Timewaster's Guide Archive

This is probably the thing that makes me madder than anything else: when someone at church says it is a commandment to date.

Baloney!!! It's a commandment to get married and have kids, but dating is NOT a commandment. It's NOT a God-instituted system, and it's NOT scriptural.

While I'm ranting I'll say that another related thing that ticks me off is how often they give a chastity talk in church, yet never actually help people find someone to marry. I estimate that I am 100,000 times more likely to be involved in a car accident in the next 5 years than I am to have sex. I would rather they spend time providing the opportunity for sex (i.e. with someone I am married to, meaning that they provide some assistance on that wise) than spend so much time telling me not to. Am I alone in this? Every time I sit through one of those talks I cannot fathom how to apply it to my own life since I am in approximately zero danger of getting anywhere close to having sex.

Anyway about dating: here's what else sucks: the pressure. All the "anxiously engaged" talks. And the fact that there's a huge double standard. Girls are not expected to exert any effort toward getting married. Guys are always ragged on.

Hey, if there's someone I would be interested in dating, I will ask that person out. I estimate that approximately 50% of the girls I have gone on dates with frequent this message board, so they can attest to this fact. And I HAVE actually been asked on a date by one person, who is also here. (And by the way, all the girls I dated here are married now.) But this is basically a statistical anomaly.

In all the singles wards I've been in, never once has a girl from them asked me out. Yet I make an effort to go to all the functions. I go to ward prayer, break the fast, family home evening, linger longer, ward temple trips, and other things of that sort. I could be staying at home reading books or using the internet, but no, I take the effort to do all those things. But today in Priesthood meeting (after the sisters in the ward shockingly provided the Elder's quorum with Father's Day banana splits as reminders that we should be fathers someday and in return for the dumb practice of giving all the sisters flowers on Mother's Day [no mention of the even stupider practice of giving flowers to all the sisters on Valentine's Day, something I refuse to participate in whenever a ward I'm in does it--come on, Valentine's Day is only for women?]) where the Heber J. Grant lesson was on the value of hard work, the person giving the lesson started talking about how we need to work hard to date, and someone said that all those things I mentioned earlier (FHE, etc) do not count as working toward marriage. The nerve! And THEN someone threw out the "dating is a commandment" line. Baloney. Balderdash.

I'm thinking of starting a website to expound my views on this subject. Unless someone knows of one that already exists. Anyone?

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There's actually quite a few series that are novels first. Recently, Twelve Kingdoms/Twelve Countries/Juuni Kokuki is a popular example of this.

Yeah, I'm talking about the novels. Not the manga. There have been various manga versions  brought over already. I think one may have even originated in the US, but I'm not sure about that.

All text...well, there are some manga-style pictures, but less than 10 in the book. This is pretty typical for mass-market serial novels in Japan.

The TOKYOPOP version is scheduled to hit the streets in September. Pretty quick for a novel compared to other publishers...

I didn't watch the whole first series but I do remember cracking up the times we watched it at Brandon's place.

About the books, they're not earthshaking great literature or anything. If you laughed at the anime you'll probably laugh at the books. They're short. Very short, actually--around 40,000 words.

The slayers world has some interesting cosmology, but not much comes through in the first book. It barely hints at future events. It also has an interesting magic system which isn't explained much at all in this one either. The rest of the world is fairly standard role-playing fantasy fare.

It's got some funny characters though. Oh, and the books are all written in first person from Lina's point of view. And there's a fair amount of "talking to the reader"...something to be aware of if you don't like that sort of thing. But the reader she's talking to seems to be someone from her universe rather than ours.

I've been doing most of my work on printouts so far but last week I edited two scripts on the computer. It was very annoying and took far longer than I liked--I was editing the rewrite of the manga translation and comparing it with the translation to make sure nothing got munged, and also with the book in hand to make sure nothing got missed. But I'm not sure printing out the script would have been faster. Probably not, since all the changed would have to be entered anyway, and there were a lot.

I do greatly prefer working on stuff that's printed out, but it's easier on the layout people and saves time (for them) if the text is corrected before it's laid out in the balloons. I highly doubt I'll catch everything though until I do see a laid out copy.

no one commented on my "deep-seeded"

Today I learned that "moreso" is not a word. I was very very surprised. It's not even discussed in my usage dictionary!

It's got a 5% hit ratio on google, but many of the "more so" hits I would not replace with "moreso."

This is a pretty cool article over at Locus. I haven't read the whole thing but here's a link:

http://locusmag.com/2004/Reviews/06Ward_Manga.html

As you may know I'm now working at TOKYOPOP. There've been a few times various of you have had ideas or stories and people have said "that would make a good anime." As manga's basically the non-animated version of anime...well...

Purist definitions aside, TOKYOPOP is wanting to expand into original manga. They run a recurring Rising Stars of Manga contest and also have an open submissions policy. You should try out! They don't go for people who just write scripts, but there's various artists out there who have much better art than storytelling ability. You may be able to find some to go with your writing! I don't know much about that scene myself but try, I dunno, deviantart maybe.

With Rising Stars of Manga the story is supposed to be self-contained, but open submissions don't really have much in the way of policy (but check the page).

The TOKYOPOP submissions page is here: http://tokyopop.com/aboutus/submissions.php
Rising Stars of Manga page is here: http://tokyopop.com/news/mangatalent/index.php

at arstechnica they just have a separate forum for the news post discussions.

isn't it true also that earlier versions of Windows can't use 200 GB drives (single partition) correctly? But if it's making clunking noises that's not likely an issue.