At the moment, this last applies to Please Save My Earth. Do you know why I love this manga? THIS SCENE IS WHY I LOVE THIS MANGA. (No spoilers.)

More manga characters need to answer that question with that statement.

And the whole manga is like this! I mean, it’s really a pretty standard plot and the characters are really pretty standard characters, but the manga just keeps doing charming and unexpected and smart things like this! It makes me happy.

But I’m disappointed by the sense I’m getting that, in the long run, no shounen manga dares stand in the way of the almighty Shounen Jump formula. For one thing, the formula seems to require that the female characters either stop getting fight scenes, or make them the froofy passive-looking metaphysical kind.

For another, there seems to have been an executive decision that Soul Eater lose his hat, acquire a hairstyle somewhere between present-day-Ichigo’s* and Edward Elric’s, and completely change the shape of his face and eyes. Because it’s not okay to have a protagonist who doesn’t look exactly like every other protagonist?

Also, Black ★ Star has suddenly become the number-one angstiest member of the cast? The guy who pronounces a little star in the middle of his name to emphasize how special he is? The one who was introduced as a parody of Naruto!? Yet he is now More Special Sasuke! It’s like the manga’s IQ is progressively getting lower.

If Patty ends up getting angst, too, I’m just going to retreat into writing fanfic where everyone’s an adorable moron again.

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* Hey, remember the good old days when Kubo Tite actually had a recognizable personal style? Whatever happened to those days? THE SHOUNEN JUMP FORMULA HAPPENED TO THOSE DAYS. If Mizuno Junko ran a manga in Shounen Jump, within twelve months it would become a story about a fourteen-year-old boy overcoming his rocky relationship with his dad through montage-intensive training to become the best evil naked zombie drug dealer gigolo nurse.

** I just checked and Soul Eater actually runs in Shounen Gangan, not Shounen Jump. Close enough!

2) Do the first three career-path mission sets! They will be easy and will give you the same items over and over! You can sell the extras?

2a) At the end they will recommend you someone to visit next! That’s good, because there are seventy billion star systems in this game, and ones that are level-appropriate are right next to ones that are for ninjas piloting the Death Star!

3) Do the advanced military career-path mission set! All the battles will be easy, and on the second-to-last one you will get an awesome new spaceship!

4) The last battle will be really hard and your awesome new spaceship will be destroyed.

5) Maybe you can beat the last tutorial mission if you train some new abilities?

5a) (Abilities are trained in real-time. It will take at least another twenty-four hours for your character to learn the relevant ones.)

6) In the meantime, you can go visit the person the other tutorial agents mentioned in 2a!

6a) Wait, the game did not save that person’s name to your address book, and it’s not like you wrote it down.

6b) it’s not in the wiki either wtf

7) Set your character to spend the night training “Complain On Blog” to level 4.

2) When I am a manga artist drawing a wacky shounen comedy series, just before the final battle I will suddenly introduce a whole bunch of new characters no one cares about. They will then proceed to have earnest romantic troubles.

3) Also, my art will get sloppy, I will decline to clear up at least two subplots, and two characters’ personalities will change completely with neither explanation nor buildup.

(The first six volumes were so great! Why does the manga want to hurt me now?)

ETA: 4) Also, my scanlators will consistently transliterate the two nerds’ names as “Ox Fold” and “Harvar,” possibly because they’re from a DC comics alternate universe where schools don’t exist because of something Lex Luthor did.

Someone stop me from playing EVE Online and watching Soul Eater all day. I think it likely that neither one is a good idea on its own, but they’re particularly unharmonious in combination. I’m going to name a spaceship something like “SYMMETRY!,” and then someone named NeMeSiN will destroy it and send me a misogynistic message explaining why they did so. And I’ll want to apologize to Death the Kid for letting the symmetry get destroyed again.

Death the Kid is my favorite character. His voice was giving me weird signals, so I looked it up, and he’s Tamaki from Ouran. Things somehow make more sense now that I know that. I just looked up Black ★ Star, and he’s Excel, which is obviously also good.

…

I’m really trying hard here, but I think the book just beat me. I’d gotten over my cold, but it relapsed; and all my downloads keep aborting themselves; the milk has all curdled; and the sun set an hour earlier than usual, with a heavy sense of finality. This is what it’s like when the book wins.

Anyway, this concept has previously appeared pretty much verbatim in Penny Arcade.

1) I bet the City of Heroes website is red or blue. (I won – both.)

2) I bet the EVE Online website is black. (I lost, it’s brown.)

3) I bet the Star Trek Online website is dark blue. (I won.)

I didn’t think to make a bet about Star Wars, but it’s also blue.

What is it with “serious” game websites and light text on dark backgrounds, though? Are they scared of being taken for a flash game portal? If so, so are some of the flash game portals.

(Bad decision time is when I decide I’m going to play an MMO.)

I like how it’s mentioned on one page in the second volume that all these people are about three inches tall, and then that’s never brought up again. It’s irrelevant! Doomed reincarnated alien love is relevant.

(My ability to get through the whole series so quickly is related to that fact that I’ve got a cold and an extreme reluctance to get out of bed.)

There is no earthly way that Octavia Butler didn’t know about this when she was writing Dawn. The heroine with whom the frightening, inexplicable alien falls in love/lust mainly due to her body’s fascinating ability to develop tumors? I think that is what a metaphor looks like.

And you guys.

It is Anne Bishop fanfic. Unequivocally! Terms and social structures are duplicated!

Lisa is a nurse at a New York hospital who has magic diagnostic powers – she only needs to touch a patient to know what is wrong with him/her! Obviously we must first see her doing this to a cute child. But within two pages, a man checks into her ward and immediately uses his magical powers to “touch her like a lover’s invisible fingers, stirring foreign urges and feelings within her that she had never felt before!” He’s bleeding all over the place at the time, but it’s cool – one of those feelings within her is bloodlust.

His name is Gryphon (excellent.) and he is on the run from the evil Mona Sera, his Queen, whom he serves because it is the natural order of things for men to serve the women who are born with the magical powers that make them Queens. If you are descended from the moon people, which he is. Turns out, Lisa is three-quarters moon person herself! In fact, she is the very first half-breed Queen ever! And could she also be… the most powerful Queen ever?! (Obviously yes.) Gryphon vows to serve her, and she vows to fix his evil-rape-y society – if they can find a cure for the poison that will kill him within 30 days!

Please assume that I got all these exclamation points directly from the book.

Incidentally, all of the moon people are combination werecreature-vampires, but Gryphon doesn’t actually transform into a griffin. I consider this cheating and will be be writing the author to complain.

So we have a matriarchal society ruled by Queens, and the society used to be very nice and pleasant, but evil Queens have turned it all rape-y and sex-slave-y! Exactly like in Black Jewels! (Except how everyone is additionally a werecreature-vampire from the moon.) Men are sold to Queens at trade fairs, just like in Black Jewels! There are Demon Dead who live in Hell and drink blood, who are exactly like the Demon Dead who live in Hell and drink blood in Black Jewels!

There are even characters named Janelle and Tersa! (Though not in the same roles.) Some of the other names – like, say, Gryphon, Amber, and Chameleo – appear to have come out of a similar random-name generator to the one that gave us “Surreal.” And in case you were wondering about the book’s sexy Prince of Hell status: this book contains a sexy Prince of Hell. His name is Halcyon. This is very disappointing. I want a “Don’t blame me, I voted Saetan SaDiablo” bumper sticker.

On the differences side: the sex scenes are a lot more graphic and frequent. A lot. So, that’s new! Sex involves “filling [your partner] with light,” which gives people magical powers and heals wounds and stuff, so that it is Lisa’s duty to sleep with all the hot guys surrounding her.

Also, there’s the present-day-US setting – the evil Queen Mona Sera lives in Queens, which is obviously a fabulous thing. Except the author got sick of New York pretty quick and moved everyone to a sketchily-described palace that the magical people have in a forest someplace. The second book, which I am going to acquire as soon as possible, is apparently going to be set in New Orleans. Pre-Katrina Anne Rice-ish New Orleans, I guess? We’ll find out.

If you are not yet decided as to whether you want to read this excellent book, please know that Bertrice Small and Patricia Briggs both wrote blurbs for it. Hopefully that cleared everything up for you.

I know that I yelled at my cold cream the other day, and I made libelous remarks about Octavia Butler due to my displeasure at her having gotten Serious all over me, and I suggested that Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest series might have been the result of a stroke or head injury. And I may have threatened Nalini Singh’s pets.

But… I’m not serious about these things? I think I would feel kind of embarrassed if people thought I was truly distraught about my cold cream, or seriously angry at writers for not meeting all of my expectations. Yet I think these people on Facebook are seriously angry at the programmers of the little farm game.

THIS GAME IS BECOMMING A SOURCE OF STRESS FOR ME!!!!

I HAVEN’T HAD ANYTHING IN MY MARKET FOR THREE DAYS SO I CAN NOT PURCHASE, EXPAND OR PLANT ANYTHING!!!! THEY NEED TO GET THIS FIXED. I DON’T KNOW WHO TO REPORT THIS TO????
MY LIST OF FRIENDS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE IS DOWN TO 5 FRIENDS WHEN I REALLY HAVE 34 FRIENDS!!
PLEASE WHO EVER IS RUNNING THIS GAME FIX THESE THINGS BEFORE MY BLOOD PRESSURE BLOWS A HOLE IN MY VEINS!!

She’s stressed! Her emotional health is your responsibility, game devs! WHERE ARE YOU

I should point out that the game’s start screen says “beta” real big, and it’s only been up a couple weeks.

is such a waste of my time…can you not get it set up so that this can be done easily as it is on other games…i spent over half hour just trying to get the screens to come up and then they disappear and you gotta reload…this should be a basic of the game not an after thought..just toooooo many steps…

I vaguely assume that people who spend time on the internet are familiar with the concept that, when a new website or service goes up for the first time, it may slow down or break if it gets a lot of traffic. Is this wrong of me? Apparently so. Complaints of this variety comprise a lot of the posts on this board.

Do Not set limitations .

People will leave this game fast. It gets boring after you have planted your crops. pay attention,, people like challenges to keep playing. Treasue hunting should be made as long as you keep finding things. Make them harder to find NOT shiny. Think it over .

I love all the imperative sentences.

i went from loving the game because of the awesome hunt for the treasures now that it is so very limited and not at all proftable i am just liking the game…..PLZZZZZ CHANGE IT BACK, increase cost on other stuff and leave our treasures ALONE!!!!!

And then she bit off a dev’s finger and tumbled into the fires of Mount Doom, the pretend internet rubber ducky still clutched in her hands.

Another thing I appreciate is the threats:

1: If there is nothing to salvage, and you can’t navigate completely around Islands, what is the point in playing. It becomes boring very quickly. We are fickle people, we will move on to the next more exciting game.

2: well i for one won’t be playing it so often
was fun when you could all pop to one island and race for each treasure.
it is now going to be the same as every other island / farm game – sheesh, thought i had found a treasure of a game !

I should make clear that, since this is Facebook, you can see how old the posters are. The median age on this board is about fifty. These people are adults.

This thread has my favorite threat:

5000 coins for 5 plow spots?

1: why does it show amounts at 500 and then 50000 and the 500 is not available?
Soesn’t seem quite right to get 5 plow spots for 5000 coins. gotta make the game a little easier to upgrade and move up if your gonna charge the point vaule to dang high!
Otherwise I really like the graphic worka dn the game. Can’t wait to see other options too!

2: [1], if you allready have 8 neighbors you can buy the upgrade plots for 500, you do NOT have to buy the ones for 5000 as they are the same as the plots for 500. Make sure you have 8 neighbors & if you are not able to buy them let Ralph know here via post, hope this helps.

2: I understand that part. But 5 plow spots for 5,000 coins? WOW!!! I’ll just not upgrade and maybe not play as much.

She’s just so blunt about the whole thing! She wants to be able to plow a lot! Make it so she can plow a lot, or else she’ll play less! It’s not hard!

(And technically, she’s wrong – it’s only four plow spots.)

This woman, on the other hand, is far too distraught for such manipulations:

HELP RAPH!!!!

My avatar is stuck! She moves her legs but goes no where!! Crops will die!!

OH NO

She’s just so sincere! She really identifies with her imaginary plants.

Something else I like is a lot of posts use the main dev’s first name to get his attention on their urgent problems. Half of them misspell it. (It’s “Raph,” but people read it as “Ralph” a lot.)

1: I just paid the $5000 for island expansion and got NOTHING except money taken out of my account. I’d really like to get what I paid for!

(Raph-the-dev explains the problem)

1: Ok, Ralph, I’ve added a bang load of neighbors and added a couple of $500 expansions. But the fact remains that I paid $5000 for the initial expansion and did not get what I paid for. You wouldn’t like that if it happened to you.

2: It happened to me as well. I even posted bout it. I got for the 5000 the same amount of land expansion as the 500. and that is 4500 hard earn coins. I would like it back.

1: RALPH! Did you give me my $5000 back?

It’s interesting how she doesn’t know whether she’s been reimbursed, because the money doesn’t actually matter enough to her that she’s keeping track of how much she has – yet it still drives her nuts to think that she’s been somehow cheated out of some of it.

This one is kind of the ideal of all entitled gamer posts. It has everything – possessiveness of free virtual goods, paranoia, use of the dev’s first name and an imperative sentence in the title, and an acknowledgement that the loss of her pretend object is emotionally troubling her.

RAPH!!!! please adress this as soon as possible

i want the gift of my skeleton back this makes me mad that it was taken away i could gift it this morning and know i cant whats going on here one day its there and then its not are you doing this just to agravate people because its not funny i am clearly upset about this

I halfway want to friend her so I can find out how old she is.

I especially appreciate that it’s her pretend skeleton that she’s getting worked up about. I can vaguely understand people getting upset about losing their animals – when I was a kid, I reset my game when my Pokemon got knocked out, because I didn’t want them to get hurt! (I over-leveled a lot to prevent this, yes.) After I caught Mewtwo the first time, I felt really guilty – I was just like Giovanni in the movie, trying to deprive Mewtwo of his freedom! So I reset and never caught him again. Even though we know it’s irrational, we have this emotional reaction to “living” things in video games, the same way kids relate differently to a doll than to a toy truck.

But the skeleton is a dead body lying on the ground that she wants to decorate with. I just don’t know, lady!

1a) But my life depends on search-as-you-type, and that’s presently only available via an extremely jittery alpha plugin.

2) It’s actually pretty easy to write a Second Life bot.

3) I like Metaplace’s aesthetics enough that I’m actually playing the Facebook time-waster game they set up when Metaplace went down.

ETA: 4) CVS house-brand cold cream is scented with something absolutely vile. It’s like citronella mixed with camphor and death. I’m sure they were trying to mimic the rose scent in the Ponds, but they… I actually have no idea how they could have ended up with this. Perhaps someone accidentally hired the mad doctor Jizabel Disraeli from Count Cain as a perfumist.

Anyway, the discovery is that in the future I’m going to have to remember to spend the extra two bucks on the Ponds. Also, try to return this stuff.

(Restaurants and used book stores count as things to do. Also, protests.)

You guys should read it, it’s pretty crazy.

Please everyone thank thegeekgene for pointing out to me that it had actually been licensed. For some reason I had thought the eventuality unlikely.

Auction Title: Pokemon The Movie 2000 DVD – No Box

Gray Feedback Left By Stupid Stupid Stupid Idiot Buyer: i didnt know that it was only the cd with no box

(I am very petty.)

With that understood, please go now about your business.

• Fool Moon (Dresden Files 1), Jim Butcher

  I heard somewhere that Jim Butcher and the Ah! My Goddess guy can combine to form a bigger misogynist.

• Dawn (Xenogenesis 1), Octavia Butler

  Octavia Butler punches you repeatedly in the stomach.

• Adulthood Rites and Imago (Xenogenesis 2, 3), Octavia Butler

  Octavia Butler punches you in the stomach more lightly, provides gender-bendy but oddly heteronormative tentacle sex utopia, repeats.

Darkover

• The Spell Sword, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Guy from earth lands on the planet of the red-haired sorceresses and goes native (he doesn’t turn into a red-haired sorceress, ’cause that would be, like, weird). Disney could make the movie of this without changing it too much.

• The Forbidden Tower, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Guy from earth’s adjustment to his new psychic family life is hampered by his wife’s psychic powers accidentally zapping his testicles and his attraction to his sister- and brother-in-law. Maybe orgies will solve these problems?

• Heritage of Hastur, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Being gay is wrong and bad, but Regis Hastur thinks he might be gay! Betraying the Comyn is wrong and bad, but Lew Alton thinks he might betray the Comyn! OH NOES

  (I would argue that “OH NOES” does not constitute a sentence.)

• Stormqueen!, Marion Zimmer Bradley

  People have terrifying uncontrollable psychic powers that may destroy them and EVERYONE THEY LOVE, and pregnancy is TERRIFYING, and everyone’s family is trying to KILL THEM, and so is the WEATHER.

Manga

• Yotsuba&!, volumes 1-3, Kiyohiko Azuma

  cannot form sentence dying of cute

• Crimson Spell, volume 1, Ayano Yamane

  Ridiculous high fantasy comedy/porn. Why is it that transforming into your demon form always seems to involve stripes these days?

HIS DAD: Cry moar. You are going to be a warrior and awesome and give me millions of awesome grandchildren because I have inadequacy issues.

COMYN LORD: I hate you, father! I fantasize about killing you with such eerie vividness that I must flee the room to rest my burning forehead against the cool stones of the corridor wall, terrified by how near I have come to patricide this day.

HIS DAD: (That is normal on Darkover.)

COMYN LADY: HI I’M HERE FOR THE ARRANGED MARRIAGE

COMYN LORD: You are so impossibly beautiful and innocent that I cannot bear even to look at you with my impure, lustful eyes.

COMYN LADY: (That is normal on Darkover.)

COMYN LORD: Women in your family tend to die in childbirth, and children in my family tend to go mad when their psychic powers develop at adolescence, and you’re a the Keeper of a Tower and psychologically conditioned to kill men who lust after you.

COMYN LADY: I am also your first cousin.

COMYN LORD: Alas, though we are madly in love already, we cannot possibly consummate our marriage.

COMYN LADY: Even though we’re telepaths, and that will eventually drive us mad?

COMYN LORD: Yup. It’s pretty crazy how often this exact situation arises on Darkover, isn’t it?

COMYN LADY: Yeah, I don’t even know.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD WHO LOOKS JUST LIKE THE HERO EXCEPT MEANER: I just did something! Something wicked and unnatural!

COMYN LORD AND LADY: *accidentally have sex due to wicked-and-unnatural-related stress*

COMYN LADY: I’m pregnant with your baby! It may be a monster. It may also be the promise of a better future, depends on the book.

SLIGHTLY YOUNGER COMYN LORD/LADY WHO HAS SUCH POTENTIAL: I just did something! Something selfish and ignorant!

HIS DAD AGAIN: It’s my fault because I raised him/her wrong, but I don’t realize it.

COMYN LORD: I dare not raise my voice to my father – his heart is weak, and it would kill him.

COMYN LADY: *miscarries due to selfish-and-ignorant-related stress*

COMYN LORD: DADDY I AM REPLACING YOU WITH AN AUNT FROM A GEORGETTE HEYER NOVEL

HIS DAD AGAIN: *is killed by his weak heart*

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: Say, have I mentioned that I am a sexual deviant in some manner? Maybe I’m a pedophile, or I keep nonhuman sex slaves. I could be into wife-swapping? Definitely bondage. Probbbably not a furry.

COMYN LADY: There was a furry one time, but I don’t think that ever actually got explained.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: Oh, yeah. That was weird.

COMYN LORD: He was like, a cat, right? Was Bradley already hanging around with Mercedes Lackey then?

COMYN LADY: No, too early. Lackey must have gotten the idea from her.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: It is not inconceivable that both arrived at the evil catman idea independently. Anyway, my point was that you can tell I’m evil because of the sex stuff. Let’s have a final battle now.

COMYN LORD AND LADY JOIN FORCES AND FORM A BAND THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN, AND THEY CALL THEMSELVES SOMETHING TOTALLY DUMBSHIT, LIKE “THE FORBIDDEN TOWER.”

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: I see the error of my sexy ways. It is notable that I have already produced many more children than the two of you ever will, so ensuring a robust population of villains and men with inadequacy issues with which to populate later books. *dies*

SLIGHTLY YOUNGER COMYN LORD/LADY: *is maybe also dead*

COMYN LORD: …so, my psychic powers tell me we will have a baby someday, so we had better get on that. Even though tragedy lays in our child’s future!

COMYN LADY: We will live happily ever after until we are slaughtered in the events of a later book.

SPACESHIPS: (There were also spaceships in this book.)

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Possibly Also Relevant To Your Interests: Anne Bishop.