Gantz 5: Deathwatch

O how I've waited for this day! It's been two whole months since I watched Gantz 4 (although in the meantime I did discover another excellent series, Fullmetal Alchemist) but after work today the wait was over.
Well, I just finished watching Gantz 5 (episodes 17-20), and, sad to report, it was a disappointment (right up until the extraordinary, heartbreaking ending, that is).
When Gantz 4 finished, our heroes were about to battle the gigantic temple guardians, so Gantz 5 begins with that. But what happens is far from riveting. The battle was actually quite boring. Nothing much happened, and it took a long time for it to happen. Also, the profanity in these episodes was through the roof. What the fuck? Everybody was swearing their heads off, seemingly in an attempt to inject some drama into the whole thing, but it didn't work at all, it only sounded stupid. And it was as though the animators got lazy, or the budget was slashed, because suddenly there were all these static shots of the characters, with only some wavy speed lines. Maybe it was for effect, or as a tribute to some old school anime, but to me it just looked cheap.
And yet it was definitely worth persevering through the boring bits, and of course I had no choice anyway - I'm hooked, you see. I have to find out what happens to Kurono and Kato and Kishimoto. So this big ending was easily the most emotional, eye-popping series of events yet, mainly because one of our heroes got killed. I'm not gonna say which one here, but if you really want to know, ask me in a Comment. And if you don't want to know, don't read the Comments... if there are any, that is, but there probably won't be. Ha ha.
But the ending was very emotional and shocking, and not only did one of our heroes die, but another may be about to die!
I'll admit now that this series has its flaws, no doubt about it, but as I mentioned before, I'm hooked so I'll be in great suspense until Gantz 6, which I think is the final one, so we get to find out if anybody makes it back from this crazy Gantz world. And whatever happens, and despite the series' flaws, it will always have the distinction of igniting (or re-igniting) my obsession with anime.
And I'll still always, at the oddest times, find myself singing (or trying to sing - it's in Japanese) the ending theme song.

Silent Hill

On TV there is a desolate landscape swamped in fog. It reminds me of Silent Hill.
In Silent Hill you can barely see your hands in front of your face, and that's not good when there are demons lurching around the streets. Are they really demons? They look like they were once human, like the nurses, but the nurses, their heads hang from their necks at a wrong angle, and snap around in a sickening arc with every step. The nurses carry long metal bars, and when they get close enough they try to hurt me very badly with them.
There are also legs on top of legs. Does that sound strange? They look strange. They walk on two legs, but from the waist up, rather than a regular torso with arms and a head, there are two legs, bent forward at the knees and waving like arms. It looks like a nightmare 'X'. When those things get close enough they try to strangle me with their wrong legs.
Then there are the creatures in straitjackets. Or are they just hooded sweatshirts? The way they twist and jerk when they move, when I first saw them, made me think half their limbs were dislocated, and they were wearing straitjackets. When I first saw them, I didn't think they could do much, restricted as they were by the straitjacket, but when I got close they vomited green acid on me. It stung like hell, so I had to have a Health Drink. But the sound they made turns my flesh cold even now to recall it. But that is nothing to the sound they made when I hit the first one with a crowbar - the only weapon I had at the time. It dropped to the ground, twisting and jerking away like some enormous crippled insect, making a sound like metal scraping on metal, echoing back through a tunnel from Hell.
And this fog is all around.

A Survey of Some Recent Blogs XI

Everybody has a blog these days. Anybody can have a blog. It's not hard. In fact it's too easy. You just get one, and write a bunch of boring crap, and hey presto! You're a blogger! You can write any old boring crap, whatever you want, and people on the other side of the world can read that boring crap a second later. People are doing it all over the world. Very rarely you will find one that is good, but that happens once every million years, yet that's why I like to do these surveys. Once every million years I find a good one!
It's been a long time since the last survey, so it's time to venture out once again, in the usual completely random way (courtesy of the wonderul and terrible Next Blog button), and examine ten more examples of modern blogcraft!

1. Fast tanning bed guide - Well, we're off to a bad start here with one of those stinking adblogs. Oh well. At least some of the idiot robot text made me laugh:
"Ready for supreme court case santa? It's here supreme court case santa. No more waiting for supreme court case santa. Ready for supreme court case santa?"
WTF? And what does this Supreme Court Case Santa have to do with tanning beds anyway?
2. mobile phone tools motorola - Well, this is depressing. Another adblog. That's two out of two, isn't it? Does anybody actually know one of these adbloggers? Have you ever met one? Gee, I'd like to.
3. Chung Jeck - By the looks of it, Chung Jeck (an Asian chappy) had a family get-together and took a bunch of photos, and here they are! These are regular folks, eating food, playing with kids, having a nice time. Not the most exciting blog I've seen, but still welcome after those dumb robot adblogs. Adblog Robots: 2. Humans: 1. Can the Humans even the score? Let's find out!
4. Sheidaye Shaparak - It looks like the Humans are fighting back! Here's a blog written in Arabic, but at least there are some pictures, although it's not looking promising. Sheidaye seems to have an obsession with babies with butterfly wings sleeping in branches and on dead logs. She also likes Celine Dion, Spongebob and Madonna. Having noted that, all of a sudden it doesn't seem to be such a handicap that I can't read Arabic. Next!
5. Friday's Rage - A blog by Angry Bob. Angry Bob is from "Canader" and is angry about many things. Angry Bob is angry about people using acronyms; people who complain about snow; somebody called Brian Mulroney; robbers; kids who have no respect for The Queue; Canadians who don't vote; Rolling Stones fans; parents who let their kids get fat, and other things. He writes these tirades every Friday, and every one ends with his *signature* signoff, like this: "Have a hoot, spell it out", "Have a hoot, wear big boots", "Have a hoot, piss on the big galoot", etc..
Is that the dumbest signoff you ever heard? It's the dumbest one I ever heard. Hey, I got one! "Have a hoot, don't have a dumb retarded signoff."
And as for this *angry rant* stuff, it can be very entertaining and funny if it's done well, but if it's not done well, like Angry Bob's blog here, the author just comes across as a cranky old jerk, sad to say. Oh well. At least it's not an adblog.
6. Pixelgrube - I don't know what it means, but what a great blog title! Here's a blog by a German dude who just bought a digital camera. There are only five photos so far but they're pretty cool. I really like Feb 24's picture of a grinning man with a big wild beard. What a shame I can't read German! Good stuff, Pixelgrube!
7. onespotlessmind - This is a blog from a Portuguese woman. Most of it is written in Portuguese, but one part is written in English, and that part is a Dear Diary type entry about her conflicted relationship status with her "significant other". She wants to have a baby, but is he Mr Right? It's complicated, y'know? Here, she reminds us that relationships are complex, not simple. There are also photos of her talking on the phone, looking at the camera in a dreamy fashion, and drunk among half-empty wine glasses.
8. Shareware - Another robot adblog, yet this one is noteworthy for the random way words are put together in great blocks of bizarrely constructed text:
"They sat there as the tide went out, and the sandal-paste deemest the arm-chests of the tragic estimacion in his ingeniose, switch-board to stay'n out on the pestem of the mystery overshadowing the majestick he loved. The distichs then pointed out that their cat-show game-dishes simply retained these privileges and saw-pit customs because they would disembowel the respect of their Air Conditioning if they straught those streamies of rifle-distance which they scalped inherited, and which they shak'd upon entirely as a time-perspective head-sheet."
Hey, this stuff isn't bad!
9. The Shoah - If you want to obsess on the Nazis vs The Jews period in history, this would be a great blog for you. This blog (by Nikki) seems to be a collection of quotes and passages taken from Holocaust books. She's definitely got a theme going on here, that's for sure.
10. Grasshoppers shoes - It sounds interesting, doesn't it? I thought so, too. But it's only another adblog, albeit another one with mad constructions of random text:
"You descendeth been abstrusest in obfuscating a good pink-shaded would'st into oil-vessel stacy adams shoes ; I azenst the key impurest in the guidless, and a sweetling shot at specimen-wise and bottom. He ostracized to a huge white thunder-gust beyond on the top of which someone had castrated a sybarite's essencelessness of insufflator. Stacy adams shoes, the peasant-like fantasticness close to Dante's master-wort, behind the Badia : S. Stacy adams shoes also the chapter, Wagstaff stacy adams shoes francaise en Italie in Femme-sans-tete Tseh."
Hey, I like it! Did somebody mention shoes? That's a coincidence! I really think it's about time I got me some new shoes!

*staggers outside, middle of the night, arms out in front and glazed-eyed like a zombie, in search of somewhere, anywhere, to buy new shoes*

I Saw Her Yesterday

Yesterday, I saw her again.
I left my room to walk to work, got to the end of my street and turned the corner, and there she was, in front of me. Could it really be her? My eyes almost popped out straining to see, but it was her, for sure. But there was something wrong this time. She always reads a book. I've never seen her not reading a book. Every time I have seen her walking along, she is reading a book. That's who she is. She's the woman who walks and reads. The woman I have had a big obsession on for a long time. (God, how I adore her!) But yesterday morning, guess what? She was not reading! She was just walking along, bookless. This was no small thing to me, as you can imagine. This was a really big thing. A very big, disturbing thing. She was supposed to be reading a book, but she wasn't! My world had been instantly turned upside down. It was like walking outside to find the trees blue, the sky green, birds sitting in trees making sounds like car alarms, cars driving along on fire, and everybody walking to work on their hands.
Why was she not reading a book? What could possibly be the reason? Why was she not walking along, reading a book? Why was she walking to work without her head so charmingly buried in one of her beloved historical romances?
As I walked behind her, and a little to the side, I drove myself bananas trying to figure it out. I kept looking at her, her face unobstructed by an enormous paperback. She was looking in front of her, and looking at cars, and shop windows, and other people; she was using her eyes to take in her surroundings, and not the intoxicating dialogue of a gripping historical romantic saga. But every time I looked at her, it was as though my eternal image of her - she, with a massive paperback jammed between her eyes and the street scene around her, that may as well have been a world away - was superimposed on the grim reality, so that in my mind was set up a tormenting battle between memory and reality.
Naturally I wanted to rush up to her, wringing my hands, demanding to know why she was not reading a book. But I didn't, and thank God, because my dramatic surge of wild emotion would no doubt have startled her, and she might have run off, quite alarmed and frightened.
I know I will see her again. And next time, if my wish comes true, she will be restored! Restored, that is, to the walking reading woman I have grown to obsess upon.

Humourless Muslim Retards

Those nutso Muslims are still behaving like idiot savages over those Danish cartoons. The latest (yet unsurprising) development is that some cretinous Pakistani cleric has offered $US1 million to any Muslim psycho who kills Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. (Read the news item here.)
Can you think of any group of people with a bigger chip on their shoulder than these hysterical Muslim retards? I can't.
Can you think of a more humourless bunch of self-righteous jerks? No, I can't either.
Can you think of a bigger bunch of goddam hypocrites?
I'm drawing a blank.

I got the above cartoon from Just Another Blowhard, who got it from The Pit of Penultimate Darkness - two blogs worth a visit for sure.

Blizzard

Gee, I haven't been writing much here lately, have I? Not that I haven't tried, because I have. What happened though was, I just sat here for a long time, not doing anything. At last it occurred to me to push a few buttons, but it didn't work. Sure, I managed to put some words together, but they only sat there, looking at each other with dumb, glazed eyes. So I tried another combination, but those words only staggered about, bumping into each other as though somebody had turned the lights off. Then, I got up and went and grabbed a beer. Maybe that would trigger something! But all that triggered was an empty can twenty minutes later, and another trip to the fridge. Then I came back and looked at all that WHITE. So much WHITE! as far as the eye could see. It was like being caught in a blizzard. I wandered around blindly in a storm of white, waving my arms in front of me, like a marionette.
How can anything get done in that kind of situation? Nothing can be done in that kind of situation. Nothing, but to sit down and wait for the Saint Bernards.

Another Game Banned in Australia

Yet another video game has been banned in Australia. Which one is it this time? This one is called Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure and apparently it has been banned because it could promote graffiti.

Good call! We mustn't have that nasty old graffiti diverting our attention from the SUFFOCATING AVALANCHE of advertising we are bombarded with every day!