Book Stuff

I went back to the bookstore and saw if the next volume of the 1632 series has a CD in it. I guess it doesn't. I thought about exchanging my book and CD for one that isn't cracked, but I folded the pages and ripped the envelope right out. And I read the whole thing. Even if I could find the receipt, I'd feel dumb about it.

I guess I'll be paying for The Cannon Law if I want it. I don't know. I might finish 1491 first. I'm almost done with the main body of it. There's probably thirty pages of appendices and another hundred of endnotes and index that I wouldn't read anyway. Right now it's talking about the people that used to live on a big island at the mouth of the Amazon.

Verbose

I just realized I used to be a lot more laconic in this thing. I guess I must be getting used to it.

1634: The Baltic War

Yeah, I read it. It's a pretty quick read. Since the book doesn't have a single, strong protagonist, the compulsory romance subplots are much more understated. There are three hook-ups that wend through the book, between an early modern German man and a modern American woman (entirely from his point of view, we're never inside her head), modern American man and early modern Danish king's daughter (not in line of succession and thus not a princess, all from his POV), and the most understated modern American man and early modern Englishwoman (neither POV).

That's a lot more tolerable than previous books. The flag-waving super-American patriotism has been toned down a lot, even compared to the directly previous book (1633) which was a step down from the histrionic first book. In general, the series seems to be replacing that tick with a fairly overbearing pro-military message. But that comes out mostly in the POV sections from members of the military, so I guess that's to be expected. I think I'd like to see more civilian POV characters. The books used to have them, but they've been heavily phased out. The only determined civilians that stand out anymore are the hippy's kids. One of them quite bluntly said that while the army looked appealing a year or so ago, it was quickly becoming something he wanted nothing to do with. Good for him. The series can get a bit one-sided on this, with almost every character of significance either in the military already, joining the military, or being a politician who happens to be a huge fan of the military. I can make some allowances for the fact that the books are mostly about a giant war, but there's room for more diversity than has been apparent.

Another thing that's bugging me is that while Eric Flint took great care to make the town thrown back in time a diverse slice of Americana, we're how many books in and romance is a heavy element...but so far we don't have one bisexual character or one homosexual character. Or for that matter, even any indications that these people exist. This is really starting to bother me. There are great tracts of heterosexual romance (Almost every new POV character in any given book that isn't attached will end the book being married.) but nothing else. I don't really expect seventeenth century Europeans to suddenly start marrying gay people, but it's very strange that no one has shown any inclinations that they, or indeed anyone they have ever heard of, might be anything other than straight. If there are any gays around, they are invisible. It bugged me a bit the past few books, but it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue. The absence is harder to sustain the longer this goes on. Maybe it's just me.

Ok then, the book. It's a fun, popcorn book, but it's fairly one-sided. While the direct predecessor was mostly about Europe uniting to strangle democracy in its cradle, and concluded with the good guys making it by the skin of their teeth with many issues up in the air, this one is the opposite. Effectively the new Thirty Years' War is over. The anti-American (and anti-Swedish) alliance, the League of Ostend, was comprised of Denmark, England, France (It was Richelieu's idea.), and Spain. The League spent the last book more or less reconquering the Dutch, cutting the good guys off from their main source of new troops (mainland Sweden), and generally enveloping them. Books running concurrent suggested that the guy in charge of retaking the Dutch provinces for Spain was going to switch sides, which would take some pressure off. Ok.

By the end of the book the Danes have been knocked out of the League, re-opening supply channels for the Swedish army. Denmark is being forced into a union with Sweden too. England was peripheral anyway and the American embassy there managed to lay a lot of groundwork for the English Civil War while imprisoned in the Tower of London with Oliver Cromwell. The main Spanish force was in the Low Countries and is very much going to turn around and if not ally with the American-Swedish alliance then at least become an independent and non-hostile power. France is very likely going to fall into civil war as a result of having its major army destroyed and thus forcing a lot of Richelieu's supporters into the arms of his sworn enemy. Most of the loose bits of Germany were incorporated into the United States of Europe (our heroes) at the end of the book. This reads a lot like the end of the story for the Central European area. The bad guys have been beaten. The only victories they scored were a temporary obstruction of the USE oil pipeline and the successful creation of some weapons a generation ahead of those the Americans made for the USE out of available materials.

It's good. I would want the plots to progress. But I wonder if this is the end of the line for the A plot of the series. The B plots are the Eastern thread (centered in Bohemia, which a rebel Austrian general has relived the Austrians of) and the Southern thread (in Italy and maybe France, mostly about religious politics). I guess that's ok, but the series seems to be at a defining moment. If it's the story of an alternate Thirty Years' War, with assorted side projects, then it's done. Spain and France are still hostile, but both have problems arising much bigger than affairs in Germany. If it's the story of the world changing because of this time travel incident, then this is a necessary and positive step. A strong Germany rules Central Europe centuries early. Now what?

I know from reading some of the side project stuff that a timeline of likely technological development (Or re-development, the moderns have neither the resources, nor the infrastructure, nor the knowledge to recreate everything from scratch and have to go through stages instead. They sort of have a blueprint for how the tech developed, but no finished products. ) that goes up into the 1700s. If they want to follow that along, ok. There's potential. They already have airplanes and ironclad warships, plus supply routes to get them materials they need to recreate more 20th century industrial base. It could be interesting to watch as the other nations play catch up and join the race in earnest. But that also means that the characters have to become disposable. They're going to die of natural causes if nothing else. I'm not sure of the books could survive that or not. Very little has been done to develop a second generation of protagonists, aside from the hippy kids who are in their teens. Most of the major figures are in their forties or later and some much older.

Either way, it'll be interesting to see if Flint's collaborative style ends up helping the books more on from his headliners or if they sort of run out of steam now that the inciting drama is about as used up as it can get.

Also, the book came with a CD that seems to have versions of many other books on it. Mine's cracked to hell. Damn, I was curious about some of those titles, but not curious enough to page through them in the store or buy sight unseen.

Don't scare me like that, Ayato!

There is no Kim content in this post. Except for that sentence.

My computer is Ayato. I name them after giant robot pilots. The last was Kaworu and the one before that Quatre. I'm going to have to watch some more anime before I get the next one, hopefully years from now. I'm all out of names I like.

Ayato freaked me well and good tonight. I turned him (ok, it, but it's strange to use a proper name and then default to a neuter personal pronoun) on and logged into my City of Heroes account. I played with some friends for a while, until I froze up. This happens sometimes in CoH. It was a pretty hard freeze and took all Ayato down. I was able to get out of the game, but not reload the desktop. The power button didn't respond. So I cut power at the surge protector.

Then I waited about thirty seconds and rebooted. All's well. I log back in and two minutes later the same thing happens while I'm trying to use the auction house. Annoying. I decide I'm done with CoH for the night. I reboot again and get into the Windows loading screen where it hangs. The drives are making the same sweeping sound I got in CoH. Oh boy.

I turned it back off and let it sit for a half hour. This time I got so far as the screen right after the BIOS screen. It tells me it's loading the PBR (Partition Boot Record, I think) and then says it's done. Nothing happens. This screen has always gone by so fast before I couldn't really read it. This time it sits. Same drive noise. Tried again. Same. I tried to boot from the Windows reinstall CD Dell gave me. Nope.

Ayato is a paperweight. I tried one more time and went to take a shower while it loaded. I came back 10 minutes later and it's on the log-in screen. Everything is fine now.

Don't do that again, Ayato. I know where you live.

The Record in my Brain

I'm too young to really remember records, but that broken record effect where the same phrase keeps going over and over again will probably be referenced a century from now.

Lately I've seen seeing a lot of a commercial for some Christian music compilation. I think the ads start around 10 and go on all night. It's enough to make you miss Girls Gone Wild back in the days when it really only had a five minute commercial but aired it back to back in hour-long blocks. I've got one of the lines stuck in my head right now, endlessly. It's driving me nuts.

Movies I Did Watch

I went to the evening showing of National Treasure 2 today. Like the first one, it was a perfectly good silly film. I think that we see more of these is a good thing. I don't want to see films that never give what's going on in them a second thought, but a lot of genre films especially get bogged down in explaining themselves or apologizing for themselves. Enough of that and I wonder why someone who actually likes the genre would bother.

So National Treasure is about a historian/treasure hunter who, this time, is out to clear his grandfather's name after that grandfather is implicated in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. The ads here focused around a Book of Secrets, making it seem like that was the treasure. In this case it was the City of Gold and the book is just a plot point. Like the first movie, our heroes break into national historic sites and in this one they kidnap the President.

It's fun. It's not deep; it's goofy. The characters are cartoons running from anecdote to trivia point. Nick Cage's love interest from last film is back, but she's less of a focus. His geek friend and his parents take much larger roles, which I thought was a good choice. These movies turn into sappy romances very easily. Cage and his designated gal reconcile as the movie rolls along, but it's safely in subplot territory. You're not going to learn anything from it, but it's not wasted time either if you can accept it for what it is.

The Goofy (as in the dog) short at the front is something else. If I knew about that going in, I might have waited for the DVD. The whole thing amounts to a slapstick love letter to home entertainment systems. The laughs are predictable. I don't know; I guess I just hate the old Disney characters. It added nothing to the experience except runtime. Worse, it reminded me of the awful Disney live action movies of a few decades ago that always opened with an animated short and went downhill from there.

Then I got home and watched V for Vendetta. It's great. It's a romantic treatment of revolutionary violence in the face of fascism. It's fairly easy to see what the screenwriters were referencing aside from the 1980s comic book too. The Dear Leader is a right-wing Christian that successfully soft-pedaled his beliefs until a national disaster gave him the chance to clamp down and make his Fourth Reich.

V is a terrorist. I guess I don't know what to think about that. The movie casts him as the heroic martyr for the cause of freedom and I kind of buy into it, but V is really, really messed-up. The movie doesn't really examine this at all. V becomes the designated hero, and his worst deed gets ratified by his victim. You can feel really good about him killing the bad guys, but should you? I guess the justice system is obviously corrupt, but I wish they found a way to have him at least imprison them until a good system was in place.

It's the same dilemma from superhero movies. Is vigilantism ok? In the real world, not really. The best you can say is that it's the system of extreme last resort and it usually gets way out of control very fast. The KKK were vigilantes and terrorists. So were Hitler's SA. Those are the brownshirts that got killed off in exchange for Hitler getting the support of the military and business. I guess I'm ok with it in a clear superhero context because that's obviously a fantasy. V is meant to be mostly realistic so I have to take it in a more real world way.

That aside, V is a wonderful, evocative movie. If you can get past the issues around vigilante terrorism, it's got a lot to like. The fights are well done, giving V enough superhumanity to sell his schemes but not enough to take him completely out of the real world until the very end. I didn't quite buy at the climax when the military loses touch with its political controllers and decides, with no previous indication, that it's not going to open fire on non-violent protesters when every flashback in the movie had them and the police doing just that without hesitation.

Once a Year is Enough

Today, I made rolls for four hours. I'll be eating them for months. I used the recipe my grandmother got off some guy that used to be a cook on a cement boat. (That's a boat that hauls cement, not a boat made of cement.) We used to make them every Christmas. With how I eat, I'll be pulling the last few out of the freezer towards the end of March. The recipe makes a lot and they're not exactly health food. I left the dough to rise in a huge metal dishpan. It's too much food. Every year I mean to scale it back. It's a huge amount of work to make them, too. The most advanced ingredients are canned milk and yeast. But they taste good. The kitchen was a wreck afterwards. I have to go back later and finish cleaning up.

Along the theme of the post, I almost never rent movies. Once a year is pushing it. I see most of what I want to see at the theaters, usually a weekend or so after opening night. If I want to see it more than once, I'm probably going to want to see it at 3 AM or something and the local rental business closes at midnight. I scared the hell out of a girl working there last year when I walked up at 12:30 to shove one in their deposit slot. Anyway, I decided this year that instead of sitting through holiday boredom, or watching any of the DVDs I mentioned that I intend to watch, I was going to pick up three or four movies to space over a couple of days. I wanted to have a little Quentin Tarantino film festival. I've seen Kill Bill (both parts), and the last quarter of Pulp Fiction was on one of the movie channels a few weeks ago. I enjoyed that too. So I figured I'd get those and snag Reservoir Dogs too. It would be a mix of old and new stuff.

Back in the old days, the rental places had a stupidly diverse selection. I remember going into a glorified gas station with Dad and getting lost in the stacks they used to have. It's not like that anymore. I couldn't find anything except the first part of Kill Bill, which I've seen way too many times to care about on its own. If they had the second part too, I'd be there. No such luck. So much for that idea.

Once a year is also enough for me to run into Kim in the outside world. I was at Walmart around 8:30 yesterday buying the junk for rolls. I had everything and decided to run by the DVDs while I was there. I just made it into the clothing section, with the little girls' clothes on one side and baby stuff on the other when I heard "Hey Midnight Wanderer!" No, not really. She used my name. It would be worth running into her if she called out, "Hey Vampire Heathen!" though.

You know how your own name jumps out of the background noise? This was like that. I didn't realize it was her until I stopped for a second. By then I was caught. I had a cart so I couldn't really vanish into the crowd, plus I had my hood down and how many other pale, bald guys are walking around Walmart? I wish Walmart sold some really dirty, weird pornography. I'd go and grab something about people from Lithuania that like to have men with the bubonic plague hit them across the face with giant rubber casts shaped like Stalin while they all play out the Battle of Gettysburg and carry that around the whole store. No one would bother me. I could just leave it in the bags of chips at the check out.

Kim comes up to me and she tries to strike up a conversation. I'm being as transparently non-responsive as I can be.

"I caught you!"
"I wasn't trying to escape."
"I think I could probably outrun you anyway."
"Well yeah, but I could throw the cart in your way."

She's being her hyper-perky, intensely happy Jesus-self. Kim told me once in her church they believe that people are only ever upset or depressed for any length of time because they know they're wrong to reject Jesus. It's guilt. So it's really important to be happy all the time or someone might think you don't care about Christianity. I guess they must all be this forced. Then she sees what's in the cart and she starts offering her opinion about when to eat rolls and all this stuff. I'm just making indifferent noises here.

Kim told me I must be really happy today. Um, why? I told her I was just having a normal day and then realized that she thinks hostility is a sign of happiness. That explains so much about her. Then she had errands to run and needed to go. She can keep me stuck in the middle of Walmart with no interest in talking to her for ten minutes, but she's on a deadline. Whatever. She promised to get back to me about that documentary. I didn't bring it up; I'm not that dumb.

FIXED!

Reset the BIOS to defaults. Did not think of that before. Scared the hell out of me when it gave me a disk recognition error, but continued through and now all is a quiet, gentle hum.

More loud fans

I guess it wasn't just a one day thing. Tomorrow I'll try killing all power into the thing when I turn it off for the day and see if that matters.

Three Hours Later

Still pissed off about the computer. Still down about it. Not quite so upset in the my-computer-is-ruined way. I guess it helps not to be actively trying to fix the problem at the moment. Dad used to get like this when he was trying to fix something and didn't make any progress too.

My Computer Hates Me

I bought a new computer. I didn't really talk about it here because there's not a lot to say. It's fast, it's quiet, it's almost everything I want. I watch DVDs on my computer sometimes, depending on whether I want to use it for anything else while watching and whether I want to get up and go across the room to put the disk into my PS2. I bought that for games years ago, but I only ever end up using it for DVDs. It's an expensive DVD player.

I've had the computer about a week now. The FedEx guy woke me up by coming a day early, so he got to meet my daytime door policy head on. If you wake me up, you get to see me in whatever I went to bed in. Usually that's the bottom layer of whatever I had on the previous day. He didn't stare too badly, but it's always at least as embarrassing for me as it is for whoever is at the door. Anyway, I was covered.

The new machine has a case fan over the CPU, a case fan over the back vent, and smaller fans for the video card and the power supply. My last didn't have a fan over the video card, but I knew that was coming because I saw it on TechTV. When it booted up, all the fans revved up really loud, but then came back down to almost silent for actual running. Perfect. It didn't even get loud when I loaded up some games from the past couple of years.

When I rebooted it after installing a few programs, the fans came on roaring and stayed on. I guessed it was still hot from before so the motherboard freaked out or something. I turned it off for about forty-five minutes. It came back on in quiet mode. That I can deal with. I just have to remember to let it cool for a little bit every time I need to do a reboot. That's not a big hassle.

I woke up today as the sun was going down and hit the power button before I went into the shower. I got out and freaked out for a second when I thought I heard someone in the driveway. Anyway, I think it was just someone going by in an old truck. I got back into the living room and the fans are roaring inside my Dell Inspiron. It's all booted up, but they never spooled back down to near silence.

I turned it off and let it cool. It was off all day, but maybe I just had some bad luck. On the old machine every now and then the hard drive would go crazy on boot up and not stop until I restarted. No big deal, just noisy and weird. This could be the same, except I guess I hoped for the best and I should know better than to do that kind of thing. The fans just kept on going. I cut power to it entirely and let it sit for an hour and a half, thinking maybe the current into the power supply was at fault. Nope. Still loud.

I stuck a DVD in. It's like it was on mute. Great. So I guess I'm out of options. I'm pretty sure the case fan is the noisy one. I could take that out, but then I'll worry every time something goes wrong that I just cooked my dual-core CPU. I looked all over and there's no way for me to directly control if the fans crank down or not. It's not in the BIOS. (I know this stuff because I took a couple of night computer classes at the college two years ago.) There's nothing in software. I guess that means I need to spend some money and get one of those fan speed controller units and plug it in. I can do it. It doesn't look hard. But then if I get one that runs on automatic I have to make sure it's set right and doesn't cook the CPU anyway. Either that or I buy one that runs on manual and I have to watch it all the time myself.

This sucks. I'm showing 3% CPU load right now and the fans are on full-blast. It's running between 1% and 3%. I don't know. If this is a one day thing I'll deal but I just hate fixing something I just bought. It's really bothering me, like I just lost the whole computer or something. I can't even hear my TV with it running like this.

Books, School, and Feet

So I get a coupon for 30% off any one book. I guess you're not supposed to buy anything on sale that you wouldn't pay the full price for. At least I read that one time. The theory's that you end up buying things that you don't actually want and end up wasting money instead of saving it. That kind of makes sense in a limited way, but it also makes sense to buy things on sale that you would not buy at the normal price.

The run up to Saturnalia/Mithra's birthday/the Winter Solstice/whatever isn't good for me. It's not that I have family I want to be with or anything. I can deal with not seeing my living relatives for a lot longer than they usually let me. But everything's so crowded. I hate crowds. I'm not crazy about the music playing everywhere for a month, or the lights on trees. Every now and then I catch some old ballet on TV. I think it's the same one from the Sixties every year. I get bored after around fifteen minutes, but it's cool to watch until then.

This year, Borders has been dropping a lot of coupons on me. I used one when I bought the manga from last post. In the lead up to the holiday, I've seen about three or four 30% off coupons go by. I ignore a lot of 20% off and 25% off, but a 30% off usually gets me to at least go to the store and look around.

Last year I got into the 1632 series by Eric Flint, et al. It's about a small town from modern West Virginia that gets thrown back into the middle of the Thirty Years' War. The first one was ok. It's up at the publisher's website to read for free, so that's what I did. It's not great. Later on Flint admitted he wasn't writing alternate history. He was writing Americana. That's what grated on me. I'm just not that patriotic and I've lived among small town people long enough to know he's being extremely generous in portraying them. I guess he's from a small town and had exactly the opposite experience from me. I kept pretty isolated from everyone else growing up, but you can tell a lot if you're the local freak just from the times you do have to go out. I liked the alternate history as far as it went, but the Norman Rockwell stuff wasn't good. Neither were the two romances he managed to shoehorn in. But ok, he wrote sequels with co-authors that go into a real exploration of what 400 years more knowledge would do to Europe. That's neat. I kept reading for three more novels and two anthologies. Some of it was really good, but he fell into a hard formula where every novel uses some kind of romance as a major plot element. That's a little much for me.

I think the sameness is a factor too. Even the town outcasts, the kids raised on the hippie commune by the pot-grower, the kids that play Dungeons & Dragons, everyone in this town wants to be exactly the same. Ok, I get that people with similar backgrounds are going to have similar ways of approaching life. That's culture. But the story of someone who's a little bit out of mainstream finding a way to fit perfectly into the mainstream happens again and again. The token Jewish male in town hated hunting and never shot at an animal, but he bought a gun and went out with the guys every year. For what? Just so he could be one of the guys. Um, ok. I guess I read that kind of stuff as saying that being different is only ok as long as you are willing to hide it and be a clone as far as everyone else cares.

So I read 1632. I read the sequel, 1633. It's got a big love letter to the American Navy, and sets out to redeem a jerk from the first book. A really racist, bullying jerk that did his best to get the Americans to set themselves up as a ruling class over a bunch of German refugees, and he was willing to play a little dirty to do it. He didn't succeed, but he came off as a pretty solid villain. Even his son hated him. He's still exactly the same guy, but I guess when you lock someone away with him for a while they turn into big admirers just because. They even appreciate how his bullying built character. That's just sick.

1634: The Gallileo Affair, is almost a political thriller. The plot diverges completely from the bullying Navy guy and moves down to Italy. Events there would overlap in time with what happened up in North Germany. Except it's about the pot-grower's kids. They were really cool in a short story from one of the anthologies but here, they're Extreme Typical and they fall in with a bunch of hapless Venetian revolutionaries who decide to rescue Gallileo from prison and are being used by a Huguenot working for Richelieu. He's trying to use them to assassinate the Pope and pin it on the Americans. Along the way, we get a Catholic priest lecturing us about how Galileo kind of had it coming because he was rude to the Pope.

That's it. I was done. The alternate history was still there, but I didn't need to read about some hormonal teenager who fell in "love" on first sight with a big-breasted Italian girl and does dumb stuff to impress her. Time passed and I did still wonder what happened. Not about the romances, the interesting stuff. There's another sequel. 1634: The Baltic War. I looked at it a few times, but knew I didn't want to pay full hardcover price, and the cover flap mentioned the romance right off. Oh boy.

So I end up back in the bookstore today. It's 30% off. That makes the book $20. I'm still kind of curious and I've passed it over several times. But it's still on my mind. I want to know what happens with the Dutch Revolt (not looking so good last time) and if things turn around (which was foreshadowed, but not certain). I've got the book now. I mean to read it eventually.

Before Death Note took over my reading life for a while, I was reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It's a neat exploration about what we now know, but hasn't really made it into the textbooks because I guess that would make kids in high school too sympathetic for the Indians. It screws things up if they had cities and farms instead of just being clueless. School sucks because stuff like that, and whatever the local politicians want, ends up deciding things. I guess colleges (not the one my cousin went to...that place is scary) are a lot better about that. I want to finish it but I might let it wait and read some more fiction before going back. I usually like fiction more than non-fiction. It used to drive Mom nuts.

I had to go out and get some foot stuff today. My shoes are old and I broke a big crack in the sole of one last spring. I don't walk when it's raining out, so I didn't really worry a lot. The shoe still worked. But now there's snow everywhere and I get water inside my shoe and soaked into my socks just going between the house and the garage. Shoveling isn't fun either. But I was stupid and didn't dry my feet out right after I got in, so now the side of my big toe is all peeled and cracked with athlete's foot. Disgusting. I'm not even athletic. At all. I hate exercising. I guess I kind of get how it could be fun, but I'm not that kind of person.

These post titles aren't very accurate, I guess. I pick them out for what I plan on writing about, then I end up writing about something else towards the end. Dad used to make me do pre-writing stuff to stop that. Nobody's getting graded on this, though. Contents may shift in shipping. Game experience may change during play.

Death Note: The Manga

I read a manga. Adult Swim is one of the few programming blocks that airs new and new-ish stuff on my kind of schedule. Usually I ignore a lot of it, but I really got sucked into the anime with the same title.

Scorecard

Manga: a Japanese sequential artform influenced by American comic books. Japan churns out loads of the stuff and unlike the American comic book market, it's not a declining niche product. It's not a genre, but the medium for many genres.
Anime: the equivalent in animation. Often based on a manga. Successful anime usually have numerous marketing tie-ins.

Enough digression. Death Note premiered on Adult Swim in late October, according to Wikipedia. It's about a teenage genius (Voiced by Brad Swaile in the dub. I loved his voice all the way back when I was a kid watching Gundam Wing. I used to wish I could sound like that.) who gets a magic notebook that lets him kill people and starts using it to rid the world of criminals. This draws the attention of an eccentric genius detective. They play a elaborate game of cat and mouse. The teenager, Light, needs to see the face and know the real name of someone to kill them. He can't be safe while his hunter, L, is stalking him with the help of the Japanese police. L avoids using his real name and letting his face be seen.

After two weeks of watching this, I was enthralled. Unlike a lot of media depictions of geniuses, L and Light are both clearly brilliant. They're an equal match for each other. Light is a real school success story. He's smart, handsome, extremely sociable, athletic, everything schools try to turn you into so you don't freak people out. He's perfect.

L isn't. He compulsively eats unhealthy food, is constantly fiddling with something, sits in chairs with his knees folded up. He's a weird guy, and I say that as a weird guy. The contrast between how they think and behave is really fascinating. I got into it enough that I couldn't wait for all 37 episodes to come out. Every week left me with this delicious cliffhanger. I needed more gratification.

I've bought a few manga before, but this was a few years ago and they were pretty expensive. I never got very far. I thought I would get the first two and read them to catch extra angles on the shows I'd already seen. That lasted about thirty seconds. In the last week I've burned through all twelve volumes. It helped that they sell for a lot less now, about two-thirds what they went for a few years ago. The lady from the bookstore didn't even look at me like I was about to cut off her skin and eat her insides when I asked about the volumes they didn't have on the shelf. I come in there a lot, but I've always got my sunglasses on and my hoodie and my coat. I probably look like the Unabomber, but without the hair.

I hate hair, by the way. I can sort of stand it for a while, but it's itchy and ugly...and there's not a barber shop in town open at night. They all have giant windows to let the sun in too. I think they have to be sadists or something. I can't really cut my own hair and I don't like it anyway, so I just get rid of it when it gets to where I can't stand it anymore.

Anyway, I read that the anime diverges from the manga eventually. That means I still have some stuff to look forward to in the show. The manga is great and the show has been great so far. I guess they're psychological thrillers, really.

A Reader and Worrying Quiet

I have a commenter. Hey. Um, welcome.

Kim hasn't called yet. I can live with that, but my good fortune isn't going to last. She doesn't forget this stuff. It's not like ways she could be less of an irritant to others. Those she forgets all the time. One of the boys at school probably took off his burkha and caused a riot or something.

Family is Hell

No progress on the DVD review project from prior posts. I've gained some ground on the sleep front, but now I'm getting these unpredictable fits of intense fatigue. I thought maybe I was forgetting to eat again. There aren't any good, obvious landmarks during the night to let you know when you should be getting lunch or whatever. So I get doing things and forget.

I tried to eat into one of these times, but it didn't really help. I guess I'm going to have to start huffing caffeine or something. I could try sleeping pills and caffeine pills simultaneously. I bet that would be exciting. Isn't that how Elvis died, passed out on the toilet and suffocated in shag carpet?

My cousin Kim called a few days ago and she really, really wanted to talk about some documentary about 1968. I haven't talked to her in like a year, and it hadn't been long enough. My cousin used to be interesting, but about a year before the accident she went crazy for Jesus. She went from being bright and quick to being plodding and rigid. You can see it just looking at her. It's like the church sucked all the life out of her body. She actually told me last year when we talked, inside of about ninety seconds, both that morality is absolute black and white and that it's full of gray. She didn't notice it either. That's what I'm talking about.

I guess that's not really why I can't stand her. I can't stand her because she decided to tell me at the funeral that I'd better get right with the Lord or I would end up burning forever in Hell. She tells me this while looking at my parents' bodies with this kind of smug insistent look on her face. I called her a sick pervert and told her to get out. Then suddenly this is a time for the family. She wasn't going. So I bailed.

Or that's what I would have done if it wasn't the middle of the afternoon and I had a car. Instead, since I didn't have a car and my ride was in my aunt's minivan, I got to sit through this. That aunt is Kim's mother. I should have thrown something, or whatever. But I needed the minivan because it was wide enough that I could lay down in the back seat and put a blanket over myself if the sun got bad. On the way home, she says she wants to adopt me. I don't think so.

But I didn't try to cut her head off, so Kim apparently thinks I got over this. She calls me at 8:30. That has to be an accident, because I'm awake. No one in my family remembers I sleep all day. Ever. Kim wants to know what I think of this History Channel documentary on 1968, which I have not seen because I haven't watched the History Channel in five or six years. She tells me -Kim is like this, she actually told me like it was an assignment for one of the kids at the unaccredited private school she teaches at- to go online and find out when it's rerunning so I can watch it and tell her what I think. She'll be calling back. I tried not answering my phone once, but she came over unannounced, during daylight, the last time I did that. She thought I "did something awful".

So the fastest way to get rid of her is to endure a three hour telephone conversation where she rants about how dirty hippies and feminists destroyed America. I programmed the History Channel back into my TV and caught about an hour tonight. I think I know what Kim is going to want to talk about. Right after Robert Kennedy gets shot, the show goes from talking about drugs, music, and protests into letting a bunch of guys who worked on the Nixon campaign and write for the Wall Street Journal lay into the whole decade for being the product of lazy, dirty, destructive hippies.

Kim's probably going to start with asking me to think about how undermining the foundation of the family (Mom: MA in History) has led to ruin. She'll make these leading questions about how people -she's not going to come out and say me that early- need to turn to Christ and faithfully accept his word and will or whatever. If I hang up, she'll call back. If I don't answer, she'll eventually show up. She might even bring friends from church. She's threatened that before. Sometimes she shows up even if I answer. Kim really wants a fight. She thinks when I argue with her I'm at some kind of crisis point where my heart might open up or something and she needs to be there to plant a seed. The fact that Kim's pissing me off means she's forced me open a sliver and deep down inside, I know she's right. My pride is just keeping me from submitting.

It would be funny if she wasn't absolutely serious. That's really how she thinks.

By the way, she's always talking about how women should lovingly submit to their husbands and how she wants to do that. Kim's never managed to get hitched, though. Not even to a nice Christian boy who believes all this stuff about women submitting. Especially not to one of those. She also wants to be a missionary, but somehow never finds it in herself to save up for a plane ticket or prevail on her church which does actually have a fund for that kind of thing.

When she does call back, she's going to want to know why I'm not showing up at any family gatherings. Apparently sitting in a corner glaring and not speaking is how people in Kim's universe show they're having fun.

Season Sets vs. Standalone DVDs

All my next up options are season sets. That's obviously going to take longer to review than a single story like Bender's Big Score. I think reviewing just the season in general would be a bit thin, and only work well for shows with strong and steadily developing plot arcs. Since my options are a fairly slow and scant plot arc (two, actually) in Everwood, pure episodic TV in seaQuest, and relatively thin and weak plot arc in Buffy, the only good option for a season arc review is Angel.

That would be a lot of watching and writing in one go, I think. I'm going to rule out Angel for now, at least for that kind of review, and watch some more of the episodic shows. I can review individual episodes.

I've had bad insomnia lately. I'm up at all the wrong times. I should see about getting some sleeping pills or something. This is really out of control. Monday morning I decided to go out for supper (Breakfast to you daylight people). I knew I'd get stuck out in the sun if I walked, so I took the car. I lucked out and the cop I drove by didn't notice me driving with sunglasses and a big hoodie over my head in the bright gray overcast. If I just walked I could have done without the glasses and stared down at the ground maybe, but it would have been full light out by the time I got home. Before that, really. That's not fun for me. Think vampires.

Next?

One review down. I'm not sure what I want to do next. I have lots of stuff I've been meaning to see. Options:

• Angel: Season Four on DVD. I've had this for a few years but back when I watched it as it came out I got really depressed by the end, so I haven't been back to it yet. It's been years though and I should watch it eventually. It's hard not to love a show that happens almost entirely at night.
  
• Everwood: The Complete First Season. This one happens mostly during the day, but at this stage the series was still comfortably weird and a little bit brave. I think it's the only series where a romance plays a major part of the plot which I can actually stand. Romance sucks.
• seaQuest: Season One. I commented on this before. It's sort of Star Trek underwater in the near-future. And more openly military.
  
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete Fourth Season on DVD. This is actually when the show started to lose me. I was homeschooled and didn't go to college, so the whole moving in drama falls kind of flat. I remember liking some of the standalone episodes, but the crossover (crossovers?) with Angel were pretty lame.
  

Futurama: Bender's Big Score

I was wondering going in how thoroughly Futurama had worn out its welcome with me. I was also wondering if the plan to package the content of the DVD and its upcoming sequels as a series of episodes would make the finished product disjointed. The Family Guy straight-to-DVD feature had that problem. In fact, the three episode arc really brought the whole thing down. There just wasn't enough going on and it felt very stretched out, even for a show normally very light on plot.

Bender's Big Score is quite the opposite. It's an excellent, CGI-laden, feature with no obvious episode breaks. The A plot involves a trio of nudist aliens who use email scams to steal the Earth, eventually delving into time travel. The B plots include the Leela-Fry relationship and Hermes getting decapitated. Hermes' wife immediately goes back to Barbados Slim, which makes for a good series of jokes. So too the powder made from ground-up executives, which is apparently good for everything. After declaring that it's made from the execs that canceled Futurama (the "Box" corporation canceled their "delivery license") the Professor dumps a load of it down his pants.

The feature is littered with callbacks to one-off gags and episodes of the series. Fry's dog from the most depressing American animation ever shows up, and his frozen ex-girlfriend from 2000 makes several appearances. His family are featured, including his nephew. These references help carry the movie along through some weaker stretches. About a fifth of the show is a very long series of extended flashbacks that eventually pay off, but get tedious well before that. The writers are not subtle enough to make the parallelism they're trying to go for anything more than a bit grating, and I really don't think that Free Willy references are all that timely...or funny when they were timely.

Overall, the DVD isn't as good as the best of the Futurama episodes, but it's comfortably in the second tier. Without the Fry-Leela romance and the flashbacks, it would easily equal them. That's odd coming from me, since I generally liked the romance episodes of the series. The writers seem to know how to work it for good comedy and fun in a half-hour episode, but got profoundly lost trying to make it a focus of the feature. Fortunately, Zoidberg was not heavily featured. Unfortunately, neither was the Professor. Bonus points for having Al Gore exult in saving Earth with deadly lasers instead of terrifying a slideshow.

Winter Thwarts Me

Storm coming in. Guess I'm not making it out again tonight, unless I drive. I hate driving at night, and in snowstorms. I'm not a big fan of cars in general, really.

Maybe tomorrow.