To the benefit of my bank account and my sense of making a useful contribution to society in my small self-absorbed way, but to the detriment of my NaNo, my immune system, and my personal hygiene. It felt like finals week all over again, but with fewer essays and more small children.
I also started a new volunteer gig (local H1N1 information line). It's not particularly hard or complicated work - the most challenging part is remembering to get the caller's info for the records, because if you let them ask their questions right away, they get the information they want and then hang up, which is awkward on our end. The best part of the job from my point of view is wearing the little phone headset and pretending I'm giving people advice over the codec.

Two ideas for future Vampire: the Masquerade characters:

1. Eccentric Toreador video game auteur. Mostly because it'd be a chance to actually do something with all my "hey, this might make an interesting game" ideas, and I like the idea of playing a Toreador who isn't a stereotypical aesthete. I can't decide whether she spends obligatory Toreador mixers being entertained by all the bishieness or bored to tears and wishing she'd smuggled her DS in. Her most famous creation (before she got vamped, which slowed her career down a bit) was a third person shooter whose plot was mostly centered around the philosophical implications of consciousness-uploading and the question of what makes a person, but which got its fanbase because you played as a lesbian robot in a latex space suit and could, if you chose, defeat a giant mecha by ramming into it with your spaceship and sending it tumbling into a volcano.
2. Nosferatu rock musician. She'd actually have very good social stats (apart from the whole zero appearance thing), have a stylized horror aesthetic in her performance persona, and make a point of never publicly appearing "out of character" (at least not unless she's pretending to be someone else entirely and using Obfuscate), so the humans she encounters probably think she's just using elaborate prosthetics and stage makeup (which she may very well be, although if she is, they're to make her look *more* human.)
This might not work, depending on how close to White Wolf fluff the game is being run (because some writing suggests that the Nossies keep their heads down for a reason), but I'd think you could work it in somehow. Maybe she was a performer before the Embrace, and her Sire got a building dropped on him and fell into a coma before he could tell about the Niktuku and all that weird stuff.

I've discovered that when I don't know where my NaNo is going and need some padding, I tend to have my characters sort of talk to themselves and reflect on what's going on and what they think they should do about it. (As opposed to, say, describe what everyone's wearing or the furniture.) I wonder if this is the fallout from all the history essays I wrote in college.

Fille du Regiment was fun, and it was great to see horitsu_kami again, but every time Marie started singing about how she was born on the battlefield or some such thing I kept having MGS flashbacks.
I also now have a couple of pet mice. This should be an interesting experience, because I've had hamsters, gerbils, and guinea pigs before, and my mom's kept rats, but mice are new to us. They're so tiny that in a weird way it's kind of intimidating. I don't want to accidentally squash them.

The thing about Ultimate Showdowns of Ultimate destiny, or even smaller "character from fandom A vs character from fandom B" battles, is that you have to decide which universe's rules are going to apply. And this doesn't just apply to things like what sort of magic or phlebotinum works. For instance, being Lawful Good is a lot less fatal on the Discworld than in Westeros (as long as you stay away from the Lawful Stupid side of things), even allowing for the series' drastically different body counts.

Have decided that my NaNo won't be "gritty social realism about coal miners" after all. Of course, in my case, "gritty social realism" would probably translate to something like: "The epic saga of a ruggedly handsome, charismatic union organizer who is secretly dying of some horrible lung disease or another and is secretly in love with his best friend."

It always amuses me when an ingredients label has "natural __ flavor" on it, when the flavor in question is of something that's a composite product. Okay, so natural orange flavor would, logically, come from oranges, but what about "natural gingerbread flavor" or "natural fruit punch flavor"? I'd imagine they'd probably be made by putting a bunch of preexisting flavors together (here's your ginger extract, and here's your quintessence of molasses, and so on), but I keep picturing the manufacturers putting a bunch of gingerbread or fruit punch into a giant still.
(I have heard Monstera deliciosa described as having a "mixed tropical fruit" flavor, but from what I know about the plant, it needs a warm climate and isn't terribly productive even then, so turning it into extract would probably not be the highest and best use.)

I'll be doing NaNo again this year, and I have about six hours to decide whether I should do:
A. "Metal Gear Solid in a Pink Bishoujo Ghetto, only it will probably wind up being more like one of those quirky slice of life series because I'm not that confident in my ability to write action"
B. More stuff with Valeriya, or some of the other characters in her universe
C. One of my other ideas (Canadian girl-band, vaguely Eva-ish mecha thing, JRPGish epic fantasy novel, retired rat-person supersoldier turned detective)
D. Gritty social realism about coal miners

The problem with writing any characters that are strongly inspired by preexisting ones is that you can fall into a sort of adaptational Uncanny Valley - where your OC has enough traits (at least superficial ones) in common with their source of inspiration that you can tell who they're based on, but are different enough in some aspect of their personality, concept, or mannerisms that they seem like a *really OOC* version of the source character.
I'm probably overthinking things, but those adaptations that latch onto the most obvious traits of a character or work while ignoring or misinterpreting what make it interesting in the first place can be so exquisitely awful that I'm a bit wary about this whole issue.

I have some writing up here at armsandthewoman. It's part of a larger project, and currently consists mostly of Valeriya being snarky and some establishment of the setting.

If wikipedia is to be believed, Takarazuka's going to do a production of Casablanca. I don't know much about it, but the prospect of Rick Blaine being played by a butch Japanese girl just strikes me as having the potential to be ridiculously hot.
They've also done Rosenkavalier, which does not particularly surprise me, given what the original opera is like.

Apparently there's a modern-day gay porn adaptation of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" out there - I wonder if the plot part is any good. There's a lot of really dumb erotica in the world, but the premise seems promising.
My mom's been reading diet books, and people in my family have the habit of sharing interesting bits of what we read with anyone in the vicinity, so I've been learning about all the different theories and practices of weight loss out there. Reading about the Drinking Man's Diet was rather impressive in a "Wow, it certainly does take all kinds" sort of way, since I wouldn't eat like that if you paid me.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have such a horrible palate for alcohol, because booze nerds seem to enjoy themselves so much geeking out over all the little details of vintage and variety and peculiarities of flavor, and to me it all tastes more or less like cleaning fluid.

Last night I dreamed that I was in charge of supervising a bunch of little kids (I think they were around six years old) as they played Team Fortress 2 - which in their case meant dressing up as the Scout, Heavy, et cetera and running around assaulting each other with Nerf weapons. My job was to help them put together their costumes, find safe toy weapons appropriate to the various characters, and keep the little rascals from killing each other. I know I found a foam bat for the Scout and a bow and velcro-tipped arrows (that would stick to the clothes of people who got shot) for the Sniper.

Which have come up and gone into our garden, and into our flower bed, and into our bean patch, and among our square crimson velvet peas, and between our broccoli, and through our anti-weed mulch, and among our lettuces, and yea, even a few where we actually planted them. (But none in our kneading-troughs yet. Just in heaps on the counter.)
Anybody want some?

In a weird way, Madlax reminds me as much of MGS as Escape From New York did, albeit in non-overlapping ways. There's a supertalented mercenary teamed up with a computer scientist to fight a powerful secret conspiracy and have homoerotic subtext, there's a glamorous sniper woman who has a weird sort of stalker with a crush/worthy opponent thing going on towards the mercenary, there's a gray-haired teenage ninja, the omniscient conspiracy of vagueness has a male operative who, it turns out, is really only in it for the sake of his own agenda - you get the idea.
It also has a higher trippiness quotient than anything I've ever read/watched, short of House of Leaves, although Madlax's brand of weirdness doesn't involve much in the way of postmodernism or playing with the fourth wall, but makes up for it with more psychological/supernatural ominousness.

Watched "Escape From New York" yesterday with pukingtoreador. I enjoyed it, and it wasn't quite what I expected (slower paced, and less of an over the top testosterone fest). It was nice that the major female character wasn't there to have awkwardly written sexual tension with Plissken or get raped and murdered by the bad guys just to show how evil they were and give the protagonist the incentive to kill a whole mess of people. Kurt Russell was very manly and stubbly and monocular, as promised, but I didn't find Plissken that compelling a character. He was interesting enough within the context of the movie, but not really the sort of character who inspires a desire in me to find out what other fans think he eats for breakfast. Compared to Solid Snake (I'm thinking of him as he is in MGS1, as that's the incarnation I'm most familiar with), who is my only other reference point for this particular archetype, Plissken came across as rather less sympathetic. This probably fits into the concept of moe somehow - Snake, for all his cranky-manly-man-in-his-thirties-ness, has it (at least if you like socially inept male tsundere), while Plissken doesn't.

The weather kami have been with us. The heat wave finally broke in early August, which was nice in its way (you could do things outdoors in the afternoon without a parasol and bottle of Gatorade), but also meant a return to default Western Washington weather patterns. A little rain isn't a bad thing, considering how dry it was in June and July, but we had Vacation Bible School this week (my mother got drafted as the Bible story lady, and I got drafted as her assistant), and keeping large groups of 3-5 year olds in a confined space for three hours with no breaks to run around is the sort of thing likely to end badly. But fortunately, however uninspiring the weather was the rest of the day, it always cleared up (or at least was not actively precipitating) for the preschool recess. This may very well have preserved the last vestiges of what passes for my sanity.
Preschoolers are a fun age group, but they are vastly easier to work with in small groups with a familiar routine. And even then, it can take it out of you.

Now that this is over, I'm free to sleep in again and spend my time pondering questions like "What is Chava's favorite philosophical school?" (I've currently decided on the Stoics, but that's mostly because I have the greatest familiarity with Classical philosophy, and she's too cranky to be an Epicurean and not mystical enough for Platonism) rather than "How likely is that kid to take a flying leap off of the piece of playground equipment she's currently climbing and fall on her face?"

Watched "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" (or, more accurately, "The chain-smoking biseinen who only develops much of a personality beyond "amoral laconic badass" in the last hour, the Revolver Ocelot reverse-Expy who's less gay but even more of a creep, and the chatty Mexican guy who, despite being treated with some of the conventions of a comic relief character, was really pretty darn badass") this evening. It was interesting, and impressive for what it was, but not really my usual taste in entertainment. I think I prefer stories where at least a few of the characters actually like each other. Some of the music was awesome, though.
Among other things, I saw the story as a sort of deconstruction of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, given that everyone of importance seems to have at least a trace of it, and it really just causes everybody a whole lot of trouble.

There comes a time in the creative process when a writer has to decide "is my protagonist a clone or not?" Or maybe this is only true for me, Hideo Kojima, and the fine people at Marvel Comics, but it's still something relevant to my current situation.
( Hi, mom... er, DNA donor )

The current hot weather is making my mom and I wish that we'd planted more marginal warm-season crops this year. However, if we'd planted sweet corn and miniature cantalopes, it might be sixty-five degrees and raining (not that that sounds so bad right now). Nature can be contrary that way.