Bread and Circus

Thanks to tarlanx, I am now thoroughly addicted to Endgame,  a Canadian show about a Russian chess grandmaster who witnessed his fiancee's death while in Vancouver for a chess competition and is now an agoraphobe who lives at the Huxley Hotel. He needs a way to pay his massive hotel bills, so he begins to solve crimes from the safety of the hotel. Because he can't go outside, he applies chess theory to construct mental models of crime scenes and runs various scenarios of what could have happened, often walking into them himself. He amasses a group of 'Baker street irregulars' who go out to crime scenes and report back to him. 

There are so many reasons to love this show. Shawn Doyle as Grandmaster Arkady Balagan is freaking brilliant. He manages to be captivating and clever and infuriating all at once. His body language and delivery really define the eccentricity and genius of the character. The supporting characters are great, and you can really see them start to come together to form a network as you go through the episodes. My favourite character is Alcina, the Guatemalan housekeeper at the Huxley who is brilliant and kind and no-nonsense. Close second is Samuel Besht, a.k.a. the put-upon little graduate student/aspiring chess fanatic who Balagan picks on/reluctantly mentors depending on his mood and the amount of vodka he's had for the day.



I am totally going to be following this series from now on. We Yanks don't really get it here on television, so I'm slightly afraid about Endgame's popularity in America (number of viewers have apparently been decreasing, A-H-H. Don't do this to me again. I'm still getting over Dresden Files and Stargate Atlantis, and at least that had five seasons), hence this post and me telling random people I know about how good the show is. I really hope this show gets another season and goes somewhere. It looks like it has a lot of potential to be amazing.

 Endgame season 1 episodes on TV-Links. We have our sources. 

God, but National Geographic has some great pieces. I think we could learn a lot studying how they write, because they are phenomenal.

Under Paris

Getting There: It involves manholes and endless ladders.
What to Wear: Miner's helmets are good.
What to do: Work, party, paint—or just explore the dark web of tunnels.

The cab glides through Saturday morning. The great avenues are quiet, the shops closed. From a bakery comes the scent of fresh bread. At a stoplight a blur of movement draws my attention. A man in blue coveralls is emerging from a hole in the sidewalk. His hair falls in dreadlocks, and there is a lamp on his head. Now a young woman emerges, holding a lantern. She has long, slender legs and wears very short shorts. Both wear rubber boots, both are smeared with beige mud, like a tribal decoration. The man shoves the iron cover back over the hole and takes the woman's hand, and together they run grinning down the street.

(Read more on their site...)

So, I don't like yaoi (we mean in anime/manga and are differentiating this from BL/shonen-ai, by the way). I think most of it is just ridiculous graphic fanservice, and doesn't have much of a plot. (Yama nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi, right?) I don't sympathise with the characters, they're usually really stereotypical and flat.

But oh MAN, I LOVE 50x50 by Kunieda Saika. I think I've read it about three times already, and it never gets old! I was completely disillusioned by the summary posted on mangafox, but I read some good things about it in the forum, so I said what the hell let's go for it. And I'm glad the summary didn't put me off, because it's terrific and I haven't laughed this hard in a long time. (A BL with plot and comedy- what?)

Summary in my own words:
Meet professional womanizers Higashino and Kawanishi  who have known each other since high school and now work in the same company. They've never fought over girls because they have completely different tastes in women, but the one thing they have in common is their break-up cycles are aligned. They always end up getting dumped at the same time, getting drunk, acting like idiots, and then mysteriously waking up together. Cue denial, fierce defensive womanizing, getting dumped, binge drinking...uh oh, does this sound familiar? ^__^

The comedy in this series really makes the two characters come alive as three dimensional people. The women in this series are great and stand as characters by themselves rather than serving as a vehicle for the story. I like that this manga has no embarrassingly graphic scenes and in fact makes fun of stereotypical moments in BL manga. And again, I LOVE Higashino and Kawanishi. Totally lovable woman-objectifying morons who spend as much time punching each other, acting like psychotic weirdos in public, and getting wasted at expensive restaurants as they do growing close to each other. (If by 'growing closer' you mean punching each other, acting like psychotic weirdos in public, and getting wasted at expensive restaurants)

50x50- check the hell out of this! Just don't ask me about the meaning of the title!



Title: 50x50
Mangaka: Kunieda Saika
Genre: BL, Comedy
Rating: mm, I'd say PG-13? There's maybe like...one panel that's iffy.
Note: Status says ongoing, but I think it's finished. The translators aren't completely sure, but they're pretty damn sure

Oh man, people- oh MAN. I randomly found this a long time ago and did my damnest to find it again. It's a deviantART webcomic with young versions of Conan O'Brian and Stephen Colbert being awkward and batting zombies! It's so randomly hodgepodge yet strangely alluring, and the art's great!

Bad Timing. Described as "if you in fact do believe that one day two talk show hosts got together to fight an evil ward of zombies in the middle of new york and fell in love, i recommend you see a physician, or join the party."

XD MRPGHAH, I am totally engrossed with this in a way I can't explain!



( Oriana132's Impending Doom )
I also randomly found a comic by Oriana132 while looking for Bad Timing called Impending Doom, which has a vaguely anachronistic feel and is just a great little snippet of a story.

So many of you know I've been taking a class on the history of wine in Virginia (which quickly became a history of wine throughout the world from the first clay pot of fermented grape juice to the genetic engineering of the future that might make the foxiness of the Vitis labrusca disappear from its DNA)

I didn't know this till someone in my research group pointed it out, but there's a MANGA about wine called Kami no Shizuku, which translates to Drops of the Gods. This is a play on words, since the main character's name is Shizuku, so the title could also be read Shizuku of the Gods.

I finished this thing in one sitting. It's is absolutely engaging, surprisingly informative, and gorgeously fantastic! Makes you want to go out and buy a Chateu Calon Segur right now! (Okay, I have to wait another year. Stupid American drinking law) I agree with the whole 'wine is food' argument. When I drink it with food, I tend to eat less and enjoy the different tastes more. I kind of see why wine-drinking nations don't get fat.



( C'est Fantastique! )

This is sort of my tribute to one of my favourite bands called The Format.

The Format was an indie band formed in Arizona comprised of Nate Ruess and Sam Means.The Format chose their name to make fun of the music industry's inclination towards a cookie-cutter "format" for a hit. This is ironic, since their record company (Atlantic Records) really would royally screw them over later. Yes, that company Weird Al dislikes immensely. You know his shirt "Atlantis Records Sucks"? Yeah...

Their style is very interesting and is described 'a mixture of indie, alternative, punk and folk music, with elements of 1960s and 1970s pop music." I've heard a lot of people describe their music as 'feel good music,' which makes it sound like easy listening music or running water or something ridiculous like that. (No offence to people who like that kind of music)




I like to describe their music as the feeling you have when you're sitting on the side of some small road in the middle of dusty nowhere in the hot summer in your car with the windows rolled down, your best friend is sitting beside you talking about nothing particular, and you've got an icebox between you filled with sweet cold pluots and crisp summer beer. And maybe your friend's moving tomorrow, maybe you'll never see this place ever again, but at least for a few hours it's like the whole summer is yours.

The style changes into something more perky and upbeat in the second album, like you've finally moved away and you still think about the past, but you're still excited about living in a new place and the adventures you could have. *^_^* I'm waay to excited about this. I talk about these guys to any indie music lover I meet.

Albums:

( Interventions & Lullabies )

Been putting off spring cleaning during finals? Keep your laptop happy and it will not eat your papers/give you hell.
Cleaning challenge for the week: clean all those coffees and library dust layers from your laptop!

Information taken from howtocleanstuff.net. That site sounds cool in and of itself.
How to taken from this article.

What my laptop wrote out while cleaning: Ytre78okl\[[-