Back in 2002, I was at my aunt’s house in Chicago, complaining to my grandmother about having to go back to get another college degree after my art degree and general lack of artistic skill failed to get me a job, or a worker’s visa for that matter.
“Our family used to own lands,” said my grandmother.
I blinked. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“You are the eldest son of my eldest son,” she replied. “Those lands would have been your inheritance.”
Back in the day, when this blog was known as “Heart’s Content”, I announced a prize of “I’ll draw whatever you want (within reasonable limits)” for whoever posted the 666th comment to the blog. The winner was Kairu Ishimaru. His comment?
epic lulz! lolis!
That was a good comment for such a milestone, if you consider that comedy and lolis are the foundation of this blog. That’s why J.C.Staff is the best anime studio on earth, why Kito is better than John Avon, and why Toho is the best game series around. For his prize, he requested a catgirl with glasses, and this was the result.
This illustration spent a while as the banner of his blog, then I adopted it as my own banner after he stopped using it.
And then my blog got hacked.
Heart’s Content was reborn as the more appropriately named “Heart’s Content (H.C.) Staff”, but the posts were all lost and the comment counter was reset to zero.
The Comment #666 award was replaced with a Comment #999 award, and I never announced it, because announcing the award made people comment more and I wanted it to be a surprise.
Reader Falkonus made the 999th comment:
lol at cirno’s face.
So when I arrived at my parents’ house in Chicago last Friday (July 2nd), I took a shower and used the Arm and Hammer deodorant that was conveniently provided for me.
To my great dismay, it turned out that I was violently allergic to the deodorant. My armpits quickly turned into the reverse of Reimu’s in terms of appeal. The skin turned red and swollen, filled with a rash of thousands of tiny fluid-filled blisters that soon spread across my upper arm and ribcage and started to itch like crazy. It was as though the deodorant had become poison ivy.
It’s been a whole week now, and despite my supreme force of will in refusing to scratch the itch, the rash is still there and has just reached its peak. These things get worse before they subside. Only allergy pills and poison ivy treatment lotion have kept the itch from destroying my sanity, and I’m just thankful that I’m not also allergic to the lotion. Heat and perspiration make it worse, and so I’ve been trying to stay indoors and keep cool, which isn’t always possible during summer in Chicago.
I’ve been trying to enjoy my vacation otherwise, but the rash, followed by an insect sting on Saturday evening that caused a joint on my left hand to swell up and hurt like hell whenever I moved my forefinger, followed by coming down with a fever on Monday, has just been making my life miserable. The itch wakes me up in the middle of the night, causing me to spend the days trying to catch up on sleep and trying to just not be conscious to worry about stuff. My parents put things into perspective by saying “It isn’t life-threatening”, but though I’m glad it isn’t pneumonia, it still itches.
I am still on track for 8 new pages of Fairy Ring this Sunday… though that doesn’t help with the itch either.
A few weeks after I got a 2d version of myself, I tried entering my name into another shindanmaker site, maiwaifu. The result?
I guess the algorithm confused me with CCY or something. I do admit, Shiori would make an excellent wife. She is the most attractive Kanon girl in terms of appearance and personality, and is also good at art and cooking. And I would rather hug a sad girl than a cobra.
So my final exam is this Thursday (June 3), and my summer break follows shortly after. I will suspend Lotus Cobra is Evil until fall, and start working on Fairy Ring, the Cirno x Suwako comic that I have been planning since the end of winter.
But before I can do that, there’s one item of business that needs to be taken care of first.
A past contest to guess my favorite old-school Magic card ended with reader YukiSilvermaine finding the correct answer, Elvish Spirit Guide. I promised a prize at the beginning of summer, and it is time to deliver.
No Lotus Cobra this week; too much homework.
Here’s something short.
So it seems that artists on Pixiv are visiting this site called Making you a two-dimensional woman, where you enter your name into a form, and an algorithm uses the name to generate a “two-dimensional female version of you.” When IOSYS album cover artist Kito entered his name, the result was this smoking hot succubus bunnygirl.
I decided to try it myself, and…
A sporty tsundere loli whose speech and personality are like that of a disagreeable older person? How random is this algorithm?
Anyway,
Following Strike Witches naming convention, her name is “Karin Garnett”, after the basketball player.
So I was looking over the Cuffs Staff Diary and wondered, who on earth would buy “Goth-Loli Sora’s White Wine” and “Miko-Miko Akira’s Red Wine”?
But then I remembered the Jones Planeswalker Soda.
And then I thought I would probably be interested in buying Rumi Cola (aka “Is That So-da”) if someone actually made it.
I don’t have any products worth selling right now, but maybe in the future a print version of Fairy Ring or a compiled Lotus Cobra is Evil might be marketable, if I threw in the proper bonuses. But I’ll have to wait until I have at least 50 pages worth of material.
Illustration: Iwai Harusaki
So the incident I have been fearing ever since I started school has arrived: when a large school project coincides with overtime season at the office. All blogging operations are suspended.
In the meantime, here’s something for you to puzzle over. Can you guess who my favorite Magic card girl is? Here are three hints:
1. She’s a green creature.
2. She’s old-school.
3. Just because I like lolis in my anime and games does not mean that I prefer real life or realistically drawn women that way.
See you in summer, hopefully earlier. I have to go to work now.
The mysterious message mentioned in the previous post was from EFINK (NSFW), founder of the circle ESTABLISH NECHOES (also with NSFW content), which is dedicated to Nekomimi. While I enjoyed reading other people’s speculation as to what his purpose might be in contacting me, I didn’t think he would actually ask me to join his circle or contribute to their next project. My skill level is still too far below the level of actual professionals.
Still not good enough
EFINK’s reason for contacting me was nothing more than to show his appreciation after I blogged about ESTABLISH NECHOES, and after he read Miao Diary. But, you might ask, wasn’t that like a year ago?
Yes, he had wanted to contact me, but couldn’t easily find my email address on this site. Before he could search more, my site got hacked for the second time. The hacker installed malware on my site, and although the site was speedily purged and restored from backups, it was enough to give my site a bad reputation at places like the Web of Trust, causing various safe browsing tools to block my site long after Google had removed it from their blacklist. Unable to get to my site, EFINK gave up on trying to contact me for the time being.
I just received an email from a professional Japanese artist, who shall remain unnamed until circumstances become clearer. This artist represents a circle of artists, one of whom is in my top 3 favorite Japanese artists of all time. This circle is dedicated to drawing catgirls. He said he wanted to talk to me and asked whether the email he used was the proper one to contact me by.
I said he had the correct email and that I was open to talk, and am now waiting for his reply.
I wonder what he could want? I have never had any contact with his circle except posting on the oekaki BBS of one of the artists. Have I offended him in any way? Maybe used a picture from his circle without asking permission? Does he need my help promoting his circle to a foreign audience? Or is this an elaborate trick and the email is not from the person it claims to be from?
Update: I received his reply and will explain more in a later post. Yes, it concerns Miao Diary. No, he doesn’t want to translate it.
