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Hi since you have some short shows on your list you maybe interested in joining The Shorts Club.

Hey Berkles! How are are you? Are you completely in love with your new iPhone? Hey, Joe gets back soon, and I get out of school next week. We should hang out sometime. :D if you want to.

Ah, I've heard the name before but never got around to watching them, but I definitely will now. It seems like something I'd really like, thanks.

Glad to hear you like it so far, at least. I don't mind the eyes, but I'm similarly undecided about the CG work: I love the unorthodox designs for the Simouns and their carriers as designs, but their implementation within the animation often looks a bit odd.

Eh, if you don't like the art or something then don't feel compelled to watch it. Good luck with the finals.

Nice!

As for Battle Roayle, I'd definitely recommend it. Even more so if you enjoy Gantz as they have a fairly similar premise of "Survival of the Fittest" but Battle Royale takes a more psychological approach to it, and the characters felt much more fleshed out than in Gantz. It's one of, if not the most thrilling thing I've ever read. Once things started to get going I just couldn't put it down.

Thanks for the Twain recommendation . . . I'll try to hunt it down sometime.

The essay question is 'Discuss the concept of omniscience and/or moral conscience and its contribution to the narrative of any three novels [from the course's syllabus]', which is obviously horribly broad (for our 3k word limit, anyway). So my plan is to ignore the concept of moral conscience, and focus on omniscience.

There's a kind of standard (and rather Whiggish) history of the novel (peddled at our university, anyway) which goes something like this: the novel developed out of the bourgeoisie's desire for a new form of literature and initially featured a lot of omniscient, judgemental narrators pushing bourgeoisie/Protestant values -- even in the work of a writer like Austen, who's famous for manipulating free indirect speech; this trend continued on in the Victorian realist novel; then modernist writers (Woolf, Joyce &c) developed a variety of different techniques to achieve a stream-of-consciousness effect, and one of these techniques was the kind of omniscient narration filled by the voices of the characters rather than by a narrator that Woolf uses in Mrs Dalloway; ultimately we wound up with the completely decentered, limited narrating voices of postmodern novels like Sebald's Rings of Saturn. The history's Whiggish element is its idea of progress from the domination of the reader to the reader's complete freedom.

What I'm hoping to do is to write an essay arguing that there's an element of omniscience, and consequent judgement, inherent in the act of narration, whoever's narrating, thus collapsing that history of progress into a flat history. (Besides, the reader's always been free: hence the medieval principle of lectoris arbitrium.) That boils down to me giong through Persuasion, Mrs Dalloway and The Rings of Saturn demonstrating instances of omniscience and judgement in all three, and then returning to Persuasion to show how Austen's use of an omniscient narrator allows her to ironise narration itself -- which Sebald also does. Then hopefully I get a good mark and we all go home happy, except for the novel theorists who've been called out on their bull challenged.

Realistically speaking I probably don't have enough time left to do that good of a job on the essay, but I only have to get a pass mark as I have very good marks on the other assessments for the course, which make up 60% of its total grade.

We studied Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire when I was at school, which I guess you could say is a Southern play . . . or at least a play partly about the South. Of course, it originally opened on Broadway, which just goes to show the dominance of New York. But I suspect a Northerner here, or a Scotsman, would probably point out how the dominant forms of culture in the UK mostly revolve around London, so maybe that kind of accumulation of culture is a common thing in most countries.

Yeah, the Gundam jokes seem to come and go as they please. There are times such as in the third movie that there will be a bunch of them and other times where it will go a stretch of episodes without so much as even mentioning anything Gundam except maybe for Keroro building Gunpla since that happens so often. Plus the show has the same problem as most long running comedy anime in that some episodes are really funny/awesome and some just feel rehashed and mediocre. Still, when it's good it's really good and it's the only comedy anime I know of that caters to mecha fans so heavily.