Okay. So. Vitas. Fucken amazing Latvian-born Russian pop opera singer. Attempting to sing his Opera #2 is how I discovered that I have a separate head range in the whistle register that upsets my dogs when I sing it. This is a dude who can reach notes that sound like dolphins would use them to echolate, or as I said when I first watched the linked video: "My god, that man is a a walking, piano-playing whistling kettle".

Anyway, as pigtail87 and I were discussing Allelujah's combined Russian/Chinese heritage the other day, I confessed that ever since I decided that Sergei was Alle's father somewhere early season 1, I've been wanting to do fanart of Alle in a hat and a scarf, standing one of the domes of St. Basil's Cathedral, singing Opera #2 (because in my head, Alle is a Russian countertenor who can totally sing operatic notes that would shatter glass in a hundred-foot radius).

Several digs on YouTube later, she found this amazing, hilarious video and showed it to me: a Taiwanese professional singer covering Opera #2 by dubbing it in a mixture of gibberish, Chinese, and Hokkien:



I COULD NOT STOP LAUGHING. Especially when he started singing "OMG cannot hear lyrics" in Hokkien.

(See, if you want to make a Singaporean laugh until their sides ache, all you'd have to do is to dub over everything in Hokkien. I found this out after thurisaz83 and I were discussing Gundam dubbed in Cantonese, and I said, "Screw Cantonese, I want to hear b00bies dubbed in Hokkien." And then we tried translating a few choice phrases into Hokkien *coughIAMGUNDAMcough*. We took several minutes to catch our breaths after that.)

Anyway, fucking amazing video, as I said. I am incredibly impressed that he not only managed to hit every single note on key, he managed to do so while playing the acoustic guitar accompaniment. Fuck. Watch it and be wowed too.

While we're at it, here's the original live performance of Opera #2 that introduced me to the wonder that is Vitas back in 2006. This time with Russian and Chinese subs (not the nuclear sort).

The Chinese subs aren't all that accurate, though. I was under the impression that "Plachet opyat nado mnoy" means "it cries once again about me", and not "I cry once again", Jesus Christ, cases, people, cases.

Also: Il dolce suono. You know the opera song featured in the Fifth Element, one of my favorite cinematic sequences ever? Yes. That song. He covered it, which is something I only discovered the day before. Although the techno arrangement is different and sounds a bit like something Sarah Brightman would do. (I still prefer the version in the Fifth Element, though. The sopranista had a lot better control of her voice.)


...aaaaand that's your dose of utter randomness from yours truly for today.

HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR, ONE AND ALL. 农历新年快乐！

Today marks the first day of the lunar calendar, also known locally as the Chinese calendar, since we're the only culture in this country that makes use of it. According to the zodiac, it is the year of the RAT. Which amuses me no end, because aside from all the cultural trappings and implications associated with the English word 'rat', the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian word RAT means WAR. So it reads to me like we're welcoming the year of the WAR.

Have a New Year sketch, drawn last night during the extended family reunion dinner (团圆饭), in between stuffing my face with scallops and throwing slices of raw fish at my relatives.



Steamboats used to be all the rage for reunion dinners ten years ago, but these days everybody has a steamboat-cum-hotgrill set, so we end up sizzling our stuff in butter instead of boiling it. Mmmm, seafood and cholesterol. Last year one of my cousins, who wants to major in Food & Nutrition, experimented by frying everything in red wine. Some things, like the meat, tasted great. Others, like mushrooms... not so much.


BUT. IMPORTANT THING. On this very auspicious day, allow me to pimp the fruits of michanu's and my labors:



It's the community for our collaborative webcomic and the first strip is debuting later today! GO JOIN IT NOW! The community's not just going to house our comic strip, but also a biweekly caption contest, random crack art dumps, and lots and lots of other goodies. The first strip is going up later today (midnight, my time), at which we will flood all the b00bies comms with the pimping, and then you can proudly proclaim that I WAS THERE FIRST, YO.

Go! Go! Go!


To end it all up, here's the one drawing I couldn't resist making: Trinity siblings putting up decorations for the New Year.



恭喜发财，万事如意！

[1] Meaning "Why hello there, 2008!"

2007 was an incredible year for me, in terms how much things changed. At the start of the year I was a miserable, failed scientist and I had no idea where my life was going. Fast forward to now, the first day of 2008. I still have no idea where my life is going. But I'm not a scientist anymore. I'm living a scret childhood dream of mine-- to write for a living. To write for television, specifically; to create worlds for other people to live in. It's like a miracle happened somewhere in between, and the self-loathing that came with failing every single experiment I tried in two years has faded away, filled in by optimism. A twisted optimism, of sorts, of the kind that figures that if I'm going to be broke and useless for the rest of my life, I might as well be broke and useless doing something I actually like.

And I'm not miserable. Not anymore.

Milestones of 2007, or at least the things I couldn't believe actually happened:

1. Quit science.


2. Became a writer for real.


3. Wrote first half-hour script for TV animation (easier than I thought, but still harder than it sounds).


4. Actually bothered to start art classes of some sort.


5. Gave up on all my American TV fandoms


6. Became otaku.


7. Started learning Japanese.


8. Started reading stuff in Mandarin Chinese. A language I've hated a full twenty years of my life.


9. Read not one, not two, but TEN novels in Traditional Chinese form. Which I didn't even learn in school.

And then there's a whole slew of otaku-related ones which run the gist of "I swore I'd never watch shoujou stuff but then I started watching shoujou", "I swore I'd never watch Gundam but then I started watching Gundam"... suffice to say, as a fangirl, as a person with obsessive interests, my self from a year ago wouldn't recognize the self that I am now. (Seriously, just check my first post of 2007 out. There's absolutely nothing in common there, fanwise-speaking.)

I guess that after betraying my 14-year-old self by developing a liking for football, the only other way downhill was turning into one of those dumb anime fans I hated so much.

[drumroll] And now, a random, somewhat pictorial summary of the past few days and their ilk!

I met people for dinner on Saturday night. I arrived more than an hour early and got so bored, I started sketching a chibi of my friend Melissa while waiting. I had with me a gashapon figurine of Setsuna which I had coaxed from the innards of a bubble capsule machine, earlier when I had been out shopping with my sister.



We had a good time at dinner, an unbelievably large part of which was spent either gossiping about the (sex) lives or others, or trying to set me up with one of my friend's past squeezes. Something may actually come out of those discussion, so keep your ears peeled.

And then, somewhere near the end of dinner, drunk on mozzarella cheese and a healthy dose of I-can't-believe-we're-doing-this, I dunked the plastic figurine of Setsuna into my glass of water.



The best thing was when I entirely forgot about the incident and drank the water in the glass. "The water tastes funn--oh, FUCK."

I spent Sunday pulling Setsuna apart, painting him with red Copic markers, and taking incriminating photos suggesting that Light Yagami was responsible for his gruesome demise. And then going off to write kinky porn.

It was a half-day at work on New Year's Eve, and we had pizza brought in for lunch.


I've been eating too much cheese over the last few days. I had potato gratin for dinner yesterday, too. My lactose-intolerant stomach is Not Happy with me.

And so, after having tackled the first grade Gunpla models and finishing about four of them with ease, I decided it was time to graduate from the School Of First Grade and move on to the High Grade ones. Therefore, I spent my New Year's Eve assembling the following:



It took me the better part of four hours and the effort of snapping nearly a hundred and fifty plastic pieces out of their frames nearly made my fingers bleed, but goddamn it was so worth it. I have pictures of the assembly this time, but I won't post them until I'm done with my Epic Gundam b00bies post in which I will educate the unwilling masses about the latest thing to have eaten my brain whole.


Happy New Year. Sretna nova godina. Xing nian quai le. Full steam ahead, world!

Yesterday I got to proofread a Mandarin dub script to check that it was okay for lipsynching with the original English audio.

Me. Proofreading a script. In Mandarin.

It is as I said to thurisaz83: people at my company need to stop letting me do things in Mandarin, or I might start thinking that I actually have a grasp of the language that is halfway decent.

Language shenanigans aside, though, I am enjoying myself at the new workplace, as many people seem to have observed over IM. Life is, for most part, is peachy.[1]

The new office is far from ready, though, so we still have contractors walking around fixing up floorings and doors and suchlike. Today the head contractor/designer, Clement, was walking around when he passed by my desk and said, "Hey, isn't that the dude from Death Note?"

"Yep."

"He comes with a chair?"

"Yep."

"That's L, isn't it?"

"Yep."

I passed him the Nendoroid box, with its assorted and vaguely-bloodied other-L-bits, and explained how all the bits were switchable. He thought it was cool, and asked where I got it from. I told him I'd preordered from a Japanese website and no, they didn't retail it locally. You could get it from online American anime shops, but the prices were grossly overinflated, even with the weakened dollar.

"Oh, it's okay. You leave this guy here at night, don't you? One of these mornings you're going to come in and find him missing. Heh."

I shall set a trap.




Post-It pads were distributed today and that made me a happy puppy. In celebration I doodled something on one of the smaller ones and stuck it to my computer.



In other news, they're still letting me write for preschool programming. I can write something like the old-school Sesame Street, right? Right? I mean, shit, I grew up on that stuff when I was a preschool kid, and I turned out just fine, didn't I?



[1] I belatedly realize that this constitutes the Worst Pun Ever. I know. You don't get it. It's okay. The people who get it know what I'm talking about.

Internets, I hate you.

I was about to come up with a spiffy summary of things that made me ":)" and ":(" over the days I hadn't updated. I was. I was.

Then I discovered the crack that is fandom_secrets and was consumed by an overwhelming urge to write out ill-advised fandom opinions and illustrate them pictorially.

And so I did. MY thoughts on Yuri FANDOM SECRETS, LET ME SHOW YOU THEM:



...it's totally true. It would be like Kyou Kara Maou!HARDCORE. Like, I want to see Wolfram do a Mello and BURN down the fucking CASTLE with his CAPSLOCK OF RAGE. I want to see Yuri go all MikamiMode and scream "SAKUJO!" at terrified peasants before he opens up the can of whupass. I want eviscerations by pencil. Horrible deaths by carwrecks. Helicopters. Shinou saying "JUST AS PLANNED". Gunter twirling his hair and calling people chicken bastards.

It would rock. So hard.

It would.


...incidentally, in the course of producing the above brain-warping awesomeness, I somehow managed to stumble upon the Wikipedia entry for Death Note. In Croatian.

Light Yagami je jako pametan teenager kojemu je većinu vremena dosadno. Svaki dangleda kako se kriminal u svijetu povećava ali on nažalost to ne možespriječiti, sve dok jedan dan 2003 godine ne nađe na podu magičnu bilježnicu, Death Note.

NAWWWW, PAMETNI RAITO! KAWAII DA NE! JA VOLIM MOJA PAMETNA RAITO. [1]

I think the thing on that page that really killed me, though, were the declensions of L's name in different cases, e.g. Light se da u potragu za L-ovim pravim imenom (Light quests for L's real name). I laughed, and I laughed, and I laughed. As a former student of Croatian, I would have yelled bloody blue murder. "How the hell do you conjugate a letter of the alphabet!? WTflyinF!"

I have also, in the course discovered that there Croatian anime website called Crotaku. I shouldn't be surprised, since I've known that milos watches anime and therefore it's not an unknown phenomenon in the Balkans, but I am highly amused nonetheless. Crotaku. Jesus. Leng xiao hua bi bing chu hai yao leng (冷笑话比冰厨更加冷).


[1] It was a knee-jerk reaction. My ex and I used to have totally silly IMs where we would affectionately refer to my then-single dog as "glupi pas" or "pametni pas", depending on how good his behavior had been. "Glup" and "pametan" are about the two cutest adjectives I can think of in Croatian.
[2] No, I am not about to go around picking up cute Croatian otaku. As much as I might be tempted to.
[3] Also, re: Light-- "On je tipičan sedamnaestogodišnjak". Um, yeah, Light's a totally normal seventeen-year-old, EAT MY ASS, Croatian Wikipedia entry writer. I don't remember wanting to take over the world through mass murder when I was seventeen, unless it was right before my math 'A' levels, in which case it was perfectly excuseable. In any case? Light? Tipičan sedamnaestogodišnjak JA NAI.

First day at work, and I got to write a book in Chinese.

Admittedly, it was a book targeted for four-year-olds, and admittedly, I only wrote a couple of lines where the translation didn't extend over the scene I had added. And admittedly, it was actually only about ten words long.

But consider the fact that I'd barely managed to pass the twelve years of Chinese classes that I was made to take, consider the fact that I couldn't write a simple Chinese composition without running to the dictionary for every three words. Consider the fact that even if I scraped an overall pass in Chinese, I always managed to fail the composition section miserably.

This is for me, a profound achievement.

All that reading of manga in Chinese? Is finally starting to pay off.





In completely unrelated news, my local iBanking website has a link that says "Make OTP Application", and I can't for the life of me figure out what it's supposed to mean.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what my brain wants it to mean, but in the event that it does--honto ni can I really? I have quite a list of OTPs I want to apply for, several of which have shown up in the past couple of weeks. Not to mention the OT3s, and 4s, and fives and sixes...[1]

My bank doesn't know what it's setting itself up for.


[1] OT6: Yuuri/Wolfram/Conrad/Gwendal/Gunter/Murata. In a tub. With pink strawberry bubbles. Possibly some of that wonderful aphrodisiac perfume. And nothing else. Oh, except perhaps a video recording device. Always handy, those video recording devices.

Just to prove that, somewhere in my fandom resume, I actually do have an OT6.

It was strange, the last day of work, wondering if I would miss the place, and realizing that I probably wouldn't.

I had almost never left college, it seemed, leaving one part of the campus three days after the finals ended, for another part of the campus just over the hill, where I lingered for the next year and a half. Faces and places remained familiar. It was simply a continuation of something I had not wanted in the first place.

I spent the day largely doing nothing, and adding to drawings on the whiteboard.



As children we get so attached to locations. The homes we grew up in, the classrooms we fell asleep in, the hostel rooms we slept in when we had school camps: they all carve places of their own in our little hearts. As adults such quaint nostalgia fades out favor. I do not miss places. I miss the parts of my life that I associate with places-- people I talked to, music I listened to, food I ate. But I do not miss places.

I will not miss the place I have just left, I am sure, and it will not miss me. The real question is, will I miss the part of my life that I spent here? Will I ever look back, and wish that maybe I shouldn't have left?

I don't know.

I spent my last Friday staff seminar doing the same thing that I've been doing for the past year and a half.

( 20 minutes, a pen, and sheer boredom )

We had the farewell dinner at a North Indian restaurant, which was excellent, and also easily located, so that I can go back there any time I want to. As a going-away present, my lab bought me a couple of sketchbooks, and a music store voucher-- guess all the singing and drawing I've been doing on the fly hasn't gone unnoticed.

As my going away present to the lab, I left this:




(Duckling added the "デスノート" signboard to the picture. In response I drew the notebook with "ノートです". The pun doesn't cross language barriers. I'm sorry.)

~~June

Today, by the reading of the Chinese Lunar Calendar, is the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the year, which marks the Mid-Autumn Festival, or zhong qiu jie (中秋节). Supposedly, it's the day in the year where the moon is the brightest, and traditionally, we hang out at night, eat mooncakes (月饼), play with laterns, and generally try to avoid burning buildings down; in this post I have pictures of my family's 2005 event. We have a Chinese phrase for this lovely activity: shang yue (赏月), to literally "admire, enjoy, or bask in the moon".

Earlier today, someone on my friendslist complained that she hadn't gotten any mooncake yet, not this year.

I, being the wonderful and kind friend that I am, have decided to remedy this.



For the record, a) I FAIL AT DRAWING MOONCAKES, and b) thanks to reading the Death Note manga in Chinese, which preserves kanji names for characters, I was clueless about Light's name actually being read as LIGHT until it was spelt out for me the second volume. I still call him "Yeshen Yue" (夜神月) just plain "Yue" (月) from time to time.

The line in Chinese reads, "Let us admire the moon (月!) together, shall we, then?"

In related news, this post of Neil Gaiman's, relating his trauma at being brought to a Maid Cafe in Japan, had me torn between destroying my intestinal integrity with laughter, or clutching my head and whimpering in sympathy for poor Mr. Gaiman. OH DEAR NEIL! I can't imagine trying to explain the appeal of these things, beyond, "It's a fetish. For French maids in frilly dresses."

Perhaps someone should reccommend watching Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu.

~~June

On Friday the 13th I painted my nails black, put on a fancy hat, and went to catch Order of the Phoenix with a couple of friends.

We had dinner first, with another friend who declined to join us for the movie, and while waiting for the food to come I tortured them with the word puzzle drawings that I had made earlier. I think the screams of agony could be heard from half a mile away.

Fear not, my LJ friends, the puzzles shall be inflicted on you in due time.

We waltzed into the movie theater ten minutes late because we were counting on half an hour of commercials and trailers (amongst which would not be the trailer for the L movie, alas, woe). Unfortunately... no, this wasn't the case.

We missed the first ten minutes of the movie.

[SHSDHSAHKASHHKAKJFH]

Other than that little tooth-gnashing fact, it was a great movie. It was made better by the fact that thurisaz83, the Greatest Snarry Slasher That I Know Of, was sitting beside me, and she spent each scene featuring Snape and Harry clinging to my arm and whimpering. As someone partial to slash myself, I could definitely see where she was coming from, but that did not stop me from being amused. In fact, it probably encouraged it.

I told her, "I see a million and one fics springing from the tender loins of this scene." Or something to that extent, perhaps less graphic (we were in public, after all. Not that it has ever bothered me, of course).

After the movie we took the customary self-taken camera-phone portrait. Amazingly enough we managed to get all our heads in the frame after just one attempt.



I'm going to re-watch the movie again tonight, with family. So maybe I'll be able to figure out what happened in the first ten minutes.

Japanese class on Saturday was extreme, wicked fun. We were learning how to ask and answer the question Ano hito wa dare desu ka? (Who's the bastard over there?) So as an example, my sensei put up a picture...

... of David Beckham.

My sister blurted out, "BAKA DESU!", much to the amusement-slash-mortification of my sensei. Seriously, the man gets everywhere. You can't even escape him in an innocent Japanese lesson. Jesus.

But anyway. After my sis and I were finally over our episode of "OMG BECKS WTF ARE YOU DOING HERE GET LOST TO AMERICA ALREADY", she put up another picture...

...of Takuya Kimura.

Whom, of course, I didn't recognize at first. I just sat there going "I know this guy, who the hell is he?" And then my sensei told the baffled class the answer I fell over laughing and saying "WTF serabut should totally be here ahahahaha."

Anyway, it turns out that my sensei at least shares some interests with us. See, the notebook I bring to Japanese class is a black, lined Moleskein cahier on whose front cover I scrawled "DEATH NOTE" convincingly enough that thurisaz83 thought it was some cosplaying prop I bought from some manga shop. So during the break, I decided to hit the washroom, and closed my notebook as I got up to go.

When my sensei saw the book's cover she went "Desu noto?!"

So she's apparently familiar with the series, despite her unknowingness of the awesomeness that is BUCK-TICK. My sister an I giggled a lot over that, especially to thurisaz83, whom we met after class.One less person we need to corruptinate into the cult of DEATH NOTE, I see!

Also, my sensei's unknowledge of BUCK-TICK shall be remedied, for I lent her my copy of their RENDEZVOUS single and she has promised to listen to it. Oh yes, I am still in the business of evilly propagating the bizarre sections of culture I dig.

I shall leave you, then, with this illustration I drew during said Japanese class (in said lined black Moleskein cahier with "DEATH NOTE" scrawled convicingly on the cover).



When my sensei saw it she said it was very nice. However, I suspect she didn't take too close a look at it, or she might have realized that it was a drawing of an undead high school student with a scythe stuck through his body. Oops?

For a bunch of similar drawings you may look at this post I made on deathnote_art. The cuteness, it kills!

~~June

[1] This post title has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the body at all.

...because, aside from the totally cool live J-Rock concerts they hold all the time, people get to see this trailer before the Harry Potter movie.



I don't care that 70% of the trailer is made of stills-- it's MATSUYAMA KENICHI! Who is absolutely adorable and edible and mumbles his lines and and and-- [insert fangirly squee here]

I find it really sad that the only part of the trailer I understand is the bit in kanji that says something along the lines of "L IS BACK ON THE MOVE". Apparently, two lessons' worth of Japanese has done absolutely nothing to improve my understanding of the language, unless it has something to do with understanding the lyrics of chirpy BUCK-TICK singles.

Also: OFFICIAL L MOVIE SITE. I died the dorky death of a fangirl when I realized that if you click the grey button to the left, the trailers come up, and the little words in the brackets beside "Trailer 2", right there? Read HARI POTTA in katakana. So now I know how to say "Harry Potter" in Japanese! HARI POTTA I ODERU NO ....how the hell do you say "phoenix" in Japanese?!

Nevermind.

~~June


(Actually, can anyone explain to me why the line on that website--below the giant fecking L-- reads Anata wa "Desu Nooto" no L... Wait, what, it's my Death Note now? I don't get it! What does it actually mean?)

(Also, Still my birthday here. So. Post of Teh Silly. Because, obviously, I am regressing in maturity as I age biologically. :P)

（。。。。ハリポタ！！！）

こんにちわ！　わたし　は　JUNE　です。　わたし　は　シンガポール　じん　です。　わたし　は　けんきゅしゃ　です！

This is my idea of bliss: sitting at my (horrifically cluttered) desk, developing a treatment for an animation series, while streaming the Tokyo Live Earth concert on MSN waiting for abingdon boys school to come on. Because they are awesome. I heard bits of their latest single off their website yesterday and I was all, "Okay, this thing needs to arrive in my mailbox, like, now."

Yesterday's Japanese lesson was fun. We learnt how to ask people for their occupation (o shigoto wa nan desuka?), and one of the jobs on the chart was, of all things, "research worker" (kenkyusha). Complete with a cutesy little drawing of someone pipetting something into a testtube. I think my sense was very impressed to have a reasearch worker in her class, because almost everyone else was either a student (gakusei) or cubicle rat company employee (kaishain).

My sense doesn't know who BUCK-TICK are, though. When she asked me what sort of music I listened to I told her that I actually listened to some Japanese music, "some" meaning "a lot, almost all the time". So she asked me which artistes I liked, and I went, all chirpily, "BUCK-TICK!" And she didn't know who they were, asking if they were a new band, a young band.

"Er, no. They've been around since 1985."

I shall go to class early next week and stick RENDEVOUS into the hi-fi. So she'll know who they are.

I have art to post. And hopefully a SPN crack drabble of DOOM, provided I manage to convince my lazyass ass to write it. Fingers crossed, everyone?

I leave you with these words of wisdom:

gakusei --> student
gakuto --> GACKT
shigoto --> job
gakutoshigoto --> GacktJOB

If you didn't get it... you didn't get it. That's the way it is. Sorry.

~~June

I just passed the first volume of Death Note to my dad to read.

The story goes thus: my dad's Mandarin Chinese is absymal. He's the reason I grew up in a non-Mandarin-speaking household. So when he was looking at the Vampire Hunter D novels we bought for Mom--in Chinese--and wondering if he could read them.

Mom said, "Er. I think you better start with comics first."

So I shoved the first volume of Death Note, in Chinese, into his hands, and went to busy myself with the scanner. Fifteen minutes later I came out of the study and asked, "So how is it so far?"

Dad scowled. "I'm not past the first page yet."

"You mean you're not past the first sentence," Mom said.

"Something like that."


Oh, Dad. Now I know where I got my un-Chinese-proficiency gene from.

---

ART: This is a planning draft I did earlier today, of a sketch I want to do. It's part of something I'm trying to develop at the moment, a series of pictures/comics/stories about a boy named Kei. I'm in the process of designing his character at the moment-- still trying to decide how cartoonish he should look, what type of wardrobe he should wear, etc. It's endlessly enjoyable-- and utterly exasperating.



The title of the sketch will be Kao da se nikada dogodilo nije-- "as though nothing had happened". I didn't fill in the background, but he's sitting, apple in hand, on the steps of a house that has been shelled to its foundations. It's partly inspired by an poster book I saw while out in town yesterday.

I have a bunch of art pieces I'm going to be posting here over the next week. Hopefully, at least one of them will be the SPN pieces I've been sitting on-- keep your fingers crossed.

~~June

I came home to find a giant-ass Express Mail package on my worktable: my eBay purchase from last week, which I was made to pay thirty fraggin' US dollars in shipping for, hath cometh!



Yes, that's the Trinity Blood DVD Volume I Limited Edition with Collector's Box, which has space to stick all 6 DVD volumes in. It's big. It's pretty. It also cost me more than two hundred dollars local currency because it's been out of print several months and I had to bid for it on eBay.

My obsessions do not merely eat my brain, they also eat out the contents of my wallet.

But the set is perfect and gorgeous and all the perks that come with it (the info booklet, the TAROT CARDS) make it so worth the money.

At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

(What really amuses me is how the top of the box is emblazoned with the giant letters 'TB'. Which, incidentally, happens to be the same thing I spent one year in a lab doing research on for my Honors Project. And since the only way I could afford these DVDs was because my sis chipped in as a birthday present, I'm perfectly qualified to say: "For my birthday this year, I got TB from my sis." Bwah.)

---

We had baked potatoes with bacon bits and mayonnaise for dinner. I was transliterating the packaging for the mayonnaise, which was in Japanese, when I suddenly exclaimed, "Oh word--this says oishii (おいし）! I actually know what this means!" Cue the fangirlish excitement that always ensues whenever I start off with a new language and begin to realize that I might one day actually understand it after all.

And then later, over fruits and chocolate fondue, we made Mom continue retelling the plot of the seventh Vampire Hunter D book, since she was done reading the book I'd passed her. AND THEN SHE GOT THE FONDUE ALL OVER MY BOOK. WHAT, MOM.

Sis was all, "Oh my GOD Mom you dripped melted chocolate all over D!" And I was all, "...and you're licking it off with your fingers." And we were all "....let's not go there, shall we?"

I know I'm too old for it now, but it is kind of nice to have Mom reading stories to us again. Even if the stories are full of people trying to kill each other by magic or cutting each others' heads off.

After all, fairy tales are full of that shit, and we all loved it as kids.

---

Speaking of Japanese, Sis has discovered that our machines come built in with a Japanese keyboard that you just have to turn on, and it does nifty things like convert romanized syllables you input into hiragana. And then, get this-- if you hit the spacebar after you input a word, the computer converts the hiragana into kanji.

Which are basically Chinese characters.

Which we understand. More or less.

In effect, what we've discovered is a inadvertent Japanese dictionary of sorts, because we can input all the romanji lyrics we find on the Internets and hope to get some sort of coherent kanji out of it. We tried it on Buck-Tick's DRESS, and we got the impression that the chorus had something to do with the wind. And clouds. And the sky. And stars. And wings. Something like that.

Er. So maybe not as powerful as we thought it would be.

But it's a start, non?

---

Finally: this is the marquee that runs across my screen as a screensaver.

Хента́й (яп. 変態 хэнтай — «странная внешность», «извращённый») — разновидность аниме и манги, основным элементом которых являются содержащиеся в них эротические и порнографические сцены или намёки на них.

Yes. It's the first line of the Russian Wiki entry for "hentai".

Yes. I put it on at work. Where anyone walking past my desk can read it.

It's a good thing there are no Russians in my lab.

~~June

This is how day went.

Morning: Cleaned house. Learned hiragana by transliterating DRESS by Buck-Tick into Romanji. Was actually pretty successful at it, as can now phonetically read Japanese textbook. Surprised that learning hiragana did not take two months as expected. V. v. good. Possible win at life. Next up, katakana.

Afternoon: Did some writing. Intend to finish treatment of script early this time round, as anticipate will be hellishly busy in the lab next week. Got distracted by J-rock music folder, which insisted I had to organize it. Discovered, to some mortification, that possess six L'Arc~en~ciel albums and am inordinately fond of them (WHY).

Evening: Hit coast to meet up with serabut who is in Singapore for the week. Plenty, plenty, plenty of fangirling ensued. Large bulk of conversation revolved around Jared, Jensen, and past projects of the MAKES YOU BLEED OUT OF THE EARS variety they kept turning up in. Am jealous because serabut and I don't. (WILL GET THERE SOME DAY SO NYEAH). Recall plenty of imaginary stabbing of people on my part. Also, found fourth instalment of Trinity Blood manga in English. Bought it, even though have already read the same in Chinese, because It Is Fun To Compare Translations.

Also, have decreed that must find copy of Moon Child and watch it, because Gackt. And Hyde. And some Chinese singer I don't give rat's patoot about. Whatever. GACKT and HYDE as GAY VAMPIRES, cannot pass up the chance. Must find torrent.

Overall v.v.good evening. Now off to watch SPN 2x18 pronto because OMG GARY COLE. Why did no one tell me he was in episode. He was first TV boyfriend I ever had and now in an episode with two current TV boyfriends? Dreams are coming true. Off to watch, pronto.






OH GOD HAVE JUST REALIZED FIVE YEAR OLD PAPER LAMP ON MY DESK HAS KANJI AND HIRAGANA CALLIGRAPHY PRINTED ALL OVER IT I CAN READ IT NOW HA HA HA WHAT THE FUCK

...can anyone reccomend a good place to learn Japanese in Singapore?




(Don't ask. Don't even ask. I suppose an explanation will be forthcoming sometime soon, but yes, June is again embarking on another misguided quest to learn another language she will absolutely, completely and whole-heartedly FAIL at.)

(htenywg YOU ARE COMING WITH ME. BECAUSE JACQ SAYS SO)

~~June

This was what June was doing last night instead of sleeping.

The title reads "吸血鬼ハンターD sans JEBENI ŠEŠIR" and can arguably be said to be in five different languages (Chinese, Japanese, English, French and Croatian). It translates to "Vampire Hunter D minus the FUCKING HAT". Except that I totally forgot that nouns in Croatian have to be in the genitive when paired to "without", so it should actually read "吸血鬼ハンターD sans JEBENA ŠEŠIRA". Or something like that. God, Slavic grammar, you SLAY me.

(I have issues with the hat. It's a nice hat, and it gives the character such flavor, but it's also a TOTAL PAIN IN THE ASS TO DRAW.)


Fullsize on DA

[authoritative Edna Mode voice] NOHATS.

Also, I've finally managed to watch the last SPN episode they aired, the one about werewolves. I'm going to try doing the poll and review for this one before they air the next episode. But first things first: I'm going to take a shower, watch a couple episodes of Trinity Blood, and then bloody COLLAPSE INTO BED.

~~June