it can’t all be about manga…

I decided to be brave after my last eye exam and give contacts a shot.  Yes, I figured it was about time that I overcame my “eye thing” and contacts would be very nice to have.  I discovered that I have a huge blinking reflex to overcome, but I’m better at putting them in myself than having someone else do it.   My eyes like to send a frantic, “Some dude’s fingers are touching me!! Get them out! Get them out!” message to my brain.  Tonight I went over to Laurie’s and got a live demonstration of taking the damn things out since that was my biggest worry.  (I was actually going to find out the location of the nearest walk in clinic just in case I couldn’t manage.)  Yesterday I spent a whole hour in the optometrists office and had to eventually get him to take them out.  His refrain was “stop digging around in there!”  but his demo was less than helpful as he didn’t actually wear contacts.

I gave them another try tonight but I’m not sure if the experiment was a complete success.  I could *feel* them covering my eyes and my vision wasn’t quite right on one of them.  It made me wonder if the lenses somehow got switched.  Not when I put them on!  I totally knew that the big “L” on the case meant that that was my left lens.  :)  I’m going to put them in again tomorrow afternoon at work and then go to the eye place (conveniently located in my hospital) and have the guy check them to make sure they’re in properly.  Maybe I just need drops or something…

But why am I putting them in tomorrow afternoon?  To see Iron Man, of course!  I went opening night and absolutely loved it.  It’s everything I could want a comic book movie to be, and I even think that comic book Iron Man is a dink.  That Civil War thing was totally his fault.  :)  But I loved Robert Downey Jr. - he was perfect.  And his little robot arm thingy in the lab could have it’s own movie.  I’d go see it.  So my second viewing is my reward for contact lens success.  It’s going to be the first movie I’ve seen since I was 12 that didn’t have my glasses framing the screen. 

Speaking of eye things, btw… there’s a new xxxHolic season/series started.  There are five episodes subtitled so far and the first story is of the grudge-holding spider that webs shut Domeki’s eye.  I loved that story. 

There is a strange, alternate reality version of Princess Mononoke on television right now.  Many of the voice actors have changed, the performances are different and so is the dialogue.  It’s a wee bit mind bending to listen to.  I’m not surprised that there were different versions of the movie recorded, just that one of them made it on to tv.

huh.

I read via the Newsarama blog that Viz sent cease and desist letters to fansubbers working on the Death Note anime.   Instead it’s available for sale on the Viz website.   But!  When you get there, it says in RED letters:

This product is only available for purchase in the US.

Of course!  Now, I’m not feeling worked up about this at all (I can’t stand the manga so haven’t bothered with the anime) but this is fairly typical.  What kind of cheeses me off about including Canada as a country it’s licensed in, yet denying us the ability to pay for legal downloads is that if you actually go for the dubbed version it’s probably being done by Canadians.  Nice, eh?  (Please note Canadian inflection on the “eh”)

Hmm.  No, I just checked it out and it’s the subbed version for sale.  That’s unusual.

Now I’m going back to rereading Twelve Sharp and watching the Dr. Who Christmas special, which is playing on CBC.  Heh.  I just got to see the Tardis high speed chase again…

I’m back!  Sort of.  I was going to blog a bit last week and thought I’d have the perfect chance when I stayed home from work for three days after getting sick but… I was too sick.  Unsurprisingly I spent all three days in bed trying to read or breathe and had a total lack of interest in my computer.  :)  One thing I DID manage to do was have a Ghost Hunt anime marathon - 17 episodes all at once.  Not hard to do since I was bed-ridden anyway.   (I didn’t even manage to get any manga read, grumble grumble)

I ended up really enjoying Ghost Hunt.  There were few surprises since it matches the manga very closely, but the animation is great and the voices worked really well for me.   Well, Mai was occasionally annoying but that’s because if there was any screaming or shouting to be done it was usually her.  I can’t say whether I prefer the manga or the anime - I read the manga first so there wasn’t much suspense for me while watching.  However!  There were some genuinely creepy/freaky moments, and I think those worked better as animation.  The chills aren’t quite the same without motion, sound and timing somehow. 

Creepy creepy ghost children are spying on Mai.

Yay!  I got my passport in the mail today!  That was three whole days quicker than the passport office guy said it would be.  Soooo…. I can now buy my ticket to Japan and then go anywhere in the world that my heart desires.  Except I feel horribly guilty for squandering vacation days on doing anything but going to visit the nephews so I still won’t be jetting off anywhere very exciting.   (What am I saying??  Northern Ontario is an endless party!)

Ahem.

So the rather longish break from blogging rather coincidentally started on the day I applied for my passport.  I spent the whole morning relaxing on a plastic chair with some books and my headphones waiting for my number to come up (I got there at 9:00 am and there were already 100 people ahead of me) and I have to say the whole process was a lot less painless than I had feared it would be.  Then, since the office is in the same building as the place I buy my comics I got to do some shopping before heading off to work.  (I picked up the last volume of Kare Kano to read while I ate lunch.  I liked the series but am also grateful that it’s over.)

More manga was bought after work and then I headed over to the bookstore to order volumes 2 and 3 of Her Majesty’s Dog and Yoki Koto Kiku (cute but dark, with many flying axes) and popped up to my section to say hi to the guys before leaving.  Then I discovered to my horror that when they had done some rearranging they moved MY anime section right next to the kids movies.  Specifically, where the Disney dvds had been the day before.  I assumed that it was a mistake.  I assumed that they hadn’t realized what they had done.  But no, almost immediately after the move other anime people in the store started mentioning that it was a bad idea.   Didn’t matter.  The section was already moved.    arg!  I left the store after leaving a verbal message for my manager that it was a BAD IDEA!  (I think I didn’t use the phrase “you guys suck” until a few days later.) 

Hmm.  Thought I could write about this without doing the rant thing, but I just erased two rather long paragraphs when I meant to make this short and sweet.  So, long story (sort of) short - apparently the move will be “reevaluated” in a few weeks to see if sales are affected, or if we get complaints, or maybe if I sulk long enough about it.   sigh.  Oh yeah, and I guess the manager who does quick walk throughs has decided that only teens ever browse anime so it belongs next to kids because that’s where the teen books are upstairs.  And I am baffled as to where that came from because he’s actually an advocate of keeping ALL the manga downstairs in the regular graphic novel section.  Also, about 90% of the anime *I* sell is to adults.  Like teenagers can afford our too high prices.

My side of it?  The obvious of course - anime must be protected from people who can’t see past the “cartoon” to the subject matter.  And quite frankly, I’ve never been in a store that kept their anime next to the kids section that had anything other than a crappy selection.  (I’ve always assumed that if they didn’t know enough to separate the two they didn’t know enough to order in the good stuff.)  I’ve never cared much about the sales part of it, either.  My job was to try to build a section that people would 1) stop snickering at and 2) stop complaining that we’d have volumes 3 and 7 of a series and nothing else.  People now have a lot of titles to choose from if they want to pay the price and that’s good enough for me.  

I’m still trying to do the rant thing.  Gah.  Needless to say I don’t feel comfortable having unsuspecting parents walk down an animated aisle to get to the Spongebob stuff and coming across some of the more adult covers we have in our section.  Not to mention the innocent looking stuff that when watched has a supply of nudity, violence, blood sprays, too many hot spring scenes to count and… hmm.  Let’s not forget the incest titles people.  Oh yeah.  I love and adore anime but I can put an adult spin on any of it when I’m trying to convince people it’s not all Pokemon.  (Tho I’m okay with Pokemon - a couple of weeks ago I spent a delightful 15 minutes with some confused newbie grandparents who’s nine year old grandson just discovered the show.)  I also took great delight in telling my manager that we got Kizuna in on the weekend.   That’s what we want the kiddies watching!

Like I said - I’m not sure if the change is going to stick, but I’ve officially declared the anime section disowned as long as it is where it is.   No shelving, no ordering, no straightening.  

Okay, that’s it!  I’ve refrained from about 2/3 of what I would have written two weeks ago and kept out the many arguments/counterarguments and complaints that I had.  Be grateful.  One of my co-workers kept telling me not to get mad about this.  I wasn’t (my mads are unmistakable) but I was pissed off and disappointed that after working with me for so long they really don’t know any better.  At least when they sent us the anime sign with the accent on the ‘e’ it wasn’t anything anyone in the store did.  (snicker.  that was really embarrassing.)

So what about the week after I got over the urge to write mean things?  Hmm.  Reread a couple of series and assorted other books, slept a lot at weird times and my tv shows started to come back with new episodes.  I keep forgetting what a time suck watching more than two shows is.

Last week when I went to the library to pick up my holds I heard something horrible.  “You have 36 books signed out.”  I have not had that many books signed out at once since they introduced the utterly useless receipt system for keeping track of due dates back when I was in college.  Sooo, that’s where I’ve been all week.  Reading my way through some of the pile and for the most part ignoring not only my blog, but also my computer.  Today I returned 7 of them… and picked up 4 more holds.  Damnit! 

Fortunately much of what came in was manga that I had had on hold forever, so at least once I start on those it’s easy enough to get through.  Of course, I also had to watch the last three discs of the Freaks and Geeks set in one week in addition to the reading…

I did manage one festive task this week, and that was decorating the little mini tree my mom made for me a few years ago.  I bought wee little glass ornaments for it, but it was looking kind of plain, so I improvised some thematic decorations.  And since this is me we’re talking about here, of course they’re anime themed!  Finally a use for all those little chibi keychains I’ve been collecting over the years!  (No one has THAT many keys.)

I haven’t quite managed the trick of reducing glare with my camera, so some of these are hard to see, but here’s the weird little tree I ended up with.

On this side I’ve managed to combine my Robin fangirlishness and my love for Fruits Basket and Chococat.  (That long rectangle near the bottom is a Kyo keychain)  Anything that looks overexposed and too white is an Inu Yasha figure.  :)  And that’s the edge of the stacks of manga I have covering the back of my dresser in the background.

This side has Yuki, Shippo and Mr. Saotome tucked into the back.   The two white glows are Inu Yasha and Sesshoumaru (I had to buy a whole package of them to get the Sessoumaru one, which is why I have so many.  Kagome and Miroku are on the other side of the tree.)  And… er… another stack of manga on the other side of the printer.  This is most of my new stuff that I haven’t posted about yet and threatens to topple over each time I sit down at my computer.

Sadly, my tree has no angel perched on top.  Could I even find something appropriate?

If you want to make your own mini tree, you can find instructions here.  Now I’m off to wrap presents, and read more library books.

Guess what I finally managed to get!  No, I haven’t watched it yet, but I was flicking through the movie and saw this scene which made me laugh.  That’s some really noxious green juice…  I love that it made it into the movie.  Some of the best moments from the anime was when Inui was forcing that stuff onto people.  Even the mighty Tezuka would fall…

(Do I need to say this is from the Prince of Tennis movie?  Yes? No?)

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.