Kyanobenthes' Scratch Pad

Meaning information, of course.

I discovered a legitimate and fairly recent website of a university course on Japanese culture. Fascinating stuff.

This, in particular, is very interesting. The date is 1994:
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~bmori/syll/Hum310japan/familyforms2

Here’s a counterpart international table from the same site:
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~bmori/syll/Hum310japan/familyresp2
(Oh, hey, check out England…)

Of course, the numbers would have more weight if we knew how the studies were actually conducted, but it’s still neat. If only I could find poll data from after 2000.

EDIT:

I found just a little more.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/member/member.html?nn20000919b4.htm

Dated 2000, “In a 1997 survey conducted by a major daily newspaper, about 65 percent of Tokyo residents polled said they did not believe homosexuality was natural…” And there was murder involved somewhere.

Getting the general cultural attitude about same-sex relations accurate is pretty important for the majority of “Syncope” even if I’m not going to show masses of people talking about it. But I’m pretty sure Japan as a whole has never been gay-friendly and still isn’t now when looking at the family units.*

P.S.: Don’t think that the United States is particularly “open” to gays either, as a whole. (Several states and the country itself have pushed forward bills to ban gay marriages, whether successful or not.)

As of a 2007 political election in Japan–
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/politics/2005-4557.html

“Only four countries allow same-sex marriage; the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Belgium, and South Africa. The state of Massachusetts in the US also allows same-sex marriage.” It may be better to read ‘allow’ as ‘recognize’.

*(So why is yaoi popular with Japanese women, anyway? There’s actually a detailed study about that somewhere. And, according to that author, it’s really not what you think.)

Life has just been so TIRING lately, and going back over Syncope has been surprising…

A late “happy new year” to everyone.

Just a little update on the state of this: I had run into a plot obstacle so I had been trying to research into it. After all, I want certain setting aspects to be either probable or “quite possible” since certain parts of the plot are kinda “huh, really?”

With that in mind, I had been researching how Japanese corporations deal with each other because the b2b culture is very different from Western so-called ideals of capitalism. Yeah. I’m using Japanese corporate structure as a huge setting, so I’d like just a tiny bit of realism.

Honestly, one of my biggest pet peeves with people writing about other cultures in fanfic circles is the complete failure and disrespect to understand differences and realism. Oh, “Syncope” is hardly realistic, but I mean, for example, heavily using “yakuza” as a plot device in a middle school. It feels kinda cheap.

Anyway! This is going to be an interesting year for me. I hope it’ll be a good year for everyone. OH HEY, IT’S ELECTION YEAR IN THE U.S. THIS IS SLIGHTLY IMPORTANT!

Note to self: When printing out over sixty pages of this thing, don’t nab a bunch of random pages in between while it’s printing just to see the quality of print… BECAUSE YOU FORGOT TO PUT PAGE NUMBERS ON EVERYTHING. Duh.

Hmm, I don’t think I asked this yet. Is anyone aware of canon information (artbook, drama CD, whatever, official site, etc.) concerning what Nao’s mom did for a living or if she had a job at all?

P.S.: TAXES.

P.P.S.: Have you ever edited a term book for four authors? I am. Mind you these are other students; I am not impressed with the language quality. “Wow.” I don’t want to be an editor ever. The stress and general annoyance might be insurmountable. ^_^

Finals long over. Had a short vacation; went home for a bit.

And now I have to actually reread everything to get back into the groove. Seriously. Be patient. :P This sort of thing takes a lot of planning and the correct mindset.

I may need to coax Muse-chan back, though; she must have finally wandered off into the wilderness when she couldn’t get my attention during midterm projects. ^_^;

Edited 9/19: XD

I finally found a hack that’s supposed to show userpics in the Generator style, so I’m going back to that. Yup! But I’m still playing with it. Such ugly code…

Things to know: One reason why I ended up buying a one-year subscription is to have the comment page styles the same as the front page. This way, I could show the Index links on every page of my Livejournal (in case someone got to a specific entry, in the old style the front page link isn’t that obvious and they couldn’t go directly to a specific section).

I also require “quick reply” functionality, and only a handful of Livejournal styles have this capability: Generator, Unearthed, Tranquility II, The Boxer, Smooth Sailing, Gradient Strip, and Expressive. You can see the style previews here: http://www.livejournal.com/customize/preview.bml

The only technical problem with this Generator style is that the width is fixed. I have it set to 1000 pixels, thinking that most people are on 1024. I’m not sure if that scrolls or not, because my resolution is 1280. (To be honest, if you have a lot of horizontal scrolling issues, you REALLY should try out Opera 9. I love my friend forever for that.)

I think I found a hack that forces this style to use a percentage width instead of a hard-coded number (yay!), so it’s set at 90% or something. Hopefully that works a lot better.