"The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometric laws."

That sentence from At the Mountains of Madness is extremely representative HP Lovecraft's body of work.

I know I'm a little late, but I do this every year. This time I added in a comics section, which is dominated by Manga...

( Books, Comics, Movies, and Anime I watched and read in 2009 )


( Best and worst Books )
( Best and worst Comics )
( Best and worst movies from 2009 )
( Best and worst Anime )

Let it be known that Monster and 20th Century Boys are, in my book, both top notch manga. So when I discovered that Naoki Urasawa's newest manga, Billy Bat, had begun being scanalated and posted on OneManga I jumped on the opportunity to read it. The verdict? It's not bad, but it's disappointing.
The series starts on a good foot. The first chapter and a half detail a story of Billy Bat. It's a pulpy late 40's detective comic. Our hero is a private eye bat hired by a dog to see if his wife is cheating, and of course he gets pulled into a web of lies and murder. This is an excellent homage. It feels natural, it looks authentic, it flows well, and it's interesting. I thought that this was an indication of amazing quality to come. Well, not so much.
Halfway through the second chapter, the coloring becomes sporadic and looks unfinished, a few panels become sketchy and we're pulled out of Billy Bat's world and into the world of it's author.
Kevin Yamagata is a Japanese-American comic artist drawing Billy Bat, which we are told is a vastly popular comic. However, soon after we meet him he's accused of plagiarizing a comic from the land of Japan. Bearing an overwhelming sense of the importance of intellectual property, Kevin feels he must track down the mangaka of this comic artist and apologize for subconsciously stealing his work. And so Kevin departs for Japan where he too get's entangled in a web of conspiracy and danger. And slowly we come to realize this Bat is more than just a comic character...
And so the story goes, and you can tell it's Urasawa. But it's also not as good as I'd expect from Urasawa. When I read Monster I loved the art. I was amazed at how he drew people. Then I read 20th Century Boy and a lot of characters looked way too familiar. With Billy Bat it's starting to get old. While the artwork of the comic within a comic was stellar and fresh, the main story's characters look recycled and forgettable. It doesn't stop at their looks either, their personalities are uncultivated too. None of the characters stick with you, which is a total shame because character writing and design were two of the biggest strengths of his previous works.
At the same time the story also feels like Urasawa is slipping into old habits. I get it, mysterious people are bad and ominous and the hero has to go on the lam to stop them. It worked twice before, right? Well it turns out the third time's not a charm. Billy Bat's storytelling feels disjointed. The thick dramatic atmosphere of Monster and 20th Century Boys is missing. Johan and Friend were both ominous and threatening to the point that the mere mention of their characters caused you to tense up a bit. Billy Bat doesn't really have that going. There's apparently some sort of conspiracy involving gold bars and taking over Japan, but it's vague and fairly non-threatening. Also, it's hard to find "Karate-Chop Man" to be threatening when it sounds so goofy. Furthermore, it's sort of suggested that Billy Bat himself is a paranormal entity, or maybe two. One of them's bad, but the other one not so much. We're told the difference is that that there's a black one and a white one but they look the same. Even if you could tell when it's the bad one, he's so cartoony and smug, it would be hard to find him menacing.
14 chapters in Urasawa pulls an Urasawa and jumps away from the main storyline. But instead of jumping to something that you'd think would somehow tie directly into the main plotline, a subplot about a minor character who hasn't met Kevin yet, but will as the arc draws to a close for example, it's a story about Jesus. It wasn't particularly illuminating to the story, and seemed mildly inappropriate. The story jumps forward in time for a short few chapters about a taxi driver that reunited an interracial couple in the middle of a civil rights demonstration. and then jumps back in time to 16th century Iga. These gaidens don't really feel like they have purpose or direction, and it's where the last translated chapter ends.

Final Judgement: It feels like this is Urasawa in a rut, retreading old territory but instead of doing it deliberately and artistically like he has in the past, he's doing it halfheartedly and sloppily. The story trashes about trying hard but failing to establish atmosphere, and not even really trying to establish characters. I'm sticking with it because I like Urasawa, but so far I'm pretty underwhelmed.

I was pretty interested in Dokapon Kingdom the first few times I played it, but I've made up my mind against it. Freshmen year, as a group us four nerds in Claret decided Mario Party was a bad game and that we wouldn't play it, well Dokapon Kingdom is a bad game for all the same reasons. Hell, I'm going to go for it and say something that my current housemates will not be pleased with: Dokapon Kingdom is a significantly worse game than Mario Party.
First of all, it's still a game based on chance. You still roll a die (spin a spinner) that chooses where you land. You still can get ridiculous advantages and disadvantages from landing on an unmarked spot with absolutely no rhyme or reason. You can make ridiculous wagers in which you can come out way overpowered if you gamble against terrible consequences. Combat in the game is essentially Rock Paper Scissors, but what's worse is that it usually simplifies down to a sort of two-option equivalent. Strike beats defend, Attack beats counter (or from the defensive side, defend beats attack, counter beats strike) My roommates can say what they want about "strategy" or "skill" it all boils down to getting lucky and picking the right thing.
Second of all, unlike mario party there's an aspect of progress in the game. It's an RPG, so you level and get better equipment and yada yada and yak yak. One reason this makes the game worse than Mario Party is that it pretty much misses the mark on what the game is completely. This game wants really hard to be an RPG, but it's not. It's a party game. As in: People come over to your house, play it once and the same four people never wind up huddled around the wii ever again. I've seen it happen many, many times when Crash and Cody have friends over. Hell, we've only been able to convince all four of the people who LIVE IN THE SAME HOUSE to play it in that exact group of four three times, and the third time two of the players insisted on starting a new game because everyone forgot what had been happening in the old one. There is absolutely no reason why this game should have classes that you get once you master other classes, I've seen this game played dozens and dozens of times and I've never seen a class get mastered once. The second reason why the element of RPG progression is bad for this game is that it creates a vicious cycle in which the loser is always the loser. The loser cannot buy the new weapons because they don't have money. The loser cannot take the uncaptured towns because they aren't powerful enough to beat the stronger bosses. The loser cannot level because they are poisoned, they have shitty weapons and if they step on a monster fighting space, the winners can swoop in and steal the kill AND gank the loser in one fell swoop, and when they're dead, they're missing turns in which the other players are leveling, and getting money, towns and equipment that further widen the gap between winners and losers. The game tries to balance this with a secret class called darkling that fucks everyone over after you have been last place for ingame weeks straight. This doesn't really work either because there's often one or two ridiculous winning giants leaving two or three weaklings squabbling over last place, shifting it amongst themselves. I've only seen darkling status attained once.
Third of all, this game is absolutely 100% unfun for those doing poorly. It punishes you for dying by taking turns away. Combat is a let down when you can't win. At least in Mario Party you get to take every single one of your turns and there's a minigame between them which you can kick your friends' butts at. In Dokapon, there is no kicking the winner's butt if you're in last. There is only getting your butt kicked by the winner and avoiding the winner. Mario Party is occasionally viscerally satisfying even for the loser, Dokapon pretty much never is.
Finally, the main reason we stopped playing mario party is because it disintegrated into shouting matches over what was and wasn't fair. Mario Party involved dubious things like stealing star, being randomly given stars, having stars randomly taken from you, winning minigames based solely on chance. Dokapon involves similar things, random thief dude, randomly losing towns, randomly being given powerful items, randomly losing money...But It involves much worse. There are many ways within dokapon to actively and maliciously disrupt your opponent's game. I think the main reason we haven't fallen into shouting matches, or even real anger against eachother is that we're a closer group of people with a healthier relationship that the people I played Mario Party with as a freshman.
In conclusion: Dokapon Kingdom is not a good game. It is bad for all the same reasons Mario Party is, but in many respects it is worse. I don't recommend it to anyone. Just as I decided to never play Mario Party again then, I am deciding never to play Dokapon Kingdom again now.

Let me tell you a little story to demonstrate how awesome being a CS major at SSU is:
So I was hanging out with Mike, Eric, Brendan, Stephanie and I think probably some other people in the SPR. (reason SSU CS major is awesome #1: We have a secret club house) We were playing boggle. (reason #2: we play board games together between classes) Stephanie's reading off her words and she calls out "Duvet." I start singing "I am falling..." Mike joins in "...I am fading..." Then Eric joins in "...I am drowning, help me to breath!" (reason #3: People weren't weirded out by me bursting into songs from anime. reason #4: people caught the reference. reason #5: more than one person actually JOINED IN singing Duvet with me...OMG.) I'm so glad I'm CS.

I was driving down to Mountain View this weekend, heading down 280 and just clearing the cityscape. I look out and I see the rolling hills in the distance, and there's fog banks drifting in over the hilltops. It was beautiful. Seeing the pink clouds on the blue sky, with the white fog creeping slowly over the green hills...breathtaking. I'm sorry, words are failing me. I wish I had a photo.

Played some Rock Band Beatles today. It was pretty awesome. I'd love to actually own it, and I would play the FUCK out of it if I did, but given that I don't own a current-generation console, and I don't own the instruments, It would cost SO MUCH for me to get it. Hell, I mean it would be $60 for me to just get the game itself and play it on my roommate's wii with his Guitar Hero World Tour instruments, but I don't even have that much to spare, really. (plus I refuse to pay money for a game that will be useless to me when I move) Easy seemed like it was TOO easy, like even easier than Easy in Guitar Hero World Tour. I kicked it up to Medium, but I didn't do too well...I'm still not really used to using a fourth finger. As for songs, it had a very strong collection. It had the ones that I felt really needed to be in the game (While My Guitar Gently Weeps, And Your Bird Can Sing, and The End) and a couple somewhat surprising personal favorites (Hey Bulldog and Octopus's Garden.) Not to say that there aren't songs I'd like to see as DLC but I don't think I'd be 100% satisfied unless their entire discography was playable (well, you could leave out a few songs here and there...I wouldn't really miss Long Long Long or A Taste of Honey). I didn't play drums at all, but I did backing and lead vocals, bass, and guitar.

SO that thing I do around New Years, the thing where I list all the books, movies, and anime I've consumed this year...I'm calling it right now: Baccano! is going to be in my top 10, my top 5, my top 3, my top whatever-number-I-pick for anime. It is highly unlikely that I'll even see one more show as good as Baccano! by the end of the year, let alone enough to crowd it out of my favorites for the year.

( Ponyo Spoilers )
disclaimer: This is all furious, furious nitpicking on my part. Ponyo is a visually beautiful, moving, exciting, fun, and creative film. It's magical and lovely and amazing. I love it and highly recommend it. Take what I say in the context of this: I loved almost all of the film, but was left with a few minor disappointments that I pondered on way to long and blew them a little out of proportion. If I were to express my true feelings on this film, it would largely be a summary of the story annotated very frequently with "that is so cool!" and "OMG, this scene took my breath away, it was so pretty!" and "I was glued to the screen, riveted and completely engaged!" However, I figured that wouldn't make a good post.

So, spring was a dry spell for me and new anime, as I've explained, I tried and dropped Shangri-La and K-On! (but...I've recently become kind addicted to the K-On! Opening and Ending themes. v_v I hate moe because it's so saccharine, fluffy, childish and shallow, but I love saccharine, fluffy, childish and shallow j-pop used as anime theme music.) Anyway, summer is looking much better to me! I'm currently watching:

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya This is sort of a weird case where it's sort of a new season and sort of not, because they're playing the first season with new episodes mixed in...And so far four of the five episodes are "Endless Eight" the same series of events over and over with slight variations. Surprising enough I'm not totally aggravated with it. I kinda love this show (as I've said, I'm embarrassed by this!), and this new season is no exception.

Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni: Rei After the two television seasons, there's not really much left for this story to do. The mystery was solved well before the end of the second season, and by the end of the second season the conflict was resolved. The first episode of Rei was terrible. TERRIBLE. As it got into the new story arc I got into it, but the mystery and the conflict aren't the same. The crazy and the violent and the suspense are gone. But still I've grown fond of the characters so it wasn't bad.

Umineko no Naku Koro Ni sort of a spiritual successor of Higurashi, it's not even remotely the same story, but it's stylistically similar. It's not quite as unsettling and suspenseful as the first season of Higurashi, but I'm getting into it! I'm trying to draw parallels to Higurashi to try and solve the mysteries, but it's not really working. I'm really interested in this show and want to see where it's going. What I dislike about it: Maria's "cute noise" which is "UUU UUUUUU." It's extremely annoying. I mean, like even more so than most anime girls' "cute noises." When this happened I actually was really happy that Rosa did that. But Maria is the one who's been doing the crazy face most of the time in this show, so I'll forgive her.

Galaxy Express 999 When my new stuff isn't updated I need something to watch! I decided to kick it old school when I saw that I could check this out legally. I had seen that Daft Punk anime recently when I started, so I was interested in Leiji Matsmoto, and I wasn't interested in anything else on Crunchyroll. So whatever, I decided to watch it, and I liked it. I've only seen 17 episodes, so I'm 96 from having seen it all, so it will be a while before I finish it. Or maybe I won't finish it.

Since leaving high school, that is to say since entering college there have been two movies that I've keep wanting to come back and watch again and again regardless of how recently I've seen them: Paprika and Hot Fuzz. And I own neither.
The Sky Crawlers was typical of Mamoru Oshii, quiet, contemplative, beautiful, confusing and boring as hell. Apparently I didn't catch that it was a metaphor for otaku and hikikomori. Whoops. That it actually has meaning rather than reckless contemplative abandon might actually make me like it less in retrospect rather than more. The two reviews on Rotten Tomatoes both say that the boring is interrupted by the dynamic and engaging dogfights, but I agree more with the Anime News Network review: they were "intentionally banal and meaningless." Instead of this film, watch Ghost in the Shell or Angel's Egg. I do, however, think I like this film more than Jin-Roh.
I'm sort of embarrassed to like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as much as I do. It's shallow, high-school, moe, and cliche. That's almost everything I'm vocally against in the world of anime. But it still makes me happy. You know about a year and a half ago when I finally caved and watched it and overcame the overwhelmingness of the first episode I went on to marathon all 13 episodes of the rest of the series...starting at about midnight when I had to get up early the next morning. I haven't watched this third Endless Eight episode, but this new season isn't quite as good. But I still like it. a lot. And I loved The Melancholy of Haruhi-chan Suzumiya when Kadokawa had it up on YouTube, but not as much as I loved Nyoro~n Churuya-san.
It strikes me as I'm watching Galaxy Express 999 that the first half of Kaiba must have been heavily influenced by it. They're very similar.
I was reluctant to read Buddha by Osamu Tezuka, but I've come out enjoying it much more than his Blackjack, Dororo, and Astro Boy. I still think I prefer Ode to Kirihito though. And I really want to read Phoenix.

I'm getting close to getting close to having read all of Haruki Murakami. When I read Norwegian Wood I'll have read all his novels. Actually, since I'll likely finish Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman before I start Norwegian Wood have finished Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, I'll have read all of his fiction at that point (or at least all of his books of fiction. He might have some uncollected short stories.) I don't know if I want to read his non-fiction though. Neither Underground nor What I Talk About When I Talk About Running really sounds like a book covering subject matter I'm interested in. One thing about his writing that bothers me: he keeps writing about women in which he starts describing them with "She was no great beauty, but..." I'm sorry Murakami, that's a bad way to start of describing someone who's supposed to be modestly attractive, because it draws focus to the idea that they could be better. It's hard to accept that these men who are our narrators truly find these women beautiful when the first words that they use are "She was no great beauty." Also he has this strange fixation on infidelity. South of the Border, West of the Sun was actually entirely about the narrator cheating on his significant others and I hated him and I hated the book. Before I read it I thought Murakami couldn't do worse than Pinball, 1973. On the other hand, I loved Sputnik Sweetheart and After Dark.
I didn't read it when it was assigned in that class I took in High School, but Siddhartha was actually really good! Makes me wish I had actually read it and done some of the assignments about it when I was supposed to. Maybe then I wouldn't have gotten a D in that class and be forced to take that summer school class at foothill.

"And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. / And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them."
Kings 2:23-24, King James Version

"But you know, even if you don't know who you really are if you have music, you can dance. If you have a Playstation, you can play games. If you have a cellphone, you can talk for hours on it. If you have a big helping of food, you will be content. So I suppose, if you did have the most advanced bomb, you could really destroy the Earth if you wanted to."
Katori Shintaro -Rolling Bomber Special

I had a dream in which, for some reason, I was on some sort of trip to the city with a bunch of my peers. (which city? I dunno. All I know is there were big buildings everywhere.) One of the girls from K-On! asked me out on a date. (I think it might have been the blonde one who had no personality. I dunno, I barely remember that part of the dream and I only watched one episode of the show) At a loss for how to respond to the situation, I wound up going on the date with her, making a total ass of myself and then leaving her at the restaurant without telling her I was going. I then went and got drunk and smoked a whole bunch of weed with Edwin or Doug or someone to take my mind off the catastrophic date. After that I went and harassed Andrea and made an even bigger ass of myself because I was drunk and high and wound up passing out on the couch in her hotel room. The next day I woke up and Andrea had called a psychologist because she was severely worried about my mental stability because I had sounded so crazy when I was high. I was really irritable because I was all hung over and the psychologist took my aggressive behavior as a bad sign.

"Are you smoking the same thing as he is?"
-Professor Rivoire to Professor Stauffer about Professor Ledin (on "Chinese" being an "object-oriented extension of English.")

From the spring 2009 season of anime, only two shows caught my eye enough for me to test them out.

( K-On! )

( Shangri-La )

Haruki Murakami's first three books are what are know as "The Trilogy of the Rat." This consists of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase. (A Wild Sheep Chase also had a sequel called Dance, Dance, Dance, but I hear it's not really considered part of the series because even though it features the same main protagonist and narrator, the characters of J and The Rat don't ever make an appearance in it.) Haruki Murakami never wants the first two books in this trilogy to be published in English again, but they have been translated. Though as of this moment I've only read A Wild Sheep Chase (and about half of Dance, Dance, Dance which I'm checking out from the library) because I hear they stand alone well without the earlier two books, I've finally gotten my hands on all three.

( My copies of The Trilogy of The Rat )

One time in my GE History class, my teacher said that what it meant to be an introvert was that you just needed to be alone sometimes. "that's all it means," she said. It's a good example of why you should take anything a teacher says about a field of study that isn't their own with a grain of salt, as I'm fairly certain that it has very little to do with the real definition of an introvert. I've never doubted that I was an introvert, but what does it mean? When I think about my Meyer's Briggs result I was always very secure in my believe that I was an IN*P but I was never really sure if it was INTP or INFP, and the difference between Thinking and Feeling seemed rather arbitrary to me. And maybe it's just plain meaningless, I mean the whole idea of separating everyone into two groups. Maybe everyone behaves the same internally but we just have different ways of expressing it verbally.

I've moved. I don't know if I want to say that it's a bad thing or a good thing. I live in a smaller room with cheaper rent, in a house with a dishwasher a washer-dryer, and garage space for boxes that cluttered my living space. Best of all I never have to navigate the hell-hole of a parking lot at the place we used to live again. My new roommates are pleasant people. But me and Edwin had a nice thing going at our other place. We hung out a lot outside of our homes, and occasionally talked at home, but mostly we gave each other space and stayed out of each other's business. It was a quiet living condition. A setup where I could unwind by myself. I still have my privacy where I'm living now but it's different. I was on the second story, with a view of the lot next to our apartment complex. A house was all the way up near the street, but they had an enormous back yard and I had a beautiful view of the field. There was a little bridge or enclave of some sort in their yard and a while back there were some other apartment buildings. I could leave my window open at night and let the frogs sing me to sleep. There were also some cats that lived by that would meowl melancholy songs in the wee hours of the morning. It was a place that I liked and felt comfortable. I'll probably become comfortable in my new place with time, but it still needs time to grow on me. Thankfully I didn't need to haul my bed impossibly through a stairwell like at the old place so instead of leaving it in the living room like I had I get to sleep on it. Saying "another unfamiliar ceiling" feels more natural on a bed instead of just a mattress on the floor.

As I hear more and more about The Watchmen movie I become less and less interested in seeing it. Mostly what I've heard have been marginally positive reviews that come across as "It's not the comic, but that was never possible, it does a very good job at getting as close as possible" and quite frankly I'd rather just reread the comic than settle for the standard woes that accompany adaptions. Because that's all it sounds like, a run of the mill adaption.
Coraline, on the other hand, was a movie I saw a second time. (though just for clarification it was mainly because of the company the second time, the movie wasn't good enough for me to actively seek it out a second time.) My memory of the book is a little hazy, to be sure, but the film had whimsy and beauty of it's own that I'm fairly certain were not part of my own imaginations when I was reading the book. It was a well executed and entertaining film in it's own right and in the context of being an adaption of a book that I read more than five years ago (was it that long? HO lee fuck! High school seems like just yesterday!)
I still find Haruki Murakami's works enchanting, so I did like A Wild Sheep Chase. I'm simultaneously attempting to go backwards and forwards in the series from there, as I'm thinking about my options for printing out the illegally obtained pdf of Pinball, 1973, Sheep Chase's predecessor which is no longer in print in English, and have a hold at the local library for Dance, Dance, Dance, Sheep Chase's sequel which some two people are apparently still reading.

Here I am, down in the SPR, alone, debating whether I should stop writing and go home to sleep or if I should go on to write about Ode to Kirihito which I'm eager to discuss. I think I'm a little to tired to collect my thoughts on the subject but I do have a lot to say so perhaps I will save them for another day.

In Shaun of the Dead the protagonists take refuge from the zombie horde in a bar because it's where they spend most of their time. Don't think I have thought about using the SPR as a zombie shelter, but I've decided it would be a terrible choice. Don't get me wrong, at first it seems like a nice idea. We could stock up the mini fridge for food, we have all the entertainment we need, internet, storage space for survival gear and weapons and a phone. If we had access to the server room, we could even expand out of the cramped space of the spr and have all sorts of awesome space throughout the sealed area of the spr, the server room, the two labs, and the storage room. plus, if we blocked off the doors we could even take the whole basement and have access to drinking fountains and bathrooms. But when you stop and think about it, the doors open inwards towards the stairwell, not out into the hall, so they'd be hard to lock zombies out of, and the server room is locked so the spr would be the only refuge and it's small and unpleasant with too many people in it. There's no food or survival gear currently packed here but some bags of popcorn, a most likely flat bottle of diet coke, and some condiments. Worst of all, I don't think we'd have access to a generator, so should the power go out we'd be stuck in pitch darkness. Expanding the area of the blockade would be futile as the first floor is completely indefensible with the glass front of the building. All the other floors suffer from the weakness of indefensible doorways that open towards the stairwells and the potential for some lucky zombie stumbling on a free ride up the elevator. So Darwin is out of the picture. Salazar, The Commons, The Student Union, The Rec Center, Ives, and The Library are all completely accessible though breaking a glass building front, while Carson and the art building are completely indefensible because they have open air hallways. The first floors of Stevenson and Nichols aren't good choices either because of glass, but I've yet to assess their second floors (or the third floor of the library. I suspect they're not good places to stay for similar reasons as Darwin.) I've decided that not only was I right when I first moved to Beaujolais about it being a decent place to stay in a zombie apocalypse, it's probably the best place on the entire SSU campus. Food and water are likely to abound the dorm rooms, and the stairs would be fairly easy to take out with a sledge hammer or light explosives or something leaving the hallways out of harms way. Worst comes to worst you're stuck in a single suite and that'd still be pretty decent conditions. The major disadvantage I see in it is panic amongst the inhabitants of the dorm rooms. Diary of the Dead portrayed a zombie apocalypse in which a dorm room was completely abandoned because college students were flocking home. I doubt in a real world scenario that that's how it would play out.

"The reason there is so much humor on the internet about software development is because there is so much pain"
- Prof. Ledin to our Software Design and Development class.

In the song "Mr. Jones" by Counting Crows the vocalist, I don't care enough to look up his name, says that his favorite color is gray. I have a vague memory of someone telling me that when you're being questioned to see if you're crazy if you answer "gray" to "what's your favorite color?" you get major points towards the crazy end. I don't really remember the context or who told me that, but it's the sort of thing that people who don't really understand real mental illness say.

I think my Album for this week is going to be either Astrolounge by Smash Mouth or Enema of the State by Blink 182. I'm feeling a little nostalgic. I can't exactly say why, the period of my life in which I listened to those albums often was kind of shit. Well, not just kind of, it was basically the worst part of my life ever. You know what? Maybe I won't listen to those albums this week.

I arrived back in Rohnert Park at about 6PM and went to sleep pretty soon after that. I woke up around 11:40 and am now considering going back to sleep at about 3AM. During this extra time being awake I've watched a few episodes of Yakitate! Japan, which is about competitive bread baking, and the first episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena, which I'm pretty sure is about being bisexual with a preference for members of the same sex. I fell in love with this ridiculous song during a scene of stair climbing though.

Today I saw a car with the bumper stickers "Dog is my copilot" and "In Dog We Trust: Bark Obama 2008"

So yesterday Mike told me he'd met his goal for the night: to not be peer pressured into trying alcohol at the bad hair day party. I was like "man, I should start setting myself goals for the day so that each day I can say 'Mission accomplished!'" So here's the results:

Today's goal: Buy a new bath towel because two is not enough given how rarely I do laundry, status: complete! And it's yellow! And they were selling plain yellow T-Shirts at target too, so I also bought two of those! I considered buying sheets because two sets of bedding is also not enough given how rarely I do luandry, but I didn't really see any colors I liked.

Tomorrow's goal: Start taxes, FAFSA, or Graduation Paperwork, do paperwork for repeating a class for a new grade.

Also, two weeks ago I set a different system of goals into place. When I first registered for Last.fm, the gap from The Beatles and the pillows to the next artist was HUGE, but Mike told me it would close over time. However, it didn't seem to work that way, because every time I checked "most played in the last 7 days" the proportions would be basically the same. But then about three weeks ago I listened to the entirety of the Bôa album "Race of a Thousand Camels" which put Bôa above both Beatles and pillows for that weeks plays. I decided to broaden my musical horizons (or more accurately rearrange my listening distributions within the established horizons) so I made a pledge to myself. Rather than just listening to my entire library on random and skipping the songs I don't want to hear, I decided to listen to at least one full album by someone other than The Beatles and the pillows each week. Two weeks ago it was "Best of GO!GO!" by GO!GO!7188, last week it was "Forty Licks" by The Rolling Stones (Okay, so I settled for calling Disc 1 a album. I didn't really listen to all 40 of the licks, but I did listen to 20 licks). This is the dawning of a new week and I've already set my sights on listening to "Discovery" by Daft Punk.

I once made a post here in which I ranked The Beatles. In this post I said that, in my opinion, John at his best was a better songwriter than Paul at his best. I just though about it, and I realized: Paul wrote Let It Be. Paul wrote Hey Jude. Paul wrote Yesterday. And as for my own personal favorites, Paul wrote Rocky Raccoon. No, John at his best wasn't better than Paul at his best. John was probably on average better than Paul at songwriting, but Paul wrote a number of masterpieces with The Beatles.

I have this tendency when writing essays. My first body paragraph will be one and a half pages long and explore the intricacies of all of my sub-points. My second body paragraph will be shy of a full page and will scrimp a little on the details. My third body paragraph will be about half a page long and will present the bare minimum of support for it's topic. That's what the storytelling in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reminded me of. It LOVED the idea of an small child people mistake for an ancient man. It was very fond of the idea of a young man people mistake for an old man. It was okay with the idea of a middle aged man who looked middle aged. It was completely disinterested in the idea of an old person who looked young, but it went through the motions and showed a few minimal details because it felt a need for completeness. Or at least that's the impression I got.

A. Each tagged person must post 8 things about themselves on their journal.
B. At the end, you have to choose and tag 5 people.

1. Since I watched Evangelion, every time I've moved to a room in which I've never lived before, I've laid down on the bed and said to myself "another unfamiliar ceiling." Ever since I've gotten an iPod, I've added to this ceremony the shuffling of my library then skipping to the 25th song and listening to it while I do this.

2. I'm left-handed for most things, but there is one specialty for which my right hand is superior to my left. That is moving quickly in small, repetitive motions, particularly moving quickly up and down or spinning in small circles. I use my right hand to shake things, to masturbate, and to wind small cranks like on that wind-up flashlight my dad has.

3. I think Ninjas are pretty cool, but I think pirates are cooler.

4. My favorite color is yellow. This is largely because Amos gave me the nickname "Cheese Chimp" because I owned two yellow shirts that I wore often, but that's not the end of the story. At the time my favorite color was blue, but blue is everyone's favorite color. When playing board games or video games where each player is represented by a distinct color, I never wanted to squabble, so I always picked yellow instead of blue because of the nickname. This is how I came to strongly associate the color with myself.

5. I'm really not sure if I ever believed in Santa Claus or not. I remember telling someone in 5th grade that I never had but always liked to pretend I did, and at the time I believed it, but now I'm not that sure. Either way, there was no shocking moment of sickening realization that it was all a big lie.

6. I have a giant mole on my ass

7. When I was a wee lad, I had a T-Shirt with a banana playing a saxophone on it that was my favorite article of clothing. I left it on top of a lamp that was on and it got a big hole burned in it. My mother told me that the part of the shirt with the banana picture had survived and that she could sew it onto another shirt. She probably told me this to stop me from crying, thinking I would forget. I didn't forget, and it took me nearly a decade to realize that it had been a lie to placate me.

8. I coined the term "Awesometimes Train" and for a while it was my own little thing. I'm actually proud to say that my friends in Sonoma have started using it occasionally.

I don't want to tag anyone. If you want to do it, be my guest.

The second time I watched The Dark Knight one of my problems with it was an inability to suspend disbelief for certain things. For example, The Joker was a ridiculously dangerous domestic terrorist, and yet the only authorities involved in tracking them are city police. I really think that, especially in a post-9/11 world but even before that, federal authorities would become involved in tracking him. In Nolan's Batman series, there seems to be two regions in the world: Gotham City and Asia. Another one of my problems I had with disbelief suspension was the unbridled optimism with which the people of Gotham city seemed to view Harvey Dent. I had a hard time believing that a man, especially a politician, could become such a symbol of hope and purity to people. It seemed ridiculous the way people reacted to Harvey Dent.

The way people react to Obama reminds me of the way people reacted to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.

I've got a question. When I use my Snakes on a Plane icon, does it show you this image?

See, it does on my computer:

I've also had problems where it will temporarily change my default icon ("I Don't want to get up." Calvin and Hobbes) into a gif of an asian woman waving, but I've looked over people's shoulders when it's happened and told them to look at my profile and seen that it hadn't been changed for then, and it always resolves itself with a few reloads of my icon page. No matter how many times I've reloaded, it's remained that NOT Snakes on a Plane image for weeks now. I've been thinking about ditching my SoaP icon since a few months after I saw SoaP in theaters anyway, but I've never had anything to replace it with, so it's stayed there for a little over two years mostly unwanted and unused. Now it's not what it should be.

The live action movie Tomie was bad. Based on a horror manga by Junji Ito, Tomie is neither faithful nor a decent work of fiction in its own right. Tomie somehow managed to miss a large part of what made the manga a successful work. First of all, the film tells how Tomie can heal wounds, but I don't remember it mentioning that Tomie duplicates off of her severed body parts, so Tomie appears to be a singular threat. Furthermore, the film had very little special effects budget, so it didn't have any of the really grotesque scenes of Tomie respawning in a sickening, haunting manner. Second of all, Tomie's character lacks the bitch levels of the character in the manga. She acts childishly and can maybe be seen as toying with people in a sadistic manner, but she lacks the sheer levels of hate-ability, of selfishness, of calculated evil that she has in the manga. To top it off, the film lags a long time focusing on an original cast of characters that are completely uninteresting. When Tomie finally shoves herself into the foreground of the film, it's the film's climax, and the film's big concluding revelation makes no sense, not in context of the manga and not in context of the film itself.

The live action movie Love Ghost, a rather clumsy translation of the title it shares with it's source material "The Lovesick Dead" another Junji Ito horror manga, is a much better film than Tomie. Much like Tomie, it lacks faithfulness to the original manga, and focuses primarily on a cast of original characters, but unlike Tomie I felt it took the story in a completely different direction that was mostly pretty well executed. The basic premise of the film and the manga remains the same, a town is obsessed with a form of fortune telling in which you ask a stranger a question (usually "do I have a chance with the guy I'm crushing on?") and despite the recent appearance of a ghostly figure who answers your question in a bitingly cruel manner that drives you to insanity and eventually suicide, people don't have the common sense to just stop doing it. Ito wrote the story very well, he's very good at insanity and being supernaturally drawn to do things that you know full well will cause your own doom, that's a big part of his forte. The film handles the concept far more clumsily, but my familiarity with the source material made up for that. The films takes you on a number of twists that are not just original to the film, but in fact direct contradiction to the actions in the comic, and these really drive a mostly enjoyable experience. It's a much cheaper thrill than the manga, but overall, not a bad experience.

Breakfast of Champions is a film that I really had every expectation of hating, but I wound up enjoying anyway. Based a pretty awesome novel by Kurt Vonnegut, the film deviates in many ways from the source material. The film attempts much harder to be a comedy. Dwayne Hoover is very teetering on the brink of a meltdown, already driven quite crazy, but unlike the novel, the whole world around him seems to also be insane. His employee, Harry, seems unnecessarily paranoid that Dwanye knows about his secret transvestism, while in the book he isn't quite as jittery, and his worries seem well founded. The character Wayne Hoobler is played up, a fairly minor character with an unfortunate life story in the book, he somehow manages to wind up in the right place at the right time in the movie such that he winds up in a strangely satisfying situation. Dwayne's wife Celia is clearly insane, but she has NOT committed suicide by drinking drano like in the novel. Dwayne's son Bunny is still living with his parents and on the way to a comfortable life as a lounge singer, while in the book his father has disowned him for his homosexuality and he's living a terrible life on skid row. All the characters are way more goofy in a pleasant way, and no one ever seems to communicate, all of them lost in their own little delusions, while we, the viewers, know that things aren't nearly as bad as they think they are. The book was pretty pessimistic and things WERE as bad as the characters thought they were, often even worse. Dwayne's climatic rampage results in a few bloody noses, and the characters all have happy endings. In the novel Dwayne's climatic rampage puts pretty much every other character into intensive care, and everyone ends up worse off. Yet again, the film is a lighthearted take on a fairly heavy source, and is a fairly enjoyable alternative that lacks the substance of its better half.

The Manga Monster was excellent. It told a riveting story with a compelling cast of characters, and strong artwork. I read all 162 chapters over a three day period. I just couldn't stop! I highly recommend it. The anime, or at least the first few episodes, was extremely faithful to its source, I've got a close eye on details and I started watching the series less than a week after I had read the corresponding chapters of the manga, and I had not one single complaint about plot details that had been changed. I didn't notice a single thing different. My main complaint is that the art became too streamlined, the animation was too stiff, and the character in Urasawa Naoki's original artwork was lost in the translation. Dr. Tenma seemed to be the only character who retained the spark of personality that Naoki so delicately communicated in his drawings.

I Am America (And So Can You!) is an great read, and everything you could hope for out of a book written by Stephen Colbert in character.

It seems like when the question comes up, people are often quick to say they aren't afraid of death. I never understood that. Of course I'm afraid of death, my mind functions properly. I can't help but feel that people who say they aren't don't really have a concrete idea to pair with the concept of death. The word "death" alone, even the abstract idea that someday a long time down the line you won't exist anymore, those things aren't all that scary if you don't really put much thought into it.
I went and visited my grandma for what is almost certainly the last time in her life the other day. My uncle Gary was saying things like "her soul's already passed on, I've just got to take care of her body until it catches up." Andrea said "She's not there anymore." But what I find scary is the idea that they're wrong. That somewhere in that body that's collapsed past the point of being able to communicate, past the point of giving external signs of perceiving the world around her, is stuck a person who still thinks and feels and dreams and, most scary of all, hurts. Oh god, if she's still in there, it must hurt like hell. It was really hard to look at her. There was nothing left of outward signs of the personality, the will, the strength of the woman I knew and loved. She looked like a skeleton with skin on it that was just barely breathing. It was painful to see her like that.
I'm going to miss her. She was a wonderful person, and she meant a lot to me. Sitting there I had all these memories flooding back. She always used to have colored paper and tons of ancient crayons that I used to draw on at her house. She taught me how rude the concept of putting your feet up on a couch was with your shoes still on. When I was younger, she used to have these toys in a toy chest, they all seemed pretty old, but I thought they were neat. She always used to tell the story about writing in chalk on the sidewalk and then being forced to clean it up. She would reminisce about the old days, and my imagination would flair with images of orchards for miles and canning factories to can the fruits. She loved her family and tried so hard to keep me interested in their business, but mostly I barely know people on my mom's side, even after all her attempts to peak my interest. Luckily she left me with a big book of family info that I can use as reference, but it's sad to know that a resource for information about my own flesh and blood is gone. She used to wear sweatshirts with pictures of flowers and birds on them. She taught people how to make jewelery and made beautiful jewelery herself. She once made me a bolo tie that I wore when I would see her for years, and she's made me numerous rings, and even a keychain that unfortunately broke. She liked to watch Jeopardy and the nightly news when I would visit her, and she'd occasionally talk about public television and educational programming, but for the most part she disliked TV. She loved hummingbirds, and always kept a feeder for them on her porch, and she even knew the difference between different regulars who stopped by her feeders. She liked the kind of paintings that have really detailed realistic looking animals, the kind that are kinda tacky and without character, but are pretty nonetheless, and she liked Norman Rockwell. She ate very small portions, and always commented that she was amazed I could eat so much. She was very judgmental about hair hanging down in people's eyes and exposed navels. She like mystery novels. She was a wonderful person and I will miss her.

In other news, Edwin's coworkers are looking for two new roommates, and they have a house rather than the shithole apartments we're living in now, and rent there is actually significantly cheaper, so we're thinking about moving.

"The Labradoodle is a Portuguese Water Dog wannabe."
- Senator Ted Kennedy

That's your quote of the week.

Last year I did something like this. This year the lists are all shorter, so I ran them all together, and I don't feel like explaining my best/worse choices:

( Books, New Movies, and Anime I read/watched last year )

( how they rank )