I did not read any more of The Drawing of the Three this weekend. I was busy writing Java code for a project all weekend, and dished a pretty bug-free version. And then came the actual hard part – writing out the project report. Drawing state diagrams. Class diagrams. README dot texts. Fuck, no wonder I hate going back to academic life. But it was all for a noble cause, and the project submission went well.

Didn’t stop me from checking out the first four episodes of Supernatural season one. Decent premise, and the effects just stop short of dissolving into standard American Horror Cheese. I think the atmosphere the makers of the show tried to put forward is more of a Hellboy-ish monster-of-the-week formula, which is bound to get tiresome unless there is some kind of a unifying thread to it all. Until episode 4, the primary motivation of the brothers Winchester appears to be “Let’s kick some evil ass”, with the seemingly half-bakedsubplot of finding their missing father. Unless there’s something more interesting in store, I think I am going to get tired of the series pretty soon.

Done with 18 episodes of Basilisk, with 6 left to go. The series veers into flashback territory in the middle, adding quite a level of poignancy to the doomed love story of Kouga Gennosuke and Iga Oboro. We get to see the other side of the supporting cast, most of whom are already dead at this point. There’s also the explanation behind Gennosuke’s powers, and quite a bit of character developement of all the people concerned. I likes.

You know, I’ve never really liked Iron Man. The only time I tried reading the character was the alcohol-abuse run, which to my fifteen-year-old brain was nowhere near the level of coolness Claremont and Byrne’s X-men was. Iron Man had lame villains, lame powers. Sorry, the only people I liked to see wearing iron armour were the Knights of the Round Table. I had quite a bit of fun teasing a friend, whose sympathy for Iron Man exceeded mine by a great length, with lame Iron Man jokes all of last month. There were also barbs fired in the vein of “I can’t wait to see The Dark Knight kick Iron Man’s ass this summer.”

You know where this is going, right? Like the rest of the world, I thoroughly dug Iron Man when I saw it this Saturday. Every single minute of it. And I seriously hope The Dark Knight manages to strike the same high note that its predecessor did a couple of years ago. Face it, Iron Man has indeed raised the bar for how to make GOOD superhero movies with intelligent scripts and uncringeworthy effects. I salute Marvel for keeping the comicbook fans happy, with that little bit after the credits. If that’s where the Marvel movies are leading to, colour me impressed!

I am really beginning to enjoy Basilisk, and not just because of the grotesquery and the action sequences. The emphasis in the series is more on the unrequited love between Gennosuke and Oboro ( and between the previous generations of the Iga and Kouga clans ) much like a Japanese version of Romeo and Juliet. The story happens in the rains, and the animators render the sequences in a dreamy, watercolour-based palette that’s stunningly beautiful. I need to go back and rewatch Shinobi ( the live-action film based on the same book) after I am done with this. A lot of characters have been shuffled around, if I remember correctly.

After a very long time, I read a Jeffrey Archer book, a collection of fairly-recent short stories, Cat O’Nine Tails. I used to like love Archer when about ten years ago, his novels were The Real Thing, his stories just the perfect level of heartwarming content and hair-raising endings. We ( a rather naive bunch of Guwahatians) used to rate short stories based on whether they were Archerian enough. O. Henry definitely was, as was Maugham. Saki was, at times. Ruskin Bond would try. I did say naive, didn’t I? Cat O’Nine Tails…sigh, well, it tries so hard to be like Jeffrey Archer that it made me groan at times. Nearly all the time. Despite telegraphing its intentions from the first page – it’s basically a compilation of con stories that the writer picked up during his stint as prisoner FF 8282, and it goes without saying that all the cons he writes about end in a stint in jail – despite telegraphing its intentions, Archer pretends he is writing stories that might lead somewhere else or end in a way that you didn’t expect was coming, but guess what? They don’t. Meh. There’s only so much white collar crime I can take in one sitting.

Once in a while – rather, most of the time – there is this inexplicable urge to sit still and consume a series from beginning till end, without falling for other consummables on the side. Be it a comicbook series, or a bunch of thematically-linked movies, a TV season or an anime series. Last week, it was one anime series, and one comicbook run. I finished thirteen episodes of Genshiken, the anime based on the manga by Kio Shimoku. The storyline follows that of the comic very closely – I have not been able to find the last few volumes of the manga, so I don’t really know how it ends in Shimoku’s version. Anime based on manga have this notorious tendency to veer away from the storyline of the work , mostly because the manga is slower to release, and the directors of the animated version have to come up with their own story once they overtake the written word.

Genshiken appealed to me primarily because of the glimpse it offers into the otaku culture. The stock of characters cover a diverse spectrum of otaku-levelness – from the strictly-anti-otaku Saki Kasukabe, who joins the Society For Study of Modern Visual Culture to keep tabs on hot gamer boyfriend Kousaka; shy, introverted Sasahara who wants to come to terms with his bizarre tastes in otakuness; the bespectacled, hardcore Madarame, obsessed with manga and doujinshi and games and Kujibiki Unbalance, the greatest anime-within-an-anime series ever. There are other members of the Genshiken, all of whom come with their own baggage and come to know each other against the backdrop of cosplay events, Comifest, doujinshi-hunting in Akihabara and general slacking around. While not really an engrossing series per se, Genshiken is the kind of anime ( and manga ) that you probably won’t enjoy unless you know a little about otaku culture – the series abounds with references to games, series and comics. A meta-anime anime, so to say.

And now I am watching Basilisk, another series that is a victim of the bought-first-couple-of-volumes-unable-to-find-rest syndrome. ( Damn you, Indian Booksellers! ) 24 episodes in this series, and I was done with 6 last night. I should take about three more days to finish this one. Lots of ninja action, the kind of ninja action that has grotesque creatures fighting each other with strange powers. So far, there is a ninja that controls his body hair to behave like tentacles, there’s a spider-like character whose primary power is to spit glue-like phlegm towards his enemies, there’s a short-lived character with no arms and legs that keeps his sword inside his gullet and fights with his tongue. Hrmm. Your cup of tea? Don’t think so.