| Started reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition today! I am amused at the plot synopsis's similarity to the Marly Krushkhova plotline from Count Zero. His writing seems to have improved quite a bit in the interim (disclaimer: it's been years since I read Count Zero). There were all of these ragged edges hanging all over Count Zero, and the plot was just, hmm. It was just lacking something, or... more like it had something that Neuromancer had managed to avoid, even though Neuromancer was an earlier work and very stylistically similar.
I need to study more literary criticism, so as to find words for this sort of thing?
Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive were both a little crappy, in my ill-explored opinion, even though the former featured one of my most very favorite lines/scenes ever. The narrative poetry in the space station? With the robot arms? *_____________________________* F'serious.
Also, Cayce's literal allergy to brand names in Pattern Recognition is Epic Win. Or, well, I guess I feel sympathetic, especially since advertising is so ubiquitous these days. But it's just awesome. Also also, Cayce is a very similar spelling to my own "Jayce" (and she even pronounces it "Case", not "Casey"!), but I didn't know about Ms. Pollard when I'd needed a name for my own character...
Oh man. I'm not sure if I expected Megatokyo to ever again achieve a truly epic moment. And yet 1241 might be close. Warning, mild spoilers! Or something.
The initial exchange between the two ends up feeling very Ralph and Sam, though it's not even clear, initially, whether Largo intends to oppose Ed. But Largo's subsequent cheerful declaration of a RL Deathmatch is strangely thrilling. These are two characters who have historically lived in different worlds. Ok, so it's not as ridiculous as Piro declaring same, but... Yesterday Ed killed Miho. Largo's effective in computer battles, and has shown himself to be proficient at creatively misusing things in his environment to bring down heavies. But he's a pretty normal guy in terms of hand-to-hand combat ability. He doesn't have the same sort of "always victorious" halo floating above his head that Erika seems to have whenever she actually fights someone. He's not a Magical Girl, or a Ninja, or able to match Ed in diabolical crazy like Dom (there's no doubt he's crazy, but he's not a monster).
It's like... it's not quite as bad as one of the civvies in Sailor Moon challenging, say, Nephrite or Beryl, but it's close. More like Xander challenging The Mayor?
I sorta suspect that this is just my kneejerk reaction, and that Ed will be defeated in some sort of unconventional way, rather than via Largo actually thwopping him with his bat. Or maybe Ed will kill Largo! That would suck, but at the same time would be sort of a daring move.
(The "Wolf and Sheepdog" Wikipedia tab was truncated by Firefox, and I was amused, because it took me a moment to remember that I hadn't looking up Wolf and Spice this recently.) | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment   |
| Contemptible con plague! I will destroy you with my bare pseudopods! Do you hear me?!? My immune system will have blood! My immune system will have VENGEANCE!
(Note that I am not actually sure what variety of flu I have.) | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| Hello World,
I was born today!
Yours,
The vagabond, Jean
P.S. When you consider what time of year it is, this probably has at least a second figurative meaning beyond the one I'd originally intended. Two years old, soon if not today or already! 
P.P.S. I use the original phrasing of the title, and not "baby boy", because I have always thought that it sounded very euphonious. XD
P.P.P.S. Still not enough. But getting there.
P.P.P.P.S. The post-scripts are much longer than the letter itself. HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT, WORLD. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | "Have you ever been out and about with Himoto, enjoying the Japanese countryside, only to find yourselves caught in a freak downpour? Was she in a snit the whole rest of the day? Did you know what to do about it? Did it ruin the rest of your trip? Come to this panel, and trained Himoto-appeasers Jay and Tan will teach you Why Himoto Hates the Rain, and why she loves it, too..." | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I want to stay up and write stores about Guan Yin and her fictional sister, who hears the cries of joy in the world, but had better go finish my sleeping instead. >_>; | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Nova Science Now's piece on Yoky Matsuoka (who worked on Cog [1]), women in math and science, and neurologically-controlled robotic prosthetics.
[1] What! The Cog project stopped work in 2003? That makes me sad. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This is more than a little bit rambly, but manages to, I think, contain no major spoilers.
Watched Byousoku 5 Centimeter tonight. Heh. Little worried that I'll end up like that. Not that I'm stuck on anyone so much as just sorta stuck. But different diseases can have the same symptoms, the same prognosis.
They graduated in 1999, ha ha ha ha. Cute.
SHINKAI Makoto is a great director. This was definitely one of his films. XD
"Visually stunning", as the AniDB tag says. Every part of every scene has been lovingly rendered by a man (or, well, these days, by a team of animators) who is clearly in love with... how to put it. The experience of living, I guess. The detail of living. That same sort of thing I tried to explain to someone one night while wandering around Ypsi, about peering into peoples' windows, observing how porchlights cast shadows and thinking about what it would be like to carry groceries past those shadows and through the door after a long day at work.
Heh. If anything, 5cm/sec deserves the "Anything Can Be Awesome" tag just as much as shows like Death Note, if for a very different reason.
I disagree with AniDB's "peaceful" tag, however. I can tell you from personal experience that living that way is not exactly peaceful, even if looks that way. More like living with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake.
Very emotionally involving. It did that same anxiety-inducing thing that "The Place Promised In Our Early Days" has been doing to me the last couple of times that I watched it. Jeez, I wanted to explode. His characters are always so stuck, and they don't really know how to get out. Or maybe it's even beyond their power. Hoshi no Koe involved light-years of distance. 5cm, more firmly grounded in reality, manages to be just as cruel using only half the length of Japan.
However, Shinkai-san is no Miyazaki, no matter what the blurbs on DVD covers claim. A great artist and director, unquestionably, but he's very much his own creator. For one thing, Miyazaki's been all over the map, as far as the type of films he's made. Whereas Shinkai has--thus far at least--tended to keep telling a very similar story. All three (four, if one counts that "She and Her Cat" short included on the Hoshi no Koe DVD) of his films have been slow, thoughtful pieces with only a couple of main characters, generally centering around some sort of adolescent or early adult heartache. Even the mecha battles in Hoshi no Koe took a back seat to contemplating (and mourning?) text messages that took 20 years to arrive.
Hmm. Had best get on to other things now. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Someone made a Stepmania level out of Haibane Renmei's "A Little Plate's Rondo". Awesome, but HILARIOUSLY ill-fitting for a DDR level. I just about died laughing.
Oh my goodness, there are more of them (and this one is ridiculously complex, holy cow).
Incidentally, according to a silly psychology test I just took, this song is supposed to represent "my heart". I think that I am flattered. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| *Jay's mind is softly humming tonight, to the tune of some quiet old sadness*
...You know, this seems to be a pretty normal state. I think I like it. Mono no aware? | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Watching Spice and Wolf, besides being a really good time, is actually a little depressing. There's no way I could play the same game with someone that those two do. Well, probably not? I dunno. And, well, I know that their's isn't the only sort of game in town, but still.
I wonder if I could even write a relationship as well as this? I mean, there are plenty of tradeoffs in the writing, where they could've branched out and explored parts of the plot or the world in more depth and it would've been interesting. But the writing skates really elegantly through any compromises that are forced on the series because of it's limited run. Perhaps the best writing makes efficient use of external details to further, more or less, a single plot thread?
Depends on what you're looking for in a book, I guess. Some people like Amy Hempel[1]... But some people like Tolkien and Robert Jordan and so forth, too.
( Obscure, one-sentence--but fairly significant--spoiler! )
Bandai's super-accelerated release of Kannagi, to coincide with their announcement of the license, is pretty impressive from a technical angle (though I wonder if the translation and/or dub have suffered as a result? I dunno; haven't checked it out), but why couldn't Funimation have done that with Spice and Wolf instead? Otaku can be pretty fickle when it comes to half-year to year-long lag times between licensing and release, and this is one series I'd definitely like to see do well.
Other news! Oh yeah, other things exist outside of anime. In other news, I'd like to be able to say that I've been programming like mad on interesting and amazing projects, or that I've been a huge help in getting Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 ready to go out the door, or something, but really all I did tonight was write a rudimentary screen-scraper. Reads in files that contain the saved output of dir commands, and spits them into an Access database for indexing. (Bet you can guess what I use that for. That is to say, always use the APIs when you can, yes, but this is handy for times when APIs don't work so well, like for cataloging DVDs. XD) At least I feel like I'm learning stuff or, at the very worst, wasting time practicing programming.
Hmm. Had better sleep. Lots of things besides programming and anime that need getting done, too.
[1] Whom, in the spirit of full disclosure, I only know about because she was recommended to me a few years by ago as a master of the short story. Thank goodness I wrote her name down. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Ah, oatmeal, breakfast, lunch, or dinner of Champions.
There was something else I was going to write. What was it. Oh well.
Oh! Did I take any pictures at ACen 2006? Really maybe just two photos? That would seem sort of out of character for me, but also sort of fitting with where I was at at the time. I dunno.
I love it when a new major point release of Firefox breaks all of the Add-ons that I use the most. >_>; Revert! Revert! | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I will probably keep editing this post for an hour or so, like some sort of bloated, misshapen clump of twitter-tweets. (I was just going to say "twitters" even though that's not the word for it, because "tweets" sounds somewhat more generic. Then I said "twitter-tweets" to myself, in my head, and it sounded as wonderfully misshapen as this LJ entry might end up being.)
o/" Sandwiches, sandwiches, on my arms from you, sandwiches sandwiches sandwiches o/"
This gets stuck in my head all the time. It's sooo not even funny, except that it's hilarious. XD
And on a "randomness found in my mp3 directory" note, I would like to, uh, note that due to my eclectic and self-imposed, somewhat isolationist musical upbringing, this Cocteau Twins track sounds like Raspberry Jam. XD Now I want to go listen to that album. o/" I scream Easter is for me / and my plank-eyed soul o/"
Ok, maybe I won't keep editing this, as I seem to be twittered out, not to mention in dire need of sleep. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Some days I think that I might finally be developing enough common sense that I have a chance to make it somewhere in the world. Some days I think that it'll never be enough. Some days I think both of these things simultaneously. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| There are so many things in this world to see and hear and do! I want to be a sparrow with a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, a thousand wings, and a thousand brains. Though that would leave me a rather large, misshapen lump, and ill-suited to doing anything. Perhaps I would rather be a networked collective of five hundred sparrows. And if you think that I won't need those five hundred extra brains, well, you're so wrong that you don't even know how wrong you are.
Chirp! | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Only on page nine, but still. Such tasty words!!
I think I might be able to write descriptions like these, but I would probably have to sit and ponder each for an hour or more, and probably with some greater wisdom than I have currently.
Oh for the day when I have that kind of leisure.
No, seriously. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Spammy links:
Sandra and Woo, a webcomic about a girl and her pet raccoon. Current comic (4/20) isn't the best one to walk in on, though. Some of the archive's highlights include Grammar Nazi, Tweety meets his match (this comic and following), zippers and space stations, eating Satan... and so forth...
They do some interesting serious comics, as well.
The art style is pretty neat. Clean line art, and very expressive. Style's not exactly European, not exactly Asian. The writer is German, which makes for occasionally interesting English, though I count that as a plus too.
Sigh. I really don't need another webcomic to follow. XD
Other links!
On the problems of anthropologists and comic artists: Cow tools and Coon tools...
Give a tiny motor a smiley face and a mission and you get Tweenbots. Adorable.
My local comic shop has a link to this page on their site, and it creeps me the frick out. O_o | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| That is a person; that is not a pair of legs and a flapping skirt. That is a person; that is not a pair of legs and a flapping skirt. That is a person; that is not a pair of legs and a flapping skirt. That is a person; that is not a pair of legs and a flapping skirt. That is a person; that is not a pair of legs and a flapping skirt.
Contemptible male gaze. I continue my half-hearted meditations upon it's demise. Despite this, Munto is, all considered, a pretty good show. More on that later. (The thing that unnerves me about Natsu no Arashi, despite the promise of its concept, art, and the first episode's clever handling of short-distance time travel, is just how well its camera angles reproduce the male gaze.)
There was a lot of stuff that I was thinking about on the drive home. Let's see if I can remember any of it.
So I watched the last episode of Spice and Wolf last night. It's nice to see the occasional example of Lawrence being a smart businessman, because the show spends enough time on him recovering from his poorer decisions that it's easy to forget that he can also be pretty competent.
It's really refreshing to see an anime that deals so deftly with daily life--and such a different daily life than our own! There's a sprinkling of gods and whatnot, enough to help keep it interesting, but not so much that it disrupts a basic feeling of... humanity. Sure, super power stories have their own sort of craft and skill, but there's a certain... particular and fascinating cleverness that one needs in order to write a good story about normal humans. Because they're such /limited/ creatures. In chess, even though the game as a whole is a complex web of interrelationships, any particular piece may have only one or two moves available to them. And say you abolish the teams, make each piece out for itself, or perhaps partnered with one or two others. And then you abolish turns, so that it's more like a real-time strategy game. The pieces would need that same special sort of cleverness to maximize the use of each of their limited moves--or even to survive.
In keeping with that theme but on a slightly smaller scale, the interactions between Horo and Lawrence are also very compelling (and more strongly so than the economics, I feel). They bicker playfully, talk seriously, flirt openly, get on each others' nerves, feint and jab, intricately mixing jest and honest expressions of emotion... And the negotiation! Everything is negotiation between them. I know that on some level that's the case with every relationship ever, be it friends, business partners, lovers, or what have you, but it's really played it in the foreground here. Given Horo and Lwarence's natures this should, of course, come as no surprise.
Horo is so wonderfully proud. Not in an obnoxious way, either, though she can also verge on haughty. She twists and dances between kind and teasing, soft and sharp without ever becoming enough of a tsundere to feel fetishized or pandering. Hers is a very... wolfish pride. I can't think how to put it any better, though she compares favorably to Shinku better aspects. Willful, determined, dedicated to those close to her. Some of the most interesting conversations happen when her ideas of honor and personal integrity clash with Lawrence's occasional willingness to go out of his way for other people at the expense of himself. Even (or especially) when it's Horo he's sacrificing of himself for! (Or perhaps in some of those cases she's just upset that he's being mistreated. There's at least a component of that, I'm sure, but it doesn't overshadow the former.)
_Quinn, with your sensibilities, I can see why you in particular find Horo compelling. XD Perhaps even more than Tan. I remember this one particular short story of yours...
The art is beautiful, but in places surprisingly undetailed. Like they were trying to evoke masterful landscape paintings but could only afford to get 80 or 90% of the way there. I do not think that Mr. Funk would've been consistently happy with the quality of their clouds. But it was still very pretty. The animation, considering this is not a very action-oriented show, is a little rough in places, but does exactly what it needs to.
*Waits impatiently for the DVDs, and/or light novels* Yeah yeah, fansubs, whatever. Somebody deserves some money for this.
Strangely, though it's such an awesome show, there's not a lot of Spice And Wolf that feels easily accessible to my writer's sensibilities. This may say something condemning about my social intuition, or it may just mean that I need to think more carefully about the show and watch it again. Probably both of those are the same thing.
I... yeesh. I've been brewing this whole huge meditation on relationships and my own... currently detached relationship to the idea of relationships. But in the process of writing a Spice and Wolf review, I seem to have forgotten how I was going to transition between the two.
Oh, right! Horo, Shinku, Alita... N, A, A, Æ... Ha ha ha. The fact that I find willful women compelling, and how it will one day be the death of me. XD XD XD Well, that is perhaps exaggeration.
But for now I need to feed the dog, go climb around on the roof, get ready for anime, attempt a kidnapping, and... go to anime! Dun dun dun. Oh! And buy the latest volume of Alita. XD | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| So it's the kind of thing to keep you wondering if maybe everything's the same
It keeps you coming back for more.
So it's the kind of thing to keep you wondering if maybe everything's the same
And it's happening again. | | comments: Leave a comment |
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falling over laughing