Youtube videos

Since I recently have had access to high speed internet, I've been spending far too much time on youtube and browsing forums. Having dial up, I used to avoid topics such as favorite youtube clips, amusing pictures, motivational poster threads, etc., now that I have high speed internet I've been going through those threads, finding quite a bit of amusing things, along with stuff I have no idea as to why people like it.

Internet video sites are pretty addictive and I find myself watching weird things. For example, I spent six minutes watching an Australian girl making and drinking Milo (a chocolate milk). Afterwards I thought, why did I just watch that?

Having high speed internet has also allowed me to catch up with some shows and watch shows I wouldn't have as easily otherwise, such as cable television. I only have antenna television, I had people record the shows for me or got them from the library before. So I've been watching things like South Park, Kim Possible, and Mythbusters.

I had already seen a lot of the good older videos on Youtube. I used to do fansub trading via the postal service when high speed internet was less common and it was common for people to add amv's and other videos as filler/extras/bonus's and occasionally someone I know would see a video they liked a lot and have me watch it later.

Here is a Caramell Dance (Caramelldansen in Swedish) also known as Uma uma dance in Japan, with Ranma characters (I didn't make it). I really like this one because the characters look so very happy and I like seeing people, or in this case animated characters, happy.

Cthulhu Tales - The whisper of madness

The graphic novel Cthulhu Tales - The Whisper of Madness was inspired by Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. I have read some of Lovecraft's works and I tend to like works that were inspired by him or in a similar style to his more than I do his works. For example, I much prefer Robert E. Howard's works, which were influenced by Lovecraft (they wrote letters to one another), than Lovecrafts works. There is a lot I like about Lovecraftian type horror, I wouldn't want to experience it but I do like it in stories.

Personally I feel that the graphic medium is not the best medium for Lovecraftian horror, the written word is. Images maybe well done but it just not as good as my imagination is. Point of view also matters a lot, for these types of stories a first person point of view would likely elicit the most emotion in the readers.

The Cthulhu mythos, basically that our world and our role in it is an illusion and that we are living in a fragile bubble, unaware of what lies behind what we can sense and filled with things that we are unable to comprehend even if we could sense them is pretty damn interesting. That we are tiny little insignificant specks to other things, as far below them as ants are to us. The idea that there are beings so very different from us, is not very hard to believe. Just look at some of the things here on Earth such as insects or bacteria that can live in places that humans could not and are radically different from us. That we are tiny, insignificant specks to some things that exist, not really that hard to believe, considering the size of the universe. The Milky Way Galaxy alone is too big to really understand/comprehend (it's one thing to say there are 200-400 billion stars in the galaxy, but that's just a number, and such a big number that it's basically meaningless). Our entire solar system is tiny in compared to a great deal of things in the universe.

One story involves a blind guy, or supposedly blind - it isn't clear whether he is blind in the traditional sense or not, who is able to see the cosmic horrors that are around us that no one else can see. I find this idea to be pretty interesting. Humans are limited, we can only sense so much with our senses, even amongst the creatures on Earth, there are ones that can sense things we are unable to. It is not impossible that a person can sense things that most people can't afterall something like 10% of the population can hear sound frequencies at levels above and below those that the other 90% can not. If a person did have a sense that is significantly different from the majority of people, how would the person explain it to people and why would they believe him? A person who was born blind only knows that sight exists because people tell him it exists, in this type scenario, the majority of humanity is the blind person and the one who has the ability is not believed simply because no one (or such a small percentage that it might as well be no one) else has the ability. The story doesn't really explore that aspect, it instead has the guy kill several of the cosmic horrors that are disguised as normal people and transfer the ability to another person. Exploring the aspect of seeing cosmic horrors everywhere and not being believed is more interesting to me than what is presented.

There is a possibly that humanity will find a cosmic horror that is currently out of our reach/understanding. We rely on our senses in learning about the universe, with the aid of technology to extend our senses. It is possible that someone will discover a different way of viewing the universe, possibly in a way currently not even thought about. As new instrumentation/technology is created, discoveries made and new information is introduced, our views on the universe and even on ourselves change. Though personally I'd find it funny if a "great old one" was sleeping at the bottom of the ocean and we just never noticed/were not able to detect it with current methods (there is that mysterious bloop sound, an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. That has an audio profile of a living creature but there is no known animal that could have produced the sound which would have to be several times the size of the largest known animal on Earth to create it).

Another story in the book that interested me somewhat is the story titled "How to get ahead in the occult". This only interested me in so far that I can easily see someone attempting black magic, i.e. the summoning of a being and allowing their roommate to be used as a sacrifice in exchange for a ruling position in the future, even though for most everyone will not enjoy that future. Power is power and there are people who would happily serve an alien creature pretty much dooming mankind in the process, in exchange for the power to rule over others.

Overall the stories in the book were not really that great in and of themselves. The above mentioned two, were interesting to me for secondary reasons. One story in this book stands out above the rest and that is "Alimentary, My Dear Cthulhu". This one is interesting in that the cosmic horrors are known to everyone and have been living amongst people forever. In addition to that it also has a Sherlock Holmes type character, a dead great old one, the birth of a new great old one, and the last few panels break the fourth wall. This story would have been better had it been longer and more detailed, but of the stories in the book it is probably the best.

Cowa!

Akira Toriyama is considered by many to be one of the best manga artists, inspiring many others. I have sort of split feelings about his work. My first exposure to his work was Dragon Warrior (Japanese released as: Dragon Quest) a role playing game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom in Japan). I did not associate that with him though; what I did associate with him is the dubbed version of Dragon Ball Z on Fox network. I did not like Dragon Ball Z, this in turn has colored my opinion of his works. Judging a manga artist on a translated, edited, and altered medium is really not a fair way to base his work.

I recently re-read his short work Cowa! which is about a kindergarten age vampire/were-Koola named Paifu, his friend a ghost named José Rodriguez, his rival Arpon, and a retired Sumo wrestler. The plot is very simple, the many monsters of the village are getting sick and Paifu and friends make a trip to get the medicine needed to save them.

I found this manga very enjoyable, having read it more than once, the online version as well as the VIZ version. It's a pretty funny manga. What I particularly like is that in a village of monsters the most scary being is the human. If you look at some of the stuff humans do and have done in the past it seems apt that a human would be scary, plus there is the monster story staple of humans hunting monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, etc.).

While I like longer series, for the simple fact there is more of it to read. In many ways I like short one shots more. One of the reasons is it is much easier to acquire one book than many, another reason being it is a complete story that can easily be read all at once.

Geocities closing

With the recent announcement that geocities is going to close soon, Ive been going through my bookmarks and saving pages/finding alternative sites. Few things I quickly realized; my bookmarks are extremely bloated and there are a lot more Ranma fanfics not on fanfiction.net or saved in the RAAC archives than I thought (just today I found 37 fics not on those archives). While quite a few of the geocities sites in my bookmarks are about Ranma fanfiction, there is also quite a few Dirty Pair, Evangelion, Tenchi Muyo, Your Under Arrest, and Slayers fan sites as well (those are really great anime). I've found more Dirty Pair fan fiction in my bookmarks than I thought had existed, sadly they aren't that good.

As I've updated, switched browsers, even switched computers I've just been adding and adding to my bookmarks. For some idea as to how long I've been doing this and how large my bookmark list has grown; for geocities sites alone there were 93, there were also more than a dozen anific sites, and quite a few xoom/nbci sites saved in my favorites/bookmarks when I started this undertaking. I am saving quite a bit to my hard drive, accessing many of the dead links via the internet archive (sadly quite a few of the sites are not on the archive), making use of google for alternative sites, and if the site had fan fiction located on fanfiction.net I've added the author to a fanfiction.net profile I created specifically for this purpose, for later perusal.

I am still in the process of going through my bookmarks and expect that this will take awhile (I really shouldn't have allowed my bookmarks to become so bloated). Some of the old fics I'm finding are pretty good like those by Zen (author of the Bitter end a very angst filled Ranma fic, though I don't much like angst), Bryan Neef (like his Tenchi Muyo short in which Mihoshi pretends to be a tree) and some are just strange (like the Ranma/Barney crossovers). There is no real hurry though since quite a few of the sites are on the internet archive and Jason Scott is making a back-up of geocities.

update post geocities shutdown: I have found that for some sites changing the g in geocities to an r (reocities) works since a group had archived a lot of the geocities sites via that way.