This is what I wrote to myself last night. I find that planning a weekend’s activities, or at least broadly outlining them in advance tends to make waking up on Saturday a very cheery activity.

Elfen Lied Episode 3-13
Stubbs The Zombie.
The Demon issues 16-58.
Reread The Man In The High Castle.

Ah, well. I started watching Elfen Lied because of the promising tone in one of vrikodhara‘s posts. The first fifteen minutes were a gorehound’s delight – a naked teenage girl silently walks through a prison leaving a trail of decapitated bodies of soldiers behind her. Bullets don’t strike her, and she does gruesome things with a pen (“plop” goes the eye) and even rips a pretty secretary’s head away from her body, and holds the torso up against the hail of bullets that ensues. How can one resist such a beginning, I ask you.

(One has to, however, when early-morning calls are scheduled.)

I finsihed Serious Sam: The First Encounter recently, and decided I had to play Stubbs the Zombie next. The game’s an anachronism of sorts, in that there is not really a set of objectives for you when the game begins, not even a storyline – other than the very basic “go-forth-and-chomp-on-brains” motivation. Yes, in Stubbs, you play as the zombie, and do rollicking things like throwing your head like a bowling ball at hordes of gun-toting humans, farting really bad gas to lay them low, lobbing clunks of faecal matter at them through a Sod-mobile, and of course, eating brains and creating your own zombie army. I am currently in the middle of the game, and having peed zombie piss all over a water reservoir, I am now being beset by scientists weilding antigravity guns and screaming “I will show you hard science!” at me. Fun.

The Demon issues, well, I got a 20-pounder package in the mail recently, thanks to th_gunslinger, who had held on to an eBay package for about a year and a half, and sent it off eight weeks ago. (Yes, dude, it got here fine, thanks so very much.) It contained a near-complete run of Hitman ( missing the last eight issues, gah! I am so desperate to own those!) and the complete run of The Demon, and a couple of miniseries like Ennis’s Fury and Daredevil:Ninja ( which I already had) I finished reading 15 issues on Friday morning, and have another 43 issues to complete. Alan Grant rocks! And I can’t wait to read the complete Ennis/McCrea run (this was the series where Hitman made his debut, by the way, so it seems fairly logical that a rereading of Hitman is in order after this one, heh heh)

I began reading Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle again, after I bought a second-hand copy of the book recently at Abids, for the grand price of 10 Rs. I had read it a couple of years ago as an e-Book, and it’s fantastic.

But yeah, most of my plans got waylaid today morning, when I got a call from Chandru in the office. Seems a package had arrived from secondspin.com. Which gave me a right tizzy, because I had ordered it just last Friday! Delivery within a week, how cooler can it get??

OK, so the monster set you see on top? That’s the eight-disc edition of Trigun, a steam-punk anime series that has won much acclaim, and is now out-of-print. ( Don’t take my word for it, go check it out on amazon, the second-hand sellers only have a THREE disc edition on sale, which is LAME, because they are bootleg editions! MUWHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Then I got the two-disc set of Once Upon a Time In The West, which means that the only Leone western I don’t have is A Fistful of Dynamite. Patience, boy, patience. Let us watch this first.

I don’t know how this happened, but I managed to buy BOTH the Lady Snowblood movies at once. The strangest thing about this was I searched for “lady snowblood” on secondspin. No results. Then I went to “search by actor/director” and looked for “Meiko Kaji”. Lo and Behold, both of these DVDs were for sale! Some indexing problem, most likely, I need to kiss the guys who entered them into the database. I also need to kiss myself for bothering to search again. Hmm, what’s so special about Lady Snowblood, you ask? Well, other than the fact that it’s based on a manga created by Kazuo Koike, who wrote Lone Wolf and Cub and Samurai Executioner, there is the added factor of Quentin Tarantino ripping off the O-Ren Ishii-Bride fight sequence in the snow-filled garden from this movie, and the song “Flower of Carnage”, sung by Meiko Kaji, the lady who plays the eponymous role appeared in Kill Bill too. I had a lame divx rip of Snowblood from before, but like they say, it’s always better to own the DVD. And the sequel too, heh.

AND, the last two DVD sets are the ones that managed to upset my weekend plans completely – the two seasons of Samurai Jack, the TV series. I have just spent the most enjoyable two hours of this week tripping on the first four episodes, and boy oh boy, is it fun or what! I hate to say this, but I hadn’t really heard of Genndy Tartakovsky, as in I knew he was the hot-shot animator who made Clone Wars and Samurai Jack and Dexter’s Laboratory, but wasn’t really aware of his stuff. The imagery completely blew me away, as did the references to The Seven Samurai, Frank Miller’s Ronin and other lone-warrior-against-evil-emperor movies. Excellent! After I complete this, I am going off to watch Clone Wars, which I half-heartedly began sometime last year and didn’t complete because of post Episode Three-trauma.

So, are you jealous yet?

And oh, by the way, Secondspin.com totally, totally rocks. In case you don’t know about them, they’re the biggest seller of used CDs, DVDs and games you will see on the ‘net, and the kind of stuff they have in stock just blows me away everytime. I have bought CDs there for 99 cents each, and 10-disc Sonny Chiba DVD sets for 4$. And by the way, if you think “used” means coverless, scratched discs, think again. The stuff looks absolutely new, and the only thing that distinguishes them as second-hand is a tag that says “used”, and can be removed easily. Once a year, they have a free worldwide shipping sale, and a “25% off all DVDs” sale. But what sets secondspin.com in a class of its own is the excellent service. Their items ALWAYS reaches India within two weeks. I had ordered some DVDs early this year. I waited about three weeks, and then mailed them saying I hadn’t received the package yet. They asked for two weeks to check with their shippers, and after that time, they said they could not obtain the shipping information and refunded my money back. All of it. No putting credit into their account, no asking questions and all, just a flat return. Can you believe that? Then Chandru recently ordered a couple of CDs off their site, and one of the CDs was not one he had ordered, and when he mailed them back, they sent him the disc he wanted for free! Didn’t even ask him for the older disc.

If you’re interested in buying DVDs and CDs at decent prices, you should try out secondspin.com.