幸村清市 - ダリア + 幸村清市、真田弦一郎、柳蓮二 - 三強と呼ばれて

I’m really loving Yukimura’s new album XD; I’ll probably be doing all of these at some point, but for now, completely random tracks!

Under the cut:

永井幸子 as 幸村清市, 楠大典 as 真田弦一郎, 胆本英史 as 柳蓮二  - 三強と呼ばれて
Nagai Sachiko as Yukimura Seiichi, Kusunoki Taiten as Sanada Genichirou, & Takemoto Eiji as Yanagi Renji – Sankyou to Yobarete
永井幸子 as 幸村清市 - ダリア
Nagai Sachiko as Yukimura Seiichi – Dahlia

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Lyric dump – 裄村清市:真実(+REMIX)、 夢の続き、自分にしか見えない光;真田弦一郎:名声

This is just a lyrics dump for songs I’ve romanised since December. Quicklinks can be found under the cut.

Songs:
Nagai Sachiko as Yukimura Seiichi (永井幸子 as 裄村清市)
Shinjitsu (真実) + Remix version
Yume no Tsuzuki (夢の続き)
Jibun ni Shika Mienai Hikari  自分にしか見えない光

Kusunoki Taiten as Sanada Genichirou (楠大典 as 真田弦一郎)
Meisei (名声)

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On fanfiction and writing in general

One question I (surprisingly) get asked quite often is why I don’t write for *insert fandom I enjoy here*. It’s not necessarily that I don’t want to write for some other series, I just can’t. It’s just how my brain works. It takes a long time for me to get comfortable enough in writing any given fandom, and once I feel like I can write competent fic, I stick with it. Trying to take on two series at once? No way, it just doesn’t work for me. To be perfectly honest, I don’t feel comfortable enough to do so. I’ll constantly question characterization, or feel that I just haven’t done enough research on a particular character or don’t have a decent enough grasp on a character’s personality.

It’s not just the “oh, big scary new fandom!” thing – even fandoms I’ve been in for years and have seen or read the series numerous times and have done a lot of meta discussion on (Gundam Wing, for example), I don’t think I have a good grasp on the characters at all.

I’m a one-big-fandom at a time person (ie, I can only handle being super active in one fandom at a time, but might dabble in others). When I’m active in that one fandom, I cannot write for anything else that isn’t completely stupid and silly and intentionally disregards all characterization and such. The only problem I see with this is that I tend to stay in fandoms for a ridiculously long time (coming on my 7th Tenipuri anniversary, soon), which sort of kills off any inspiration to write for other fandoms – even ones I want to write for.

“But you draw for other series, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?” No, not really. I’m more of a visual learner. I can look at the character and say “Ok, this is what s/he is, there’s nothing more to it.” It’s hard to fuck up characterization when drawing. You don’t have to question whether this person would say that, or just how delicate the relationship between character A and character B is. You don’t have to worry about dub characterization versus sub characterization. You just do it and hopefully have fun doing it.

In essence, I don’t write for anything that isn’t second nature to me by now. You can give me just about any character in Tenipuri and I can write them. Actual plot and content might be a bit questionable, but the characters would be the characters. Give me Gundam Wing, a series I’ve adored since I was a little girl, and have previously written fic for? No way. I’d constantly be re-watching certain episodes, or checking various manga scenes, and questioning whether or not, say, Quatre (without the Zero System) would go tell someone to fuck off and die.

For me, I don’t care if people loved/hated some fic of mine. If I don’t like it, I think it’s complete shit. One of these days maybe I’ll get over my own insecurities. Until then, Tennis is my game.

And to make this post not completely pointless, downloads in the form of music. For all Dragonball GT sucked and/or was complete epic fail, it has some of the best music of the franchise. x3

[download#1]
[download#2]

A not-so-new start

In attempt to get myself pumped up for this (and to give me something to do), I finally took advantage of WP’s import/export feature and imported all of the archives from 2003-2005 over to this blog. Reading through some of them made me stop and think “Wow, I was a really retarded teenager.”

It’ll take some time to go through and rename posts and fix categories, but I shall persevere (somehow). To some extent it’s kind of amusing (“Wow, once upon a time I actually did chapter and episode summaries!”). If I had any sense of dignity I’d probably delete them and disassociate myself with my own teenage stupidity, but at the same time it shows me how much I have (or haven’t, lol) grown and changed in the past ~6 years.

And while I’m on the subject of change, need new theme. We shall see how unlazy I get, because although I adore Donghae’s stupid face, these colours just aren’t doing it for me.

Things that got changed in the not-so-distant past:

Ukepile.com got a new layout, and I’ve moved all of my song romanisations over there (they’re still posted here, but I’ll be keeping them over there so I have a complete list for my own reference more than anything.

Rhythmic High was split into three separate sites: RH:GUNDAM for all of my Gundam works, RH:TENNIS for all of my Tenipuri works, and the main site for everything else.

And now to go obsessively refresh Menclave for my Gundam 00 fix. XD;

Welcome to OSX.

First post from new laptop, horrah. I’d been toying with the idea of getting a Mac laptop since last semester when my financial aid check came, but put it off in favour of Genki pbs, Higamyu photosets and Yaoicon. However, the end of December brought Hiku getting a new laptop and was selling her older (mid-2005) laptop and needless to say, I asked her to hold onto it for me until I could pay her in January. After a few weeks of trying to decide how we wanted to deal with her getting it to me without having to worry about it getting damaged, we ended up deciding we’d both just drive to Santa Rosa and hang out for a bit. Sasu came with her and gave me easily $100 worth of Copic Sketch markers she had extras of, plus some other stuff that we had ordered together and she was going to send to me anyway. They didn’t get to stay very long, but fun times were had.

Needless to say, I’m now the owner of an iBook G4 with OSX Tiger (tiny and cute!). While I grew up using a Mac (We still have our first computer in storage – I can’t remember what model it is off the top of my head, but it has a whopping 500mb hard drive and 5 mb of RAM. XD), and all of the computers I ever used at school were Macs (I was a freshman in high school when the original candy-shell iBooks came out), I haven’t really touched one since I was 17. So, naturally, it’s taking a while for my Windows-ingrained brain to get used to Macs and Mac shortcuts again. Not to mention all this newfangled stuff they’ve added to Mac OS since the last time I’ve used one. XD Now, if I can figure out how to get php properly set up for local use (not that I’ve tried very hard to set it up, lulz), life will be good. At the very least, it gives me a handful of machines to check designs and coding on. This cute little Mac laptop w/OSX on a 1028×768 res with Firefox, Safari and Opera installed, my desktop with WinXP on 1280×1024 with Firefox, IE and Opera installed, and mum’s laptop (that I like to use for the fact S is allowing her to leech his wireless – asshole won’t give me the password, so still stuck with dialup for my comps >_>) with Vista on a 1280×800 (+her lower-res-than-my-account’s res) with Firefox and IE. Plenty of options, really!

Also, iTunes. I hate iTunes. I don’t know why, it just irritates the hell out of me. There’s a reason I do not have it on my desktop even though S is like HEY GET ITUNES IT’S AWESOME. Any ideas on a Mac-equivalent of WinAmp, raise your hand XD;

School has been keeping me pretty busy, which is kind of sad when you consider how poorly I’m doing right now. Really need to get myself caught up and get my ducks in a row if I want to pass any classes this semester. Too much stress, really. Not having my license is making me all sorts of askdjf;alksdjfjsdalf if only for the fact that it would be so much cheaper to drive to school rather than pay $20 a week for cabs to school ($10 two times a week). The $2-$3 given to a classmate for rides home is easily swingable but >_O’ Hurrr now if only I didn’t hate driving with every bone in my body. Though I probably should try to go get that soon (damn you family not helping with uhhh a usable car and someone actually being home on a day the DMV is open so I can take my test again >EEE), permit kind of expires (again) sometime in April >>;;

Enough of that. This time next week I’ll be in… snowy, freezing-ass Burlington, Vermont visiting with my Leah over spring break. Leaving on Friday, returning home to California on the 30th. We have plans. Plans that involve sitting on our asses watching Kane & Genki dvds on big screen, spazzflailing over Rikkaimyu Genki!Kirihara and Kane!Sanada, and watching Power Rangers. May be watching some Gintama, for people will be happy if we do and start fangirling it. With Tenipuri manga finally being over (NICE COP-OUT, KONOMI.), it may be time to find a new fandom. Except the part where I still ♥ Tenipuri with all my ickle heart. …:D;

Other fandom news involves writing for balls_it_up, in which I wrote the single most awful fic I have ever written. XD; Which fic, however, I am not yet allowed. Writing mojo is finally starting to come back, if the few pieces I’ve started recently are any indication.

On the subject of fannish stuff, new fanlistings!
[+] Narugami aka Narukami/Thor {Matantei Loki Ragnarok}
[+] Heimdall {Matantei Loki Ragnarok}
[+] Seles {Apocripha/0 – Game/Manga}
[+] Platina Pastenr {Apocripha/0 – Game}
[+] Schwarz {Weiss Kreuz}
[+] My Friend Flicka {Book – Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka}
[+] Green Grass of Wyoming {Book – Mary O’Hara’s Green Grass of Wyoming}

Upcoming fanlistings:
[-] Thunderhead {Book by Mary O’Hara}
[-] The Horse-Tamer {Book by Walter Farley}
[-] Nakagauchi Masataka {Musician}
[-] Four Rooms {Film}
[-] 0 no Soukoushi {Manga by Kaori Yuki}
[-] Fairy Cube {Manga by Kaori Yuki}
[-] Psycho Knocker {Manga by Kaori Yuki}

I certainly have my work cut out for me XD;

Mmmm. Since my last post, Rhythmic High has also been updated with quite a bit of artwork and fic from the past year.

I think that may be about it, except for one thing: Downloads!

[=] Oliver & Company Soundtrack (32.31 mb, .rar)
[=] The Nightmare Before Christmas Soundtrack. (54.99 mb, .rar)

Er, enjoy. XD Need to find myself some free to so that I may make a new layout for this poor neglected place.