Of course, to me, the Four Questions start with Ma nishtana ha-lailah hazeh ... . However, the meme has something a little more personal in mind! It goes like this:
 

• Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
• I'll respond by asking you four questions so I can satisfy my curiosity
• Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
• Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions

lady_ganesh asked me:

1. Who's your favorite character to write?
   
   Has to be Gojyo from Saiyuki! I think he lets the inner me come out and play.
    
2. What's your favorite offline hobby?
   
   The Young Lady heard me ask this outloud and said it has to be reading. I'll add photography - although that goes online once I post the pix to Flickr.
    
3. Do you go to conventions? (I can't remember.) Is there one you want to go to?
   
   I do like to go to cons sometimes. I used to run tournaments at gaming cons. Now I hang out and take pictures of people in costumes. I've gone to Katsucon the last couple of years and hope to do so again in 2010.
    
4. What's your favorite fannish possession?
   
   After the actual books and manga themselves, it has to be my big print of this picture (pefectly worksafe; click on the image once you get there so you can see the whole thing properly). telophase drew/painted this for me! I won her in a charity auction, and asked for something with four mysterious shop keepers from manga/manhwa. We have this framed and hanging in the dining room.

This is all telophase's fault, because she made me remember that I had done these once upon a time (ca. 1978 or 1979, as an undergrad at U.Va.).

All the cool kids are doin' it ... like louiselux and kispexi2. So I'll spam everyone with some favorite Saiyuki pix as well!

Actually, I had the problem that my favorite pics of individual guys are picked out of group shots ... still, there were an awful lot of nice shots,and it was hard to pick.

( Cut for big pile o' pics )

telophase has finished the picture I won from her in the Sweet Charity auction a while back. It is the most gorgeous thing! Check it out here, and also see her notes about how it came about - what I prompted, and what happened after that - because I think it was an interesting process.

And I have won the story that emungere offered on the livelongnmarry auction, which closed in the wee hours of the morning! I need to come up with something really good in the way of an idea ... probably I will do a few ideas, as I did for the picture, and hope that one really hits home.

(A digression - or perhaps not - on the subject of creativity on demand: In my gaming heyday, when I ran tournaments at cons and stuff, someone once asked me what type of roleplaying scenario I liked best as a player myself: Tolkien-ish? Oriental fantasy? SF? Urban noire fantasy? Spy? My answer was: "If the gamesmaster is good, then whatever the gamesmaster enjoys running the most."

XD

Exactly a month ago, I posted that this wonderful manga/anime art resource had gone under because of financial difficulties: she was starting to have to pay too much for hosting. Fortunately, she took the suggestion of a number of her fans and put up donation buttons for donations via PayPal (on the upper left of the gallery page linked below or on the bottom of main Aethereality site page). I view it is a subscription of sorts - I'm happy to put something into the hat because I've used her materials so often.

Anyway, if you make icons or wallpapers or banners and haven't checked this out, you should - she has some lovely stuff:

Aethereality Gallery

And of course, if you use her stuff and can afford to donate, please do ... .

Folks, you may recall me recommending the manga art gallery at Aethereality.net as a resource for making icons, etc. I haven't been able to get into it for a couple of weeks, and I just found out why. Posted on main page of the site is this notice:

Aethereality Gallery is now closed. It is using way too much CPU resource for shared hosting that Dreamhost can no longer support.

By "resource", I'm not talking about space or bandwidth. I have plenty of those already. Unless I have $40 to shell out for private server hosting each month, which I don't, I can't bring the gallery back. Sorry.

I've told her (as have several other users) that I'd be willing to help pay for this to be back up. If anyone else has any suggestions for her, please let her know. This was an amazing resource, and it's terrible that it's gone!

I was looking for some examples of Hiroaki Samura's art work for the discussion of manga in the comments of my previous post, and I came across this picture (set up to pop in a separate window or tab), which is frickin' adorable! The only thing is, I don't recognize all the female characters who are shown in school costumes. From the left, I see Hyakurin as the teacher, then Rin, Makie, and Doa, but who are the other three?

It's definitely That Time of Year, for better or worse:
 

At the first sign of Solstice, I assembled all my stuff:

12 bows like pompoms
11 rolls of foil
10 spools of ribbon
9 bows that pop up
8 rolls of Kraft
7 sheets of stickers
6 books of art wrap
5 Hannukah rolls!
4 spools of silk cord
3 rolls of scotch tape
2 art tissue packs
and some sharp scissors with the long blades!

Right here.

Most of them are images I've found elsewhere, and a lot of them are from the anime (ugh!), but there are better versions of the Gaiden chibis than I've seen previously, and there are some very nice Sanzo pix I hadn't seen before and a couple of good Kougaijis and one very nice Dokugakuji.

There are also images for lots of other anime and manga on the site, including Wild Adapter (there's a really lovely Kou) and Gravitation.

Enjoy!

Today I'd like to introduce my favorite science fiction and fantasy artists/illustrators: Leo and Diane Dillon (who are an interracial couple) and Kinuko Y. Craft (who is Asian American).

There's something that Samurai Deeper Kyo mangaka Akimine Kamijyo does that I haven't noticed in the few other series I've read, and I'm wondering whether this is something fairly common in manga or not. Basically, there will be an illustration that consists of a long pull-back shot of the scene with an inserted close-up of the face(s) of the character(s). A few of them have borders between the elements, but even then, there's usually some element bridging the two sections.

I didn't see any striking examples early in the series, but by vol. 6, they're occurring fairly regularly. Sometimes they're used when a character is introduced, and sometimes they're just used when a character appears dramatically (the kind of thing that would get a "ZAA!!" in Saiyuki). Anyway, below the cut are several examples (some pretty large), and I'll talk about the characters and scenes a bit as well ....