Seeing through a Vision Quest in The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott

So here’s another quite outburst of Things What I Done Just Read. I’ve just put down a copy of The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott by Zoe Thorogood, and wanted to capture some thoughts on it quickly.

The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott is a 200ish page graphic novel that was published in 2020. It’s the debut work of Zoe Thorogood, who according to the book is 21, and according to her twitter is vision impaired, having had gradually deteriorating vision since the age of 4. It captures two incredibly rough weeks in the life of Billie Scott, an artist in her early twenties who suffers a detached retina after an assault, and is told that she’ll go completely blind in a short period of time. Following a drunken pep-talk with housemates she barely knows, she decides to go on a journey to paint ten portraits to use in the gallery exhibition she has just been accepted for. She’s woefully unprepared, but this act is sort of a preventative measure taken to avoid sitting alone and imploding, as self-destructive and dangerous as it is.

The story kind of darts around between Billie’s encounters with different people, but if you were new to living on the street your life would be pretty chaotic too, so it’s fitting. A series of new people (and one dog) gradually round out the ten portraits on her journey, and new relationships are built and shattered.

The art is good – I liked it. Look, I’m aware that I’ve just put out a phenomenally bland statement there but it was good – I wasn’t blown away but I don’t think I needed to be. I’m trying to think of who the art reminds me of, Paul Pope maybe? It’s certainly detailed, and the coloring is great. The book uses a muted color palette, and sticks with black & white, adding in an accent color for certain pages. I don’t know if there’s a theme to it, red pages mean this and blue pages mean that, but it helps create the tone that Zoe Thorogood is going for.

One thing that I liked about the story is that it’s not a touching ode to someone grappling with their impending disability. There’s a space for stories like that, and there are some really excellent examples (as an aside I’ve heard phenomenal things about The Sound of Metal and I really need to carve out some time to see it), but not every story about disability needs to cover this territory. The message that the author wants us to take away is that art is meaningful, and that we should attempt to create whenever we can. Art will change the world. This isn’t subtext, by the way, this is literally text and it’s spelled out for us in the last few pages by Billie.

Adding in Billie’s portraits at the end is a nice touch. The epilogue wraps things up perhaps a little too cutely for my taste, but it closes the book on the story well enough.

All in all, it’s an interesting read with an excellent title – I haven’t mentioned that I love the title earlier but my god do I ever. Definitely worth a read, and maybe I’ll go out and look for her second creation myself, rather than check it out from the local library like I did for this one.

Following the trail – an understanding of The Migratory Forest

One of the underrated aspects of manga, in my opinion, is the existence of the short story collection. The halls of manga literature are defined by their epics, but there’s nothing like a good collection of short stories that allow you to understand an artists’ qualities and style quickly and effectively. The best writers can create wholly realised characters and worlds in less than 20 pages.

The Migratory Forest – a collection of walks – is a single volume manga, a collection of interconnected short stories written and illustrated Yaku Haibara that was published in 2008. No official English translation exists, and this is the only thing of Yaku Haibara’s that I think I’ve read. Looking at their page of credits on mangaupdates.com shows a few josei titles, one long runner called Outen no Mon and a truly stunning amount of Fullmetal Alchemist yaoi doujins. One of their credits is even an NCIS LA doujin, which OK, sure why not – rule 34 is an absolute I guess.

The Migratory Forest, Kaiyuu no Mori, kind of bears those influences. It’s not explicit, but more on the line of introspective moments that you see in some romance manga. Every one of its chapters meditates on love, whether forbidden, unrequited or forgotten. Forests and nature as metaphor for love and secrets are a constant motif through the stories.

I did mention earlier that each of these chapters are interconnected, but it’s really just a token level of connectivity. For example, the first chapter ends with the chapter protagonist returning to work, asking where a co-worker is – we’re told taken the day off as she’s livid after discovering her boyfriend of eight years cheating on her. The next chapter follows her and another passer-by as they free themselves of past attachments by burying belongings and a nameless goldfish respectively.

It’s a cute way to hand things off, but I like it. Every chapter ends and leads off into a new beginning. You solve your problem, pass someone in a store and we then get to see what is in their head.

My favourite chapters are the first, “Mirage”, and the fifth, “Black Forest”. I don’t want to turn this into a frame by frame retelling, but “Mirage” shows the forest in its least metaphorical way. We follow Satoshi, a 35 year old office worker from Tokyo as he returns to his grandparents rural village for a memorial service. He’s haunted by a dark secret, something he revealed in the forest there more than a decade ago with his much younger cousin Miyo. The early parts of the chapter are spent on edge as he navigates social situations and his own anxieties.

When Miyo reveals that she remembers enough, we look into his eyes and it’s a

fucking

dagger.

It’s pretty clear that this will (deservedly) haunt Satoshi. The forest that lurked in his nightmares now has a face with eyes that stare into his soul. That’s a cliched sentence, but read the chapter and you’ll get the same feeling.

Black Forest is less dark, but still delves into emotions that lurk beneath the surface. The teacher of a German cooking class for housewives (the Black Forest in this title refers to the cake here) discovers that one of her students is married to her ex-boyfriend that she had a long and troubled relationship with. There’s no elaborate plan, no scheme to humiliate the other woman, merely a knowing smile as her husband comes to pick her up from class is all the meager revenge she needs. There’s nothing better than showing quietly your own existence and successes to someone that never expected to see you again. An interesting part of the chapter is also that there’s no real indication that the abusive ex is continuing his ways. He’s not featured, but the broken relationship is positioned more as the failures of two different people rather than an escape. The chapter uses a few flashbacks, as well as using the chocolate flakes on the cake like feathers to obscure memories.

I really like this collection. It’s a quick read, but there’s enough to come back to over and over. It’s not too hard to find, punching the title into your search engine of choice will bring it up pretty quickly. If you’re here it’s probably through a similar search, so why are you asking me?

Maybe I’ll keep an eye out to see if Outen no Mon is ever translated, or dig through the rest of their works for something properly serialised. Who knows?

Within me lies a deep, dense forest.

What, no noodles? A review of sorts of Boku-tachi ga Yarimashita

It has become clear to me that the triumphant return to noodle blogging that I bragged about six weeks ago obviously hasn’t happened. There’s a couple of reasons – I’m finding it harder to get excited about instant noodles as I used to be, although I’m sure they’ll pop up again here sometimes. It’s also harder to justify throwing an entire bucket of sodium down my throat once every couple of weeks. I want to keep using this space, so I think I’ll pivot the contents of this blog to some broader musings, specifically about some manga I’ve been reading.

Throughout this endless hell year of near constant lockdown, I’ve had plenty of time to power through various manga titles. Despite having what is ostensibly a full time job I’ve added a significant number of titles into my weekly checklist and powered start to finish through entire series’. Catching up on One Piece, reading hundreds of chapters of Naruto, even reading every Yu-gi-oh manga except Arc-V, these have all been things

Today I read something a bit more obscure and went through the entire thing cover to cover. Two of the titles I’m waiting anxiously for each week are Blue Lock and Jagaaaaaaan (I think that’s the correct number of a’s). Both are written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro who has a very weird style. I’d like to talk about both of them at a later date because they’re worth analysis, but they’re not the topic of discussion today. I tore through 87 chapters, nine volumes in total of Boku-tachi ga Yarimashita and it’s a goddamn trip. The series was launched in 2015 in Kodansha’s Young Magazine and roughly translates to “We Did It”. The series was adapted as a live-action drama, which seems to have the title “Fugitive Boys” as well. There’s no official English translation of the manga, because, y’know, there’s still gigantic chunks of the market that are unlikely to ever see the light of an official English translation.

The premise is a relatively common one, our four main characters commit an act that has unforeseen consequences, and it progresses from there. We watch these very different people, all with their own unique flaws and character quirks deal with the knowledge that they’ve caused people to die. This is definitely something that’s been done before, but Boku-tachi ga Yarimashita (BTGY?) excels in its approach. It flips quickly between dark comedy and moments of introspection. This is largely helped by the fact that of the four main characters only our protagonist, Tobio Masabuchi, seems to be really repentant. It poses interesting questions to us, how would you deal with your own conscience? Do you believe you’re worthy of happiness if you’ve done horrible things? Who would you betray to survive? Who do you trust? When someone shows you their true self, will you believe them?

The ending is fucking solid. Over the course of the series, we get to see the true personalities of the four main characters. Some of them are completely detestable, some of them are too deeply weird to live in this world. You’ll go through a significant period of the series hating most of the main cast, so it’s that kind of a manga. The weird blend of humour and deeply depressing moments reminds me of a Ryu Murakami novel, “Popular Hits of the Showa Era”. I think I’d recommend it overall, I’d also recommend that people approach it the way I did and just slam through it in an afternoon if they can. It does have some similarities to other Kaneshiro works, I can see how this was refined into Jagaaaaaaaaan.

It’s taken a long to until I’m ready to hit publish on this, I’m not super happy with it, but maybe the next series I talk about will be a better analysis/overview. This one was tough – I don’t really want to dig in with analysis as I feel like I’d spoil the entire plot. I think I’ll dig into Cestus next time – a truly unique boxing manga set during the reign of Roman Emperor Nero.

I completely forgot about this

As it says above, I completely forgot about this blog.

Well, it’s been remembered now. With the world the way it is, seems like as good a time as any to get back into this kind of thing.

I’m writing this in the evening, so this isn’t going to be a noodle review. Luckily my taste for instant noodles hasn’t really gone away, so there are some in the pantry waiting to be eaten. These things take up my sodium content for an entire week, so they’re not really as regular a thing I eat anymore!

Get excited though, I’ll be kicking this off this week with Nong Shim Shin Ramyun, and following up later with some Indomie Mi Gorengs. Plenty to be excited about.

Since every previous post referred to whatever I was watching/listening to at the time, might as well continue here. I’m currently watching Blood of Zeus and it’s complete shite.

Return to the Noodleverse

I know. Two updates, within 24 hours of one another.

Madness.

Although, given the lack of noodles in the other update, it can be said that this is really the first real update of the resurrectioning. First post that is back on track, highlighting my journey through the noodleverse.

So, today’s lunch was something unique. Unique in that I could not understand a single word written on the packaging. I was taking one hell of a risk.

It was kind of expensive-ish, $3 compared to the usual 75c-$1 stuff I usually find myself buying. But still, $3 isn’t exactly going to break the bank.

To tell the truth, I was a little bit surprised that there was no English anywhere. Usually there is at least something, a brand name, a flavouring. There was a picture of a chicken on there, which was somewhat amusing.

You’ll note that there are three different types of package, one of which being the hated dried vegetables. I decided to use them a bit differently, I’ll explain in more detail later. Unfortunately, the saucy sachet was mushroom flavoured. Look, I don’t dislike mushrooms, I just find the flavours a bit too overpowering, especially when semi-artificial like these noodles surely are. I only used about half of the sachet, which I’m sure some out there will identify as the first big mistake I made, and discredit my eventual rating of the noodles as lacking the full noodly experience. And to those people, I say, bad luck, this is my damn blog.

See, I’m not too fond of the rubbery mushroom bit either. And, foolishly thinking the red bits were dried chillis rather than dried tomatoes of some kind, I decided to pick and choose the vegetable content of my lunch. So, in went the green bits, the red bits, a couple of unavoidable mushroom bits, and the rest of it spilled all over the bench. Eccchhhh.

I did mix it up a bit, in that I only put the veggies in as I was ready to eat the noodles. This meant they weren’t as saturated as usual, which helps a bit, I guess.

 

Concluding Notes:

• Stupidly bland. Kind of mushroomy, which I knew when coming in, but the powdered sachet had next to no flavour at all.
• I listened to the instrumental tracks of some dude called Jakub Zytecki (I think), while waiting for my noodles to be ready. Really, really cool music.

Pros:

• There were a lot of noodles. Like, 110-115g, I think. It was definitely filling enough.
• Really cool packaging
• That’s about it.

Cons:

• Unfortunately, the flavour just wasn’t great. More mushroom flavouring might be great for some, but I personally wouldn’t have liked much more mushroom flavouring.
• Dammit red dried vegetables, I wanted you to be chillis. I was so disappointed when you weren’t 😦

I guess I’d put that one at around a 5.5. It really didn’t have many redeeming factors, apart from the overall size. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone (not that I’d recommend 2 minute noodles to anyone anyway, but still, you know what I’m saying).

Until next time.

Peace

The Second Resurrectioning

I think I might convert this blog into a regular type blog thing. Hopefully with more regular updates.
I mean, it hasn’t been updated since August last year, and to tell the truth I don’t think I’ve actually had too many two minute noodles since then. Not out of like a conscious decision or anything, it just kind of happened. I guess the noodles were the conscious decision I was making, and it kind of fell to the wayside.

I know this will be devastating to you, regular viewer, but… who am I kidding? No one is reading this, which is kind of cool. Semi-anonymous blog posts that anyone can see, but no one does. Kind of cool, in my mind at least.

Don’t fear though, loyal denizen of the internet. The noodleverse will be back, in some format at least.

And, since some traditions on this blog can’t really be ignored:

Concluding Notes:
– This blog post written whilst listening to I Fight Dragons’ Kaboom album, which is really kind of phenomenal.
– It’s been like, ages since I burnt myself on a metal fork, and I’d completely forgotten about all that junk. It’s making me hesitant about re-opening this blog, but you know what? I’ll risk it.

Pros:
– Um, welcome back, me? I guess.

Cons:
– It is amazing the things I’ll do to avoid studying.

So, overall, I’d rate this blog post as a 6.3. Still plenty of room for improvement, and let’s see if I can back it all up with more noodles/rambling/interwebz stuff.

Smashing through the Noodleverse

How cool are semi-regular updates?

Not really that cool,  but still, they’ll do.

So yeah, this week I ventured away from the usual flavours and brands to take a step towards Trident. Specifically the Chow Mein flavour.

Personally, I didn’t know that Chow Mein was a flavour, I thought it was a style, a way things were made. An overall classification, like Ramen or something. I dunno, I’m not exactly an expert on noodle flavourings, as much as this blog would convince you otherwise.

The packet made some pretty big promises, like “cooks in 3 minutes” (which it didn’t really), “authentic flavour” (considering I don’t exactly know what ‘chow mein’ is supposed to taste like authentically or unauthentically, I’ll have to take it at its word) and “quick and easy” (yeah, it passes there. It’s pretty damn hard to create instant noodles that aren’t quick and easy to make).

Unfortunately, it got a little crunched up in the transportation period, but what are you gonna do? So yeah, there was oil-flavouring and powder flavouring, neither of which were particularly strong.

It cooked pretty well, and the noodles were of a different kind to all the others. Softer and noodley-er, almost. It wasn’t bad.

To be honest, for the amount of times I’ve ragged on other noodles for being way too salty, this almost felt like karma back to bite me as there was an intense lack of salt in this one.
Concluding Notes:

• Totally forgot to to check the weight, but we’ll go with “there wasn’t really that much.”
• Cooked to No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age. Fantastic cooking song.
• A little unflavoury

Pros:

• Tasted alright
• The noodles themselves tasted pretty good, stylistically. That sounds weird, but it makes total sense to me.

Cons:

• Ehhhh. Ranks pretty high on the blandness scale
• Seriously, some salt would have been a could idea.
• Or flavouring that had a reasonably strong taste that wasn’t “garlic-and-oil”
• I don’t know if that was legit authentic Chow Mein flavour, but I’ll take my guess that it might have been a little off.

Overall, it wasn’t too crash. I mean, it wasn’t awful, but pretty forgettable. Not something I’ll be lining up for in the future.  Overall, I’d chuck t down as a 5.5. You know, average-ish. Whatever.

Not Noodles, but 100% good enough

TINY CHICKEN DINOSAUR NUGGETS

Look, I know they’re not 2 minute noodles, and people looking for noodles will be very confused when they see tiny dino nuggets at the top of the page, but

A: I was being serious about the updating more frequently thing

B: There were no 2 minute noodles in the house that hadn’t been already reviewed, and I definitely haven’t done enough reviews yet to start rehashing old reviews

C: THESE ARE AMAZING

Seriously. Tiny chicken dinosaur nuggets. I can not explain how amazing they are in words.

10/10. For serious.

NO FORK RELATED INCIDENTS BECAUSE YOU COOK THEM IN THE OVEN AND I’M PRETTY SURE I’M NOT DUMB ENOUGH TO STICK A FORK IN THE OVEN.

Regular Updates! I promise (only not really)

Yeah, like it says above, I will try to update this more frequently, which means eating more noodles and gradually reporting on them. Not that there’s anyone out there absolutely dying to read this, but you know, consistency never hurt anyone.

So, today (and by today I mean about a week ago) I tried Gong Brand “Mi Goreng Oriental Beef Fried Noodles”, which seems to be a fairly over the top description for a bunch of dry noodles in a cup.

Although, I suppose that the noodles weren’t the only thing, there were a hell of a lot of flavouring packets and the like, as seen below.

I mean, there’s so much stuff, I figured y’all would want a larger picture of the components and sachets’n’stuff. That and I finally noticed that you could actually make these things bigger when you insert them into the page, so I thought I’d see if it was worth doing.

Anyway, back to the noodles.

Oh god, this one’s full size too. Oh well, I suppose I’ll deal with it.

For these I actually followed the intructions printed on the packet, which turned out to be a bad idea. It says to like, cook the damn things, then drain out all the liquid and tip all of the flavouring sachets on top.

Which is basically a horrible idea. I think I may’ve done this before, probably lower down on this blog, but whoever writes the cooking instructions on 2 minute noodles has never actually eaten these things before.

That, or cooking these things is supposed to be so trivially easy that anyone that needs instructions should be locked away for crimes against intelligence. Either option seems good to me.

Concluding Notes:

• Salty, salty, salty. Way salty. Seriously.
• 80g. Ugh. More than the 75g last time, but still not exactly a whole meal, not even really a lunch.
• “Cooked” whilst listening to Helmet’s cover of the Gigantor theme song, which is always good for a laugh, even if you aren’t a huge Helmet fan

Pros:

• Wasn’t too bad…I guess.

Cons:

• Too salty. My fault for following the instructions, but when a thing like this has instructions, you’d expect that they were written with the assumption that someone somewhere out there would follow them and they wouldn’t cause his meal to be over-salted.
• 80g is only a small step up from “really tiny.” Not a huge step up, but a step up nonetheless. This is both pro and con, but mostly con.

In essence, I’d have to give this a 6.8. It passes, I guess, and gets higher marks because it only cost me like, 25c, because it was on special and I ended up buying quite a few before tasting them (rookie mistake).

So I’ll eat it, I may not completely enjoy it, though.

It does get a whole extra point because it didn’t need to be cooked in a pot, and therefore allowed me to avoid the indignity of burning my hand on molten forks. Hooray for it, I guess.

2 POSTS FREE OF FORK RELATED INCIDENTS.

Return of the Noodles

My God, it’s been a while. Over a year in fact. That’s not to say I haven’t eaten noodles in a year, more to say that it was just easier to eat them and not write a review about it. But, the time of laziness is back, and a new dawn of noodling has been heralded.

So, I decided to open year 2 of lifenoodles with a classic brand. Indomie, of course, Soto Mie, Java Spicy Chicken Flavour. I figured, what the hell, why not. The packet looked pretty cool, so why not. One thing I’ll never understand is why they show a whole meal on the packet, and not just the noodles. After eating this for a while you begin to realise that the egg and lime slices on the packet aren’t inside with the contents, nor do the noodles have a taste that really resembles egg-and-lime-slice.

Speaking of the contents, here they are, in all of their shiny goodness. you may have noticed that the photos here are more blurry or spotty than they were in Year One, but the camera on my phone has been treated pretty badly in the last year, so I’m just happy enough that it takes photos in the first place. And not treated badly as in ‘OMG, SO HARDCORE, PARTIES N’SHIT,’ but treated badly as in ‘phone, meet floor. Oh, you’ve met? I guess you really should meet bench then, phone. And probably his friends, chair, foot and wall.’

Apart from the lowered photo quality, (which, let’s be honest, you don’t really care for, you’re not here for high-quality photos of noodles taken from an old phone), the biggest change that you’ll notice since Year One will be, and I say will be because so help me if I screw this up again, will be the lack of metal forks resting in pots of boiling water. In the last year I have grown both wiser and slightly more attentive to the little things like that and I have no intention of burning my hand again. So, I’m going to put a little reminder for this at the bottom. You’ll know it when you see it.

And there it is, spots and all.

Concluding Notes:

• This one actually smelled pretty good as well. Almost lime-esque. Maybe for all of my sarcasm, there was lime in the flavouring somewhere.
• Only 75g. Really not enough noodles at all. I ate that, 2 smallish apples, half a packet of snakes and I’m still a bit hungry.
• Cooked to 19-2000 by the Gorillaz. My god, I love that band.

Pros:

• Tasted alright-ish, middle of the road really. Not too great, not too bad. I know this isn’t really a pro, it’s slightly negative, but more positive than negative so it goes in the PROS column.
• Not too salty. Which was a pleasant surprise.

Cons:

• Still hungry right now.
• It was a little bit oily. Probably because there was an oil-flavouring sachet, but still. It was a little oily.
• Writing the word “spicy” on the packet is a lie, to put it bluntly. I’m not one of those freaks that eats extra-hot sauce for breakfast, I’ve got a reasonable tolerance to heat, but still, this was pretty mild.
• Might go and grab something else to eat.

So, overall, I’d put this at a flat 7.0. Wasn’t bad, wasn’t great is probably the best way to summarise it. I’m going to leave this post here, and hopefully I’ll be back before a year passes this time.

1 POST FREE OF FORK RELATED BURNING INCIDENTS