Very small week this week. Only one book I subscribe to came in, and that was Booster Gold.
So, this month in Booster Gold... I don't give a shit. No, really, I just don't, and I suspect you don't either. They used time travel to rehash storylines from 20 or 30 years ago, as they've been doing since this damn series started, and it's not particularly interesting or fun. Remind me again why I handed over $3.99 for this?
Oh, right. Because the back-up feature is Blue Beetle.
So, this month in Blue Beetle, the story was too short and a little predictable in places (let's face it, you knew the daughter was involved as soon as she was mentioned), but quite entertaining and somewhat original. All the things that the main feature that I was forced to also buy to get it was not.
I was hoping that the return of Batgirl was this month, but it turns out it's next month. Damn. Although with covers like this, I suppose I shouldn't be getting my hopes up at all. (Oh, for pete's sake, tell me they're not bringing back the yellow boots. Fuck you and your nostalgia, Dan Didio. They were retarded in the '70s and they're retarded now.) Remember the early part of the decade, when Batgirl first came out as an ongoing series and she was not sexualized at all and her costume actually fit the "terrifying creature of the night" motif of the Bat-Family and her sexuality was a non-issue? Kiss that goodbye, apparently.
I need to cleanse my palette with some Usagi Yojimbo or something... DC is leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
Oh, right. Finish revising that short story that's been sitting around on my hard drive for months.
::headdesk::
It'll get done one of these days, I swear.
(Anyway, I'm going to try turning in before the sun comes up for a change. Twelve hours of sleep will just about cover the sleep I shorted myself the last couple days.)
- Mood:procrastinatorial
Except for
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
life_on_queen , who gets a belated "Happy Canada Day". I bet you thought we forgot, but we didn't. We just put off celebrating it for three days so we wouldn't have to throw two parties. We're cheapskates like that. :-)...but things got busy. If I ever again agree to work overtime and to run a game on the same day, please shoot me. (Err... just not with a rifle, please.) I slept through Monday. Yes, all of Monday.
I put the complete run of Moribito up on my Mediafire account, to help somebody who was looking for it, so I figure I should make it available to everybody. As I've mentioned before, it's an extremely good series, one of the few with an unquestionably-badass and practically dressed female protagonist. It's based on a novel, written by an anthropologist, and the theme of how conquering cultures absorb indigenous cultures and heritage is lost runs throughout, amidst the devious scheming and fast-paced action. I actually think the adaptation is better than the original book, with more plot and character development. The second book is out now, too, and I enjoyed it immensely. I hope it gets adapted as well.
I still have Noir on there as well, although anyone with Netflix who can borrow the DVDs cheaply would probably be better served by doing that: eight years ago video files off the internet didn't look as good as they do now. I've already said how much I think you all would enjoy this series, so I won't reiterate.
Anyway, off to work. Again.
(Are those gray hairs in my beard? I'm strangely unbothered by the thought for a 27-year-old.)
It's been an unusual week.
( Polter-Cow visits, gaming and sleep deprivation. )
( An old friend visits, beer, Star Trek, and general nerd stuff )
( Casual sexism and magazine publishers )
( Amazon delivers: TSCC, Moribito, GITS:SAC )
Anyway, off to work again.
I could swear I had something more substantive to say, but... tired! And I'm going to be doing at least another 24 hour day tomorrow, if not 30+ hours. The guys want to game in the morning after I get off work.
- Mood:
sleepy
It all started Monday night, a couple hours after I got back from going to see some (not very good) bands play in Fremont with some friends in what was not exactly a celebration of my birthday. One of my friends and I went to the pizza place on the corner for something to eat. There were some belligerant drunk frat-boy types there, harrassing everybody and trying to pick a fight. Attempts to talk them down proved futile. When they started getting physically aggressive, I started dialing 911. I got hit the first time because I was calling the police. It was annoying, but didn't do any damage. I got hit the second time by a different guy because I'd pinned the guy who hit me the first time against the wall with my forearm across his throat. I would also categorize that one as mostly annoying. Somewhat later I got hit the third time, by the first guy again, because I was pulling him off my friend who the two of them were trying to pummel. That one actually hurt, and gave me this black eye. The police showed up around this time.
Anyway, we're pressing charges against those assholes, and the security camera and employees at the pizza place will back up our side of the story. I hate that shit like this happens in my neighborhood. I hate that these people think that they can get drunk and do whatever the fuck they want and it doesn't have consequences.
I haven't been in a fight in a long time. I've determined that I'm pretty rusty. And they're not any more fun with age.
- Mood:
sore
...is agreeing to work a sixth day in a row in a week with almost-90-degree temperatures in a building where the air conditioning hasn't been run all weekend when you only own five UnderArmor HeatGear shirts and no quarters for laundry. Oh, and you waste the time that you could have spend getting quarters and doing laundry because your friend comes over (waking you up) and wants you to watch Gungrave with him and hear his theory about the ending of Noir that he tried to tell you yesterday afternoon when he woke you up with a phone call but you
Oh, and you forgot you were going to write something about that book on paleoanatomy you read.
Just felt like griping. Enjoy your evenings, see y'all in the morning when I'm sweat-soaked and tired. And older. Frelling birthdays.
- Mood: groggy
(Taking a break from raving about Noir for a moment...)
Okay, the Playstation 3 has never really interested me at all. But this new motion capture thing they've got going looks pretty interesting.
I've played on my friend's Wii a few times, and it's fun and all, but I've found that the thing can't keep up with me. In Wii Boxing the on-screen character throws one punch to my three. It might have been a long time since martial arts, but I still have a fast jab... too fast for the Wii to follow, apparently. This seems like it might do a better job of actually tracking how I move.
(Oh, who am I kidding? I still use an original-flavor X-Box. I'm not about to drop five large on a PS3.)
Just a random neat thing I felt like sharing before I headed off to work.
- Mood:
impressed
So, if you read my absurdly long review of Noir then you know that I think it's a fantastic series that you'll enjoy. If you didn't read it, please do! But if you're in a hurry, allow me to summarize: a main cast composed entirely of strong women, complex characters, smart and full of subtlety and subtext, brilliantly twisty plot, great action, great drama, visually impressive, great music, less cheesecake than the norm, I totally fell in love with it, you should watch it.
However, it's been pointed out to me that there's a real lack of decent torrents for downloading it. Not really surprising for a series from 2001. Of course, if you've got a Netflix account or your local video rental place has a good selection and you can rent the DVDs, that's certainly the best way to watch it. (If you lived in Seattle I would loan you my DVDs, like I've done for many of my real life friends I've gotten to watch and love this show.) But if it's not an option for you for one reason or another, and you want to download, then I might be able to help you out.
Even though I bought the DVDs (twice!) I still have my old downloaded copies of the episodes. And I finally remembered that I have a mediafire account, so I uploaded the whole series to it. (This took quite a bit of frustration to accomplish, but I'm stubborn.) They're eight-year-old video files, so the video quality could be sharper. And they have old fan-done subtitles, so the translation is sometimes a little awkward. But they're watchable... they're what I watched the first two times I saw the series, after all. (I wish I had the software and know-how to rip my DVDs and compress them down to a reasonable size, but barring that, this is the best copy I have.)
Now you have no reason not to watch. :-)
Click here
- Mood:
quixotic
It was back in 2001 or 2002, when it was still new, that I first saw Noir. A friend and I were trying to watch all the best series out there, and when we found this one we tore through episodes as fast as we could download them. Although I now realize that we didn't really grasp more than a small portion of what was going on beneath the surface, at the time we both felt that it was an excellent series. It's remained on my "A+" list ever since, one of a handful of series that I felt were truly fantastic, but for more than six years I never got around to watching it a second time.
In the summer of 2008, someone on my friends list was asking for recommendations of series to watch. Her criteria included things like "strong women," "intrigue," and "maybe some angst." I listed off a handful of personal favorites, including Noir, which I felt fit those descriptors like a glove. I realized then that it had been a long time since I'd seen Noir, and that my memory of it was getting a little vague. So, I got out the CD-ROMs I'd burned the downloaded episodes to back in '02 and spent my next two days off marathoning the series.
The show hit me with the force of a freight train. Emotionally I was drawn in to a degree I hadn't been before. Intellectually, the 26-year-old me noticed levels of meaning that the 19-year-old me had missed, subtleties and nuances, layers and depths. There was a whole lot more going on in this show than I'd thought. I went out and rented the DVDs and watched those, uncovering new meanings in the series with the help of the better translation. Then I rented them again to show to a friend, who agreed it was awesome. Finally, I realized that I was going to wind up wasting money that way and just went ahead and bought the series boxed set, the first time other than the Farscape Starburst Editions that I'd bought an entire series on DVD. I started to show the DVDs to friends, and to loan out the boxed set to them, all of whom agreed it was awesome. I started to cruise the internet for analysis of the series, background information on the production, and yes... even for fanfic.
In short, I turned into an utterly unabashed fanboy.
Now I want to convince you, my internet friends, to watch Noir. I do this because I think you will enjoy it, knowing the ways in which your tastes coincide with my own. I do this because I love to share the stories that I enjoy with the people that I like. I do this because I know many of you have recently lost (hopefully temporarily) a show that you love, and I think this will provide some of the things that you miss from it. And I do this because my real life friends, while generally intelligent people who loved Noir when they watched it, don't do the sort of in-depth analysis that you all do. They don't dig down into the layers of meaning like you all do. They don't read into subtext and nuance like you all do. And I really, really want someone I can talk about this series at length with, about more than just the surface stuff. About the things underneath. It's a selfish desire, I don't deny it. But I think it'll be to your benefit as well.
Some of you have no experience with this medium. Perhaps this would be a good time to give it a try. Others of you have only seen examples of it you didn't like. I urge you not to judge an entire medium based on those poor examples, any more than you would judge all of film by the works of Pauly Shore or all of television by the reality shows on FOX. I guarantee that this series is not like those you've seen before, because it's not like anything I've ever seen before, and I've seen a lot. This would not be a bad gateway series for the medium, despite its complexity. There will not be a lot of confusion over divergent cultural concepts (most of the series takes place in France) and it abstains from many of the more odd or obnoxious tropes of the medium. One could easily have made this series live-action, if one had a hundred million dollar budget for practical effects and location shoots.
If you're reading this, then I know we like some of the same things. I think you'll like this, too. If I'm wrong... well, video rentals are cheap and downloads are free. It's only 26 half-hour episodes, the exactly length it was always intended to be, so it's not a huge cost in time, either. What do you really have to lose?
And now, on to the review....
Overview
( Noir... )Plot
( It is the name of an ancient fate. )
Characters
( Two maidens who govern death. )
Qualities and Flaws
( The peace of the newly born their black hands protect. )
- Mood: excited
The Narrator’s-Living-Room Inn was doing a brisk business this weekend. First some old friends let me know at the last minute that they’d be visiting Seattle and crashed on my floor from Friday night through Monday morning. Then my friend who comes down from Bellingham for the weekly gaming decided to crash on my couch rather than try to go back on Monday night.
The old friends slept at night while I was working, went out and did the tourist thing in the mornings when I was sleeping, and then we hung out in the evenings. On Sunday, with my work week done, I decided to only catch a half-night's sleep to spend more of the day with them. As always when they come up, we had a few tasty beers at the Elysian Brewery. They insisted on going to the top of the Space Needle, though, and dragging me along Let me tell you a little something about Seattlites: we don’t go up the Space Needle. There’s a reason for that. It’s just not that interesting. You can look out over the whole city, yeah, but we already know what the city looks like. They were inexplicably fascinated by it, however, and stayed until it closed. It was after dark, and Seattle Center and Downtown are not great neighborhoods... I found myself longing for my body armor.
Monday night my friend from Bellingham and I stayed up until dawn (which is turning in early for a night-shift type like me) first watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya for about nine episodes and then stopping and working on game-related stuff for a while, because there’s only so much Haruhi one can stand in a single sitting. Not the show, which is funny and smart, but Haruhi herself. She’s such a horrible fricking person! Like, a borderline-sociopathic sexual predator. It’s not as funny as the writers seem to think it is. They really need to tone it down. (They need to tone down the fan service, too, but I know that’s a vain hope.) Even with a little rum (previously established to help with the viewing of the first few episodes), we hit the limit of our tolerances after a while. One of the reasons the first episode of the second season that aired last week was so good was that there was so little Haruhi in it.
Got up early (for me) and then he and I went out into the U-District for a bit. It was fun. We checked out the comic and gaming store to see if they had some RPG stuff he was looking for. They didn't, but on the shelf I spotted Farscape comics! New Farscape comics! Why didn't anybody tell me they were doing more? I grabbed the two issues there and told the guy who runs the place to put the rest on my subscription list. I'm always interested in more Farscape.
Even better, my replacement Noir boxed set arrived. Discs themselves are exactly the same as the previous set, so I have all the extras, and I like the box art even more than the other one. Black suits this series, for obvious reasons, and the whole thing is more badass.
Anyway, the net result is that I didn’t really get a proper night’s day’s sleep all weekend. Decided to sleep late today yesterday rather than get up early enough to get my comics before the store closed. Will have to get them tomorrow today.
Also, it seems Television Without Pity has finally decided to close the TSCC forums. They shall be missed. Goodbye, Meet Market thread! You were the source of much fun and wasted free time over the last two years! (Did we ever decide on a fallback point, or are we just going to do our nerding on LJ full-time now?)
- Mood: tired
- Music:I can hear construction outside....
So, when I went back for some more sleep after my very long day Friday-through-Saturday, I only wound up getting a couple more hours before waking up unexpectedly. I think it might have been because of hunger. It's early Sunday morning, and I have a few things I wanted to do before my friends show up for gaming anyway, like my laundry, so I decide to roll with it. I'm way short on sleep, but I'm not really feeling it.
So, after a shower, a breakfast burrito from Memo's and a lot of time-wasting on TV Tropes (damn that wiki and its addictiveness!) and absolutely no washing of laundry, my friends start to arrive for gaming. One of them is supposed to be bringing back the Noir DVDs I loaned him quite a while ago, which is nice because I have a hankering to watch them. And when he arrives he returns to me four of the discs I'd loaned him... out of seven. The other three? Apparently his soon-to-be-evicted deadbeat housemate decided to deliver one last "fuck you" to the house by stealing them and (most likely) pawning them for cigarettes.
Damn it!
My friend insists on paying for a whole replacement boxed set, which is perhaps overkill, and even shoves $60 into my hands on the spot, much to my surprise. (I ordered the new set Monday night, so it should arrive shortly. Went with the older black boxed set instead of the newer white one this time. It just looks cooler. And more fitting: the name of the show is the French word for the color black for a reason.)
What really sucks? He hadn't had a chance to watch the last disc before it was stolen. So he's stuck in the middle of a huge, tense plot arc with no resolution. And I can't talk with him about how awesome the ending is yet. And I really want to talk about how awesome it is. It is very awesome.
Then we gamed. That part of the day was good. We played Shadowrun, which is always fun. One guy couldn't make it, so we had to run his character for him. Unfortunately, he was playing the "face" for the team- the one who does all the talking- so we had to spend quite a bit of time putting words in his mouth. One of the other characters pulled off a particularly neat trick: shooting the gun out of somebody's hand. (Absurd in real life, of course, but only a -4 penalty in the game.) I decided to have my character try it as well, but the dice weren't with me. After two complete misses, my character gave up, took the time to load a rubber bullet and just shot him in the chest instead. :-P
Then it was off to work, which I don't normally have to do on Sunday nights, but I'd swapped shifts so I could go to the union meeting on Saturday. It was really warm in the tower because of all the sun that day, the heat-distibuting shirts I wear under my body armor were all in the wash, and I was soaked in sweat the whole time. Then, in the last hour, everything went crazy. The engineer apparently forgot that a test of the fire alarms had been scheduled, so he hadn't told anyone it was happening and wasn't there to help. I had to run all over dealing with that in addition to handling everything else people needed from me because I was the only one there.
I go home and go to sleep. At this point I've been awake almost 30 hours, and I wasn't well-rested to begin with. Less than eight hours later, I get woken up by a text message from a friend over something really trivial, but I decide to roll with it because I didn't want to sleep too late. I get up and go to check what's happening on the internet.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been cancelled.
GODDAMMIT!
Yeah, it was hardly a surprise. But it's still a shame. It was an intelligent and enjoyable show. I met a decent percentage of the people on my LJ Friends List on the TWOP forums for that show. It shall be missed.
Well, maybe there will be some new, equally cool scifi show in the lead-in spot for Dollhouse next season.... What's that? Sitcoms? Damn.
....and my laundry still isn't washed.
- Mood: tired
Meeting was useful and interesting, but I still don't feel like I have a handle on this shop steward thing. Luckily my "shop" is only four people and aren't really having any problems. A lot of other people there talked about all kidns of ways they're being dicked around by their companies.
Getting there and back was a pain in the ass, however. When I get my hands on the city planner who designed South Spokane Street, I'm going to give him a piece of my mind. That whole area is one big mess of can't-get-there-from-here. I had to hunt around for the return bus stop, because it wasn't near the one going the other way. And the buses were crammed to capacity like sardine cans.
It was hot today, too. After a cold, grey spring, all of a sudden it's summer. My first time wearing the vest in such warm weather. Wasn't too bad under a polo shirt (not usually my style, but the summer wear of choice for those who want to keep their concealable body armor concealed). Under that godawful blazer at work... it'd probably kill me.
Saw a damn silverfish in my bathroom this morning. I'll have to hunt it down and kill it later. Hate those things. I only mention it because it seems like half my flist is talking about their pest problems tonight, and I want to be one of the cool kids. :-)
- Mood:
lethargic - Music:Out Of Sheer Loneliness (Acoustic) - Floater
....watching goofy anime like Busou Renkin is way more fun when you're drunk and have a snarky friend to bounce wisecracks off.
That was some much-needed unwinding.
- Mood:tipsy
Yesterday was, of course, Wednesday, the day on which new comic books arrive. Luckily I manged to grab mine before having to go into work early for some unexpected overtime. (Coworker's car attempted to share the same space-time coordinates as a garbage truck on her way home from work last night. No serious injuries, but she decided to take today off.)
Not a bad week for comics. Not an outstanding one, either. Reviews under the cuts. Warning: May Contain Spoilers.
( Battle for the Cowl: The Network )
Final judgment: decent.
( Buffy: Season 8 #25 )
Final judgment: disappointing.
( Deadpool #10 )
Final judgment: fun, but not super-fun.
( Angel: Blood & Trenches #3 )Final judgment: enjoyable.
Nothing that really made me sit up and go "Awesome!" this week. No KOTOR or Ex Machina (those were last week or the week before, I think). But not a dead week, either.
Anyway, I should really be asleep.
- Mood: sore
Last night was pretty crazy. I'm not sure what was going on, but there about twice as many drunks wandering the streets as usual, all looking to make trouble. It finally culminated in a guy getting his lights punched out right out in front of my work. I'm closing the garage gate and I hear a smack. I turn around and see a guy down on the ground unconcious. Called in emergency response, but in the end he woke back up, told the cops he wasn't pressing charges and wandered drunkenly away.
I really didn't need that on a day I'd only gotten three hours of sleep.
Anyway, weekend time. My parents are visiting from Oregon for a couple days, which is nice. A little awkward, tho. The vest is going in its carrying case for now, since that's a conversation I'm not ready to have.
- Mood: drained
I'm so sick of hearing about the swine flu.
In addition to all the overwrought hysteria in the news media (no surprise there) there's also been a slew of memos at work, all fairly useless and containing tips that people should have been following all the time anyway, like "wash your hands" and "don't cough on people". And that's not mentioning the ones that just contain links to the CDC website, which would be useful if they weren't paper memos to people with no internet access at work. It's all a bit absurd the way they're going on about this. As if people in my line of work don't already take precautions to avoid catching far worse things than N1H1 from the people we encounter- like scabies, a variety of bloodborne pathogens, and knife-in-the-kidney syndrome.
And last time I checked, we've got maybe a couple hundred cases in the whole country and one fatality. I've yet to see any indication that it's any worse than the regular flu, which kills hundreds of thousands of people a year without getting this sort of press.
As usual, John Stewart puts it better than I can.
- Mood: tired
....I can't sleep.
Managed an hour, then was woken up by a small noise, and after two hours of lying awake I have to admit that I can't get back to sleep.
I even took another melatonin, in clear defiance of the warning label.
....dammit.
(Also, have reached of my patience with upstairs neighbor, his subwoofer and his copy of Guitar Hero. Complaint to landlord at next opportunity. Sick of being the only one in this building who's considerate about noise. Anyway, overcranked bass is a blight upon music.)
- Mood:
aggravated
Whatever I did to frell up my sleep cycle this past week, I need to NEVER DO IT AGAIN.
- Mood: groggy
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