Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Joyful Kwanza. Gleeful Festivus. Warm Newtonmas. Quiet Cephelapodmas. And all praise the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

This morning Kouryou-chan was prepared to explode. She desperately wanted to open her gifts immediately, but we had her hold off long enough to get breakfast into her (and coffee into me; I was up way too late last night. "A dimensional phase shift of this magnitude is highly improbable!").

Omaha got me more pyjamas (yay! Long ones, too; my other three sets are all shorts, modest but not warming) and she paid my Ballmer tax, getting me a copy of XP so I can run the latest and greatest. Now I just need a hard drive to put it on: my last one died. I just need a small one, 100GB or less, and it has to have a five-year warranty: windows seems to eat my hard drives alive.

Kouryou-chan got a ton of stuff: a digital camera, more My Little Pony's, a lot of clothes, a knitting kit. A good haul of loot, all things considered.

I've been trying to write. I had to chop about a thousand words of story out of Dove & the Twins' third day. It was going in the wrong direction: I want Dove to be angry at her co-workers' nosiness into her private life, and having the Twins drop "let's just be friends" on her in the same afternoon wasn't what I really wanted to do to her. This isn't supposed to be a tragedy.

Movie thoughts.

Proof Bush isn't Palpitaine: And now, young Skywalker, you will die.

Oh, and I have identified a new form of movie: Battle Porn. Thanks to LoTR, we now have the power to create incredibly detailed, hyperreal depictions of bloody battle in all its terrible glory. And the movie linked to above does that in spades. Personally, I can't wait to watch it.

Evangelion: What the Hell Was That?

So, I just mainlined the entire Evangelion original broadcast, all 26 episodes, no director's cut, no movies, in about eight solid hours. Up until about Episode 22 it was doing okay, and then it all fell apart. The end is a complete mess, the entire point of the show gets lost.

I even recognized the problem. The writer/producer/director thought he had something and then he woke up one morning, looked at his script, and said to himself, "I got nothin'." He flailed around for a week and then said, "I know, I'll tell everyone it's a deep mediation on the fact that I went through a really shitty depression phase in my mid-20s, throw out the story, and just mess with people's heads anyway." Who knows? Maybe Anno-san really did have something when he started and just ran out of steam. It was a beautiful, brilliant piece, it seemed to be going somewhere, and then... blah.

I also don't get why Ayanami Rei is such a popular character. She's a blank, a cipher, more annoying than Asuka ever could be. Part of the reason is that her relationship with Gendo is never clarified: why is she so damn perky in that one scene and then a complete waste the rest of the series?

And yet, I so wanted there to be more to this series. I'm so disappointed in it: I wanted Shinji to be more than a mouthpiece for Anno's fucking "I'm okay, you're okay" bullshit. I wanted Asuka to recover, and Rei to find herself, and all the other things that the characters deserved and didn't get.

I wanted to laugh, or cry, or have some reaction, however tritely elicited. Neon Genesis Evangelion failed, leaving me only annoyed and let down.

Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb and maybe piss someone off: Sousei No Aquarion is a better giant robot series than Neon Genesis Evangelion. The characters in Aquarion aren't as deeply wounded, and maybe that's to its detriment, but on the whole it's a better-made series. It has an arc, intent, and a proper ending, and, y'know, it's really made with as much courage, often for hilarity's sake as much as the dramatic ending, as Evangelion.