To carry the story over from Thursday... I ended up driving into State College to pick up the last few weeks' worth of manga from the 'Swap and ate at Ponderosa. Steak & a good, long ransack of the buffet. Five courses of beef!

Skip Beat volume 5. They're now advertising it as "by the author of Tokyo Crazy Paradise". That's great and all - I've heard good things about Tokyo Crazy Paradise & even read a couple scanslated chapters of it - but that itself is the problem. I read them in scanslation. Nobody's published Tokyo Crazy Paradise in English, although there was a rumor for a while that Viz had the license. Why are you advertising a manga in its fifth volume in the English market with a comic which isn't even available yet? Oh, well. Maybe it's a hint that they're getting ready to publish. Tokyo Crazy Paradise looks like fun - it's sort of like Burst Angel with a cross-dressing heroine & bishie yakuza.

Last volume of Please Save My Earth. Eh, it doesn't end all that well. All that drama & elaborate Rashomon-style flashbacks, and it all kind of deflates in a trainwreck of a climax. It bore more resemblance to a classic Takahashi pileup than the conclusion of a proper reincarnation drama. The coda was fairly sweet, though. If the author had only resisted the temptation to have the whole cast in on the climax, it would have been a much, much better finale. As it was, she managed to make the ending of a series in the twenty-first volume feel rushed and slap-dash. Meh.

Well, heck. I almost forgot. Today's the fifth annual International Eat An Animal For PETA Day. I'll have to stop at the Burger King tonight & get myself around a triple-decker.

Walking in to work earlier this week, during that last semi-big snowfall, I made the discovery that while rain might roll proverbially off the back of ducks, snow does not do the same. It's somewhat odd to discover the local waterfowl happily paddling about in Spring Creek during a snowstorm, backs heaped about an inch high with piles of fresh fluffy late-winter snow. Shame I didn't have a camera with me...

I don't really do ACW blogging much anymore, but since Dimitri doesn't have comments and I don't have his email address on hand, this is the only way to comment on a recent item on his blog, which notes a letter-writer's peculiar quote of Lincoln claiming to have incited the war, and an even more peculiar quote from Karl Marx describing the war as "a tariff war", and turning upon a "Northern lust for sovereignty". I don't know about the Fox letter of Lincoln's quoted, but the Karl Marx cite is a deliberate distortion. It's from one of Marx's wartime newspaper essays, and as I thought when I read Dimitri's post, the sentiment is not Marx's own. He was characterizing the view-point of a class of London newspapers, noting contemptuously:

It is characteristic of this discovery that it was made, not in Charleston, but in London. Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place.

Karl Marx was strongly pro-Northern in sympathy, as even a cursory reading of his wartime writings on the subject will reveal. He considered it a war of capitalist against feudalist, and naturally chose to approve of the more dialectically advanced antagonist.

Wow, this is pretty ugly stuff - the Cherokee Nation is threatening to purge its roles of Cherokee "freedmen" - members of the tribe who draw their line of descent from freed ex-slaves of Cherokee ownership. I honestly thought we were past this sort of stone racism. Admittedly, it seems tied up in petty tribal politics & it looks like the main goal is to narrow down the number of people with a claim to a part of the gambling pie, but come on, really.

I didn't think the Cherokee were all that big into gambling, though - isn't there too many of them for something as inherently limited as reservation gambling to pay off? I mean, the economics make sense when you're talking about a pocket-sized tribe like the New England remnants, but a three-hundred-thousand-member group like the Cherokee? The money'd be like a drop of ink in a rainbarrel, even if they did purge everyone with a slave ancestor.

Wheee. Obama's descended from slaveholders. Whoop-de-friggin'-do. I'd be willing to bet that at least 80% of all American blacks are descended from slaveowners. The only novelty in Obama's case is that the lineage is from his white, American mother, and not the father from which he gets the pigmentage which makes him "black" by racemongering standards. The discovery of slaveowning ancestors probably gives his "blackness" more cultural credibility.

I haven't found any evidence of direct-ancestor slaveowners, but some of the New York Thorns in the richer, Episcopalian families were. The New Jersey line we're descended from were modest country folk, and were lucky if they owned land, let alone other people.

Via K.J. Lopez at the Corner.

Huh. The Pakistanis coughed up a Taliban minister. If they're going to produce an al Queda or Taliban target every time a prominent American official visits, then we need to send Cheney over there at least once a fortnight for the foreseeable future. Well, at least until they run out of ISI-subsidized malefactors to sacrifice on the altar of false-hearted alliance. Not as if the vice president seems to be doing anything else of value these days, other than playing clay pigeon for opportunistic Afghani terrorists.

There's something about the Right Stuf's 25-for-$100 sales that brings out the bumbling moron in yours truly. Last time around, I screwed up while ordering & forgot to ask for the free shipping, and had to beg and plead via email to get that amended. This time I missed the coupon code box (where you're supposed to enter "abundance10" or "abundance25" to get the respective 10-for-$50 or 25-for-$100 deals) and ended up ordering almost $700 worth of DVDs I only sort-of-wanted for full price.

Damn, I hope they straighten that order out. It'd be nice if their ordering interface was a tad more forgiving of errors & mistakes. Betcha they'd have less of a customer service load if you could cancel or amend orders prior to processing. As it is, if you've given the system your credit card information, you're stuck until the customer service staff get back to you on your problem.

Bonfatto's down on Zion Road is doing a free poker tournament series. I walked down there from work yesterday, since the weather was so nice & all. A dachshund was running around in the slushy snow in the meadow the next block east from the National Guard barracks, and I thought it had gotten away from someone walking it. Nobody was around, though, and after a minute or two it ran back to a bloody lump of fur over by the trees, which turned out to be a freshly dead rabbit almost as big as the weiner dog itself. Said dog proceeded to drag this enormous leaking hunk of meat off into the treeline, clearly concerned with protecting its kill from the big threatening predator-shaped animal walking towards said dinner. IE, me. One of the players at the tournament told me later on that dachshunds are particularly vicious hunters, and described some alarmingly alpha-male encounters with the little monsters. Who knew?

Well, I'm now the proud owner of a slightly foxed grey Camry station wagon. It'll need some work, but not too much out of pocket, once the insurance pays off on the totaled Lanos. Emergency averted. Yay?

So I was about to write up a great big "yay, Captain Herlock: Endless Oddssey" rave about said thirteen-episode OAV series, and then the last minute or so of show dropped a big ol' pile of WTF in my lap. Somebody fell asleep during "Introduction to Foreshadowing 403" at screenwriting school. Not only did it come out of far left field, but it underlined just how useless and passive one of the core characters had actually been in the course of the series.

Don't get me wrong, Captain Herlock is 90% of a really cool series... argh! Can I digress for a second to express just how annoying that officially-endorsed misspelling is? It's stupid - the character is clearly being called Harlock, same as he's always been, and every other translation has *always* used "Harlock". Er, except for that one company that used "Warlock". Anyways, there have been more than a half-dozen different companies that have turned out Matsumoto anime and manga in English with the Harlock character, so the trademark issue is almost certainly not a valid factor. What the heck was Geneon thinking?

Ahem. Right, the semi-compromised coolness of "Captain H[e]rlock". The animation is top-notch, if a tad dark and murky at times. The usual gang of Harlock cronies are about, and it's a real nostalgia-trip for those who remember the old TV series with any sort of affection - and I did like what little I've seen of the old Fuji subs, which is to say, about a dozen or so episodes. The villains are nigh-Lovecraftian in their Elder Godness, full of menace and honest creepy-crawliness. It's an honestly dark show, bordering on outright horror. Rin Taro's talent for set-pieces and striking composition is here in full form, and there's a lot to keep attention riveted fully to the screen. On the other hand, I have to wonder who hired Nobuteru Yuuki for this project, as his "natural" character-design style is not at all similar to the classic Leiji Matsumoto look, and the clash is expressed in a certain plasticity and rubberiness around the eyes which takes a bit away from the presentation.

I guess I've seen much, much worse anime from the Leiji Matsumoto oeuvre. I just wish that ending had been handled better than it was. Maybe another episode? Better foreshadowing? Some more adjustment to the character dynamics to lay a better foundation? Something.

So we're supposed to call fujoshi "otome" now? I call bull. If you see a fan self-appellation and it isn't derived from something derogatory, it isn't legit, it's some sort of marketing gag traveling under false papers.

[BTW: fujoshi ~ "rotten women"; otome ~ "maidens". Roughly.]

Of course, I could be misreading the situation. After all, there are lunatics running around the States these days talking about "princess culture", although that seems to be a mainstream mundane sort of thing. If this otome business is actually legit, then... nosir, I don't like it. One of the things I've always found refreshing about fan culture is its collective tendency to not indulge in excesses of self-esteem. There's very little I love less than self-congratulation.

H/T Brigid.

Mm. Car's been written off by the claims adjuster, I've got the license plate in my office now. I have a line on an under-blue-book '89 Camry wagon that a woman in State College is selling, but I haven't seen it yet & she doesn't want to go outside until next week - "it's so very cold outside!" We'll see, the mileage is low, but a lot of things can happen to a car over eighteen years, and the automatic transmission is worrisome in such an old car.

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.