This is the greatest thing I've ever seen.

Like an enormous, obsessive geek, I bought the three Gankutsuou tankouban in original Japanese off eBay, mostly because I wanted to see the full cover art that the english language volumes obscure. It's quite nice, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the dust jackets also have colour art on their interior flaps, and the first few pages of each volume are in colour as well as Japanese tankouban so often are.

No other perks or extras but I will probably do some page by page thumb-throughs comparing the translation with the original because, again, enormous geek over here. I might start collecting all the Gankutsuou merchandise I can. Enough time has passed since the show aired that there'll at last be a degree of difficulty to it... Right now I have the artbook, the two production books, the boxset of the series, a teeshirt, a pin, some other detritus... I should probably look into getting the official doujinshi anthology and the novels but damn, eBay is useless for finding deals anymore.

My sister-in-law is pretty sick with some manner of disease that involves a lot of snot, so I watched my niece most of the day. While we were wrestling she bit my right tit so hard it now has visibly bruised teeth marks on it. She's going to make some lucky dyke very happy one day.

Would you like to gaze upon her majesty? I haven't posted a picture in a while. I like this one 'cause she looks like I'm about to lock her in a soundproof shed in the backyard for fifteen years. And her little tutu, too!

She has a really awesome vocabulary. I can get her to stay out of most drawers and cabinets now by saying they have bugs in them. There's a bedroom full of headless mannequins and she'll touch their neck stumps, puff out her lower lip, and whine "Owwww!"

That's probably enough niece wank. Back to your life with you!

Except

I have watched my niece so much over the past week. Even now she's sleeping in the next room. I hope I'm as fondly remembered as Patrick Swayze when I die :(

Anyone watch the stream of the Squeenix Concert in Germany yesterday? Here's an MP3 rip of the audio if not - http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AQ75QPFQ - There's also video on YouTube. Some fine arrangements all in all, I think, but the choral sections in the FFVII battle theme are probably the high point. As always, Sakimoto is given the shaft.

Hey! So the Gankutsuou manga is one of the greatest manga I've ever read. Volume three - the last volume - just came out and I devoured it today. Like, I sat down with it and some A1 sauce and a steak knife and just ate it page by page. It is exquisite, horrible, depraved, transcendent, amazing, heart-breaking, scary. You should read all three volumes and learn what an awesome comic is. The art breaks me open with a mallet and rubs acid all over my brain.

( Some of my favourite bits from v.3 behind the cut. There are some boobies. )

HOW and WHY does this exist?
http://kotaku.com/5348985/japanese-phoenix-wright-musical-in-english

And why is it like, kinda good? x_x Man, woman, the futa playing Phoenix is eminently fuckable.

Ya know, I don't even really like the games (as games, I think they'd make good anime) but this shit's hot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftIFFXDs3g0&feature=related

Ack, feel dirty. Must cut self.

I can't imagine I'll get too many takers for this one, but what the hell! A meme I've seen in a few places:

This is when you get to ask me anything. I mean anything -- fandom things, real life things, things you think you should know, things you think I should have told you a long time ago. Just leave a comment.

Went to the Tarpon Springs Sponge Docks today because sometimes you need a gyro that doesn't suck, and a Greek canoli. It's really a kitschy little area that wouldn't be anything but a tourist trap if it didn't have some of the best Greek restaurants and bakeries outside of like, Greece. There's also a super old Greek Orthodox church and a cool bronze statue of a guy in antiquey scuba gear. I wish Mackenzie had been along. A Bioshock photo shoot might have been arranged.

Sleepy now and sunburned. Time for a nap.

I didn't really know what a "Mary Kay" party was. I went because my aunt wrote "This means a lot to me" on the invitation. I knew make-up was involved but, if it was anything like a Tupperware party, I could mostly sit in a corner and think about vampires for two hours.

But no. A Mary Kay party is like being trapped in a surreal Lifetime birth control commercial. Trapped at a dining room table with an ethnically diverse group of strange women, a center piece on the table that that looked like it'd been stolen out of a Pier One Imports display window. Everyone had one of those swivel mirrors that blows you up really huge on one side so you can see your pores. There were shallow finger bowls of water and "kabuki brushes" and an old lady with her skin all stretched tight and too much make-up on using phrases you don't generally hear in real life, just on Home Shopping Channel.

I don't wear make-up. Ever. I don't own any except for some black lipstick and some white greasepaint I used one Halloween. I knew I wouldn't be making any purchases - even if it had been a Dildos and jRPGs party, I'm broke - so I tried not to use any of the resources available. I ate no snacks and drank no beverages. When tight skin lady started assigning foundations to everyone I was like, "No, ma'am, I don't wear make-up, thanks!"

Tight Skin Lady (TSL): That's interesting, Ashley! But let me ask you, if I left a glass of water outside overnight, would you drink it the next day?
Me: Sure.
TSL: *befuddlement*
Me: Um, no?
TSL: That's right! But why wouldn't you drink it?
Me: Uh. Hrmm. A hobo might have peed in it?
TSL: *again, deviation from script, befuddlement, table full of o_o's*
Me: I... I don't know... zombies are cool.
TSL: But it might have rained! Or insects might have flown into the glass! Pollutants might have infused the water with pollution!
Me: You mean pollution?
TSL: Pollution!

At one point TSL had us use this gritty skin-polishing stuff on only half of our faces so we could see the "miraculous" difference it made compared to the old, ugly half. The lady across from me was super ancient and had a cool two-hundred year old prune visage. TSL asked me if I didn't think she looked much improved after the dead skin had been sloughed off half her head and I said sure, like Two-Face. Then TSL asked what that meant. SHE ASKED WHAT THAT MEANT! No one at the table knew who Two-Face was!

So next time I get a Mary Kay party invitation, I'm killing myself.

I have to go to a fucking Mary Kay party now.

Got this off mullenkamp.

• Post ten of any pictures currently on your hard drive that you think are self-expressive.

• NO CAPTIONS!!! It must be like we're speaking with images and we have to interpret your visual language just like we have to interpret your words.

• They must ALREADY be on your hard drive - no googling or flickr! They have to have been saved to your folders sometime in the past. They must be something you've saved there because it resonated with you for some reason.

• You do NOT have to answer any questions about any of your pictures if you don't want to. You can make them as mysterious as you like. Or you can explain them away as much as you like.

( Wound up being mostly old photos... they make me larf )

Except for Fox letting me read the conclusion of her story, everything and everyone on the internet is pissing me off tonight. If it isn't whining Christians it's whining atheists. Whining from either side is fucktastically irritating. If it isn't trite superhero comics it's trite comics recycling zombies, or giant robots, or some manner of mythology AGAIN in a way that the author thinks everyone's gonna find super neato cool! And they probably WILL because the people of this sad world are so starved for culture and so glutted on the empty calories of Hollywood and the corporate world that half the stories on CNN today concerned Michael Jackson, and Transformers 2 broke box office records. Holy shit, planet earth, if koala bears drank Penzoil I'd suck a fern upside-down.

THAT'S RIGHT, I'M WHINING TOO. EAT A GRAPE.

On nights like this I wish I was Murkoph. Murkoph would find a sparsely populated street, track down the nearest thing with a pulse, and explore the texture of its insides. Being a pacifist though, I'd have to settle for doing this to a cat but cats don't count. CATS DON'T COUNT.

She has a lower lip, she just seems to be digesting it in this picture.

Desktop meme!
001: Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
002: Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper.
003: Don't change your wallpaper before doing this. The point is to see what you had on.



1 - i lik boats
2 - I must have at least mildly monochromatic wallpapers or I break out in hives.
3 - Though I have two monitors I don't bother with widescreen wallpapers - each monitor is at a different resolution and 'twould have to be customized.
4 - I don't know who the artist here is but I believe this is concept art from a vidya game.
5 - BOOM BOOM BOOM splassssh! splinter! kkrrraaaaaaak! "Sweet Bess, ne'er will I again see your faaaaaarrrgh!"

Though I loathe G4 almost as a rule, this douche hat actually expresses my thoughts on yesterday's Castlevania: Lord of Shadows preview quite well. I will say this now and I mean it - if I find out that Konami has let IGA go I will never buy another Konami game. I don't care if they come out with a Castlevania title that washes your car or a Silent Hill game that brings you to a shuddering orgasm. Konami and I will be done.

In news not related to geeky raving, the wedding is Saturday and it's still going to suck. Tommy will be in St. Pete for a few days tomorrow though and we're gonna get crab legs! Woo!

Sony clearly won E3 this year.

God of War 3 still looks fucking fantastic and if I'm less poor next March, I'ma buy a PS3 for it, I reckon.

FFXIV - THAT'S FOURTEEN - fucking FLOORED me when it was announced and then the COCKSUCKERS SAID IT WAS ONLINE! GYEYEYEYWAYDHAHGOISjdf;oaijerfa!!

I still have no interest in FFXIII.

ModRacers looks really fun!

The PSP Go is cool, but unnecessary.

Sony's motion control prototype excites me in a way the stupid Wii never did.

Go Sony!

This is bullshit of the highest order. And if you think it doesn't effect you, take another look at all the bishounen in your hentai or yaoi collection and ask yourself how old your grandmother would guess those characters to be.

I'm so enraged over this I could burn a few flags. This isn't supposed to be a country where someone is prosecuted for the manner of drawn imagery they enjoy collecting or looking at.

I've smashed windows out of stores
And I've organised riots for maybe a few
And I've harboured fugitives - and I'll harbour more!
And I've conspired against heads of state

But the only thing I've done that I ever thought was wrong
Was walking away from you

I've thrown rocks at the cops
Hell, I've thrown cops at the rocks
And I've thrown kids - little kids! - from moving trains
Hell, I've thrown little kids in front of moving trains

But the only thing I've done that I ever thought was wrong
Was walking away from you

So take me back, I promise to be good
If you take me back you can name anyone
I'll slit their throats and bury all their bones
And burn down their house and make orphans of their kids

Cause the only thing I've done that I ever thought was wrong
Was walking away from you

Magpie Killjoy. It's pretty much all like this :3 Recommended.

I didn't wanna do this because I don't really care that much, but the internet decimates my resolve.

ADULT AVATAR FANS! HEED ME! THE AVATAR MOVIE IS NOT FOR YOU!

You liked the show because there were things in it that appealed to you. It wasn't another episodic western series as intelligent as a moistened brick. The animation was good. The voice acting was professional, with children actually being played by children and not middle-aged women. It was anime written by English-speakers, with jokes that didn't require knowledge of obscure Japanese culture to understand. Some of the characters were cute and they were only drawings, so their age didn't really matter much. You could like Zuko if you were thirty years old because he was only ink and paint. Animation is awesome like that, 2D animation in particular. Would you really be shipping Sokka and Toph if Avatar had been live-action? Would you have ever seriously given the show a second look?

I liked the series too, guys! I really, really did! But I never forgot that it was airing on Nickelodeon - the self-professed kids' network - and that it was being targeted at children. For all its high points - and there were many high points - Avatar was frequently goofy, shallow, and just plain STUPID in the way that only children's entertainment can be.

And this movie, grown-ups? This is a movie for children. More importantly it is a LIVE-ACTION movie for children, and that makes one hell of a difference. There is bitching about Zuko's scar and how dramatically downplayed it is from the series', but if they had translated the scale of it faithfully it would have produced a horrific, grotesque boy-freak the likes of which is just not SEEN in a live-action children's movie! Sure, most of us would have loved it, but it would have frightened little kids and made parents wary.

Let me tell you something else you need to expect out of this movie, grown-ups. You need to expect some watered-down fight scenes. They're not going to show an actual little boy being kicked around the way Aang was in the series. The rest of the fights are going to be flaky affairs with a helluva lotta wire-shots reminiscent less of awesome kung-fu flicks than the fucking Power Rangers.

"But Harry Potter!" you say. I say magic isn't a flying fist. And Avatar doesn't have the kind of built-in, review-proof audience the wizard kid did. The producers of this movie want kids in the seats, their parents' money in their pockets, and your post-pubescent fatass at home writing Zutara fics.

I know Hollywood. You know Hollywood. But I don't think you know Hollywood as well as you think you do if you are still paying the Avatar movie more attention than you pay a wreck you pass on the side of the highway.

And I'm turning off comments on this because disagreement will make me rage and I don't have the mental energy to spare over a FUCKING CHILDREN'S MOVIE at the moment ohgodI'maspatheticastherestofyou

Haha, check this trailer out, cocksuckers. MEGA SHARK VS GIANT OCTOPUS



Thanks for all the comic feedback yesterday, guys. By that I mean ROT IN HELL, DOUCHE HATS. Last time I ask you chodes for anything - ANYTHING. In fact, don't watch the above trailer. OH GOD DON'T DO IT PLEASE. I bet you weren't going to anyway!

DIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE