frog princess

Thanks for all the answers to the special powers poll. My favourites:

Sanzo:
If he had telekinesis, he'd never let anyone get within 50 metres of him.
Pissed off!Medium.
Slight precognition and slight telepathy, the rest is all attitude

Hakkai:
Psychometry, healing and life-force vampirism
Only acts like he's reading your mind.
Absolute direction sense like an internal GPS - this made me think of Mildmay!

Goku
Spidey-sense
Telekenesis or just plain superstrength. Maybe he's the Incredible Hulk?

Gojyo
The ability to give someone an orgasm just by thinking about it.
Charm / presence / awe-inducing magnetism. Or pyrokinesis.
Empathic / psychometry - quite a few people suggested empath for Gojyo.

*mulls it over*

Also, random thought of the day (last night): I was wondering if Koumyou kept Ukoku and Kouryuu apart on purpose. Kouryuu only has one memory od Ukoku, but it's clear Ukoku visited Koumyou sometimes - or even regularly? I really want to read more stories about Nii.

My internets went for three days and now it's back. *holds internet close*

I really enjoyed the new chapter of Saiyuki Reload (over at radiofreebanri). The thing I enjoyed most ( spoilers )

Shiny baubles!

Jeep in an apron! by xsmoonshine. Her powers of cute are awesome. More Jeep in an apron - kind of

Really Bad Eggs - by ranalore, Saiyuki/PotC crossover and really very adorable. (eta: changed the link! oops)

There's been some interesting Saiyuki meta dotted about the place recently:

cicer: Gojyo and sex
devikun - bits of Saiyuki translations that baffle eg, Jack of all trades and master of none, and flemmings elaborates on what the Japanese equivalent of this phrase actually means.

In other news...

We are having a Buffyathon at my house. We watched all of season two, and now half of season three. Poor lonely Faith. I keep thinking of her as female version of Gojyo, and that way madness lies because then I have to work out who is Hakkai, and Sanzo and then doom.

I watched the first four eps of Heroes: - ( random thoughts )

I also have things to say about XxxHolic 8 and 9, Melusine and The Virtu, The Prestige and Connotations, but where is the time? I have porn to write, and my yaoi challenge story, and then more porn. Ahh, the busy schedule.

Bumholes! The precious new laptop needs mending already. Nothing ever works, as M tells me, solemnly. A person is coming to take it away it on Wednesday and they have a 5-10 day turnaround. That means I won't have it for displaying my lovely barcharts at the meeting of doom on Monday. It means I can do less work on the train too, which is very shit.

In other news, Hakkai and Gojyo apparently have the most appallingly creepy conversation in the latest chapter, via radiofreebanri. wildelamassu has a review in far greater detail and depth here

( Spoilerific )

Evidence carefully gathered from a cross section of Saiyuki fangirls points to Sanzo's undergarments being made of pleather cotton. The following conclusions were reached:

a) as akisawana pointed out,  a Buddhist monk's uniform wouldn't use materials that meant the death or pain of a living creature, so that rules out leather and possibly silk, but leaves him with the option of clingy PVC or lycra.

b) he rips it to make bandages in Gunlock, apparently, meaning unless he's got really strong hands it's not leather or plastic or spandex.

c) God, I'm really avoiding doing any work, aren't I?

d) maybe it is leather, or PVC, or even nylon (scritch, scritch, scritch)  - at least it would explain why he's so bad tempered all the time.

e) Goku paints it on fresh every morning

f) whatever, it's hot. Damn you Minekura for giving us a fetish we never knew we had.

You know, in Chapter 22 of Even a Worm, where he suddenly has some sort of realisation. I had an idea. ( Spoilers )

I am a slow thinker. This morning I had a fragment or two of thought about the Koumyou bit of the Reload Burial arc,
( spoilers )

Wild Adapter rec: this is a brilliant Komiya story: Kohai by Mikona. I'm very fond of Komiya and I wish there were more Komiya/Kubota stories, or at least in places where I can find them. I think in this fic I like the feeling of tension most of all and Komiya's frustration, because the thing about Komiya is that he's teetering on the edge of knowing what it is he wants but is just not quite brave enough to admit it.

Because of something on someone's journal this week, I went back to read Ukoku's bit of the Burial  arc and sort of fell in love with him, a bit. A lot. Or more accurately with him and Koumyou. ( better cut this for spoilery things )

And later on I noticed a startling similarity between ( this picture of youkai Hakkai and this one of Ukoku )

Writing this is EXACTLY what I should not be doing. I should be working, should be digging around in journals etc and compiling lists of stuff, but I'm not. I'm refreshing lj every 10 minutes and thinking about writing fic and generally being harebrained because there's no one to tell me to get on with it. This is what happens when I'm left to organise my own time. And I still don't truly understand what affordances are but I've decide to shelve that for the moment.

The end of Saiyuki Gunlock is quite odd, although not that bizarre for an anime. It feels like the animators got desperate and lost their heads and wah! The End. It made me laugh and laugh, again. I'm very glad that Minekura has been quoted as saying that the manga will not follow the same story line as the anime, because the anime ending is just a bit silly. ( spoilers ahead )

Can anyone point me to a good analysis of what Sanzo, Goku, Hakkai and Gojyo's names mean, or indeed can anyone tell me in some detail? I have very little knowledge of Japanese. I'm fairly clear on the number thing, but I know there are other meanings too. For Hakkai, meanings found so far on a cursory internet search are 'eight precepts' 'eight views' 'eight stormy seas'!

So, aaargh! confusing! I'd really appreciate some advice on this, if anyone can help.

The reason I'm asking and the reason this post is fairly closely locked to those likely to know is because it has to do with a remix story I'm writing, hence the desire to get things right.

Huh, who'd've thunk it?



I found this quiz while pootling about looking at the FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) site, which looks interesting. It's a way of creating simple machine-readable pages, ie, a page with simple fields (using RDF and XML) that lets the computer read and piece together information from the web. You fill in the FOAF sheet and upload it to your site. I'm not sure what its ultimate purpose is - a way of creating social networks, or to make searches simpler? Another way of finding information about people? I made myself a foaf sheet for one of my other sites (the ones I show to family and friends, of course), just for the curiosity value. There are only certain fields at the moment, such as name, phone number, place of work and names of friends and their email addresses. As a way of tracking groups and friends it's really interesting, but at the same time I'm slightly dubious about shoving my friends's emails and names on the web without asking first.

That reminds me, I was thinking that the tracking meme that recently went round really needs another part; where you make bar charts and graphs showing who the lj connectors are, or those people who seem to act almost as an lj introductory service. As far as I can tell, these sorts of people often rec a lot, have fairly diverse or large friends lists and often have a vibrant online personality. I can think of a few on my friends list who I'd call connectors. There are certain people who have either large or multi-fandom, eclectic friends lists and I know that I like to read their friends list just to see what's going on in other places/fandoms/people's heads. Friendsfriends in other words, except for the bit about having the paid account.

Is anyone a member of Orkut, just out of interest? It's another social networking site, but you have to be invited to join.

I've watched 'Once More with Feeling' twice over the past few days. One of my favourite bits is at the beginning, when Buffy sings (something very like) '...we'll do or die, and I've died twice.' Giles looks at her and gives the sweetest smile, and I turn into a little puddle of goo.

I'm deep into my second reading of OotP, and am noticing so much more than I did during the first frenzied read-through.

( the obligatory OotP cut )