The deal: I have too many doujinshi, so I'm selling some of them here. All books come from a smoke-free home but have been exposed to dust and cats.

Shipping: $3 within the United States and $6 to somewhere outside it, unless you're ordering a large number of things, in which case we can work it out.

How to play: Leave a comment here specifying what you want and whether it'll be shipped to somewhere in the United States or outside of it, along with an email address I can send the Paypal invoice to. Note that I will not sell doujinshi marked as NC-17 to someone whose age is listed as under eighteen in their profile.

Feedback: Here.

( Under the cut.Collapse )

The deal: I have a number of figures and other anime-related merchandise to get out of my house. I'm selling them here. All items come from a smoke-free home but have been exposed to dust and cats.

Shipping: $3 within the United States and $6 to somewhere outside it, unless you're ordering a large number of things, in which case we can work it out.

How to play: Leave a comment here specifying what you want and whether it'll be shipped to somewhere in the United States or outside of it, along with an email address I can send the Paypal invoice to.

Feedback: Here.

( Figures and so on.Collapse )

I have a number of books of various sorts (trade paperbacks of American comics, volumes of manga and light novels, prose novels), some comics, DVDs of anime and other things, and video games that I'd like to sell.

Condition: All books I'm offering are completely readable with no problems, but have been exposed to a house full of dust and cats. Most of them have already been read. Few have been kept in perfect condition, but very few have any serious damage. I'm noting their condition as new, excellent, very good, good, or fair.

Shipping: $3 within the United States and $6 to somewhere outside it, unless you're ordering a large number of things, in which case we can work it out.

How to play: Leave a comment here specifying what you want and whether it'll be shipped to somewhere in the United States or outside of it, along with an email address I can send the Paypal invoice to.

Feedback: Here.

( The items...Collapse )

A quick, mostly non-spoilery summary of the first two Madoka Magica movies:
★ The first one is just a recap of episodes one through eight with some new animation and a lot of enhanced music and re-recorded dialogue. The second one is just the last four episodes with a tiny bit of new stuff added in, plus the same extras as the first.
★ Sayaka confirmed for heroine of the first movie.
★ Homura confirmed for heroine of the second movie.
★ The new opening is essentially just a Madoka/Homura AMV. How does anyone still doubt that it is canon? Seriously.
★ Isn't it sad, Mami? She got shafted hard for screen time.
★ On the other hand, the new Kalafina version of "Credens Justitiam" is probably capable of aurally inducing orgasms.
★ The trailer for the third movie has me really damn excited. It's also pretty gay. But what else is new?

A quick, spoilery summary of my day:
★ I now want to write a tragic Mami/Madoka fanfiction entitled "Cake or Death."
★ Every decision I made today was excellent.
★ Except maybe the one where I thought I should have nothing but a pretzel dog and a cinnamon pretzel from Auntie Anne's for dinner.
★ Yeah, not that one.

Here are some things that have been going on with me, in no particular order of importance.

☀ I've been recovering from a really ugly episode of depression; hopefully, in the process, I've been gaining some tools and self-awareness to prevent things like it in the future.
☀ After six years of muttering about how much I liked this one character and pairing in it but could never get through the damn visual novel, I flung myself at Fate/stay night and became completely consumed by it. Also, I was wrong to think I would be utterly enamored of Archer and Rin/Archer. I'm actually completely and soul-crushingly obsessed with them. I've been thinking for six years that I'd love them and I wasn't prepared.
☀ This means that I'm back in fandom actively again, for the Fate franchise and for Puella Magi Madoka Magica. But I've also been gathering up some tools for not letting the toxic parts of fandom get to me. Which means not letting myself be shamed or guilted into fights over the social justice problems in my favorite series, even if that would be the right thing to do, because I can't handle it.
☀ I have a really good therapist.
☀ I have a lot of extensive fanfiction ideas.
☀ I also have some quite nice original fiction ideas, but they're on the backburner at the moment.
☀ I'm signed up for a program that will help me go to school at the local community college--hopefully starting in January. Said college has a couple of two-year video game design and development tracks. I want to try one of those. I know that it's a tough field to make a career in, but I think I have more chance of actually getting through such a program than I would if I tried to force myself through one I'm not interested in because "the degree is for something practical."
☀ I switched from drinking coffee to drinking tea. When you use loose leaves and have a proper infuser, tea is great.

It's been a long time and the original form of my fandom preferences post, despite (or perhaps because of) how often I added stuff onto it and tweaked it, is both unwieldy and out of date. So let's have a reset.

( All these shiny fictional things I have ridiculous feelings about.Collapse )

For the first time since mid-November last year, I wrote fanfiction. 1,568 words of Rin/Archer awkward angst that is also basically a character study. Or something.

I want to write so much more. Part of me hates that I've been sucked into such a screwed-up canon and fandom so thoroughly--and part of me does not care, because I am enjoying it so much.

In addition, I've been spilling out a lot of ideas for a much, much longer and plottier Rin/Archer AU post-UBW futurefic.

I also have Archer at capeandcowl now. I am so pleased. So very pleased.

So last night I finished Unlimited Blade Works and cried so hard I had to turn auto-read off for a bit.

It's annoying, because there are a lot of things that mean I can't recommend Fate/stay night without qualifications--the hideous stilted translation, the terrible pacing, the gross problematic gender stuff inserted to drive sales with waifu fanboys, maybe even the unabashedly ridiculous over-the-top anime feel of it (although I don't really mind that, except when I occasionally go "augh everyone is acting so much like a goddamn anime character in this scene"). But good God, is Kinoko Nasu ever devoted to characterizing his beautifully traumatized people in the most loving and soul-crushing ways, and do the themes and characters and relationships thus ever hit my narrative kinks.

Archer is actually just a perfect crystallization of everything I want in an angsty, screwed-up, broken character. And Rin's relationship with him stomps all over my pairing kinks. Rin herself is also amazing, by the way.

I already have a pretty good idea of the post-UBW Rin/Archer fanfic I want to write--it's one I had an idea for six years ago when I first tried to watch the anime, but of course wasn't able to flesh out until now. As a bonus, I'll be able to weave Fate/Extra characters into it. Maybe I'll talk about it here later.

I also put in my application for Archer at capeandcowl. Yes, I should have waited until finishing Heaven's Feel, but it's long as hell and I plan to finish Fate/Zero first and I had the application finished anyway, so here goes.

My Tumblr is now basically a Fate blog with cats (or a cat blog with Fate, whichever), and I continue to descend into the mad abyss of fangirling. I'm vaguely irritated at myself for spending some two and a half years searching and searching for a new character who would smash into my heart the way Lockon did when that exact character was already waiting for me and I knew it perfectly well, I just couldn't bring myself to slog through the visual novel. But whatever. I have him now.

I hammered out some conclusions about my character type recently.

( TL;DR, Hell, and Fate.Collapse )

I'm doing all right for some values of all right, but my attention span is an expanding cloud of glitter floating gently in the breeze. If things go well, that should improve soon, but right now I'm pretty useless for any task that requires sustained concentration. At all. I'd like it if that were to change.

Some time back I analyzed the various traits in fictional characters that can push me to fixate on and obsess over them. It was rather detailed, which is something of a shame as I've since come to the conclusion that I can express the factors involved quite simply: I fall into orbit around (typically male) characters composed of some combination of psychological facades and emotional sleight of hand; an alternately self-sacrificing and self-destructive nature; and the capacity for intense and passionate emotion, especially if the emotion in question is a driving anger. Of course this has evolved over the years (only the fascination with heroic sacrifice in fiction has been with me as long as I can remember), and I've attached myself to several characters who don't fit it very well in the past (usually as a result of the text playing up their charisma and larger-than-life nature, which is a sort of wildcard factor in this science). But I need to be able to root them in those three things--and ultimately also in an essential nature that is in conflict with itself, which tends to manifest as self-destructiveness of some kind.

I don't always know who's going to do this for me. The situation I'm in now--of entering a huge and complex text with virtual certainty about what character and pairing are going to light me up--is an aberration and has a lot to do with the fact that I felt the sparks six years ago when I flirted with the tepid anime adaptation. Anyway, I named my PSP Tohsaka, so I'm pretty secure in this.

I was going to talk about the three ideas I have so far for Madoka Magica fanfiction here (one short thing that's Mami-centric and kind of Mami/Madoka, and two vague ideas for lengthier stuff, both complicated what-if AUs, one Mami/Kyouko and one Kyouko/Sayaka), but at this point I might as well save that for another post. Stay tuned.

So I think that, in honor of having an anime blog which I should really get back to posting on now that some of my personal troubles have lessened, I will make a valiant attempt to keep up with some anime series as they air starting this fall. Let's go over the series in question.

( Under the cut.Collapse )

I'm thinking tonight about two of my favorite scenes in anime, and some of the associations they have, and I felt like rambling (quite a bit more than I initially intended, as it turns out).

They aren't necessarily the best scenes I've watched in anime. I mean, I do think both of the scenes I'm going to talk about really are great (though one also has its problems), and that's no doubt part of why I react so well to them, but that's not really the point.

They're both intense and dramatic expressions of terrifying, destructive love from one female character to another.

( Spoilers for Mai-HiME episodes 22/23 and Madoka Magica episode 10, though.Collapse )

I don't know what to make of it. Probably I shouldn't take any of this too seriously, and neither should you.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Good: This show has a reputation for being overrated, and as such I went in with extremely high expectations, so it seems wrong to say that the show wound up meeting them. But it kind of did, at least in its technical excellence. It is a really, really good series in many different ways. If you can adapt to the stylized, childishly simplistic art, the animation is gorgeous and beautifully composed. The music is terrific. The themes and concepts being addressed through the narrative are complex and weighty. The characters are easy to care about and reward you for doing so. The overall writing is excellent, and some of the dialogue is incredible.
Bad: I don't really consider this show to have much in the way of objective problems, aside from some potential issues with pacing and plot structure--the middle third of the show is kind of weak in coherent and substantial plot, and the function of the final two episodes as a satisfying resolution is questionable. Indeed a whole lot of the series relies on using emotion more than action to advance the story, which is always a gamble. If it works, it's fantastic, but if it doesn't, you've lost viewers. Which brings me to my point here. What I do consider the show to have is an enormous capacity to polarize its audience. Whether you like it or can't stand it is very strongly dependent on your preferences, so try to take that into account and by all means walk away if you decide it's not to your taste. But don't spoil yourself too badly investigating.
My Favorite Part: The tenth episode is, I think, one of the best individual episodes of anime I've ever seen. Madoka and Homura's relationship is completely heart-wrenching. Ultimately, though, the peculiarities of my experience with this series mean that right now my favorite part is probably the show's conceptual and thematic framework.
Comments: The problem here is that it took me nine episodes to shed the cloak of detachment I had made for myself out of spoilers and analytical thinking. I had the basic themes of the series mapped out by the fourth or fifth episode, along with how they corresponded to each character arc, relationship, and plot twist, which is really unusual for me and fiction. Since Madoka Magica relies heavily on emotional manipulation of the viewer, this was kind of a problem. I think I might be able to fix some of this through rewatching bits and pieces, but it's thrown the whole thing into a weird place for me. Even though it was ultimately Madoka and Homura who got through to me emotionally, it's Kyouko I'm thinking of roleplaying. And I have about ten years' worth of commentary and analysis to regurgitate. I don't know what to make of it all.

You should watch it if you...
♦ Have a fondness for the tenets of cosmic horror, but would like to see it brought down to a more personal level for once.
♦ Revel in angst and melodrama without shame.
♦ You'll notice I'm not rattling off anything about "strong female characters" or the like! It's true that this show pretty much exclusively revolves around teenage girls, all of whom are meaningful and active characters, but I think in this particular case, one's opinion of the themes and the atmosphere of the series outweighs that aspect too much for it to really matter. I should note that this isn't because it's a seinen show, though (and anyway interviews indicate that the creators weren't too wedded to the male demographic; they've said they targeted the show at adult anime fans in general), and in fact I'm pretty sick of being told that it's wrong to enjoy such stories when they're targeted at men or else you're a vile neckbeard. I will say, however, that there is virtually no sexual fanservice in this show, aside from some tame shots in the opening.
♦ Seriously, if you're of the Bujold school of thought that plots by thinking up worse and worse things to do to characters, this is up your alley. I don't know what else to say without spoiling more than I already have.

Notes on influences and other texts
If you like [X], you should watch this: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Final Fantasy VIII (or even what it could have been), Shin Megami Tensei properties in general and Persona in particular, Sandman (and a number of similar Vertigo properties, such as Lucifer and Hellblazer at its best).
Additional notes: There are also a number of other canons I can relate Madoka Magica to without making a clear proclamation that someone who liked them would like it--which is to say, they share philosophical influences, address some of the same tropes, grapple with similar themes, use the narrative for related purposes, but don't necessarily belong to quite the same traditions, and they definitely don't all reach the same conclusions. Roll call: Magic Knight Rayearth (there is a thesis to be written on the conceptual relationship between Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Magic Knight Rayearth), Princess Tutu, Persona (the second and third games the most, I think).

Well, it looks like my anime blog is up and running. Promote it if you want.

I have a lot of self-indulgent, pointless things I want to talk about there. For a preview, the ideas for posts lined up in my notes touch on narrative structure and ways to evaluate it; themes of transhumanism in science fiction and the deconstruction of them (with a primary nod to Evangelion and Gurren Lagann); awesome mecha designs; gender and sexual identity; translation and localization quality; the way adaptation from one medium to another works (with Terra e... as the role model); relationship dynamics in fiction across genres and demographics; the repetition of metaphors and themes within long-running franchises; and the construction, display, and recognition of identity within Western anime fandom. I'll also try to do reviews of individual anime, games, and manga. It's going to get pretentious up in here.

For now, I'm going to try to stop getting distracted and finish the first Ace Attorney game. I really like Lana Skye, and I hope I will conclude this game with a desire to roleplay her on the internets.

Let's talk about impossible but awesome anime/manga development team-ups.

Kinoko Nasu and Keiko Takemiya. Nasu creates the female characters, Takemiya reminds him to treat them decently as she busies herself with writing in blatant yaoi subtext for the dudes.

Takako Shimura and CLAMP give each other lessons on finding the middle ground between touching but vaguely tedious slow-paced slice-of-life realism and absurd over-the-top balls-out romanticized melodrama full of self-indulgent and occasionally creepy fetishes. Heterosexuality does not exist in the world they create.

Cross-cultural genocide inducer: Yoshiyuki Tomino and George R. R. Martin. No life will survive. Except the guy played by Sean Bean, just for kicks.

Gen Urobuchi and Hiroyuki Imaishi. The outrageous flashy sexy campy characters and story actually turn out to conceal pure evil and despair. It would probably be called Nyarlatto-chan Boin Boin.

Kaishaku and Kouga Yun have a gay fanservice battle to the death over their new manga, and the resulting product destroys Western fandom entirely in a massive explosion of THAT IS SO DISGUSTING AND OFFENSIVE.

Shouji Kawamori supplements Moto Hagio's heartbreaking tale of gender-changing soulmates in space with mecha designs and advice on when the characters should burst into song.

Ryohgo Narita, Gen Urobuchi, and Kinoko Nasu play a tabletop RPG campaign together and then turn it into light novels. Wait, that one's actually happening. Carry on.

Yoko Kanno does the music for all of these. Every single one. This also actually happens, though. Half the time when I go to look up who was involved in a favorite anime's awesome music, it's her.

I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night.

It's time to round up the things I've gotten into since last I spoke with Livejournal. This is going to involve some hardcore rambling.

The big one is A Song of Ice and Fire. ( Details. No specific spoilers, though some general observations about character arcs.Collapse )

Let's move on to, oh, everything else.

After I turned the last page of A Dance with Dragons, I took a shot at my omnibus of the Amber series and got to the early parts of the fourth book before being distracted. ( On my mixed feelings. Not really spoilery, except sort of for the first book, which is over forty years old anyway.Collapse )

I also read the first two books of N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy. ( Discussion, not much in the way of spoilers.Collapse )

That's it for books. I have many yet to read, with the rest of Amber and the Inheritance trilogy up there on the list, but The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson is also tempting me. In addition: The Dark Wife by Sarah Diemer and Declare by Tim Powers.

This brings me to anime, into which I am also going to group visual novels for the purposes of this post.

I finally watched Tiger & Bunny earlier this year. ( Kind of vague spoilers, maybe.Collapse )

Shortly before the second half began airing, I watched the first thirteen episodes of Fate/Zero. And thus my old feelings of ambivalence and longing towards the Fate subfranchise of Type-Moon awaken from their slumber. Oh, Nasu, why must the twin demons of compelling premises and obnoxiously tedious writing further compromised by stilted translations reside within your heart? ( And then there's Urobuchi.Collapse )

Did you know that Urobuchi Gen, Nasu Kinoko, and Narita Ryohgo (the creator of Baccano! and Durarara!!) are playing a tabletop roleplay campaign with each other with the intent of chronicling it as light novels? If you didn't, now you do.

Last in this category for now: I'm confronting my aversion to NVL-style visual novels and starting on Umineko no Naku Koro ni. I'm on the second day. ( So, spoilers up through there.Collapse )

Video games! I've been doing those too, and not just the ones where you click repeatedly on a screen, read text, click more, read more, and listen to sound effects and freaky music. I've been writing this post on-and-off almost all day and I'm getting tired of building walls of text. Let's go.

Do you know what game I've always really wanted to replay and finish? Psychonauts, ever since years ago I got distracted in the middle of Waterloo World and never got back to it. Do you know what game I now realize I will never finish? Also Psychonauts. If I'd kept trying much longer, I would have become a vegetarian. I love almost everything about this game, but the last level defeats me. I still ship Sasha/Milla, though. It's the best. I'm going to try to crunch through some other Tim Schafer/Double Fine games before the Kickstarter one comes out. But I'm not putting money on my success, considering how many other games I have lined up.

In the wake of my Meat Circus failure, I turned to Bastion. ( Praise, and pretentiousness, and nonspecific spoilers touching on the themes and devices.Collapse ) Short version: it's a deceptively simple RPG whose primary strength is in integrating story, aesthetics, and gameplay. The music is amazing. You should probably play it.

Then it was February 7th, and I still needed a distraction, and Steam had just discounted The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I used to have 205 hours of free time, but then I took an arrow to the knee. I barely dented the main plotline before I got distracted by other games, by the way. There's not much point in doing a lengthy and obnoxiously pretentious ramble about this one. It's a goddamn sandbox for you to act out your epic fantasy Mary Sue adventures in, and everyone knows it. It never wanted to be anything else. If you don't like sandbox games, you won't like Skyrim. If you like sandbox games, you will lose a chunk of your life to Skyrim. Personal opinion: the best part was making full sets of enchanted dragonbone armor and feeling proud of it, at least until I realized I was feeling proud about video game armor.

Later, I repeated a similar process, but for about half as much money and time, with Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale. It's extremely cute and enjoyable, and I really appreciate that someone's localizing doujin games like this and that the infrastructure to easily distribute them (Steam and similar platforms) exists. If you like parodies of the RPG genre with addictive gameplay, anime art, and slightly self-consciously silly dialogue, go for it. I finished the main game, but still have a few dungeons to clear if I ever get back to it. Which I won't for a while. Because--well, let me get to it.

Did you know that some ridiculous people made huge, high-quality, expansive RPGs for the Wii? Some ridiculous people who are not the Zelda developers? And have you ever wondered how totally boned players would be if confronted with a game with sidequest and exploration potential to rival Skyrim, but a plot you can actually care about? Let's not mention how much time I've already clocked on Xenoblade Chronicles without even advancing to the point where I have a full party, and say we did. Summary: it is a really fun game with great, flexible gameplay, loads of sandbox potential, and creative environments that can be thoroughly explored. I may have overstated the case a bit when I said you can care about the plot, but not by much. The characters aren't too complex so far, the mascot is the unholy revenge of Chu-Chu risen from the grave of underfunded PSX properties, and nobody's pretending that it's deep and artistic. But there are some interesting twists and unusual bits of world-building, and I'm really only getting started. I'll get back to this one when I have more to say.

I'm done here! It only took me all day. This was not what I signed up for.

So take Cervantes and bring him back to life in this century or the last. Make him attend a performance of Man of la Mancha. More to the point, make him listen to the theater-goers gushing over the beauty of dreaming the impossible dream.

So take Machiavelli into the modern day and let him look up his name in the English dictionary. Then ask him to finally tell us what he was really thinking when he wrote The Prince and if maybe we should've read a little more of his works before making his name a byword for deception.

And then say that in 2013, someone writes a His Dark Materials fanfiction about the creation of the Church of the Dust, and a hundred years later, a post-apocalyptic society constructs this Church and sends its Silvertonguist preachers out to spread the word. How about that, Philip Pullman?

Here's the thing. In fandom we often perceive the debate over the legitimacy of fanfiction as motivated by angry, possessive authors seized by ridiculous feelings of attachment to their characters, unable to understand that fanfiction is not actually a profound sin akin to adultery. Either that, or otherwise sympathetic authors haunted by the legal ghost of Marion Zimmer Bradley, fearful of litigation from an unscrupulous fan. Probably because those actually are the loudest voices.

But not everyone crying, "Intellectual property," is conjuring an ethical chimera or bowing to their fear of the law's misuse. Some of them are voicing a very real conceptual concern, hinted at when they start to talk about trademark and copyright laws intended to prevent someone from passing off a false product as that of the original author's. They are not making an irrelevant and specious comparison. (Some of the time, anyway.) They mean exactly what they say: they fear that fanfiction, unrestrained, could take the pure and true story they have given the world and change it in the eyes of the public. Because sometimes it actually can.

Here's an example fandom might be more interested in: where do you think certain Harry Potter fans got the idea that Blaise Zabini had to be white? Okay, yes, racism. But fanfiction probably helped convey it.

When some professional creators of fiction argue against fanfiction, what they are saying is not, "It makes me uncomfortable, those characters belong to me and it's wrong for you to play with them." Instead, it is, "I have defined those characters, and I would like to exercise my right to keep that definition from changing."

They're still wrong. They have been told repeatedly, often by other professional creators of fiction, why they are wrong. But this is a different (if related, and not entirely distinct) argument in nature than "fanfiction is disgusting and wrong and violates my ownership of these people who are like children or spouses to me" versus "seriously, they're just characters, nobody is trying to have an affair with your spouse." It's actually an argument between the modern idea of "intellectual property" as a defensible ethical concept and the human reality of the ancient and eternal shared and fickle nature of culture.

There are also nits to pick, and complexities undefined. As Niccolò up there would point out, it's not just straight-up fanfiction that transforms, but also shared commentary and interpretation, and nobody could ever ban those. Not to mention: virtually everyone will concede that the dead can no longer protect their intellectual property...eventually. Maybe their children and grandchildren get to do it for a while, and where do you stop? Whatever: Anglo-Saxon #74839 in the year eight-hundred-and-yonk can hand it over to John Gardner by the time the 1970s roll around, but goddammit, my kids are going to make sure nobody lets women with curly hair become spirit-bonded with space otters for another fifty years.

Anyway, not everyone's looking at it from the perspective of the ones comparing fanfiction authors to adulterers and kidnappers. Some are coming at it from the perspective of an angry Spanish satirist who thinks the music's terrible, an Italian republican who wishes we'd remember that he really hated the Medicis, or Android Pullman in 2287 fighting the new theocratic forces of Lyra's Disciples from the haven of the Brights' Satellite.

Unfortunately for them, the stew still bubbles on.

All shipping within North America is $3, unless otherwise noted or unless you're buying a lot, in which case we'll work it out in comments. If you're purchasing from outside North America, let me know in comments and I'll work out how much the shipping will come to. Where possible, all items will be sent by United States Postal Service packed in a bubblewrap mailer, with additional plastic bags or, where indicated, original boxes and/or wrapping for disassembled figures.

Payment should be made by PayPal. I will ship within two business days of receiving payment unless extenuating circumstances intervene.

All items come from a smoke-free home, but have been exposed to dust and cats. Always cats.

Feedback can be found and given here!

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Last night I saw Terry Pratchett.

It was a last-minute thing; I found out a little after one in the afternoon that he was speaking at the Tribeca Barnes and Noble (that's in lower Manhattan) at six. I was worried that my mother wouldn't be okay with my going, since we'd planned for me to go with her to pick up my aunt at the airport, but she was actually very excited for me, because she knew what an opportunity it was, and encouraged me to go. So I did.

He talked about a lot of things, including the new Vimes-centric Discworld installment, Snuff--but mostly about his recent experiences visiting strange little places and dealing with Homeland (in)Security. He was soft-spoken and seemed tired but composed. Someone asked him which one of his characters he'd choose to be if he had to pick one, and he said it would be Sam Vimes.

I was an idiot and forgot a camera, but I brought my netbook, and to my great relief the webcam worked fine. Here I am with him. I was so focused on setting up the shot properly that he had to remind me to smile.

I had given up, years ago, on ever getting a chance to meet him. But now I have.