And I read comics, too! But this was long enough as it was. Tumblr hiatses are awesome today.
♥ ♥ ♥ → Sometimes I am reminded of how I have weird sayings. I've been using, "Go cry on your mountain of porn!" a lot again lately, which is something I started saying back in... mmm, I believe the KHR fandom, because the Dino/Hibari shippers were really kind of everywhere and, every so often, someone would be like UGH THIS PAIRING SUCKS WHY IS IT SO POPULAR IT IS EVERYWHERE I HATE IT IT'S SO OOC GROSS and I would think, ugh, why are you being a jerk? And then I would think, you know. I literally have about twenty NC-17 D18 doujinshi I just downloaded, so your hate does not bother me! I shall just go cry on my mountain of porn that you don't love my ship! How terrible it is to be a fan of a popular ship!! in order to not be a jerk. Because I get that popular pairings can be pretty ubiquitous and that's frustrating to people who don't like it.
And one of my great feelings on fandom is: If you have the lion's share of fanart/fic in a fandom? Suck it up when people express their frustration and dislike for it. Yes, they're being jerks about it often times. Yes, it seems unfair that they can rant about it, but you can't. But you have the overwhelmingly popular ship. You have a hundred things to read or look at right at your fingertips! Be the bigger person, okay.
This was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I suppose that's one thing the Prince of Tennis fandom did for me. Jesus, people were jerks about the TezuFuji pairing.
Anyway, that's what I meant when I first said that and that's still what I mean today. I really wish Bleach fandom, too, would follow this philosophy. I know a lot of shippers hate the IchiHime pairing, but you guys have mountains of porn to read. Try being a little nicer next time, okay.
♥ ♥ ♥ → I haven't talked much about FARMVILLE lately, but it's one of the things that's kept me busy lately. Prepare for picspam?
- One of the big new things is the Lighthouse Cove. Mostly, I am in favor! I love having a new farm to play with, I love having three farms to take care of (my ideal would be five!), and I actually don't mind that they're limiting the amount of crops you can have, forcing you into doing more with decorations. I'm past the point of doing much with crops anyway, I'm just here for the other stuff! It will make it harder to do the recipes, because you'll get fewer bushels, but most of what you need will probably be available from neighbors anyway, since it's a limited amount of crops.
- I am giving the harvestable cove the side-eye, though. The first couple of days, I worked like mad to upgrade it, so I'm on the last level now and... honestly, that was A LOT of building parts. You start with three of each type of building material. Then 5. (Or did it skip straight to 10?) Then 10. Then 15. Then 20. Then 25. Then 30. ON AND ON AND ON, until we get to 60 OF EACH PIECE. That's so many and it kind of burnt me out on Farmville a little there for awhile.
- Other things that burn me out: The eternal search for animal feed, jesus. I worked really hard to get some rare babies going and Sherry has been helping me tons, but on any given day, I usually have about five of them to grow. They each take 30 feed. That's 150 pieces of feed I need. Nevermind that some days I have eight or nine to grow. That gets to be upwards of 300 pieces of feed. PER DAY. I can't even think about doing common babies because I just can't spare any feed! Zynga needs to either make it easier to get feed (maybe let you post feed every five pieces you feed your baby animals instead of only at the halfway point?) or take it down to 20 pieces of feed to grow the rare babies.
- I am a little tired of the pens. I liked the wildlife pen. I'm really enthused with the zoo pen. I like the pet runs. I am very apathetic on the livestock pen, despite that I had a couple of hot pink pigs in storage, so I could immediately do rare babies. I would be more interested if there was a chance at exclusive animals from mystery babies because there is a shitload of them that I want from this list, both common and rare!
- What I really wish Zynga would do as well is make the adoptable babies have a system exactly like the trees--let your neighbors adopt one of the babies you get like you can with a tree! That would make things a lot more worthwhile! And (at least according to this list) a lot of the rare animals are not adoptable, including the fairy deer that I wanted so badly, which is a lot of my reason for going for the wildlife babies!
- My list of rare babies so far:
RARE WILDLIFE BABIES COLLECTED:
american mink
amur badger
blue arrow frog
canada lynx
golden elk
moose bull
mouselope
red dart frog
river otter
white squirrel
jackrabbit
RARE ZOO BABIES COLLECTED:
bongo antelope
cassowary
peafowl
white faced
spider-monkey
camel
lemmings
puffin
alpine ibex
blue dragon
european boar
gorilla
male ostrich
purple gallinule
trick or treat monkey
There are a lot of exclusive ones that I don't think I'll ever be able to get and I'm still missing quite a few, but! I have a decent collection now! I don't care as much about the livestock rares, so I haven't been working hard on them and the pet rares are getting me kind of bummed because they're all starting to look the same and I just want those Halloween cats already. T__T I did get a purple vineyard cat the other day, though!
Okay, farm layout time! You can see the basic idea of what I was going for with these caps, but it just... wasn't quite working out for me. I would fiddle and fiddle with it, but it got to be too messy after awhile. I liked some aspects of it and I love my collection of water features, but it was just too much to look at. But I didn't know what to cut out! So I just put everything in storage and started over. But! I took caps of the way it used to be:
An overview of the fairy tale section of my farm, where you could see the cliffside I was building and how I was starting to structure a fenced in area. I really liked now it looked like several waterfalls all coming off the line of the cliff and I definitely liked the combination of the Matterhorns and the rainbow trees that looked like clouds around them, which gave it a sense of height. I really liked the way the water features flowed together and looked like they could have actually been meant to be together! I liked the way the fairy tale cottage was tucked away inside a little forest and I liked the bright colors of the trees and I liked the glitter paths and I liked the flower towers, but it all just... started to look a little busy after adding all my garden stuff in.
The leftmost edge of my fairy tale area that moved into my rows and rows of cows. I really liked the way the water wheel and the two duck ponds turned out (I still don't know how I lucked into two duck ponds, but I will never sell them because I know I'll never get two back again!) and it looked like the water from the pond flowed into the water wheel's water and the Irish Falls flowed into the other pond. The lush grass actually looks really cool around them, too!
I started filling in the bottom half of the farm here. The top is still pretty busy, but with the large view you can see that it would look pretty neat if you were actually in it. It's hard to comprehend at a distance, but up close it looked kind of cute! And I really loved using the lavendar bridge and the greenhouse + glasshouse fenced in with a bunch of those beautiful glowing blue flowers. I liked the ribbon trees in bloom and I still love the carraige in a field of flowers. I liked the path of rose petals leading up to the garden seat. But I was getting frustrated with how the flowery well was getting lost and you could hardly even notice the little garden seat that sat right in front of the wishing well.
This is a little further out again, so you can see that it's starting to look even busier at a further angle and there were uneven patches that almost looked bare if I wasn't completely filling them in. But too much more decorating and I ran the risk of overrunning it. I did, however, have to buy the two fairy tale house decorations, the treehouse and the tree castle. FAIRY TALE THEMES ARE MY WEAKNESS. Those and Asian themes. There are still aspects of this I like, but....
My horses. There are aspects of this I like as well. I enjoy seeing foals mixed in with their parent horses, so my fairy horse and dark cherry horse and irish cobb horse and blue gypsy horse look excellent! And I'm actually really fond of using the butterfly pens and sweatpea flowers around the edges of the horse pens, despite that it makes it look super busy. It's all flowery and pretty and cute! And FINALLY a use for all that fuschia greenery! I knew I saved those for a reason! But I'm not quite entirely happy with this yet. And those little mini foals frustrate the ever loving shit out of me. They're too small to display more than one or two! But I have rainbow pony foals!! Mini fairy foals!! Little purple pony foals!! So cute--!!
Overhead view of the farm. It had some structure, you can see that it was starting to flow together a bit, but it still felt very unbalanced. Looking at it like this is super frustrating, because I had all these aspects I liked, but it just wasn't coming together as a whole. It didn't help that I extended the area that my little farmer was trapped in, creating a pathway over to the lavendar bridge, which I lined with wedding trees and it was cute but... it just got to be WAY TOO BUSY.
The biggest problem in redecorating is always, always the fucking trees. I have a bunch of chrome cherry trees that I want to use to line an area, they would look really cute staggered and then toss in some roses to fill it out a little and voila! Adorableness! But then you had nearly TWO ROWS of whatever's right behind them, if you're not putting them at the edge of your farm (which I don't really have room for) and space is always at a premium! That's the hardest fucking thing about this farm, trying not to lose space to these decorations and buildings and trees that are often just way too tall, sob.
♥ ♥ ♥ → 30 day challenges!
30 DAY SAILOR MOON CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Best friendship:
30 DAY FINAL FANTASY CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Your favourite Final Fantasy party from your favourite game:
30 DAY MARVEL CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Your favorite royal:
30 DAY OKAMI CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Favorite male character?:
30 DAY ADVENTURE TIME CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Favorite genderbend character:
30 DAY SHIPPING CHALLENGE - Day 04 - The pairing with the most chemistry:
30 DAY ICHIHIME CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Favorite IchiHime moment (Manga):
And one of my great feelings on fandom is: If you have the lion's share of fanart/fic in a fandom? Suck it up when people express their frustration and dislike for it. Yes, they're being jerks about it often times. Yes, it seems unfair that they can rant about it, but you can't. But you have the overwhelmingly popular ship. You have a hundred things to read or look at right at your fingertips! Be the bigger person, okay.
This was a hard lesson for me to learn, but I suppose that's one thing the Prince of Tennis fandom did for me. Jesus, people were jerks about the TezuFuji pairing.
Anyway, that's what I meant when I first said that and that's still what I mean today. I really wish Bleach fandom, too, would follow this philosophy. I know a lot of shippers hate the IchiHime pairing, but you guys have mountains of porn to read. Try being a little nicer next time, okay.
♥ ♥ ♥ → I haven't talked much about FARMVILLE lately, but it's one of the things that's kept me busy lately. Prepare for picspam?
- One of the big new things is the Lighthouse Cove. Mostly, I am in favor! I love having a new farm to play with, I love having three farms to take care of (my ideal would be five!), and I actually don't mind that they're limiting the amount of crops you can have, forcing you into doing more with decorations. I'm past the point of doing much with crops anyway, I'm just here for the other stuff! It will make it harder to do the recipes, because you'll get fewer bushels, but most of what you need will probably be available from neighbors anyway, since it's a limited amount of crops.
- I am giving the harvestable cove the side-eye, though. The first couple of days, I worked like mad to upgrade it, so I'm on the last level now and... honestly, that was A LOT of building parts. You start with three of each type of building material. Then 5. (Or did it skip straight to 10?) Then 10. Then 15. Then 20. Then 25. Then 30. ON AND ON AND ON, until we get to 60 OF EACH PIECE. That's so many and it kind of burnt me out on Farmville a little there for awhile.
- Other things that burn me out: The eternal search for animal feed, jesus. I worked really hard to get some rare babies going and Sherry has been helping me tons, but on any given day, I usually have about five of them to grow. They each take 30 feed. That's 150 pieces of feed I need. Nevermind that some days I have eight or nine to grow. That gets to be upwards of 300 pieces of feed. PER DAY. I can't even think about doing common babies because I just can't spare any feed! Zynga needs to either make it easier to get feed (maybe let you post feed every five pieces you feed your baby animals instead of only at the halfway point?) or take it down to 20 pieces of feed to grow the rare babies.
- I am a little tired of the pens. I liked the wildlife pen. I'm really enthused with the zoo pen. I like the pet runs. I am very apathetic on the livestock pen, despite that I had a couple of hot pink pigs in storage, so I could immediately do rare babies. I would be more interested if there was a chance at exclusive animals from mystery babies because there is a shitload of them that I want from this list, both common and rare!
- What I really wish Zynga would do as well is make the adoptable babies have a system exactly like the trees--let your neighbors adopt one of the babies you get like you can with a tree! That would make things a lot more worthwhile! And (at least according to this list) a lot of the rare animals are not adoptable, including the fairy deer that I wanted so badly, which is a lot of my reason for going for the wildlife babies!
- My list of rare babies so far:
RARE WILDLIFE BABIES COLLECTED:
american mink
amur badger
blue arrow frog
canada lynx
golden elk
moose bull
mouselope
red dart frog
river otter
white squirrel
jackrabbit
RARE ZOO BABIES COLLECTED:
bongo antelope
cassowary
peafowl
white faced
spider-monkey
camel
lemmings
puffin
alpine ibex
blue dragon
european boar
gorilla
male ostrich
purple gallinule
trick or treat monkey
There are a lot of exclusive ones that I don't think I'll ever be able to get and I'm still missing quite a few, but! I have a decent collection now! I don't care as much about the livestock rares, so I haven't been working hard on them and the pet rares are getting me kind of bummed because they're all starting to look the same and I just want those Halloween cats already. T__T I did get a purple vineyard cat the other day, though!
Okay, farm layout time! You can see the basic idea of what I was going for with these caps, but it just... wasn't quite working out for me. I would fiddle and fiddle with it, but it got to be too messy after awhile. I liked some aspects of it and I love my collection of water features, but it was just too much to look at. But I didn't know what to cut out! So I just put everything in storage and started over. But! I took caps of the way it used to be:
An overview of the fairy tale section of my farm, where you could see the cliffside I was building and how I was starting to structure a fenced in area. I really liked now it looked like several waterfalls all coming off the line of the cliff and I definitely liked the combination of the Matterhorns and the rainbow trees that looked like clouds around them, which gave it a sense of height. I really liked the way the water features flowed together and looked like they could have actually been meant to be together! I liked the way the fairy tale cottage was tucked away inside a little forest and I liked the bright colors of the trees and I liked the glitter paths and I liked the flower towers, but it all just... started to look a little busy after adding all my garden stuff in.
The leftmost edge of my fairy tale area that moved into my rows and rows of cows. I really liked the way the water wheel and the two duck ponds turned out (I still don't know how I lucked into two duck ponds, but I will never sell them because I know I'll never get two back again!) and it looked like the water from the pond flowed into the water wheel's water and the Irish Falls flowed into the other pond. The lush grass actually looks really cool around them, too!
I started filling in the bottom half of the farm here. The top is still pretty busy, but with the large view you can see that it would look pretty neat if you were actually in it. It's hard to comprehend at a distance, but up close it looked kind of cute! And I really loved using the lavendar bridge and the greenhouse + glasshouse fenced in with a bunch of those beautiful glowing blue flowers. I liked the ribbon trees in bloom and I still love the carraige in a field of flowers. I liked the path of rose petals leading up to the garden seat. But I was getting frustrated with how the flowery well was getting lost and you could hardly even notice the little garden seat that sat right in front of the wishing well.
This is a little further out again, so you can see that it's starting to look even busier at a further angle and there were uneven patches that almost looked bare if I wasn't completely filling them in. But too much more decorating and I ran the risk of overrunning it. I did, however, have to buy the two fairy tale house decorations, the treehouse and the tree castle. FAIRY TALE THEMES ARE MY WEAKNESS. Those and Asian themes. There are still aspects of this I like, but....
My horses. There are aspects of this I like as well. I enjoy seeing foals mixed in with their parent horses, so my fairy horse and dark cherry horse and irish cobb horse and blue gypsy horse look excellent! And I'm actually really fond of using the butterfly pens and sweatpea flowers around the edges of the horse pens, despite that it makes it look super busy. It's all flowery and pretty and cute! And FINALLY a use for all that fuschia greenery! I knew I saved those for a reason! But I'm not quite entirely happy with this yet. And those little mini foals frustrate the ever loving shit out of me. They're too small to display more than one or two! But I have rainbow pony foals!! Mini fairy foals!! Little purple pony foals!! So cute--!!
Overhead view of the farm. It had some structure, you can see that it was starting to flow together a bit, but it still felt very unbalanced. Looking at it like this is super frustrating, because I had all these aspects I liked, but it just wasn't coming together as a whole. It didn't help that I extended the area that my little farmer was trapped in, creating a pathway over to the lavendar bridge, which I lined with wedding trees and it was cute but... it just got to be WAY TOO BUSY.
The biggest problem in redecorating is always, always the fucking trees. I have a bunch of chrome cherry trees that I want to use to line an area, they would look really cute staggered and then toss in some roses to fill it out a little and voila! Adorableness! But then you had nearly TWO ROWS of whatever's right behind them, if you're not putting them at the edge of your farm (which I don't really have room for) and space is always at a premium! That's the hardest fucking thing about this farm, trying not to lose space to these decorations and buildings and trees that are often just way too tall, sob.
♥ ♥ ♥ → 30 day challenges!
30 DAY SAILOR MOON CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Best friendship:
- There are a lot of really excellent friendships in Sailor Moon! Chibi-Usa and Setsuna in the manga are gorgeous, I love Rei and Usagi in the anime, and Chibi-Usa and Hotaru's friendship is very sweet. But I can't lie, Usagi and Minako being adorable BFFs with no concept of personal space and reading manga all day long and dorking out on the latest hot trend, whatever it may be? BEST EVER. I really wish there had been more time to explore individual relationships in the manga and I wish the anime had done a better job of it, because I think this could have been AMAZING. They are the two loopiest of the Solar Sailor Senshi, the two who will giggle together as they link arms and dash off to eat ice cream or pour over fashion magazines. They are amazing. Amazing!
30 DAY FINAL FANTASY CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Your favourite Final Fantasy party from your favourite game:
- My favorite is XII, where I always used my Penelo - Basch - Fran power trio. I'm not sure why I settled on those three. I suspect they're my favorites of the cast, so I just used them a lot. Well, actually, Balthier is probably my favorite, but I swear he was terrible about actually doing anything when he was in my party, he would just stand back and not shoot anything, so I started putting him in time out and just... never quite got back to him. I loved the three I had! Fran was an amazing archer. Basch was fantastic for putting Bubble + Haste + Shell + Berserk on him and just letting him loose on the enemies, he would always make his MP back before he needed to recast those on himself. And Penelo. Darling Penelo with her Zodiac Spear that she practically danced around, this cute little blonde girl just mowing down everything in her path. I loved it.
30 DAY MARVEL CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Your favorite royal:
- I guess I'll have to go with Namor. I never used to be a fan and I'm finding, as I read his solo series, that Namor is pretty boring by himself. But you put him with the X-Men? Suddenly, he is a JOY FOREVER. He clashes with many characters (and I almost shipped Namor/Bobby for a few minutes there!) and he's one of the few characters who doesn't praise Scott up and down. He's actually pretty badass when he wants to be. And he has super hot chemistry with Emma. I have definitely found myself very fond of Namor at times these days.
30 DAY OKAMI CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Favorite male character?:
- Waka! Totally and absolutely Ushiwaka is my second favorite character in the series, after Amaterasu herself. I thought it was obvious from the first time he showed up that there was more to him and that there were things he was hiding and that he would be important somehow. And I only loved him more when we got to know him more and learned just all of what he'd actually been through and how guilty he felt and how much of a burden he'd put on himself because of what happened. I am a sucker for characters who hide their misery under fluttering, grand entrances and obnoxious greetings, so you don't think too hard about them.
30 DAY ADVENTURE TIME CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Favorite genderbend character:
- Fionna, definitely. We never even got to hear Marshall Lee speak. Cake was delightful, though. And I enjoyed Prince Gumball and NPH a lot! And, man, the Ice Queen was actually kinda hot. But Fionna was clearly the star of that episode and she was just so straightforward and her adventure-loving spirit was so intact that she was far and away my favorite.
30 DAY SHIPPING CHALLENGE - Day 04 - The pairing with the most chemistry:
- ALL OF THE ONES I SHIP. Seriously, how am I supposed to answer that? I wouldn't ship them if I didn't think they had chemistry!
30 DAY ICHIHIME CHALLENGE - Day 04 - Favorite IchiHime moment (Manga):
- So hard to choose. Part of me wants to say the entirety of the Hueco Mundo arc, despite that I actually had a lot of problems with its pacing at several points. But if I can only choose one favorite moment... well, I love the moment where Ichigo finally finds Orihime again, hauls her up over his shoulder, and is prepared to abscond off with her. I just. Never get tired of that scene. But the moment I love the most is when Ichigo's Hollow awakens because he's died and he can't stay dead because she's calling for him. He can hear her. She's calling for him. He has to save her. Save her. Save her, save her, save her. The sheer intensity of that moment, of how desperate he was to save her, that he would let that Hollow take over him, that he would come back from the dead for her... that blew me away.