We are shining stars

HI EVERYONE.

So, I have been gone for several months! My last post was in July! Hur hur hur. This is what happened: I was busy and I didn't update one week and I was like, "oh, well, I'll just do it next week." And then the next week came along and I was still busy and I was like, "Okay, so I'll do a big triple update the week after this!" And then that week came along and SUDDEN PLOT TWIST, MY COMPUTER DIED. LIFE IS A COMEDY.

Soooooo what this means is that for the last couple of months my only Internet access has been via iPhone, meaning fic and chapter reviews and all that has been put on the backburner because haha you kind of need a keyboard for all that good stuff. So, I'm like... nine chapters behind on KHR? Something like that. Basically.

But this story has a happy ending, because just now today I finally got myself a brand new laptop, this little hellraiser over here, which I am exceedingly pleased with so far. Ignore those two negative reviews because this thing is freaking awesome. I have christened him Watson, and he and I have spent the last two or three hours getting acquainted with one another and he is really quite the charming fellow. We are thinking of getting a new Photoshop together, but due to hypothetical money I may or may not hypothetically want to spend, I am open to any hypothetical suggestions on where one might hypothetically obtain a copy of Photoshop without hypothetically paying... for... the things... and... yeah. >_> ANY SUGGESTIONS ON THIS WOULD BE A+, as I hear tell it's a little more difficult to do these days than it was the last time I was setting up a new computer.

(ETA: Hypothetically elanor_pam's suggestion worked perfectly, thank you so much! <3)

Last but not least, immediately following this post I will start doing catch-up reviews until I am fully caught up with the most recent KHR once again. Now that I have a sexy fast laptop at last my activity should go up a bit, because that was one of the main things keeping me from being on LJ more frequently. (To explain this a little more: my current laptop is running on an Intel i7 quad core processor with Sandy Bridge and all that shit, and 6 GBs of RAM. HOLLA. Whereas my last computer before this... had 128 MBs of RAM. Yeah. That is not a typo or anything, that is literally all I had to work with. Someday soon I will look back and that and laugh, and then cry just a little bit.) I have been keeping up with the manga and the Arco Arc has been pretty spiffy so far and I am excited about it and I have many OPINIONS which I wish to share with you, friends and neighbors of the Interwebs! Plus I am like dying to write fic again so much it's not even funny, I have no fewer than three giant fics I want to write all at once and I have PLANS, ladies and gents. This may be the first year ever that I end up doing NaNo. We shall see! Obviously I have quite a long history of saying I will do things and then not doing the things, so let's take things easy for now.

Anyway, I missed you all and I am super psyched to be back, HUGS FOR ALL OF YOU. <3 And now I'm off to go find a copy of KHR 247 and type things about it.

BOY HAS IT BEEN ONE RAINY JUNE. Yamamoto, somehow I blame you.

Things!

1. If you missed it on the comm a few days ago, knights_manga posted a translation of chapter one of Gokudera's Secret Bullet story, Bakudan Bambino. It's an absolute must-read if you're a fan of Gokudera, especially if you've ever wondered about the period between his running away from home and finally joining the Vongola. I'm pretty sure this is the only canon we've ever gotten concerning that part of his past (well, not counting like a two-second flashback during the Daily Life arc). And it's really good, and I can't wait for the next two chapters.

2. Happy Birthday, viridianphoenix! Hope you have a great day. <3

3. Question: Would anyone be interested in betaing a KHR fic for me? The mods over at khr_undercover have requested that everyone who signs up for round 2 (WHICH IS STILL OPEN BTW if anyone hasn't completely burnt out from mini-bang XD) find someone to beta their entries before submitting them. So if anyone on my flist is interested and wouldn't mind reading over my submission (which probably won't be finished until at least a couple of weeks from now), let me know. I HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY WORKED WITH A BETA BEFORE, so uh. This should be interesting. XD

4. MEME WHICH IS PURELY OUT OF CURIOSITY AND I ASSURE YOU IN NO WAY HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE FIC CHALLENGE MENTIONED ABOVE:

What do you think are the "trademarks" of the fiction that I write? What type of themes or characterization notes or quirks keep on manifesting in my writing? Essentially, what do you think is a stereotypically "Makeste" way of writing fic?

I totally will not be taking notes at all, I swear.

And by 'you' I mean 'I'. XD

1. This is late, but Happy Birthday to engrave and rikasaurus! ♥

2. And, welcome to theprerogative and vazavati! Great to meet you guys. :)

3. Okay. So by this point, I can't really say that I'm new to Livejournal, but. Occasionally situations still crop up where I find myself wondering what the proper etiquette (I guess?) is around these parts. FOR EXAMPLE: Friend memes! Now, if you post on a friending meme, and someone replies to your post but doesn't explicitly say they want to be friends, do you wait until they do? Or is it just assumed that, seeing as it is a FRIENDING MEME, that their responding to your post means they want to add you? I always wait until people ask, just to play it safe, and in all likelihood I will continue to do so! But all the same, I'm curious.

And... I actually had more questions along a similar vein, but then the Dominos guy came, and I went to get the door (it's Dominos!!) and got PIZZA, and by the time I came back to finish this I had forgotten what I was going to say. So I guess I'll just stick with the one question for now.

Nick Carr was on the Colbert Report the other night and he said something about how the Internet has kind of fucked up people's attention spans. Can't say if that's true or not, but I know I'm sure as hell pretty absent-minded tonight. XD