Blog

God. The last two weeks seem to have been entirely me thinking about doing things and then not doing them. What the hell. Lack of mental energy and inexplicable loss of ability to kick myself in the arse and get on with it. Ridiculous.

Anyway.

Anime.
Durarara!!, my current favourite anime in the world ever*, has a really rocking opening theme. See how rocking it is?


The rockingest.

I may or may not have been listening to it on repeat endlessly for the last few days.

Durararararararara is a great show, and it has completely captured my heart. Every time I start a new episode I feel like I'm getting a super delicious special treat. They had better keep it up, though, because now I have expectations.

It's one of those stories that's more about a place and the interactions of the people who live in it than about any one character and their mission. Which I like, because people interacting is interesting. I guess it's an... *spins the genre wheel* urban fantasy? It's almost the real world, one or the other urban legend just happens to be true. There's a headless Irish fairie** looking for her head, a guy who can throw around vending machines when he gets angry (my favourite, but I might just be biased because the latest episode focused on him), some internet gangs, and some mysterious mad scientists, because what would life be without those? I presume they will eventually provide the plot that brings all the strands together in the grand finale, as you can't go on telling anecdotes about a vaguely connected group of people forever, unfortunately.The pacing and general storytelling is great, too. You constantly feel like there is a huge, colourful world going on that you're only seeing a small slice of, which is one of my number one things in a story that makes me cream my metaphorical pants.

Yes.

Oh, and the art is really nice, too, though it does suffer from obligatory improbable breast syndrome sometimes.

You can also watch it in a shockingly legal manner (I actually mean that this time) and for free at Crunchyroll, which I still think is a wonderful website. I do quite enjoy giving people their due when I've enjoyed the fruits of their efforts. That is sort of how society functions. I'm trying very hard not to turn this into a rant about the annoying attitudes of internet pirates, especially as that would be a little hypocritical, since I'm evidently still selfish enough to download some things — though I honestly plan to buy DVDs of things like Star Trek or BSG when I can — so I'll shut up now.

Also I can't actually afford a Crunchyroll account at the moment anyway, so I steal Tim's.

Also books.
I borrowed The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold from my mum last week, and read it through in one go.

It wasn't very good.

The basic plot is: girl is raped and murdered gruesomely, and watches her family try to cope with it from the afterlife. Woo!

The first half really captivated me, hence deciding to read it all in one go; there were atmospheric and creepy and sad things going on, and it was all quite engrossing. But then after the halfway point it just completely lost it's drive. I was ready for something exciting to happen, and it just... didn't. It continued to be a series of stuff that didn't really flow or seem to signify anything. And when the tragic and creepy atmosphere dissipated, the characters started revealing themselves for the flat clichés they were, and after a while I found myself increasingly tempted to skim forward to the end so I could be done with it.

And when I finally got there, the end turned out to be the worst part of the entire book. -_- First of all there is the utter wtf-ery of the dead girl stealing the body of the gay goth girl who can see ghosts, and using it to have sex with her old crush from before she was killed. Because raping someone else is totally the way to get over being raped, amirite? Apparently neither the goth girl or the crush really mind, either, which is the main thing that makes it as wtf as it is. This is apparently the last thing the dead girl needed to do before she could let go of the world of the living and move on to the permanent afterlife (which is... full of pillows? Something like that. If I had the book with me right now I'd look it up). And then there's a ridiculously saccharine last scene in which her parents have gotten back together despite never actually resolving any of their issues, and her sister is getting married to her middle school crush, and her little brother gets a set of drums for Christmas, which don't actually seem to have any significance at all as far as I can tell, and everyone is happy.

It would have made a pretty good short story, I think, if it was about half as long.


Speaking of disappointing books, I have totally let the internet down re: Colony reviews. I haven't actually finished it yet; I was on the last chapter just before we left for the States, and it was just so boring, even at its climax, that I could not bring myself to go on. It got worse at it went on, not better. Occasionally, at high points, it worked itself up to about as exciting as the baseline of a normal book.

I was trying to figure out why this was, and I think it's the characters. Everyone is so simple. They all have one or two simple motivations, and the book keeps telling us exactly what they are, FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. The same goes for the political factions. In any case, the only things you missed was the sheik ordering someone to be raped to death as a punishment (in case we still hadn't realised he was the bad guy), and all of the "black, brown, and yellow" people in the US mounting a violent pseudo-communist revolution against all of the white people in the US. I don't know what the outcome of that was, because even armed revolution was interesting enough to hold my attention.


There are some good books in my life, too, though! I don't remember if I mentioned it here, but Friendly Fire by Alaa al Aswany was amazing, and at the moment I'm reading an anthology of Sci-Fi and Fantasy stories that my parents got for me in the States, which has yielded nothing but good stories so far. ♥ I might talk about some of my favourites — if I can pick favourites — when I'm finished.


*Though I have just downloaded the first episode of the brilliantly named Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn subtitle: Just When You Thought We Couldn't Get Any Sillier, so we will see.

**I hope if her head ever shows up, it really is like mouldy cheese with a hideous grin and gigantic, darting eyes. XD
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