That’s it! Done with almost everything from semester 1. Final year takes away most of your time and it’s so hard to find some freetime to do things you really want to do. Well, not that hard, I still have my fair share of gaming and manga reading – however it isn’t as much “play” as it was before… Oh, I’m in my 4th year after a placement, which I guess you people in the US would call “senior year” of a Bachelor degree.
Recently OneManga decidedly made a nice move including a RSS Feed into their website of newly “released” translated manga. I used to dislike RSS Feeds – I mean, who would want to run a forever running rss feed reader in their PC eating away RAM? Now it’s different though – I’m on Mac OS X (“Hackintosh” though) and its memory management system is fab – with NewsFire running, it doesn’t even seem that much more load, even though I’m still on a 2 GiB RAM system! (Didn’t think I’d go into installing a x86_64 operating system which is why I chose only 2 GiB RAM… how wrong was that decision now that I’m on Leopard, sigh…) Yeah, and the updating icons on the Dock is also great… I’m addicted to Mac OS X now. All the best that I want in Windows and all the solid backend I wanted in BSD merged together, with a nice GUI: Aqua… what more to ask? It’s the best thing to use for my line of work (I’m a Client-side Developer, i.e. Web Developer).
Another thing to say is that OneManga now implemented an Advanced Search system – I experimented with it and tried to look for manga which bear the tag Historical (but to avoid stuffs like Fushigi Yuugi, of course I had to stop Shoujo from appearing). Then one thing hit me: a lot of historical manga (at least the ones on OneManga) are manhwa or manhua…
After some refining, OM spurted me a reasonable list of 10-15 or so historical seinen/josei manga. I went through most of them, though I’ve actually read most of them already. But flicking through the list, I found something interesting: Shut Hell, also known as Akuryou. A quick résumé of the story’s contextual position goes along the line of: it’s early 13th century and Genghis Khan had united most of the Mongol tribes. He now plans on invading the western Xia (Tây Hạ) country and erasing it from the world map altogether. Our story opens with a young man in contemporary Japan who has vivid dreams of battles from the time, through the eyes of a soldier of western Xia – she’s the main heroine they call “Shut Hell”. Once he meets Suzuki, his conscience is transported into the dreams with the help from an ancient music instrument. We now get to read about how a forgotten son of Genghis Khan and the devil woman Shut Hell traces their journey through Western China to help preserve Xia’s culture and writing.
It has its fair share of lame-ness, however the plot intrigues me as a historical-amateur. Too bad only 17 chapters seem to have been released. Hopefully it’ll grow in time!
Here’s an artwork from Shut Hell (link is to TVTropes) to tease your appetite (if any!)
Shut Hell, author's artwork
I want to blog more about other stuffs and not just manga but it’ll have to wait until I get enough stuffs to put into one blog entry! For now, it’s until next time… Stay tuned!
孝