Eras that need to come to an Nd Friday, Aug 31 2007

Like giving up “drinking” just because you ran out of booze, it occurred to me recently for all that people are saying that the Nintendo Wii is killing hardcore gaming by giving game developers no incentive to do anything but cater to the lowest common denominator I would say that it was actually Pokemon that did it.

Under the surface pokemon is the worst sort of “grinding” RPG out there. But you can take the games at face value and they’re extremely casual. Nevermind how I know anything about pokemon, this kind of entry is only of interest to very few anyway.

So you can blame the Wii and the DS all you want, you can moan about Dragon Quest 9 being exclusively for the DS and the decision to discontinue the Shadow Hearts franchise after 3 games. But Nintendo started out with casual video games (I think I still have an old “game and watch” or three around somewhere) and they never really lost sight of that. People complained when the N64 had demographic issues and the Gamecube did nothing to solve that and Nintendo was in tough spots but the more I think about it now, the better it is for people to eventually give up video games or to at least not dedicate lots of time to them.

And like most things the only way to keep most people from doing things is to never give them the opportunity. I actually have no interest in seeing the way that the game industry turns out first hand. Anything from this point I’ll find out by being the most casual of observers. Probably.

You kind of feel it when you drink from dawn til dusk and vice versa for over a week and then stop. It’s not quite withdrawal but it’s still disorienting. Good excuse for bad writing, not even spell checking this time!

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The Sky From The Dance Floor Wednesday, Aug 29 2007

The only thing I ever liked about Roger Federer was his girlfriend but just now I’ve found out that she used to be a player as well so that dampens my enthusiasm for their relationship for some reason.

I went up into the hills by car the other day along one of the most dastardly roads you can imagine. Someone recommended that I re-frame anxiety as excitement when I described the experience to them.

Lately I’ve been sitting around drinking hard alcohol and watching television instead of writing. I can not in good conscience recommend that course of action. Not least of which since it’s not like it makes me feel any better. I happen to be the sort of person who doesn’t get a hang over and I’ve got nothing else going on though so there isn’t a lot of incentive to not drink. I feel kind of bad when I think of the fact that for most of my life I subsisted without the drink, only to finally fall into bad habits at this point. When did I become so weak? Is it the law of attraction? I don’t know.

Continuing my woes about the state of quality within the French film industry, I’m pissed that I even saw a good Belgian movie the other day which happened to have French actors in it the other day. Giving the matter some thought I remember even seeing a Canadian movie that was filmed in French which was absolutely terrible. I can’t say that one usually thinks of Canada at the forefront of anything but there have been respectable things to come out of the country (mostly american film and television projects that were produced there), it’s not a bad place. But this one movie really stands out in my mind as being the worst Canadian anything I’ve ever seen and I have to wonder if it’s only a coincidence that it was in French. I’m not sure whether the work was produced by or featured ethnic French which would give credence to my theory that it’s some jinx of the language rather than the people if it didn’t.

I can’t remember whether I already mentioned the belgian and canadaian movies, the problem with drinking so much I suppose. If anyone was curious my drink is the Gimlet for complex reasons. I actually don’t even like it or Gin at all, but now I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve grown into it you could say.

In a list of things I dislike insects and being bitten/stung by them would rank high, as would the golf player Tiger Woods, French films, Germans, money, depression, and bodily fluids.

As to  Germans, the only German I’ve ever liked was a young woman I met through a friend while she was on foreign exchange. She lived on a dairy farm in some small place I had never heard of and have since forgotten. What I always remember when thinking of her are the wonderful breasts she had. It was like some sort of divine joke that a girl born into a dairy farm would have such large breasts that could only cause one to think of milk. She was not fat at all and as far as I could tell her breasts were proud and firm though one might expect them to be soppy and saggy due to their size (I had known other girls in my life of that sort). I’ve never been the type to be jealous, but looking at her I could understand why some are inclined to get cosmetic surgery. Whether she was what you’d expect for a farmer or whether she blew away your expectations for farmers it’s difficult to say, a bit of both perhaps. And so I think that I shall continue to remember her, the only German I’ve ever liked.

I’m not going to touch the issue of whether there’s really a difference between a stereotype and a prejudice or not, draw your own conclusions. I will say that there’s a difference between not liking and hating. Different words do exist for a reason after all. Too bad I don’t know all of them.

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Dirty Paws Friday, Aug 24 2007

So many fine things are French, some of the finest in fact. So why are French movies so bad? This is especially mind boggling to me because French actors are as good as any other actors and French writers and even philosophers are of course quite renowned. So what is the problem? French Directors? I don’t have any idea but I will once again have to turn my back on the film industry.

On the other hand I saw a good “American” (USA) movie right after this lousy but award winning (I can’t decide whether Cannes is valid anymore or not) French film.  Now it’s no secret that the US produces the largest amount of bad movies in the world, mindless action films, T&A comedies, horror movies, cheap thrillers, and what have you. But all the best movies I’ve ever seen were American. Same with tv shows for the most part, but as has been documented here I have a taste for japanese animation and comics. I feel like the comics field is a bit leveler as I’ve seen good stuff from around the world but it seems like it’s uncommon for there to be serious animated works in many countries aside from japan. I blame america’s influence for that but that’s neither here nor there.

A thought occurred to me that the difference between French and Americans is rock music. On the other hand the English have good rock music and their movies are debatable so that’s probably neither here nor there after all. But seriously I’ve never seen a good french movie, not even marginally. It’s pretty disappointing at this point in my life. I want to just go out on the street and scream “why can’t any of you make a good movie!”

As something neither here nor there I really like the japanese singer/songwriter Shiina Ringo. She’s been around for a while now but I don’t think she’s obtained a lot of notice outside of japan. I would imagine this is primarily because none of her music has been used in/for anime but she just seems more like the semi-fringe type in the first place. Which is part of what I like, her voice, her styles. Am I wrong to say they stand out?

On the other hand Morning Musume has only gotten worse and worse ever since they branched out into all these variations. I liked Tanpopo (dandelion?) which was the first such one if I recall correctly, but that was 10 years ago. I swear that MM peaked musically around 2000 so I have no idea how they’ve continued on all this time. It’s kind of an interesting thing, you can’t so easily compare Morning Musume to other singular musical groups/projects since the only consistent member is the producer Tsunku (I really liked his band Sharan Q), rather they’re more like a theater troupe perhaps? The name stays the same but the members are arbitrarily replaced as their popularity fades and trends change. For my part I don’t like ummm…. pretty much anything about the whole matter, you always wonder what happens to these poor girls and/or how much money they are actually making. Exploitation. I’m not sure that they could be more exploited even if they were involved in pornography. But I am not qualified to say more than that having never been involved in either industry myself. To conclude you could say any fascination I have with “Hello! Project” is mostly morbid. There have been a few songs over the years to come out of there that I actually enjoyed, as I said I was a fan of most of the stuff by Tanpopo and at the least a lot of MM songs are catchy. Sometimes bubblegum is a nice diversion in your mouth even though it’s not food.

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fuck please Tuesday, Aug 21 2007

You know you’ve hit rock bottom when people start suggesting that you consider getting disability payments, for MENTAL illness, when you didn’t think you had any. Yeah it’s been a great week in a great year. If I could make a suggestion, don’t break someone’s heart if you can avoid it, you’re not going to feel good about it afterwards.

So am I saying that you should go out of your way to accommodate others even when you are miserable yourself? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. So just do it. One should never ruin their own life for another person, but it’s not always apparent which road leads to that outcome.

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Lifted upon a pedeStal Monday, Aug 20 2007

If you start a story and are unable to finish it then you’re terrible. I’m thinking about HunterXHunter today since I’d been reading a lot of manga and took the opportunity to read the Greed Island arc again. Which as it happens was the last point when the work had any artistic quality to speak of before eventually going into a mysterious hiatus. If I’m not mistaken HxH is still featured on weekly jump’s webpage so presumably the author (togashi yoshihiro) isn’t dead. Although with how bad the situation had gotten before releases of the series dropped off the face of the earth almost anyone could have come along and done the series pretending to be Togashi and I’m not sure it would have been apparent. The series didn’t quite fall to the point of using stick figures to represent the characters but at best often times the drawings were little better than amateur sketches.

Well that doesn’t matter right now. I’m a person that is never happy to see an ending, but I can almost become enraged at situations like HxH where the story will likely never end. No more than that the problem is that I’m the type of person who gets attracted to things that never turn out.

Have you ever eaten so much that you’re full for 2 days? I don’t recommend it. For a myriad of reasons. God plot holes piss me off! So listen up, here’s the best advice I can give you about being a good writer: write short stories. At the most single volume novels. Frankly if you write more than a sentence it becomes difficult to maintain consistency. If you’re a good writer you can usually come up with a paragraph that doesn’t contradict itself, but I’ve never known of a series of works that don’t fuck themselves over somehow. I hadn’t been paying that much attention until recently now. I want to reread my beloved “count of monte christo” (which is a long book written illicitly, allegedly by more than one person) but I’m afraid to turn a critical eye to it . A lot can change in a day so 10 years can make a difference between people.

My point is that if you start writing a story one day and it takes you 10 years to finish it then you’ve probably got a mix of entirely different things that you’re trying to pass off as one entity. It doesn’t work. In the same vein, if you read a new book in a series every year for 10 years then the particular you that first appreciated the series has probably disappeared.

This is my advice if you want to enjoy fiction: only partake of completed works and finish with them subsequently. I’ve heard some people say that you should only read the works of those who have been dead for ~20~ years or failing that (there are still plenty of authors alive who wrote in the middle of last century) only read works that have been around a certain number of years. I don’t agree with that philosophically though it’s possible that it’s the way to go if you want to enjoy things. I might say that you should only partake of things created during your lifetime though, it can be hard to get into stuff written 200 years ago.

I lost my train of thought. So before ducking out I’ll mention that I get people coming to my blog from some pretty interesting search queries. Mostly anime/manga and game related since no one is interested in reading entries like this, but there was something the other day that really gave me pause. I suppose I ended out at this Hunter X Hunter (yes I have now used multiple variations on writing out that title on purpose, take your pick) situation as a result of that. Right now I’m trying to remember if I ever heard what happened after Dragon Force 2, which I never played. I mean, did the development team go on to create another series like that? Why was there never a 3 on any system? Was there an unofficial one? I was thinking about that just now because as I mentioned recently I was playing the PS2 version lately and…

Well let me write a bit about Dragon Force. 10 years ago it was a really impressive game for all kinds of reasons. Even now I’m still impressed by the game but for much subtler reasons. The plot and execution is retarded as epic fantasy tends to be, but the attention given to detail is praiseworthy. Something that I did notice when I originally played it on the Sega Saturn, but only became aware of the extent to which it was executed recently while playing the PS2 version are the character relationships. In a way these actually provide the bulk of the plot since there are no scenes at all for the majority of the characters in the game, and not that many in the first place. A lot of the random characters really don’t have anything going for them, but the special (the monarchs and their inner circle) and semi-special (like the ones that are usually your first opponents at the start of the game) characters have at least one other character whom they will have a special interaction with in/before battle. The thing is that these might as well be hidden under normal circumstances since there’s no typical reason to use Jarome (jarohm? I can’t remember how his name is written in the original japanese right now let alone how to romanize it) against Uryll even though it results in a fairly lengthy pre-battle conversation.

If I was more dedicated I would make some kind of log of these sorts of things but as it happens in the PS2 version (I don’t think this was in the saturn version but I could be wrong) there’s a feature that you can unlock which gives you background information on ALL the characters as you unlock them. Unfortunately it doesn’t give you specific information on whether you’ll see a scene by having two particular characters fight but it does mention many particular relationships. Like Ailos and Ra Deli being friends or Kiriko and Manoa being siblings. Things that you really wouldn’t just know… actually I think those ones were even in the manual but you get the idea, Hayate and Kyoem is semi-hidden though. You know I wonder if the “lecherous old men” characters have special interactions with all the female characters? I think that they’re probably generalized to a broad extent hmm…. Anyway for those who don’t know japanese I was considering going over the character summaries. It really is pretty impressive that they wrote one out even for the likes of Ena and Mea. But in the end I don’t feel like doing that much work. Nothing screams otaku like writing up irreverent information for a game that originally came out 10 years ago, I wonder if the AGES version for ps2 is even still in print?

This reminds me that back when I used to participate online there was this phrase “if you want to know then go learn japanese” that people would use whenever someone would ask for/about translations of information like that. I imagine that people still use that a lot for all languages. My pet peeve is “I wish I spoke [blank]”, I wouldn’t use up a wish on a foreign language. As someone who can barely read japanese after years though I can understand the sentiment, it’s just that if you have the time to lament then you should take action!

Stabbed in the heart with my own advice. The last thing I’ll say is that the sort of things I’m talking about in Dragon Force were pretty common for [x]rpgs back in the day. When the main focus was game play rather than long story scenes (these days they just have long story scenes anyway) they had to work stuff in somewhere. Of course it’s ultimately fruitless since it’s not like you get anything for your troubles. I was thinking of this in the sense of the obscure SRPG Epica Stella (which was actually released outside of japan) where during all of the scenarios there were chances for conversation if you wanted to take them. That game did also have an intermission conversation system similar to dragon force as well now that I think of it hmm…. Well better known series with larger budgets like Fire Emblem and Super Robot Wars still do those sorts of things and there’s actually a point to going out of your way for special scenes. I was so pissed that building up the character relationships in the Game Cube Fire Emblem game didn’t change the ending (it does in the GBA games). In SRW you have to do certain things in battle to get special units and characters although I can’t seem to recall the old “convince” option in battle being there in alpha 3. Well whatever. Can you tell that I’m in a strange mood?

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Fog Saturday, Aug 18 2007

You can tell that the well is running dry when I use different words for what is ultimately the same thing as a title twice in a row. Fortunately I can’t imagine what would inspire me to use the title “steam” (I think I saw a movie about a Turkish bath house that was titled steam years ago) so there shouldn’t be a third time in a row.

Upon reflection I’ve decided that it’s precisely because I am this age that I keep thinking things will never end and I’m surprised when they do. That’s as opposed to “you’d think that when you get to be my age you wouldn’t be surprised when things end”. People, projects, relationships, one after the other they’re falling down. I think it’s more or less a coincidence that a lot of things that I’m involved or interested in either just happen to be finishing up right now or I’ve become aware of their ends. Probably there are some things which will go on forever. There are a couple of Shounen Jump manga series that I can’t imagine ending for example. Although they probably will some day, won’t they?

Is that bleak or just normal? I’m distracted by trying to quantify the essence of cooking after eating a melty popsicle. You see for the most part subtle differences in heat have a greater effect on texture than on taste. The difference between a 0 degree popsicle straight from the freezer and a 3 degree popsicle that was warmed up by your body heat when you put it in your pocket on the way to your computer for instance. Taste wise you don’t really notice anything but it’s a different experience to put something solid and something that’s soft into your mouth. You know what I’m talking about? I wonder if anyone has tried to calculate the “just noticeable difference” for taste to temperature in food? I’d imagine that taste is altered every 5 degrees at most but are we talking served temperature or cooked temperature? There would have to be a difference there. I could go for some duck about now.

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Misty Friday, Aug 17 2007

It occurred to me just now that the point of the protagonists always getting beaten down over and over again in low class works of fiction is not explicitly because of poor writing. Rather it’s supposed to be a message to never give up, that as long as you keep striving you can achieve victory.

But it’s not that cool. I prefer works with logically superior characters. For the most part if you consider works that play out like what I was referring to in the first paragraph they actually are poorly written though. It’s fine to send out a message of perseverance but, usually what happens is that all of the sudden the main character will be saved by some convoluted plot device. Actually I’ve made that mistake in the past too, it can be hard to watch out for because it seems clever to all of a sudden reveal that the main character is an angel or something like that. But unless you hint at things and establish those sorts of points in advance then you’re just putting out a poor work. What the hell am I doing writing about writing instead of actually writing anyway?

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history Thursday, Aug 16 2007

In order to broaden my horizons I was watching a program about education and theories on how to improve teaching practices to maximize learning. To summarize  that everyone has a different solution which they are convinced is right but they seem to agree that things don’t work right now. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that during the math segment I was not able to solve the math problem presented to the children in my head. The children weren’t able to either but that’s not exactly gratifying. I won’t say what it was but it was an arithmetic problem. I did at least remember how you are supposed to solve such problems and by writing it out I was able to get the correct solution, eventually. I’ve said it before but math is the natural enemy of writers such as myself. Things should not have to be this way though and I will strive to relearn that which I have forgotten even though I’m well past the point in my life where I use anything but simple arithmetic day to day.  I feel like my experience not being able to solve the math problem even though in my student days I got excellent marks highlights the flaws of the traditional instruction educational method. But I am not in a position to say much more or elaborate on alternatives seeing as I never thought for 5 minutes about becoming an educator myself.

Speaking of children, it recently came to my attention that there is a manga series in japan which started running this July in the Shueisha published “shounen jump”, and therefore is aimed generally at males who are perhaps halfway to their majority, wherein the French male protagonist lives in a convent and tortures people in secret under the authority of Cardinal Richelieu during the reign of Louis the XII (I think it takes place in 1926 but do not recall). Yeah. I have a problem with this even though he is using wit and magic rather than straightforward violence. Actually I might have more of a problem with a beautiful young man who can chop people up without blood and put them back together again than I would if he was ripping people’s fingernails off. For the most part though as a hypocrite even though the concept of the work doesn’t bother me in and of itself (even though the setting offends my sensibilities) I have to question the sanity of presenting torture in an enjoyable way without consequences to children. If you want to have works about fighting and nonsense and whatever then one can debate up and down about what kinds of effects that does or doesn’t have on children. But it can not possibly be a good thing that children are reading ベルモンド Le VisiteuR “Belmonde Le VisiteuR” (sic). The series Death Note which also had run in shounen jump and has since completed publication was pushing things as far as content to demographics go as well but eh. I don’t feel like getting deep into this issue.

I’m sure that as others are reading this thoughts come up of series that are aimed at youth which they don’t agree with. Perhaps even memories of ones that they enjoyed in their own youth but now have some doubts about after seeing a new generation exposed to them. The reasons for this are myriad, the shows are too stupid, too violent, not realistic enough, too complicated, too realistic, politically or morally subversive, etc. In other words it would seem that no matter what kind of work you put out people will have an issue with it. And so I will reiterate a point I have made in the past that although it is perhaps not reasonable to hold the creator or perhaps even producers of any given work responsible for anything outside of the consequences of production (if an actor dies in a stunt for instance then that is somebody’s fault), as a creator it is not responsible to publish a work without considering the effects it might have. And I just do not have the impression that Ishioka Shouei, the creator of “Belmonde”, did that. Again, from the bits of the work which I have seen it is in no way extreme and I do not have a real issue with the contents, my problem is with the demographic the work is being presented to.

I wonder if that might not be the story of this generation of fiction though? Fiction aimed at children created for adults… This is giving me a headache so draw your own conclusions. I will now practice what I am preaching and write something carefully considered in case children are reading this: fuck tits grabass 人犬

That by the way is the reason why the works that are out there are out there, twisted people like me really don’t think things through before throwing stuff out.

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in heart in mind in control Wednesday, Aug 15 2007

You can’t change your actions no matter what. But you can change your thoughts at any time. So rather than committing sinful acts such as theft and violence just think about them. If people really did that all the time then the world would be a much better place, well at least aside from all the damn insects and vermin that is.

Wow talk about a mixed message. This is the result of deep investigation into Violence Jack I think. But seriously, the moment that you started to believe yourself above another living thing is the moment when you started consciously sinning. ワイワイ!

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the moment I stop talking about anime is the moment people stop reading Sunday, Aug 12 2007

It seems that no matter how old one gets there are still things that can make you hesitant or scared. Then again in my case have I only gotten more hesitant and scared? Perseverance huh? Well that’s todays moral.

And just to break my habits and ruin the hell out of it for some people (so if you don’t like things ruined then don’t past this point), as far as I can tell the Violence Jack manga is the confusing sequel to the original Devilman manga. Since all I read of Violence Jack (which is a pretty unpleasant series) was the bizarre ending and the surreal Mazinger story arc I can’t say for sure whether the whole thing was planned that way or whether Nagai Go just came up with the idea to have it be the sequel some years after it started. I suspect the latter. Actually I’m sure it was the latter because I read somewhere that he doesn’t plan his work in advance and just takes things as they come to him. A contemporary work I would compare Violence Jack to offhand is The Dark Tower novel series by Stephen King. That’s almost a spoiling comparison. Have I made this comparison before? Aside from working past characters from other works in, some in cameo, some in canon, what I’m really thinking of from the comparison is that both authors just let the story carry them along to its conclusion rather than intending everything to go that way. In the realm of anime and manga Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles by CLAMP is a similar concept, I recall hearing that members of CLAMP are Nagai/Devilman fans. Tsubasa is markedly less unpleasant to read but at the same time it’s not a particularly powerful work (I like CLAMP’s xxxHolic the best out of their works).

Well back to the point I’m not intimately familiar with Devilman but I do know that there have been a lot of manga incarnations (10 or more), some by Nagai and some not. I think that most are alternate versions but some are surely derivative of others that came before. So in that sense Violence Jack is probably directly related only to the original manga series as far as I can tell, and it thereby presents a continuation and an end therein (I heard there was a second Violence Jack work that started more recently but whether that itself is a sequel or alternate violence jack…). But just because it derives from the original doesn’t mean that it’s intended as the true version, the true continuation, the true end. Or maybe it is I really don’t know since I’ve never looked into it that deeply.

As a side note in Nagai’s case I think that he continues to work on his franchises after all these years out of consideration for his fans rather than desire for fame and wealth. His older works are pretty off the wall compared to things he was able to put together more recently. Unfortunately with so much stuff floating out there now it’s really hard to figure out what the real deal is if you don’t know japanese very well. I suspect that even for japanese natives or perhaps Nagai himself it’s still hard to figure things out… Oh well.

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