Maikeru Hasshin!
I filled in a quiz meme: “What if LiveJournal Were An Anime?” and got the following:
The performer of the opening theme: southernsinger
The magical girl: tango
The talking animal: nviiibrown
The lecherous old man: stephaniesmom
The teenager who uses ancient magic to win games: aylinn
The fifteen-year-old Japanese girl with blond hair and a D cup: rubinpdf
My only comment is that I really want to hear Keith compose and perform an anime soundtrack. I’d buy copies to give to my friends.
Still woefully behind on my anime watching: I’ve got all of Fullmetal Alchemist and Macross Frontier to get through. Sometimes I consider setting up a designated “anime half-hour” after work on weekdays, but that makes it a bit like a chore, and that’s no fun. I think I’m probably giving up on Chobits for now, I read the manga and that will have to do.
Y’know, my evenings are showing a tendency towards “recover from work, catch up on email, make dinner, do laundry / chores, cuddle with Starr, go to bed”. The Starr part is nice, but otherwise, it’s a bit of a rut. I need to look into this.
Here’s the whole quiz, if you want to do it yourself
Stolen heredity
Some Ponyo research led me to an article about Lupin the Third, and it suddenly struck me that I should read some Lupin the First – just for purposes of self-education! Luckily the 21st century makes this pretty easy for anyone capable of reading this LJ entry; thank you Project Gutenberg for this collection of Arsene Lupin tales.
I found the first book of stories to be entertaining reading, though I noticed that Lupin resembles the Bronze Age Superman – nothing is truly a challenge for him. If author Leblanc needed Lupin to escape a locked room, frequently a subsequent scene would show him out of the room with no explanation, other than a shrugged “it’s Lupin, what do you expect?”
And this is what put the brakes to my reading of the character, when the French author decides to place Lupin against Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes in “The Blonde Lady”. It’s a pointless battle from the start; Holmes at least engages in his own equivalent of Star Trek technobabble to justify his more unlikely successes (“I can recognize hundreds of brands of cigars by their ashes, of course.”) Lupin has no such limitation, and in this tale penned by a Frenchman, the French thief walks all over the English detective.
Of course, I knew that Holmes would lose the contest – I can see the author’s name at the top of the document, after all – but I’d have enjoyed a real battle of wits, with each side forced to play their best game against the other. Instead, Holmes is shown as completely unprepared for Lupin, and incapable of causing him even mild discomfort. It’s an ungentlemanly treatment of another author’s work, and I’m hardly surprised that Conan Dolye’s estate demanded the removal of Holmes’ name from reprintings. I could not even finish the novel, such was my irritation with it.
I’ll go back to Lupin III, I think. The unstoppable thief is more fun in the slightly deranged world of anime shenanigans; but I’m glad to have briefly met his grand-dad. (Leblanc’s estate does not approve of Lupin III’s use of the name, btw, and in several countries he’s had to be called “The Wolf.” Pot, may I introduce you to kettle?)
Hey… where’s my watch?
Happy Returns for the Rat
Happy belated birthday to rattrap!
Of all my friends, you’re in the few that have had the most influence on who I am and where I am today. I’m very glad that I know you, and I only wish we got to catch up in person more often.
If you didn’t get to this weekend, go treat yourself to Ponyo. You fanned the flames of my newborn anime fandom back in the day, and it just seems appropriate.
Starfleet Vice – 1990
The RoVaCon 15 Starfleet Vice video, as threatened promised…
So, I’ll explain a little of what’s going on. I’m in the wheelchair because I’d been in a life-threatening car accident only weeks ago, but I was too stubborn to miss the con. Heather and Valerie are dressed in costumes from the anime Dirty Pair. Mike Allen represented KODRA, a ruthless Klingon-Orion terrorist organistion out to rule the Alpha Quadrant; while Markus… well, he had a lab coat, so we worked that in. And of course, Tom, Mike, and Beth were solely there to support our blatant swipe of Monty Python material.
I don’t remember the name of the dude working the camera… but he really liked the anime costumes.
Brief updates
- 10:42 News is that the house contract is almost done and we can overnight it to the sellers in the next couple of days. Please let this all work. #
- 13:14 For the Interstella 5555 fans, a great Daily Costume pic of the Crescendolls: dailycostume.com/archive/greenabsence/ #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
The latest Guardians
Having already closed a couple of tickets this morning, I bounced over to my RSS feed reader, which notified me of the day’s posts on dailycostume.com.
Clicking through the links, I brought up this particular group of variant Sailor Senshi. I thought, “Okay, cute, bet I’m missing someone’s fanfic story here…” and then I suddently realized exactly what the theme in question was meant to be.
All I can say is, there’s a weekday afternoon cartoon that I’d put on the DVR recording list.
20 SF Movies
There’s a “25 Things About Me” meme going around Facebook. Rather than just re-post it here, I was inspired by John Scalzi’s column to write “20 Memories of Sci-Fi Movies of My Youth”. Agreed, it’s not quite a catchy a title, but I can live with that.
1) The first SF movie I saw in the theaters was “Star Wars”, when I was seven. I remember seeing the commercials and thinking, “Meh, might be okay.” Yeah, underestimated that one a bit. I do not remember “Episode 4” atop the opening crawl. The John Williams soundtrack spent long hours in the following months accompanying my pretending to blast TIE fighters from a laser gun turret.
2) The next one I recall seeing in the theaters was “Starcrash”. This would only have been a good movie had I been old enough to enjoy Caroline Munro’s outfit. I can’t remember too much about it now, which may be a good thing, but I’m tempted to find a copy and enjoy the badness from a whole new perspective.
3) “Close Encounters” confused and frightened me, especially the part where Richard Dreyfuss starts losing his sanity. I didn’t understand the ending at that age, either. In fact, to this day, there’s a lot of unexplained bits having to do with the aliens, which is just as well; I suspect that any explanation from Spielberg would have been far lamer than the mystery.
4) While we’re on such movies, I was mildly traumatized by the laser surgery and ‘cannibal’ robot in “Logan’s Run”, and I didn’t understand the whole “Carousel” thing at all. That’s another movie which is probably unwise to watch before puberty, especially in a midnight showing in a darkened house.
5) “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”: Wow, new Klingon ships. Whoa whoa, new Klingons! Triple whoa: I am in love with the new Enterprise model! Okay, excellent, what’s going to happen for the next ninety minutes? Oh. Not much. I’m glad I never took it in to my head to get myself one of that movie’s uniforms.
Reviewer to Battloid mode
Four years after the OAV series concluded in Japan, I have finally found time to sit and watch through Macross Zero. For my part, I was disappointed in the show.
The CGI effects of the Valkyrie fighters made up a high point – the opening chapter demonstrates a drawn-out Fighter-to-Battloid transformation sequence that nearly made me drool. Sadly, the actual plot and characters brought me right back down. The series suffered from prequel-itis: I knew the Earth wouldn’t be destroyed, because that job would fall to the Zentraedi in four years. For the same reason, I knew that Roy Focker wouldn’t be killed in combat, making his dogfight duels mildly tedious.
A repeated subplot is the preservation of the ancient ways of the island people, which again felt moot with the coming holocaust; and the bad guys only received the personalities of one-dimensional psychopaths. I expect better than that in anime. One of them had the nerve to try a sympathy ploy on the audience minutes after napalming a village of non-combatant islanders. I just wanted them to hurry up and get killed in combat so we could get back to the real plot.
Oh, and late in the series, there’s the standard anime “I have taken it upon myself to decide that humanity has reached a dead end so I shall cause their destruction in order to pave the way for the next rulers of the Earth” scientist. Isn’t that one on TV Tropes yet? Boring. Lame. Move on.
Still, I feel more “caught up” on the Macross mythology now, so I’m ready to hit Macross Frontier next. As always, your mileage may vary.
