(no subject)
It's been a while, really. Lots to say, little time of course to say it, so I'll try to be as brief yet complete as possible-
Last tuesday was a special election for California, where I live. And to be honest I was pretty disgusted with the results:
Nothing passed- there were some turkeys, like the last bunch of them but there were some real gems in there: Especially prop 77 which was designed to reassign a polititian's representive district (Currently, districts can be sliced any which way by the people who are running for these districts, so you have really weirdly shaped areas that contain mostly the politian's target market and nothing else- in otherwords, a monopoly.)
Then afterwards, reading the paper on thursday had a few letters where the authors promptly blamed "The Governator" for "foisting" the blame on the average citizen and that these things should have gone through the legistation branch. That just hurt my head. Who the hell is going to vote for screwing themselves out of a sure thing job?
Which gets to my main point on this subject: I'm getting incredibly sick of this polarization of the two parties. Too many people mistake politics for a sporting event- that they have one side to root for and the other side are a bunch of baby eating monsters and should be pounded into the ground. go team. -_-
This last election took a "snapshot" if you will, and the general jist was that the propositions weren't really simple matters, and people don't like Arnold in office. (No, I'm not part of his fan club after he passed that junky bad gaming bill written by that rat Leland Yee, but the point is I didn't care who was backing what if it looked good.) So since he was backing them, they must be really bad! It's quite literally cutting your nose to spite your face. With this kind of thinking, it would have been better if he took the "George Costanza" approach.
In the "Im glad I don't live there" portion of the story, it got pretty bad for San Francisco.
First off, a measure passed banning military recruiters from schools, college campuses and the distribution of data, which Bill O'Reily made some famous harsh comments on his show about and the opposition took their interpretation of his response a little too far saying he was encouraging terrorisim.
No, I don't belong to the military, but I'm proud to know some people who do. I mostly stayed away from recruiters, and they stayed away from me, but I had no problem with them being around. Simply banning them is a sign of pure facisim, closing off an opportunity someone might find appealing.
Second and most importantly, Measure H passed. This is a law that states all handguns are now illegal in the state of San Francisco. (no, that wasn't a typo, and probibly what's the big plan what with some of the stunts the city's governing body is pulling these days) We only need to look at Washington DC or New York for the results... near 20 something years of near draconian gun bans on lawful citizens in those cities have made them havens of crime. With any luck, it'll promptly get overturned quickly before the city goes broke in the sea of lawsuits and the criminal element of the city get really emboldened. I'm planning to visit the city soon so I'm not really looking forward to a bigger chance of being mugged. Parking garage fees already do that job quite well without the worry that you might get shot, and then there's the pawy homeless folk...
I've picked up some new manga books recently: Death Note, Dramacon, Mark of the Succubus and Genshiken.
Death Note is about an ace high school student, Light Yagami, bored about everything around him, until one day he finds a notebook with instructions written in english discribing that any name of a person written in the notebook will die soon after. The book was purposly dropped by a Shinigami (a god of death) who was in the exact same situation as Light was- bored as hell and nothing to occupy his time with. Once Light figures out that the book works as advertised, he decides to become the first arm chair vigilante and sets out on making a new world with a pretty nasty deterrent to crime, and begins knocking off high profile killers and maniacs in all the same method so people know it's not a coincidence. Problem is the worlds governments frown on that as it makes them look like the Springfield Police dept, and so sends out a detective who can solve any crime known only as "L" to bring in the culprit. This begins a very interesting chess match between L and "Kira" (who Light is refered to on the internet) with the Shingami Ryuk just hovering around Light and enjoying the show. Honestly, this could be called the "Reverse TriGun" as Light's view on criminals is the polar opposite of Vash and the story discusses both sides- crime has gone down, but Light tried to kill L strictly for stating his opinion and has become obsessed with making his new world, even coming up with a plan to root out FBI agents in japan that were tailing him and then kill them. Even without Light being a really likable character, there's something about it where we want to see both players moves and how they figure out how to get around each situation. To top it off, the Death Note itself is pretty much plothole proof with all its rules and the rules are used to Lights advantage. A must read for suspense fans.
On the other spectrum, Dramacon is pure fluffy reading about a girl who goes to her first anime con with her artist boyfriend to sell a comic they made, but then begins to fall in love with a brash cosplayer. The first rule of a romance story is to make the main characters LIKABLE and I honestly couldn't find them here. Since the girl is going to meet this new guy, the author figured the best way is to make the current SO quickly become a trog, first by actually trying to sell the comics they made at their artist table and striking conversations with customers who happen to be girls in costume. Of course, she gets mad and runs off because cthulhu forbid actually trying to be friendly to people who might wish to buy your product. Then she gets mad when he is going to a panel and she has to stick around to watch the shop... It finally spirals down to a large spat in their hotel room, and while I've never condoned violence on women and would kick anyones ass that I saw doing something so dispicable, the selfish girl really had something coming to her. (not in the way it happens in the book, but a tire iron to the head would be nice.) Of course the guy acts much worse in the end after being pushed so it makes her past incidents "okay". Seriously, as much as Nekoewen crows about this book, I think and know he could do a trillion times better with people I actually care about than some self centered whiny girl and some sort of cosplaying 1 dimensional gentle "man without a face" (to get that "oh, he's vunerable" feeling.) The art is nice and very quirky, and the concept of setting a story inside of an anime or fan convention is a very appealing idea, but the convention setting works against this story if I'm to have any sympathy for the characters.
Not worth anyones money, and the time could be spent reading fanfics which some would be of equal or higher quality.
Then there's Mark of the Succubus- I picked it up after seeing some coincidental relations with a story I have, but it's thankfully nothing like what I had in mind. It's another romance story, this time about a Succubus training on Earth to earn her license and ending up meeting a daydreaming boy.
While it suffers from a few of the same problems as Dramacon- the biggest culprit being the 1 dimensional psycho S.O. that belongs to one of the main characters, and being rather predictable, I really liked both Maeve (the wided eyed fun loving succubus trainee) and Aiden (the drifting boy who has a silent rebelion against his live-in-my-childs-shoes father), with some points going to Maeve's father figure Incubus teacher, which counter balances the fake best friend of Aiden (who is about as tollerable as Jar Jar and more prying into his love life than even the biggest social spider girl I ever knew in high school) The art has a good blance of mood and feelings, and it's quite obvious that the artist is not a one trick pony. Even with its weak world setting (we never know why she's earning her license, because it's obvious she doesn't need to feed and she becomes suprised when reminded Succubis are supposed to kill people.) and a cliffhanger I could see a mile away, I had fun with it.
Lastly is Genshiken- which is about a club of nerds sitting around reading comics and playing video games while dealing with the outside sources that get in the way of such activities. Currently, I'm at volume 3 and there was an interesting segment where two girls with no interest in hobbies begin discussing the "pitfall" of dating a person who's really into a niche activity- "You have to give them their quality time." I think that's pretty much dead on, and if you were interested in the same things I was, more the merrier, but it's silly to think that another is going to give up what they like because someone else wants to do another activity, and it's equally as frustrating when people fib that they enjoy a certain event or activity just to try to spend more time with another even though both will end up miserable because one's bored as a rock and the other feels guilty about being the only one having fun. It's even more scary when I know many people who are like the characters in the series.
Whew! That's alot! Thanks for reading!
Last tuesday was a special election for California, where I live. And to be honest I was pretty disgusted with the results:
Nothing passed- there were some turkeys, like the last bunch of them but there were some real gems in there: Especially prop 77 which was designed to reassign a polititian's representive district (Currently, districts can be sliced any which way by the people who are running for these districts, so you have really weirdly shaped areas that contain mostly the politian's target market and nothing else- in otherwords, a monopoly.)
Then afterwards, reading the paper on thursday had a few letters where the authors promptly blamed "The Governator" for "foisting" the blame on the average citizen and that these things should have gone through the legistation branch. That just hurt my head. Who the hell is going to vote for screwing themselves out of a sure thing job?
Which gets to my main point on this subject: I'm getting incredibly sick of this polarization of the two parties. Too many people mistake politics for a sporting event- that they have one side to root for and the other side are a bunch of baby eating monsters and should be pounded into the ground. go team. -_-
This last election took a "snapshot" if you will, and the general jist was that the propositions weren't really simple matters, and people don't like Arnold in office. (No, I'm not part of his fan club after he passed that junky bad gaming bill written by that rat Leland Yee, but the point is I didn't care who was backing what if it looked good.) So since he was backing them, they must be really bad! It's quite literally cutting your nose to spite your face. With this kind of thinking, it would have been better if he took the "George Costanza" approach.
In the "Im glad I don't live there" portion of the story, it got pretty bad for San Francisco.
First off, a measure passed banning military recruiters from schools, college campuses and the distribution of data, which Bill O'Reily made some famous harsh comments on his show about and the opposition took their interpretation of his response a little too far saying he was encouraging terrorisim.
No, I don't belong to the military, but I'm proud to know some people who do. I mostly stayed away from recruiters, and they stayed away from me, but I had no problem with them being around. Simply banning them is a sign of pure facisim, closing off an opportunity someone might find appealing.
Second and most importantly, Measure H passed. This is a law that states all handguns are now illegal in the state of San Francisco. (no, that wasn't a typo, and probibly what's the big plan what with some of the stunts the city's governing body is pulling these days) We only need to look at Washington DC or New York for the results... near 20 something years of near draconian gun bans on lawful citizens in those cities have made them havens of crime. With any luck, it'll promptly get overturned quickly before the city goes broke in the sea of lawsuits and the criminal element of the city get really emboldened. I'm planning to visit the city soon so I'm not really looking forward to a bigger chance of being mugged. Parking garage fees already do that job quite well without the worry that you might get shot, and then there's the pawy homeless folk...
I've picked up some new manga books recently: Death Note, Dramacon, Mark of the Succubus and Genshiken.
Death Note is about an ace high school student, Light Yagami, bored about everything around him, until one day he finds a notebook with instructions written in english discribing that any name of a person written in the notebook will die soon after. The book was purposly dropped by a Shinigami (a god of death) who was in the exact same situation as Light was- bored as hell and nothing to occupy his time with. Once Light figures out that the book works as advertised, he decides to become the first arm chair vigilante and sets out on making a new world with a pretty nasty deterrent to crime, and begins knocking off high profile killers and maniacs in all the same method so people know it's not a coincidence. Problem is the worlds governments frown on that as it makes them look like the Springfield Police dept, and so sends out a detective who can solve any crime known only as "L" to bring in the culprit. This begins a very interesting chess match between L and "Kira" (who Light is refered to on the internet) with the Shingami Ryuk just hovering around Light and enjoying the show. Honestly, this could be called the "Reverse TriGun" as Light's view on criminals is the polar opposite of Vash and the story discusses both sides- crime has gone down, but Light tried to kill L strictly for stating his opinion and has become obsessed with making his new world, even coming up with a plan to root out FBI agents in japan that were tailing him and then kill them. Even without Light being a really likable character, there's something about it where we want to see both players moves and how they figure out how to get around each situation. To top it off, the Death Note itself is pretty much plothole proof with all its rules and the rules are used to Lights advantage. A must read for suspense fans.
On the other spectrum, Dramacon is pure fluffy reading about a girl who goes to her first anime con with her artist boyfriend to sell a comic they made, but then begins to fall in love with a brash cosplayer. The first rule of a romance story is to make the main characters LIKABLE and I honestly couldn't find them here. Since the girl is going to meet this new guy, the author figured the best way is to make the current SO quickly become a trog, first by actually trying to sell the comics they made at their artist table and striking conversations with customers who happen to be girls in costume. Of course, she gets mad and runs off because cthulhu forbid actually trying to be friendly to people who might wish to buy your product. Then she gets mad when he is going to a panel and she has to stick around to watch the shop... It finally spirals down to a large spat in their hotel room, and while I've never condoned violence on women and would kick anyones ass that I saw doing something so dispicable, the selfish girl really had something coming to her. (not in the way it happens in the book, but a tire iron to the head would be nice.) Of course the guy acts much worse in the end after being pushed so it makes her past incidents "okay". Seriously, as much as Nekoewen crows about this book, I think and know he could do a trillion times better with people I actually care about than some self centered whiny girl and some sort of cosplaying 1 dimensional gentle "man without a face" (to get that "oh, he's vunerable" feeling.) The art is nice and very quirky, and the concept of setting a story inside of an anime or fan convention is a very appealing idea, but the convention setting works against this story if I'm to have any sympathy for the characters.
Not worth anyones money, and the time could be spent reading fanfics which some would be of equal or higher quality.
Then there's Mark of the Succubus- I picked it up after seeing some coincidental relations with a story I have, but it's thankfully nothing like what I had in mind. It's another romance story, this time about a Succubus training on Earth to earn her license and ending up meeting a daydreaming boy.
While it suffers from a few of the same problems as Dramacon- the biggest culprit being the 1 dimensional psycho S.O. that belongs to one of the main characters, and being rather predictable, I really liked both Maeve (the wided eyed fun loving succubus trainee) and Aiden (the drifting boy who has a silent rebelion against his live-in-my-childs-shoes father), with some points going to Maeve's father figure Incubus teacher, which counter balances the fake best friend of Aiden (who is about as tollerable as Jar Jar and more prying into his love life than even the biggest social spider girl I ever knew in high school) The art has a good blance of mood and feelings, and it's quite obvious that the artist is not a one trick pony. Even with its weak world setting (we never know why she's earning her license, because it's obvious she doesn't need to feed and she becomes suprised when reminded Succubis are supposed to kill people.) and a cliffhanger I could see a mile away, I had fun with it.
Lastly is Genshiken- which is about a club of nerds sitting around reading comics and playing video games while dealing with the outside sources that get in the way of such activities. Currently, I'm at volume 3 and there was an interesting segment where two girls with no interest in hobbies begin discussing the "pitfall" of dating a person who's really into a niche activity- "You have to give them their quality time." I think that's pretty much dead on, and if you were interested in the same things I was, more the merrier, but it's silly to think that another is going to give up what they like because someone else wants to do another activity, and it's equally as frustrating when people fib that they enjoy a certain event or activity just to try to spend more time with another even though both will end up miserable because one's bored as a rock and the other feels guilty about being the only one having fun. It's even more scary when I know many people who are like the characters in the series.
Whew! That's alot! Thanks for reading!