Children of the Night
My cousin in Japan came to visit for two weeks at the beginning of this month. He was supposed to hang
around here for 4 days of that. Thanks to the rest of my family intervening, this period was reduced to
less than the amount of time it takes to play a game of Chuchu Rocket (and I was winning too). I'd probably
still be griping about that, if not for the fact that he did leave me every episode of Inu-Yasha, and
watching them inspired my personal muse to cram an entire diceless paper RPG into my brain. I'll probably
post the rules here after I test it.
Before I get into the rant proper, let me just pretend for a moment that I really care about these here comics. This here is the last Slime World no omake in the series, so next rant is back to the usual stuff, more or less. Because you see, this also happens to be the 78th Slime World, which is divisible by 26. SO, now I'm going to do something different, like maybe stop saving it as badly compressed jpgs or something. Oh, and cheesy merchandise continues to bring in not one red cent.
Now then. Fairly recently, someone pointed out that I only eat two meals a day, and that that isn't good for you. I was inclined to agree, considering that I often go on for 11 hours after eating dinner. So now in addition to eating lunch and dinner, I eat a third meal some time around midnight. It struck me that a lot of people are on a schedule where they aren't awake at traditional breakfast times, so there should really be a name for that midnight meal. There isn't though. To rectify this situation, I hereby dub it Darkmeal until someone can think of a better name.
The lack of such a name is just one of the many examples of how morning people rule the world. Another is our public school systems. I have never seen a grade school, high school or junior high that didn't start some time near the vicinity of dawn (or at least 7:30). Plenty of places of business work the same way, but they usually wait until 9. In any case, it seems quite unfair, since in my experience, morning people are actually the minority. So why do they control when everything starts? Because they get there first!
This of course poses a problem. Aside from an actual revolution, there is no real way for night people to make such schedules more fair. Thus I must ask myself, what CAN we do to get revenge? Then it hit me. Every New Year's Eve, everyone traditionally stays up well past midnight partying. Night people are just fine the next day, but morning people are often MISERABLE. Sometimes more miserable than us night people are when we have to get up at the crack of dawn, especially with all that traditional drinking. The problem is, New Year's Eve is an annual event. We need more days like this. Good canidates include other big holidays. Take Christmas. If you're a parent with a bunch of kids, and you all hate waking up early in the morning, let your kids open their presents 5 minutes after midnight every year then play with them until they pass out. Make sure they tell all their friends. Thanks to the miracle of whining, soon your whole neighborhood will be celebrating Christmas in the middle of the night. Then just throw a few 2 AM surprise birthday parties, and you'll be on the right track to making morning people lose just as much sleep as you! A good number of pagan holidays can help fill out the calendar, and just work better at night.
Now, if I may abruptly change the subject, there's a few more things on my mind right now. You may have noticed that when I moved this page to this server, I slipped /rants/ into the url. The reason for that is that I actually intend to put some stuff on this server apart from rants. There is of course the anime section that I really do intend to get up some time. I also might set up a little section for paper RPG related items, like this wad of optional rules over here, this diceless RPG here, and logs of some really amusing AD&D sessions. Kind of like the setup Frogboy has at the moment, but without the pretense that they're all equally important or the nicely drawn splash page. Not that I wouldn't LIKE a nicely drawn splash page, I just can't draw. Oh, and as for this page, I have a fair number of Slime Worlds all planned out, and I have fodder for a great many rants, I'm still having a huge dry spell of Scary Pics, so basically, if you send me a decent one, I'll post a rant with it the first chance I get, and this'll hold true for a while.
and now...
on that note...
here it comes...
drawn by someone called Cantatrix...
and sent to me by someone called Chimerasame...
who I believe may have posted it in a Q&A column while filling in for me...
in which case most of you have already seen it...
but here it is anyway...
Lavos-chan
