Posting streak broken, back thankfully not

After seven months of blog posts on every day since the start of December, I finally found myself unable to update this damn thing. What was the problem, you ask? A lower back sprain that left me bedridden and immobile for over a week. Whether it was me deciding that it was a good idea to lug my entire entertainment system on my back to my brother’s house, or to later do an EA Sports Active workout, or to sleep on my brother’s springless couch, or a combination of those three that led me to that state, but whatever the cause, I’m definitely not going to let it happen again.

Now that I’m back on my feet, I’m able to go back to work, write fan fiction and do all the other dorky stuff I claim to be good at. In fact, I got started on a piece a couple of days ago, entitled Looking Out For Number One (link goes to FanFiction.net story; Red Mage version to come soon). It’s been a while since I’ve written anything Mai-HiME/Mai-Otome related, and there’s only a handful of fics starring Sara (since she’s a minor character), so I thought I’d add one to that pool.

Soup’s on!

Man, it’s been a while (I seem to say that a lot lately, don’t I? Or perhaps it just seems that I do) since I’ve sat down and concentrated on fan fiction of any kind. I’d been thinking for a while about a certain Mai-Otome episode where Shizuru teases Natsuki about not being able to finish the survival exam on time when she went to school, and Natsuki blames it on a certain someone (okay, okay, it’s Mai). Later in the conversation, Shizuru mentions something about seeing the two of them in a “rather curious position”, but Natsuki cuts her off before Shizuru can further explain it. It gave me an idea for a fic called Through Her Stomach, which admittedly is a lot less dire than the story Shizuru tells in the anime, but there is still a bit of awkwardness when the three of them meet.

Mao-HiME: Coming soon to a TV far away from you

A few months ago, there was an announcement regarding a new Mai-HiME animated series. Details have been scarce since then, but now, it looks like we have a few preliminary character sketches (kudos to LJ users hajiketobiume and shanejayell) and details about the new heroine. Meet Mao Kuzunoha, a 15-year-old spirit medium and transfer who’s…a [...]

Kicked out of the trophy room

Something’s wonky with the PlayStation Network lately. I picked up a few trophies from Lumines Supernova and Burnout Paradise, but for some reason I can’t sync them up with my PSN profile online (the progress meter hangs for about a minute and then stops at 21% before giving up and producing an error message). I wonder if this could be a side effect of everyone and their brother playing their brand-spanking new PS3 games they got for Christmas this year. I also had trouble getting online in LittleBigPlanet yesterday, but that appears to be unrelated to this, since the LBP servers are run by Media Molecule and not Sony.

Soul Calibur IV Pic-chewers

I’m fully convinced that the Internet doesn’t want me to surf it today. GameFly’s down, so I can’t update my membership…and TVTropes appears to have been hacked/DDossed/crashed down to Earth I started messing around with the Character Creation engine from Soul Calibur IV, and proceeded to make a mess of it. I only really have two characters that I’m proud of having done so far: Mikoto and Mai. I also have a Natsuki-in-progress, but since there’s no “gun” weapon style, I had to settle with making her a ninja, like Taki. You can see the full images at my Picasa gallery, or just keep reading for more.