snarp’s blog

thegeekgene: Dad bought a minivan, you know.

Me: What - no, he didn’t.

elongated_tito: He did. It’s red.

Me: Mommmm!

Mom: I know -

Me: Weren’t we, as of, like, less than twenty-four hours ago, buying a used Corolla and renting a minivan for a couple days?!

Mom: I don’t - I don’t want to talk about - I am irrational about this! I don’t want to talk about it!

Ohhh yes I knew this had to exist. I think I’m about to order it.

It looks like it’s just one volume. The artist’s name is Kihara Toshie - I’d never heard of her before, but when I googled the name I found some pages grouping her with the 49′ers. This manga will definitely be awesome.

Having been awake for 36 hours finishing a thirty-four-page research paper, what do I do? Do I… sleep twelve hours and eat a bunch of junk food? Or do I… sleep slightly less than six hours, then get up and read two more books on the same topic as the paper, and set about purchasing another?

I slept a very short amount of time last night. I think I had a dream, because this conversation is in my head:

did you bite somebody
only slightly

All in lowercase and without punctuation, too. But they were talking out loud. I don’t know.

This was in my paper that I turned in an hour ago or something.

My life is a long series of headaches and essays about Japanese transvestites that I can’t finish on time. Or maybe I just can’t remember back very far, I don’t know.

I’m at home, alone, because my family is uhhhh… basketball… and oh god this puppy is just dumb. And I have to carry the keyboard around with me because there is only one in the house, but two computers, both of which I need.

Here is a picture of a book with a plan of some sort.

Quick, LiveJournal people - what’s a fairly recent manga where these high-school kids get pulled into another dimension, and one’s a girl with secret powers or something who keeps zoning out and having visions (at least at first), and one’s a dark-brooding type who I guess she’s in a love triangle with, and one’s the blond shouta-con type who’s totally not in the love triangle? This is supposed to pretty popular or something, to the point that it’s probably already licensed but they haven’t got it out yet? (I need a third in my triumvirate of blond shouta-con types with Momiji and Hunny, for part of my gosh-darn paper. I’ve got some others for back-up, but they don’t fit the pattern so perfectly.)

-

Edit 12/21/06 - It was Harukanaru Toki no Naka de.

I just heard a little noise and reached into my pocket. I really hope that my iPod hasn’t been playing “Melt With You” for the past two and a half hours.

Unrelatedly. I will die horribly.

My second BookMooch request to come in. This is by the artist of Petshop of Horrors, and like Petshop of Horrors, it has a simultaneously mysterious-and-silly bishounen character with a ridiculous name, a blonder and more boring bishounen who exists to be startled and confused by the former, a stupid premise, and sociopaths. Unlike Petshop of Horrors, unfortunately, it is not awesome.

Two high school students, the aggressive tomboy Haruka and her timid, confused servant friend Masato have just won a contest with their mystery novel, written under a pen name, and seem to be on the fast track to becoming the hottest new… uh… I just wrote that and it was painful. My lungs did a thing… Haruka and Masato are apparently good.

For Haruka, though, being a mystery writer means solving murders in real life - and real life helpfully provides them for her. However, she finds she has competition as a detective when the capricious and over-dressed Kamen Tantei, or Masked Detective, begins appearing before them, providing the solutions to the crimes, and insisting that they make him their protagonist. He even shows up at the big mystery writer parties (big mystery writer parties?) in costume claiming to be the author of Haruka and Masato’s book. This causes the other writers to decide that their protagonist is a Mary Sue*, and infuriates Haruka.

Okay, does that sound like enough wacky antics to last us a while? Did I mention yet that there are ghosts?

Masato and Kamen Tantei can see dead people. The secret to Kamen Tantei’s success as a detective is his ability to call up the murdered and ask them. This enrages Haruka, who insists that ghosts can’t exist, because “If this was a novel about ghosts, it wouldn’t be a mystery! It would be a horror novel!” And she’s right. This is about the ghosts and the gore.

In Petshop of Horrors, our anti-hero Count D sold people pets that destroyed them psychologically, physically, or both. And though he said he was giving people “what they deserved,” he rarely cared enough about them to make us think he could be trusted to mete out justice. D was a sociopath, but he has nothing on these guys.

Haruka is the worst. When someone she knows is found dead, her first reaction is stars-in-her-eyes thrill at the proximity of a real murder - now she can solve it! Kamen Tantei doesn’t seem to care about anything except impressing people with his clothes and secret knowledge. Presumably he’ll get some kind of character development later, since you can’t hold up this kind of burden of mysteriousness for long, but that’s the situation as of volume one.

By standard manga characterization rules, it seems like Masato should probably be the foil here; the one who cares about the crime that’s been committed, but is too scared and ineffectual to deal with it the way Haruka and Kamen Tantei do. It looks like Akino’s trying to set him up that way. Unfortunately, she doesn’t try very hard. When a girl who had asked him out is found dead, apparently a suicide, he doesn’t cry, and feels guilty for about three pages before dissolving into comic-relief about something.

Actually, no one cries for the girl - the students all try to shove their way into the classroom where she died to get a look, and everyone at the funeral looks like they’re applying for a job. No one’s ever really interested in the murders, and that clashes weirdly both with the fairly-graphic depictions of violence, and with Kamen Tantei’s flowery explanations of the motivations for the crime at the end of each chapter.

Also, there is the plotting. It… gets distracted. The fourth chapter, in particular, looks like she started drawing it without knowing where it was going - the last three pages have literally no relation to the rest of the story. Her deadline must have attacked her.

My I-have-to-go-to-work-now conclusion: I am glad that I did not pay for this.

* I wish I knew what the original Japanese phrase was there…

It seems that Sensei really does think of me when he thinks “Hitler manga.” I finally got the pile of manga I loaned him back today, and he added in a volume of Adolf in Japanese. He made it clear to me that he has never ceased to find this manga’s existence completely hilarious.

(The price tag’s in dollars, so I assume it’s from the tiny-little Japanese used book place in Columbus. I can easily imagine him squeezed in there having a sudden giggling fit over a manga with a frowny Hitler-youth on the cover, while the other, much shorter shoppers slowly edge away from him.)

I now feel like I need to get him something equally ridiculous. I was going to just give all my professors a Green and Black’s bar, but Hitler manga kind of ups the ante. It’s probably too late to try and find someone selling an imp of Akuma…

(In the translations sessions last year, see, we read two or three different short stories that had an Akuma in them somewhere.)

In CS we’d had a contest going on with the last assignment, which was a bunch of sorting algorithms - whoever’s implementations were fastest got an extra such-and-such points on the assignment. We spent all of today’s class timing them. I somehow tentatively tied for first with The Fear, thus completely breaking Sound Effect Jr.’s heart - he and The Fear had been bouncing off the walls about their brilliant optimization ideas, and I’d… left the lab early. (I actually came back for an extra, like, five hours later, but he didn’t see that and thus was surly.)

But I say “tentatively” because Nova, who had come in last in nearly all the other trials, actually won one of the quicksort trials. Unfortunately, he won by a lot. We suspect that his “win” might, in fact, be mathematically impossible. Seeing as his user interface wasn’t complete (gasp!), and we couldn’t check to see whether the array had actually been sorted, the professor assumed something was wrong and gave the point to me (I’d come in second). The Fear and Sound Effect Jr., whose pasty, 110-lb CS-major bodies contain far more testosterone than is healthy for them, were extremely cruel to Nova about all this.

I asked Nova to tell me what that was about when he figured it out, so I could give him a certificate ceding the point if it did turn out he’d inadvertently invented a brilliant new sort that would revolutionize computing. He assured me that he would do so. He was still looking dubiously at his code when I left the room.

…and yesterday this shows up on the intarwebs.

Somewhere, a three-story-tall teenage-girl-head with ramen and demons coming out of its eyeballs is laughing at me.

Worst thing ever.

I win at the internet.

Ha. I just realized I DON’T HAVE TO GET UP TOMORROW. She canceled class and I forgot until just now. HA.

I got my first thingie from BookMooch today. It is a CLAMP manga. This is a huge surprise.

Am I the only one who doesn’t want the purple people getting eaten either?

The school’s holiday-themed meals get more and more disgusting the closer we get to the end of the semester. Highlights of Christmas dinner:

- seasonally-colored glitter on the tables (1)

- “Mexican sushi” - burritos cut up

- cheese and crackers (2)

- “barbecued” meatballs (3)

- wild rice pilaf with secret ingredient (4)

- mint-chocolate-swirl bundt cake, rock-hard-stale

- pumpkin bundt cake, rock-hard-stale

- some kind of pink jellow thing with marshmallows (5)

- crepes with ice cream and fruit (6)

(1) Extrapolating from previous uses of the damn glitter, at least one person will accidentally swallow some before the night is over.

(6) This was the only edible dessert. It has been snowing all day and the wind was picking up and the ice cream was the only edible dessert.

edited a couple hours later because I left out an item of disgust and thus got the numbers mixed up

For whatever disrespectful reason, the supervisors at the library have us make paper snowflakes; the nicest ones get hung up in front of the desk, and the uglier ones behind it. Because I’m awesome and nonconformist like that, last year I decided to make a Ninja Snowflake and a Pirate Snowflake and have them fight. The ninja snowflake would throw smaller snowflakes like ninja stars, and it would be brilliant.

It didn’t work out so well - they ended up not being round, and the pirate was bigger than the ninja, and they decided to move him to another section of the wall, which ruined the flow of the battle, and also someone stole the ninja after a while.

I’m skipping the pirate, but this year’s ninja… will be better.

Maybe I should hire someone to cut it out for me. (I was sane enough not to try and put cherry blossoms on the tree. He’s a winter ninja.)

Depending on how sick I am of it tomorrow, it might not be done yet. I kept changing my mind whether I was doing all straight and geometrical inside the the circle or not, and he needs a mask, and in my artistic vision he’s supposed to be leaning outward and pointing the katana at you.

I mean, today’s just fired.

(The third round of power outages was the last straw.)

But it does prove something I’ve suspected since the beginning of the semester - no matter how infuriating everything else is, coding always calms me down. I just go into the zone. When I get frustrated about the program, it’s not the big-smile “I WILL PUNCH ANY DEITY IN THE CROTCH” sort of thing I get from papers and whatnot. Your essay or your paper ninja ornament might have an problem that’s just impossible to solve - but your algorithm won’t.

Or, apparently that’s how I look at it.

I just uploaded my last month or so’s stuff to Flickr. (Though most of it’s marked private.) When I was looking through my photos for the animal shelter ads, I thought this puppy picture was cute, but…

…I don’t… it looks like it’s going to transform. Into something bad. I don’t know about this puppy.

(Fortunately, I don’t think it’s the one I actually used in the ad.)