Impressions

One thing many people remember fondly about Nintendo Power magazine was that, besides just straight-up video game news, reviews, and the like, they’d occasionally serialise comics based on one of Nintendo’s popular game franchises. These could easily have been mailed in as cheap promotional material by C-grade artists, but to NP’s credit they were actually genuinely pretty good. I remember a couple of these, but unfortunately they stopped doing this not long after I subscribed, so I missed out on most of them. As far as I’m aware, few or none of these were published elsewhere, so unless you have these now-ancient back issues of a discontinued magazine, there’s no way to own a physical copy of them.

Reading e-books is, for me, an act of desperation. As I’ve written before, I love books as physical objects, and only resort to my Kindle if there’s no other feasible way to read something. So, this is how I read Short Breaks in Mordor, the newest book from Peter Hitchens, published exclusively in digital format.

His difficulty in finding a traditional publisher is unfortunate, because Short Breaks, which collects many of the author’s articles on his travels around the world, is well worth picking up and I’d love to have a physical copy of it. Destinations vary from Moscow, Russia to Moscow, Idaho, and in each place Hitchens speaks to as wide a variety of people as he can meet to give readers a good sketch of the people who live there.

The sixth volume of Yasuhiko Yoshikazu’s Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin picks up where the fifth left off with Char and Sayla’s backstory, but this and the seventh volume expand to include other major characters on the Zeon side, as well, going up to the start of events in the main storyline in the first volume. This gives the series an unusual structure where roughly the first four volumes proceed from what now seems to be the middle of the story, then the next three volumes cover the beginning. Now that the backstory has caught up to the beginning of the series, I assume that the eighth volume will jump to where the fourth left off. I’d be interested to know why Yasuhiko decided to structure the story this way; perhaps he wanted to make sure his adaptation began the same way as the original TV anime before going off on a different path, similar to how the first Rebuild of Evangelion film started mostly the same as its predecessor and only made major changes in the second film.

Ever since I first took an interest in history back in middle or high school, I’ve occasionally gone to the local library or bookstore and there confirm something that is, unfortunately, unsurprising: most American’s aren’t interested. A look at the shelves would turn up a few things on Greece or Rome, maybe the Cold War or China, and if you wanted to know about, say, the unification of Italy, you’re totally out of luck.

Though I haven’t played video games with any regularity in several years, there are a few games that I still remember very fondly and even revisit once in a great while. A couple of my favourites are the two fantasy-themed Ogre Battle games, both the Super NES original and its Nintendo 64 sequel. For years, I’ve also owned the two Tactics Ogre spin-off games, but never really played either of them until now, and I’ve just finished the PlayStation port of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together.

As one can easily guess, Notes on the Third Reich is Julius Evola’s follow-up to Fascism Viewed from the Right. Both books are similar in their structure and approach, and though both are well worth reading I think only the earlier one is really essential, because it’s more thorough and touches more on the general principles that define the Right. Evola’s criticisms of National Socialism are similar to those he made of Fascism, e.g. its populism, totalitarianism, and racialism, though each of these is much greater in Nazism than its Italian cousin. In fact, one notable difference between the books is the tone; Evola was moderately supportive of Fascism, finding several things to praise, albeit with multiple reservations. Here, though, he is relentlessly critical.

This series is going to end with a whimper, isn’t it?

I’ve been down on Oh My Goddess for a long time now; the series basically lost me way back in volume 41, and I’ve basically just been stewing in a fairly mediocre arc for three years waiting for it to end already. Things have improved somewhat in the last couple volumes, I suppose; Fujishima Kosuke is better at drawing motorcycle racing than he is any other sort of action, and the character art is still nice enough. The end is also in sight - this is the penultimate volume, and after two decades and change it does feel like the story’s wrapping up. Encouragingly, with this action-oriented story arc done the final volume should go back to a type of storytelling that Fujishima’s good at.

The American “Right” is a strange beast. The more one looks outside the bubble of the United States of the past five minutes, the stranger it looks, because what Americans usually call the “Right” is simply the Republican Party, an incoherent coalition of neoconservatives, social conservatives, Tea Partiers, and right-libertarians. What these groups have in common besides opposition to the various groups that make up the Democratic Party’s coalition isn’t at all clear to me. Indeed, it’s not at all clear how most of these are meaningfully “right-wing” at all, except in the relativistic sense of “less liberal than the faculty of Harvard.”

I talked about the first two volumes of Suenobu Keiko’s comic Limit way back in March 2013 in a Bibliophile’s Journal post, and only this week have I gotten around to reading the other four volumes, which I read in a single sitting.

Now, that may make it sound like this is a real page-turner and I couldn’t put it down. Unfortunately, I blew through the books so fast because, well, there’s not really much to them. The story’s moderately entertaining, if a little overwrought, but as I mentioned in that previous post, it’s just Lord of the Flies but less plausible and without any of the symbolism. The characters come across as panicky and drama-prone, but only one of the characters is given a backstory reason for acting this way, and her story is a clichéd one. Perhaps my expectations of teenage maturity are too high, but I expect them to be able to spend a few nights in the woods without turning into, well, Lord of the Flies; even Lord of the Flies didn’t descend into Lord of the Flies this quickly.

Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, published in 1994, looks at diplomatic history from Richelieu up to the early 1990’s, focusing on Europe and the United States and especially on the Cold War era. Overall, the book is excellent, and very useful to anyone looking for an introduction to how diplomacy is, and generally ought to be, conducted. Kissinger takes a point of view that reminds me of a craftsman looking at his peers’ work; he avoids moralising for the most part, and instead focuses on whether a particular policy worked or not, and why. For example, while discussing Joseph Stalin, he does mention the enormous death toll of his purges, but is primarily concerned with his relations with the Western powers and analysing his personality and domestic terror only insofar as it affected his foreign policy.