snarp’s blog

How the hell could you possibly need to release a new edition of a book called “Intercultural Communication in Contexts” after less than three years? Have there been major breakthroughs in the field of human interaction since 2003? I paid fifty bucks for this book (which was complete drivel anyway, it has a 1:10 content-banana pudding ratio) and now I can’t even sell it to anyone.

Next semester I’m serious about the not buying stuff from the school bookstore thing. I’m saying it on the internet so that makes it true.

…

(…there should be a website comparing editions of textbooks somewhere. Angry college students are an important intarweb demographic, Google, I know I’m right about this.)

People on BookMooch - this guy look fishy to you? He’s asked me for what I’m pretty sure is the most expensive book I’ve got up (and I remember that it wasn’t on any wishlists when I posted it), he doesn’t have his last name posted, and he seems to be trading back and forth pretty heavily with this one guy in the UK who also doesn’t give a last name.

Making up a fake foreigner and trading imaginary items seems like the best way to scam points; the Moocher only uses up two, but the Moochee wins three, so you’re getting them for free.

[after a minute]

And another thing, the book in question is a volume of the Akira manga, and there are two different sets of that - the nice big $25 ones from years ago, and the cheap Tokyopop-sized recent ones. He asked some questions about the book in his request, and I think they were meant to confirm which edition it was.

Oh. I just noticed. He supposedly sent three separate shipments to the one British guy over a one-week period. I really don’t think people ship internationally that way, IIII don’t think I want this guy to have my manga.

And pretend UK guy has never requested anything except from California guy. Translation: There is no actual UK address.

me = genius detective

(Edited to make public after a minute because I’ve decided he’s totally guilty and I don’t care who sees his account. And I hate flocking stuff.)

A conversation yesterday:

*heard outside the door*

thegeekgene: …Mom? Does chocolate go bad?

Mom: What do you have, sweetie?… how old is that?

thegeekgene: …London.

*silence*

thegeekgene: Hey, snarp! I have a present for you!

Me: Did you just say, “Does chocolate go bad?” and then “…London”?

thegeekgene: No, no, I got it for you! Mom says it’s okay!

Me: …

Me: *opens door*

thegeekgene: It’s Henry the Eighth and his wives - in chocolate!

(I think she was in London in… April? I don’t even remember.)

Dad: Oh - oh, honey, look - look - is that a Saint, there, is that a Saint Bernard -

Mom: That’s a Welsh Corgi, dear -

Dad: - I know that’s - I know I know I know I know! I’m not a complete idiot!

Me: Dad, did you just let the dogs lick the food off your shirt!?

Dad: …yes.

Popular entertainment is wrong about everything. It’s actually just really depressing and weird when people you didn’t get along with in grade school are on TV for stupid crimes.

(And I’m against the death penalty for whoever eventually murders me.)

And, uhhh… we took the puppy to the vet because there were living things in its waste, and during the two hours we spent in the waiting room with the woman who talked constantly to her Scottie I read an issue of Cat Fancy, and there were all these messed-up ads, and okay just what is this?

I guess it’s for if you’d like to keep a kinkajou in whom the force is strong, but the terms of your lease won’t allow it.

1) New monitor.

2) Haircut (you can’t tell).

3) New clothes of the upper-body variety; still haven’t got new pants, or a suit for job-interviews and stuff.

4) Yet another pile of cheap manga haha there’s a Half-Price Books in Lexington now and they had volumes of Basara for $3.

5) I now own Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods. It was $5. I am in charge of used-book shopping.

6) I put some stuff up on Book Mooch yesterday at around noon, left the house with Mom for a couple hours, and had gotten a request by the time we got home.

7) I think I’m supposed to be doing dishes.

It has been pointed out that my memory of the time thegeekgene fell down and cracked her head open when she was two (and I was six or seven) is at least half made-up. I have two specific memories of this incident. In the first, she trips in front of the fireplace and bangs her head on it, and there’s red stuff on her and people yelling and the like.

In the second, she is being strapped to a round table, with heavy blue bags over her arms and legs to keep her still. The light in the room is an eerie cool blue, and as I watch the table begins to spin, slowly gathering speed. She opens her mouth to scream - and two heavy blue doors slam closed in front of me, truncating the sound with a sickening clang. The hallway is quiet, and lit a bright, searing white.

Mom says that first part totally didn’t happen. thegeekgene’s blood is, of course, yellow, and coagulates instantly upon contact with oxygen, ossifying into powder in under one-point-three seconds.

…

Apparently I wasn’t actually at the hospital with them, since obviously they didn’t need any extra screaming children there. When I heard someone saying later that she’d been X-rayed, and they’d had to hold her down with something like sandbags, I must have just constructed the rest in my head. I assume I took the scene from a TV show or something.

But for years, I seriously believed that this had happened. It’s probably lucky I never needed an X-ray myself until I was a teenager.

The noises thegeekgene’s new puppy makes at night sound like a person talking.

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1) Went to Barenaked Ladies concert with Mom, Dad, and thegeekgene. This is exactly the third concert I’ve been to in my life, if you count Sesame Street on Ice.

I will never again attend a concert without earplugs. I still hear roaring.

Mom says it wasn’t really that loud.

1a) There was a Yelling Shithead (TM) behind us. He was a middle-aged man who was balding and had chosen to grow his hair long to in some way disguise this. He screamed constantly and derided the intelligence of his companions (”‘Mediocre’ - oh, do you know what ‘mediocre’ means?”), whose responses we could not hear. (Or, actually, I’m not totally sure those poor people were actually with him.)

He yelled “Nutshelllll!” at regular intervals throughout the concert. I was pleased that they never played it.

2) Dad owns a t-shirt with the election results printed on it.

3) Okay, I’m going to have to make my family buy a new monitor. This one is going to kill their eyes. I guess it’s been kind of blurry for a while, but it was actually painful for me to read through my friends list just now. Urrrgh.

4) Joseph Beth in Lexington was having a huge manga sale. $2 a volume. I mean, the stuff that this applied to was 90% crap or random high-numbered volumes of series no one wants to buy all of - to give you an idea, I think about a fifth of the selection was comprised of volume 4 of Shaolin Sisters: Reborn and volume 18 of Samurai Deeper Kyo. But I still found eight things I wanted enough to buy, and I didn’t even realize there was a second tableful downstairs until after I’d checked out. ( The haul. )

5) Mom and thegeekgene are watching the Sci-Fi channel.

Mom: “It’s - what are they doing now? Why are they running through a field?”

6) This seriously is hurting my eyes, I’m going go cook something in the properly-equipped kitchen I have access to.

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“- play Risk, and he was all like, “Ohhh, I have to give a talk to Mensa,” and it was like, “You suck, now we don’t have enough people.”"

-

I am going to fall over and die and I will fall very, very hard. On a walrus.

I just accidentally put some pork in my pocket.

Leave me alone.

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

Apparently, Yukito Kishiro is taking some time off the main Last Order plotline to start a series called GUNNM Gaiden/write some side stories? Or something? You’re not helpful today, internet.

I’d actually be kind of okay with that. I feel like Last Order is moving really slow. Over the first seven volumes of the original GUNNM, we had like six plot arcs spanning about fifteen years. That was one of the things I liked so much about it. It was a fighting manga with no filler! No monsters-of-the-day! A new, absurdly melodramatic plotline that completely breaks Alita’s heart almost every volume! This was awesome.

But at seven volumes of Last Order, we’ve only covered a few months of time - the past three volumes have just been a couple of days. And they haven’t really been eventful days, by Kishiro’s usual standards. An eventful day for Alita used to be:

( cut for massive spoilers for first series, minor spoilers for Last Order )

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(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

I’ve been going through the library catalog requesting volume one of random manga. The easiest way to find manga in the catalog is just to do a keyword search for a manga publisher, so this the CMX batch. Also known as the WTF batch. I will now review them. While sleepy.

These are going to be kind of grumpy reviews, by the way.

Musashi #9, Takahashi Miyuki

There exists a secret organization called “Ultimate Blue,” unfortunately and frequently abbreviated “UB”, whose nine super-elite top operatives vigilantly protect the innocent, punish the guilty, and defuse delicate diplomatic situations that could lead to World War III, by means of the delicate diplomatic application of explosives controlled by big remotes with exactly two buttons.

(I feel safe!)

And of these most elite nine operatives, of this most elite secret organization, the most elite of all… is known only by his codename, Musashi #9. And he’s actually a sixteen-year-old girl!

(Spoiler for the end of chapter one and, like, the back cover. I don’t think it really matters, but I’m being nice and hiding it anyway.)

This is your basic shounen manga that knows the names of approximately seventeen thousand guns, and approximately three foreign countries. Each of the chapters in this volume is a self-contained story, and each is basically the same story - rebellious teenagers get inadvertently involved in ridiculous international political intrigue, get rescued by Musashi, and learn valuable life lessons.

Many of which are kind of covertly about Japan’s very important position within the world community, and how you can help, teenagers. This manga gives me nervous Saburo Ienaga flashbacks. It might be, like, federally approved for human consumption or something.

( the spoiler is also behind the darn cut )

Totally Representative Scan: Musashi’s vocabulary = SOPHISTICATED. (has that darn spoiler in it again)

Swan, by Ariyoshi Kyoko

Masumi is a young ballerina who is recruited into the first national ballet school of Japan due to her great natural talent, but is handicapped by being years behind the others in terms of practical experience and by the intense disapproval of her peers who feel that she was admitted due to the favoritism of the Russian dancer Alexei Sergeiev who is so handsome and whose dancing she adores but who is cruel and inconsistent as a teacher and who makes her cry and will she be able to achieve her dreams???

(See, I’ve reviewed these last two in a format intended to evoke their style! I hope that isn’t completely annoying italics.)

( Read more… )

Totally Representative Scan: You were born to be a statistician, Headband Guy.

Pieces of a Spiral, by Tachibana Kaimu

Three very different young men find that their fates are linked by shared experiences in their past lives, and wait-a-second they’re not having sex.

This is one of those manga that is in the closet about being shounen-ai. The characters are hot guys who keep talking about how beautiful the others are, and who keep swearing vows to protect each other and having sad flashbacks while the others look on worriedly and the like - y’know. But there is no chemistry whatsoever between any of them. It’s like they’re just kind of in the same room a lot.

Part of it is probably the art and page design are kind of crap - there are a lot of places where characters who are supposed to be looking at each other instead seem to be looking at a chair, or where an unimportant panel is given too much space and disrupts the flow of a conversation. The pacing is bad enough that you sometimes can’t even tell where the artist is trying to make a joke.

( Read more… )

Totally Representative Scan: Panel four on the second page? That’s supposed to be funny. (Bonus Alternate Subtitle!: “Plot? I tell you, man, plot. All kinds of plot. Plot? Plot.”)

Land of the Blindfolded, Tsukuba Sakura

High school kids with psychic powers have pleasant, boring relationships.

I just read this manga, and I don’t remember anything that happened.

Totally Representative Scan: I, personally, care deeply about Eri and Ezawa’s relationship.

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I’ve figured out what YouTube is for.

The other day I decided that sumi-e was cool to look at, but it was even cooler that they have to do everything right the first time, without going back to touch up. Which I then decided I wanted to see. So I googled “sumi-e video”, and found this guy’s YouTube videos, which were exactly what I was looking for.

It then occurred to me that, if there were people posting videos explaining such abstruse things as “how to properly paint a bird on a maple branch using ink,” there might be instructional videos for other stuff.

Make Rollsushi - Step 1 - Maku

Moshi’s way of making sushi

How to gut a fish

(I didn’t have the sound on for any of these, so don’t blame me if Al and Moshihino are hitting on you.)

But I got grumpy and distracted when I couldn’t find a good video on how to bread something so the stuff sticks when you fry it. So, uh.

Baby Pandas

THEY ARE SLIDING ON A SLIDE, PEOPLE.

And then,

Kefka one hit kill (Final Fantasy VI)

This actually isn’t that impressive - the game lets you get away with stuff like this all over the place - but it’s always oddly cathartic.

Knights of the Round (Ultimate End) (from Final Fantasy 7)

I guess I don’t remember that part of the King Arthur legend.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain about FF6.

Mario speed run

I think this is machine-assisted, but, still.

(Also, the person who posted it clearly didn’t do it himself - real speed-runners go on forever about the strategy involved in a particular run, and who they were influenced by (speed-runners have influences) and angrily anthropomorphizing places that gave them trouble on previous runs. This kid has one sentence, and there’s no punctuation, so maybe it’s not even a sentence. But he seems to be okay with letting equally clueless people think it’s his work.)

“I must admit I question the educational value of Dr. Disaster’s classes.”

(Goddamnit, that asshole’s in the lab again. Maybe if I open the window he’ll fly out.)

To the internet:

I take upon myself the ancient and sacrosanct wanker mantle that is Oppressed And I’ve Got Anecdotes To Prove It.

If you’ve got to make fun of Santorum’s kids in that picture, mark it friends-only or something. This is bad behavior.

Thank you,

me

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1) WAHAHAHA election

2) I got nervous the other day (see: election) and spent something like a third of my paycheck on manga. ( It came today. )

3) Sensei’s giving a talk in a couple hours. Apparently he’s talking about Miyazaki somewhat. I hope he doesn’t switch directly from crazy porn to Miyazaki. I hope he doesn’t say something that makes me start giggling and he gets grumpy at me and takes it out on my research draft.

4) ELECTION

I’m feeling kind of weird and hyper and everything’s-awesome. I hope I don’t hit the bad side of it and die this evening, because I really need to get started on my computer science project.

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I am 21 years old. A legal adult. I can buy plane tickets and view pornographic materials. I have conversations about how I think I sprained a muscle in my wrist doing all that typing. I can’t find my keys.

I ought not “have a tooth coming in.”