Yearly Archives: 2014

As real as real?

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That Philosophy 101 class back in my freshman year in college was a very bad idea.

It taught me more than what some dead people once thought about various things, it taught me that reflection on things that most people don’t think about is acceptable (to some, at least) and valuable (again, to some, at least). Which provided validation for my thinking about things that most people don’t bother to think about. Which as it turns out, in most places is not regarded as acceptable or valuable. Plus it gets you talked about.

Still, my stupid useless blog, my stupid useless musings.

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Wondering why

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At times I wonder why I do the things I do. I look around at my apartment, and I have festooned it with anime posters, wall scrolls, and figures. I purchased additional shelving to hold the anime DVD and Blu-Ray discs I have purchased. I bought display cases for the figures. Why?

The flippant answers come readily. “Why not?” “It occupies the time between now and when I die.” “They won’t let me mount the severed heads of mine enemies upon the wall.” Real answers come harder. Like: “because I need to be reminded that humanity can create beauty as well as hellish muck.”

Also because anime characters are the closest I get to caring about anything.

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Shipping rant

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Sorry, ye olde Mythical Readers, this is just going to be a straight out rant. Even non-existent readers will probably want to skip this one.

Because I’m incredibly pissed off.

At what, you inquire? At people I buy stuff from online. Especially, but not exclusively, eBay sellers.

Is it because they are the bottom-feeders of rouge capitalism? Is it because they are providers only of fake and ill-gotten goods? Is it because of their questionable personal hygiene habits or lack thereof?

Nay, my good fellow. ‘Tis none of those.

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A year is short, and also long

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A year ago my best friend died.

He was at home in his room, playing video games. He would almost hide in his room most of the time, as he shared the house with his sister, his sister’s daughter (his niece), the niece’s two kids, and whatever person was his niece’s “friend” that week. He was no lover of chaos, so the room was his retreat.

Lest I make him sound like some kind of a loser, living with his sister, let me explain that the house was originally their parents’ home. My friend left his good paying job across the state to move in with his mother, when she could no longer quite make it living by herself, for health reasons. He found a new job in this area… but when the economy tanked, he had too little time on that job to survive the cutbacks. So while taking care of his mother, he worked what jobs he could. It was hard on him, and I had to help him out with short term loans at times — which I didn’t mind a bit, because he’d helped me in the same way earlier when I was between jobs.

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Off in a niche

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Well, the idea of trying to use a Bluetooth keyboard with my little iPhone to type on didn’t last long. It’s annoyingly small, the keyboard will lose sync with the phone if I pause to think (how could anyone expect someone writing something to pause to think), and the app I was using is quite difficult to get sync via iTunes so I can actually get the file onto my desktop. iOS is for content consumption, alas; to create something you need Windows. (Or a Mac, I suppose, but why do that when I have a Windows box already?)

So I dug up an old Windows netbook I had stashed away and nearly forgotten about. I’ve taken it into work and I’ll keep it there, and use a little USB drive to move files back and forth. No, I can’t post things from my work machine directly; they have our work machines so locked down and so blocked from internet sites that it’s nearly useless to have an internet connection to them at all. Well, I’ll see how this system works out for me. And of course all the readers out there that don’t actually exist.

I’ve noticed of late another way in which I fail to comfortably fit into the mainstream. Even of anime viewing.
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Communication Difficulties

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Well let’s see if this works…

I suppose it does.

Well, then.

Welcome back, Mythical Readers. Your favorite mad writer has been away for a bit. Sadly, he writes most of these missives at work during his down times. In the past, this was done on his computer, and he transferred his work to a USB drive, then later to his home computer, and hence out into the interwebs to be vastly ignored. Alas, his employer hath rendered all USB connections to all work computers read-only, as a way of blocking a possible avenue of release of “sensitive client information”. While leaving the DVD writer in my particular machine functioning perfectly, at least for now. Well, they employ a madman, so we can’t expect too much rational behavior from them, I suppose.

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Subs versus dubs

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In my occasional perusal of the Anime News Network (ANN) site, I will sometimes against my better judgement dip into the comment sections. Every time I do I am reminded yet again of several things: 1) I am dissimilar in tastes to almost all the usual ANN commentators, and 2) yea gods and little fishes do those motherfuckers hate subtitled anime.

I myself hate dubbed anime.

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