I just realized that it's been exactly one year since I joined Swagbucks. I don't spend nearly as much time fussing with it as I used to, but it's practically free money even with relatively minimal effort. I was sort of curious how much I'd actually made after all this time so I dug through the account and found that to date, I've picked up $940 in Amazon gift certs. Not bad when you think about it considering all it cost me is some time and God knows I have plenty of that.

Really, the total's actually a bit higher than that since I've still got points left unused yet in the account and orders pending. By the end of the month, I should have another $150 for a grand total of $1,090. That works out to around $91 a month, which seems sort of piddling when you look at it that way, but free money is free money. Honestly, I think what keeps me going with Swagbucks more than anything else is inertia. I know some people online who are members of a half dozen different sites all offering prizes and money in this fashion, but I just can't be bothered to start anything new. Besides, the current payout is good enough really and I can pick it up without any excessive irritation.

I've already decided what I'm going to do with all the Amazon certs I've been saving too. Well, one of two things anyway.

1) My laptop is now 2 years old. It's been great but it's always had various wiring problems from the start. I have a 3-year warranty I bought through Squaretrade which I haven't used, always planning to wait until it was close to expiring before actually sending it in to get the problems fixed. It's not a big deal really and if I did it before then I would be without my laptop for potentially weeks. That said, it's time to think about a replacement and that's where all that Amazon cash will come in handy. I should have enough to buy a really spiffy laptop by the time I need it.

2) A tablet. I always figured I didn't need any more gadgets but I'm seriously thinking about picking up a tablet at some point. I was reading somewhere that the new iPad will have a battery life near 12 hours which is almost unbelievable. It's not like I'll need it for computing, what with the netbook, but it would make for a much better way to view videos when traveling.

The nice thing about Amazon certs are that they're easily convertible to cash, so even if I can't find what I want on the site I can still get what I'm looking for.

So this past Friday I went with Karen to see Damn Yankees at the Papermill. It's actually the last of our 3-show subscription which started with Newsies and progressed through Boeing Boeing. I've never actually seen Damn Yankees before, but it first made an impression upon me back in high school. So in a way, seeing this show has been a very long time coming.

My highschool was pretty small with only 500 students grade 8-12. There was a drama club which put on productions of musicals and plays, but the general consensus was that the results were lackluster at best. In fact, I never attended a single showing of anything and Damn Yankees is the only production I even recall having taken place. That's mostly because of David Kapner. He was a guy in my place who wanted to do the whole drama thing while lacking as far as any of us could tell, any smidgeon of talent or ability. One day, they dragged the entire school into the auditorium so we could see a preview of the production of Damn Yankees. They presented the first song of the show which at one point consisted of the guys singing 'He's out, he's safe, he's out, he's safe...' with the corresponding gestures indicating as such as if they were umpires. Kapner proceeded to sing his part but did the gestures backwards, which my friends and I found immensely amusing and was the source of much mockery over the next few days. For that one reason, Damn Yankees has stuck in my head for the next 15 or so years, though always with a bit of a negative spin on it.



All of that said, the papermill seemed to do the musical justice. I enjoyed it quite a bit though some elements were just not to my tastes. A lot of the older musicals always have choreographed dancing which is usually not my thing. There are clear exceptions like West Side Story where the movements match the music so beautifully you have to love it, but in general, I just don't appreciate dancing much. It wasn't everywhere in Damn Yankees, but numbers like 'Two Lost Souls' did have me twiddling my thumbs a bit.

It's also interesting just how much of the music was familiar to me, though I wouldn't have known exactly where it had come from before seeing the show. A musical like Damn Yankees has had 50 years to percolate into the general consciousness and I have no clue now whether I've heard the songs on radio, tv, or wherever.

In the end, what's compelling about Damn Yankees is that it's a love story. Not the start of love with its passion and excitement, but endearing and enduring. It reminded me of that silent montage from the beginning of Up in a way. The message that we never really know what we have until we lose it really does ring true and it was a beautiful way to express it. It makes me wonder if this was a sentiment that was especially fitting for the 1950's. After all, this was a generation of people who had lived through WWII and seen ridiculously rapid advancement in their early lives. The sky must have seemed to be the limit back then, and I wonder how many of them as they started their later life wondered if they had somehow missed the bus.

I should relate one other little interesting tidbit about that night. As Karen and I exited the playhouse, I heard something incredibly daft. A guy in his mid 20's stops this girl who's about the same age and says to her something to the effect of, 'Excuse me, you look a lot like this girl I used to know who stopped speaking to me. I was wondering if you're her.' She gave him this bewildered look and the professed not to be the girl in question at which point he proceeded to elaborate a bit on how the girl in question cut him off. Maybe this is the naught's version of 'Hey, you look familiar, don't I know you from somewhere' pickup line? 'Hey, you look familiar, don't you have a restraining order against me?' I thought it was hilarious and Karen was sort of miffed she missed the exchange.

When I related the exchange to Connie, her response was that of course there was something wrong with him. At his age, he's out seeing a musical the night before St Patrick's day. Of course, I realized immediately that I also get tagged with that brush. Oh well.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Japan Touhoku earthquake and tsunami. I remember seeing posts about it on facebook as it was happening and searching around online until I could find a webfeed of CNN to get the latest info. It's hard to forget just how crazy some of the pictures coming out of Japan during and afterward were. Really though, what has stuck with me more than anything about the event is how quickly the world forgets and how little we care once the media glare shifts away. There's nothing malevolent about this fact. It's just human nature. Unless it impacts us directly, we're captivated for a moment and then it just floats off into the breeze as someone else's problem.

What it really comes down to is that our monekysphere just can't accommodate things that happen to people in far off lands. Hell, it can barely accommodate what happens in the next town over. In case you have no freaking clue what I'm talking about with the monkeysphere, you really should click the link and give it a read. I stumbled across it a couple months ago and it pretty much hits the issue right on the nose as to a key facet of human nature and why we'll never fix problems like The Tragedy of the Commons.

I was listening to a NPR segment earlier today talking about the aftermath of the Touhoku earthquake in Japan, mainly focusing on the fallout (ha ha) over the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown. Japan gets a huge proportion of its electrical energy from nuclear power, generating almost 50,000 Megawatts a year or 30% of its total usage. Ever since the meltdown, the public has turned on nuclear power in a big way. All of a sudden we're back to the no nukes rallies of the 60's and it's going to have drastic effects upon the rest of the world if the movement grows. The NPR host was saying that if Japan switched from nuclear back to traditional methods of generating electricity through natural gas, it would increase the amount currently consumed by the world market by 20%. The corresponding spike in energy prices would be tremendous and God only knows the repercussions. It's just another example of the monkeysphere and general human ignorance. Even if you say that nuclear is dangerous you have to consider this is the worst 'disaster' since Chernobyl and that was 25 years ago. The amount of good nuclear power has brought over that timespan so immensely dwarfs the downside that it's almost not worth measuring. If global warming alarmists are to be believed, then burning that natural gas or whatever to generate electricity is inevitably dooming us all anyway, but the specter of nuclear Armageddon is just something you can't wipe away with facts or logic.



Anyway, back to the earthquake and tsunami. I found this spiffy picture on wiki which documents the height that the tsunami reached at various points around Japan that day. At its highest, it was a 30 foot wave which basically scrubbed the land clean like a huge celestial mop. They say the final death toll is around 16,000 with another 3,000 missing an unaccounted for. I think after a year it's pretty safe to say they're not going to turn up with an amazing story about how they were swept to see on a floating door and took this long to make it back home.

What's really amazing if you think about it is that there is probably no country on earth which could have been better prepared to take an earthquake of this size and then the tsunami. Japanese architecture has required quake proofing for decades and as a island-country, they're generally used to the presence and danger of tsunamis. Even then, the devastation was immense. I'm willing to bet the US wouldn't fair nearly as well if a 9.0 earthquake popped up off the coast of Los Angeles and then hit it with a 30 foot wave. What might be the most amazing story in the end is just how little damage there was compared to what could have been and how little loss of life there was given the circumstances. Of course, what if's and it could have been worse's, aren't exactly something human beings are good at really comprehending either.

So, as I first reported a couple weeks back, I'm still in the midst of watching One Piece. In fact, I've watched so much One Piece I think it's been dribbling out my ears when I sleep. It was a huge mountain of episodes but I've steadily chipped away at it and am currently in the middle of Episode 463. I could actually count back and see how many episodes per day I've averaged, but the result would probably make me want to weep. I have skipped over the clearly filler episodes, figuring I'll get back to them one day, and have doggedly followed the plot where it's led.

So how is it? It's not bad at all for a shounen series. I'm still not seeing what accounts for its ridiculously high popularity, but it's clearly improved greatly ever since the Water 7 arc. Those first 200 episodes I watched once upon a time made me want to stab out my eyes with sporks. It was probably just as bad as the last hundred episodes of Naruto before Shippuden where it was nothing but filler hell.

All of that said, there is something that is starting to bug me a little bit. The entire premise of One Piece is that almost every major character is either a Pirate or a Marine and the major plots all involve the conflicts between the two groups and amongst pirates themselves. While there are 'good' and 'bad' characters in each group, it seems that the general idea of pirate gets a huge whitewash. Now, obviously the main characters never do something so heinous as to kill innocent people or loot and plunder (from those who can't afford it/don't deserve it), but this clearly isn't the case with all the other pirates. Even the ones we're supposed to view as the 'good guys' have behaved, well, like pirates though mostly off-screen. I'm starting to find that sort of disturbing and it starts to seem like relativistic morality and Karma Houdini's. The main characters always go out of their way to see no civilians/innocents get hurt, and they don't even kill bad guys to boot. Yet they seem to take the fact that many of their companions have certainly sunk ships and murdered hundreds if not thousands.

Part of this is just human nature I guess. There's absolutely nothing we won't romanticize once we get a little temporal distance from it and the actual horrors start to scab over. You can take actual historical examples, like the literal pirates of olde who were usually murderous rat bastards, or even fictional ones. Sparkling vampires, anyone? The weird difference is that if this were an American story told in cartoons or comic books, they would simply scrub the moral black and grey out of it. It's not like we haven't had pirate cartoons before but you never see pirates kill and even the big bad only tends to steal from people rather than running them through. In One Piece though, it's been alluded to many times that various pirates have killed entire crews on ships let it's not like they ever really get called on it. I mean, there's only so far you can go overlooking the sins of a person because they're your friend or ally. Well....the whole Stalin thing in WWII just popped into my head so maybe not.

Either way, it just seems whacky to me to have main characters who are so extremely goody-goody not take note that they might be sailing through a crapsack world. True, the crapsack is usually off camera, but surely they must hear about the crimes and horrors and yet, they never seem to have any doubts that the pirate life is spiffy. Frankly, it's not even like they're pirates as much as just adventurers. I guess the word pirate just doesn't mean what it used to.

*sigh*

I came to manga late, relatively speaking. Even after I started watching anime and enjoying it, it was years before I even gave any thought to the media from which so many of those animated stories were derived. If I ever did think of manga, it was usually with some level of disdain. Most of this comes from my general distaste for comic books during my childhood. It's not like I ran into comics often as a kid, even now I can only remember a few instances including a copy of GI-Joe, but the entire idea repelled me. I loved books and would devour them at a ridiculous rate. That's one reason I think I drifted toward fantasy where authors tended to be prolific and even the shortest story ran as a trilogy. With certain authors like Piers Anthony, even his trilogies ended up having up to a dozen books in the end.

A comic book, by comparison, provided so little content and then broke what little there was into chunks you had to wait for and then purchase again was anathema to me. Not to mention I figured the pictures were just wasteful and took up way too much space. I could very easily imagine the images of a story in my head and didn't need someone sketching them out for me. It frankly seemed like comics were the domain of the generally illiterate or people who needed to be amused by pretty pictures. Yeah, perhaps it was harsh and even undeserving, but that's what I believed through most of my life. It's for that reason that I never even gave comic books a second look when the whole graphic novel phenomena appeared and new works became geared more toward adults rather than kids.

Because of all of that baggage, I didn't given manga a try until a few years ago, and even then there were plenty of false starts. Rather than just picking a random title, I tried to read manga of anime series I already enjoyed. That ended up being problematic since the overlap was often total. When an American company might make a tv show or movie adaptation from a comic or book, you know they are going to change a shitload of things. In fact, it's often a miracle if the final product even slightly resembles the original which leads to a lot of fan angst and gnashing of teeth. I assumed the same thing would be true of anime made from manga. I assumed wrong. I have no clue if it's tradition or lack of imagination or the strictness of buying the rights to a work, but the overlap between an anime and the manga it is created from is almost total in most cases. If you've seen the anime, then for all intents and purposes, you've read the manga. There might be small snippets that were left out or storylines that were combined, but in general we're talking about a handful of pages out of perhaps volumes and volumes of manga.

This repetition made it hard for me to get into manga since it was a complete retread and in many cases I had just finished watching the damn anime. What ended up saving me in a way is the infamous Gecko Ending. While most anime lasts a season or two, your average successful manga goes on for _years_ if not _decades_. I mentioned this amazing longevity when I wrote an entry about One Piece which is still going strong after 12 years. Because of this, anime adaptations often have to have a Gecko Ending, meaning an anime-exclusive end to the storyline because the actual storyline is still going on in the manga. Well, if you really like an anime and get to the end, it sort of makes you wonder what's really supposed to happen, right? That's what hooked me in the end.

While I started to read manga more often, what really hooked me and converted me was Mahou Sensei Negima by Ken Akamatsu. Ken had authored the manga to my favorite anime for years, Love Hina so it was a natural fit that I would give the Negima anime a whirl. When I really enjoyed it and the series ended, I naturally went to see what ended up happening in the manga to all the characters and how the plot continued.



Amazing does not even begin to describe it.

It turns out that Negima was a prime example of author jujitsu on an epic scale. When Love Hina ended, Ken Akamatsu's publishers wanted him to write and draw another similar manga, namely a harem story. A single guy and a bevy of attractive girls who all swarm him for no particular reason. Ken on the otherhand really had it in his mind to do a shounen battle manga but as you can see from the image of the characters from Negima above, seemed to give in. It wasn't just a harem series. It was a freaking harem series turned up to 11. We didn't have 3 or 4 competing girls but 31 in a class (though to be fair not every single one was in the competition) and it was like he created the characters going through some sort of massive fetish/moe checklist.

• Loli *check*
  
• Tsundere *check*
  
• Megane *check*
  
• Cheerleader *check*
  
• Gymnast *check*
  
• Ojou-sama *check*
  
• Robot girl *check*
  
• Ghost girl *check*
  
• Ninja girl *check*
  
• Kung-fu girl *check*
  
• Twins *check*
  
• and so on, and so on, and so on....

That wasn't the true genius part, though I imagine plenty of people burst a nutbladder thinking it was. The genius is that the manga eventually evolved into a freaking shounen battle story rather than a harem one. It seems absolutely ridiculous that you could turned a story about a 10 year old Welsh teacher at a junior high school for girls who almost all want to Marshmallow Hell him to death and somehow morph it into the ultimate red-blooded, gun-ho, ass-kicking battle story, but he managed to do it.

The story was amazing and engrossing as all hell. In fact, I was reading the manga at the airport while waiting for a flight from Chicago to Indianapolis for Gencon a couple years ago and _missed two flights_. I had never missed a single flight in my life up to that point but the manga so captivated me that I missed two separate gate change announcements (not to mention not realizing that the boarding area I was in had turned into a ghost town). The festival arc and the beginning of the magical world arc were just that good.

Of course, from reading the title to this entry, you know that I wouldn't be writing this if there were any joy in mudville. Negima is over. It ended in just about the worst way possible with huge storylines left unresolved, frankly none of the main storylines had actually been resolved, and just plopped like a dead fish out of nowhere. No one really saw it coming and the nerd rage was pretty virulent. Conspiracy theories abounded as to why an ending would come out nowhere like this with a single shocking message that there were just four chapters left. 4 chapters to resolve plot points that couldn't be unraveled with justice if there were 4 VOLUMES left, much less chapters.

I won't go into the details because frankly, even if someone is reading this I'll wager dollars to doughnuts you don't care about them. The nerdrage hit nearly epic proportions when the following imagine was leaked ahead of the 4th chapter from the last.



Oddly, the idea that the hero dropped dead didn't actually bother me that much. As I reflected on things, it seemed a kinda poignant way to go. Nothing comes without sacrifice and if you want to save the world, what are you willing to give in exchange. Maybe it's just me being maudlin and a sign that I'm even more of a pessimist in my old age. I thought there would actually be a lot of meaning in an end like that where all the characters (with the exception of the one who time-skipped forward to wake up 130 years later with all of her friends dead) lived their lives and then passed on, without the readers ever knowing the details. What I feared more was some sort of saccharine deus ex machina which would just fix everything and have it all be happy joy joy without pain or loss or a price.

Guess what happened in the next chapter?

*sigh* I guess I can see where Ken Akamatsu is coming from. If he had left it with the death and depression ending, there would probably be otakus burning him in effigy outside of his house. Even as it is, the unwashed and disturbed masses are pretty pissed he won't resolve the whole 'Which Girl Wins?' question, not to mention all the other plots left hanging from the noose. Frankly, the whole thing is just sort of depressing all around.

Still....no matter how sad and unsatisfying it ended up, I can still remember that day at Midway Airport when I was crouched by that electrical socket with my laptop, feverishly reading and lost in a world of magic.

Dreamation is over. Things went pretty much as expected though in general I played less games than normal. I spent some of the slots just vegetating whereas in the past I would have found something to get in on. That said, I still probably played in around a dozen events and taught a bunch more. I even learned a few new games, which is unusual for me.

In the past I usually just stuck with what I already knew since it caused less stress to my brain. That gets harder and harder as the games vanish from the collective gamer consciousness faster and faster now. It used to be that if you were a game designer/company who put out a good game with good reviews, you could count on it sticking around for at least a couple years in people's playlists. Not anymore. Now, even the best games tend to be mere flash in the pans by comparison, soon booted to the side of the road for newer and flashier models coming down the pipe. I imagine a lot of gamers realize this after a while and are less likely to buy new games when they know that in 6 months time it might be hard to find anyone willing to play it with them as everyone's already moved on to something else. This won't stop the avid collectors who buy everything new that comes down the line, but those people are far fewer and can't prop up the entire economy. No wonder many parts of the boardgame industry has problems then since it means that there will be less copies sold of each new game and the economies of scale begin to work against you.

Curt Covert of Smirk and Dagger was there and it's always nice to see him. I'm sure I've said it before but Curt is such a nice guy overall. It's also spiffy that I really like his games, especially the new version of Hex Hex. That love of the game also brought me one of the few boardgame injuries I've seen. The new version requires you to try to grab one of a set of wooden sticks in the center of the table at certain points. There is always one less stick than the number of people, and so the scramble for one can be fierce. During one of the exchanges I managed to get a stick but received a fingernail induced stab wound in the center of my palm in the process which immediately began bleeding. When I went to find something to staunch the blood and groused to some other GM's one claimed she thought it was stigmata. Ha. I don't think even God is that hard up yet.

All in all, it was nice to see the people I usually only see at these conventions. The time spent just shooting the breeze is probably more interesting and valuable then the time actually playing games in the end. Which, really, is probably how it should be.

Still reading the blog and it looks like they finally got him. It looks like he lasted a good year and change, which I imagine is probably close to a miracle.

Ultimate Kancho boy had teleported to the other side of the classroom, and with my ass perfectly unguarded he kanchoed me. I had no idea it was coming. I yelped out in surprise, jumping out from behind my teacher. Now, I was exposed to the mob. What happened next I can only describe as a Japanese-Roman orgy of grabbing and poking. I was gang-kanchoed/dick grabbed.

Doesn’t this count as rape in, oh, I don’t know, every other civilized country?

I can’t tell you who got what or what got hit or how many times. I don’t know how many of you have been in a position where 6-7 Japanese boys are grabbing your dick and sticking fingers up your ass simultaneously (show of hands?), but in that situation, you are only aware that you are being violated. I assume they got me good, but I honestly just don’t know. Maybe my mind is blocking it out, and it’ll take years of intensive therapy and thousands of Kleenex tissues to finally dredge it up again.

I wonder how many incidents there have been where this happens to an American teacher and their first instinct of whipping around with a backhand gets the best of them before they can stop themselves.

Holy cow. I just realized something else. No wonder pedophiles want to be teachers in Japan. It's a twisted world where if the wolf gets the right job the sheep will wander up and literally try to stuff themselves down its throat. The entire idea is just so warped and twisted I think it's sending my brain into vaporlock. It's apparently a job where little boys and girls will spend all day trying to stick their fingers up your ass and grab your dick. I mean...good grief. There are probably American pedos crying themselves to sleep each night, broken by the fact they weren't born in Japan.

On a sidenote, I did think the Naruto references were hilarious. I'm not sure it makes it any better but someone trying to grab your junk while calling out anime attack names probably does make it more hilarious for spectators.

Then again, maybe it's just a cultural clash sort of thing. I mean, if everyone tries to stick their fingers up your butt, after a while it probably doesn't seem strange or have a sexual bent to it.

I got my tea, headed back to my desk, and started reading my book. And that’s it, end of story. If this were America…good Lord, man! There’d be lawsuits, counter-suits, counter-counter-suits even! This shit would be on the evening news! “Tonight on Channel 5, instead of teachers molesting students, we now have students molesting teachers! Can we blame video games for this one? Film at 11.” The old farts on CNN Crossfire would be debating the ramifications! I’d have a book deal at least, “Obliterating The Line: The Azrael Story” or something like that. But no no no, not in Japan! In Japan, this is 5th period. The worst part is, even I stopped caring. The last little shred of American sanity was screaming at me, “Dude, that was fucking weird! That boy ain’t right! Do something!” But the rest of my brain, which is slowly but surely being assimilated by Japanese culture, was saying “Oh, ha ha ha! He tried very hard to grab my big black American penis. I admire his “gambatte!” spirit! Now, I must remember to pick up some tentacle rape animated porn on the way home from work, and see if I can’t grope a few high school girls on the train as I go.”