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2011 in manga

2012-01-27T21:12:00.001-08:00

2011 in Manga

So this year's been pretty good for manga developments, I guess. Probably will just go through all the series I read regularly and talk about the developments they had during 2011.

Wait wait hold on first what the heck where are all these supposed 2011 posts, why did this take so long, etc?

There are many reasons but whatever let's just forget about it.

Bakuman

This year we had... Lots of Nanamine, it seems. He's an okay character in my book. Good execution of a pretty traditional villain-type, which isn't common. What else... Eiji's run to end Crow was pretty entertaining, it was a nice exciting arc with some genuine suspense. Their new series is all Death Note mode, seems cool, always knew they'd do that eventually so it was pretty, I dunno, triumphant or climatic or something. Whole series has that tone lately. Even the Aoki/Hirawaru story climaxed in a hilarious fashion. Really seems like the series is wrapping up and I'm glad, I think if they go out now with a terrific arc, final showdown against Eiji, all that, they'd really cement this as a great shonen manga. A

Berserk

So this year we got something like uh seven chapters of Berserk which is okay but they're all just him dicking around in some big sea god belly, fighting pirates or zombies or something, and then there was mermaids and I don't know. I really don't. Chapters are still really fun and exhilarating and just absolute elder god tier artwork but I don't even know what I'm looking at half the time and I'm having a hard time remembering what I'm excited about OH YEAH FAIRY ISLAND, let's get on over to Fairy Island, okay? I honestly can't even remember why we're going, something about Casca? I just want to see more of Griffith's sweet-ass kingdom and for Guts to see it so he can scream at it. B+

Bleach

Oh... God. What... what is this. What is happening? This year in Bleach we went from confusion to utter despair as the shambles of plot staggering out from the great corpse of Aizen proved, as we all knew deep down, to be nothing more than... nothing. Ichigo meets some people who want to do something something powers and then surprise twist betrayal. Then a big fight with the absolute weirdest pacing I have ever experienced in anything, everyone shows up, the sideliners get sidelined again, everyone introduced dies or something, and we're right back where we started with even less hope, if it was possible. D

Fairy Tail

2011 covered most of the S-rank examination/Tenrou island arc, basically from the initial fight between Markov and Hades to the supposed time skip. I dunno, when I look back at this arc, I can honestly say I do not feel even the slightest bit good about it. I seem to recall tolerating it when it was running because there was a lot of crazy art and some of the fights were pretty entertaining, but what manages as 5-minute-a-week entertainment really can't stand up as, y'know, good shonen manga. Like, what was the plot here? Fairy Tail's special island is under invasion, sure, that's a good enough premise. But nothing really follows from it. More and more contrived stuff just kept cropping up. I felt like I was playing Katawa Crash. Or rather I'm just thinking about Katawa Crash a whole lot these days and felt like saying that, but the analogy works. He writes like his characters fight – in a corner? Losing steam? Don't worry, something will pop out of nowhere and give you a little boost for no reason. And then that timeskip. Oh man, don't get me started. What happened there? It just baffles me. As does most of the transition into the new arc, although some of those chapters were kinda fun. On the plus side, the characters are still likable and I'm danged if his art isn't some of the best in a regular weekly series. I think he knows the plot is about as feeble as it's allowed to get and compensates by working really really hard at every other aspect. And that's more than admirable. C

It's Not My Fault That I'm Not Popular!

New series this year and oh boy is it funny. Art is perfect, timing is perfect, gags are perfect, premises, situations, references, everything. I feel like it's sort of painted itself into a corner like most sitcoms where no matter how great they do characterization or how intricate a world they build up, they'll never be able to do anything besides just funny. Which is fine I guess but I feel like there's some stuff here that approaches a border of being able to actually provide some touching insights into a tragic character. Or maybe not. Just funny is more than good enough when it is this funny. S-

Naruto

So the big war arc (penultimate arc?? I'm crossing my fingers!!) has been going on for about a year now, eh? Well geez it's been one big blur for me. Some of the villains have actually been kinda neat, I'll admit. I mean, Kishimoto can do whatever he wants with this stupid thing. It is stupid, yeah, but at least when he does something stupid he makes it so stupid that he can get away with anything. Like an army of resurrected ninjas, okay. That's dumb. But he gets the chance to bring back any character he wants, plus add any new one that can do anything and he can write whatever “cool” back story he wants for them too. Former Kages, legendary assassins, whatever. Total freedom. That's pretty smart. Sure I can only remember like two or three winners generated by this system – those being a few of the former kages that had cool designs and did neat things – and I can remember many more utter failures (remember those Batman villain guys with the magic jar that would suck you in if you said the wrong word? I wish I didn't) but really I think what's most unimpressive is the vast number of characters introduced this way that were just really really uninteresting. Like guys who would get multi-chapter arcs and they'd just have these stupid little gimmicks that got old and usually forgotten within two pages and then it would just be another ninja fight. Seems weird that for characters that are supposed to specialize and individualize as they matured, pretty much everyone in Naruto these days seems to fight using the same stupid fireballs or summons or big wave of whatever moves. Dumb dumb dumb. Seriously the more I think about it the more utterly mindblowingly dumb things I remember like the whole retcon about Gaara's mother or when Madara showed up and threw a big rock or the stupid little arc in the medical tent with the imposters or oh geez it just goes on and on, special negative bonus points for any fight where the enemy's emotions would leak through or whatever and they'd shout their weaknesses at the good guys, that was absolutely painful. And uh anything with the tailed beasts is dumb, there was another “what's the real body?” fight that was dumb, lots of fights that start and then don't go anywhere aw man screw it this was just too dumb. F

One Piece

Okay, so was this the year One Piece jumped the shark? Or went into the deep end? Har har har harummm yeah Fishman Island wasn't quite what I hoped it would be and it's really bugging me. Pacing problems I can forgive, it reads a lot better in volumes, but there's something else a little weird. People compared it to Skypiea a lot and I think Oda wanted it to be like a new Skypiea maybe? With the ending I get that sense, plus a lot of the other parallels. But Skypiea's real strength I think was the really simple three-act structure to it. They showed up, had an adventure, got all split up and came back together. That was act one, lots of world building, few major fight scenes. Then they had a good reason to go back in, the whole survival game which I think is generally just genius gave a really clear but compelling way to get everybody fighting, there was several really good fight scenes between established characters, and the build-up to the final act, with the flashback (I guess this could be an act in itself, but it's really more of a gaiden, if you will) and the ark arc (lol)... it was just sublime. With Fishman Island, everything was muddled. Everything seemed a bit less natural. Many characters underwhelmed. Instead of spread out all over this cool island, things seemed to be happening in this vague poorly space that seemed almost... dare I say it? Bleachean. And none of the fights really seemed that exciting once we realized that the New Fishman Pirates weren't real enemies. I mean, it was cool 'cause we got to see the Straw Hats' new powers, but it didn't really seem to be building to anything. And the climax was just pretty absurd, I think. Van der Decken going down basically off-screen, Hodi not really doing anything interesting, and the final suspense of Luffy almost punching a boat to death. It's just... weird. And all the half-assed resolutions of Caribou and the treasures and Shirley's prophecy really don't seem like Oda. Unless they're not really resolutions but geez I don't know what they could do at this point. ON THE PLUS SIDE: the flashback has grown on me since I last talked about it, the art's fantastic as always, there were some really exciting parts, all the characters and their new powers are so cool I just oh wow, and oh man that Big Mom arc is looking really really exciting, the character designs of her crew are just fantastic, I am hyped. A-

Oyasumi Punpun

This year we got volumes 7, 8 and 9 but really volume 7 actually came out the year before so I'll just focus on 8 and 9. Both of these volumes really impressed me, but what can you expect, it's Asano! Uhh I dunno I feel like I've said mainly what I want to say when I first talked about the volumes. I think the series is wrapping up and it's doing so in a grand, all-encompassing fashion. How it will end I have no idea but I think we're in for something truly special. Both the Pegasus and Punpun plots are getting pretty intense, and all the side characters are being developed wonderfully as well. The big twist with his friend uh the hallucinating friend, that was pretty crazy. As was the holy crap realization of the connection between the cult Aiko's family was in way back in volume 1 being the same one that Pegasus is involved in now. Oh yeah retroactive spoiler warning whoops. Also not sure if there will be any supernatural elements or if I want that or not. Hmm, hmm. Good stuff though yeah. *

To Love-Ru Darkness

Man why am I admitting I read this? Well no one's ever called me out on something like this in my blog 'cause no one reads my blog so bun whatever. I guess the real question is why am I reading this in the first place? I don't know it's just fun, I guess, and I'm pretty invested in the series and characters after reading all of the original and all that. Plus sometimes they provide small bits of what appears to be an actual plot when they have time but I don't really see that going anywhere. Oh well, it's more of what it is, and I think it's just getting more and more refined in its unrefinedness. B

Yotsuba&!

So this year I think we got 10 chapters? Probably 12 actually I don't think I remember him missing a month. And honestly I don't know what I can say about Yotsuba, it certainly hasn't gotten any worse which means it's one of the best comics running. And actually a lot of these recent chapters have been above even that lofty average – Duramulin's surgery arc was intense! Cameras? Classic! The return of Danbo??? I dunno this is probably the BEST comic running right now! Yeah yeah!! **

Okay those are the series I read regularly this year and how I thought they did this year.

This year I also read a bunch of old manga but really the only ones I feel I ought to mention particularly is that I read Nausicaa and Phoenix for the first time and loved both of them, but more serious rambling on that subject will have to wait until I do some sort of “top 10 manga” post, so like essentially never sorry I'm lazy.

Next will be... anime of 2011? I dunno.

2011 in books

2012-01-05T21:23:00.001-08:00

2011 in new books

Uhhh... the only book I read that actually came out this year was The Pale King. And that was far from having been written this year. Hmmm.

I'm not especially happy with not being at all current with literature but whatever can't have them all.

2011 in old books

Okay since I keep track of such things I'll just go through and talk about every book I read this year in roughly chronological order. Crazy? Ha but you're reading it who is crazy now???

James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Reread this near the start of the year, can't remember especially why except that I guess I was just reading stuff on the new kindle. I actually got a nice hardcover version of this from 1960 today for five bux at the used book store. It's illustrated too. But yeah good book second favorite book. ****

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

I didn't read this through cover to cover again but I did probably reread the entirety at least once this year as it was sitting next to the toilet. Compared to stuff like Finnegans Wake or Infinite Jest, which I also had in the “study” for frequent nonlinear “study”, GR is probably the most fun 'cause the mysteries of the text can usually be found just through concentrated imagining, not novel-spanning analysis or uh whatever cosmic knowledge is required for FW. Plus the whole thing is fairly hilarious. Good stuff. ***

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Idiot

I think I started this last year but only finished it this year. Prolly my third favorite Dostoyevsky. Maybe the best example of a purely sympathetic character who is compelling and generates genuine sympathy in any novel outside of Alyosha I guess. ***

Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

Reread this some afternoon on the kindle 'cause I was curious if his little drawings were recreated in the ebook. They were. This is still my favorite Vonnegut, I think it captures a lot of concepts he goes for in a lot of his books the best, like, the “running joke” idea thing, the idea of author as god within book, some of the best Kilgore Trout novel within novels, etc. *

James Joyce - Ulysses

Reread this twice cover to cover this year, plus probably most of it three or four times in sections. Definitely have sank more hours into this than any other book this year, probably twice as much time as the second most read book, Infinite Jest I guess. Anyways uh still the best piece of text produced by mankind and an artistic achievement on the tier of Beethoven's Ninth, Tetris, etc. *****

David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest

First big novel I read this year. Also the biggest novel I've read ever. Beautiful, beautiful book. I regard it now as the true manifesto outlining the death of the dehumanizing cynicism of postmodern aesthetics. Is that a “crazy sentence” either because it means nothing or means something untrue? I'll have to get into it more later but uh I would love to see it regarded down the line as influential in a new era of sincerity in writing. I'd love to see it as influential in any of the millions of other regards in which it is brilliant, too. ***

Stuff by H.P. Lovecraft

I read a whole lot of his short stories at the start of the year. I can't remember which ones but obviously your famous Cthulhu stuff and colour from space and what have you. Some were great, others just decent. His language is always very vivid and evocative and imagining whatever crazy thing he's dreamed up is trivial so the quality hinges mainly on the novelty of the idea. And really most of them were novel at the time, it's just the ones that are easier to replicate have been replicated many times and now feel lame. So I dunno, fun stuff in general.

Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita

Starting in on the Nabokov with his most famous. And for good reason! This is a memorable, one of a kind book. Yeah yeah unreliable narrator risque subject matter they're all novel but I think the quality really comes from the beauty of the prose. Holy cow the man can write, can't he? What I remember more than any plot element is the descriptions of things that really could be found in any story. ***

Tao Lin - Shoplifting from American Apparel

I figured I had to read this and it was short so whatever. Seems like lots of people on the internet are writing like him, even those people who don't like him so much. At times I think I'm in that category. Guy has some insight and poetics but really I dunno like really there isn't much actual content here. B

Jack Kerouac - On the Road

I guess this was the beat generation's Tao Lin? Ha ha not at all. Seriously the frantic writing of the futureless has certainly changed over the years, hasn't it? This is gripping explosive prose that stirs the most irrational parts of the inner soul. *

ulillillia - The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters

Geez what can you say of a masterpiece like this? I don't think I've ever seen someone's artistic vision rendered so acutely, so accurately. Seriously this is like a 1:1 pixel-by-pixel mapping of everyone's favorite posthuman's imagination. *

David Cross - I Drink for a Reason

Funny stuff, I dunno, some of it kinda hit or miss but mostly laughs. Worthy of being written which is what I think these celebrity comedian text-version-of-their-routine books should strive to be. A-

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar

Oof, bleak! Third bleakest novel I read this year? Or second? Some real nice writing makes her plight pretty intimate. I loved her poetry so I love this too, that checks out. S+

David Foster Wallace - The Pale King

dfw moves on from tackling the extremities of human emotion to the extremes of unemotion. Well and a lot of other emotions too but here we actually have a writer actually sitting down and going “today I am going to write about boredom”. Amazing. Some of his best writing, and thus some of the best writing in the post-internet voice. Also contains some beautiful beautiful forays into the realm of “confrontational sincerity” that was conceptualized in his earlier stuff, really the only example of long prose in this mode, which I honestly believe/hope will be the major literary style of decades to come. It's also tragically unfinished and disjointed without the microcosms of resolution seen in his short story collection, which makes it end up being just... dissatisfying. Ahhhh welllll. *

Milton O. Percival - William Blake's Circle of Destiny

I was reading some essays on Finnegans Wake and one got really into Blakean mythology and mysticism and all that so I felt pretty lucky when I picked up this nice book on the very subject. Sorta dry but I suppose most literary explication texts will be. Very informative and insightful, really spells out with clearness and organization Blake's system of mythology. Has great reproductions of Blake's drawings, too. S

Ernest Hemmingway - The Old Man and the Sea

I dunno why I left this classic for so long. I feel like I missed like a whole category of writing, of the like, single event in epic mode with allegorical easiness. Well I guess some Orwell stuff qualifies, anyways yeah I still wish I had read this earlier. It was the sort of thing that I heard so much about that eventually it seemed like I had read it. But yeah, gripping powerful stuff. I read it over a weekend where I was sick, I think that helped me get in a good mood for it. **

Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

There was stuff I liked here, yeah, some nice writing and an intriguing plot, but lots of it is pretty silly too. Basically he can't write well enough yet to get away with whatever he wants. Almost, but not quite. Maybe that's just the translation, I dunno. I wish he could be like Pynchon and make everything wonderful, but not quite. A

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

I dunno why I waited to read this one for so long either. I think it was on some level just 'cause other aspects of Dawkins bug me, but that's a dang silly thing and I regret that pettiness. On another level I just thought I probably knew all the relevant stuff from this but geez no, even though I basically understood gene theory before but explanation made me realize quickly I didn't really know it. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. And now I act like I know even though I just read the most surface explanation of it. Cool cool whatever. S+

Haruki Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

Took another stab at Murakami, had more fun this time. The simpler plot suits him nicely, and his little artistic commentary tangents seemed way more natural. S-

David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Great stuff. Titular essay is probably my favorite, but his look into the dynamics of reflexivity and cynicism of TV as a medium is one of the most insightful looks into the culture of my generation that I've ever seen. *

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

Reread this, can't remember why, why not I guess. Second favorite Dostoyevsky, very focused, very intense. A real thrillride, something you might not expect from the Russians. Well maybe not quite a thrillride, something like a fast and scenic train ride through Siberia. ***

Jane Austen - Mansfield Park

Had to read this for class. Brutally uninteresting. Empty glorification of insubstantial idleness. Only redeeming feature is the prettiness of the writing. C

David Foster Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Great stuff in general, some a bit hit and miss but some on par with the best of Infinite Jest. Lots of cool experiments into literary form, not all successes but the inclusion of ugly attempts seems endearingly sincere and insightful and entertaining. This is also I think the first time I think people actually hard called out the fundamental paradoxes of sincerity in a postmodern environment. Sure, he didn't really escape that trap, but at least he acknowledged it. S

David Foster Wallace – Oblivion

Oh geez this is brutal. Tragedy too intense for anything longer than a short story. Some of his best work in both the neo-sincere and postmodern “writing as logical exercise” modes. **

Richard Harrison - The Hero of the Play

Had to read this for class. Collection of poems about hockey. Fun, sure, good stuff, good way of addressing subject matter. B+

Richard Outram - Mogul Recollected

Had to read this for class. Collection of poems centered around the drowning of an elephant after the sinking of a circus ship. Lots of animal humanizing stuff, fine with that. Also like half-parody of traditional poetic styles, that's always a lot of fun. Some really deep ideas here, too. A

Marilyn Dumont - Really Good Brown Girl

Had to read this for class. Collection of poems from a Metis author. I actually met her, yeah! It was pretty neat, fun to talk to an author about their work. I wrote a pretty decent essay about her approach to dual acknowledgment of cultural perspective and refusal of the expectations of that perspective. Fun times. A

Kate Chopin - The Awakening

Had to read this for class right after Austen and I was like ehhhhhhh bet I'm gonna hate this too, but nope! This was a very refreshing piece of work. Really ahead of its time, beautiful prose, complex ideas about societal roles that has some good relevance today without being too hamfisted about it. Wrote an essay about this one where I went crazy trying to explain some half-baked idea about dreams structures but my TA liked it so okay. S

Aiyoku no Eustia demo

This was a visual novel demo that my roommate got me to read. I had never been into VNs but this started turning me around. The release of Katawa Shoujo is obviously the big event, though, oh man excited for that. Anyways uh since this is a VN I wasn't sure if I should talk about it here or in the post I plan on making about comics/manga or the planned one about video games or what, but whatever here's good enough. Plot/setting/protagonist all good, on the tier of good Final Fantasies. Dunno if it'll live up to that reputation in terms of scope/villain but so far so good. Supporting cast is obviously pretty different in role from FF games, dunno yet if there'll be like, routes, but I doubt it. I like all the characters though. Music and voice acting are great, fan translation reads nicely even if it's more like, light novel/anime narration tier than a contender to real lit. A

James Joyce – Dubliners

Reread this after we took on “Araby” in class. Still my favorite collection of short stories, even if only “The Dead” is on the tier of Ulysses. Recently I've been reading a lot about Joyce's early work and first attempts to be published, it makes me respect this work even more. ***

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

Had to read this for class. Pretty nice book overall. I liked the greyness of the morals and the strong sense of immersion in the community. When a setting influences the prose on a very basic level I really find myself getting into it much more. Plus we talked about Colonialism in class a bunch, interesting stuff there. S-

Thomas King - Green Grass Running Water

Read this one for class too. Postmodern look at the intersection of the western academic/intellectual canon and the traditions of Aboriginals with a fairly predictable moral base, albeit a more complex one than most. Comedy through the mashing up of various canonical texts that ol' trick, well, I like it. And I liked the characters and the way he writes. Good stuff Mr. King, I will look for more of your books I think. S-

That's about it for books in 2011.

Since then I've started Pale Fire, enjoying it so far but also just completely failing to “get it” on other levels.

Hopefully you enjoyed this post, I certainly enjoyed making it, you can hopefully expect to see more such things for TV and video games and anime and comics and movies and music.

Hey Steven I don't get your ranking scale

Yeah me neither. It's based off the one in ITG, I like it because it goes from letters to stars and there's no sense of something being out of something (even though in ITG this is absolutely the case). Instead the thing just gets the grade it has earned. It looks like this:

F – Absolutely nothing of value contained within.

D-

D – Insufferable. Nothing good.

D+

C-

C – Bleh, mostly average stuff, just mediocre. Maybe a few decent elements.

C+

B-

B – Good enough that you don't regret viewing it/reading it/whatever as a waste of time. Worthy of inclusion in the medium or genre.

B+

A-

A – Really enjoyable on some level. Has some ideas or elements worthy of thought and full appreciation.

A+

S-

S – Exemplary work, something great, something worthy of really sitting down and thinking about why it is so great. Contains real originality and interesting ideas.

S+

* - Fantastic. Good enough to make your jaw drop. Will stay with you for years.

** - Wonderful. Good enough to make you feel like fainting at times. Will stay with you for the rest of your life.

*** - A masterpiece. An artistic effort so magnificent that you feel you cannot, perhaps never will, be able to appreciate it fully.

**** - God tier. The sort of thing you could happily devote your life to study of. Completely changes the way you think about things on a fundamental level. Stuff that constitutes the cornerstone of a medium.

***** - The greatest artistic achievements of man.

****** and beyond – I think I'd only go here as a joke, or maybe in weird specific cases like trying to put the Hidamari characters on a scale that has Strike Witches characters at *.

No I mean I don't get what the point of it is at all, like, who rates books in such a childish manner?

Me. Because otherwise I wouldn't be able to get so enthusiastic to write up little blurbs about random stuff I've read this year. 'Cause like without the ranking what's the point of those little blurbs? I can barely begin to explain how much I liked something, let alone why, so I ought to make one of those really clear at least.

And why do you have such a detailed record of all the books you read this year? Who does that?

DON'T ASK ME THAT >=[]

My Top 10 TAS Videos of 2011

2012-01-04T08:08:00.000-08:00

Top 10 TAS Videos of the Year

I knew I had to make this post as soon as I started really investing into my theory that 2011 would somehow end up being the best year for pretty much every medium of entertainment. At the same time, despite wanting to do this from very early on, I still don't really have a very good idea of what exactly the list should contain. Okay yeah my ten favorite tool-assisted replays from video games sure but there's some ambiguity there. Should this just be actual “runs” (I eventually decided yes) or could they contain short demos and such too, and if so, was there really anything in the latter that I wanted to include? Sure maybe some of wak's tool-assisted Melee matches have the most “thrills per second” of anything I've watched, but can they compare to the impressiveness of a full run? But wait is impressiveness the word I want? Or does that lean too hard towards “difficulty to make” and not “fun to watch”? And moving on from that, what should the policy be regarding movies that are slight improvements on older movies, if it's like, just a few frames faster and more awesome than a legendary older movie, then it's obviously that much more legendary and amazing, but is a list like this better suited to things that had really never even been imagined before that particular run? Oh and should I preference stuff that's actually entertaining from a sheer visceral level over glitched out runs where you can't even tell what's happening? Or is the latter even more entertaining? And how much does my enjoyment of game elements out of the TASer's control factor in, like, the music and graphics and stuff? Really I think this is why TASvideos.org's award-show style is so much better but oh well I like lists I do lists.

I decided not to really go hard on policies and just choose stuff that I really liked watching, that I'd go back and watch again and again. All the factors I mentioned played into this, but not in any strict way.

First:

Honorable Mentions

I decided not to include the new Super Mario World any%. Even though sub-10 is amazing, the sub-5 or whatever that the new run using the credits glitch will be even better. It's the same situation with Super Mario 64 DS – sure, 8-star is cool, but 1-star will be cooler. Seiken Densetsu III and Secret of Mana both had hugely impressive runs, but I think I'd have to be a bit more intimately familiar with them to really enjoy it. Same with the amazing 8-hour Final Fantasy VIII run. The fact that Super Metroid any% had an improvement is bananas, but I opted for an even more fun Super Metroid run instead. A few other games with improvements like this – Super Mario Bros. 2, some Sonics, Mega Mans, Goldeneye, etc. - all deserve huge applause for their efforts, but I dunno, I just think they didn't have enough substance overall to keep me coming back. The Super Mario Bros. 2 warpless almost made the list and maybe I ought have just done top 20. No because then I'd spend hours getting the order right argh. Anyways uh also shoutouts to wak and brasterd and everyone else doing that's amazing Super Smash Bros. Melee videos, all of Mugg's insane glitched runs, that great butunoptimized Sunshine run from nicovideo, and tons and tons of other ones I've forgotten.

10. Ivy the Kiwi? “100%” in 15:23.86

Nintendo DS

by Ryuto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfpxcNF5sVk

This might seem like an odd choice after talking about the noninclusion of so many great runs for famous (for a reason) games. Ivy the Kiwi? is a cute enough game with a clever concept but it didn't get a whole lot of attention. I bet it would have if playing it was actually anything like this movie. Ryuto proves himself to be the master of touch-screen TASing again by twisting a Lemmings/Canvas Curse style platformer into a chaotic bullet-steering simulation. Watching the bird navigate increasingly intricate courses at non-stop break-neck speeds brings back the simplest joys of TAS. It might sound repetitive on paper, but watching the run never gets old.

9. Pokemon Blue “Gotta Catch 'Em All!” in 3:20:46.17

Super Gameboy

by p4wn3r and Mukki

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1csHl7oe3vY

One of the beautiful things about video games is how, due to their predictable logic and wide range of possibilities, the previously unimaginable can quickly become the hypothetical. Any question you can ask of a game, like, “what would happen if I got out of Kokiri Forest without beating the Deku Tree?”, you can come up with a reasonable answer for just through knowledge of the game. The beauty of TASing is how the then hypothetical becomes the real. When I saw people on the TASVideos forums discussing a run that would catch all 151 Pokemon of the first generation as quickly as possible, I wrote it off as an exercise in hypothesis. I honestly never believed I'd someday have over three hours of Pokemon-catching action in front of me, but that's TASing for you. Now, when I say action, I may be generous. The fast forward button was made for this sort of thing, I admit. And although the variety of and glitches is pretty vast and the blatant disregard for the supposed rules of the game is hilarious, this is really a run you go back and watch bits of occasionally instead of sitting down with a bowl of popcorn for the duration. But don't get me wrong, those brief visits won't fail to leave you with an undeniable sense of awe at all the brilliant creative work put into route-planning (and probably a strong case of “nostalgia sickness”). The players simply go to work on this game. Never have I seen what should be the unfeasible ultimate goal of a huge game like Pokemon deconstructed and solved with such ruthless efficiency. And yet, there's some undeniable charm in what really boils down to the adventures of the luckiest Pokemon trainer hypothetically possible.

8. Super Mario World “small only” in 1:18:23.22

SNES

by PangaeaPanga

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpdpVOutIHc

This is a category that might not sound good initially – without Yoshi or powerups, Mario's options are pretty limited. But when you look at the number of exits this run manages to clear without these luxuries, you'll quickly realize that what few tricks Mario still has will be pushed to their absolute limits. Level clearing aside, speed optimization becomes a whole new game when flying isn't an option, and some of the tricks used to eke out a few frames are mind-boggling. Super Mario World nails that miraculous instance where the fastest thing is usually the coolest looking.

7. Super Mario 64 “0-Star” in 5:03.73

Nintendo 64

by Kyman, sonicpacker, Nahoc, Molotov and SilentSlayers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBoqw7kGH00

Improvement not contained in that encode:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHBGuo0Ll58

I went back and forth about including this a few times. If you had asked me a year ago if I'd call like 2 seconds of improvement over the course of a year a “revolution” in Super Mario 64, I probably would have, well, uh, I probably would have said “yes”. But if you asked a random person that, I kinda doubt they would have. But honestly, the 0-star team continues to leave me in total shock and awe over the most seemingly minor improvements. I mean, wall-jumping up the BitFS towers? It's so simple, so elegant, and yet, you really feel the bleeding-edge sense of pushing the envelope you might get in an extremely fast new car. If I can make a weirder sort of comment here, I really feel like Mario 64, like the good sciences, is moving through periods of innovation and weirdness towards a universal, celestial perfection that we will know through its beauty and simplicity. Weird thing to seriously think, sure, but look at the final backwards long jump in that new version of BitS, doesn't that just look... right? If I can someday watch a 120-star run that is all that beautiful, I'll die a happy man.

6. Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, 2 (USA) and 3 in 10:39.75

NES/Famicom

by agwawaf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x9Pwy8C_6s

It was only a matter of time before the multi-game, single-input challenge that Mega Man fans flocked to came to Mario. Want a new favorite way to get a headache that doesn't involve binge drinking? You've found it. Iconic sound effects highlight the synchronization and the feeling of three Marios “waiting” on the last to do some trick is hilarious. The best part is, more than just the combination being very clever and entertaining, each run, although not as great as it would be solo, is still an exciting classic on its own right. These sorts of exhibitions, challenges unimaginable to an unassisted player, really prove the worth of TASing as a creative and enjoyable art form.

5. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island “any%” in 1:33:40.18

SNES

by Carl Sagan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2sCG3X8WBU

Most TASing comes from within the community, that is, someone who makes a TAS of a given game is more likely to be an experienced TASer rather than an experienced player of that game. This is a notable exception, and it shows. Carl Sagan is a name well known to uh, fans of science. Sorry. That will be my only reference to the player's internet handle. Carl Sagan is also a name known for different reasons to fans of Yoshi's Island, as well, as an extremely talented unassisted speedrunner. Watching his unassisted runs feels like watching a TAS – not just because of the preciseness and inhuman speed, but because of the crazy tricks and shenanigans he manages to squeeze in. It's a full celebration of the game, born out of a love that hasn't diminished through expertise. So when he actually TASes, this same attitude blooms even further. Autoscrollers becomes circuses of juggling. Enemies become platforms. Doors become warps. One of the fundamental aspects contributing to the joy of playing Nintendo platformers is that few things slow you down when you do them. In Yoshi's Island, this is especially true, and in a TAS, it's especially doable. Give all these possibilities and tools to someone with a proven dedication and appreciation to the game and the result is something beautiful. Can't wait for the 100%!

4. Mega Man & Bass “100 CDs” in 38:07.60

Super Famicom

by sparky, parrot14green and woabclf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAJ44SRoYpQ

Mega Man is an incredibly difficult series to TAS, I'd imagine. With an arsenal of weapons and tricks to add platforms or little boosts – each of them with limited ammunition – the amount of options in each room can be head-spinning, especially when you consider the many speedy TAS-only zipping glitches that end up being possible in the weirdest of places. Add to that the ability to choose stages and thus unlock weapons in an order of your choosing, creating a challenging “traveling salesman” problem, and you get a puzzle with a solution that would induce migraines in all but the most veteran TASers. Luckily for viewers, these same challenges create one of the most beautifully busted and varied series to watch. For my money, there's no run that provides better Mega Man hijinks than this full exploration of one of the series' best games. Sure, the NES-era might be more thoroughly annihilated through glitches, and even if skips of that magnitude were possible here, the requirement to hunt down all the CDs would prevent them, but when the gameplay is this entertaining, I'm glad we have to actually make it through the whole stage. The sheer number of glitches, movement tricks and clever small skips required makes for a seriously varied run, and anything unnecessary is shown off during the periodic bits of downtime while waiting for Rush to dig up a CD or a boss to cycle back into vulnerability. The players here show a serious commitment to milking every frame to maximum energy, and the result makes an hour pass like a minute.

3. Super Metroid “Reverse Boss Order” in 48:08.58

SNES

by Taco, Kriole and Hero of the Day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X71iFHw7cwE

For a detailed explanation of why this run is amazing, you'd be better to ask my roommate or one of the other members of the cult of Super Metroid. My mental encyclopedia for the game is hardly comprehensive, the limits being something like “wow I didn't know you could do that there and wow how does he do that when that's still aaaaaaaaghehgbfelfph”, like someone who has only seen a tire rolling down a hill and then is shown the Autobahn. Reverse Boss Order, which, as it sounds, has you fighting the major bosses of the game in reverse before finishing off Mother Brain, seems like a bit arbitrary, like someone running out of other things to do, but watching it should make it clear that this is a route that is just riddled with cool stuff. Well, cool stuff doesn't really begin to explain it. Cool stuff is a bit of an understatement. Just watch it. Even if you somehow have had some childhood of Kafkaesque tragedy where you never got to play Super Metroid, just watch it.

2. Cave Story in 50:10.30

Windows

by nitsuja

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NYJA-JGJx0

If you've played Cave Story and you've watched TASes, I don't need to sell this to you. It's simple. Running and gunning doesn't get much more fun than this, and seeing it done perfect is pure joy. Cave Story was on the shortest of short lists of games I eagerly looked forward to seeing TASed, and the result meets and exceeds my expectations. Again, I shouldn't have to sell this if you're at all familiar with what you're about to watch. Enjoy.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 1:29.32

Nintendo 64

by MrGrunz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1RrLvJ4qsA

It should come at no surprise to anyone that MrGrunz's masterpiece of TASery is my favorite run of the year. It's probably my favorite TAS of all time. The 2-year history of the creation of this run could make for an entertaining movie itself: full of controversy and intrigue, tantalizing previews and bitter disputes, false starts and false ends, dates promised then missed, and the payoff, oh man, the payoff in the end. The any% route for Majora's Mask is like a gift from the Gods of video gaming, varied and exciting, glitched-out and wacky without seeming unsatisfyingly broken. We're further treated to an execution of this route where more ground is covered through explosion-propelled slides and jumps than any conventional means. Trips back to the bomb shop might be one of the few tedious parts of the run, but you'll appreciate the break and savor the anticipation it serves, as not a single explosive is used in any case where your jaw doesn't end up dropping. There's like a million ways to speed yourself up a bit in this game, and Grunz does all of them, often all at once. The excitement is heightened by expert camera work – you can tell he had a very clear picture of not only what the run should contain, but the coolest way to display it. The result is positively cinematic – pulling back for big jumps or arcing overhead to emphasize the chasm crossed, oh, and the entirety of the isometric view in the Deku Palace... but if I start naming highlights we'll be here for days. The whole run is a highlight. It plays like a highlight reel of the coolest parts of thousands of other hypothetical runs for lesser games. There's something said about the quality of Majora's Mask too when you consider all the amazing things you're thankful that he can't manage to skip. Such an amazing game deserves nothing less than this wonderful string of inputs.

So that's the list!

I hope you enjoyed it. Come back for more “best of 2011” pointless retrospecting soon. Oh but first a quick bonus:

My top 10 anticipated TAS runs for 2012!

(Note that at best I just hope these will come out in 2012. Some I am fairly confident in, others not so much, but I do know there is at least some work being done on them. I think.)

10. Metal Gear Solid

9. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

8. Super Mario 64 DS “1 star”

7. Super Mario World “glitched any%”

6. Super Mario World “96 exits”

5. Final Fantasy VII

4. Final Fantasy IX

3. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island “100%”

2. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time “Medallions, Stones and Trials”

1. Super Mario 64 120 stars

Even if half of these actually come out it should be a great year. Look forward to it!

Special last minute addition!

So I wrote this a couple of days before the year actually ended and I just knew somehow it would come back to bite me. And I also knew that if it did, it would be because of a good thing – another fantastic run cropping up. And here it is!

Super Mario World “glitched any%” in 2:36.40

SNES

by Masterjun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syo5sI-iOgY

I'm not sure if I would have included this on the top 10 list or not. It's certainly pretty entertaining, and quite mind-boggling, and the research that lead to the discovery of the credits glitch is fascinating, but really, there isn't a whole lot of content to the run. Still, amazing beyond all recognition.

goodbye11/hello12

2012-01-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

2011: You'd better retrospect yourself before you wreck yourself

So the year is finally over. Am I crazy or did that seem like an especially long year? Stuff just seemed to keep happening, good and bad. As far as media/art/entertainment sorts of stuffs went, although it wasn't really the “best year ever by such a large margin that all other years quit and decanonize themselves” like I had predicted, it was a pretty darn good year.

AS SUCH I AM GOING TO MAKE A BUNCH OF LISTS, because people seem to like lists.

But they won't be in this post, oh no, I am going to milk this for ALL that it is worth. So this is a further suspension of so-called regular blog features, yes.

But first a quick look at 2012: a few things I am looking forward to

Are silly apocalypse theories so prevalent now that the expected thing to do when talking about 2012 is that you make a joke about them? I really feel weird doing anything else uhh guys did you remember that there's an American election and those are usually like three solid months of the best entertainment we can handle? And then when Ron Paul/Herman Cain wins and we experience the collective quickening towards the higher consciousness of Quetzalcoatl I dunno something good will likely happen.

The Platform Master

In case you didn't know, they're making a movie about Nick Smith a.k.a. ulillillia a.k.a. my single favorite human of the internet. It's touring film festivals this year and they might actually bring along the man himself. You can bet I'd go to the far ends of the earth to meet ulillillia and maybe even get my copy of his book signed or something. Anyways the documentary itself looks to be pretty good. My understanding is that it will be both about his day-to-day life and also contain a lot of footage and interviews he himself did about the flooding. Interesting!

So obviously when I watched the trailer I was very excited but I also felt overwhelmed by another emotion, some sort of vague frustration. I really can't put my finger on it exactly. I think it's just that for so long I had contemplated various ulillillia-related ideas of documentaries or funding projects that when something like this happens it's like the rug getting pulled out from under my feet. Even though this, having actually been made, is many many times more concrete than anything I planned and I gotta think also many times better, just the fact that I “lost control” of it as an idea and now it exists beyond my scope. I felt a similar thing when that unreleased Radiohead track was unearthed – suddenly something I thought I had a total grasp on spun wildly beyond my understanding. Frustrating, but I think with another, better, attitude, it could actually be a very powerful and fun sort of feeling. So let's aim for that!

As far as the film itself goes, it's interesting 'cause it's been shot and finished and all that and yet ulillillia's just gone on with his projects with no noticeable changes. So I guess the documentary isn't some “break out of his shell and change his lifestyle” sort of challenge, thank god for that. What's really strange is that he didn't even mention it in any capacity whatsoever. I think he might have had a NDA or something but still. Funny. Exactly what I'd expect from him.

Das Racist Mixtapes

So apparently there were going to be three DR mixtapes released on January 1^st. Wellll nope, but oh well. KOOL AD's is out and it is pretty great. “Lagrimas Blancas” has about as banging a beat as I've ever heard, rude essence of McCartney. Says he's James Murphy and then proves it twice over on “Fun”. Most of the other stuff goes pretty wildly between “interesting and catchy” to “interesting and grating” and I gotta think that will depend mostly on the person. Can't wait for the other two!

Katawa Shoujo

I'm playing this because there's no way I can be on /a/ and not play it. I'm looking to it I think but I dunno some aspects appeal to me and others really don't and really I guess the fun will be the latter becoming appealing?

K-On! Movie

I gotta assume I'm gonna BR rips of this by the end of the year. Geez I would hope.

Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo

>implying I'll see this before 2013

ANYWAYS THAT'S ABOUT IT FOR THAT BLOG POST I THINK

There should be one soon later about either books or tool-assisted speedruns in 2011.

what is blog number what is your post number

2011-12-22T08:15:00.001-08:00

End of year quick blog update

So from now until uh not sure when I'll be pretty busy. The good news for all you blogfans out there is that one of the things I'm busy with is various posts for the blog. Seriously! But they're all gonna wait until the new year. Mainly because I want to post a minimum of 52 blog posts in 2012 so heck I might as well save some.

What else I am up to now

Uhhh not a whole lot, Christmas stuff and such. I haven't been watching anime so I can't comment on that, nor can I comment on whatever albums have come out since I've been back home 'cause I haven't been checking trackers. I have been watching some sitcoms uhhh let's take a look at those maybe.

Life's Too Short

Was really hyped up for this. New Ricky Gervais show. Fake documentary following Warrick Davis, a semi-famous dwarf as he looks for money/fame, settles his divorce, etc, etc. Weird show, really. It's even weirder than it looks when I describe it. It feels like the format of Extras, that is, main character has some sort of opportunity, problem with opportunity arises, celebrity pops in, main character completely blows opportunity. Except now there's like a two phase thing where Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant pop in first and then the celebrity goes through that and it seems pretty dang arbitrary but honestly I don't care. They acknowledge the arbitrariness of it and the similarity to Extras and then just move on to giving you what you want. What's interesting is this weird two-pronged approach to humour with pretty much the extremes of it: you have really nuanced humour based around awkwardness and misunderstanding, and then you've got your main character, who is more of a clownish oaf than David Brent or Andy Millman ever were, and the secretary character is played as like a straight up dumb caricature instead of Maggie, on Extras, who had a lot of “stupid” jokes but still seemed like a real human, and you've got all sorts of physical comedy stuff around him being a dwarf. So I want to say that going for these extremes, with the former situations seeming kinda arbitrary and the latter just the most crude, straight to the gut comedy you can come up with, it seems like pandering, right? So yeah, it is, and I have absolutely no problem with that, because it's hilarious. Also weird though is the heart of it, 'cause Gervais shows are always good for being pretty dang heartfelt and moving at times, but here it seems, I dunno, more just pathetic at times. Like there's not a lot to sympathize with? But we'll see I guess, I've only seen four episodes so far. The other issue I suppose is this whole angle of him being a dwarf and the show dealing with the rights of little people to do anything and not be laughed at for their stature and yet there's a lot of humour that's derived from him being short. But like is that not true equality? To be ridiculed with the knowledge that the ridicule doesn't define you? Like when you make something like that taboo so as not to offend someone, it suggests that that person's identity is so tied up with the taboo subject that joking about it is going to actually offend them as a person? I don't know I don't think I'm expressing this well, and I can't think of good examples off the top of my head, but I think this show hits on something pretty deep here and I'd like to get it into words. There's like five reality shows about little people and they all seem way more exploitative and dehumanizing than this even though this has uh well if you've seen the show you know what it has and if you haven't you should watch it because I sure won't try to describe it.

Louie

Watched the first five or six episodes of this too. Was pretty hyped up for it by friends, press, etc. and it did not let me down. Really funny at times but some stuff I don't like so much. I don't like how the plots vary wildly from outlandish to brutally realistic. Or maybe I do like that I'm not sure. I don't know if I like how much of the humour seems to be about “oh man I can't believe he's being so excited and funny about something so bleak hahaha” and then so much of the poignancy seems to be about “oh man that thing we were just laughing at the idea of laughing at because it was so bleak... welllll daaang it's actually really bleak!!” I dunno hyperbole but you kinda get what I mean? It's still funny and poignant, don't get me wrong, it's just kinda lazy about it sometimes. Like it'll spin the same thing two ways and each way it's really sorta just spinning it as unexpectedly not being spun the other way. Anyways aside from those minor beefs the thing is great. Excellent writing, top-notch acting, hilarious plotlines, great pacing and structuring with the shots from his act, I love it. It's like uh, the other half of Seinfeld that didn't go on with Curb. Do you know what I mean? I don't know if I can explain fully what I mean by that, but think about it.

Music stuff

I have only three tracks I need right now:

-Big Baby Gandhi's “What is Mobile Number”

-The original Bollywood song that was sampled for aforementioned BBG song, “What is Mobile Number”

-Previously unreleased Radiohead track mysteriously uploaded onto /mu/, “Putting Ketchup in the Fridge”. Or something like that.

Books and stuff

I got some real neat stuff at the bookstores a few days ago. Uh let's see:

-A little paperback collection of Joyce containing Chamber Music, Exiles, Dubliners and excerpts of his novels, nice, nice, I think that was two bucks.

-Nice old hardback collection of Kipling's poetry introduced by Eliot from the 40s, I think, also only like two bucks.

-Phoenix volume 2, they had another couple of volumes but they looked a bit beat up, still hoping to track down all of these someday

-A book called “Our Friend James Joyce” written by some friends of James Joyce. Recounts a lot of his early days generally being a baller in Dublin. Fun little read.

-Surely I've bought enough James Joyce stuff today? Hold up there. Hardcover copy of Portrait, circa 196*, with jacket, with some illustrations?!??!!, only like five bucks, cool, cool.

I think that was it. I'm also gathering up a lot of manga and stuff from back home so when I get back to home 2 in Waterloo the great collection will be consolidated for the first time in years. Pretty exciting!!

And that's it that's pretty much the last blog post for 2011.

Look forward to stuff in the new year

You are now reading my blog

2011-12-15T21:33:00.001-08:00

Another blog post what is new

I don't know not a whole lot, going to mention a few things and then try to keep my supposedly regular features somewhat regular.

LOL since I wrote this part I waited like five days to post this, I am bad at blogging.

Music

Trillwave

So I kinda missed the boat on this cloud rap/trillwave stuff 'cause I didn't really understand what it was and a few of the key artists slipped past me. For awhile I've been thinking about how hip hop is moving in many directions at once and how rapping is sort of just becoming a very basic style of delivery rather than something that has implications of beat or subject or anything else like that. I think this is really cool but at the same time a lot of the stuff it's produced doesn't interest me at all. Sometimes it seems too fake or like “smarmy”, I dunno. I also am a big fan of anticon style stuff, though, that's one extreme direction the genre's gone in that I really enjoy. Anyways these factors made me think that this supposed genre was some sort of surface approximation of anticon-style abstract rap and was basically a catch-all term for any rapper surface enough for people who used the term to hear them rap about weird stuff.

Yeah I'm dumb I know. So in case you didn't know this isn't that or like even remotely close at all. What I guess I would call this is Lil B's “I'm God”: The Genre. That isn't quite fair but yeah, lazy heavy swag sorta rapping over the most beautiful grand ethereal beats you can't yet imagine. This is of course now my favorite thing ever ever. A$AP Rocky's who I've been focusing on mainly these days and like holy cow this guy is so great. My friend wrote a good blog post about it if I remember I will link it hereabouts.

Psyche Origami

These guys are like an old bed I have slept on them for too long. They are quite a bit like Typical Cats, which means they aren't typical cats at all, ha. Really nice jazzy beats and lots of good lines per song. Some pretty funny parody stuff, they did a part with fake rap names that I like, I always like that joke. Really solid hip hop, almost to the point where it's boring again? Like what happened when people got too good at indie rock and I lost interest because there was no “tension”. What the hell am I talking about I have no idea these guys are great and not boring or anything. Plus this stuff is like half a decade old now and predates the sort of stuff that I felt was less solidified so I don't know what I'm talking about I guess is what I mean. Point is listen to this, maybe the next person who is interested won't take as long as I did to find them.

TECLA

Female rapper okay cool, another pretty solid entry in the Greedhead stable which by the way is now officially big enough that I can't keep track of who all is in it anymore. Seriously the roster has exploded lately and I can hardly keep up and it all seems to be pretty good. But yeah on this first mixtape or whatever of hers (THANK$GIVING – btw has dollar sign s hit another peak of popularity?) a sort of inner paradox of Greedhead comes out really strongly and I think this is something they need to get a handle on before they continue. Basically they're scooping up all sorts of really fresh talent, which is great, but these guys are all gonna do their “first release” stuff. Which is yeah okay. Pretty much every new artist in every medium has a period where they get some stuff off their chest, do all the stuff they've got locked in as cool since age 12, make the requisite shoutouts to family, kinda do image creation/solidifaction, all that stuff. Okay fine yeah, I have no problem with that. It usually produces some really heartfelt stuff. But like specifically on Greedhead there's this problem where you get some of the new artists doing this stuff and then you still have your Kool A.D. running up on your tracks and getting p silly. And it's like... conflicting? I dunno. It's kinda weird to listen to is my point. Like you got “No Music”, which is pretty banging but it's like half Tecla legitimately trying to rep her skills and seem hard and stuff and then Victor and Lakutis are being dang silly almost to the point where you feel like they're mocking her, and I don't even know what this guy Fat Tony is doing but he's p good. And of course yeah the whole thing ends up being just witty and fun instead of internally conflicting but I feel like maybe there was an attempt to do some sorta genuine “Gangsta Shit” sorta swagger. Or or then you get the cliched song where Tecla apologizes to mom and pop and sure it's pretty moving sure but you can actually see her realize how strange it'll seem to have this back to back with traditional postironic partyrap stuff so she transitions pretty cringeworthily with some stuff about laughter being the best message. Aw geez we don't need that sort of thing. I dunno what the solution is though but I think something's gotta be done. All that aside though everything on here is pretty solid.

Playlist report

Like last time here's more of the playlist I've been listening to.

M.O.P. - “Ante Up (album version)”

Album version being the remix or whatever with Busta Rhymes and such. I will be perfectly honest with you about why I am listening to this song. It has nothing to do with a recent reobsession with Busta Rhymes. My obsession with Busta Rhymes has no beginning or end. No, this is due to a fairly old video that was recently posted to reddit. You can find it by looking up “idolmaster ante up” on Youtube. I suggest that everyone who doesn't already know what sort of thing they will be getting themselves into not actually do this. Everyone who does, use your discretion. Anyways this song is nuts. It's like, two guys try to beat Busta Rhymes at his own game and actually make a decent shot at the throne. Really feels like a whole entire world collapsing. Such powerful hooks! Like, a boxer, you know? Seriously though that video. I don't know what I think about anything anymore.

Wolf Parade - “I'll Believe in Anything”

This is what motivated this playlist, a strong want to hear this song and one other song a bunch of times. The other song, which will not be named due to spoilers, was a new song, but this song, like, why did I suddenly have a strong want to hear this classic Wolf Parade cut? I dunno, my taste in indie rock has become really strange. Now it's like, I'll have one or two songs that I really really like at a time and the rest bores me. Also from when I first heard this song years ago up until very recently when I heard it again I thought the lyrics were “Where nobody loves you and nobody gives a damn” and now I struggle to understand how I heard that in the first place. Whatever. I still sing “loves” when I'm singing it and not listening to it. I guess my brain is just permanently screwed up in this regard. I'm sure it'll cost me a promotion at some point.

Wugazi - “Slow Like That”

So big themes of this playlist: Retribution! Mashups! Rapping! Weird level of seriousness! It hits every base! It's a home run! Really though this song is a whole lot of fun. The hook is just crazy catchy, the riffs are solid, etc, etc. Probably one of the least Fugazi tracks on Wugazi but screw it. I really like when people rap with like, righteous anger. The M.O.P. track has some of that, but here it's a bit more precise and justified. Raw swag cool cool.

Video Games

Smash Bros. character discussion

Today we'll look at:

Luigi!

Playing as Luigi

This alone makes learning wavedashing worth it. Even just sliding around like an idiot is deliriously fun. Combine that with any of his attacks and it's like seizure-inducing fun. I cannot think of a single attack of his that isn't fun. That includes his taunt, yes. Juggling stuff with nairs and dsmashes and stuff is great, but give me the slide in ftilts and quick fairs any day. He's just so mobile! But at the same time he really really isn't. Being on the defensive with Luigi isn't fun. It gets really bad whenever you're off the stage and your opponent is still on the stage because you will not be returning to the stage. The “recovery”, if you could call it that, isn't like the many quick and sad attempts of like, Captain Falcon trying to get past Marth, rather it usually just... doesn't happen. Especially on Battlefield. I hate the Battlefield edges plenty in the best of times but with Luigi I honestly have no idea what to do. I also have no idea how to use his down B to help recover, even though that seems to work fine with Mario and Doc. But yeah overall the Dan of Smash (this is intentional, right? I mean the dash attack, the fireball, the damaging taunt... I dunno) certainly lives up to his pedigree, very very fun overall.

Overall fundex: *

Tier of my playability: “Tertiary”

Playing against Luigi

Hmmm doesn't happen too often but when it does it's just a mixture of frustration (when you can't combo him) and shame (when edgeguarding is stupidly easy at best). Apparently there was a really really good Luigi player in my area for awhile, I never saw or played him but he had quite the “rep” among a lot of my friends, even then I think it's probably a myth.

Mario Kart 7

Bought this, pretty good overall, like, really fun, but just so massively flawed in one key area that instead of being hopelessly addicted like I was to MKDS I just play occasionally. Here I'll do a bit of a review I guess.

So I'm a big fan of Mario Kart overall, I'd say my ranking for them going in is something like: DS > DD > 64 > SMK > Wii > SC, although I didn't really play Super Circuit all that much so that's a bit unfair. Maybe it being with those ambassador games will change that. Anyways so I'm pretty sure going in that I'll like MK7 to some basic extent so long as it has fun courses. Actually that's all I expected from it after I found out about how miniturbos would be done.

Mechanics

This is the most important part of the game but it's sort of pointless to worry about it, there's no way that a Mario Kart would hit the shelves if the core gameplay was gimped. MK7, with one exception, has the best collection of stuff yet, new stuff that feels fresh but not weirdly so and a greatest hits assortment of stuff from before. Okay good stuff first: controls are beautiful (again, with one exception). Karts at all different tiers of handling feel completely natural, the differences in traction in different terrain are all perfect (especially underwater! Seriously, the way the kart drifts and bounces underwater is a thing of beauty! Oh and also especially “fast mud” sections, (like at the end of Luigi's Mansion) that was one thing MKDS did very confusingly and inconsistently and it works great here.). Gripping the 3DS isn't perfect but isn't too bad either. I would have liked the d-pad option maybe but I might honestly prefer the circle pad anyways. Oh yeah and collision stuff seems weird but somehow good, sometimes I get like weird corner boost bounces off stuff, don't really get it yet but it's all pretty fun. I think hitting something ought to slow you down a bit more but this is pretty good overall.

As far as the “gimmick”-type gameplay features, I love every one of them. Coins are back, and they're so great I wonder why they even left. It adds some much needed strategics of route (since you'll be so bored driving straight ahead wait no I'll get to that later) and adds new dynamics to the ol' sandbagging metagame. Tricks being back does roughly the same thing and is generally pretty fun. It seems like overall the boost mechanics have changed, now powerslide and trick boosts seem to be affected much more by offroad stuff? Not sure what I think of this but generally it just confuses and annoys me. Like you used to be able to cut through a few feet of grass or whatever off a trick or powerslide boost without dipping much but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. They also upped the power and visual effect of drafting even further, which I'm fine with.

Underwater is awesome, as I mentioned before. Really cool experience overall and the aesthetics are great too. Flying is more mixed, on some tracks it's really exciting but on others it hardly seems more interactive than the “movie-style” flying that it replaces (see Airship Fortress, etc). Places where you can do a bit of a shortcut by extending your flight are really cool. I think if they really wanted to sell this idea of like, multiform karts they'd have made it a bit more prevalent, though. When I saw the Magic Leaf item, before I knew what it did, I thought it would launch you up a few feet and put you into flight, sorta like the feather of yore. That would have been really cool but probably impossible to implement/balance well. They maybe could have used one more kart “form”, too, maybe some sort of drill/burrowing thing, I dunno, that's the only idea I have and it doesn't seem very good. Or maybe some super item thing kinda like the Bullet Bill but you still have some control and it varies by character? Basically all I'm picturing here is Yoshi going into his egg.

Speaking of that, I should mention stuff about kart options. So they did the same thing as MKWii and had characters effect stats slightly. This really bugs me. The character doesn't effect anything cool like getting personal items or karts, and yet it isn't completely aesthetic. This makes it so you can't just choose your favorite either by which character you like or by what bonus it has, you essentially just have to choose what'll end up being the best character (I think it's Wario, not sure) or put yourself at a disadvantage for the purpose of aesthetics. Bun. Uhh good stuff, I think kart customization is really cool otherwise. While I'm on the subject I think the kart/character selection is decent but weaker than Wii/DD/DS, which sort of makes it the weakest of the games that had this sort of kart/character separation. Oh well. I shouldn't really comment yet because I haven't unlocked all the karts yet and oh yeah here's another thing, the unlocking system in this game is the worst I've ever seen. I mean getting stuff in a randomized order, seriously? This is the second worst choice they made with this game.

And here's the worst. When MKWii came out, I was completely distraught at how they absolutely butchered the system of powersliding/miniturbos that had hit a pinnacle in MKDS. They replaced it with bikes and wheelies, which had all the fun of aligning yourself on a good path and hitting up on the dpad. Welllll, MK7 makes me nostalgic for wheelies. Yup. Seriously, without the ability to quickly do miniturbos, the game hardly feels interactive at times. Now, with the player cap down to 8 from 12 and the most stupid items nerfed, I don't feel the complete lack of association between my interaction with the game and the results of the race that I did on MKWii, but at times I certainly do. There are times when you get behind and there's just nothing you can do. And that's just not fun. And why? Why? Seriously, why? I don't understand this. Why not like, have both systems of charging miniturbos? And let players pick which one they wanted to use? And allow them to search for races/communities online that only allow that system if they want? You have like, manual and automatic, just like MKWii, except the former carries on the proud Mario Kart tradition of alternating left and right to charge turbos, a marvel of kart racing gameplay that elevates MK from party fun to a worthy competitive masterpiece, a contribution to human fun matched only by things like the second control slot and the ball. The latter can even have MKWii's auto-drift thing if they're so concerned with appealing to the demographic of people with only one finger on their hands. AARhgHRgHAgHGHRghGHGDHDghg the only reason you are even reading this is because they screwed this up, I admit, because if they had done it right I'd be playing it right now and probably wouldn't have gone to any of my exams and failed so THANK YOU, Nintendo and Retro Studios, THANK YOU for ruining the best part of one of your best series, because I completely WRECKED those exams, BOOM.

Anyways uhhh online play is good, the best Nintendo's ever done, communities are a great idea, thanks. And the way they handle ghosts now and time trial mode in general is AMAZING. Where's flap records though? Anyways moving on:

Items

Banana/Triple Banana

It is what it is. Communities that are only bananas are uh really bananas though. Like fun. B+

Green shell/Triple Green shell

Is what it is. Sniping people seems easier in this one than past games but I think that's because the courses are tighter than in Wii and people aren't moving around as much as they are in any game before that because the STUPID MINITURBO SYSTEM AAAAAGHRGa but yeah classic item. A

Red Shell/Triple Red shell

Apparently can fly now if they need to! Cool. Hit time doesn't seem much different. Dodging them seems about the same difficulty as it has been in recent games. So fine, I guess. A-

Spiny Shell

Running along the ground is really fun, MK64 style! Makes it more of an actual interaction with the game again. The explosion seems smaller than usual, and the hit time seems less, both of which I approve of. Can't figure out if there's a way to reliably dodge them yet but maybe not. So yeah implemented well and at this point they basically have to do it but dang if I still hate it as a concept in general, no forgiveness. D

Bob-Omb

Awesome! I love these things, always will. Really fun for the guy in 4^th to get in a close race. Other times it's useless but bun that's true for everything I guess. I want to try the only bomb community but I haven't found a match there yet. A+

Mushroom

I seem to get these in first even now?? Cool though. Seems like the offroad crossing ability has been reduced a bit? That sucks but oh well overall it's great. I think an only mushroom community would be excellent. S

Triple Mushroom

Probably the coolest item in most ways. Has all that resource management deal and stuff, especially in the many courses here with a lot of little shortcuts (the ramps in the middle of grass, etc). I can't figure out exactly where these things are given out, I've had a few in 5^th/6^th but I seem to recall getting it even in 3^rd which is pretty crazy. *

Golden Mushroom

As always, very fun, very exciting, can make a really really big difference in clutch times. Good to have a god-tier item that doesn't just automatically help, it has some subtlety to exert like, skill with it. S

Bullet Bill

I've only gotten this once, I don't really have a good sense of how it works. In MKWii I just straight up hated it. I think I'll hate it here too. The worst kind of god-tier item. F

Blooper

Stupid. D

Lightning

The “staggering” of how long you stay shrunk is pretty much perfect here. Also the impact of getting run over when shrunk is really reduced, which is nice. Basically a fun item, a classic for a reason, but also very frustrating at times. B+

Star

It's the Star! Like always, one of the best items if you use it really really well. Gives you all sorts of fun power over the race and really changes your mindset for the duration. I kinda remember it changing in this one so that if you drive over offroad stuff while using the star you still slow down, I think I just was confused though 'cause if that was true I think I'd be a lot more annoyed. So yeah great stuff. *

Fire Flower

I don't really get this one? Do you have a certain number of fireballs or a certain time in which you can throw them? At any rate it seems really really good, especially if you can snipe someone from some distance and then just lock them in hit stun. Seems way too good to get in 3^rd, which is where it seems like you get it, but at least it's exciting and a challenge to use to the best of its ability. B+

Super Leaf

Okay I thought this was really really lame but now that I'm actually reading the description and it says you have to press L to swing it I realize that maybe I've just been using it wrong this whole time. 'Cause to me it seems just worse than any other item, but if it actually does things besides block one shell and prevent you from getting new items (what's the point in thaaaaaaaaat) it might be fun. I certainly think it looks cute. Anyways I thought it was like a F but maybe it's not.

Lucky Seven

I haven't gotten this yet and I'm not sure if I understand what it does. You get seven items, but what are they? I dunno. Too lazy to look it up.

Overall these items are pretty good. Where's the fakie, though??

Tracks

Okay this is obviously the most important part. And overall yeah MK7 has some great great courses. Probably my favorite selection of courses in a Mario Kart... ever! Wow. I think I'll do like one cup per blog post, does that sound like fun?

Toad Circuit

So this is the standard boring circuit track. Pretty fun, one of the better ones, but still boring and standard. Looks very pretty. Have I mentioned how great this game looks in general? Because it looks amazing. So yeah this more interesting than a typical first track really just because MK7 in general is more interesting than other games. Like now we have jumps and such. Cool. Basically as good as it should be. B

Daisy Hills

Beautiful course. Great aesthetics. I love the little goats that wander in. The multiple paths are all really cool, especially the shroom shortcut that I usually forget. The flying section in general is a blast, and the way the shortcut adds to the challenge is perfect. Great track that reminds us that exciting stuff doesn't have to be difficult. S-

Cheep Cheep Lagoon

“Go! Go! Dive!” Okay. So here we get a nice little underwater based track. Nothing too fancy, but a good way to introduce the concept. The clams are a great element, as are the two pseudo shortcuts. Good stuff. B+

Shy Guy Bazaar

Pretty cool, Mario Kart doesn't do this type of environment too often so that's pretty neat. The nighttime aesthetics are particularly nice. Driving around the booths and stuff is really fun but I don't know how much I like the idea of that one narrow area that's like, the “best route”. I dunno it's kinda interesting though. The contrast between the marketplace part, the big turns and the buildup to the flying section is really well done, all sorts of skills being tested. Geez I wish I could miniturbo through this thing properly... But yeah, great course. A+

So yeah

I'll probably continue doing track reviews like that for the next seven blog posts? Overall the game is a ton of fun and a half. Soundtrack, graphics, all that stuff good too.

Tetris

After a four month break caused by like... Linux and apathy, I'm finally back into this and I shaved about two seconds in a period of about a week. Crazy. If this rate of improvement continued, I'd sub 40 before Christmas. Wouldn't that be a nice Christmas gift? Seriously if I sub 40 I'm done with sprint. Please someone hold me to that.

Spiral Knights

Played this for a bit? I think I missed when it was really popular. Can't remember why I played it now but it is pretty fun. For awhile I've looked for a semi-grindy semi-actiony game I could just plug time at and make some progress in small spurts. Tetris Friends worked like this but now I just cannot stand the controls there. I dunno I think I'm just gonna play random games for awhile and see if there's one I really like. Speaking of which:

Sword Girls

New online trading card dealie thing. I love/hate the aesthetics pretty much 50/50. I haven't actually played it yet because I'm too lazy to learn how but I figured I'd mention it here so that I don't forget about it when I actually have motivation to learn it. Speaking of which:

Starcraft II

So I started really enjoying watching professional Starcraft. My one roommate who is pretty into it and I will watch finals for various things and get hype and he can explain what is happening etc. It is really such a cool game, like, holy cow, the more I watch the more clearly this is just the absolute emperor of competitive video games. So I try playing it and suddenly this exciting game of wit and willpower becomes the adventures of General Alzheimers McIncompetence, the Boy Unwonder, a horribly stressful test of memory that I will always fail to some degree. OH WELL. Sometimes it's really satisfying, like when I 4gate and don't get supply blocked for very long. Basically all I'm doing is 4gating, that's fun enough and I'm not in a position to demand anything more exciting. Not sure how much more I'll play before I lose interest and go back to solely spectating because geez it is hard. Speaking of which:

Street Fighter III 3^rd Strike Online Edition

Another game that I watched way way more than I played and really respected and sort of understood on some high level but just have absolutely no ability to actually play. It's just so tough! It's good because it's so tough! This is something where I just have to sit down and learn a lot of things and practice them really hard before I'll be able to play the way I want, which is kind of lame but also very cool on another level. Not at all speaking of which:

In the Groove

With ITG I can kinda just keep grinding stubbornly, never learning crossovers or deliberately changing my mindset or actions at all, and keep getting better. Hooray! Now I can pass most 10s, except for the really hard ones, and have been getting close to passing some of the easiest 11s. I play a lot of stuff from Mandoto's (sp???) Easy as Pie packs, that's a really fun level of difficulty. Here's the stuff I play most often today I guess:

1. Ika Musume Theme – 9. This is a pretty easy 9 but it got me into playing for accuracy, which is insanely fun. Best I've gotten is a 93, which isn't great but whatever it's a start. Plus the chart is just ridiculously fun. The string of jumps at the end is just... perfect.

2. Hatsune Miku no Shoutisu some remix – 10. Really fun and a decent level of challenge. The stream at the end is eighth notes at 240 so uhhhh... 480 per minute? That's as fast as I can go, I think, 'cause MAX300 is still too hard and stuff like Kahu is only 130. Er wait am I doing this math right? I really think the streams in Kahu are faster. Anyways.

3. Crazy Loop – 11. Wow this song is like heroin just being poured into your ear. Absurdly catchy. Too much fun. I have passed it all of once, the streams at the end usually kill me. So good.

4. If These Trees Could Speak – 10. So happy with myself that I can do a Flashbulb song. Basically this is just nonstop streams at 100BPM, a really fun comfortable speed, and all the patterns are just great.

5. Bruk Out (Burka Som Sistema mix) – 11. Easy 11 but whatever. Mmmmmajor lazer. Such a good track the stepchart could be anything and I'd play it. Luckily the chart is pretty interesting too.

6. Kahu – 11. Current “boss song” sorta thing. Well this and “Robotix”, can't really decide which I find easier. Here it's pretty much all easy until that ungodly stream at the end which just goes on too long.

7. Robotix – 11. More interesting than Kahu but prolly harder 'cause of all the crossovers at the end. Lots of fun parts though, the step jumps feel almost unnervingly natural, make me wonder why I suck so much at step jumps otherwise. Gimmicky speedup part kinda neat but sometimes frustrating, I often just close my eyes.

8. Xuxa – 11. When I'm playing completely on point I can get through the first bit of this before I die. Until like... 15% maybe? And there's parts at the end I can do. It'd be neat if this was the first real 11 I passed 'cause I think it was the first 9 I passed.

9. Tricky Disco – 9. This is too easy now, which is a shame 'cause it's prolly my favorite chart to play ever. There's the version Mandoto did but it's too long, and the 11 of this one is just dumb. But yeah, tons of fun, jumping over those mines and stuff.

10. Aurora – 11. This is the version Mandoto did. Really hard but also has some really fun stuff? I dunno I'm a ways away from passing it.

I think there's some I'm forgetting but yeah basically that's my top 10. Usually I'll play these + other random 9s and 10s until I get tired.

Speaking of which:

Geez this is an awfully long blog post, isn't it?

Yeah, and I haven't even talked about TV stuff yet!

TV Stuff

Boku wa Tamadachi whatever whatever

Up to episode 10 of this. Weird stuff. It's like, we all know what you can't show on TV, so why make an entire show about acting like you'll show something we know you can't? I dunno, it's still funny at times and almost heartwarming occasionally so I'll stick with it.

Guilty Crown

Up to uhh episode 7 with this one. Can't be bothered to make sense of the plot. A whoooole lot of stupid stuff is happening but the production quality is so high I don't care. Most of the characters are irritating but again, who cares, fight scenes, music, explosions. I kinda want to be up to date with it so I can follow the drama on /a/, which is probably more entertaining than the show itself.

Community

Boo hiatus etc. Last few episodes have been pretty solid, a few things spectacular. I usually cringe pretty bad at musical episodes but the Christmas one subverted it quite nicely. I feel like the “shooting a commercial” one “ought to be funnier” but I don't know how, and it was pretty funny. Foosball/Batman was a mixture of great jokes and weird stuff that only sorta worked. The one with Annie moving was hilarious, and solid proof that they can still make a real masterpiece of an episode with a standard structure. So yeah good in general.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Still funny! Seems like the episodes have been getting less extreme, which is sorta mixed 'cause like, you can only escalate shock humor so far, but when you've created the shock humor precedent it gets sorta weird when you don't do it. The more conversational stuff is great but only occasionally as good as it was in the “golden days”. I'd say now it's a thing of each episode having one or two absolutely hilarious aspects rather than the whole thing being great. Like the caricature in the shushing man one, or Frank's boat tour in the Thundergun one. The whole episode where they try to break in and get the vase is hilarious through and through though. As is the one where they explain who Mac gets fat. And the half I've seen of the high school reunion one has been all great. So yeah.

Hidamari Sketch

Watching through this, have seen all of x365 now and started x***. Beautiful, beautiful show. Maybe my favorite Slice of Life now. It's just... wonderful. I don't know. I'd have to write a lot more to get across this wonderful like, serene emotion that I get when watching this. It's beyond moe. I'd get into it but:

Man this is a pretty long blog post

Yeah heh well I had a lot of stupid stuff to say. So now it's like end of year season so hopefully you'll see some year-end lists of music etc on this blog if I don't get lazy like I did last year. This is about it for now though. Oh man by the way, there's this service now that will print out your blog into an actual paperbook! Yeah! Crazy! My blog, if I printed the whole thing, would be like 500 pages! I actually feel some weird feeling of pride welling within me when I considered that. 500 pages of text. Likely nothing at all useful to anyone else. Hurrah.

blogun

2011-12-02T12:56:00.003-08:00

Oh man look another blog post what will this have?

FIRST OFF A TRACK BY TRACK STYLE LOOK AT LAKUTIS'S EP I'm In the Forest EP

I got pretty hype for this after the previews.

“Lakutis In the House”

Production for this one is seriously next level. Lakutis gets into his flow really quickly and these lyrics are pretty nuts, gonna have to go back for some serious study of what seems like a lot of Japanese sorta lyrics. Oh man what is he quoting from? His verse on “Rapping 2 U”? Okay that's fine. Seriously the beat on the hook is just supernuts. “My visage makes villages recoil” that's pretty dang. This is like postironycore straight up attack dogging party culture. “Mirror mirror on the wall/water water everywhere” and then he seems to thematically expand on this, woah nice. Cool outro on this intro.

“Death Shark”

Lol intro. Dang this beat is heavy heavy heavy. Wow this sorta flow, okay, go for it man. Beat levelling up, “Jewish Eddie Murphy in your barber shop” wow and I missed like three more good lines while I was writing that one down. “I am the flora hydraulic” cool cool. Hook solid. Beat getting more and more interesting. Same with hook. Wow NICE verse 2 intro. Beat legitimately level 87 atm. Things getting weird near the end here, hook over repeated line, very nice. I love that little horn blow too. “My blood is made of bones” woah this is getting swagger????? And then hook vs. repeated line again, really cool, really cool, very much an actual song. Outro great. Where those samples from? I recognize it.

“Swann Gangg”

Woah Jesus Christ this beat is way way way too good. Way way way too good. How you using a beat this good? All these lines so good. Breakdown so solid. Hook so heavyswag. Heaviest swag. DVS comes in oh my god he is getting ready to body this I can tell. “It's DVS, opposite of the Seacrest”, is that that American Idol guy, is he still relevant? Oh well. End of his verse amazing. This almost feels like El-P. Is Lakutis the postironic El-P? El-PEE? I dunno. I dunno what I'm talking about this song is too. Trading lines? Nicely done.

“I'm in the Forest”

Title track get hype. Wow bricklayer flow, okay, go for it. Beat legitimately scary. Death shark bitches on dick yeah okay keep at it. “Free hexes”. Wait wait wait, seven spiders of hip hop? Oh man this is gonna get oh wow what is going on this is hilarious this is excellent oh god I'm gonna have to get all these names down on like tattoo. “I'm in the forest” on repeat excellent go for it. “Flesh party” oh what wow. Now he sounds more like Aesop Rock??? But like angrier? I have no idea. Some great lines here. Stop-start sorta flow now, sounds good. Beat going absolutely insane. Namedrop machinegun style YES I like this technique. That coulda been the outro but I feel like we just warming up now. Some sorta Lil B boasting here I am very happy with this. “Hold the mic crazy” oh inDEED. “I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead” wow that is a good outro WAIT NO NOT OUTRO what's next “DEATH SHARK DEATH SHARK” yes that is prolly the coolest nickname yet. Okay actual outro sonic annihilation good job.

“Ja Rule”

Birds + heavy heavy beat, I can dig it, I love this vocal technique. Guitar sample so cool. What's he saying I have no idea. “Real hip hop, real rap”, yeah, I know what it is, can't wait. This is legit sonic bliss mang he's doing real songs that's so exciting dreamcore postrap micgaze #ironic this guy is the white black Ariel Pink does that make sense? I had to hit repeat on this one actually even halfway through the first listen that is a mark of quality, no? Couldn't help myself, this is sincerely legit beautiful sounding. Seems a lot of this new generation of rappers likes this sorta pseudo-instrumental no-rap breakdown semi-sung sorta deal and I love it 'cause I have the same taste in non-rap as these rappers see Heems has a Panda Bear shirt etc. And then we leave through the same way we came in. So cool. Maybe the coolest thing to come out of the post LCD Soundsystem system of cool.

“I'm Better Than Everybody”

FEAT KOOL A.D. This intro is better than any thing. Lil B style flow. Amazing. Amazing. Wow. Lil L. Go harder. Sample coming in of his name repeated is the coolest thing ever. “I'm Nietzsche, ho!” “If I ever die, remember me as etc” this is my favorite sorta thing. “iTunes paint job” OH JESUS. This is the best surface hip hop parody ever. Wow wow wow wow. These lyrics god tier. This beat god tier. This song... god tier. Prolly best so far. I dunno. Wow these samples going nuts. “Name your fucking everything” the theme has come to a head. The drums on this beat are like “B.O.B.” tier maybe. Outro straight bananas. “My bad” etc. Oh wow. Oh wow. This is Big Baby Gandhi production makes mad sense.

“Wifey”

FEAT DAS RACIST EVERYTHING. This beat is surreal. Sounds like some surface beat heavily remixed, like, some specific one I can't think of now. “You play Hungry Hungry Hippos?” Oh man this is like some put a ring on it ish. Okay I guess? “Wife her out” is a pretty good term for that I guess prolly coolest one I have heard thus far. I don't wanna get married but I finna wife someone out maybe. This sorta plodding flow I dunno really well done but just not as exciting as past stuff on here I guess. “Wait like the dialup on the beat” and the beat goes really cool. Good final song I guess though.

Overall

This was really good too short Lakutis drop an LP now. Best track prolly “Swann Gangg” or “I'm Better Than Everybody” but “Ja Rule” is really intriguing.

Regular blogging stuff

So a lot of time I work on stuff that just sort of spirals out of control length-wise, usually because it's easier to throw words at it every once in awhile instead of resolving it satisfactorily. I don't really mind that, it's nice to have a project to just work away on with bits of free time, but it either ends up just never getting done ever or when it is done it's so long that not even I want to read it again. To this end I have a rough plan to regularly post some sort of chunks from them as regularly as I can. Sounds good? I dunno. Here's the sort of stuff it'd be:

Regular Feature #1: Super Smash Bros Character discussion

Something I've wanted to do for awhile. Just gonna get my thoughts down about pretty much the whole cast. Prolly will post these in a random order. Today we're gonna look at... Donkey Kong!

Donkey Kong!

Playing as Donkey Kong

Generally really really fun. So many very satisfying moves to hit with. What do I mean by satisfying? I really should deal with that now because I think it'll come up pretty often. It's a combination of the actual like physical impact of the move, sort of how much it changes up the situation in terms of positioning, damage, momentum, etc. and the difficulty of landing it. Or I guess more just the scarcity of it than the actual difficulty. So yeah a lot of DK's moves are very satisfying, especially like his dair, fair, and neutral B. His neutral B is one of my favorite kill moves. Aggressively spacing bairs as a sort of approach is pretty fun but the meat of his combos is obviously grabs, uairs, spicing it up with dair techchases. So you get sort of an inner battle between just spacing it out and playing it safe and going for risky combostarting dairs and utilts and stuff. Edgeguarding is also like, get it done right with bairs or go crazy (go bananas?) with up B, dair, ledge attack, whatever. Side B and down B are cool in concept but not good enough for even me playing DK to want to mess with.

On the other hand, the guy's meaty in all the wrong ways. He gets comboed back and forth by whoever. His recovery is really good horizontally but if you're below the ledge you're as good as dead. He's pretty fast but slow in just a few wrong places that leave you high and dry. Stuff like his ftilt and dtilt seem safeish but are really punishable, which can be frustrating. His smash attacks are so cool you want to use them but rarely are they actually the best action. One of those characters where every aspect of him ought to be really fun but just a few things are too bad for it to really work. Plus I dunno I just can't get a handle on playing such a grab heavy character, I usually grab when on the defensive and I see the opportunity, trying to actively get grabs is hard for me to get my head around.

Overall fundex: A-

Tier of my playability: “Tertiary”

Playing against Donkey Kong

Yeah jokes as if. I played my friend Josh's DK a few times, I think he brought it out against my Puff when he really hated himself, and although he did a lot of really cool tricks and kept scooping me out of stuff I was able to just sort of outspace and shut him down with bairs and stuff. So I dunno. Seems like I'd have a lot of fun “getting off” with Falco/Falcon etc but maybe not enough to outweigh guilt? And then I'd probably be uair juggled to death and that would be confusing.

OKAY THAT'S DONKEY KONG

What do you mean by fundex?

Basically a rating of how much I enjoy playing as that character.

What about tier of playability?

Basically how I would describe my skill with that character in terms of when I'd “go to” them in a serious match that I was trying to win. So DK being tertiary means there's two tiers of characters that I'd be more confident with first.

Hey I bet you didn't think playability was a real word

You're right about that.

So you're gonna do this for all the characters? Who cares?

I dunno you tell me???

Possibly Regular Feature #2: Playlist Report

So I made another big playlist and I started writing about it but I kept adding to the playlist and kept writing about it but one sufficiently outpaced the other and bun here we are. So I'll just post like a song from it at a time? This I am pretty sure I'll be able to do often for quite awhile just due to the huge buffer. They're all gonna like reference each other 'cause it was originally a playlist deal so whatever just deal with that. And most of them were written awhile ago and thus might mention stuff that isn't relevant/true anymore.

Hyadain - “Hyadain no Jojo Yujo”

This is the new OP for Nichijou, well, uh, not that new, and it goes just absolutely hammer. Both the chorus and the verses, not that I really can say which is which, and the interludes that might actually be the verses, are fantastically catchy. I don't know how he does it, the guy is like actually some sort of genius. It's not like one of those weird things that doesn't sound catchy on paper but ends up being stuck in your head (right now I have “Party Rock Anthem” and “Dynamite” stuck in my head and I don't know why but I suspect that this is why surface pop is surface and pop), it's something that looks like it was calculated on paper to be super catchy and you look at the calculations and you're skeptical 'cause like, this formula seems to say that you can jump to the moon. The math doesn't lie, though!

Okay what else

The Roots – undun

Well this was a really pleasant surprise. Like really pleasant. How I Got Over has been on repeat basically continually since it was released just last year. Yeah, just last year! I have a hard time believing it too. And that one came a few years after the one before so I was used to that release schedule, so I dunno, I was surprised yeah. I was optimistic but honestly pretty reserved, it just seemed too soon for another classic. Well ha ha jakes on me hurrah this thing is really excellent. Dunno if it's as good as How I Got Over but it is hard to compare something to an “instant classic”. It's great though I mean like Sufjan Stevens out of nowhere? Is this a cover or just the same song? I dunno. First half had some songs that don't seem too memorable yet but this second half is just going wild. I think mainly I'm more in it for super stone cold ham jam songs like “Stomp” but I'm glad to see them experiment too. I mean wow this ending sure sounds cool, wish there was more rapping but whatever. So yeah recommended.

Anything else?

Nah that's probably pretty good for now.

I uploaded the Lakutis EP to my Youtube channel also started playing Tetris again so there's a new sprint video there too.

Who do you think's been blogging while you were gone?!

2011-11-28T18:28:00.003-08:00

Why there hasn't been many posts on the blog???

Basically in the last few weeks in times where I'd usually crank something out for the blog I had some other project to occupy that time. But I might as well make a blog post out of that so here they are in chronological order.

Oyasumi Punpun vol 9

This came in the mail so I scanned it, which went pretty well. Previous volumes took like ~8 hours but this one I broke 5! Most of the time saved came from the fact that I realized that really no one was expecting me to combine the 2-page spreads, and I was terrible at it besides, so I got to skip all of that. Easy! And good news for all readers sick of my BS screwing up those beautiful spreads

Also it's been fully translated and such now. It's great! Punpun is always great! Which is why I am so sad that I think it must be ending soon. Well, I think. Maybe not. I wouldn't be surprised if the next volume was the last, at any rate. Nice even 10 volumes sounds good, right? Plus Punpun's run into Aiko again, and the whole Pegasus thing seems to have reached the climax. And oh man oh man mfw I realized the cult thing that his thing is a fraction of is the same cult that Aiko's family is in at the very beginning, with the duck thing, oh man, oh, man, and the pyramid, and oh man, the series has a cohesiveness to it that is staggering. Plus it has some really refined commentary. Plus it is really emotional, like, farthest reaches of my emotional capabilities emotional. And it has the best art of any current series at this moment imo. So yeah. Read it, read it, read it.

Essay on Kate Chopin's The Awakening

This thing almost drove me insane. 1000 word essay on the meaning of dreams and awakenings in the novella. Easy. Like actually should be really easy. But no. I was like alright fine dreams anticipate further character development and awakening serves as an actualization of that but that's too dull. I decided instead I should try to talk about the structure of the story and of the character as being based into figurative dreams and awakenings. This was a topic I initially wrote some 4500 words about. Then I realized that that was over 4 times as many words as I was allowed to have. And unlike in high school, that would probably not fly. So I cut out a bunch, rewrote it like twice, and the result is like, geez I have no idea. I honestly cannot tell if it made any sense whatsoever. I think I might have had the occasional good idea but I can't tell if I illustrated it at all. So bun. Back in high school I guess I was just lucky that I was allowed to blow off word limits without repercussion. Or maybe I could have done that here too if I asked but like bun I ought to be able to do this too I think. So yeah pretty frustrating. Grinded at this for most of three days and I think it just got worse and worse aaaargh.

Essay on Marilyn Dumont's A Really Good Brown Girl

This one went a lot better overall. Focused on the paradox of minority writing in regards to identity both limiting and enabling work. Sort of a “have your cake and eat it too.” It was a comparison essay between two poems in the book and I was like “hey she acknowledges the bind here and then she can express herself here without being tied either way” which I'm pretty happy with as a thesis but I think I really only scratched the surface of how friggin' cool dual acknowledgment/utilization of binds – be it cultural responsibilities, cliches, genre expectations, whatever – can be. Anyways yeah pretty happy with this one even though it also had to be 1000 words so I guess maybe I can do this stuff anyways.

November Novel Writing Month

I tried this again. You may remember last year that I tried it and gave up about halfway through both the 50000 words and the month. I just got sick of it, really, realized that I was stuck writing a lot of stuff I didn't really have any interest in. This time I did the opposite: started like way way late into the month (i.e. like a week and a half ago) so I didn't have time to get sick of it. Hilariously bad idea. I also decided that I would be less likely to get sick of any particular part of the story if I didn't obligate myself to write like anything. So what I wrote has essentially no plot whatsoever. That wasn't really enough to stop me, though. I churned out about 25000 words mostly last weekend and I was like whew this is going good and then I read some of it again and I thought woah, this is not going good at all.

Basically I hated it. It was just really really uninteresting. Now I don't know why you'd be interested in reading why I thought this thing I was writing was uninteresting but it's either that or insights into why I think Community is still plenty good this season or maybe why Hidamari Sketch is so good so whatever let's try this for a change of pace.

Alright so awhile back when I was writing a lot of short stories I wrote a bunch involving some college age kids, usually they'd have some sort of conversation or argument, usually about conventions in art, and that was it. They were really heavy on references and wordplay and basically just little attempts to be clever and occasionally I'd also have a few ideas I liked in them. The characters, which I reused in a lot of these stories, were pretty fun too. So when the novel rolled up I was like, sure, I could do this sorta thing for 50000 pages. I combined it with an idea I had had for an actual novel for quite awhile to be like, the central plot (although the idea from day 0 was that said central plot was completely abandon-able if I ever got sick of writing it) and set to it. And it was fun but not as fun as writing those earlier short stories. I realized I was feeling a lot more limited here and it was strange because if anything the greater number of established characters and larger structure affording more microcosms of weirder things but nevertheless I felt pretty fettered. I think I understand now but at the time I didn't and I just quit. So here were my problems:

I was scared of making it too weird. Especially with formatting and the prose. Everything seems really dry as a result. Why did I worry so much about making it too weird? I dunno I think I thought that if any one part was especially strange it would just ruin the whole thing. I don't think this is a valid fear, though.

I was scared of making it too personal. This is something I really just have serious difficulty getting my head around. I was scared of adopting any character traits I saw in any of my friends in any characters in the book 'cause I figured that might offend. I didn't want to include any stuff that had happened to me because I figured any changes I made would be, I dunno, too easily seen as fantasy projection or something? I especially didn't want to include any of my own ideas in it 'cause then maybe every idea in the book might be assumed to be mine and that wouldn't reflect well on me. And even then I didn't include ideas that wouldn't reflect well on me 'cause I figured that people who didn't know me might assume the thoughts to be mine. Then I realized that no one who didn't know me would read this. Then I realized that even people who did know me weren't likely to read this and really any sort of personal stuff ought to be fair game. Like, the first emotion that must be abandoned in creation is shame, right? And if you don't write about what you know, what can you write? Which leads me to my next thing:

It was really about nothing and thus very hard to care about at all. Structuring it in such a way that I could sort of do anything was I think a good idea still but I think not committing to anything inadvertently committed me to nothing. Like I couldn't have many climatic or interesting things happen because then I would have to write them and my dread of having to write something later, as in, locking myself into writing a specific thing later, prevented me from establishing any sort of dramatic narrative. Instead I just had a bunch of references I kept oblique enough to abandon later if I needed to. Bun.

Plus it wasn't really clever enough to support itself without a narrative and I struggled with that ol' awareness/reflexivity double bind. This is because of the previous three things mainly. Plus when I got struck due to them I played the ol' meta card, which is a powerful card if you're being clever but sort of breaks down when you aren't. And plus (as I discussed in the novel, lol) if you start being reflexive/meta/whatever it looks like you're trying to be clever even if you're trying to be sincere, and this, sincerity vs. cleverness, I think is like THE problem with postmodern/postpostmodern literature. DFW deals with it really well in a story in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. And by deals with I mean he illustrates a failure to deal with it. And so do I, I hope. We're pretty low when the best we can hope for is to illustrate a problem in literature rather than actually deal with it.

OH WELL.

A lot of the ideas I came up with I still really like, so there's that, at least. I also like a lot of the characters. I also wrote myself in as a character, how wacky. I've always liked that idea, even though it really flies in the face of the personal stuff/meta issue above. But like sort of sneaking myself in was really fun. I really liked the idea of having “shadow plots” and “shadow characters”, stories that run through the whole novel and are interesting but never are actually commented on. I started to do that a bit so that was good. I also would have liked to bring back the sort of content/style I had in the original short story dialogue dealies I mentioned earlier, and although the problems I mentioned above were a big deterrent, I did get a bit of that same sense at times. I'd say maybe every section had three or four things I liked and then a whole bunch of blegh.

There's maybe four or five sections that I do like, too. Most of them are just tangentially related to the rest of the book and really just feel like short stories. So maybe I'll post them. I'll post one of them in a second in this post at least. Anyways writing those sections was pretty fun and I think I sort of stumbled into a format I really enjoy, which is a short story where you parallel some sort of technical explanation of something obscure or maybe entirely made up with a fairly mundane plot about a semi-dramatic incident in someone's life, or maybe just a general overview of the guy's life. DFW does things like this a lot. So yeah this is a section of my book where I talk about one of the major characters and also the video game with which he is obsessed. I have not edited it nor will I even attempt to edit it or even reread it before posting because whatever.

No wait I did reread a bit of it and it seems way more over the top than I remember. Oh well this is it:

James Heath lived in the big house of Jack's father's for seven years. He emerged less of an adult than when he entered. The last four years he spent there alone. This was arranged by the creator of VX, who had stepped in to continue paying the bills at the place after Jack wound up in the hospital. James was totally unaware of the situation. All he knew is that after Jack had left, he didn't know who to pay rent to, so he stopped, which was convenient, because he also had stopped going to work. Food was always present, but he was not aware that this was due to the creator of VX having food shipped to him and even going as far as to pay the delivery guy extra to go put the stuff in the fridge/pantry. It might seem unfeasible that our James would be so ignorant as to never question how it was that he lived in this house for absolutely nothing and seemed to have infinite food despite being in contact with no one and living in an empty house, but this is a hidden talent of the human brain. Just as one abstracts the circulatory system without question so as to focus the conscious brain on more relevant tasks, James regarded the supply of food and shelter as a natural process enabling him to live, i.e., play VX, and gave no more thought to it than he did each breath.

Deep down, he probably thought Tom had something to do with it, and he felt like an unannounced kindness from Tom such as this was made such that it not be acknowledged, that is, Tom was doing this as a secret favor. James had no reason to believe Tom would do this besides Tom being a generally nice guy, and, James liked to imagine, probably pretty successful and wealthy after all was said and done with his new career. The fantasy of Tom supporting his career in VX with the money he made with his job at the design company – and it was a fantasy – was much preferable to thinking that Tom was just never going to contact him, that maybe he was a failure and ashamed, or had come to hate James, or, and this was the true one, he was dead. So James stored the idea of the food coming from Tom in the depths of his brain and never thought of it and played VX and ate and showered and took little walks and hung around with Jason and browsed the internet and sometimes slept. Of course, it was the first task that took up the vast, vast majority of his time.

VX is the fifteenth game in a series of competitive games made by a small-time developer who only went by “why”. As far as anyone knew, it was just one man, although the games were of exceptional production value. Although the roman numeral for 15 is really XV, why opted to name it “VX” because “that sounded cooler”. Diehard players of VX often get the formatting for roman numerals mixed up in their head because of this. VX is a game that is played 2 on 2, through the internet. Each player on the team has a vastly different role. My role was to get yelled at over the mic by Jack. Jack's role seemed to largely involve yelling. On the other team, Tom's role was to make stuttering sounds and jab at keys every few seconds while James made twitching movements with his whole body. Intra-house games came to an end after only an hour or so and never resumed. Apparently James got Paul to play with him a few times, but I think most of his teammates early on were friends of his from past video games that he knew through the internet. James had been playing video games for longer than he could remember and had a good stable of friends that he had met through them. Of them I think we only really knew one, a guy Jeff who lived near us that James played fighting games with, apparently. Jeff called James “toaster” in real life which was pretty awkward. I think Jeff and James played as a team for awhile but James' skill in the game improved at such a rate that I don't think anyone besides “static”, his final teammate, could really have kept up with him.

VX is a game where one player, designated “V”, is playing a fighting game with the “V” from the other team. However, the attacks “V” has access to is determined by the moves of “X”, who is playing a puzzle game that is difficult to describe. The whole game is hard to describe. When the match starts, “V” and “X” are chosen randomly, and can change again during the game. All players see the same screen, with the puzzle elements intertwined with the fighting game. What this means is that no one who hasn't invested significant time and effort into learning to do so will have no idea what is happening at any given time. Jack usually yelled things like “Hit him!” without realizing that it was he that was supposed to be doing the hitting, and that I was the one controlling the blocks flying around in the background. At least I think.

When you finish a game of VX, the winner doesn't really matter. In fact, the winner isn't even like, especially displayed. The game will end even if neither player loses, but it will end immediately if one player loses. At the end of the game, each team receives a letter grade based on their performance. The letter grade reflects both player's performance. The game will also verbally say something, a word like “Incredible!” or “Excellent!”, which reflects only the performance of the individual that hears it. Teams have a overall letter grade that is made up of an average of their letter grades. Players also have an individual rank that can only go up and is based on consistently doing well. The highest rank is unknown. The highest achievable letter grade is unknown, however, any game that gives a team an A+ automatically submits a replay file of the game to some mysterious judges, who review the game and see if the team actually deserves some higher grade, such as “S” or “M” or even the mythical “*”.

What this means is sort of irrelevant. The relevance is that James and his longtime teammate static, playing together as g0d`toaster and g0d`static respectively, often played A+ games, which means they often got emails a few hours later telling them what judged score they actually achieved.

That is also sort of irrelevant. Also sort of irrelevant was that the timing of judgment often worked out that the reviews would come in around 3-4AM.

Here's the relevant part: James Heath opening these emails one by one and shouting. A lot. Either things like “S MINUS WHAT IN THE EVER LIVING FUCK ARE THEY SMOKING etc” or things like “THREE STAR OH WOO YES OH SWEET YES YES OH etc” and honestly I couldn't tell the difference at this time, to me I just heard “FUCK YOU DAVID TRYING TO SLEEP HA HA HA JUST SEE IF YOU CAN KICK MY DOOR DOWN AGAIN.”

I mentioned it once to Jack, who agreed that, yes, it was annoying, and yes, it probably would keep him up, if he was trying to go to bed. I tried mentioning it to Tom, but he made some dismissive remarks about it being good to have passions, but maybe not so good to have obsessions, or “monomania”, the term I suggested which he said was a bit much, and felt that it would be better to address the “root problem” here, which I said was located somewhere around his head, which was somewhere around his anus, and that sorry that was rude I didn't get much sleep last night. Tom and I were on Good Terms and I dang well wanted to keep it that way, he was, at the time, my only link to certain persons in which I had acute interest. But that's another thing, and the relevant thing now was my going to class on two hours sleep, and how I felt capable of physically throwing 6'5” Jason down the stairs when I passed his yawning, satisfied, rested, physical insult of self on the staircase. I was twitchy when I was sleep deprived, I admit it, and short tempered, and high strung, and essentially everything I didn't want to be in those days.

Upstairs, twitchy and short tempered and high strung was everything James Heath wanted to be. Good VX play required not so much mental concentration as mental chaos. A certain abandonment of the senses occurs when overloaded to this extent. Sound cues. Situational rules to remember. Multitasking. Switching rapidly between making broad choices and extremely taxing small precise movements. Reflexes. Knowledge. Strategy. Speed. It was perfect. It was perfect. It was perfect.

The real world was inferior on a level of rules of logic. VX was more logical than logic. Cause and effect was a model of a temporal prison. VX was the world of infinites. James could not shut up about it when we were out with him, which was more and more seldom.

In 2014, Jack is in the hospital, Jason is just gone, and I move to the basement to get further away from the noise coming out of James's tiny attic. I talk to Tom about issues of bill payment, why has no one kicked us out yet, etc, etc, and he knows as little as I do and also can't afford to care. Within the year I'm gone and I hear later that Tom hits on some opportunity and moves to New York only a few months later. I didn't tell James I left. We held a big party downstairs; he didn't hear.

James lives in Jack's dad's big house until 2017, when the internet goes down and nothing James can think to try can bring it back up. He moves in with Jeff, who lives pretty close to him at that time and considers it an honor, doubly so when mysterious checks follow toaster to this new abode. James is at this point a “Demigod” and static is a “Immortal” and their team has an average grade of “M”. Jeff is a “Legend” and with Steven, also a “Legend”, they have an average grade of “B”, but they don't really play so often these days. Steven agrees that it is an honor for g0d`toaster to be staying at Jeff's place.

In 2022, Jeff's relationship with a girl he's met at work gets serious enough that James's presence at home is becoming a major inconvenience. He is relocated from a main floor room to a corner of the basement and seems to not even notice the transplant. He hadn't seen Jason in a year and thus had not heard even a word about Tom or David or Jack in about a year too. They were slowly slipping away from him. Across the Pacific Ocean, g0d`static attends his grandfather's funeral and thinks about how when his own parents die he will likely have to kill himself. The funeral also marks the first time in a few months in which he has left his house. He is a “Old One” and James is an “Elder God” and their team grade is “**”. There are only fifteen teams with a star ranking at this time. Only three have “***” or higher. The highest ranked team is players named “lucifer” and “satan”. They have the only “****” ranking in VX. James regards their name choice as a deliberate response to his and static's “g0d`” tags and is both honored and disgusted. He regularly has nightmares about them, about playing with them, as they do regularly. Sometimes, though, the nightmares are just “about them”, somehow the concept of them, even though he has never seen them or heard their voices. Someone has told them once that they lived in Brazil, which would explain some latency issues.

In 2028:

<~g0d`static> hey how you pay for internet

<~g0d`static> do u have job

<~g0d`static> or parent or what

<~g0d`toaster> what?

<~g0d`toaster> oh not sure

<~g0d`toaster> some government thing

<~g0d`toaster> i think

<~g0d`toaster> why?

<~g0d`static> u have house?

<~g0d`toaster> yeah

<~g0d`static> i come to america

<~g0d`static> live in yr house?

<~g0d`static> ? ok?

<~g0d`toaster> huh

<~g0d`static> i'm on street

<~g0d`static> made to leave

<~g0d`static> by parent

<~g0d`toaster> oh uh

Uh he was living in the basement of Jeff's family's house still and it was at something like a “boiling point”, which, hilariously enough, happened at around the same time as the boiling point for static's, whose real name was Tanaka Ao, parents. A major opportunity on the Mandarake online store. A major lack of funds in the personal account. A quick dash out to grab his father's credit card. It was the one too manyth time. Meanwhile Jeff and James shuffle in the early evening to be told by the wife that while Jeff was “walking James” (the wife's term), the kid had taken first steps or said first words or something, and the whole situation was huge and confusing and exploding, and had nothing like the one-frame explosion cancels of VX for James to punch in through before the argument started. James and Ao and six other players, including lucifer and satan, were at the rank of “Grand Master”, currently speculated to be the highest rank. The g0d` team had a ranking of “***” while their antagonists had maintained “****”. But the devil had not won yet.

So static did not move to America, but he did get kicked out of his parents house. Before the final cutting off, he was made to endure one cruel revenge by his father, who had barely tolerated his presence since like 2014. He was made to watch, screaming, as his father smashed and ripped to fairly small bits his entire collection of anime figures, anime DVDs, anime posters, video games, computer parts, manga, wall scrolls, body pillow covers and sometimes even the pillows themselves, the feathers and little synthetic puffballs settling as his father in a pulsing berserker stance. He was screaming out prices, begging that these be sold and the money used for anything, even things specifically to torture him, even the bullet that would kill him, so long as they lived on. But no.

He then got a part-time job at a Family Mart and spent all of his time there, at a local public bath, or at a local internet cafe. He slept whenever possible in any of these spots. He played with random players, who spammed him later with personal messages demanding to know the secrets of his skills. He played as g0d`bread. why? did not fund him like he did James because he did not like the style of his play. Funding or no, James also took a bit of time to land on his feet after finally being made to move out of Jeff's basement. The checks eventually followed him to a cheap apartment his brother helped him get. He was also contracting arthritis and had been experiencing symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, but he hardly noticed. It was Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2028 when he finally talked to static again. What had passed, or didn't pass, between them, or within them, didn't matter. The end of their last game, played that April, where g0d`statc's legendary chain of block-cancels into a “surreal beatdown” by g0d`toaster, earning an extremely rare “VX” grade, still a hot topic in many discussion circles, the end of that game seamlessly connected with the start of their next one, played that night, against two well-known Korean players who, after the match, reportedly entered every channel and forum they could with “THE KINGS ARE BACK” on the tips of their fingers.

Only for one week in 2030 could they be called the actual kings, after a series of matches against Chinese players GMOst`toro and GMOst`carrot gave them five consecutive “VX” rankings. Controversy erupted instantly, the extreme rarity and unlikeliness of the situation had people calling into question every aspect of the matches. Judges were interviewed, plays were reviewed and rereviewed, and the g0d` players reached a new grade of “****”, tying them with lucifer and satan. At the end of the week, though, the entire debacle was pushed aside in the public consciousness by lucifer reaching the rank of “Final Master”. That day, James' brother called to tell James that he had read in the paper that a Jack Barnes had died, and was that the Jack that he knew? And it was also that day that James felt a completely debilitating pain in his right wrist that numbed his fingers and left his hand a flopping fish on the keyboard. The match scored a “B-” and at the funeral, where he overheard that Tom was also dead and he talked to no one and recognized no one and seemed to be recognized by no one, he decided that he would never play VX again. The devil had one.

James' favorite day to recall as he walks slowly through a local park is the day when I broke his door down. The money from why? keeps coming in, although no one is sure why at this point. He doesn't remember the day as the day that I broke his door down, though. Nor does he remember it as the day that I snapped a canvas over my knee on the bus ride home, or ineffectually punched Jason in the stomach as he laughed in the seat next to me, or made a girl cry for the very first time ever, which is certainly the way I remember the day. He doesn't remember or make the connection that it was after this day that money started arriving for him from nowhere in the mail. He remembers it for when he opened the email that said “g0d`static and g0d`toaster, for your performance in match 223034 with briang0 and schappie0, we have awarded you a * award. Congratulations.” And then he remembers playing the loudest song he had the loudest he could and singing along as loud as he can and standing on his chair, and what else is irrelevant.

He remembers the nights in the basement after he had finally learned to be quiet, remembers the silent clench of fist, shudder at elbow and slow nod, eyes closed, after hitting “Galactic Champion”, the rest, the tattered mattress and drafts, is irrelevant. He remembers hitting “Veteran” and telling Jason breathlessly about the percentile, which was like 96^th at the time. He remembers hitting “Legend” and rubbing it in the face of Steven, who was at “Hero” before anyone they knew but got stuck at “Hero”, getting like constant “C+”s, for like a year. He remembers his first “****”, awarded for a match where he played X almost the whole time and comboed like his life depended on it. He remembers the feeling of neurons rewiring in a sensory bypass of consciousness tedium: colour to sound to muscle as one circuit. It was perfect, perfect, perfect.

He remembers meeting g0d`static in #VX, although he had run into him in the game before. At the time they were just static and toaster. When he wonders where static is now, which he does pretty often, he gives up after he realizes that he can't picture anyone's life in Japan at all. He sometimes realizes that he can't picture anyone else's life at all. They run around looking for matches. The run around dropping bricks in holes. They run around looking for something to punch or block. Problems without solutions. In VX, problems solvable, perfection. He remembers telling Jeff about VX, describing it like “Tetris and 3S without all the problems”, to which Jeff said “Since when do Tetris and 3S have problems?”, to which James just chuckled knowingly. He remembers speaking to someone, he can't remember who, about the difference between Tetris and VX. He doesn't remember much about the conversation, except that the Tetris player was a good Tetris player but only an okay VX player and wasn't taking “You're not very good on V” as an excuse for his mediocrity at the latter, and he remembers the advice he gave: “Think about wholeness, VX is a game that demands wholeness.”

The person he was speaking to remembers it well, has it in a .txt file named “toaster vx chat.txt”, and looks at on occasion. He has it in a folder with a failed project that he began after seeing why? propose the idea on his blog. It was like Tetris, except the blocks didn't clear, and the game didn't end, so you just kept building higher and higher and higher. why? suggested it be called “Tower”, the actual programmer referred to it himself as “Tetriminos of the Sun”, and the only released version was called “Babel”. You drop bricks as fast or slow as you want. Your Tower is as organized or disorganized as you want. Once you go up enough, the camera scrolls off and the bottom disappears. There's a background that starts with sky and clouds then goes to stars and then galaxies. It is an “art game”. After working on it a few days the “artist” realized he was terrified of it. He told James why at the start of “toaster vx chat”. He said: “babel made me realize i'm afraid of heaven”. And toaster said, and this is what he remembers much more than the advice about wholeness, was “just play vx more its actually living :D”. He claims this offhand statement by James, who was, at the time, responding to pretty much everything said by anyone with a suggestion that they play VX instead, he claims this remark changed his life. They talked about the merits of VX for an hour or so until static signed on and James left to play more.

In 2055, James doesn't know if there ever was a rank beyond “Final Master”, but he suspects not. He doesn't know if anyone still plays VX. He doesn't know if lucifer and satan are still the top two players, or even who they are or if they still live or what. He suspects there was no rank after “Final Master” because it was the fiftieth rank. He still suspects that there could be a team better than those two, though, a team worthy of the grade of “VX”. He can see them in his mind. The dim flashes on the impact of the brick still burn his closed eyelids. The soft swoop sound played when the bricks drop out the bottom of the well echoes in his brain. The undeniable tremor that runs through his whole body as the bright flash of a gold parry gives way to a flurry of finger movements, the reversal combo, he clenches his wrist as he involuntarily moves to recreate it. VX is perfection in that it contains perfection in that the hazy city sky contains a celestial perfection in the grand symmetry of galaxy within galaxy. The gap between “Galactic Champion” and “Cosmic Hero” was crossed by &yohiro in 2025. Within clunky bone and flesh lies the perfect graceful movement. In static lies the tone. In the chaos of the world, James Heath had found VX. Our God Colin watched him play all of once, mild concern clouding his face as he focused more on the twitching pudge around James' cheeks rather than the utterly incomprehensible firework vomit on the screen. We had nothing to judge James' life by but our own, and that hardly seemed fair. Criticizing him left us feeling ugly and hypocritical. The joy in his face as the office chair slowly swiveled to meet my foot and his wrecked door planted a seed of guilt in my anger almost instantly. Anger cannot meet joy, joy is the despair of anger. James was, is, the happiest of all of us. My first draft of my paper on “The Fundamental Light of Humanity” was called “A Study of Flow and Ecstasy Through Competition in the Game VX”, but it was scrapped.

One idea I had in those stages was a “Fundamental Hole of Humanity” as a counterpart and motivating contrary to the F.L. of H.. I have since abandoned it, but if it existed, James would be the only one I know who has come close to filling it. He filled it with some billions of bricks dropped and exploded, blocks turned cancels and cancels turned jabs. He filled it with thirty-nine keyboards and a lot of friendships and a lot of futile arthritis meds. He filled it with VX. And someday, maybe, we'll all find our VX too.

So yeah

The idea was a lot of stories like that that interconnected, some being big summaries of a whole life, most being just events that developed character a bit. The other sections I liked the most were elaborations on this game and the creator of it, by the way, maybe I should have just tried to do the whole thing on that. I dunno.

But that's what I've been up to essentially

There's also the standard new music and anime and sitcoms but this post is plenty long enough so I'll cover that later.

WOW IS THIS THE MOST INTENSE BLOGGING YOU HAVE SEEEN IN A BLOG??

2011-11-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

Anime

Guilty Crown

Still watching this, still sorta enjoying it but also sorta scoffing. I have a million little beefs with it but if I ever think about any specific one I feel like I'm nitpicking. Most stuff is pretty good, but not great. Main character? Yeah, he's okay. Gai? Sure, sorta interesting. Female MC? I like her, yeah, but she could be better. How? I dunno. The plot is... good enough? The plot devices are... sufficient? The progress is... a little to episodic but also not really resolved enough? All these little quibbles... One thing I have to give super props for would be the scene in the latest one – episode 5 – where MC learns that female MC doesn't really care for him and was just told to act that way by Gai. Now I know this'll probably not last and after a little tour around with the other female characters he'll still end up with her but still, this was pure solid NTR and seriously unexpected. There's been a few other unexpected subversions in this show, not as many as there should be, but there's at least an effort to defy the traditional plot, but none of them really hit very hard, all of them seemed more like “creative cop-out for easiness” instead of “woah ho ho, did not see that coming.” But this was like, woah, brutal! Aside from the fight scenes I think this is the best scene they've done. They actually imparted real despair in there. Now you might wonder why I consider that a good thing. You may remember me praising other stuff for the despair it made me feel and think like what is this kid some emo depressed kid up all in black clothes? But nah. This is a big subject that sort of crosses into my idea of “secret art” but really the “secret art” idea is just another way of presenting my ideas about “deep emotions”. Anyways I don't really feel like explaining it all here but since no one reads these anime review dealies I figure it's a decent enough place to start trying to get this idea into words. Basically I think of emotions as a big 2-dimensional web that expands out from “neutral”. I think an interesting way to think of art is by trying to map how it moves you along this emotional web. I also think that some of the best art is that which aims for the extreme areas of the web, trying to take you as far from neutral as possible. Most people would agree with that, right? So I qualify a really deep emotion in the sad region as “despair”, and although it feels really bad to be there there's also a depth to being there, a certain inspiration, a certain wholeness, these extreme emotions being where we are more ourselves than anywhere else, where we are more human than anywhere else. And a bunch of other stuff too but maybe you get the idea. So yeah. Despair. Pretty cool. And when she walks away from him with the MAJOR SHUTDOWN I was like ugh, that HURTS, I am IN DESPAIR sort of, but nowhere near as much as I was when I read Oblivion but at any rate. The main reason I'm watching this show is the fight scenes, though, because the special effects budget on this show is I think the crown jewels of Britain. When he was jumping around in zero-G and then he pulls the sword from the girl's void (btw I really do think this a cool mechanic) and slashes at the big robot DAAAAANG.

Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai

Watched the first five episodes of this. Why? I have no idea. Nah I dunno it's pretty fun, pretty funny. I like roughly half the cast wait let's figure this out:

MC – C

Eh. His like, tortured past is just sorta dull. Doesn't really do anything too interesting. I miss MCs that narrate and have some wit. Passable, though. The whole delinquent shtick is funny but is sorta the least funny it could be? Hmm.

Childhood friend girl – B

Her voice is like... just a bit too low? It bothers me. Her singing voice in the ED is good though. Design is great. Personality pretty funny but at the same time she's sort of just a less interesting but meaner Haruhi?

Meat – S

What the hell Meat, why is this character so entertaining? Design is like nothing I really like but it somehow works. Personality is just Kirino with more dere which uh is actually pretty much just genius.

Kid sister – S

Again, design shouldn't be good but it is. Personality pretty funny but essentially one joke. Way too ham on attraction to MC though I think. Sometimes just barely not annoying. Voice pretty good though.

Nun – C

Argh, I dunno, I like Index alright but this half-assed Index parody just gets on my nerve. Voice goes way too far. Personality is Index without the interesting backstory etc. Good gags with the kid sister though.

Reverse-trap – B

I figure this will end up being a girl? I dunno. Sorta funny premise. I like the design, personality is good enough. Most of the time it seems like there'll be no jokes here though.

Science girl – A

Probably the most original character. Don't really like the design, nah. Seems uhhh hypocritical? All the girls in this show look like they wear makeup but really only here does it seem grossly inappropriate. Anyways she looks like she'll motivate a lot of the future plots with Doraemon-style gadgetry which is fine. Her gags are all really funny, too, the Evangelion/Gundam thing was seriously hilarious. So yeah good times, I guess.

So yeah I guess I do like most of the characters. There's probably much better shows I should be watching but whatever. I sorta watch shows based on /a/-hype since really that's the only thing that isn't improved by waiting for the BRs. And this show gets a lot of pretty crazy arguments going. By this logic I should be up to date on Idolmaster and nope I'm not.

Saimoe

Wow so congratulations Mami. I really didn't think she'd beat Madoka, but there you go. I guess if I was up on pivix numbers I'd have realized but whatever. Saimoe this year was fun 'cause of all this Madoka stomping but sort of disappointing otherwise. All the non-Madoka factions (blasphemers) were apparently engaged in all sorts of sketchy cheating shenanigans and by the end most people just seemed to lose interest. Like, less than 1000 votes per side in the finals? Lame. Next year will be super-hype, though. Let's hope I still care!!

Sitcoms stuff

Workaholics really funny. The “trapped in suburbia” one seemed like a movie, almost, y'know? Like when the had the first like, mini-adventure with being in the closet with the adulterer, it seemed like they'd format the rest of the episode like that and it'd seem like a movie that maybe some crude older brother of Michael Cera'd star in. It's a dang good premise. Carl's wedding was hilarious too. Community's been pretty good too. Haven't seen the latest one but the one with Pierce's dad and the Halloween one were both good. IASIP has been varying like really wildly, often within the same episode. Seems like they're a bit too eager to land “classic” jokes or premises when those things have to emerge naturally. So yeah good times all around.

ITG Updates

Gonna keep track of stuff I pass that I'm proud of.

10s I have Passed

-Hand of Time

-My Favorite Game

-some other song that was really fun, but I sorta fudged a lot of the 4th-16th-16th-4th rythms with just 4th-8th-8th-4th. That's just HOWs I ROLLs though.

-some other song where really the only 10-worthy part is the stream at the end I think

Let's hope this list continues to grow! And maybe has more descriptive song titles!!

That's it for now really. I should be working on other stuff at the moment.

childpost is father of the manblog

2011-11-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Books

The Hero of the Play

This is one I had to read for school. Book of poems about hockey. Yeah, I groaned too! I figured it was gonna be an incredibly mislead attempt to appeal to “jocks” that might have enrolled in this poetry class but no no this is actually pretty dang good. Couple quick beefs: first off I mean it's like, hardly poetry. Aside from maybe a bit of a feel of linebreaks and such occasionally there really isn't any reason this couldn't be chunks of prose. I think he chose “poetry” mainly for what I think he felt was a freedom from the requirements of prose i.e. a narrative but who says prose needs to have a narrative? Now I think the same freedoms of poetry have turned into restrictions, and when you feel like he's on the verge of some really stunning little narrative it like hits a wall. And plus this contributes to my other beef, that this is really in some contemporary mode of subject preceding feeling. It's like he just had a bunch of hockey related subjects and then set to making a poem for each of them versus having a bunch of feelings about hockey and then looking for how to express them. Yeah again almost all of them are done really well, some really nice phrasing and interesting ideas about sport and violence and legacy and all that, but a lot of them still manage to be forced, sure, so much good stuff came out, but you get the sense that he really really dug for it. The best poems are the ones that seem like they burst out of some inner heart of the poet and whatever words or images needed to encapsulate it formed naturally. Geyser versus picking a spot on the map you figure you ought to use and drilling until you find a bit of oil. I dunno. As far as hockey itself goes, it's still one of my favorite sports to watch, mainly because plays go on for so long and everyone moves around a lot. The very principles of hockey culture seem to be about like unrefined things, pretty contrary to this elegant writing, but the paradox is intriguing rather than frustrating. Good stuff all around. I guess I shouldn't complain much about contemporary poetry's subject matter choice and stretching things for it when I wrote a sonnet about Tetris Attack in school.

Oblivion

Have read a bit more of this:

“Another Pioneer”

This one's a little nicer, a bit. Very clever, yes. I love the fact that it's a story being told by one guy on a plane to another, the teller obviously having heard it or read it somewhere else, with a friend of the narrator overhearing and then telling the narrator later, and then the narrator tells us and there's even another layer that's that abstraction between author and reader that's sorta neat but I'm too lazy to get into it. So anyways I think the really cool thing you can get from this is that dfw is one of those people good enough at writing that they can essentially choose any topic, no matter how difficult the concept, no matter how varied the ramifications, and contemplate it fully and enthrallingly. What I can't really decide is if this gift is more impressive when applied to simple cases or complex ones like this. Actually though this is sort of a simple case too: “what would happen if a kid in a basic tribal village suddenly had unlimited knowledge?”. Probably more simple than “what if a depressed person is caught in a double bind of needing support and said support making her feel guilty and then their therapist kills themselves?” But yeah my point is that no matter what the situation, Wallace can and does take it to its natural limits. And once you're talented and experienced enough to that, the world, or I guess any world, is your oyster. Speaking of which:

“Good Old Neon:”

Oh man hahaha this is the name of one of Kool AD's Hyphy Ballads. Specifically it's the one where he drones out The Stooges' “Search and Destroy”. What are the ramifications of this? Pretty wacky prolly! I dunno I can't say I get it or if I'm sure there's something to get. Probably should focus on this story then okay wait no it's just too sad, it really is. One aspect of Wallace's writing that I sometimes dislike is when he has a character who has a trait like “socially manipulative” - it's a character trait that guarantees success, you know? Like, I dunno, it always seems just a bit... well, socially manipulative itself. Like, the difference between seeing a character engage in social situations and coming to the conclusion that he's socially manipulative, but still getting the tension of like “wait what's he doing what's he saying why's it working oh I see how it's working how clever, how socially manipulative” versus being told “this guy's socially manipulative, he's gonna socially manipulative this conversation, okay I guess he did it” or even more often “ah I see, he socially manipulated that”. I guess the former doesn't really work in this retrospective structure. It doesn't matter anyways because I realized something pretty big with this one: because of the flawed and centered third person, we're still getting a lot of these “socially manipulative” characters opinions of themselves filtered through themselves. They are, in short, often frauds, and this simplification and predetermination of a trait like that is their own justification. Like this dude here in “Good Old Neon”: he starts by talking about his social prowess, his ability to do this and that without revealing his inner self, etc, etc but we begin to realize that this is a facade as well and either the thing he'd been putting on was his true self or there was no true self at all. I feel like a lot of the text is sort of a distraction from this key problem, which I think is this: the self, when evaluated in a certain way, will always feel false. By “evaluated in a certain way” I mean “evaluated by a person who has some sort of inherent chemical imbalance causing depression” but to some extent I think this is something we can all relate to, right? I know sometimes I look around my room or whatever and think “there's no way I can actually like all of this, I must be faking some of it somehow” and then I get thinking about what I really like and what I like for appearances, and, depending on my mood, evaluating anything like this, no matter what it is, will reveal either that I must truly like it and be faking the rest, or I must be faking it and liking the rest. It's one of those traps you can just think your way into. A minor logic loop propped up by the fact that there really is some stuff you just can't know about yourself. Speaking of which I went on a tangent about Godel's incompleteness theorem being applicable to conspiracy theorists and conspiracies themselves on a recent film assignment and my TA completely called me out on how confusing it was and I felt a mixture of pride and shame and I couldn't tell which one was real. But that's really enough or too much about me, the point is this story really examines this little pseudo-paradox that I've never really seen addressed before, and examines it with the comprehensive depth that is customary of this collection. He finds a situation at the extremity and presents it realistically, which is impressive in itself. Good job etc.

“Oblivion”

So the last one focused on what I called a pseudo-paradox: the examined self is false, acting without introspection is false, thus there is no real self. I call it a pseudo-paradox because I don't think the premise is true in all cases, I think for most people examination of the self can make the self seem truer than ever. But in the case of someone mentally disturbed in such a way to make these premises true, it would seem to me to be a legitimate paradox. But because of this not being a universal paradox but rather some private one, the story thus becomes a story of private suffering. In “Oblivion”, the protagonist and his wife struggle with an actual paradox: he is asleep, but feels he is awake, his wife is awoken by his snoring, he cannot be snoring even if he is asleep because if he thinks he's awake he isn't in the stage of sleep where he can snore, so what gives? Or vastly simplified: “What happens in an argument when both people are mutually exclusively right?” So as just a quick aside I like two terms when I think about these sort of dilemmas in fiction: contraries and paradoxes. In my mind, a big part of plot development can be summarized as “a paradox is proven actually to be a contrary”. For example, in “Good Old Neon”, we're presented with his life as a paradox, but as the flaws in his character are revealed, it's more of just a contrary between the way he thinks and the way he thinks he is able to think. Basically the shift is between “two things that are mutually exclusively right” (a paradox) and “one thing that is right, and one thing that is wrong but might as well be right for the effect it will have” (a contrary). I think this is maybe getting too abstract. Anyways my point is that Wallace, and a lot of other authors, like to construct paradoxes in our mind and then deconstruct them to contraries as a tool for, like, plot pushing or whatever term you want to use here. So here we get the same thing that he constructs this paradox of both of them being right. Or rather he constructs a situation where he is right and is saying his wife isn't, but any Wallace vet is ready to see the conclusion where his wife is right as well. So at the conclusion, where, spoilers, but I guess I already spoiled it, we see that yes, they are somehow both right, there's a bit of this jarring reeling feeling like someone's just snapped your bungee cord. It isn't all about the snoring, obviously, just like it wouldn't be in real life. The real art of these paradoxes and contraries is how they exemplify the character dynamics at large. And we're trained to think that the various marital dilemmas will be resolved by the resolution of this snoring paradox, right? So when they aren't, when the paradox is revealed to be indeed paradoxical, what happens with the rest of the plot? And then we enter the twist ending, which I won't spoil but will probably inadvertently make obvious, and we reflect on the title a bit, and we go back and reread, and everything makes more sense, and we see that the true contrary was between paradox and reality, and we raise our eyebrows and make a little puffed sound and think, dang, this next story better be good if it's gonna try to top that.

And whoops I forgot about the one with the woman whose plastic surgery is botched and makes it look like she's always screaming

But I don't know if I'd have much to say about that anyways.

The next one I haven't read yet, I'm saving it I think. I've noticed a lot in these sort of story compilations (that is, exceedingly good ones), that the “thrust” story, that is, the story that really exemplifies the book, is the penultimate one and then is followed by the “followthrough”, that is, the story that exceeds the book in just the right ways. Example I can think of off the top of my head: Sekai no Owari to Yoake Mae, by Inio Asano: the second to last one is the pseudo-biographical gutspill that captures a ton of the themes in the rest of the collection and rolls them into one bruiser of a story, followed by “The End of the World”, probably my favorite single chapter of manga ever, which zooms in on the real quality of the whole book, disregarding anything less than that brilliance. It's the “miracle to masterpiece” quality that I tried to describe about the first and second season of a lot of shows but in reverse. I dunno. Anyways that's the dynamic I'm expecting here.

Saimoe stuff

Okay so I was wrong about Kuroneko vs. Kyouko, man oh man Madoka is just going full out DJ Khaled “all I do is win” mode if you know what I mean. Also interesting: Madoka vs. Sayaka got like half the votes of the other matches, lol. Seems like there's definitely still a Madoka faction that is aside from just “everyone”.

Music

The Smile Sessions

So at some point I was convinced that “God Only Knows” was the most beautiful song of all time, or perhaps just the greatest pop song of all time, or maybe just the best song ever. And heck yeah I believed whatever website or list or whatever this was, 'cause it was sure one of the best songs I've ever heard. It was the best song until this March when “Black and Yellow Sketch” came out. But no not now. They had it wrong. “Surf's Up” is actually the best song I've heard besides “Black and Yellow Sketch” and is thus the best song of those 44 years. Wow, 44 years, I cannot get my head around that. So yeah The Beach Boys started making Smile and that all got generally screwed up but now, 44 years later, we get the recording sessions. Okay okay yes most of this stuff has been released in some form or another, usually many forms, since then, sure. But I dunno like as much as I liked Pet Sounds – and I really really like Pet Sounds – I never really felt the motivation to try to piece together the rest of the whole Brian Wilson affair. Geez like I haven't even listened to Brian Wilson Presents Smile, although I probably will get on that soonish. So yeah, this is actually my first time hearing “Heroes and Villains” and “Vega-Tables” and “Good Vibrations” and especially “Surf's Up”, which I have been listening to over and over again for the last day or so just because I really still cannot get a grip on how good it is. This is pretty exciting stuff, for me, at least. Everything is like 10/10 great and then on a few moments it kicks it up to like the quad-star god-tier of uhh, well, not a whole lot else. Like a few seconds into first track “Our Prayer” when you remember exactly why these guys were the godkings of harmony and you realize that you really couldn't have prepared yourself for this at all. Or the end of “Gee” transitioning to “Heroes and Villains”, that suspense, that hesitation, then BOOM, “I've been in this town so long that back in the city/I've been taken for a lost and gone/An unknown for a long long time”. This song is seriously good, huge and sprawling, an aesthetic that seems some weird combination of The Beatles and Bob Dylan near the start, then changes a good five or six times in five minutes into things I honestly have never heard before or sense. This is the sort of like, ethereal celebration that Animal Collective is still trying to nail. This didn't just have potential to be the best song, it had the potential to be like the best five songs. But oh well doesn't matter because the best song is actually “Surf's Up”.

Anyways I might have more to say about this later but for now let's just do some more fun lists and post this thing.

Top 5 Beach Boys songs

5. “I Know There's An Answer”

4. “Heroes and Villains”

3. “That's Not Me”

2. “God Only Knows”

1. “Surf's Up”

That's pretty standardish I guess, really.

And plus since The Beach Boys have got me listening to a lot of them right now again:

Top 5 Animal Collective songs

5. “My Girls”

4. “I Think I Can”

3. “Mr. Fingers”

2. “Brother Sport”

1. “Banshee Beat”

Geez that was a hard decision. I'm not sure if I believe that. I think it needs more stuff from Sung Tongs prolly.

Also this probably:

Top 5 hardest songs I've passed in ITG

5. “So Deep” on 9

4. “Epileptic Crisis” on 7

3. “Tricky Disco” on 9

2. “July” on 9

1. “Hand of Time” on 10

Yeah yeah new list that's right old list out of date that's right I passed “Tricky Disco” and it was tricky and then I passed “Epileptic Crisis” which isn't so much actually difficult on that difficulty as it is just overwhelmingly weird and that is RIGHT I passed “Hand of Time” in that I got a D, a 48%, but I had meter at the end, I didn't die, it didn't say “F” and “Ineligible for ranking”, I passed, I passed a 10, and that is what counts.

I am so happy that I passed a 10 that this blog post ends RIGHT NOW.

7503

2011-10-27T18:32:00.001-07:00

Emergency Saimoe Update

Okay 'cause bracket is up now I want to make these prediction before the first match actually starts.

QF1: Astarotte Ygvar vs. Erica Hartmann

Geez I hope Erica has this. This match isn't really that political in terms of the characters themselves, but there's sure a lot of politics behind it. You have the whole Raildex faction out for revenge on Astarotte and the entire Strike Witches fanbase now unified against, well, anyone against these two huge and hugely controversial franchises. My bet is on Erica, though. Mainly cause Astarotte seemed like a crappy show and I never felt like watching it. I guess that was true of Strike Witches until a bit ago too though so I dunno.

QF2: Kyouko Sakura vs. Ruri Gokou

This one is tricky. I'm tempted to say Kuroneko will take it, but uh Akaneko? I dunno trying to make a joke here. Akaneko has all the force of the Madoka masterpiece behind it. Do I need to point out how Madoka, through sheer quality, has preformed some sort of Instrumentality Project-type restructuring of human consciousness, known in many circles as “The Quickening”? Yeah it did that. Kyouko is prolly the least popular Puella Magi, definitely the least moe, but who is gonna vote against Madoka? Like, really, who? The horrible Raildex brigade, that's who. I still can't believe Homura got knocked out. But yeah I think Kuroneko has it actually.

QF3: Madoka Kaname vs. Sayaka Miki

Wow, this is cruel, isn't it? To have these two great friends square off in quarters? I guess it's one of those things that just has to happen sometimes, though. It would have been cool for it to be distributed such that the semi-finals could be entirely Madoka, but this really isn't too bad. Anyways yeah I think Madoka has this. I think. It's hard to say 'cause Madoka hasn't had many hard matchups whereas Sayaka had to take on that stupid Infinite Stratos girl, plus the two minor Railgun characters – here, she didn't even lose to the Railgun faction splitting and getting all confused – although that did happen – she got more than them combined. So Sayaka has proven support but geez Madoka's the main character I gotta think she has even more support even if it hasn't been flexed yet. And maybe the Infinite Stratos kids are against Sayaka now? I dunno they're dumb so I don't really care what they're up to. TWGOK fans have a beef with both of them so probably won't sway it. It'll really come down to actual character popularity instead of political grudges. How neat! And if that's the case Madoka should and probably will have it.

QF4: Mami Tomoe vs. Squid Girl

This one I really have no idea. Mami has been just absolutely stomping everything. I mean winning her group finals 427 to 182? That's a massacre. Of course Squid Girl might have won by that margin were her opponent someone besides the wonderful Yunocchi, may she rest in peace. So I dunno. Politics are too confusing. I gotta just guess Mami will win unless like everyone unites against the Madoka franchise, but I really really doubt that. Usually when a series rampages like this it attracts a lot of hate, but how could Madoka? It's just SO. GOOD.

SF1: Erica Hartmann vs. Ruri Gokou

After Kyouko I'd imagine this'd be easy for Kuroneko. Maybe. Maybe not. Was gonna make some golden cat joke but too lazy to look up words. Probably will be some political thing but I have no idea. I just can't see Kuroneko losing to anything short of Meduka. I could be wrong though.

SF2: Madoka Kaname vs. Mami Tomoe

Same thing as quarter finals, I don't see how Madoka would lose to another Puella Magi.

Finals: Madoka Kaname vs. Ruri Gokou

And here Madoka takes it GG.

OKAY LET'S SEE IF I'M RIGHT.

If I get all of these right, you, the hypothetical reader of this post, have to give me fifty bucks. If I'm wrong I'll uh I dunno I probably won't do anything but if you have a good idea for something I should do I might consider it.

Content to pad out this blog post that might interest more people

Awhile back I made top 20 lists and that was fun and more recently I made top 5 lists and that was fun and even easier so here comes some more:

Top 5 Games I am Looking Forward To

5. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U

4. Kirby: Return to Dreamland

3. Super Mario 3D Land

2. Mario Kart 7

1. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Hmm all Nintendo games. I think there's probably some more here I'm not thinking of but if I'm not thinking of them I can't really be looking forward to them too much, can I?

Top 5 TAS runs I am Looking Forward To

5. DarkKohbold's Final Fantasy VII run

4. Lil Gecko's Final Fantasy IX run

3. ISM's 96 Exit Super Mario World run

2. SwordlessLink's MST Ocarina of Time run

1. Like every single SM64 player working together's 120 Star run

Of these I think like... 4 and 2 might finish in this year. I have no idea what the status of 1 is even though I get email updates about it every week or so but lol they are in Japanese. 5 and 3 I don't have any idea about.

Top 5 Webcomics

5. Dresden Codak

4. A Lesson is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible

3. Pictures for Sad Children

2. Dinosaur Comics

1. Gunshow

I should probably write more about these choices but whatever some other time. Gunshow takes first with a bullet (haha (AH HAHAHA (lol (omg lol, lol, HAHAHAHA, lol (lol) (ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha (lmao (lmfao (party rock! Haha lol)))))))) partially due to the drawing KC Green put in my Anime Club book which sometime I will take a picture of I think I should.

Okay that's a thousand words SEE YA.

7500

2011-10-23T23:58:00.000-07:00

Day 7500

Today I have been alive for 7500 days. Three-quarters to the big 10K! Anyways here's some stuff I've been doing:

New Cell Phone

Boldly stepped into the current decade with this new phone. Reasons I got it were like:

10% - Really good deal

10% - Maps

20% - Old one screwing up

60% - New phone can play music

I had a 5^th Gen iPod video since like... late 2005, I guess, and that thing has been really great and super functional with rockbox etc up until early this year when the harddrive just went completely kaput. That thing was like a pseudo-umbilical cord so pretty devestating loss, but since I was so familiar with it and none of the newer ones had rockbox and because I was too cheap to get a new one I refused to get anything besides another one of the exact model. And that's surprisingly tough! Anyways I'm still on the lookout but eventually I got used to not having it. Well BAM that's all changed because NEW PHONE plays MP3s. And it's actually like a really bad music player, the battery is pretty low and it doesn't support many filetypes and there's no easy non-menu way to change tracks etc but whatever. On the other hand it has Youtube so I can listen to a bunch of stuff I didn't think to put on it and on the only hand that matters it plays mp3s and is portable. I finally get to give a proper workout to the earbuds I got in Japan and oh geez I swear these things have more bass than my actual cans. Or maybe I'm crazy. I think they have like an overabundance of like “aggressive” bass that plagues Skullcandy and Beats but they still sound fairly clear. Very happy with them.

One thing that's weird is that when I first got an mp3 player I sort of eased into it, combination of not really realizing how much I'd enjoy using it in various places and not really having a whole lot of music. Plus back then I had horrible little dollarstore earbuds and random 128kbps stuff from Limewire; these were dark, dark days. So yeah, a process of easing in, so I never experienced the weird thing I'm experiencing now which is going suddenly from no music to great sounding music everywhere. Suddenly the streets have all gone mute and campus went from like rowdy or whatever to very demure and unsettlingly calm. It's eerie! A bit. I dunno. But I forgot how nice it was to both appreciate outside with music and appreciate music with outside. Walking home in light rain listening to some piano arrangements of the Yume Nikki soundtrack, HOW NICE.

Oh speaking of which:

Video Games

.flow

Playing this again, got a new version but I don't think the newest version 'cause I can't get any of the non-English patched versions to load. Very very impressed. I have I think nine effects now? The latest one I found was the gas mask one in the crazy plant area, wow, wow, what an aesthetic. Seriously, this is rivaling Yume Nikki in terms of variety of really intriguing areas. I love the neon world especially, it's pretty “deep” though and I don't know if I'll be able to find it again. This game really fills me with some serious dread. Sorta goes into a whole thing about “art that is secret because it is so dreadful”, like, following my idea of “art so good that it's hidden” here we have “art so good at freaking people out/depressing them that it fades into obscurity despite it being awesome”. The extreme “conceptual” version would be a movie so systematically life ruining with its tragic beauty that everyone who watches it kills themselves. The real examples are stuff like this, to some extent Chris Ware, dfw's Oblivion which I have almost finished now, Dear Zachary, ultimate example is the K-On doujin trilogy - please do not investigate this further.

Okay so I was going to do other stuff but now I feel like doing this:

7500 days, 75 top things

List One: Predictions for the top 5 in Saimoe (too lazy to look at bracket to see if this will actually make sense)

5. Erica Hartmann

4. Mami Tomoe

3. Ruri Gokou

2. Squid Girl

1. Madoka Kaname

List Two: Top 5 Breakfast Cereals

5. Apple Cinnamon Cheerios

4. Raisin Bran

3. Reese Puffs

2. Just Right

1. Honey Nut Cheerios

List Three: Top 5 Sufjan Stevens songs

5. “Impossible Soul”

4. “Seven Swans”

3. “The Upper Peninsula”

2. “Dumb I Sound”

1. “Vito's Ordination Song”

List Four: Top 5 websites

5. tasvideos.org

4. karagarga.net

3. reddit.com

2. what.cd

1. 4chan.org

List Five: Top 5 Subreddits

5. /r/askGeorge

4. /r/comeonandslam

3. /r/TAS

2. /r/keatstalocation

1. /r/100BlackMen

List Six: Top 5 4chan Boards

5. /r9k/ WELCOME BACK

4. /v/

3. /lit/

2. /mu/

1. /a/

List Seven: Top 5 Strike Witches

5. Eila Ilmatar Juutilainen

4. Lynette Bishop

3. Erica Hartmann

2.Yoshika Miyafuji

1. Sanya V. Litvyak

List Eight: Top 5 Outkast Hooks

5. “Roses” - “I know you like to think your shit don't stink/but lean a little bit closer, see roses really smell like poo”

4. “Millenium” - “Uhuh, uhuhuhuh uh uh, uhuh uh uh uh uh” etc

3. “Elevators” - “Me, and you/Your momma and your cousin, too/Rolling down the strip on Vogues/Coming up, slamming Cadillac doors”

2. “ATLiens” - “Now throw your hands in the air/And wave em like you just don't care/And if you like fish and grits and all that pimp shit/Everybody let me hear you say oh yeaer”

1. “Rosa Parks” - “Ah-ha, hush that fuss/Everybody move to the back of the bus/If you want to bump and slump with us/We the type of people make the club get crunk”

List Nine: Top 5 Characters I am good with in Melee

5. Captain Falcon

4. Falco

3. Peach

2. Sheik

1. Jigglypuff

List Ten: Top 5 Characters I enjoy playing in Melee

5. Luigi

4. Captain Falcon

3. Mario

2. Pikachu

1. Young Link

List Eleven: Top 5 Hardest Songs I've Passed in ITG

5. “Destiny” on 9

4. “Remember December” on 9

3. “AA” on 9

2. “So Deep” on 9

1. “July” on 9

List Twelve: Top 5 Hardest Songs I'm Trying to Pass in ITG Now

5. “Tricky Disco” on 9

4. “Hand of Time” on 10

3. “Spin Chicken” on 10

2. “Tribal Style” on 10

1. “MAX 300” on 10

List Thirteen: Top 5 Coolest T-shirts I own

5. Galley-La company shirt

4. Marisa “Yukkuri shiteitte ne!” shirt

3. Godspeed You! Black Emperor shirt

2. Punpun standing on planet shirt

1. Das Racist T-shirt by Mishka

List Fourteen: Top 5 things I do with my new phone

5. Check 4chan, remember that all Wind users are banned on 4chan, close tab and sigh

4. MSN/email/text message etc

3. Directions

2. Listen to mp3s

1. Dick around trying to do the pattern thing as fast as possible to unlock it

List Fifteen: Top 5 other lists I was going to do

5. Top 5 other blog posts I have made

4. Top 5 channels on Youtube

3. Top 5 One Piece volumes

2. Top 5 types of “secret art”

1. Top 5 pieces of art ever

OKAY THAT'S ALL FOR NOW, let's aim for another enjoyable 2500 days. Or I guess 7777 will be a “lucky day”, then 8000. Whatever.

blog can't do it, wife won't do!

2011-10-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

Books

Oblivion

So I finished Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and it seemed pretty logical to follow that up with Oblivion. The stories are pretty long and so far have no direct connections between them so I'll give my thoughts on them separately. I've only finished the first three.

Mr. Squishy

I don't swear much on this blog or ever but please permit me to say holy shit because holy shit, this story. I have never known Mr. Wallace's work to be especially cheerful but I did somehow think that maybe this book wouldn't open with an absolute kick in the face. Yeah relative to the rest of the book from what I've seen maybe it's more like a elbow nudge and eye-roll but on an objective scale this is a kick directly in the face. What is this about? The grotesqueness of failed ambition? The paradox of wanting to make a difference and being a good person? I'm not sure. When Wallace writes about these failed people, is he being empathetic to a generation? Or is he writing out of that sort of lasting fear that outlives the thing that you fear of? Like do you ever get when you catch a bus but just barely you find yourself still locked in some fear that very easily you could have hesitated a bit here or there and missed it? Wallace caught the early bus of talent and made that hard connection to determination and stayed on over the whole rocky road that is success but the fragility of the whole thing might haunt him. Or maybe I'm projecting. Or, and this is the most scary, does Wallace actually feel he is one of the Mr. Squishies of the story? That one hauntingly oblique reference to being one of the ones in the focus group, what could it mean? What could it all mean? Stuff like Chris Ware that transmits loneliness on such a base undeniable level is brutal, but I am finding that the greatest despair hides in mystery.

I digress, though, 'cause what this actual story is actually about is a focus group and a man on the building and people working for the focus group company. And I guess it is also about botulism and a crowd on the street and delicious all-chocolate Felonies!. And each plot is a metaphor for the rest, and each symbol a symbol for all with varying levels of subtlety. And each description is perfect and each image really truly haunting. I have had a string of somewhat nightmarish dreams involving botulism in some form. Honestly if it wasn't so excellent I probably couldn't keep at it. dfw seems to want to push the sadness of the characters to the point of ridiculousness but we learn, and this is really truly scary, that we'll believe anything when it comes to someone's sadness.

The Soul is not a Smithy

This one's actually a bit more upbeat I think. Hmm. We get a sense that it ends sort of happy for the main character, at least? He seems happy with his wife, he understands his father more but doesn't seem hung up on regretting not understanding him when he was alive, which he knows would have been impossible. His mentions of his firm don't seem especially negative. I dunno. I found myself obsessing with the idea of the main character's adult happiness. I think that's what I was supposed to do. That aside almost every aspect of this is sad, sad, sad, which makes me I think want him to be happy later so much as at least one some sort of happy outcome. But yeah moving on I think this contains some of his best prose. He really really perfectly captures the wandering attention of the narrator, the way he mirrors his focus with the events of the scene is effective for all sorts of reasons. His “describing a movie” technique, or here, describing a pseudo-comic, is out in the fullest of forces. I'd like to write more in depth on what I mean by this but I think most people who've read his stuff probably have some idea of this. But yeah whereas before he'd sort of let that go on extended for awhile, here he interrupts it with a really natural feeling of distraction and elaboration. And ohh man the story of Ruthy and her dog is really one of his most overtly sad things, isn't it? And it's so sincerely sad, too, which is a whole other subject I really want to cover, the operative word for the last few months worth of things I've read is “sincerity”. Something about the entire description of the substitute teacher's breakdown seemed really “sincere” too, dunno.

But yeah this story was just fantastic. So many things I felt like I could really relate to. So many amazing descriptions. Wow, wow. Just finished it earlier today so I guess I don't really have a whole lot to say yet, but wow.

Incarnations of Burned Children

Okay so on the kindle for good e-books it'll separate chapters and stories like this, which is nice, 'cause I can then go to specific parts much more easily. A bad thing, though, is that I get a bit of spoilery metainfo like here I knew this would be especially short before I even started reading it. Although I really do think that even if I hadn't I'd know as soon as I started reading it that it would be pretty short. It just has that feel, you know? With the titles instead of names and such? Anyways I got really hype because dfw does some really really knock down sort of emotive stuff in his shorter fiction and this did not disappoint. It's one thing to immerse someone in a horrific situation beyond the imagination, but to take something easily imaginable but just not something someone would ever want to think of can be so much more powerful. I guess it's because it's this brand new reality that you always have to live with. Some crazy horror story might be a hundred times worse in terms of actual suffering, but it never really happened. This is something that's happened many many times. And oh geez the whole “the wound that was being treated was not the real wound” is something that absolutely destroys me, always had, back as far as Snowden in Catch-22, one of the first big boy novels I can remember reading. I think this is my favorite one so far.

Mansfield Park

I had to read this for school and I wasn't like, worried about it or anything I'd say. I figured I'd like it I mean c'mon Jane Austen's one of the greats, right? And I've yet to dislike one of the classics. But woah. No. I hate this thing. I really really wish I didn't but I do, I can't stand it at all. Not only that, but I see absolutely no literary value in it. Argh. Okay no first that's a lie there is some value. The novel is certainly very long and yet cohesive. The plot itself is trite and dull but at least it concludes without too many major things disregarded. Characters have some amount of consistency and do something resembling growth. And the prose is pretty, but I can't say anything nicer about it than that. It is definitely the work of a confident and expert writer who has set out to write something and has written exactly that. So I suppose it deserves some praise for that. But for the life of me, and I honestly feel like I have lost a good deal of my mental health trying to figure this out, I cannot see why I would be asked to study this today when there are so many other fine novels. This is the most socially ignorant book I have ever read. It seems like it was born out of some ivory tower located in the vacuum of deep space in a universe far removed from ours. Yes I know different place and time and all of that but so many other books are in much different times and places and can still connect to me by addressing issues that are common and live in the depths of the human spirit. Here is where I would try to transition into a new topic and start a new paragraph usually but no screw that this book actually makes me angry. Dostoyevsky plumbs the very depths of what it means to be human and does so by commenting on the biggest issues of his day which have really no bearing on me now. Austen seems to be completely unaware of the world outside of this very tiny slice of romanticized upper class and the characters barely skim the very top surface of humanity. Things are either wrong or right. There is no complexity in issues. Fanny's morality is absolute and everyone else has to be corrected by her in some way. Please contrast Fanny with Dostoyevsky's the Prince in The Idiot for the sake of getting angry. Both of them are essentially unfailingly good, yes. But the Prince's goodness is the sort of active, impressive goodness that makes interesting things happen and raises issues. He's still a flawed person and although his spirit is undying you get a sense of an actual struggle to be the person he wants to be. He is truly a beautiful soul. You may be wholly unable to actually relate to him but you try to, you want to be able to. Fanny Price whines and cries and complains but never ever attempts to improve her standings from within. She is completely powerless and inactive. Her absolute morality is a wrought iron box instead of a majestic mountain. She doesn't do a single interesting thing throughout the entire story. Okay gender issues, let's breach that. People have told me a few times now that yeah sure I won't like it I'm a man and the story's for girls. No, screw that, I won't accept it. Nor will I allow the protagonist of a long novel to be thrown around like a mannequin for the sake of realism. “Isn't it sad that women had so little power then that Fanny Price had to allow things to continue despite knowing better?” Yes, it's sad, sure. But it's not like that conflict is really presented to us in any sort of interesting form. It's not “I wish I could speak out about this, let me relate to you my suffering” it's just “I can't speak out about this, that's a fact, let's move on.” This is what I'm talking about when I say the book simply does not take place in my universe. It doesn't even follow the set of logic in my universe. Fanny being unable to do or say anything of any consequence to anyone sounds way more like really lazy writing to me, like a lazy and easy solution to the paradox of having Saint Whiny the Infallible bumming around all these depraved souls while they continue to do depraved things. Oh and I ought to put those “depraved”s in quotes because my god I have never seen a more bland cast or sequence of events. Times nothing. Shakespearean protagonists wouldn't lie around in catatonic shock over a little affair. They'd make some beautiful poetic speech vowing revenge or something and then do something actually worth a gasp or two. And my god such glorification of this bland little upper class slice of paradise they call Mansfield Park. You know how they write stuff about the inner glory of the common man? They being authors worth a damn. Or you know how you can do stuff that seems to justify a man's standing, conversely? This does neither. This is a cross-section of a group of people that seem shallow on the surface and on the inside they're even shallower. My god I have never seen people objectified to this extent before. Not even in my Japanese animes. Maybe this is just realistic for the times too but again I can name a lot of books in the era that actually seem to have human beings in them instead of these cardboard cutouts. Maybe those books weren't as realistic but seriously there is a point where you have sacrificed too much of your depth for the sake of realism. Oh and plus in what way is this realistic? This is the most juvenile of all fairy tail type happy ending tripe, self-serving in that unashamedly gross way of bad fan fiction. If it wasn't for the pretty phrasing and pointless length I'd swear it was indistinguishable from “My Immortal” etc. Already privileged (goddammit the house in Portsmouth had servants. I cannot get my head around this. If you wanted to show some sort of deplorable impoverished hell why not show the house of the servants themselves? Or how about some slaves? No one in this book suffers even for half a second no one no one nothing interesting happens to anyone in this godawful book) girl with no flaws that any other can see goes somewhere even nicer where everyone falls in love with her except for a few people who “get what's coming for them”. Aaaragrhghatagh it just steams me to read this stupid thing. I think I can take solace in the fact that, on further inspection, Austen doesn't really appear in my literary canon at all! I don't think anyone I like a lot took inspiration from her in any way shape or form. I don't even think she represented any sort of social advancement as far as I know. This is just some trash that slipped through the cracks of history and wound up in my hands. I don't get it. At all. Like think about this. Subjects covered in Crime and Punishment (and I mean COVERED, with like, multiple characters with differing but fully formed viewpoints, each of them expressed eloquently and in natural progression with the story, actual interesting legitimate opinions on these issues that are left up to the reader to consider fully without full explicitness): crime, punishment, entitlement, religion, love, class, pride, prejudice, logic, madness, marriage, education, tons of current social issues, fate, free will, I could go on. Subjects covered in Mansfield Park, by those standards: none. Subjects “covered” in that they're given some sort of opinion: class, love, marriage, morals. So much stuff is just completely and utterly ignored. Okay at this point I doubt anyone is reading this but oh my god I just have to express how much I hate this book. It really bothers me how much I hate this. I feel like other people might feel when they talk about how much they hate Joyce and it's all making me feel very sick to my stomach. There must be something here I've missed. It can't be that wholly devoid of anything even beginning to resemble poignancy or a statement on the human condition or actual conflict or social commentary or anything, anything at all that's worth reading some two hundred years later. Not that I can do better but so many amazing authors can and why did I have to read this one I can't possibly read all the good books so when I am lying there on my deathbed and wondering what it was that happened in One Hundred Years of Solitude I will surely remember how Fanny and Edmund had all these wacky adventures and I will damn Jane Austen then and there so let me do it now anyways damn you Jane Austen damn you to the pits of hell.

Sitcoms

This season I am watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's seventh season, Community's third and Workaholics' second. It's interesting 'cause I'm following the fanbases for these shows more actively and they're all sounding pretty similar in a few regards, mainly that they're all saying that a) the show is running out of ideas b) the show is pandering c) the characters are becoming caricatures (known in some demonic tongues as “flanderizing” and d) the show has officially jumped the shark. Now obviously not everyone is saying this, but irateness leads to vocalizing more than contentedness etc etc but what's really funny is that a lot of people said this last season for the former two shows and nearly every season after the second for IASIP. And I think they were the same people! I don't think it's like they're saying they feel like the show is continuing to do these various bad things, they seem to look back on the previous season very fondly.

My theory is this: sitcoms almost always go through a period where they morph into something much more specific. Funny elements are given more time and less funny stuff is cropped out. Stuff that's kept in has to be escalated. This results, in, essentially, pandering, a departure from “realistic” plotlines to outlandish ones, escalation of old ideas, etc, etc. When you're watching this stuff for the first time it can seem sort of lame, I guess, especially if you're a big fan. You'll notice these sort of things and yearn for the old days. But really, what matters is that the funny stuff is still funny. That is really what actually matters. So yeah in Community's 2^nd episode Chang was way crazy and the model UN thing was ridiculous and Britta was way over the top but c'mon it was hilarious. Same with the first three episodes of IASIP. And all the episodes of Workaholics. And the third episode of Community? That was great! Hilarious! I dunno. I think a lot of these people watch sitcoms for vastly different reasons than me. It's interesting. Anyways more importantly the fourth episode of Community I just watched now and oh wow, oh wow. They seem like they almost have an attitude now of doing “regular episodes” and then super-tryhard format-breaking innovative “masterpiece” episodes. I'm cool with it in general, yeah. This one isn't quite as good in concept as the “clip show that isn't a clipshow” from last season, nor is it quite as funny, but it is still very good. I can't remember the last time someone's done the multiple timelines sort of plot and had so much fun with it. They didn't hang up on the idea so much that we were expected to laugh more at the idea than the jokes themselves. Maybe they overdid the style of humor that's like, a bunch of crazy things happen, someone walks in on the resulting chaos but like, each time they did that sort of joke said craziness kept getting more and more genius and crazy. Overall maybe my second favorite episode of the series. Great stuff.

Anime

Strike Witches

I started watching this expecting it to be the new low point of my life and I guess it probably still is but on the other hand it really isn't that bad? I started watching it 'cause I wanted to see what all this Saimoe-dominating fuss was about and now I understand what the fuss is about and I'm worried I probably won't be able to stop watching. Seriously it is not that bad actually. The plot is... sketchy, yeah, I dunno, like Evangelion with only half of the ramifications considered, but there is some plot, and it motivates stuff without interrupting the real meat of the show, which is, of course, the characters (this isn't some objectification “just meat” joke, by the way, 'cause of most of these characters are actually pretty well developed (that isn't a joke either)). It's no Soro no Woto, oh no, but it is a crude approximation of that technique, which is better than nothing. All the action scenes are quite well done and exciting, great details on all the military fanservice, great scenery, etc, etc. It's excessive in all the right ways but the way in which it is most excessive is the really disturbing way i.e. why are none of them wearing pants? Seriously I thought the “no pants” thing was a joke, an exaggeration, but nope, there's just flat-out no pants. Huh? It's actually really surreal at times, everything will be serious-ish and dramatic and there'll be plot or character development or something but no one will be wearing pants. It's like some vat of fanservice just got spilled on the show. You might say it's intrinsic with the premise but it really isn't. I mean I guess some amount is intrinsic to pretty much any anime, but that's the sort of wacky shenanigans type of fanservice that Misato promised at the end of Evangelion previews, the stuff of beach episodes, etc. Here it's just randomly in every shot. I mean magic flying leg machines sure sure but I'm sure they have time to take off their pants/put them back on afterward. It really does confuse me because I figure people who are into that sort of thing would dislike the amount of desensitization it causes. I dunno. Anyways the next episode is a beach episode and I'm terrified to watch it because I have no idea where they will go from here. Some of the characters I really like, though.

Saimoe stuff

Alright let's check in here quick. We're getting to the big hype matches soon, and I am big hyped.

Group A: I predicted Misaka over Miya. Had no idea Astarotte was so popular. I still think/hope Misaka will make it though. Congrats to Christina for making it to round 3.

Group B: I had no real idea here. I thought Merry would do well but I should have realized the popularity of Angel Beats. Erica making it to finals is obvious in retrospect but I don't think she can beat Kanade. I hope she does, though, although I haven't even watched Angel Beats.

Group C: I said Madoka over Run or Elucia here and bam I was pretty accurate. Not an especially hard call, though, not many close matches here. Madoka will stomp in finals.

Group D: I guessed Yuno over Squid Girl and it actually might happen. Both these characters have tons of momentum and hype and honestly I'd be fine with either of them getting it.

Group E: I guessed Sayaka over Ohana but geez Iroha is no at all as popular as I thought it was I guess. Or maybe just The World God Only Knows is way more popular than I thought it was, geez, should get on that. Sayaka still has this easily, though, I think. Crazy that Homura is the only Puella Magi not making it out of groups, eh?

Group F: I figured Mami over I had no idea. I wouldn't have guessed someone from Hidan no Aria because geez I have heard like nothing from that show. Surprised that Yuuko made it as far as she did and also peeved that she knocked out Nano and Nori. Yuno is carrying the team Hidamari banner solo now.

Group G: This is a pretty stacked group I think but I figured Index and Kyoko would make it to finals and it seems like I'll be right. Kyoko will win it there, I think/hope. Good for Index for finally not having crazy hard pulls and making it to around as far as she “should”.

Group H: Here I guessed Kuroneko over some TWGOK character but nope Hidan no Aria/Infinite Stratos. Really doubt the IS girl will make it to finals, and I doubt either of them can beat Kuroneko.

So I'm doing pretty well with predictions so far all things told. Still, pretty crazy. No Keions left, no Nichijous and only one Hidamari. Pretty scary. This is the year of Madoka. 4 of the 8 spots in finals will be occupied by them, most likely. It woulda been five if not for that absolutely crazy loss of Homura to Misaka that I just cannot get my head around even now. Like any Saimoe, though, I'm finding myself more interested in figuring out how next year's will go than this years. I want to see Akari win. I honestly think she has a shot, too. I guess we'll just have to see and see if we still care!

Boku ha Tomodachi Ga Sukunai

Have only seen one episode yet. I started watching this based on the merchandise, specifically the Nendoroids of the main characters. How ass-backward is that? They looked pretty good, though, like the one girl had a butterfly in her hair. So far this seems to be generic, generic, generic. The premise is like a super-simplified Haruhi, which alright sure that could be fine. The MC is essentially Toradora's, right? Except I find him extremely unlikable, although I guess he did have some funny scenes. Maingirl seems like conflicted, I dunno, her personality doesn't really add up yet. Same with secondarygirl. Why don't harem shows get rid of the MC? I'd rather see a YuruYuri sorta relationship web between everybody else. No idea what to expect of the rest of the characters but not exactly hyped I guess. I dunno. It's alright though. The animation is really nice. Character movement and such reminds me of Denpa Onno, which I also have only seen one episode of. Have you noticed that the trend these days seems to make people smile deeper and have more complicated eyes???? Okay now have watched the second episode. Sorta weird for them to go all parody mode so early but I guess they figured it'd be better with only the two girls so far. Speaking of which it's weird that they still haven't introduced the rest of the cast but whatever. Pretty funny really, lots of well executed jokes, production value high. The running joke of the MC being misunderstood is pretty funny, making me start to like him. Overall probably going to keep watching this although there are better shows I should be following more like:

Guilty Crown

Geez if you want to look for high production look no further. I felt like I was watching a movie. This thing must have a budget that could feed me and everyone I know for a year. And like good food too! If this anime was a food it would be really really high quality sherbet because sherbet looks very nice and has great music but a plot that I am very skeptical about being good. Really though whenever I get all cynical about a really ambitious plot-type show like this I have to remember that hey the first episode of Evangelion probably looked about this stupid plot-wise? Maybe even stupider like they just sorta dump Shinji in there. I dunno. It could be good. It will be really stunning to watch, at least, unless they're just going super tryhard with this episode.

Music

NieR tribute album -echo-

I haven't played NieR and since JRPGs take forever and I fancy myself a very busy man these days I probably never will. I had heard before that the soundtrack was pretty good but honestly that is irrelevant. What mattered was the band line up for this tribute. Track by Matryoshka? I am sold already. Ametsub? world's end girlfriend?? sasakure.UK??? Oh man oh man oh man. What's even better is that the rest of the bands I hadn't even heard of but I just knew they'd be great. This genre of like ambient Japanese IDM, often with vocals and string parts, has just been exploding in the doujinshi scene lately. There's hundreds and hundreds of little bedroom artists cropping up doing this sound in tons of amazing new ways, which is great, because I love that sorta sound. They hit some sort of threshold where making a really good sounding string synth or whatever, something that sounded “real” instead of “chintzy”, was possible for basically anyone instead of just anyone with equipment. For a long time the sound was good enough for hyperactive speedrave/speedmetal sorta stuff and stuff that was so entrenched with “genre” that the cheesiness of the sounds only added to it (see: some of the IOSYS stuff, “dead girls be-bop” being a good example) but now we're at the point where you can begin to do some really emotional things. How cool is that!! Of course it isn't a universal movement, and there's a lot of variety here, hitting all the sort of “classic” doujin sounds. sasakure.UK's track has a real IIDX feel to it, but that plus like Matryoshka plus vocaloid. Excellent! A few of the other tracks in the middle go for the more rockish or jazzish feels but the prevalent mood is that like, post-IDM? I dunno what to call this genre. Classic-glitch? Or maybe romantic-glitch is more accurate. But yeah excellent stuff all around. As I explore this blossoming genre more I get that exciting overwhelmed feeling I got the first time I looked into other genres. It's been awhile. The standout track here is still world's end girlfriend's, by some margin. Like granted they gave a nice 8 ½ minute section for him and let him do what I figure must have been the game's final boss' theme, but it still isn't fair, the guy's an elder god of the genre. This song is like, life-altering – that page turn sample, the strings, that total sense of buildup, splatters of glitch: the hints at chaos to come... and maybe at the 2/3rds point you feel satisfied, this is more of a progression song than a traditional big bang climax sorta song, that's fine, that's even better a lot of the time, but... what's this all hinting at? And then, and then, the “volta”, that wonderful part when the choral parts bend “wrong”, and you realize something big is still going to happen, something pretty huge, and I gotta say, I have heard a lot of big climatic finishes before, I have heard a lot of them from this man himself, but the way that piano comes in, the way the whole thing just starts humming, and then that crazy beat, you know you're entering the next level. I have heard a lot of this sort of thing before yeah but this honestly could be the best one. That's probably hyperbole though. Maybe I like the ending so much 'cause it sounds like something they'd make a stream out of in ITG and I really like doing streams now in ITG but geez I dunno I dunno it really seems like a really great song.

M83 - Hurry Up We're Dreaming and Justice – Audio, Video, Disco

These both had a lot of hype but they also had people saying “why can't they just stick to what they were great at”. M83 hasn't done much of a departure, more of a continuation into pop that they've really been heading towards for half a decade now. This is a great big sprawling gorgeous album and I really sort of want to say “yeah but now they've lost their subtlety, they've lost their restraint” or something just to justify why I haven't listened to it a lot and have listened to that world's end girlfriend song twenty times but I really can't because it isn't true. I hope this album brings them a lot of success and I think it really has a good chance to. Okay now Audio, Video, Disco, this was a pretty big departure in one fundamental respect but like not much of a departure in many others. Everyone's saying “70s prog rock 80s stadium rock” but like... barely? It's sort of structured that way I guess, the vocals are pretty like that at times, sure, but I dunno, still seems pretty dancy? I guess they lost a lot of the noisy stuff, that's a shame. A lot of these songs are dang catchy though. I wouldn't put it above Cross, and I think Planisphere is still the best thing they've done and I kinda wish this was more like that, but this is fine. I think people way overestimated what it'd be, hence all the backlash. Dunno though.

That's all for now I think.

blog post 4 my fans only haters plz log off

2011-10-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

Blog update about blog updates

So I was actually updating this pretty frequently for awhile, eh? Like once a week at least for many weeks in a row!? Like an actual blog would do??!! Granted yeah the actual content of the blog was at like an all-time low, which is saying a lot, what with it being just reviews of anime episodes, which I think approximately no one was reading. So that's prolly gonna stop! No not 'cause I got some perspective and realized there were slightly more important things I could write about no no it's because I'm watching like five shows this season (wait lemme think: Idolmaster, Working, Squid Girl, Fate/Zero, uhhh there is one more geez see I can't even remember all of them) plus I'm watching three sitcoms (Workaholics, IASIP, Community) which I also used to always write about plus I'm watching through some old shows plus plus since my schedule has changed up a lot I usually don't have time to watch them as they come out and rather just marathon a bunch of stuff on the weekend and basically yeah I just don't think it's feasible to write a paragraph on each episode of each of them.

But yeah my schedule has changed 'cause I'm back in school, first I was in the “work hard at something you don't really want to do so you can get a high paying job program”, now I'm in the “there's only like five jobs that pay anything and only one of them pays anything decent but you don't actually have to work hard but if you don't want to starve to death while doing this sorta work you'd better!” program which is way more fun and yeah I am working really hard at it 'cause I want dem jobs. When I do get a chance to do some more blog stuff I want to write a bit about the sort of things I'm doing in said program, especially my big capital-bee Beef with Jane Austen.

So what can we the loyal readers expect out of this blog???

I'm gonna try a new strategy where I just like flat-out allocate some of my free time to getting blog posts done and posted instead of just assuming they'd finish themselves up somehow without my explicit guidance. Often I'll get something for this mostly written and then sort of lose interest and never go back and finish it. Usually if I actually force myself to finish it it is extremely easy to do but since that's the case I never actually think to sit down and do it. So now I'm gonna be like “okay from 2-3pm on Thursdays or whatever I'm gonna work on blog things” and I'll probably do the same with other projects. This is usually the very first tip they tell you on productivity websites but I guess I thought I was “above it” or something. Now I'm gonna try though.

Okay so does that mean [thing I have been working on that I've mentioned] will actually be finished?

Maybe.

The top 100 albums of 2010?

Maaaan I don't even want to hear about it. That was just a bit too ambitious. I haven't worked on it in a loong time. Now I go back and a bunch of the albums I forget why I liked them so much and some others I now like way more and my previous comments barely reflect it and there's a bunch of new albums that I had missed that I now want to add and it's generally like megabun. 100 was just like 50 too many. I wrote the blurb or whatever for about 50-60 of them, kinda feel bad abandoning that, maybe I'll post them in some form later. The ones I had left were the ones that probably shouldn't have been included in the first places, ones that I felt impressed by but had no actual emotional connection to and thus had little to really say. Now I'm already working on the 2011 list so I wouldn't hold my breath to see this one. If you were curious the top 20 looked like this:

20. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky
19. Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People EP
18. Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me
17. The Flashbulb - Arboreal
16. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
15. Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma
14. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
13. Faust - Faust is Last
12. Shad - TSOL
11. Jónsi - Go
10. Kno - Death is Silent
9. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
8. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
7. The Roots - How I Got Over
6. Animal Collective - ODDSAC
5. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
4. Das Racist - Shut Up, Dude
3. Das Racist - Sit Down, Man
2. LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening
1. Avey Tare - Down There

And even that I can't really agree with the order anymore, e.g. I think I'd put Have One on Me in the top 5 easy now, I dunno.

The moe “essay”? The Tetris strategy guide?

These still get worked on and thought about a lot. Eventually I'd like to call them finished but they are very hard to be satisfied with.

The tactical RPG?

The status of Unlimited Tactics is strictly confidential.

One Piece volume reviews?

Actually underway! I want to fully clear the hurdle of the relatively dull early volumes before I commit myself to doing this, though.

Madoka post?

Probably will wait to do this after I rewatch it in glorious 1080.

Nichijou post?

Mostly done, finding it difficult to express like a few really specific aspects of it.

The 50 enjoyable albums project?

Who are you how do you even remember this argh the next one I had to do I was having a stupid time with so I might skip it and do some more 'cause I really was enjoying doing those way back when.

VERY RARE BASED SECRETE PROJECT: “the youth of the world”

This is the novel I am trying to write now and I don't think I have even mentioned it to anyone but in case I have I am telling you now that I plan on posting part of it sometime soon so maybe you can look forward to that if you are the type to look forward to things like that.

Hey weren't you reading Tezuka's Phoenix? You finna write about that?

Yeah I read it and I loved it, writing something about it, yes, yes. Next one I will read is probably either Nausicaa or Lone Wolf and Cub.

And a post about Smash Bros?

Yeah there's something in the works I think.

What else?

Uhhh have been playing ITG a lot, can pass most 7s and 8s and some 9s now. Played a bunch of Innistrad in Magic, that's been fun. That's about it I guess.

That's about it, I guess.

i come to every blog post with the intention to do harm

2011-09-26T09:53:00.001-07:00

Recent Anime

Steins;Gate

Okay so now I finished watching this show. On the whole very nice. Plot, in all, was very well done. They expanded on concepts without abandoning old ones, they managed to make things more complex without making it too much more convoluted, basically avoided that thing I was so scared of at the start. Really could see the game roots, but that's okay. The idea of having to go through the old characters and undo their D-Mails is obviously straight game rip, as is like the “final challenge”, but whatever, it makes for good TV too. Sure the relevance of the characters varied so much that you felt a little bit jarred, but there was at least a strenuous thread tying them altogether and keeping it from being completely arbitrary. I think really their drive to avoid plot-weariness through expansion was their biggest, although admirable, mistake, leading to plot-weakness through containment. Once each plot element has looped over itself doubly and triply you definitely get a sense of impressive complexity, but it really starts to fall apart under analysis. Like, FB is Mr. Braun? Sure it's interesting and leads to a series of follow-up “fridge” explanatory twists (was Okabe's unlikely ability to avoid the Rounders due to a soft spot held by their leader? etc) but ultimately it's just another very unlikely thing we're just forced to believe. Like and I am not even close to being done with my beef with this the whole thing about the dichotomy between Mayuri and Chrrrrisstiiiina. All Alpha world-lines tend to Mayuri dying and all Beta ones tend to the Assistant dying? So they need to go for Gamma, aka Steins;Gate! Sure. Wait why didn't that thought occur to them before? Geez I dunno I think for scientists they didn't really explore many of their literally infinite possibilities. I guess there's the factor of it being very psychologically stressful to see your friends die over and over but it really seems more like they were saving it up, twist-like, for the final gambit, which is sort of lame when it's just the first thing you'd think to do. And and what's the deal with chunks of time lines “tending” to things like people dying, anyways? I mean memories of other times manifesting in people when emotionally charged sure I'll let that slide 'cause Okarin's Reading Steiner is arbitrary too so this can function by the same mechanic but the idea of fate in a show that was handling time travel in such a simple and logical way beforehand just bugs the heck out of me. They could have had some way of getting the same effect - choosing between the two girls – if they came up with some clever plot that actually tied the life of one with the death of the other it'd have the same effect, and it'd be less blatant too. Not that I know what that would be but I believe in the power of the human imagination to the extent that any describable story and quality requirement can be met with sufficient work and inspiration. So do it! Oh and one thing that kept confusing me is like going back to Beta would stop CERN from making the time machine and creating a DIS-topia, right? So why did Ze Zombie never mention that when advocating for her own sacrifice? JUST WONDERING.

Okay plot stuff I did like: most of it, still, yeah. The last two episodes sort of seemed sprung on me a bit much, like, suddenly World War III, suddenly we can save Christina, suddenly we can do this thing we should have thought to consider many episodes ago, etc, but it was executed really nicely. Running around the radio tower, the message from the future, stabbing himself... all great. Sure there's asspulls for each of them that diminish it, like uh, accidentally stabbing her, the thing being dry, plus the whole “the only reason it doesn't get published is 'cause it burnt up in a plane (maybe if someone threatened to stab you you should photocopy your valuable document???)” seems really weak but whatever. Oh wait this section is for good things well okay well I think the idea of “the reason no time machines exist is that every time machine's existence inevitably leads to that time machine never existing” is really, really cool, and something I'd almost believe like, given infinite time, the only “termination point” is destroying the machine before it exists, thus it seems like it must eventually happen? I dunno might think about it more later but maybe not because I might realize it's all very silly. Right now it seems mad cool though.

Anyways I realized that, although this is a very high-concept plot, this is still really a character drama, isn't it? Framing a character drama in a high-concept plot isn't a new trick, but it certainly isn't done too often 'cause it's really really hard to do properly. The characters can pick up the slack when the plot starts to trip over itself, which it starts to here, and the plot is good to come up with new things for the characters to do if their “internal drive for plot” diminishes, although overusing this ability can seem really desperate. Despite these reprieves, it's still really hard to actually do this, actually keep it balanced. Evangelion is still probably the best example. Madoka almost, but the beauty of it was that it really wasn't much of a high-concept plot after all, was it? S;G does a good job, though, and I think this is really the greatest strength of it. I was both engrossed by the idea of the next events and the next character interactions. I wouldn't go as far as saying I was “shipping” but I was invested in the idea of the relationships. I always feel sort of bad when they go from VN to anime and all but like two of the relationship subplots get delegated to a couple episodes and a couple scenes in other episodes and you just know they never had a chance. Ah well. His “final” scene with Christina was quite heartwarming, a good conclusion that I worried would be too much or too little. As far as characters went she was probably the best developed, the combination of tsundere and expertise and such went quite nicely, and she was a better foil to Hououin than everyone else, who didn't really acknowledge his most entertaining quirks enough. And oh man they were entertaining, too, weren't they! When he hits his return to form in the final two episodes it was one of those things where every time you feel like they're about to hit that line where it goes from awesome to just pandering your threshold for awesomeness just gets bumped up a little more. Awesome!

I guess that's about all I have to say about Steins;Gate. The movie ought to be like really really good if they don't completely blow it, which I guess there's an outside chance of. All they have to do, really, is come up with a good plot, which is both easy and hard. Like, they have the mechanics and cast to support a billion excellent plots (wait by my own belief system that I casually mentioned earlier this ought to be true of any given set of cast and mechanics, whoops dang hoisted by my etc!) but they still have to be very careful. Do like a “the gang's got another adventure” sort of thing, like, another future disaster must be prevented, and it could feel too irrelevant. Try to one up the show's plot with like “the gang overlooked one thing, now there's another big problem”, like, some paradox they overlooked, SERN still figures them out, Mr. Braun does something??? and they risk invalidating or at least diminishing the impact of the show. Hm examples uh Cowboy Bebop did the first style excellently for their movie because it's main plot was decentralized and obscured enough that they could insert a great adventure without worrying about tying it in. Most anime movies do something like this, but S;G is so plot-y I'm not sure if they could. Well I mean they could just because the premise and characters are so great, but I feel like they feel like they shouldn't. So they'd have to do the second style, which like... Evangelion did it with End of Evangelion, but I don't think anyone ever will have the balls to say “okay we'll do it like they did with End of Evangelion.” plus I honestly don't see where they could fit a gigantic escalation like that. If I had to guess I'd say they'll try to do an ultimate crisis sort of thing where SERN has one more trick up their sleeves, and we see a plot that extends well into the future, we see the effects of SERN's time meddling, there's a new character introduced as SERN villain dude, and there's some sort of scientific showdown (also best new imaginary Discovery channel show: Scientific Showdown – Iron Chef meets Mythbusters – call me if you want to sponsor this idea) and all the characters are shoehorned into the solution but they can only afford to give them like fifteen minutes each, and I find some of this disappointing, but some of the plot twists will be so genius and some of the scenes so powerful that I end up happy to 8 on it.

Which basically is true of the show too! It fell flat at times, it was far too complex and holey to attain any sort of Madoka-esque perfection, nor was it masterful or innovative enough to attain Evangelion-esque mindblowery. Sorry to keep comparing it to these two, it isn't quite far, but it's what comes to mind. Really I guess it should be compared to like Lain or Paranoia Agent or uh other VNs but whatever I'm more familiar with these. It was still really great, though, loads of fun to watch, very emotional, really made very few mistakes overall. I'd recommend it to almost anyone, which, really, is what an anime is trying for more than anything these days. At the very absolute least, it gave us Hououin Kyoma, a character I feel like I will be quoting for ages to come. I kinda want to see a slice of life show with him and the gang just screwing around and coming up with Future Gadgets. Sure it'd make no sense for that to happen without this sort of plot, but bun it's not like any of the other shows I have realistic plots. Actually heck as long as I'm dreaming why not make it so they're all girls, still in high school, and they all have crushes on each other, and forget the science!:

YuruYuri episode 12

I guess it'll make a lot of people mad if I call this the breakout hit of the year after talking about Steins;Gate. Probably so much so that I want to do it, even if Nichijou and especially Madoka are obviously way more worthy of the crown than any of them. So lemme say it: this is the breakout hit of the year! This is a new era in moe anime, when “what people don't want to” was finally just as optimized as “what people do want”. YuruYuri trims all the fat. It crashes right through the bushes most other shows dance around. Homework and exam plots are boring? Skip 'em. It's tiring to get every major character in every episode? Leave 'em out if you want. If the fans complain you've already won. And oh man on this show all they did was win.

This last episode was the most pandering piece of art I have ever seen. If a show was somehow able to give me fifty dollars I don't think it would have been as much of a bribe as any plot element of this episode. Yui's niece doing the intro – that alone is more effective than mailing two hundred bucks to every fan. Extended in-universe Magical Girl show intro, complete with the devotion to really doing the joke I've come to respect then expect from the show? That's like $300 or so I'd say. Every semi-major character showing up for a sleepover in the club room for no reason? Better throw a grand or two on there. Animal costumes? Tomato?? A series of contests – boardgames, impressions, charades, experiments??? We must be in the hundred thousands. Bathing in barrels? Akari rolling away screaming???? Chitose's drunken rampage??!?!?! Welcome to the million dollar episode. That's right: if they somehow just offered to make any viewer a millionaire for their devotion, it would have been less effective, more difficult, less pandering than this. This is at least a billion dollars' worth of concentrated pandering.

Do we have some sort of responsibility to the elder gods of art to not let this sort of thing work on us? Do the blind eyes of immortal Homer weep as his serial epics have traded their heroic conquests and fantastical lands for... schoolgirls and exploding alarm clocks? But is there no land more fantastical than their middle school? No conquest no heroic than that of the heart? Oh... there is? Oh. Okay.

But still! Can't you praise art for efficiency, for optimization, for simple audience understanding? No? Oh. Right, yeah.

So what makes this “the breakout hit of the year... much better than Steins;Gate”? If it doesn't lie in the actual artistic quality than it must be one of those masterpieces of the “low emotions”, the realm of funny sitcoms and movies where one guy fights a lot of guys and party rock anthems. True moe does sometimes transcend this sphere, albeit in a very odd way. I don't want to get into it right now but the emotion of “moe” I would think of as very rich at times, even though it's one of the most “unrealistic”. For a simple proof just try to sample the budding (lol) genre of “sad-moe”, which I just made up now although it does have quite a few examples. I say “just try to sample” because the powerful blend of moe and depression you can feel is certainly rich, and addictive, so good luck looking at just one. I'd like to write about this more later. I think I already know the masterpiece of the genre, although Chris Ware I think has the potential to bring about a revolution in the idea if he wasn't so hung up on the idea of uncute aesthetics. I DIGRESS. Moe can be rich. YuruYuri does not try to be, but it leaves room for it. It is definitely a very simple comedy, and quite a funny one at that, and it's moe elements are so blatant that I cannot argue they achieve any sort of the moe-subtly I hinted at unexpectedly wordily a second ago, but it is minimal enough to leave room for this level of moe-attachment to occur, and that's what really makes it so good.

I want to explain this more but I also don't want to get into some subjects I'd like to talk about at more length with more clarity later so here's a quick pseudo-thesis: by giving us 99% of what we want, YuruYuri has unexpectedly enabled us to imagine 200%. Where there's blatant pairing, as blatant as any fan could hope for, the fan sees pairing more blatant than they could ever have imagined, and this budding (LOL, LOL) new level of emotion is immensely enjoyable to them. The same is true for the jokes and easier to explain: take the Akari is invisible joke: most shows would have given that like, 25% at best, and the fans would have given it 100%. Here, YY has given it 100% (disappearing from the intro, all sorts of genius scenes of things blocking her, etc, etc), and the fans have given it 200% (I don't even know where to start – the expertly edited OP with her removed that shot up like a day after the show started airing is a good enough example). Anything at level 200%, even this most pandering of shows, is a sight to behold. And yes of course fans are going to escalate it like that. Moe slice of life as a genre is all about idealization, so doesn't it seem right that the fans would idealize it too?

Wow I have said very little about the actual content of the show, haven't I? Sorry to my only reader: me a few years from now, scratching my head and trying to remember which show this was out of the haze that will surely develop of all these nearly identical ones. Okay here's some help: there's four girls, but they have some other friends too. Most episodes involve them going to school, but in one they go on a trip and in another one they go to the beach and in a few they have sleepovers. There's implied lesbianism and absolutely no male characters. Is that helpful?? Well, how about this: this was the one that did all that more than the rest. Their friend characters were better developed and more involved. The main four were archetype breaking and had many jokes to their name. The trip and other standard episode archetypes had more jokes packed into them than anyone thought possible. They went to Comiket! The lesbianism was a subtle as a slap in the face. There was a tsundere pair that was as veiled as Garchomp in ubers (baaaaam I hope I still get that joke in a few years because no one else on Earth ever will). It was a step ahead, it was the first moe that knew itself, that looked upon it and its contemporaries and strove boldly ahead where they hesitated. Maybe soon my helpful elaborations will be inaccurate, perhaps the new wave of shows will be self-aware and build on tropes as much as sales patterns, maybe most of this praise should really be going to Nichijou! Maybe next year there will be a show where there's twenty girls, and they all work at a farm, but in their spare time they have a gymnastics team, and they sell the milk from their farm, and okay if you want any more of this trillion dollar idea you have to front me some cash.

Oh yeah and this last episode: well as it was the finale they really had to do just about everything they did. Glad to see more of the Student President, she really grew on me. Some great scenes, some scenes that inspired a confused horror in me that most of the “great” scenes would probably instill in most others. Par for the course? Sure, but that's saying a lot. Sometimes you just gotta pull out all the stops to see what'll happen. Solid 8.5.

The IT Crowd

Watched the rest of season one, some pretty decent episodes. The premier of season two really really impressed me, though. One of the most hilarious episodes of anything I've seen in quite some time. Contains pretty much everything I find funny in a sitcom. They managed one of the most difficult things to do in a sitcom, too – transition quickly from the standard premise to a new setting without it being too forced or time consuming, and, most importantly and most difficultly, while making it hilarious. This is a rare art that most sitcoms usually confined to one setting have a hard time pulling off, often leaving this as the single flaw in these usually otherwise excellent “A trip to the whatever” episodes. So yeah, impressed, hoping the rest of the season will keep on trucking like this. And Roy had a Drinky Crow figure on his desk! I am being pandered to but I love it!!

Community S03E01

I was pretty hyped up for it and it didn't really disappoint. Both guest appearances were great, hope to see more of them. Feel like they've been set up as “recurring roles”. They had a few pretty glaring plot-type problems they needed to deal with – well, needed to deal with if they were to continue being believable and not lapse into that unrealistic “sitcom environment”. Like, you know how it seems pretty unrealistic that everyone spends all that time at Cheers? Like, even though it's way more realistic than many of the premises of Community episodes, something just feels off. And it isn't because they're written to talk like sitcom characters instead of the more “modern” conversational writing of Community. Nor is it stuff like the camera angles. Or maybe it is, because I honestly can't tell you what it is, but something about some sitcoms just seems unreal in a very fundamental and unalterable way. Or rather, deviation from this “feel” too much towards realism or fakeness is a surefire way to make the whole episode incredibly awkward. Aaaaanyways Community, on this scale, is one of the more realistic ones, and if they were to remain so, they had to revisit the whole “study group” thing in the first place. See yeah that's what it really is, validity of premise! Not gonna spend too much time trying to explain this idea any more but hopefully you get what I'm trying to say. If Community didn't readdress why they were all there in the first place, and how they might not actually need to be there, etc, it would have fallen into some sort of weird limbo where the premise stops being realistic and the whole show is unreal. That's what I'm trying to say, I guess. Doing this is also as good an opportunity to re-establish the premise to new viewers, what with it being the premier and all. So fine. And the thing itself was quite heartwarming and well done and the meta-level of using the format of the show as the plot element in the show is cool without being too much. They set up the overarching plot elements of the season quite smoothly – school is broke, Chang as security guard (hilarious!), Omar as Biology teacher (intense!), Abed and Troy moving in together (wait didn't they figure out why that was a bad idea in an earlier episode? What changed?). Very nice, all of them. One thing I didn't like so much was Abed's plot line about getting a new show. It was funny, yeah, and it was like, really Abed, and I get that they wanted a plot like that to establish his character early for new viewers, what with him being the most popular character and all, but it just didn't fit into the rest of the episode at all, completely arbitrary. At least the Dean vs. Vice-Dean vs. monkey-actually-Chang plotline interfered with the Jeff and Study Group as unit plotline (the 2001 parody was pretty great). Oh and also the laziness on the parodies they had Abed watch (unless that itself was some parody of Dr. Who's budget? Nah I don't think so, I think they were just lazy and wanted to be a bit cute about it) bugs me, but I think I'm spoiled by anime doing that in that regard. The highlights still outweighed these problems, though. The final moral at the end with the Bio teacher was very nice, pretty poignant, nice and succinct, near perfect. Great, great, can't wait for more. 8.5.

That's it for now. I still haven't seen the end of Usagi Drop, but I probably will soon. Nor have I seen the finale for Nichijou, but I don't think I'm ready. And Ika Musume starts again soon!!!

geometry and the imagination

2011-09-19T20:47:00.001-07:00

Recent Anime

These are sort of late I guess? My roommate who I watch anime with is behind and I'm waiting for him to catch up. Blame him, hypothetical and certainly imaginary person who has been really wanting to know what I thought of the latest moeblob adventures!!

YuruYuri episode 11

Really good. Flashback scenes were all excellent, moe factor of five heart attacks out of five. I really wasn't prepared at all for the second arc plot. It got really heavy really fast, actually quite legitimately moving. The uh “we can't go back to happier times” sort of scene, especially with a “this character has changed and we realize we miss the wackier things we used to complain about”, especially especially if they have some good ol' “reminiscing the halcyon days by looking at an abandoned location”, that sort of scene rips me up no matter what the context is, not even if it's presented with a lot of self-awareness that basically amounts to satire as it is here. Or maybe I'm just sad that the show is ending soon and it manifested in watching the show but geez, yeah, heavy stuff! Of course the setup and resolution were very in-line with their “skip every unnecessary thing knowing that audience knows that we know that it's silly and no one cares” philosophy which sort of numbs any sort of genuine emotional stuff, but sometimes the plot itself can stand out of its framing. Anyways yeah great times, next episode's the finale I think and it seems like they're just gonna go crazy, should be fun. 8.

Nichijou episode 24

Ah, so a seemingly forgotten plotline returns in full force. Mio's crush on Sasahara I originally thought would be a very major plotline, but they dole it would with a lot of restraint and it makes it very effective. Although with that and more gundere and the extended fantasy of Nanohara, this episode really started becoming “Everybody Loves Sasahara”, which really was fine 'cause they did a good job actually explaining why people did. Guy is just generally a baller. Watch him drink from the bottom of the cup! Baller! He rides a goat! Greatest of all time! What a hilarious character that transcends the archetype parody, yeah? Yeah you know. Gundere's sister and Mio's sister and Gundere all have such an excellent relationship too, such an interesting mix of tsundere respect. Uhh what else, Helvetica Standard this episode was one of my favorite, the timing just absolutely fantastic. Same with all the scenes of the chemistry teacher watching Nano, those were some very well timed and subtle jokes. So yeah, still very excellent, still very beautiful. Maybe the plotline at the lab could have been more elaborate but whatever it was more than good enough. 10.

Idolmaster episode 10

Oh man big track meet, easiest plot line ever. Seems like they're sort of long-term focusing on some characters and not others, which is alright 'cause this isn't even half over yet and it's probably better that they chunk it like this so we can really feel an attachment. Bunch of new characters showing up, some very villain-y, okay, whatever. Lots of good scenes for nearly every character, except singing girl who once again does absolutely nothing. Winning at the end was surprisingly satisfying. The rich girl/tomboy begrudging alliance was good, and even though she spent all episode beating people up I really don't think the show can have too much tomboy athleticism. Oh man and poor girl, poor girl has the sort of breakdown here that I figured she'd have in her own episode, and it was done quite well. So yeah everything was alright but nothing that great. Like the last few they went really plot-y which is okay but the plot has to be a little more engrossing. Rich girl saving everything sorta seems a bit too easy. I dunno. Pretty fun times all things considered. 7.

Recentish Anime

Steins;Gate

Now have seen up to episode 15. Uhh let's see... I have a few beefs. What I talked about being worried about in my last post really hasn't happened nearly at all, which is very impressive. They've continued adding plot elements without obsoleting or abandoning previous ones for the most part. They've also, for the most part, kept up an escalating tone, albeit the feeling of “perpetual crisis” doesn't gel (banana) well with the requisite (and I acknowledge that it is requisite and it would be even worse without) comedic scenes. But yeah my big problem right now is that the plot devices are just a bit too arbitrary. They hit upon a really, really great way of doing time travel. Send a message back to the past: awesome. Okarin is the only one who remembers the old world when it changes: I can live with it, it's necessary, hopefully will be better justified later. Send memories back in time: very cool. Do time travel without the idea of concurrent timelines, save a lot of headache, who cares about stuff like the “abandoned timeline” (well I do a bit but not enough to want something more convoluted instead). Save Mayuri by switching to a beta world line with a divergence number of over 1% which is required for a major shift away from a major event that all world lines tend to: whaaaat no this is silly, why do you have to do a thing like that??? So arbitrary! So unscientific! So poorly explained! Bun! Okay let me fix this problem, here's what you have to do:

So you have the SERN(??) or Rounders or whatever invading, right? Led up by Mail-chan? Sure. Actually I have some beef with that. Seems a bit weak. You need some sort of crisis, sure. Make it something that follows from time travel! Something not new, but legitimately overlooked! Escalate an existing condition! I mean the “one of them betrays the rest” card is a dang easy one to play, resist the temptation! It's just not very interesting! As a saving grace, the direction of the scene was amazing, very powerful in presentation, if not in effect. Geez I've failed to mention any of the aesthetics, I'm very impressed with all of them, even if they don't do anything too innovative very often. Anyways yeah the effect just wasn't too much 'cause you knew something was gonna happen and what that thing was was about the least interesting thing it could have been. And then like happiness character was shot in a show about time travel and I couldn't believe for a second that it'd be the last time you saw her. And then in the next episode he tries to save her over and over and finds she's like, fated to die, and it's this same problem over and over again. Things feel too easy, too arbitrary, too unlikely (Okarin just runs back to the lab every time?) and eventually even the death scenes, each of them still expertly done, start to lose their effect. Bun. So here's how you fix it:

Drop this whole thing about “Mayuri has to die.” First cycle remains the same 'cause whatever I'm still hopeful that that will be justified more later. Subsequent cycles have him saving Mayuri, but someone else always dies. Send people out of the lab without telling them why, grab Mayuri before she goes, try to beat town? Christina, overwhelmed with curiosity, calls from the lab to a Okabe, horrified as he notices Mayuri's watch stop and the door burst open on the other end of the phone. Prevent that somehow, Daru goes back to wait for the pizza he forgot to stop him from ordering. Etc. Etc. I'm not gonna try to come up with all of them, but I think there's way more good things here than there could be just trying to come up with ways to kill Mayuri. Plus like now Okarin has this horrible feeling where he feels like he has to choose which of these bad outcomes is the best and of course the big thing is he realizes he needs more time and perhaps then he can save everyone. Still gets this sense of having to do a major, orchestrated, planned change without this arbitrary thing that that's the only way to save Mayuri for some reason 'cause she's like superdead.

Aaaaanyways I just think that would've been a lot better. Uhh what else though... like I said, the aesthetics and direction have all been really solid. All the characters are becoming more and more complex and likable, especially Hououin. Man what an awesome character! And I don't just throw around the word awesome much these days. And I really can't overstate how well done the whole idea of time travel is in this show. Aside from these last minute “time line beta” or whatever ideas it's been very simple, very logical but without ruining the “feel” of time travel, which they capture perfectly with repetition, changing tone, parallels, all that excellent stuff. Maybe the like, perpetual frantic tempo sometimes loses effectiveness and just becomes really tiring, but whatever. Oh yeah the twist with part time warrior was pretty well done, sure, but I think the concept is better than the twist and maybe they made it a bit too twisty. The like, secondary twist with her (that is, the one I'm just calling re: she's Daru's daughter) is good but I wonder if they're going to make a big deal out of it, or if it'll be a running joke like oh man like Mayuri keeps getting the dad into more hypothetical trouble with her posters and no one explains it to the Zombie and when she finds out she thinks that Daru's guilty of all that stuff. At any rate if it's the former they should pace the foreshadowing a little better, like, more steadily, and if it's the latter I think they're making a bit too much of it in terms of “serious scenes”. But oh well. Still very good show, still lots of fun.

Idolmaster episode 11

Big concert prep episode, huh? Lots of scenes with poor girl, clumsy(?? can't remember her trait?) girl and shy girl, also (big surprise here) some good stuff with singing girl. Yeah I dunno though this sort of plot is just so stressful. And geez Miki man why so you silly why you misunderstand that and act on it like that that's just sad for real I don't want to see sad idols like that. And like, nervousness about failure? Jealousy? That's not too moe. Luckily optimistic clumsy (??) tone-deaf (????) girl was all cheerful otherwise this episode would just be way too much of a drag. It'll all be worth it for that big hype concert I guess. But yeah I dunno. 6.

Nichijou episode 25

Wowwwwww, what is this? WHAT IS THIS? We are definitely in climatic times. Gundere seems to have her big scene here and dang it is done well, yup. And when Mio sees! Oh man, when she sees that, oh man, aw man when she sees that, you just KNOW you're in for THE GREATEST SCENE THUS FAR. Mio runs a RAMPAGE through the show itself! The show itself! They do the deluxe version of one of the first classic scenes in the series and it becomes a metaphor for the series itself: buildup giving way to hilarity to absurdity to poignancy. Holy crap what amazing animation! What rapid-fire humour! Such powerful emotions! And they've finally played the reference card in full force! I knew it'd always be an option, and like not even a difficult option, but here it is played so superbly. Here we have the best sense so far of just how the world of Nichijou really works as Mio seems to almost break free of the typical scene structure and just bursts into the entire cohesive universe. What amazes me more than the fact that it's so heartwarming or so hilarious or so absurd is how much of a real slice of life this show can feel. More than almost anything else you get the sense of an actual school, of actual classes and clubs and and and FRIENDSHIPS. Oh wait hold that thought first there is a big climatic thing with the chemistry teacher that is just amazing. You really get a sense of just how developed and hilarious and wacky the lab is when it's presented like that with all the throwbacks and references and such. Hilarious. Great. A perfect ending to that plotline, if that's what it is. Okay. But the real beauty of this episode is, well, you know what it is if you've seen it. Mio's remembering of walks back with her sister and Sasahara and his wise words sets the stage for one of the most beautiful messages I've ever seen in anime. Seeing everyday life as a series of small miracles... it seems cliché, but who has ever really pulled off this message before? I'm gonna say no one. And, of course, the biggest miracle of all is still friendship. The whole lottery prize scene may have been sudden and simple and maybe even unnecessary (was Mio not “enlightened” to the beauty of her own life after saving the drowning kid? Or was she still feeling lonely on some level?) but it managed to top the scene with Mai leaving the lab two episodes ago which I actually would not have guessed possible. How are they gonna top this next episode? Well I figure Nano's gotta have some resolution, and then maybe one nice thing will happen for once to Yuko. The whole “genre” of Nichijou scenes of Yuko just suffering for basically no reason used to be among the most popular but they've sort of moved away from them. The amazing thing is that they did so while leaving the impression that these things are still happening to her, that this sort of misfortune is just ingrained in her character. So maybe that'll have a resolution? And undoubtedly it will be great. This episode already would have been an amazing season (oh god please don't be series) finale. But yeah I really cannot overstate how impressed I am with this show. Really simply cannot. I started it 'cause Kyoani yeah. I stayed because it was the best absurdist humour that side of Tim and Eric. But I love it because it's easily the most heartwarming slice of life in recent memory. Oh yeah and the scene of Takasaki-sensei and Sakurai-sensei was also great. 13.

The IT Crowd

Started watching this, pretty fun but not at all what I expected. British sitcoms seem to have the two extremes of sitcoms on lock, both the driest, most sophisticated stuff and the classic madcap sorta thing. I figured this was the former given the subject matter, but it ended up being the latter, and honestly, I'm fine with that. Sometimes I forget how much stuff like this can make me laugh. I usually think of the subgenre only in terms of the classics, like, Fawlty Towers, Black Adder, etc. but like, Father Ted wasn't so old, I guess. There just seems to be a general divide of genres that I expect new things from and ones I don't. For example, I love classic rock, sure, but I'm not really looking for new classic rock. But really that's silly, I should be looking for good examples of things I like no matter what it is or how relevant I consider the style. This show is funny. The plotlines escalate very nicely, good running gags, really solid characters, good level of wackiness. I feel at times that this is like, When the Whistle Blows, y'know? Like maybe it was supposed to have no laugh track and be sorta depressing and all that. I mean Roy has a Jimmy Corrigan doll on his shelf someone must be sorta depressed, right? I dunno. Fun times for sure.

That's all for right now.

blog post, you feel me?

2011-09-10T23:59:00.000-07:00

Video Game Report

Have stopped playing Ten Desires so much because I decided it was TOO EASY and that bullet hell shooters needed to be combined with another difficult genre – the skyrocketingly popular platform hell game. Also rhythm action games sort of. Enter:

I Wanna Be the Revolution

This thing is seriously fun but seriously hard. My difficulties are like, 25% me being retarded and playing this with a bullet hell-style graze-everything mindset and 25% it just being incredibly tough though. The other 50% is having shift for jump. SERIOUSLY. Shift for jump is... physically painful to me. Part of it is my keyboard, yeah, but it's just so big and clacky, it almost feels wobbly. It feels both loose and spongy. I can't explain it. I feel like it isn't going to work half the time, and I can't press it fast for anything. I honestly don't understand how people can like it. Same with space for hard drop in Tetris. It seems like mapping your input to like, frying pan. Dang. Anyways I want to play or at least see the designs of a few of the other stages, but I can't unlock them. I can't even find videos of them online, nor can I find videos of people beating some of the other stages. Does this mean they just haven't been beaten yet? And maybe I will be the first? Very unlikely though.

In the Groove

Playing a lot of this lately too. Mad fun. Really determined to get good because my roommates that I play with are way better than me and it's vaguely humiliating. Right now I think my biggest problem is that I over-commit with a lot of steps and end up scrambling, which is very exhausting. Also I get up and down mixed up a lot, especially on jumps. I can pass most fives and a few sixes and I think like one seven if I'm playing well. I like uh “Utopia” and the Working OP and “The Beginning” and “Party Rock Anthem” and one of these things is not like the other! Just now I almost full comboed the six of “Utopia”. Hooray!

Recent Music

Kassa Overall – Stargate

This thing is really fun. Much more, uh, emotional than I thought it'd be. I was expecting like Big Baby Gandhi type silliness or at least Das Racist seriousness-behind-silliness. This has a few songs that seem downright sappy, and I dunno what I think of that. They'd come in with these soft-sounding beats and I was expecting parody but I see no real parody. A lot of these beats go really hard, though. I appreciate his willingness to go with the ol' major surface pop sample, people seem to be moving away from that 'cause it seems too easy but there's a lot of ground that hasn't been covered with it yet. His flow is pretty smooth and solid but definitely this level and not the next. Kool AD's verse is really good, and I was impressed with TECLA, I'll have to check her out. Best verse on the whole album is probably Heems' on the last song, which also has a really really great beat. Yeah so overall pretty fun stuff, lots of great lines and some good flows. I guess my biggest beef is that he's going too hard for actual songs, like, Kanye West sort of 50/50 hook/rapping stuff with a message I ultimately don't care about, when his best stuff is his most casual. Whatever though this is a really solid artist to have on the Greenhead roster, I could see him getting pretty popular since he seems to want to make the sort of songs that are popular. Glad to see At Heems get this sort of fresh talent.

Das Racist – Relax

I might actually like this more than Tomboy. Seriously! Gotta think about it some more though. As you can see I was pretty excited previously but now I think I'm actually thinking about it. I can't say it's just directly better than the mixtapes because it's so different. It sounds more like their non-mixtape work than their mixtape work, specifically a lot of their pre-mixtape stuff, making me wonder if “mixtape” was a more loaded definition than I previously thought. On those they went almost completely straight hip hop – the beats were classic, most songs didn't go out of the typical structure of a hip hop song, even the subject matter had hip hop as its primary cultural reference base. Here it has become the Jacksons and the music has expanded too. It's not about great lines, although there are a lot of great lines. They're taking the furthest steps in a trend of what I feel to be redefining rapping as just another style of singing. The line is becoming more blurred between this and stuff like Boy Crisis. The priorities are all changed up. Seems like #1 was producing a collection of perfectly produced and wonderfully catchy songs. Mission accomplished!

Not So Recent Anime

Steins;Gate

Started watching this, four episodes in. Really enjoying it. Wish I'd been watching it from the start but oh well. MC dude, forget his name, he's definitely very entertaining and really a unique character as far as I can tell. Rest of the supporting cast is great too if maybe a bit too cliched, but they all have room for development. Atmosphere very nice, well animated, good mix of comedy and seriousness and such. Some of the dialogue shows its roots a little much? Not sure if I can explain that very well. You'll notice I haven't mentioned the plot yet. Well, I'm not completely sold on it yet. The premise is great, I mean, mad scientist with his future gadgets lab, that's mad cool, but I dunno when you have a concept like this it's really hard to move past it properly. Already I'm seeing what I'd call “disc 3 JRPG syndrome”, where, like, the original dilemma has splintered so many times and has had so many other random sort of things popping up, “now we need this, now we need this, now this happened, etc”. It really hasn't happened yet, no, but I'm scared. They were after this computer and now they have it and I bet we see it in like three more episodes, tops. It's a really difficult thing to keep up this sort of plot, where the basic premise of the show is very high profile. Make developments too unrelated to the main plot and the impact is diminished. Make enough developments related to the main plot it makes the main plot feel stretched out and arbitrary. 20^th Century Boys, Death Note, most JRPGs – hence my descriptor... 24 was the worst offender I've seen... Really, most stuff fails to this on some level eventually. The solutions are either to end it quick and magnificently (Madoka), make the base plot simpler (One Piece), lose the idea of a main plot almost completely (The Wire), or, and this is the big play that I think very few things have pulled off, manage to continue escalating and adding new elements without seeming tired out or irrelevant. I'd say Final Fantasy VII and VI did this. Also I feel like this is what Breaking Bad does but unfortunately I haven't seen that yet. And this is what I think Steins;Gate will go for, and it seems, from the INSANE amount of hype I've seen about the last few episodes, like it'll succeed, maybe. But even if it doesn't, well, look at what else I consider to have “failed” at this - 20^th Century Boys is not a bad manga by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, the last few arcs made you raise an eyebrow with the ol' c'mon now attitude, but many awesome scenes involving the established characters you loved made the other eyebrow shoot up too – in delight! So yeah I really don't think I could start disliking it at this point.

Hidamari Sketch and moe as basically the only purely modernist thing left in art

I've been watching Hidamari Sketch a bunch and really enjoying it but there's been something very subtle that's off about it and in trying to figure out what specifically I disliked I may have realized what specifically I like about moe stuff in general. The thesis is right there in the title. Nearly every artistic movement seems to have moved into a time-transcending postmodern phase. Modern always seems like a, uh, modern or recent term, but I've always felt like it was “modern” as in like “current”. Most specific artistic movements have always progressed “forward”, techniques being passed down, things made as a reaction to previous things, etc, etc. A modern piece of art couldn't be made at any time previous. Nowadays “modern” is associated with all sorts of stuff, from the weirdest art installations and atonal space-symphonies to the most sophisticated, futuristic architecture to most of the music you hear on the radio. It seems to me that the only property in common with all of them is that they were made as, like, the latest and greatest. If you choose any of these examples you can see them as the latest step in a long journey since the start of the art form. Sometimes, as with classical music and painting, there's been a phase in the last hundred years or so where it seems like a long progression of advancing specific skills had reached some sort of limit, and they seem to have gone back several steps to eke out a new path where progress could be made. In other things, like a lot of aspects of design, a lot of newer genres of music, things like action movies and, well, moe, the march of strict improvement continues straight ahead.

Postmodernism, then, isn't so much what follows modern but what happens after you stop caring about being modern. The difference between the things created by this and those working in a modern mode and taking the, like, “alternate route” that Picasso and such did is subtle, but loosely definable. You can sort of think of it in terms of motivations, but I think that's pretty weak and unknowable for certain. I'd rather just analyze it roughly case by case. Stuff that I'd describe as “avant-garde modern” can usually be linked to the “traditional modern” immediately previous in some identifiable and usually pretty fascinating way e.g. seeing Dadaism as a parody of what were the currently established ideals of sculpture. Postmodernism, on the other hand, would be something like Pollock. Yes I know his stuff is lauded in Modern Art museums but modern art encompasses a lot of avant-garde postmodern art functionally even if (at least I'm trying to argue) the philosophy is different and noticeably so in the art. Pollock's stuff seems “timeless” and functions through emotions basically invariable in the human condition whereas something like Duchamp functions through a paradox established by the current conventions of art. That's not to say that postmodern art can't be contextual or satirical or whatever, just that it wasn't made as an effort to take a step further in any particular direction, not an escalation. Of course there's also escalation within postmodernist movements. Also it seems like I might be implying something like classicism to be postmodern, but that's more due to the fact that I'm presenting them as dichotomous supergroups. I'm getting over my head. This wasn't even supposed to be about postmodernism.

Okay here's an attempt at a definition before I move on to the actual subject (which I don't even have a whole lot to say about aaaaah)

Modern art has an element of reaction or escalation of what was previously considered modern art. Even if the previous thing was called something else, like realism or romanticism or irony-core hip hop or slice of life comedy, I still consider it modern if it was reactionary or escalatory to the previous thing that was modern and oh my this is circular.

Postmodern art has an element of reaction to the idea of modernism.

Most things still have neither, however, the overall progression of an artistic movement can be classified as a modern or postmodern progression even if the art itself can't be said to be either.

Okay.

So moe is a modernist development

Yes.

It is hard to compare moe, which is like an emotional artform, with anything else, but here lemme try:

Consider Redline vs. the moeness of K-On!: Redline, while in many ways representing the pinnacle of several trends (not the least of which is the art I mean SEVEN HANDDRAWN YEARS, I really still can't get over that), operates with a sort of knowing simplicity that, while being sort of knowing and satirical of other plots, makes it's biggest plays in it's refusal to acknowledge it's disregard of modernism. Oh geez I don't know if that will make any sense to anyone besides me. Okay so Redline knows exactly what it is, it is not Evangelion and it is not Lain or anything like that. However, it doesn't lord the differences over you like Gurren Lagann does (GL is more like a deconstruction, which I'd argue is modernism??? oh man this is getting difficult). It goes out of its way to avoid any sort of contextual theorizing of satire or other commentary. It is an example of sinceritism, a word I just made up for stuff that is definitively not ironic in any way, and I'd say is a definitely postmodern sort of movement.

Okay enough confusing things about what it isn't get it on to whattitis.

Slice of life is as old as dirt. A lot of the very first, like, caveman era art can retroactively be seen as slice of life, but that's really just because they didn't have much of an imagination in those days. True slice of life as genre can be seen as a reactionary thing to the dramatics of the greats of the late Romantic era (if you want I can defend this at length, basically I feel like early SoLers figured the Russians were unable to really make their point if their philosophies could only be realized in exemplary circumstances like murders) and the precursor to both the neo-hyperrealistic stuff that was like the bold first overstep of today's realism and the surrealistic stream of consciousness stuff. Definitely modern, all of them. The former evolution can be seen in Calvino, the latter in Woolf and Joyce's Ulysses. Slice of life itself was given its first real masterpiece and still greatest example in Joyce's Dubliners, but you knew I'd say that. Much later, in... the early 90s I guess? another genre sort of sprung up as a modern escalation of teen melodramas, an attempt to real nail the feeling of realism, almost mundane, that allowed viewers to really relate to the characters. This stuff went back to a lot of the SoL staples: few big dramatics; deliberate “flaws” to pacing, dialogue etc for the sake of realism; repetition - elements that viewers could count on, etc. Modern sitcoms are also an example of this – Seinfeld as a reaction to increasingly unrealistically saccharine “family sitcoms”.

So slice of life shows took the shojo teen dramas desire for relatable realism and eventually realized the best way to do it was to drop the drama altogether. Things became more and more ideal, there was a long series of one-uppance where each show just abandoned unpleasant elements of previous shows, losing like, the mean character, actual stress over homework, etc, etc. This was due to the fact that they'd really succeeded in making the characters relatable – people suffered as their favorite character did. Of course, this came at the expense of most of the comedy. Defining moe is a whole lot of work that I don't think I'm up for now but you can see how it emerged from this sort of progression – people would want the characters to be happy, even at the expense of the show's quality, even at the expense of their happiness. The emotion causing this could be called nothing other than moe.

And hoo boy, this emotion was marketable. This, more than anything, is what caused the slice of life genre to have such “Room of Spirit and Time” speeds of escalation. Making someone consider a character to be moe directly lead to them considering it a good thing to spend money on PVC figures of that character, Blu-Ray copies of episodes of that character's show, and pretty much any product under the sun if it had the character's likeness on it. Everything was optimized for this purpose, everything else scrapped. Now what qualifies as moe has become a Lovecraftian hydra that probably has a tentacled head in everything imaginable, including blushing tsundere Cthulhus (I hope. Brb gelbooru). It's so modern! Think of how when Clannad made so much money everything looked like it in terms of like, eye-size and hair colouring. Then Haruhi made a bunch of money and suddenly hair was more fluid and eyes were closer. Then K-On made rounder and chipmunky and shrank the appendages down. Next is... YuruYuri styled basic colors and, like, circle to curve designs? Or A-Channel's pure blobbiness? Of course there's also like, Raildex's branch of going classic anime design (and, unfortunately, classic anime QUALITY) and then just going ham with the character designs. Hmm.

Anyways, there's very few artistic movements that do things like this, things that basically amount to completely unabashed but very effective pandering. Console first person shooters also apply, I guess. If you happen to like the thing, the way I like moe stuff, you really have no place to complain. This is like someone driving a buffet up to your house. Yeah, it feels good to get up on the high horse and decry how easy the market but c'mon can't you appreciate just how hard they're trying to be the absolute moest? Isn't that amazing itself? Plus, there's been some real masterpieces that couldn't exist without the level of moe technology we have today. Like Madoka! Or:

Hidamari Sketch is a porcupine of moe

That's an evolution metaphor that I'm too lazy to explain, I think it's sort of understandable if not actually scientifically accurate? Madoka sort of uses some of the styles of H. Sketch, as does YuruYuri in the occasional scene, but for the most parts stuff like 20:3 faces or symbolic uses of characters (indulge me for a second: did you know that in a lot of the early drafts of Finnegans Wake, HCE and ALP and Shaun and Shem and Izzy didn't even have those “names”? Forreal they were just SYMBOLS, I think they were old alchemical symbols. And now we have Yunochi's X [that took me way too long to get, the -chi = X thing, by the way], Hiro's squid, etc, etc! Plus like... okay no that's actually the only FW/HS comparison I can think of) or scaling the rest of the limbs, uh, proportionally (instead of the “they would be falling down all the time” limbs of most other shows) or photo-inserts or whatever didn't see a lot of play in other shows. It's a shame, for the most part, because these are great ideas (except for the limbs thing. I'm sorry, I cringe when I see them walking in the opening credits. It just seems so wrong. How ironic.) and are very artistic, especially compared to the rest of the genre. However, they aren't moe. They're just a little off. And it's not like they're a little off-moe because they weren't established in the moe-canon and repeated ad-diabetes, they weren't established because they were a bit off-moe. And I can't really explain why that is no more than I can explain why other stuff is moe, which is an open problem in my book just behind “is there objectivity in art?” and just after “what is consciousness?”

Lots of other stuff in lots of other artistic movements have had stuff that's much more off than the stuff off here. Blu's new albums have this weird beat system that I don't think any other rapper is eager to try. Asano's photorealism and Ware's minimalism. Etc, etc. However, since the movements of those are already very beset with postmodernism, of all sorts of things being done because nothing needs to be done, stuff showing up with no steps being taken, just sort of popping in. It's the difference between hopping in a time machine and winding up in the Jurassic Age and walking down the street and ending up in a cow pasture. The latter is weirder, yeah. Not unpleasant. But weird. Especially if you were trying to get to the store.

I guess that's all I'm trying to say.

Oh speaking off all this, this is why Saimoe is so interesting to me: it's like evolution hyperspeed action!

Also why I'm so annoyed that Hakase and Ui both lost to some girl from some show I barely have even heard of!! WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE. YES, I'M MAD.

Hiro and Nori won their matches, though, so that's good.

Recent Anime

Will be in the next blog post~!!

RELAX

2011-09-08T14:39:00.001-07:00

SPECIAL RELAX REVIEW: IT'S HERE IT'S HERE IT'S HERE MY GOD IT'S HERE

Das Racist – Relax

TRACK BY TRACK AT FIRST I GUESS

TRACK ONE: RELAX

this just in this is the best beat I have ever heard.

Kool a.d. does lil b better than lil b. he goes BASED HAM on his verse. This electronic sounding “relax” loop is the best hook ever.

HOLY @HEEMS CALM DOWN NO WAIT GO HARDER MY GOODNESS.

En-uff funds t' do that okay this flow is like mad buh-buh-b-blackin' out. Electronic voice coming in over verse madness supermadness. Original beat comes back in and it's like WOW WOW, WOW, WOW. Oh man outro beat is the one from that chillin' island preview OH MY GOD this is so good OH. My. GOOOOOOOOOD. Hahahaha oh my god

TRACK TWO: MICHAEL JACKSON

okay I have heard this like a hundred times now you feel me? I probably don't have much to say about it anymore but okay wow this is still like the craziest song of all time, amazing.

TRACK THREE: BRAND NEW DANCE

there was an old video called “victor dances oddly” I hope this is about that wow this beat is like brand new underworld level, like a bonus hidden level on the rap spectrum. WOW THE BEAT CHANGEUP ON 30 SECONDS SO OR IN IS JUST INSANE INSANSE I”m SELLING OXYCOTIN ON MY PALM PIXIE SHE GOT THREE SISTERS ALL OF THEM DO 100 PUSHUPS WITHOUT EVEN LOOKING REDDIT REFERENCE? NO I DON'T CARE. Heems doing this hook some serious justice. Beat like david bowie in a swimming pool that he thinks is space. These references are actually in space though mad over my head gotta get the study on we on safari, rap safari. Me on da beach. Semiaquatic like otters be. Caveman rap. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. I want to give them all my money and love everybody.

TRACK FOUR: MIDDLE OF THE CAKE

WOW. What is this beat doing? It is outside my audiovisual spectrum. MIDDLE O' THE CAKE. Raspy flow. Raspberry filling flow. I think the raspberries i'm eating have mostly spoiled, that's a real life insert comment. Money is money is money is money how many licks geez I dunno, blah blah blah WOAH WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THIS ELECTROCUTION VOICE MAN I CAN'T HANDLE THIS. This is too squarely in that NEXT LEVEL. RAP GENIUS DOT COM BEAT. TAKE THAT URBAN DICTIONARY. Rick ross on the radio @ the pharmacy. Tweet a bout it. Brb gonna toss these berries on the end of this song they smell all funky. OUTRO MAD STYLAN. STYLAN RAPS. Brb.

TRACK FIVE: GIRL

MY GOD THIS BEAT, MY GOD, HOW CAN HUMANS DO THIS? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?? my god like SEMISUNG? Okay ohkahy I can deeg it. You almost got yo fake patois right here man but okay i'm pretty sure that I do too. OKAY RAPPING, PRETTY SMART COOL BEAUTIFUL AND I HEARD YOU GOT A POOL, PLUS YO HAIR SMELL NICE. Feeeeeling weird and straaaange is like heems' motto. Inside jokes in all of my rhymes NO KIDDING.

TRACK SIX: SHUT UP MAN FT. EL-P

I heard this on the radio rip a few times before it disappeared okay but this is a whole new level 'cause good quality my godness this beat is just wow this is just amazing my god victor what are you EVEN RAPPING ABOUT walk it out man I am gonna hear this song at least twenty thousand times before I die heems I get you maybe you sound aight you sound tight okay so I won't worry about it. I'll get you a hovercraft. 100Gs ez. IF YOU DOUBT I SPIT FIRE YOU PROBABLY A DRAG YOU DOUBTFIRE, it's HIMANSHU WHO COULD IT BE? AMAZING. AMAZING. HERE COMES EL-P COMING WITH SUPERFIRE, FINE LIKE SINEW, amazing, level X. BURN AIR VACCUUM. El-p is still raw legend status. Busta rhymes of postironicweedrap.

TRACK SEVEN: HAPPY RAPPY

THE BEAT THAT INVADES FROM SPACE. Baby beat. What

my god

that's ridiculous

COUNTING TO OH MY GOD HE'S COUNTING TO 20. BACK IN TOWN. WAKA FLOCKA FONZIE. OH MY GOD. OFFICER RICK ROSS. MY GOD. ROOM FULL OF DRACULAS BIG COMMERCIAL. YOU ARE QUICKLY BECOMING THE BEST RAPPER. TUMBLR FLOW WONDERFUL. I KILL EM WITH THE HELLO YES HAPPY RAPPY THIS WHAT YOU'RE HEARING RIGHT NOW ACTUALLY. Happy rappy genre of 2011-infinity. This outro is destroying my mind lovecraft style.

TRACK EIGHT: BOOTY IN THE AIR

OH

MY GOD

THIS IS THE BEAT FROM DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OH

MY GOD

LIKE AN AIIIIIRPLANE

MY GOD

LIKE HER BOOTY WAS A CLOUD

thunderclap I get it that clapsyncopation this is

wow

they've really advanced every technique in their aresenal by three levels on this one

JESUS

WOW

WOWOWWOWOWOWOWOWOOWOWOWOW

HEEMS FULL ON SINGING AT THIS POINT AND IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL

this might be the BEST TRACK YET actually I have NO IDEA.

Heavy ART SCHOOL ROOTZ but TAKEN TO SPACE TIER. Beat is just ALL HAMMERS ALL THE TIME. WOW. DIFFERENT SCHOOLS VERSE YEAH DO IT DO IT THAT WAS SUCH A GOOD VERSE DO IT AGAIN I AM GLAD. Fake patois x100000000. Booyakah booyakah now followmefollowmeson.

ME LIKE THIS GIRL AND SHE LIKE ME TOO

BUT ME NOT KNOW WHAT ME GWAN DO.

Amazing, amazing, aamazing, I hope this is like a timetypo and this song is actually 10 minutes long OH NO THE OUTRO OH YES IT IS SO GOOD.

TRACK NINE: POWER

okay this beat is giving me CHILLS

wowOWWOWOWOWOWOW

okay here we go

here it comes

l RON HUBBARD WITH NO BLING

jesus

DING

MAYBE WE CAN SELL THE WHOLE THING

I finna buy twenty copies.

POWER

WHAT

oh my god the beat

is warp digivolving

in my ears

is this the hook? I have no idea. This is like gourmet. DANNY BROWN GOING SUPERHAM WHAT IS HAPPENING I THE BIG DAWG YOU THE FIRE HYDRANT WOW WOW WOW.

My mind is just reeeeeling this verse is just WHAT so heavy WHAT on the WHAT that I CAN'T HANDLE IT. BEAT CHANGING UP AGAIN IT SEEMS. Hook I guess. Wwwow what a good hook, I wouldn't even believe it. HALF INTERNET HALF HIGH SCHOOL CAFETERIA, AMAZING, AMAZING, AMAZING.

Prolly think this song is a bouchu WHAT THE HECK THIS VERSE IS GETTING IS CRAZY. WHAT. Oh man. OH MAN. WHAT'S the DIFFERENCE, this is like gunit new millennium??? wow POWER, wow, WOW.

SONG TEN PUNJABI SONG

HOOOOOOOOOOOLY COW THIS BEAT what is this beat. I cannot get a handle on it or even half. WOW THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING maybe this WHOLE SONG WILL BE IN PUNJABI? No okay that's even better. This hook is craziness beyond craziness. This beat is madness below madness. This rapping is a whole new coulor. Heems is going harder than anything ever. Who invited heeeeems? 'bout to get DIZZEEEE.

Guys this is seriously insane I didn't think this sort of song could get made ever. GUYS THIS IS TOO MUCH SAVE ME. Transcendental beats. Beats from another universe. WOW. HOW? WOW.

SONG ELEVEN: SELENA

WOW, what is that SAMPLE? It is koocoobanananas. Nuts. MICHAEL DOUGLAS A MILLION DOLLARS?!??!?!?! you have gotta be kidding me man you can't pull that off no way no way. WOW. SLAVE NAME VASQUEZ. Or however you spell that. CATCH ME IN A COOL PLACE DOING A FUN THING. SAMPLE COMES BACK IN AND IT HURTS HOW COOL IT SOUNDS. HEEMS NO DON'T QUIT EVEN THOUGH YOU'RE A BORED WALRUS. KOOL AD THE WALRUS TOO. BEST RAPPER ALIVE I SWEAR TO GOD MAN. Amazing amazing wow david bowie starman. I didn't know how to say john carpenter. YEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH. Heems has just STUNNED ME with these lines. WUH-WOAH. Amazing. Jesus wow. All these songs man. I can't get over it. Ham on ham stacks on ham.

SONG TWELVE: RAINBOW IN THE DARK YOU KNOW WHAT IT ISSSS

kinda hoping they'd ruhmicks this a bit but so far no changes well this is a MODERN CLASSIC alright, nah it does sound remastered, sounds more MINIMAL actually, okay, that's cool. So many great lines so so many WOW WHAT WAS THAT, there are some like ANIMAL COLLECTIVE STYLE NOISES ON HERE, what's that COLLABORATION WITH NOAH LENNOX INCOMING? I hope. This is like, so nostalgic at this point. It's been like a year and a half or so maybe. Dang. Still kills. Still superkills. I think I have every single line of this song memorized, I will recite it to you if you pay me a dollar maybe but you have to do your best to emulate the beat, which is EXCELLENT as the day it was born.

SONG THIRTEEN: THE TRICK

nice transition wow nice drums what is this gonna be I can't wait wait what's that sample from? It sounds like my low bitrate mixes almost. Wow listen to this relaxed flow wow kool ad just pouring out the raps. Et cetera et cetera essssseteraaa it's better with no geppetto though wow too lazy to look up spelling but that's an AMAZINg line. IT's REALLY HEEMS AND i'm RAPPING WTH MY FRIEND. Thank you my friend. YOU'RE WELCOME HEEMS. Sing then shoutrap the same lines, WHERE CAN I SEND THIS MEDAL? Where does the money go????

SONG FOURTEEN: CELEBRATION

okay this is it :( :( :( :(

but it's a CELEBRAAAAAAAAATION, we can SELL THIS TO YOU. WE CAN GIVE IT AWAY, WE DON'T MEAN WHAT WE SAY, okay, what can I give you that you would actually need? Dang this is, this is, mad deep? WOW BEAT CHANGEUP, nah I HEAR YOU THOUGH, I actually DO man, I do it is a CELEBRATION. Beat changeup 2, also amazing, crazy, crazy, crazy, okay, crazy, I ask RELAX. It's over.

Wow.

Great job das racist

more coherent thoughts to follow maybe.

Welcome to my Blog (remix) (ft. Ludacris, Busta Rhymes, Andre 3000, '98 Eminem, the guy who did that Cheetahman remix, Alice Margatroid, ulillillia, Kazuya Himawaru, Little Bee, こしじまとしこ, Tux, Jimmy Corrigan, Deacon the Villain, CombatEX, MC Kuribo's Shoe, Edward Newgate, Chuck Berry, Yoni Wolf, Finn MacCool, Waka Flocka Flame) (an exercise in testing the maximum length of blog post titles)

2011-09-06T22:21:00.000-07:00

Arch Linux report

So I decided I'd install Arch Linux on my netbook. This was after an older cousin showed me around on it and I ended up pretty confident that I could actually install and use it myself. This confidence, though, was undercut by a deep fear that I was definitely going to screw something up. However, when I tried to actually think about those concerns, I found an even deeper egoistical belief that I was more than capable of pulling it off flawlessly. Analyzing that left me skeptical of it, and so on, and so on. I often have this sort of problem. Sometimes it stops me from trying in the first place. This time it DIDN'T.

Why I wanted to install Arch Linux

1% - Experience with Linux might help land me a job

9% - Experience with Linux might help me not look like an idiot while talking about Linux

20% - Too lazy to figure out how to change desktop background of previous OS, Windows 7 Starter

25% - The idea of doing a bunch of stuff in Command Line seems “fun” and “what a hacker would do”

45% - Like the name

Problems I encountered while installing Arch Linux in chronological order

-Program that puts an iso as a bootable image on USB device corrupted USB device

-Cannot edit config files

-Won't boot Display Manager

-Display Manager resets after I log in

-Xorg-server does nothing

-Window Manager does nothing

-xterm does nothing

-yaourt can't seem to install correctly

Solution techniques

-Install everything to do with the thing I was trying to install instead of just what I thought I needed

-Google every word to do with problem

-Install something that seems, at best, tangentially related, but showed up in some search results

-???

-Success, by some definitions

What I am able to do now in Arch Linux

-Have a desktop

-Change the desktop background

-Play Tetris, although there's like +-10fps of lag pretty often, which is pretty annoying

-Have a command line and do some stuff in it

-Browse the web – this is really the big one

-A million billion other things that I will never want to do but installed with the Window Manager out of desperation and I think they're all slowing down my system and I don't know how to get rid of them

What I am unable to do that I kinda want to do

-Get to the Window Manager in less than five steps, those being: 1) Load display manager 2) Quit display manager, get command line login 3) login as root (I know, I know) 4) start xorg-server 5) start Window Manager

(Now, you might wonder why this is. Briefly it's because starting the Window Manager from the Display Manager seems to restart xorg for no reason, so I can't do that. But I have to load the Display Manager because it seems like I can't adjust the run level to 5 unless I do that. I also can't do anything as a non-root user because I can't seem to change the local settings for xorg for any non-root user. Bun.)

-Play music

-Use word processor or spreadsheets

-Use MSN

(These I think are all really easily solved by getting yaourt working)

What I suspect I am unable to do but have been too afraid to try because that will then force me to try to fix it and honestly this has been enough of a headache for now

-Plug in USB harddrives etc

-Anything with sound

-Connecting to wireless internet

-Playing video files

-Playing like flash video stuff online

Each of these I'm like 50% sure will work maybe.

Anyways

This was probably the worst time to try all this because I will likely very shortly actually need my netbook to do well at least wireless internet and word processing and probably some other random obscure crap too. So yeah good one, me! I'm thinking my next step might actually be a like 100% retry. It would fix a few things, at least. I might go with the like, core install versus net install too.

Recent Anime

Usagi Drop episode 9

Ah, what a lovely episode. The school scenes were lots of fun, typhoon's always a nice environment for an episode. Real big Yotsuba vibe from this one, but like, the latter half would be a scene in the neighbors' house. And uh Yotsuba would be both child characters, except sometimes Ena would be Rin. Anyways yeah that's about the highest praise I can give, that it was as fun as Yotsuba. I wonder just where the “romance” plot will go, I honestly wouldn't mind if it was developed pretty heavily so long as it doesn't start to exclude the kids in the show. These are characters that I like enough that I just sorta want them to be happy, I guess. So yeah, no complaints, really. Kouki and his mom are becoming more interesting characters, Daikichi had some good development with the scene at his office, Rin probably had the least significant scenes but her scenes were so much fun I don't care. Good stuff. Also there were a few tracks in the soundtrack of this episode that I really noticed as being awesome. Gonna maybe start rating things now I think maybe and thus this gets an 8.

Idolmaster episode 9

Lots of fun. Second sort of “genre parody” episode they've done in a row now and they've managed to nail the combination of parody and example again. The intro was especially impressive. It's easy to say “do a murder mystery show” on paper but they actually went the whole distance with it, made it feel very legitimate. I've been worried that the twins would have a really dramatic episode soon with like, themes of jealousy and such, and that it would just be painful and not very fun to watch, but this wasn't it. Those things were addressed swiftly and smoothly with just the right level of tact. Maybe the parallel with the show within a show was too shoved in our face, that was a bit awkward. Great to see the whole cast being so involved, though, and it was a great way to highlight each of their personalities. Also the ending sequence was great. This is also gets an 8.

YuruYuri episode 10

Okay first off my only complaint: when you do off-model deformities as a joke and include them in like 75% of gag punchlines and you have a really gag-dense show it creates this really weird feeling where the animation in a whole lot of scenes just gets... weird. It's off putting in the best of times, and the slightest step back can make it almost intolerable. Also uh Chitose's nosebleed jokes have gotten really, really disturbing now that they've had to kick them up so many notches into absurdity to make them still funny. Like, bleeding into your soup? Bleeding out of your eyes? Exactly who is this appealing to? I do not want to meet them but uh congrats to them on having this amount of fanservice. Anyways aside from all that this was great, really great. Trip episode obviously has a lot of potentially great scenes and this nailed all of them, including some new ones. It also had some idea of like... moe tempo? Moe hype? Moeticipation? I guess it's because the reaction to something really moe is such a basic reaction that you can very simply give the sense that is upcoming like you can build tension in a scary scene. Seriously like before you even know the whole premise or consciously realizing what scenes will probably result, just DAT music and DAT bus and just the ridiculous tempo of the opening scenes and how jarring all the changes are, it just sets you up so perfectly. Oh yeah here's my other complaint, and this is the big one, actually: come on you have a whole other show's worth of cast that you are just completely ignoring and since every character is my favorite character you are neglecting my favorite character four times over. I think the tsundere twins actually shouldn't appear too often though? Like uh their relationship is so simple that trying to force it into too many scenes would just ruin it. Oh also I remembered that this episode I thought Yui was a little too quick to get aggravated. It seems like I mainly complained here but like everything I didn't explicitly mention as bad was great. Gets an 8.5.

Nichijou episode 23

Wow. What is this nonsense? Build up a lovable cast of characters through the wackiest gags in anime history then go all hard flipmode and use these same characters in these absolutely legitimately beautiful scenes? Every second of this episode was in some weird surreal world where cliché and originality meet. It was like a second layer of heartfelt sincerity was hiding behind every character. Yuuko has like, transcended the idea of a main character, and now her misfortune is like a universal constant to be admired with awe instead of just simple laughs. Mio's despair at the horrible tasting jam prompts one of the finest flashback montages I have ever seen. The soccer and igo club developments, the Sakurai siblings at home, the confession to the “punk kid with the mohawk”, the scene of Yuuko getting guidance counseled... it was all just so pitch-perfect and sincere. Sincerity! If I have one really abstract and high-level and not fully developed complaint about YuruYuri is that it's just so self-aware and has this sorta biting undercurrent of, like, satire. It's still stuck in the level of irony, brilliant but with a deep hollow center that can be hard to ignore. Nichijou, then, is post-ironic, and, unlike K-On!, which is also post-ironic, Nichijou is complex enough that playing it straight is actually more difficult than copping out and doing simple satirical sketches. How weird is it that pure absurdest humor with a heart, probably the simplest form of humor, the stuff kids will try first, is so difficult to find while it seems like everyone can crank out some overblown version of something with the asterisk linked to “I know it's silly!” clearly marked when the latter requires all sorts of sophistication and knowledge that the former doesn't? Have we hit some sort of cultural threshold where it's become easier to metaemote than to actually emote? And yeah of course that scene with Mai and Hakase like, what can you say about that? It's so touching for so many reasons. The 180 of Mai's character and then the 180 of your own character when you realize that it wasn't a 180 at all. Beautiful. Really, really beautiful. Easy 10.

Curb Your Enthusiasm s08e09

Funny funny episode. Everything escalated very quickly, but they managed to link everything together pretty well. Lots of pretty funny scenes, Larry's flashback was handled well, as was the guest star. Really great Leon action, too. Not a whole lot to say, honestly. This is just classic Curb. Has the inevitabile feeling on a lot of it's jokes, the multiple plot threads, the wackiness in every classic Curb category – baseball, sex, race, Jewishness, celebrity. Nothing super super great I guess but solid. 8.5

Das Racist report

RELAX COMES OUT IN A WEEK

Saimoe report

Yeah you better believe I'm following Saimoe. There's been some interesting matches so far but it honestly hasn't really begun to heat up yet so it's okay that this is my first mentioning of it really.

Misaka beating Homura is really unfortunate, I think. Well it was unfortunate that they were in the first round against each other, seriously. Railgun is probably my favorite character in Raildex, which is a series where I like maybe a half-dozen characters and sorta like the general plot but dislike so many other aspects that I can't bother to watch it. But geez Homura, like, this is supposed to be a moe contest, right? You can't get more moe than flashback Homura, you simply cannot.

Seems like K-On! isn't actually gonna do well this year, eh? Well they all had sorta tricky opening matches but I wonder if it's more like an anti-K-On voting brigade behind this? Hm let's see:

-Jun is a minor character so of course she's prolly gonna lose to a titular character. Plus apparently she has a boyfriend now in the manga? That's a death sentence.

-Nodoka was a minor character but I dunno I thought this might be her year? Nah just kidding/hoping.

-Mugi geez she had a shot but the angel love is just too strong I guess. I prolly should watch Angel Beats at some point. Saw the first episode but it seemed like too much of a “thing”, y'know?

-Wow Mio got STOMPED by Squidgirl. I'm actually... okay with this? She had her time in the spotlight, well deserved. She can do great again next year after the movie. It's Ika's time!

-Geez Azusa losing to someone in a series I've been too lazy to even consider being too lazy to watch sorta bugs me, but I guess it's prolly really the same deal as with Mio.

-Ditto Yui losing to some Baka to Test girl.

-Ui is awesome and probably has a shot, which is disappointing, because I want Hakase to win this one. Actually I just want both of them to win.

-Ritsu will be devoured by Kyoko. It is just what needs to happen. This is Madoka year and I would want nothing else.

-I like Sawachan and all but if Miyako doesn't win that one I will be displeased.

So yeah, no K-Ons making it past round one as far as I can see. Pretty shocking, eh? I guess it was a pretty slow year for K-On, all things considered. The movie, which I am pretty hyped up for, will change all that.

Oh yeah speaking of Hidamari Sketch, I am very, very pleased to see that Yuno completely STOMPED her match. She would have won even if all the Raildex fans allied against her. Unless this is somehow skewed by some anti-Raildex sentiment, it seems like she has a lot of well-deserved support. I could see her going as far as group finals! Geez Squidgirl vs. Yuno in group finals would be great. Too bad about most of her comrades. Miyako will probably win her round one, I think, though. And Hiro's could go any way, I don't really think HSotD has a following on Saimoe but Momo will be formidable. I'd be okay with Ayase beating Nazuna, as will probably happen, 'cause Ayase is pretty great.

Nichijou is doing better than I thought it would be but way worse than I think it should be doing. Yuuko won a close match, I didn't think she'd be able to take down a popular Strike Witch. Mai losing is a bummer but she put up a good fight. Izumi was never really a factor which is a shame, but Last Order is pretty cool at any rate. Mio, Nano and Hakase I think all have a good shot at their round one, so let's cross our fingers.

Those are the main ones I care about. A few others surprised me but whatever on that. Sorta nice to see Tooru and Run from A-Channel winning, that show was pretty moe if nothing else.

Anyways if I have to make predictions, and I guess I ought to:

Group A is won by Misaka over... geez, I dunno, I guess Miya has a shot.

Group B is won by Yuuko. Ha, I wish. Nah I think Merry has this? Her or Erica, maybe? I really don't know.

Group C is won by Madoka over either Elsea or Run.

Group D is won by Yuno over Ika Musume. I believe it!

Group E is won by Sayaka over Ohana, probably. If Charlotte beats Sayaka I will be peeved.

Group F is won by Mami over... Anjou? How popular was Ano Hana, all told? I hope Nano makes it that far but I have my doubts.

Group G... wow, Index, Kirino, Yuri and Haruka all have like, group final potential, I'd say. Kyoko will destroy Ritsu and Kanata, which is sort of sad because I like all those characters, and then move on to crush Charlotte and whoever else, unfortunately including Mio and Ayase. Oh well, only one can win, and anything to do with Madoka will and should. Kyoko over Index is my final guess.

Group H will be won by Kuroneko although probably Kuroko and hopefully Miyako will give her some competition. No idea who she will meet in the finals but I'm gonna guess Kanon cause people seem to like TWGOK.

Too lazy to figure out how the quarter finals and all that will be seeded but I think Madoka will beat Mami in the finals. Or at least I hope.

Okay that's it for this blog post

They should do a Saimoe-like tournament for Linux distros.

this blog the best forever

2011-09-01T19:33:00.001-07:00

Recent Anime

YuruYuri episode 9

This episode seemed really 4-koma-y to me. Maybe that's just 'cause this had a plot I had read in the manga before I saw it animated, but the manga isn't 4koma and even the stuff I didn't read first was really 4koma-y somehow. I guess it's just how they did the jokes. There were quite a few pretty good scenes here but nothing stellar. They spent a lot of time on the president/teacher characters which I was pretty hype for but they seem a little too gag-y at the moment. Then again, Chitose started off like that, and she's pretty rounded now. Not enough Ayano, and the tsundere twins showed up just long enough for me to want more of them. Also not enough Akarin but that goes without saying. And next episode is gonna be year two only again, whaaat? I dunno I mean I watch these shows entirely for the characters, it's annoying to have them not show up for long stretches of time. Oh well.

Nichijou episode 22

They really seem to be in a phase of, like, wrapping things up almost? This had a lot of Nakanojo action and really seemed to be the climax of his character, as much as possible. Really good scenes yeah. Also some of the “other group” action, that was good, Fecchan is one of my favorites for sure. But yeah you might think hey 22 minutes that stuff has to come at the expense of the main character scenes, right? NOT REALLY. There was still a really good Mio/Yuko scene, albeit not their best or anything, but oh man DEM DOGS. And obviously Hakase and Sakamoto were a “riot”. The Helvetica Standard and Lovelike segments were also top tier. Four episodes left! Oh man oh man.

Usagi Drop episode 8

Very wonderful episode. Lots of really beautiful scenes. Glad to see there still being some mom plotline, and this development does really nicely to escalate it both emotionally and in terms of general tension. Manga-ka can be really fascinating characters, and she is no exception. “Commitment to an artistic goal to the point that it becomes self-destructive” is a pretty enthralling plotline, I hope we see more of it. But not like a lot more. As far as the movement away from the whole “raising Rin” thing I mentioned about last week's episode goes, they seem like their plan is to just come up with new things for him to struggle with. I liked that they really highlighted the changes she's had in the past year. It all felt very natural and realistic. I would've liked to see more of the Obon festival, though, festival scenes are always good.

Idolmaster episode 8

Really enjoyed this episode. Straight up classic movie sort of plot. The “big city caper” genre. Don't see too many of those anymore or maybe they're just usually aimed at kids. I was sort of miffed at how arbitrary everything seemed until they hit some critical threshold where it became apparent this is “what the were going for” and then it was a whole lot of fun. I guess Miki's becoming like the “super-idol” character, fine, someone has to be I guess. Makoto was really great in this one, really happy they had her out kicking ass and such instead of having some wussy plot about wanting to be more feminine. Plus her insert songs are all cool, and she got 3! So much action! So many little jokes and nice scenes! Good job, Idolmaster! You actually did something that a lot of moe anime doesn't even try: to have a fun adventure! The motivating devices were simple as they come, and classic at that. The various resolutions were pretty amusing in their self-aware unbelievability. Characters getting fleshed out, good animation, lots of pretty hnnng scenes, yeah, I was impressed.

Curb Your Enthusiasm season 8 episode 8

Okay so I have a theory about this episode. Well first I have a theory about Seinfeld in general. You know the pretty frequent gag of Kramer pitching some idea to Jerry that Jerry would kinda sarcastically ridicule? There were a few episodes where this was a major plot but a bunch of other throw in ones. Well, I've thought for a long time that these were taken straight from Jerry-Larry writing interactions. I can see it so perfectly in my head: they're sitting around, pitching ideas, and Larry says something like “You know what they should make? A pizza restaurant where you make your own pizza.” I think that that part of Kramer's personality comes straight from Larry. This episode was like a hard confirm of that. One of my favorite Seinfeld scenes that I think is under-appreciated is one in the one where George is getting married and Jerry meets the girl that acts just like him. It's right before he meets her, actually. He and Elaine are walking down the street, talking about George's marriage. Jerry mentions that they'll probably never see George anymore after he gets married, meaning it'd just be down to three. Elaine says, no way, I'm getting out too. Jerry realizes that this leaves just him and Kramer. As they depart, he has a fantasy about it just being him and Kramer, and, horrified by the prospect, almost walks into traffic, when he is saved by the girl. ANYWAYS, in this fantasy, well, it's just brilliant in all regards. You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqGo42jEXPw I'd like to go on about how hilarious it is but the point is BAM CAR PERISCOPE. Back with a VENGANCE in Curb. So my theory is that Larry really wanted to make an episode where they actually have a car periscope and like, Kramer and Newman have adventures with it, or something, I dunno. And now he's done it! And it was a really wacky episode! I dunno though I always wonder about shows with inventions that are a good idea in the context of the show, like, how can you act like it would actually be a good idea when no one's done it? I mean I assume no one's done it. I think I do remember an episode of the Red Green Show where they had a car periscope I think. No maybe it was a reclining chair. Anyways I ended up saying a lot without actually saying anything about this episode. It was pretty funny though. Some good escapades. Sorta similar to this week's Idolmaster in how it went for shenanigans over some sort of like, core CYE-esque plot.

Exhibition Report

Went to the Canadian National Exhibition a few days ago with my mom and my grandma. This is a tradition with us. It was pretty fun, saw some nice things. The role of Exhibition as Exhibition has been obsoleted by the internet even more brutally than it was by television and before that the radio, but the spirit is still there and in some ways it can still shine through. I think one of my favorite parts is going to the farm building and seeing the city slicker kids freak out about seeing cows itf and up close. Very Yotsuba-esque. Of course I do the same thing when I look at the ostriches, though. Those animals seem like they shouldn't work. Other fun stuff are the ice shows, sculpture guys, big demos, little random shows, yeah, I dunno, a lot to do, but it always seems like a nice manageable amount and everything is more just fun and neat instead of intimidatingly overwhelming. This is, more than anything, why I'm happy to go year after year where other such experience, if annual, would be way too much.

Also good: What I Ate.

Shawarma

Shawarma is one of my favorite foods (well, it's like, on burger tier, I guess), but the taste is so unique etc that I basically want it as often as I go to local Egyptian place Al Medina's and no more often than that. Today was a strange change from that. I saw a shawarma stand and could not get the idea of it out of my head. Of course, I ended up being pretty much totally disappointed. Shawarma is the food most skewed in my mind, I think. The only places I've had it really are Al Medina's – a chicken shawarma so good I think it's probably the best meal in that whole huge plaza – and the places that have to compete with Al Medina's. So yeah I eat what is probably still an above-average shawarma and it seems brutally over-flavored and the meat seems dry and the bread mushy. Oh well. This is my curse I guess.

Tiny Tom's Donuts

This is another CNE tradition obviously. Got “apple cinnamon” which I think is probably the best flavor after plain cinnamon. Chocolate is bun.

Deep Fried Butter

This stuff is disturbingly good. Seriously. It's so good it makes me rethink everything. I got this last year too and I was amazed at the taste. There's this really brief window where it just tastes like the topping sauce and generic fried taste, and then you really bite into it and suddenly it's BUTTER, just like a ton of butter airlifted directly into your mouth. Insane. A very “concentrated” flavor, I'd say.

Doughnut Burger

This was disgustingly good. Definitely the “last donut of the night”. So it's uh, two Krispy Kreme doughnuts as buns, then a pretty hefty patty, then tomato, lettuce, and, if you got the deluxe version I did, a fried egg and a bunch of bacon. Very very dense and heavy. Second messiest burger I've ever eaten to that “mega teriyaki” burger I had in Japan. Really tasty, oh Jesus ugh yeah very tasty. Egg on burger is something I have become a huge fan of. Doughnut as bun is something I will be a huge fan of for the next three times I eat it and then I will be dead and on my tombstone they will put “holy dang who would have thought that sort of creamy/sugary sweetness would work SO WELL with the savoriness of meat and egg????” So yeah, pretty crazy.

The last few years there's been this unofficial contest to one-up the last year's unhealthiest wacky food. Even though the exhibition as food exhibition thing has been heavily quashed by food courts, huge grocery stores, etc this specific thing is still pretty unique to it. I guess this is mainly due to the whole “once a year” aspect, maybe? At any rate I'm pretty curious about next year. Eventually it will probably best me, but I look forward to that day.

That's it for now I think.