This is traditionally the time to write a What I Did Over Independence Day Vacation post, but it was a combination of traumatic, boring, and tiresome, so I'll move right on to what's really on my mind: anime.

Saiyuki is bitchy gay love. I'm burning through it at a terrifying rate--I just got Volume 2 from Amazon, and have already run through it and have had to order Volumes 3 and 4 in one go. There are 9 to 10 episodes in each volume. Mind you, each episode is about 19 minutes long if you don't watch the opening and ending, so it's not like I'm blowing through Buffy or Firefly, but that's still a LOT of Saiyuki.

( Spoilers for Hakkai's SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN. )

The next series should be the rest of FMA, but the prospect of watching it on the computer is making me drag my feet. I might go for Loveless instead. A piece of fan art by llyse prompted me to look up Soubi, and asoigna345ewrkap[]i3... attack meganekko with long hair.

And it's shounen-ai.

The drawback?

Mr. Meganekko's partner is 12.

Fuck you, Japan.

We'll pretend he's some more reasonable age. Because it's anime, that "reasonable age" would probably be a hoary 15 (fuck you, Japan, fuck you and your bizarre age fetishes), but that's still better than effing 12 (fuck you, Japan, and what in hell are you thinking?).

Or possibly there will be an actual plot, and the pairing between Mr. Meganekko and the Cat-Eared Jailbait won't be the only thing to think about--

--Wait, what am I saying?

Things I did yesterday:

Bought a house outside Balmora. It cost 20K, but the realtor gave it to me for 13K because she liked me so much. I showed up to claim my digs, and found incredibly powerful monsters parked in the dining room, breathing like Darth Vader. Dude, when we bought the House of Red Doors, all we got were wasps. But I cleared them out, then ran about inspecting my wee minipalace. It comes with far more than 20K worth of sellables, plus loads and loads of built-in storage, so I zipped back and forth with my teleportation ring, yanking all my swag out of the crates in front of the Mages' Guild and putting it in its place.

Yes, last night I spent two hours tidying my RPG character's house. To avoid tidying my own house. It's like playing the Sims, but without the threat of alien mpreg.

Washed a sink's worth of dishes and did two loads of laundry. Guilt cleaning.

Got irrefutable proof that, now and forever, chauni rocks. She sent me approximately 17,000 hours of anime (or two DVD's, whichever is larger)--Gankutsuou, Loveless, the FMA movie, Advent Children, and no doubt about 12 other things that I didn't get to because dude, Advent Children.

Kadaj is indeed yummy. He needs to be spanked. It is a necessity. But he's a Final Fantasy character; of course he needs to be spanked. I started watching the movie in the middle because it started with a Lion King montage, and I am all about the instant gratification, but peacefulchaos assures me that plot does not matter. After watching a troop of leather-clad young men leap about like fleas for an hour, this seems like an eminently reasonable assertion.

Chauni, you are the nougat in my Snickers bar. Thank you so, so much.

The driving force of anime is the desire to make life harder for oneself out of guilt.

The secondary driving force of anime is the quest for things to feel guilty about.

Although anime understands the concept of therapy, it thinks that it is best administered on the battlefield while therapist and patient are shooting at one another.

Roy had better strip down to his shirtwaist soon, or I may stab myself in the head with a fork. What more angst can they milk from the backstory? What random plot thread haven't they milked for paaaaaain? Did Winry's dog voluntarily give up his leg because of his involvement in Papa Elric's disappearance? Is Grandma Rockbell styling her hair with Elmers Glue as expiation for destroying the baggy half of Winry's wardrobe? HOW MUCH WORSE CAN IT GET?

What the world needs now... is a bunch of parties where we can swap the gifts we got and didn't want for the gifts other people got and didn't want.

EDIT: A few observations from Christmas vacation:

1) verdelite SUCKS. Badly. She sucks so bad, she couldn't get a tapioca ball through a pearl tea straw. And she will continue to suck until I get my hot, obsessed little hands on every episode of Wonder Falls, the show she addicted me to Christmas night. BECAUSE SHE SUCKS.

2) Wonder Falls rocks. "What are you? Are you the cow of pain?"

3) Every show is improved by the addition of a cow creamer.

4) It is wrong, thoughtless, and hopelessly rude to take advantage of someone's failure to remove tags and scratch out prices in order to take the item back to the store. But I'm doing it anyway.

5) My dad also rocks. Possibly more than Wonder Falls.

6) It's hard to stay the black sheep of the family when other family members are coming out of the closet and admitting that they like that weird shit you do, too. A successful businesswoman in the family has fessed up to being a long-time Rocky Horror Picture Show fan, and her daughter wants to spend this summer working at a Ren fair. We're already well supplied with a video gamer geek. Now all we need is a LARPer, and I'll look positively normal.

7) "Liberaceositude" is a Good Word, for lo, has it broken several of my cousins' brains.

8) "Liberacelicious" is also a Good Word. (It means "being delicious like, as, or unto Liberace," and implies a more temporary state of being than Liberaceositude.) The person who came up with it was... my brother.

9) "But why did you burn all the rum?" is not an adequate substitute for "But why is the rum gone?", and repeating it ad nauseam will not improve it.

10) I will barter funky Japanese snack food for subtitled copies of FMA.

11) It was bad enough that we had to gamble when we bought Magic cards. Now they're making us gamble on anime models. I just wanted two specific characters, dammit, and they gave me a pile of sealed boxes that might contain any of seven--with no returns! I appealed to the counter chick, and lo, did she hear my cry and take mercy. She showed me how to weigh the boxes in my hand and compare them with the pictures on the back, then warned me that the companies put extra weights in to screw up the people who'd figured out the weight trick. Then she tried to pick the boxes containing the characters I wanted. She was willing to open one box as a floor model (plus whatever boxes I planned to buy), so we got to check her accuracy--and she was right twice in a row.

All bow before the anime-fu of the owner of Anime Ink, for she is mighty.



And now back to terrifying amounts of work for three days, and then four more days of lovely lovely vacation. I plan to unleash a whirlwind of paint and hammers on the apartment.