neonvincent

I've been waiting all century to hear the music from Princess Mononoke on a football field.

I linked to this video in my top tweet so far this month.

"Utena as mainly a fun adventure story" Hah! My take on the show was that it was two seasons of Sailor Moon directed by Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. Also, by the time viewers figured out how deep the rabbit hole went, it was too late to climb out.

I had my doubts about posting something for World UFO Day today and my feelings proved correct, so I didn't. Here's a song for that.

Watch as two of my fandoms collide on a football field.

Since it's the first of the month, I'd normally share the comments I posted to other blogs today. Tomorrow. Today, I wish happy drum corps Canada Day to my readers! Today's entry is A happy drum corps Canada Day 2019!

Also, "it's time to recycle San. It wouldn't be one of my Canada Day posts without her."

I found this at the bottom of YouTube's Trending page: Only Slightly Exaggerated | Travel Oregon.


When I read "Oregon travel ad looks like Miazaki," I thought the writer was kidding.  Nope, it really does.

BTW, I was planning on writing something about the swallows returning to Capistrano today, but this was a much brighter shiny object.  Maybe next year.

I ended Driving update for December 2013: My car by postponing making good on a promise.

Also, I made a promise at the end of the last report.

Yes, I bought this car in October 2003. I have a story about that, but I'll save it for the next report, along with why I named my car Yuki. Stay tuned.

I'm going to take a rain check on this promise. These look like the kind of stories I would write to post while I'm traveling, which I might do over the next two weeks.

Instead, I explained the name of my wife's car.

It's late and I'm tired, so I'm not up to it. Besides, this report is about my wife's car, which I call Ruby (my wife doesn't give her cars names). I gave her that name because of the car's color and because my wife and I are fans of "Once Upon a Time," which had a character named Ruby, who is really Red Riding Hood, for the first two seasons.

Well, my car turned over 220,000 miles today, so it's time to tell her story.

My previous car, a Nissan I called Molly, died in October 2003 after she turned over 210,000 miles during a drive back from an anime convention in South Bend, Indiana, although I didn't realize it at the time. I heard the engine knocking, which it did when the oil was low. I put in two quarts of oil (!) and continued driving home. Within a week, I had to put in more oil, and the engine began to sound just horrible. I took it in for service, and found out that all the seals had blown and the engine was getting ready to throw a rod. That was the end of my driving Molly. I had to get a new car.

About this time, one of the local Kia dealerships was advertising its deal. "Got a job? Got $100? Get a new Kia!" I qualified, so I rented a car and drove over to the nearest Kia dealer and got Yuki. It wasn't even the right dealership, but that didn't matter. I picked out a car from the previous model year that had a rebate to entice people to get it off the lot. I was able to roll that rebate into the down payment and was able to drive Yuki home without paying a cent. Ah, the long-gone days of easy credit!

As for Molly, the dealership accepted her as a trade-in worth $50 and had her towed away. At least I was able to get scrap value and free towing. Best of all, Yuki's interior looked exactly like Molly's. From the inside, it was as if I had just gotten a newer version of the same car with an automatic transmission. As I wrote back in 2011 and again in 2012, it was a concession to comfort and age.

When I needed to buy a car, I got a Kia instead. It got 32 miles to the gallon, but it was an automatic. I was willing to sacrifice a few miles to the gallon so that my left foot and right hand could rest. Yeah, I'm a sucker for convenience, too.

At least it wasn't the Aztek my son wanted me to buy. That would have been an environmental and economic disaster.

As for the name, my younger daughter suggested Yuki after Yuki Saiko, a character in the manga and anime "Silent Mobius." The character's image is the one I used at the head of this entry. It's the same one my younger daughter downloaded as a wallpaper on the computer I owned at the time. Why Yuki? In addition to "Silent Mobius" being a mutual favorite of ours, my daughter picked her out as the kind of woman she'd want for me; she was sweet, pretty and owned a coffee shop.* Yes, I love my coffee. Besides, the artist who drew the manga was named Kia Asamiya. My daughter wanted to name a creation of one Kia after the creation of another Kia. It stuck and that's how a Korean car got a Japanese name.

...
Now to celebrate my finally following through on something I've been teasing since March 11, 2010, when I was still posting these updates on my LiveJournal, I present the opening to Silent Mobius. Yuki Saiko appears at 0:45.

*Yuki wasn't my favorite character from the anime. That was Lebia Maverick. Even so, people who know the series would understand why a real person like her would have been a bad match.

**That was the day the renewal of my car registration was due. It was also my ex-wife's 65th birthday. That's as much as I'd like to think about her, thank you very much.

Adapted from Driving update for April 2014: Yuki, a longer entry at Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

I've been reading two more campaign comics in addition to Darths and Droids over winter break,  One Piece: Grand Line 3.5 and Friendship is Dragons.  The writer of the One Piece comic leaves prompts in the comments for some of his strips, which got me to write some incidents from the campaign I described in Dungeons and Dragons memories almost five years ago.

The first came on page 246, where the artist requested that the readers "share a story about a flaw that... turned into an advantage of sorts."  Here's my response.

I have a story from the days before there were official flaws in D&D,* back when some people were still playing out of the original three softbound booklets plus Greyhawk and Blackmoor.

I was the DM for low-level group who was exploring a stronghold full of martial arts monks. The defenders were too much for the group, which was about to suffer a whole party wipe when one of the clerics prayed for divine intervention. I rolled the dice and the deity intervened. Unfortunately, the cleric was evil and so was his deity.

After killing the mob, the diety turned to the cleric, sent him on a quest to capture a high-level good cleric, then cursed him with a permanent stinking cloud, not to be lifted until the cleric was captured. The good news was that anything within 15 feet that could smell had to save against poison or collapse from disgust. The bad news was that this included the player characters. This eventually turned into an advantage when the party eventually all saved, which meant that only the monsters would suffer from the ill effects.

The party eventually was strong enough to go to Hell, defeat a couple of pit fiends, and capture the good cleric, who had been taken there by an arch-devil. It seems the cleric's deity wanted him for itself.

*Chaosium's games had them at the time, but not TSR's.

His second prompt was "Tell a story about how your GM or DM implemented a seemingly weird or out of place idea that a player introduced just for the hell of it" on page 256.  My response:

In the same campaign where the evil cleric called on his deity and was cursed and sent on a quest for his trouble, the other cleric in the party decided that he didn't like the leader. It was good role-playing, as the clerics served different divinities and were of different alignments, but he decided to do something about it.

He convinced me to let him contact the local thieves guild and recruit some guides for the party. He did, but he also paid them extra to backstab the leader when it the time was right. The rebel cleric also recruited a bunch of horse barbarians to ambush the party on the trail. The idea was that the guides would assassinate the leader during the ambush. He forgot one thing; he never actually role-played telling the guides about the ambush.

So when it happened, they hung back, until the horse barbarians were starting to lose, then launched their attack. I justified it by saying that they didn't want to share credit with anyone else. They didn't kill the leader, but they escaped to harass the party all the way to the end of the campaign, even following the party into Hell. That was something I would never have thought of myself.

Ah, memories.

In James Howard Kunstler swims against the stream on gender role equality, too, I mentioned another blogger in passing.

By the way, was one of the people who objected to your protrayal of women your neighbor up on the hill, Elaine Meinel Supkis?* I know she thinks you got it wrong about dogs in the "World Made by Hand" and I agree with her.
...
* Elaine Meinel Supkis blogs on Culture of Life News. I reviewed her old blog on my LiveJournal. She is another great example of a blogger swimming against the tide who deserves her own post, and I'll have to review her new blog later this month. Yes, my plate continues to fill up.

( The review of Elaine's use of anime at her old blog, with elaborations on the post from my archives, behind the cut. )

As for her telling Kunstler that he was wrong about dogs in his post-peak-oil future, she did so in her review of "A World Made by Hand." It's a long post, and she has even more to say about dogs on both her old site and her new one, so look for my commentary on those posts later.

Above originally posted at Crazy Eddie's Motie News.