Thursday 20 March 2003

Pic of the day: Sometimes it feels like time suddenly speeds up, leaving me behind, immobile. (And sometimes it's the other way around...)

Blurred days

Not only am I running almost a day late on my journal; my hand hurts too. From my archive I see that this is common at this time of the year, and I am sure it has been worse. Right now, an obvious reason is my writing. Typing is always a bit hard on my hand. Some keyboards are worse than others, and I typed my recent "shounen ai" story on the Computer Who Hates My Hand. You would think I knew better after several years.

The short story is finished, incidentally. It is very mild indeed, I don't think most children would find it strange at all. And there is magic, of course. If it were an anime, it would be kind of in between Naruto and Someday's Dreamers when it comes to the reality it describes: A world much like ours, but with moderate amounts of magic. The magic is an important part of Eishi's life, but for the story (stories) it is more a tool to make things happen. Things don't just happen if you're just some nice guy with no magic. Well, unless you have an online journal.

***

Yes, one of the things that eat my time is that I have met someone on the Net.
(Audience: "Someone?")
Well, a woman to be more exact.
(Audience: "Ooh! Aah!")
No, no. Not like that. She is madly in love with someone else. Aren't they all? It seems that adults are either madly in love or planning a divorce, these days. Sometimes both, I guess. Anyway, this person is showing up on ICQ late at night to ask me strange questions. Or, if I am really lucky, she sends e-mail instead. But that is rare, even though it is so much simpler. And because of these questions, I realize how little people know (or at least understand) about me, even after 4x365 lengthy journals.

I guess if you only read a random sample of my journal, and especially if you look too much at the pictures, you can get some pretty wild impressions, depending on which entries you stumble upon. You may think I am a remote and unapproachable guru (this seems to be most common) or a lonely man looking for love (runner up) or a practicing mage ("tell me how to become a werewolf plz"). I guess you might also think I'm a slightly retarded homo, or an online gameshop, though I can't remember anyone actually saying so...

I guess some of the strange and seemingly unprovoked entries since late February are results of this person's soul-searching in my soul. The first of them was on February 27th, where I summed up some of my thoughts on religion. There have been more of them since. But of course she is not the only thing on my mind, so don't read strange things into everything now! It's not like "everything I do, I do it for you".

***

My anime fad has lasted longer than most of them; I am still downloading amateur translations of Japanese animations. Decent stuff, mostly teen romance stuff with a sprinkle of magic, or the other way around. I understand there are some creepy and indecent things out there, but I am not into them. I get my amateur translations ("fansub") through AnimeSuki.com. Thanks to ADSL, I now have several hours worth of anime on my hard disk that I haven't watched yet. And the backlog increases a bit for each day.

Actually the anime that I am downloading right now is one I don't plan to see. Kodomo no Omocha ("Child's Toy") was my first love in anime, two years ago. Back then it was a rather low-resolution RealMedia file that I could download even without broadband, although it took all night. I still remember it, though, so I won't need to watch the first ten or so episodes. (I took a look at episode 1, and of course it was the way I remembered it, only with sharper pictures now.) I am downloading it anyway, in case someone need me to share it later. Or perhaps I will watch it again some years from now, when the memory has faded. If I am still around, some years from now. I'd like to, but of course we have no written guarantee.

I've played a little Morrowind lately, the single player role playing game. Since my bandwidth has been mostly used by the anime trafficking, I have preferred offline games instead of online. So Morrowind instead of Dark Age of Camelot. And of course The Sims, in order to harvest screen shots.

Work still eats up almost half the time I am awake, if you count the commute. You probably shouldn't, though, as I now sometimes fall asleep on the bus both to and from work. There is always something interesting to do when I am at home. Always, always, all the time, no pause, until I stagger to bed late at night, already asleep on my feet. And then I wake up, and do it all over again. It's all a blur ... Blurred days and nights.