That’s my photo of last night’s sunset, marking the day-time end of midsummer (circa 22.00, give or take a minute). As a bonus you get to see our window screen. Now say, “Thank you, Doug’s window screen, for keeping out the bugs.” Show some care, Space Pilgrims, for these windows screens are good friends of mine.
Currently it seems a bit too hot for even the insects to be out, at least during the heat of day. Still, its nice to have the screens at night when the temp is low enough to make having windows open worth it and the buggies are just fine with stinging.
Anyhow, midsummer. Maybe that’s met hoofdletter, eh? Midsummer. Capital M. Behind Halloween, it is possibly the date of the year that I feel the most spiritual about despite genuinely considering summer to be my least favorite season by some margin. I am autumn’s child and do ok in the winter while enjoying enough of the spring-time that I forgive it mostly for wrecking me with pollen.
Summer, though? Bah.
I hate the heat. I am of mixed-feelings about storms. I don’t like drought. I’ve also been tied up in academia for long enough that summertime was always a strange liminal moment. I liked working with students. Even though I usually had projects that benefited from an extended quiet, it was never quite the same. Never the same joy.
One of my primary summer memories was in undergrad just walking around the campus during summer when everyone was gone. This was UAH in the late 90s, early 00s era. When the campus was almost entirely commuter instead of just mostly commuter. What scant campus life was holding on by a thread during Fall and Spring semesters popped out of existence in the summer interim.
There was such a striking sense of quiet, of nothingness, it depressed me more than any shadows or stormy weather.
Midsummer, though? I like midsummer. For me, the return of the dark seems more important than the return of the light. As the saying goes…there are no sweeter words than this: nothing lasts forever.
It’s good to be reminded.
This afternoon I finished off the last couple of volumes of Jujutsu Kaisen. I thought it was perfectly fine. That’s about all the praise I have for it. It was interesting in how hard it tried to justify its ever expanding rules of sorcery and cursed spirits and dozens of other classifications that were forced into being to justify single plot points. The world was boring as hell, the characters are kind of fun, the character designs were nice, and the story never trusted itself to slow the hell down.
My absolute favorite portion was when Gege Akutami would toss in inserts. That dried up more and more towards the end (something he himself calls out in the final few pages).
I might do a fuller review but probably not. Besides the above, my primary comment would be that the story would have been better at 40-50 volumes instead of the 30+1 we got. And maybe half the characters. We were supposed to care about characters taking 10-pages to die when they only had 2-pages to speed run their backstory? Having some downtime would have made it feel like flesh instead of just fancy skin. The between-the-lines that was there tended to be stuff I liked but it ended up feeling like I was reading the end-game crossover arc of multiple series that mostly existed in Akutami’s head.
Especially when the last few volumes are just constant “OH, but what if I used a triple third strike reverse widdershins life beam yellow hawk cry” and then someone going “its over!” only for the yellow hawk cry to get bested immediately by a filtered water stream double strength shatterspoon or some crap.
It’s cool but when you can endlessly invent new moves and rules and twists it feels less like a world and more like two kids shouting at each other in a sandbox after school.
To the 15-year-old kid who considered it the most exciting thing he ever read: don’t worry about me. I’m old and cranky.
On other happy media consumption notes, I realized there were a few patches in my general Japanese music collection I wanted to fill. The long and short being that across this past month I picked up some albums by Marie Ueda, tiny yawn, Aooo, Monthly Shonen Irony, Porno Graffiti, L’arc-en-ciel, and cinnamons. I also got Mono’s newest album, but I’ve been following them a long time. And tuki. just released a new song so I got that as well.
My plan is to avoid the heat by just jamming to tunes and maybe getting back into solo play stuff that took a big backseat lately.
If I try another manga series any time soon, I’m thinking Dorohedoro, maybe. I’ve only ever read volume of it but thought it was neat. That, or I might finally read Gantz to completion. I’ve read it twice before it was finished and never went back to finish out the missing pieces.
