laceblade

--I am still watching The Newsroom, but I am loving the ever-living fuck out of Political Animals. meganbmoore and liseuse are both writing great thoughts about the show, and I don't have much to add. EXCEPT THAT I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

--I finished reading Kou Yaginuma's 12-volume manga series, Twin Spica. Its premise is really interesting - a small, young girl wants to be an astronaut, so she goes to space school. There are some flashbacks to a tragedy that took place before the series begins. The protagonist, Asami, meets friends at space camp school and it is sometimes pretty adorable.
After a few volumes, though, the story begins to lag.
And then to wrap things up, the manga-ka takes this turn with chronic/severe illness, basically saying that it is okay to literally work so hard that you kill yourself by refusing to live by any standards that aren't the same as your best friends - so long as you're all together.
This was extremely disturbing to me. The emotional impact of a character death had a way different effect on me than it was supposed to, I think, and this narrative thread kind of retrospectively ruined the entire series for me.

--The first omnibus volume of Mitsuru Adachi's Cross Game was emotionally compelling in a way I wasn't expecting. Highly recommended; I'll be reading more.
I somehow came to this book unspoiled despite everyone & their mom blogging about it the last couple years.
I'd also give a shout-out to the flawless backgrounds. Normally I find this vaguely cartoon-ish drawing style hard to get through, but the amazingly well-done backgrounds make it extremely tolerable for me.

--Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story continues to be fantastic. It's worth picking these up just to sigh at the art. I <3 Kaoru Mori.

--ALSO EVERYONE, EVER, SHOULD READ CODE NAME: VERITY BY ELIZABETH WEIN. HOLY SHIT.

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Manga Bookshelf recently held a blog carnival about series by the group CLAMP.
This post about Why You Should Read Cardcaptor Sakura is great, and includes many images from the series. Cardcaptor Sakura is one of my all-time favorites; this blog post does a great job explaining why.

Nightschool, vol. 1 and 2 by Svetlana Chmavoka
Volume 1 was a reread for me. It held up well, and I look forward to reading more of this series.

Her Majesty's Dog, vol. 2 and 3 by Mick Takeuchi
Not as good as volume 1, but still good.

20th Century Boys, vol. 3 and 4 by Naoki Urasawa
I continue to have so much love for this series.

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper (3 of 5 in The Dark is Rising)
I like this book the least out of the three I've read so far, but I'm still looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Why Buffy Matters by Rhonda Wilcox
Great academic analysis of Buffy, I ate this up. I didn't care for the introduction much, but I'm glad I kept reading.
Massive spoilers through the end of the series, so I would not read this book unless you've seen it all, or don't care about spoilers.

Critiques: For a book that had the goal of explaining why Buffy as a whole is important to society, the author focused mainly on analyzing it in order to prove that the show is "art." A lot of the things she chose to focus on were references in events to episodes that are repeated throughout different essays, to the point that the repetition became annoying.
Also, the author focused on the most artistic episodes in the entire series, aside from "Surprise"/"Innocence" (which are good episodes, but not stylistically different from the rest of the series), she wrote about "The Zeppo," "Restless," "The Body," and "Once More, With Feeling." I guess if my goal was to argue that an entire TV show is artistic (and I'm not sure why the argument needs to be made in the first place), I would use "mundane" episodes to prove my point.

Despite my critiques, I liked the things that Wilcox analyzed and expanded on. Visual cues/framing devices have to be extremely blatant for me to pick up on them (ie, Revolutionary Girl Utena), so now there will be things for me to look for. I am really eager to continue my re-watch of Buffy (I left off after finishing Season 3 a couple of months ago).

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Baccano! ep. 1-3 (of 16)
This is a re-watch for me, first-time viewing for the Boyfriend. Boyfriend finds the show a little pretentious [We're telling the plot in a non-linear fashion, Audience! We're so clever!], and I'd say I'm inclined to agree with him. It's a fun show, and I still love Isaac/Miria, but I think I've decided it's one that I don't want to own.

CLAMP School Detectives, ep. 1-5 (of 26)
A ridiculous opening sequence! CLAMP School Detectives is like Burn Notice, except that instead of an ex-spy, they're three fourth graders who try to help women in trouble. I don't think I'll finish this show, as there's not a lot of emotional growth/etc. Still, I liked the manga (my write-up is here), and it was nice to see the anime version.

Burn Notice, 3.1-3.2
It seems like these seasons start out a little slow for me? I like this season's antagonist more than I liked season two's, I think.

Robotech, ep. 1-4
I'm not really sure how to describe this show. It's so cheesy, and I hate all of the characters thus far. BUT post-apocalyptic futures IN SPACE will carry me far. I'm in it for the long haul, as the DVDs I have are from the middle part of the series. As I said, I dislike all of the characters for far, but the one I dislike the most is Minmei.

"High Society"
Didn't like this movie much, aside from Louis Armstrong. Lots of awful dialogue, especially the misogyny of Grace Kelly's love interests.

"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"
The subtitles didn't work on the DVD we rented from the library, so thank God this movie had a good English dub. I kind of loved this movie, aside from a couple of needlessly long crying / running/panting scenes. It's about what a high school girl would do if she had the ability to leap through time. I thought that the protagonist was maturing emotionally, but that turned out to not be the case.
I was kind of hoping for a Donnie Darko ending, but I loved this anyway.

"Freedom Writers"
My mom wanted me to watch this movie. I know that it's all "nice white lady blows the minds of kids of color with uplifting and simple phrases," but I did like the fact that the kids told their stories in their own voices throughout the movie, and that it showed the outright racism of teachers/administrators in schools. Better than I expected, but not great.

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Google Wave
I unexpectedly received an invite from my friend nylorac15. I'm a little wary about Google Wave - I think that for simple chatting, I'd much prefer Google Chat. I don't want people to watch me type as a type! In most cases, that would be very bad. I self-censor, but I need a little bit of time before I hit "Enter." Wave seems to remove this safety net.

What kinds of things might Google Wave be used for? I can only think of fannish-related activities: epic writing of fanfic between multiple parties, collaborative real-time WisCon panel write-ups, etc. Outside of fandom, I really can't come up with any uses for the technology. Let me know, Internet. Wikipedia is vague, and I'm not watching Google's hour-long video. I've got shit to do.

I need to figure out a way to have the contacts list not contain everyone I've ever Gmailed in my entire life. :[ It seems like the only way to delete people from the list is to delete them from my Gmail contacts list FOREVER, and that sucks. How come there isn't more control, as there is with Google Chat?