DoomBook

It occurred to me that I haven’t put a series specific write up for anime lately, or anything on what I’ve been reading and listening too. Here’s a brief post to remedy that, possibly with some specific write-ups later.

Reading:

• “Whitechapel Gods” by S.M. Peters
• “Undead” by Richard Lee Byers
• “Wrath of a Mad God” by Raymond Feist
• “Twilight Watch” by Sergei Lukyanenko

And watching:

• Welcome to the NHK!
• Karas
• Zombie Loan
• Night Magician
• Samurai Champloo
• Ouran High School Host Club
• Genshiken Season 2
• Rental Magika
• Denno Coil

And basically listening to the same run of audio. Nothing really exciting on that front. Groove Coverage, Tiesto, Ferry Corsten. Anjunabeats Worldwide off di.fm. A good run of Last.fm.

Even though it keeps insisting that I want to listen to bad 80′s New Wave and seriously clangy industrial, which I don’t.

And that’s it for now. Maybe I’ll have something up on the series or some single tracks that have caught my ear out of the noise.

Nochnoy dozor (Night Watch in English) was an excellent book by Sergei Lukyanenko. Night Watch the movie (in it’s original Russian, no need to watch a bad dub) is a mediocre movie that’s a horrible letdown from the novel it’s based off of.

Honestly, I’d say to give it a pass unless you want to see how badly a book can be translated into a movie.

The plot changes are drastic and largely unnecessary. One of the major ones is even listed as a “glitch” by Lukyanenko in his comments.. how on earth you glitch a major part of your adaptations plot is beyond me.

If you’d like to see the array of differences check the movie listing out over at Wikipedia.

Acting talent for the movie isn’t all that bad, casting is alright, with characters fitting in with their descriptions from the novel well enough. It all really comes back to the plot being a horrible adaptation that really chops the heart out of the story.

Read the stories (although I found Day Watch to be a bit odd and that it didn’t fit well with Night Watch/Twilight Watch) but give the movie a pass. Or catch it on broadcast TV.. this one’s not even worth a rent. I’ll post if Day Watch (the movie) is any better when I pick up a copy to check out.

Kio Shimoku’s slice of life manga on the happenings of a group of high-school Otaku is at an end. Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture volume 9 wraps up the series and ends on a somewhat longer note than the original from Kodansha’s Afternoon (from which the series was reprinted).

The same dense art that originally had me pick up the series continues through the last book. Panel’s are filled out with expressive character action and the dialog tends toward wordplay and conversation rather than a trade of statements some manga writers over-use.

Almost all the characters that appear through the series are present for the finale. The only notable absence was the creepy former club president, who hasn’t shown up since the early issues of the series.

So all-in-all it’s a somewhat more satisfying ending than the original print release. It’s already gracing my bookshelf, go check it out.

Just read Outlaw Nation by Jamie Delano, Goran Sudzuka, and Goran Parlov. It’s essentially a classic meandering American tale written by a British writer to show what he saw in our country on his travels. It misses a lot of the veneer and really cuts to the heart of the States.

Also, the storyline proves to be a bit prophetic what with the clamp down on American civil liberties in the wake of 2001.

Outlaw Nation illustrates the death of the American Spirit in pursuit of the American Dream, to steal a line from the liner notes. That’s truly the best way to phrase it, and an interesting perspective you don’t often get in native tales.

The story follows Story Johnson, a zonked out ex-writer and member of the somewhat extraordinary Jones clan. The Johnsons are a particularly long lived specimen of American that started out from a brutal act in the Old West and carry on the raucous Western spirit. Even in the face of encroaching government intervention and the new world order.

Almost poetically, Americans aren’t portrayed as being good or bad, and are mostly (seen through the eyes of our character, a native son) our own worst enemies.

Even though the yarn raps up early the story romps at a good pace and satisfies. As the author states, in light of the events happening in the real world post-publishing, it comes off a lot cleaner than he had intended.

Grab a copy, it’s a good read.

Raymond Feist’s latest outing to Midkemia, part of his DarkWar saga, builds up the storyline in interesting ways. The usual suspects are all there rendered in vibrant colors.

As a follow up to Flight of the Nighthawks and a part of his larger canon of works in Midkemia Into a Dark Realm really worked for me. Characters don’t tend seem overly repetitive or static.

Into a Dark Realm being the middle book in the series I can’t say much about the content without spoiling it. If you liked the previous book in the series this entry should hit the same bar of quality.

Anyone new to Raymond E. Feist’s work might want to start off with Shadow of a Dark Queen or one of the earlier series just to get a feel for the continuity. Plus they’re excellent pieces of literature in their own right.

Finally the trade paperback of Warren Ellis’s Fell has been released. I picked it up to fill in the blank spots from the comics I couldn’t find to purchase (even after 8 reprints) and it’s good. See my previous post for a quick description of what it is. Here’s Wikipedia’s take on it.

Feist is back with more novels set in his Midkemia world. Once again the Conclave of Shadows is fighting a threat to the various and sundry realms they service.

The over-arching plot in these books is fairly straightforward. There’s some evil personages, some gods, and a handful of good characters with foresight and a good view of the “bigger picture” attempting to thwart the evildoers machinations.

So the plot (although involving some well thought twists) doesn’t exactly break new ground in the Fantasy genre.

No, I think what keeps me reading Feist’s novel’s on a somewhat regular basis is that they’re just so damn well written. Each character comes off as being real rather than simply a device awaiting a certain point in the plot. Scenery is richly described. And the books chapters flow with uncanny pace . Not too quick. Not slow and grindingly mechanical.

So, the assassin’s guild is on the move with only Pug’s conclave to stand in there way. Revisit Stardock, Sorceror’s Isle, and Great Kesh in Feist’s latest work Flight of the Nighthawks.

An excellent read.

Yea. That about sums it up. His three panel comic on how it went down is here.

Now, what bothers me here is the fact that he got fired for talking about it being hard to kill someone with a .22 rifle.

This is a conversation I’ve had before.

And oddly, the content of it wasn’t much different. Basically, the same context with a “yea, a .22 caliber rifle is great for target practice.. you’d have to really try to kill someone with it, not just accidentally misfire or something.”

I’m kinda shocked someone could mis-construe that, with the “have to shoot them in the face” added on, as being some kind of warning that you might be a psychopath. Psychopath’s *don’t* casually talk about the dangers of firearm ownership, they simply start shooting people with them.

This, folks, is why they’re psychopathic. Stating you picked out a target practice rifle based on it’s improbability of harming someone (yes, even with a colorful metaphor) shouldn’t raise any red flags here.

Is it just me, or are people starting to witch hunt because of a infinitesimally small number of deranged individuals?

Strange things tend to happen with this online medium. Looking around today and following up to see if Jack L. Chalker had released anything new(ish) prior to his untimely demise I noticed that his website hadn’t been updated or even kept running smoothly after his departure.

How I found out about his bout of heart troubles and unfortunate end is also a bit odd. It was in the forward to a book on programming AJAX, one written by someone apparently influenced by the accomplished Science Fiction writer, teacher, and from all accounts good guy. But I digress.

One of the stranger things about all of this is that writings online tend to collect up like so much electronic floatsom washing up on the shore. Even if they’re not officially run by anyone sites stay up long after their authors slip the mortal coil.

Writings on forums get cataloged forever.

With all it’s various archives no antagonistic Usenet statement about someones affiliation with fascism or resemblance to mustached dictators will ever be lost. Just forgotten.

Postings about Usenet I find particularly funny, as they’re always written in the present tense. The reason that’s funny, for those of you who don’t use, don’t know about, and have no inclination of ever using Usenet news forums is that they’re all dated circa the late nineties.

And always proclaim that their subject matter, alt.fiction.literature or whatever, is still a vibrant community of writers that’s just waiting for you to drop in. There’s still people loitering on Usenet mind, it just hasn’t scaled. In fact, it appears to have shrunk quite a bit since the endless deluge of AOL users back when (see Eternal September on wikipedia).

Speaking of which the font of Cyber Punk genre fiction at the Tea Bowl mirror being maintained by Joel Benford. Ken Stone seems to have disappeared, washed under the tide of data. Or maybe just forgotten by Google. He ran Anime.net back at the dawn of time.

I’ll mirror it once again when Villa-Straylight is back online or Doombook’s main page gets cleaned up. Just to keep it from getting too dusty.

Because that’s all that happens. For a medium with such a short shelf life on “new” content it’s funny how things are starting to disappear less as the network spreads out. Although it’s freaky to see someone’s last writings lingering around with no tidy closing notice put on them.

–Fin

Nochnoy Dozor (Night Watch in English) is the first book of Sergei Lukyanenko’s modern dark fantasy (trilogy?) centering around “Others” waging a war unseen in Moscow. The Others encompass warlocks, were-critters, magicians, and other fantasy elements.

So far, so good. It’s kept me reading straight through to the tail end of the book. His writing style is aptly compared to William Gibson’s as they both center the story neatly on the characters and wrench a well researched and colorful environment into place for them to play in.

Without giving away too much of the plot, the Night Watch (players bound to be good who work for furthering law and the light) monitor the activities of “dark” others at night. Were-wolves, dark magicians, and the like are all under their purview. The Day Watch is made up of the same chaotic evil-doers and monitor the activities of the light side during the day.

All this goes on under an truce arrived at after the last cataclysmic meltdown between the two sides. However, they still jockey for position and our protagonist is a pawn in the Night Watches latest machinations.

So give it a look. The translation is good and manages to convey the correct sentiments without destroying the unique Russian feel of the writer. It’s worth the 12$ or so the paperback goes for a good novel and a little insight into Russia at the turn of the century.

There’s also a movie.. but the book has quite a bit of intricate play between the characters. I’m not sure it’ll translate well to the big screen.