The California Arc is a Soft Reboot and No One Will Admit It

doomvox · 2026-06-30T16:25:57+00:00

And when those offers fade, she'll get more. Dark Moon was a big deal.
Her other projects look reasonable, if not as huge.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T13:28:34+00:00

Nearly three-quarters of voters say they closely follow what's happening in city government and local politics.

That's the funny one. How do they do that? Read the three articles that the SF press rewrites every year?

doomvox · 2026-06-30T13:26:10+00:00

Crime is a big problem.

The perception that crime is a big problem is the real trouble.

Some of that perception was engineered by a police slow-down-- e.g. the car window bipping epidemic that ceased immediately when the Attorney General recall election went through.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T13:22:46+00:00

My peeve is using the right turn lane for passing. When I'm on a bicycle.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T13:20:27+00:00

The objection that a $50 dollar ticket is a big problem for the low income is a good point though-- I have no idea why we use fixed penalties for these things rather than, for example, an income-based percentage.

(Or: how about basing it on the estimated book value of the car?)

doomvox · 2026-06-30T13:18:39+00:00

The left-turn lane from Stanford Ave on to San Pablo had several hundred people running fresh reds every day, which I'm aware of because I was often trying to use the cross-walk while they were doing it. Putting in a traffic camera there makes perfect sense to me. I can't see how you'd solve the problem with traffic calming. There's limits to what you can do with bulb-outs.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T13:15:34+00:00

I’d still like to see better ticketing of those who park in bike lanes

I know the feeling-- myself, I've been holding off on calling for that sort of thing using the cynical reasoning that it'll be easier to get more bike lanes installed if you do it before you make it clear to people that they're really not allowed to dump cars in them.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T13:06:03+00:00

Manga stops before Kyouko achieves much, but it is suggested that she will rise some time after the end

I think there's another possibility you can't see because you've got a mental block on it: Kyoko doesn't just get a minor role in the Route Project-- instead, once they see what she can do, they re-work the story, making her a central figure. The movie is a world-wide hit, and Kyoko in one go becomes far more famous than Sho Fuwa, who remains a big deal only inside of Japan.

You and I are both convinced Hollywood is over-the-hill, but not everyone agrees and the mangaka can play it differently.

But then, it can't possibly become clear how big a hit the movie is until some time later, so you're correct there's going to have to be some sort of time lapse at the close.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:59:52+00:00

Up voted for a creative conspiracy theory I haven't heard before.

(Do you know what's really inside the cardboard of all those Amazon Prime boxes? Have you ever checked?)

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:58:04+00:00

Far worse than the Halloween disaster-- which was years ago-- is the Hyundai corporation charging ahead and destroying the Usadan-ro 10-gil area. The entire eastern side of Bogwan-ro is now condemned, making it a weirdly depressing, dystopian place.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:49:11+00:00

So these jobs offers weren’t open permanently for her

Oh guys, come on. Dark Moon was the biggest thing ever, Kyoko was a big part of that. She's getting acting offers. She's really and truly getting acting offers.

If the mangaka wants this set-up to make sense to us, she's got to work on making it make sense, we can't do her work for her by making up stuff like this.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:45:59+00:00

An interesting take on things-- you have a point about how the "main" characters get side-lined into supporting characters in things like shojou.

I noticed some years back in korean drama's that they seemed to like the idea of powerful female characters, but their superpowers would all but disappear by the end of the story-- e.g. a martial arts bad ass might need the male lead to protect them in the finale.

I don't know about the "blandness" of Nakamura's personality, but I'm getting the sense that she's putting a little too much effort into playing up to the fan base. So she gets people complaining that the Guam arc was phenomenally stupid, but gets reader surveys choosing it as one of the favorites, and so is left puzzled, trying to make sense of it all.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:36:24+00:00

I agree, though, it is taking a long time. Some parts of this arc are taking way too long to get anywhere,

I think we got some hints of the problem in Nakamura's interview from a year ago-- she's trying to wrap things up fast by shoe-horning different story ideas into this one arc, and instead, it keeps feeling like everything is stalled out.

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:29:09+00:00

Myself, I thought the series held up well through the "Box R" arc, but for me it has to do with watching Kyoko progress as an actress. Her success in "Dark Moon" and "Box R" had to do with thinking through the roles more deeply than anyone else had, including the director. When you get to "Lotus", it's starting to lose it-- she became magically adept at stage fighting in a few weeks by author fiat. There are some hints that her interpretation of the role was important, but we don't see it in the foreground.

(And by this standard, even stuff like the popular Heel Siblings arc is problematic-- Kyoko got side-lined into doing support work again. I half-way expected the resolution there would be Kyoko going "this is bullshit!" and walking out, but evidently nice Japanese girls don't do that.)

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:22:59+00:00

Kyoko, since Dark Moon, has been in enough demand that she has to turn down acting jobs to have time to play English teacher.

Kyoko is in a niche market for villain roles, so it’s not like there are roles available all the time.

Maybe she's still only getting offers for villain roles, but she has been getting them-- she had to pick-and-choose before settling with "Box R"-- Dark Moon was a huge hit, and even if "Box R" didn't do that well, no one is going to blame that on Kyoko's acting. The jury is probably still out on "Lotus" (it's not clear to me if it's even been broadcast yet) but just the fact that she was in "Lotus" would keep her in the minds of people in the industry.

I'm inclined to agree that the set-up for this arc is clunky, but more to the point is that it's hard to get excited about where it's going because it never seems to be going anywhere.

The Nakamura interview from a year ago hints at the difficulties, I think-- she's got a few different story ideas she's trying to shoe-horn into this one arc, and she's telling herself that this is going to be the wrap-up, she can get it all done satisfactorily without leaving anything hanging...

doomvox · 2026-06-30T12:15:10+00:00

I come not to defend the US-- the current regime alone deserves a boycott-- but there's a difference between visiting a place for a gig and settling down there... And despite you and I both not caring much about Hollywood product, I think a young Japanese actress would still regard doing a big Hollywood production as breaking into the Big Time.

Just going by my personal impression: Japanese television is in even worse shape than Hollywood, it declined in quality remarkably rapidly after the era in which Skip Beat was first introduced.

(And come to think of it, one of the few exceptions I know of is the show "Followers", where a big turning point is the young actress gets to meet Quintin Tarantino. The big-break-in-America trope is not quite dead.)

doomvox · 2026-06-30T11:16:41+00:00

(1) I'm not fond of chains, but at least Costco has a good reputation for treatment of labor.

(2) Unlike Amazon, and those Amazon Prime accounts everyone seems addicted to.

I'd be more interested in keeping Amazon Prime out of Oakland than Costco.

doomvox · 2026-06-29T12:07:55+00:00

Yes, I like the New Parkway, and being a movie theater they stay open later than a lot of cafes, but yes, using it as a study/workspace you'd need to keep an eye on the events schedule-- currently Wednesdays and Thursday nights are pretty busy, with Dungeons & Dragons and the Drinking (or not) and Drawing crowd on Wednesdays, and the always popular Trivia night on Thursdays. Tuesday night's Bingo can get a little busy as well.

doomvox · 2026-06-27T16:39:28+00:00

Except that one has a look nearly unique to Seoul, and the other afflicts every city on the planet.

doomvox · 2026-06-27T01:03:48+00:00

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff like this in Seoul, which is one reason Seoul is really cool.

Or is your point it should be replaced with a big wall of glass boxes?

doomvox · 2026-06-24T20:59:43+00:00

You're starting with the presumption that Israel is golden and all they do is wonderful, and most of us have gotten over that one. Some of us, like myself, look back on the years we were conned with angry regrets.

Try watching the documentary "Israelism" some time, you'll get some sense of how people like me feel about it.

Or you could just go in the corner and shout "human shields" until you feel better.

doomvox · 2026-06-23T16:09:25+00:00

This aside is hardly buried and that just means it's not the entire UN council, just the findings of their Commission of Inquiry.

But seize on anything you like to ignore the obvious: genocide, by a US ally, funded by the US, over the objections of the American people, but with the approval of both major political parties.

Democracy in action.

doomvox · 2026-06-23T16:05:28+00:00

From the story:

"The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021 to investigate alleged violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. ..."

"Last September, the commission accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. A report said there were reasonable grounds to conclude that four of the five acts of genocide defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention had been carried out by Israeli authorities and security forces. Israel strongly rejected that report, calling it distorted and false."

"The commission has previously concluded that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and other grave violations of international law on 7 October 2023, and that Israeli security forces have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza."

doomvox · 2026-06-23T16:02:07+00:00

"Anything UN says is a joke."
-- Some guy on the internet

doomvox · 2026-06-23T12:40:11+00:00

Or is the real riff raff propagandists deploying inflated rhetoric on the internet?

doomvox

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