Dear Secret Santa Assigned To Me By The ReverseThieves

I do not know who upon this illustrious list of people you are.

Neither do I know your motives, nor the intricate heuristics you doubtless used to arrive at your tripartite conclusion.

All I know is that you have thrown down the gauntlet, and I am left with no recourse but to accept the challenge.

It might be a torturous path, fraught with untold perils; the journey may be grueling, the summit unspectacular.

Or perhaps I am too pessimistic; perhaps it will be a rewarding journey, with untold pleasures strewn around the path and a summit more majestic than spacious skies or amber waves of grain.

In either case, however, I suspect I might be in need of some drastic medical care at the end of my epoch-making quest.

It’s Time for the Beach Epiosde of My Life [vacation hiatus]

Vacation has sprung upon me like Minori upon a hapless Taiga, and, whilst I saw it coming, perhaps, it still struck me by surprise. I don’t think I’ve left very far from home in the past couple years (school and work kept me fairly tied down, to where a “vacation” meant “everyone else but me isn’t in the house so I can have sanity for a few days”), but now, for the next week and change I’ll be in Florida, enjoying the luscious sounds of beach white noise while I (probably) read books and forget that there’s some water nearby. (I’m taking twenty of the things. I will read maybe six or seven at the most. Selection!) I also packed along Honey & Clover for a rewatch, because why not?

Yes I know, I’ve not been writing as much lately–I keep getting hijacked by life, and even though I currently don’t seem to have much of it, I seem to spend more of it doing stuff that doesn’t really fit in here. I also appear to be regaining more of the Solitary Reading for Pleasure Experience®, which can never be a bad thing.

Unfortunately I was hoping to at least get something in before I left, at least about Toradora! (I quite enjoyed the final episode, and the penultimate episode, and the one before the penultimate episode, and so on back to the first episode), as I’ve a thought or two that probably needs to be put into text before the moment passes (plus figuring out if the spinning logo dots are important or if they did that to fool me), but since preparing for a vacation is oftentimes more stressful than the word “vacation” seems to imply, I’ve been unable to.

Maybe I’ll be able to get a post out while I’m gone (there’s a library and we have a really cruddy laptop that can maybe pull off WiFi trickery or at least Notepad and, all else failing, I’m bringing a spiral-bound notebook), but probably not. I feel bad for being somewhat neglectful of this blog anyway (slowblog.jpg seems to be applying ever more to me, it seems; procrastination, what hast thou wrought?), but there’s not much helping it now. If nothing else, the experience of being cooped up with family members for a grueling 32-hour round-trip Drive-A-Thon will simply fuel a desire to hole myself up and pound a keyboard.

By the time you read this, I’ll have left the building (barring the interdiction of Murphy’s Law); but I felt that all three of you who might have cared deserved to at least know why there won’t be anything here for a few weeks. We plan to return on April 5th (next Sunday), but the best-laid plans only go so far.

In the words of Mark Twain…

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Greatly, greatly exaggerated.

This is the whiny post, but it’s also the “this is why I have been very silent for the past few weeks” post. And it’s only whiny for a bit!

Due to a rather silly confluence of:

a) 3 mandatory 12-hour days a week plus one optional 12-hour day (which I tend to take as keeps me socially occupied when otherwise I would not be), as well as alternate weekends and a third Sunday every month, with very little in the way of breaks in the day
2) the fact that I have been doing such insane crazy hours for the past, oh, two years now, with exactly two weeks of vacation time, one week taken in May 2007 and the other in August 2008)
iii) the emotional numbness that tend to accompany (i) and (ii) when combined with a disturbing tendency to sleep less than is custom
四つ目) my own natural tendency towards unnatural levels of stress, real or imagined

posts have been quite sparse this month, for no other reason than I am eternally drained of energy. Arguably I am not MAN ENOUGH to buck up and handle the stress (this is true, of course, since I’m sure I have far too much estrogen in me to really be a MAN), but I’d rather be semi-sane than MAN ENOUGH. And, besides, this nightmarish schedule is going to go away in December, to be replaced with the burning question of every college graduate: what now? But more importantly, more free time and a chance to at least be a psuedo-NEET (I would not quite fit the NEET status, but it would be the next worst thing).

At any rate, since most of the series in recent seasons I’ve been following heretofore are either lagging in subs, I am lagging in watching them, or are about to complete, I’ve been refraining from posting about them, simply because I’d rather not spend time building either expectations or presenting false views so close to the end of a series. I will definitely be posting something on Macross Frontier when it concludes next week (I saw 24 earlier today; it was awesome, and I was most amused by Ranka’s Ayanami Rei impersonation), probably a post on the perinnially confusing, confounding, and conflagrating Code Geass R2 (can I make sense of episodes 21-25? ONLY TIME WILL TELL!), possibly something on the most recent four episodes of The Daughter of Twenty Faces that I have yet to watch (and will not have time for tonight, at least), and, when the new season starts, at least initial impressions of whatever I, insanely, decide to pick up (which is a long list right now, but one that will probably be cleared off pretty fast). I do have a Kaiji draft somewhere around here, I’m still trying to figure out how to say what I want to say without spouting nonsensical gibberish as I usually do, but the results will probably be slightly more comprehensible nonsensical gibberish. And sometime soon I’m going to have to run through Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai in preparation for Umineko no Naku Koro ni, so there might be posts on that.

In other fronts, I’ve also just received a giant order of CDs the other day: the fantastic BOOM BOOM SATELLITES – EXPOSED album, the also fantastic SUEMITSU & the SUEMITH The Piano, It’s Me album, the also also fantastic BUMP OF CHICKEN albums Yggdrasil and orbital period, the also also also fantastic soundtracks to ef – a tale of memories, and the also also also also fantastic new album from Sound Horizon, Moira, which was the whole reason I ordered all that nonsense anyway (and also the one I hadn’t heard before it arrived, and which I still haven’t, uh, heard all the way through). What possible bearing this could have on anything at all, I’m not sure, but I can tell you that Sound Horizon is totally radical and if you haven’t heard them yet, you should. I would explain more but whatever genre I put them in wouldn’t work, but it involves violins and amazing singers and electric guitars and whatever else Revo decides to throw into the mix, including Wakamoto Norio and yukana and Noto Mamiko and Tamura Yukari and Kawashimi Houko and other seiyuu.

I’ve also been picking up books to read like crazy; excluding the not-Japan stuff, I have Zaregoto to go through, Dragon Sword & Wind Child to finish, my fresh-bought copy of FAUST Anthology v.1, Moribito, and, uh, probably other things. Not to mention manga that’s been piling up. Some might get reports, some might not, but that’s how it goes.

So, uh, in conclusion, have a not-to-proportion picture of Nyamo, who I am seriously missing because I have no way of watching more without delving into the complicated world of raws.

I swear I’m not using anime girls as a method of escape from my horrible, traumatic, stressful life detailed above. Or maybe I am! I can’t tell anymore, because there’s all these people making huge broad sweeps and stating that those who might, conceivably, enjoy two dimensional girls in any way, shape, or form, is socially incompetent. Ahh, the wonderful politics of sociology. I have no idea if I am “socially competent”, but people will talk to me of their own free volition and without seeming vehemently repulsed, and they, in turn, do not vehemently repulse me, so I figure I must be doing something right. Unless everything right is wrong again, which is when we have even worse problems.

I’m going to stop now. See you, uh, in an indeterminant period of time, but probably measurable in days! I will still probably respond to personal communiques of either the email variety, the MAL message/comment variety, or even the antiquated blog comment variety–and sorry if I keep neglecting replying to comments. I do read all of them, but I can’t always necessarily formulate something to reply with, or I do and want to but forget about it and beat myself up for not doing it.

You may return to not caring now.

Insults go here: vvvvvvvvv

In Light Of Recent Revelations of the Beijing Olympics…Or, Should I Say, Moelympics?

As some of you may or may not be aware, the performance of China’s national anthem at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics were actually lip-synched.

Now, of course, this is an entirely logical thing for China to do, since they’re so obsessed with presenting a positive image to the world as the whole world watches the Olympics (to the point that they might actually be stabbing themselves in the back, given this and several other cases I’ve heard [see below–ed.]) that presenting an extremely photogenic girl instead of a much more down-home girl for the grand national anthem singing backed by choir, but that’s not the point here.

The point is the moenetic analysis of the two girls in question.

Let us consider the on-stage “singer”, Lin Miaoke:

Twintails. Hair clips. Making a weird and seemingly nonsensical yet still terribly cute and adorable hand gesture. “Low” moe.

Now consider Yang Peiyi, the actual singer:

Down-home appeal. Barely visible hairclip, or possibly flower. Damn good voice. “High” moe.

I don’t know about you, but the concept of a cute, twintailed girl actually being voiced by a much more down-home kind of girl seems pretty anime to me. And there was that Olympic promo art that bore an eerie resemblance to Haruhi…

Now, of course, we here at Anime wa Bakuhatu da! (by “we” I mean “me” but the “about” page fails to mention that I am actually bizarro zombie Queen Victoria, since I am amused, unlike actual Queen Victoria, who was not) can’t really have a post about Chinese girls, now can we?

Yes. Yes we can. But here’s something to make up for it:

Klan Klan wants to sing, too. She fits all the criteria posed by Lin Miaoke! GIVE HER A CHANCE~

[DISCLAIMER: My apologies to the families of both Lin Miaoke and Yang Pinyi, and probably to Chinese people in general. The Beijing Olympics are probably going much smoother than the Western media outlets seems to tell us. You know, because they’re the media and all. Remember the Yellow Scare of the early 1900s (that was in reaction to Japan’s growing military, I know, but just bear with me here)? Yeah. Yellow journalism’s a great thing, isn’t it? How DARE someone not be like us. I hate you, Joseph Pulitzer. Hate hate hate.]

Can I Send Acheron Hades After ANN Now? Please?

Did you just let Carl Kimlinger insult Jane Austen in his VIctorian Romance Emma review?

Did you really? I mean, seriously. I’m glad you liked it, it’s a wonderful series. But, really.

JANE.

AUSTEN.

Did you also put “Jane Austen” and “Harlequin-esque bodice rippers” in the same sentence, as if to imply that they were one and the same? (By the way, Harlequin novels are actually fairly tame compared to some of the other romance novels put out by specialty publishers. I would link pictures but it’s far more fun to just walk into the romance section of the bookstore and have a blast playing Bodice-Ripper Roulette–be sure to check the inside of the cover, if there’s a glossy sheet there, because that’s where they hide the really saucy I-hope-my-mother-never-sees-this stuff. I don’t think even Kanokon paraphenalia can outdo some of the covers I’ve seen)

Did you also let him by insinuation talk smack about Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, and Arthur Conan Doyle too?

Who’s next? Edgar Allen Poe? Agatha Christie? Edgar Rice Burroughs? H.G. Wells? Charlotte Bronte?

WILL THE MADNESS NEVER END?

We are most certainly not amused.

I should go read some Jasper Fforde to curb my literary rage, but, alas, I think I am going to go watch Natsume Yuujinchou instead.

(ps: buy Victorian Romance Emma because it has my name in the credits!)

3 2 1 GO! Tengen Toppa Cheer Girls!

This has nothing to do with anything whatsoever, other than that Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan is the greatest game ever made. Best use of $220 I ever made (DS lite + 1 + 2, and I have played the crap out of both of them and keep them handy in case of dire need of pacifier and I am a self-declared Minor Ouendan Deity) and it even overflowed and made up for the $30 I “spent” (trade-ins yay!) on Elite Beat Agents for the sole purpose of playing Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The Elite Beat Divas don’t have the charm of both teams of Cheer Girls, though. That and I just found this image on Danbooru and it is now my wallpaper (there is a 1600×1200 version, you may click if you feel so inclined) because I need some burning passion cheerleaders in my life right now.

And, yes, that is Amemiya Sayaka who graces my last.fm profile with her presence. I don’t plan to change that anytime soon. Or ever.

I don’t know whose brilliant idea this was, but this is an anime that needs to get made. Now. Or, well, just Sekai wa Sore o Ai to Yobundaze. With fluid dance moves. GET ON IT, KYOANI.

PIERCE THE HEAVENS WITH YOUR DANCE! CHEER GIRLS!

And while we’re at in, in case you’re one of the rare few who haven’t seen it in the year it’s been floating around: this is what cosplay should be like.

(Will there be an actual post at some point in the near future? Will deadlines destroy my mind? I don’t know! I want to go back to work on Monday and it’s only barely Sunday morning!)

Real Drive: I Have Exactly One Thing To Say About Real Drive 7

And that one thing is: DOG MOE.

But not just ANY old dog.

A dog IN A SHERLOCK HOLMES HAT.

My thoughts exactly, Nyamo.

He can even take a bath!

NINJA DOG!

Kid tested, Nyamo approved!

So, yeah, episode 7 of Real Drive (I’ve taken to referring to it as Real Nyamo with my friends, if only because Nyamo is awesome) was a ton of fun, and, as a devout fan of dogs, I quite loved it (see above), and its touching message about the relationship between man and animal, but I have to admit that it was a total fluff episode. So you get this post instead. I am going to go watch 8 now. There might be a more serious post to come but not necessarily!!

P.S.: I don’t care what you say, Real Drive is awesome. It may not be the most potent science fiction anime out there (especially not one with Shirow’s name attached), but who cares. It’s a ton of fun. As I commented to a friend earlier today: Reading/watching/listening to something is about entertainment first. Intellectual stimulation is a bonus, but I would like to point out that intellectual stimulation can and frequently does crop up in the strangest places. For instance, I could talk about the inversion of the Holmes/Watson relationship in this episod

Okay that’s enough of that.

The Mugi-Choco Chibi of Apology, Regret, and Cuteness

To make up for the rather graphic violence contained in Parasyte, should you read (or have read) it, and included a rather creepy cover image with a hand with eyeballs in the post about it, here is some hyper-cute Mugi-Choco chibi to soothe your soul.

Isn’t she just adorable? Mugi-Choco Love, now and forever. Thank you, fictional sister. You are a hero among men.

We Have Nena Trinity Touchdown

Fanartists waste zero time getting in on the Kugimeister’s appearance, although they’ve had some time to toss ideas around.

Seriously, Kugimiya Rie in a Gundam series. And she has freckles. What kind of madness is this?

An awesome kind, that’s what.

Actual content to follow once Conclave-Mendoi decide they want to sub 16. I am waiting with an expression like this:

Sochie-sama ga Miteru

This screamed “wallpaper me!” at me, so I did. It works pretty well, if you don’t mind TONS of blank white space. But that’s where you put your icons, though, right? I would, if I had any.

I need to watch Turn A Gundam again soon. Maybe after I watch Wing…