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Katawa Shoujo
Despite my affection for most things Japanese, and having lived there for a year when I was twenty, I've never been much of an anime or manga fan. When you've spent hours on the subway next to men of all ages reading truly disturbing "comic books" that seem to consist mostly of torture porn, you get a little biased against the genre. (Side note: ( Read more... ) -
Take the Reddit Buffy Survey!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGhtTXBPeTFHRWxuX2haUFZSOXlSeWc6MQ
There are some really good questions in it. Y'all need to go rep S6! -
Terriers
I finished watching this show (all half a season!) on Netflix last night, and I really enjoyed it. It's an adult drama, not in the usual sense of being trashy and exploitative, but in the sense of being about adult things. That was a hard sell even on cable TV, obviously. The main character is a divorced recovering alcoholic who basically torpedoes ( Read more... ) -
I get funny calls sometimes
A lady just called in at 9:30 at night (we do some after-hours desktop support) and said she got a Blue Screen of Death. Thinking I could run down and take a look if she happened to be in the building, I asked where she's calling from. Long pause... "My desk."
Nothing will ever beat the calls I used to get as a fraud investigator for AT&T Wireless, ( Read more... ) -
Donny, these men are (moral) nihilists
Warning: philosophical post incoming. I sometimes get the urge.
I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine that tomorrow, someone discovers the definitive codex of normative ethics. Assume for the sake of argument that the case for its legitimacy is irrefutable: we have finally found the Real Answers to all those pesky questions of right and wrong ( Read more... ) -
The Avengers
I'm a little disappointed that I don't have more to say about this movie. It was entertaining and worth the ticket price -- though perhaps not the piratical $15 a head AMC charged us for a showing we only belatedly found out was 3D -- while clearly delineating the limitations of the genre. There were a few distinctive Whedon touches, but it could ( Read more... ) -
My night at work
- Supervisor has a ten-minute face-to-face conversation with me, complete with two handshakes, then leaves half an hour later because he has strep throat and "doesn't want to infect anyone ( Read more... ) -
Your Annoyance Annoys Me
EW has picked Dawn Summers as one of their "20 Most Annoying TV Characters Ever". (Speaking of annoyances, what's with the compulsion to append the word "ever" to all these TV lists? We know you don't mean the 20 most annoying characters from 1971-1978.)
Personally, I don't find Dawn annoying -- my ranking of the most annoying characters on Buffy ( Read more... ) -
Really Overrated Books Dept.
Inspired by gillo's post on the Thomas Covenant books (thank goodness someone else hated those as much as I did).
Stranger in a Strange Land: I have one good friend and two lapsed acquaintances who consider this the greatest novel ever written. I read it in college, mostly to humor one of them, and it was really hard to get through. I can't stand ( Read more... ) -
Really Underrated Books Dept.
I was talking to a couple of friends this weekend, and neither of them had read one of my all-time favorite sci-fi novels: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. I don't know how popular it is in general, but the fact that neither of those two hard-core F/SF fans had read it made me wonder. It was nominated for a Nebula Award, ( Read more... )