are the goodies:



Lately I realized --- or at least it sank in in a new way --- that while I cannot yet close-read Japanese, I can read well enough to basically follow a story, at least if I have the furigana, and hey, there are whole publishing imprints that make fun novels for kids with furigana on almost everything, my favorite being Aoitori Bunko. They offer online samples (about the first 20 pages of each book) going back to August of 2008, and it helped whet my appetite for some of this (file under "their plan is working"). Also found a really nice guide for ordering from honto.jp; they're cheaper than Kinokuniya.

Anyway, the two books on the right are Kemono no Souja by Uehashi Nahoko --- having rekindled my love for the anime, I started getting the books; Aoitori's editions split each of the original novels into two, so this is equivalent to book 1. The reading level on it is a bit higher and I haven't really gotten into it yet. I have started reading the one on the upper left, "Parsley Densetsu (vol. 1 of 12!)", and as best I can tell so far it's about a princess of a fantasy Water kingdom beset by war who is spirited away to live like a normal Japanese girl in Hokkaido. It's fun. Lower left is "Kaze no Yakata no Monogatari (1/4)" by Asano Atsuko (who also wrote the original novels of No. 6). Don't know much about it, but the online sample looked good.

And still slowly progressing in Devil Survivor 2. Sometimes I'll go a couple of days without playing, but always when I get back to it it's like "OMG, this is fun!"

Comments

[smurasaki]

It's really cool that you can read enough Japanese to read those. (Though I've always thought that would be a good way to learn to read a language.)

I suppose at some point I should do tag wrangling or something on Ao3, having joined it and all. Also learn to actually participate in fandoms I fan, as opposed to sort of poking vaguely at them.

[foxinthestars]

There's no reason you should feel obligated. I don't actually "participate" in fandoms much, I just wanna write my stories, and despite whatever implicit messages you might get, there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want to do.

[smurasaki]

I don't always know what I want to do. I have some desire to squee about things with other people, but always fall down on the "how one does that" stage of things. I never know what to comment on people's stories when I read them on Ao3 (and I feel a little bad that my tastes are so narrow - when one skips all the porn and grimdark, there really aren't that many stories left in a lot of fandoms), I don't entirely understand Tumblr, and I run into the same "what do I say?" problem a lot of the time on deviantArt.

I sometimes think blogs are the only place I'm not completely socially inept. (Or people are just too nice to say anything...)