Category — anime nerd

Hey, look, four-dimensional synchronicity!  And by that I mean, Wow, I randomly acquired a book that takes Jungian concepts to extreme conclusions with awesome results!

By "randomly acquire", I mean to describe the sort of incident where you’re in a comic book shop, maybe stuck there by a fruitful conversation between your pet webcomic artist and the proprietor, and you’re going through the Super Discount bin figuring, if you see anything that really tickles you, you can afford to just grab it.  And so you see something and it looks good, and you flip it over and it looks good, and you open it and the art is really arresting, and you read a page and the writing is solid and weird and, if nothing else, certainly drags your eyes compulsively over its skin.  You like…but it’d be four bucks even with the discount.  Meh.  We’re broke right now, and we got the two discount copies of Nausicaa we wanted. Go back over to the ten cent bin…but then, right when it’s time to go, change your mind and grab it, perhaps not wanting to taste the cowardice of giving in to money for the rest of the evening.  Who knows.  The mind is a mystery, as the book so eloquently illustrates.

It’s called The Scribbler, it’s by Dan Schaffer and the cover looks like a spin-off of Clanbook: Malkavian.  In fact, if you liked the latter, you’ll definitely like the former; but you’ll probably also like The Scribbler if you like all or most of the following:

*  sophisticated black-and-white art

*  multilayered storytelling

*  visual symbolism

*  psychological thrillers (R, verging on NC-17)

*  science fiction

*  clever endings

Really, it’s possibly my best find this year (Bridge of Birds happened last year, right?).  Still, that’s saying something, considering the glut of coolness I’ve injested lately due to cosmic forces.  …It almost sucks that The Scribbler may be unseated so quickly, if I get to watch the infamous Gojira this weekend.  Oh, and The Crow (the graphic novel), American Shaolin, The Host, um, Heroes, oh yeah, Xenosaga which I actually just obtained (via borrowship from an ever generous friend) tonight ……….All these things are waiting to be ingested.  They all look positively effervescent with kickass.  Will I explode?

Nah.  I’m about as volatile as a library of stoned senior citizens lately.  Did I mention that I got a good backup alarm set up, and the same night, my primary alarm inexplicably died?  It’s dead now.  I only have one alarm again.  Geeeeez.  ;)

Night ya’ll!

Since the local public radio station is having bug-you-for-money week and I have no spare money for which to be bugged, I’m getting my news from random sources.  Today that includes this bit on NPR that I ran across, wherein a Harvard professor in Commercial Law talks all about credit cards.

I thought I knew most of this sordid tale, but I didn’t know quite a few things.  Like:

* The bill processing center that your credit-card payment is mailed to is always on the other side of the country from you, in a small, non-metorpolitan area.  This is so that the mail takes the longest possible time to reach them, upping their chance of charging you that huge “late fee”.

* Credit card companies routinely charge a random fee to everyone — \$75 in the professor’s example — and will gladly refund the money to anyone who calls (and sits through their VIR system and tolerates being on hold 20 minutes, etc.) and complains.  However, they get millions upon millions of dollars from people who don’t notice the charge, or are too busy or timid to complain

* The steaming lie that is Credit Scoring is now taking hold with employers, more and more of whom are checking the credit reports of prospective employees and using the lies therein to make hiring decisions.  This, combined with the change in bankruptcy laws that makes it very difficult to discharge credit card (or medical) debts, has resulted in credit card companies who put the kind of pressure on people to pay that you’d expect from the mafia.  Your credit card company may now call and threaten your current and future jobs if you don’t bend over and pay their interest rates, which are now more than four times higher than Al Capone’s were.

Listen to my lawyer friends and family, people.  Credit cards are a complete scam; you can never be smart enough to come out on top of them — at best, you’ll only lose a little money, if you start and stay lucky.  And credit scores are not an indicator of how good you are with money, or how good you are for your debts, or any of that. 

Credit scores are a means to measure how attractive a customer you’d make for the loan industry, period.  They’re a method by which banks can cherry-pick the customers they want, and give the finger to people who won’t make them as much profit, without setting off the “organized crime” alarm (though it should). 

And that’s where the usefulness of a credit score ends.  (In terms of usefulness to you, the consumer, it’s sometimes better for you to have a low credit-score than a high one–seriously!)

Yes, be educated in the way the system works, but also be realistic about what it is.  It’s not a valuable product for consumers or a useful service to society.  It’s an attempt to turn America (and as many other places as possible) into an industrial farm that produces as much money as possible for the people who already have more money than they could possibly spend.  It takes advantage of the hardships of hardworking families in our two-income nightmare economy by playing games with the legal system and using psychological warfare to convince the public that the farm is good and vital, and that the best possible way to go is right up that ramp and into the big barn with the screams coming from it. 

And quit blaming the victims already!  As the Harvard professor said, “I wish this was an issue of too many iPods, too much Prada” –  But most of the time it’s about paying bills, surviving emergencies and supporting your children.  Of course the criminals running this gig love it when we blame the people they run over for standing in the road; what criminal doesn’t?  And unfortunately, these criminals have access to unlimited television airtime and mouthpieces everywhere, including in government (where, the professor explains, the “financial services” lobby employs enough well-dressed people to personally contact every single Senator and Congressman two to three times daily, to push their issues).

…

This concludes my essay for “Why I should be given an army of DestroyerBots and who I would declare war on.”  Thank you for considering my application.

;)

Getting ready to upgrade WordPress in hopes that it fixes the d4mn “Internal Server Error” that everybody’s sick of. (The error, if you don’t know, doesn’t mean that whatever you just did didn’t work. In fact, it seems to always have worked, in spite of the big error page. I would get, not just an error, but a nonsensical error. That’s what I get for choosing to name the site what I did.)

Anyway, if things break on Sunday night, that’s why. Sorry in advance! ;)

In other news, it’s time for me to knuckle down and report that things aren’t going so well here, sleep-wise. I expect that to change, but as it stands, the last several weeks have been each sloppier than the last. This is the second weekend in a row that I’ve overslept both days, and on Friday night I slept eight hours. That marks the second time in a month that I’ve slept eight hours in one night. I do much better during the week, but not as well as I could and should: During most days, one of the following happens: a) I fall asleep up to an hour early at night; b) I sleep up to an hour too long in the morning, or c) I miss a nap. I don’t feel much effect from it; I’m not tired all the time, but I am tired about once a day, like really tired. That’s not good enough for me though; I’m supposed to be giving this a good go for posterity n’ shit, and it’s just not acceptable (to me anyway) for me to fail from lack of willpower.

To be frankly honest, the problem isn’t based in sleep. I do, for those of you blessedly ignorant up till now, have a bit of a, er, major depressive disorder thingy. Had it since I was very young; maybe wiring difficulties, or, to flatter me, sane-girl-in-an-insane-world complex. Anyway, hard work, willpower and, admittedly, poverty, have kept me drug-free for ten years now, and I like it better this way — except that it’s not always a smooth ride. It’s emphatically not just sleep that I’ve been screwing up lately, in other words. The only thing I actually seem to be keeping my grip on is Tai Chi…but that’s neither here nor there. Suffice to say, I know what’s up, and it’ll be over eventually, probably soon. I’m almost 100% positive that one my Happy Fatty Acid or whatever gets properly regulated again, things will straighten out. No worries.

So no more of that needs to be inflicted on you, but at least with that much I can add that, if posting gets a bit irregular for a little while, I’m not dead. Or a ghost, like in Serial Experiments Lain.

That’s my absolute favorite weird anime, though. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend. Here’s why I love it, from the Wikipedia article:

Serial Experiments Lain deals directly with the definition of Reality, which makes its complex plot difficult to summarize.^[4] The story is primarily based on the assumption that everything flows from human thought, memory, and consciousness.^[5][6] Therefore, events on screen can be considered hallucinations of Lain, of other protagonists, or of Lain fabricating the hallucinations of others.^[6] Story misdirection is central to the plotline;^[7] even the offscreen voices or narrations’ information cannot be considered truthful.^[8] The series consists of a cross-reflection of philosophical themes instead of the traditional linear events depiction: episodes are called “layers“.

All that and it’s absolutely beautiful, too.

Anyway, enough digression, pleasant though it was. I’ll get my crap together, though when I do my posting level may actually go down, I think, as there are a lot of other things I should be doing more of as well. (Like working on the book, if I’m still going to write one.) Things will even out in the end, have no fear. The Blogger Gods are strong here. ;)

Okay, off to upgrade. Cross your fingers! Your good intentions don’t give a crap about physics, and will have no difficulty at all travelling back in time to influence how this upgrade is about to go!