When the sky is full of little holes.

I played two games of pool at the Ding Dong uptown not long ago. Both of them were so lucky, but resembled skillful play to the point that I'm wondering if it isn't just better to retire. I played that well. I was invoking The Color of Money mentally, and it actually worked!

Did you know we're approaching the hundred post mark? The fact that this has lasted that long and yet managed to so meagerly increase its readership is evidence of... let's be generous. Let's say that the internet has not really gotten to a point where this blog can be fully appreciated. Because. Right. That's why. Sure.

A bird defecated on me recently. I guess it could have been worse, since none landed on my books or in my hair, and there's a giant box of t-shirts tucked away in a corner of the store that I was able to change into.

Oh God. Please let me get through this week. Classes on Tuesday, and everything else besides. (I've deleted most of it for pointlessness. A leak for three days into and around a fuse box, firefighters, one of whom said something to another one as they were leaving that I didn't catch, but the response was, "Well, I guess there are white people all over," management companies, absentee supers, Craiglist, roommate hunting, stress and anxiety galore. Still to come; bills being transferred into my name, and a lease renewal that might just end up kicking my ass onto the street come December 1st.)

(Took too long in posting. Guess what? I got through it. What a shock. In school again. Always one step behind current here, huh?)

I've seen a few good movies lately, including The Long Good Friday, Mafioso, and Black Book. I wasn't sure Verhoeven still held any appeal for me, but the simple fact is that the man can make a quality movie, entertaining, certainly somewhat restrained by his standards, but still with that childish Slavic perviness that makes him so undeniably fun. This is a long way from Hollow Man, and you should absolutely check it out. (It's actually fairly similar to Ang Lee's last picture, Lust, Caution, which was a far better film, but I wouldn't necessarily say more entertaining, if that makes any sense.)


So alright, enough foreplay. I promised scanlations, and scanlations you shall have. Kotonoha and Mangascreener are the two groups that I've been perusing. There are countless others (including Entropy, which I'm not sure how I came across, and can't speak to the quality of their projects, but you the readers are certainly welcome to do a bit of browsing and recommending, if there's anything worth recommending), but these two were the one's that Dirk Deppey recommended most highly, and they will keep any reader busy for a long, long time. Deppey was the one who initially clued me in to the existence of the community in his extremely well written analysis. (This essay was what originally pointed me towards Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, or Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip, which if you've been following along here for any length of time you know has been an ongoing obsession of mine since I first discovered it, and has become one of my most treasured reading experiences, comics or otherwise, period. I always bring up YKK, and always feel guilty because I never feel I adequately do it justice. It's has single-handedly carried me through more than a few rough patches, and despite its quiet, humble simplicity seems to me to be full of wisdom that does nothing less than teach one some of the skills and habits that contribute to gaining some small joys in life, which I certainly consider no small feat. I'll have to return to it yet again, as the summer has seen a few interesting developments both in my obsessive love for the series, as well as the creator's new work, which I only just realized was available within the past few weeks, and is looking to be of a similar if not equal caliber to my sacred Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.)

(And YKK still functions as a litmus test for like minded comics fans, and this guy passes with flying colors. Actually, his thoughts on it are phenomenal and insightful. You can just tell when somebody's got standards that they apply to what they're reading, which is surprisingly rare when you're dealing with comics. Comics blog well worth your time, and definitely a kindred manga fan for me.)

You're familiar with Dirk Deppey already, I'd imagine. His Journalista! comics news blog is basically the one comics related site that you need to have bookmarked. I do miss the editorial content that used to be sprinkled occasionally throughout and now seems more seldom, but it doesn't change the fact that Deppey might single-handedly be the reason why I'm still reading comics. Somehow I missed his best of 2007 roundup when it first appeared. It's a great read, full of interesting titles you might want to check out. He threw a couple scanlations into the list, which was what initially prompted me to return to that well in the first place. Honestly, I couldn't be more grateful that he continues to follow this community. Deppey is simply invaluable.

(I should probably offer fair warning that, to the best of my knowledge, all of the material from the two groups mentioned can be acquired either through straight HTTP links [click and save] or through Bit Torrent packets. If you have never used Bit Torrent before then it seems impossibly daunting. I use Vuze, personally, and it's pretty idiot proof, in that I can successfully get files without knowing exactly what's happening or why. It's really not so bad. And if you're like me, and apparently Deppey as well, you'll leave that IRC shit the hell alone. Is there someone out there more knowledgeable than myself that can explain what I'm missing out by ignoring the IRC side of it?)

Anyway, I think those are pretty much the resources that I have to make available to you, which means that now we're free to look at some of the work, right? Right.

I've mostly been reading the one-shots from Kotonoha to start off with. The three I'll be talking about can be downloaded from this page in under five minutes. They're all about thirty pages long, and entirely self contained.

The images in the previous post were pulled from a story called Rome Rome by Kenji Hamaoka. It's a dark, twisted little family comedy with a simple situational gag; chores and housework combined with zombie hordes. The artwork is fantastic, and the story and premise are good enough that if it were a series I'd probably pick it up. Also, it reminded me that I shouldn't just be looking for a series to blow me away in the way that YKK did. Manga is, of course, far wider than we as non-native readers can realize. Comedy's a tricky thing. International comedy's even harder. International horror comedy.... Well worth the ten minutes it requires, and sharp enough you'll want to return to it.

If you're into the whole zombie manga comedy thing, you're actually in luck. Last Gasp just published Tokyo Zombie, brought to you by the Same Hat! Same Hat! people. You can read about it here, an excellent comics blog, although it might be a littler spoiler-heavy. I skimmed it. I'm pretty excited about this one. Last Gasp is a publisher you can feel good about supporting, too, which I'm going to hold off for the moment on complaining about all the shitty anime DVD people that publish manga without what Fukasaku would describe as honor or humanity.

And since this is Japan we're incessantly talking about it's already a movie starring Tadanobu Asano, who is in every fucking Japanese movie that has come out in the last five years. I love you, Asano, but you're working too hard.



DVD's due out in... November? Something like that. Not long.

She Got Off the Bus at the Peninsula by Yûki URUSHIBARA. This is a more subdued story dealing with a young widow with a young son. It's a quiet sort of story, with an easygoing rhythm that is somewhat at odds with the sadness that seems to permeate the story. Death is to be found everywhere in it. It doesn't destroy the characters, but you can tell that they've been through a lot, all of which is expertly conveyed in small comments and through mood. The effect is of a much longer and more developed story, but here relayed with great economy. (Am I allowed to generalize and state that the Japanese are basically masters of the short story? I don't see why not. I've been led to understand that they consider it to be one of their great sources of national pride. I'll come back to this when I get to my readinglist discussion post, pending shortly.) It's a beautiful comic.

Yamamoto's Ear Cleaning Shop by Yarô ABE. This is my slam dunk. You cannot not love this comic. I guarantee it, actually. What's really kind of amazing is that it's based on an actual business model. It's a hilarious story, tender, sensual, earnest, touching.... Please. You won't regret it.


Gaming has taken a few knocks lately. Fucking life, man, always getting in the way of the important things. I've only had one opportunity to play any Harvest Moon since last reporting. It's a tough summer at Cropland Farms. Minerva the cow's not producing much (to say nothing about how I'll afford to knock her up once she runs dry), the chickens aren't cutting it, vegetables barely cover the cost of reseeding (I'm realizing that if anything I'm losing money on them, at least until I can supply myself with seeds and fertilizer), to say nothing of my orchard ambitions, which currently resembles a desert. Still, I can tell it's just a matter of continuing to funnel profits back into the farm, and eventually the money will be coming in much easier. Things with Nami are progressing according to plan. We had an odd scene on the beach, where she was all,".................................................. sigh ..................................................." so that's... good... right? And then she was mysteriously hanging around the farm one morning when I left the house, but when I tried to talk to her she just got strange and wandered off. Did I fuck it up? Geez, it's more like a real relationship than I'd thought. But at least the game can tell who I'm going for. Another difficult thing in going after Nami is that the only way to tell if a girl likes you, and how much, is to snoop in her diary. Most of the girls' diaries are in very accessible locations. Nami keeps hers in her room, which is locked when she's not there, and she never is. I might just propose early. I think she'll turn me down, but I suspect she'll come around by the end of the first chapter, my marriage deadline. If she doesn't, what... game over? At least once this whole marriage thing is settled a lot of the pressure will come off, although apparently how you raise your kid is variable, and important.

She's gonna have to wait, though. My roommate is always buying whatever old school arcade classics discs he comes across. We've enjoyed both Midway discs, he more than I the Namco, neither of us the Genesis collection. But the Capcom collection which has recently graced our homestead... holy shit. All I have to say at this point is 1942, 1943, and 1943 Kai. I'm just discovering this, and they're so intense that I can't really play them for more than an hour, but man. I finally get the appeal of shooters. And UN Squadron has apparently conditioned me to the point where I feel pretty capable. Still got to get better about utilizing the roll, though.

(To say nothing of all the Street Fighter II that's been getting played. It's funny, because it takes a little while for your ridiculous conditioning to come burbling up out of your deeply recessed memories, and then all of a sudden you realize that you just know how E. Honda works. You've just got it. But it's coming back to my opponents at about the same rate. I really dig the old school fighters. I like the slower pace, the emphasis on blocking and timing your counter-attacks. I never really got into the whole combo thing, and characters shouldn't have more than three special moves as far as I'm concerned.)

Odd note to end it on. Sorry it took so long. Happy ending!