A Novel Idea

...pun intended.

Nick and I decided to write a sci-fi type story together. Or more accurately, I dragged him into it. I borrowed the skeleton of a plot from one of my unwritten Sailor Moon fanfics, ripped out all the parts about pretty soldiers and magic, and tried to turn it into something other people might actually want to read.

Ok, from that description you probably think it's going to suck. I promise it's not as lame as it sounds. The basic premise is that there's this group of scientists who find a girl from an ancient civilization buried deep in a cryogenic chamber under the desert, and her DNA is the key to activating this secret powerful technology they've unearthed, so they try to clone her. (Nick says this sounds a lot like Stargate, but I swear I didn't know that at the time.) We haven't yet decided what the secret ancient technology does. My dad thinks it should involve aliens, but I'm not sure.

Also, lately I haven't been able to actually write anything. Don't you hate it when you get into one of those moods where you feel like writing, but you can't actually form enough concrete thoughts to get a sentence down on paper (or text file, as it were)? This occurs quite frequently at two in the morning after drinking too much caffeine and spending three hours staring at cheesy video game fanart on DA. (Yes, I know, only losers are on DA because the critiques are not nearly heartless and soul-shattering enough to be helpful to real artists, and drawing anime-style doesn't require any talent.) I don't know if you can call it writer's block, because I'm not at a complete loss for ideas. My thoughts have all turned into fireflies--maddeningly evasive and only occasionally brilliant, and all too easily squished. Fireflies do not make very good pets. Sure, they're cool for a while, but they don't do any tricks and they aren't exactly affectionate. I can't keep them very long because I'm not sure what to feed them.

Seriously, what do fireflies eat? ...Pollen, nectar, or other insects, apparently. I love Wikipedia.

Ficathon! and other fanfic-related ramblings

Yup, I did the Ficathon this year! This year's theme is "non-couple interaction," so things are bound to be interesting. I did Ami/Jade, which was apparently quite popular. I'm not allowed to tell what I wrote about yet, since the stories don't become available to the public for a couple of weeks. Only four days until the participants are able to see each other's! I can't wait to read them. "Flash of Crystal Tokyo" sounds interesting, and so does "BrideFight." It sounds like we aren't going to be told who the author is, so it'll be fun to guess.

All this has put me in a writing mood, so I'm going back over all my old stories from high school and trying to whip them into shape. Some of them, however, are beyond help. Teen angst poetry is bad enough, but teen angst poetry about SailorMoon characters is just wrong. And then there's the abomination that is The Fragile Flower--Ganondorf x OC, nuff said. Not that I'm really that much better of a writer now, but I usually have enough restraint not to post it. (Crystal Generation notwithstanding...)

Speaking of fan fiction, Yume can't wait for the next chapter of Drawing Conclusions! That whole series is awesome. It's funny, it's touching, and the characterization is spot-on. Ah, I hope she updates soon... *goes to re-read again*

It is Groovy in 5 Languages

Apparently, お洒落 is pronounced "oshare" and refers to clothes. (So says WWWJDIC.) So I looked up "cool" instead and got 格好いい, kakkoii. Just for kicks I plugged that back into the dictionary.com Japanese to English translator and got "It is groovy." In Chinese that's "它是时髦的." At least that's what they said it is. I'm gonna take their word for it.

That's American English, by the way. In British English they say "Sorry, translation is taking too long. Please try again later," instead. Man, those British people are weird.

So now we know how to say "it is groovy" in four languages. But apparently four is a really unlucky number in Japanese because it's pronounced the same as the word for death. So I'll go on and translate it into Italian too to make five. "Spiacente, la traduzione sta prendendo troppo lungamente. Provare prego ancora più successivamente." Italian sure is a wordy language...

Just now I realized that I'm supposed to be working on a project, so good night/おやすみなさい/晚上好/good night/buona notte!

Gotta Start Somewhere...

So... it's two in the morning, I'm staring at 36 ounces worth of empty Mountain Dew containers, my little brother has flooded the bathtub, and I'm getting the distinct sense that I'm not hip enough to have a blog.

The biggest problem is that I really have nothing to blog about. (Is "blog" a verb?) I mean, there's a certain amount of arrogance in posting your deepest thoughts on the web--you're assuming that someone will be interested in hearing them. And I'm slowly realizing that I don't have any meaningful or interesting thoughts. I'm not into politics enough to rant about that, besides which I'm a Republican, and I think Republicans aren't allowed to have trendy things like blogs. (We make up for it by sending each other mass emails with patriotic poems and stories about how a package of tampons saved the life of a marine in Iraq and links to websites with annoying streaming midis of God Bless America. I like the song, but please people, learn to turn the auto-play off...) I'd review my favorite anime shows, but there are nine million anime blogs out there, and they're all prettier than this one. Plus, I'd have to reveal my embarrassing mahou shoujo fetish. I could go off into deep and insightful philosophical musings, but then there's always the fear that I'll end up just sounding pretentious.

Honestly, I'm not really sure what the difference between insightful and pretentious is, or if they're mutually exclusive. Is it a matter of what you say, or is it just your attitude? Or maybe it depends on how much the other person agrees with what you're saying. Then again, maybe I'm not smart enough to be pretentious. I'm not even sure I know what pretentious means. Let's see, Dictionary.com says:

pre·ten·tious –adjective
1.full of pretense or pretension.

...yeah, that's helpful.

2.characterized by assumption of dignity or importance.
3.making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious.

Okay, #2 makes sense. #3 would make sense to a person who knows what ostentatious means. (I'm gonna take a wild guess and say it means "making an exaggerated outward show.")

So I learned two words for the price of one. I also learned that pretentious in Brazillian Portugese is "presumido." And in Japanese it's "気取った" which I think is pronounced ki-something-tta...? Spiffy. Hmm, I wonder how you say spiffy in Japanese. Apparently it's "お洒落." No clue how to pronounce that except it starts with an o.

After a few minutes of playing with the online translator, I remembered that I was writing this post.

All right, I don't want to sound like I think I'm smart, because that might seem arrogant. But then again, why would I write things that I think are stupid? That's a waste of everyone's time. (That is, assuming anyone would actually read this, which is in itself a bit arrogant...) I could try to imitate what intelligent people say about politics/philosophy/esoteric academic subjects, but of course since I don't understand it I would just be a poser. The alternative is to ramble on about mindless fluff, which is a complete waste of cyberspace and an insult to the blogging community, because the words I write here should be meaningful and insightful, a service to humanity. Oh wait, that was totally pretentious.

I guess the solution would be to get a life. But that would require going into the Real World, which is scary and requires People Skills. While I am not completely incapable of pretending to be sociable (yay double negatives,) I'm not exactly the friendliest or most interesting person. And how do you go about meeting interesting people if you're not very interesting yourself? How do you force yourself to become interested in interesting things when you're really quite content with the uninteresting things you're interested in right now?

The other alternative is to just shut up and not have a blog. But darn it, I like playing with html and wanted to see if I could make a blog layout. To tell the truth, this post was mostly just to see if I could make the layout work. So I'm just going to hit the publish button and not worry about how pretentious this sounds or whether I'm using that word correctly, because nobody's going to read this anyway.