Because the US is apparently part of Russia now...

Merry Christmas!

We are experiencing technical difficulties, please stand up.

Well, yay. Enough things on this blog are now so completely borked that I'm going to have to start paying attention to it again. Maybe all of the forthcoming image fixes will convince me to start updating this thing on a regular basis.

Okay, okay. You can stop laughing now. Get off the floor. Please.

In the meantime, while I scour ten years of hard drive cruft trying to find the stuff that was here, please enjoy the following video:



Test card photo by tm-tm. Wall located in Riga, Latvia.

Luxury Condo Update

Previously, on Live from the Mai-King Chinese Restaurant...

May 2006

And now, our progress three months later:

August 2006

So, as you can see, we now have more than one car parked in front of the half-building! Better looking cars, too! Not only that, but most of them now seem to have their windows intact! Doesn't that just scream luxury? Surely, the throngs of obscenely wealthy Scrantonians are anxiously awaiting the grand opening of this fine establishment! What's that, you say?

Poverty rates double the national average! Job cuts galore! Mission accomplished!

Ah, but surely you don't know about the fine business plans of these entrepreneurs:

1. Go into a city where white-collar jobs exist only on an NBC sitcom, and build countless luxury condos and upscale boutiques such as pet "centers" that look like something Tsubaki Nekoi would be doing if the whole manga thing hadn't worked out.
2. ?????
3. Profit!

This is a foolproof concept! How can you plebeians possibly pan such a patently perfect plan?

Ever Closer to the Dark Side

So I've been finding myself using the aforementioned Mac more and more lately, to the point where I can now almost consider it my main computer. Despite the fact that I have two much faster computers sitting here.

Is this because of OS X's power, usability, and all-around design? Ehh, maybe a little.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that my Windows box consistently suffers total lockups every time the temperature in my room rises above 70° Fahrenheit and now has to be mothballed until October? Or the fact that every time I run a software update on my Linux box, all of the 11,476 media players on it completely cease to function for at least two weeks until the people maintaining those packages get them fixed up? YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES YES! PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, GET ME OUT OF THIS HELL!

So yeah, it's pretty much either this or the laptop. And despite the fact that the laptop can theoretically run all three of the operating systems involved (albeit one of them with questionable legality and functionality), I kind of value my wrists, so the Mac it is. Heil Jobs, and all that.

Still, it is a pretty good system to work with, and I'd probably have no problem switching for good, except for one little annoying fact. You see, the model that I have now is an ancient PowerMac, which has been Apple's top-of-the-line. When this machine was manufactured in 1999, it would have cost $3500. As it is, I paid about $250 for this thing on eBay back in January, which is actually pretty low considering that slower systems with much less memory were going for about $250-300 at the time. If it weren't for the Buy It Now price, this one probably would have went for about $350-400.

The reason I mention this is because, for a couple hundred dollars more, I could have just gotten myself a brand now Mac Mini that would have been faster, had iLife and all that other good stuff installed, etc, etc, etc. There's just one little catch: If you ever, for any reason, want to do something silly like... ohh... add another hard drive, put in a better graphics card, or anything like that, you're SOL. As somebody who enjoys tinkering with hardware, and who is offended by the idea of a disposable computer (which is essentially all it is), this prospect irks me to no end.

Then there's the iMac, which not only commits the cardinal sin of integrating the computer with the monitor (Keeripes! A few dead pixels and the whole thing's useless!), but also requires that you be a qualified brain surgeon just to get the case open. Thanks, but no thanks.

So that leaves the Pro line, which, when new, is always way out of my price range, and more computer than I could ever justify buying for myself. Hell, even the refurbished models bottom out at $2000 for just the tower. The only option left for people like me is to buy older machines secondhand, and forget any hope of warranty coverage, packaged software, support for newer features (802.11g... oh, sorry, *ahem*... "AirPort Express™"), and so on. Not to mention that they've been around the block a few times, and have their share of wear, tear, and annoying little problems (Mine wouldn't sleep until I yanked some SCSI cards, for example).

It would be nice if they offered us a lower-end tower that's easy to upgrade as one's needs grow. Judging from the amount of people trying to coax OS X onto non-Apple hardware, there certainly seems to be a market for such a system out there. That prospect even got me interested in the project for a while last year. Of course, Apple, being a hardware company (depending on who you ask), doesn't seem too likely to introduce anything with a lower margin and a longer life span, but a nerd can dream, can't he?

Feh. If anybody needs me, I'll be over here teetering at the edge of the Dark Side, looking fearfully over the ledge. But now, a picture:

...Why Mayor Quimby?
(graffiti from a train car parked on the bridge over Spruce St. in downtown Scranton)

Finally, because I've somehow managed to go an entire page of blog posts without a gratuitous reference to them, here are some actual, 100% true facts about CLAMP:

• In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. After that, he was stumped, and had to ask Ageha Ohkawa for advice.
• Mokona can draw over 150 pages in the course of an hour. She can draw over 500 after she wakes up.
• CLAMP are such accomplished manga artists, that they can miss a deadline three weeks before it even occurs.
• The ending of Cardcaptor Sakura is the only thing that has ever made Chuck Norris cry. Ever.

Alright, that's it for tonight. Be sure to tune in next time, when we'll have John Goodman, Amy Sedaris, and that guy who won the latest American Idol series. Does anybody remember what his name was? Better yet, does anybody still care?

(Fun Fact: The word "blog" is not in the Blogger spell checker.)

It all started with an iPod...

Well, it seems like it's finally happened. After all these years of managing to successfully avoid it, I now appear to be succumbing to the Dark Side. It all began in November, when I used my "holiday bonus" at work (20% off one item instead of 10%! Aren't faceless megacorporaconglomerates wonderful?) to buy myself a video iPod. It was fine at first, but then I suddenly found myself being overwhelmed by this inexplicable, uncontrollable urge. I didn't know what to make of it at first. As the urge escalated, I found myself doing things that I have never done before. I begain checking Apple rumor sites almost daily. Steve Jobs' MacWorld keynote? Watched the whole thing. All the while, the urge was getting worse and worse. Finally, last week, after a blurry few days of which I remember little besides the eBay logo and lots of cursing at snipers, I awoke to find this sharing a desk with my Linux box:

Just the thing I need. How nice.

So, yeah, as you can see there peeking out from behind the monitor and under the architecturally-dubious Leaning Tower of Kiseki™ (a Moosic landmark since 2005!), I am now the proud owner of an aging Mac.

Actually, I'm pretty much using this as sort of a training exercise. Now that Apple's switching to Intel (and thus opening the door for things like VMware and WINE, for when I acutally need a Windows program), I'm considering making the switch when my Windows box gets too old to be useable. Seeing how I like to run these things into the ground (I had a 486 Linux box running 24/7 until just last year, for chrissakes), this probably won't be happening for at least a few years. In the meantime, I grabbed myself this G4, seemingly plucked straight out of the hallowed halls of a forgotten University computer lab, judging by the number of labels that were stuck to it at some point or another. It also posesses the strangest CD loading mechanism that I have ever seen:

I'm your mighty, CD-gripping Jaws of Love, baby!

It's actually a DVD-RAM drive, where the recordable discs would come in their own cartridges. Do we remember DVD-RAM, kids? No? Neither do I. So anyway, there's what I'm going to spend the next few months playing with when I should be doing something productive. Like making timely updates to this blog. With that in mind, here's one last look at Christmas Mokona before I pack the lights up for another year:

En fuego!

Goodnight, everybody.

Happy Freakin' Holidays

From all of us here at the Mai-King Chinese Restaurant.

Mearii-saaaaaaaaaaaaan!

So now if you ever run into a Japanese woman who is attempting suicide, you'll know exactly what to say to her!
(From my Japanese workbook)

And now, a brief look at some of the various "What the crap?" moments in my Japanese textbook:

First up, we have the image above. This is from an exercise in the workbook, where you have to listen to the CD and decide what would be the most appropriate thing for the guy to say. First of all, if I were to encounter somebody about to jump off a building, I wouldn't know what to say in English. Do you even say anything? Or do you just sneak up from behind and pull them away from the ledge? Why didn't my grade school grammar classes include training on how to handle suicide attempts? Is suicide really such a big problem in Japan that this needs to be in a first-level textbook? Most importantly, why did she take her shoes off first? None of this is explained in any way.

Then, as if that wasn't enough, the third chapter of the book:

Holy "low opinion of people who want to learn your language", Batman!

That's right. The third chapter, before you even get to the all-important "asking for directions", is dating! It's almost as if they were saying, "Alright, we know that 99% of you are probably fat, smelly, anime-watching geeks who are only taking this class as part of a futile attempt to score a Japanese chick, so let's cut the crap and get right to the chase." Is this how the Japanese see us?

I'm beginning to think that it is. A few years ago, there was a Japanese family shopping at the local Circuit City. Every time an American came within 20 feet of them, the father would corral his wife and children off to another, more isolated aisle. Of course, there were a lot of Americans in the store, as it happens to be in, well, America. So he kept retreating his family further and further back into the store, until they were all huddled up in the back corner by the stereos, not moving. I have no idea how he managed to find enough of a clearing to get them into the store to begin with. But I digress...

Then, as if that wasn't enough, there was a listening exercise for this chapter that involved a guy asking an American girl out for coffee (gotta reverse the roles so it doesn't look too suspicious, you know), and getting shot down repeatedly. I mean, if you ask somebody out, and they tell you, really slowly, "Uhh... I have to... go home!", you wouldn't exactly need a degree from Sally Struthers to figure out that she means, "Go pound sand, you cretin!". Not this guy, though. No, he just keeps on trying! And trying! And trying some more! Eventually, the girl says goodbye really quickly and runs away, leaving the poor sod shouting, "Mearii-san! Mearii-saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!" I'm sure that the voice actor responsible for this had to have recieved an award of some sort for his performance. It's like the ending of Citizen Kane, only better!

Anyway, I'm sure that at this rate, I'm going to get at least six more blog posts out of this thing before next semester is over. In the meantime, I need to put together a presentation on some aspect of Japanese culture. I'm doing one on baseball, although I'm probalby going to be focusing on the Hanshin Tigers, because, well, they're the Hanshin Tigers, dammit! (Curse them for making me into a fan!) I'm secretly hoping that the instructor is a Yomiuri fan, just because it would make for some really amusing looks. It'll be fun!

And now, as promised last time, and just in time for the holiday season, here they are:

Fweeeeeeeeeee!

Well, that was quite possibly the single most funnest semester that I've had ever! It was, in fact, so great that I haven't even had the energy to write anything about it until now. That's how wonderful it was. Tremendous! Fabulous! Spectacular even! Please hold on while I go over here and shoot myself.

*BLAM!*

Okay, that aside, let me just sum up my entire spring semester in one word: "Whuh?". That's pretty much how it went. I ended up stuck with an instructor who graded her course pretty much entirely on a single project, that had to be accompanied by many, many "short" pieces which were then changed to 5-page papers at the last minute. Did I forget to mention that she gave us absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what these papers were supposed to be about? Nope, no explanation at all. She just gave us a vague title for each paper and we had to guess from there what she meant by it. Also, I never got a single one of them back, so I never even knew whether or not I was writing these things correctly. This, of course, kept me from ever being able to do any decent work on my actual project, which ended up being a steaming pile of crap. Despite all this, I managed to get by with a B. I don't know how, since I don't think I handed in several of the things on her list, but again, I can't be sure, since that list seemed to change with every class. Yes, folks, this is why I'm only going to school part-time. If I had to deal with four or five of these people at once, I probably would have shot myself by now. Or at least died of sleep depravation.

Anyway, now that that's over, I can finally turn my attention to that horrendous pile of DVD's and CD's that I've been gathering over the past several months but haven't had time to watch/listen to. At least in theory, anyway. So far, it doesn't seem to be working out that well.

"Carrot Top's Last Stand"
(Image taken from amusing.org)

Latest Update from Retail Hell

So last week, a woman waddled on over to the electronics department and racked up an order of over $500. When she got to my register, she proceded to pay this down with gift cards until it was under the limit at which I would have had to automatically call for a check approval. She then handed me the most blatantly obvious counterfeit check that I have ever seen in my life. I mean, this thing was just horrible. It was like she wasn't even trying. There were no security features whatsoever, most of the numbers were missing, the box for the dollar amount was just a very tiny line, and to top it all off, the whole thing had that "inkjet printer running low on ink" blur to it.

So I call the supervisor over, show her the check, she tries not to burst into laughter in front of the "customer". When she informs the worthless crook that we're not going to take her check, she, as expected, starts throwing a fit. So she calls somebody from the accounting office over to look at the check. At this point, the woman realizes that the gig is up, and tries to get her gift cards back and hightail it out of there. She eventually made off with a $250 item on the gift cards, which we later found out were purchased only minutes earlier. That's right, three of our illustrious front-register cashiers actually accepted those pathetically bad fake checks.

I really need to find a job where I won't be associated with these people.

Sakura Kinomoto and a small contingent of Mokonas are confronted on their travels by the nefarious Sw!ms footsoldier.

And now, a play-by-play recap of CLAMP No Kiseki Volume 1

• Cover: Good Lord, this has to be the single pinkest thing that I have ever had the courage to walk into a store and buy. Somehow, I don't think their target audience for this is 25-year-old ponytailed dorks. Just a hunch there. I also bought an Atom & His Package CD along with this, so if you can picture the contrast of those two sitting on the register counter together, you can imagine that I'm probably on every mental health watch list in America right now.
• Page 1: You know, one of these days the Blue's Clues people are going to send a platoon of lawyers into Tsubaki Nekoi's place and banish her off to wherever it is they exiled Steve to. Although it would be fun if Nickelodeon replaced Blue with Ioryogi for an episode or two. You just know those kids are gonna have problems.
  
  Also, Mokona is drawn with a very serene appearance here, which is probably a boon for all those people who believe the "Mokona Is Dead" rumors, but I'm still not buying it. And yes, I have listened to Raison D'être backwards. Several times. I don't hear it. Besides, I don't think William Campbell would be that great of a manga artist, anyway.
• Pages 2-3: I am thoroughly convinced that there was never, at any time, tea spilled on this illustration, and that CLAMP wrote this just to trick their fans into poring over it for hours in a vain attempt to locate the stain. Well, I, for one, won't fall for it!
  
  Okay, okay, I fell for it. DAMN YOU, CLAMP! DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN YOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUU!!!
• Page 4: I wish I had a bathroom that looked like that. Although it leaves me wondering what the rest of the fixtures would look like. Would the toilet have wings, too? Because it would be kind of weird doing one's business while sitting on a physical manifestation of a screensaver from the waning days of the After Dark era.
• Page 5: So in case you haven't guessed yet, this volume happens to be entirely about Cardcaptor Sakura, which is a bit strange. It's sort of like making a Beatles retrospective, and starting it off with an in-depth look at Sgt. Pepper's. Sure, it's probably more well-known than the earlier stuff, but it pretty much kills all sense of context when they arrange it like this.
• Page 6: I do not, however, wish I had an outfit that looked like that. Poor Li looks as though he had a run-in with an irreputable lederhosen dealer. Granted, he's practically guaranteed not to have a "wardrobe malfunction" with all those straps, but I don't think that's really a concern of his.
  
  Also, I never would have pegged Sakura as a Grateful Dead fan. But there you go. I'll be willing to accept this so long as we never see Watanuki in posession of a Phish T-shirt.
• Page 7: And by "atypical", they mean that CCS actually doesn't consist primarily of long, drawn-out transformation sequences and gratuitious upskirt shots. It's amazing the level of quality that you can achieve when you leave those out.
• Pages 8-13 And now, for those of you tuning in late, a recap of Cardcaptor Sakura, complete with all of your favorite moments!
  • The awakening of Sakura's powers!
  • The appearance of Syaoran!
  • Rika and Terada: Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot?
  • Sakura is kidnapped by the Empire!
  • Syaoran finds out that Darth Vader is his father!
  • Tomoyo is frozen in carbonite and taken prisoner by Boba Fett!
  • Ewoks! Ewoks! Ewoks!
• Pages 14-15: I am astonished that the character pages contain no mention whatsoever of those two girls in the top panel of the eleventh page of chapter 10. This is clearly a glaring omission, and I will be demanding a refund.
  
  ...
  
  Yeah, yeah. I know it's a dumb joke. But I just spent a half hour scouring through my copies of CCS trying to find some suitable nameless extras (there aren't that many, amazingly), and I'll be damned if I let that time go to waste.
• Page 16: Ah, it's good to see a reminder of what a great company Piffle Princess was before they were acquired by an American big-box retailer a few years ago. Now there are always fat people blocking the aisles in smelly motorized carts, the register lines are about three hours long, you need to take out an extra life insurance policy just to venture into the parking lot, and don't even think of entering an angel you bought there into a tournament, unless you want to be laughed clear out of Tokyo when it inexplicably falls apart right in the middle of fall-in. It's a crying shame, really.
• Page 17: The essay manages to do a perfect job of describing what appears to be a favorite CLAMP storytelling strategy: Lull the readers into thinking that it's just a mindless fluff story, and then when they're least expecting it, sneak up behind them and whack them across the head with a very large cinderblock. It's like a top-40 station that suddently cuts into an entire Captain Beefheart album accompanied by an old, scratchy LP of Tuvan throat singers played at 45. Jarring at first, but way more addictive than it should be. Miyuki-chan In Wonderland is actually listed as a controlled substance in many European countries because of this effect.
• Pages 18-19: This outfit is a lot better than the strap polka motif, although I probably would have gone with an off-whie sport coat and a grey shirt with those pants. Then again, everybody knows that striped pants are a violation of the Geneva convention, anyway, so it's all a moot point.
• Pages 20-21: So here we have a look at all of the original Japanese cover art for pretty much every CCS-related thing that ever existed in Japan, most of which we never even got to see because we're stuck having to get these things through &#@%ing Tokyopop. And now that I've seen the original DVD artwork, I'm just a bit peeved about that, too. But only a little bit. It could be worse. We could still be stuck with nothing but the dub.
• Pages 22-23: Something I noticed in all these illustrations is that they're all covered in these little white dots, as though they've been lightly sprinkled with bleach or white-out or whatnot. I'm waiting to see how long it takes until Pete starts using a technique like this with his photos. He'll probably work it in somewhere between "burning the negative" and "soaking the print in Kool-Aid and letting it sit under a rock in the neighbor's backyard for six weeks".
• Pages 24-25: Yoshiki Tanaka is a man who has a fedora, and knows how to wear it. 'Nuff said.
• Pages 26-31: See, this is what I meant by that cinderblock comment earlier. Just when you thought you were reading a nice, sane retrospective: *WHAM!* Six pages of fighting cat-fairy-things. You will now be left wondering where the hell that came from for several weeks. That, I think, is the sadistic beauty of Kiseki thus far. You pick this up, thinking that you might finally get some answers as to where some of these f**ked up ideas came from, and not only do you not get any of these answers, but you end up being left even more confused than you were before!
  
  Poor Kakyo. She's so misunderstood. *sniff*
• And finally, the chess pieces: I'm kind of torn over this. On one hand, there's the coolness factor of having a full CLAMP chess set. On the other hand, everybody knows that it can't be a true novelty chess set unless it's made out of pewter at the Franklin Mint. Not only are these things made in China, but they've also committed the blasphemous act of making them out of plastic! And not even the good kind of plastic, either! I'm talking the really weak, bendy stuff here. Where's the fun in it if you can't throw a pawn at your opponent in an angry rage and leave a nice Mokona-shaped bruise on his/her forehead for the next several weeks? Feh! Feh, I say!

Anyway, that's it for this edition. Be sure to tune in next time, when we'll have with us special guest Roger Moltewicz. We don't know who he is yet, but we're sure it will be interesting. Goodnight, everybody!

Relive the magic of Cardcaptor Will

Non-triumphant return to the web

Well, after almost three years of not doing anything whatsoever with the website I had, I've decided to take the whole thing down and try doing just the blog thing for a while. I'm sorry to disappoint the thousands upon thousands of you who I'm sure are just biting your nails to the quick waiting for the Ashlee Simpson update to "Where Are They Now: 2010", but I'm sure you'll manage. (My prediction: she'll hack Jessica up in a jealous rage; then take her own life by bashing her face in with a brick. Her face won't look any different afterwards.) I think that when you get to the point where you don't even remember writing half of your site, it's time to let go. Although I'll definately have to bring back ScrantonCam eventually. Maybe I can turn the Mokona dress-up thing into a running gag? There's Mokona as Homsar, Mokona as Shaft, Mokona as Kurt Cobain, the list goes on. Eventually a small army of Kodansha lawyers will storm into my house and sieze everything I own, allowing me to not have to worry about a website anymore. Problem solved!

Anyway, I don't really get much time to walk around downtown Scranton randomly anymore, like I did a few years ago. So if you're perusing the archives and see those entries where I found strange things on such walks, you must be really bored. Err... I mean, there probably won't be too much of that anymore, as I am now a member of the Nation's Elite! That's right, folks, I'm one of the few, the proud, the retail workers! Expect a lot of griping about dumb customers in the future, as that's just what we do. Well, besides trying to deal with said customers without slamming them repeatedly into the endcap and screaming something like "FOR! *slam* THE! *slam* LAST! *slam* TIME! *slam* THE! *slam* VIDEO! *slam* NOW! *slam* PLAYERS! *slam* ARE! *slam* IN! *slam* TOYS! *slam* THIS! *slam* IS! *slam* ELECTRONICS! *slam* THEY! *slam* ARE! *slam* NOT! *throws customer out of dept* HERE!". This is, of course, after the customer insists for twenty minutes that they are in electronics and refuses to take no for an answer, somehow thinking that he/she knows the store better than you do, even though they needed to ask you for directions. Sometimes you wonder how these people manage to dress themselves, although many of them can't even manage that properly.

Also, I've been doing a show called "Chaos: Live!" on WUSR for the last three years. If you want to check that out, you must be really, just totally mind-numbingly bored. Err.. I mean, you can hear it on Saturdays, from 4 to 8 PM Eastern, either on 99.5 FM in the Scranton area, or via WUSR's Real or Windows Media streams. If you're so bored that you're almost suicidal, you can see my past playlists here. Mostly I play a lot of the Hipster standards, mixed in with various obscure or downright strange things that I find online or through listening to WFMU. It's college radio at its worst!

So anyway, that's pretty much it for the re-re-re-reintroduction thing. You may now safely proceed to a blog that's actually somewhat interesting. Assuming that you've actually bothered to read this far, in which case: Congratulations, you are indeed extremely bored!