Fanfiction Reviews, Interesting Links, and General Geekery
I’ve been enjoying these fancomics for a while, but I always kept forgetting to share them. Now, I’ve got the perfect opportunity. After all, who could possibly resist the fun of seeing the teen titans as if they’d always been swapped?
For the record, the title of this post refers to the combination of an American song and a Japanese comic… not that I’m not also messing with you, as you’ll see when you start reading. Now, with that out of the way, on with the post…
First, a little something I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of months and I keep forgetting about: Boku no Futatsu no Tsubasa
One of the myriad fetishes which can be found in adult comics in Japan is what I will call “full-function hermaphrodites” (people who appear to be women, but have both sets of genitals. This differs from the medical term “hermaphrodite” because it’s genetically impossible for a single mutation to produce two fully-functional reproductive systems in a single body)
Anyway, I suppose you can kind of understand how that would appeal to some people. The reason that this manga is sheer genius is that, instead of being some cheap excuse for naughty pics, the author managed to come up with a “why didn’t I think of that!?” plot concept… What would a female main character do if her (supposedly male) cousin was invited over to co-habitate, and the cousin turned out to not only be a fully-functioning hermaphrodite (and a real bombshell), but (instead of being a sex machine) is naive to the point of never even having had rudimentary sex education?
The answer: One of the funniest legal-for-teen-buyers comedies that I’ve ever seen as an average Japanese girl ends up having to provide a two-gender sex education for her cousin who has ZERO sex education. (doesn’t even know what words like “masturbation” mean “virgin”, or where babies come from)
Add to that, the fact that the characters don’t fall into the same tired old stereotypes you see throughout manga, and it makes for one of my newest all-time favorites. If you’d like to give it a try, the manga’s name once again is Boku no Futatsu no Tsubasa (Translation: My Two Wings) and you can get scanlations from DummyScan. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
Now, you may be wondering, “How the heck is he going to connect a Japanese sitcom comic about a hermaphrodite to something from the U.S.?” Very easily…
Music by Stephen Lynch
If you’ve never seen this guy, you don’t know what you’re missing. For a first on my blog, I’ll embed a copy of the video to his song “Hermaphrodite”
(which, for the record, is the song that reminded me to make this post)
Interestingly, this is actually the third song I’ve heard by this guy. The first was If I Could Be A Superhero which I saw in a clip from AMV Hell 3 and the second was Lullaby, sometimes called “Why Mommy Left Us”.
To anyone who reads this, happy holidays. Hopefully, I’ll have time during the break to whip up a few programs to share.
As it is, I do have a few improvements to announce. First, I’ve set up a nice new cocktail of anti-spam tools that’s working out wonderfully. (A mix of Akismet, Spam Karma 2, and Bad Behaviour)
Second, I’ve installed Rudd-O’s XHTML validator and my site is now completely XHTML valid, and will stay that way.
Third, I installed a plugin named Sociable, so if you view any of my posts individually, you get that nice little row of icon-links to social bookmarking sites.
Finally, I decided to treat myself too, and I’ve installed a dashbar plugin so I can get to the posting page more quickly since I haven’t had time to get bookmarklet-compatible Javascript enabled in Konqueror.
Oh, and I’ll be adding the following once I have time to fix what seem to be incompatibilities with WordPress 2.x:
A week or two ago, I started a Last.fm thread asking people to point me to music with unusual/uncommon lyrics. I didn’t really get much, but the list of examples I provided (which is still growing) is definitely something worth reading.
Curses and Blessings @ Fanfiction.net
For the longest time, I’ve been looking for crossovers between Ranma ½ and I, My, Me! Strawberry Eggs. I’d always thought it would be cool, but I could only find one or two crossovers where the author tried to put Ranma in Hibiki Amawa’s place and ended up only writing a chapter or two.
Finally, I’ve found something that is not only complete, but merges them without dropping Ranma into the IIMSE story… a refreshing change. (not that I’d turn away a complete “Ranma as Hibiki” fic) From what I can see, it seems to be a one-shot that was originally intended as the first chapter of a longer fic. The basic premise is “What if, during his post-IMMSE travels, Hibiki met Ranma?”
As much as I hate seeing things not continued, I must applaud the author for ending it the way it is. If I hadn’t read the authors’ notes at the end, I wouldn’t have realized it was intended for continuation. On the plus side, there are two other one-shots, “Speaking from Experience” and “Curses of All Kinds” which take place in the same universe before and after “Curses and Blessings”.
Well, it seems I have the dubious distinction of being one of
the few (if any) people to discover a way to play music using shell
script. Observe the following snippet:
/usr/bin/yes foo > /dev/dsp & SP="${!}"; sleep 1; kill The more characters in the argument to /usr/bin/yes,
"$SP"
the lower the tone. The length of the sleep argument determines how
long the tone lasts, but a pre-constructed string of repeating
“foo\n” components will do just as well, though you need about a
thousand of them to last one second.
Bad Behavior has blocked 172 access attempts in the last 7 days.
