Elf Sternberg

The other day I found a delightful dickgirl hentai manga entitled Your Name Gets Me Off in which not only were the traditional roles of seme and uke completely ignored, but the male character actually went down on the futanari character and did not get raped for it by the end of the story. Sadly, it usually is the case in futanari stories that a man/futanari pairing almost always results in the futanari on bottom and a woman/futanari pairing always results in the woman on the bottom-- the "most male" character "wins," and a male character eager to go down on dick-- even dickgirl dick-- is almost surely going to be nonconsensually and brutally victimized by the end of the story. Pleasantly, in this case the futanari was simply the delicious center of a threesome with no ill-will among any of the characters. Yay!

This was a wonderful surprise, given how much crap there is out there. This season, the theme for victims has been mostly wuxia heroines being punished for being female. Which really sucks because I happen to like wuxia, too.

I was such a naughty boy today. With four kids in the house, they were relatively self-entertaining. I wrote 3,000 words in an hour. (Okay, 2,972 words). None of them were for Caprice.

Damn that Muse.

I also put eight more Kanji into my "learned, now memorize, then master" flashcard set. They're words like "myself," "little," "book," and "afterward," words that I've seen a lot. Remember my little rant about 誰 ("who")? Someone who knows a lot more about Japanese than I do pointed out that the 2,230 standard Kanji are for reading a newspaper, not a story. Since I'm reading more fiction than nonfiction, I'm going to encounter a lot more kanji than those in the "standard teaching suite," and I should just get used to using Edict. I'm also going to have to find a good onomatopoeia dictionary, since today I encountered ペキペキ (peki-peki) meaning, uh, "the sound made when spanking someone playfully."

Someone is going to have to explain to me how the Kanji Learner's Dictionary, which until this evening I have sworn by as the best Japanese dictionary for a third-year student like myself, could possibly be missing the word 誰, だれ, meaning "Who." As in "誰ですか？", "Who is that?" How is that even conceivable? Is the word "who" not one of the 2,230 most common words in Japanese? I think I use "who" in daily conversation a lot more often than I use "dishcloth", "feudal domain", or "slack".

A friend of mine who knows more Japanese than I do says it's probably because it usually is spelled out, だれ, rather than Kanjified, but it still seems like a weird omission, especially since hentai is hardly supposed to be run-to-the-dictionary reading.

I should probably have more slack, though. ね？

As I mentioned earlier, I had to go into work this weekend. It's a quick drive, no more than 20 minutes when the traffic's good, which it was, so one trip out and back has just enough time for one lesson of my Japanese classes on audiobook.

I haven't been posting about my Japanese studies because I haven't been doing them. Too much to do, and I've started to feel the need for more downtime from my busy and crazy life recently. I'm not really getting it-- children don't allow for it-- but I have put aside some extra-curricular activities that one might consider life-enhancing. (Sadly, one of those seems to have been dating, recently. I should get out more often.) So I put it on random and let it pick a track for me.

The lesson was one of the transitionals: it started with "How many people in your family? How many boys? How many girls? Are they here with you in Japan?" and ended with "Please put 40 liters of gasoline into my American car, which is really too big for me. I have to go to Tokyo. Which road do I take?"

I had no problem at all with the lesson. I tore through it, only once losing a vocabulary point, expressing someone else's desires, "My wife would like wine." Other than that, everything was in place: grammar, conjugation, tense.

It was mildly frustrating because I now know that I have no excuse for not continuing. The mechanics of this language are easy for me, now. I'm now carrying, along with a library of 1,500 books, the finest Japanese-English dictionary available, 24/7, in my pocket. I can look up Kanji with radicals and with hirigana, with English and romajii if I have to. I have every tool I need to complete my study.

I just need to memorize 2,000 kanji and 40,000 combinations.

So, I was listening to the Mai HiME radio play this morning; it comes around on the MP3 player once in a while, and I realized that I understand the very first part of the monologue. Unfortunately, it consisted mostly of the character Mikoto stumbling into Mai's closet and commenting "Wow, her bra is huge. Too huge!"

Yeah, that bit of understanding will come in useful someday, I'm sure.