I'm a litterateur (ooh). I may be the only man in the world who creases his formal trousers with The Norton Shakespeare (it's heavy, you see, and I can't afford a proper iron).
My MAL blog was an attempt to write intelligently about anime. I now have a 'proper' blog. I currently use my MAL blog for Twitter-esque instant responses to anime episodes, and run it into an RSS widget on my main blog. And I also drop personal wafflings. And sometimes I just ignore it. But feel free to leave comments.
I sometimes lurk on /m/, the home of /m/anly /m/echa that any /m/an would be proud to pilot.
MAL Stuff
A note on tags: I recently discovered the tagging feature of my Anime List. The tags scattered across my List are not all entirely serious. Two perhaps need to be glossed. 'long dark night of the soul' is a facetious way of saying 'prolonged, deepening angst, possibly resulting in catharsis', while 'eye candy' refers not to fanservice but to eye-popping, high-budget animation.
My list is currently set to private.
The ratings on my list do not indicate how much I like a series. They indicate how good I think it is. The two do not necessarily coincide (see also my favourites list, which is similarly disconnected from quality). They represent absolute values (these ones, in fact), not relative ones.
My avatar image is a portrait of the Greek revolutionary bandit/general, Theodoros Kolokotronis (1770-1843). Hopefully his obviously masculine appearance will work against the fact that Leuconoe is a female name.
- Balsa is in many ways a reworking of Ghost in the Shell's Major, but she's considerably more badass, as instead of an armoury of technological gizmos she just has a spear. She also manages to be a great foster-parent.
- Char/Casval/Quattro/Edward is of course a great rival, a great mentor, and then a great villain. He also has considerable force as a cultural icon: you can buy Char mobile phones and Char suitcases. Besides all that, he deserves to be on this list on the basis of anime's greatest headshot alone.
- We see Bright mature from a an inexperienced captain into a powerful commander over the course of the first MSG, which is good in and of itself. However, after that he becomes a comfortingly changeless surrogate father to successive generations of angsty, heavily-armed teenagers, which I think demands a lot of respect. And after those teenagers have moved on, Bright is still there to oppose Neo Zeon.
- The selection of Master Asia needs no explanation and will receive none.
- Chirico Cuvie is a great example of the gradual recovery of a dehumanised character, and he's also badass enough to be mixed with 'Ai Wo Torimodose!!' without seeming out-of-place.
- Harry Ord is the refined Char of the Happy Tomino phase, a dedicated and chivalrous servant. His skill in combat and his ability to turn up in the right place at the right time are only matched by his brilliant dress sense.
- Neya is . . . a bit cool?
- Guchuko is a node of concentrated moe filtered through the tsundere archetype, shorn of the complications of attraction by being plainly non-human.
- Renton's growth is obviously one of the great strengths of Eureka Seven, but I found Dominic's maturing to be just as interesting and considerably more affecting. An unsung hero.
Claims
I've claimed the 'Claim a Sick Character Club' at the Claim a Claim Club Club. So hands off!
How's Patlabor? Not a huge fan of the movies, but I liked them enough to take a little interest in maybe seeing the other OVA's and the TV series, depite hearing that they're a lot more comical and different?
By the way ultimate challenge for you:
- Download Brain Powered.
- Watch two episodes.
- Try to come up with an analysis of what just happened.
[Impossible step?]
- Finish the series.
Yeah. I was very optimistic about it, but episode 2 blew my face off. I was speechless, utterly speechless at what the hell I just watched. I'll probably put it in [indefinite...] hold and just go with Gainer. But in nearly finishing Blue Gender, I'm still really in the mood for some more serious, gritty, dark mecha. Might pickup Gasaraki soon... but other than that, I'm out of ideas. Any suggestions?
Also dunno if you lurk mSubs, but it sounds like Layzner and L-Gaim (yes!) are being heavily worked on now, out of nowhere. Very awesome.
And man at your pace, you'll pass my time here pretty quickly. Not like it's a big deal or anything ... lol.
Apparently CPA is easily stopped in it's tracks by taking pauses every hour or two and doing something which necessitates full focus. The good effects (an ability to fast parse information) are also slower to be dropped than the inability to focus, since you have good use for it. The brain is a rather elegant little mechanism.
The vast array of characters is certainly a contributing factor to the general "OH GODS THIS IS GREAT" feeling I get; especially that they all seem so well integrated and actually meaningful to the story, and persons (or whatever some of them should be called) in their own, overblown, right. Something which, for some reason, is often fumbled at. For example, the now rather famous SUPER ASHURA scene, which not only showed a good deal of how badass s/he is, but also that s/he has reasons for doing what s/he does.
...Well, not that the characterization is deep and subtle á la LOGH or the like, point nis rather, they are people. Rather than being corks flowing along the plot, they are salmons, either going with the flow, against it, or perhaps circling around, but in allcases, going by it by their own devices. And that was a bad metaphor, I'm sorry.
"Amazingly testosterone-charged JAM Project opening song", aha, that almost sounds superfluous. Which means, I suppose, it is particularly so, even for them? I'll try it; super robot shows are a shameful dark zone in my anime repetoire.
the first episode of Simoun was pretty good. Surprisingly deep with that weird combination of soft SF and High fantasy. Still not too sure about the cg animation, or the characters having eye's the sizes of my fist, but they're lesbians so it's ok.
Aye, and perhaps my last year, I was left more or less incapable to write during my depression, so now I have a bunch of essays I must hand in, well, in the past, preferably. But, luckily, since the depression vanished I have been nearly incapable of feeling down, or even anything but euphoric, so I do think it was a rather fair trade.
Procrastinating is quite addictive yes, continuous partial attention does not help it (CPA would be that, after a fair amount of time allocated in front of a computer, due to how most people work on computers and how information is presented to you on them, you develop an inability to focus your attention any longer time - something I have rather bad).
And on other news, I do believe the new Mazinger has hit a nerve in me nothing has since Gurren Lagann; it is rather amazing, the amount of excitement they can cram into something so small and delightfully cheesy. So I were wondering, have you seen any of the prior incarnations? And what is your opinion on this, if you watch it?
I finished Utena, and I'm struggling to find a word to describe it, which I don't hate... As much as I dislike the usage of Post-Modern, Utena really fits the description.
hmm that's an interesting topic, and having finished Mrs. Dalloway(and none of the others, but if i want something terribly british Austen is always good) I feel confidant I can agree that it does have tons of judgment. Take any instence where Septimus is in a room with a "doctor". Woolf is clearly showing disdain for the pseudoscience quacks running rampant trying to tell her she wasn't really mentally ill.
Also yeah now that I recall we were taught the tradition of Southern Gothic, but never read anything you could consider in that style.
and as a p.s. I finished Mrs. dalloway and found septimus suicide to be beautiful and completely out of place in such an average book...sure the narration is intriguing, but the plot was lacking fir the first 2 thirds of the book then septimus kills himself and the book got great
Oho, I see that you started watching Simoun. How do you feel about it so far? (I suppose you can't say much about all the technobabble in episode 1, but I really am looking forward to seeing what you think about the next few episodes.)
yes twain is surprisingly dark actually. if you get a chance and want to read something terribly funny and quite irreverent you should try "The Bible According to Mark Twain"
what's the essay about? (forgive me for being so curious, but i'm quite bored and at the time putting off reading the last hundred or so pages of Mrs. Dalloway)
and yes I've noticed in a lot of the strictly American Lit. courses I took in high school most of the writers were mid to upper class new-yorkers, even though I've always lived in the deep south(ugh i feel dirty just saying it) in face I think the most southern writer we covered was Poe. and he was from massachusetts
Really ?!?!?!?!!? i didn't know that there is Byron fan club in London
and that there is lesson about acient Greek @_@
I studied acient Greek at school too about 6 years -_-''
there is a lesson about acient Greek in every single school year here in Greece
Basicly i am from Eyboia which is close enought to Lamia about 1 and half hour
i am studing in samos wich is closer to Turkey than Greece (i am far far away from my home -_-'')
oK Samos is Greek island in the eastern Aegean,is a really small island there are lots of historical places there to visit
Samos is know to all because it's the hometown of Pythagoras (was an Greek mathematician)
also there are lots of nice beaches there......... that's all i can think for now :D
Huh, sounds like Destiny fails to setup a "grey area" from what you're saying. LoGH certainly did it best and when it comes to Gundam, I think I could only argue that the original MSG did a fair job with it, probably because the Zeon have gotten more development with the OVA's and such.
I think the first season of 00 kind of had this idea going, there were so many sides and you were never quite sure who was right and who was wrong, but yeah, then 00-2 came around and kind of stomped on that giving us two sides.
I don't even know if I really plan to actually get around to those GSD movies. Maybe it was a bad day, but I remember the first boring the heck out of me. I think the whole CE world in general has just kind of worn thin for me, not even sure if I'll check out the SEED movie (assuming I'll need to get through GSD for that). The Gundam designs always seemed decent in that universe, but the character designs are so disgusting, and then there's the recycled animations during battles... yikes. Hisashi Hirai has pulled off some miracles like Infinite Ryvius and Heroic Age... I'm not sure what it is, but the art and animation for CE stuff bugs me. I think it's just because that's when companies were starting to use more cel-shading and it just doesn't look like those shows aged well. Probably a weird complaint, but oh well. I imagine the SEED movie will look pretty good though.
Sounds like I need to catch up with Sora Kake Girl. Haha, I can see the new OP poking fun at previous Sunrise stuff. Notice the dude with the glasses at ~0.30? Totally does a Quattro move, haha.
I keep thinking it'd be hilariously awesome if Leapard got a humanoid body at some point. I guess that could ruin him a bit though, since his current form is pretty hilarious.
Ugh, the downside to this and new releases in general, my laptop is finally starting to age a bit and I can't always handle the new stuff. Luckily Shin Mazinger seems fine, but with some other shows like FMA2 or whatnot I have to grab the smaller releases. Yesterday I even had to grab the LQ releases for Tytania 25-26, gah. I imagine it doesn't help having two huge externals constantly hooked up, so maybe I should disconnect one when I run anime... lol. I know some people here have it worse though, I think Dremark can only do SD releases of modern stuff.
Well I can hopefully get a desktop PC sometime this year. It's crazy how high specs are now, I mean even for laptops, I see ones for like ~$500-600 that are nearly 3-4x as powerful as my laptop, which is only a few years old. Crazy technology!
Ahah, wow, that diagrams pretty great, though I have to question some of it, like if Wakaba is really Bi? I'm pretty sure she's just playfull with Utena in that adolescent way(but then maybe something will happen in the last three episodes)
It does manage to be somewhat subtle about most of these things, though I guess
Himemiya's relationship with Akio's kinda blatant.
A lot of it is left open to intepretation, or just very vague.
Its an interesting show, I might just pick up Mechademia when I'm finished to see what people have wrote about it.
