A sufficiently desperate amalgamated waffle sorter

Well, I think I now understand exactly why Milliways' Warehouse 13 crew went AU.

( You see, I've now seen the beginning of Season 4. )

( Addendum )

I wonder... if I were to change the past so that I started watching My Little Pony now, with no prior knowledge thereof... would I see Pinkie differently?

As it stands, she's essentially the founding member (though not the first, chronologically, even in my experience) of a brain-category that has some relation to the "manic pixie dream girl" trope, but, well... the four foremost members of that category are Ty Lee of A:TLA, Pinkie Pie, Nora Valkyrie of RWBY, and Tess Fontana of Eureka. And the latter two are my current favorite members of their respective casts, whereas Pinkie is pretty near the bottom.

Don't get me wrong, I realize there are substantial differences between the four. And I don't see any way I could prefer Pinkie to Twilight, let alone Fluttershy. But it seems rather odd for the same brain-category of this type to contain both extremes.

I don't have a Brandon Sanderson icon, maybe I should change that, but this is the next best thing, I think.

Christmas! It was a very Sanderson Christmas. I gave my sister the Mistborn trilogy, she gave me a scarf she made with the Steel Alphabet symbols (the first eight, anyway), my brother gave my dad Warbreaker...

( Other things I received: )

Good year, I'd say.

As some of you may know, I'm a fan of the Rune Factory series. For those unfamiliar, this is a fantasy-themed spinoff of the Harvest Moon games, which takes the original's farming system and adds Zelda-like combat and a fantastic quest.

As I imagine you're not aware, unless you're really good at putting things together or you're a StE person (and I haven't noticed any of those subscribing to me here), I've recently become a fan of RWBY, Rooster Teeth's new project. Not long ago I wouldn't have imagined I'd be interested in any Rooster Teeth thing, but I digress.

( Here's where they come together. )

Just thought I'd share.

You know what's weird?

Dreams.

There are, according to our culture, certain "standard" dreams. Flying, falling, being naked in inappropriate places.

I don't remember many of my dreams, but I don't remember ever remembering having one of those. The dreams I remember remembering have much more bizarre topics. Like...

• The One Where I Tried To Explain What I Meant By "I Am Harry Potter"
• The One With The Hole In Snowy Ground, That I Couldn't Get Away From
• The One With Murder And Ponies (though not, I think, murder of or by ponies) On A Lake
• The One Where Rainbow Dash Raced A Series Of Video Game Characters One-On-One (I'm pretty sure Samus was cheating

And so on. Weird stuff. Dreamlike stuff.

Well.

It seems I accidentally a plurk. Not sure it's really my thing, but it seems to serve savetheearth in much the same way AIM serves milliways_bar. So we'll see.

Of course, now I'm left with the same sort of "what now?" feeling I had when I got a facebook. And plurk doesn't even have Mousehunt.

You know, sometimes I wonder about my brain.

So I've got Felix, yes? Simple guy, saved the world, all that jazz.
April of 2009, he shows up at milliways_bar over on LJ, from three parts of his life.
November of '09, a DE response crosses him over with Young Wizards.
Shortly after this, dalzoon is born, spinning off from that DE and becoming a separate (if quieter) headvoice. His surname is produced by running "Vale" and "son" through an online translator until I found a language where the combination looked like a surname. In Dutch, it did.
May of 2010, I post a picture with Felix in it to my deviantART gallery. Others follow, and "dA Felix" begins to gain presence in my mind. Not a voice, though; as a result of an idle comment about "eloquent body language", I think of drawn!Felix as entirely silent.
Early 2011 (I don't know for sure, but the relevant document was created that January), an attempt at porting the Golden Sun universe into the Homestuck universe produces variants of all the GS party members. obstnatearth results; his last name, Zoonderdal, was an attempt at rendering Dalzoon into three syllables. I have no idea if "der" would be appropriate. (This Felix's voice has not been very much heard for some time.
March of 2013, I forcibly pull myself out of an RP slump with a dear_mun post. This has the unexpected result of persuading a Sheba to come to Milliways. More relevantly, something about it hits me hard with the RP bug, as I begin investigating other games and even writing apps. One of these games, savetheearth, strikes me as a good place to send Felix, but it wants a native version thereof. I toy with the idea of adapting Felix Dalzoon, but decide to go a different route. The result is (or will be, once I put a little more effort into things) seriallylucky, Fred Vandenberg - whose surname is chosen solely because it's vaguely fitting and appears on a list of common Dutch surnames.

So. That's four separate journals, at least eight semi-distinct voices, all for essentially the same character. I blame you, Chanter.

(The best part doesn't even line up with the rest of it. You know one reason I'm glad I didn't try to port dalzoon? His occupation - high-school biology teacher - is already specifically taken by someone else in savetheearth. Talk about crazy random happenstance.)

You know what's sometimes really fascinating?

The "More Like This" box deviantART added to the side of picture pages a bit ago.

For instance. This is Ivan. I just saw a fanart of him for which that box featured several instances of the title character of Yotsuba&!. (Who, curiously, does share his daughter Karis' hair color. Is dA promoting crossover ships as backstory...?)

For another instance. Mudshipping, in Golden Sun fandom, is shipping of Isaac with Mia. I just saw a mudshipping fanart for which every picture in that box, except one, was Legend of Zelda fanart. I mean, yes, I can see some resemblance between Isaac and Link, and one of the Hylian goddesses has blue hair, but almost every picture?

I wonder what it looks at. I imagine the artist, and what else the artist has uploaded, plays a part, but clearly that isn't everything.

There is a discussion that periodically comes up, in various forms, at my primary My Little Pony thread. Every so often we get to discussing what is a masculine or feminine trait or activity, and what that does or should mean.

Today, it occurred to me to wonder how that discussion would be different if the people involved were speaking a language with gendered nouns. Arabic, Latin, German, French, Spanish - all the other languages I've studied or had significant exposure to use two or three genders, but not English. And I wonder how that affects this kind of discussion.

O Beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America, America!
God shed His grace on thee!
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O Beautiful for pilgrims' feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America, America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control;
Thy liberty in law!

O Beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife!
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America, America!
May God thy gold refine,
'Til all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!

O Beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years;
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America, America!
God shed His grace on thee!
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!