| Sep. 28th, 2005 @ 04:02 pm Random stuff |
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So, time for another long-winded post of random tidbits.
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Had a weird dream last night. I somehow travelled thirty or so years into THE FUTURE. In this future, the world was in the last stages of everything - people, countries, companies, etc. - becoming part of one great big multinational corporation. In the role of an observer, I saw their shock troops move into another company's building, and the CEO being presented with an ultimatum at gunpoint: "Join us or become irrelevant." Or something like that.
It then rapidly shifted tracks, and I was meeting the future selves of people I knew from the present. In a weird twist, someone else who had travelled into the future with me met his future self, but there was no future me for me to meet. Before the dream could explore the meaning of this scary development, I woke up.
Somewhere during all this, someone jabbed his finger at a spinning fan and got the tip of it sliced off. (Eww!) As I rushed over to him, trying to remember first aid, he told me to go get the First Aid kit. I did, he picked out some sort of super-bandage, and it somehow regenerated the tip of his finger. I was all like O_O and such.
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Extremely US-centric point: You know Michael Brown? He was that fellow who recently resigned from the top job in FEMA because he was supposed to handle the federal emergency response to Hurrican Katrina and did a very poor job of it. I understand he's been rehired by FEMA. Not only has he been rehired, he's been rehired as a consultant, looking into what wrong with the Hurricane Katrina response.
This makes no sense. Par for the course for the current US Administration.
I have always thought that perhaps I might one day visit the USA. Right now, though, I am thinking that it would be extremely advisable for me to stay the hell away from the country. Yes, even though I'm a white male of reasonable means and no obvious affiliations to the Middle East. (*)
Oh, and more US news:
Bush wants to let the military enforce laws, or something.
Dear USians, I would like to politely tell you that your country seems to be extremely fscked of late, what with all the cronyism, incompetence, and avoidance of responsibility. It would be nice if it all changed in the wake of the 2008 elections, but that's 3 years away, and by that time Dubya may have worked out a way to declare himself Dictator-For-Life.
(*) Come to think of it, perhaps they'd think my Scottish name is Irish, and lock me up as a suspected Northern Ireland terrorist. Stranger things have happened, I'm sure.
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It seems, though, that my own country is also rather fscked. I am hardly following Australian news (grar, I say, GRAR!, or perhaps just "whoops") but even I noticed the following: It seems that those damnable anti-terror laws have passed. One of the most distressing items is the ability for terror suspects to be detained for 14 days without charge. Oh, and in secret, too, it seems. I wonder who'll be targeted as terror suspects first? People of obvious Middle-Eastern descent, perhaps?
I tell you, this general Western anti-terrorist hysteria and Dubya's "War on terra" has a lot to answer for.
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In a truly 'ARGH!' moment, I have misplaced the piece of paper on which I put the account name and password for one of my banking accounts. I thought it was in one place, I went to get it, and it was not there.
I know I've seen the piece of paper around, now, I just have to re-find the blasted thing. This is going to be harder than it sounds, for I will have to sort through masses of paper.
I just hope that if I wrote them down in pencil, that they haven't faded yet... :/
Fsck fsck fsck.
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Incidentally, I seem to have become rather enamoured of the word 'fsck' of late. ^_^;
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In other State of the Steven news, I am continuing to chip away at my unwatched anime pile. It is still, as ever, enormous. I've got *seven* box-sets to get through. (*) Why do I have so many, you might ask. The answer is that typically I got the boxsets because I wanted to see the series, just not necessarily right now, and that I should get them before they were no longer available. This has actually proved to pan out: Quite a few of the boxsets I got seem to no longer be available. Not a surprise, considering at least one of them is over two years old. Or maybe three years old, even.
So! I have returned to one of the box-sets - in fact, one of the earliest I ever got - Samurai Girl: Real Bout High School. Typically of a GONZO production, it looks nice but is a little dodgy, story-wise. One particular WTF moment was in... um... episode 6, I think it was, when the heroes were fighting the villains, they were all pulled into an alternate world, and suddenly they had joined together and were all fighting their common enemy. As you perhaps should do in such a case, but there were no scenes of them deciding to work together, it just suddenly happened. Meh. In any case, I got this series, I'm now halfway through, and I'm going to damn well finish watching it.
Something else of GONZO's I have seen recently is Chrono Crusade DVD volume 6. The bit at the end (Black Rosette) was a huge WTF moment for me, and not in a good way. If it wasn't so close to the end already, I'd not bother watching this series anymore, and just stick with the manga, which I hear is much better.
Really, it's because of things like this that make me extremely leery of picking up Last Exile. Because that's done by GONZO as well. I'm always hearing that Last Exile is good, but every time I hear GONZO's name I cringe just a little.
(*) And that's just DVDs! I've got a huge number of downloaded anime episodes to get through as well... le argh.
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Now for some amazing GRIT news! After many years of talking about it, we're finally up to the long-awaited Hiatus.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about, GRIT is sort of this improvisational-writing/role-playing game type thing loosely based on the Ranma 1/2 universe, and has been going since early 1996. In that time, a lot of dead weight and continuity has built up, making things rather difficult, as you might imagine. Also, many of the primary players have moved on, and now have more pressing concerns on their time. Because of all this, GRIT has been very stagnant and slow for the past few years.
To fix these problems, the Hiatus is a year of game-time, twinkling by in a flash. During this year, characters will be retired, things will change, and plot threads will be largely tied up. Theoretically, this will allow things to start all over again, with a mostly clean slate.
I'm not sure how well this will work, though. Some of the old threads and characters were so intricately tied into things that we won't be able to ignore them. (For example, the character Jo, who is close to being the main character of GRIT.) So it's not as clean a slate as I would like.
Not to say I think the Hiatus isn't a good idea, it is, but I'm worried that it might not work.
Oh well, we'll see how things play out. |
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