incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Should've stopped with 25 rather than going onto 26. Oh well.

(I should say that I'm getting over a cold, I'm tired and my head hurts, and I was foolish and got spoiled for episode 25, so if I sound rather flat and befuddled, that's probably why. Also I need to go to bed so I haven't proofread.)

Spoilers for these episodes, as usual (and don't be like me and get spoiled for this set if you haven't seen them yet); spoil me for future episodes and I will kill you with my brain.

( spoilers for Fullmetal Alchemist episodes 24-26 )

I've got a "why watch" post half-done, because Adult Swim is starting to air episodes from the beginning next week. I have to drive to Massachusetts tomorrow, so I don't know if I'll manage to finish it before I leave—I want to, because otherwise it probably won't be done until late Sunday if not Monday morning, and that's not so much use when episode 1 is airing Monday night. We'll see.

[Edit: the "why watch" post is up.]

After a booklog entry, some spoiler notes on volume 2 of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, and on the differences between the manga and the anime. Spoilers for volume 2 of the manga and—oh, episodes 8, 14-16, 18, and 20 of the anime. Do not spoil me for subsequent manga or anime episodes or I will glare very fiercely in your general direction.

( Fullmetal Alchemist manga and anime spoilers )

I've posted a longish booklog entry on volume 1 of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, talking about it in comparison with the anime. As I said there, "The art here strikes me as clean and with slightly more delicate, less detailed lines than Saiyuki. The panel layout is mostly straightforward and linear. . . . I only found a couple of additional things to say about this art."

Two things, specifically, both below the cut. 129 KB of images, spoilers for the first two chapters, but nothing major. Spoilers for further volumes of the manga, or of any anime episodes but the corresponding ones here (1, 2, 5, 9) are not welcome.

( Fullmetal Alchemist volume 1 art commentary )

Like I said, not a lot. I did look, honest. Since this is easily available as scans, anyone have comments on things I overlooked?

It's football season! I stayed up much too late Thursday night watching the Patriots play the Raiders, because they had to go and make it interesting in the second half: a tipped extra point, a blocked punt, and it was a two-possession game with the Raiders deep inside Pats terrority with about four minutes left. The Raiders got the touchdown, but the two-point conversion failed on Randy Moss's offensive pass interference (!), and then the Pats got the first down and could run out the clock, and I could go to bed. Of course, I had to get up at 1 a.m. when the dog started yelping and whining, so I got even less sleep than football could account for.

Yesterday started out cranky and sleep-deprived, but a stroll to the library in the lovely fall sun, and then sitting in that same lovely fall sun with a book, helped quite a bit. Not a library book, a manuscript for which feedback was long overdue; the only thing I got at the library was the first volume of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. I'd been vaguely planning to read the manga after I finished watching the anime, so as to get events in one order, but, well, it was there and it seemed a good thing to encourage the library to buy more, and I knew it didn't have anything I hadn't seen already. (The library also had a display of anime and manga action figures—I have no idea why, there weren't any labels or anything. It had the Ed and Al from this set, and this Hawkeye which I rather like, though I can resist it quite handily because it doesn't also have the dog.)

We also ended up watching Holes on TV Saturday night. Reviews of this made it sound incredibly complicated, but I didn't give it my full attention until fairly late in and didn't have too much trouble following it, and I enjoyed the last bit. A strange story, in that it is fantasy but doesn't feel like it, but it's well-acted and interestingly done. (IMDB's trivia page has an absolutely mind-boggling description of an earlier draft of the script; I guess I should just be impressed that the draft didn't get produced.)

Today I got the not-unexpected news that my iPod's hard drive was dying, all of 45 days after it came out of warranty. Grr. I disapprove of extended warranty plans on principle, but if I'm going to be the kind of klutz who drops a small hard drive at least twice in a couple of months, I might have to think about it. I also got the latest Young Wizards book, Wizards at War, which I'm partway through, and the new Discworld book, Thud.

I made Québec meat pie (what my recipe book calls "tourtiére") tonight, which came out well and was dead simple. ( The recipe follows: )

This worked really well. Next time I will try the recipe my mom has, which is more like Grand-Memère's because it has potatoes. It's sized for four pies, but I don't see any reason it couldn't be scaled down to the same proportions and times as the one I made tonight. ( Here's the recipe: )

What do you all think?

And now I am tired, and so my book log entries on Last Call and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell are going to have to wait yet another day (they are proving strangely difficult); I'm just using this icon because I like it.

(Yes, still ignoring news in order to function; have donated, scheduled donations for the next several months, and put "110 Stories" up outside my office for the week. And I hate feeling like I need to disclaim all this.)

Thanks to having figured out how to tweak BitTorrent's settings and how to improve our internal bandwidth, the fansubs of Fullmetal Alchemist [*] finally finished downloading Saturday morning—which was when I was heading to get car maintenance done. Since I knew the dealership's waiting room would have a TV on, I brought along the laptop and headphones to block out CNN.

[*] By AKeep-ANBU (episodes 1-31) and Spoon (episodes 32-51). Oh, and I have a DVD+/-RW drive, so if anyone needs these, just say so. (I could even throw in manga scanlantions as a bonus (stockpiled against possible later interest)—will the manga be complete with the forthcoming chapter 51, or did I get the wrong impression somewhere?)

I watched the first three in their entirety at the dealership; back home, I saved time by muting the sound and putting the speed up for most bits (I can read faster than the characters can speak, especially in Japanese). I think the English dubbed voices are fine, but I do like the Japanese Ed; he sounds older and more cynical to my ear. The fansubs are also more terse, a tendency we'd already noticed in comparing the more-literal subtitle track that comes with the dubbed DVDs. At the moment, I don't have a strong preference between the two, except that I have the fansubs. (We've been NetFlix'ing the dubs and appear to be way, way down the list for disc 4.)

Spoilery notes behind the cut on stuff I noticed this time around. I am still only up to episode 12, so spoil me for episodes after that and I will kill you with my brain. (People who put what appear to be series-destroying spoilers in the icons they use in general discussions? They get cut into very small pieces and fed to chimeras. I'd been doing so well at avoiding spoilers, too . . . )

( spoilers for episodes 1-12, fansubbed versions )

Observe, how good I am: I stopped at episode 12 and didn't watch any new-to-me episodes while home by myself on the holiday, because Chad said he might be interested in watching the fansubs and I couldn't afford to spend my whole day watching it, as almost certainly would have happened.

Not as good as the last half of the second disc, IMO.

Standard warning: do not spoil me for later episodes, or I will kill you with my brain (tm coffee_and_ink).

( spoilers for episodes 9-12 )

Look! A non-Saiyuki post!

Those who said the series really caught them at episode 7—I can definitely see why.

( spoilers for episodes 5-8 )

Chad has Netflix'ed the anime of Full Metal Alchemist, and this weekend I saw that Borders had the first volume of the manga prominently displayed. Do people have suggestions about which I should experience first, bearing in mind that the only anime I've seen before is Princess Mononoke (and also that I may not have time to watch DVDs at the rate Chad might)?