Oh Yeah

Hay, I forgot to mention.
Had my practice defense on Monday.
My advisers said I was really well prepared, especially compared to a lot of other students.

So, awesome.

I think I have a date set for my official defense too.

FMA Rules!

I've been steadily increasing the number of anime and manga in my repertoire.
I've gotten hooked on a number of them.
And yet my favorite series remains one of the very first I ever read: Fullmetal Alchemist. The manga, and the Brotherhood anime.
I've read it and seen it several times.
IT is also the only manga that I bought almost entirely new for the whole series. Usually I raid used book stores...

I've been thinking about what makes FMA so awesome. Besides the fact that it's one of the things that originally got me hooked on anime/manga (hey, there's plenty of sentimental value there. For me, that's hard to shake).

Checked around for some other opinions too, to see how ideas compared.

First of all, FMA has great characters. Which is always an extremely important thing.
Ling makes me laugh so much. And Ed and Al are also great.


The development of the world and the system of alchemy is fantastic too.

Also emotion. FMA is a series that can leave you laughing, crying, or gasping with horror within a couple chapters.
Phew. Awesome.


But one thing that, at least to me, makes it stick out from other anime/manga is the timeline.

I'm going to use some other popular series for comparison.
Inuyasha. I enjoyed the first part of this series. I don't know how many volumes there are in the series. It kept my interest up through volume 16. Everything after that was just limping along, dragging out as far as it could go.
This partly has to do with the way manga is serialized, I think. There doesn't seem much encouragement to make the story neat and enclosed, like a book or movie might be. It's more like a TV show, which can go on long after it has ceased to be interesting.
There's plenty of other anime/manga that follow this, but I use Inuyasha because I quite like the beginning. I'm not really into Bleach (though I gave it a really long try), and I haven't gotten into any of the other hyper-long series.

Fullmetal Alchemist does not drag on and on and on. It goes through the story, and it concludes when it is timely for it to conclude. It might be a bit longer than it could be, but whatever.

And another thing I love, everyone in FMA is important. Even the sleazy mine guy in one of the first chapters? Yep. In the end, he's important.
I really really love it when things tie together.

So, go read FMA! It's awesome~

Defense

Been working on my thesis defense (it's not technically a thesis defense, since I didn't do a thesis - I did a project, but I'll call it a thesis defense anyway).
Designing the outline of the slides was pretty fun, actually, because I got to put up lots of pictures from movies like Ponyo, Bambi, Princess Mononoke, and Tomorrowland.

The past couple nights have been dedicated to citing everything. Less exciting.
I'm going down on Monday to do a practice defense. MY real defense should be a couple weeks after that.

Atlantis

When Atlantis was in theaters, I saw it several times. More than I've ever seen a movie in theaters, I think.
I still have all of the toys I bought. And I probably still have all of the magazines and papers about the world, language, and characters.

When I watched it again last week. I had an epiphany about part of what makes it so great.
I always knew the characters were fantastic, or I wouldn't have gotten all those magazines with character bios and everything.
But for some reason, something clicked in me this time.
Atlantis is not a long movie. And it has a lot of characters.

Usually that gets confusing, with most of the characters being rather dull and undeveloped.
But that's not the case in Atlantis. The characters are all fun and fascinating.

Because every moment they are on screen makes them shine. Everything they say, every time they react reveals more about them.
I feel rather dramatic saying this, but it's freaking masterful character development.

And it's given me lots of ideas~

Jealousy

The next topic from The Artist's Way.
A quick thought about jealousy.

There are many types of jealousy, of course.
I'm not going to talk about all of them.

Jealousy can form around something that you really want to do. Something that you want to do, but are not brave enough to start. There could be any number of excuses. Maybe you're afraid will fail at it, or maybe you don't think you have time to devote to it.
Since you can't get started on what's important to you, you might get jealous of the people who really excel at it.

Jealousy can be a way to cover up fear.
Or it may be anger that someone is getting something that should belong to you. Even if you haven't even reached for that goal yet.


Jealousy obscures the bigger picture.

Freaking Spellcheck

I spent most of two nights trying to fix this cursed thing.
My document of Katani's story has been a bit messed up. For a long time.
Word informed me ages ago that there were too many spelling errors, and it would no longer mark them for me.
Which is inevitable, considering how many weird names and places there are in that story. It overloaded Word.
But Word's tolerance must be pretty freaking low...

Anyway, I figured I'd end up catching most of the typos, even without the red lines.
Wishful thinking.

I finally did something about it. I started copying the whole thing over to a new document, and adding in all of the strange names, like Katani and Youka and Shanka.
Seems simple, right?
I wish.
If I pasted more than two (or 2 1/2 if I was lucky) pages at a time, word would panic and tell me that there were too many errors.
I had to restart two or three times, because it got stuck on the "ABORT! TOO MANY ERRORS."


But finally, after pasting 2 pages or less and fixing most of the mis-spellings, I now have a document that shows me my freaking typos.

Since then I've been smart enough to ad in the weird names as I go, so Word doesn't panic as much.
I really suck and finding them when they're not marked, it turns out...

Leeching Ideas

I'm currently reading a book called Sabriel. It's a fantasy about a girl called Sabriel, who is something like a necromancer. It's her job to keep the dead under control.
I'm almost finished with the book, and it's pretty good. It's the first in a trilogy, so we'll see how it goes.



This book got me thinking though. How would necromancy work in my world? Would the spirits of evil dead things be able to return to life?
As I read Sabriel, I keep thinking that the way the dead work is definitely not how it would work in my world.
Which is wonderful. It shouldn't be the same.

Because I've already put so much work in the "mythology" of my worlds, it was really easy for me to fill in the area around dead spirits.
The people in Magic-Earth and Soreina are at very low risk from the dead, thanks to the gods. Especially compared to the world of Sabriel.
Anyway, I won't write it all out here, since it involves a lot of the information surrounding gods and spirits and demons.

It's exciting to fill in gaps like this.
Hey, that's part of what reading is for! To help you hone your own craft. Without outright stealing, of course. Although you can snag ideas here and there (yes, everyone does it. It's impossible not to, even by accident).

I'm still working on filling out the guides for my two worlds. The writing is slow going, but I keep stockpiling notes for different areas.
It's probably something that I will never finish, because I will always have new ideas. But each bit I write lets me get deeper into my world.
For now, I'll just aim to get caught up on all of my current notes.

Decorations

Heheh. Finally got the logo picture fixed.
And I added a little mascot character~



Icon from here <3
http://ferngirl.deviantart.com/art/LeopardBoop-631941742

Kid Power!

I rarely watch TV, but I happened to catch the end of Matilda today.
I've gotta say. I think this movie is one of the most empowering things I've seen for children.

Many movies argue with good cause that revenge is not the answer.
But in Matilda, revenge is oh so sweet.

Royal Crests of Taysia

On my dragon world, the main continent has five countries. And each country has a royal family.
I've known for a long time that I wanted each country to have a royal crest.

I originally got the idea during the Arith and Saleera story, because Jade wore the Draykia royal crest as a medallion around her neck.
Everyone in the direct royal line would have a solid gold medallion of their country's crest. Heheh. Royals have too much money.
And I knew that each crest would be a dragon with a sword.
I even plotted out which dragon species would be on each crest. And the type of sword would vary too, depending on the country.

I drew Draykia's royal crest a long time ago, and then I never did any of the others.
Until my Europe trip.
Heheh. I finally drew out all the rest of them.
So, I officially have all of the royal crests of Taysia.

One of my long-delayed projects has finally concluded!