At midnight, the date changes. On July 5, it is no longer appropriate to play with explosives. It’s nice that you feel like celebrating, but I really need to sleep.
Category: Real life adventures
I can see again
… or, less melodramatically, I finally got the new glasses I needed. I’ve read far less than usual these past few years because reading has been a tedious process: read 20 minutes, holding the book and my head at uncomfortable angles so the print is within the narrow zone of close focus, until my vision blurs; wait 20 minutes, until I can focus on nearby things again; read 15 minutes, until my vision blurs again; throw the book against wall and listen to a CD instead. My health insurance covers eye exams but not the glasses themselves, and even at the cheap mall outlets a new pair of glasses is still beyond my budget, so I tried ordering a pair from 39 Dollar Glasses.com. I need varifocal lenses with hefty corrections for nearsightedness and astigmatism, so my glasses cost about twice $39, but they still were only about a third the price quoted by the salesman at the mall.
Am I satisfied with them? Not entirely. The frames need a bit of adjustment, which I’m hesitant to do myself, and while I do have good distance and close-up vision now, intermediate vision, such as is necessary when working at a computer, is confined to an annoyingly small region. I may need to get a second pair specifically for work.
However, I’ve never been completely satisfied with any of the glasses I’ve purchased in the last 20 years. My new pair, even with its problems, is a better fit than the second-last pair, which was expensively mis-manufactured and ill-fitted by the optician at his shop. And my new pair does pass the crucial test: I can read all evening long.
Bookless in Wichita
I had an unnerving experience last week. I made one of my rare forays to the shopping mall and stopped at the bookstore there. I couldn’t find any book I wanted to buy, not a single one. What looked interesting I already have in my library, and everything else looked irrelevant, tedious or dumb. This has never happened to me before. At every bookstore I’ve ever visited, no matter how small or specialized, there was always something that caught my eye. In recent years I’ve minimized the number of trips to bookstores because I’ve run out of space for more bookshelves and I can only pile books on the floor so high before the stacks become unstable. If my experience at the bookstore last week is a harbinger of things to come, bookstores may not be the dangers to my budget that they have been in the past.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can still find plenty at Amazon.com.
Something isn’t quite right in this picture. Although the spine of the book on the left end states that it is also “Fugitives of Chaos,” actually it’s “Titans of Chaos,” the conclusion to John C. Wright‘s trilogy.
Historical artifact
Note the license plate. It was Richard who loaned me his copy of Princess Mononoke several years ago and thus made The Kawaii Menace inevitable. (Richard’s brother has an astonishingly huge old Cadillac. There’s room for a children’s wading pool between the front and back seats.)
Two years ago today …
… I launched The Kawaii Menace. It’s my second anime weblog, succeeding Beware the Kawaii, which I abandoned when bots found ways of circumventing the anti-spam mechanisms. I’ve been writing about anime to some extent now for about five years, ever since I discovered Serial Experiments Lain.
Today is also the sixth anniversary ((Six years, while not negligible, isn’t all that long in the blogosphere. Charles G. Hill has been around for over thirteen years now and still posts more in a week than most bloggers do in a month.)) of my first weblog, Mixolydian Mode, also defunct for the same reason. ((Coincidentally, Pixy Misa began blogging at almost the same instant I did six years ago. Congratulations, Pixy)). Its successor, Scuffulans hirsutus, devoted largely to photography, music and nonsense, is a good place to escape the virtual crowds; daily traffic there is usually in the single digits.
This is probably as good a time as any to acknowledge the obvious: The Kawaii Menace is essentially retired. I’m not shutting it down. I do have a series of summing-up posts in mind — though I’m in no hurry to write them — and I am as curious as anyone to see who the top ten anime babes are. There likely will be occasional observations, trivia and links about animation, Japan and women with blue hair. But my interest in anime has run its course. Little I’ve seen in the past year has sustained my interest past the second episode. I still enjoy watching old favorites, but I don’t have the patience anymore to plow through all the unremarkable new releases hoping to find another Denno Coil.
Music at the office
(This has nothing to do with anime, but it might be of interest to those who are into ambient sound.) Here is last month at work, condensed to two minutes:
More ambient music
Here is this past February at the office, condensed to about two minutes:
Ambient music
Here’s what life has been like here at the office this week:
Here’s what my office currently looks like:
Quote of the week II
*****
I haven’t spent much time on anime recently, and I don’t know when I will. My current obsession is a collection of fiddle tunes. (([Link deleted because of reported virus.] If you’re in the Kansas/Oklahoma area in September, go to the Walnut Valley Festival and drop by Carp Camp. And if you are building a website, don’t use frames.)) It should keep me busy for quite a while. I’ll be back eventually — maybe — but don’t hold your breath.
Advisory
I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days. Like Pete, I’m taking Moribito with me, though in my case it’s the book.
My picks for the top five anime endings should appear one a day. As you will discover, my taste is very different from Astro’s, but there is one we both chose. I don’t have time to write commentary on my picks tonight; perhaps when I get back.
Oldternative tunes and more
The crowds were smaller than usual at Winfield, and the camping and campground picking were off-site this year, but the music as as good as ever. I’ve got a bunch of pictures and some field recordings to survey and edit. Until then, here are some videos of this year’s discoveries, The Wiyos ((This actually was their second year at Winfield, but I missed them last time.)) and Doug Smith.
What happens when you combine Irish dancing with Talk Like a Pirate Day?
Cutlass dancing.
My friends and I stopped at the relocated Carp Camp on the way home from Winfield last night. Here’s a bit of the music we heard:
The sound isn’t wonderful (crank it up), but it might give you an idea of the energy flowing there.
There will be many more pictures of Winfield and Carp Camp when I have time to sort and edit everything in the camera.
We interrupt the regularly scheduled program for a bit of reality
(I just got an email from a friend checking to see how I am, and I thought I ought to make an announcement here in case anyone else is wondering.)
The remains of Tropical Storm Lowell (an east Pacific storm that nobody paid much attention to) dropped ten inches of rain in the Wichita area yesterday. Several of the rivers in the region are well above flood stage. Fortunately for me, none of the flooding is near my neighborhood, even though the Little Arkansas River loops around it.
My principal, selfish concern with the flooding is to what extent it will interfere with the Walnut Valley Festival next weekend. The spot where I normally camp is currently under at least ten feet of water. (If I do go this year, I’ll be day-tripping. Even if the Walnut River is back within its banks in time, the mud will be deep and gooey in the campgrounds.)
Carp Camp, September, 2008. Here’s what it looked like a year ago. (Photo from The Winfield Courier.)
Public enemy #3
Tribulus terrestris, a.k.a. puncture weed. One of the pleasures of bicycling in summer.
Close-up, showing the developing seed heads.
Public enemy #2 is the idiot who chatters on a cell phone while driving. #1 is the jerk who doesn’t look, doesn’t think and doesn’t care. All three are common in Wichita, particularly the last.
Checking in
Odds and ends in lieu of a substantative post.
My ankle has healed to the point that it’s a minor nuisance, not a major problem. It doesn’t feel right, and I expect that it never really will, but I can get around plenty well now, up and down stairs and out on my bicycle. I’m done with formal physical therapy. Next month I plan to take a beginning ballet class as a form of advanced PT. I don’t expect to be back on the dance stage again — my ankle is getting better, but my knees aren’t — but taking class will be worthwhile just to demonstrate to myself that I can still do it, despite everything.
*****
I’ve installed a new photo gallery that I hope will be easier to upgrade in the future when it becomes necessary. I’m in the process of uploading the pictures from the old site. There are a bunch of them, and it’s going to take a while to post them all. Currently, there are some pictures from last year’s Walnut Valley Festival, some from the local botanical garden, and a selection of pictures from my days in the Society for Creative Anachronism. The last are mostly black and white and date back to when I worked in an old-fashioned chemical darkroom.
*****
Robert the LLama Butcher, one of my favorite bloggers, has his own place now, The Port Stands at Your Elbow. He promises to keep posting at the old site as well.
*****
Watchmen is one of the very few comic books graphic novels that I have read. The inevitable movie is due out next year, and it looks like it might not be a botch — though it almost was:
… they originally wanted Keanu Reeves for Dr. Manhattan, Ron Perlman for The Comedian, and either Jude Law and Tom Cruise for Ozymandias. Gack!
Toren makes an essential point in the comments there:
Alan has put his money where his mouth is and transferred all his share of the profits from the movie to Dave Gibbons, the artist. I’ve met Dave a few times here and in England and I must say he’s not only a great guy but his work in adapting Alan’s brutally difficult script has been vastly underrated. To take Alan’s insanely complex and dense scripts and adapt them to read fluently and yet contain the unbelievable amount of required detail and foreshadowing is one of comic’s great accomplishments. Dave’s work was hugely appreciated within the industry but alas, never got much credit outside of it. It was all “Alan Moore is God.”
It’s a damn shame.
Alan Moore isn’t God, but is he Shakespeare? Eve Tushnet has some interesting things to say about Watchmen (spoilers), finding parallels with Measure for Measure and much else. (You may need to scroll down to the entries for January 23, 2004.) Scroll up for additional comments and links.
Update: More on Moore from Tushnet.
Ack
Right now I’m playing loud music to drown out today’s treat: a bunch of no-longer-young drag queens lipsyncing to mediocre music down at the corner. No pictures; I want to forget the images, not share them with unwary visitors. There’s also an ice cream vendor playing tinny banjo recordings of teevee themes in the parking lot across the alley.