Don’t be fooled by this image, this is a DVD one 2x zoom so it’s pretty grainy on the 40″ screen. The picture’s fucking amazing but neither of our components is capable of projecting in 1080p resolution. The only thing we have that can- our indoor antenna. We were watching Monsters Inc on ABC Saturday night and you couldn’t tell me that it wasn’t Blu-Ray. The Digital signals across the antenna are stronger too, we get all the local stations as clear as a bell.

Of course the Wii’s been as fun as Hell too, though having Resident Evil 4 in the house while I’m supposed to be working from home will be challenging. The challenge being “How do I get them to think I’m still working?”

My next step will be to get a second video card for the desktop so we can watch Lost and the Venture Bros off the Net.

I’ve been watching my future TV like a day trader. I see the price rise and fall two or three times a day as the sellers with the lower prices sell out and restock. I watch the review trickle in. We are in the third quarter now if there’s going to be a price cut it will happen sometime soon. When it does I will strike! Like a cobra!! >>>FHISK!!!<<<

In an anticipation of the new methadone metronome I’ve replaced the DVD player because it was starting to crap out on us and I replaced the antenna because… well… we didn’t have one before. What we’d been using for it’s antenna-like properties was a Dreamcast RF Switch. The funny thing is, Melissa’s never owned a Dreamcast. The best we can figure, it’s a left over from three boyfriends ago.

Well the real antenna get twice as many stations as the RF Switch did, that’s twice as much insipid crap, and it’s digital ready so the new set will feel at home right away.

I swear, EMC cuts-up their technical documentation.

Is the Manga bubble about to burst?

This isn’t like the Image bubble of the 90′s where clueless speculators and shortsighted comic book retailers gave the industry a shot in the arm and then a shot in the foot. The appreciation for Manga was real, though overrated.

I’m hardly knee deep in the Manga industry but I do read the Previews pages for Manga publishers and I’ve seen a trend away from Japanese produced Manga to American produced titles (I’m sure Manga fans have names distinguishing them but I’m too lazy to look those up). And the new titles that are coming out of Japan seem like more of the same, derivatives of previous older, better books.

America has always been a secondary market for Manga and publishers like Tokyopop have been hauling it over here at a gold rush speeds. I suspect that the backlog of good material has dried up and the American publishers tried to push out second and third rate Japanese and American produced material in an attempt to keep the momentum going.

For example, Tokyopop’s been a middleman for years and now it seems like they want a piece of the proprietary pie, (Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of Scott Pilgrim seems to think it’s a bad deal.)

I suspect the Manga industry is experiencing a correction. It won’t be the end of the medium but I wonder how this’ll effect the convergence with European and American comics art forms. Will they all merge into a global sequential ant and industry or will they go back to their core audiences where it’s safe?