トラ爺

I forgot to mention it before, but starting with this entry I decided to make my journal public! Since I don't really post private information on here, so keeping it friends-only is pretty pointless. Which means I gotta update my intro post to match (it's needed a facelift for a while now anyway). derp

A few days ago my dad broke my external hard drive. Knocked it off the table by accident and it wouldn't work anymore. I mean, I was and still am pretty pissed about it because I had a LOT of anime on there and it's going to be a pain to download it all again, but he was so genuinely apologetic about it (and he promised to buy me a new one if it can't be fixed) that I can't really stay mad at him. Which apparently made him feel worse because I took it a lot better than he would have if I'd broken something of his. But, I mean, the TV tray I'm using as a desk right now is pretty rickety and I've nearly knocked it off myself a few times, so I can totally understand how it happened. So now I'm just annoyed that I can't watch anything I had downloaded, and I can't torrent anything in bulk right now because I don't have enough space on my laptop for it, which is why I bought the hard drive in the first place.

Regardless! I finally caught up to Heroman because I at least still have space for assorted individual episodes. I'm legitimately excited for the direction the plot's taken, because I have a thing for the fugitive premise. Also, Hughes is hot////. I am still frustrated that none of the characters have gotten much development, though. I mean, it's a silly faux Saturday morning cartoon so I know I shouldn't expect much in the way of complexity, but still. In the show's defense, the characters feel flat to me not because they don't seem well-realized but because we just don't know all that much about them. Which I honestly prefer to the alternative of shoehorning in backstory exposition where it doesn't belong, but eventually they're gonna have to give us something somehow if they want us to see Denton, Psy, and Lina as anything other than Generic Kooky Mentor, Generic Big Brother Figure, and Generic Love Interest, respectively.

Also, I went to Borders today to get Pandora Hearts volume two, because a clear and understandable translation of those chapters is still unavailable anywhere on the Internet. I haven't read it yet, but I flipped through it and Yen Press's version still seems to be somewhere around better-than-average scanlation quality, where all the characters have a particular way of phrasing that would sound odd to anybody unfamiliar with Japanese. Which, again, is fine for free scanlations, but I'd still prefer for official localizations to be a little more natural-sounding. Oh well.

Speaking of PH, I'm not entirely up-to-date with it yet but I've gotten a liiiittle concerned as of late with how the story's going. When I first started reading the manga, I was under the impression that Mochizuki had a specific story in mind with a specific idea of how to end it, but it feels like lately she's been introducing new plot threads without really concluding any of the previous ones, and it's unclear to me whether it'll ultimately all tie together or whether PH is supposed to be one of those manga that will continue to run as long as it's popular, with smaller, self-contained plot arcs happening within the bigger picture. Which would be fine! It would just be different from what I expected it to be. Whatever the case, I remain convinced that PH is one of the better-plotted and better-characterized offerings within its intended demographic.

I also decided to buy one other manga volume while I was there and had a brief moment of panic when I realized they had several Urasawa series to choose from. More specifically, I was torn between volume one of either Monster or Pluto--Monster I've been needing to read for a while but Pluto I know I love and had prettier packaging. In the end I elected to go with neither and got Not Simple by Ono Natsume instead. I actually didn't like the first chapter much when I read it online (too melodramatic for me), but I couldn't find the rest anywhere and regardless of the story I genuinely find Ono's doodly art style pleasant to look at.

I will be making an AX post once nativegirl sends me the rest of the pictures she took. LOOK FORWARD TO IT!!