So I was discussing the likelihoods of my car getting repaired with Jason G. in front of the guy at Catherman's along with a random cop hanging out at the counter. Like a pair of comedy sidekicks, the Catherman's guy cracks "It's a Daewoo, of course it's totaled", and the cop commences to busting on my poor violated chariot o' kimchee. I'm feeling a tad oppressed, people.

Sadly, Jason G. agreed with our group consensus. It's a write-off. I walked around parts of Bellefonte looking for tell-tale damage. Less car damage out there than I'd expect. I suppose I've been mis-led by all those years living in a college town, expecting a quarter of all vehicles on the road to have visible damage.

Well, heck.

Last night I lost that long-running long-odds bet called "parking on the street". I was woken up by my neighbors hammering on my door to inform me that some drunk in a light sedan had slammed into my little Korean putt-putt and smashed it around the street, then driven off. The "driven off" part made me wonder how much the neighbors saw, because it's hard to picture a small sedan doing that much damage & driving off under its own power. You'd think that the gas cut-off would have shut down the vehicle at the least. The whole left rear-end was folded back into the trunk, right up to the wheelwell.

Called the cops & had Catherman's tow it away to their wrecked-cars storage lot. It's probably totaled, given that it's seven years old, Daewoos aren't really all that common, and as a modern subcompact, the frame is probably compromised.

Crap. I wanted another two or three years out of that car. Throws a right spanner into my down-payment project, too. At least I structured my savings in preparation for this sort of emergency. But damn, I didn't want to divert house savings towards a new car. Not when I can get by without a car for, like, two hundred sixty days out of the year.

[Edited to reflect the proper name of the towing service & the damage. Got them confused with a customer of ours here at work.]

Setsucon was a success by backcountry one-day event standards. Lots of kids in costume, with a dusting of college-age kids & parents keeping an eye on the herd. I ended up spending a lot of time hanging out with the Duartes from the Con, who were taking out the traveling cosplay photography suite for a test-drive at a local convention, since they live in State College, doing postgrad studies in their respective fields. That seemed to be more of a success than I would have predicted - perhaps that particular budget item *won't* be the dead loss I thought it would be. I ended up getting the "elder statesman" treatment by a few of the staffers, which was kind of peculiar. Oh, well. I've spent worse Saturdays. I expect they'll run another one next year - perhaps they'll be able to get the hotel rooms to support a full weekend next time, assuming they can find a weekend without some sort of athletic event soaking up all the loose hotel space in town.

There's going to be a one-day anime minicon in State College tomorrow, something called Setsucon, run by the anime club on campus. It doesn't seem to be much of a muchness, but I wasn't going to be doing anything this weekend but playing Campaign: Vicksburg, reading Basara, and watching DVDs, so what the heck. At-door registration is $15, and they are running in the Days Inn Penn State, which was the location of the first anime con on the east coast back in '94. So: nostalgia time!

The Days Inn has gentrified a bit since the period when it was the typical venue for comic cons and similar planned, fannish affairs. It was quite posh the last time I stopped in. I had heard that they didn't "do" fan cons anymore, but the anime club people talked their way in - at least in part by agreeing to not run a con suite, if I understand correctly. So be prepared to feed yourself without aid of free con-provided potato chips and soda. The time I ran a con there, we got too much of the stuff and ended up grazing off of the leftovers for two or three months afterwards... the days when you could actually run con suites for anime cons has been long gone, at least for my crowd. Oh, well.

Don't expect any sort of extravaganza, and I doubt there'll be all that many people from outside of the county, knowing the current anime scene. But if you're in town, I'll be around. Look for the heavily-bearded guy in flannel and jeans. If the clutch of cosplayers who seem to be planning to come show, I should stand out by failing to stand out. Like a big ol' blotch of grey in the middle of a Jackson Pollack.

Man, Skip Beat rocks. I started reading the fourth volume over breakfast and was almost late to work because I sat & read it all the way through. The "Secret Language of Angels" story wrapped up about like I expected, if a bit more upbeat than it could have gone. The rest of it was fun with variety show chaos, which isn't something to spit on, really. Who can hate Japanese variety show wackiness?

I've not been saying much, and I'm sorry about that. It's the dead of the year, and I just don't have much energy left after work's done and what little exercise I get in.

I end up deleting most of what I have to say for the high sins of tediousness or ill-consideration. Most days the sun is a rumor, appearing in breaks in the monocloud during office-hours spent in my windowless cubicle. The weather is oddly mild, unwelcome warmth in the Christmas-solstice season. At least I can now start counting the days until daylight will stretch far enough to light my way back down the hill, and put myself back on a walking regimen.

But, it's not all gloom and drear. I bought Gun Frontier cheap from Right Stuff, and it's a grand lark of a series: Leiji Matsumoto characters shanghaied into The Old West. And not just any version of The Old West, but a darkly comic, bitter, late-Sixties version, full of racism, ill repute, sudden violence, and dubious heroism. Harlock as a laconic doofus of a gunfighter is particularly impressive, but the real hero of the story is his lecherous sidekick Tochiro, searching for the scattered remnants of the massacre at Samurai Creek. Their dynamic is roughly similar to that of Eastwood and Willich from the Dollars trilogy, but with the addition of the third character, maiden of negotiable virtue/conspiratrix Sinunora, it becomes clear that the model we're looking at is that of Paint Your Wagon or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Matsumoto anime shouldn't be this much fun - they're supposed to be all long-faced and virtuous and noble in that typical Japanese nationalist fashion. They're not supposed to have episodes featuring riflemen fatally giving away their positions with rainbows created by pissing into the sunrise, or having the protagonist arrested & sentenced to hang for the high crime of public urination in a particularly starchy town.

Also, the Japanese creators seem to know more about the period than the American adaptation crew. There's a mention at one point about knowing that a character hadn't been with the cavalry because he was lugging around a converted Springfield '61 - an infantry weapon, not a carbine. Or, at least, there was in the original Japanese - the translator got confused and had the characters talking about a "Calvin cavalry gun". No, guys, that wasn't "Caluvin", that's "carubin[e]".

Photoessay about the postapocalyptic remnants of Detroit's State Fair neighborhood. I didn't quite buy the essay's line until I pulled up GoogleEarth and found the neighborhood, which appears from the air to match the essayist's descriptions. This is a knock-on essay from this inital article, which features more of the downtown Detroit wildernesses you've probably seen in mainstream articles before now.

Via Bruce Sterling's blog, which I'd read more often if it wasn't such a glitchy disaster area in its own very special way. Why is it that Wired's blog layout is so very technically incompetent? This site might not look like much, but at least it isn't an eyesore.

Someone claims to have engineered a flying full-size version of Nausicaa's flying wing. Eh, I'm not convinced. Looks like they've built a large kite which can carry a human being, but I betcha if you dropped that towline & let it glide, you'd see that sucker flip end for end until the pilot fell or the vehicle hit the dirt. It looks like it's getting all of its pitch and yaw axis stability from the towline.

Via Chizumatic.

Scientists in Toronto may have made a major breakthrough on both type I and type II diabetes. At any rate, they seem to have found out how to cure the diseases in mice. It hasn't been tested in humans yet, heck, there hasn't been time for other scientists to replicate the results with mice, and there's always the chance that they're blowing smoke, but damn! Interestingly, the line of approach is neurological, attacking pain neurons in the pancreas instead of the usual gland-oriented approaches. Immunologists are harumphing furiously, so who knows?

But I've got a number of relatives with type II, and any prospect of a serious cure is heartening.

Via the Instapundit.

Phhpbt!

Fred asked me for a list of recommended manga the other week, and things have only just now slowed down enough for me to look around and try to put something together. Here's the first five, in no particular order:

1) Natsuki Takaya's Fruits Basket, from TokyoPop. I was just reading someone's comment on a liverjournal decrying how angry she was that this title was commonly denounced by people who had read it as "commercial crap". If you ask me, this attitude is preposterous, because Fruits Basket is glorious, brilliant crap of the highest calibre of commerciality. It is perfectly constructed to offer truly mass-market appeal - it's sold ten million copies in Asia, and another two million in North America - while also managing to be clever, aesthetically charming, and subtly disturbing all at the same time. The plot, described baldly, is ludicrous - a saintly orphaned girl's interactions with a rich family cursed to turn into the various animals of the Chinese zodiac - but the story hung on that silly notion manages to be in turn sprightly and tragic, without either element undercutting the other.

2) CLAMP's XXXholic, from Del Rey. My copy of the eighth volume just shipped from Amazon, and I'm looking forward to it as the only CLAMP title I'm currently reading. Now, CLAMP in the aggregate isn't the best story-telling or character-creating four-headed artistic team in creation. They're not really brilliant at plotting, and their style is so consistent and prototypically shoujo (even the ones that are technically shounen, like Angelic Layer) that I've heard half the shoujo titles in print mis-identified as "CLAMP" by the ill-informed.

All that aside, XXXholic is pretty damned nifty. The art style is severe black-and-white - I've yet to spot a ziptone or shade in the seven volumes released in North America. And it's a story that belongs in black-and-white, all harsh supernaturally-themed lessons in right and wrong, and the karmic price of weakness and the inevitable cost of human fraility.

Watanuki is a gifted medium and spirit-magnet who gets tricked into a state of indentured servitude to the proprietor of an improbable shop somewhere deep in the depths of Tokyo. The protagonist exists to be amusingly cantankerous and to act as foil to his employer, the decadent and striking Yuko, as she tells her various customers how doomed they are, what they need to do, and then to smirk sadly as they fail to appreciate her advice and stumble off to their aforementioned dooms. About the only downside to the manga has been the ill-advised crossovers with another concurrent CLAMP manga, RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE Tsubasa, which if you ask me, sucks, and its suckiness drags down the rest of the chapters in which the characters of said sucky manga appear or are mentioned. Eh.

3) Saki Hiwatari's Please Save My Earth, from Viz. The biggest shoujo SF manga of the early Nineties, it's one or two volumes away from completion here in the States, and I've enjoyed every volume so far, which is better than what I can say of certain other long-running manga - Kare Kano, your ears ought to be burning right now. The art isn't always gorgeous like the two previously mentioned manga, but it hits the high points on a regular basis, and when Hiwatari's on, she's on. If only she could have resisted throwing in fannish piffle and marginalia about Saint Saiya in the early volumes...

Please Save My Earth is a reincarnation romance, following the last survivors of an extinct race through their deaths in a research facility on Earth's moon through their reincarnation as schoolchildren in Tokyo. (Why Tokyo? Hell, it's where the audience is located...) There's lots of soap opera, a reticent, passive-aggressive heroine, a mad, bitter, compromised hero reincarnated as a puckish eleven-year-old boy, cross-gendered reincarnated unrequited love for the shounen-ai crowd, and enough angles on the fatal final days of the doomed aliens to make Rashimon raise an ambiguous number of limbs in surrender.

However, fair warning: this is not the shoujo manga for those who demand assertive heroines and politically-correct, or even particularly moral love-interests. Alice is a pretty, sweet wet noodle, her prior incarnation was more outgoing but still a ditz, and Rin was a obnoxious little cuss even before he remembered that he was a bitter, contrary, mankilling bastard named Shion in a previous life. Still, it's one of the few titles I usually read twice, once to tear through the new volume, and the second to savor the story and the execution thereof.

4) Hitoshi Iwaaki's Parasyte currently from TokyoPop, soon to be properly re-printed by Del Rey. A horribly violent, ugly, semi-nihilistic cannonball of a manga, Parasyte suffered mainly by being one of the first comics out of the chute in the early Nineties, just before TokyoPop got its stuff together & started printing unedited, unflopped material. The new release from Del Rey ought to be everything Parasyte should have been the first time around, except for the proper name, Kiseiji. Or, heck, just plain old Parasite - the "y" was so very, very... ugh. My probably-spoilery thoughts on reading the last volume are here.

Parasyte is an alien-symboite story in the vein of Hal Clement's Needle or James Triptree, Jr.'s "The Only Neat Thing to Do", except that every other version of the buddy-symbiote's race are what they were supposed to have been - man-eating intelligent monsters, with our protagonist escaping having his brain eaten by his particular parasite by successfully trapping it in his hand until it was "set" and stuck in unnatural symbiosis insead of where it belonged, in the driver's seat behind the hero's face. The art is rough and harsh, but the story is set in a rough and harsh and unforgiving world, and the roughness perfectly compliments the highly kinetic, sudden bursts of appalling violence. I'm seriously thinking about buying the new editions when Del Rey starts rolling them out.

5) Takeshi Obata's & Tsugumi Ooba's Death Note, from Viz. This is another one of those series which sounds kind of nonsensical in brief: a high school student finds the notebook of a shingami, a Death God, with which you can script the deaths of others, adhering to a certain set of proscribed rules, which becomes increasingly elaborate as the protagonist becomes increasingly megalomaniacal, brilliant, and oddly appealing. The fun of Death Note is the amorality of the basic story - you can't help but find yourself rooting for the sociopathically brilliant Light Yagami, as he slaughters everyone he can't fool or outwit. The body-count is quite impressive, and the celerity with which characters are lethally shuffled off stage once Light discovers their vulnerability is breathtakingly swift.

Death Note at it's best is a puzzle-book, in which various antagonists are pitted against the anti-hero in games of wits. Authority figures and geniuses maneuver to figure out who Light is before he figures out that they're on to him - and kills them in a way which doesn't reveal his ownership of the "Death Note". There are some parallels with Obata's other North American-published work, Hikaru no Go, even though he's only the artist on both titles. Wonder if he's drawn to battle-of-wits sort of stories, or if that's just what he's been assigned to by the Shounen Jump editors? Either way, Death Note's sharp art, intricate logic-puzzles and Jacobean savagery make it an enjoyable bimonthly romp.

Stuff like this makes me go absolutely mataglap. Edward Kennedy is so much like one of the cardboard Washington villains of a Tom Clancy novel that it isn't funny. He probably thought he was playing both ends against the middle, but one of those ends were the enemies of civilization itself. And we were in the middle, with Damocles gone thermonuclear and half-spastic.

This man was almost a presidential candidate, and is still a senior US Senator. How can we be sure he isn't playing games with the Iranians or, gods forbid, some well-mannered salafist front? I really, really hope he's bugged and wired to an inch of his life, but knowing the modern intelligence community, I fear that's wishful thinking.

Well, it's Florida time again here at Blogfonte, wherein your faithful hero goes venturing into the land of retirement, relatives, and excessive flatness. The way which yours truly chose to beat southwards was somewhat more convoluted than last year's, suiting the current season's parsimonious & farthing-pinching mood better than the previous attempt.

Left the Korean putt-putt in a park-and-ride north of the city by the bay (eastern edition), and took the light rail to a new airport, which likewise has a newish monicker, borrowed from a respected, historical, and newly-defunct SCOTUS member when I wasn't looking. The light rail operator kept talking about the line terminus being "Thurgood Marshall", which was terribly confusing while examining the map, which had two termini listed, neither of which being named after the region's most recently famous son. I suspect that if I were a member of my greataunt's generation, I would still be talking about people flying in and out of New York City's Idlewild Airport.

A businessman was barked at by a uniformed TSA type for carrying a bottle of water through the security station, wherein I damn near stripped naked in an attempt to get my metal into the scan-bin. Meh, taking boots off in public is entirely too much of a spectacle for my sense of self-worth.

This year's flight was actually a pair, with an hour-and-a-half layover in Atlanta, waiting on the connecting flight. Both seats were in the rear of each respective plane, which made for much more lively airtravel than I've come to expect. More like a roller-coaster ride, less like a glorified seat on ye olde Greyhound of the Sky. By the way, what exactly is the point of automating the trash recepticales at Atlanta-Hartfield, which make impressive mechanical sounds every time someone shoves a bit of rubbish inside, presumably compacting each empty fast-food bag in real-time? This cannot be particularly efficient. Is it that hard, getting the janitors from one part of the stretched-out string of Atlanta sub-terminals to the others?

The second flight, from Atlanta to Orlando, was both more crowded, and much more impressive. The difference between a 757 and a 767-400, is the difference between a airborne bus & an auditorium on springs.

All in all, the trip was quite long, and I'm pondering just driving down next year. The extra five to ten hours might be worth having mine own transportation oncet I arrive. Course, it would completely negate all the pretty promises I've made to mine honorable auto insurance agent about how few miles I'll be putting on the Korean putt-putt, in exchange for this year's much lower premiums...

There's a new martial-arts supply shop in Bellefonte, located behind the Jabco Millrace Cafe on Dunlop Street across from what used to be the Bush House & is now a rubble-lined hole in the ground. Presumably they're aiming at the traffic from the Tae Kwan Do parlor the next block over on High Street. I'm not so much into the kung fu or the kendo, but at least now I know where to go if I ever feel the need for a bokken or a nifty pair of Seventies-style spangled nunchuku.

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.