Sunday, April 15, 2001

Hmmm. I have a rant about economics and rich people and taxation based on a conversation with Saalon (and a recent entry in his diary, which he’s started using now), but I think it’ll wait for another day. I have other stuff to talk about for now.

I woke up this morning in a very sturdy funk. I couldn’t drag myself out of bed, which meant that I couldn’t go to church with my parents. On today, of all days. Easter Sunday.

And to make matters worse, I surfaced briefly to hear Dad say, “I guess you won’t be coming with us this morning. That’s really disappointing; I was looking forward to having all of us there.” Now, that looks really mean-spirited here on the page; it wasn’t meant to be that bad, and he said later he wasn’t trying to guilt-trip me. But it did hurt.

So, I spent most of the morning puttering around (never even thinking that I could go to a later service myself), adding entries to my online library, until I started skimming through an omnipresence in wired, an artbook for the anime series serial experiments lain. And that’s when it happened.

I was struck by how similar the early lain artwork is to the character designs Max Kim is creating for my series, Wine to Those in Anguish. I really am doing what the lain crew did.

An incredible feeling of vindication and joy washed over me. We have this tendency to put people on pedestals, and even though I am pushing forward with Wine, still there’s a little voice in the back of my head, warning that I’ll never really fly that high. I’m just some guy, some 24-year-old programmer, who’s still living with his parents. I can’t really achieve anything remotely like the greatest TV series I’ve ever seen. Who do I think I am?

Well, guess what? I can do it. I am doing it. Nothing can stop me, except the fear of failure, which is far more insidious than I’d given it credit for.

So. This was a good thing. I’m feeling more personally committed to Wine now.

I’ve also re-structured my library, into a much more sensible layout. It could probably still use some tweaking, but now it’s a lot easier to wander through.

And at the very bottom of this diary page (part of the little italicized boilerplate), there’s now a little counter to see what sort of accesses this page gets. It’s extremely trivial, but it’ll be interesting.

(Hmmmm, a lot of stuff happened today.)

I’ve been very good at my promise, and indeed haven’t bought any anime series in well over a month. So, to reward myself, I ordered Bubblegum Crisis DVD 3, an episode of Slayers (it was on sale), and Essence (a new Yoshitoshi ABe artbook) off of Right Stuf, and the new Cowboy Bebop band score from AnimeNation.