Koi Koi!

Before watching Summer Wars (an excellent movie, by the way), I had only a dim awareness of the traditional Japanese game of hanafuda.  Well, to be honest, about all I knew about it was that three of the characters from Naruto (Shikamaru, Ino, and Chōji) were named for a particular hand in hanafuda (ino-shika-cho).  But Summer Wars’ charm provoked an interest in hanafuda, and after learning one variant of the game thanks to a flash animation version I found online, I decided to buy myself a deck of hanafuda cards.  For about $36 (including shipping costs), I got a set of two decks of hanafuda cards through Amazon, made in Japan and distributed by The House of Rice.

Wednesday Wallpaper

Tōsaka Rin, from Fate/Stay Night

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It Starts With a Shebang

# I decided to try my hand at writing a simple shell script.  One click on a specific icon on my top panel in Ubuntu, and my novel is compressed (currently, from about 479.5 KB to 108 KB), and that compressed file is saved to two different locations, one on my primary hard drive, the other on my storage hard drive.  It is rather simple, but it serves its purpose well enough.  Here it is:

Wednesday Wallpaper

Hanekawa Tsubasa, from Bakemonogatari

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Preview: Rikuzentakata: Book One of the Mecha Monogatari

And now, a preview of my upcoming novel.

Originally, I was writing under the working title of The Mecha Monogatari: Twilight of the Fierce God, but having written thirty thousand words of the narrative, that title just doesn’t seem right, so now, I have changed the working title to Rikuzentakata: Book One of the Mecha Monogatari.  Inspired by mecha anime like Gundam, Evangelion, Full Metal Panic, and the like, Rikuzentakata follows a young mecha pilot named Enokido Harumi during her first few days of real combat, culminating in a stand against Japan’s attackers around a small town in southern Iwate prefecture, the titular Rikuzentakata.

Everything in this preview is subject to change before the finalized novel; most likely I will need to tweak some of the more specific bits to make them all match up.  In any case, without further ado, on to the preview:

Wednesday Wallpaper

Yōko Littner, from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

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On the Subject of Writing

I’ve been working on my novel (working title: The Mecha Monogatari: Twilight of the Fierce God) since April 22, a mere twenty days, but I’ve been making respectable progress, I think.  Writing a novel with a length in the tens of thousands of words, seems like a pretty daunting task, and it is.  But ever since completing the National Novel Writing Month challenge in November 2009 (which resulted in my first more-or-less complete novel, Hecatonchires), I knew I could do it.  After all, I wrote fifty-seven thousand words in twenty-three days.  All I needed to do was have a concrete goal.

Wednesday Wallpaper

Akiyama Mio, Tainaka Ritsu, Kotobuki Tsumugi, and Hirasawa Yui from K-ON!

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