I wanted to comment on a few of the emails I’ve gotten lately. The whole manga thing has prompted a lot of folks to write in with suggestions of other manga for me to try. This is largely due to the kind efforts of other bloggers linking to my manga entries. I thank you all for your suggestions, and will take them to heart. There’s a few titles that many have suggested, so they are definitely ones I will look into.

One writer, Jenny, took umbrage at the entry I did in which I mocked some titles based on their blurbs on the Tokyopop page. She advises me not to judge a title by its blurb, as some of the books I mention there go far deeper than how it seems from the descriptions. Rest assured that I was doing that out of goofy fun more than anything, Jenny. I’m fully aware of how stupid comics I like would sound if you tried to summarize them in only a few sentences.

I also started getting some mail about Ground Zero. Largely words of encouragement, but also some nice suggestions. Thanks everyone, and keep them coming! Although I don’t particularly want a comment feature on this weblog, I often wish the Ground Zero one had such a feature.

In other postal news, a letter of mine to the Knights of the Dinner Table comic got published in issue 86! You won’t know it’s me, though, since some kind of glitch resulted in my name showing up as “DaveGil Reyes”.

Anyways, I just wanted to acknowledge the people who’ve taken the time to email me. I do read and appreciate the comments, even if I don’t always write back.

After almost two years of disuse (apart from playing DVDs), the Playstation 2 has once again become a bustling hive of activity!

I admit that the PS2 hasn’t gotten as much use as it should. When it comes down to it, I don’t like console games that much. I like Role-Playing Games and hate console ones, likening playing one to watching an anime and pausing the video every five minutes to do ten push-ups. I also find that I’m just not capable of playing many console games, not having the patience, skills, and fourteen thumbs required by them. In addition, I find the money spent on PS2 games to seldom be worth it. They cost about forty bucks a pop, and usually last about ten hours. For that kind of coin, I can get a PC game that will give me a lot more play-time and replayability. It also didn’t help that I bought a few PS2 games that turned out to suck massively. But every now and then a game grabs me.

It all started with the rave reviews of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It sounded like the kind of game I could get into — a solid platformer with the ability to “rewind” time and correct your screwups. I need that kind of forgiveness in my games. I grabbed it and played it and found it to be a lot of fun. Not too tough, not too easy, and a decent plot, ended in an interesting way. I highly recommend it.

Shortly afterwards I bought Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and Ratchet and Clank. The former was bought after watching my nephew Jonathan playing it. It seemed like a cool one we could play together. It’s damn tough though, and often player death requires you to have to go back and do a level from the very beginning, which is annoying as hell. Also, like I said, it’s pretty damn hard. At one point we decided to crank it down to “easy” level, only to discover we were already there. So we haven’t progressed overly far in this one, though it does seem good.

After finishing Prince of Persia I moved on to Ratchet and Clank. This is a cute little platformer in which you play some kind of critter pairing up with a robot to save the galaxy. You have at your disposal a wealth of gadgets that help you accomplish this. I started playing it and then Becky started up her own game, and we’ve been swapping back and forth. There were two pretty difficult patches in the game, but we’ve gotten past them. The game reminds me of the old PS1 game, Ape Escape, though that game is notorious for being cute and fun and having a nice learning curve and then, on the last level, beating you with a pipe wrench while insulting your parentage. Hopefully Ratchet and Clank will not do that as well. This one is available as a “Greatest Hits” title, which means you can snag it for $20.

And then there’s Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II. Becky and I really enjoyed the first Dark Alliance game and were excited about this sequel. Whereas the original Dark Alliance was pretty much exactly like a D&D version of the PC game Diablo (run around, fight, health and mana potions, various weapons you can upgrade to improve your hacking, skills you can buy to enhance your powers), Dark Alliance II is more like a D&D version of the PC game Diablo II — it adds to the mix weapons that can be enhanced and customized through the use of various gems and runestones. There are a lot of interesting characters to pick from (Becky is playing the Cleric of Helm and I’m playing the Dwarven Rogue, but I have my eye on trying out the Moon Elf Necromancer and Dark Elf Monk), and a lot of great enemies to fight (including returning baddies from the first game.) We’ve been playing it since we got it, stopping only to eat, sleep, and go to work. The original Dark Alliance is now available as a Greatest Hits and this one will be as well. It’s tons of fun.

I still plan on getting the new Castlevania game and Brotherhood of Steel, a PS2 game based in the universe of the Fallout PC games. It’s nice to once again be using the PS2 for gaming, after such a long break.

A quick comics note here. A couple of people, upon seeing that the “Trigun” manga was in my stack felt obliged to warn me about it. Hoo-boy, were they right.

Trigun was one of the titles I looked at during my big anime experiment. I was finally trying to get into anime, see what the fuss was all about. One of the titles that seemed interesting was Trigun, a blend of sci-fi and western elements. The lead character, Vash the Stampede (who doesn’t look at all like someone who’d be selling DVDs at Borders books) is an ace gunfighter with a huge bounty on his head, yet two insurance agents sent to keep him out of trouble find he’s actually a shy pacifist. Seems okay.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the high level of goofy in the anime. It turns out that the thing is supposed to be a comedy, and in this case largely involving wacky hijinks and broad physical humor. Everything that appealed to me about it was canceled out by the sheer silliness of it all.

When I saw the manga versions of it available, I thought I’d give it another chance. After all, I still liked the concept, and I liked some of the designs, so perhaps it would work better in this form. After all, as a rule, I don’t like watching much stuff on TV, so this was perhaps part of why I couldn’t get into anime in general, and this one in particular.

The warnings from John Jakala, Shawn Fumo, and others were spot on. The manga suffers from the problem that it’s nearly incomprehensible in many parts. Despite being a comic book, neither the words nor the pictures convey the action. There are two storylines in which, despite re-reading it several times, the conclusions are completely unfathomable. Something happens at the end of it, Vash does something that solves the problem, but damned if I can tell you what it is. There are also entire pages that feel like panels randomly selected from other comics, that don’t seem to be holding together any kind of plot at all.

I don’t know which came first, the manga or the anime. I know that some of the bits in the manga were in the anime, but I can’t tell you if they were handled better there (though, out of my problems with the anime, not knowing what the hell was happening in it wasn’t one of them.)

It’s really a pity because, like I said, I like the idea, I like the character of Vash, and the manga hints at a backstory that I’m curious about, but unless someone can tell me that the art and writing improve significantly, I’ll never know how it turns out. I will say that the sheer goofiness of the anime didn’t come across so much in the manga (though it was definitely there) so it’s really just the art and the writing — which some may argue are the defining traits of a comic book — that are holding me back.

When I was a kid, I remember seeing bumper stickers that said “Rather Biased” with the CBS “Eye” logo on it. I wondered what that was all about and my dad explained how many people felt that CBS news was biased towards the left. This was my first encounter with the “liberal media”.

The myth of the liberal media is more pervasive than the myth of Santa Claus — at least people stop believing in Santa when confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Yet, we still hear about the pervasive liberal bias in the media, even though we can show that not only does it not exist, the exact opposite seems to be present.

CBS has bounced back from its “Rather Biased” days with a vengeance. They recently announced that they will not show MoveOn’s Child’s Pay ad during the Superbowl because it does not meet their standards. CBS claims the ad is “too controversial” and besides, they don’t do “advocacy advertising” during the Superbowl — that is, advertising that advocates something other than drinking a certain beer or a certain soda. This is why they also nixed a Peta ad. And yet…they ran the “drugs = terrorism” ad last year and plan to do another one this year. By what I’m sure is sheer coincidence, CBS’ parent company, Viacom, is currently trying to get the White House to pass an FCC bill that would allow it to grow even larger than it already is.

(Oh hey, looks like CBS still has a ways to go.)

Meanwhile, over at ABC, during a Democratic candidate debate, Peter Jennings says that the charge of George W. Bush as a deserter is “a reckless charge not supported by the facts”. Really, Peter? Because the facts speak pretty clearly. George W. Bush, while supposedly in the National Guard, disappeared from active duty for a year. That’s desertion. He’s never accounted for that disappearance, and in fact has never been asked to by the supposedly liberal media. If you or I did that, we’d be court-martialed and probably jailed. The Daily Howler looks at the facts that supposedly don’t support this and finds them to be pretty damn crystal clear.

That’s just a few examples of a media that can’t kowtow to the administration fast enough. As the Daily Howler points out, in the latter case, Jennings is not only stating an outright lie, he’s trying to get Clark to accept the lie and repeat it in order to disgrace another liberal. This is anti-conservative bias?

The thing about bias is, Republicans seem to be just fine with it when it’s in their favor. Their little campus snoop groups seldom seem to report when a professor is biased in their favor, just when he’s biased the other way. At the same time, their definition of “bias” has expanded to “anything that doesn’t expressly agree with the right wing philosophy.” That is, even if the media is simply stating the facts, if it fails to do them in a way that favors the right, they’re still biased. This is wholly consistent with George “I’m a uniter, not a divider” Bush’s policy that if you’re not with him, you’re against him.

In other political news, looks like the party of ethics and morality got their hands caught in the cookie jar again. Not learning any lessons from Watergate, it turns out that GOP Senate Judiciary staffers exploited a glitch in a server that allowed them to read secret Democratic memos and messages. Always eager to share, they handed some of these missives over to conservative columnist Robert Novak, who apparently didn’t find it odd that Republicans were giving him secret Democrat memos, and didn’t suspect anything unscrupulous had happened. Then again, Novak’s the same guy who printed Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent, info that was leaked to him by an unknown administration insider - an act that is a felony, yet no one seems to have suffered about it.

The GOP’s defense of this act is that the Democrats were warned about the hole in their system over a year ago (which the Democrats deny) and they failed to fix it. So keep that in mind: as the Democratic Underground points out, according to the Republicans, if you tell your neighbor his door is unlocked and he doesn’t lock it, you’re free to go in his house and steal stuff. Hey, you warned him! Make sure you give some of it to Bob Novak, though.

The sad thing is, despite missing WMDs, proven lies, illegal shenanigans, and so forth, it’s still assumed that the 2004 election is going to be a conservative blowout, largely because the media seems intent on presenting it as such. The liberal media. Right.

With the new report that the 9/11 Commission has been told it’s out of time by the Bush Administration, I think Bush forfeits his right to bring up 9/11 during the campaign. If he was the man his supporters claim he is, he would be embarrassed at his shoddy handling of this event.

FACT: Osama bin Ladin still has his job. Do you have yours? This war in Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, despite what conservatives would have you believe. Iraq wasn’t behind the attack, Osama bin Ladin was, and he’s still free as a bird. The Taliban supported him, and not only are they regaining power in Afghanistan, there’s rumors we may even be working with them. Saudi Arabia provided 15 of the 19 hijackers and is still our good friend. Instead of striking at the heart of terrorism, Bush has allowed the architects of 9/11 go virtually unpunished, instead using our resources to go after his father’s enemy.

FACT: With the demand that the 9/11 Committee present its findings early, we close the book on the investigation of the event. The single largest terrorist event against America in history, and we spend less time and money on it than we did investigating a blowjob in the Oval Office. That’s how much he cares about this. That’s how concerned he is.

FACT: Despite promises and photo-ops to the contrary, Bush has pulled financial support from “first responders” such as firefighters and police. Due to his policies, should such an event happen again, we would be even less prepared to handle it than we were on that day.

Bush has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was nothing more than an opportunity to pursue his own agenda without fear of criticism. Many people have said “thank God Gore wasn’t in the White House for 9/11″ but honestly, what would he have done differently in those first few days. Bush’s actions right after the event were exactly what one would expect — which is fine, because they were the appropriate actions. It’s his actions afterwards that are a problem. In almost no time at all he had squandered the goodwill and support the world gave us, he abandoned the search for the true perpetrators, and he’s now ended the investigation into what could have been done to prevent it. And then his supporters have the audacity to criticize Howard Dean for saying that we’re no safer with Saddam Hussein out of office.

“Never forget” is what people have said of 9/11. Odd that the person most of them support is trying his damndest to make people forget.

Osama bin Ladin isn’t running for President, but apparently his “running airplanes into buildings” program has the full support of George Bush. Vote for Bush if you agree with this idea.

Well, I’m hip-deep in the manga now. Not only have I bought some for me, I bought some for people for Christmas (Samurai Deeper Kyo and Chronicles of the Cursed Sword for my nephew, and Initial D for my brother-in-law.)

Here’s my own Stack of Intimidation:

As you can see, I’ve gone past the initial stage of trying out titles and have continued with ones I liked. (On the “to-buy” list: more Hellsing, Kindaichi, Firefighter, and Sanctuary, plus more of the ones I have second volumes of.) I’m really enjoying them, and am glad I was able to get past my initial prejudices to enjoy a whole new branch of comics. I haven’t yet read Planetes 2, Cowboy Bebop, or Trigun.

Also, I don’t know if it counts, but TJ loaned me some old Usagi Yojimbo trades that I’ve been enjoying. I have some Usagi and have always wanted to get more, and plan to do so soon. It’s nice to be able to start from the beginning.

I said before that manga was mostly robots and panties, and I was wrong. There’s a wide variety of stuff out there. My thanks go to those people online and off who helped me find the good stuff, especially my comics store, Modern Myths, that not only has a wide selection, but brought Planetes to my attention, which started this whole mess.

It’s sure cold here! Check out this frost from one of our windows! Temperatures had reached record lows in the area. Fortunately by this weekend it’s supposed to get up to the more reasonable 20s and 30s.

Speaking of photos, I finally put some photos from Christmas in the Photo database. I have more than those ready, but I’m going to make a scrapbook page for them soon.

UPDATE! The photos are now up. Go check out the “Scrapbook” section.

While I’m here, for both of you that are interested in the Ground Zero Post-Apocalyptic RPG project, I’m back on track with that!

An excerpt from my forthcoming screenplay, Zombie Romance:

MARGARET: You had me at “…brains…”