Author: Ky

Happy…

Halloween and all related nomenclature for this particular seasonal holiday.

I won’t finish chapter 1.12 by tonight after all. Parties and all that. But soon. ^_^

Muse-chan wants to dress up as George W. Bush. I don’t think so.

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Document maintenance

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I had a hard drive wipe. My computer had gotten a virus. I was in college, and rather than try to clean it out (perhaps they couldn’t), the campus tech support decided to reformat the entire thing.

I fancied myself an archivist back then, but I was still inexperienced. I had all my school papers not only from those college courses but all previous papers through middle school stored on that hard drive. But it was just one hard drive. It never occured to me to use any external media of any sort.

Let’s just say I was pretty unhappy for a long time.

Right now, “Syncope” exists in four–yes, FOUR–complete forms. I have fully formatted versions on my laptop, my PC, a USB flash drive, and then the current online version. Then I have every individual chapter plus its matching notes in triplicate, since those are online-formatted with tags and individually uploaded during updates. Three copies of my full outline. Three copies of every single research piece I’ve scraped up over the years.

Excessive? Perhaps.* But when you lose a fifty-page senior thesis that was your crowning achievement in high school, you might react the same way.

Lesson of the day: For feck’s sake, BACK IT UP. ^_^

* I think a document comparison thingie of some kind would be easier. Hmm.

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1.12 in the works…

I’ve finally completed the full chapter outline, which is a big deal for me. ^_^; Having completed a contracting job helps with the whole time thing.

While doing that, I’ve also been writing various dialogue exchanges and narrative snippets into Part 2–Shizuru’s relatives and such. Fun stuff.

But back to the task at hand… I’m aiming to complete chapter 1.12 and thus Part 1 by the end of October.

Plugging along.

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It’s over.

Sit down, kids.

Reading Rainbow is over.

It’s a sad day (week or so) and a sad reminder on the state of true literacy in good ol’ America. It’s not enough to teach the A-B-Cs of how to read and write when no stupid American kid wants to read or write. They’re dumbing down everything, everything, everything.

True literacy includes the ability to understand deeper levels of meaning in all manner of written works (including academic) and concepts that aren’t so light that a cat’s sneeze would blow away the so-called plot. Honestly.

What made Reading Rainbow so good for a television show (there’s some irony in that) was that it taught kids like me to really embrace reading books. What do youths embrace now in this country?

That’s right.

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LJ account

I’ve decided not to renew the subscription to that, since I’m paying for this domain and hosting anyway. I think the only difference it (lack of subscription) will make is that the post pages won’t be styled and… not sure about the gallery.

That reminds me, of course, that I need to transfer the little gallery over here for a complete move. Oops!

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Squib #4: How much do you invest in your work?

“Dedication”

Occasionally, one of my professors would point this out to me. I would invest far too much into the research project I was writing at the time and do too much research, find too much information, and then just write too much, covering too much ground or going too deep. This would sometimes lead to a paper or project being late, but it was still good, and I would still receive a good grade. A much simpler analogy is the “Wikipedia clicker,” someone who starts on a specific topic page and just keeps clicking out, out, out, absorbing more, more, more indirect information. A couple of my friends have that problem. [cackle] I would joke that they need a parental lock on Wikipedia, but that only leads to a pot-kettle comparison.
Continue reading Squib #4: How much do you invest in your work?

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Waaaaiiit a minute. (Natsuki & Shizuru @ garden)

In reviewing my stuff, I don’t think I nailed down exactly how old Shizuru was when she met Natsuki in the garden. Eh?

Natsuki’s Prelude as translated by Apollyon indicates that Natsuki knew Shizuru while she was in her 3rd year middle school and Shizuru was in 2nd year high school. So they met each other before that point, anyway.

And then in chapter 1.3, I mysteriously indicated that Natsuki has known Shizuru for about four years up to that point in the story. It’s mysterious because I don’t remember at all how I came up with that number. Whuh?

Anyone have thoughts on this? I have this little chart I’ve been trying to fill out as a general age timeline:

School year Age range Notes
h3 17(18) Anime: Shizuru is 18 in this year
h2 16(17) Prelude: Shizuru was in this year
h1 15(16) Anime: Natsuki is 17 in this year
m3 14(15) Prelude: Natsuki knew Shizuru since at least this year
m2 13(14) ?
m1 12(13) ?

Let’s see. I remember in the anime flashback that Shizuru was wearing… well, not the middle school sailor uniform, so they had to be across school levels. I suppose one conclusion is that Shizuru was in h1 and Natsuki in m2 at the time. Hmmm. That would make it technically “three years” in 1.3, then.

Well, okay. I typed all that out and ended up answering things myself. Guess I’ll change that bit. ^_^; (This timeline is kinda important for Part 2 as well, I suppose.)

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Blah-y Bits.

Honestly, I should just make a T-shirt and get it over with:

OMG talky bits! D: Noooo

…I guess there wasn’t much point to this post. ^_^;
But I’m busy researching and outlining and all that. Maybe I’ll post that squib I have saved up.

It’s been a couple weeks since I posted 1.11, and by now I can’t help but wonder if it just slipped through the cracks due to the end of the school year for most people or something. Maybe my timing’s off, and people are off gallivanting across Europe! (I hate you!)

Carry on.

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Trends for Japanese women–older research

I’ve been digging into my bookmarked research sites and downloading/saving/reading a lot more new articles concerning various aspects of Japanese culture, this time as it pertains to women.

Here’s an older article (2004) that people should find interesting. Note the irony in my “older” label for it–2004 really wasn’t long ago at all, but according to this, Japanese women hoping to be successful outside of being housewives have little hope in finding Japanese male mates who would support them. Has much changed in a mere five years? I doubt it.

But I will take issue with this paragraph in the article:

To be fair, not all the blame for female angst here can be laid on Japanese men. The government has been slow to enforce equal opportunity laws, and both pay and the glass ceiling in most Japanese corporations remain low for women. Recession has hampered longer maternity leave and other family-friendly policies.

If 90%-plus of the Japanese government and higher corporate structures are being run by men, then the above is definitely self-contradictory. (It seems a lot of people have a general inability to connect the dots in logic, honestly.)

Whew. Going through this particular leg of research isn’t just time-consuming but pretty painful. I’m researching many subtopics from laws to business structure to higher education to cultural social expectations to criminal statistics like rape. I really feel sorry for Japanese girls and women, even if it’s through a Western lens. Granted, things should still improve here on this side of the pond. ^^

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