the minor frustrations of everyday life

[edenfalling]

Things I have done today:

1. Wash dishes at 4am (...my sleep schedule is still out of whack from my blue funk, shut up) and drop my favorite glass to shatter all over the kitchen floor. Then I had to sweep up the fragments by hand with damp paper towels, because I couldn't run the vacuum cleaner at that hour and wake my upstairs neighbors and their baby! *headdesk*

2. Buy a new pair of slippers, because the sides of my old pair were giving out. (Also the lining was worn away to pretty much nothing, but since I only wear them over socks, that was not exactly a pressing issue.) Mmmmm, nice, comfy, warm slippers that were on sale for under twenty dollars... *curls toes happily*

3. Start reading Kuroko no Basuke so as to better understand branchandroot's fic. I am not sure this was a good life decision.

4. Attempt to get back to writing "Trollstuck." Crash headfirst into the minor world-building problem of how in the seven hells Vriska's vision eightfold actually works. I mean, seven pupils in one eye are only going to focus extra light on the same retina, right? So how does that equate to ~magic eyesight~ or whatever? Why do they glow red when she's staring really hard at something? I assume her psychic powers must be involved somehow, but god damn it, I didn't expect I'd need to come up with a good technobabble handwave for this! I just want to get through a bit of exposition and take votes on which character should talk to her online! Gnrgh.

5. Decide on an idea for my Yuletide fic. My recipient wants minor character and/or OCs? Great! The character I plan to write about appears for less than a single page in the entire saga. ...And now I need to invent her nearly out of whole cloth. Oh well, it's not as if I don't have experience there. At least she has a few lines of actual canon dialogue, which is way more than I had to work with when creating Ilgamuth Tarkaan.

6. Figure out why I kept occasionally feeling drafts and smelling cigarette smoke in my bedroom. It turns out that when I removed the screen and closed the window for the autumn, I didn't actually close the window, since the top pane had slid down two or three inches over the summer, and therefore when I turned the lock it went over the housing it's supposed to slide into, which, like a dumbass, I completely failed to notice. *headdesk* That is fixed now.

Comments

[branchandroot]

*cackles just a little over the KnB* You will be assimilated! Resistance to Kagami's amazing powers of marshmallow-heart is futile.

*thoughtful* Maybe the different pupils actually each have/cause a difference in the cornea and/or strike a super special set of receptors so that each sees in a different wavelength? So, perceiving seven other not-normally-visible-spectrum views? Of course, if this magic eye thing is supposed to see through time or space or something, then you're down to "it's psychic, actually those are totally separate eyes in different times and places, and it's just the pupils manifesting to focus the resulting perception in her eye right now".

...or, given Homestuck, maybe that's the most logical explanation to start with.

[edenfalling]

I am still very early, just in the middle of the practice match against... Kaijou, I think? Whatever Kise's school is called. At the moment I am mostly annoyed that I have no idea who the other Seirin players are. I am starting to sort of recognize a couple of the sempai by appearance, but I don't know their NAMES! It is VERY FRUSTRATING!

Also, Kuroko's "but I was here all along" *blink blink innocent face* act is hilarious every time. He projects a certain innocence and social awkwardness, but also a lot of quiet, evil humor -- the way he punctures Kise's dramatic statements, for example, or flat-out refuses to give Kagami the arguments he wants early on. *sparkles at him* *sparkles at Kagami too for good measure*

(Hmm. Also so far Riko seems to be portrayed much more as a trainer than a coach, which I guess makes sense -- that's what her background is in -- but does put a lot more responsibility on the captain and other players to manage the strategy aspects of their games. Does she get character development in that direction later on? It would be neat to see her learning to do the tactical part of her job, not just the drills and so on.)

As for Vriska, she doesn't see through time, but she CAN see through a completely solid and opaque magic cue ball to read the accurate answers to any questions she poses. So more like X-ray vision, I guess. This is implied to be basically a result of her focussing really hard with her funky eye -- she even has a special semi-robotic eyepath to help her do so.

[branchandroot]

Yeah, the other first years are kind of the nameless cheering section until very late in the Winter Cup. *rueful* The second years, at least, have some attention paid to them and their progress, but the focus is almost all on the active players.

Kuroko is just love. He's an evil little thing, no question, and he's also has a /serious/ temper under there. I love the contras between his "quiet but not actually innocent, and determined as hell but not entirely pure hearted" and Kagami's "big, brash, loud, painfully pure hearted, and the only genius with any emotional intelligence to speak of". It's so tasty. That's a big part of why I tossed Aomine into Seirin, in that AU, so that he'd be right there to heighten their dynamic.

Riko... gets short-changed in some of the same way as the second-years. It's /mentioned/, and shown a little, that she's a trainer not a basketball coach as such, and we do get to see her increasing facility at strategy, but her own work on that is not shown much. (Also, when she and Momoi interact in canon there are really annoying boob-size comparisons, just so you know to skip those as fast as you can.)

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

I read the other comment, and maybe it's not so much "seven other spectrums" as that it's a slight widening of the visible spectrum -- like she can see into infrared and ultraviolet -- and the effort to do the vision-eightfold is like peering through frosted glass or trying to find the one reddish dot in an orange speckle pattern. If that makes any sense.

Or the perforated iris could be part of a genetic mutation that mainly messes with the retina, so there are structures among the rods and cones that are usually dormant, but can be flexed to see into a different spectrum, and when they're flexed they reflect some light in the red part of the spectrum so the pupils look red instead of black. Of course, it takes a bit of concentration to flex them...

[edenfalling]

I figure any functional difference must be either in the retina or in the brain itself (perhaps her vision is somehow cross-wired with her empathy/mind-control powers?) and the extra pupils are just a visual gag on Vriska's general arachnid theme, but I keep stalling on trying to figure out what exactly she's doing when she's seeing into things.

...Then again, this is Vriska. She may well not care how her vision eightfold works, so long as it does what she needs it to do. She is not exactly self-reflective OR the kind of person who does patient scientific experiments.

[red-volpe.livejournal.com]

As far as the vision eightfold, I always figured part of it was weird xenobiology bullshit. ::::D
Maybe it can see on different waves of light? Kind of like a bee or something.

[edenfalling]

Maybe! But then why the extra pupils??? *shakes tiny fist of RAGE at Andrew Hussie*

[red-volpe.livejournal.com]

Maybe they aren't actually all pupils? *grasps at straws* Maybe the six surrounding the main pupil are actually filters or something? *doesn't know biology enough to bullshit*