CHARACTER NAME: Clow Reed
SERIES: Cardcaptor Sakura
CANON POINT:After his death, but before the events of the main storyline take place
LOSS: The deck of Clow Cards - they’re his ultimate creation, and by the time of his death, he’s grown quite used to having them around both for the use of their powers, and for their personality. Losing them is a personal slight to a very proud man, and makes magic use more complicated and less powerful for him, as a portion of his power is bound in the Cards.

ABOUT THE CHARACTER: In canon, Clow is something of an enigma - he only appears in a handful of flashbacks, and, once, speaking directly to Sakura. His demeanor is friendly, quietly and politely upbeat - always smiling, although there's always sort of the sense that he's smiling /at/ you, rather than /with/ you. He is of mixed Chinese and British heritage, and an extremely powerful mage - the most powerful in his world, while he was alive. He is shown to have a talent for innovation - the Clow Cards represent the culmination of his life’s work on magical theory, and are an interweaving of both Eastern and Western magical traditions, implied to be the first of it’s kind.

Many of his personality traits seem to be a result of this immense power - the ability to bend reality to your whims alters one’s perspective and one’s desire. He has absolutely no qualms about manipulating people for what he thinks of as their own good, and seems to even enjoy it. For example, he’s responsible for almost all the events that unfold in the series itself, particularly the Sakura Card arc, where his partial reincarnation affects events directly. He also alters memories of his Guardians of the time surrounding his death, giving them a more peaceful closure to his life, and his reincarnation alters Sakura’s memories, to keep their little game going longer.

At one point, Keroberos accuses him of having a 'twisted personality', which he matches with a smile, and no denials. He's one of the most powerful mages in the world, which means he can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants to, and so he /does/. There’s evidence that having this much power has lead him in pursuit of the new and unique. His character profile lists his favorite thing as ‘anything unpredictable’ and his hobby as ‘surprises’ - when you can see the future, finding something /new/ becomes increasingly hard, and Eriol (his reincarnation) shows both some surprise, and a great deal of interest, in the the elements of his planning that did not work, such as Sakura’s choice to be in a relationship with Syaoran rather than Yukito - it’s an instance in which he was wrong, and that’s something that’s infrequent in his life. It’s also implied that he could have chosen to live for longer than he actually did, but was simply bored of life.

Overall, on the surface he can seem like he's airheaded and has zero attention span, as he tends to jump from one thing to another rapidly - however, if something really catches his attention, he can be incredibly thorough, and underneath the smile, he's an incredibly intelligent man with a passion for scheming. He's not actually outright evil or malicious, but he does have a very strange sense of humor, and a tendency to pull pranks which can seem a bit unfunny to those who doesn't share his outlook. He finds people in particular interesting - the more unpredictable, the better.

ABILITIES: Clow is an extremely powerful mage - in his universe, the second most powerful who will ever exist (Sakura being the first), and an experienced master of both traditional forms of Chinese and British magic (with some dabbling in other forms because he’s a nerd like that). The powers he or the cards he created are shown to have in canon include basically complete mastery over creation and change of the physical forms of things (up to doing things like entirely remapping where doors lead within a single building, shifting objects, looping sections of the physical environment, creating sentient beings), divination (not 100% accurate, and it seems to be more focused on his family), memory wiping (this would absolutely not be used without player consent), and postcognitive spells (possibly with a small measure of interaction, but nothing that would allow him to alter past events, as far as shown).

(for a more in-depth list, this page covers the abilities of various cards - it can be assumed that if the Cards can do it, Clow can, as he created them)

I started documenting my cosplay stuff on Tumblr because of the ease of posting short posts and mixed media posts (text and pictures, for example). And then I started actually writing about costumes and costume-making and it basically turns into GIANT ESSAYS and then I think I am maybe missing the point of Tumblr.

(do I have a thousand-word draft of working with plastics saved to finish off at some point? Yes I do.)

So, I have mentioned the previous misadventures of me and my media server. After much debate and discussion in #dw (I seriously ♥ you all for putting up with my annoying tech-support-ish questions, seriously), I came to the conclusion that the reason I've had a ton of boot issues is because my main, big drive on the machine was having problems spinning up adequately when the machine was started, which lead to it failing to various points in the boot cycle (depending how much it had spun up). Between that and SpinRite finding a bunch of sectors it couldn't fix, I decided these were signs that while the drive was not dead, it was probably on the road there, and that it would be better to replace it before it actually died.

So I went out and got a 3TB WD Caviar Green from NCIX, my local parts chain (on sale for $30 less than NewEgg had it before shipping, no less), and set about recovering files from the bad drive, reinstalling Xubuntu 12.04, and configuring all the drives to automount. There were a few hitches along the way, but the only unsolveable one is that it turns out my salvaged memory card reader is incompatible with Ubuntu versions after 9.10 or so, due to updates in how the kernel handles USB devices. So when I have some money, I think this thing finally deserves an IR reciever and remote, and a new memory card reader that's actually USB 2.0 compatible.

I also renamed the machine and all it's drives, as azurelunatic made me realize that naming a machine after a city that gets blown up is almost as inauspicious as naming devices after crazy villains (I named an mp3 player Sephiroth once. Bad idea). So my FF7 naming scheme has been laid to rest in favor of a Gundam 00 based one, because... nerd. So:

- Veda - my sleek little Alienware laptop (it has been Veda since I bought it, actually)
- Celestial Being - The media server
* Setsuna - boot, programs and docs drives (because he's the important one)
* Lockon - Games, comic scans, RPG books, misc Fun Stuff (because you know Lockon is the one with the most normal concept of 'fun')
* Tieria - the 3TB drive for video files (because Tieria is the master of GIANT GUNDAMS)
* Allelujah - music (...because it needed a drive. Sorry Alle, I really do love you anyway)

When I have some free time to dig into files, I'm going to try to make a skin for XBMC that looks like the Ptolemy's computer interfaces, I think.

Also, in the category of 'this might be a sign', I started up RhythmBox, imported my collection of roughly five thousand songs, put it on shuffle - and this is what I got first. Yes, Gundam 00 music. And this is what the desktop looks like when not cluttered with windows.

For pantswarrior's amusement, Ashley and I were discussing plotting plans for our Fuuga OT3 (Kazuki/Toshiki/Juubei):

Her: I also think that at some point, they should all have bathtime.
Me:..........does the Mirage have a hot tub?
Me: because if so they should take it over and fill it with bubble bath (LOL)
Her: lmfao
Her: yessssss

(and to everyone in general, I swear I really truly will have con photos uploaded this week. Once I reinstall the OS on my laptop. Yes, again. I probably could have fixed this one, but trying to swap from Ubuntu to Xubuntu without a clean wipe, after upgrading Ubuntu from 10.10 to 12.04 in one day, was making it's own share of problems, so I decided to just go clean.)

...Things I forget about, obviously. I guess general status update - I have a job! It is basically a trained monkey job, but it's fulltime, and may have benefits (I started as a temp but am being switched to perm). It's also kind of a gongshow right now because it's a new facility so stuff isn't 100% online and they got kind of flooded with business, which in the long run is good but in the short run means I worked like a 44hour work week last week, and that was with finishing early on Friday.

April is con month! After a lot of waffling, I decided that yes I am going to Sakuracon, mostly to hang with inoru_no_hoshi and enjoy Seattle. Costume line-up:
-Gintoki (Gintama) for Friday
-Ukitake (Bleach), with Unohana and Kyoraku for Saturday (YAY old captain group)
-Hakkai (Saiyuki) for Saturday night and Sunday. Maybe, idk.

And then ACen at the end of the month which I am SUPER EXCITE about:
-Gintoki (Gintama)
-Juubei (Getbackers)
-Hakkai (Saiyuki)

OTHER THAN THAT, I have been cleaning more, which is good, and have a terrible headcold right now, which is bad. I called in sick to work for basically the first time ever because I woke up at seven this morning with a fever and a headache that's been there since Friday. I feel kind of guilty but on the other hand fuck, I couldn't handle an 8+ hour day of lifting and walking and LOTS OF NOISE like this. So I'm going to hide in my house with tea and maybe cook some. Home remedies for terrible headcolds with bonus sore throats appreciated, this is an awful feeling :|

This was born out of a Skype conversation with nique a few weeks ago (by way of the Dewey decimal system, incidentally). Basically - being a design nerd, I ended up going off on a long rant about how basically every cosplay community site (ie, places you can join rather than an individual or group's personal cosplay page) has the worst interface ever (or absurd arbitrary rules for joining, for the few I haven't tried), and are terrible at actually sharing information about costumes and process, which is ostensibly what they are about. And she replied that in the cosplay community nobody cares about process, so why would they bother? Which, honestly, is completely true, and kind of depressing.

( longwinded rambling within )

Unfortunately, getting a community site off the ground is a lot of work, both in coding and in attracting enough users to make it a viable community. My smaller goal is to maybe code an easily deployable content management system (like the blogging software for your webserver. Hopefully someone other than me actually knows about those these days....) that would make adding costumes easy. You wouldn't be able to interlink things the way you could on a community website, but you could do everything else, and have skinning functions, too.

Of course, first I gotta learn Perl *g*

Just a bitty note - I'm shifting people who crosspost from being friended on both LJ and DW to DW-only, just to clean up the duplicates on my reading lists :3

Okita Souji, captain of the first unit of the Shinsengumi of Kyoto, and assistant to Vice-Commander Hijikata Toshizou. I was born in Edo, though.

[...]

And I'm twenty-two. Funny how I never figured that out.

There are a lot of people who are important to me here, but there are a lot of people important to me at home, too. And promises I made - to my friends, to my superiors, to myself - that I can't break. So I'm going to go back, and I'm going to bring Digit with me. I hope he and Saizo don't fight. But I'll be back, I'll come to visit everyone. And if you want to come to Kyoto, there'll be rooms, and I'll show you around the city. I know where all the best sweets shops are, too ♥

I found a new bridge off of Stuff Inc today! It leads to a little island near the wall, with a building and a big screen in it!

[Part of the map given to newborns is quickly redrawn, with a new addition]


The whole place is pretty interesting~