I can say that I am definitely liking the 2003 Astro Boy series. Picked it up on Sunday when I was out with The Girl as a bit of a YAY CLASS IS OVER present to myself. It doesn't come in subtitles, but the voice-acting is about regular American cartoon normal, which means it's not Oscar-winning but the actors didn't phone in their lines in one take like some anime dubs. They picked a really weird one for Dr. Tenma... he reminds me a little of a phone sex operator. XD I've noticed some of the romanizations of the names are different, and the 2003 series lacks some of the really depressing moments of the 1980's version.

Miso has been dubbed adorable by one of The Girl's coworkers.

I am envious of the NaNo participants, but realistically there's no way I can participate this year with moving and packing to do on top of my usual insane workload. I might still get off my butt and write something, though. It's been an age since I actually sat down and wrote stories, and doing a little comment flashfic for glitterbats makes me want to do something cool again. Maybe when this all-day headache goes away.

I'm having fun being a paladin. I'm going to spec her holy and take healing for a spin, since I enjoy being DPS and tanking definitely drives me up a wall. I haven't healed in years, though, and my last healie character was a shadow-specced priest, so this will be interesting. Moose even quit Demon Soul in disgust and rolled on my server on Alliance side and is considering bringing his badass prot warrior over and faction-changing to play with the rest of us gaiz. Hey, his tank will have a healer if I can settle down and play for a while.

Tomorrow I may or may not be seeing the new Astro Boy movie with The Girl. We know going in that it's going to be hella Americanized, and a lot depends on how bushwhacked we both are by the end of the day. It does, however, make a good excuse to show off Uran-chan. Alas, she is not in the new movie. Which is a double-alas since they'd be obligated to give her superpowers too in the Girls Can So Kick Butt Law of the mid-90's

I have also learned today that Miso is a nut for tuna fish, to the point of repeatedly trying to climb into the sink in order to lick the dishes for the PRECIOUS PRECIOUS REMAINS OF TUNA OM NOM NOM.

And holycrap the new layout is full of ALLCAPS.

Sleeeeeeepy day. I think I'm going to watch some more Dai-Guard after this post amd veg out tonight.

Vet adventure went well. We had hella fleas (both cat and apartment have been treated and are itch-free) and a minor ear infection from ear mites that I get to treat with drops twice a day. And ear gunk, but that was cleaned up at the vet's. Otherwise his bill of health is clean, and barring anything from the poo test we won't need to come back until next April for shots. Miso does not like the ear drops, but I can headlock him long enough to get them in his ears and he keeps coming back for scritches because he's a hedonist like that, so it works out.

I have ceded the top of the cabinet above the fridge. I have a water gun for the places he's not allowed to go. :D It's an impressive generic super soaker! I also ended up getting takeout, some cheap-ass cookbooks, and a present for The Girl while I was out. I cannot resist picking up lots of weird crap at Five Below.

A little less than two weeks left until Otakon. It's been such a wild summer the convention's kind of been slowly sneaking up on me. Thankfully my replacement shirt for my costume arrived in the mail today (the old one still fits, but it's a little yellowy and there are a couple odd black marks on the shoulders undoubtedly caused by wearing it in last year's costume) and I have only to spike the wig and I'll be set. I'll get the wig when I'm at something closer to one week left, though, since hair spray does lose its grip after a while and I can't find a decent spiking tutorial that doesn't just boil down to "hairspray lolz!" (If any of you cosplayers out there know a relatively fool-proof method for spiking wig hair into something relatively fuss-free, gimmie a holler. I'm cosplaying Phoenix Wright-- see icon.)

Sink Cat has a name now. It's Miso. He needed a Japanese name after his ninja antics last night, but I didn't want anything stupid sounding or pretentious. There were actual ninja antics involved-- I will probably upload them later since I made sure to take a couple embarrassing pictures of them.

He is going to the vet for his wellness checkup in about an hour. Wish me luck, gaiz.

In other news, I've finally gotten around to reading some of my backlog of manga. The Ace Attorney manga, which is a compilation and NOT the serial manga released in Japan only, is really adorable and the second volume was nothing but stories revolving around Miles Edgeworth. (The picture from the icon is from that volume of the manga, actually, but the bear in question wasn't driving.) XD I'm also finally starting in on xxxHoLic, of which I bought the first three volumes at Otakon last year after watching a few episodes of the anime. It's got lots of CLAMP adorableness with a dash of Petshop of Horrors style occult-ness. The first Petshop series, too, since there's some death and destruction involved.

Both books are Del Ray manga, and they're a pretty new company to the block, but I think I really love their translations. They make a point to simply transliterate the Japanese honorifics rather than omit them or try an imperfect translation, with a little note at the beginning explaining to people what the different honorifics mean. It really helps to preserve the tenor of the different conversations and makes it real damn easy to keep track of character relationships. They also have note sections at the end of each manga explaining some of the different cultural references and in-jokes, sort of like they do for the Excel Saga anime, and explaining what got changed and why when they localized a few of the jokes to something an American would understand better. There's a great respect for the source material in the translations, and with the extra notes you can even learn a bit about Japanese culture and pop culture that you wouldn't have known before. :D

That's my shameless plug, anyway. Tokyopop is all right and so is Shounen Jump. Dark Horse actually puts out a few manga titles as well, but they are hella slow. (They're currently the ones releasing Hellsing at the rate of about a book a year! D:)

I borrowed Dai-Guard from my brother when I went home last, and I finally got around to starting a watch of it today. It's a little bit of EVA and a little bit of Power Rangers and a little bit of Shinesmen. I'm only finished with the first five episodes and it's a 26-episode series, so I'm imagining it does get a bit more serious as time goes on and the plot starts to thicken, but it's a good one. Giant robots FTW.

Otakon is in two weeks! I still need to style the new wig I bought, but I'm trying to wait until it's a bit less humid to mess with it. I think the cut of this wig will give me better spikes, and I've read some of the advice from Petting Zoo Wigs' forums that I also shouldn't have to worry about the wig trying to escape my head this year, either. Just needs two bobby pins my ass!

Say hello to Sink Cat:



He got his nickname from sleeping in the sink in the bathroom (there is photographic proof on my photostream-- I am too lazy to link right now) and he needs a proper name since the Humane Society was calling him Hubba Bubba. I am not making this up.

He has spent most of the evening sticking his nose everywhere kittyly possible, begging for scritches, and looking out the window. He is a bit of a whee certain death! kind of kitty and surprisingly talky given how quiet he was at the shelter.

Any ideas on a name? :D

It's been something of a week.

I'm back in my apartment after spending a few days with my parents. I feel like I'm living in a monastery under a vow of silence since there's nobody else in the apartment now. lostangelssong and I are going to the local animal shelter beginning of July. I had originally thought to go after Otakon, but I don't think I'm going to make an entire month. I know my parents waited a long time between dogs after Molly passed on, but their house also wasn't empty.

My cat is still the wallpaper on my cell phone. I can use my phone without getting wooby, though.

The vet sent flowers.

To top off my not so great first full week of vacation, the air conditioner died today-- it started making disturbing grinding noises that my mother says is a result of the bearings going or whatever that means. I'm frankly skeptical that maintenance will get to it anytime soon.

Tomorrow I'm going back parentsward for a combined father's day/brother's birthday thing. And since I'm spending the night I'm planning on getting myself happily buzzed up on margaritas. I will be back Monday afternoon.

Hopefully week two of vacation will go better than week one did.

Open Beta on DW starts on Thursday. I'll be getting myself a paid account.. maybe a paid premium if I'm feeling particularly reckless. If anyone wants invite codes, they better ping me so I know who to pass the goods to.

They're calling for people to test the importer function to make sure the multiple-journal function is working... but I don't wanna use the importer. I half got involved in the whole DW thing to get myself a fresh start since I've been dragging around one bit of baggage or another across two journaling sites.

I might change my mind, though. I'll have to go through and take a look at it more closely.

It's not helped since I'm not 100% sure at the moment what to do with my fiction/fanfiction. I'm mostly ambivalent about whether or not to archive them separately from the rest of my journal-- on the one hand, it means I don't have to worry about fanbrats jumping in and following me around all stalkery on my normal entries. On the other, I like having everything in one place and I am not particularly thrilled with the idea of diluting my "branding" on the interbutt at this late date. As I've said in earlier posts, I've been Kittykat for about a freaking decade. I played around with different internet handles before that, but most of my actual participation in fandom has been with that tag. (I've been mucking about the tubes since I was 12. No joke. I remember when AOL was the biggest internet provider, everyone used Netscape because Internet Explorer did not exist, and you had to pay by the hour for access time. We rejoiced in my parents' house when the local phone company started offering interbutt at a local number and a flat rate per month.)

I'll probably think about it a while longer before I decide on anything. The importer is probably clogged at the moment anyway.

On another note.. today was probably not the smartest day to arrange my schedule so I'd be trooping up and down long flights of steps. Weather's getting ready for a major change and my ankle's been gimpy since last night. And I get to tromp around on long flights of steps tomorrow, too. D:

I had breakfast for dinner. I will be good and not blog my dinner, though really ankle pain and dinner were the two most interesting parts of my day. Oh, and I paid my rent and peeped at the office staff to take a look at the air conditioner. Just to make sure it's all in working order, especially since the way it's mounted it looks like it's just barely in the slot in my wall, which is, as they say, a Bad Thing. I just hope the Obligatory Cat doesn't trip the workmen if they show up while I'm at work. He's a little too friendly sometimes, and his coloring makes him very hard to see.

The Obligatory Cat actually has a real name, btw. It's Gregory. Which is not nearly as impressive, especially because he's named after Gregory Edgeworth the video game character and not any actual, important Gregories. He's black and has gold eyes and I have a few pictures of him but none that I care to show off right now.

My shirts came today.

Obligatory Cat decided to get back at me for tripping on him by throwing up on my duvet cover, so now I'm stuck doing laundry. That sort of scrapped my original plan of being a layabout in bed and playing way too much Gardening Mama.

The Girl heard back from the state about taking her exam to become a counselor-- she's all good to go. The current plan is to take it in June, since the May test is the first full week of May and she kind of wants time to study considering it's about $200 to take the thing and if you flunk you have to wait three months to pay the fee and try again.

I had to take a test like that. I actually had to take two tests like that on the same day... I'm still not 100% sure how I managed to get a perfect score on the literature test on only about two-three hours of sleep. Unless lack of sleep somehow buffs my English-fu. I'll be the first one to tell you that standardized testing is a total racket, though. Totally.

We ended up doing Sarth+0 since we were actually at 21 people for the raid. Then we split up and tried Malygos-10. That sucked, at least the bit I was involved in. I had to go after only about three tries at him since, you know, work. I'm 25 Emblems of Valor away from getting my T7.5 shoulders, which would be a major improvement over the rep blues Yats has right now. I'm also a couple quests away from trying out being a Valiant in the Argent Tournament. If I'd actually played more last week I'd be a Champion by now, but meh. Since I've been off the invite list for Naxx-25 lately, I've not been logging in quite as much.

Noblegarden starts on Sunday. I'm so going to be on that one. I want some more bunnies.

So I'm trying to save money a little better because one of my goals this year is to try and get some money actually squirreled away where it compounds interest and I don't touch it. (I'm looking at getting a couple IRA CD's ATM. Maybe around Christmas since I'll be up closer to my physical bank office visiting relatives.) So part of that is really taking a look at my food spending since that's been killing me a little now that I actually bother to cook most nights.

Though admittedly since I'm by myself 90% of the time, I really only need to cook half the time and reheat leftovers the other half of the time.

Doing bento for lunch has really helped things, at least nutritionally speaking and as far as keeping my diet more interesting. I'm finding as I go into winter (traditionally a point where I start to run low on steam) that I'm actually still pretty full of energy, even when I push myself a bit hard. Of course.. my minor Ichiban Kan addiction maybe doesn't make it as cheap as it could be. XD It's worth the 10-20 minutes it takes getting everything prepared and into the boxes, ready to go in the morning, and I get a little extra time to myself in the mornings that I used to spend ransacking the kitchen for something to eat.

But anyway, to help with the whole spending-money-on-food thing, I'm trying a novel thing and actually sitting out and planning out dinners and writing it all down rather than the previous nebulous "what might I want to eat?" thing from before. Word lets you download calendars you can write on, so I took a quick inventory of what's laying around and slotted it in for dinners. Hopefully it'll help me cut down my food bills on any one shopping trip a little bit. We'll see how it works.

I'm considering taking my cat with me to my parents' for Christmas holiday so I can actually spend more than a day and some change there. Ordinarily I'll only visit someone for a couple nights and then come back because Gregory needs food and a box cleaning by then. Or I get a cat-sitter to come in for me. But I would actually like to make an extended visit to my folks without having to worry about what will happen to my cat if I'm gone more than a day or so. :| Any of my cat-owning friends have any ideas about leaving cats at the apartment for short whiles? I wouldn't be gone more than a week, probably closer to 4 days counting the days when I'm in transit back home.

It's cold in here. I'm also trying to keep my heat bill down. Sigh. :|

I've been wading through papers all day with no end in sight. But I also got girl scout cookies (mmm Samoas) and somebody at the office decided to pass on a little Halloween care package. :3

All in all good day.

So I finally got the pictures off my camera even though I've been lazy about getting everything else in my house completely settled and cleaned. So now you get a con report!

( Long con report is looooooooong )

More pictures of cosplay and hijinks!

( Just what the title says )