1949 replies to this topic

[bassclef]

Hmm, '04 was an OK year. Oddly though I woke up at 8 am instead of 11 am... I guess my body is preparing itself for school Monday. Hmm, about four more weeks until part 2 of Naruto is expected start, can you hold out til then? I know I can... that is if there are plenty of NaruSaku fics to keep me company.

[Smiter]

Hear, hear, Bass. I just linked a new NaruSaku in the fic listing thread. There was a second one as well, but I didn't quite like it (felt disjointed, angsty, made little sense and OOC). ;;

The month will pass swiftly if the trickle of NaruSaku fics continues. I want to do something special for the H+E boards as well.

I got up at 9am, with no hangover. I stayed in my sleeping bag for an hour since I didn't want to wake the friends who were sleeping in the same room as me (they were sleeping on the floor, blocking the way to the door) so I just spun a little story in my head while I waited for them to start stirring.

Now I'm finally home and the busy season should be winding down now. Time to start finishing my fics, damn it.

2005... I wonder what it holds in store for all of us.

[Geno Calamari]

So last night we had three seatings for dinner, reservations required and all, at 5 7 and 9:30. The 5 o'clock seating was, as you might imagine, filled to the brim with old people and people going to other parties. These people drank the most of what you and I term 'Old-People Drinks.' If you are unfamiliar with these, I'll designate a few of them as the Martini, the Manhattan, and the Rob Roy. For those of you who know a little something about the craft, those are all the same drink, just with gin, whiskey, or scotch, respectively.

Waitresses are an interesting thing. Some of them are nice and sweet, no matter how hard it gets or how many tables they need or how many drinks they need.
Then there are others. It does not amuse me when a waitress slides into the bar behind me in an attempt to get something that she doesn't want to wait for.
To an extent, I understand this. The quicker they get out the alcohol, the larger their tips will be and waitresses make jack in hourly wages.
However, I am paid specifically to stand there and get alcohol for the waitresses. I am good at it. I know how to make everything and I have much practice at the craft, so it's not a matter of me being too slow. It's because I only have two arms and multitasking with only that is pretty much pointless.
It annoys me when waitresses come into the bar instead of telling me what they need because the bar is a one-person bar. There is only one of those soda/cola/tonic spigot guns. There is a very limited amount of floor space. By entering the 4x4 square through which I move, they hamper my ability to make drinks, my entire purpose as a bartender, the very zenith of my existance.
A waitress will only do this if her order is not going to be the first one I make. If Sue comes up (yes, I understand you do not know these people, so names are little more than labels, but using them helps deliniate and allows me to illustrate my point) and writes down five drinks, it will take me, depending on difficulty, no more than 90 seconds to do them all, assuming nothing goes awry. If Sue, Kelly, Laura, and Michelle all come and give me orders at the same time, I am kind of in a quandry. I could choose arbitrarily who's order to do first, but then I run the risk of having Kelly or Laura come into the bar and try to make their drinks while I'm working on Sue or Michelle's. By this logic, I should make their drinks first, so as to avoid conflict and conserve my bar-space.
If I do that, however, Laura and Kelly will inevitably come back with a second order on top of the first one. This is a rule of fate and I am sure it's an extrapolation of Murphy's Law, but I hardly care to derive it and the point is that this is doubly true on New Year's Eve. So then the other two, Sue and Michelle, who will stay out of the bar even if rabid dogs are chewing on them because they acknowledge that I'm much more competant than they are with the alcohol, are left without drinks and they get tipped less and I feel bad for them.
So all I can do is make whatever I can as fast as I can and get it to them. This is fine, but still being human (I'm working on that one, just you wait...) I'll make a mistake or collapse of pulmonary seizure. So far, it's been the former rather than the latter. And if I make a mistake, then Kelly and Laura become even more convinced that I'm unfit to make their drinks and will frequently just ignore me completely and go around me. As I have already mentioned, not only does this make me angry, it pins us both down to waiting for the other to finish with certain items. Everything slows to a crawl.
Not that they care, mind you, because their order is now being completed right away instead of having to wait the three or four minutes it will take for me to get around to it.
The end result: I get screwed by pushy waitresses.

sigh.

I feel better now. Last night, I was down to my last nerve there. I was making Cosmopolitans (Vodka, Triple Sec, Lime Juice, and a splash of cranberry juice for color), you know, the pink things that come in those martini glasses. And Laura asks for 5 espressos. Now, espressos and I don't get along. Possibly because the espresso machine is five or ten years old, whirs and clanks like a poorly-tuned organ in church, and likes to make meals of my fingers.
Ignoring all that, I only have 3 espresso cups. At any time, you can only find three espresso cups in my bar because you only need, at most, two cups. It is not a drink that is commonly enjoyed, thank god. I dislike fighting the machine for an ounce of bad-tasting, bean-steeped fluid.
So then Kelly asks for some espressos, the quantity escapes me at the moment but it was no more than 6 and no less than 3. I tell her that she cannot have any espressos until she finds me some cups. She proceeds to give me a look that plainly says what she thinks of that. Telling myself that 25-to-life is not worth it for Kelly, I release my deathgrip on the fruit knife and calmly point out that she's the one who can go retrieve things, as I have to stay in one spot and make drinks and her job description includes 'Pick-up and delivery of food.' And if she wants these espresso, she can get me some goddamn cups.
I got those cups and she got her espressos.

I can talk about bartending and wanting to kill my waitresses all day, but I think I should leave it here. Suffice to say, it was hell on wheels last night, but I survived. My head's a little fuzzy today and I feel like I'm carrying a desert in my mouth, but I'm alright.

I'm going to go drink some water and go back to bed.

[bassclef]

Woo! It's a hot winter day down here in Georgia. Right now it's about 74 degrees F.. so it's probably 22 degrees C. *mumbles* I need to work on my metric measurements....

[HinataFanBoy]

i was reading a narutohinata, and the author said that yaoi lemmons are allowed on ff.net but others are not, is that true?

edit: heh heh, oops, spelled lemons wrong

[sharingank]

O.O If it IS true...I'll be really scared. XD

How is everyone?? I'm sorry I haven't been around for awhile! But I'm back at school now, so I should be on more often. ^^

HAPPY BELATED NEW YEARS!!!!!!!!!!

[Faucon]

Wow i just saw that post and wow.. the Sakura hate is soo crazy there.

[Smiter]

i was reading a narutohinata, and the author said that yaoi lemmons are allowed on ff.net but others are not, is that true?

I highly doubt that is true, HH. After all, the point of FF.net banning lemons was to prevent any possibility of underage kids reading about explicitly detailed sex scenes between characters. If they were to allow yaoi lemons, but not heterosexual ones, they would be discriminating against heteros and losing the point of the ban in the first place.

You can get away with a little sex as long as you don't put a lot of focus on it - such as Geno Calamari's "Asinine Rationalizations" and SharinganK's "Burn". Hell, you can even make a story explode with ST and UST (Sexual Tension and Unresolved Sexual Tension) without falling foul of FF.net rules.

Wow, you're already back at school, Ash? Happy new year! *glomps* I was wondering where you were.

[Geno Calamari]

I highly doubt that is true, HH.   After all, the point of FF.net banning lemons was to prevent any possibility of underage kids reading about explicitly detailed sex scenes between characters.  If they were to allow yaoi lemons, but not heterosexual ones, they would be discriminating against heteros and losing the point of the ban in the first place.

You can get away with a little sex as long as you don't put a lot of focus on it - such as Geno Calamari's "Asinine Rationalizations" and SharinganK's "Burn".  Hell, you can even make a story explode with ST and UST (Sexual Tension and Unresolved Sexual Tension) without falling foul of FF.net rules.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Funny thing about that, the administrators of FanFiction.net do not have the time or resources to go chasing down every instance of lemon in their archives. For instance, Madame Manga's 'Chasing the Dragon' Gunsmith Cats story is very, very lemon, but it's so old and well-established and well-thought-of that no one complains.
They're only going to remove lemons if they know about them and they're only going to know about them if someone mentions/complains about them. Thus, if no one complains... you get the picture.
If some old bat gets cranky about my stories, well, there really isn't anything I can do about it. FanFiction.net provides me a place to express my views and correct the misconceptions of the Naruto Fandom (my personal crusade) and they do it for free. I don't have any right to complain. I'll continue to post what I write, and if it gets shot down, like Sharingank's 'Fly' (which was the happenstance that prompted me to post 'Something or Other' on MediaMiner,) then I'll find alternate locations for posting, even here if I have to.

But more to the point, yaoi lemons may not be technically accepted, but think about this: Who makes up the large majority of fanfiction readers?
Single, straight females who (for some as yet unknown reason) enjoy yaoi between twelve-year-olds. This is also the largest fraction of people who write fanfiction.
Given the above method of 'complaint gets lemons removed,' we can extrapolate thusly:
A lemon between Heterosexual characters is more likely to be noticed (and complained about if it doesn't fit someone's delicate preconceptions, or simply because it's not yaoi and the series is so obviously yaoi.) Thus, it's more likely to the target of complaints and more likely for targeted removal.
A yaoi lemon is simply less likely to be the target of complaints, hence, less likely to be removed.
Therefore: A yaoi lemon is much safer being posted on FanFiction.net. QED

[hokuten]

Yuck to cosmos, yay for White Russians. Then again, all i have to say is if it isnt vodka, then I dont want it.

[Geno Calamari]

Yuck to cosmos, yay for White Russians.  Then again, all i have to say is if it isnt vodka, then I dont want it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

They both have vodka, or as I like to call it, 'Burn Juice.' I can't see how you stand that crap. When I run out of cleaning solution, I just crack open a bottle of vodka and get back to work. That kitten scours, man.

[alphabet]

Well, hello everyone! I haven't been on for a little while, but I'm back. ^^ *knows no one noticed*

. . . Smiter, nice icon! Lurve Ichigo.

[Smiter]

Don't you just love the yaoi crowd?

Geno, I recently got a book/DVD bundle about manga and the most famous artists in it. It's imaginatively titled "Manga" and is put together by Masanao Amano.

Now, the DVD contains interviews with the staff and managers of a few Japanese manga shops. There was one common theme they had.

If a manga shop stocks yaoi/shounen-ai, they get a huge increase in female customers and most of their customers will be females. If they don't stock it, then most of their customers are male.

I'll leave you to draw whatever conclusions you wish to.

Interestingly as well, children only make up a small part of the consumer base in manga shops despite the wide range of titles available for that age group.

Hokuten... what about Southern Comfort? Please don't tell me you hate it!

EDIT:

*glomps Alpha* I did notice! Good to see you back, Sonny.

Thanks for the rep on my icon. I just love Ichigo's expression, heheh. Have you read Chapter 150 of Bleach yet? You must!

Click For Spoiler

Ichigo x Rukia is screaming canon now. Surely it must happen. It MUST.

[Yoko]

ALPHA! SMITER! *glomps both*

[Smiter]

YOKO! *glomps*

Ooh, new NaruSaku chapter. (Think of how a kid reacts to shiny things and you'll get a perfect picture of how I react to new NaruSaku fic updates).

*scampers over to TGNFL in Fiction Press to post it*

[alphabet]

No, I haven't! But I need to! You have to send me that chapter. Now. You have to send me the link now. Please. And is it scanlated?

[Smiter]

It is indeed scanlated. It's only on IRC but I can whip up a temporary download link!

*link now taken down*

[alphabet]

Yay! Thank you! I'm looking forward to the Ichigo / Rukia goodness. ^^

And Yoko! *glomps*