Scary stuff

I was thinking last night that my list of Hallowe’en manga wasn’t very scary.  Maybe a bit spooky if you consider individual chapters (like the creepy possessed doll story in Ghost Hunt) but on the whole they tend to lean towards creepy more than scary.  Part of that is that I don’t seem to get scared while reading very often.  Creeped out, a bit chilled, but not scared like I would for something I was watching.  But I came up with a little “scared me” list last night so for what it’s worth, here it is.

Scariest book:  I don’t have one, which floored me when I realized it.  Considering the amount I read and how wimpy I can be you’d think I’d have a whole list of contenders.  Maybe because I tend to stick with sci fi/fantasy rather than a lot of horror?  Still, I read Salem’s Lot when I was about 12 (I heard my oldest brother talking about it and just had to read it myself, despite still being mostly afraid of the dark) and I didn’t think it was so bad.  I liked it, but it didn’t keep me awake at night. 

Two things stand out book-wise for the scary factor.  1)  I remember once lying in bed reading a book and it had a scene involving someone peering in through a window at an unsuspecting victim.  It scared me to the point where I couldn’t have turned over to look at my own window if my life had depended on it.  I have no idea what book it was though, so the rest of it couldn’t have been that memorable.  2)  I was snooping through my parent’s closet when I was a little girl (I think I was trying on shoes or something) and my dad had Rosemary’s Baby in a box of books.  The cover of the carriage with the claw poking out gave me a recurring nightmare that lasted for years.  If the book is as lame as the movie was, I wasted a lot of time being scared when I was little.

Um, since I have a lack of scary books, my favorite ghost story is Smoke and Mirrors by Tanya Huff, which is about a tv crew that gets stuck in a haunted house overnight.  Spooky, funny and very Canadian.

Scariest movie:  The Entity.  I saw this when I was about 25 (and cured of the whole scared of the dark thing) and had to sleep with the lights on for two nights in a row.  I jump and cover my eyes during slasher flicks, but have no real fear that an undying serial killer is ever going to come after me.  I’ve heard enough friend-of-a-friend type ghost stories though, that if I’m going to get scared during a movie (or while thinking about it in bed afterwards) it’s going to be a ghost story.  This movie was one of those based on a true story deals about a woman who is repeatedly attacked (and raped) by a ghost that invades her home and apparently followed her when she eventually moved.  Gah!  They had really effective music and special effects, especially considering it’s an 80’s movie.  I thought the 80’s cheese factor would make it safer to watch.  Oops.

Honourable mention:  Jeeper’s Creepers.  Lame lame movie, and I still haven’t figured out what the gratuitous psychic was for, but the last two minutes of that movie freaked me out and I had to give away the dvd.  Didn’t even want the box in my room.  The rest of the movie was pretty funny though.

Scariest anime episode:  Perfect Blue was a fantastic, tense psychological thriller, but for sheer spookiness, I’ll have to go with episode 12 of xxxHolic.  More ghosts!  Are we getting the theme here?

Scariest tv episode:  Home, from season four of the X-Files.  The episode with the creepy inbred family.  I saw this for the first time when I was visiting a friend in Waterloo and was pathetically grateful to be watching it with company.  :)  Supernatural did a Home-lite type episode called the Benders which was amusing but not as creepifying.

Scariest real-life event:  Crazy dude broke into our house when I was like, 6 or 7.  Oddly enough, three of the five people in my family were awake at the time but the only person who could have done something about it (my mom) didn’t know he was in the house.  He didn’t hurt anyone (other than kicking our dog for barking at him) but he did wander into my room at one point.  I remember him tugging on my pyjama sleeve and playing with the hangers in my closet.  Then I fell asleep, which people think is weird, but you can only keep up the adrenaline rush so long before you crash, I guess.   I woke up with my dad’s alarm the next morning but my parents thought I had been dreaming until my brother casually announced over breakfast hours later that “there was some guy in the house last night.”  arg!  I heard years later that he was related to the former owners of the house and used to do the nocturnal visit thing with them as well.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Today’s header is (of course) in honour of the holiday.  And who better to celebrate with than spooky Sunako-chan?

And if like me, you aren’t getting any real-life pumpkin carving joy, you can have fun designing your own jack o’lanterns online.

Hmm… scary manga for Hallowe’en…  How about Ghost Hunt, Wallflower (not scary, but Sunako loves the day so much!), the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, xxxHolic and uh… well, it’s not spooky, but there’s definitely some ghost action in Eerie Queerie.  

So what would be the proper criteria for a Hallowe’en appropriate manga?  Scariness?  The mere presence of ghosts and demons?  A costume party in a shojo romance?  I suppose it’s an individual choice.   :)

Update: Here’s the picture, for posterity.

The Prints of Kenneth

A co-worker was asked for the Prints of Kenneth today.  The customer even wrote it out for her.  Amazingly enough, she figured it out.  Awesome!

Public service announcement:  today is the day we turn back our clocks.  I don’t know what it’s like everywhere else, but for me here in Ontario it means I don’t get to see the sun again until Spring.  While I normally don’t mind shunning the daylight, leaving work in the dark at five o’clock is just depressing.  It usually takes me a few months to stop saying things like, “It’s so dark out!” and “It’s only five!  Why is it so dark?”

Yes, I do it every year.  I can’t help it.

Money is an important part of the manga buying process

Who knew?

Yes, I ran to the comic store today to pick up my manga, only to get really really embarrassed when I realized I forgot my wallet in my desk.  Oops!  I had to dash back to the hospital and then to the comic store again and still find ten minutes to grab something to eat.  No, I couldn’t go back after work – some friends and I went to see Wicked tonight and I had to go meet them for dinner.  My fourth dinner this week, and one more to go on Friday.  And then another one on Monday, damnit!  Yes, my birthday is this week plus my mom is visiting.  Food seems to be playing an important role.

Wicked was amazing, by the way.  It took me about fifteen minutes or so to get into it, but once I started being able to make out the words in the songs I had a blast.  I was worried for a bit there.  Sets were wonderful, costumes were fantastic (and glittery!) and the music was pretty darn good.  So so glad I went to see it.  I think it also made a difference that I hadn’t read the book and had no idea where the story was going.  I got to have some nice surprises along the way.  Glinda was my favorite character and during the intermission all you could see in the women’s bathroom lines were people doing her hair “toss toss!” thing.   heh.

Sooo, the new manga.  It was a DMP/yaoi kind of week.  I picked up:

 Only the Ring Finger Knows: the Ring Finger Falls Silent – the third and last book, I believe
Jazz 3 – will the emotional torture continue in this volume?  Probably.
The Man Who Doesn’t Take Off His Clothes 1 – I was undecided on this novel since it’s by the same people who did Don’t Worry Mama.  I spent much of that book mentally telling the arrogant domineering lead to shut up, so I didn’t know if I’d end up getting this one.  I was swayed by the guys at the comic store making fun of the title.  I don’t know why that persuaded me to get it, and I know that it doesn’t make sense.  Welcome to my buying process.
Aishiteruze Baby 4 – sadly left behind a couple of weeks back
Rin! 1 – Finally!  I’ve been looking forward to this one.  I wrote a little about it when I first heard it was licensed and have been waiting eagerly ever since.  It has a lot of the same elements of other yaoi books I’ve read – innocent younger guy with a protective older brother who’s best friend falls in love with him (usually on the rebound after giving up on the older brother, tho that’s not the case here).  Throw in an amorous friend and the naive youngster saying “he only kissed me as a joke!  what do you mean he likes me?” and you have a lot the first volume of Rin.   I think what makes it different for me is the archery.  The author uses it as a focus for the guys’ emotional states and having Katsura struggle through his anxiety problems and reliance on Sou while trying to improve his archery through his own efforts adds a needed touch of originality.  Blah.  Yes, I was gushy about this series when I first read the scanlation (two days before it was licensed!  excellent timing there) and am looking forward to lending it to friends.

Definition of frustrating

That would be trying to get really tight shrink wrap off of a volume of manga the day after you’ve cut off all of your nails.

And I was on the subway so I could only swear in my head.

pick – pick – pick – pick – pick

damnit!

pick – pick – pick – pick – pick

We do really good shrink wrapping at the store now…

Bye bye YouTube videos!

I read in the papers today that YouTube removed over 30 000 clips and videos at the request of The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers.  I was curious to see how that would affect the videos I had put on my site (mostly opening credits of different anime or previews) and I’d say maybe 6 of the ten are now gone.  I’ll leave the empty video windows there for posterity.  :) 

It makes sense.  American studios were having clips pulled, it was only a matter of time before other countries followed suit.  Perhaps there are more people out there today who have learned a bit about copyright.  Or… perhaps not.  I’ve been to a few copyright seminars through work for interlibrary loans and it can get pretty confusing between standards for different countries and different publishers licensing agreements.  For example, it’s legal in the States to email articles to patrons but illegal in Canada.  So we have to attach copyright sheets to all of our articles asking the borrowing libraries to print the article and destroy the file and hope they follow through.  Thinking about copyright issues gives me a headache.

2 CMX previews

We’re already into October, so this might be old to some people…  There are previews for Emma and Densha Otoko on the DC site.  I passed on the two train man manga that recently came out (too much buzz I think?) but Densha Otoko looks pretty cute. 

Grr… stupid spam!

You know, up until recently spam comments getting caught in the spam filter were vaguely annoying but no big deal.  I got, on average, about 10 a day.  I have now passed 1000 spam comments here (I know, low for some but too high for me) and in the past two days have gotten over 300.  Seriously.  Over 300.  Do they think their nasty pr0n comments or ads for casinos are ever going to get published?  Do people who blog really keep that little control over their sites?  arg!

On a completely different note, today I went to a departmental staff meeting at the bookstore which was a first for me.  We don’t get together as a group that often, but the inventory for our section has been getting screwed up with every attempt so we had a meeting to figure out what we could do to make it run smoothly when they do another count in a couple of weeks.  Or even correctly, which would be nice.  I ended up volunteering the information that I was taking a few vacation days from the library and could pop in to help out and my manager responds with, “Okay, I’ll probably put you on for all three days then.”  Damnit!  I don’t think I meant to work that much.  But, I will do almost anything for my two managers if they ask and I’ll have to keep a steady “think of the $$, you’re getting paid twice for today and Christmas is coming” chant running through my head.  That’ll get me through.

I also discovered that what was supposed to have been my last DMP manga list (TWO YEARS I’ve been trying to get this stuff in to the store…) somehow got misplaced.  Or at least the manager I meant to have it never saw it.  Soooo now I get to make another one, and this one is going to be called “Cathy’s last DMP list FOR SURE this time.”  Ha.  I like making ultimatum lists.  Heck, it worked with my anime section.  Which has apparently been doing very well and getting many compliments.  sniff!  I tried, and worked very hard making lists and going through hundreds of entries at Amazon to pick out titles and box sets.  People used to make fun of our anime section.  It made me sad and annoyed, so it’s nice to see it going over so well.

Back to the afghan now.  I’m 1/2 done and it’s looking pretty good so far.  Yay!