Hooked

It's a beautiful thing to watch someone get hooked on a series you love.

A few years ago, I lent the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender to my aunt and uncle (after having successfully gotten my parents hooked on it). My aunt and uncle said that they might try a few episodes. A few weeks later when they called, I asked if they'd watched any. Yeah, they'd seen a few episodes, but they weren't too enthusiastic about it.
Then a couple weeks later, they called up, asking if they could drop by to borrow season 2.

I got my cousin to Read Fullmetal Alchemist a while ago. And he was sad when I told him that he was already half way through, because he wanted it to keep going.

I got Nick hooked on Last Airbender a while ago. Now I'm getting him into FMA too. We watched some today, and he kept wanting to watch more. He said that last week, he had finally gotten hooked.

Aaah, it's so fun to see people get hooked.
Maybe it's because now you both understand the awesomeness of the thing.
"Yes! You understand!"

The Yosemite Battle

I wanted to talk about this new development regarding Yosemite National Park. How a bunch of corporate idiots somehow got ahold of the rights to all the iconic names across the Yosemite park. Despite that fact that none of them came up with the names. And they're trying to hold onto the rights unless they get an insanely crazy amount (I think it was $50 million?).

And then I tried to hold myself back, because it seems that the media focuses on all the negative stuff, and leaves out a lot of the good things that happen.
I didn't want to contribute to the negativity by ranting about this, as I easily could.
I suppose it's easy to shout about stuff that outrages you. Like greedy, nasty people.
Besides, they won't ever be able to stop most people from continuing to use the real names. Assuming they can get away with this idiocy. Which I hope they don't.

So I guess I should go for some positive new instead. Though admittedly, I'm not usually up to date about the news, except for big stuff, and stuff that's in my study area.
(I had to resort to flipping to the page-long news updates in Dad's Sierra Club magazine):

Two new marine reserves have been created near Easter island and the South Pacific. Each is about 250,000 square miles.


That has a nice parallel for Katani's story. After the events of the story, Katani and Tyra will patrol the coast and catch illegal fishers that poach from the marine reserves near Reyu, or break the harvesting rules. So they'll sort of become rangers (I got this idea a couple months ago, while thinking of what Katani would do after the Retrievers disband. I know what Shanka and the Betas will do too. They'll work at the palace, and I think Shanka will take up Fei Yen's old position).

The Winter of Shinies

Okay, I'm pretty sure this will be my last of these posts for a while.
But my search is complete!
I finally found my shiny Girafarig. The shiny that I encountered in the original gold/silver games, and failed to catch (along with Nidoran M).
Actually I found him about a week ago.
I caught him in my Alpha Sapphire game, with the Dex nave. Though my encounter meter was over 300 by the time I finally found him.

I named him Savannah, because I thought it would be a good name for him, and I already had it in mind (I broke my rule, of naming them after stuff that happened that day).

But a couple days before that, I had a totally random encounter with a shiny Floatzel in my X game. I named him Haiku. Why? ...well, I was watching Haikyuu at the time...

The funny thing was, at that time, I was trying to catch a couple missing Pokémon to fill my Pokédex, so I could get the shiny charm. As it was, I got the shiny charm less than an hour after catching my shiny Floatzel. I think these games are making fun of me.

So, over the past 2 months, I have caught almost half of all my shiny Pokémon. And only half of those were intentional catches.

Okay. Back to working on my grad project.

Theater Season

I thought I'd briefly mention some of the movies I saw at the end of last year.

First up is Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
I'm a Star Wars fan. I hated Anakin in episode 2, but I generally love Star Wars.
And I liked the beginning of The Force Awakens. Up through where the 2 new heroes meet.
But overall, I was disappointed in this one. It just felt like a remake of episode 4. Apparently that is a widely held belief.
Although I may like it better the second time. More likely is that if the next Star Wars is really good, I'll end up growing attached to this one too.
Still, I'm not sure why they couldn't actually try to do something new?
Sigh.

And then There was The Good Dinosaur.
It didn't feel like anything new either. Though I did like Spot.
The art was really odd. The backgrounds and landscapes were really beautiful and realistic (Dad couldn't stop gushing praise about them). But the characters were so cartoonish, that they really didn't seem like they fit in the world at all.
As far as Pixar goes, the last of their movies I really loved was Up. After that, some of their creativity seems to have disappeared.

Except for the short. I freaking loved Sanjay's Super Team. Dad loved it too. I really want to see it again.
Awesome animation, motion, and story. The designs of the gods were awesome too!
I suppose it helped that I grew up with some of the stories it's based off of. Hanuman, the monkey god, is probably my favorite.
And now I want to make sure that I actually correctly identified those three gods...
Turns out I was wrong about the woman. She's Durga. Hanuman was obvious. I was a bit torn about the central one, because I'm used to Krishna being the blue-skinned god. But it's actually Vishnu, which makes sense because of the multiple arms.
Hmm. My Ananda side is showing.


I think I may be a bit of a hypocrite. I never read reviews that other people have written of films, especially not before I see the film. But I do like writing about films (and games and books). Trying to find out what works, and what didn't.
I suppose it's my way of learning what not to do myself, in my own stories.

A Strange Combination

I noticed something odd about some of the films they've been making recently.
For example, the movies Van Helsing, and The Lorax (the new one).
Both of them have really nice parts. Emotional, or insightful. And they also have parts that are really stupid...

This combination seems to be becoming more common right now. Insightful, and stupid. I wonder why. I guess film makers are desperate about keeping the attention of the viewer? But at the same time, it drives away people that have more... refined tastes.
For the two movies I mentioned above, there are parts that I really love. They're awesome, or heartbreaking.

(Yeah, okay I admit I cried when they cut down the last truffula tree).

And then there are some parts where I almost feel embarrassed to like the movie.
I wonder what other reasons there are for this. Maybe some of the people working on the movie just have bad taste.
I don't mind if there are funny parts in a movie. Heck, I love a good funny moment. I laugh my head off through most of Big Hero 6.
But that doesn't mean that I want it to be stupid or tacky.

Sigh. I guess I am pretty picky. That's probably why I haven't found a favorite book, or movie. There's always something that I wish had been done better (But I'm reading the second book after The Name of the Wind! It's really really good still~ I hope book 3 will be this fantastic. They might actually be my favorite books. Curses to the fact that I can't decide until I've reached the end... Unfortunately the end of Shadow Scale proved this fact even more).

Read On

Today was the first meeting of my creative writing class.
I'll probably not go the whole semester, because I'm not sure what to share. I suppose I could bring in chapters from Katani or Ashlyn, but for both of them, I'm reluctant to share the next chapter.

But I did read tonight. I brought in the first chapter of Evva's story.
Everyone liked it.
The teacher asked who wanted to read on, since this was the first chapter. Nearly everyone raised their hands.
Aaah, I'm so happy. I really need that motivation right now, because I just heard back from one of my advisers about my graduate project. So, I've got to start working on that again. And I know that by addressing half of the comments, it will only make the story worse. It feels so counter-productive, to write knowing that the quality of the story is suffering. But I've got to do it anyway, if I want to graduate.
I may not be able to work on Evva's story as much for a couple weeks. But at least in the back of my head, I will know that people really are interested in it.
So, until then, wish me luck with my graduate project.

Your Tour Guide

For the last couple weeks of 2015 (before I started my next big writing project) I did some work on the guides for my two main worlds.
For my first outline, I've been writing it in a sort of textbook voice. Which is handy for getting all of the data sorted out and organized.

Now, when I was reading Seraphina, I read through the glossary, and other info at the back of the book. Because I like seeing info on the world and culture, etc.
And the glossary was actually written with voice. And it actually made me laugh a couple times.

When I read the second book's glossary, it got me thinking. Why would I want to write my world guides like a textbook? Given the choice, most people would rather not read a textbook when presented with so many other possibilities for reading (or watching/playing).
(Not to mention one of the main arguments I've used over and over throughout my grad program is that fiction is great at getting across environmental messages specifically because it's NOT a textbook).
So, I thought that I should have my guides presented as though a character were leading you around and explaining stuff.

But who?
And the answer was immediately obvious.
Fern.
So, in the far future, when I have some sort of presentable version of the guidebooks, they will be presented to you by Fern.
Also, since I would have glossaries at the end of my stories (with info about the dragons, characters, magic, etc) they can also be told by Fern.

It will be nice to give her more room to herself~ Usually she's tangled in the stories that other people have already written.

Infestation

I don't think I ever posted the link to the ghost chapter I wrote for class last semester.
One of our assignments was to write our own "chapter" from one of our readings in the scifi/fantasy class. For my topic, I chose the short story "We can Remember it for you Wholesale." It is the short story that the Total Recall movies are based off of.
In the story, there is a mention of a scene from the childhood of the protagonist. So that's what I wrote my chapter on.
You don't need to read the original story to understand mine. It's pretty self-explanatory.

Here's my short story, Infestation

Evva

Okay, so I have started working on my new writing project.
I went with Evva, who I was most excited about.

I spent a night trying to figure out names for 2 of the characters. With no luck. But I did come up with names the next day while I was stuck in a waiting room. So, that night was mostly wasted. Why did my favorite naming website have to go under? (Although I did find a good name book. I'll have to buy it).
And last night I got some actual writing done.
No matter how much I think that I have no ideas, if I just start writing, something inevitably happens.
So, I'm actually getting somewhere! Which is good. And I have an idea of the next step too. So all these little steps should lead together and get me through the first draft~
I'm starting to get excited about it again, so that's always a good thing.

Re-Editing

So, The Last Unicorn has been one of my favorite movies for pretty much my entire life. Mom got the VHS when I was very tiny, and I never stopped loving it.


And then several years ago, I got the movie on DVD.
And I was really mad because they edited out the "dams" and "hells." So the characters mouths moved, but nothing came out.
Now I finally got a different DVD.
On this version the "swearing" is still in place. But they edited some of the sound effects. So the Harpy makes really strange parrot sounds, and there's really loud dripping noises that weren't there before. Etc.

What the heck? Stop messing around with stuff! I want the original movie! Not something that weird DVD editors thought they'd play with.
It seems that people are always trying to change stuff. I guess they want to make their mark. But usually it just ends up taking something good and messing it up.
Like so many movies that are based off of books...

I just want a DVD of my movie that hasn't been messed with... Does such a thing even exist?

Another New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!
Let's try our best to accomplish great things this year~
Since I only have one semester of grad school left, I probably have some big life changes coming up.
Wish me luck! And good luck to all of you~

I'll keep writing, of course. Though I need to rebuild my motivation. I thought I was making some progress on a couple new writing projects. But I guess the important one needs to go back to the drawing board. I've got to shake the mood that I've been working on this for a very long time and even when I think I'm making progress, I'm still not much closer to my goal.
I think I've finally settled on a new story, at least. Since I finally got to see my friends for New Years eve.
Except I have no idea what to do after the first chapter. I'm wondering if I should switch between a couple stories for a bit, just to see what happens.
There's the story I'm excited about (Evva's story). Except I'm only excited about the ending. I have almost no idea of anything that happens until that point, except we meet one of my favorite characters. I finished writing the first chapter a couple days ago, which was fun. But then I lost some of my motivation for it.
And there's the story that I've been adding a lot to recently. Which means I actually have a vague idea of what to do for chapter 2. I wrote the first chapter of that probably over a year ago.

Gotta rebuild my energy. Make this annoying feeling go away... Urgh. I wanna talk to people about it to see if they can get me excited again, but I don't think that will help.
I must be tired. My words feel like they're all over the place. And then I realized, of course I'm tired. I stayed up really late last night for new years. XP