It's been a whole year since Sayuki fans have been able to read an official English translation of any new material - but of course, no time has passed for our boys. As you no doubt recall, the Sanzo ikkou had split up in the aftermath of the mysterious and nearly deadly attack on Goku. Sanzo's off on foot with cheerily narcissistic, youkai-hating Western exorcist Hazel Grosse and his massive native American bodyguard Gat, while Hakkai, Gojyo, and Goku (and Jeep) have been struggling to make it on their own without Sanzo's Gold Card to pay for their upkeep.

As of last volume, the three sort-of youkai had been rescued from the desert's hostile clutches by the inhabitants of a youkai village, all of whom have been through the Minus Wave and come out the other side quite sane, although frighteningly blasé about the possibility of Human as a menu item. This village turns out to have a serious water problem: the inhabitants used to be part of a mixed human-youkai town located on an oasis nearby, but the youkai were kicked out some time ago, and have since depended on hauling water from a river several hours away. When drought dries up even that remote source, the youkai are poised to invade their ancestral territory so that they can take what they feel is rightfully theirs. Hakkai, Gojyo, and especially Goku - whose friendship with a downright young youkai girl is blossoming rapidly into something more - are caught in the middle as events push the village to the breaking point.

Meanwhile, in a striking coincidence, Sanzo, Hazel, and Gat find themselves in ... a lovely, prosperous human town located on an oasis. The mayor and townsfolk have a wee problem, however. Seems some vicious youkai live just over the hill, and are fixing to attack the town for its water. Hazel is charmed to be among people whose viewpoints correspond so well with his own, but Sanzo is deeply skeptical about the entire situation. What's the truth about the town? Only time - and a lot of sorrow, and learning of the toughest kind - will tell.

This is a very involving volume with a lot of real-world parallels. I found myself thinking of racial conflicts, terrorism, water rights (obviously), and environmental issues, just to name a few.

Clearly, your birthday should involve good food and good books!

I thought I had glommed onto a really, really great idea! And then I thought of one really, really big problem with it. It had to do with Pippi the youkai girl ... .

I know you already had your party, but here's hoping that today is a good day, filled with cosplay fun and progress!

Just got back from seeing this with my family, the Young Lady's best friend, and smillaraaq. I'm not doing a huge review, because I'm not a huge movie person ... but I enjoyed it. There was a certain amount of horrific nastiness, but most of it was over in about the first 25 minutes of the film. And yes, it was violent, but of the type of violence that any shounen manga fan would find quite resonable.

A couple of little points, some thoughtful, some just silly ... Ron Perlman really inhabits the character of Hellboy (note: I did not see the first movie). You only have to compare his performance as the adult Hellboy with that of the competent young actor who played the juvenile Hellboy in the introduction. I was constantly aware of the kid's makeup as makeup, but I completely stopped thinking about it with Perlman after the first minute or so. And he is such an excellent character for me, so reminiscent of so many wisecracking RPG sessions and snarky manga heroes. But when he starts trying to be friendly with the average man in the street, and fretting over why people don't like him, I whispered to smilla that he reminded me of a very large, red Goku. And she whispered back that his friend Abe Sapien was clearly Hakkai. And it was so true. Although when both of them get sloshed about halfway through the flick and started sappily maundering about love, the dynamic began to get more like just-buddies Gojyo and Hakkai.

See, everything comes back to Saiyuki eventually.

Anyway, the whole thing rattles along at a marvellous pace - I couldn't believe nearly two hours had passed when the credits began to roll.

I hope you have a wonderful day, with goodies and good ties with family and friends!

telophase has finished the picture I won from her in the Sweet Charity auction a while back. It is the most gorgeous thing! Check it out here, and also see her notes about how it came about - what I prompted, and what happened after that - because I think it was an interesting process.

And I have won the story that emungere offered on the livelongnmarry auction, which closed in the wee hours of the morning! I need to come up with something really good in the way of an idea ... probably I will do a few ideas, as I did for the picture, and hope that one really hits home.

(A digression - or perhaps not - on the subject of creativity on demand: In my gaming heyday, when I ran tournaments at cons and stuff, someone once asked me what type of roleplaying scenario I liked best as a player myself: Tolkien-ish? Oriental fantasy? SF? Urban noire fantasy? Spy? My answer was: "If the gamesmaster is good, then whatever the gamesmaster enjoys running the most."

XD

I hope you have a wonderful, joyful, special day!

> hugs! <

A Saturday is a perfect time for a meme! This one is ganked from kispexi2:

Your Thinking is Abstract and Random

You are flexible, adaptable, and creative. There's many ways that you can learn - and you're up for any of them. You relate well to other people, and you do well working in groups. You can help people communicate together and work with each other's strengths. You don't work well with people who are competitive or adversarial. You prefer to work toward a common goal... not toward conflicting goals. What Kind of Thinker Are You?

Whoa, pretty good result there for only 4 questions!

Exactly a month ago, I posted that this wonderful manga/anime art resource had gone under because of financial difficulties: she was starting to have to pay too much for hosting. Fortunately, she took the suggestion of a number of her fans and put up donation buttons for donations via PayPal (on the upper left of the gallery page linked below or on the bottom of main Aethereality site page). I view it is a subscription of sorts - I'm happy to put something into the hat because I've used her materials so often.

Anyway, if you make icons or wallpapers or banners and haven't checked this out, you should - she has some lovely stuff:

Aethereality Gallery

And of course, if you use her stuff and can afford to donate, please do ... .

... about the plantar fasciitis in my left foot. And he basically said "Well, our Round 1 therapies haven't been effective, so I have several possible things you could do for Round 2." And in the interest of efficicacy and time-saving, I opted to ...

( Cut to spare the squeamish )

Anyway, it's still a bit achy, but he said it should improve rapidly. And I'm also supposed to see about physical therapy twice a week for 4 weeks or so.

Now if this stupid cough I picked up in Cophenhagen would just go away! It seems to be fading, but it's slow.

I was sitting pretty for several days with the top bid on emungere's fic writing offer in the livelongnmarry auction, but the rest of the usual suspects have suddenly shown up in force, and I'm teetering on the edge of what I can afford.

But it's all good for the cause! I think I'll leave it alone for a couple of days and see what happens.

> sniffles quietly <

We went to Bray & Scarf! And ordered a new stove! Anna new dishwasher! They will show up on Wednesday!

> facepalm <

I am so easily amused.

We also went to Jaleo, and ate too much tapas and paella, and desserts that turned out to be gi-normous.

And then I went home and spent an hour messing about with digital photos. The effort to process the Scandanavia trip pix brought me face to face with the fact that I haven't uploaded anything to Flickr since Hanukkah except for the Katsucon pictures, even though I took pix at half a dozen family get-togethers. Given that the recording of family events was one of the main justifications for my spiffy big camera, this fill me with much guilt.

I've long wanted an "I can kill you with my brain!" icon, but couldn't find artwork I really wanted to use. Predictably, I recently found 2 pieces:

Bereznoff or Zakuro? Zakuro or Bereznoff?

Zakuro is a much better piece of art and far more of a character, but there's something beautifully loopy about using Bereznoff for this purpose ... .

(For those not familiar with Ouran High School Host Club ... Bereznoff looks like a hand puppet because that's exactly what he is! He's not quite as weird and spooky as the sock puppet in Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but he's not quite the innocent toy one would think, either ... .)

I don't believe in rice cookers. I know how to make rice, dammit. But I scorch it maybe 4 to 6 times per year, so the Mr. bought me a rice cooker to prevent this calamity. To put this statistic in perspective, you should note that I make rice an average of twice a week ... . He was tactful enough, at least, not to buy it as a Mother's Day or birthday gift - but enough of a guy to proudly point out that he hadn't bought it for that sort of occasion.

But I digress.

Anyway, tonight, because our stove is dead (it's a sordid tale involving mice, and a socket wrench, and old wiring ... don't ask), I was forced to use the rice cooker.

I managed to scorch the rice.

I think the problem was that I left it on "warm" too long - the manual didn't give any estimates for how long it would take the rice to cook, so I ended up having to let it sit while the meat finished cooking. But let me tell you, I felt a really bizarre sort of triumph in pointing out to the Mr. that rice cookers do not prevent scorched rice ... .

So today I should be doing wash and packing. But while I was getting the Young Lady off to school for her last 2 exams, I found that I couldn't turn the kitchen tap off completely. This is a symptom of low water pressure, and sure enough, the Mr. heard on the radio that there's a major water main break down the highway at Piney Branch Road.

They haven't locked down the main yet, so by using the basement bathroom, I was able to shower, and I'm running a load of cold water wash (mostly lingerie and some linen tops) - I hope it gets through the rinse before the water goes away entirely ... and I've been catching the trickle in the kitchen sink in every soup pot and bucket I can, to flush the johns and so on once the water goes off.

This is, BTW, the third time we've had water issues in 10 days. I feel like I'm living in a third-world country instead of one of the nation's wealthiest counties.

Not only did I find Diana Wynne Jones' latest, House of Many Ways, on sale unexpectedly at the B. Dalton in Union Station, but I randomly ran into smillaraaq on the way back to the office! And of course we babbled about books and manga and fanfic, while the travelers milled about us.

:-D

Folks, you may recall me recommending the manga art gallery at Aethereality.net as a resource for making icons, etc. I haven't been able to get into it for a couple of weeks, and I just found out why. Posted on main page of the site is this notice:

Aethereality Gallery is now closed. It is using way too much CPU resource for shared hosting that Dreamhost can no longer support.

By "resource", I'm not talking about space or bandwidth. I have plenty of those already. Unless I have $40 to shell out for private server hosting each month, which I don't, I can't bring the gallery back. Sorry.

I've told her (as have several other users) that I'd be willing to help pay for this to be back up. If anyone else has any suggestions for her, please let her know. This was an amazing resource, and it's terrible that it's gone!

Ganked from vierran45:

1. One book that changed your life.
Passages: A Guide for Pilgrims of the Mind introduced me to meditation, self-hypnosis, and trance states in my teens.

2. One book that you've read more than once.
Peter Dickinson's mystery One Foot in the Grave. Yes, already know "who done it," but the wry humor, brilliant characterization. and vivid dialog keep me coming back.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island.
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh: a big, fat SF doorstop with twisted, creepy politics and insights into what it's like to grow up as a genius and what it takes to be human.

4. One book that made you laugh.
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones. OK, the humor is wry and dry, and so I mostly chuckled rather than roared. But it is funny, funny, funny for anyone who's annoyed with multi-volume Tolkien-clone fantasy epics.

5. One book that made you cry.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The waterworks turn on like a tap every time I come to the parts where Scout realizes who has rescued her and (at the very end) where Atticus reassures her that most people are indeed "real nice" once you get to know them.

6. One book that you wish had been written.
Any additional Master Li/Number 10 Ox stories. Apparently something Very Bad happened between author Barry Hughart and his publisher, and he stopped after writing only three books in the series.

7. One book that you wish had never been written.
American Psycho by Brad Easton Ellis. I never read it, but the extract that Newsweek included in their review haunted me for years afterwards, floating up in my mind's eye to freak me out over and over again.

8. One book you're currently reading.
I'm re-reading Little, Big by John Crowley.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, which has been recommended to me over and over again by like-minded fantasy fans - even though the book is not, per se, a fantasy.

Bonus question: What book scared you the most?
Not a novel, but a short story: "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison. Eeeeeeeek!

As the volume opens, Kyo and Sasuke Sarutobi continue their confrontation with Shihodo, the strange guardian of the "latrine level" of the city-sized Mibu palace/temple complex. It's far from clear whose side Shihodo supports, but through flashbacks we learn a lot more about her history - and Kyo's. Escape from the Stygian depths of the Onmyo Palace will eventually hinge on whether or not Kyo can truly master his Muramasa-forged sword, Tenro - which turns out to have a very strong mind of its own.

Meanwhile, Bontenmaru, Akira, and Benitora become the unwilling guests of the unpleasantly impish Tokito, whose idea of fun and games is on level with that of Kami-sama in Saiyuki. Although three of them will join Tokito in spooky Tsukikage Castle, only two will emerge afterward.

In the final chapter, Kyo and Sasuke meet up with Akari and Yuya - and make a terrifying discovery about the fate of Yuya's brother that will affect them all.

This volume suffered from being rather betwixt and between: the incident in the final chapter is the set-up for the next sub-arc, and although the other two incidents were interesting - and provided some valuable puzzle pieces - their emotional impact is simply not as great as some of what has already happened. I also miss the characters who didn't appear: Yukimura, obviously, but also Hotaru and Shinrei. And although Yuya and Akari make an appearance, they don't get to do much. The same is true of the more intriguing villains: Fubuki and Yuan give the intro and then pretty much disappear, while Hishigi gets nothing but a few lines in the Shihodo flashback and two frames of editorial comment right near the end. And there's far too much Tokito ... but that's just my opinion!

The artwork's a little odd in this volume: everyone continues to be very elongated and leggy (not just Shihodo, who's meant to be that way), and yet the faces seem even more rounded and childish than usual. But there are some very cute drawings of Kyo and Akira in the various flashbacks (Akira-chan is rather more believable as a child than Kyo-chan, who looks more like a Kyo-chibi from one of the extras).