I'll admit right off the bat that I've gotten spoiled. I'm used to being able to find anything I look for on bittorrent assuming that it exists and it's not a brand new release. There are so many pirates out there sharing files that there's no absence of choice nowadays. Most of the time my concern is not whether I'll be able to find a file but which version I want. This is not an insignificant issue since there are still quality differences for a lot of media especially when it comes to things that are subtitled/translated.

It's partly because of this abundance that those cases where I can't find what I want really stick in my craw. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before but one anime that I really liked from a while ago is Mahoromatic. Actually, now that I think about it I know I made an entry about it here because I remember ranting a little after finishing the series. The anime adaption had a crazy gainax mood-whiplash of an ending which came out of left field. For almost the entire length of the show's run it was a romantic comedy with a little bit of action tossed in for spice. Then, in the last couple of episodes, everything changed. It turned dark like storm clouds rolling in on what had previously been a sunny day. The eponymous character dies saving the protagonist in an apocalyptic confrontation and the next episode takes place after a 15-20 year time jump where we see the protagonist has lived in self-imposed hell ever since because of it. The entire story ends with you being completely unsure if it's a somewhat happy ending or the protagonist (who got stabbed with a light saber) is merely having a near-death hallucination. Screwy doesn't even begin to sum it up when you compare it to the series as a whole.

Anyway, it was after the unsatisfactory anime ending that I read the manga actually turns out different and better. It's still a bit darker than the series as a whole but at least it's not soul crushing. I guess it's the difference of being forced to grow up and accept reality versus being forced to grow up and accept reality while working in a whore house giving handjobs. There are differing degrees of suck.

I've been trying for a couple years now to find a pirated or scanlated copy of the manga with no success. The really irritating part is this manga has been licensed in the US and has been released in english for years now. That means that it's not even like I'm asking for a bunch of manga pirates to painstakingly scanlate the entire damn series. I just can't believe that none of them have just gone out and gotten a copy of the english version, scanned, and uploaded it. You wouldn't believe the amount of effort some of these people will go through to provide manga to the masses and the absence of Mahoromatic is just baffling. I finally found a torrent last night which claimed to be a translated version of the manga but when I snagged the file it turned out to be in fucking Chinese. That would probably work out just fine if I wanted to get my mom to read it to me but other than it's a worthless piece of crap.

There has been one good part to this whole thing. While doing my periodic search for the manga I found that the studio which did the original anime has put out a 2-part tv special just a couple weeks ago for the show. I have no idea what sort of thinking makes you decide to produce 2 additional episodes for a series that you ended over half a decade ago, but I'm looking forward to seeing them anyway. Just getting all the voice actors back together must've been quite a bit of effort. Maybe they're floating a trial balloon and seeing how good the ratings are for these two episodes as well as the eventual dvd sales. Maybe if it goes well they'll bring the show back for a re-written 3rd season. The plus side there is that if there's more episodes there will be more fan attention and with more fans, maybe some pirate will finally upload some copies of the damn manga so I can finally find out how the story is supposed to end.

Other than the ridiculous amount of anime I've been watching lately, the only other thing I've been doing is sleeping. I'm not sure if all the extra sleep is a symptom of being down or maybe it's simply my body's defense mechanism against it having realized that I'm only going to use a lot of my awake time brooding. Regardless, I seem to be able to sleep and sleep without ever really feeling well-rested. It's not the worst thing in the world since it's not as if I were really doing anything with that time anyway.

It's sorta funny really but I was looking over my credit card bills a few days ago and it's pretty much possible to track this emotional downturn based on my monthly statements. My discover card bill this past month was $2.50. It's probably not the most accurate way to predict my mood by looking at the amount of money I spend but it's correlated. On your average month I'm buying video games or other things of interest and perhaps even heading out to stores to pick up this and that. That more or less stopped completely without me even noticing and one net result is I've got a small amount of cash building up that I can blow on something frivolous. I thought about it for a while and decided that my frivolous, economy-stimulating item will be a PSP2go.



I wasn't sure if I even wanted one considering the new version made some pretty drastic changes including yanking out the UMD slot. This means that the new system can't play any of the PSP games I currently own. The PSP2go will only run downloaded games that have to be purchased separately from Sony. If you recall a while ago I was all happy about the Patapon sequel but never followed up about it. Well, the decision was made to release it as a digital version only and that pretty much meant that I had to pass on it. I wasn't keen on getting anything without a UMD (game disk) regardless of how interested I was in the title. I guess that will change once the PSP2go arrives and at least I know I'll enjoy playing Patapon 2.

I dunno if a PSP2go will actually cheer me up any but it might fill some of the time I've got and that can only be a good thing.

I just finished watching Nogizaka Haruka No Himitsu (or Haruka Nogizaka's Secret) and I've got that romcom afterglow going. Wouldn't be nice if the world really were like this? Sure, you'd have to turn off your internal snarker as well as disable all irony detection and sarcasm, but it still sounds like it might be nice.

As you can probably deduce from the commentary sofar, NHnH is a happy anime. It's about Haruka and her secret of being a closet otaku. Our male protagonist stumbles over this fact and helps her keep up the subterfuge until she's ready to reveal it to the world. This causes them to start a relationship through the shared secret which eventually blossoms into something more. Throw in a mixed cast of characters including a potential love triangle, a worldly younger sister, a couple of maids armed with weapons (including a freaking chainsaw), a scary overprotective father and a pair of bottle fairies and it's pretty par for the course as far as romantic comedies go. What is sort of unusual about the series, at least from my perspective is Haruka's secret and her, to my perception, extreme reaction to it and desire to keep it secret.

I'm going to segway a bit because I found her reaction odd enough that I actually did a little more digging. It seems odd to me that Otaku would be such a dirty word. English and America have pretty much borrowed it and here it simply means someone who is a big fan of anime, manga, and sometimes Japanese culture in general. You can't turn around twice in geekdom nowadays without bumping into at least a half dozen self-professed otakus. The best English equivalent might be Trekkie, for those who were die-hard star trek geeks back in the day. That said, 'otaku' is apparently not a harmless term for the Japanese. It's apparently considered offensive to call someone an otaku and they can't understand why so maybe gaijin would self-label themselves as such. I imagine it's like going around and happily telling people you like to watch child porn or have a diaper-wearing fetish.

When you think about it, it's hard to understand why the Japanese would have such a negative view of otakus considering how much anime and manga they churn out as a society. Disney is such a small percentage of American animation but our society wouldn't look down upon the numbers of Disney fanatics out there. Even Trekkie (or Trekkers) aren't so much stigmatized nowadays as seen as just another facet of geekdom. As long as you don't go out of control with it by trying to redesign your volkswagon to look like a starship and calling it the Enterprise-F, no one is likely to make a big deal of it. Then again, no trekkie is known to have killed four girls and tried to insert a zoom lens up the vagina of an 8-year old (in case you're curious) so maybe I'm comparing apples and oranges here.

All in all, it just seemed like a strange thing to have kept hidden as a secret and been so worried about others finding out about. After doing the research and looking into the topic some more, I can see how it might not be a good thing to be stuck with the label of otaku in Japan. Maybe that's why this series ended up being such a sleeper hit. There are probably plenty of hidden otakus out there in Japan watching the show and thinking it might be nice to come out of the proverbial anime/manga closet. It was popular enough that they're producing a second season that's airing right now.

On a sidenote, Haruka is voiced by Mamiko Noto who also does Nodoka from Mahou Sensei Negima, which I absolutely love and is about the only seiyu I can identify with ease. Negima is what caused me to miss two flights earlier this summer as I got so engrossed in the manga chapters I lost track of time not once but twice.

I'll admit that I'm a fan of fanservice though not usually because it's titillating. Fanservice is often tied to humor and you pretty much can't not like it if you're into anime rom-coms. There's almost always a couple of accidental gropings or trips and falls during a bath/hot spring episode that leads to one character sprawled on top of another. Since the reaction is usually embarrassment sometimes followed with a megaton punch, I find the whole thing humorous and touchingly sweet. It probably doesn't say much for my sense of humor but it's harmless enough.

That said, I think I just found a series where the fanservice just goes a bit too far. It's almost embarrassing to watch. I thought I'd share one of the scenes since (to my complete lack of surprise) I found it on youtube. The setup is that the girl is from another world and thus, unfamiliar with most of the things on earth including the local food. Here's her introduction to bananas.



I know I'm not going to look at bananas the same way for a while. How about you?

According to wikipedia, Japan currently produces 60% of the animated series in the world right now. This results in some interesting cultural differences that should be obvious if you think about it. For instance, I don't know what percentage of movies are made in Hollywood but I figure it must produce a far larger chunk than you would estimate based on GDP or population. That over-representation has led to our country's fixation on media celebrity with the assorted magazines and websites and award shows that come with it. Well, in Japan a similar situation exists when it comes to anime. There, the manga authors and animators and anime directors receive more popularity, recognition, and fame than the equivalent here in the states.

One other difference is the popularity of seiyū, or Japanese voice actors. Not only are they lauded for their roles but seiyū end up being pop stars more often then not, doing voices for anime and also recording songs and putting out CDs. There are magazines devoted to them and fans follow their careers much like you would have fans of Julia Roberts or whatever Hollywood star.

As I've watched more anime lately, I've tried to make a real attempt to recognize seiyū from one role to another. It's harder than it sounds, a lot harder. For one thing, they're often doing a slightly difference voice to fit whatever character they're playing and secondly, it's all in a language I don't understand to begin with. You might be able to pick Sean Connery's voice out in almost every movie role he stars in but imagine trying to figure out if it's Sean Connery when he's speaking Hungarian and trying to do a voice which sounds like a 10 year old girl. Not so cut and dry then.

That said, I'm always unreasonably proud when I manage to sort one out without having to resort to wikipedia. I know it's probably a strange thing to be happy about but you go with what you got. I wonder if this sort of fixation on trivialities is just one step on the path of good intentions to being an otaku. Before you know it I'll probably be collecting little anime figurines and talking to them at night.

One of the things that I've done over the past week to fill the time opened up by quitting RoE is that I've started to watch a large amount of anime. There were plenty of series that I always meant to get around to and since I had nothing to do with all the spare time but brood, I decided to work my way through the backlog.

My relationship with anime in general has always been a bit haphazard and odd. For many years, I think I liked the idea of anime more than anime itself. When in college and grad school, I amassed a ridiculous collection of the stuff, burned onto literally thousands of cd's and yet only watched maybe 4-5% of what I owned. It was as if the collecting the potential enjoyment of watching it was actually better than sitting down and watching the episodes. I think part of that reason is that anime covers such a wide variety of genres and levels of quality compared to animated tv shows in the US. It really is often hit or miss and descriptions or ratings online can be incredibly deceptive and unhelpful in predicting whether you'll like a series.

Anyway, one series I just finished watching recently was FullMetal Alchemist. I had been aware of the franchise for a while, having seen the multitude of product tie-ins for the show targeted towards kids like CCGs and various toys. That perception that it was marketed towards a younger audience produced a ridiculous level of mood whiplash. You think it's going to be something cheery for kids and it begins with a blood mutilation scene followed by the failed resurrection of the kids' dead mother leading to glistening, pulsating exposed organs and a cadaverous death rictus and open mouthed scream by the zombie corpse. Then right after that it becomes all happy and cheerful again until some happy little girl gets melded together with her dog into a chimeric abomination by her father and then has her entire body exploded into a bloody smear on an alley wall. Fucked up doesn't even begin to describe it.

For all that, Fullmetal Alchemist provokes not only rising gorge but thought. The entire series is about two brothers and their experiences with alchemy, which has developed on their world instead of science. Everything is driven by the principle of equivalent exchange. You can pretty much change one thing into anything else as long as they're of the same mass and have similar properties. As one of the brothers puts it in the voice-over intro:

People cannot gain anything without sacrificing something. You must present something of equal value to gain something. That is the principle of equivalent exchange in alchemy. We believed that was the truth of the world when we were young.

Their first indication that there might be something more to the equation is when they try to resurrect their dead mother using all the pieces of a human body including water and carbon and all the other elemental bits and pieces of which a physical body is made of. This ends in bloody failure, costing one brother an arm and a leg and the other his entire body. The rest of the series entails their quest to try to recover what they've lost.

If you think about it, the whole idea of equivalent exchange is even around today and we teach it to our children. How many times are kids told that outcomes are based on effort and that what you put into something determines what you get out of it? It's a way to make the world seem logical and rational. Work hard and good things happen. Do good and good things will come to you. It's pretty much the entire idea of a more direct and immediate form of karma.

Of course, what all kids eventually learn is that the world isn't fair and that not only do you sometimes get something for nothing but very often you get nothing for something. In the anime, this inequity can be powered by the philosopher's stone, an artifact which allows you to bypass the need for equivalent exchange and will basically grand wishes for free. This is what the brothers end up seeking in order to get back the assorted body parts they lost.

The Philosopher's Stone. He who obtains it is exempt from the principle of Equivlent Trade, And Does not have to Sacrifice anything to obtain something. We sought after it, and we found it.

And of course, nothing is ever simple and there is no free lunch. Maybe they should have seen it coming but it becomes one of those endless recursions like what happens when people ask if God made the universe, then who made God? If the philosopher's stone allows you to get something for nothing, then what would you need to get a philosopher's stone? The answer in this case is mass murder and the collection of souls. You don't really get something for nothing. The philosopher's stone is like a debit card where someone's already deposited a large amount of funds by murdering a few thousand people. You can then make withdrawals on that balance and it seems miraculous and free. As you might imagine the anime manages to get even darker after this particular happy fact is discovered.

All in all, I liked FMA, though there were definitely parts of it I found disturbing. I'm pretty sure it's really not suitable for kids given the sheer amount of Nightmare Fuel. Those grabby, big-eyed tarbabies from beyond the gate which detach limbs is something I won't be forgetting anytime soon. For all the blood and guts and insanity though, at the core the story is about the bond between two brothers. The sad part is you get a real Gift of the Magi feel from it as each tries to sacrifice for what they believe the other wants most when what each really wants most is what they think the other wants most.

I don't think I've said it explicitly but I've quite playing Realm of Empires. It's sort of sad really since I devoted insane amounts of time to it over the past 5 months or so. I actually started later in the realm than most people by 3-4 weeks and still managed to crawl my way up to the front page's leaderboard. I was already starting to feel a little burnt out in the weeks before I quit but what really made the decision for me was the war that erupted. Half of the top 10 clans all decided to attack at once and it was ridiculous and excessive. I spent around a day and a half with no sleep, trying desperately to stay awake and fend off thousands of attacks. It led to the equivalent of a small panic attack and I was twitching like a 2-pack a day smoker gone cold turkey. I just couldn't handle the whole thing anymore. I don't deal with stress all that well to begin with and that sort of situation of needing to be constantly vigilant and being attacked by a dozen different people caused a BSoD. It's kinda sad that a facebook game could even cause that sort of reaction but it was something that I had tried to fill the emptiness of my life with for a while. It was a way of reaching out and making some connections again.

I haven't thought about it much but I've probably become more emotionally fragile over the years. Well, not fragile as much as brittle. Sharper, but whack it the wrong way and it all crumbles into jagged shards. I guess that shouldn't be surprising really if you think about it. I've slowly lost most of the things that most people base their self-image, self-esteem, and emotional strength on. If it weren't for my family, I don't think I would have a single emotional pillar left to me. Even there, things aren't all clear skies. My family is hardly demonstrative in affection and I still have that fear that pity will turn to contempt.

One thing that leaving RoE has given me is time, and that's not necessarily a good thing. Time right now is just an opportunity to brood. I try to find new things to fill the empty space but it's hard not to see it all as ashes.

So far, signs still point to improvement from the Humira injections. I've started to take the oxycontin sporadically or even not at all and there haven't been any problems so far. You'd think this would be a happy occurrence but not only am I not feeling very enthused about it, it actually brings a lot of new worries and uncertainties.

I also managed to confirm that the Humira injects really does sting like crazy and the first time wasn't simply a fluke. I finally got badgered into administering the second injection yesterday and I spent a good 10 seconds yelling obscenities. Shelley was over and she offered the suggestion that it would probably be less painful if I jabbed myself in the stomach as opposed to the upper thigh. That might very well be true and it's what I've heard from several people who have to do daily injections. The problem is the idea of jabbing myself in the stomach with a needle gives me the willies. If the Humira didn't hurt so badly, I probably could bring myself to try different injection locations. It's harder convincing myself to try a new location when I know it hurts like a son of a bitch. After all, it could be even worse elsewhere.

All in all, I've got enough 'scripts for 2 more months of Humira (4 injections total). It'll be interesting to see if there's continued improvement and what that will mean for my life overall. It's hard not to see things as a zero sum game and that for something to get better, you can rest assured there's going to be a compensatory worsening elsewhere.

A couple days ago my car was taken off to the big junkyard in the sky. It had been having problems for some time and if I look at it rationally, it really wasn't worth fixing. That said, it's the car I've had the longest and I'm going to miss it. It started out as Shelley's car back in the day when I was still driving the Altima in Chicago. My mom felt, perhaps justifiably, that with my track record of ramming into things, I was better off with a nice solid American car. She made Shelley trade with me around a year in and ever since I've driven the Taurus. It's been with me through quite a few back and forth treks over the years to and from gaming conventions and back and forth between Chicago and NJ when I was in grad school.

I've never been very attached to automobiles in general. I wasn't one of those kids who went through highschool reading books about cars and obsessing over various stats like horsepower and torque. For me, a car was always a means of getting from place to place and I didn't care about the trappings. That said, the one thing I will really miss about the Taurus is that it was comfortable to sit in. That's incredibly rare given my issues and over the years I've run into many cars that are just downright awful as far as that goes. Not to mention my head also didn't brush the ceiling in the Taurus which also seems to be an unusual trait. I feel like half the sedans out there are designed for midgets and I've actually had to tilt my head to the side to fit into the driver's seat for a few.

In the end, things just started to break down with the car. It gobbled oil like you wouldn't believe, seems to have started overheating, the battery recently died and just as we got all the crap out of it in preparation for the tow truck, the trunk release broke. Maddie was over when a couple of guys with a flatbed came for the car and she seemed sad to see it go. She recognizes the car as being mine. I was told she has a little black matchbox car at home and she'll often point out that it's uncle's car. When they were driving the car away, she dragged my dad down the street, wanting to follow and get the car back. Oh well. In the end, it's for the best that we donated it to Alzheimer's research. I'm not sure if someone will find it worthwhile to fix but at least they can chop it up for the parts and there will be some benefit. Still, it feels like the end of an era.

Connie's husband Jeff has been out of town on business for the past couple of days and so my Mom stayed over at her place last night to help out with the kids. Today, that meant that the entire caravan stopped over here along with my uncle and grandma. I haven't spent so much time with Maddie and Will in a long time. Maddie and I even took a walk partway around the neighborhood, which is probably more of an accomplishment for me than her nowadays. I can't remember the last time I simply walked around. My life seems to consist of no-activity for long periods of time with frenzied periods of action usually involving Gencon or something similar. On your average day the only people I beat in activity level are the comatose.

All in all, I'm still feeling pretty down. It's hard not to give in to despair once you board the emotional death spiral. Every regret just piles upon the next and it's hard to see daylight. I was telling Connie today that my new meds seem to be having a positive effect. I was prescribed Humira, which is another tumor-A blocker medication much like Enbrel, which hasn't done diddily squat for me. The Humira also comes in an auto-injector pen but only needs to be taken once every two weeks and hurts like crazy compared to the Enbrel. I've only had one shot so far but I think it might actually be having a positive effect. It's hard to tell since my symptoms are so cyclical with unexplained up's and down's but medically speaking I've had a good 3-4 day run. It all started just as I hit my emotional tailspin so I was telling Connie that either the Humira is working, I've just hit a good patch, or for some reason anxiety, depression, and despair are some sort of unholy trinity which results in medical cures.

Connie's response was pretty flippant, saying that I had nothing to be depressed about and that she did seeing as she actually has to go back to work next week. It made me think for a bit about just how much I'll never have. A family of my own, a real career, a life. For all intents and purposes, a lot of that is just out of reach despite what some happy-go-lucky jerkface will likely like claim while singing about happy bluebirds and how anything can happen. If you feel any urging at all to tell me that all dreams could still come true, I suggest you quash it because as well-meaning as it is it'll only stoke rage and make me want to punch you in the face. I know what the score is and I gave up on dreams a long time ago.

There's a reason I don't share many thoughts and feelings with my family about the way things are. I know that there's pity and that's sometimes hard enough to take but what I fear is that there is also contempt there. No one ever says anything about it and maybe it's all in my head but it's hard not to see it lurking. Why wouldn't they be contemptuous when I feel it so strongly myself.

I ran across an article a few days ago that I found sort of interesting. It turns out that someone decided to plot on a map of the United States every single McDonalds. Here's the result:



Pretty spiffy, eh? It gives me a sort of hands across America feel. Based on the information used to make the map, they were also able to figure out that there is nowhere in this country you can get more than a little over 100 miles from a McDonalds. Or as they put it:

The McDonald’s location map above shows that within the United States, McDonald’s really is everywhere, if one defines “everywhere” as “within 107 miles of anywhere” (or 145 miles by car).

While that's some pretty incredible saturation given how large this country is, it still leaves some pretty extensive dead areas out in the Mountain West. I can't even imagine needing to drive 145 miles to find a McDonalds. Living here in the middle of suburb NJ, I've always felt that if I can find it within 10 miles of where I live, it doesn't exist.

In case you were wondering, the subject line comes from an old McDonalds promotion from when I was a kid. It was a menu song of everything McDonalds served and I still remember how to promote the song they put a little tiny record in every single sunday paper. I know that most of you can't even imagine that because I find it hard to imagine it and I lived through it. By the time this came out I was 12-13 years old and I had never seen a functioning record player other than in music class in elementary school. I remember holding the little record in my hands and wondering what the heck to do with it.

Despite not having a record player, I still remember making an effort to memorize the song and to this day I can still get part way through it up to 'Big big breakfast' anyway. Thanks to youtube, that closet of discarded media clutter, it looks like someone found and uploaded a full copy of it complete with lyrics. It made me feel pretty nostalgic.

Since I'm feeling down, I figured I might as well do something tedious since it's unlikely to make me any more miserable. I finally got around to uploading some of the pictures that I took while in Maine with the family. I figured I'd share a few of them here and caption them. The complete set is on facebook if you're interested in seeing them all.
( Cut for pictures )

I've been feeling pretty awful lately. It's really no surprise that my life in general has been backsliding for a number of years. Ever since disability became a necessity, I more or less gave up, though it's been a steady decline rather than a rapid one. At first I still had something close to a life but bit by bit it's all rotted and blown away. For the most part, I've managed to avoid any self-reflection. I've kept myself busy with trivialities. I've read, I've listened to audiobooks, I've spent innumerable hours playing ridiculous facebook games and I've invested my time and energy in all those so I didn't have to look at the emptiness. What it comes down to in the end is that when looking in the mirror I see a wasted life. What is that quote that slips my mind at the moment? Something like great potential to no great purpose? Everything tastes like ashes.

I just got back from casting what may have been my first ever in-person vote. I realized this only upon entering the voting booth and being completely confused by the setup I saw before me. I had brought along the Flip Mino with me and I had planned to film a running commentary during the voting process but I became flustered when I realized I had no clue what I was supposed to do. I had sort of expected punch-cards or maybe even a little paper ballot of some sort. What I was not expecting were the electronics complete with glowing X's. After glancing around in bafflement, I found a paragraph of instructions, put away the flip, and read them through to figure out what I was supposed to do. It turns out that the changes to make voting idiot-proof was what was giving me the slip. All you had to do was actually push the name of the person you wanted to vote for an a little glowing X would appear under their name. When you finished pushing all the options you wanted, you hit a big glowing button that reminded me of those on a slot machine and poof, you're done. I hadn't been expecting something so incredibly user friendly that it threw me when I didn't find a pen or a stylus or anything of the sort.

Anyway, I'm happy to say that I did my small part in kicking Corzine in the political balls. I only hope he looses the election and then is immediately devoured by dingos. I have seldom run across a politician I loathe more. I want to see him fail and die in howling agony and even that's probably too good for the sonofabitch. I don't care what people say. It's a lot more satisfying to vote against someone than to vote for someone. Someone you vote for can probably only let you down in the end. Casting a vote against some asshole you loathe is the gift that keeps on giving because chances are good no matter what happens you'll continue to loathe the SoB.

So, no Flip video of me voting but it probably wouldn't have been all that interesting anyway. Now all I have to do is hope that this state is not completely full of gibbering, acephalic asshats and Corzine goes down in flames when the results are announced tonight. No matter what happens I'll at least know that I did my part.

Last friday I finally got around to visiting all those 7-11's looking for the domo-kun promo items. I finally hit paydirt on the third 7-11, finding both the straws and cups still left in the stock. I ran into a couple of problems though. The first problem was I had gotten confused somewhere along the way and I was sure there were 4 different figures on the straws. I was really disappointed that the 7-11 was missing the 4th and I couldn't help but speculate if that one was super rare or had some greater collectible value I hadn't heard of. The second problem was that I had thought that wanderingasian only wanted a set of the straws when he commented in the earlier entry. I ended up buying 2 sets of 3 straws, one for me and one for wanderingasian as well as a set of cups. I was told on the way out that the cups were the same price whether I filled them with slurpees or not so I went back and got a fillup. I then got to experience the pleasure of trying to juggle three full slurpees while trying not to spill anything.

Because I thought there was a missing 4th straw figurine, I proceeded to hit up another 2 7-11's, all of which were out of everything. It wasn't until I got home, dejected in my search, that I looked at the promo picture and found out there were only three to begin with. I ended up heading back out to the one 7-11 that had everything in stock last night and cleaned them out of the straw figurines as well as grabbing 3 cups for wanderingasian.

You might wonder at this point what I'm planning to do with 9 domo figures attached to slurpee straws. Well, I figured there's an off chance that I can sell two of the sets on Ebay. I have no clue how much they'll go for but if I'm lucky I figure I can sell two sets and cover the cost of everything, meaning I would have gotten my set of cups and figures for free. That's the idea anyway. I figure at the worst I should be able to break even since these were limited edition items and are now pretty much OOP. It was pretty lucky that I even found a store with some left.

I was just reading an article about those charged in that California homecoming gang-rape and I had a squishy sort of moment. After all the hype that there were up to 20 bystanders watching the 2 hour attack who basically stood around laughing and taking pictures, I had some racial preconceptions in mind. I just assumed that the accused would all be of the same ethnicity. I could picture a group of black kids doing this with a bunch of black spectators or a group of white kids with bunches of white spectators. Instead, I found that gang-raping has finally matured into a post-racial Benetton ad. How's that for Change we can all believe in?

Peter is the only black suspect named in the case. Smith is white, and the other suspects are Latino.

Every time people of all races join together into multiethnic mob, Barrack Obama gets his wings.

Of course, it always turns out that not everyone get get behind this post-racial goodness and see all the positives. Someone always has to bitch and complain and ruin it for everyone else.

Peter's family accused prosecutors of having racial motives in charging him. Peter "didn't have anything to do with this," his aunt said. "My nephew is scared," she added. "He is the one they've arrested who is black, and if they give my nephew a life sentence, I will sue Richmond. There is no way in hell I will see my nephew blamed in this because he is black."

Of course. God knows the prosecutors couldn't simply allow such a crime to go past without a token Black guy to blame it on. They probably just arrested the White and Hispanic kids to provide cover so they could carry through on their real and nefarious goals to persecute the darkie.

Instead of trying to play the race card, she should be happy her nephew looked past racial boundaries and chose to do his raping with other people regardless of race or creed or skin color. Just imagine what sort of 'I have a dream' speech you could put together based on this incident. I'll spare you my version, but I'm sure you get the picture.

As much as I follow politics, and I follow it obsessively, I don't actually participate in the process much more than tossing the occasional verbal Molotov cocktail onto some forum or blog. I'm not a policy wonk, caring little for the intricacies of various bills or laws, and I tend to view politics more like someone reading the box-scores of a baseball game. I like to see how many runs were scored, who made the unforced error that lost the game, and cheering on my team to victory. This is not to say that I don't think that there's no point to the game other than who wins but I think I'm jaded enough that the greatest joy in politics is crushing your enemy.

That said, I don't actually vote very often. Partly, it's because I live in Joisey where I seriously doubt my vote matters even if I could stuff a ballot box. I cast an absentee ballot or two when I was in Chicago, but I've never voted since arriving back in the state. I'm going to try my best to make an exception next week when I will actually venture out and cast a ballot for Chris Christie for governor. I find it pretty appalling that my vote might even be necessary and that there are actually enough morons in this state who want to give Corzine another term in office. I haven't heard one good thing about this asshole from anyone and it's only through voter idiocy and his attempt to buy the election that things are this tight. He's ended up spending more than twice what all the other candidates have and has run a pretty disgusting campaign all around. In that, I guess he's just the consummate politician in this state. Corrupt and dirty all rolled into one. Sometimes you can't help but feel that the people of this state deserve what they get when they keep voting these people into office. On the plus side, the way things are going we'll probably see Corzine led away in a perp walk before too long. Something like 3 dozen NJ politicians have been indicted in the past couple of years.

Sometimes I really don't understand why there isn't some sort of test before people are allowed to vote. It seems that we allow some of the most potentially damaging rights go to any moron with less scrutiny than we give to someone buying a pack of cigarettes. There has to be something wrong there.

Sad, sad, sad.

Ages ago (around half a year) I remember posting on facebook about a promotion that 7-11 would be running in the fall. They were basically going to bring Domo-kun slurpees over the US. I had been sort of excited at the time, making a mental note to check out a 7-11 once they arrived. Well, it seems clear that my mental day-planner must've fried sometime between then and now because it completely slipped my mind until yesterday when I saw an article about it.



Now come one. Isn't that the coolest thing you've ever seen? I was planning to go to a 7-11 immediately when I saw that the promotion is already more than halfway over. The chances that I'll actually find a 7-11 at this point which still has this stuff in stock is pretty slim. There are already tons of people on ebay trying to hock the items for ridiculous markups. Since I have to pick up my mom, grandma, uncle, and Shelley at the airport tomorrow, I think I'm going to make a few 7-11 stops and see if I get lucky. I'm not optimistic though given how spiffy the items look. I've decided to blame this on the fact that I never leave the house nowadays and I'd like to believe that in an ideal world where I did, I would have happened to wander into a 7-11 just as they were unpacking everything a month ago.

Oh, and I guess I should also mention that my mom, grandma, uncle, and sister have been in China for the past 2 and a half weeks. I heard second hand through Connie that Shelley has vowed that she's never doing this again. This will actually be her second trip to China with the lot of them and I thought that she had actually enjoyed the first trip to have agreed to the second. It turns out that she felt obligated to go since no one trusts the idea of my mom, grandmother, and uncle wandering a foreign country by themselves, even if they speak the language. She's already stated she's unwilling to do trip #3, and next time someone else will have to bite the bullet. I've already decided that it's going to be Connie because I'll be damned if I'm going to volunteer for something like that.

Back when I was last making regular entries in the LJ, I was sort of obsessed with Naruto. I have no clue if I actually made any entries about Naruto, but I remember rambling off and on on the facebook profile about it. I fondly recall having quasi-philosophical discussion about why ninjas all seem to run like retards. I still remember running into people trying to justify it as a argument for reduced wind resistance.



I think it's far more likely they're just retards.

Anyway, I haven't thought much about Naruto for a few months now, mostly because I caught up with the series and there's nothing I hate more than having to wait around week by week for new episodes of something to appear. It's that impatience that makes it so I don't watch any TV show until it's canceled/over if I can help it. At the time I started watching Naruto, I thought for sure it had long finished since I had heard of it being around for years. Most anime series have a run-life of a couple of seasons tops with most failing to even get that far. Naruto has now been on the air for 14 seasons over 7 years which makes it practically neolithic by comparison.

Anyway, it finally popped into my head that I should check on the show's progress yesterday and my willful obliviousness has net me 20 new episodes. I just have to decide whether that's a big enough chunk to be worth watching or if I should wait and let the backlog grow some more.

Ever see something and just be absolutely baffled that it doesn't turn into porn? You're just certain that any minute someone's going to whip out an oversized sexual organ and bow-chika-wow-wow starts pumping in the background. I imagine that a lot of people get this sensation when the first start watching anime. How could they not? I mean, half of them out there are magical girlfriend series or unwanted harems or all sorts of different impossible premises which seem as one-tracked as the proverbial plumber ringing the doorbell to 'snake her drain' would be for Americans. Maybe it's just a fact that I've seen too much anime now that that particular neuron in my brain no longer lights up. It doesn't matter if an anime is full of half-nekkid cartoon girls all scampering around professing their love for some whackjob, it no longer seems like a situation which leads to wild monkey sex. That being said, every once and a while you run into something beyond the pale, something which you just can't wrap your brain around.

I just downloaded and began watching a new (well, new to me) anime series called Midori No Hibi. It basically translates to Green Days. Midori in this case also happens to be the name of the female lead in the show. The protagonist is your average anime loser guy, in this case a brawler/delinquent/bad egg with the proverbial heart of gold. Because of his habit of constantly getting into fights and basically freaking out all the normal people, girls want nothing to do with him. As the anime begins, he's struck out 20 times in a row and upon getting home, laments that the way things are going he's going to end up marrying his right hand. The next minute, a nekkid green-haired girl appears in place of his right hand and fully attached to his wrist. I shit you not.



Now, I'm not going to try to pretend that I have virgin eyes when it comes to something like this. I have seen animated tentacles, various demented sex demons, so much scat that I wish for the life of me I could scrub from my memory, and about all examples of the varied and often disturbing twisted shit that can come from a Japanese imagination. The difference is all of that was PORN. It didn't have to make sense since half the time it was just catering to some weird sub-fetish whose proponents usually keep it to themselves. I have never seen anything which has so begged to be porn and then, simply, wasn't. It's not like I wanted it to be porn exactly, it's just that it should be porn. I imagine it's along the same lines as what goes through a hippie nutjob's head when they see a Black Republican.

Anyway, for all that I keep expecting the show to turn into porn at any minute, it's not horrible. It's not exactly my cup of tea but I generally have a softspot for these sort of anime rom-coms even if this one is screwier than most. Also, the porn issue aside, it also brings up all sorts of disturbing questions doesn't it? I mean, having a six inched living person attached in place of your right hand must be problematic in a lot of ways. Most of which, come to think of it, would probably be explained by porn.