All Souls' Night

My father has just informed the cat that he doesn't get on the floor because he's a hummin' bean.

So, thanks to my father and the way he reinterprets my occasional sounding-out of Japanese pronunciations of non-Japanese words, I now have the urge to call Hellsing's Alucard "avacado".

Maybe it's a little strange, but I tend to approach things from fandom and then, once I have a general idea of characters and plot and have read pretty much any spoiler I can find and I know I'll like it, I go for the real thing. Example: Slayers.

I discovered Slayers at some point years ago. I think I was in high school, but what year I couldn't tell you. I also don't know how I stumbled across it. I don't look for things, they just... come to me. Like how I found out about Weiß Kreuz, which was by searching for Rurouni Kenshin. Um, yeah. Anyway. Moving on. I discovered Slayers, looked into it, and forgot about it. A year or so later (or was it more than that? Oh, my lamentable memory!) I bought and snickered my way through a couple volumes of the manga, and then forgot about it. And then, a couple weeks ago, I convinced mine father to let me buy the anime series. All 78 (is that right?) episodes.

Now, keep in mind that I'm the one who introduced my father to anime. He's the kind of person who usually likes to enjoy it an episode at a time, which is a little irking since I prefer marathons or at least to complete a DVD all at once. So we've been watching it for four days, and we're nearly through with the first season.

Of course, my father writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and he's been collecting D&D since it first came out, besides making up a version using random tile selection to create pretty much an infinite number of possible dungeons, and an extremely simplized version of the rules of combat based soley on D6, and ignoring almost all of the rest, that happened to be perfect for the six year old girls I and my best friend were at the time - he swears we'd squeal every time a monster showed up, and then beat it to a pulp - introduced me to Warhammer and Necromunda and anything else from Games Workshop while we were in London and could just walk into the store, and has played practially every explore-and-beat-up-the-badguys computer game that's available for the Mac and doesn't involve twiddly finger stuff. He's the one who got the playstation, not me. And all those videogames are his. Plus he goes to conventions several times a year.

My dad's also the person who gave me my sense of humor. So extremely silly sword and sorcery is pretty much the ideal for us to watch together, but still! We're sitting down for four or five hours just watching this thing, and he's the one who prompts me, and all I have to do is just make a reference and he does this Pfff that means he's laughing. Dad's not very expressive unless you get him intense. He's much more inclined to cripple you with bad puns, and then keep you on the floor by just looking at you, and...

I guess, I'm really just saying, Wow. Dad and Slayers... I thought he'd like it, but this is beyond anything.

Oh yeah. And he doesn't like trying to twist his tongue around Gourry, so he's just calling him squid-for-brains. I tried saying jellyfish, but he insists on squid.