it's a gas

[wombat1138]

The wombat-consort had an impromptu vacation for most of this week, having accidentally gotten into his labwork a bit more than usual. On Tuesday, he opened up a neglected storage cabinet and got a lungful of random fumes, including some trace cyanide; at some other point in the day, he'd also been working with enormous quantities of some fine powdery stuff with structural similarities to amphetamine. So he had a few spots of wooziness during the day, then ended up being very ALERT all night with random chest pains. Of course, he didn't actually tell me about any of this until Wednesday morning when he asked me to drive him to the emergency room, where I spent a few hours relaxing in the waiting room while they poked at him. Luckily, I'd come prepared with a bagful of beads to assemble something I'd just sold on eBay without actually having one prepared beforehand.

Evidently the EKG didn't show any cardiac damage; they ended up just giving him something to inhale to reduce the pulmonary inflammation and then I brought him home, where he stayed for the rest of the week, resting up and re-watching Escaflowne while the cats gallivanted around him. The occupational health exam yesterday morning concluded that the powder was a red herring, and while he'd probably inhaled enough whatever to irritate his lungs, everything else was just panic attacks. He seems a bit disappointed, but from my point of view, it's just as well, really. We've also been working through some more recent anime series: Great Teacher Onizuka, Twelve Kingdoms, Tenchi Muyo GXP, and Witch Hunter Robin. Thank goodness for rentals.

Comments

ouch!

[happypete.livejournal.com]

got to stay away from that trace cyanide...and fie on the Occupational Health Exam people. I think one is entitled to a few panic attacks after breathing in noxious chemicals!

And in other notes--hey, you live! What's up?

[eeedge.livejournal.com]

I'm very glad that your Figment still lives. That's gotta have been more than a bit disturbing.

What do you think of the anime series? I'm looking for something new, and I'm finding the final episodes of bunches of things to be remarkably BAD. I've seen some of the manga for Great Teacher Onizuka, but didn't get much of a feel for it.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

GTO is entertaining in a way, but rather predictable-- student behaves strangely due to feeling isolated/alienated from his/her parents, Onizuka engages in various outrageous ways to demonstrate his fitness as a substitute parental figure, all is well until the next student acts up. Also, I get the feeling that the GTO mangaka (though I've only flipped through some of the manga per se) has some Serious Issues about women; in general, the male antagonists are comical and ineffective, but most of the female antagonists are a stone-cold bitchfest.

GXP is pretty much like the other Tenchi serieses; although there's almost no actual character crossover, it introduces lots of new members of Tenchi's extended family, and the protagonist is one of those hapless inexplicable chick magnets.

WHR and 12K are damn good. At least so far, anyway; the last disc of WHR isn't out yet, but it's easily one of my favorite series at this point-- it has remarkably rounded and ambiguous characters; beautiful animation in a muted, almost noirish palette (including very well-integrated CGI backgrounds); twisty plot machinations, music that isn't bubbly J-pop, what more could you want? (Well, okay, more bishounen might be fun, but hey.) 12K is one of those things (like "Crest/Banner of the Stars" or the books of Jo Walton or GRR Martin) where I don't feel strong empathy with the characters despite all the skill put into making them psychologically realistic, but it's the worldbuilding that really draws me in. Maddeningly, 12K (which we haven't finished watching yet either) is reputed to just plain stop withour resolving some of the central plot elements, and while some of those are answered in the book series it's based on (or at least the plot summaries and fan translations I've found), the books just stop at a random point too.

None of these are particularly new, but have you seen Escaflowne? The OVAs of Tenchi Muyo or El Hazard (both much more compelling than their corresponding tv serieses)?