Monthly Archives: August 2023

Nerd minute, August edition

anime nerd corner

Hooray, I’m not the only person swearing up and down that Buddy Daddies had some layers (as well as some extremely bad decisions in the last story arc)

We’re still hanging onto Masterful Cat, though I feel bad for anyone who thought this show was soothing going into it. I don’t like the judginess of the term “cringe comedy”, but Human Whatsherface is useless, and the show seems to know it. Sometimes the joke is that her cat is her mom, usually the joke is that she’s the cat and the cat is the human, but I’m not so sure they really care about one another so much as that she’d die in squalor without him. Which is pretty cynical. Maybe on my part, if I’m misreading the situation.

I’m not quite hate-watching, I guess? Yukichi the Cat is great. I want better things for him that I know he’s never going to get. Occasionally it’s funny, particularly the mental contortions the side characters go through to avoid realizing the premise of the show. But the colors are still distractingly ugly.

Undead Murder Farce is fun, though. Yes, it’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Anime. Yes, it turned the Phantom of the Opera into Arsene Lupin’s sulky bishounen boyfriend. (not literally, settle down, but… basically.) You can either get on board and hang on, or give it a hard pass. I am entertained.

Spy x Family is coming back in the fall, along with The Saint’s Magic Power is Omnipotent, which I haven’t watched yet but seriously mean to, and Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, kind of, with some kind of wacky-hijinks sidestory thing. (Bananapants title, surprisingly cool show, by the way.) Two currently airing shows feels like enough for me, since I probably won’t be caught up with Omnipotent anywhere near then, but we’ll have to see.

[edit: An odd bit of trivia, too: This month was the first time Therapist outsold Healers in terms of sheer numbers across their respective series, although Healers 1 was still the top single book. Vaguely interesting. However future months shake out is also fine, though; I don’t have a real plan here. Just moving forward.]

[Edit 2, a week later — so after Masterful Cat episode 8 — I take it back, that headbutt was heartwarming as hell. Though I think the episode hiccupped and repeated half a scene? Was that a wrap around a commercial break, maybe? Anyway, Useless-chan shows that she is good at something, and Yukichi is adorably Concerned. Though in the grand tradition of overthinking everything, I can’t help but notice the weird combination of “gross jokes about marriageability” + “female character who gets to be a complete hot mess” + “male character who unapologetically loves cleanliness, cooking, and idol singers and wears a frilly apron to the grocery store”. Is this show accidentally doing a gender thing? My head hurts.]

Good news & bad news

The Process

Well, Goodreads believes I’m C.A. Moss. So much so that they merged the author profile with my actual reading profile, which is not, you know, Crafted for Maximal Social Media Engagement(tm). On top of that, the widget I included with the SER book list (currently on the right sidebar) has since been deprecated, so I literally can’t generate one for the new name. I didn’t realize that till I got into the author account and then did some googling about why most of the widgets were gone.

So now I have linked that account to my personal one for absolutely no reason~

(Hi, I have had Wonderbook in my “currently reading” for almost four years now. It’s a good book! I don’t know why I haven’t finished it! Everybody be cool, okay, I’m insecure about what a slow reader I am. That example is excessive, but just generally. I can’t seem to sit down and read anything for hours on end unless I’m on vacation. It’s not good.)

Oh well. I at least updated CA’s profile. Honestly, it’s okay from this side of things. It’s a system for readers, and I don’t intend to do any publicity through it. Just thought it would be nice to have the little graphical list on the sidebar. SHRUG.

(It has bugged me for a while that the widget shows the old cover for Healers 1 — which I liked, but that I couldn’t expand into a series, since it was a one-off cover — soooo maybe that plus the lack of symmetry will eventually drive me to take that one down. We’ll see.)

Some minor making of sausage

The Process

Still existing. Added links to Goodreads on the Therapist sales page, because I was just informed that those books are on Goodreads. Which I’d kind of forgotten about, despite using it as a checklist system for myself as a reader? Anyway, those are up. It would be kind of nice to add a sidebar widget with those books as well, but first Goodreads has to believe I’m also this person. The application is in.

In other constructive procrastination news, I started mostly moving from Google Drive to Atticus, which is a cloud-based paid service aimed at authors (I don’t use that word for myself, but y’know, that’s who the service caters to). This is a two-part decision based on a) the fact that Atticus seems to be quite useful for ebook and print layout, which saves me a lot of work, and b) I don’t agree with Google’s data scraping for AI. I don’t harbor any conspiracy theories about my work being “stolen”; it’s more of an “I’m tired of this techbro bullshit and don’t want to make myself into fodder for it any more than I have to” stance.

Atticus is not, unfortunately, as usable on mobile as it is on a computer. At least in my experience. Nor can it be used for sharing documents, because that’s just not what it’s for — which is fine. So I will continue to use Google Drive for things like brainstorming/notes and reference documents for art commissions. It has drawbacks. I don’t trust it to be secure. But I’m willing to compromise for some purposes.

That said, I’m going to sound like a shill when I say that I enjoyed trying out the layout tools in Atticus. It is so much easier than what I was doing before. I haven’t ordered a test print of the Therapist omnibus yet, but I look forward to it.

However, as much as it pains me to have a prettier option at my fingertips, I don’t intend to redesign the Healers paperbacks at this point. I live in fear that somebody will have bought books 1 and 2 before the redesign, land on 3 after the redesign, and promptly rip my jugular out because they don’t match. I do not need that in my life. They’ll stay as they are unless there’s some drastic need to change them.

Games update: Finished Pokemon Violet‘s main plotline and, since I can’t trade, did not bother trying to fill out any more of the Pokedex. Then played through Road 96 and Storyteller in quick succession (extremely quick, in the latter case). I enjoyed both of them, although Storyteller is ~2 hours long for $15, so y’know. I don’t demand that every single game be 200 hours long, but it seems worth mentioning.

After that, I looked at the funds remaining in my Switch account and the games on my wishlist and, despite my grousing that I wasn’t in the mood for another RPG, went with Final Fantasy VI Pixel Remaster.

I first played the original version (well, the US port, anyway) around my junior year of high school; it might also have been the summer between my junior and senior year. I bought Final Fantasy III (US) with my own money, which I had hardly any of. Did you know that AAA games with battery saves still cost about $60 in 1994? About $120 in today’s money, according to a quick search. So it felt like a big deal.

Should be fun. I’m only a couple of hours in, and already running into the need to grind for exp. Sigh. Still, it’ll entertain me a while.

100% whole bean, un-ground whatever-it-is-I-do-here

Recs, The Process

Recently I came across this essay, “Be Whoever You’re Gonna Be” by Dave Walsh. TBH, I don’t know who this is, but I really appreciated the essay. (I found it through the always entertaining blog of romance author Jenny Trout; I appreciated her reaction to the essay too.)

Okay, so I started self-publishing in 2014. After the initial “gold rush,” but a hell of a long time ago in internet terms. I have never, for basically one nanosecond, done anything Right(tm) according to any advice doled out for people in this situation. This used to bother me! A lot! A whole hell of a lot. When I started out, bright-eyed and ready to learn, I joined some self-publishing forums. I was told all my efforts were worthless because I hadn’t quit my day job, and as such, nothing I did counted or meant anything. I was told nobody would ever read anything I wrote because I didn’t devote my entire life to marketing. I was told so, so many things. It used to bother me so, so much.

Because I care about this stuff, you know? I love writing. Sometimes it’s frustrating and sometimes it’s hard and I’m never quite as good as I want to be, but imagine that: I like doing this thing that I have chosen to spend a lot of my free time on. Also? I was raised to base my own self-worth on what other people say about me. It’s not good. I’ve been working on that. It’s gotten a lot better.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t need to slag people who spend a lot of time on marketing, or who research their keywords in order to come up with a story, or who publish every month. Whatever they do doesn’t have any bearing on what I do, and I don’t spend my time slinging shit at them or telling them they’re worthless. Because I don’t need to justify my decisions or cover up my own insecurity.

Just.

Saying.

I’m going to rant. If you didn’t know that, hi. Welcome. You must be new here.