So, Skip Beat volume 3. I had been worried that the artist, Yoshiki Nakamura, was going to ease up and let her saint-gone-sour protagonist, Kyoko, revert to saintliness & sweetness. As of the third volume, that threat has not yet materialized. Our heroine, having been provisionally accepted into talent agency LME as a member of the cloyingly named "Love Me Section", is obliged to prove that she can both elicit, and accept, affection. The flamboyant head of the agency believes that the most bedrock requirement of "talents" who work in the entertainment industry is this ability to be lovable. Kyoko, whose whole life up to the point of the beginning of the story was a sort of rigorous ryokan-themed training in this exact sort of self-denial and hospitality, is thus emininently qualified to do what is required of her - be what the "customer" wants to be, by engaging the core emotional needs of the "customer" - but her radical alienation means that she harbors the worst possible motivations for said performance.

After the climax of the story which covers the last half of the second volume and the first half of the third, Kyoko comes to an interesting revelation: the horrible realization that she is hollow. Everything she ever did for others, especially for the cad Shotaro who betrayed her selflessness in the manga's inciting incident, has been entirely *for others*. She was a shell of performance - of doing things for others, with a reflexive smile and outward happiness, and an internal, manic sort of grasping desperation. Admittedly, it was a cheerful, happy-eyed sort of grasping desperation, but even in the initial scene of the first volume, the allegedly-happy Kyoko, slaving away at multiple jobs to support the selfish Sho, briefly breaks out of her working-happy shell to race madly and maniacally off on a poster-hunt. This sort of outburst is not the behavior of someone living her ideal life, although this is allegedly what she was doing at that moment. When an unintentional revelation shows her that her self-sacrifice has only earned contempt and betrayal, this shell of selflessness and outward cheer is shattered, exposing what was supperating below. This new Kyoko is a personification of the grudge, with a comedically-themed mania for curses, voodoo, and scorned fury, but what we're seeing is the energy of desperation directed outwards for the first time, the little that was left of the heroine which hadn't been dedicated to the shell of performance.

The second volume was kind of uncomfortable, as it cut a little close to the true, core theme of desperation, as Kyoko, rejected from her attempt to spite the now-hated Sho by outshining him at his own business, tries to crawl back into her shattered shell, to be other than what she is - to heal her "inability to love" by main force. The irony is that everything the agency president wants her to do, she could, and can, easily do, if she was willing to deceive herself & crawl back into the shell.

Once the stories shift to her direct interactions with other artists at the agency, this discomfort fades, because it's the other artists who are being discomfited, instead of the audience. Or, perhaps, just me. You see, I prefer to identify with Kyoko-the-terrifiying-truth-revealing-monster, scaring the crap out of her peers & fellow entertainment-workers, over suffering with the comedically abused Kyoko-the-desperate-victim, scrabbling after her false, lost sainthood. This is why the next arc, which covers the last few chapters of the third volume, and extending into the yet-to-be-published fourth volume, has my rapt and urgent attention.

The story rotates around the rehersal for a performance of a play at the agency's acting school, where the theme of the play - the effect of a mother's death on a child and her family - echoes the emotional trauma of the president's difficult young granddaughter. The granddaughter's problem is that she doesn't want the happy words and fake optimism of the play's script and her grandfather's artistic dogma - she wants to be told the things she fears. It's a true bit of characterisation - nothing is as infuriating to a depressive personality as to be fed aphorisms and happytalk. The granddaughter is looking for catharsis, and her grandfather's philosophy only allows for empathy. Nakamura brings us to that moment of catharsis, with a perfect look of appalled shock on the president's face as Kyoko inverts the schmaltz and pollyannaesqueries of the script into something ugly, and dark, and real - and then Nakamura drops us into the gutter between volumes. See you in two months! Argh!

On another subject, while I agree with Jarred Pine about preferring heroines who are self-motivated & empowered over the self-sacrificing types who exist to motivate or control a strong love interest, I have to think that Night of the Beasts is shaping up to be one of the worst possible examples of that particular post-modern impulse. The protagonist of Night of the Beasts, Aria, starts out as a kick-ass man-thumping brute who has literally never lost a fight with anyone, and gets into enough daily street-brawls to make that more than an empty boast. But the conflict and ongoing centre of Night of the Beasts isn't Aria vs. demons or thugs or whatever, but rather Aria's ability to redeem her morally-precarious, demon-haunted love interest Sakura, to keep him from going wild & killing innocents in the heat of a beserker demonic episode. So far, her toughness has only been of use in fueling her ability to get close to the out-of-control Sakura & bringing him under control - to tame him. This is classic romance-novel wish-fulfillment, acted out with a big-boned busty tomboyish thug of a heroine instead of the usual big-eyed demure wisp. I don't know, maybe Night of the Beasts will go in a different direction from the one I'm anticipating, but it doesn't feel like it'll be a Devilman Lady or cross-gendered Bleach, with growth-through-fists-of-fury character-development.

Instead, it scans like Red Sonja cast against type as Jane Eyre.

Picked up the second and third volumes of Dokebi Bride from NetComics based on the impressive first volume, and found that, while the story and art continues to impress with a flair for the low-key and the mildly grotesque, the translation and lettering is getting increasingly nonprofessional and intrusive. Somebody needs to do a bit more polishing to their scripts - there's a lot of bad grammar and worse English. And the font they're using in the word balloons? Even *I* find it ugly and coarse, and I'm not exactly a font snob.

Robert Gates? Who the heck is Robert Gates? How is an ex-CIA guy SecDef material? Is this Harriet Miers Pt. II?

Aigh. Waited for twenty-some minutes outside the polling place in Bellefonte West before they came out & said that they couldn't say when the machines would be up & operational. Had to get to work, so it looks like this evening instead.

Idiot technophilic optimists. Yeah, we can set up a commonwealth-wide secure network in an hour! Bah!

OK, that was the shortest Fall, ever. I just got snowed on, while walking over to the main building to pick up some packages. There's still leaves on the trees...

Oh, wow:

...when someone says he's a Green and wants to "save the planet", that translates to me as:

"I am a puritanical killjoy with no concept of the scientific method and a burning desire to decimate my fellow-men so that the ugliest remnants of humanity can live the short, miserable, disease-ridden, brutal lives of medieval peasants in a spirit of smug self-satisfaction born of the sense that we have condemned billions of tediously aspirational humans to poverty or death"

Ironically enough, that also perfectly describes the plot and general spirit of S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire novels. The sad thing is, I consume those books like bon-bons. Just finished reading A Meeting at Corvallis the other week.

Via Andrew Stuttaford on the Corner.

Rightprof asked in the comments to this post if Bono was actually an evangelical. (Tried to respond in the comments, but Haloscan is being obnoxious this week. Thinking about dropping that service.)

Evangelical? Bono?

Sort of. By Irish standards. There's this interview with BeliefNet. There was mention back in the late Eighties that most of U2 were members of a Christian fellowship of some sort which sounded evangelical.

This article talks about that group, Shalom, and has a quote from Bono that he is sort-of-maybe Catholic, at least to the extent of raising his kids "technically" as Catholics. There's a chunk here that describes Shalom as charismatic & non-hierarchial, which definitely matches my informal definition of "evangelical".

This article seems rather definitive, though. They left Shalom in the Eighties over the whole rock-star thing, but are still pretty much believers in that tradition, just unchurched.

BTW, lesson from Tuesday's Halloween barbeque-and-potluck, to which the new CEO brought a bunch of candied carmel apples:

Don't eat a carmel apple when you're wearing a full beard, especially not when you're due for a trim. At least a quarter of the carmel will end up in your mustache or beard instead of in your stomach.

If anyone could argue me out of my agnosticism back into the Faith by negative example, it would be John Derbyshire. What a shallow, cretinous fool. "Mysterian" my arse - if you want to totter through life a deist, use the proper terms. His reasons for losing faith are variously foolish (human minds being wired for religion is an argument neither in favor of, nor in contradiction to, the propositions of any particular religion) racist (blacks are religious! east asians aren't! I hates me some blacks, and love those Chinese!) and ignorant (dur, never did understand biology, but now's I've been edujumicated on my Darwin, I sees as how religion is bunk!).

I mean, he's still more religious than I am, even on a good day, but I can't help but feel contempt for his irreligiosity. And I suppose you can't possibly find a better argument for man's essential irrationality than that admission right there. Or at least, my essential irrationality.

Oh, well.

Utter, vicious nonsense.

The actual article - which provides the detail which Noah fails to supply - namely, that U2 was relocating to a country which *doesn't* impose an arbitrary and obnoxious windfall tax on royalties, in addition to the usual income taxes. Furthermore, Bono and the rest of the band will continue to pay their normal income taxes within Ireland proper. Nothing illegal or even particularly immoral is going on here, by rational standards.

Noah's predicate - that if someone crusades against poverty, then he can't have his own self-interests at heart when conducting his own private business in a tax-minimizing fashion - is utter, miserable, ill-thought-out horse radish. Real anti-poverty activists - from the early Victorian bourgeois to Carnegie to Melinda & Bill Gates - have traditionally been wealthy, canny capitalists with a perfectly rational commitment to not wasting their private resources on non-tax-optimal behavior.

Bono is merely the latest in a long string of wealthy evangelical Christian do-gooders. To denounce him as a hypocrite for not behaving as an economic martyr is just foul.

On another level, U2 is just the latest rock band to become tax emigres due to confiscatory European taxation policies. Were all of those hedonistic Seventies hard-rock outfits like Led Zeppelin hypocritical for bailing on Laborite England's obscenely high top tax rates, even though that money theoretically financed the era's progressive permissiveness in some sort of roundabout fashion? Of course not.

I wonder how much of this is just a push to tar Bono as a nasty, hypocritical evangelical neocon. He's said a few too many nice things about American Republicans recently. Time to cauterize the wound, soldier! Burn him!

X_X Ugh. X_X

Halloween company picnic, with silly hats & "Pumpkin slice" contest. Ate *way* too much.

Afternoon productivity? Hah!

Z_Z

After School Nightmare and Night of the Beasts were both very much worth the purchase, BTW. Although After School Nightmare dances on just this side of my bishounen ai comfort-line, so you have been warned - not sure whether to classify the protagonist as a heroine or hero, but either way, likable person. Herm? Eh, whatever. The protagonist is one of these effeminate, hairless hermaphrodites which only exist in manga, trying "his" best to pass as male, and deeply conflicted about the whole thing. There's some sort of strange shared-dream-experience class/afterschool club thing which "he"'s being compelled to attend to "graduate" from "his" school. Lots of dream logic, conflict. Fun, although I'm not sure whether this will develop well, or just go in shoujo circles.

Night of the Beasts's heroine is thuggish and violent, which suits my personal tastes nicely. She's being semi-stalked by a superficially amiable Type A romance-novel love interest pretending to be a Type B. Since he's possessed of a beast-like demon, and there are demonic complications, things get bloody and violent quickly, but the book still has a light touch which sort of reminds me of a cross between one of the darker Yuu Watase plots and a Hojo character dynamic, like City Hunter crossbred with Ayashi no Ceres.

I've never heard of Night of the Beasts's Chika Shiomi, and it seems like this is her first translated manga. After School Nightmare's Setona Mizushiro apparently wrote X-Day, which I took a disliking to after the first volume, and never bought the second, so eh.

I decided to stop walking to work based on the new lack of light on the evening walk back to town. Last night, the gloaming fell as I was halfway down lower Valentine Hill road, which is not exactly safe unless I get myself a hat with reflectors or something likewise unspeakably dorky. So I drove in to work. And discovered that with the construction on Benner Pike, that it would have been faster to walk.

Argh! I want my hour of daylight back!

Oh, bollocks. The Iron Dream is unreadable except as an Eye of Argon exercise in Sturgeon's Law stamina. The prose is intensely, and intentionally, obnoxious. I certainly didn't get all the way through it, dropping out somewhere through the middle of a political streetfight-bordering-on-outbreak-of-civil-war in which the heavy-handed "truncheon" imagery just overwhelmed what was left of my good sense and better taste.

And I'm tired of having the right wing blamed for Hitler. Fascism wasn't rightwing. Need I point out, once again, the "socialist" in "National Socialism"?

"'infinite' doesn't necessarily mean 'contains all possibilities'. The sequence of all even numbers (246810121416182022...) is infinite, but the number '17' doesn't appear in it anywhere."

From the discussion following the posting of a color image generated from pi. That's about as succinct a refutation of the "monkeys typing Shakespeare" conundrum as I've ever come across.

Via a semi-random Ann Althouse link.

[But this follow-up, of the same pi derivation except in a radial arrangement, is a far cooler display.]

Ugh. Miserable weather - can't decide if it's raining or not, which leaves me wetter than if it just rained, flat-out.

And darkness is falling. Less and less time for walking & reading, as we creep towards the dark of the year. Meh.

So here's a question for you. I was talking to Bill Johnston while working ops at MangaNEXT, and he wanted to know why manga are shelved in American stores by title instead of author/artist. Bill, when he reads manga at all, reads 'em in the original Japanese, so he shops in the used bookstores and import places, where they shelve 'em the way the Japanese do - first by publisher, then by author, and then finally by title. I couldn't explain or justify why comics are filed by title, even in the real bookstores.

Of course, comics as comics have always been displayed in that fashion - it's a relic of the Big-Two-and-a-Half days, when the titles were forever - Batman, Superman, Fantastic Four, Spiderman - and the artists and writers came and went like the hirelings which they were. That explains the comics shops and the rest of the direct market. But bookstores - real bookstores - file their normal print offerings the way God intended 'em - by author. The only stuff that used to get displayed by title was their periodicals. Is it because they initially thought of manga and other graphic novels as periodicals, and thus deserving of the periodical treatment? Maybe it's the way that the publishing companies advertise the books. Title up front, artist/writer as an afterthought. Lord knows, I don't necessarily know the name of the artists responsible for the manga I read, not up front & foremost, the way I would with a paperback novel or nonfiction history or whatever.

Eh.

So I drove down to Shaler last weekend. Lots of Santorum signs. Some Casey signs - not all that many, and most of them on semi-public land rather than on somebody's yard. More Rendell signs, and some of them on people's lawns.

Fairly few Swann signs, south of New Bethlehem. Fewer as you get closer to Pittsburgh. Since Southwestern PA is supposed to be Swann territory, I'm thinking that Swann is pretty much a dead letter, which kind of sucks.

But a lot of Santorum signs. More than I expected, given the CW that he's dead, dead, dead in the water, dead as a duck, dead as a doornail.

BTW, I must have passed through Murtha territory, in Armstrong County. I saw two signs, one for Murtha, one labeled "Boot Murtha". No Ihrey signs. Damn if I know what that means.

Milesburg is kind of strange. Not a single political sign, although it was getting kind of dark when I drove through late Sunday, so I may have missed one or two. Wonder if they're having vandalism problems down there?

The hunters were out in force in the Sheetz outside of Brookville. One pair of chowderheads in a white H2 Hummer took up way, way too much space at the pump. I had to tie myself into knots in order to get the Korean import putt-putt in beside 'em to gas that sucker up. H2s are just too big for civilian use. Specifically, they're too blasted wide.

Listened to the Steelers game on the way back. Haven't done that since... well, ever. Interesting game. Shame they didn't win, but it was amusing listening to the announcers describe a half-bare-foot touchdown sprint by a Pittsburgh receiver. And that quarterback... he's pretty much cursed, isn't he?

I may be forced to migrate over to Windows XP in the next week or so. Why?

Internet Explorer 7.0.

Windows will squirt out the finished version to their XP slaves in tomorrow's updates, and they've crippled 7.0 to not support Windows 2000. I've used 2000 since forever, and have never seen any reason to change over to the latest Windows crippleware until now. But, since a significant proportion of my customers are stuck with XP, they will be migrating to the new version, and I will be at a loss in supporting their issues and complaints if I'm still running 6.0 on Win2000.

Supporting my primary website-and-database is the only use I make of IE, BTW. I shifted over to Firefox years and years ago, after it became painfully apparent that my using IE for day-to-day interweb trawling was a gaping, ineffectual, dangerous hole in our security.

But I've got piles and piles of applications implemented on Win2000, all of which still work, and show no signs of giving me any kind of problems. God only knows how many of them will get absolutely rogered by a shift over to Windows-for-Bill-Gate's-sins-sodding-XP.

Argh.

You know, for all the talk of the auto industry and planned obsolescence, at least they didn't go out into parking lots in the dead of night & smash in the headlamps of last year's model when the new lines were announced, or refuse to manufacture replacement parts for old models.

I came back from my long weekend working MangaNEXT to discover the usual mountain of work urgently needing done. It never urgently needs done when I'm actually *here*. As I finished digging out from under the pile, a customer came by my cubicle, twice, to lie to customers of *his* he was escorting through the building, claiming to one that I was the world's foremost expert on [x] and to the other that I was the greatest processor of same [x], quoting a figure at least four times what I actually process, by the most generous of computations. I hate it when people do that.

MangaNEXT was a qualified success, in that the hotel didn't burn down, and the con covered its budget. On the other hand, it just barely covered its budget, and the break-down was a bit of a scramble.

The only programming I was involved in - besides sitting in the one video room now and again to spell our sole video staffer while he did things like get dinner - was the "Manga Swap", which was four hours set aside, two on Friday, two on Saturday, in the workshop room for people to bring in their unwanted manga & see if they could trade it for something else. No cash, no trading adult material to children, but at some point the definition got stretched past just manga to include DVDs, toys, and tchotkes. This expansion occurred when I wasn't paying attention, or I'd have brought in about a dozen unwanted DVDs I haven't gotten around to getting rid of in some other fashion. Managed to unload all the manga I brought with me - yes, including Ravenskull - and mostly traded for DVDs, one of which I actually was kind of interested in.

I don't know if the event is scalable - it worked with the two dozen or so people who showed up over the four hours, and no real problems arose at that level of participation. But would it work if two hundred traders showed up, at, say, the Big Con in Baltimore? Not with only one staffer hanging out. I'd guess one staffer to thirty participants would be the necessary ratio, but that's assuming that it can actually scale. It is possible that beyond a certain point, the potential number of connections would become untenable, and thus utter chaos, no matter how many staffers were in attendance.