Bring it to the higher authorities.

All the anime I’ve watched for years now are reruns of anime from before I was born. Anime as of late has been so sucked into its own style that it’s starting to feel like that, in order to appreciate anime, you have to separate tropes between “everyone else’s style” and “anime style” or “humor you’d expect from everyone else” and “humor you’d expect from anime”. I think this is what one calls a subculture. However, to put it one way, if it’s an acquired taste, it has unacquired me in being one.

The only exception to this is Pokémon Horizons (someone who knows my artist side may notice this series has been an enormously recurring part of my art), and a part of me thinks they’re actually trying to pull the anime equivalent of Pokémon Red/Green saving Nintendo (there was a time when Nintendo thought of just going back to selling cards again like they did in the 1800’s because games pre-Pokémon were failing in sales) and save anime with it.

I, of course, am not unaware of other modern anime, and you may find art of them from me, but my main source for these is second-handedness in some form. These anime are not always bad in my mind, but they’re all “just there”. Which as an artist of such anime I’m aware rubs many the wrong way, that I may do things pertaining to a fictional world but at the same time not talk about it with the same enthusiasm (the art equivalent of inventing baseball and not liking to play it, the horror). It’s just too distinct with so large a subvariety it’s difficult to fully appreciate it.

I’ll be 25 in one more month on the 16th. Unless someone is from a culture where the standards are lower (because the definition of virginity changes based on culture, demonstrating how much of a social construct it is), I’m still a virgin (even as a woman) but I don’t really care that I’m one. I didn’t care for physical expressions of love before trying them out, then tried just enough out to know if I want it, and still didn’t care for them enough to seek them out. Physical fulfillment is very overinflated.

It’s rural here and I guess that comes with the implication that a lot more of the costumes are going to be basic. Regular vampires, regular witches, etc. So for a lack of a better word, I probably overdo it every year because I do it in the form of cosplay, which used to be normal before I inherited my current home and the social environment changed. I might be biased since they’re a common subject in my art, but the main exception were some Pokémon characters, namely from Pokémon Horizons. I know one very well-dressed Liko and one very well-dressed Roy were wandering around telling people they were looking for treasure (candy) and the adventurer Lucius (using that character as a parody of how nearby is Bernie Sanders’ childhood home, which itself is a hotspot), nods to the Pokémon Horizons series.

If my experiences have taught me anything, it’s that the act of caring is gradient. Sometimes it’s for the sake of onlookers that it occurs. I don’t strictly encourage insults, but the real enemy so-to-speak is escalation.

I don’t encourage insulting, but the most durable ones (and, by some peoples’ definitions, more tolerable, often because they appeal to some kind of truth) are usually the oddly creative/specific ones. For example, there’s the famous Shakespeare line “I’d engage a battle of wits with you, but I see you’re unarmed”. Basically what Dirty Harry and Sgt Hartman do. In contrast, you have things like the “F you” and the “a**hole” which just seem like you’re throwing what you can find.

I’m too old for trick-or-treating and was never really into it as it’s not my culture, but I’m on the receiving end of trick-or-treaters every year. I don’t know if they’re what one would consider a tough crowd or what, but they really, really haven’t liked what I handed out. One year it was fruit and I guess that’s a no. Last year it was cotton candy and I got complaints because it took up peoples’ Halloween bags to carry cotton candy around. This year I gave out candy canes and they complained again, this time because they thought I was adding to the feuds surrounding premature Christmas products.

After trick-or-treating was all done, I also stepped outside to sort through the trash and discovered someone threw up on the side of my home. Was it a kid who ate one candy too many? Was it an adult who was drunk on cider? Was it an animal who tried to get involved in the holiday too but got carried away? Who knows. I just know I have something to clean up before sunrise.

I originally cosplayed as Stephanie Dola for the day, but it rained for the first half of the day and I got soaked, so I cosplayed as Yoko Littner (another anime character) in a way that was as presentable as possible without looking out of character. At one point I put some warm clothes on over the cosplay because it was cold but didn’t take off my cosplay, knowing people might still recognize the character underneath a green sweater and a jean shirt and jeans. A young autistic boy came by and recognized the character I was and noticed I was wearing clothes over it and asked if he could take a picture of me and him without the clothes, but he asked it in a way that made his family and peers, who didn’t recognize the character and/or may not have known it was a cosplay at all, think he was being “inappropriate” thinking he was just asking me to get undressed, and it would be an understatement to say I can tell he felt bad when he was scolded in front of everyone, but I didn’t know how to step in without it backfiring. I still feel bad for him and I’m hoping he shows up again somewhere so I can grant his request.

The week is going alright, though Halloween not as much. I’m cosplaying and giving out candy, and last year people backlashed because I was giving out cotton candy which they complained took up too much space in their bags (the year before that, I gave out fruit, same reaction since people want candy). This year I have been giving out candy canes. Same reaction, since they say they don’t want anything to do with Christmas until after Halloween or after Thanksgiving. So this doesn’t seem to be my day.

Had a cosplay on of Stephanie Dola, but it got soaked in the rain earlier, so I changed into a backup cosplay, of Yoko Littner. I was originally going to go as a number of other characters but ended up doing those earlier and didn’t want to just redo them, plus the Yoko Littner cosplay is easy to wear something over. An autistic trick-or-treater recognized the character and wanted a picture after the point when I had put some of my everyday clothes on over the cosplay due to it being cold (while not getting rid of the cosplay, plus I was still handing out candy), but he got intensely scolded because his family and peers didn’t recognize the character and it sounded like he was randomly trying to ask an uncostumed person to undress from how it came off, and I feel sorry for him. I’m not outside the request and hope he’s socially alright.

As opposed to up front? I provide more personally, usually ending up doing it through gift cards, offering the roof above my head if they need that (as opposed to saying “here’s some big ones, go get one yourself”) to those in my community (it’s good to do this first), checking on one’s health faults using examples of good layperson methodology and addressing them when I see them, encouraging the idea of them trying their best because that’s what matters, not the bureaucratic definition of profession, as it always seemed that, in the end, people need humans most of all, not what they give off.

Those only address the main issues up to a certain point. Not sure how one could just throw any situation at them.

How so?

I can relate. Severely. Someone who is good/lucky at this knows how to “exploit” (for a lack of a better word) the exceptional aspects of peoples’ sense of analysis, which can in part explain why I mostly end up associating with those on different spectrums after this being a thing for so long.

Oh that’s why I was wondering. They’re the ones indigenous to Eurasia. Where I am, we got the boring monochrome slugs.

Back in the 1960’s, requiring people to wear shoes to use public services was seen as a way to shoo hippies, since the government at the time was not fond of them. The requirement never went away, but the excuse today is that being in bare feet is a health risk.

Same.

It’s learning to come out of its shell.

I haven’t been free of the risk of encountering things like glass, random animal waste, and anti-barefoot laws for so long that the idea of taking strolls barefoot seems alien to me.

Leopard slugs? As in they’re spotted?

Sometimes you just gotta come out of your shell.