Status Report, Going Forward

Okay, so I lied. As it turns out, I didn't manage to get any blogging done about my most recent vacation. I seem to be pretty good at failing to realize my own limitations when it comes to blogging. It's a little late for spring cleaning, but I might as well get around to the blogging version of that now.

Part of that was the Internet situation where I went. I'll confirm that now, for the people who don't know me well enough to have already guessed: yes, I went to Japan. I have since returned from Japan, sadly enough. For the moment, I'm not going into great detail about that trip. There will be at least one post, and more likely several, in the near future in which I'll look back in more detail. The hotel didn't have wireless Internet, and I was sharing a room with my brother for most of the trip, in which I let him monopolize the single available wired Internet connection. It's not much of an excuse, but...

Well, I also came down with a cold. Tokyo's 2 for 3 on me being sick while being in that city, so yeah. At least, I say it was just a cold, but it was bad enough that I didn't feel like doing anything that wasn't lying down and sleeping for a while. It probably would have gone better if I hadn't ran out of cold medicine halfway through the ordeal. I really should have just gone and bought more.

Anyway, enough about my personal tribulations over the last two weeks. As long as I'm posting one of the few things I've felt deserved a "notifications" tag, and as long as I'm talking about why I haven't been posting all that much over the last few days weeks (practically), I might as well take a moment and say what I expect to happen here on my blog going forward.

If nothing else, "tomorrow" (he said, posting just before midnight) is a day of particular significance for people in the United States of America, and I'll probably have something to say about that. Other than that, my primary motivations seem to be losing some of their interest as of late. Looking at my tags and the number of posts each one has, while I do post some things about anime or gaming, the majority of posts express my personal opinions (which is what I seem to use the "personal" tag for, although perhaps a rethinking of that is in order) regarding either politics or feminist/progressive issues.

I'll still do that, although I've kind of missed the chance for punditry on the recent Supreme Court decisions. Not the only thing to talk about, but one of the biggest recent events in political news - and, to some extent, in progressive news as well. However, I did just get back from Japan, and as I said I plan to say a few things about that trip. Plus, I came back with all sorts of fun things which can be translated, discussed, what have you. So I'd kind of like to have a few more things of that nature happening here.

In specific, there's one particular project I can think of that pretty much throws in all of these elements. When talking about PAX East earlier, I used a visual novel called Kanon as an example of a problematic game, although only in passing as something that could use further analysis. Well, thanks mostly to my brother's generosity, I have in my possession a copy of the Japanese light novel following one of the five storylines tied up in the game; essentially the novel version of part of the game itself. What I'd like to do with that is read it and liveblog it, examining the story from a feminist perspective and translating some of the important scenes.

That's my project for the near future - the book has six chapters, and if I get through one a week, call it a month and a half. (It'll probably take longer than that, but given that I already sort of know the story's general outline, I might as well set the bar high.) And as I've already implied, I expect there to be other things along for the ride, whether I keep translating songs, add some games to that backlog, finish some of my fanfiction works, chat about developments in the political sphere... and ideally, somewhere along the line, I find myself some form of gainful employment, now that I've just graduated from college and all.

To what regular readers I have (and I'm pretty sure that's "not too many"), thank you for still checking my blog in light of my frankly pathetic update schedule. For people new to the blog (and the majority of those are courtesy of either Shakesville or the timeline of the entire Penny Arcade debacle), I hope you stick around, and I welcome any (constructive) comments you all have to make.

And to one and all, thank you for taking any time at all out of your day to bother with anything I have to say here. I really do appreciate it, and I'm going to try and do better about putting things up here that are worth your time and attention.