(no subject)

[miko2]

I found out yesterday that one of my coworkers died Monday. She had been sick and off work since mid December due to kidney failure and... well, that's all I really knew, I didn't know all the details. And all I know was that she went back into the hospital with complications and died.

I hadn't seen her or talked to her more than once or twice in the last two years, but before that when I worked evenings/nights, her desk was right behind mine and we talked a lot. She was older, but not yet near retirement age, so still too young to die. The last two to three years she had bought humor desk calenders for me and another coworker, and I had always shared what was on the calender that day with my coworkers. I don't have a desk calender for this year.

Some two or three years ago I lent to her a couple of issues of Tales of the Tai-Pan with stories of mine in them. She liked them quite a bit -- I remember one was Angel of the Pathways, about the lizard-like Zylithians. I'd mentioned writing another story about them and she said she would like to read it. I also intended to lend her a couple more issues with more recent stories of mine, but I never got around to doing it.

Maybe a year, a year and a half ago, she really got into the book "The Secret" and bought copies for everyone she worked with. It's a silly psuedo-philosophy that basically boils down to you can get whatever you want just by wishing for it, and if you don't get it, then you're not doing it right. I believe in the power of positive thinking to affect your own life but I don't think my own thoughts can alter the universe, which is what the book teaches. Still, it was very thoughtful of her to buy books for other people at her own expense.

She taught me how to make candied walnuts, a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe which is where she came from originally. I can't eat those anymore though.

Anyway... that made for a weird Tuesday. Other than that I had a pretty quiet evening. Did my exercise, watched some anime, worked on my new little dance club in Second Life a bit.

The anime I've been watching this week is one I borrowed from my former roommate Tom. It's Kujibuki Unbalance, the "fake anime" that the otaku in Genshiken were always discussing. When they made Genshiken into an animated feature, they also did one extra episode per disc (three discs total) that was an episode of the fake anime show. Now, we get 3 discs of the actual Kujibuki Unbalance show, with 1 extra Genshiken episode per disc.

The Genshiken episodes are welcome because I loved that series and the anime barely covered 1/3 of the manga. However, it's only 3 episodes, and they kind of gloss over a lot of things since they don't have time to explain them. They don't explain how the older members have graduated, they don't explain how two of the other characters wind up succeeding each other as leaders of the club, they introduce one important character who never made it into the original anime but they don't cover her status as an excellent illustrator at all... and they never deal with another character's two American friends who make more than one appearance in the manga. So, all told... glad there was more animated Genshiken, but it still leaves me wanting more.

As for the main series, Kujibuki Unbalance, it worked much better as a pretend anime series than it does as a real one. For one thing, it pushes the anime boundaries of "lots of female characters who look like little girls, lots of "fan service" to the point that it really seems almost creepy to watch it. For another, it's an overblown high school show at a school that is impossibly large and over-the-top -- and yet that also describes Negima! and Trouble Chocolate, both of which were far more entertaining. For all of its attempts to be over the top, it's really kind of boring.

Plus I liked the theme song used for the 3 episodes that appeared as extras on the Genshiken dvds better. ^_^