Look, a journal!

Oh yes, I keep meaning to do this and I keep forgetting.

My Shakespeare porn anthology (that I edited, I didn't write any of it myself) is finally out! It technically doesn't go live until tomorrow, but it is already sneakily available on Circlet Press's e-store, Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, AllRomanceEbooks, and the iBookstore. It was my intern project, so I don't make any money off it, but you should go buy it anyway, because I am really happy with the way it turned out! It includes stories based on A Midsummer Night's Dream (of course), Romeo & Juliet, Twelfth Night, Othello, and Cymbeline. Yes, Cymbeline. I would do short summaries, but it's late and I'm too lazy (I had the first rehearsal for a production of Pirates of Penzance tonight, which was great, but I only got back about an hour and a half ago). Seriously though, it's super cool. Tell your friends, and all that.

At the very least, you should admire this sexy, sexy cover art:



We had a hell of a lot of trouble finding cover art that was both Shakespeare-related and suggestive of erotica, and finally teal_deer trawled the depths of iStockphoto and turned up some old woodcut illustrations from editions of Shakespeare's plays from the 1700s or so. Whereupon I shoved them at my boss and went "CAN WE JUST USE THESE, THEY ARE WAY BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE I'VE FOUND AND ALSO IF I HAVE TO KEEP LOOKING FOR COVER ART I WILL CRY." And my boss was like "hmm, I don't know, these kind of look like grayish blobs at smaller resolutions, but maybe we could use one of them if it were colorized..."

So I colorized that sucker myself. (With a touchpad, no less—which, admittedly, you can kind of tell.) And the only reason that I know the first thing about Photoshop and the coloring of black and white images therein is because of all those stupid manga icons I've made for RP. The moral of this story is that pretending to be fictional characters on the internet is not simply a waste of time, but can actually teach you useful job skills! Mostly it's a waste of time, though.

Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yes, cool book. Totally buy that shit. The end.

Finally did a proper update on Serious Blog that's not a crosspost from here or... just me being silly. So in case anyone's interested in a slightly more literary treatment of my stupid anecdotes, there it is.

Not much else going on right now. Tomorrow the JETs in my area are meeting up and having a Thanksgiving dinner, and I spent the entire evening (well, night, mostly) in a wild cooking frenzy out of excitement at the prospect of feeding people other than myself, but now I'm all worried that people won't like it. I mean, the vegetable soup might be a bit bland, and it's very chunky because I don't have a food processor. And I made a huge mess of the daigaku imo (about half of them are okay and the other half are really nasty, and I can't reliably tell which is which without biting into them, so if I bring them, I run the risk of someone getting a really nasty one). At least I feel pretty good about the cheesecake.

So, I'm getting organized and attempting to get rid of stuff so as to have less things to drag around with me when I finally move out (whenever that may be). Most of this stuff I am selling, donating, or throwing away. However, I've come across some things that I don't feel I can charge money for and which no one would ever want as a donation, but which I don't want to throw away because it's in good condition and I have this niggling feeling that someone, somewhere, might have some use for it.

And I am sure you will all be flattered to hear that when I think "Who can I get to take this junk off my hands?", you, dear flist, are the ones that come to mind. Yes, all this can be yours for the low, low price of... whatever it costs to ship it! Which shouldn't be more than $3 or $4 unless you want it delivered tomorrow or you buy every single thing in this post.

Oh, and this is very not dialup-safe.

( anime/manga/video game merchandise )
( cheap jewelry )
( a book, a DVD, and two CDs )

So if by some chance you want any of that, just drop a comment here and then PM me your address and I can PM you my PayPal and it'll be good times.

And if you guessed "writing that final paper that's due on Friday," you'd be wrong. No, rather than waste my time on something as silly as that, I spent my evening... scanslating a manga. To be precise, it's a two-chapter manga based on the song "Ark" by Sound Horizon.

It's a bit sad, really, because after spending all that time translating and editing it, I have no idea what to do with it. I don't have a website, I'm not working with a scanslation group, and apparently the online manga-reading sites (onemanga et al) don't let random people upload stuff to them or anything. So I will post it here, even though I don't think any of you guys are into Sound Horizon (not that you need to be to follow it), in the hopes that someone will take pity on me and read it so I won't have to feel like my efforts were for naught. Or something.

It's... difficult to explain what it's about, really. The first chapter is about the relationship between two siblings, a pretty normal brother and his increasingly-unhinged cult-member brother-complex-having sister. Then in chapter two it takes a detour through WTFville heading straight for Gainax Ending Land and I spend the last ten pages or so going "What? ... What?" It's also science fiction(ish), not that you could really tell from that description. ... It's better than it sounds, I swear. Though I will concede that it's not for everyone.

So here's the manga (both chapters are in the zip), and as an added bonus, here's the original song and the translation thereof (from which I cribbed more than a bit when translating the manga -- hey, it's my own work, I'm allowed to recycle it).