Merry Christmas! Of swag and boons

It being Christmas, I’m taking it easy today. I’ll be back with the rest of my rant on the new Tokyo Metro Bill later, but for today, let’s celebrate the birth of the Western world’s savior with a mountain of presents.

To note, I’m Buddhist – and with that I’m not even really sure about – so I’m not particularly a major player in the holiday season of giving or receiving, but various people insist, and I end up getting things for Christmas. So here’s some swag I got!

• A Menchi plushie!

Remember that crazy show called Excel Saga? Yeah, that horrible show that left nothing sacred. Well, if you haven’t, the show is basically about two girls and their attempt to take over the world for the sake of their apathetic and sociopathic leader. Menchi is the lovable animal mascot of the series, not to be mistaken for Puchuu, the lovable alien mascot.

He also doubles as an emergency food ration!

This show and I go back a long way, it was here that I started to watch terrible anime instead of watching normal shows like Inu Yasha and Dragon Ball. This is what introduced me to everything horrible in the world.

A good friend of mine gave the plush toy to me as a gift when I noticed she was putting it up in her moving sale.

• 600 peice Jigsaw puzzle of Totoro

My father bought this for my mother and I… This will take a while. I got the easy part down, now it’s a matter of putting together all the grass bits. This isn’t as bad as The Beatles White Album Puzzle but I can only match up so many blades of grass before I go insane.

I don’t even know if I got all the blue pieces in the right spot.

• Kaira by Yoshitoshi ABe

This is more a gift to myself. I’ve been wanting to buy this book for a while, and I finally swallowed the fact I’ll be buying this sooner or later anyway, and why not sooner when I can find it at Kinokuniya with little hassle. I’ll probably write a review or something of it later, but for now, I’m basking in the wonder of this almost full color tome of sheer depression.

You think Texhnolyze was sad? You think Lain was mind numbing? Those shows are nothing in front of Kaira. This work is torture in almost every way rolled into one long series of stories about suffering. The book itself took 10 years of drawing, the colors are all depressing, and I’ve yet to find anything uplifting in its pages.

Just to note, this is how Kaira starts:

“There is no Salvation.

In the world ahead, there will be no such thing as salvation.”

And that’s the first line.

Anyway, hope you all had a good holiday, and I’ll see you next week with your regularly scheduled blogging!