Mine are about:

50% - AIRPORTS

25% - Teaching classes I forgot I had and haven’t prepared for.

25% - Attending classes I forgot I had and haven’t prepared for.

It’s dumb how I pretty much fear airports more than anything else in the universe. I am going to be so bad at at it when I am a Lovecraft protagonist. My studies are going to lead me to the lost city of doomish things, and there are gonna be check-in kiosks in there.

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A professor I had described the difference between Western and Eastern culture this way: Western culture believes that history points forwards. It is bringing itself towards some end point, honing itself into something purer and in some way perfect - though perfection may mean destruction. Our world is a story, and are certain that it will end, the way all stories do, with a new sort of equilibrium established.

History is different in Eastern culture, he said. Once there was a golden age, but it is over now; and things deteriorate. They are continuing to deteriorate, often gracefully, and beautiful things are found in the ruins, and at times some facsimile of the golden age is established for a while. But it always falls apart again, and each time it returns a little coarser. There is no endpoint in sight, only a constant tumbling of the pieces of that perfect civilization, thinning out. Time seems to be getting wider. It’s not going anywhere.

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Do you guys want to know how it ends? Okay, this is how it ends.

They wake up and it was all a dream, except for the parts that weren’t a dream.

I hear the next one’s going to be called “Professor Layton and Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

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I spent a lot of Flame of Recca going, “Man, I would be enjoying this fight scene so much more if Nobuyuki Anzai had not spilled his sexual hang-ups all over it.” Now I know what happens when he doesn’t spill his sexual hang-ups all over things! He makes manga that is kind of perfunctory, with characters he doesn’t really seem to care about. Okay, Anzai, you can have your sexual predators and dominatrices back.

(Not the pedophiles or the thing with the peeing, though. I’m drawing a line there.)

For me the main value of this manga is the knowledge that (spoilers for chapter 107, plus the end of Flame of Recca)

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Hey! Nobuyuki Anzai! Can we please go like two chapters in a row without your problems with women making themselves visible! Because that would be nice! Thank you!

Also, scanlators. Listen. You know I love you, but for the love of Christ. This guy’s name is Hamelin. You are making me very crazy.

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There are branches on the ground all over the place, and I can see a tree that’s fallen over in the park. I wonder if it’s been an unusually bad year for dead trees?

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Man, Kurei, no. You do not break the alternate dimension by punching it really hard.

I mean, there are narrative conventions that need to be observed here. When you are in the alternate dimension, you do metaphysical battle with your soul - or, you know, somebody’s soul, given as how there’s times you may not necessarily have a soul, due to reasons - while solving some kind of riddle. You don’t just punch. There’s a time and a place for punching, just like there’s a time and place for casually disposing of a complaining minion with a small gesture of one hand in the lower right-hand corner of an otherwise empty panel, and a time and place for unexpected shows of vulnerability under a tree branch or a source of thin light.

We’ve got standards in this community, Kurei. Uphold them.

<3,

Ichimaru Gin

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In late 1553 or 1554, Suleiman the Magnificent, the reigning Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, issued a firman (royal decree) formally denouncing blood libels against the Jews.

The Catholic Church denounced blood libels in the 1960s.

- Wikipedia on Blood libel against Jews

(Okay, yeah, there were popes who weren’t happy about it much earlier than that - memorably Sixtus IV, and I do appreciate how there were at least four of Pope Sixtus - but I think the Church as a whole never paid much attention to papal policy on the matter. The blood libel was all local politics.)

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I’m reading Flame of Recca. It’s strangely addictive! Though the art, writing, and gender issues are all unbelievably terrible.

I think the Avatar guys must have read it, because villain #1, Kurei, is (minor spoilers for both)

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