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Vinland Saga Omnibus, Vol. 2


author: Makoto Yukimura
name: Peter
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/27
date added: 2024/03/27
shelves:
review:
Thorkill, Thors, and Thorfinn.

How many people had names based on Thor?

Do you think “Thor” was like the “Gunner” of the day, and it eventually became an old man name? Or did the relatively short lifespan of vikings probably make those sort of name trends a little less obvious?

You know what’s hilarious? All this stuff around the internet of living like ancient peoples because our modern society is full of toxins and whatever.

Do people not have the ability to google the typical viking lifespan? Because it was like 40 years. The average human lifespan today is in the 70s.

“People were so much healthier. You didn’t see the vikings using walkers.” I mean, yeah, because the chances of a viking living to age 60 was almost nil.

Terror in Tiny Town (Deadtime Stories, #1)


author: A.G. Cascone
name: Peter
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1996
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves:
review:
I feel like the cover of this book is the biggest lie it tells, and this is a book in which toys come to life and start attacking kids with actual lasers.

The character on the front is clearly meant to be none other than Charles Lee Ray, aka Chucky the doll who kills people for increasingly opaque reasons as the series goes on.

However, this character is meant to be Hurley the Hobo, a tiny figure for a model train set, who is, as his name would indicate, a hobo.

Why does this hobo look like Chucky? I guess because that indicates scariness waits within the pages.

But this isn’t really the first face I think of when I think of “crazed hobo,” the chubby, but also evil, face of a child.

By the way, we’re talking about a hobo, here, not a “person experiencing homelessness.” This is a fictional character with a bindle, not a dude living in his car because he lost his job last week. Hurley never had a job. He’s a figure for a model town. Who, also, is insane and is able to imbue other toys with sentience. Really, his having a home is far from the most important thing about him.

Is it super progressive or regressive to have a hobo in your model train town? On one hand, he’s basically a decoration, but on the other hand, literally every figure in the town is a decoration. It’s not like the guy with the top hat and monocle is highly respected by a child with a model train while Hurley the Hobo exists to be pointed and laughed at.

Vinland Saga Omnibus, Vol. 1


author: Makoto Yukimura
name: Peter
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves:
review:
I’m not the biggest swords and sandals guy, a genre which I feel also includes other footwear, such as snowboots in this case. Was Braveheart what really goosed this whole thing with two groups of guys running across a field at each other for like hours and hours?

I mean, there are great examples, fun books and movies about this stuff, stone cold classics, but overall, if you tell me there’s going to be a lot of swordfighting, I’m usually uninterested.

I have my doubts about whether the swordfighting you see in movies was super common in ye olden days. Like, was there a lot of perry, thrust, block, kind of shit? Or was it more like a bunch of guys running and stabbing or cutting each other with very little real experience or technique?

Which is fine for these sorts of stories! Drawn out swordfights are usually pretty boring, IMO. Unless they’re set in a chandelier factory and we can have lots of swinging on chandeliers, or in a chandelier exhibit at the museum, or something like that, know what I mean?

How were there not space chandelier lightsaber duels in Star Wars? They were always fighting in basically a space warehouse. How boring is that? I guess there were not guardrails, so that’s something, but surely chandelier technology would be amazing by then, like a chandelier that’s a drone and flies overhead, bringing light along with you into each room you enter.

I guess I should mention that there were SOME lightsaber duels not in space warehouses, and those were always TOO not in space warehouses and on like a lava planet with explosions and EVERYTHING happening. And yet, still kinda boring.

It’s all the chandelier, man. That’s the key. You want that little bit of intrigue without going overboard, which only a chandelier can provide.

Spirited Away, 2001 – ★★★

I really enjoy that in this world, an evil witch is basically just trying to staff her business. She forces people into servitude, their lives kind of suck, but it’s mostly because she’s trying to run an otherwise legitimate bath house that caters to monsters.

There should be a lot more stories like this, someone building a tale around a supernatural world or heavy, weird elements, but in the service of doing something super normal.

Vampire temp office where they provide overnight employees for stuff?
Ghosts who can pass through walls and make excellent home inspectors as a result?
Mummies who go on the teaching circuit, lecturing about ancient history, aka their day-to-day lives?

My preference would definitely be Working Blobs, a movie about blobs who live on a farm and devour pests while leaving crops alone. Sort of like barn cats, but, you know, pink and probably glow in the dark.

There we go: Monster Farm. Monsters could use their monster-y skills to run a successful farm. Especially when it’s pumpkin patch season.

Oops, sorry, got to go. Phone’s ringing, and it’s almost certainly Hollywood calling.

Movie Reviews Update: March 24, 2024

Dumb and Dumber

Most underrated part:
“Hey, guys! Oh, Big Gulps, huh? All right. Well, see you later!”

Quiz Lady

When Sandra Oh got hit by a car in the opening minutes, I was like, “Oh shit…is this gonna be one of those movies where the one sister is a party animal and the other is a bookworm and they learn a little something from each other?”

But the movie kind of rights itself once it has a story to pursue and we end up with a good comedy with an earned emotional moment or two that’s, well, not some piece of shit about some lady who’s supposed to be in her late 20’s and can’t get her life together and learns a bullshitty lesson like, “And then I realized that maybe it’s not cool to have a toddler hold your lit cigarette while you’re pumping gas,” and her sister isn’t like, “I guess I can drink half a glass of white wine once a month and not do my taxes or something.”

I always hate that. The responsible sister is fine! She doesn’t need to be on TV! She doesn’t need to be super rich! She’s content! Jesus Christ, do you know how few people are content?! Leave her alone! She doesn’t need to learn a lesson. She’s a millennial who will never own a home, her life doesn’t need an ill-conceived road trip to the Wigsphere to fix her. That’s such a Hollywood idea: people who don’t pursue their silver screen dreams are cowards who are unhappy. No! Lots of people don’t want to do that stuff. I know you think it’s gross that some people are happy working as accountants for small organizations and having a small family and owning a home in, let’s say, Omaha. But it’s true. Face your fear, Hollywood: we don’t all want to be you.

Ahem, anyway, solid movie that doesn’t go those dumb places.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

For a movie with almost zero plot, it delivers.

Fuck you, cute movie, cute review.

It’s also kind of the best Spider-Man movie. Person trying to use powers loses faith in ability to do good, loses powers, regains them to help someone in crisis high above the city. 

Extra points for hitting the comedy point I was salivating for, when the guy is like, “That’s MY broom!” when his broom is on TV. That man and I, we are the same. Just hoping to one day see a broom we use sometimes on TV. That level of fame is right where you want to be.

What’s Pete Been Reading: March 24, 2024 Update

Cat + Gamer, Volume 2

It turns out that cat drawings are also very appealing to me.

Reminder to self: Write a post-apocalyptic novel where all the cats suddenly vanished overnight. Society collapses. People good at drawing cats become insanely wealthy and powerful. Cat photos become the new currency.

Giganto Maxia

I’m not as into wrestling, but Kentaro Miura’s artwork NEVER disappoints. What can I say, I’m in love. If I was head over heels for someone and they loved wrestling and we had to watch wrestling every week (is that how often wrestling happens?), that’d seem like no biggie.

Isn’t it funny how when you’re young, someone liking a shitty band is a dealbreaker, at least in your head, and then when you get older, you’re like, “Who gives a shit?”

Some may feel it’s a lowering of standards. I feel like it’s acknowledging reality. Because, in reality, if some hot babe approached me at age 20 and was like, “I’m a huge wrestling fan, we will have to watch it for two hours every night, however, check out this hot bod,” I would’ve been like, “Yep, I can see a future for us together.”

If some lady now is like, “Hey, I love something you don’t, but we can date for the next 10 years and maybe have like 4 or 5 minor conflicts in that entire timespan,” I’d be like, “SOLD.”

So I guess what I’m saying is that Kentaro Miura is my hot babe who is obsessed with wrasslin’, and I am more than mature enough to deal with that.

I Luv Halloween vol. 1

This book has a BIG speech balloon problem. There’s no consistent order, so sometimes it’s whichever balloon is higher goes first (regardless of left/right orientation), and sometimes it’s left/right, regardless of height.

There’s very little more frustrating in reading comics than reading a speech balloon, being a little confused, then reading the next speech balloon, realizing you read them in the wrong order, and then repeating that process throughout the entire book.

I have my preferences for speech balloon order, but I can hang with anything so long as it’s pretty consistent. So you can either engage in the mysterious art of making it super intuitive, which is a mastery of the form, OR you can make it super consistent, which creates the same effect, albeit while making some sacrifices in the art here and there.

Which is, I think, what was going on with this book: they had a SUPER talented artist with an interesting style, and that overrode all other considerations for the book. I kind of get it, but at the same time, each panel of this book was like my own personal Memento moment where I was reconstructing the story’s order all the time, so the art was awesome, but it felt like it was a beautiful mural on the side of a porta potty.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Vol. 1

This is fine, a little like a sitcom pilot where it seems like the idea is still finding its footing.

The premise is pretty good, a guy is reincarnated into a fantasy world, but instead of being like a warlord or a skilled elf or whatever, he’s reincarnated as a slime, which is generally a weak, ineffectual creature in fantasy settings, to my understanding.

It’s kind of funny to watch a slime sort of bumble through a bunch of situations, but maybe it’s just not quite funny enough for me.

Whoever came up with fighting slimes in RPGs is both a genius and a terrorist. It’s super simple, so that makes it pretty easy for game designers, but my god does it get boring fast.

Someone needs to make a game called World of Slimes where you fight ONLY slimes. You level up and it gets easier and easier to the point of slimes being a complete annoyance who really can’t possibly kill you, and yet, still more slimes.

Yes, someone should definitely take the time to program a game because I think it has a funny premise.

Uzumaki

Probably Junji Ito’s best in terms of being one long, coherent story where all the pieces fit together and things go from bad to worse to worse to worser to worstest.

Something Junji Ito does really well is diving into the horror where the folks involved are deliriously happy. The characters who are evil or who are transformed or whatever are going through these nightmarish things, but it’s mostly, sort of, something they WANT to do, and I think that’s a scary concept that’s rarely explored.

In slashers, for example, it doesn’t seem that Jason is particularly tickled by killing, or Michael Myers. Freddy is the closest, and even he seems like he’s in it for revenge, and at some point, he’s like, Okay, time to finish this kid off. Freddy knows what he’s doing is evil, where the characters in a Junji Ito horror comic seem to often not see themselves as the bad guys at all, and instead they’re like, “I know this looks freaky, but it’s amazing, my life is much better now!”

It’s a strange kind of horror, but I like it. It solves a lot of motive problems you see in horror movies where we’re limited to the concepts of revenge or “he just kills people because he kills people.”

Sneeze: Naoki Urasawa Story Collection

It’s always good to prepare for what you would do if you met The Beatles…

Not that it’s likely I’ll travel back in time, but you never know.

I’d definitely turn it into a money-making scheme, have them sign a pack of notecards or something? A bunch of vinyl records?

Maybe I’d try and figure out the deal with Yoko Ono. There’s been a recent spate of Yoko cultural reevaluation that I’m not really buying into. There have been a lot of artsy types who didn’t get their due because they were ladies, but I’m not so sure that Yoko Ono A) hasn’t got her due and B) has produced a body of work in need of analysis.

She definitely got some unfair blame for breaking up the Beatles (even if she played a part, Lennon made the choice, ultimately). But we all live our versions of that: My mom still blames me for bottle rockets that were shot off in the garage, and it was DEFINITELY my brother, and why he won’t fess up to it 30 years later is very baffling to me.

Maybe I’d ask the Beatles to drive me to my house, witness my brother shooting off those bottle rockets, and then write a song about it, or add a liner note in a record so that my mom would HAVE to buy my side of the story.

Knights of Sidonia 1

This is a book with lots of good ideas, and probably the least good idea is people fighting monsters in mech suits, and it seems to be a primary focus.

I don’t know where that leaves me and this book, but it’s not looking good.

I do like the idea of mech suits fighting things, though. It’s incredibly impractical, which is why it’s awesome. Maybe it’s because we live in the age of drones, so it’s easy to be like, “Why would you do all the work to make a bipedal, humanoid robot when you could just have a weird lil helicopter airplane guy blow things up?

But there’s a good answer: Because nobody wants to watch that, stupid. You little dumbass. Idiot. DumDum.

後遺症ラジオ 1 [Kouishou Radio 1]

The stories are super short and mostly not connected, except when they are, I dunno. I guess that’s not what I was expecting, which, from the book’s description, seems fair? Because the description doesn’t, you know, describe?

I get the idea of doing a book description that is already weird, leading people into the weirdness early, but I think this book would probably attract its audience and confuse fewer people if it had a description. On one hand, I, as someone who screws around with writing things, can appreciate the idea of making this a cursed object in every possible way, including a description that appears to have been written by some kind of ghoul. On the other hand, as a reader, it’s a bit of a waste of my time when I end up on books that aren’t going to be to my taste, and it was difficult to learn this fact via the provided info.

Tomahawk Angel Volume 1

There are monsters, and we don’t know how. That’s…about all we get in this first volume.

Amnesia is not my favorite plot trick. It has its uses, god knows, but it’s just so vague and I think it should only be used briefly, not as the setup for a whole thing. I understand it’s helpful because then we, the reader, can have everything explained like we’re idiots, and it still feels sort of natural. But I think I’d prefer an alternative method more often.

You know what I would like, though? A machine that would cause you to forget specific books or TV shows or whatever. Then you could watch them again for the first time! Wouldn’t that be great?

I mean, sometimes it would suck, because sometimes I think I’d like the memory of watching something more than watching it again. But DAMN would it be handy if you cheated and watched a new episode of Bake Show before your partner.

What’s the protocol for you all in that scenario? I’m of the “just fess up” school of thought. It’s really not THAT big a deal, it’s not like I’m going to be furious or anything. I’d rather you just tell me you had a moment of weakness and watched a show without me rather than pretending like everything is happening for the first time. OR, the only other option, you must never admit you watched it before. Never, ever. Those are really the only two choices.

神さまの言うとおり弐 1 [Kami-sama no Iu toori Ni 1]

One of my favorite genres, people trapped in a bad situation, looking for a way out.

My favorite part was probably that the one loser guy gets picked up by a robot, and halfway to the destination, realizes he got on the robot wrong, so he’s the only one facing backwards while everyone else is facing the right way. Perhaps this will be an important story point later, but I’m hopeful it’s simply that this dumbass did something that seemed reasonable at the time, then he realized it was all wrong.

I felt very seen.

ワンパンマン 2 強さの秘訣 [One Punch Man 2: Tsuyosa no Hiketsu]

It only took me eight years to get back to this one. Worth the trip.

I laughed several times at this one, it’s just so goddamn absurd, and I don’t know why, but something about the main character, the most dangerous man on the planet, also looking so silly just really pleases me.

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

Volume 5

There’s always that one guy in the zombie movie who can’t just hang out at the mall and enjoy this new life where you never have to go to work again.

What’s with that guy?

Like the bikers in Dawn of the Dead. I guess it kind of makes sense if we assume that bikers are already, pre-zombie, living the life they want to. Maybe bikers prefer the zombie world? Maybe this is better for them? I’m not sure I really believe that, but hey, my experience with bikers is not vast, so I’m not the right person to ask. I just sort of think that even a hardened biker, if they came upon a mall with working toilets, might be like, “Whoa, hold on, boys. Maybe we should go ahead and trash EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD and leave this place, and its functioning shitters, intact?”

Volume 6

An overanalysis of this series would have to ask the question: Are zombies more interested in a naked man’s admittedly juicy ass than they are in more run-of-the-mill “foods?” Because that seems to be the implication, however it could just be that the naked man in question just enjoys displaying his juicy ass (who wouldn’t, with an ass like that!?) and is the only one insisting on repeating this trick.

My only hope is that hundreds of years from now, instead of analyzing Shakespeare, scholars are analyzing Zom 100 and getting to the root of these important questions.

Volume 7

This series is just fun to read, and Akira is the person you want around during the zombie apocalypse: he absolutely refuses to have a lousy time. It’s just not in his nature. I don’t know that it’s possible for him to be a downer.

He’s definitely that friend that pulls people together, has great ideas, and makes the world a more interesting place, even when it should be horrible.

It’s the person I aspire to be: when you’re stuck in a bad situation, which in my case is waiting for a delay at an airport or something, you want to be the person others don’t mind being trapped with.

I like to make up games when I’m bored. One of my favorites is The Best Friend Game, which I made up at a baseball game because I was bored out of my goddamn mind, mostly because I was at a baseball game.

TBFG works by scanning a crowd and selecting a person who you will now be forced to be BEST friends with for the next year. You’ll be at their life events, they’ll be at yours, you’ll see them every couple of weeks. You may be a people watcher, but this game is about people scrutinizing. Every little habit, everything they’re wearing, this is all the info you have to try and base a yearlong friendship on.

Where this gets fun is your friends saying, “Ugh, no I could never be friends with someone who wears yellow shoes.” You find out your friends are goddamn weirdos who really have no business just existing in the world with everyone else.

That’s my life advice: Whenever you’re bored, make up a game. And if you’re bored while playing a game, make up your own game within the game.

WITH THE EXCEPTION OF that bullshit where someone is like, “Make cleaning the bath tub into a game! Time yourself, then see if you can beat your best time.” That is NOT a game. Working hard and then seeing if you can work harder is work, dummy.

Volume 8

A funny thing about this zombie series is that it works kind of like others, but kind of backwards: Mostly, the characters go from fun activity to fun activity, and the zombies eventually show up in order to push the characters onto the next thing. I think in most series, the zombies kind of work to push characters out of comfortable, reasonable survival situations and into danger instead of pushing them onto the next item on their itinerary.

The way it’s the same, though, is that the zombies fade into the background as the series goes, really only popping up here and there as the plot requires. If you go through the early parts of The Walking Dead, the zombies are a significant threat, but as you go later, they’re really no big deal most of the time. Same here, except less emphasis on “The walking dead is us guys!” or however that was expressed.

Volume 9

I learned a thing!
Apparently, people from Osaka have a reputation:

“In Japanese media, if there’s a character from the Kansai region (Osaka especially), chances are they’re the most crass character present. In stark contrast to the rest of Japan, Japanese Politeness (or even just basic concepts like decorum and “good manners”) doesn’t exist for these guys. The people themselves are portrayed as lacking any semblance of sophisticated culture, being idiotic, loud and passionate, alcoholic, gluttonous, materialistic, prone-to-violence, incredibly cheap (yet somehow always broke), and speaking with a characteristic Kansai accent instantly recognizable to native speakers of Japanese.”

Now, in Zom 100, this seems softer, that Osakans are more passionate and boisterous, not so much crass or whatever, although I guess that’s a little hard to tell when we’re talking about Osakan zombies (where’s the decorum in flesh-eating?).

It IS pretty hilarious that in this series, zombies kind of reflect their former more alive selves in some ways, which is pretty fun, and I guess if I was a zombie I’d spend most of my time not really wanting to party with other zombies, so on one hand, you’d be safe as far as me joining a big horde, but on the other, I’d be that one zombie that’s always hiding out in a room alone or whatever, which can be the most deadliest zombie of them all!

OF THEM ALL.

Volume 10

My understanding of geisha stuff is not strong, and my hesitance to google it is, so I guess this is an area of Japanese culture that will remain somewhat mysterious for me, which is probably just fine.

Volume 11

One of my eccentric millionaire ideas (I have many) is to create a walking pilgrimage in America like this. I love this shit, like when you have to walk towards a rock with a hole in it, eyes closed, and see if you can put your walking staff through the hole without looking, or legends about what happens if you do or don’t see your face in a reflection pool.

Some of the features of my trail:

-A heavy stone to attempt to lift as a test of strength.
-A wishing well that only accepts 20-dollar bills.
-A part that requires crossing a somewhat challenging creek, a rite of passage in rural America.
-Probably a danger zone where you try to navigate a roundabout on foot (I don’t have strong feelings about roundabouts, but I feel like Americans…let’s say they’re not at their best in roundabouts).
-A lot of pizza places along the way.

Volume 12

Well, the cover got horny. Which is not unusual in the manga department, but I take umbrage with the cover being MUCH hornier than the contents.

Because if the contents aren’t going to be this graphic, then why are you making me hold a book with this facing everyone but me, causing people to be like, “Typical manga-reading pervo”?

Which is fine, I have no issue with that label, but if I’m going to get stuck with it, give me the pervo goods! Don’t force me to wear the label without even giving me the joy of perversion!

Fist of the North Star

Volume 3

If I had to be The Fist of [something], what would I be…?

The Fist of The Sometimes Harsh Book Reviewer?

His blows are not mighty and harm very few, but those who feel his wrath are forever haunted.

Volume 4

I feel like me and my brothers do not fistfight anywhere near as often as is depicted in this series. We also weren’t competing to be the sole practitioner of a martial art, but still. I wonder how many times in history two brothers have engaged in hand-to-hand combat to the death? I know they say The Civil War was brother against brother, but that’s not literal, right?

Well:

-There was a pair of brothers who fought, and the one brother captured the other brother and took him prisoner. Seems like that probably worked out okay, probably much better than running at a Gatling gun.

-There was a pair of brothers who both gained the position of brigadier general on opposite sides. One was relieved of duty for drunkenness. That’s a rough Thanksgiving right there, you come home and your brother is not only as high a rank as you, but he fought on the winning side AND didn’t get fired for drinking.

-Oof, while we’re on that note: As cited in the book, “A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky”, brothers Anthony and William McBeath fought on opposite sides of the Civil War, Anthony for the Confederate Army, and William for the Union Army. At the end of the war, both brothers returned home the same evening, William in a “resplendent uniform of a Major in the Federal Army”, and several hours later, Anthony in “rags with a ‘taterhill’ hat.”

It looks like the closest this came was two brothers, on opposite sides, fighting within yards of each other and not realizing it until the end of the battle.

It seems they took a lot more prisoners in those days. Maybe that was the “civil” part of The Civil War, they would take prisoners and not torture them and shit, perhaps because they were often related? Perhaps also because what would that do to help? It’s not like some dude with a single shot rifle fighting in central Kentucky has any fucking idea what the Union is planning for their next big strategic move.

Volume 5

Attack On Titan

Volume 28

The Impossible (2012)

I only like disaster movies that involve flying severely unqualified blue collar workers to space armed with a nuke that’s going to solve the problem. 

Really? Did we really buy that nasa scientists and pilots would have more trouble working on an oil rig than oil workers would have trouble in space?

Fist of the North Star, Vol. 2

This shit is amazing. It’s that martial arts stuff where so and so’s north star technique defeats so and so’s south pole technique, and a guy touches like 5 points on some dude’s body and then his head implodes. It’s glorious.