coldIt's very cold today, which is kind of surprising for Fresno. I mean, we had it snow in mid-April when we were at college, but that was Utah. And it's windy, which always weirds me out. And then when we checked e-mail and we still hadn't gotten anything, we were like, "Never mind, I've had enough!" It probably doesn't help that we really just want to play Neo Angelique.
But now I have a Mimsy on my lap (she's probably trying to get warm), so what shall I ramble about today? Last night, a random train of thought had me thinking about... what was it again? Right! Doujin Work. It's an anime (based on a manga, we think) about a girl who learns that it's possible to sell doujinshi and decides to try it out in order to make a quick buck. Only she's never had any interest in it before and has no experience or training or anything, so the first manga she draws is completely terrible. And whenever she shows it to a friend for their opinion, they always say, "Wow, this is really nice paper." Sometimes they'll go on to say that you don't usually find paper that good in doujinshi by new artists. And that's something we've thought about sometimes, especially when friends on LJ talk about critiques they get on their own works.
We used to be very bad about giving constructive criticism (we're not sure how we are at it now, because we don't get much opportunity, quite possibly because of how bad we were before, but also likely because we don't read fan fiction so much). There were times when someone would do something that we were like, "But I wanna do that! *whinewhinewhine*" so we would point out all the flaws, because we were jealous, and thus relieved to see that there was room for improvement. It took us a long time to learn that you need to point out the good things about it, too, even though it seems so obvious. So now whenever I hear about someone getting really harsh criticism without any compliments, I tend to think the critic was jealous.
But anyway, the "This is really nice paper" line is a good reminder to me to always point out what was good, even if the only thing you can find is paper quality. And then! our boss at CMX taught us another really good trick, because, bad as it is to get criticism, it's just about the same badness to get, "Now, this was pretty good, but..." But our boss at CMX had to correct a few things about our translation scripts, so he told us what all to fix, which had us all like, "Oooohhhhh nooooooo! We have failed! Aaaaaaahhh!" But then he pointed out all the good things afterward, which helped bring us out of the depths of despair! Yay!
And now that Mimsy has left, we're going to go play hooky for the rest of the day.
Today I'm thankful for pretend work, finding out when Psych is on, getting a new Classic Composer CD (at the same time as getting new manga!), nice paper, and it not being too warm to eat chocolate covered pretzels.
