"The bitch! He's spilled the whole bottle of Chateau Latour!"
"It's a disaster!"
At the time I first saw this, I scoffed, "A 'disaster'? It's a freakin' bottle of wine!"
...years later I learned that some vintages of Chateau Latour sell for more than $5,000 per bottle, and then realized that yeah, spilling the entire bottle would be a disaster.
That doesn't mitigate my outrage at that ludicrous price, though. WTF! IT'S FERMENTED GRAPE JUICE FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!
In general I think all the nonsense around and about wine is pretty stupid. Then again, I watch Japanese cartoons, which is also pretty stupid. Everyone's stupid, one way or another.
* * *
I just finished reading a manga title named No Bra. I torrented it solely because it's a bonus title at BakaBT--no one was seeding it--and figured I could use the UL.
The story surrounds a young man named Makoto, who lives in a condo in Tokyo by himself. And then his childhood friend Yuki moves in. Makoto's father tells him that Yuki is a guy; but when Yuki arrives Makoto is surprised that Yuki appears to be a beautiful girl with long hair.
...it turns out that Yuki is in fact a guy, one who wants to live as a woman and looks 100% like one, even to being able to wear girls' underwear. (I guess he's a master at "tucking"?) Makoto knows Yuki is a guy but has to continually remind himself of this.
SPOILER WARNING
There are several places in the story where Makoto tries to confirm that Yuki actually is male, and is thwarted. The problem here is that the artist drew Yuki totally female, even to the contours of tight clothing on the lower torso.
In one chapter Yuki is wearing a girl's one-piece swim suit, and says he used some kind of "device" to hide his bulge. I have no idea what such a device would look like nor how it would operate, and it makes me cringe just imagining what kind of torture device it would be in order to make him look totally female in a woman's swim suit.
A perusal of /b/ on 4chan will sometimes bring up a de-motivational poster showing what looks like a young asian girl at the beach. "LEGENDARY TRAP" goes the big text, and under that, "if you don't see it, you deserve it". You can see the outline of the guy's equipment under the swimsuit if you look for it; but if you don't see it, you think you're looking at a pretty girl.
...so the artist cheated when drawing Yuki. That had me convinced that Yuki was actually a girl, and was either ignorant of anatomy or else pretending really hard in order to satisfy some requirement.
(Like? Oh, one example is Shun Kisaragi from Here is Greenwood. Shun is a guy but looks totally female. In his family, the line of succession follows girls rather than boys, so the eldest daughter stands to inherit the family business. But Yukie Nasu didn't cheat with Shun.)
In the case of No Bra it turns out that Yuki is indeed male, but we're never actually given any proof of it. Makoto certainly never confirms it, and neither does anyone else. Given the way the artist teases us throughout the series with "is he a she, or is he a he?" we should have been given that much.
Makoto kisses Yuki an awful lot, proving that some teenage boys will hit anything that even looks female, even when they know better. This is not disgusting precisely because Yuki is drawn as a girl, not "man who looks like girl".
END SPOILERS
It's not bad, though.
* * *
Apparently AnimEigo isn't going to do any more Yawara! than the first 40 eps, so Live-eviL has once again taken up the gauntlet. I just finished downloading the torrent of episodes 41-58, and look forward do seeing more.
I'd wager that AnimEigo didn't make enough money (sell enough copies) of the first volume to justify doing more of it. It's a crying shame, but at least I'll be able to get it through the fansub community. Hopefully.
Do you realize that it has been eleven stinking years since I got the first VHS tape of Yawara!? Eleven years have passed and I still haven't seen more than the first fifty-odd episodes of this stuff!
There's so much more story coming that I know about (and plenty I don't know about!) which I've been eagerly awaiting...for eleven years! Argh!
* * *
It looks like the hacked account was hacked because of an addon program. That's just convinced me not to use any addons. The latest release of the addon apparently contained a keylogger, and several people in the guild have been hacked that way.
Blizzard is working on reversing the money and equipment transfers, and the players will get their characters back.
Blizzard offers a nifty little authenticating dongle, and it might just be worth the investment. How much? $6.50 and shipping.
I'll probably do it: it's cheap insurance.
* * *
No, shipping is free. I'm buying it. In fact, I just finished my order for it.
* * *
Here's the list of current anime I'm grabbing by the episode, as it's released:
Arakawa Under The BridgeIn every case I used the old standby formula: good art + interesting synopsis + gut impression "from the curb", looking at the promo image.
B Gata H kei
K-on!!
Kaicho-wa Maid-sama
KissxSis
Mayoi Neko Overrun!
Working!!
BGHK is the one I'm not sure about. I don't know if I'll like it; I'm not sure I like the premise. But it costs me little to add it to the torrent list; and if I don't like it I don't have to keep watching it.
The torrents came screaming in at mach 9 once I took the DL limit off. (I limit it to 70k so I can play WoW while torrenting.) In fact, everything I added to the list this morning is already finished, including the Yawara!
* * *
Come to think of it, I never did do that write-up about I, My, Me! Strawberry Eggs! that I was intending to do. I was going to present pictures and explain how the artists cheated to make what's-his-name look girlish in drag and masculine out of it.
...it would probably be too bandwidth-intensive for my free Photobucket account. Oh well.
* * *
Wow: the record low for this area for May 1 is 26°, set in 1978. I can't remember what that was like, but I'm sure it seemed like winter was never going to freaking end. That was a pretty bad one, as I recall.
Somewhere there is a picture of me, bundled up, standing in front of the plow drift from that winter's snowfall. The plow drift is taller than me. (To be fair, I was 10.)
It's plenty humid and it looks like temperatures will be in the mid-70s today. They were pretty warm yesterday, and the temperature in my room didn't fall below 80° until 3 AM, after I'd had a fan in the window for 7 hours. Sheesh.
Mom and I discussed the possibility of getting one of those freestanding air conditioners for my room. They're not cheap, but one would be cheaper than running the AC for the whole house in order to cool my room down.
My room--it's the coldest room in the house in winter, and the hottest room in the house in summer. It's on the north side of the dogleg (the house is an L-shaped ranch) which itself is on the west side of the house; it doesn't get much sun in winter which is why it stays cold. But that doesn't carry through to summer; come summer, it's hot in here.
The master bedroom is just south of my room and it stays a decent temperature year 'round. *sigh*
This being the case, we figure the thing would probably pay for itself pretty quickly. I would just mount my window AC if it would work; but I tried installing it last summer and I simply could not get it to fit in the window and get everything sealed correctly. Furthermore, the window sashes are vinyl, and I don't want to drill holes or drive screws into them anyway, so the thing wouldn't be secure even if I could make it fit. Which I can't.
(My mind supplies me with an image of a wooden box to which the AC could mount, which would be designed to fit over the window casement and would securely hold everything in place, provide a good seal, and not require that I ruin the window sash. This box is beyond my meager carpentry skills.)
* * *
That's an interesting bit: I suck at woodworking, and I know it. I can fix cars and other machines, but whenever I try to make something out of wood it ends up looking like ass.
In the '90s, when my entertainment system was growing, I needed a hutch of some kind to stack them in. I bought particle board and used a circular saw to cut it to the size I wanted; and after screwing everything together then I realized that I should have used a square. It was kind of /_/ shaped.
When I got my workbench--a kit, made entirely of pre-cut 2x4s, except for the top, which is 2x6s--I used a square and very carefully lined up everything three times before driving screws, and I managed to put it together pretty square. If it had been plans instead of a kit, it would have come out pretty badly, I'm sure of it.
I never did very well in shop class, except for the small engine repair class I took. *sigh*
* * *
Today--same as yesterday--I logged off WoW about 3 AM, intending to hit the sack. Instead I started fiddling around with torrent stuff and reading No Bra; the next thing I knew the sun was up and the birds were singing. *sigh*
* * *
...and that's all the bloviating I'm doing today. I'm tired.