I’m not very happy right now, and I don’t like it. I’m tired of this everpresent feeling of doom. I can’t keep up with current technological trends; I feel non-unique; I’m worried about money; and I can’t make plans.

I’m really really unhappy and I have to change that now. I refuse to live in this state.

I discovered what blogs are today. We’re all the same, you know. I know that you sometimes feel unique, but surf for blogs. See how people cry out into the universe with their tiny voices. “Here I am! Here I am!” before falling to the ground, sobbing, “Here I am.” We’re all children seeking love, attention, approval…

Validation.

There is a quote by Stanley Kubrik which I recently discovered: “The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”

I’m dwelling on morbid stuff…. I’ve got to crawl out of this funk.

So, I’ve been working a lot on the manga translations link page of the Himechan pages:
http://www.wizardmoon.com/himechan/other_translations.html

All the other compilation pages out there are out-dated by about one to two years, ie. no one has maintained them or kept them up to date for the last one or two years. Now, these other compilation pages only had about 100 or so links at the most, so I thought there weren’t very many manga translations out on the net.

Boy, was I wrong about that.

Three days of intensive work later, I have over 1100 entries on that page! I had no idea. I mean, I know the internet is vast, but I still didn’t realize manga translation sites were so popular.

However, that wasn’t the biggest revelation during this project. I realized that I was not keeping up with current net hipness and available technology. I first had an inkling of this when I would talk in-person with fellow anime fans here in Austin. Everyone is talking about digisubs. Apparently, VHS fansubbing is going out of style, and now everyone is downloading digisubs off the net.

I don’t know where you download these, what the format is, nothing. I think you can find them on usenet, irc, ftp… I don’t know. I’m behind. But I was already aware of that and had a tickling at the back of my mind that I had to research this new source of fansubs.

Well, these kids are also doing fan-translation manga where they actually scan the manga in and replace the Japanese words with the English words. They are called “scanlations.” And they are beautiful. They obviously take a lot of work, but they have the work all divided out. One person does the translations, one person does the scanning, and another person does the editting.

And the sites are really lovely! These people do really great website design. Don’t believe me? Check out a few:

These are a couple with scanlations. There are a lot more than just these two.
http://www.anime-anime.com/
http://www.studiorobb.com/manga.html

Anyways, here are a couple pages with beautiful layouts:
http://haneoka.net/
http://www.amalthia.net/literalx/

People had “blogs” and were using Streamload to share files. All these things that I never heard of. I felt so behind… me! I love the internet. I surf the internet on a regular basis and play with it, and I still am not keeping up.

I wondered how my kids would be different than me. I mean, I listened to heavy metal and wore awful metalhead clothes when I was a rebellious teenager. As I got older, I started hearing heavy metal as my mom did (loud annoying crap) and I quit dressing in rags. So I expected my kids to listen to some loud annoying music and dress badly.

Life is never what you expect, is it? Kids are internet-savvy and have their own internet shorthand and language. They talk to each other through their blogs or on IMs with their kid-like shorthand and create webpages to showcase their creations and thoughts. That’s how my kids will be different from me.

Looking at all those pages while creating the manga translation compilation page was very sobering. My design is weak. There are some really lovely non-professional pages out there. In fact, I would say that the best pages are non-professional because they don’t have to stay within a corporate look and feel which always has the feel of white bread.

It’s been educational and cold splash in the face.

So today is beautiful. Austin in September and October is beautiful. The sky is kissing blue and it’s 63 degrees out. There is another cool front coming in from the north today to keep the temperatures crisp and clean. I love Austin in September and October.

…. oooooo, and Halloween is coming up! :-))

I’ve been having mixed feelings of hope and intimidation. I wonder if anyone on this planet is truly at peace. I’ve always lived a very emotional life– I think it’s one of my defining traits. Emotions tumble inside me and are constantly needling at my brain.

There’s so much to do and not enough time. Clean the house, learn about mortgage loans, pack the house in preparation for a move, write my Great American Novel, find a job, make Wizard Moon fun, update my other pages, make Wizard Moon not so heavy for modem users, learn Japanese, learn to sew, organize the important papers, learn to draw better, draw more characters for Wizard Moon….

Most people I understand. I understand their motivations and desires. I understand their actions and thoughts. But people who say they are bored or who don’t have enough to do– I don’t understand them. As an adult, the world leaps with possibilities. I think children are more confined and inexperienced, so I can see how they get bored. But adults? One lifetime isn’t enough for everything I want to do.

So today is an internet day. That’ll be fun. I’m going to finally update the Himechan page and the Garden page. And I have a lot of work to do on the Wizard Moon page.

I also feel like I walk the line between egotistic and banal. Trip trip trip on a trippy little tightwire.

I wonder when I’m going to get through this “We’re all the same so what I do doesn’t matter” phase of my life. It’s a pretty suck phase.

So, Carla and I decided to concentrate on making Wizard Moon just a store. It was too much work and too large of a scope trying to make it an interactive fantasy site as well as a store. Maybe one day we’ll make it an interactive fantasy site, but for right now, we’re going to concentrate on the store part.

We both really want this idea to work. It would be a lot of fun… I guess we’ll just have to work at it and see what happens….

Dear Universe,

How have you been? How is the whole constantly expanding thing working out for you these days?

Well, the Italian work for Matt is drying up. Only a trickle of Italian water passes by his feet now, and we will very soon both be without jobs.

Well… that’s frightening.

Money money money. It always comes back to money. It’s as constant and pervasive and important as breath. That is unfortunate, but also true.

I wonder when people step over the line from wanting the amount of money you need to live comfortably and greed. Now, I’ve never had enough money to come to that crossroads myself, but I wonder if the line is faint and ambiguous, or if it is as clearly visible as an obnoxious blinking internet banner. If you had a lot of money, you could do really fun stuff and buy luxurious things. But when does it become greed? At what point does it make your mother shake her head and wonder where she went wrong?

Not that I’ll ever have that kind of money. That’s really not a particular moral quandry I expect to encounter in my life.

But anyways I’ve been thinking about money a lot. It looks like I’ll be getting a job soon. :-)) For real this time.

… and still not pregnant. *sigh*

Well, thanks for listening. I realize you have to get back to exploding stars and 4D warped space. It was nice of you take the time for a strange woman who lives on the unfashionable side of the Milky Way galaxy.

Sincerely,
Angel.