I'd heard good things about this show, so I added it to my hulu to-watch list when I went through and added a bunch of stuff I wanted to catch up on. I rewatched all of Psycho-Pass, and I finally watched Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood (I watched the original 2005 or whenever series that only went through the first manga volume or so, which means that this time, I could see all of it.)

So, Hanako-kun. There's an anime trope of haunted schools, and at Yashiro Nene's school, there are 7 "great wonders," the big apparitions, as well as a couple minor ghosts. The 7th wonder is Hanako of the toilet, who's linked to a specific girls' bathroom stall. Yashiro hears about ghosts who will grant you a wish, so she goes to summon Hanako, and it turns out Hanako is a male ghost. (Hanako is a female name.)

The first few episodes are typical light-hearted hijinks: Yashiro eats a mermaid scale to get her crush to fall in love with her; it doesn't work out very well, because mermaids in Japanese folklore are vicious. There's a minor ghost in a tree that makes confessions of love come true. A younger student, Kou, who's descended from a family of exorcists and is supposed to exorcise Hanako and gets a crush on Yashiro, who stops him from exorcising Hanako. You know, silly stuff.

But then it starts getting serious, with every episode exploring deeper into Hanako's psyche and Yashiro's growing fondness for him, and Kou's relationship with a classmate. Several episodes were heartbreaking. There's a growing conflict between some of the ghosts in the school and Hanako and friends.

I liked it. The only problem is that it's only 12 episodes, and it doesn't really end. It stops. It was adapted from a manga, so it probably ends where a collected volume or a story arc ends. It has a satisfying final episode, but I want a sequel to find out what happens next, to get more of the threads tied off.

So: I enjoyed this, and I recommend it to anyone who's looking for a surprisingly deep light-hearted shonen show. You can watch it on hulu and (I assume) funimation.com.

When I got an email gauging my interest in working on this project that said "up to 20 hours a week," I thought, "cool, I can work around that." I got a new file to annotate today, and the instruction was to turn it in "as early as possible," with about 14 hours of work. They said to let them know if we needed more time, so I told them that the initial email said 20 hours; I've already put in 10 this week (in 2 days); Monday at the earliest.

I'm a chronic over-explainer. It's that thing you do when you start explaining why you can't make it to X or won't work more than they said you would. It's really hard for me *not* to add things like "I figured 3 hours a day or so, and I could work on my other annotation project which is more fun for an hour or so a day, and I can still do things like write."

I have to keep reminding myself that people don't need explanations. I don't have to justify myself, my right to a life and work/life balance, etc. It's hard, though.

It stems from anxiety, like all of my bad habits. (Well, maybe not all, but a damn lot. Overplanning, getting places way early, all that kind of thing.) At least with Prozac, I can keep the "you fucked up, remember that time when you were 8? let's relive that now" away. I still have those moments of "oh, boy, I fucked that up," but only a normal amount, I guess? Not replaying things over and over while I'm trying to sleep.

Anyway. Time to finish the book that almost kept me up way past my bedtime.

This month went surprisingly fast! Hard to believe it's almost the election. Speaking of which, I've read a lot of commentary with terrifying and doomsday scenarios about what will happen depending on the outcome, and, while I hope it doesn't come to any of them, I hope I'm prepared enough. I've got a supply of my meds on hand, and there's no shortage of food in this house (though it's not all vegetarian).

Am I ready to haul into DC and join protests? The question on that is, am I brave enough?

I spent 5 hours on my contract work today, and I'll probably need another 4 tomorrow to finish the file I'm working on. Which they told me this morning they wanted today. Hahaha lolno, this is part time, my friends. It's also surprisingly mentally exhausting. So anyway, I asked them to tell me *when they assign the file* when they expect it to be done, because I didn't work over the weekend and generally don't plan to (at least not on this contract work). I haven't seen (that I can remember) that they have a general X-hour turnaround expectation, so ...

I also need to get myself moving faster in the morning so I actually *have* a morning to do work in.

My sister texted me that Dad was in Frederick visiting his brother and wanted to come see her, and did I want to come? Yes, with the caveat that masking had to happen and we'd sit outside.

Spoiler: I was the only one wearing a mask, and we mostly didn't sit outside.

Dad is ... weird. He's right-wing with some libertarian leanings, I guess? I don't talk politics with him for the sake of keeping the peace, but you can absolutely infer things just from talking about stuff in general. Like today, he was talking about cryptocurrency and how we should all get some, and I just said "uh huh" a lot. I don't have extremely strong opinions on it, or much knowledge of the subject, other than b*tcoin exists, it crashed and people lost a lot of money, and in general it seems to be the plaything of loons.

Things I have more knowledge of I challenged from sideways, I guess? He said something about needing more productivity, I said productivity is up a lot over the last 40 years, he said something about "I meant in like Africa" and got into food aid (it was hard to follow sometimes, it may have been via the "Soros/Gates decrease the population" conspiracy, idek). I responded, when I eventually got a turn, that there *is* enough; it's just not evenly distributed. (Because there are enough resources and is enough money but like 40 people have most of it.) [#fullCommunism]

He's always been blustery and kind of a windbag, so that isn't surprising. It's harder to follow his trains of thought than it used to be, and apparently his brother's memory is garbage. Considering their dad died of Alzheimer's when I was in college, I'm not terribly surprised. Though I worry about my own future and hope for an elderly-hood like my mom's parents: generally healthy, give or take age-related heart trouble and all that. Grandpa made it to 93 and was as sharp and irascible as ever. Grandma is currently 91, getting a little forgetful but she had cancer twice, and chemo isn't great for your brain. She has macular degeneration, though, which means she can't really see close up anymore. She used to do quilting and crochet and that kind of thing.

Irascible is a great word; we should use it more.

Now to read some books.

I'm almost done with the stupid audio transcription. I think I can send it for review tomorrow. Only like 10 hours of work on a 30-minute audio file -__-

My sister texted me last night to say that our dad is visiting his brother and did I want to get together? Sure, caveat: masks and distance, of course. She asked him if he was ok with that (because she is also a masker), and, anyway, we're getting together at her house Saturday afternoon. It's absolutely a #2020mood that you have to ask your Boomer parents to mask up for a gathering.

I still don't really want to think, so more Magnus Chase and preventing Ragnarok. (PS: Rick Riordan said trans rights.)

I've been the queen of to-do lists basically my whole life. When I was in school, I had a little planner with all my stuff in it: clubs, church, choir practice, homework due dates, test dates. When things were busy, I would break it down into chunks, like "English paper - draft" and that kind of thing.

The planner I got for this year would have been fine, if this year weren't a fucking dumpster fire and all my plans were table-flipped. It has a lot of tools for long-term goal setting and breaking things down into steps.

But, I have to say, I found the "handwritten to-do list in a spiral notebook once a week" generally rather effective, especially in combination with looking at my GCal to keep track of dates. So I want to try something more free-form, and a million people have talked about their bullet journals, so why not try that? Plus I have all these fountain pens now and a variety of inks, so I should use them!

For one thing, I have approximately negative artistic talent, and everyone I've seen using them has these pretty drawings on their weekly planner pages and whatever. Plus, it seems like a waste of time to me to spend hours drawing my weekly/monthly planner pages. No judgment, whatever floats your boat, but it's clearly not for me.

But I did a cursory google this evening as a break from the annotation gigs, and, even though a lot of people spend a lot of time on the art and design aspect, the OG concept guy doesn't. Apparently, the guiding principle of BuJo is "whatever works for you."

I'd like something 'nicer' than the spiral notebook I used for 3 years in grad school to keep track of my entire life, but it doesn't have to be ~fancy~. I'm probably going to pencil out a design for what they call "spreads," but I'm thinking it's going to be basically the month, monthly goals, a week by week with individual pages for each day that I only add day by day, so I can do more in-depth journaling if I want to. I might put in an activity tracker and motivate myself with stickers. I should make a key/code or something, because those seem useful.

I have a hardbound journal coming from RedBubble, 2 actually: I planned already to use one of them for my 2021 book log and have more than just a list of titles. The other one can be the first ... 3 months? of 2021. I think the RB journals are 120ish pages.

I might try a modified version next month for NaNoWriMo to keep me on track for that and for work I'm getting paid for.

But I'm not doing any designing tonight. Tonight I'm reading more Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, because adventures for the t(w)een set are fun when you don't want to think too much.

One of the hardest things for me to adjust to, mentally, was that I don't actually want The American Dream (TM): big house in the suburbs, picket fence, 2.5 kids, all that stuff. All my years growing up, I learned from the media, from books, from family and peers, that the outward signs of success were a free-standing house in a good neighborhood, or a townhouse if you had to, and that these were the things good Americans should aspire for and acquire.

So, I got the large house in a subdivision. And after about 10 years living there, I started dying inside. I didn't have contact to anyone that didn't require driving somewhere. I had to drive to the bar, to the grocery store, to the downtown, to the park. (The main good thing was that, being a subdivision with lower traffic, running on the streets where there weren't sidewalks wasn't particularly dangerous.) It was around that time that I started building my plan to move to Berlin, where I felt at home in a way I didn't feel in a lot of other places.

I grew up in Frederick, MD, about 50 miles from DC and the home of Fort Detrick. (It was almost literally in our backyard at the first house we lived in.) At the time (the 80s-90s), it was a fairly small city, but growing as a bedroom community for Bethesda or even DC, as housing prices went up and up in Montgomery County, and Baltimore, to a lesser extent. I've been back a dozen times since my mom moved away around 2004, because one of my uncles still lives there. It's grown very poorly. The terrible intersections around the mall are only worse. The main road into downtown from the south (off 270, at this same horrible intersection) is two lanes. You want a bus? Good luck. The only positive, I guess, is that you can get the MARC train, which will take you to Baltimore (I think) or to a station where you can transfer to Metro for DC. There are tons more subdivisions, many more people, correspondingly increased traffic, and nowhere to put any of it.

Even though I grew up there, I don't feel at home there. I have nostalgic feelings, I guess, for downtown and Baker Park, and the handful of times they flooded the empty field by our second house (by the covered bridge) in winter for an ice skating rink. Could I feel at home there? Maybe, but almost certainly not anywhere I could afford to live.

I like going into DC, because it's alive and has public transit (to some extent, even if the Metro is as old as I am and hasn't been kept up at all), and you can do things there. But you still need a car, pretty much, if you want to do things like get groceries or visit friends/family in MD or VA.

But after the divorce, when I was living in a 2-BR apartment, I spent a lot of time figuring out what I actually wanted. I want an amount of space I can reasonably keep clean/tidy on my own. I want a balcony, and I need a bedroom separate from the living room. I don't want to do yard work, but maybe have a container garden on the balcony. I want to be able to walk to a bus stop or subway station (or both), to grocery stores, and ideally to restaurants, but I'm fine with hopping on the bus to get to one. I don't want to need a car.

There aren't a whole lot of places in the US that meet that description, and the ones that do are unaffordably expensive. But Berlin meets those criteria (although the city has a lot of problems, usually involving a lack of money), and it just feels right to be there.

I'm waiting for this pandemic to be over, or at least under some semblance of control, so that the EU will let us plague-bringers in (because we won't be plague-bringers anymore). My American dream is in Europe.

I drafted another column for tor.com. It's going to need polish, but it isn't "due" for a while yet, so there's plenty of time.

I got 2 more transcriptions assigned, and these are gonna take a while. 90 minutes in, and I'm on like 5 minutes of the 30-minute recording. I'm getting paid, and I could be doing something else, like working retail.

My hosts' cat Shelby, aka Darkness, aka the Void, has adopted me. She likes being on my bed and follows me around sometimes. It's pretty cute.

After last week's paean to fountain pens, I ordered more. I put them up on Insta.

I got my first assignment on this freelance/contract transcription annotation gig. I'm not allowed to go into detail, but it was a little more in-depth than I was anticipating. At least it won't be something that bores me to tears!

Of course, I'd planned on going out for a walk this afternoon and calling my grandma, but I spent nearly 4 hours on this annotation thing. Maybe tomorrow. It looks like the last warmish day for a while before fall really hits.

I finished this novel about a month ago, so it's time to start sending it to agents to see if any of them want to represent it. I have a list of around 50 agents who sound like good fits for my book, and I've sorted about half of them into the first 3 rounds of queries. I sent 8 out today, and now I wait for responses.

Or no response; there's an annoying trend right now where "no response means no."

One less-annoying trend is the Query Manager submission form, which each agent can personalize with the submission elements they want. It's pretty cool, and you get a link to your query status, so you can play rejectomancy like with short stories. One thing I wish QM had was the ability for authors to have a saved profile-ish where you paste in your query, etc, and customize it for the agent in question, because copy-pasting the same things 5 times is annoying.

For the agents who want emailed submissions, I made gmail templates for query + 5 pgs and query + 10 pages, both with the synopsis at the end, which I can cut for the ones who don't want it. There are a handful who want 50 pages (yikes), but they want it as an attachment.

The hard part is going to be not being crushed under the inevitable pile of "doesn't meet our needs right now." But who knows, maybe a strongly anti-capitalist queer romance will hit the Zeitgeist.