All Irish-Mexican girls probably aren’t annoying Monday, Mar 31 2008

Q: “Does eating Vegemite does that mean you’re eating beer?” A: No, though allegedly made with yeast that’s a by-product of beer production vegemite is almost the opposite of beer. You see, with beer the goal is to create an environment in which yeast can live in order to ferment thus turning sugars into alcohol (thanks Moyashimon). On the other hand with vegemite the goal is to kill the yeast as unhealthy amounts of salt are added and the yeast mixture is boiled down thus killing the fermentation process. I almost said “when was the last time you had beer made with vegetables” but actually there are such products out there.

Q:”Is it OK to eat risotto while pregnant?” A: If it’s normally OK for you to eat risotto then it shouldn’t create problems. If you have eaten risotto when pregnant and feel particularly ill it could be possible that any number of things were wrong with it, or considering the copious amounts of butter and cheese in risotto you might be “lactose intolerant” if not outright dairy allergic. I haven’t heard of people becoming lactose intolerant during pregnancy but all kinds of crazy shit is going on when you’re knocked up so anything is possible. If the father of the child has any particular allergies or intolerances then it might be worth it for you yourself to avoid those things if they start to bother you during the pregnancy. But actually risotto is also just a really rich food of questionable virtue so there are other things you’d be better off eating while pregnant. Simple brown rice porridge  with maybe some banana and raisins in for instance. Your baby will probably never thank you for eating healthy but you’ll know. Make sure to avoid vegemite and marmite while pregnant. There’s no way that shit is good for anybody.

Eh hem well that’s the wrong start but while getting particularly annoyed with someone earlier I realized that there’s always a way out. If someone really bothers you that much, you don’t have to have anything to do with them. Making this choice may result in other consequences, like getting fired or losing out on an opportunity to be accepted to something. God knows intake interviewers can be the most annoying people in the world, I once got a eurotrash bitch who went by one name and had fake everything, not sorry I didn’t get accepted that time let me tell you.

Of course a more responsible choice is to take some time to collect yourself or get off or away from whatever the annoyance is before resuming. It is possibly not good to walk out on your wedding just because the date of a prospective in-law really annoys you. But my point is that you don’t ever have to just put up with anything if you don’t want to. You can always try to do something, don’t ever think you can’t. Even if you’re bound and gagged you can probably still breath and open and close your eyes and struggle. Or not. There’s always something even if it’s not likely to do you any good.

But seriously the next time somebody really pisses you off, and it seems like a bad idea to smack them (it often is), then just get out of there. It’s pretty liberating. Of course as I’ve said before true freedom means that you have nothing, so the more you liberate yourself the more you isolate yourself. Just something to keep in mind.

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The value of fiat currency Sunday, Mar 30 2008

So as promised I finished reading Making Money by Terry Pratchett which was yet another Discworld book and the second Moist von Lipwig story after Going Postal. As you might imagine from the title the premise is that Moist is now taking over the bank and mint and he decides to eliminate the gold standard and introduce paper currency. Chaos ensues.

I didn’t find this book as amusing as Going Postal and I think this is because the bank characters were not as interesting as the post office characters. Or perhaps it’s because “Adorable Dearheart” was not as prominent in this book? There was a large subplot having to do with golems and I thought that got botched. I think that this book had a lot to say about society and indeed the matter of fiat currency was something that was on my mind since I had recently, well, found out how it works. Sort of. Basically the thing is that money has value just because it’s valued. The value isn’t necessarily tied down to something. In theory it’s tied down to something, but in reality it’s never tied down to anything but the institution. In other words money doesn’t really exist.

That’s crazy right? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. I think that materialism is a problem, I wouldn’t say a sin but at least a demerit, but having some sort of standard just helps things to run. Especially in what has turned into a non-production based and wealthless unskilled labor society. By that I mean for instance a clerk (store or office) who can do their job but isn’t necessarily able to create anything or do anything and doesn’t have anything of tangible value like a cow or transient value like gems and metals. So how would a person like that get a house without money? Yes in truth money is what has let society get to this point. Actually it’s more like the world revolves around credit and money was originally a part of that but one thing at a time. Anyway what I’m trying to say is that money just is so use it, don’t worry about it not having value, or in some cases having too much value, as long your country exists (which is something you might worry about) your money will work. And unless you’re in some kind of questionable business you only need the money that works in your own country.

So saying I somewhat wonder whether or not there will be a discworld novel about something directly comparable to oil etc. but I suppose that was touched on somewhat in The Fifth Elephant with… fat….. hmm… Anyway the book (making money that is) was fine, I enjoyed it moderately. I wouldn’t recommend reading it before going postal though. And apparently the next “main-line” discworld novel will also feature Moist and be about taxes. This was hinted at in the end just as the banking angle was hinted at in going postal but then it was stated otherwise anyway. I suppose this is somewhat of a spoiler but you know… it’s Discworld. That’s all I can say. By the way this is apparently the 22nd book I’ve read this year (I don’t mention them all here). I wonder if I could make it to 100 after hitting 50 last year. There are probably other things I should be doing though.

{ 7/14/2008 Just a small update, the end of this entry ended out being somewhat prophetic as I have only read a handful more books by this point but I did indeed do something better by starting in with math lessons. What the goal of this is at this point in my life I don’t know, it just seemed to me like it was a great deficiency of mine and I didn’t have anything better that I was likely to do or be able to achieve than learn math. By the way this was a pretty shitty review after all that rambling about fiat currency. But there really isn’t a lot to say about Discworld that it doesn’t say itself, I find the books amusing and sometimes possessing remarkably insightful social commentary}

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Gun Damn you Sunday, Mar 30 2008

機動戦士グンダム００ Mobile Suit Gundam 00, 25 episode mecha tv anime series. It sucks. The animation is good, the action is pretty intense, the story is contrived and transparent, past gundam elements are purposefully re-used, and oh yeah, the series is intentionally left incomplete so that they (Sunrise/Bandai) can produce another 25 episode series for the fall after they’re done with Code Geass R2 (not region 2 as in the DVD encoding region, it’s got the same name as the first and they tacked on R2). To me this is the lowest that the gundam series can get. Some would argue that creating a 50 episode sequel to gundam SEED even though the story had seemed to be complete is the lowest the series could go but this to me is more annoying.

Let the record show that I watched this series in spite of loathing it and constantly belittling it because I am a mecha anime fool. I might also be some sort of gundam otaku. Let me also say that it’s a really low blow when the majority of the plot takes place in the final episode. There is no doubt in my mind that they could have done this series properly in 25 episodes instead of producing a sequel. At least it will be the immediate next work that sunrise works on I suppose. The same could not be said of what happened with Code Geass where there was a blank space between airing the last (double) episode of its first season of 4 months only to have its future left in limbo while shitty manga iterations ran. shit.

Well whatever, stay the hell away from this series unless you have never seen any gundam series before and don’t plan on ever seeing any of the older ones. I will say that if this had been anything but a gundam series I probably would have thought it was at least passable (the transparent and retarded plot would have killed it anyway though). And it’s not that I hold the gundam franchise to a different standard compared to other works, it’s  that the gundam franchise needs to stop. It should have been over with at the start of the decade with Turn A gundam (which is the best one), but instead it keeps walking on like a headless zombie. They could do anything they want to, and I thought that Sunrise came out with a good one in Code Geass, but instead they continually re-use the same things over and over again in a gundam package. I just about died at the end of 25 when they revealed “gundam 0″ which had a head like the First Gundam even though none of the other gundam heads in the show looked anything like that. fuu well whatever. It’s over and at the end of the week code geass will start again. I really hope that they end it properly this time although with the way sunrise anime is running now I wouldn’t put it past them to go on alternating geass and gundam.

So just to bury 00 for now, (I’m sure I’ll cut it down continuously as time goes on… and I’ll probably watch the sequel) even early on I was trying to remember if the solar powered robot aspect was even that original (it kind of seemed like it) and didn’t think it was. I still don’t remember if there were any “real robot” series that had exclusively solar powered units (being a means of energy it has been as aspect of a variety of shows) but Daitarn 3 the super robot used the power of the sun although being a super robot the science was extremely questionable. I only remembered that since I was playing SRT Impact again lately and Daitarn 3 is in there, I never actually saw the original series myself it’s just that for some reason Daitarn is a perennial SRT cast member along with Combattler V. Well I was never exactly certain how the solar power aspect was supposed to work in the show but ultimately it was about the same as ever with the units having a long runtime but being able to run out and needing to recharge anyway. What I wasn’t sure about was whether they could just charge by being in the sun or whether they had to charge through their carrier ship, or whether they charged the carrier ship. I should have paid more attention but it doesn’t matter.

No I can’t help it I have to say one more thing. This show above all else just had really shitty character. The characters were kind of shitty too but even if nothing in the show was original, if it would have just tried to put on its own unique face instead of just a gundam mask… For example Gurren Lagann (I think I’ve said this before) didn’t have anything especially original about it but it had a lot of character which made up for that. I also thought it was really cool in a ridiculous way, whereas gundam 00 tried so hard to be cool it gave up substance in exchange. Well whatever.

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Hot rainbows Saturday, Mar 29 2008

Q: “What did you think about the soviet union” A: I never thought it was going to fall the way it did and I assumed it would remain a power as long as any other place unless it came to WW3 or something. Which of course always seemed to be a strong possibility. Failing that I thought that they’d take the rest of the world down with them. In a certain sense, they might have actually done that by “waking up” the middle east and having remnant detractors sell off all kinds of munitions. You still hear stories about old soviet warheads, especially nuclear ones, although a lot of them probably are stories. The AK-47 being the most popular assault rifle to be used by terrorists isn’t a coincidence though. Also, the consecutive weakening of Russia after the dissolution created a vacuum of US attention which allowed them to get up to the sort of mischief which apparently pissed off almost every country in the middle east. Now that Russia has been fairly firm (I’m pretty sure that the population is still shrinking with a higher death to birth ratio) it has been reasserting itself as a pissing contest opponent for anyone, particularly the united states which hasn’t been good for the stability of the world. It is true that being essentially on opposite sides of the northern hemisphere the needs and wants of Russia and the US are also opposite in many ways but frankly I feel like there’s mostly just a lot of resentment from the cold war fueling things. eh hem well anyway, I’m not a socialist myself so while on the whole it’s not like I was sad to see the dissolution it’s possible that conventional warfare died with the USSR and while that SHOULD have been a good thing, the reality is that it ended out meaning the proliferation of unconventional warfare.

Well that was a bit more than I’d intended. Yesterday I finished reading Going Postal, another Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. I found this to be one of the most amusing novels in the series so far and its tone was appreciably lighter than that of Monstrous Regiment. It was also the start of what has turned out to be a new sub-series for the franchise as the protagonist Moist von Lipvig has now been featured again in the most recent discworld book “making money”, which I’m in the middle of now. I would say that the Moist stories are structurally a bit similar to the Sam Vimes/city watch stories in that you have one man placed in a position of power by Vetinari and neither necessarily wants to be there but ends out rising to the occasion anyway. The difference is that Vimes is a cop and Moist is a criminal, their modes of operation are remarkably similar though. I do have one major qualm with the book though, it managed to conveniently rid itself of its initial premise and major difficulty through a pretty big plot twist. Only, I’d call it more of a copout. This point is easily identifiable in the book. Also, everything went just a little bit too smoothly after that. This is not uncommon in the discworld books but sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse. This however is not the worst of such offenses it just happens to have been the one I just read.

In the end I would recommend Going Postal and I’ll probably recommend Making Money unless it really spirals past the halfway point. Always a possibility. As a side note, I don’t think that Going Postal is a bad place to start yourself on the series since it’s a pretty good indicator of most of the rest of the series. In fact the archetype for most discworld books is “protagonist that’s more inclined to run than anything undertakes (typically is forced to undertake) to save some failing or otherwise doomed enterprise, hilarity ensues”. As it turns out you can turn that into almost anything since all stories are about the same anyway (they begin and they end and they never cover everything).

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That part can remain at ease Thursday, Mar 27 2008

Q:”Did Margery Daw die in episode 23 of Shakugan no Shana II (second)?” A: No she was just unconscious, look for her to possibly make a final desperate contribution in the finale. But seriously they don’t even have the guts to kill of enemies in this series, there is very little chance of them killing off a major, and I think popular (well I certainly like her), character. There is one character who might die, but it seems to me like they left the way wide open for that to not happen either. hmph… series these days have no guts.

That aside I finished reading Monstrous Regiment, another discworld book by Terry Pratchett at some point. In case you can’t tell, yes I do indeed spend the majority of my time on fiction but I think that my reading speed (in english that is) isn’t that bad. Anyway this was a book that in spite of a lot of humor was frankly downright depressing. The premise is that a girl from a before unnamed country (I think)  on the Disc disguises herself as a boy to join the army in order to bring back her older brother from the war that’s ravaging her nation so that he can inherit the family inn. The cast is fairly colorful and of course they have even more colorful reasons for being that way. Similar to “small gods” there’s a heavy dose of religious skepticism thrown into the work but while the focus of that book was religion the focus of this one was on war. Something that’s easy to forget at times is that satire doesn’t always have to be comedic, it just has to be mocking, and so quite serious stories with quite a lot to say can still be satires. Unfortunately I think the book got carried away with plot twists and hurt itself a bit. It also seems to have set itself up either for a direct sequel or to be tied in with other works. Having not read all of the discworld books I suppose that perhaps it has already been tied in with some others while I was not aware of it or have already forgotten. Anyway this is one of the darker and heavier discworld books and as such was not the most enjoyable but if you only get your serious thinking done thanks to fantasy novels then you might check it out. Or if you’re just reading all the discworld books in the order that you get hold of them like I am then you might also consider it, the book has fewer ties to past works although Samuel Vimes from the Ankh-Morpork City Watch themed books factors into the story in an unconvincing manner.

On that last note, something that I may or may not bother to find out about is why, though only Terry’s name appears on the cover and the flap of the books his wife is still also credited with writing. Which makes me wonder whether this is cursory acknowledgement of inspiration or whether as has been the case in other long running series whether he isn’t actually running the show. I have remarked recently that there tend to be two distinct styles of Disworld novels with ones like Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch, and Small Gods, being a lot darker and ones like The Last Continent being somewhat lighter. Now to be fair I haven’t read as many of the recent novels as the older ones (maybe) and it’s not as though a person can’t write different stories different ways. But it just seems pretty dramatic. Not that I care that much, I’m reading them anyway.

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There are still some who remember the original meaning of glamour Wednesday, Mar 26 2008

So the Rental Magica レンタルマギカ anime finished up recently. I have written about it on a number of occasions since it started in the fall of 2007 and I watched it throughout. Recently I questioned whether or not the strong finish that the series was heading for would rescue it from mediocrity. For me the answer was no because it ended out not having that strong of a finish. But I might as well start from the top.

Rental Magica レンタルマギカ 24 episode fantasy TV anime series which is based on an ongoing “light novel” series. For those who don’t know the “light novels” in japan are moderately short novels with a smattering of manga style illustrations which are typically serialized (I don’t know whether the novels are written in whole, then serialized, then published, or written in installments for serialization and then collected like manga is) in periodical anthologies similar to the well known manga anthologies. Some of the most popular anime series in recent memory, and a few manga series, have been based on light novels rather than manga or games which are more common sources (there’s not a lot of totally original anime). But that’s another story. RM just happened to have been a popular enough series at the right time (a time when a lot of light novel series are on the rise internationally and getting anime versions) to get an anime version produced.

Back to RM, as you might guess from the title it is about a company of magicians who get hired out for jobs, they are officially “magicians for rent” both for private individuals and jobs assigned by the “magician’s society”. This is not an original premise. Nor is the otherwise worthless male protagonist Iba Itsuki (family name first) who has a special power but doesn’t actually use magic, who somehow finds himself in the midst of a love triangle with two particularly competent female magic users. blah blah blah Itsuki takes over the magic association Astral even though he doesn’t know much about magic because his father is missing etc. etc. This series reminds me a lot of Negima with fewer female characters. The only things that are possibly original are the fairly wide variety of magic and magical phenomenon with the two mentioned female characters Honami and Adilisia using Celtic magic and the demons of Solomon/Goetia respectively. However the problem with some of this stuff is that there ends out being a lot off about it. At least it’s not just typical and vague white or black magic though.

So the show is mostly composed of short story arcs, some of which are single episodes, that give background on the main characters rather than a true overarching plot. For some reason the order of the episodes is not chronological though it is numerical. This at first put me in mind of the anime series Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu 涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 which is also based on a light novel series, however while that series basically just aired the episodes out of order RM actually
just seems to have a chronology that jumps around. I have no idea if this is the case with the original novel series or not but it’s kind of annoying and though it worked for Haruhi by adding an element of mystery (and subsequently really detracts from Haruhi if you watch it in chronological order) it didn’t really do anything for RM except always make you ask yourself “OK so just when is this happening?” and take away some of the suspense. Maybe it was pandering to fans of the original work by showing what they wanted to see earlier or something, who knows?  In the end as is typical of anime now, the work does not stand alone as an original story based on another work and since that other work is still running RM doesn’t really end. In fact there isn’t a clear goal for the series at all though there are various potential goals like “fixing” Itsuki’s eye, finding his father and possibly defeating the shadowy group Ophion that seems to want something from Itsuki and so must be lead by his missing father or something contrived like that.

To be fair to anime, or perhaps japanese fiction in the first place, the weakness of serialized fiction of all sorts is that the producers are happy to let it go as long as possible even past the realm of completion if they’re making money. And for a creator if you create a big open-ended series that you like you don’t necessarily want to end it. But the problem is that you just end out with a lot of vague series that can drag on for years and maybe never end out finishing properly. More directly for anime series, you end out with a lot of works where not a lot ends out happening. I will probably readdress this when Shakugan no Shana II finishes since that’s an even better example.

Anyway in the end Rental Magica was a vague series that didn’t explain the right things at the right time or have an actual plot. It also didn’t have an actual ending but that’s what you expect from a series that’s based on an on-going work. I was reminded early on of Matantei Loki Ragnarok and Tactics (two manga series that have the same author and were animated and had questionable endings, with Loki in particular poised for a second work that has never come) and nothing happened in the course of this series to shake me of the similarities. It was possibly better than Tactics which was also pretty annoying though I liked Loki better personally even though it was really questionable. It does have some redeeming qualities though, it’s a pretty lighthearted and attractive series (the animation is fair, the characters are flat and attractive though not especially unique in that anime way) and even if the characters are a bit contrived they all have some depth and get developed properly through the course of the series. So if you can just take it as it is (which I can’t) it’s alright. But it’s boring, and it doesn’t take much advantage of being animated because the action level is pretty low (to be fair when you’re writing there’s not a lot of advantage to writing a lot of action since it takes a lot of space and effort to travel a short distance). To me the most interesting thing about the work is that I haven’t come across a single person who has writing much about it that actually liked it that much or thought it was anything but mediocre. But for some reason we all watched the whole damn thing anyway. So there must have been some kind of charm that the series had to get people to watch it even though they didn’t like it. Dare I say that the series possessed some kind of strange magic?

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You always get more attention when writing about sex Tuesday, Mar 25 2008

There are a lot of perverts out there after all.

Well it occurred to me recently while watching professional sports that even though inflation is theoretically caused by the scarcity of goods, I’m pretty sure that at this point and perhaps for the last 50 years it’s been at least highly influenced by the varying entertainment industries. Entertainment is something that no one hesitates to put a price on, like for instance £13.29 for the newest Terry Pratchett Discworld book in hardcover on amazon.co.uk, however it’s something that is very hard to place a value on. So of course that means that as much money as will be likely paid will be charged for it. Interestingly enough illegal means of entertainment are not necessarily more expensive than legitimate ones, and perhaps they are actually cheaper. You’d think that the risk factor would drive up the price but instead it becomes almost the sole pricing factor in a lot of circumstances. After all, no one is paying taxes, no one is likely paying anything except the consumer. But that as well is another story. More amusingly is that illegal or simply free entertainment actually tends to drive up the costs of legitimate paid entertainment. That’s definitely inflation right there. What a world we live in hey? We can’t even blame god for inflation either. I’d like to see someone try though.

Well I could be totally wrong about inflation being driven up by entertainment, but I’m probably not. The thing about inflation though, is that it really doesn’t even matter in the end. Once the costs of enough things go up the cost of everything else goes up with it and we end out right back where we started. The only people that inflation is a major headache for are people with a lot of money because now the money they made off of things that were worth less isn’t worth as much. Actually I suppose that you could be inflated off of a pension too if you lived on it for long enough. viva inflation huh?

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the sounds we made Tuesday, Mar 25 2008

Indeed it is so that as the days go past the only things that seem to increase are my age and trepidation. If anything I find that the older I get the more hesitant I’ve become, as though I need to walk as carefully as possible lest my next step be the one that shatters the glass staircase that is my life.

I would not say that I long for my childhood, but I would say that knowledge has only made me worse off over the years.  I finished reading “the last continent” by terry practhett earlier, another discworld book, and I found myself relating to Rincewind. I found myself relating to Rincewind. Let me try that out one more time. I FOUND MYSELF RELATING TO RINCEWIND. It’s not a great thing.

There’s not a lot of point in thinking about it though, I’ve always been the type to know just what the right thing is, or at least to realize when I shouldn’t be doing something, and to go on anyway.

The Last Continent was pretty amusing by the way. I’m always up for ripping on australians and I think that I caught most of the references but quite possibly not all. I knew somebody who lived there for a long time but wasn’t born there. Maybe I technically still know that person, I’ve never been sure when, after being out of contact for years, you’re supposed to switch from “know” to “knew”. And does it change if you could still get in touch with that person if you had any desire to? I don’t know.

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Start with the head when eating chocolate bunnies Monday, Mar 24 2008

Although if you really want to make a splash, bite the tail off first if there is one. A lot of chocolate rabbits don’t have a very prominent tail in my experience. I even wish that people had given me some pesos or rubles or maybe some gasoline or something instead of bags of candy for easter, but so it goes.

By the way, what do you think “javimetal” is? Good thing I’m not trying to make anything off of this I guess.

So recently enough I read the book Succubus Blues by the american author Richelle Mead which is apparently the first book in a prospective series about, can you guess, a succubus. For those not in the know a succubus is basically a european (“succubus” are abrahamic I think but the concept is universal) female sex demon, according to lore their main traits are changing their form and absorbing the life energy of humans (generally males) through physical/sexual contact. For the most part the idea is that they tempt men, usually catholic priests (back then pederasty was a sign of class), with promises of carnal sin in order to either simply get them to fall or to outright sell their souls to satan. Further according to some apocryphal interpretations Adam’s first wife was Lilith and she went on to be (or just was) the original succubus, and for that reason succubi (the plural) are referred to as “the daughter’s of lilith”. I think that’s actually just supposed to be a metaphor since for the most part succubus are supposed to be formerly human women (as opposed to fallen angels like Satan and other lords of hell) but it’s usually taken literally or used symbolically in fiction. I only mention the Lilith bit since she had a cameo in this book. She’s pretty popular in fiction actually, had a major role in two books of Piers Anthony’s “Incarnations of Immortality” series, probably much more so than Eve, but after all men can’t get enough of women like that. But perhaps Lilith is somewhat of a sympathetic character… well leave that for another time. By the way the male counterpart to the succubus is the Incubus but I don’t know a lot about the mythology there. Perhaps most recently well known because of the (metal? emo? screamo?) band by the same name who I can’t think of a single song by though I’m sure I’ve heard them on various occasions.

So anyway I would describe the book as a “thriller” as it had elements of suspense, mystery, action, maybe horror (nothing in the book scared me in the least but it did have demons and vampires), and romance. All in all I thought the book was pretty fair but I wasn’t very sympathetic of the main character. Mostly because she was a moron who bumbled her way through the events of the book and entered into Satan’s service without much hesitation or thought to the consequences. She of course went about her succubus duties with great trepidation but didn’t bother to try and find a way out or around things. In the end she was a sort of “hooker with a heart of gold” character, it was kind of a joke. I think that she was written pretty realistically from the standpoint of a young woman with a lot of issues, but I’m not sure how much I believed her as a hundreds of years old (or was it a thousand+? I’m not much up on my ancient history or memory) reluctant servant of satan. The hierarchy and motivations of the various forces of evil and good were also very quesitonable, it was like they just weren’t even trying. Probably the real problem was how oblivious to things the main character was, when it came down to it she realized she had no idea what was going on, but the question is why she never realized before? Perhaps apathy, I don’t know.

But logistics aside, I rather enjoyed the book actually. Having mentioned Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series it rather reminded me of that somewhat, the clearly defined yet no less ambiguous position that the protagonist was in most of all. I think that the book could have used more incidental prominent characters since I saw the villain coming like a MACK truck but to be fair things advanced consistently. There was a beginning, there weren’t too many flashbacks for a series about immortals (most such series are dominated almost entirely by flashbacks), there was a middle, there was a climax, there was a resolution which left plenty of room to franchise. In other words it was a proper book. Having just read “the demon and the city” by Liz Williams I couldn’t help thinking of how much smoother this book (which had a single narrative thread) went compared to that one (which was written from multiple perspectives), also better. My main criticism of that book was that the author had a great character in the demon Zhu Irzh that she didn’t seem to know what to do with and instead the story ended out being dominated by the events that happened to a human woman. Richelle Mead did not make the mistake of trying to write a character she couldn’t relate to and if nothing else her protagonist, I hesitate to say heroine, Georgina was consistent. Which is important.

In fact this is a matter for another time but I feel like plot twists, especially twist endings, are betrayals of the reader. You tell a story and neglect to give out the crucial details to explain things or indicate what is going on until after things happened. This is of course the way life usually works, you end out reacting to things a lot more than just acting to make things happen, but it’s not the way that stories have to work. So of course plot twists are valuable writing tools, I just think that they get abused a bit too much. The classic example of the most annoying and overused twist ending is the “it was all a dream” one. Crazy shit happens, maybe everybody dies, and then the protagonist wakes up. The work I felt most betrayed by recently was the anime series Higurashi no naku koro ni Kai (note the kai) which in the first series (~ – the kai at the end) was really intense and then by the last story arc in the second series basically took everything back. To me it felt like the result of bad planning and guilty writing but those also are other topics.

So this is a shitty review with lots of distractions but, in the end even though Succubus Blues ended out fairly implausible at crucial points (probably the main twist of the story was an outright unfillable plot hole, which I would spoil by revealing, everything else was pretty much indicated and explained otherwise or at least somewhat plausible by being in line with the other actions of characters) and also fell back a bit to the old “I’m writing a story about divine characters so it’s OK to have divine intervention and not reveal how things work until after the fact” routine (which is not improper, if anything it’s the one time such things makessense, just a bit tedious) to disguise “deus ex machina” I enjoyed the story and I look forward to the chance to read the series as it’s ongoing. I believe the second book is available and the third is entering the final stages of editing. I do not however look forward to the angst promised by Georgina’s touch and go (almost more like run) relationships and self-pity but if that’s part of the package I can put up with it.

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further days further questions Sunday, Mar 23 2008

While drinking alcohol recently, which is an activity that I of course discourage heartily, I found myself in an exceptionally philosophical mood. And a question popped to mind not unlike that of “which came first? the chicken or the egg” in the form of “does drinking make me philosophical or does being philosophical make me drink?”. Of course the answer to the chicken thing is that some other creature lay an egg or three and it’s been all chickens ever since. Probably. Well I suppose that selective breeding came in along the line somewhere. hmm… well never mind.

I’m not drinking now, just to throw that out there. But while looking at an ubiquitous list that certainly did not contain every anime title I’ve ever watched I was forced to ask myself just how much anime one person should watch in their lifetime. So I’m thinking of making a bit of a go at it and then hanging up my hat. But without my hat the sun will just get in my eyes so bugger it.

In news of no consequence I happen to have read some more Discworld books since the last time I said anything about the series. These were Soul Music and Small Gods, in that order, which is not the order they were released in I don’t think. Soul Music was pretty amusing, mostly being a rock music parody while focusing on the exploits of Death’s granddaughter trying to fill in his role for a while, however Small Gods, which is about religion, was entirely too serious. Pretty morbid in fact. Some of Pratchett’s books get that way, Night Watch also comes to mind as a pretty miserable story. Now that I think of it both might have had the minimal character Lao-Tze or whatever his name is in them. Well, for a fantasy author I think that Pratchett is writing to a more mature audience for the most part, keeping with his age and whatnot. Which includes some good old fashioned sexual innuendo of course, very british humor that, staffs and knobs and what have you. But of course in the end like all others he is writing for himself and that seems to include some particularly manic bends here and there. The highs are highe and the lows are lowe as it were. Indeed.

So that was Soul Music: thumbs up and Small Gods: thumbs down.

You want to know something a bit queer? It rather seems that the cheaper the alcohol you’re drinking the more philosophical it makes you. This also holds true of weaker alcohol and worse tasting alcohol. Which means that the most philosophical alcohol you can get is probably canned beer.

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