renaissance poisson

i just got notice from BK1 that they have gokujou no koibito in stock. and yay, now there are finally cover pictures, and pretty ones at that:

http://www.bk1.co.jp/product/2789064
http://www.bk1.co.jp/product/2789065

IIRC it's already longer than all of minase masara's other work, and the serialization is on chapter 14 and ongoing. that makes me very happy, since i find most of her work sadly too short, and i hope a successful triple tank series (or so) will encourage her to write a bit longer stories in general.

in other news, i can now manage to order from an all-japanese book or CD store, no english help provided. yay!

*slips back into japanese-study hermit mode*.

ok, this is the middle of march. i've had it with the freezing temperatures. i want to start gardening! this winter has been unseasonably cold. it's not like i wouldn't have hermitted anyway, but i've been extremely bad about leaving the house, and the cold is not helping. the older i get the more narrow the range of temperatures in which i feel really comfortable.

i was gonna put the sole picture i've taken of a snowdrop cluster here, but photoshop's filebrowser is still busy thumbnailing aegis' image drive, which it has now been doing for more than two hours -- that was probably not a bright idea, to let it start doing that. i need to do better digital asset management. really, the images should move onto the external drive.

i am listening now almost exclusively to jpop/jrock. me -> handbasket -> hell. i blame BUMP OF CHICKEN (lead singer of which is in my icon)(ghod, i have a japanese boyband singer in my userpic. shoot me now.). except how can i not love a group called "bump of chicken", i ask you. no really, i should blame aja. *hearts aja*.

yesterday i spent several (3? 4? 5? time escaped.) hours trying to translate 3 scenes from (another) manga that has sucked me in.

jinian: gokujou no koibito by minase masara -- very, very pretty bois, great dynamic between the characters. i loved that lots of people on yaoi_daily couldn't tell who the seme was until they were right in the act. probably her best after empty heart. maybe even better. hard to tell; there are 4 chapters missing out of 13, and only 2 are scanlated; empty heart is much shorter. there is something about her characters that hooks me even in her oneshots, but i don't know quite what. cast: yoshimi (dark hair), masahiro (glasses). text removed to prevent innocent eyes from burning. gayboy is developing a crush on masahiro. down, gayboy. you do not need two lovers. i need some rest.

i must stop with the translation attempts, really. it takes up so much time, and i am so bad at it yet. however much i want it, i can't force the absorption of japanese at that level. i do get something out of it; it feels really amazing when i decipher a key kanji, and suddenly the phrase sounds in my mind, and i RECOGNIZE it. but my time would be better spent conjugating verbs and learning about sentence structures.

( more detail about my kanji adventures in yaoiland than most anyone will care to read )