Merry Christmas! For those of you celebrating tomorrow, here’s hoping there’s plenty of anime under the tree. Also, if you haven’t purchased gifts for everyone else you need to yet, you are among the worst procrastinators in the world. Buy them some anime already; the tool to figure out what they’d like is right in front of you!

Netflix’s service in the last few weeks has been bad to me. Extremely bad. Hacking Netflix says that everyone’s basically been having trouble, but I think I must have the worst luck in the world. I seriously don’t know why I bothered keeping my subscription this month. According to the site, Netflix has sent me a total of exactly 3 titles this month.

It’d probably help considerably if Argentsoma Vol. 5 would actually arrive intact. So far, I’ve sent back one copy that had a huge crack in it, to which Netflix sent a replacement, which has apparently been lost or misdirected or something, so Netflix has sent a second replacement.

I went to the post office today, and I can see what the problem is: dozens of people were lined up to send packages. People, your packages are not going to arrive in time for Christmas that way. Please use UPS or FedEx or something, and leave those of use who just want to send plain old mail alone. U.S.P.S. says that it’s the busiest shipping day of the year but they’re ready for it. Bull. If people are seeing a slowdown in mail from here to Texas, it’s clear that the system is overloaded.

It’s not just the mail. The stuff that I’m trying to get from Netflix consistently hasn’t been available in-state. Ouch. Like I said, just my luck.

[Editor's note: This is a conversation I had with A Link to the Past, who I met on Wikipedia.]

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A Link to the Past: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Man_kills_baby_over_Xbox_360
Nic: Wow, thank goodness for you Nintendo boys it wasn’t a Wii.
Nic: Just a little humor.
A Link to the Past: Nintendo fans know better than to think falling on the floor would break it

Noir… it is the name of an ancient fate.. it’s also a pretty good anime, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen antagonists who were quite so poorly equipped to deal with, well, anything really. Everyone in the Noirverse acts as if Noir had incredibly elite skills. They’re impressive, no doubt, but most of the people they face are, frankly, stupid.

[Spoilers follow]

It doesn’t take a hardened criminal or Sean Connery to know that if you bring nothing but a dagger to a gun fight, you’re probably not going to do so well. This is especially true when you’re standing around in the open and your opponent is at a significant distance. It takes a special something, however, to die in such a situation by being stabbed instead of shot.

In yet another scene, a group of Triads show that they’re apparently affected by the Inverse Ninja Rule. Kirika is approaching a very, very large group of them. She’s apparently unarmed, but surrounded by dead bodies.
Advice for you: If you are ever in a situation where you are being approached, very slowly, by an elite assassin, and your mission is to kill her, and you are at an obvious advantage, do not stand still and do nothing at all. Fire. Run away. Tell her to stop. Do something. Just don’t stand there. If the real world worked the way the Noirverse world did, there would be no need or use for armies. Each country would have a single, poorly equipped sniper, capable of taking on an entire brigade of tanks and winning in less than five minutes as people pour out of their tanks for a better view (which, as I recall, is the AI’s strategy in at least on FPS I’ve heard of).

Oh well, at least it’s fun.

I had this article from The Citizen of Laconia forwarded to me yesterday:

The Dungeons and Dragons and Anime clubs of Franklin High School held an all-night Dungeons and Dragons game to raise funds for a trip to an anime convention in Boston.

According to Dungeons and Dragons Club adviser Molly Horn, students spent all night playing the popular role-playing game, watching anime, which are Japanese cartoons, and playing video games, among other activities.

Back when I was in high school, there was no anime club, and no one that I was aware of that I knew that played traditional RPGs. I’m glad to hear that, in some places now, the situation is different. So different, in fact, that you can apparently put together a fundraiser for a trip to an anime convention around an extended RPG session.

I wish someone would pay me to play Exalted…