Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Geez. Everybody and their brother are watching Shingu now. I suppose I ought to keep an eye out for the next time it gets discounted on Right Stuf. To be honest, I've got viewing material piled to the ceiling, more than enough for the next several months. Heck, I've even got Stellvia in the pile, thanks to the latest Pioneer Geneon 10/25 disc sale.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Bwa!

I have to back him up on that - the anime fan gets conditioned to take video in twenty-three minute chunks, and watching a live-action TV drama at forty-five minutes or an hour - if you're watching it old-school, with commercials & all - can be kind of unbalancing.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

So I'm trying to hide from this year's Bellefonte Cruise. The last two years, I staffed a convention in New Jersey to avoid the 'Cruise; this year, that convention is running first weekend in July, so I'm kind of stuck here. We went over to a guy's apartment in Toftrees to watch the last three Star Trek movies, but that was over too long. I'm sitting here at work, trying to kill time. At home, it's like I'm under siege by the car savages from the Road Warrior. Revving engines, fumes, lily-white, tattooed, pot-bellied crackers as far as the watering eye can see. At least they don't have the car stereo contest on my block this year. No, it's just the food court right outside my door. Fried bread and grease stink bad enough I closed my front window.

Meh. I prefer it when they're just burning the dearly departed in the crematory across the parking lot. It's quieter, and smells less.

I guess I'll go home & play anime loud enough that I can't hear the barbarians hammering at the gates.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

OK, two volumes into the Dark Horse manga Reiko the Body Shop, I'm giving up. I had heard that it was worth the preposterous Japlish title & gore factor, and the first volume gave me some reason to think there might be something there. The grotesque violence and blood-splatter came with a certain vicious-minded willingness to follow through, and I kind of respected that. On the other hand, the artwork was bad enough that a friend, upon looking at it, asked if it was American, and the writing wasn't exactly brilliant.

The second volume, sadly, drops everything that made the first volume marginally interesting. The protagonist is no longer an ice-blooded money-grubbing mercenary who barely cares about the living, nor are we expected to sympathize with the victimized, risen dead as they tear apart living villains. Instead, it's a fight-the-evil-wizard slog of the most generic, cliche-worn thread, teeming with one-trick necromancers & their pet, customized zombies. The zombies aren't aggrieved characters with their own emotional arcs, they're grotesque Pokemon. It's lame.

It's kind of shocking just how lame the second volume is in comparison with the first. Even the way that almost every new character introduced in the second volume is gorily dismembered during the course of the book doesn't make up for the lameness they sprayed all over the walls in their death-throes.