Update Archives - Page 7 of 23 - deus ex magical girl

I gotta work tonight …

I’m starting to explore the possibilities of self-publishing, so I’m spending tonight looking into the subject and gathering information on what steps to take. I’ll check in later with some some reviews and stuff.

Why Blood Tastes like Copper

Sorry for the long time away. Life is happening. I got a wife and baby and job and stuff. But anyway, here I am.

While my wife is sleeping off her night shift, I have spent most of the day working on my current novel in progress, which happens to be volume 3 of Jake and the Dynamo, currently under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.

Anyway, as I was working, I happened to find myself asking a trivial question—why do we typically describe blood as tasting like copper?

This question led me to an interesting article on LiveScience. Although some speculation appears to be involved in the article’s conclusion, the apparent answer is that copper and other metals, including iron, don’t actually have the metallic odor we attribute to them. Rather, the smell comes from an oil in our skin, which breaks down in the presence of metal.

So, when you grab a piece of metal, the breakdown of the oil in your hands leaves behind the “metallic” smell. Naturally, since metal coins get a lot of handling, this makes coins smelly. Thus, the distinctive odor of copper pennies.

Similarly (this part appears to be more speculative), the iron in blood can produce the same smell for the same reason, and (this part is conjecture) we may be sensitive to this metallic smell specifically so that we can be alert to the smell of blood.

So, we smell blood because blood reacts to skin oil in the same way coins do, and then we turn around and attribute the smell of coins to blood.

So there you go.

Jake and the Dynamo: The Shadow of His Shadow

Phase:Writing

Due:3 years ago

33.2%

The Magical Pumpkin

This is your annual reminder that we know next to nothing about Samhain or its relationship to Halloween, that all Halloween customs have supposedly Christian origins just as convincing as their supposed pagan origins, and that none of this should matter anyway because every agricultural society has harvest festivals and cultural borrowing is the norm.

Anyway, in our last episode, I mentioned that the magical girls and I purchased pumpkins for carving. I planned to create a magical girl-themed Jack-O’-Lantern; I wanted such a theme both so I could display it on this blog and also just on principle. However, my main magical girl hadn’t carved a Jack-O’-Lantern before, so she wanted a more traditional one.

Since I’m not a master pumpkin carver and was not working with any fancy tools, I wanted a simple pattern.

I chose this:

Now, I already know what you’re thinking: It looks simple at a glance, but it actually has a lot of small, delicate details and very little to hold the construction together.

At first, I was doing pretty well and thought I would get this right, but I eventually made some wrong moves. I lost the area below her arm, so I had to reattach it with toothpicks, but my biggest mistake was carving the moon out last, thinking I should do the delicate work first. I ended up with this:

Damaged pumpkin. — The hole in the pumpkin represents the hole in my life.

That’s the magical girl diligently working on her own in the background there. She was also laughing at me.

If carved correctly, the design has delicate spots that leave large parts of the image supported by tiny bits of the pumpkin’s rind. I broke through a couple by applying too much pressure. The result was what you see here: I shattered the entire image like an eighth-century iconoclast.

Broken like my life. — On the plus side, that’s a delicious Old Fashioned Cocktail.

My wife, who judiciously wanted a simpler, more classic design, was entirely successful in her carving endeavor. She and the other magical girl who can never leave her worked diligently, and now their Jack-O’-Lantern, made from a stencil my wife chose because it made her giggle, adorns the top of the post. I don’t have any tea candles to show it in all its glory, but I’ll undoubtedly display it lit up at a later date.

At the Pumpkin Patch

Yesterday, I, the magical girl, and magical girl 2 went to a local seasonal attraction, the misnamed “Pumpkin Patch.” I guess I was actually expecting a field of pumpkins growing on the vine, but it was actually a square of grass with pumpkins on pallets. Nonetheless, its creators had brought in lots of props and some kiddie games and such, so it made for some fun photo opportunities.

We ended up purchasing two pumpkins. The magical girl wanted to carve a traditional Jack-O’Lantern, but I wanted to use a stencil and carve a magical girl-themed pumpkin I can display on the blog.

So, anyway, we have our pumpkins. The question is when we’ll be able to find the time to carve them. I’m also contemplating turning their insides into pumpkin pie, but since these are large ones with probably stringy insides, that might be a bad idea. I’m sure we can bake the seeds, though.

An Update to My Hate

I recently completed a small project I’ve been meaning to get to for a while: I went through all the posts in my hyperbolic but half-serious series of essays, “Why I hate Cardcaptor Sakura” to make improvements and corrections. I’d like to do this with several of my posts, but that particular series brings in most of the site’s traffic, so it got priority.

If you’ve read those essays already, there’s no reason to re-visit them unless you happen to be a masochist. WordPress has been through some updates since I wrote them, and I’ve learned more about writing for the web, so I went back to improve HTML semantics, add headings, clean out dead links, and insert additional links to make it easier to move from one essay to another. I also corrected typos and grammatical errors when I found them and occasionally rephrased a sentence to remove ambiguity, but the content is still the same.

On my list of things to do is to sit down with the Clear Card Arc, a sequel to Sakura that appeared about the same time I wrote those essays. I haven’t got to it yet because, though I exaggerated in the essays for the sake of entertainment, I mostly meant what I said: I don’t particularly enjoy Cardcaptor Sakura, so I’ve put off the task of slogging through more of it.

I have no timeline for when I might get around to the sequel; I have a bad habit of starting blog projects and then losing track of them when I get interested in other blog projects, so I should probably make fewer promises.

Some Updates

I’m working on a story for an anthology project I caught wind of. I don’t know yet if the anthology will actually appear or not, but if it doesn’t, I’ll submit somewhere else.

I’m also much distracted from both the blog and my other project because my wife is having a baby. Soon, we’ll have two magical girls instead of just one running around this place.

Speaking of magical girls, it seems like it’s been a long time since I sat down and reviewed one of those, but that should change in the near future if I can get through what I’m currently watching.

Sorry, Maintenance Day …

I’m behind on some reviews, but I’m also behind on some site maintenance, so I’m working on cleaning out dead links, deleting superfluous plugins, that kind of thing. I’m also making sure that the pages with essays and posts are up to date.

Thanks to my real job, I’ve learned a lot about HTML over the last couple of years and can now see a lot of things I’ve done wrong, so I’m going back and repairing mistakes and improving the internal links.

I do have some reviews coming up. I was unable to get to them over the weekend, and a lightning storm shut me down early yesterday. Should have some interesting stuff up in the near future, though.

One thing I’m trying to figure out: Every time I link Crunchyroll, WordPress thinks the link is broken and strikes it out. I don’t know what’s causing this, and since I link that site frequently (considering my blog’s focus and all), it’s kind of annoying. Crunchyroll is pretty good about keeping its pages live even when it removes content, so pretty much none of those links should actually be dead, but go figure. Anyway, if you see me link Crunchyroll and the link has a strikethrough, it’s probably actually a good link. Just FYI.

Progress

Made some good progress on my next novel today, and I think I should have another review up sometime tomorrow … but for now, good night!

Update on My Projects

I won’t deny that I’ve been struggling with the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo. For this volume, I had a lot of clear vignettes in my mind but no idea how they related to one another. So I’ve been writing disconnected scenes without really knowing what I was doing.

Fortunately, I finally had a breakthrough: I had a single plot point come to me that tied everything together, so I’m working on the book tonight and it’s flowing reasonably well.

On that note, I have no update on publishing. I haven’t heard back from any publishers to which I’ve submitted, so I will probably, in the next few months, give them up and submit to other places.