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POPULAR: What Did You Write Today?

I accidentally wrote a poem. It's complicated. It'll take a while to format, so it probably won't be published until April 1st. Though I'm sure the formatting won't take any longer. I just feel it, you know?
 
I'm working on chapter 54 of Pokemon: A Marvelous Journey. Mostly the end of it, as I'm struggling with the middle part of it, so I'm just gonna bang out the end of it to get it over with.
 
Maddening writer's block. All I need to finish a poem is 1 stanza of 7 lines. And my only draft so far is so bad, it makes me feel icky. I can power through the needed rhyme scheme and syllable stress pattern, but anything I write feels like redundant filler. I'd cut the stanza, but it's a sectioned-off block in the middle of my poem, and I need it to keep the rhythm consistant/build tempo for the next stanza. And it's less than 100 words, it should be so easy, but nothing fits. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that looks almost done but the last few pieces just don't come together. But I like what I've written so far; I'm not redoing everything because I can't solve one stanza.

Poetry is weird.
 
Recently wrote a bit that would suggest an offscreen adventure of Mewtwo breaking into the Spirit World to get AMbertwo's soul, until m cowriters said that was a bit too much
 
Went to finish poem #10 for my collection. Opened the wrong file, found an incomplete poem with only one stanza. Finished it in one go, wrote a good seven stanzas. Opened the correct poem, hit writer's block immediately, then I got sidetracked writing 20 short paragraphs for an upcoming chaptered fic. Finally beat writer's block by just forgetting the poem and writing about five paragraphs of author's notes. Still no progress on the actual poem, but it's technically closer to publishing.

In other words, business as usual.
 
Finished a 7400 word ish self-challenge based on the idea of 'how to do the rather common fanfic episode 4 take' in a new and better way. Featuring Ash saving time with plant sheers, the Samurai having a non-hardening based challenge, the Pokedex quoting MST3000, and many more.
 
Fake news.

My protagonist in an upcoming longfic was somewhat-directly involved in several newsworthy events. And I have a supporting character who's a professional journalist. So I wrote some news stories about the incident, with different news outlets getting different takes. A nice bit of worldbuilding/character development/plot hole closure that lets me break from a limited first person narrator's perspective. Plus the switchup of writing styles should hopefully offer some variety/keep readers on their toes. Ton of fun to write, would write fake news again.
 
Rough draft and major editing for Battle With Me: Pokémon XD. Moving into "find a bunch of company logos that qualify as fair use" territory. As it turns out, the amount of companies involved in making a Pokémon game is ridiculous.Trying to make a Pokémon spinoff that uses core series mechanics is absolutely insane. Chunsoft had the right idea using Mystery Dungeon as a base.

Learning is fun!
 
Got all the company logos I'd need fir Battle With Me, plus did some cleanup of the Prologue (I keep backup .txt files with BBCode preformatted for ease of writing/editing and for personal archiving purposes, so I needed to update ny copy with my panic edits). Rough draft of CH1 just about finished; just need to go through some Pokémon XD menus for screenshots/one final editing pass to make sure everything's properly formatted/there's no glaring grammah errors. I might salvage my own train wreck yet.
 
Continued making good progress on LC chapter 37, should be able to finish it this week (feels weird to talk about chapters that I won't be able to post here for at least 6 months, haha.)
 
Rough draft of Battle With Me: Pokémon XD. I decided to look into the origin of the English protagonist's name selection, and now there's a MATURE content warning for the Chapter. I want to punch whatever idiot translated the Japanese name, because they fucked up. Not in the "this was a bad decision" way. I mean the “this was morally wrong perversion of innocent art" way. Because the localization gles places. Like, "endorsing the apocalypse" places. I'm sleeping on it and praying I missed something, but my research was clear and my opinions were heavily backed by linked and archived sources. Thank whatever's out there that I can rename the protagonist, because the English version's justification for their name selection is...no. Just, no.
 
@Snuggle Tier List - I'm intrigued. What could possibly be so wrong with the name Michael?
Bit of a spoiler, but to sum up for those not reading Battle With Me: Pokémon XD:
By cross-referencing Wikipedia tables, I was able to translate "Michael"'s Japanese canon name myself. His name in the Japanese release is written as リユウト, but because script Japanese is super-duper complicated, this isn't Japan's "real" alphabet. リユウト is Katakama, which is just the phonetic pronunciation. It's used to represent Kanji, or the Japanese alphabet officially used by the government. And リユウト uses the same pronunciation of what I think リユウト is most likely to be: 竜徒. It is pronounced "ryūto", and its literal meaning is "dragon junior".

But there's a snag. リユウ ("ryū") is very definitively "dragon" in Japanese, but ト ("to") has the same phonetic pronunciation as 68 different Kanji, each with their own meaning. I believe リユウト is 竜徒 as most other interpretations are stretches at best (i.e. "dragon diagram", "dragon Big Dipper", "dragon spit"). "Dragon Junior" is by far the most representative of リユウト, as DJ is literally a junior who trains monsters.

Official English localization doesn't agree with me. They translated リユウト as 竜刀, pronounced "ryūtō", literally meaning "Dragon Sword". And a dragon sword, Kusanagi, is one of Japan's Three Sacred Treasures (think Holy Grail level stuff). Kusanagi originally appears in a myth from the Japanese Shinto religion, where Susanoo used it to slay an eight-headed serpent dragon. Kinda like how Archangel Michael of Revelation 12:7-9 to slay "the dragon" (actual phrasing used in King James), AKA Satan.

Except Revelation 12:7-9 doesn't specify Archangel Michael used a holy sword. Nothing in the King James Bibles implies Archangel Michael ever possessed a sword. The idea of Archangel Michael having a holy sword similar to Kusanagi comes from Paradise Lost, a poem written in 1674 that's essentially biblical fan fiction. And Paradise Lost happens to be the cornerstone of several Christian sects collectively known as Millennialism. Millennialism, in this writer's researched opinion, is a doomsday religion that at best is the driving force behind rapture conspiracy theories. At best, it's just passive waiting on the belief they (and only they) will be saved by God from the rapture. At it's worse, it's a politically-active religion that attempts to influence US foreign policy in hopes of instigating the rapture.

For the record, having slept on my rage, I don't think the name Michael is the end of the world (rimshot). Pokémon XD is a very bad biblical analogy, mostly because any religious themes come from an entirely different religion. But localization doubled-down on their translation hiccup. In the English version of XD, Michael's alternate preset names are David (David and Goliath) and Adam (Adam and Eve). Most likely, some translator made a mistake and, not being particularly familiar with the King James bible, just didn't do the needed research. Regardless, the idea of a Pokémon game's localization turning an innocent but appropriate protagonist name into academically discredited Bible symbolism is as tone-deaf as tone-deaf gets.

Battle With Me will have my sources, and I'm still doing research and editing that might shed more light on the translation decision before publishing. It's possible I've missed something major and will need to revise my conclusions. For instance, I'm going to triple-check my own translation of リユウト before finalizing my draft. And there's the possibility リユウト is indead meant to be "Dragon Sword", with the Japanese writer drawing from a religion they understand through pop culture. Plus, "竜 (ryū)" as I understand it has symbolic meaning within Japanese culture, which might shed light on the intended translation. Still looking into it, but I'm suddenly interested in pitting Pokémon Trainer against Ryu in Smash.
Thank you for asking this question, uA. Paraphrasing my own writing has helped me clear my own head. I'll likely incorporate more alternate explanations and reiterate my research's limitations. I'm not a native Japanese speaker, I don't live in Japan, I haven't grown up in Japanese culture. But the research so far has me pressing my hand into my forehead. Hopefully, there's something I missed, for the sake of my childhood memories. I hope.

EDIT: Clarity, tyops
 
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I wrote a bit more of the first chapter of the slice of life thing I'm working on. I changed it from the first draft significantly in terms of the events that happen, but now I feel like the first draft was better than the second draft because I was more sure about the point I wanted to make with it. I might just rewrite the whole thing instead of cutting and editing the second draft.
 
Edited all my fic's intro posts to shave the giant copyright tumor clogging them up. Probably the least fun reformatting I've done on published works, as it required me to skim the 1,182 page "Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices", published by the US Copyright Office. This is what I get for using a Creative Commons license. But it's done now, I have a couple-sentence copyright notice with all the legalese quarantined into a spoiler, my intro posts have had their tumors surgically removed. This cancer better not enter remission.

On the plus side, I'm now free to finish CH3 of Battle With Me: Pokémon XD. The gameplay opens with a disguised tutorial, so I've been prodding all the ways a new player might play through the battle. Turns out the odds are secretly skewed in the player's favor, in more ways than one. Still testing some hypothesises and writing notes; I have the chapter's structure down, I just need to do experiments that I'm totally not procrastinating (replaying tutorials over and over isn't fun). But after this hump, I start my Pokémon adventure and just play the damn game. And also analyze it, but I like writing analyses. Win-win! Soon. Probably. Hopefully.
 
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