The good, the bad, the gothic...

I wish I could get a grant of $273,000 to study when kids go Goth.

Not a lot otherwise to discuss. I wrote about 800 words yesterday on the bus and had a delightful conversation with a young lady who was just starting to take typing classes in her high school. She wanted to know how fast I typed and how I learned. She was using the Mavis Beacon set and found it boring.

My right wrist had been bugging me for a while and I finally found the culprit: my wrist brace. The metal tongue had become bent somehow and was putting unnatural pressures on my forearm. I fixed it, slept on it, and in the morning it was great. I also had to reboot my box yesterday and didn't notice until late this morning that one program that hadn't restarted was Dr. Wright, my reminder program for wrist stretching and breaks. I tried to install Workrave, but the requirements were odious.

The 800 words I wrote were, sadly, not in any story I should be working on, but one slated for release two years from now. For some reason I just can't seem to get myself as interested in the Feffer Lizzel series as I was when I started it. It's only about forty thousand words so far, and now I'm mostly filling in the interstitials. Instead, I wrote some more in Hybridization, while trying to figure out if I can get some instance of Shardik into the Embrace, Extend, Empire trilogy... Maybe a sideline story.

Dammit, I have more ideas than I know what to do with.

Cute line that probably won't go into a story: "Girls, get your fingers out of my head!" See if you can come up with your own context.

Some reviewer suggested that Tron 2.0 should be viewed more as an interactive movie than as a video game. I can see that. There's a narrative and you're an engaged participant. If you were a fan of the movie, this makes a very good sequel.

The tension! The tension!

Alright, another anime on which to get painfully hooked. I just finished watching episode one of Maria-sama ga Miteru (Holy Mary is Watching).

Now, that doesn't sound like something I'd watch, does it?

Ah, you see, that's the beauty of it. This story was clearly cooked up for us silly otaku who want nothing more than to have an all-girl version of yaoi, and the Lillian Catholic School for Girls gives such shoujo ai by the truckload. So far, not much in the way of fanservice, though.

The set-up is quite, um, set up. It's a four-year finishing school for girls where seniors give their rosaries to younger students and promise to look after them and help them. There are three seniors known as "The Roses," and they basically make up the school's student council. They pick juniors who will replace them, and their juniors in turn pick "little sisters" to watch over and groom for positions on the council. When one of the junior girls picks a young, bashful first-year girl without going through the normal process of politicking (or getting her rose's approval) all sorts of internecine struggles with jealousy, envy, and love break out.

Whoo. Sounds like fun.