Sunday: Quiet and Peaceful, with Moments of Hacking and Slashing.

Necco helps with laundry

Sunday was much more quiet. The ringing in my left ear remains, but it's coming and going, and it's hard to say how persistent it is. Omaha thinks it might be an inner ear infection, but it doesn't hurt and the odd clogging sensation has faded away, so I'm thinking it's temporary loud-noise damage. I had a similar experience after the Rush (the band, not the blowhard) concert.

I did a ton of laundry, cleaned the kitchen, and hacked on some code. I ended up going down a rabbit hole trying to convert my existing code to my current favorite toolchain.

In the evening, we had our bi-weekly D&D game, which was a lot of fun. There was fighting, and magic, and all the rest. The mage dropped an ancient magical weapon into a pit of lava, and all heck broke loose.

One of the things I've often chafed at in D&D is the moral clarity of it. The bad guys know they're bad guys. I guess that's fine when you're thirteen, but in our late 30s through 50s we ought to know better. I had an idea for a game played in the Aimeeverse, pitting our heroes against another group that likewise believes themselves to be the good guys. I don't know how well that would work as it goes against the grain of the entire alignment system, and the magic system seems to be dependent upon that.

They're manga. Only with just words and stuff. No pictures.

Haikasoru is a publishing house that is translating into English a number of popular science fiction novels written in Japanese. Someone on my F-List has been touting Haikasoru, after John Scalzi briefly mentioned it, and I decided to jump in with both feet.

This was harder than it sounds. There were no copies of anything from the publishing house at Barnes & Noble, or at Borders. Desperate, I made a trek over to Kinokuniya, which once upon a time was an awesome bookstore for native readers, and has now become an interesting bookstore for locals with a hidden upstairs section for native readers.

I looked through the "Translated Japanese Novels" section of the bookstore, and found only one Haikasoru novel, Battle Royale, the back cover of which reads a little like The Truman Show meets Lord of the Flies. Not the title I was interested in.

I took it up to the front and asked the woman at the counter, "Do you have any other books from this publisher?" She asked another employee to help me, and he led me to the translated manga section. "They're not manga," I protested. "See?" I flipped through The Lord of the Sands of Time to make my point. "They're novels. Shouldn't they be over there?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. You'd have to ask the manager. They're distributed by Viz, so, that's where we put them, with the manga."

Yeah, they're manga. Only with just words and stuff. No pictures.

Anyway, I bought The Lord of the Sands of Time, The Stories of Ibis, and Usurper of the Sun. I've been reading the second, and coming away with mixed feelings, the cause of which may be the translator, may be the writer. The first story can best be described as Star Trek fanfic; the second, a predictable tell-don't-show Twilight Zone episode. I'm more interested in seeing how the writer handles the contextual story of Ibis herself.