Forgotten Dreams of Elves

Although the goal of this blog was to cover more research/technical things, sometimes other things will slip in as well. This is one of those times.

Last night I had a dream about something I hadn't thought about in quite a while: ElfQuest. For quite a number of years, from elementary school (starting in 3rd or 4th grade?) up through high school I was entirely obsessed with this wonderful independent comic book series. A classic work of fantasy, ElfQuest followed a tribe elves who ride wolves living in a primordial earth-like planet with two moons. Sadly (fortunately?) after two and a half decades of independent publishing, DC comics now distributes it in a manga-like paperback format. The best of the series is considered to be the first 3 series (all originally black & white), which were published in a series of 8 colored graphic novels, which is how I was originally introduced to it. I would read all the way through those volumes, excitedly pouring of the pages, and then start over again at the beginning. I lost track exactly how many times I reread those 8 volumes, and along the way I obtained a nearly complete collection of the original comic books they were published in and eagerly awaited the newest issues to read my local comic book store. I loved everything elven, and I excited used my first scanner and later my first laser printer to scan scenes of favorite my characters and post them up on the walls of my room (and they were still there the last time I was home along with my treasured ElfQuest poster). I in fact still carry a keychain that bears an ElfQuest scene (it was a keychain which you could open up and put in your own little picture--the rubber part long since too hard to open to change the picture). This was actually how I fell in love with comics and fantasy originally. And, interestingly, it was actually ElfQuest that drove me to Japanese comics in the first place, looking for a longer, more emotionally involved stories then I could be satisfied with the super hero comics that ruled in America. Ironically, also was that Wendy Pini (the artist/co-creator of ElfQuest with her husband Richard) was partly inspired by manga in the first place; the elves are reminiscent of anime characters, while the humans are closer to those of American comics. Thus, as I had already had a partial sense of the anime aesthetic burned into my eyeballs from my many readings of ElfQuest, it was not that large a jump to Japanese comics.

Waking up this morning, I found that ElfQuest was very much still on my mind, and a visit to the official website reassured me that it was still around. However, I realized that there was a bunch of stuff I had missed when I lost track of ElfQuest in college as I got deeper and deeper into Japanese. Near the end of high school, I had discovered Inuyasha (which I had originally hoped would be like ElfQuest) and then by association, I found Maison Ikkoku, which turned into my new obsession for several key years in college and was undoubtedly one of the reasons I ended up in Japan. Ironically, it was not the fantasy manga that really did it for me, but the a seinen romance series set in Tokyo in the 1980's. Of course, as a high school student, Tokyo was probably almost as exotic to me as the elves on the World of Two Moons.

In any case, I once more lamented the loss of my copy of the first ElfQuest graphic novel, presumably, lent to a friend in high school and never returned. Having invested so much emotion into a book, it was a very painful realization that I didn't know where volume one had gone. I had picked up the first volume of the DC comics reprint, but in black & white and with the page layouts redone for 'manga' size (as ElfQuest could fit in nicely with the booming manga market), it just wasn't quite the same as the oversized graph novels I had read so many times. Looking at the list of items for sale on the official website, I thus found my wondering how the new DC comics reprints fit in with the ones I knew (as they have 14-volumes published now) and ended up on wikipedia. To my surprise, they actually gotten up to a couple volumes near the end covering material after I what I had known. A quick look on Amazon found a hardcover version of volume one in the editions that I had originally read (I had actually owned the paperback of volume 1) being sold used starting for a bit over $10. Needless to say, I ended up ordering a copy out of nostalgia and a need for completeness (how could I not have the first volume of a comic I loved so much?) .

As a side note, my love of wolves (I spent much of high school wearing wolf t-shirts) also came out of ElfQuest, and this is part of the reason that Princess Mononoke is my favorite Miyazaki Hayao film. Long live the elves!

Searching History

Yesterday Google News unveiled archive search on the official google blog. There's something fairly cool about being able to search the last 200 of so years of news. Unfortunately, many of the articles only give you a preview and a link to buy them, but some of the sources are free, like Time magazine. For example, a search for Arthur Waley gave me a review of part 4 of his 6-part translations of the Tale of Genji. An interesting quote in the article that reveals sentiments of the period is "Translator Waley learned both Japanese and the still more difficult Chinese from native teachers in London." I've never particularly thought of Chinese as being much more or less difficult than Japanese. Another fun quote about Waley is "He has never been east of Suez, and yet he is a recognized authority on literature and art of the Far East." Although, I knew he had never actually been to Japan or China, I still found it amusing.

The archive search gives you nice options for filtering dates and publications, and so I could find several articles about computers from 1889, when 'computer' was a job position for a human. It would be nice to be able to search for 'free publications' and I did find what I assume was an error with the word database showing up in an act supposedly from 1776 (and in the contect of a DNA database no less). ;) The next reference of the word 'database' is 1984 (which is more like it). I sent them a feedback email about it; we'll see if anything happens.

Car Repairs

A few weeks back the wipers on my car stopped working. I don't mean that the rubber came off the wiper blades and they were uneffective, but rather that they stopped moving altogether. This is bad when you live in a climate where it rains. Fortunately, we do have a second car and I walk to school most of the time (when I'm not running late and my wife is nice enough to give me a ride...), so it wasn't extremely pressing. Anyway, it's a 1991 Honda Civic that I got from my parents as an undergraduate granduation present, and it's also the car that I first learned to drive on. At this point, it's blue book price is only $2500, so imagine my surprise when I go in to get the wipers fixed and they tell me they want to make about $1800 of repairs on it: broken wiper rods, shifter cable, hood release cable, 'bad battery', and then they were suggesting that I replease the timing belt on top of that. Well, I had known about the wipers, it had been getting fairly difficult to shift between forward & reverse (dad had suspected the transmission, which it fortunately was not), the hood had required two people to open it the last couple times, and the battery had died a couple times over the winter (...after the lights had been left on). Anyway, so many of those things were at least somewhat reasonable. In any case, after a couple weeks of agonizing and looking over old repair receits (my parents had religously kept them all), I finally took the car in and got the wipers and the shifter cable repaired today. The battery I can replace myself for half the price (and it's still works well enough to start the car), and it turns out it's only been 15k miles since my parents replaced the timing belt (to replace every 60k miles...), and I don't see a problem with it taking two people to open the hood. I must say that it's really nice to have wipers that work again and it's so easy to shift gears now. Between that and the free car wash, my old car has a nice, shiny feeling now. :)

Thesis Proposal

As I'm now entering my third year as a Ph.D. student with the qualifying exams already behind me, it's now time for me to start working on my thesis proposal. I must say that since I originally entered as a master's student (and switched to directly getting a Ph.D. after my first semester), I didn't exactly get oriented properly to what exactly is involved in doing a Ph.D. thesis. It's partly my fault for not reading all the information available to me, but most of the important things I seem to have learned from labmates as new things came up or from administrators who suddenly told me that I had to do something. Furthermore, since my dad is professor himself, you'd think that I would have learned some of these things second-hand; afterall, random graduate students have been visiting my parent's house ever since I was a kid to discuss their research with my dad or drop off manuscripts. However, despite this, even after being told I had to do a 'thesis proposal', I had little idea as to what was actually involved in this. Writing was involved, I was sure--but how much? Well, it turns out that it doesn't have to be that long (10-20 pages is likely to be fine), but, it does involve an hour-long presentation and finding people to be on my thesis committee, including someone outside the department (and/or university). Presenting in front of a group of professors sounds a bit scary, but I'll probably be ok. However, what I do need to now before that is much more slipperly: find an original problem to research...

Well, given all the time and energy that has been invested into managing my ever-growing personal photo collection, I have finally gotten permission to do my thesis on personal image mangement after 6 graduate class projects and 4 years of developing and maintaining my site. However, it may end up going in some very new and different directions after I complete this soul-(& literature-) searching process.

English Blog

I feel a bit weird starting my third blog, but I must admit that it does serve a different role than the other two. Being a visual person, my first, and primary record of my life is via my photo blog/picture database website, risukun.com, which runs on my home-brewed photo management software, RisuPicWeb. However, there are times when a more normal, purely text-based approach is called for and I find myself lacking the time or motivation to implement the featureset of a fully developed blogging package into my existing system. My second blog is purely in Japanese and so requires a bit more time and effort to discuss anything of a technical nature, as my technical Japanese is far worse than my conversational Japanese. Thus, as my friends (and even my dad) have set up blogs to discuss both personal and academic interests, I find myself constructing yet another blog. For myself, however, this blog will likely focus on more technical persuits, as most of my personal happenings work their way into my photo or Japanese blogs.