Thai coconut ginger noodles are mankind's finest achievement.

Trying a new system with the "Moving Nameless" fanfic--which I've settled on calling "Moving Innocent"--has made me feel a lot further along with it than I actually am. I decided to finish all the pencils first, then do ink and colour. So while pages one through fifteen are the only ones actually finished, I've drawn up to page twenty-two. Which means I have just one more page to draw.

I don't know if I'll use this technique in the future. It's slightly disorienting, but maybe that's just because I'm not used to it. The reason I tried it was that the pencilling takes more concentration than the latter two stages. It works like this--when I'm writing the script and doing the layouts, I can't have any music playing and I want as little extraneous noise in the area as possible. When I pencil, I can work with music but not spoken word. When I ink and colour, I can listen to the news, DVD commentary, and whatever's on Adult Swim. So I figured with pencilling out of the way, the rest would be a breeze.

Did everyone else see the Saddam Hussein execution snuff film? My sister told me about a right-wing friend of hers who was eagerly looking forward to the execution, and I've seen a number of right-wingers online salivating over the video. I think barbarism has gotten too widely to be seen as a badge of honour. It seams like there was a time when most people would be at least ashamed of their bloodlust. It's awfully telling that the same people claim they can't begin to understand how the Sunnis and the Shi'ites continue in a cycle of vicious reprisals. Even setting aside for a moment the fact that the U.S. was courting Hussein as an ally during the period in which he committed the crimes for which he was executed, we can't claim moral authority to feel righteous about killing Saddam or anyone. Not after all the casualties produced by this government. And just imagine for a moment one of these slobbering Anne Coulter-ites in Saddam's position as dictator. Guys without even political savvy to keep them in check . . .

Well, I suppose I oughta get to sleep.

Great prestige:

Ursula-martinez-gala-juste-pour-rire
Uploaded by Gryb

I am Sherlock muthafuckin' Holmes, people!

Remember how I said yesterday, talking about Hellboy: Sword of Storms; "The lighting schemes and the animation itself were also fairly lacklustre. These things tend to be outsourced, and I sort of get the feeling the people at the drawing boards were thinking mainly about paychecks. I believe that's why a regular Japanese television series like Haruhi Suzumiya looks enormously better than a top of the line, American television animated project like Hellboy: Animated--everyone cares more, down to the lowest grunt, and the people in charge are more in tune with the people working under them."

Well, to-day an anonymous person sent me a URL to the Hellboy: Animated production diary blog. Two paragraphs from this entry read;

Okay, let's talk mutation. No, the X-men are not crossing over with Hellboy but it's time to face the reality of the animation process. When I watch a show like Justice League Unlimited or Teen Titans, every episode looks great to me. The are some stories I like more than others but technically, everything looks good to my eye. Not so when you talk to the guys on the production, they definitely have their favorites and gnash their teeth at the fluctuating quality...because they know what they sent and can see the differences in what comes back.

Long ago, I resolved myself to the idea that the design style of a series or movie is not what you send overseas but what comes back. We are lucky to be working with Mad House Studios in Japan who have done great work in both in features and television. We've started talking back and forth about the mood and quality level of what we expect. Sadly, we can't just keep working until everything looks perfect; there are realities of time and money. But with constant communication we have enough of both to make these things look damn fine.

Seems I was right. And apparently there was the added problem of time constraints, and the distressing fact that this guy actually thinks Teen Titans looks good (I like Justice League Unlimited a lot--its style's not as over the top as Teen Titans, but it's still only a watered down version of the great Batman: The Animated Series' look). Sure, he talks about "constant communication", but what's that really worth when you're short on time, you don't speak the same language, and the Pacific Ocean's between you?

Looking at Mad House Studio's credits (the ones where they're most central to production--most big animation projects in Japan get help from all the big studios) isn't very illuminating, as I see many good looking projects and bad looking projects, which may be explained by staff changes and the amount of passion for different projects. Though I see that they're involved in a number of CLAMP adaptations, which might explain why the CLAMP comics are always better than their animated counterparts.

Anyway, if American animated projects are ever going to be interesting again, either more American directors are going to need to learn Japanese and really get in bed with some people over there, or America needs to cultivate some home-grown talent. Maybe I oughta write a letter to Lou Dobbs about this?

You want noodle now, yes?

Happy New Year! Saddam Hussein's dead for crimes he committed when he was our ally! Bush has a trophy! The Empire's marching on America!

I have an ipod! The nicest thing about the little beauty is that it holds eighty gigabytes. I can use it as a portable hard drive--I took twenty gigabytes of anime from Tim's house just the other day. I finally got to see the rest of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which only got better as it went along. Aside from top notch design and animation, the show wasn't afflicted by broad characters and empty, irritating romance teases, as so many anime series' can be. The series is told from the point of view of Kyon, a teenage boy and confederate of Haruhi Suzumiya in her S.O.S. Brigade club. We hear his irritable but copious and interesting internal monologue. The show has far more character coloured dialogue than most anime series', in fact, and it was very refreshing.

Apparently it's going to get a U.S. release, and I dread hearing the English dub most U.S. audiences will inevitably know it by. There's simply lack of appreciation for the role a voice actor plays in animation here. I was thinking about this when I finally caught Hellboy: Sword of Storms on Cartoon Network a few nights ago. The writing was decent and some of the direction was very good, but what was truly nice about it, apart from the familiar Hellboy characters, was the quality of voice acting. Ron Perlman's great, but I'm fairly used to hearing him do voice work (as he does a lot of it), but Selma Blair was the revelation. Not only was she bringing good acting chops to the table, her voice was also wonderfully atypical, reminding me somewhat of Claire Danes in Princess Mononoke. Inflection, thickness . . . All interesting, and evocative of character. It's a shame she looked awful.

Unfortunately, Hellboy: Sword of Storms looks awfully similar to the new The Batman series and Teen Titans, featuring characters with freakish, hard edged, Easter Island statue faces. Hellboy himself comes out fairly well, as the look is somewhat similar to his comic book appearance, but Liz Sherman, Blair's character, suffers the worst, with an oddly triangular head and enormous eyes without iris or light reflection, just huge black pupils that're a lot eerier than is appropriate.

The lighting schemes and the animation itself were also fairly lacklustre. These things tend to be outsourced, and I sort of get the feeling the people at the drawing boards were thinking mainly about paychecks. I believe that's why a regular Japanese television series like Haruhi Suzumiya looks enormously better than a top of the line, American television animated project like Hellboy: Animated--everyone cares more, down to the lowest grunt, and the people in charge are more in tune with the people working under them.

Don't believe me? I invite you to compare;

From the first, which is the second, episode of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and the Hellboy: Sword of Storms trailer.

A Cephalopodmas Vision?

POV of the Hunter

A silver medallist in a women's race took a "gender test" and failed.

She's not a man and she's never had a sex change. She has "abnormal chromosomes." Abnormal enough for her to be stripped of her medal.

So, what? She took too much man-ness across the finish line? That's considered an unfair advantage? In the future, will sex be determined by footrace?

Released February 8, 2005:


. . . and released December 5, 2006:


My prediction for next year:

Senator Tim Johnson's recent medical troubles have forced a lot of people to look at the fragility of the new Democratic majority in the Senate. It's got me to thinking . . . there are a lot of senators. Do you suppose a right wing nut, similar to the one who mailed white powder to Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Jon Stewart recently, might decide assassination of a senator might not be so hard to pull off?

Good morning.

So I've got myself a headache. The past couple days, my aunt and I have been tending to Victoria the cat. The experience has taught me that I can never be in any medical profession.

Victoria's got a tube in her neck right now, whereby my aunt and I put food, medicine and water into the kitty. Doctors still don't have any idea why she won't eat. She just seems to not want to. Whenever I put food in front of her, she looks at me like I've made some juvenile joke she's in no mood for.

And I just don't seem to have a head for keeping track of the various medicines and when they need to be administered and how. It's a struggle--I constantly have to re-read the instructions, and frequently have to start over, cutting the pill, crushing it, warming the water, putting the pill powder and water together and into the syringe, and go.

At least she's started passing waste again. Well, it didn't seem like such a good thing when I opened the door to her room yesterday and discovered the diarrhoea-scape. After much scrubbing, I managed very little cleaning. Then my aunt came home and took a crack at it and somehow got that white carpet spotless again. But oh, the time consumed. I went to Tim's last night to numb my brain with Oblivion a bit, but that was the first day in about a week I hadn't worked on the "Moving Nameless" fanfic, which is now at twelve pages. So I think I'm mainly doing well. Except for the fact that I still have most of my Christmas shopping to do . . .

Why can't there be more stories like this?

In 1986, Bob Briggs was director at the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito when Doctor Gillian Taylor, the institute's assistant director, disappeared.

These days, Bob manages a Denny's in Bakersfield. He and I recently sat down over All-American Slams and coffee to discuss Dr. Taylor.

How long did you know Gillian Taylor?

A long time. She and I went to school together. We got our degrees in cetacean biology the same year. We were close, we studied together several times. She was sort of my, you know.

Girlfriend?

(laughs) I guess you could call it that.

What do you remember about Dr. Taylor's behaviour, shortly before she disappeared?

Well, she'd been acting pretty emotional and, you know, out there for a while. It was like she was going through early menopause or something. She would yell at me and then be really quiet for a long time. Is menopause the right word?

Er, 1986 was also the year the Cetacean Institute released George and Gracie, the only humpback whales ever held in captivity.

Yeah. Yeah, well, we'd been taking a lot of heat from the fishing authorities and a few liberal groups for holding the two whales.

Yes, my notes say there was a lot of concern regarding the tank. At only 15 thousand cubic metres, there wasn't even enough room for the whales to turn around.

Oh, that wasn't really the problem. The problem was money. We couldn't afford all the shrimp we had to dump in there to keep them alive. Gillian had a . . . Well, she was really emotional about seeing the whales go. She loved those whales--she'd stand over the tank and talk to them sometimes. I think she really thought they loved her. I should've seen the red flags, in retrospect.

You think her disappearance was directly related to her feelings for the whales?

Well, I don't know, but it would be a real big coincidence if it wasn't, right? I tried to soften the blow when--when we knew we were going to have to release them. I said to her one day, it's not like they're people. It's never been proven they're that smart.

How did she react?

She flipped out. Told me she didn't--how did she put it?--how much she cared for someone--it wasn't based on her estimate of their intelligence. It was sort of embarrassing. It was like she really thought those whales were her kids, or--or something.

You're referring to her status as a registered sex offender. Those kids she'd allegedly molested a few years earlier.

Uh, maybe, I mean, I don't know. The judge had been pretty easy on her, I guess because she was a woman, but I figure, she was a little fragile. I think not being around kids she transferred her--her obsession to the whales. It's weird because she was very religious.

So she didn't want to be parted from the whales? Even if it meant keeping them in those conditions?

We took good care of those whales, okay? I don't want anymore--I don't want to hear anymore about that. But, yeah, she--she was really paranoid near the end. She seemed to think whalers were going to immediately find them out there. Of course, maybe they did--we lost track of the whales pretty quick, even though we'd tagged them.

When was the last time you saw Dr. Taylor?

Just after George and Gracie had been removed. We'd kept secret from her the real removal time, so she was really surprised when she showed up for work to find them gone.

Why did you keep her in the dark?

She'd been so, like I said, hysterical lately, we didn't want to deal with her. And I figured if she had to watch them go, I'd have to watch her bawling . . . Boy, was she pissed. She slapped me. Called me a son of a bitch, last time I saw her. You know, I was her boyfriend for eleven years and we never even got to second base? I tell ya--well, I guess she's gone now, so. That's that.

Er, yes. Well, thank you for talking to me to-day. I'll let you get back to work.

It was nice talking to you.

Here's my ranking of the 2006 movies I've seen (though imdb lists some of these as 2005--even V for Vendetta which came out in May 2006). Looks like it was a year of mostly bloody, unhappy drama and broad satire;

1. Tideland
2. The Proposition
3. The Departed
4. The Prestige
5. Marie Antoinette
6. Casino Royale
7. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
8. Clerks 2
9. Art School Confidential
10. An Inconvenient Truth
11. The Illusionist
12. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
13. Hard Candy
14. Little Miss Sunshine
15. V for Vendetta
16. Superman Returns
17. Friends with Money

Two movies didn't make the list because I didn't like them enough;

The Devil Wears Prada
Bobby

Even if size doesn't matter, this is still pretty unfortunate for Indian men, I must say. Indian men are going to be taking so much shit now.

I was fantasizing to-day about interviewing Diddy and asking him, "Is it all right if I call you 'Penis'?" When he said no, I was going to go on, "Okay. So who's diddling your diddy these days? Your uncle?" Every question would in some way make reference to the fact that his new name sounds like a word a paedophile would use to refer to a little boy's penis.

Just thought I'd share. Victoria the cat's home and still not eating, but at least she used the litter box. The doctors say she was eating the kitten food they gave her, so my aunt's going to buy some of that. Victoria does seem happier, though. She purrs when I pet her.

Now I've got eight and a half pages done on the fanfic thing. I still haven't thought of a title. The two main contenders right now are Moving Innocent and The Two Loves of a Nameless Lady. Part of me wants to go with The Two Loves of What's-Her-Name. I want something intriguing without sounding stuffy and self-important. I'll keep thinking.

I still need to do Christmas shopping. Yes, I declared war on Christmas. But I see no reason not to abuse the native customs of my conquered island.

Let's see . . . There's been some cat drama around here lately. Victoria the cat's been in the hospital for a few days since we noticed she'd stopped eating and using the litter box, and was throwing up what little we could get her to swallow. The doctors still aren't precisely sure what's wrong with her. They thought it might be a fatal virus causing a liver problem, but now they seem to think it's a liver problem caused by stress and change of diet--my aunt had changed the cats' food three times in the past couple months in the hopes of getting them to lose weight. And stress may indeed have been a factor, since Victoria seemed to get bad after I'd taken her in to get her claws capped and she'd had a nasty encounter with a candle when I brought her home. She'd seemed very affectionate when I brought her out of her carrier, but unfortunately she decided to rub her face on the leg of a wobbly three-legged table on which my grandmother had decided to put two skinny, wobbly candles, one of which immediately fell and struck Victoria between the shoulders like an arrow.

Yes, the cats here have capped claws. It's better than declawing, but it does kind of bug me that my grandmother's so Republican about her furniture as to put the couch's welfare over the cats'. Taking Victoria in, I reflected on how Republican mentality helps make the world a shitty place in even little ways. Yeah, I'm a partisan motherfucker. So much for my presidential run.

Here're Keith Olbermann and Sam Seder discussing the Wondrous Lesbian Cheney and Her Babe of Hypocrisy. Every time I wonder if Stephen Colbert is a straw man, all I need to do is remind myself of the elephant horse jockey. Or the vicar in a tutu, if I want to reference Morrissey.

For some more food for thought, here're several people patiently explaining to Deepak Chopra that it's not absurd for a brain to want a banana. Sometimes I think religious people just need more hobbies. It's disappointing--I'd pegged Chopra as being more benign than that.

Well, I think I'll go work on that "Moving Nameless" fanfic while listening to Olbermann. Progress has been a little slow--I've only gotten seven pages done. But then, part of me thinks this is a transitory period that needs to be slow and contemplative. Never underestimate the usefulness of daydreaming, I always say . . .

The Decemberists counterattack Stephen Colbert! Green screens everywhere are burning!

I'm not a Nelly Furtado fan, but this was pretty damned funny, inasmuch as it pretty much confirms that many of our modern vocal talents aren't especially, well . . . talented.

That wacky Orson Scott Card is at it again. I've never read Ender's Game, but it baffles me this guy ever wrote anything that some people I respect consider to be intelligent.

I finally got a chance to see Final Fantasy XII yesterday--Tim bought the game and I watched him play for a couple hours. It seems pretty good. A lot of the gameplay has gone very MMORPG, Tim tells me--something it inherited from FF XI. I haven't played any MMORPGs, so I can't say if I think it's a good thing. I do rather like that there are apparently no random encounters now.

I was struck by a few similarities to Final Fantasy IX, like the emotion symbols above people's heads to indicate types of available interaction. And the villain is reminiscent of Kuja--though he's not as sexually ambiguous, he's certainly as vain. In fact, is name is Vayne.

I find it a little amusing that the protagonist's name is Vaan, so it seems to be a matter of Vaan v. Vayne. "V, V, V,", "Evey, Evey, Evey." Okay.

I was disappointed to see that Nobuo Uematsu isn't in charge of the music, though two of his themes appear at the beginning. Including, I was very cheered to note, the theme to Final Fantasy, which traditionally appears in the end credits of every game, but was conspicuously missing from Final Fantasy X. I guess they put it at the beginning of the new one to make up for it.

Well, that's that. So who's ready for Final Fantasy XIII?