If you’re thinking, ‘Wait, it moved again?’, you have a point, but I’m serious this time.

Seriously.

In the past, I’ve always juggled multiple books at once. Typically, I’d have a couple things I was reading for a class, and at least one other for leisure on top of that, usually with the leisure reading taking priority, of course. Add to that graphic novels, which, fortunately, I can knock out quick enough that they don’t add to the backlog too much. Now, there’s no reason for me to do that, but for whatever reason I’m still juggling.

Anyway, enough of my eccentricities. Here’s what’s on the plate now:

-A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Sir Winston Churchill. I have mixed feelings about Churchill as a leader, but I do like his writing. I’ve been wanting to get a better feel for English history, and the scope of this work (in four volumes) also appealed to me.

-The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, trans. Ivan Morris. More Japanese stuff, this time from the Heian period. A collection of anecdotes, observations, lists, and whatnot from a court attendant. It’s best in small doses, but I’m impressed enough to consider renaming this blog ‘The Pillow Blog’, since my idea for ‘Everything is OK!’ seems similar to how Shonagon went about the Pillow Book.

-Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas is my patron saint, and I’ve read many of the articles in the Summa before, but I’ve decided to finally read the whole thing. It’s an epic project, so I’m just going a few questions at a time.

-Dragonball, Toriyama Akira. Popular series hurt my indie cred (*ahem*), but I liked the first volume and bought the box set, which came in a nice box with a poster, booklet, and all sixteen volumes. Seven volumes down, and so far I’d say DB deserves the popularity.

-Ranma 1/2, Takahashi Rumiko. What’d I say about popular series? Well, I’ve really liked the first ten volumes, so whatever. The main criticism I’ve seen of Ranma 1/2 is that the jokes get very repetitive. There’s definitely a pattern to them so far, and there’s still over twenty volumes to go…

I’ve also just finished Economics for Helen, by Hilaire Belloc, which a friend of mine highly recommended. I’d also highly recommend it to anyone.

Partly the reasons are just practical things that will likely be (and in some cases have been) alleviated in future versions. No colour, no support for Japanese text, spotty availability for books I want, lousy formatting for others, and a few other nuisances. To the Kindle’s credit, there is still a lot of material available, I do like the iPhone app, and I especially like how it handles annotations and dicionary lookup.

However… however… I still have to drop it. The Kindle simply does not engage the reader as well as a traditional physical book. Though certainly better than a computer monitor or iPhone, following a story or argument remains more difficult than with print. I can only speculate why, but suspect that the reason lies largely with print’s more tactile experience. I remember a professor of mine, while discussing interactive fiction, commenting that one also interacts with print books by turning pages. At the time that seemed a bit silly, but looking back I think there’s more than a grain of truth to that. Though small, turning pages, physically taking a pencil or highlighter to make notes, even that used book smell, engage the reader more than just hitting a key or scrolling a mouse wheel.

In any case, I also happen to love used bookstores. Just randomly browsing bookshelves is a lot of fun for me, and I like seeing the annotations, doodles, and whatnot from previous owners. The Kindle does highlight frequently noted passages, but that’s just an aggregation with no personality, something like getting information about a show or novel series or whatever from a Wikipedia article versus a fansite. The aggregation may have more data, but lacks personality. In textbooks especially, those signs of life reminded the student of those who’ve struggled in the academy before. The days of print as a dominant media may, in the long run, be numbered, but I can see myself holding out for a long time.

I don’t think K-On! itself caused it; I did like the first season of the anime adaptation, though I never watched season two. Rather, while about halfway through the graphic novel, I realised that I just didn’t care about what this story. I think the sudden realisation may stem from a recent episode of the ANNcast podcast, where one of the co-hosts (Justin Zevakis, IIRC) commented that, as a grown man, he had no reason to care about what a group of high school girls are doing.

Actually, maybe my distaste isn’t with moe per se, but with high school comedies. The first graphic novel I really got into was Azumanga Daioh, by Azuma Kiyohiko. At the time, I was in high school, so watching a bunch of high schoolers was relevant to my interests, even (or perhaps especially) if they were girls. Since then, though, I’ve seen several other shows with the same setting, some of which I’m sure I’ll still like, but at this point I graduated high school five years ago. The setting seems really trivial, and honestly some stories suffer from the lack of gravity inherent in most teenage relationships. ToraDora had this problem – though the urgency the characters felt to clarify everyone’s feelings may have seemed important from their point of view, I found that sense of urgency unnecessary.

First of all, the basic gameplay hasn’t changed at all, as far as I can tell (I just got the first badge about 1.5 hours in). You wander around, catch little critters, train them, and fight them against other little critters. It’s still a great premise, and I can certainly see why the franchise has continued to sell so well.

As for changes, White and Black are more politically correct than Red and Blue. For one thing, instead of Prof. Oak we have some woman professor, and instead of having to play as a boy you can choose between a girl and a boy who looks like a girl. Enough girls play Pokemon that having a girl avatar is probably a good move (though I’m guessing it’s one that’s a few generations old now). Also, there’s a lot more talk about the special relationship between humans and Pokemon and what it means to be a good trainer. I think Red/Blue touched on this, but it wasn’t a major theme. I guess it’s a decent way to teach younger players to take care of animals, but really I just want to catch monsters and fight them.

Which brings me to Team Plasma, our antagonists who want to liberate the world’s Pokemon. They seem shady and I hear they have some ulterior motive, but… I don’t know. I always liked the original games’ simplicity. Not that White/Black is a new Hamlet or anything, but Red/Blue seemed to focus more on just catching and training Pokemon. Your rival there was Gary, who was your rival because he was a jerk and… that was it really. No motive that I can remember. He just was a jerk. Oh, and I guess Team Rocket was there too doing, ah, whatever their big plan was. Conquer the world or something. I realise that after over a decade you need to mix up the story a bit, but there’s something to be said about the almost perfect simplicity of the originals, which really captured that childlike feeling of adventure better than almost any other game I know of. I’ll wait until I finish the games to decide whether the new Pokemon measures up.

Like many fans, I’m still not sure what to make of the whole endeavour. The studio, Kyoto Animation, put too much effort in the animation for this to be a mere instance of laziness, or even a deliberate lowering of expectations for the upcoming Haruhi film as a bold few have suggested. Some fans, my sister included, did enjoy noting all the differences between each episode, and E8 could be viewed as an experiment in how many different ways one could animate the same events. Using a flagship franchise like this for experimentation, though, seems like a tremendously ballsy move.

As for me, I’m quite comfortable a-sitting on a fence on this one, beyond noting that, while I appreciate KyoAni’s boldness, if that’s what it is, and greatly enjoyed the drama of a thoroughly alienated fanbase, ultimately I did not enjoy the actual show, and would place the experiment, if that’s even what it was, in the ‘noble failure’ category.

I’ve read that the Japanese edition had serious problems with video quality, so North American publisher Funimation did their own remastering. The end result looks very good. There were moments when lines became noticeably jagged or the screen looked a bit fuzzy, so one could easily tell that this show came out before HDTVs were common, but I think they do look better than the original DVD release. If you already have the old DVDs and aren’t a big fan, though, it’s probably not worth the purchase.

On a final note, this is the first post I’ve written via my iPhone, so if anything looks weird that’s probably why.