The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

I found a meme I like:

1. Comment with almost any subject that you would like me to rant on, with possible swearing involved. Any subject - I don't even have to agree with it.

Two addendums - no US politics, and the deadline is noon EST (or EDT? Whenever the hell it says 12:00 on my clock) today.

Cheers!

These are raw, unedited, and unplanned. I'm not even spellchecking the damn things. Enjoy!

For larom: Public Parks, Plazas, Piazzas, and places to hang out.

Say it's a nice, sunny spring day, and all you want to do is go outside, enjoy the weather, and maybe have a little bit of a picnic. You drive (or walk, if you're lucky enough), to your nearest public park, and things just go downhill from there.

What the hell is it with people and public places, ostensibly there for the benefit of all? You pull into the parking lot, and it's nothing but trash - trash on the ground, people throwing trash out the windows of their cars, people throwing trash and missing the trash cars without bothering to pick it up, etc etc. If you're especially unlucky, there isn't any parking, and there's at least one asshole who decided that the lovely flowerbed on the edge of the lot is the perfect place to park his oversized gas-guzzling SUV. Once in the park itself it just gets worse - idiots letting their dogs shit all over the place, assholes carving graffiti into swing sets, discarded needles, discarded condoms, and a plethora of people who are utterly convinced that the very sun moon and stars revolve around them and them alone.

What happened to personal responsibility? What happened to people caring about our public places, and making them nicer places to be rather than trashy shitholes? When I go hiking fifty miles from the closest anything, the last damn thing I want to come across is a discarded can of Red Bull. These should be our treasured showpieces, the places where we all come together to have a good time, enjoy the beauties of nature, and the places we should be attempting to make better, not just for our children and our grandchildren, but for ourselves as well.

What is it about us as a people that compells us destroy public property? Does the fact that it's not yours and yours alone mean that you have to treat it like your private dumping grounds? Instead of creating community, these precious public areas are being destroyed by a community, a community who then stands back, claims it isn't their problem, and bitches that Something Should Be Done. By somebody else, of course, not them.

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For mcfinnigan: The proliferation of pseudoscientific beliefs.

Somewhere along the line it became unfashionable to hold educated, researched, and well-founded opinions. Somewhere, this became "close minded," "exclusionary," and generally offensive and non-PC. Somewhere, wanting scientific proof for phenomena ranging from ESP to alien abduction to super-aliens-from-the-future-really-built-the-pyramids became unfashionable and unreasonable.

Somewhere along the line pointing out that there was no scientific proof of any of this, or of the factual basis of astrology, or of Atlantis, the discovery of the Ark, or that the Earth was only a few thousands of years old earns the speaker the title of "skeptic," always spoken in a derogatory fashion.

Guess what, folks, The X-Files was fiction. Science is founded on something you might be familiar with, something called "the scientific method," that has done a pretty damn good job of showing us that genuine natural phenomena are quantifiable and repeatable. Don't ask me to blindly believe something without proof.

And, for god's sake, "I saw it on TeeVee!" isn't proof and it isn't a convincing argument in your favor. An artist's rendition, or a reenactment don't qualify as proof, either. Even a genu-ine Doctor of Psychology or Psycholinguistics or whatever the hell on the news doesn't qualify. Why? Because you haven't bothered to do your own research.

Don't believe everything you read. Don't believe everything you hear. For god's sake don't believe everything you see on the Internet. Take everything with a grain of salt (a large one), and do your own goddamned research for once in your life. This may require getting your fat ass out of your Laz-E-Boy and going to the library. It may require comparing multiple sources, and your research may have to branch out from there. It may only require going to the nearest dictionary.

But be prepared to not like what you may find out. Someone once said that "almost everything [science] tells us we do not want to hear." You very well may not be the fifteen reincarnation of High Priestess Shal'ath of Atlantis and a powerful psychic in touch with sixteen different alien races. Be prepared to find things that don't make sense, that defy your sense of order. Ghosts fit into your worldview? You'd damnwell better find a place for quantum physics, too. And I know which one I put more stake in.

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For mizunotohru: The Anime industry in USA

(Heh heh heh...I find I'm having trouble replicating the speech patterns exactly, though.)

Bastards OMGWTF, why don't you make everything freeeeeee?!?!111oneeleven I can download it for free of the internet, that's good enough. Fuck you assholes for not catering to me, personally, the HARDCORE FAN who consists of, maybe, a mere fraction of a percentage of your sales! Oh yea, and while I'm at it, FUCK YOU for wasting money on dubbing Title X, when you could have saved money and made it cheaper by just releasing it subtitled!

Why did you even bother releasing Title Y, it SUX0RS, you're wasting your money! If you can't get the rights (who the fuck cares about those, anyway) to a song or something, use it anyway! It's not like anyone's going to find out or care!

Why wasn't this released with fifteen episodes a disc like this super-cheap set I found on eBay? Why wasn't this released with god-like bitrate? Why wasn't this released widescreen when it wasn't widescreen originally? Why don't you make all boxes out of titanium and release them for free? Why release something in a new format that SUX0RS when there's this other format coming out Real Soon Now that may or may not be better?

And fuck you all for making my hobby popular, I want to be all counter-culture again, because, in the end, that's what's really important, isn't it?

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Ok, that's exhausted that train of thought (I'm sure I'll remember something I forgot shortly), but that's really more about anime fans in America, rather than the industry itself. Let's give this another shot:

Dear US Anime Industry:

Why do you hate me? Why do you hate the shows I like? I don't ask for much, really, just a few titles that are heads and shoulders above the nearest Wacky Half-Naked Cutegirl Comedy. Sure, they're a bit older, and sure, many of them are directed at girls. But you know what? Us girls have cash, too. Really, we do. And we want our shows treated better.

Is it too much to ask to have our shows released with boxes and nifty extras? And not those crappy boxes that get crushed in transit to me, but real boxes. We like pencilboards and postcards too, but typically not when they feature young girls with panties showing looking like they're about to get laid (ROD 4 - creepy as hell). The boys get their classics, featuring giant robots, explosions, and half-naked chicks, and that's great - the more diversity, the better. But we're not seeing much diversity here on this side of the gender gap.

Where is our Glass Mask? Where is our Candy Candy? Where is our Full Moon wo Sagashite, or Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne? For god's sake, where is Rose of Versailles?

Sure, you're doing a little better lately. Kodocha is finally coming (summer!), Kyo Kara Maou is getting a pretty quick release, and Tutu appears to be making a splash, even if it's for all the wrong reasons. We're getting more Kaleido Star. But, notice that there's not a box or pack-in extra among them (with Kodocha being a possible exception, since it hasn't been solicited yet). We're being neglected again.

Not only that, but when we do get a show, it's frequent for the treatment to degrade as the series progresses. We have Super GALS!, but where is the second season? We have Kaleido Star, but there's no box for the second half. We have the first two seasons of Sailor Moon uncut, but with crappy video and audio, and a missing episode. And where the hell is Sailor Stars, anyway?

We're out here too, guys. It's not a Boy's Club anymore, as your manga sales sheets should show. We're here, we have money, and we're waiting to be pandered to. Are you listening?

For izuko: Why Izzy is teh win.

KenIzzy is teh win because he's cool enough to shop for dishes with me and go to tea in a "tea house" designed for midgets. And he's got good taste in many things, although I can't class books as one of them. ^_^

Also for izuko: Oh, and the historically recent rise of the "geek chic" to respectability or at least cult popularity in US society... that's if you decided that the first topic would require several Gig to properly cover.


Nerds and geeks have always been the punching bags of society. Awkward, socially inept, and unable to hold a coherent conversation on anything except specific topics of interest, they were, admittedly, and easy target. Jocks and BMOCs took great joy in shutting them up in lockers, dunking their heads in toilets, kicking sand on them at beaches, and so forth.

Then came the computer, and The Information Age. All of a sudden, geeks were in great demand. No longer shut up in basements (where they'd likely be more comfortable), geeks were suddenly plastered on the front pages of newspapers, written about in Time Magazine, and given salaries and stock options to make all those fucking bullying bastards from school drool as they finished up their fifteen hour days in the mines. Where's the Football Star now, huh, asshole? I guess all that muscle wasn't enough in the end. Brains equal money in today's world, fucker, and guess who got all the brains? Me! I have the brains, I have the money, I have the l33t water cooled PC gaming system of d00m. And I won't be invinting you to my LAN party, asshole.

I'm frigntened at how fast I can dash this out. They'd be more virulent, except nobody's actively pissing me off today. Thus far.

For jgrummell: Your opinions on DC comics vs Marvel vs Other Labels.

(Methinks this one is going to go a bit far afield from the intent, but that's OK.)

DC and Marvel are the ultimate one-trick pony. Superheroes in Spandex are great and all, but it gets old. Really old. Especially after the fifteen time a character has been shockingly killed and then, in a completely unexpected plot twist, brought back to life. But he's been changed by experience, of course, so now he's evil/depressed/posessed by an evil alien spirit/addicted to crack/secretly a crossdresser, whatever.

Clue in, folks - character deaths lose impact when you know they'll be brought back to life in another three exciting action-packed issues. Also, do you realize that many of these characters have been around since World War I?!? Can't you find something new? It's old, it's tired, and there's a reason why your sales suck, you've been on the verge of bankrupcy since the Great Comic Bubble of the 90's, and you can't seem to reach any audience other than hormonal boys and the geeky adults they grow in to.

Let me be frank with you - you're wasting the graphic media. Wasting it. There's so much you could be doing, so many avenues you could be exploring, so many preconceptions you could be breaking - but you're not. Graphic novels are a respected art form, as well as a form of entertainment in other countries. France, Japan, Germany - you don't see every single newspaper or magazine review containing either "This ain't your daddy's Superman comics!" or "Comics aren't just for unwashed nerds anymore!"

And the sad thing is, you know it. You know you're not reaching the audience you could be, you know there are whole flocks of people out there just waiting for the right graphic novel to come around, even if they don't know it yet. If you didn't know before, the sales numbers you're seeing from the past couple of years on manga. Especially shoujo manga. The Japanese are doing something right, something you've never been able to do, and they're making girls open their purses and for the first time in their life they're buying comic books. Bookstores are buying comic books by the truckload, and you need to get off your asses and get a piece of it.

You tried a few years back with your ill-advised "Tsunami" line (I think, only vague memories here). Guess what - it isn't the art style that attracts people to manga, it's the stories. It's the characters, and the fact that they grow, develop, die, and the story eventually ends. And they're not stories about superheroes, either.

American comic companies have within them the ability to create stories to speak to Americans of all ages and sexes in the same way. Some of them are doing it. Wendy Pini's groundbreaking Elfquest is getting no fewer than two all-new releases - a smaller, cheaper version mirroring a manga release, and a large high-quality hardcover with all new digital coloring. Blanketes got rave reviews in several high-profile publications. The Sandman is one of the best sci-fi/fantasy stories out there. CrossGen (Come back, CrossGen!) had some fantastic books with realistic female leads and stories that didn't involve superheroes in tights.

The indies are doing it. The indies are trying, anyway, but they have both limited resources and limited exposure. You two have neither. It's up to you, the Big Two, to make this revolution happen.

(Incidentally, I now love DC with great love, since they picked Swan and From Eroica with Love as two of the titles they used to launch their manga line. Old-school shoujo, how cool is that? And they have "Phantom Thief" Jeanne, too. Yay!)

For sangochan: Drama and stupid people, not necessarily in that order.

Dear god where do I start? We'll start with drama, since there's been a bit of that of late.

Stop. Just...stop. When something is done and over with, there's no logical reason whatsoever to go stirring the pot to see what comes up. You are not the center of the universe, you are not the direct focus of everyone's problems or energy, and nobody, quite frankly, gives a shit.

This may be news to you, but...not everything that evereybody does has anything whatsoever to do with you, and creating your own little Greek drama with you as Oedipus won't change that.

Thrive on chaos? Move to the Middle East, don't create a mess in my backyard that I have to deal with. You won't like the kind of attention I bring to bear.

And stupid people are the number one reason why the Darwin Awards are a good thing. Want to do something boneheaded and get yourself killed? Fine, but at least have the sense to leave me the fuck out of it! If you don't have the sense to know that waching porn on your 8MPG SUV while you're driving 80MPH in the snow is a bad idea, just ask. I'll tell you straight.