a box of chocolates

Wikipedia is such a time suck. Had fun reading a bunch of entries, including the one on Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files. I love love love this quote from "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man":

Life... is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that nobody ever asks for. Unreturnable, because all you get back is another box of chocolates. You're stuck with this undefinable whipped-mint crap that you mindlessly wolf down when there's nothing else left to eat. Sure, once in a while, there's a peanut butter cup, or an English toffee. But they're gone too fast, the taste is fleeting. So you end up with nothing but broken bits, filled with hardened jelly and teeth-shattering nuts, and if you're desperate enough to eat those, all you've got left... is an empty box... filled with useless, brown paper wrappers.

Such an eloquent expression of a bleak outlook on life.

various manga thoughts

Downloaded and read Crimson Spell chapter 12 (here). I ended up rereading from chapter 8 as well. ( Some comments. )

I also was over at the house of a friend who subscribes to Hana to Yume. She had a stack of them from the last year or so in the living room, so I started randomly reading the Fruits Basket chapters in them...completely out of order. But it's amazing seeing this manga that feels like it's been going on for a long time winding down. ( In any case, some superficial comments on recent developments. )

I found a scanlation of a manga by an artist who illustrated a novel I really really like, but was rather disappointed by the contents. I'm not 100% sure if the fault is with the actual story or the translation. It was another case of the English that didn't quite jive and didn't let me immerse myself into the story.