Rogue 7's Random References

8.8 Earthquake Strikes Japan

2011-03-11T01:06:00.000-08:00

Oh my God. It's 4 in the morning on the East Coast, and I'm not going to bed anytime soon. Fuck, fuuuuuckkkkkkk.

OK, I'm a bit calmer now. But oh my god. I've been able to get in contact with a lot of my friends who were over there, and I'm pretty sure most of them are OK. So that's good. But I don't know if my grandfather's over there or not (I'm pretty sure he's not but...). And Jesus Christ I'm worried for the folks I helped when I was with Sanyukai. Those people were right on the river, and they might not have gotten any warning. A lot of them sleep in the afternoon, did the tsunami go up the Sumida river? Oh God.

I wonder what this will mean for teaching programs over there, or if I can go over for relief work once I graduate. I gotta help out somehow.

Serious Post is Serious

2011-03-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

So this blog hasn’t been updated in forever, and this is going to be something of a different topic. By which I mean I’m going to be blogging about politics and society. I suggest anyone looking for an amusing read, get out now. Please. It’s for your own good.

I’m a U.S. citizen. Been one all my life, haven’t lived anywhere else except Japan for a few months. I’ll say up front that I genuinely support the US in being a decent country. I’ve been politically aware since around 2000 and the fracas of the elections then. Generally, I haven’t been too unhappy with the way things have worked in this country. I’ve been opposed to the war in Iraq soon after things went to pot (I’ll not lie that I was a bit hoodwinked by the initial promises of an easy victory, but I was about 14 at the time, and still a bit uneasy). I was reasonably for the war in Afghanistan, but there’s no doubt it’s been mismanaged and is in general a shitty situation. Even in the darkest years of the Bush Administration, I was generally OK with…argh, it’s tough to put. I was confident that people who had policies I opposed were misguided, as opposed to out-and-out evil.

I’m not so sure now, and it’s troubling me greatly. The trigger’s been what’s happened in Wisconsin, both tonight and over the past few weeks. We’re seeing the real impact of what having the Tea Party and conservative Republicans in power means, and it fucking scares me. What Scott Walker has done, and what looks to be an increasing national trend, is subverting democracy and is fucking over everyone but the very rich. And it’s working. We’re all getting fucked over, in a way that I see as unprecedented. And I’m not used to that. For God’s sake, I’m a white, middle-class Christian male! I’m supposed to be the one doing the fucking! Now, I’m apparently fucked over because my folks don’t make millions per year. Jesus fucking Christ, what is with this? I can’t understand the mindset of people who support the methods and measures taken by Walker and the Republicans. What does it accomplish? How do they think this helps them?

I know not all republicans (I use the small “r” there to designate folks who vote republican) are evil. Christ, I know a bunch who are wonderful people, people I love and care about. But it’s becoming harder and harder to think that all those Big-R Republicans (elected officals) aren’t. They’re not serving people. They’re serving corporate interests.

And that’s another thing! Corporations! Christ, it’s hard to say you hate corporations. I’m typing this on a computer that was made by a corporation, I’m watching the news on a TV that was made by a corporation, all my shit is made by a corporation. Corporations and capitalism, I feel, are really what have enabled the sort of life I’ve got right now. They’re the ones who developed the technology and the structure that’s made my life possible. But fuck me if I can’t think that they’re a force for evil right now. Many corporations are so hell-bent on pursuing profit that they’ve decided people are no more than numbers. And then they have no problem deleting those numbers. And it’s not looking like there’s an infrastructure in place in this country to oppose it. They have the money, they have the propaganda, they have the power.

I don’t want to get too in-depth tonight. I could write all night about politics, international relations, the state of the world, corporations, the economy, everything. And I want to have this conversation.

Previously, I felt like I could just tune out politics and all that stuff when things got too overwhelming. Especially because I found that the internet forum I primarily discussed politics on turned into an echo chamber of opinions that I didn’t really agree with, and which I didn’t feel were effective or realistic.

I don’t think I’ve got that luxury now. I don’t think anyone has that luxury now. What I guess the brunt of this is talking about is this:

I previously felt that the country would be alright. Things would work out. There were flawed people in power, there were misguided policies being enacted, but the core of America was sound.

I don’t have that feeling anymore. America, if we continue on this course, is fucked. Royally fucked. And the biggest economy and most powerful military going down is going to drag a lot of people down, and it’s not going to be pretty. It’s going to be bloody and horrific. And I can safely level the blame at Republicans, and at corporations who put profit above human lives.

So the question is now, what the fuck do we do? How do we reverse this course? I don’t know right now, and I think I need to find out and do my part.

Christ Almighty, I wish I had a drink right now.

Durarara!!

2010-10-14T13:01:00.000-07:00

So I just finished up watching Durarara!!, the show about crazy adventures in Ikebukuro. I put off work to do it, but that's not really anything worth noting, as I'd have probably put it off anyways.

So, I felt like writing about it 1. because I haven't posted on here in...forever, and 2. because that was something I haven't done often enough.

Complete and Total Spoilers Below! You HAVE been warned!

So, Durarara!! is a show about Ikebukuro. Ultimately, it's not about the people in Ikebukuro, or what happens in Ikebukuro, it's about the place itself. Of course, this version of Ikebukuro is home to a headless woman who drives a bitchin' motorcycle and commands the power of shadow, as well as a crazy freak who can use a highway sign as an axe to cleave the top of a car off, plus a crazy schoolgirl who controls people she's stabbed with a cursed sword.

Did I mention crazy? Because this series is chock-full of the crazy. The only person in the cast who isn't nuts in some way is Simon, the ...wait for it...giant black Russian man who advertises and delivers for a sushi joint and kicks the ass of anyone who causes trouble, including the aforementioned crazy freak with the highway sign.

Yeah, it's a weird show.

So, plot. Here's what you find out ultimately ended up happening in the series.

A kid from the country, Mikado, moves to Ikebukuro to go to high school with his best friend, Masaomi Kida, who moved there a while back. Kida's a veteran of the town, and he introduces Mikado to a few friends and warns him about some unsavory sorts. Seems like a relatively normal start, right?

Then the Dullahan shows up. I had never heard of a Dullahan before, but what they are is apparently a Celtic spirit that rides around headless, with a headless horse, acting like a grim reaper. Celty, the one in Ikebukuro (and it's unfair to say "shows up", she's been there 20 years), has lost her head, and drives a motorcycle instead of a horse. She does awesome stunts with it.

Anyways, there's this guy, Izaya. He's a total troll. But he also knows everything about Ikebukuro.

Oh, and there are these gangs- the Dollars, some new group, and the Yellow Scarves, leftovers from the old "Color Gangs" of yesterday. And there's a sword-wielding maniac going around slashing people.

Alright, that's the setup. So here's how it all goes down.

Celty, living with this dude Shinra, is out looking for her head. As it turns out, this head is in the posession of a crazy lady who runs some pharmaceutical company. Or, alternately, attached to a girl. This girl is the friend of Anri Sonohara, a girl whom Mikado and Kida start hanging out with. Also, people are being kidnapped by this company.

The first batch of episodes are a bunch of scene-setting, introducing just what the characters were and their relationships. Then, Celty finds out about the girl, and starts chasing her. Shit happens, one particular element of which knocked my socks off:

Mikado, a while back, created The Dollars as a sort of social engineering thing, which took off in Ikebukuro. They started getting out of control, and he eventually wrangled them together into a modicum of decency, just by suggesting things. So, when things come to a head, he declares the first meeting of the Dollars and weaponizes 4Chan. Seriously. He went to confront the crazy lady (what she did is next), who had bodyguards ready to take the kid. He says "you've got brawn, I've got numbers." He sends a text message. And the entire public square they're in erupts as everyone's cellphone goes off. The entire square was made up of Dollars members. It was epic.

I can't be bothered to summarize the rest of the series, as it is so completely and utterly crazy, on the part of absolutely everyone. Suffice to say that it is wonderful, and I have never been as truly surprised watching something as I have been watching Durarara!!.

The series is wonderfully paced, has a great, diverse cast, and is so crazy in plotting that it's just a ton of fun to watch. It also makes me miss Tokyo like crazy. The show's about Ikebukuro, and even though I was on the opposite side of Tokyo, it's still about Tokyo, and...I WANNA GO BACK!

I also need to stop spoiling myself, because being surprised by Durarara!! was wonderful, and I haven't had that chance in a while now.

Nanoha! Battle of Aces!

2010-06-04T08:22:00.000-07:00

Well, I had planned to watch quite a bit more StrikerS tonight. Despite my raging fanboyism for all things Nanoha, I haven't finished the series, possibly because I've been spoiled rotten on it. It's still really good, and I have no excuse, but I haven't.

Well, tonight, actually, I was playing Mahou Shoujou Lyrical Nanoha A's: The Battle of Aces. That's right, bitches, I've got the Nanoha fighting game. And a PSP, provided I rolled well enough on diplomacy to convince my hallmate to keep the new PSP he bought and sell me the old one.*

And it's really kickass. The combat itself is rather simple, but it's tons of fun, and really gives a great feeling of being in the middle of a Nanoha battle. It won't win any sort of award for combat complexity or anything, but I don't give a flying fuck. It's fun, that's all that I care about.

The story mode is cool. Lots of dialogue that some industrious folks over on Animesuki are translating, which, combined with my own skills, makes me feel like I'm practicing. There's a lot of cute CGs and kickass music, and the entire thing is fully voiced, which is really cool for a PSP game.

And I read somewhere that Fate's VA, Nana Mizuki, apparently wore her thumbs out on it.

*Dude's not a bad guy, but seriously. I tell him I saw a cheap PSP and it turns out to be the one he wants, so he buys it, sells me his old one for cheap, and everyone's happy, right? Well, apparently a couple of minute defects on the screen (like, seriously, it's amazing how unnoiticeable they were to me.) were too much for him, and he wanted his old one back. So I've been spending the last day fast-talking, trying to convince him that A. He's not going to get a much better deal on this PSP- if he wants better, he'll have to buy factory new, B. Returning it may cost him some money, C. I'm willing to buy his old PSP to cut back on the actual cost, and D. I already bought this game and REALLY WANT a PSP.**

** Which is funny. If you told me six months ago (well, before I heard about P3P. I don't know how long ago that was), I'd say there's no way I'd ever buy a PSP. Go figure.

Certain Moderation Policies

2010-05-24T08:03:00.000-07:00

As an internet denizen, I am frequently found on forums. Sites where folks post back and forth from various and sundry places all over the world. Different sites have different policies when it comes to how moderation works. Suffice to say that I have certain issues with one particular site.

I'm not going to name names here, but anyone who is reading this who knows my posting habits can probably figure out where I'm coming from.

Across the internet, standards vary in terms of what's acceptable to post. Some sites don't give a damn about what kind of language you use as long as you're polite and aren't actively insulting people. Some sites (Something Awful) don't give a flying shit about language or insulting other people so long as you're legible and not being an idiot. And even then sometimes that's cool. Some sites aren't moderated at all.

And then there are...other sites. Sites where all discussion of politics and religion are flat-out banned, and any topic so much as trending towards there are locked.* Where absolutely no foul language is tolerated. Where, apparently, you aren't so much as allowed to criticize another poster. Where my calling out of another poster for his overly negative comments (admittedly, something of an overreaction on my part) earned me a warning.

Look, this is not the way to establish a productive discussion, single moderator who oversees the whole damn board. If you're not allowed to establish an antagonistic dialogue with someone, you cut off a fuckton of options for discussion. Fundamentally, a board is supposed to be about a bunch of people getting together to shoot the shit. When people shoot the shit, they're occasionally going to disagree. If they can't at least talk about disagreeing directly, if they've got to pussyfoot around each other like bulls in a china shop for fear of offending precious mod sensibilities, they're not going to be able to have a productive dialogue. They're just going to passive-aggressively snipe at each other and build up resentment. Fortunately, that hasn't happened with me too much- most of the folks there are surprisingly nice, but it doesn't work. It's not dialogue, it's canned, sugary bullshit.

And another thing! The policy of "infractions" building up to a ban is so goddamned retarded it makes my head spin. Functionally, it's 3 moderations means they think about banning you. Now, that in and of itself seems reasonable. It's not that reasonable when the moderations stick with you for two years each. Let's take an average- I post about 3.25 posts a day on the site in question.** Which means that if roughly one out of every 900 or so posts I make gets called out for flaming, I'm going to be looking at a ban. And you know what? What I've been modded for isn't fucking flaming. Nor were the people I was arguing with! It's disagreeing! Calling someone out! Disturbing the peace of the perfect little world that the mods have set up. It's like fucking Hot Fuzz- any and all deviation from the perfect facade is wiped out in the name of "The Greater Good". It's like they can't tolerate any sort of disagreement- everything's got to be picture-perfect and happy or else...what? People's feelings will be hurt? You won't be able to brag about having the "friendliest" community on the net? It's goddamned retarded.

And you know what it means when bans build up? Prolific posters get shafted. Not for blowing up and actively going off on a bender, but for stupid things that add up over time, things that wouldn't even be fucking noticed on other sites. And since another thing that's banned there is discussing banned posters, well, it's like they just drop off the face of the earth. I've seen several quality posters get banned, and never heard a reason, nor a justification.

And the site does not appear to be looking to change anytime soon, which means I can apparently take my problem and shove it up my ass, as I have no doubt that attacking the moderation policies like I'd like to (kind of what I've got here, but more respectful and with less profanity) would get me another warning and not accomplish anything.

Seriously, this is the worst- modded site on the internet. If I didn't have this safety valve to rant in, I'd be tempted to just go suicide by mod and send the main moderator a ridiculous hate-filled invective.

So I'll just say it here.

Go fuck yourselves.

*If you didn't know what site it is before, you probably should now.
** Which I very nearly typed out just now.

One Piece

2010-05-16T09:38:00.000-07:00

So, I spent the weekend (and a good chunk of last weekend) reading One Piece. It was very good, and I fully see why it's the single most popular manga ever in Japan. And I mean, it's ridiculous how much One Piece crap you see here. You go into a random store, and I'll be willing to bet that there'll be at least one One Piece item. I recall hearing that One Piece tankouban are among the best-selling books in Japan, if not the best-selling. Books, not just manga. One Piece is ridiculous. One friend of mine mentioned how some people he was working with asked him what manga he liked, then (drunkenly) insisted that he read One Piece.

At its core, One Piece is a silly, lighthearted pirate drama. It's pure shonen cheese, and it revels in it. Reactions are overblown, characters suffer ludicrous punishment* and come out smiling, and the power of friendship can beat down anything. The bad guys are ludicrously evil at times, and at other times just ludicrous. I don't feel like summarizing any of the plot right now, but suffice to say that there are moments of the purest win, and distilled awesome, and no real lows like you get in Naruto and Bleach.

Saying that...the latest arc (the Whitebeard War one) didn't do it for me. And there's a prime reason for that. The crew was broken up, and we've heard exactly jack and shit about them since Kuma split them up. It was all about Luffy trying to save his brother, and a bunch of characters I really didn't care about doing stuff. Plus, I really don't feel like One Piece's power system lends itself to epic clashes. With all the individual devil-fruit powers and whatnot, fights need to be one-on-one type deals where each combatant can have attention focuses on his abilities. Mooks are there to be effortlessly swept out of the way. Previously, One Piece pretty much stuck to that formula and it worked, but with the sheer amount of unique powers being slung around in the battle, it was highly confusing and altogether not as awesome as folk squaring off one-on-one. Sure, it's probably a touch more realistic, but...well, if you're expecting realism, you clearly haven't read One Piece.

But like I said, the fact that the Straw Hat crew was broken up (really, right after Brooks joined!) bugs me. The primary appeal of One Piece was the sheer dedication of the Nakama to one another, and that's just vanished ever since the group's been split up. Luffy's been so focused on Ace that he hasn't given a spare thought to his friends, and the manga hasn't saw fit to give them much more than a couple pages.

So I hope that we'll be seeing a reunification of the crew very shortly.

P.S.- Nico Robin is smoking hot.

*For this reason and this reason alone do I think that Luffy could take Naruto in a fight. Even given Naruto's superhuman toughness and recovery, Luffy is just in another league.

Negima Spoilage and Speculation

2010-04-27T06:41:00.000-07:00

So, I've not talked about Negima for a few months now. In the interim, we got Nodoka being ten kinds of kickass, Fate's plan revealed, Asuna's personality after memory restoral revealed, Negi proving one again he can solve any problem in the world by finding the right girl and kissing the bejeezus out of her, and he's apparently going full demon power or something.

But anyways, Fate's plan involves transporting everyone in the Magic World to a special "other place" that is apparently a paradise, but he doesn't really know. Because magic is what sustains life on mars, and eventually that magic's going to run out, and the whole thing will come crashing down. When it does, well, first off, every single "magic person" there vanishes straight-out. Second, every normal person (mostly in Megalomesambria) suddenly ends up on Mars proper...

So Fate's plan, since it would be wrong to just save the real folks in Megalomesambria, and impractical to have 1.2 billion new refugees on earth, is to just teleport everyone...well, somewhere. He doesn't really know much about the place, apparently. And he's got to use Asuna to do it. He apparently also needs to mass magic power in the world, which is why he destroyed the gateports- they apparently siphon it off, and now it's all poring through the old ostia gate, straight into....Mahora, obviously.

Now, I've seen this as a huge computer metaphor. The humans are all "ghosts in the machine" if you will, the magic folk are all sentient programs, and the entire magic world's a computer on the verge of a blackout. Fate wants to move folks over to a new hard drive, but he hasn't been there to see if it's kosher.

Now, with the world tree glowing, here's how I see this going down. Step one: Chao comes back! This time, there's a crisis, and Negi et. al. agrees that it's time to reveal magic to the masses. Then, using newly integrated magic and technology, they can adapt to the new refugees. That'd be chaos and hell, but it'd be interesting. I'd love to see the political implications.

Shibuya is Awesome.

2010-04-24T08:13:00.001-07:00

Alcohol can be fun in reasonable quantities. That is all.

Elaborating on said Idea

2010-04-20T02:52:00.000-07:00

So, it's rainy tonight and kind of misty. Combine that with listening to the soundtracks for 3 and 4 on my way home, and you could say that I'm in a bit of a Persona mood. Incidentally, Feinne, a Let's Player, has taken up Schildtroke (or however the crap you spell his name)'s mantle and is LP'ing Persona 4 over on Something Awful. Check it out.

So! This has given me a bit of an idea for a sort of fanfic based off of the idea I posted earlier. Here's my intro for Persona 5:

-----

The train pulls into the station, and you hear the familiar jingle as the doors open- or you would, if you didn't have your headphones on, the music blasting. It's been about a week since you moved into the dormitory at the bottom of the hill. Since then you've gotten used to the route home. The ramen stand bustling with customers, and wafting out a scent that makes your mouth water. Unfortunately, you're on a budget and all you've got is the cheap instant shit at home. That one big house that would be sizeable even in America- here, it is monstrous. Another train, laden with weary commuters, roars by, the rattling shaking your teeth. It's cold, and your jacket is pulled around you as the rain drips past your face. You should have packed that heavier jacket, but you weren't supposed to need it and you needed the space in your suitcase. So you hurry through the rain, looking forward to your warm room and hot dinner.

An overpass spans the path, creating a narrow tunnel you must walk down. Bikes and scooters carrying tired commuters home pass you by, indifferent to one more hooded figure, moving too fast to even tell that you're a gaijin. Unlike the rest of this whole town, the lights here are in poor condition- they're dim and flickering. You're looking down at the pavement, music still blaring in your ears, trying to ignore the water still falling in front of you.

Out of the corner of your eye, you see a shape. It's not even remotely human- long, spindly arms reaching out to grasp at you, a slavering mouth gaping. You turn suddenly, and it's gone. All you see is the dirty graffiti on the wall, and all you hear is the thumping bass and screeching guitars that your headphones continue to pour into your ears. You shrug, and turn back to your walk home. Probably just a shadow on the wall caused by a passing biker.

The wind picks up as you exit the tunnel, blowing the rain horizontally in your face. This is miserable. As you walk down the street towards your dorm, you have to squeeze to the side of the road to prevent yourself from being run over by the drivers who take these narrow streets at ludicrous speeds. They splash your legs as they drive through the puddles.

As the music on your headphones fades out, the guiter making one last, haunting note, you swear you hear a faint voice emenating from them:
I am thou. Thou art I.

It is just on the edge of hearing, and quickly dismissed as the warm light of the dorm washes over you.

Your friend Brian- he's in your History of Tokyo class- comes up as you take your shoes off.

"How's it been? Cold as hell, isn't it?"

You mumble a response and head for your room, desperate to change into some dry, warm clothes.

After you've changed and eaten, the trash still sitting on your desk because it's too damn cold out to go to the trash can, you pull out your Japanese book and try to study. The teacher's got a bad habit of giving quizzes every single day, and you have several vocab words and a couple pages of kanji to memorize.

Something seems to be wrong with the light in your room. It's flickered twice now, and both times, something outside your window throws up a weird shadow on your wall. It almost looks like a gnarled, twisted tree, reaching out for your throat. But it's nothing, right?

Suddenly, from outside your window, a light flares up. It's coming from the shrine up on the hill, the one you explored over the weekend. You know, back when the weather was nice. The light doesn't seem to be dying down, and it's too steady to be from a fire.

You exit into the hall to see if anyone else has noticed, but there's no one around. Shrugging, you decide to go and investigate alone. You're not tired, even though it's kind of late, and for some reason, you're now afire with curiosity.

It's stopped raining. The stars are even out, though this close to the city, you can't see many of them. The moon doesn't hang in the sky, and you seem to recall that it's a new moon tonight. You walk up the street to the shrine, where you can still faintly see the light. It's pale and soft, not quite like anything you've ever seen before. It seems to be coming from one of the tori, the gates that overlook the entrance to this little wooded area that houses the shrine.

As you stand in front of it, you wonder why there isn't anyone else around. The light is nearly blinding here, and it's taking up the whole archway. This...isn't natural, to say the least. Is it some kind of trick the locals do? You haven't heard about anything like this, and there's no one else around. What is this?

Suddenly, a dark shape springs from the light at you. You see the glint of razor-sharp claws and talons before time seems to slow and a voice rings in your head.

I am Thou. Thou art I. The time has come. Open thine eyes and call forth what is within!

"Per...so...na!"

------
Cue kickin' guitar. Yeah, that last bit is shamelessly ripped off from the Persona-Get! scene in Persona 4. Also, aside from a few minor details, what I described is very similar to how I'm actually living here.

I don't know if I'd want to take this further. I don't have any sort of overarcing plot laid out, nor do I have any idea for characters. In fact, this whole thing is written in the second person to avoid characterization. Based on what little fiction I've written, I have a horrible habit of turning basically every main or viewpoint character into myself, as I find it really hard to come up with scenarios that don't directly involve myself. I don't want to just be mindlessly parroting my own method of thinking into text, so I deliberately went for a style that avoids getting into my protagonist's head. I don't know, I'll see what my brain comes up with.

Pokemon!

2010-04-11T04:39:00.000-07:00

I am a 20 year old man. I pride myself as being reasonably mature and controlled.

I fucking love Pokemon.

Now, given the other content of this blog, that really shouldn't come as much of a surprise. And I'm not one of those pokemon nuts who breeds compulsively and debates all the best strategies. I just enjoy beating shit up with my little murderbeasts.

I am disappointed with myself that I didn't buy Heart Gold before I left for Japan. I've got such a fucking awesome team in my Pearl version, I wouldn't dream of resetting, but I'd love to actually play through the games again.

When I first started up with this playthrough of Pearl (and Jesus Fucking Christ, I have like 95 hours on this one game! I grind like a motherfucker.), my roommate, who's far deeper into the actual battling and strategy aspects of Pokemon than I am, gave me a few eggs- a Sneasel, Bagon, Houndour, and Murkrow. So, in addition to my rockin' Piplup, I had some very powerful pokemon with very powerful movesets (well, except Murkrow) early on. I added to that a Crobat (first time I've raised a Crobat, he's pretty awesome), Roserade, Misimagius, Luxray, Machamp, and my roommate proceeded to trade me a Nidoking and a Skuntank just because I wanted them. I was going for something of a Dark/Poison theme- Houndoom, Weaville, Honchkrow, Roserade, Nidoking, Crobat, and Skuntank are all either one or the other. And every single one of the above creatures is awesome.

I took on the Elite 4 for the second time today. I raise so many damn Pokemon, it was with almost an entirely different team my first time around. Actually, there's an interesting story to that. The first time I went to face the Elite 4 was way back in the summer. Now, between the 8th gym and the Elite 4, there's a bit of a gap, so significant grinding is something of a good idea, or else you'll get completely destroyed. When I first got to this point, I was on vacation up in Cape Cod with my family. Most of my pokemon were mid-40's, and I needed to have them at least at level 50 if I wanted to stand a chance. So, the grind commenced. I got a lot done on our way home in the back, as we were in hella traffic (everyone else was pretty miserable) before eventually deciding to pick a good team of 6. Just because I was getting bored as shit. So I saved and started the fight with Empoleon, Misimagius, Roserade, Machamp, Sneasel (he wasn't a Weaville yet) and Salamence. That was about when the power light on my DS switched to red.

I don't remember too much of the individual battles- Salamence was sweeping through the Bug dude's team before Drapion Ice-Fang'd him into oblivion, and his Heracross was giving me some trouble before I realized that Empoleon's Drill Peck hits him for 4x weakness. The ground lady is ridiculously easy with Roserade. When we got to the Fire dude and his Infernape, I was a little worried because Empoleon's Steel, and any Fighting moves he brings out will destroy me (there was a realization that Heracross could do that as well.) And I've always hated that freaking flaming monkey for some reason. He offends me. So when Empoleon's Surf one-shotted something about 10 levels higher, I immediately threw my fist in the air. In our car, this meant I punched the cieling and totally freaked out everyone else in the car, since I'd been pretty quiet. I don't remember a thing about the psychic dude, but with Sneasel, Empoleon, and Misimagius, I'm sure it was pretty easy.

Now, on to Cynthia, the champ. She's got some ridiculous mons, including a hilariously broken Garchomp. I remember having a fairly hard battle against her, but not the specifics. However, just as my victory was assured....my DS gave up the ghost and ran out of juice. I had realized this was a possibility so my reaction was more laughter than frustration, but still. I then went back and kicked the 4's ass legitimately.

Man of the match both times went to Empoleon, who is just such a fucking awesome tank. He does not give a shit what you throw at him, and hits everything hard with Surf. I love defensive steel-types. I could use him against pretty much anything and he'd chew it up and spit it out.

After that, I didn't play very much, but last semester a friend traded me for an Eevee, Cyndaquil, and Charmander. That Eevee would become an Umbreon, and I'd have three of my all-time favorite Pokemon. I also got an Eevee in-game and got a Glaceon out of that. All 4 are destined to join the main rotation.

Now, this time around, I took some weaker mons- Empoleon for insurance, and Roserade, Honchkrow, Houndoom, Crobat and Nidoking. Well, Nidoking was higher-level, but he's awesome anyways.

This team was a bit less cohesive than my previous one, but it had some useful tricks. Honchkrow's awesome with Roost and Drill Peck. Man of the match this time went to Houndoom. He was able to get Nasty Plot off several times and just eat through half the stuff thrown at him, including that fucking Garchomp (admittedly, I got lucky when Dragon Rush missed twice). All in all, a ton of fun.

Burning Question

2010-04-04T01:31:00.001-07:00

I have asked in several places, and still haven't been able to find an answer-

Does Fate/Stay Night and the patch for it run on Mac OS? I don't have access to a windows machine here, and I'd really prefer playing now rather than waiting until I get back home.

Just an Idea

2010-03-28T00:33:00.000-07:00

Three posts, now! Madness!

Really, this is something I forgot to mention yesterday, so I could theoretically just edit it in, but where's the fun in that?

So before we went to Akihabara yesterday, we went just up the street from where my dorm is. There's a little wooded area up the hill, and in that area's a Shinto shrine. Really cool little thing, with a bunch of all the traditional buildings. It's really great to see, and I'll probably go visit it more once the weather warms up (it is bitchin' cold today).

But of course, my mind immediately went to how this would make for an awesome RPG. Hell, I'll go whole-hog and say that it would make an absolutely awesome Persona 5. Six strangers (In our case, we can say they're Americans, but if this was Persona 5, they'd probably be either all Japanese or have only one token foreigner. The fact that it's an all-dudes dorm is something of a detriment as well.) move into a dorm down the street from a shrine. There are a bunch of mysterious happenings that start going on around town (what, I'll leave to your imagination). Or perhaps the group starts just looking at the shrine. But either way, demons show up out of the shrine and we descend into a fairly standard plot. I haven't really thought about it any more than that. But I still think that it would make for a good intro to an adventure.

Akihabara Electric Town

2010-03-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Two posts in about 24 hours? Unheard of!

So, as the title mentions, a few of the guys I'm rooming with and I went into Akihabara for the day. We were originally planning to hit up a lot of Tokyo, but we ended up spending a lot of time in Akihabara, and it wiped us out.

It was...shall we say, an experience. I'm sure most of you know what Akihabara is- the anime, manga, video game, and general Otaku center of Tokyo, which, with Tokyo being the center of Japan and Japan being the center of Otaku stuff...pretty much makes it ground zero for all things to do with anime, manga and the like.

So, let's start with where we went first- a big ol' arcade right across the street from the station. In the basement were rows upon rows of fighting games that my buds dived right into. They were pretty good. We walked up and down the street, marvelling at the amount of girls in costume hawking maid cafes. We checked out some amazing stores- there was this one amazing figure shop where I would literally blow thousands of dollars if I had it (I ended up only buying a cute little Motoko figure for 100 yen, but I'll be back for some of the better stuff.) We got food from these street vendors.

There really was an awful lot of advertisements for the moe stuff, which coupled with the maid cafes, really says that yes, a lot of the otaku industry, so to speak, is about catering to dudes' fetishes. There's really no getting around that fact, despite all of the other awesome stuff that goes on.

Oh, and there was also a lot of Touhou stuff being advertised. Is there a new game out or something?

Across the Sea (Live from Chiba!)

2010-03-26T01:18:00.000-07:00

Hello, any and all readers of this blog (If I really have any who still check after the almost 4-month absence of substantial posting, I am impressed at your dedication.

This post comes to you live from Chiba, Japan. For those of you who don't know (and why would you?), that's a little bit outside of Tokyo, similar, I think, to the more famous Yokohama. I'm here as part of a study abroad program, and I'll hopefully be learning a great deal about Japanese culture, traditions, customs, and lifestyles. But given where I post, I doubt you want to hear that. You want to hear about the wonderful land of anime and manga, the otkau's paradise, right? (I kid, I kid.)

Well, actually, there's not a great deal of anime and manga stuff around, at least right at the surface. The anime and manga subculture is, I think, only slightly more popular here than it is in the West, so you don't see a lot of it up front. There was the arcade...

Alright, I've got to correct my previous statement. We just went out to get some booze and check out this used game store.

Holy Mother of God, did they have absolutely everything in that game store. I'm talking the Nanoha A's fighting game, like, three dozen visual novels you'll never see in the States, friggin' Fate Stay Night (which I'm picking up either now or before I leave, depending on whether or not it works on my mac), a few of the weirder F/SN fighting games, tons of manga, anime. I mean EVERYTHING geeky. I'm going to have to go back now that the shock's worn off and see what I missed.

And tomorrow I'm probably bound for Akihabara. Well.

MASS EFFECT 2!!!!

2010-01-27T06:33:00.000-08:00

Hi. It's been well more than a month since I've posted, yeah? That happens when I'm at home a lot- I tend to be on our XBox 360 a lot more than on the computer, and when I have been on the computer, lately I've been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2. But I have something to say, and this, as the title indicates, is my safety valve to prevent me from either shouting it in the middle of my office, or just starting to run home:

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I NEED TO PLAY MASS EFFECT 2 SO GODDAMN BADLY IT IS KILLING ME HERE LITERALLY KILLING ME

Now that that's out of the way...(spoilers for the first hour or so)

Yesterday, my brother and I walked into town to pick up our preordered copy. At around 10 AM. That's rare for us, especially since I ended up walking a long way more (New York City is big, man.), and especially since my brother has midterms so we really shouldn't be playing the game until Thursday. Since it's his Xbox and he preordered the game, he got to play first. Either he was a lot faster than I was or he had a bit longer to play, since he got a lot further, and I finally got my mitts on the controller with just over an hour to play before I had to leave for the aforementioned New York City. Sped myself through things so fast that I regret it and will simply be restarting the next time I can...fracking....play...

And Holy Fucking Shit on a fucking crapstone, it was awesome to play for the first hour. But therein lies the problem. The first hit was free. And now I'm an addict. I need my fix and it is driving me mad here. My brother's been going on about how awesome this game is, everyone on the internet is going on about how this game is, I've seen how awesome this game is...can I get hit by a car and laid up so I can just sit there playing Mass Effect 2, please?

You Must Watch This

2009-12-18T10:25:00.001-08:00

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. That is all.

Today is a Good Day!

2009-12-14T21:20:00.000-08:00

A'ight, so this blog is nominally supposed to be about geeky things, things outside the mainstream, right? Fuck that, I'm talking about football!

So I was having a good day today. I handed in my paper on time, then went to my club's office (which the members had cleaned spectacularly- I feel a little guilty because I'm the office manager and I didn't do anything, but then I had a paper to write. But now I don't have exams until next weekend. Woohoo!) and played a good game of Civilization. After that, some friends came by and we were playing Scrabble- we ended right when I managed to make the word "Jots", the "s" also forming "quays", and that "s" was on a triple letter score. Almost 80 points. Muahaha.

After that, we played a round of Settlers of Catan, and I managed to pull a good victory out of that, too. It was awesome.

So I'm having a good day, and I go down into a hangout area in the school commons to relax some more. And lo and behold, it's Monday Night Football. And even better- my Niners are on! Now, I've been born and bred on the East Coast, so it's a little odd that I'm a San Francisco 49ers fan, but my dad always rooted for them and I picked it up as a little kid, so I've been a diehard Niners fan my whole life. And they're playing the Arizona Cardinals- if Arizona wins, they win the division and are in the playoffs. The Niners have been having a mediocre season this year, which is a lot better than they've been doing in the past few years, sad to say. So they were the underdogs here.

And you know what happens? Seven motherfucking turnovers, bitch! The Niners handed the Cardinals their asses on a silver platter, 24-9. 7 turnovers! It was amazing!

God, I love football.

What is this I don't even....or This shit is bananas.

2009-12-11T21:32:00.000-08:00

OK, so a few days back I talked about how odd it was to get information on Viridian, the author of Team 8? Well, it seems the internet saw my post and said "Hey Rogue 7? I can do better."

A while back, I read this epic fanfiction- Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness. It's a Harry Potter fic, if that wasn't obvious. It's about Neville, Ginny, Luna, and the other people at Hogwarts dealing with the fact that they basically live in a totalitarian, Nazi state. And it's crazy. Absolutely crazy. The writing, I felt, was superb, characterization was great. And the end was heartbreaking, becuase the author basically took everyone and shoved them into a meat grinder. The sequel, much more of an original flavor thing, deals with some Irish mythology and a bit of King Arthur (and as I mentioned before, I suddenly want to look at it again and see how adding Fate/Stay Night would improve it- but then, I think just about anything can be improved by adding either Saber, Rin, or Rider.). But sweet onion chutney, was it dark. This eventually soured me on them a bit when I sat back and took a look at them- they were too dark for my tastes, too dark for the HP universe if you ask me. So I'm not interested in rereading, regardless of how good I found the writing.*

...and then today I'm browsing FandomWank (Fandom Wank is this online repository for people acting crazy on fannish parts of the internet (usually Livejournal), put up for public mockery. I found it through TV Tropes.) and who should pop up but the author of the fic, Thanfiction. Relevant post here. I start reading through what happened, and my jaw starts dropping. Here's what I get out of it.

Thanfiction, who identified himself as a dude originally, is suspected of being a somewhat legendary figure. Apparently, several years back, he/she was known as Victoria Bitter, a female person who apparently conned a large group of Lord of the Rings fans out of a substantial amount of money. And was apparently claiming to be channeling Meriadoc Brandybuck in her dreams. And apparently cosplayed as various characters for money. And was on the whole, rather crazy. Follow links around for the full story, because it's beyond me. And then people start posting about how Thanfiction is planning a con, and probably attempting to pull the same stunt, and posting some of his rather ridiculously overstated claims from various parts of the internet. Like about how he apparently fought on both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland and generally revealed himself to have an ego so big it was verging on creating a singularity.

So I'm sitting here absolutely stunned. A while back, I mentioned on a thread over on the Playground that I thought Dumbledore's Army was one of the best things I'd ever read (as I said, my opinion's changed somewhat, but I still feel they were brilliant pieces of writing), and he PMs me to thank me. Nice guy, it seemed, but it was just a little weird to get these messages. And now I find out...well, just look at this shit, man. It's unbelieveable.

I recall the debate that comes up whenever someone mentions Orson Scott Card- the author of Ender's Game. Now, I loved that book and a bunch of the sequels back when I was younger- the "Shadow" series was something of a factor in my decision to pursue an IR degree.** And then we find out that Orson Scott Card is virulently homophobic (I'm personally on board with the theory that he's so far in the closet he can see Narnia). Now, the question is, it it cool to like someone's works despite the fact that their personal views are...somewhat divorced from yours, putting it mildly, or in the case above, if the person is apparently a compulsive liar and genuinely nuts? I honestly don't have much of an answer for that question.

* To be honest, I'm fond of imagining what would happen if...say...Gaara or Nanoha showed up to defend Hogwarts from the Death Eaters. Imagining curbstop crossover scenarios like that is a fun pastime of mine. So I can look at it a bit like that- there's all this setup about how they're all going to die, and then Gaara shows up and crushes everyone with his sand. Yes, I'm odd.

** Looking back on the books (that seems to be a theme this post) with some knowledge of how IR actually works, I can see how completely ridiculous they were, which sort of limited how I viewed them as absolutely brilliant, but meh.

More Manga Mayhem!

2009-12-10T18:58:00.001-08:00

So I like aliteration. So sue me.

So here's all the manga I read in a 24-hour period today, despite having a big test and a 15-page paper due.

Naruto, Negima, Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist, MGLN Force, and the Haruhi Suzumiya Yuki-chan manga.

And you know what? All of them were kickass.

But I'm really tired, so I'll probably write tomorrow.

Naruto! Where to start....well, let's get the fact that Gaara's still just as cool as ever out of the way. He's pushed Naruto's buttons in exactly the right way to get him to see the truth about Sasuke. He's the one who's been the true friend, Naruto. So do us all a favor and go kill that motherfucking Uchiha.

Anyways, the main meat of the chapter is Fu and Torune vs. Madara. Fu, as most folks have probably realized by now, is a Yamanaka. Torune, as it turns out, is an Aburame. Complete with microscopic kikai bugs that essentially work as a touch poison! Freakin' sweet! They find out that Madara has an either-or bit with his intangibility- he's either all there or not, so you've got to hit him while he's attacking. Once again, Kage Bunshin is a good tactical opportunity here. However, Madara adopts the expedient option of simply sucking the two of them into another dimension, though Torune does manage to get Madara's arm with his bugs before he cops it. Madara tears his arm off like it's nothing, and I will be willing to bet it grows back rapidly.

Now, Madara brings Sasuke out to take a shot at Danzou, and guess what? His right arm? Is covered in Sharingans that I assume he stole from the corpses of those killed in the massacre. I laughed so damn hard, because it's so ridiculous, and at the same time, so plausible. I don't know how that's going to work in a fight, except that I'd be willing to bet they pop in and out of his eye socket to give him different powers, since it seems that each Sharingan has different ones. This will be an interesting fight, especially since Sasuke's been healed. Who do I want to win? Well, I'm always up for Sasuke getting his ass kicked, but I'm going to throw the little fucker a bone here and say that he can go ahead and take this one. It'll help smooth Kakashi's transition into power back in Konoha, which will be a benefit for our side. I'm breaking out the popcorn, though.

On to Bleach. Son of a bitch, it was actually good this week. Tosen finally reveals some motivation (and is wondefully creepy in doing so- that mask is ridiculous) and it's confirmed- he is, in fact, batshit insane. Blinded by revenge and all that- he joined solely to take revenge on the organization that allowed the chick he was crushing on to be killed (by another shinigami, IIRC), and not to see justice done for the good of all. Komamura gets a great line about how that's basically impossible to reconcile with his worldview, so they're destined to fight. A pity he's going to lose. And Shinji reveals his Shikai against Aizen. A shame he's going to lose as well.

Really, my problem with Bleach is that the narrative structure just fell apart so badly. This is shaping up to be it. The grand finale. The battle Royale with Cheese. Once we're done with this, it's over. The manga would seem to be done. And...well, that's a criminal lack of plot for how long it's run. Look at Naruto- since this fight started (JUNE OF LAST YEAR!), here's what's happened- we got the fallout from Jiraya's death, Sasuke's fight with Killer Bee, the runup to Pain's invasion, Pain's invasion, Naruto's epic fight with Pain, the meeting of the 5 Kages, Sasuke's interruption thereof, and several other major events. Bleach? More and more fighting. Too little's happened- I feel like this is what Dragonball was supposedly like, though I never read Toriyama's manga. It's just too sparse plot-wise for me to be invested in it. But this week's chapter was good.

Negima! The gist of this chapter- Kurt Godel, you are an idiot. Negi kicks his ass with a perfect application of Taijuu rai-bunshin no jutsu (Mass lightning clone technique) to overcome the fact that he can't beat Kurt's shinmeiryuu one on one (I'd pay for a good training session with Setsuna afterwards). Unfortunately, Kurt's Hannibal Lecture cause Negi's magic ereba damage to kick in, and he's down. Kurt gets up and starts monologuing, and Chisame brings the house down by hacking through Kurt's VR program with her artifact. Way to go, Chisame! And then Asakura reveals that they've been spying on him and calls out a position to Ku Fei...who reveals that her Monkey King staff can become roughly the size of a skyscraper. It brutally pounds Godel into the dust. He gets back up to try and attack her...and guess who punches him so hard in the face his mother feels it? Takamichi, that's who! He's finally show up! That is a good thing!

FMA. Alright, so Pride forcibly opens the gate for Mustang. He goes through and...loses his eyesight. Oh shit. Of course, he can now transmute without a gate. He's dumped in with Ed, Al, Izumi, Hoho, and Father. Now, Al's soul is currently out on business from his armor, but he meets up with his body before the gate and realizes that if he goes back to his original form, he'd suddenly have 1's in str, dex, and con, and so decides to stay in his armor so he can fight. Which means his soul comes back and suddenly Father's plan can go off. Mei Chan shows up, I think (I don't have the scan in front of me), which is...somehow significant, I think. I guess if Father turns the alchemy off? I dunno. Oh, and Wrath and Scar are fighting. Two nameless warriors, Wrath says. Coool.

Mahou Senki Lyrical Nanoha Force- Magical War Chronical Lyrical Nanoha Force, as it's called, is looking like the setup for a 4th season, along with the more traditionally magical girl fare that is Vivid, focusing as it does on Vivio. This one deals with this dude, Touma, who rescues a girl, Lily, from some facility. Now, Lily seems strikingly similar to how Hayate was in that she's granted Touma this crazy gun-blade device with wreck-your-shit level powers. And now they're on the run from the cops- only in this case, the cops are Signum, Tea, and Fate. In this chapter, Touma reveals some backstory about how he's hunting for some particular people who caused a mining collapse that killed some people close to him...and they show up at the end of the chapter as typical badguys. Signum is awesome. Cool stuff, need more.

The...Something of Nagato Yuki-chan. Well, this is a sort of alternate-reality spinoff of Haruhi that's basically Yuki being moe. Go read it.

...Why am I talking about this?

2009-12-07T21:47:00.000-08:00

I should really be editing my paper. But for some reason, I want to talk about Megatokyo. No, I don't know why. Nothing really of importance has happened lately. But it's my goddamn blog, I'll talk about it if I want to!

So. Megatokyo. Half internet legend, half internet punching bag. I'm fairly sure that Megatokyo's one of the earlier webcomics to really gain recognition and fame, so that it's creator* could do the comic as his fulltime job. So it's a big comic in the world of webcomics, but then again, there are quite a lot of those. That's what makes it the legend. It's big, and it's one of the rare big ones to be almost exclusively story-focused. I'll get to the punching bag bit later.

Now then, as to the actual *content* of Megatokyo. It's...very obtuse to explain. Alright, so the plot begins with these two author avatars, Piro and Largo, hopping on a random flight to Tokyo. They get stuck there, and inexplicably land jobs- Largo as a teacher, of all things, Piro working at a game store, something at which he, unlike Largo, is at least marginally competent. They meet two girls, Erika and Kimiko, a former and aspiring voice actress respectively. There's romantic complications, various character drama, and a supernatural bent. No, I can't really describe it, not without going into furious detail and start straight-up summarizing the plot. If you want to know, read the comic yourself.

So, the reason it's an internet punching bag? Well, for one, it's very, very heavily anime-inspired. That automatically means it draws criticism from *some* folks on the internet, but fortunately, most of the places I go to don't really do that.** But the main reason? Well, it's slow. And I mean really slow. When I first started, it was supposed to be a three-day a week comic, and was plagued with a ridiculously erratic schedule. Now? Pretty much completely random. Two a week is very good, one a week is typical, nothing in a week is not rare at all.

Now, I read a lot of slow-updating webcomics. Order of the Stick hasn't updated since...the 29th, about a week and a half ago. And before that, there was a big gap as well. No Need for Bushido updates once every TWO weeks. Goblins is on something like a once a week schedule. So the slow pace doesn't bother me personally. I'm up to date with the plot, so I can follow it when I check in every few days to see if there's an update without missing anything. But to a lot of folks who are used to more regularly updating comics, they find it unbearable. And to compound their distaste there's a difference between how Goblins and OOTS updates and how Megatokyo does it. Megatokyo will post what basically amounts to the page you'll get in a standard manga. OOTS or Goblins will post about double that. Which means that even at the same update speed, you'll be getting half the content in Megatokyo.

And it really shows. The current chapter/day started...Jesus Christ, I think it was my freshman year. July 2008. Summer between freshman and sophomore years, then. That's about a year and a half, almost. And there's still quite a bit happening this chapter. Now, there has certainly been a lot of content in each chapter, but sweet onion chutney, that's a slow pace. It's not particularly new, either. So the plot moves at a pace that is approximately slower than molasses.*** Now, this doesn't bug me, like I mentioned before. Half because it's a webcomic I can check up on whenever I want, half because I appreciate the level of detail Gallagher puts in his drawings. But I can certainly understand why it draws the flack it does. And on a certain level, it slightly offends me that this is supposed to be this man's job and he doesn't have the professionalism to maintain a regular schedule, or push to get more content up. I can accept that he's raising his kid, but this is supposed to be a job, dude.

But you ask me, it's a good read, the characters are solid and interesting (Erika and Miho in particular are very plot-intesive characters, which is something good to read), and I like the art. So I'll keep reading. Fred, I can't really think of anything you'd reasonably do that would lose my readership, but at the same time, more is always better.

Oh, and Dom (I think he does tech work for the website, either way he's friends with Fred) has awesome blog posts that are consistently good to read.

Oh, and my current wallpaper. I'm normally a Rider man, but damn.

* There was apparently some dramalama that went down a few years in the strip. Here's the skinny. For the first few years, there were 2 guys working on the comic. Rodney Caston (Largo) wrote, Fred Gallagher wrote a bit and drew the thing. Now, there were apparently creative differences over what direction to take the comic- give it something of a plot, or keep it light and unserious. Gallagher was in favor of the plot, and Caston was for the lighthearted stuff. Long story short, as evidenced above, Gallagher won and Caston left. The question in a lot of folks' minds is, how did he win? Gallagher says it was an amicable parting, while Caston claims that Gallagher basically took a "my way or the highway" approach. This all happened long before I read the comic, so hasn't impacted my enjoyment at all, but interesting to know.

** Which reminds me. Do you remember when I put up that business about how "the best fandoms are in places not actually for fans of a particular show"? I'm like that, only a lot more so, in real life with anime. I am a big anime fan, and not particularly shy about it (that's not to say I'm obnoxious about it or anything of the like. I hate those kinds of people- the kind who feel the need to parade it around that they're huge obsessive otaku. You're just making yourself look weirder, dude! It's just when someone asks me what I'm interested in, or what type of TV I like to watch, I'll say anime.). Now, admittedly, I don't watch a great deal, but I am a big fan. So one might be inclined to think that, upon hearing about an "anime interest floor" (My college has a particular section of dorms devoted to groups based around particular concepts- I have several friends on the Film interest floor, a few on the Music interest floor, I think there's theater and others), I'd be on it like the proverbial white on rice, yes? No. Helllllll no. I've never even so much as considered joining an anime club. And it's probably because of similar reasons to what I mentioned in that massive parenthesis above, about how I don't feel the need to flaunt that I'm a fan. I don't feel the need to be in close contact with other people whose sole connection to me is apparently that we both like anime. Nor do I want to be solely defined by being an anime fan, which I feel might be an unfortuante result of choosing to live there. Blah, massively off-topic.

*** What is it with me and these today, anyways? I just realized. The current big Bleach fight in Karakura town started right around the same time. A YEAR AND A HALF AGO! And it's covered approximately the same amount of content because christ, it's only been friggin' fighting. Tite Kubo, do you realize what this means? Fred Gallagher, a man who posts one page of his story a week, has managed to have the same amount, if not more, plot, than you have had writing a manga chapter a week. A manga chapter a week! 18+ pages! That's 17 times as dense! Let's look at Negima in comparison. A year and a half ago, Negi was...fighting Fate for the first time. Since then, we've gotten massive backstory on Ala Alba, Negi's trained up and fought Jack Rakan in a fight that was ten times better than what you've put out....I really need to stop myself from going off on Bleach. TL;DR: Bleach's pace is terrible and the manga sucks.

Team 8

2009-12-03T23:03:00.000-08:00

So, who here has read "Team 8"? I'm too lazy to link it, but it's the first hit on Google for "Team 8". Anyways, Team 8 is one of the best Naruto fanfictions I've had the pleasure of reading. It takes an alternate universe that puts Naruto on, well, Team 8. Kurenai's team. With Hinata.

Now, it's superbly written and well-plotted. Naruto, Hinata, Kurenai, and Shino are all great characters, well-rounded, believable, and unique. Some of the side characters lose out a bit- in particular I think that the Naruto-Gaara interplay was weakened, as the story, almost by necessity, takes a bit of a different tack and lacks some of the similarities that made the interaction between the two so poignant. There was less emphasis on Naruto's "I GET you" towards Gaara that I loved in the manga proper. As Gaara's shot up the ranks of my favorite characters, I consequently find anything, even something as awesome as this, that draws down on his characterization, to be a bit weak. But it's still an amazing story and well worth your time reading it. Parts of it are much better than Kishimoto's actual work.

Unfortunately, it hasn't updated in a freaking year. Now, most folks who would be reading this have I'm sure experienced it with a favorite fan fiction that died on them. (I have the same hangup on Lelouch of Britannia, which is to Code Geass what this fic is to Naruto, except that Naruto didn't explode into the trainwreck that Code Geass did, so I think LoB is better.) But I have a bit of an interesting perspective on this. See, my DM, Joe (that's vague enough, right? If you read this, Joe, WIZARD IS CREDIT TO TEAM.), beta's for Viridian, the author of Team 8 (a beta's basically an editor, only with less authority.) So I get a bit of perspective on what this guy's doing since they're friends. Which has led to a bit of an interesting view- Joe's been telling me how this guy royally irritated him in a roleplaying game they were in over the summer due to excessive rules-monkeying and the like. It's an interesting perspective, how this guy who's written this absolutely brilliant work is revealed to be...well, I want to say less than perfect, I want to say. I mean, it's completely unreasonable to expect that about a regular celebrity, never mind a freaking fan fiction author, but it's still an interesting perspective to have, considering how fanfiction authors are among the most anonymous of folk. You don't even get the same degree of personality that you get with a forum username, because you're not interacting with that person, you're just reading their work.

I guess what it is is that I'm used to not having much of a face at all on the authors of the work, and in this case the face I get is a negative one. Plus it's interesting to hear gossip about a pseudo-celebrity, even if he is just a fan fiction author.

Oh! Right! Something I forgot. It doesn't help that the forum he has soured me on Naruto for a while. Not the author's fault by any means, but the main Naruto manga thread was nothing but hate-filled bile and contempt for the work and Kishimoto. When I first read the thread I had a fairly negative opinion of the manga and hopped right on the bandwagon. Thus, I continued to have negative reactions. When I stopped hanging around the forum and just reading the manga on my own, my opinion shot up on the manga. I went back in a few months ago to check if the opinions in the thread mimicked my own, and they hadn't in the slightest. I'm much happier enjoying the work than waiting on a guy who updates once a year.

Naruto 474, Negima 272.

2009-12-02T21:34:00.001-08:00

Awesome.

You know, I don't get people who say that Naruto's plot's gone downhill. There have been moments where things have spiraled out of control, been ridiculous. I'll be the first to point those out. But you get a chapter like this one, it ties everything together so smoothly, so well, sets things up in a way that is eminently logical and good, that I can easily forgive any occasional lapses. Or occasional shoddy endings to fights (Cool as it was, Kisame went down like an absolute chump. His player probably flipped the damn table over when that happened (I've seen lots of folks make reference to various characters as being played by people in Tabletop RPGs, and I like the metaphor). He got screwed over. Though it does seem appropriate, given how damn broken Samehada is.)

I'm off-topic. Naruto is having a total character moment here, and I'm flipping out. It's actually getting through to him! Sasuke's a tool! He's a douchebag! He's Fucking evil! He's not worthy of your support. What he is worthy of is a Rasenshuriken so far up his ass his mother feels it. Because Naruto, even knowing the truth you do, that Itachi was a "good guy", that doesn't change what Sasuke's done. Most of Konoha realized that Sasuke's a tool when he, you know, shoved his hand through your lung. And now Naruto's illusion that he can bring Sasuke back and they can all be one big happy Team 7 family has been shattered- literally, on one of the pages, a picture of the team before the timeskip shatters. He's gotten it, he's finally gotten it! And there's going to be a fight! They're going to fight, and it'll be the climax of the manga! Kishimoto's got it planned out, this is going to make sense! Whee!

Sorry. But I'm not done yet. Because the guy who helped him come to this relevation? Mainly? Gaara. Just when I thought the guy couldn't get any cooler, he goes and does this. He helps Naruto realize something we've all been praying he'll see for years now. With a few solid words, he makes Naruto get it. And now he might just possibly be my favorite character. That's right, he may have just passed Shikamaru. One of my favorite characters ever.

Oh! And we finally see Madara and Danzou in the same place, finally putting to rest that retarded theory (and in all honesty I was kind of scared Kishimoto'd do it) that they were the same person. Villain fight! Whoever loses, we win! Well, I mean, it's obviously going to be Madara, but this might take care of a major problem- Danzou's technically the Hokage. I mean, since Gaara contacted Kakashi, it's not as much of a problem as it could be, but it'll be nice if we don't have to deal with an organized Root.

Naruto's gotten so much better since I first caught up on the manga and I thought it was terrible. God, I love all these characters so much.

And Negima! Just as good! Jack Rakan will not listen to your puny "ability to rewrite reality", he'll still punch you in the face as though he were the hand of god. And apparently Fate manifested that whole "reality-warping" thing from doing something to Asuna. He. Will. Pay.

And Negi just goes and completely destroyes Godel with a few well-placed questions that finally uncover that Godel has an agenda that is very much not good. There's not a great deal to say about this chapter, except that it was awesome. Round 2...FIGHT!

This Really Says Something...

2009-11-19T09:14:00.001-08:00

So I've found what amounts to a fan-image wiki. Safebooru, it's called. Now, Danbooru, its big brother, is fairly well-known. It's a big site filled with images of whatever folks want to upload, tagged with appropriate descriptors for searching. Safebooru's the worksafe version of Danbooru. Danbooru without all the fan-porn. And fan porn is to be expected, rule 34 and all that, yeah?

Well, last night I was doing a Fate/Stay Night image trawl, with distractions for various other shows/manga. Now, the site told me that there are apparently around 350 pages worth of images. And so I scroll through, grabbing the cool ones that caught my eye. I think I got more than 100 from just FSN alone, when all was said and done. Now, I get to around page 230, and it starts throwing up blank pages. And I've figured out why. Y'see, all images on Danbooru get uploaded automatically to Safebooru, provided that they are, well, worksafe. But evidently some of the code is a little wonky, because I think what I am seeing is the total pages for Danbooru. Which means that all told, there amounted to about 120 pages of porn. About a third of the images, and that's comparatively low.

Now, I'm not some sort of prude who objects to porn on principle. Or even Fate/Stay Night porn. I'd be a hypocrite if I did, if you catch my meaning. But I do find it to be somewhat excessive. For all the bandying about of that tired old phrase "The Internet is for Porn", I genuinely think it's not- that there is far more non-porn than porn. It's really something when a good third of all the images on this site are not worksafe. It crops up a lot in other parts, too, that folk are sex-obsessed, but still, y'know...

Goin' to Tokyo.....

2009-11-06T19:52:00.000-08:00

It is relevant to this blog's interests for me to state that from March 23 to July 11 (tentatively, I haven't gotten much information yet), I'm going to be studying abroad through IES in Chiba, Japan, just outside of Tokyo. No, I'm not just going because I'm an anime, manga, and video game 'tard. I've got a keen interest in Japanese culture and history. Hell, I'm writing this as a break from a history essay I'm neck-deep in about Japan during World War II. So I felt like that announcement is relevent, especially since it'll mean I'm at home for 3 months between the end of my first semester and when I leave, which is going to affect how I consume media- less internet, more TV and video games.

Fate/Stay Night has ruined Arthurian myths for me.

2009-11-04T19:45:00.000-08:00

You want to know why? Three guesses. First two don't count. If you know anything about F/SN, you may in fact have this problem yourself.

Yes, it's Saber. I simply cannot look at anything about the Arthurian mythos without thinking to myself "the King Arthur character I know best is a girl." And an attractive one at that (Though not the most attractive in F/SN. Mmmmmm...Rider.) This invariably means that I break out in a fit of giggles when I picture the love triangle with Guenivere, remember that retarded movie with Kiera Knightley (another Mmmmm... if there ever was one), or anything of the sort. I don't even know what's going to happen the next time I try to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think my brain might explode.

So have I talked about Fate/Stay Night before? Lemme check. Nope. Fate/Stay Night is an interesting concept. It's a Visual Novel* where the porn is not only incidental, but detrimental to the overall quality of the work. Type/Moon, the creators, are perhaps the most famous Visual Novel creators out there, and Fate/Stay Night is their magnum opus. It tells three stories, entitled Fate, Unlimited Blade Works, and Heaven's Feel. They all have the same characters, but radically different themes, focuses, and plots. Each focuses on a different heroine, whom you sex up over the course of the route.

Now, obviously, there's a lot more too it than that. Like I said before, the porn is incidental. Alright, here's the gist of it. There's this event called the Holy Grail War. Seven mages summon seven "heroic spirits" and do battle in order to claim the Holy Grail- not actually the cup used by Jesus at the last supper, but just a really powerful artifact supposedly capable of granting wishes. These "heroic spirits" are reincarnations of mythological heroes- with the caveat that in this world they actually exist, so no Superman or Goku. Participants include the aforementioned King Arthur, Hercules, and others (who they are is generally a spoiler). I'm in a cool RPG where I've partnered with Fafnir (look him up.) So, they fight it out with really cool powers. There's some great storytelling and characters in this, despite how incredibly screwed up things are (the setting is very complex, but that's part and parcel of Nasu (the author's) writing style). It's hugely popular and actually quite cool, so check out either the anime, the actual visual novel, or any of the other stuff.

* A visual novel is basically a choose-your-own-adventure book on a computer. I mentioned similar when I talked about Persona, but this one has much less player choice, except the choices matter more.

Naruto 469

2009-10-29T17:24:00.000-07:00

Hey, I feel like talking about this week's Naruto chapter!

So, Danzou's crew pulls one over on the Byakugan-mist guy following them and I hope that's not the end of him, because I liked the guy for fucking up Danzou's plans. The Raikage's appointed leader of the shinobi alliance, because he appears to have cooled his head a bit, and the only one still recalcitrant is the Tsuchikage, who apparently fought Madara. Want some backstory on that. So now we have a solid 4-village alliance, the only outlier being, funnily enough, the leaf village. Given that it's highly unlikely Danzou will be able to influence Gaara or Kakashi, and that Konoha has an able stable (heh) of Byakugan users, I suspect that the leaf, under the leadership of a new Hokage, will be part of the alliance. Danzou and Root will most likely go rogue. Maybe that's where Madara will get some of his cannon fodder? Root?

On to quote "important" stuff /endquote. Sakura confesses to Naruto. She lies through her teeth about not liking Sasuke anymore, and that she's got a bunch of reasons to like Naruto now...while she rolls decently on bluff, Naruto, who has most likely put points into Wisdom as he's leveled up, rolls well on Sense motive and calls her B.S. End chapter.

So, I liked the political end here- we've got a solid alliance that could prove to be real grounds for an overarcing peace come the end of the problem with Madara...without Naruto having to do a thing! Though, much like the real world, it'd probably degenerate once peace broke out. So it goes. I was pulling for Gaara, but I'm a hopeless Gaara fanboy.

On the shipping front, I am very glad that Naruto called Sakura out. The impression I got with regards to what Sai told her and her subsequent reaction is that she felt really, really guilty for what she saw as leading Naruto on this whole time and taking advantage of his good nature. She still does love Sasuke (why, I couldn't tell you. He's a tool, but you knew that already.) but she's trying to be nice and say all the right things to Naruto to help him and prevent him from going off to stop everyone trying to kill Sasuke. You could really tell- and I must give some credit to Kishimoto here, the art expresses this very well-that her heart isn't in this, and Naruto realized that. Major points to him for realizing that this was all fake and not putting up with it.

Now, here's the real question. What does Naruto feel about Sakura, particularly in light of Hinata's confession to him? Before Hinata's move, it was fairly well-established that Naruto still harbored a crush on Sakura. When he still had a wisdom penalty, he was constantly bugging her and asking her out on dates. Has he really done that since the timeskip? Has he recognized that this girl was absolutely dedicated to Sasuke (once again, inexplicably...maybe not seeing as how Naruto himself is so dedicated), and given up? It'd help that Hinata let him realize that there are other girls out there, including cute kunoichi with long black hair and white eyes who've pined for him for ages...sorry. Shipping preferences showing. Anyways, I'm curious as to how this'll be resolved.

In other news, Rick Castle just uttered "Bam Said the lady" in the episode of Castle I'm watching. I believe that Nathan Fillion just threw in a shoutout to his ODST role as Sgt. Buck. Now more than ever am I convinced that Mr. Fillion is a God among men.

Edit: Upon further viewing of TV Tropes and subsequent searching of Nathan Fillion's facebook page, Bam Said the lady is in fact Nathan Fillion's own catchphrase. Which is just as awesome.

Edit the second: And upon further use of my internet-fu skills, apparently Mr. Fillion got Bam Said the lady from ODST. So I was right the first time. Yay.

Checking In...

2009-10-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

I'm just throwing this up because I feel like I should have something up. Schoolwork's been heavy of late, so I really haven't been watching/reading/doing anything worth talking about. Still, there's a few things to share.

This is something quite cool. The chick doing the singing in that song, as well as the others on her channel, is Cristina Valenzuela. Obviously, judging by that and the fact that she was apparently discovered at an Anime con a few years back, she's something of an anime fan. She's gone on to voice, among others, Nanoha, and I am currently absolutely addicted to her version of Super Driver I linked. She's got one hell of a fangirl's dream going on, so more power to her.

Bleach has been pretty boring as of late, so there's not much to say there. I'm just so damn sick of the Karakura fight and still boggled by how the pacing got screwed up. I mean, where do you fucking GO from here? Once this fight is over, that's it, innit? The manga's done.

At least it makes Naruto look better.

Naruto is good- Kisame vs. Killer Bee! Fuck yeah! Madara has an absolutely stupid plan for world domination...well, it's not stupid in its execution, just ridiculous. I mean, a 10-tailed beast (as I've said many a time, it should be the 45-tailed beast for maximum lulz), mass brainwashing, the fucking moon? It's a Saturday morning cartoon villain plan, and since I reduced Naruto to that in my mind, I've been able to enjoy just about every single aspect of it.

Negima...need more info before making judgment calls.

Need to catch up on Umineko.

I Have Found The Magical Formula

2009-10-14T20:05:00.001-07:00

...unfortunately, it's what lets me study. That combination is hot tea, cold temperatures, late nights, and anime music. I mention this here because I don't particularly feel like parading that around my Facebook account.

Examples Of What I'm Listening To.

Haven't done THAT in a while.

2009-10-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

So I was relaxing in my club's office this afternoon, idly surfing the net, and eventually planning to call up some friends to go hang out on a Friday night, you know? Well, that plan got changed rather swiftly. I was reading something, and it brought up Baba Yetu- the absolutely amazing opening song from Civilzation 4.

Now, when I was younger, back in high school, I was absolutely addicted to Civilization 3. My mom got it for me as a birthday gift (when I had wanted Age of Empires 2- shows how much I knew!) and I got hooked. I'd come home from school and play for hours and hours. But, I grew up and grew out of it, particularly when my mom would hide the discs and then just flat-out lose them.

So someone brought up the song, and I immediately got a massive bug to play the game. Now, I had left my copy of Civ 4 at home- I don't play much at all anymore, and my mac has some issues when it tries to run the game- so I was thinking that I wasn't going to get my fix, but I turned around and saw that the office computer had a copy ready and waiting. So I fired it up. My first game I went with the Japanese on Noble difficulty, and I was staying reasonably competitive. For some reason, Sulemain, the guy I was next to, was just blasting ahead scorewise, for reasons I could not fathom. I could see that if I was gonna win, it'd have to be a long haul, and I wasn't really up for that, so I quit and started over, knocking down the difficulty and playing the Celts. I had a very nice starting position- on the coast with some good land and resources. I explored west, and ran into Stalin. Lovely chap. He was right in the middle of my prime expansion space, so I built up 2 Chariots and 2 archers and killed him straight off. Moscow was a crazy city, in the middle of a shitton of floodplains, which meant that it'd be a population powerhouse. I planted some good core cities, and met 2 neighbors to the North. I had snagged Buddhism right off the bat, so that allowed me to get them on my good side pretty quick. I filled in a good chunk of land, then went to my usual strategy of sitting on my ass and building. I constructed several wonders in one city south of my capitol in particular, when I noticed that I was making a lot of culture. So I figured I'd use my capitol, the city to the south, and Moscow to go for a culture victory- you have to have 3 cities with 50,000 culture by the end of the game. That entailed a lot of temple-building, selective builds of Cathedrals, and spamming wonders. In the process, I got obscenely rich with good builds and wonders, and I pretty much just coasted. The entire world had a bad case of "peace"*- there was only 1 war that I know of after I wiped Stalin.

Fun times, and a weird relapse for me.

* Speaking of peace, President Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize! I'm a little skeptical, but Yay!

The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya

2009-10-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

So they're apparently making a movie of The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. Now, I have yet to bother to watch more than three episodes of the new Haruhi season- I couldn't be assed to keep up with the eight repetitions of Endless Eight, and Sighs never interested me, but this shit right here? I'm on it like white on rice.

And a sort of self-contained plot like this I think would do really well adapted into movie form. A 2-hour movie is roughly 5 episodes, which is plenty of time to cover the light novel in plenty of detail (and by plenty of detail I mean many, extensive shots of Yuki Nagato looking cute). This is not the sort of big-budget hollywood adaptation that would rape your childhood and destroy things in pursuit of money. Japanese studios know how not to piss off Otaku (they also know how to piss off Otaku, very ably, but...) . Really, they'd have to try very hard to screw this one up. Big budget+Haruhi-trolling=win. So I'm optimistic. But given what they did with Endless Eight...

Umineko No Naku Koro Ni+ Subaru Nakajima!

2009-10-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

TOP EDIT: And a tribute to a good image that was taken down from TV Tropes and now needs a home. Subaru, you're ten times more badass than Lara Croft.

So I've been marathoning this show today (at the complete expense of any work, I might add), and I'm honestly really enjoying it, particularly since I have absolutely no idea what's going on. It's a novel experience, honestly. I can't even describe the damn premise, I don't get it myself. Ah, what the frak, here goes.

So back in 1986, a rich family showed up on their own personal island with some servants to conduct a business meeting with regards to the passing of their patriarch. There's a legend surrounding the family and the island with regards to an ancient witch who formed some sort of contract with the patriarch to get the family finances up, and now she's come to collect on the debt owed.

People start getting brutally murdered, and the whole thing's a mystery as to who did it. The real question is, is there actually something supernatural going on or not? I don't have a damn clue, and I'm just waiting to see how it ends. Go watch it yourself.

Edit: I caught up with the fansubs. Still hooked, still absolutely clueless as to how things are going to go down.

Roleplaying Talk

2009-10-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

So I thought I'd talk about my various roleplaying games today. I've gotten involved in 3 real life games this semester at college (I'm a member of my school's gaming club, so there are a lot of folk running games. I'm also involved in 3 online games. It's interesting the differences in the characters I've created for these games.

So the game I've technically been involved in the longest is the first Naruto d20 game I got into on the GiantITP boards. It's a prequel game to the main Naruto setting, in a homebrewed village of Callos_deTerran's creation- Kagekure, the village of shadow, if I translate it correctly. The Naruto d20 ruleset we use is ridiculously overcomplicated. It's more than 900 pages long, and a good half of that at least is rules for the various jutsus and techniques you can use. In practice, the rules are actually pretty simple, since, just like how in in regular D&D you don't need to know every spell that can ever be cast.

So in this case, I thought up the most complicated backstory I've come up with to date. Here's a link to the actual character sheet, but the essence of it is that he's a Nara clan member who was framed for being a traitor by a deep-cover mole from the Hidden Stone (an enemy in the war), and he had to flee to Kagekure to get rid of the ANBU. This gives him a whole host of issues, which I really regret not being able to develop a bit further- the game had a lot of issues, mostly related to the fact that our GM joined the army and went to basic training with no access to a computer to post. So it goes, but it's picked up a bit more as of late.

The next-most-recent game is the most in-depth of my Play-by-post online games- Team Rin. I'm playing a character I originally based on Yuri Lowell from Tales of Vesperia (with the result that my build sucks total ass), but, based on various developments that have occured over the course of the game, has developed into a bit more of his own entity. The most important bit is how he (his name's Yuu Nagase, btw) got himself a demonic arm and is now contractually obliged to be revenge-focused. I've also been developing that the demonic arm gave him another occupant in his headspace, which I've been playing with at various times.

Most recently, there's a Modern NarutoD20 game where my character is...well, that's private. I will say that I am quite fond of the build for this guy, though. He's a bit lighter in the damage-dealing department, but he can counter that by being very good in the defense department (when he's going all out- that is, he's got his Byakugan and speed ranks up, he'll have an AC of 29, and a reflex save of +13, I think, with evasion) and he'll be hitting touch AC with something like a +12 to attack. So in that sense, I'm going to enjoy playing this character.

Now, as for my real-life games, the first one is your basic D&D campaign- we've only had 2 sessions, and the setting is fairly basic right now- we're exploring a city with something odd about it that's been cut off from its sister city across the river. I'm playing a swordsage (Tome of Battle class) and, for a change, it's a female. Fortunately the Swordsage class means I can play her fairly reserved and quiet, and the campaign's a lot more hack-and-slash anyways. It's a nice way to get into playing a female without worrying too much about roleplaying, since there isn't a lot. My character's been pretty effective- Swordsage is a good class, but her damage output is low right now (I'll get a feat next level that'll help). That meant that I was pretty much useless against a Wereboar we fought last session with DR 10/nothing I had, until I went and grappled it in a fight I was practically guaranteed to lose. That gave my other party members enough of a chance to kill him. Fun times.

Next is the Birthright game, the very roleplay-heavy political mod my friend's running. The setting is akin to that of pre-Norman England, and I'm embroiled in a war for control of a particular province. Basically, an older family got replaced by a newer one (that I'm a member of) and resisted rather violently. They lost, rather spectacularly, and were besieged in their capitol. The lord in charge of the seige was an absolute tool, and he's been doing a lot to get me killed, so I've pretty much set myself against him. I thought I had an absolutely flawless plan to bring him down, but someone's pointed out a flaw in the plan, and that really offends me. I'm not terribly good at improvisation, and for once, I'd like for something to go my way.

The last game is my Sunday game, which is about a group of ne'er do wells making money in a city of adventure type setting. We're all either True or Chaotic neutral, and unashamedly in it for the money. It's still one of the most unified and coherent groups I've been a part of, with a decent amout of surprisingly good roleplaying to go aloing with it. Lots of fun, and really simple.

Something Interesting I saw.

2009-10-01T10:12:00.001-07:00

I'm posting this mainly because I don't think it actually warrants a post on the General Anime Discussion thread over at GiantITP.

So I saw this Article when I was perusing the NY Times, and I thought I'd share my thoughts on it.

It's very interesting how I'm getting all the way through the comments, and no one has mentioned visual novels in any way, shape or form. I've been getting absolutely enthralled with Seorin's Let's Play of Fate/Stay Night that I mentioned earlier- it's miles better than Tsukihime- makes more sense, easier to read, better characters, much cooler action, particularly as Unlimited Blade Works gets going, and I've also discovered that, with glasses as opposed to that blindfold she normally wears, Rider is smoking hot.

Anyways, there's a lot of talk about how this whole thing "will destroy reading" and cheapens its value, blah blah blah, because the imagination is apparently super-important and only comes through if one reads words printed on paper. It's always very interesting to look at this from the perspective of someone who is so ingrained into the types of entertainment that my laptop has pretty much become another appendage for me, and the resulting fact that I don't read nearly as often as I used to (When I was a kid, I absolutely always had my nose buried in a book.). But I don't think that my creativity or my imagination has been stifled by shifting my enthusiasm towards anime, video games, and the like. I mean, how the hell do you measure friggin' imagination? Playing pretend? I did that more for Power Rangers than any books I read. Creative Writing? Well, I don't do that, but look at all the friggin' fanfiction that exists out there. Once again, I'm asking just how the fuck you measure imagination. Are there tests?

Also, there's a lot of complaints about how kids today aren't focused, all A.D.D-like. Well, I haven't really seen that, and I don't think it's true of a lot of otaku culture- you've gotta have a pretty good attention span to buckle down and watch various shows, or read that 1,000,000-word fanfiction. So I think a lot of the people commenting on the article are, in fact, full of shit. It's in the storytelling that lets you dig into the characters and analyze them, it's the storytelling that makes a deep work of literature. That's true regardless of medium. It's just that movies, video games, and the like have other things they can fall back on when the story sucks- spectacle, gameplay, pretty music. Books don't have that luxury.

Thoughts, anyone?

And Every Time She Makes A Point You Have A Counterpoint...

2009-09-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

So, to immediately contrast what I just wrote, the next film our professor showed was a piece of propaganda from the Ultranationalistic Japanese side, all by one dude, that came out in the late 60's. Supposedly this fuckwit wanted to restore the glory and honor of Japan that it had had during WWII. Now, this moron had been too young to fight in the actual war, so methinks a bit of disassociation resulted. Anyways, same deal, here are my notes on the piece. This one's less WHAAARGGGGABBLLLE and more "sweet onion chutney this is retarded", but I think it's an interesting bit as well.

Rite of Love and Death- Mishima Yukio.

Private home movie- famous, ultranationalist Japanese author in 64/65. Tried to rekindle Japanese militaristic spirit after the western conquest.
Written, acted in, and directed by this guy. No dialogue, silent movie. Group of young radicals in 34 decided to restore the Emperor to power. Shows the con
Reiko, the lieutenants wife has seen in her husbands face the resolution to diea as he leaves for the palace in the morning following the coup…and I missed the rest.
Kanji on the wall means “be sincere/dedicate yourself” as we see this woman doing calligraphy. Shot of porcelain animals. The woman takes one and holds it, thinking of a hand that I assume is her husband, seeing the back of his head as he…shapes her face in his hands? Weird. Dude hugs his wife as he’s in uniform, and she doesn’t even move, just kinda gets knocked over. Shots of hands moving. All of this is with dramatic music that seems really inappropriate. Shinto shrine floating in midair that she’s picturing.
Ch. 2 At midnight, the lieutenant appears at the door, the guard has been changed and he has to go kill his comrades in the morning. He’s got to kill them to remain loyal, but he can’t so he’s going to kill himself, and apparently his wife’s coming with him.
He’s coming home, hands her his sword and coat, they’re sitting, her Seiza, him Indian-style. Woman brings him the calligraphy she was writing earlier, he goes to hold her. They reenact killing themselves, because this is a cheap home movie and they don’t actually have special effects. He mimes stabbing himself in the gut classic style, she does herself in the throat. They make out.
Ch. 3
This is a pure and passonate as a ritual counducted before the gods. They are alble for the first time in their lives to reveal unabsshadly their most secret desires and passions…missed the rest, and now they’re naked next to each other. Did they not fuck beforehand? A sword, then alternating shots of their eyes…now they’re making out more and apparently actually doing it, and I’m wondering if this is a propaganda piece or just a couple’s sex tape….as the scene goes on, it’s looking more and more like a sex tape. Something…fuzzy, I guess it’s her hair. See dude now in uniform, he closes her eyes, holds her face, kisses her. Shot of various supposedly beautiful parts of her, but the melodrama is killing me here. More making out and the sex tape theory is looking stronger and stronger.
Ch. 4- the lieutenant does himself in.
He’s in a diaper, puts on a kimono, they write out calligraphy that I can’t read, shot of that Shinto shrine from before, he actually puts on his uniform, and then sits in the traditional position as his wife sits with him. She bows, he takes the wakizashi, wipes it off, and unbuttons his shirt…and takes off his pants. Not making this up, folks. Ouch, he’s going for the femoral artery…or the gut. The gut works, too. Mimes stabbing himself, because again, no FX Budget, and does the cut across his gut, with fake blood spilling out, and that actually looks pretty realistic…I guess, having never seen any fillet themselves bfore. Wife is getting blood on her kimono and crying, and dude hams up the death scene even without dialogue. He’s really bloody. This is why they had a dude with a sword behind you, to whack you so you don’t die horribly like this. Wife wants to stay with him , can’t move, and looks like a puppet as she goes over to him and he continues to ham out the death scene. Now, how does she kill herself?
Ch. V- Reiko’s Suicide.
Guess we’ll find out, eh? She walks around her husband’s body, goes into the next room, goes into her won little room if the little beauty thingamabob’s anything to go by, she goes up to it, takes out a mirror, and starts doing makeup. Gotta be pretty when you die, eh sister? Ooh, she’s got a knife in her kimono. She goes back to herdear old dead husband, having stabbed herself and bleeding out, and tracing blood all over the nice floor. Where’d she stab herself? I don’t really care. She puts the dude’s hat back on his head, then places his body laying faceup, and apparently the knife is through his neck? She kisses him and did she stab herself or not? Oh, no, not yet. She takes out her little tanto and apparently all the blood was his, and she stabs herself in the head with the knife and kills herself, and they’re all lying there pretty. They got transferred into one of those zen sand gardens somehow.

This is from the people who brought you Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, folks.

And here's a bit of story about what happened to this nutjob.

Mishima made film to try and encourage the spirit of nationalism and sacrifice that he thought had been lost- the militant nationalism- by the US occupation. Mishima and about a dozen friends trained with the JSDF, so he knew something about the army, and he had some images about what he imagined the dedication of the army to be. In 1970, he and a small group made an appointment with a general of the SDF forces, took control, and tried to harangue assembled troops into reestablishing the emperor as a political force, and then went inside and committed seppuku. His second performed kaishaku-nii (I probably butchered that), and screwed it up, couldn’t do it, so another dude did it for him and the second killed himself as well. The general got out alive. Japanese reaction- some ultranationalists thoguth this was a dramatic symbol of his commitment to regaining japan’s pride, others thought it was a ludicrous statement from a fringe nutjob. Laughed at by the troops he rallied- they threw things at him. Japanese society figured he was an anachronism. At 45, he was scared of aging, wanted to go out with a bang. Wanted to recreate the image of the fanatical dedication to purpose and virulent belief in the divinity of the emperor.

Losing A Little Bit Of Faith In America

2009-09-14T13:03:00.002-07:00

You might have noticed on this blog that I am somewhat enamored of Japanese meida. Looking back over what I've posted, something like 90% or so of the stuff I write is either about anime, manga, or Japanese-developed video games. So I just got out of my Japanese History course (It's actually the first one I've had this semester, due to the fact that class only meets on Mondays. Two weeks ago, class started on Tuesday, and last week was Labor Day). The course is about Japan during and after WWII, which is a subject I have a bit of interest in. So we're going to be doing a metric fuckton of reading, as well as some movie viewing. Unfortunately for my mood, the first piece we got treated to was an old World War II propaganda piece. By the US War dept. So, good readers (...hello? hello?), I will treat you to my notes on the subject. Most of what I wrote is pretty much transcription from the film, but I apply my own commentaries simply because I couldn't help myself. So enjoy some really rather sickening US Propaganda!

US Propaganda: Know Your Enemy Japan (I’m probably going to have to indulge myself in some serious weeabooing to get over this one).
Wasn’t actually shown, as they thought that if US troops who were occupying Japan actually saw it, they’d be completely hostile to the citizens. Lovely, innit?
War department film.
Starts with laking about Japanese-Americans. Mentious a unit of Japanese Americans who served in Europe well…then goes right for the Japs.
Swords to start- Japanese in glasses hacking away at straw dummies. Various images of festival (Gion?) Very primitive-looking, which I suspect is entirely the point. Cut with footage of trains in Japan, mostly. Basically contrasting modern and primitive. Shinsengumi?
We don’t understand Japan, they don’t understand us. We’re trying to make you understand.
Average Japanese soldier. Basically calls them clones. Unsoldierly, apparently, but effective. Soldier is the highest achievement in Japanese culture, trained from birth, Japanese descended from gods. Brutality, rape, etc acceptable against nonjapanese. Death is infinitely preferable to surrender. Closes to hand-to-hand in a sort of blind fanaticism. Emperor is the ruler, a god, religion and politics all done by him. (Bullshit!) Hirohito supposedly the descendent of the sun (Amaterasu?) Bunch of stuff about how the emperor is so special. The emperor is responsible for everything, blah blah blah. IN his name they bring justice, truth, peace, coprosperity- combined with shots of suffering. (I love how we left this man in power). A japanese prayer- about their emperor #1- supposedly untranslateable. Japanese origin legend, is dealing with Amaterasu. 2600 years ago (from 1940), the emperor landed in Yamato and blah blah blah, and supposedly all Japanese are descended from divinity. Their blood is apparently superior to all others, thanks to the gods, and apparently they believe it. All their acts fall under Shinto.
Oh god, Shinto. WTF, is it gonna be Voodoo type shit? Gods, this is pathetic. How long until they mention the strong tradition of Buddhism?
Shinto dictates all actions for the living and the dead, so try to understand. All spirits are part of the nation and watch over them. Ghosts are apparently worshipped. Apparently, the average Japanese is identical to a ghost, except that he breathes. Constantly being watched to ensure obedience for the emperor. Bunch of talk about how local gods are worshipped. Christ, I know more about Shinto than these fuckers. Apparently Japan’s elaborate rituals and formality are all according to divine will. “A nice, quaint religion for a nice, quaint people”.
State Shinto- forced a mad doctrine that encourages war, causes the death of millions (I think there’s a grain of truth here). Supposedly that Japan wants to conquer the entire word by divine mandate. BUM BUM BAAAAMMMM! Buddhist bell being rung.
Japanese supposedly believe that Japanese war dead become war gods, placed in Yasukumi Shrine. “Greatest Honor” Supposedly mothers and wives take their soldiers’ ashes without grief or tears. Bunch of rituals for the dead supposedly perverted into fanaticism stuff. That’s apparently why Japanese don’t surrender.
If you are not Japanese, what of Japan? Supposedly comes from the Chinese, who said it’s the land where the sun comes from. Basic geographic facts. Tokyo is the 3rd largest city in the world. Japanese are supposedly a mix of Ainu, Mongol, Chinese, and Malaysian….I’m pretty sure most of that is bullshit. And supposedly the emperor ruled over the islands. Daimyo had the real power, Samurai were their knights. Perversion of Tokugawa and the right of the daisho and bushido into a history supposedly encompassing all Japanese history. Supposedly encouraged brutality and treachery. Holy moses this sis such bullshit. Japanese samurai had the right of hara-kiri, and more perversion ensues.
Supposedly endless civil war to become the Shogun. Oh my god, this is such BULLSHIT. Hideyoshi (who wasn’t even a shogun as I recall), invaded Korea, and apparently plundered a lot, supposedly taking back 30K ears and noses.
Supposedly after Mageallen, Chrisitanity was introduced by the Portugese. “Peace on earth and brotherhood towards all men”, and making it out to be the typical oh my god I can’t even type this. “They’re teaching equality to the peasants, and now there’s the evil foreign tyrants rounding up and killing good christians and Christ on a motorbike I want to shoot something. Christians were supposedly burned. Tokugawa era Japan became isolated, “Progress of mankind!” stuff. They never even CALL it the bloody Tokugawa era.
Perry’s black ships showed up. Japanese saw the weapons and guns, and so they needed to modernize weapons and their culture. Feuding barons stopped fighting and unified, and elevated the Emperor to power. OH MY GOD, did they just completely eliminate the Bakumatsu? THERE WAS A HUGE FUCKING WAR, PEOPLE!
Samurai were too few to be an army, so they allowed peasants to bear arms and become soldiers, and JESUS CHRIST, Japan doesn’t even have a noble class at this point. Supposedly the militaristic Shinto, blah blah blah.
Japan modernized quickly. The Japanese wanted to modernize and supposedly double-cross- “befriend the foreigner, use his weapons, then kill him.” British Naval advisors, German war advisors, apparent lack of democracy. Whatever Japan took from the west or the Chinese, no morality or anything. Everything is perverted by the ruling classes and handed down to the people as law. Bottom-up is preferable in the US.
Bows are for obedience to one’s superior. No right or wrong- whether you’re obedient to your superior. Lack of women’s rights. Japanese welfare does not matter, people still work hard, all for the divine mandate. They give up everything for the Emperor. White-collar salaryman supposedly puts on a kimono when he goes home. No chairs, tables, etc. Japanese standard of living is supposedly one of the worst in the world, and it was supposedly just for warfare.
Why don’t Japanese revolt? They believe in Japan’s divine mission to conquer, leaving them slaves to the social structure, led by the “Warlords” of the army and navy, and the corporation owners, as well as the political “stooges” who slavishly follow orders. At the bottom of the heap are the masses. Police, gendarms, Gestapo, and Japanese Ghosts wo watch over them. THOUGHT POLICE! YES! They arrest you if you think dangerous thoughts. The thought police decide who to arrest, and it’s supposedly 10,000 a year. There are Secret organizations to keep the nobles in line- the Black Dragons, who are supposedly in charge of everything. Bunch of deaths of prominent politicians supposedly attributed to them. Christ, I’m surprised they didn’t mention fucking ninjas.
Schooling is government-controlled, designed to mass produce students who all think alike, teaching only what’s required to make the kids servants of the emperor. They absorb only what they’re taught, and only those fanatically loyal are allowed to teach.
“Our race has an ideal to assimilate the earth and the universe. They’re born only to dedicate their lives to the emperor. I can’t make this shit up.
1894- Japan takes Formosa. 1904- Japan kicks Russia’s ass at Port Arthur, gained control in Pacific. Supposedly ambuished the Russians. 1910 they annexed Korea. Allied with the Allies, and took land from Germany. Japanese signed everything, but insited on keeping their own islands. “Tanaka Memorial” is Japan’s Mein Kampf. Japan needs to conquer Asia first, first Manchuria and then China, then Siberia, then Malaysia, then the US of A. Then the rest of the world falls like a ripe plum. Yayy, Japan wins! Many details to prepare before this. Make sure the home front, because despite all the brain control, they couldn’t keep everything out. Western music, dancing, movies. Axis powers. “Super-chess” called Go was favored over western card games.
Western books banned, “If we Fight,”, “Arguments against American Politics” required reading supposedly telling about Japanese conquest.
Baseball was popular, so apparently kendo, judo, and sumo were favored.. Judo- the act of giving in, then tripping. Isn’t Judo Korean? Kendo- no defense, only offense. Sumo- act of waiting, stalling for time, then a swift charge. Politicians think in terms of Judo, Army Kendo, the people Sumo.
Japan infiltrated the west with agents, who posed as fisherman and the like. Japanese posed as tourists to photograph sites supposedly for war. Barbers who didn’t talk. All this information was collected, studied, and filed away. Japanese spies brought propaganda- “Drive out the white man!”
Industrialists- Osaka, Tokyo, Nagasaki, Nagoya, etc. Cities were not the real machinery- small backroom factories in the slums produce 64%. The industrialists undersold all other nations, and dumped cheap goods, and added piracy- made US goods in Japan and sold them to Asia. Undersold Silk to Italy, Cotton to UK, Undersold US FLAGS! With the money they made, the Japanese didn’t do anything to improve Japanese life, but they imported various industrial goods and built up their power from war machines. Sweat for guns, sweat for planes, sweat for ships, sweat for war, sweat for KILL ME NOW!
The greatest weapon is the Japanese soldier- humanitarianism is beaten out of him, he’s beaten into the perfect Samurai, various images of Japanese soldier training and martial arts training, all to the sound of iron being beaten. Final product- the Japanese soldier ready to shoot Japanese superiority into all nonjapanese.
1931- Japan invades Manchuria. “Coprosperity, enlightenment, justice, etc, peace, al to dead people and news headlines of conquests. “BANZAI” Apparently no one in this film spoke Japanese, because Christ, they’re speaking basic Japanese and it says “Unintelligible, can’t be translated”.
Bataan Death March- “Insane arrogance and brutality of the Japanese soldier”. No food or water for 7 days. Blah blah blah atrocities. Unspeakable humiliation and torture in prison camps. Japanese burned most of Manillia, butchering civilians. (Ironically, that looked a lot like Hiroshima after the bomb). Shots of dead Philippinos.
That’s your enemy- a tough, seasoned, intact army, who can supply a million new conscripts a year, and they will outfight us, outlast us, outdie us. And they want to conquer the world or commit national suicide. Defeating them is as necessary as shooting a mad dog.
US propaganda about all our victories. This came out in 45! We had pretty much won by then! Mother of fuckstick. Marines took part in glorious history by killing 20,000 Japanese on Iwo Jima. Trapped and destroyed 100K of their best roops. Marines shooting Japanese, but apparently it’s now heroic. ¾ of their naval strength at the bottom…fuck it, this is all “THE US IS AWESOME WE ARE BLASTING THEIR FACTORIES” (and, might I add, hundreds of thousands of civilians. I’m fairly sure that the firebombing of Tokyo killed more than each individual atomic bomb. )
Jesus Christ, at this I want the Japanese to fucking win.

Been A Long Time Gone.

2009-09-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

Is that the title of a song? I don't think so, but it sounds cool anyways. So I didn't really update this more than once or twice during the summer. Honestly, I really didn't feel like it, and I'm not going to waste your time or mine doing something I didn't really feel like. I'm blogging, not dictating the Declaration of Independence here. But, now I'm back up at school and I actually feel like typing stuff in here.

So, what did I do with my summer? Mainly played Persona 4. It is quite possibly the single best game I have ever played. I was going to put up a massive review, and I will, but I got a bit bored of that and wasn't really in the mood- for some reason I've been on a Fate/Stay Night kick recently, so I'm not really feeling Persona 4 tonight. Other than that, I beat Bioshock (great game), got addicted to NCIS (great show), and generally mucked around on the webbernetz. Not much worth telling. Maybe I'll put up a post on Bioshock later, but probably not.

So, let's go over what's happened in my 3 weekley manga over the Summer. God, last time I talked about Naruto, Pain had just died. So, since then, we've gotten a bit more ninja politics, a bit more Naruto being a Determinator, and more love triangles. Let's start.

Oh, right, Pain revived everyone he killed, even the folks he killed by shoving sharp, pointy objects through them. It totally killed the drama of the past 30 or so chapters, but I'm not as incesed as most, simply because I didn't want Kakashi to get that crappy death scene, not to mention I don't really take this stuff particularly seriously. So afterwards, there's a particularly nice scene where the entire village turns out to thank him for saving their collective asses and they all realize that he's a goddamn hero. And he gets a hug from Sakura, but absolutely nothing on the Naruto/Hinata front. Anyways, after that, Tsunade's in a coma from burning out all her energy trying to keep the villagers and ninja alive (which turned out, as we see, to be ultimately pointless), so Danzou gets Hokage over the objections of a bunch of jounin, who wanted Kakashi. As it turns out, it would seem he used mind control to do so, which was actually a decent plot point. No prizes for guessing just how he pulled off the mind control- he's got a Sharingan! I actually don't mind this plot point very much, as it was revealed that he took it off a dead Uchiha (Uchiha Shisui, that dude Itachi supposedly killed for his Mangekyou). His first action, at the behest of the Raikage, is to declare Sasuke a missing-nin and a criminal, which immediately makes me respect him a lot more and Naruto hate him, as he still thinks Sasuke can be redeemed. He wants to open Sasuke's eyes and end this whole "circle of violence" thing that's going on. It's cute, and I let him have his indulgences because, hey, shonen manga. Danzou heads out to the meeting of the 5 kages along with Gaara!, the Raikage, and the other two. They bring along two companions each, and of course Gaara brings along Kankuro and Temari (woohoo!), but the character designs for all the others are cool. Sasuke follows along, having been told by Madara that Danzou will be there. Sasuke, obviously, wants to kill Danzou. Naruto went with Kakashi and Yamato to try and convince the Raikage not to kill Sasuke, but Raikage's not having any of this "mercy" business. He's going to kill Sasuke because Sasuke's a goddamn criminal, just like a ninja should. There's politics talk at the council of the 5 kages, about creating a joint task force to deal with Akaksuki. Danzou uses some mind control to try and get this force under his command, and overplays his hand as a mist ninja with a stolen Byakugan figures out his game and calls him on it. At that point, Zetsu sells out Sasuke and Raikage goes on a killfest. His crew and Sasuke's crew are currently fighting, and it's a lot of fun. Madara's villain monologuing to Naruto, and there's a whole Cain and Abel thing going on. I don't take it seriously, and the politics bits are relatively well done. Here's hoping Sasuke loses.

Bleach...um....they're still fighting. The Vaizard showed up and Hacchi teamed up with Soi Fon (who incidentally has a bazooka for a bankai- pretty awesome) to bring down Barrangan, but Bleach has been Bleach for so long it's not really worth talking about. They're fighting. Whoo. There's better fights to be had, and I'm only really reading it because it takes all of 2 minutes.

Negima!...eh, I'll talk about it later.

E3 Goodness

2009-06-02T17:29:00.000-07:00

A few things that are FUCKING AWESOME, courtesy of E3. I won't bother providing more than two links (that's all that's open in my tabs right now)- look this stuff up yourself. Kotaku is probably the best source.

Let's start with the 360, which, I'm sorry Nintendo, is my Console of choice right now. Even with Persona 4.

Halo 3: ODST! We've got gameplay footage, and it looks awesome. It seems as though you've got a health bar, but it looks gritty, bloody, and awesome. Bungie has always delivered well-crafted storylines in Halo, and I'm looking forward to a view of the war from someone other than a Spartan. It seems as though you've actually got a health bar, which will be tricky to adapt to. Still looks like a ton of fun, and it seems you'll be relying more on NPC allies. Maybe it'll feel more like Call of Duty...which leads me to...

Modern Warfare 2 Trailer is out, and it looks awesome. I'm not the biggest Modern Warfare fan (I admit I prefer WWII shooters), but this looks awesome. I'll probably rent World At War at some point this summer when me and the brother get the XBox Live back.

Mass Effect 2- Mass Effect 1 was a lot of fun (even if I found the characters to be lacking, but then I'm a JRPG man.) and this one looks just as good. Woot 4 Kroot.

I think they announced the new Final Fantasy release date, but that's a curiosity for me, honestly. I'll play it, but the above gives me many more interesting things.

And a new Halo game- Halo Reach, which is a prequel- there's a shitton of material in the war to cover. God, I love the Halo franchise. That's all that was announced, but still, Fucking AWESOME.

Nintendo. I admit, I've been a bad nintendo fanboy, but I've been playing my DS regularly! Advance Wars: Days of Ruin.

So, Mario Galaxy 2, a new Metroid game, a new side-scrolling Mario, Golden Sun 3 (lots of folk are happy about that one)...can't think of anything. All good stuff, but nothing I'm really into. I suppose I need to actually bust out the Wii and start playing Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3.

Sony...no Persona news, so meh.

And...THIS. Holy. Fucking. Shit. The Old Republic MMO. Do want, and I've never played an MMO before. My only problem is that it does NOT appear that you will be able to take command of a spaceship. God damn it, I want to fly a Star Destroyer! EVE Online looks way to serious business and intense for me, even if it's exactly what I want to do. This means I won't be able to recreate my idea of Mithril in the Star Wars 'verse!* Or run a smuggling ring! Or other stuff like that! Because Star Wars is so much bigger than epic lightsabre duels, cool as they are (and that video clip is one of the best I've ever seen.) The EU taught me that. Besides, all the cool battles take place in space.
*On a train ride back from College at one point, while watching Full Metal Panic and reading some X-Wing novels, I came up with the idea of taking Mithril from Full Metal Panic and making it an organization within the Star Wars universe. A lot of the EU I read (Particularly the X-wing novels) were largely about dealing with warlords who went independent after Endor. So that gave me the idea- an imperial task force goes rogue, and decides to do good. Enter Mithril, complete with Sosuke, Kurz, Mao, Tessa, and all the rest. I unfortunately don't see a way Kaname would be put in there- the concept of the Whispered just doesn't fit with the Star Wars universe in my mind. I've got awesome ideas and concepts, but I feel I lack the writing skills to pull it off. Anyone up for a challenge? Because I think this is awseome.

WhooooPersona!!!ooooo!

2009-05-20T19:43:00.000-07:00

Spoilers through the end of July!

So last week I finally decided "screw it, who needs a car", and walked down to my local Gamestop to purchase a used PS 2 and a copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. I then carried it home in my backpack and spent a while trying to find a working TV to set up in my room to play this, as it is something I do want to play alone, without interruptions, and in my room.

And it's just as fucking awesome as I had hoped. I mean, dude, it's awesome. I've logged more than 30 hours on it in one week, and I'm worried that I'm burning through it too fast. The dungeons all seem a bit too short for my liking considering how few of them there seem to be. (You can cover one floor in a little over five minutes, and with ten floors in a dungeon, that's an hour plus the boss.) The dungeons themselves are pretty cool- Yukiko's Castle has some awesome music, as does the Bad, Bad Bathhouse (Kanji's), and Rise's is a freakin' strip joint for crying out loud! But the best has got to be the one I...was in last night....alright, I did something incredibly retarted when I was playing last night. My only excuse was it was around 2 A.M. So around 10 I sit down and start playing- I had just beaten Rise's dungeon last night (It wasn't hard when Shadow Teddie gives you that much warning on his attacks and only casts Mabufu occasionally- I was all set up with an ice-draining persona, too- gotta love a ridiculously high Priestess link, but more on that later. Should've substituted Kanji for Chie, but I like the original gang too much.), and played straight through all the stuff that happens between that and the next dungeon- finals, social links, and the ridiculous amount of stuff you have to do to find enough info for Rise on Mitsuo (creepy bastard). So I finally get into his dungeon, and it's ten kinds of awesome- it's modeled after an old 8-bit RPG! I felt like I was going on some kind of real D&D dungeon crawl, or playing Final Fantasy or something. And I get to the second floor, and let an enemy get the advantage on me. Stupidly, I had switched to a Persona weak to lighting. Mazionga. Teddie and I go down. Mazionga. Now we're dizzy. Enemy turn. Mazionga. I'm dead. And I had just switched off an item I had that would have let me survive (wasn't really thinking, there.) OK, no problem. You saved before you entered, right Rogue? Nope. I didn't. In fact, I hadn't saved once that entire session. Yeah.

But anyways, the game is still awesome. I maxed Yukiko's social link around the beginning of July. And remember how I said that I thought she looked very cute when I first mentioned the game?* Well, that stuck. It's full-blown Perverse Sexual Lust, now, and I don't find myself particularly ashamed. A girl with long, black hair and a very nice figure (OK, now I feel slightly ashamed), who is also smart, very nice, caring, and has a...well, I won't say she has an awesome sense of humor (my taste runs more towards the sarcastic), but she's not afraid to laugh. So yeah, I'd fall for her in real life in a heartbeat. The max scene features you two hanging out in your room. While the scene goes black, I don't think I succeeded in getting laid, especially considering how short a time we'd been going out (It's rank 9 in the link, 1 below max, IIRC.). Just lots of cuddling and makeouts, I suspect. But earlier you were presented with three options. Yukiko had been scrounging for conversation and the scene was getting a little awkward. Your choices: "Is the Futon good with you?" "Is the sofa good with you?" "Is the floor good with you?". Yeah. I literally sat there for a minute or two just staring at the screen saying "really? Is there any option there that wasn't made by my...0ther...head?" and dreading which one I'd actually have to pick, because dude! My character isn't like that! I went with the sofa option, hoping she'd interpret it innocently, and thank god, she did. If I was playing this for shits and giggles, I probably would have gone with one of the other two, but I'm not, so I didn't. Anyways, yeah, not going to do the dating thing with any of the other girls, since even though you can't hang out with her, you still interact a ton with Yukiko. So I'll roleplay it like she's my girlfriend (I'm particularly looking forward to the confrontation with Mitsuo, seeing as how you met him when he was asking Yukiko out out of the blue. My girlfriend! Mine!

The battle system is fun, I find, even if it's turn-based and can get a bit repetitive. And fusing personas is awesome. I just fused Yamato-no-Orochi, this giant, 8-headed snake, just because I could. Hmm. Maybe I should actually start the Moon social link even though I find Ai to be a total bitch.
*Crap, I just lost the game.

TV TROOOOPPPPPEEESSSS!!!!

2009-05-06T20:39:00.001-07:00

I have a shitton of work to do. I am massively behind. But I need to write this.

Why the fuck are some people so adamant that anything the least bit creative and inventive immediately be given the axe solely for clarity? I mean, what the fuck? Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night was a fucking amazing name. I'm linking it and clicking it so that they can't just cut it. That little bit of a poem was great, but some people (looking at you, DQZ, you SOB) are just so damn insistent that anything the slightest bit "unclear" be purged and done away with. Hell, the trope itself was merged! I don't get it. It was a wonderful name, evoked the image of the trope beautifully. And now it's merged into "Rousing Speech". How dull.

And the natter-patrol also bugs me. It's admittedly not terrible, but the idea of going through and just axeing natter solely because it gets in the way of the message is stupid. TV Tropes isn't about the message. It's about being fun! It's about creative wit on the trope pages! A bit of natter helps that. Justifying Edits, "Actually", and all that stuff does serve a purpose. But the people doing the natter thing seem to be at least marginally sane.

TV Tropes is fun because it's so damn unserious and loose. It's a place for bad puns, fanboy gushing, and other shit like that. And trying to make it all serious and clear to boost the userbase, which is the argument those morons have been making is retarded. That's not what gets people here, it's not what keeps 'em, and it's not gonna grow the wiki. It's just going to drive people off and leave a few diehard editors if everything is all serious and dull and literate. So I'm going to combat this however the fuck I can.

Fuck you, DQZ, for killing an awesome trope and starting to ruin the Wiki. I'll fight you every step of the way.

And this is why you will never see this linked on my Facebook.

2009-05-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

When I started this blog, I had the general idea that I was going to keep it separate from my "Real" life. By which I mean that the people I encourage to read it (and by "encourage to read" I mean that I have a link in my forum signature) are not those I interact with face to face. I've never been particularly ashamed of my geekdom, hell I'd shout it from the rooftops, but I also know that a lot of folk don't want to hear about it, for one. For two, there's a few things I really enjoy that are...difficult to explain to normal folk*, and I'd honestly rather not go through all the trouble. Trying to explain why I enjoy Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha or Mahou Sensei Negima without coming across as a huge pedophile/pervert** tends not to work the entiere time. However, I still try when I'm feeling optimistic.

But This? Dude, I'm not gonna even bother. Katawa Shoujo is an Original English Language Visual Novel. Visual Novels, for those of you not in the know, are a rather odd form of video game. Essentially, there's no game. Even in the rare case of the games where you are fighting monsters (the most famous of these being Type-Moon's Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night. If you want to see them without bothering with downloading/patching/whatever, check out Seorin's Lets Plays for added snarky commentary. You've got to be a Goon to see the Fate/Stay Night one for a while), you don't actually control anything about the combat. There's no party management, no level growth, no FPS action, nothing. You sit back and read what's going on, and occasionally you're offered a choice. In essence, I think something like 95% of these games are dating sims. Boy is pushed into a situation with inordinate numbers of attractive single women, player makes various choices that hopefully lead to boy picking one girl, boy has a substantially high chance of getting laid and/or falling in love. If he's really lucky, he can pick the harem ending and mack on all of 'em. Depends on the game, really.

Aaaanyways (I have a ton of work to do, I really should keep this brief), Katawa Shoujo was spawned in the dark, dank sewers of the internet called 4chan. Ok, Ok, 4chan's not that bad. /b/ is the board that gets all the attention, but there are a fuckton of other ones, and from what I've seen, most of them are your fairly typical internet board, just bigger. I still don't plan on visiting (largely because I've got enough to distract me for one, and for two I don't like anonymous posting), but they're not the true evil. As this product proves. Anyways, a few years back, some japanese doujin artist posted up a brief page with several girls with disabilities- one blind, one deaf, one chick with burns on half her face, a girl missing her lower legs, and a girl with no arms. He mentioned that if someone made a dating sim about this, he'd be on it like white on rice. Somehow /a/, the anime board, got enamoured with the idea and actually put serious thought into the entire concept. They formed their own boards to discuss the idea, and, as of a few days ago, posted the first act, which they say is roughly 15-20% of the game.

So this is a game about disabled people. Your main character's got arrythmia, so he can't do too much strenous physical activity, or take a hit to the chest, or else his heart will explode. He ends up at a special school for folk with various problems, and from there, he meets several girls. There's the tsundere-esque deaf, mute chick and her bubbly friend who try and rope you into the student council (consisting solely of the two of them). There's the legless track girl*** who doesn't let anything, not even her conspicuous lack of feet, slow her down, and her friend, the enigmatic, absolutley crazy painter with no arms. There's the serene, aloof, kindly blind chick, and her friend, a girl with burns on her face from a terrible accident who's so shy and scared of people that she makes early-Negima Nodoka look extroverted. You take the dude through his first week at the new school, up to the school festival, where you either get to hang out with one particular girl (in essence, I assume, selecting her "path" and eventually getting to the whole dating/sex and whatnot) or you fucked up royally and go get drunk with your blind, misandrist roommate and then fall to your death. I did that the first time out of a couple of mistakes, and grumbled a bit that I wasted so much time.

And you know what? This is really good. I admit to not having played a visual novel of the high school dating sim variety (closest I've come is watching the first season of "Clannad"), but I really liked playing it. I admit, some of it's the whole wish fulfillment thing that comes from the scenario of having a large number of attractive anime girls to pick from whom you know are going to fall for you eventually (I've been single for YEARS, man.) , but the writing is really good- funny at times, the art is great, and they handle the plot with seriousness and realism. And the girls are really cute, too. Shizune, the deaf girl, has an awesomely cute tsundere vibe coming off of her, but my god, despite the burns, Hanako is so goddamn Moe that it hurts at times. You just want to pick that girl up, give her a great big hug, and say something to the effect of "You're beautiful. I love you." and then go take her off to a carnival or something and have fun.

And with my enjoyment of this game, I'm realizing that I am turning into one of them. A stereotypical moe fanboy. The sort of sexual pervert who has an unrealistic view of women, and who, as a consequence, is never going to get any and lives in his own little fantasy world, and not to mention is ten kinds of creepy. When you stare into the abyss for too long, it stares back, man. I need to be careful about this.

*On a random tangent, I find myself using the word "Folk"- singular- as an all-purpose substitute for "people". I think I picked it up from Firefly.
** I am quite obviously not a pedophile, but I'd probably be lying to myself if I said that none of the whole "nekkid bits" of Negima were ever appealing.
*** Honestly, that isn't very surprising. I've read an article about how a dude with no legs was banned from racing in the Olympics- and not the para- or special Olympics, because his mechanical legs gave him too much of an edge. Take from that what you will.

Ten Thousand Thundering Typhoons! The Tintin movie!

2009-04-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

So I just finished reading up on the Tintin movie that's coming out in a few years. I was always a big fan of those comics when I was a kid- they're really good sort of "pulp" adventure books, and Captain Haddock was always good for a laugh with his creative expletives.

So when I found a passing reference to the movie, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and DOOD! Peter Jackson and Steven Speilberg directing! Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock! Nick Pegg and Simon Frost as Thomson and Thompson! They're adapting the plot of two of the better books for the movie- treasurehunting, yay!

So I'm psyched, as this is gonna be awesome.

Naruto 44something.

2009-04-16T23:58:00.001-07:00

Naruto...when did I last talk about the manga? Huh. Well more than a month ago. I won't bother to go in depth about what happened with Pain's Chibaku Tensei and the 4th Hokage showing up in Naruto's mind. Suffice to say that I have thoughroughly enjoyed and appreciated each chapter as it's come out. Oh, and Hinata's good to go, thanks to Sakura. I smell love triangle, and I know who I'll be rooting for! Naruto's gotten right back into the stride it lost with Sasuke's massive arc, and things look to be shaping up for a fantastic conclusion. Naruto is done with the killy, and is moving on to the talky (apparently paper-chick...Konan, that's it! is just standing there helpless...Like a good woman should!*) with Pain, who's still espousing his ridiculous idea for world peace. Here's a hint, genius. Nuclear weapons didn't stop fighting. This won't either, and it's just going to kill a lot of people. Still, we're getting this guy's backstory, and while I'm reasonably sympathetic to the kid, it's really hard to empathize when right now he's going on the "MY PARENTS ARE DEEEEAAAADDDD!" schtick. It's been done before, dude. Nobody gives a shit. And killing you wouldn't be for revenge. It would be eliminating a threat that just destroyed Naruto's entire village. Revenge is a powerful motivator, but it sure as hell isn't the only reason anyone has ever killed. So shut up and deal.

Oh, and Mr. and Mrs. Nagato's parents? I'm unaware of how war generally works in the shinobiverse, but over here most folk will tend to know if their enemy is of the "brutally slaughter civilians" type. And Konoha? Isn't that type. Which is why charging fruitlessly at an enemy you have no chance of winning against in a dark room when they're not attacking you is generally a bad idea. If you had just sat down, whimpered, and begged for mercy, they probably would have apologized for eating your food. Dumbasses.

*Kidding, kidding. I hate the "Stay in the Kitchen" stereotype.

Because I feel like sharing

2009-04-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

I should be studying right now. But I'll pause to share this link with you guys. And no, it's not just so I'll have it linked for myself later. That'd be sad....

I feel like I'm betraying someone.

2009-04-07T11:13:00.001-07:00

So I'm browsing various gaming sites (honestly, mostly Gamespot), looking for new games that interest me. Obviously, there's Persona 4 (God bless Youtube- I'm listening to the OST right now), but on the actual "games that are coming out", there's nothing. Particularly on the Wii. I'll be honest. I haven't played anything other than Super Smash Bros on the Wii in a long time. And there's nothing new I want to play. I've got Okami at home that I really need to play (I played it a bit last summer but just sorta didn't bother- maybe because I was playing The World Ends With You a bit too much) and I guess I'll pick up the sequel to Tales Of Symphonia once I get done with Persona 4 (and even then I might just go back and replay Tales of Vesperia on the 360). But there's nothing on the Wii that interests me, really. It seems to be a lot of gimmicky stuff. God, I hate saying that because it makes me look like such an elitist hardcore gamer type, the type that everyone who isn't one likes to rag on for good reason, but when I'm bored, I tend to just want to play Halo and shoot things up. When I really want to get into a video game, it's most likely because the story draws me in, I guess. Controls, graphics, and gameplay are all honestly secondary to "I want to hear a good story." And it really doesn't look like there's anything coming out that'll do that. Short form is I'm looking for good RPGs, and there's really something of a dearth of them on the Wii. I saw something that said it might be getting a new Tales game, but that'd be years off, and I feel like I'm being a bad Nintendo fanboy for turning to the PS 2 or 360 for my RPG needs. Whatever, I don't know. I'll look into this in more detail when I get home and can actually look at what I'm gonna do this summer.

This can't be healthy...

2009-04-06T14:51:00.001-07:00

Heya folks, I doubt anyone's reading this, but I like venting anyways! I'll actually give a synopsis of what's been going on in my manga probably when Fullmetal Alchemist comes out this month (also I'll probably be talking about the new Anime, which is apparently incredible, but I haven't downloaded it yet. Funimation's putting out legal subs so I'm waiting like a good little boy. It's out on Thursday.

So remember back in February when I was talking about how I'm going to buy a PS 2 solely for Persona 4? Yeah, that hasn't changed much. If anything it's gotten worse. These folks over at www.giantbomb.com have been doing an extended "Endurance Run", basically a Let's Play crossed with Mystery Science Theater 3000 of the game, and I'm enjoying that immensely, but it's not helping my addiction. I know I'm sucked into a game when I start trawling the intertubes for good fanart, but most of the stuff I've found has been official and very good. And the more I see of this game (and, given that GiantBomb thing started back in February and it's on average 35 minutes or so a day... I've seen quite a lot.), the more I think how awesome the main cast of characters are. The GiantBomb bit is on rescuing one dude named Kanji Tatsumi, and I'm not particularly looking forward to him joining the party. Even if he's voiced by the guy who did Yuri Lowell and appears to be an all-around cool guy, I don't want to see it. The main group has such an absolutely fantastic Five Man Band dynamic going for it that I don't want that broken up by the addition of more characters- The Main character (I'm going to name him after one of my Play By Post RPG characters) is the Hero, Yosuke's the Lancer, Chie's the Big Guy, and Yukiko and Teddie trade off The Smart Guy and The Chick roles. The four (well, three, since the protagonist doesn't exactly say much) humans have such wonderful interactions that I can really see them becoming a core, tight-knit group- a Nakama if you will. Seeing as the main character is designed to be the player by proxy, I really want to hang out with this group. Kinda sad, I know. But Chie reminds me a lot of one of my friends from home, who I've trained in Karate with for a few years now. And Yosuke's a lot like a lot of the guys I already hang out with, particularly back home (again.) Crap, I think this game is making me a bit homesick. Short form is that I wouldn't mind being the protagonist, demonic hellspawn trying to kill me and all. Of course, me being the antisocial loser that I am, that probably wouldn't work out so well. Sigh. Ah well. Fantasy and all that.

Oh, and I've been watching a bit of Castle. Because dude! Nathan Fillion! The man is awesome. I can say, with 100% confidence in my heterosexuality, that I have a mancrush on Nathan Fillion. I'd watch the man reading a soup label. And he makes the show so damn fun. Thanks, Firefly, for, among many things, showing me that this dude is awesome.

Naonha StrikerS

2009-04-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

I'm up to episode 13- Vivio just got introduced. Overall, I'd rate StrikerS as mixed, but definitely not as good as A's. All my favorite characters are still around (mostly. Chrono hasn't done much other than stand around and talk- and when he does, it's Kyon's voice! Tomokazu Sugita FTW!- and Zafira and Arf are pretty much nowhere to be seen, but meh. It's Nanoha.) and I really like most of the new ones- as in, the main force of Section 6. Surprisingly, the only character I'm a little sour on is Nanoha herself. I thought her actions with regards to Tea were out of line (Tea herself was as well, but Nanoha's in charge.) More than that, though, she's really kind of boring. She's this perfect, happy mage training new recruits and watching them take form. That's fine, but that type of character isn't really good to focus on. To the writers' credit, she hasn't been the focus as much before very recently, but in the past couple episodes the focus has shifted to her and I hope it moves away soon. I feel slightly hypocritical about this, because I still absolutely adore Fate. And really, now that she's moved away from her "I'm not technically a human" angst*, she's not too much different from Nanoha. She's certainly a lot more motherly (which is odd considering she's 19- my age!) but really not that much different. Maybe it's because she genuinely seems nicer in a lot of places than Nanoha. Maybe it's because Bardiche is cooler than Raising Heart. Maybe it's the long blonde hair. Not sure.

Vita and Signum are still great- Vita had a great Big Damn Heroes moment, and Signum's still as solid as a rock in the group, always there when you need her and still looking as badass as ever. But, they haven't had much focus or a great deal of time for action, as the limelight's been on the newcomers. Hayate and Reinforce Zwei, who I'm fully convinced is not created out of magical energies or anything but instead pure cuteness have much the same deal, except with more Out of Combat focus on running and dealing with Section 6.

The newbies- Subaru, Teana, Caro, and Erio- Let's take 'em from the top. The internet gives Subaru the nickname of GaoGaiGar-tan, as she is apparently one big shout out to that series (just as Signum's an expy of Lamia Loveless from Super Robot wars and such) and tells us that rainbows are straighter than she is. Which is very true. She and Tea seem to be even more of a couple than Nanoha and Fate, and the latter two share a bed. And she fights on rollerblades by punching shit really really hard. Vita has been giving her lessons on how to tank. So in combat, she's just awesome. Strong, straightforward, and excited, she's basically a typical shonen hero. You could make her a dude and it wouldn't change a thing. So Subaru? Is awesome.

Teana Lannster is a dual-wielding mage who comes into the situation with not a great deal of special skills and connections like the others do. She thinks this means she's got to make up for it with Hard Work (TM) and nearly snaps as a result after she almost injures Subaru and overworks herself trying to make up for it, culminating with attacking Nanoha very seriously in a fight. Now, I'm a shonen junkie. Perhaps I've watched too much of it and it's coloring my perceptions. But in many training fights I've seen- Kakashi's Bell Test in the opening of Naruto, many of Evangeline's sessions with Negi- hell, even his battle with Rakan probably counts, a few of Ichigo's more intense sparring sessions- the rookie is expected to be aiming to kill and not hold back in the slightest. Tea's moves fall under that if you ask me, and Nanoha called her out on it. Now, if that wasn't the scenario, fine. And in either case Tea's subsequent attempts to attack Nanoha were out of line. But Nanoha blasting her not once, but twice? Overkill and uncalled for. Bad form, even if it did work out. Tea got over her issues and is developing into a solid team leader.

Erio and Caro pretty much come as a matched set. Caro's a buffer with summoning abilites who was cast out from her tribe for being too strong and got picked up by the TSAB. She's cute, meek, and shy. Think Asahina Mikuru without the chest and the rape. Erio's a quick spear wielder who apparently had some nasty stuff done to him as a kid. He's polite and attentive, and generally a good guy. I like him largely bceause one his weapon's cool and two I would like to see more males in the Nanohaverse and I have to stick up for 'em whenever I can.

It's funny, the four Strikers in Section 6 can be easily characterized combat-wise as the classic D&D party. Subaru's the fighter, focusing on taking and dishing out big hits, but she's got good mobility to back that up. Tea's the wizard, blasting things from a distance with skills in illusions and a focus on making the shot and countering enemy attacks rather than dodging. Caro, is, clearly, the cleric, being taught how to dodge since she doesn't wear heavy armor, and packing a goodly number of buff spells that help out a lot in combat, plus her dragons for heavy fire support. Erio's the rogue/ranger, using his ridiculous speed to flank the target and hit heavily, but he's not able to take blows like Subaru. I think I may have to use this at some point.

My main complaint about StrikerS so far is that after the action-packed adventures of A's, there hasn't been much action at all. Most of the fights have been against robot drones (I was going to say robots until I remembered that all the cyborgs who would make for interesting fights are technically robots, too) or training, and they haven't been very long or good. The sewer fight was very nice, so I hope we'll get more of that.

* One of the things I do really like about MSLN is that for the most part, clones and the like are treated as being perfectly human. Fate's a clone? Heck, who cares? The Wolkenritter are programs? What's your point? They're all integrated in with no problems whatsoever. I'm still a bit fuzzy on Erio's backstory, but I'm pretty sure he is, too. I like that quite a bit.

Now That was an Role Playing Game

2009-03-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

Note how I spell that out. I don't think I've mentioned it before, but I'm in a gaming club up here at college. We're having our annual gaming con this weekend. Honestly, there wasn't too much of note. I wasn't involved in really interesting games, and I sort of blundered into helping with one event that I ended up doing badly in- really, I think, because of luck more than anything else.

Except the game I signed up for tonight. I was waffling over helping one of my teammates for a general challenge thing with Super Smash Bros Brawl, as I'm pretty good at that game, and going to this one, but I play a lot of smash and wanted to do something different for one, and there were a lot of other players for two.

One of the best decisions I've made in a while. The game was d20 Modern, described as a cross between "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "Lord of the Flies". There were eight of us playing, of whom I knew 2 other folk. We all sat down and the GM handed out good, detailed characters built around simple backgrounds. We were all kids, for one thing. I was an older brother to one of the other characters (luckily I knew the girl playing her, or things would have gotten a touch awkward), traveling in a convoy to Canada to get away from the Blitz, essentially, during WWII. The first part of the game was some exploring and an eerie chill my sister and I got when a heavy fog rolled in. There were a few other touches that no, we were not dealing with a completely mundane situation. My character was somewhat in denial about all of this, which made for some interesting roleplaying. That night, we got attacked by a U-Boat wolfpack. A lot of the other kids were running around trying to help, but I had my sister to watch out for, so I mostly stayed out of the way. We had thought we'd get away, but our engines died* and we got lit up. Everyone ended up in the lifeboat. That's when things started getting strange. We ran across an empty lifeboat that came from another boat (that probably shouldn't have been there empty) and then a Canadian plane started appearing from directions it couldn't have. We saw an island, and landed there. That's when things took a turn for the supernatural. We were investigating, finding food, when the rest of the party found a crashed plane- supposedly the one we had seen before, and got weird messages over the radio. Then...a dragon attacks the plane and sends us rolling into a ditch, where we go exploring. Nearly get caught by weird goblins, and ended up running into a crypt/cave thing that was the home of a Fae Queen. She tested us with this weird lovecraftian horror that we diplomacy'd into submission (it ended up being friendly) and she fed us, clothed us, and gave us cool gear. The thing about that was that the other players (and the GM) mentioned how capricous and manipulative the Fae are, and that we should not under any circumstances make any promises to them. We didn't, and she asked us to go kill her evil counterpart. Because of what a conniving, manipulating bitch she was, we ended up going to her evil counterpart to ask for her take on things, expertly bluffing our way past her gnome guards (one of 'em was going to duel me for asking if he had parents, but there was no time for that. Would've been fun.) She gave us considerably more info, telling us more about the conflict between them and continuing, as the Fae did, to make a choice. Who do we kill? She told us where to find the Queen's weak point. So we all had a choice to make. Go with the manipulative queen and her gifts and the promise of sweetness and light (however superficial), or the openly evil, but far more honest witch. It ended up being a choice between progress and stasis- do we stay in Neverland or go back? We ended up choosing to go back.

The GM crafted an incredible story and atmosphere. We really got completley drawn into the plot, played everything in character, and never got into combat. That's amazing, and it really impressed me with how well the GM ran things. Made me realize what I'd been missing in terms of real roleplaying.
*Turned out to be sabotage, actually

Battlestar Galactica- my thoughts on the finale.

2009-03-20T21:55:00.001-07:00

Sweet jesus, that was awesome and amazing.

I don't have a lot to say about the first part of the series. It was Epic, it was GAR, it was total badassery and completely awesome. Galactica, you magnificent ship you, that was amazing. Stuff blew up, shots got fired, Centurions were on the colonists' side, it was awesome. Galactica rammed the Colony to deploy her marines, the Vipers generally kicked ass (I was disappointed Apollo wasn't in a Viper) even if we didn't see a lot of them, and the plan went off perfectly.

Earth...I like it, and I've got a few problems. I suppose it's very possible that they settled into an "old west"-esque level of tech with stuff that wouldn't be preserved in the fossil record, but I'll just let it slide for the sake of giving everyone a happy ending. I still think it's absurd that everyone would agree to give up indoor plumbing, but maybe that' s just me. So them being our ancestors? Pretty cool, if you don't think about it too hard. So I'll just go with the assumption that everyone got a happy ending, and maybe look (or try to write?) for fanfic detailing what would have happened if they'd landed the ships and made a city. I'd like that.

Now, on to the most important part of BSG- the characters.

Bill Adama- these three episodes made me remember why I love this guy. And why, if Bill Adama pulled out a gun, handed it to me, and said "shoot yourself, son", I'd ask him to move so that the splatter didn't hit him. The man is fucking amazing, badass, and awesome. He comes up with the single most reckless plan I can ever imagine, and then makes it work. Truly, awesome. And then he goes and takes his woman home and builds her the home she'd always wanted. This was classic Bill Adama, and it's good to get back to that.

Lee Adama- I dislike him for being the guy who thought up giving everything away with regards to tech, but he really didn't do too much besides listen to Kara and almost have drunken sex with her in the flashback. I do agree with him that exploring the place would be awesome. But nothing new from him, if you ask me.

Saul and Ellen Tigh- wonderfully Frakked up before, they seem to have finally gotten their happy ending and made peace. Saul was typical badass XO for the battle, and I loved his comment to Tyrol that he'd have done the same thing. I loved how he was willing to give Cavil resurrection tech in return for getting Hera back and leaving humanity alone. Ellen didn't do much. Those two are good together, I'm glad of it.

Tori- Karma's a bitch, ain't it, you bitch?

Tyrol. Tyrol, Tyrol Tyrol you poor bastard. Dear god, how much more shit could they have thrown at you? I don't want to bore all of you reading so I won't list it, but it's long. And so after being betrayed by everyone and everything, he goes off on his own to just live in the forest. I can respect that. And I can respect killing Tori. Interesting that it threw a wrench into the truce, but everything worked out. So Chief, you've got my respect. Go enjoy Scotland.

Gaius Baltar- man, I just don't know. Baltar is Baltar. I never really saw him as evil or anything, and seeing him in Marine getup was awesome. I'm glad he got closure and Caprica 6. Now go farm, Gaius.

Various redshirts and what I think happened to them- Hot Dog raised his kid, got remarried, and lived in Australia. Because he looks like an Aussie. Racetrack died in space after those nukes, obviously. Shame. Hoshi? Stayed in Africa, most like. Cottle? Went somewhere and farmed tobacco. Being a doctor on the side as well. Seelix? Survived on in humanity's collective unconsciousness and became a Pokemon- Steelix. Seriously, that was the only way I could remember her- "the chick whose name sounds like a Pokemon". Can't remember anyone else significant I cared about. Favorite characters coming up. And Starbuck. Oh, Starbuck.

Helo, Athena and Hera- happy ending! Yays! They recovered during the action sequences and Helo's injury. They go and live happily, Human-Cylon fully integrated, and proven in that Hera becomes the one ancestor of humanity. I'm a bit skeptical on how she could have had that many kids and died in a way that let her become fossilized, but meh. Great ending for Helo, a character that was slated to die on Caprica back in the miniseries. He gets his daughter and his awesome Cylon wife.

Boomer- best possible ending for her in my mind. She realizes what a bitch she's been, but that doesn't stop her from getting shot up by Athena. Good end for a character I had sympathy for in the past, and they did a good job of letting me sympathize with her a bit in the end.

Starbuck- alright, here's my theory. God had nothing to do with her coming back. She was just that determined- it was her spirit that allowed her to take form and come back all whole-like, such was her dedication to not letting the old man down and finding a place for humanity. And I fucking called it that she'd figure out the notes as a star chart or something. There was probably that bit planted by "God" with the song, but that's it. Most of it was because Kara Thrace was Just. That. Good.

Now, if you ask me, as Johnny Q. Public what I'd do on the new Earth? Well, as nice as Africa is, it's a bit too volatile and hot for my tastes. I'd have a few preferences- the major one being the East Coast, maybe around Virginia. That's beautiful country, and it doesn't get too cold in winter. More importantly, I know the weather's mild. No tornadoes, no major hurricanes, no earthquakes, no volcanoes. Found a little community, start farming, and try and write a story in my spare time. If it's really a personal fantasy, throw in a Cylon model 8 I had previously fallen in love with in the fleet and a few half-cylon kids running around.

Tales of Vesperia: Whee!

2009-03-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

So, I got back home for spring break, and immediately sank myself into Tales of Vesperia. I was about 2/3 of the way through it, and just managed to finish up this afternoon. So, having played through the full game, let me give you my rambling review that will bear little resemblance to anything like a real review and basically consists of me just talking about the cool shit that went down in this game!

Now, let me say right out- Tales of Vesperia is nothing special. It pushes no boundaries and does nothing unique you haven't seen before. It stays firmly within its comfort zone. If you've played another jRPG, you can probably guess half the plot twists. The worldbuilding is simple and basic, the only twist being that monsters are genuinely present as a threat. We don't get a lot of information on it or a great deal of backstory about any of the characters. Saying that, it tells a well-crafted story, the characters are excellent, the world is fracking huge, the villains are well-crafted, no one in the plot suffers any major Idiot Ball moments, and combat is fun. In short, though it pushes no boundaries, it does what it sets out to do extraordinarily well.

Let's get s0me technical praise out of the way. On my big ol' HDTV, the game looks fantastic. There are a few areas that took my breath away, and that's tough to do with a cutesy styled game like this. There's almost no slowdown in the combat that I've seen, and the cutscenes are all great. There, that's done.

The story is fairly simple at first, and I like that. Unlike Tales of Symphonia, which starts off with this massive plot to save the world, Vesperia starts off with Yuri Lowell, your Robin Hood-esque main character meeting up with Estellise (Estelle as she's known for the entire game). They each have their own objectives- Yuri wants to get back a stolen Aque blastia- basically the control device for the local fountain, and Estelle wants to find Flynn, Yuri's friend and a Lieutenant in the Imperial Knights. For the first part of the game, the plot deals with fairly mundane issues- corrupt officials and conflict between the guilds who control one continent, and the empire on the other. The second part of the game mainly deals with Estelle and discovering her identity-there's a lot of this for the whole cast as well. The third part is a standard save the world plot. Again, nothing new, but it's all very intelligently done- there's no moment where I said "boy, you guys are idiots", and it was genuinely fun to play through. I would have liked it more if there had been less focus on the "save the world", but I'm weird that way.

Characters-
Your main cast is composed of six people and a dog.

Yuri Lowell is your protagonist. He's cool, tough, and very sarcastic at times. He's your standard chaotic good character, with an emphasis on personal freedom and personal choices- so much so that he's willing to commit murder, which sets him apart from a lot of other wishy-washy antiheroes. He's still committedly awesome, if you ask me. He wields a sword or an axe. Really, he's not particularly involved in events, but his presence is such that people rely on him- he tends to take a lot on himself, which inevitably leads to him becoming more entwined with the plot. His best friend, Flynn, I'll talk about later, but the conflict between how they do things is essential for his character.

Estelle is a pink-haired princess. She looks like she's going to be stereotyped as your typical "naive noble"- she's never been outside the royal palace before the journey starts, and in a way she is. But she's still an awesome character, and never gets annoying. Part of that is because she is one of the nicest people you will ever meet, and comes preequipped with healing artes to compliment that. Another part is that she's got plenty of book smarts to make up for it, and part of it is that she's willing to learn and adapt. She suffers a bit from not knowing what she wants to do with her life, but basically she finds out she wants to help people. Simple, really.

Rita Mordio is a young mage, your typical bratty tsundere type. Really, there's not a great deal to say about her. She's loyal to her friends, particularly Estelle (from what I've heard there's rather active shipping of those two), she can come up with solutions to most of the party's blastia-related problems, and she's wonderfully sarcastic, which oftentimes makes her great fun to listen to. Michelle Ruff does a standout job voicing her, giving her a lot of personality she'd otherwise lack. I listened to a few lines from the Japanese version and eurgh!

Karol is another fairly stereotype, stock character and he's probably my least favorite. He's a young idiot hero out to prove himself despite the fact that a lot of things scare him. He comes to learn the value of teamwork and not being headstrong and doing things on his own, which is an odd lesson to teach someone who is so involved in guilds. Meh, whatcha gonna do? He's certainly not a bad character, but there really isn't much to say. Yuri, Rita and Raven get a lot of good jokes at his expense, so he's not all bad.

Judith is a Krytian, a member of an elfin species that is supposedly separate from humans but really doesn't get elaborated on. She starts off alone with her companion, a dragonish thing named Ba'ul out to destroy those blastia that are utilizing aer (magic energy, mana is something separate here) at a dangerous rate, earning her the ire of Rita, who researches and loves blastia. She meets up with Yuri while the two are in prison and tags along with the group, becoming ingratiated and working towards the group's goals over her own- that they happen to present a better solution doesn't hurt. She's wonderfully witty and calm, and very fun to use in battle. But really, not a great deal to say.

Raven is an old, fairly laid-back man who tags along with the party for his own reasons. He fights with a bow or knife as the situation depends and tends to complain a lot. He gives advice to the rest, and has his own reasons for doing things, which are spoilerriffic, so I won't bother. He's not terribly well-executed (those of you who have played will know what I'm talking about), but not horrible. Props again to his voice actor for turning in a stellar job.

Repede is a dog, and Yuri's friend. Not anything else to say.

Minor characters- Flynn is your textbook Lawful Good without being Lawful Anal- he abides by the laws, sometimes to a fault, but he never stops being a good, nice guy. He's set up as Yuri's foil and it works very well. Sodia is an interesting character, but again, it's spoilerriffic. Don Whitehorse is another awesome leader-type, and Cumore makes an awesome villain to hate, if only because Liam O'Brien turns in a creepy performance.

Combat is hella fun. The Tales games have always been fighting games for their combat, and this one's no different. In Tales of Symphonia, I was only really comfortable using Lloyd, but in Vesperia I got to the point where I could use Yuri, Judith, or Rita well, and my goal in my next playthrough is to master everyone. Combat consists of an open field, where you use basic attacks and special artes to deal damage and the like. Yuri's a typical frontline fighter with emphasis on multihit combos along with several knockdown attacks, Estelle is a backline support/healer who can hold her own in melee (figuring her out in close combat is where I'm at now) and is apparently an incredible tank, Repede is a quick mover, I think (didn't really use him much at all), Karol is slow and heavy hitting and uses up TP like there's a hole in his pocket, Raven is an all-around midrange/longrange jack of all trades, Rita is a longrange spellslinger who can be incredibly broken in Over Limit and has a few decent close combat moves, and Judith specializes in aerial combat, something that's ridiculously fun. I got to be good with Yuri and Judith, and Rita's really easy to use- pick a spell and target it. The game at times was ridiculously hard, but either I got better (not likely after the break I took) or the game got easier towards the end.

So, it's a long (took me 50 hours), fun game with great characters and an interesting if formulaic story. Best game I've played in a while.

But here's something I've noted about stories as a whole. There are two main types of stories- character-driven and event-driven. Most stories tend to be character-driven. There's something that only they can do, or it's less about the events and more directly about how the characters do it. To give examples, Battlestar Galactica is all about the characters. William Adama, Starbuck, Baltar, et al are essential to the show, how it works, and how things get resolved. More so, they tend to trigger the events. Whereas if you look at Lord of the Rings, it's very event-driven. Apart from Frodo and Sam, there's not a lot about what the rest of the fellowship does that couldn't be done by someone else- there's nothing inherent about the character's personalities that means that they are perfectly suited for this task. Events are driven by the fact that they have to win the war, and little personally. In fact, we learn very little about most of the fellowship's personaliteis and motivations. Halo is another one- for all its focus on the Master Chief, he's little more than a mask. The story is all about the war. I tell you this because, despite all the awesome characters, Tales of Vesperia is event-driven. Someone's gotta get the aque blastia back, someone's gotta save the world, etc. It's an interesting observation.

Bleach, Negima and Naruto: Can't think of a Witty Title

2009-03-05T22:19:00.000-08:00

So, first and foremost, our girl isn't dead! Yet... But Sakura knows she's bleeding out, so she'll get there to fix Hinata, hopefully. I swear, I'd be even more mad if this whole thing ends with Hinata tearfully dieing in Naruto's arms. How this scenario ends depends on how sappy and cliched I'm feeling. If I'm really feeling cliched, Sakura heals Hinata up and, just as Naruto causes Nagato to high-tail it out of there and then starts looking for more non-motherfucking bastard blood (being six-tails and all that), Hinata calms him down. Awkwardness ensues, but eventually they start going out. If I'm feeling less sappy, skip straight to the awkwardness. Other than that, Naruto smashed the ridiculously expensive necklace that helped to seal him. That's a problem. Pain can't handle 6-tails this far from Nagato and so books it and is apparently unleashing some jutsu next issue. Ten bucks says it doesn't do jack. There's also a bunch of reactions to Naruto going Kyuubi, including Yamato, who's apparently out with Sai and Anko, of all people (haven't seen her in forever), hunting down Kabuto. So yeah, I'm happy, waiting to see what happens next.

My only complaint is that there needs to be some sort of extenuating circumstances as to why Pain didn't kill Hinata- It's out of character for him to spare her, and physically impossible for him to fail to kill her. So explanation needed.

Negima- Rakan and Kagetarou get up and start kicking Negi and Kotarou's asses. This is a problem. We get a bit of Rakan's backstory- he's been a gladiator all his life. Go figure. And he apparently wasn't trying before, as he's countering every single move Negi makes and beating the crap out of him. Fate is displeased that Negi's losing.

Bleach is out- A decent chapter, if only because the action was pretty cool. Ulquiorra apparently has a level 2 superpower that no other Espada has. So why isn't he #1? He beats the snot out of Ichigo, and apparently kills him as Ishida and Orihime watch. Now, this is Bleach, so clearly he's not going to die, but if he does, I will gain huge amounts of respect for Tite Kubo for having the balls to kill off his lead. I'll be mad, as I do like Ichigo a lot, but I'll be far more impressed with the plot twist. That said, my money is not on it, logically. Nobody dies in Bleach. Especially getting curbstomped like this. Guess we'll wait and see. Ulquiorra's new form looks cool, unlike his older one.

My Thoughts on Fandom.

2009-03-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve been slacking off of late. Nothing new, right? Anyone who knows me knows that this is a regular occurrence. Well, it’s a bit more problematic when you have three tests this week. But, I’ve been slowly studying, so I’m not ready to just jump out my window and fall to my doom just yet. But I’ve been slacking off at this completely inane livejournal thing called “fandom secrets”. Now, I am never going to get a livejournal account. I think I remember that they were mainstream sometime around middle school, maybe my freshman year of high school. I honestly don’t give a shit. This site is where a bunch of people (and when I say people, I mean fangirls. Folks who talk about there being no girls on the internet have clearly only been to select parts of it.) post their innermost thoughts and concerns on various fandoms. Which mainly comes down to a picture of a guy saying “I’d hit that”, various complaints about how they find heterosexual shipping to be boring* , or various personal things that they relate to fandom and are too chickenshit to say in real life. It’s stupid, but I find it addictive. Maybe because it’s fun to come across material I know. But one thing that comes across is that there’s a really strong sense that there’s one fandom for a show/movie/whatever. It’s apparently centered around livejournal, heavily involves fanfiction of the short, quickwrite type, and there is a large number of “BNF”s, or Big Name Fans. It tends to be cliquey, self-insulated, and generally full of a ton of stupid discussions and pairing wars. Basically, there’s a huge number of people gathered around, who have one thing in common, and they really don’t have a lot to say on it. That’s true for everywhere, not just on Livejournal. I occasionally cruise the Onemanga forums when I’m really bored and it tends to be the same thing on boards dedicated to one particular manga. Hell, it’s pretty true on the Order Of The Stick boards at Giant In The Playground, though I have seen plenty of good debate there (man, there was that one long debate I got into with David Argall that one time…stupid, but fun. And I was still right, dammit!) But here’s Rogue 7’s law of good fandoms-
The Best Fandoms are found on boards that don’t deal with your fandom. I offer as evidence three cases- TV Tropes , the Giant In The Playground boards, and the RPG.net forums. I’ll start with Giant In The Playground. I’ve been a member of GiantITP roughly since I started college- I found the webcomic just before coming up to school and signed up for an account shortly thereafter. I drifted around a bit at first, but now there are two boards I regularly check- the Media Discussion and Other Gaming boards. More specifically, there’s the General Anime Discussion thread, which is what made me watch Full Metal Panic, Nanoha, and a whole mess of other stuff. I find that if I want an honest opinion on anime, I go there and ask and I’ll be given good advice. When the folks there get on a topic of discussion, it’s intelligent, well-written, and usually fairly quick. That holds true for other threads as well. It’s the polar opposite of a board dedicated to one subject. Instead of a huge number of people talking about a narrow topic, it’s a small group of people talking about a fairly broad topic, which makes for much better conversation. RPG.net, (I lurk) is much the same, only with the scale upped a bit as they’re a bigger board. I go there when I want to read analysis of this week’s Galactica episode as the Giant In the Playground thread on it isn’t what you’d call regularly posted on. They also just have generally good discussion and an awesome thing called “Where I watch” which is someone taking a show and making commentary on it when they haven’t seen it before, while fans get to enjoy their reactions. The guy doing the Naruto thread is awesome in his writeups. TV Tropes is probably the largest of the boards, and as it’s a wiki it involves the smallest amount of actual interaction, though the forums have been picking up as of late. But if you want good fan fiction? Go to TV Tropes, look up your series, and see if it has a page for Fan fiction recommendations. I guarantee it’ll be better. Particularly, look for stuff with multiple recommendations.
So, to review- boards that deal with one particular fandom? (or, gods forbid, one particular pairing?) Stupid, wanky and pointless. Boards with wide topics that have individual threads on one particular work? Awesome.
• As a relatively sane human being and a straight male, I must say I’m confused and irritated by the tendency of women in fandom to “slash” everything with a penis. Slashing, for those of you blessed not to know (hi, mom!), is the practice of writing, believing, or drawing two male characters in a romantic relationship. Also known as Yaoi. Which means that regardless who you are, you’re going to get slashed. Let’s take a gander at the Harry Potter fandom, shall we? Here are, from what I have heard (honestly, I was only involved in a Harry Potter forum for something like 4 months. Doesn’t stop me being a huge fan). Our hero, Harry James Potter, gets regularly paired up with Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy. Fangirls are adamant that Sirius Black and Remus Lupin were gay. Et cetra, to levels man was not meant to know. Anime fandom probably has it worse. Fullmetal Alchemist, for example, regularly has the lead Edward Elric paired up with Roy Mustang and quite possibly his metal suit of a brother as well. Et cetra. Naruto features every single male imaginable written in smutty, pointless relationships. Am I the only one who finds this creepy as hell? I’ll admit to a small bit of a double standard here: I have a number of lesbian couples I support, but that stems mostly from being a Nanoha fanboy (If you need to ask, clearly you know nothing about the show) and thinking that Setsuna Sakurazaki is really gay for Konoka, and therefore finding that coupling to be inordinately cute. But those at least have some basis in canon, which is why I can see where people think that Naruto and Sasuke are gay for each other. But this concept that “Everyone is gay”? I think it’s weird, creepy, and stupid. I’d excuse it if it only seemed like porn for girls- that is, that they write it to get off on (which in itself weirds me out as well but I’m willing to think that that one’s me- I think it’s creepy to enjoy that sort of thing about your favorite characters and still look at them in the same light afterwards. Which is why I prefer regular porn of girls I don’t know), but it seems like they do it because they honestly think that these two dudes belong together. Which is just…no. Guys don’t work like that, and thinking that we do is just…yeah.

Anyways, to sum up- Slash and/or Yaoi is creepy and weird, and I don’t understand why it’s so prevalent.
Let me end by stating that I have found a suitable punishment for Pain for what he did last chapter in Naruto. Completely ripped off from Dragonball Z Abdridged Episode 9:
Naruto: I’M GONNA EVISCERATE YOU AND USE YOUR GASTROINTESTINAL TRACT AS A CONDOM WHILE I FORNICATE WITH YOUR SKULL!
Pain:…wha?
Naruto: I’M GONNA SKULLFUCK YOU, BITCH!
Cue ass-kicking.

Naruto 437- Refrigerator-Stuffing no Jutsu!

2009-02-26T20:36:00.000-08:00

OK, so Naruto 437 is out. As I indicated in my last post, I started picking up on spoilers this afternoon, and I've been waiting and seething all night. Completely put me off work, but that's what happens. I'll give you a calm, logical response, but you'll forgive me for indulging in a more visceral response right now. I warn you, I'm going to get pretty profane in this rant. Just so you know.

Frackfrackfrackfrackfrackfrackfrackfrackfrackfrackfrackittyfrackfrack.

No. Hinata is Not. Fucking. Dead. We didn't see the body!
Naruto, I'm completely sympathetic with you going six-tails on Pain. You've got a wide-open space. Every single person in the village should know to get the fuck out. Just don't go too crazy because your girl is gonna be alive, goddamnit! You're both gonna be fine, and this manga's gonna have a happy ending that involves lots of little blonde-haired Hyuugas running around...

Fuck!

And Fuck you, Pain, Mr. My-Pain-Is-Worse-Than-Yours. Give me a fucking break. "Oh, God! My parents were killed in front of me! Now I am sad and emo and I've got a completely fucking retarded plan to take over the world!" Give me a goddamn break, kiddo. You sure as fuck didn't have it worse than either Naruto or Gaara. You were trained by Jiraya, and you had friends with you, for what looked like most of your life. One of them is probably sucking on that wrinkled
rasin you call a cock right now, and you're actively manipulating the other one's corpse you Fucking. Piece. Of shit. So don't give me any sort of bullshit about how your Pain is worse. You're a fucking cowardly bastard and I am going to thouroughly enjoy the next chapter, which is going to involve such a curbstomping on the part of the Kyuubi that it's going to functionally dissolve this body. And then once it's gone and you're all alone with your fucking little paper chick, Naruto is going to rip through her like she's made of...well, paper, and then, he is going to torture you. Slowly. And oh. so. painfully. Who knows, maybe he'll go ahead and kill that bitch in front of you, just like you TRIED, yes, I said TRIED to do to him. And it will be sweet. Oh so sweet.

*Ahem, ahem* Sorry for that. Needed to get it off my chest. So, Pain's immobilizing Naruto and trying to mess up his brain with stupid talk about "peace". Shikamaru's dad, a faceless ANBU*, Ino and her dad are off finding Pain, and Shika's stuck there because of his broken leg. Team Gai is heading back and sees Gamabunta (man, if he's dead, too...) so they know something's up. Unfortunately the premier Taijutsu team isn't going to be much use against gravityboy. Pain uses those weird black rods he's got to immobilize Naruto. Ma toad yells at him not to give up, and Pain just kills her. As he's doing this, Hinata, who had been watching and wating, attacks gravityboy all by her lonesome. Naruto tells her to get the fuck out, she's going to die, but she says, basically, "Yeah. I know. I want to do this. Because I love you." And with that, she attacks gravityboy. Who just Shinra Tenseis her into the ground, then apparently stabs her. I say apparently because we didn't see it on the page. Pain lobs a taunt at Naruto about how love leads to pain and some shit and compares it with his parents being killed. Naruto, completely understandably, flips the shit out. And now he's in six-tail mode with some weird skeleton thing around him. Pain comments "my pain is greater than yours"

Analysis-...well, not really much to say here. I am fucking pissed off at Kishimoto for making Hinata go in alone. I loved her character and shipped her with Naruto over Sakura. Hinata had like, zero time in the limelight over the course of the manga. She had the one fight with Neji and what, a few reaction shots? But through a combination of the anime writers really liking her, the incredible determination she showed, and the fact that she was something like the only character in the manga who gave a damn about Naruto before the series started endeared her to, basically, everyone in the US fandom. Plus she's just so damn cute! Also, if you take a look at her on this page here, I think you'll agree, pretty darn hot once the timeskip kicks in. Maybe it's just that I have a thing for long, dark hair. So I have always loved Hinata's character (she's not up there on my Perverse Sexual Lust list (It's really not as wrong as it sounds), but she'll make honorable mention**). I shipped her with Naruto over Sakura not because I dislike Sakura, but because I thought Hinata would fit with Naruto better romantically for one, and for two I really wanted her to get that happy ending. She didn't get much development onscreen, but that's hard to do when you get 50 or so pages dedicated to you in a 437 chapter manga. And we did see how just Naruto's example helped her to change. She wasn't scared. She wasn't nervous. She was standing up strong, protecting the dude she loves. And now she's apparently dead. Fuck. Kishimoto, you are a bad, bad man. Don't kill her. Please.

And to top it all off I've been reading Clannad After Story spoilers to make my cry like a little girl even more.

* Always Nearby Basically Useless

Shippuden Filler to Distract me from work

2009-02-26T14:10:00.001-08:00

Got 3 tests next week. Including one in a class I'm really behind in. Not looking forward to it. So I'm taking my mind off it by watching Naruto filler and the like. So, latest Shippuden episode I've seen- first clash between Team Kakashi (Team 8) and the filler villains of the week. Is it just me, or does Naruto reuse the exact same woman for all their female filler villains? There was that one chick in the last Naruto filler arc with the Sand Sibs, that creepy mannish chick in the Sora arc, and now this chick, who at least is fairly easy on the eyes. So we've got a fight, and a minimum of Naruto stuck in a toad's mouth. Seriously, folks, that's just retarded. One fillervillain draws Kakashi away from the fight, leaving Kiba and Hinata all on their lonesome facing down three people, as Shino's left behind doing his own thing. Not particularly good odds, even with Akamaru. They call up a smokescreen (Squirtle's accuracy fell!), which blinds Kiba and takes away his sense of smell. Don't dogs have great ears? But Hinata's still in great fighting form thanks to the Byakugan, and it looks like we're going to get a chance to see our girl kick some ass. Nope, sorry. Her foe just happens to have some sort of gooey layer that lets him ignore her Gentle Fist hits. And he's a creepy-ass motherfucker. Hinata's fairly good at dodging his attacks, but she's got no way to hurt him, so she's slowly getting beat up by blue gumby. Kiba is, needless to say, peeved that his teammate's gonna die without him being able to do anything, but he wises up and manages to use his Gatsuugan move to clear the smoke and bail Hinata out. Not that it helps much, as it's really four on three and most of them haven't even started fighting yet. But then they book it. Three guesses as to why. Shino pulls a Big Damn Heroes moment and, displaying Batman-level planning, would have captured all of them with his bugs if they hadn't picked up on it. Kakashi shows up, and his foe was fast. Methinks that this bruiser calls for Might Guy to deal with. We get a few shots of what I take is going to be the three-tails jinchuuriki (that little kid who's supposed to be all cute but inspires nothing but apathy in me) and now the crystal chick, Guren, is about to attack. End episode. Next, looks like she's trying to take on Team Kakashi all on her lonesome. We got one shot of Hinata smacking her with gentle fist in the preview. Team Yamato shows up. Sounds like a party!

No Negima this week. I am a sad panda.

Edit: I'm reading spoilers for the latest manga chapter. Now I am an angry and violent grizzly bear.

New Fullmetal Alchemist Anime Preview!

2009-02-24T10:06:00.000-08:00

WOOT 4 KROOT!

We've pretty much had it confirmed that there's a new season of Fullmetal Alchemist coming since sometime last year, thanks to several ads in the manga, but this is the first footage I've seen. And we've apparently got an airdate! April 5th! Awesomesauce.

So, obviously, I'm psyched. I think FMA was the first anime that I finished watching (largely because I hadn't realized at this point that not all anime were like Naruto and Bleach and ran for hundreds of episodes). But since I read the manga, I'm even more psyched that this could be an adaptation thereof. Because the manga is one of the best damn things I have ever read. The characters are great, the pacing's awesome...blah blah blah, I said this when I talked about the latest manga chapter a couple weeks ago. So, please, please please let this be a manga adaptation. Pretty please?

I'm also torn because, obviously, I'm gonna download the fansubs and watch this the moment it comes out. While I'll obviously try and watch the dub if it's on TV and buy the DVDs, fact remains I'm gonna watch this ASAP. Which means I'm waching the Japanese audio. Now, normally that'd be cool, but I'm such a huge fanboy of the FMA dub that it'll be really weird. I think I read somewhere that they got the same seiyuu for Ed and Al (both, ironically, females- Paku Romi and Kugimiya Rie), but Vic Mignogna is Ed Elric for me. So it'll be weird. Incedentally, this means more than ever taht I shoudl really go to that Anime con near me (Toracon I think) at the end of April, seeing as Vic Mignona's gonna be there and I'll have to ask him if he's playing Ed.

Naruto, Bleach, Nanoha, and, for a change, Galactica

2009-02-20T23:25:00.000-08:00

Alright, Manga reviews for this week.
Spoilers for the most recent episode of Battlestar Galactica after all my animu talk.
Naruto 436- exposition. Meh. Pain explains his whole plan- he's going to create the next H-bomb, and then plans to let it be used. It's a theory of punctuated equilibrium. Long periods of peace broken up by the occasional mass destruction. Yeah. I'm an international relations major, so I could tell you ten or so different reasons why this won't work, or methods that one could use to stablize the world in peace without this mass destruction, or even that pure peace is frankly impossible, but I'm just gonna sum it up with this- Pain is a retard, he needs to die. And I don't think, for all his bragging, he's in that good of a situation. Naruto's got his one remaining clone back at the Toad Mountain. Ino, Shikamaru, and their dads, along with Shihio* are gonna find Pain, and unless that stupid walker's secretly a transforming mecha (wouldn't put it past them), he'll get in trouble there. The eight-tailed beast is out on vacation and he needs to be sealed before Naruto. Tsunade managed to save just about everyone in the village. Pain has one capable body left, and he apparently lost his method of ressurecting (the hub got destroyed!) when Naruto took out that one body. Yeah. I'm not too worried, which will probably mean that Kishimoto is going to fuck with us all and have Pain win.

Bleach. Again, pacing problems! Is Kubo going for art here? Because I just don't get it. Nothing Happens. Naruto had great pacing on its Pain-Naruto fight. This? Ishida and Orihime watch. Ulquiorra clashes with Ichigo, and brags how much stronger he is. Ichigo uses Getsuga Tenshou (Moon fang Sky Charge. I fucking love that.), Ulquiorra blocks it and launches a black cero. End chapter. Man, I'm just bored right now. I read it because I want to see where the story goes, but I'm bored. Oh, and the next chapter's going to be titled "The Lust". They've got this whole thing where they're naming chapters after the seven deadly sins. I don't really see how it fits.

Edit: Well, it's Monday night now. Sorry. Weird weekend (mainly composed of me slacking off, but still). But anyways, Nanoha and Galactica.

Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is a very weird series, for those of you who don't know. It appears to be a magical girl's show at first glance (the frilly costumes, transformation sequences, and 9-year old girl of a protagonist), but then you get into the complex characters and, more importantly, the fact that these little girls shoot blasts of magic energy that would make the Death Star proud (a slight exaggeration. slight.) The characters and cool action (along with the decent setting) sums up why I and many other ostensibly college-age people like the show. I can't be assed to sum it up any more, so just go to The TV Tropes Article on it.

Anyways, after a long delay, I finally started on StrikerS. Watched 2 episodes. First things first- Reinforce Zwei is impossibly cute. Like... heap of kittens cute. Second- Midchildnan military setitng is fairly cool. Tea and Subaru are...well, from what I've been told they're nice, but I don't really have an opinion as of right now. Good strategy in their fight, but the in-depth, emotional speechifying by Subaru when Tea hurt her ankle was a bit much. Killed a lot of time, that did. In a situation like that, you say "get up, lean on me, let's go, no questions asked."

On to Battlestar Galactica. I got into the series in between season 4 and season 4.5. So, I'm savoring the one run of new episodes I've got. So far, the season's been absolutely kickass. My only complaint is not enough space combat, but the action on board Galactica during the two-episode mutiny kicked a ton of ass. And all the relevations we got last episode made so much sense. This episode- interesting stuff. I've got a few complaints. Number 1- I had thought that Tyrol was a bit more loyal to Galactica, and he knows the fleet needs the Basestar's power. It seemed like the only reasoning he'd have to go was so that the producers could set up a 2-2 vote with Ellen as the deciding factor. Number 2- Ellen's a bitch again. I don't really like that. Number 3- Man, I really feel sorry for Boomer. She's been through so much hell, and now she's going to be put through more... Number 4- not enough Helo and Athena. Saying that, here's what I loved about the episode- 1. Saul motherfrakking Tigh. The man has gone from a drunk when the series started to fairly incompetent when the Old Man got shot, absolutely ruthless on New Caprica, to a principled badass who, despite being a Cylon, having knocked up a Cylon, and generally having all the reason in the world to question his humanity, doesn't. He's still loyal to Adama and the fleet, and nothing's going to change that. Simple as that. 2.- The Cylon-human integration. I don't know why, but I like this- it's how I see the series ending- the ragtag fleet doesn't find a new home but, using the Cylon organic tech, integrates the two races together, and they keep flying. They'll need to find a way to synthesize tastier food.

* Alright, man, what is the point of Shihio's character? Shikamaru is far and away my favorite character, and it's nice to see him get fans and all, but, if Kishimoto is setting her up as Shikamaru's romantic interest, I'm going to be irritated. Yes, I ship Shikamaru and Temari. I don't see how people can't. They work together well, there's a ton of sexual tension, and they snark back and forth so wonderfully. Plus there's the setup with his dad and mom's relationship. So yeah, will not be happy if Shihio's just his token love interest. WILL NOT BE HAPPY>

Negima 242, or "Thousand Bolts vs. Thousand Blades"

2009-02-19T09:55:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to "Beautiful Wild Green Beast" off the Naruto soundtrack as I type this. That's the song that gets played whenever Rock Lee starts busting out a can of whoopass. And that's precisely what Negi did this week. I was reminded of nothing so much as Lee busting out the Fourth Gate on Gaara. Rakan's sitting there, bold as brass, and then Negi, just like Lee when he took his weights off, starts moving at another level. It's due to his Magic Ereba and the "Thousand Bolts" spell he's taken in. And he. is. fast. So fast that Rakan can't keep up. There's one panel that shows Negi rocketing around the arena to hit Rakan from all different angles. It's not quite the same as Lee doing it to Gaara in midair, but I get the feeling that one of these punches from Negi would just break Gaara's back right there. So Rakan's holding on, but then Negi goes for the finisher. He gives a few details on the technique- apparently he is almost literally transformed into lightning-, then performs a basic charging punch attack- +2 to attack, -2 to AC!- and sends Rakan flying into the air. He then flash steps right next to him in what TV Tropes so succinctly describes as a Meteor Move and slams him into the center of the arena. Any typical Shonen protagonist would think "I got him, right? I had to have gotten him!", let the opponent get up, etc. Not Negi. He follows up with an incredibly powerful attack that blasts the ever-loving shit out of Rakan. Rakan goes down on one knee, complaining how that hurt...and Negi doesn't stop. He knows this guy's tougher than anything he's ever seen and blasts him point-blank with Tempestas Fulgrenis, which, I think, is his most powerful wind spell. I don't know, I can't read whatever language the various spells are in. And Rakan. Goes. Down. They're waiting on the count.

So that'd just leave Kagetarou, right? Nope. He's fighting Kotarou, who suddenly shifts into his demonic form- this is the first time I think we've really seen it for more than 2 seconds, and wails on Kagetarou, taking him down in an instant, too. I would have loved to see more of that fight, because Kotarou's one of my favorite characters, but I'll take all the awesomeness above. Oh, and they still have time to reveal that Ako's finally figured out that Negi is Nagi. Now, the way I see it, there are a few ways this can go. Best-case scenario- she gets over it, doesn't fall for Negi-kun proper, and we all go home. Worst case is that she angsts considerably. Most likely case is that she just joins the harem, which would put it up to...let's see...Nodoka, Anya, Yue, Ayaka, Makie, Chachamaru, and I guess we can put Ku Fei in there as well. That's...8 total. Wow. That's a lot better than Urashima ever pulled off. At his best he had what, 4? 5 if you count Kitsune, who was just horny? Lucky little bastard. I've seen a theory over on the Wild Mass Guessing page for TV Tropes that Akamatsu's deliberately using all the time-extending devices like Eva's resort not so much for training but to age Negi faster. He catches up to his harem and it's no longer squick, it's your typical harem scenario.

I feel like an unpleaseable fanbase for this, but I can't help but feel like God Mode Negi (Literally, he's called "Thunder God Negi" in this chapter, which is awesome.) is just leaving everyone in the dust. One of the cool things about Negima was how for a good portion of the manga, Kaede, Ku Fei, Setsuna, and a few others were actually a hell of a lot stronger than Negi. Now...not so much. I mean, look at what this boyo's doing! It's unreal! I love it, but...I dunno, the best thing about Negima by far is all the awesome characters, and if it just becomes Negi being awesome, it'll be kinda eh. Ten bucks says that this is a Dangerous Forbidden Technique, and it'll do to Negi what the gates do to Lee. But, take those complaints as the small bit of sour on what is otherwise an epic helping of pure, pure awesome and win.

Giant In the Playground Forum Rant

2009-02-18T13:50:00.001-08:00

I'm typing up this rant here instead of actually expressing my opinions over on the site because I'm apparently one flame post warning away from being banned, and I don't want to lose my access to the site where I waste the majority of my time on the internet.

The mods over on the boards there are more draconian than any I've seen on the web, and tend to equate "a bit of harsh language" with "flaming troll post". Two prominent members, EvilElitest and Rutee, who were frequent posters, got banned over the time I've been at the forum (basically since I started college) for the occasional arguments that one gets into when one posts several thousand times. But I digress.

Recently, bceause of both the popularity of the comic and the general size of the forum, the site's been either ridiculously laggy or just plain down. It's a crapshoot as to whether or not I'll be able to get on and check both the games I play in over there and the other regular threads I post in. The administrators and the Giant have said many times that they're aware of the problem and working on it- they've asked people not to refresh so much, purged a bunch of old threads to ease the actual physical content on the server, etc. Nothing's worked. The site still goes down every time there's a new comic, and occasionally just when it feels like it.

Many posters have spoken up, stating that they ....

And for some reason the power just went off while I was typing this. Weird, as the weather can be described as "typical Rochester"- that is, it's a snow shower. Hopefully this'll mean class is cancelled, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Aaaanyways, many posters have spoken up, stating that they want better reliability on the forums, and they're willing to pay for it. The Giant has categorically refused any and all suggestions from forumgoers that he take donations or place banner ads on the site in order to raise additional revenue. He has accused several people of "entitlement" for wanting to have a smooth-running forum, claiming that the problem will only get worse if he starts accepting donations.

Seriously, man? Seriously? Give me a break here. I'm looking at this from an economic perspective right now. I'm a poor college student. I...

Power's back. Nuts, class is still on.

I have a very limited income. That means I've got to be fairly thrifty and decide carefully what I want to spend my money on. I am perfectly willing to spend $20 in order to be able to have a faster server and avoid the ridiculous downtimes that plague this site. It's a purely economic analysis- this is a product I enjoy a great deal, hence my willingness to spend money on it. That would not grant me any extra priviliges within the community, it would not mean that I think I could say whatever I want and not get banned for it, et cetra. It means that I want more reliable access to the site, and I'm willing to pay for it. The fact that the Giant is completely disregarding this option in favor of doing nothing instead makes me very, very irritated. I'm sure I'm not the only one (I know it for a fact), and I think that there's a large enough number of regular posters who want reliable forum access that they'd be willing to pay the first fee for the new server and continue to pay the fees for running it, purely because they want to have continued access to the forums. I don't think I'll ever pay the $10 it costs to sign up for Something Awful, largely because there's no guarantee I'd get a return on my money. Here, I know I'd get that return. So Giant? Come on, man. I'm not looking for the comic to be updated faster or to pressure you into allowing a bit more freedom with the rules, or anything of that sort. What I am saying is that I will pay for a more reliable forum. Plain and simple. That's not entitlement, regardless of the fac that the site is free now. That's pure capitalism right there. Gah, this bugs me.

Edit: Once again ranting here because I don't want to get hit with the banhammer. There was a thread in the "Board Issues" board dealing with site connectivity in which there was a debate going on that the Giant got involved in. Both sides getting fairly heated. Aaaand then Roland St. Jude, the mod who's handed down both of my flaming warnings and the only real Mod on the site, so far as I can tell (haven't seen Gorbash in months, which is a shame as he used to post on the anime thread quite a bit), goes and locks it. That's counterproductive and it's going to piss a lot of people off. Like me, for instance. But, since I'm out of wiggle room and the dude's already proved himself draconian, here I am. Gaah! It bugs me that they've got this very uppity attitude about the whole thing. We want to give money to get a faster server. I don't want to give charity. I want to participate in a movement that'll get me a better forum.

My Wallet is Going to Hate Me...

2009-02-16T15:14:00.000-08:00

Dat da duh na nah, duh nah na na nah, da da dat da daa daa da dat da daaaya..

Sorry. Bleach Ending 17 still stuck in my head.

My second post today is my expression of a dilemma I've been having for quite some time. When I was younger, I was a Nintendo fanboy. I certainly didn't bash other systems much, but at heart, I was a Nintendo diehard. I still am, they're my favorite video game company, but the Wii hasn't had many games that I've wanted to play, while there've been a ton coming out for the XBox 360 (lessee, Tales of Vesperia- pure win, I'll talk about this in about 3 weeks when I finally get the sweet game back when I go home for Spring Break, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Mass Effect, Halo 3, a variety of interesting-looking jRPGs, etc.). Point is, I never had any interest in getting a PS 2. That was the system with a huge load of licensed games that I never cared about. There are plenty of games I certainly would play on the system if I had the chance- Shadow of the Colossus, probably Final Fantasy X, another bunch of RPGs, but nothing made me think I have to get this system. All fine and dandy, right? We're in the next generation, the PS 3's got nothing worthwile coming out on it that's not also coming out on Xbox. Right? Right?

Wrong.

TV Tropes, through its constant references to it, made me mildly interested in Persona 3. Enough so that when I saw a Let's Play of it highly recommended, I decided to take a look.* I got addicted. The commentary and characterization provided by the author is great, and gives a face to what was a silent protagonist, but the game itself stood out as an absolutely fantastic story that really made me want to play it.

Aaaaand, now Persona 4's out and just about every review of it I've seen compares it favorably to Persona 3. The TV Tropes article on it is huge, and everything I've seen about this game suggests that it is absolutely fantastic. Which means that now I need a PS 2. *sob sob* I'm a poor college student! Do I really need to blow $15o on a used PS2 just so I can play Persona 4 (and, eventually, Persona 3)? I...I..think I do. Goddamnit. Thank God it's out for the PS 2 or I might just despair right now.

So, for all of you wondering, just what is the Persona series that has me so enamoured? Well, it's a jRPG series by Atlus, part of the Shin Megami Tensai series. From what I know off the webbernetz (having never played any version myself), the common theme of the game is that they revolve around a "mons" system- that is, collecting a variety of creatures and using them to defeat other, similar enemies usulally through exploiting weaknesses. Yes, this is like Pokemon. But Shin Megami Tensai came first for one, and for two, you're summoning mythical beings from a variety of religions and cultures. To quote that Persona 3 Let's Play: "We're summoning that guy (Jesus) to do battle with death itself. This game couldn't possibly get any more metal". But that alone is not what appeals to me, particularly as that aspect of the game, according to TV Tropes, is murderously hard. Like, throw your controller through the screen and curse at 3-AM hard. I've got the feeling that if I do play these games, I'm going to have to bring them up to my room so that my swearing when I die doesn't wake my parents (yes, I still live with my folks. Poor college student, remember?) But what makes the Persona series (or at least Persona 3 and 4) unique is that this aspect of the game is only half the package. The other half is a life/roleplay sim that puts you through life as a Japanese high school student who's got to build up social links with other people in order to get greater demon-slaying powers. That's the interesting part. What also makes me drool is that the storyline is fantastic, the writing is incredible, and all the characters are incredible, with fantastic voice acting to boot. The games are unique, intelligent, and look to have ridiculously good stories. And that's primarily what I want in an RPG, more so than great gameplay. Which is why I'll be willing to forgive the murderous difficulty for the sake of this game.

Oh, and I think I've already got something of a crush on one of the characters from the game. Yukiko Amagi. Hel-lo. She seems to have a great personality to go with those looks, and several gameplay videos I've seen feature her in a Yutaka. Yum.

*If you don't know what a Let's Play is, I'm with someone over on TV Tropes who said it's the only good thing to come out of Something Awful...If you don't know what that is, I kinda doubt you're reading this blog. Essentially, a Let's Play is where someone goes through a video game and plays it for the entertainment of others, either using screenshots to tell the story (and usually snark, either in- or out-of-character) or videos, where it tends more towards explanation and letting the game stand for itself. I'd love to do a playthrough of Tales of Vesperia as a Let's Play, largely because I think people would get a kick out of me swearing at all the boss battles.

What I like about Bleach

2009-02-16T09:50:00.001-08:00

So, a good portion of my manga review on Friday was dedicated to complaining about Bleach. The pacing is very off right now. But as a pure Shonen fighting series, I really don't like Bleach. Sure, a lot of the fights are fun and awesome, but Negima and Naruto both do them better. The two things I really like about Bleach are the characters and...this general feel about it. I'll explain the later one now.

Bleach just sort of exudes this aura of...I don't know, general coolness. I don't want to say "trendiness" or "chique" because I'm about as far from that as you can get while still being a functioning member of society. But most of the characters look realistic. With certain exceptions (lookin' at you, Kenpachi), they look like someone you could feasibly see walking down the street, which is something that doesn't happen with a lot of animated things. A lot of the splash pages in the manga have the cast sitting around in a bunch of different clothing rather than the standard costumes we see most animated characters in. And the opening and ending themes for the anime are generally fantastic. A Few Of My Favorites. (I'll admit, pulling up the links of those, which I have saved on my computer for when I want to listen to them, I listened through most of 'em.) Take particular note of the first opening (A) and the thirteenth ending (Of), both of which have almost no fighting in their animations. Naruto has great music, but it tends towards the more typical Shonen hot-bloodedness- which is fun, but all the tunes in the Bleach EDs and OPs are fresh and modern, and they really don't sound like something that's going to lead into a typical Shonen hack-and-slash fest. I guess what I'm saying is that Bleach has really modern sensibilities, and despite me being a complete and total fantasy geek, I find that stuff very cool.

The second bit is obviously the characters. I don't think I really have to go into great detail as to why I like the characters, but the chance to see them doing awesome things, even if the awesome stuff drags and doesn't make too much sense, keeps me reading. The core cast of Ichigo, Ishida, Orihime, Chad, Rukia and Renji (I'll throw him a bone for his big part in Hueco Mundo) are great together, and there are a ton of secondary characters I love. Basically, Bleach has a great cast.

All this sums to my personal opinion- Bleach would be better as a sort of teen drama. I know this sounds like a horrible idea, and it probably is. But less of the teen, less of the drama, you know? I'd ideally set it at a College. Lord knows that even though they're in High School, those guys sure as hell look 18. You've got Ichigo, Chad, and Ishida all living as roommates. Renji and a couple other secondary shinigami are down the hall. Orihime, Rukia, and Tatsuki (thrown in because I wish we'd see more of her) are roommates. Secondary characters (minus the espada et al) are there in various roles- Mayuri is a creepy-as-hell chemistry teacher, for example. Things go from there. Keep it simple, keep it smart. Just the character interaction can drive the show for the most part. I know it'd never happen, but I'd kinda like to read an AU fanfiction about it.

The Weekly Manga Review or Sneak Attack, Bitch!

2009-02-13T13:28:00.000-08:00

Good releases this week. All three of the weekly releases I read, plus Fullmetal Alchemist.

Negima 241- The fight starts! Negi starts charging a spell, and Rakan tells shadow-boy to go in and stop him. Kotaro swiftly disabuses him of this notion by stopping an attack that, before his powerup, Negi couldn't really take like it was nothing. Glad to see that he's grown, too. Kotaro's one of my favorite characters, and with all the powerups Negi was going through, he was in danger of getting left in the dust. So Rakan fires off a spear? Halberd? Whatever it was, it was roughly equivalent to the detonation of a small nuclear device. Everyone is shocked, largely because he almost killed the entire audience, but Negi comes out completely unscated. Why? Because his artifact lets him copy the artifacts of his partners- meaning in combat, he's got Asuna's sword and Setsuna's daggers. And apparently Asuna's sword (which looks fucking awesome) has her magic-cancelling powers. So, this artifact effectively nulls Rakan's swords (it cuts through them like butter), and they get ready to beat the crap out of each other with their fists.

Ah, Shonen fighting. Fun. Not too much more to say, except that I didn't think Asuna's sword could do that- I thought it was Asuna herself.

Bleach 345- Crazy executioner Arrancar brags to Rukia about his power. He notices that Ulquiorra's going do do his release. We see the release- he's got wings and freaky eyebrows, apparently, and then proceeds to get a hit in on Ichigo. There's a bit of bragging.

Yeah. That's it. Do you see the difference between what I just described and what happened in Negima this week? I suppose to make things even, I should give a brief, 2-sentance character analysis. OK. Renji shouldn't have much of a problem cutting through that executioner. I mean, he's got infinite weak minions spawning. Renji has a huge-ass fucking bone snake to cut through them with. There. Doesn't make too much of a difference, does it? I don't know if Bleach always moved this slowly. I can't help but think that it moved faster, but maybe the fact that I read the whole thing in one huge chunk changed that. Back when this whole arc started with the fight in Karakura town, it was awesome. There were characters we hadn't seen fighting before, and all of them were quick- one or two chapters tightly packed with awesome fights. Problem is, the main fights haven't even started yet in Karakura, and...I don't know, the fight with Ulquiorra has dragged on like nobody's business. Tite Kubo, if you were releasing this in a graphic novel and we got a lot more with each update, I could forgive it, but as of right now, it's not doing it for me.

Naruto- First things first- Naruto uses the fact that he's immobilized to take the chance to gather sage chakra...which turns the Pain sucking up his chakra into a toad- and Grampa toad isn't there to knock him out of it. Unfortunately, Gravity!Pain (I don't like saying God realm) proceeds to beat up Naruto and then pull Gramps toad onto his sword. He doesn't poof, so I figure he's dead. Pain pins Naruto's hands to the floor and then starts talking- he's got a chronic case of Bond Villain Stupidity going on. Meanwhile, Ino, Shikamaru, their dads, and that Shihio chick are conversing about Pain, and Ino's dad thinks he's got the location of Nagato's body or something.

So, hopefully Grandma toad will summon Naruto's last clone and he'll proceed to wail on Pain like money was owed. I've mentioned it in other places, but I really think that Naruto spamming Kage Bunshin would work here. Pain throws a few of them away, but there's always more. Shame I doubt this'll happen, but it'd be fun.

Fullmetal Alchemist 92. The Fullmetal Alchemist manga is storytelling perfection. I mean that. This chapter is composed of Al proceeding to wail on Kimblee and Pride, two of the most bastardish of the enemies the group has to face, and showing just how damn good he really is. Of course, having a Philosopher's Stone helps. It's also the Armstrong Siblings facing off against Sloth, which is pretty awesome, especially when Alex blocked. Every time I see Armstrong doing something cool, I hear his dub announcement- "Alex Louis Armstrong, the Strongarm Alchemist!" The man is such a Large Ham he's awesome, particularly as he's probably one of the most caring individuals in the show, while his sister is literally carved out of ice. That ice is frozen awesome, but it's ice all the same. And it all ends with Al pulling off a plan that results in what you see below. The next image is Khimbly getting his throat crushed. Next month we're looking at more confrontations. Hopefully Hohenheim vs. Father will be here, as that'll be epic.

It's a shame the manga's ending so soon- I had heard 100 chapters, which means there's only 8 left. This manga is amazing. It's less the awesome action and great characters (I'm particularly a fan of the Chimera dudes who defected. They're just semi-normal guys going along with things, and they prove to be hardcore badass dangerous, if I can cop a phrase from Megatokyo. For instance, below?) than it is the plot. The homunculi and father have an intricate, well-crafted plot that's looking closer and closer to fruition, but all the protagonists, particularly Major General Armstrong and Colnel Mustang, react so intelligently that they're able to have a damn good shot at bringing the plan down around their ears. It's far too in-depth for me to explain at 4 AM right now, but suffice to say that everything makes perfect sense and plans are intricately thought out. I love it.

Why I dislike the Haruhi dub

2009-02-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was the series that convinced me that I was a no-hope otaku. I had just gotten into TV Tropes and had begun to rekindle my love of anime that had flagged the past few years, and saw it referenced everywhere. It's one of the wiki's pet series, along with Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (also quite good) and most of Joss Whedon's work. I had gotten such a good overview of the plot and peculiarities of the characters and whatnot, that I started commenting on the series like I was in the know (that happened over at the Giant In The Playground boards- there was a thread on what fictional universes you'd like to restructure, and someone commented "This one. It's getting boring". The person above them had an SOS-dan signature, and I commented that the juxtaposition amused me.) After that, I figured I should just watch the goddamn show. I did- some dude on Youtube had the entirety of it- and I loved it. It was just as funny, had just as many moments of What Do You Mean, It's Not Awesome?!, and characters as awesome as everyone said. I liked the series so much, I felt compelled to go out and buy the DVDs. I'm missing...two or three episodes, I think- the one with that bigass cricket and the two on the island. One DVD boxset (The second) had the first five episodes of broadcast order subbed-only, in addition to episodes 4-6 and the Baseball game in chronological order. That one boxset for $40 or so got me the entirety of the main plot, plus episode 0 and the baseball game episode- about half the series. Not too shabby.

Now, I watched the dub, and objectively, I should have loved it. Every member of the SOS-dan is played by an experienced VA who I have loved in other roles. The translation is faithful, almost to a fault, and each actor seems to know their character very well. But I don't like it. Or, I mean to say, I prefer the Japanese version. I'll break it down character by character.

Kyon- Played by Crispin Freeman in the dub, one of the big names in voice acting. See also- Orange-kun (Jeremiah Gottwald from Code Geass) and Regal from Symphonia, which is where I know him from. TV Tropes tells me that he was Alucard in Hellsing and a bunch of other roles. He's got a great voice, fairly deep, perfect for that big, kinda quiet badass role. My main problem with Mr. Freeman, and with probably anyone who took this role is simple- they're not Tomokazu Sugita, Kyon's Seiyuu*. Kyon's Japanese performance is incredible. There's such a marvelous tone to it that you can hear right from the opening monolouge that Kyon gives in Episode 1. It flows perfectly, and you can hear the different levels of exasperation, fear, and excitement that Kyon gives, which is hard for me to oftentimes do when I listen to the Japanese. Kyon feels both like he'd really talk that way- it's completely natural, and never awkward or inconsistent. So Mr. Freeman has huge shoes to fill, and unfortunately he doesn't manage to make it. His Kyon is good- he captures exasperation (so, so important for Kyon) very well, but he doesn't have that same flow, that same rhytm that Tomokazu managed to pull off. It's just not the same...

Haruhi- Aya Hirano in Japanese, Wendee Lee Dubbed. Wendee Lee is known for Faye of Cowboy Bebop and about a million other things. The most recent thing I recognized her in was a couple of bit parts in Tales of Vesperia. Aya Hirano brings a shitton of energy to Haruhi, which is really necessary to the character. She also legitimately sounds like a teenage girl, whereas Wendee Lee, who's pusing 50, sounds...like a 50 year old trying to pass off for 16. It's the same problem I have with Jun Fukuyama's Lelouch Lamperouge- s/he doesn't sound like they're 16.

Yuki- Minori Chihara in Japanese, Michelle Ruff in English. Now we get to VA's I fanboy a bit over. Michelle Ruff is Rukia Kuchiki, Yukari Takeba (Persona 3, knowlege gained through Let's Plays), and Rita Mordio (Vesperia) and she's fantastic in all of them. Rita in particular is great. Yuki is your stereotypical "emotionless girl" and both voices reflect that. Yuki's Japanese voice is quiet, simple, and calm. It fits her perfectly. Michelle Ruff sounds like she's trying just a bit too hard to deaded all the emotion, and sounds like they did something artificial that makes Yuki seem more like a computer. It doesn't really work for me.

Mikuru- Yuko Goto in Japanese, Stephanie Sheh in English. I know Stephanie Sheh as Orihime and Hinata Hyuuga. Her voice fits the character perfectly, and sounds almost the same as the Japanese version. High-pitched, breathy, just like Mikuru. And yet it irritates me. That sort of thing doesn't work to my tastes in English.

Koizumi- Daisuke Ono in Japanese, Johnny Young Bosch in English. I really fanboy over Johnny Young Bosch- he's Ichigo Kurosaki, Lelouch, and a bunch of others. He's got a great "timid" voice, and a kickass angry voice. He works fine for Koizumi, but I don't have much to say about Koizumi's Japanese voice, either. So meh.

The dub's not bad. I just don't like it. I love other works of these folk, just...not here.

And on a sidenote here, either I (who was supposed to be listening for the timer) or my roommate (who may have forgotten to set said timer) screwed up and we nearly burned our dorm down. He comes back to his burger cooking and calmly tells me "You forgot to turn the oven off...and now it's on fire". Despite what looked to be a grease fire, he threw water on it, and miraculously it went out. Didn't set off the fire alarm or anything. I don't know. Amusing that I was just sitting here while the oven lit on fire not ten feet away.
* Seiyuu is the Japanese term for voice actor, dontchaknow.[/weeaboo]

Negima 240

2009-02-04T20:49:00.001-08:00

I *think* I mentioned earlier that I'm a complete Negima fanboy. If not, now you know. Chapter 240's out. And I'll say the same thing I said on the Giant In The Playground thread- And here...we...go! Negi and Kotarou vs. Rakan and Shadow-dude. Negi's got a plan, he's got himself an artifact, and we've got ourselves a fucking epic fight. Oh, I haven't drooled this much since Naruto showed up to kick Pain's ass six ways from Sunday. A bit more Kotarou-Natsumi flirting in this chapter. I don't really ship in Negima per se- Nodoka's probably my favorite of Negi's haremettes, but then who doesn't like Nodoka? But those two? Those two are cute. So, epic fight upcoming. Can't wait for next Wednesday.

I downloaded the Naruto and Shippuden OSTs and they're fantastic. Naruto has a really weird thing going where the music recombines classic string tunes and flutes with guitars, and it's really, really good. Look 'em up on Youtube to try and find them.

Dammit Hulu, how could you screw this up?

2009-02-03T19:21:00.001-08:00

Alright, so my last post was full of gushing about Hulu. Well, unfortunately, compounding on my crappy day, the damn site won't run the goddamn Shippuden. I managed to watch one episode with minimal amounts of loading, but after that it completely crapped out on me. I tried reloading it to fiddle with it, and it only made the damn thing worse. I don't know what's wrong- my internet works fine for Youtube and the like, it's only Hulu that's not working (and it's not just Naruto. I tried pulling up an episode of Burn Notice and it's running just as quickly. As in, it's not).

Saying that, I did like the filler episode. Kabuto seems to have accquired a mysterious waif that has some tangental relevance to the three-tailed beast (that's the one that wasn't sealed) and Naruto is acting typically Naruto-ish, which is damn boring, but about half the episode was focused on Team 8! Yays! They got absolutely zero love in the manga compared to what Team 10 got, so it's really nice to see them again. The opening even changed to reflect that they're taking on a prominent role in this arc. Now, I'm a huge Shikamaru fanboy, so any love that Team 10 gets is more than OK by me, but it is good to spread the love around a little.

I like what Shippuden is doing with the filler, even if it comes with a change in pace to the manga storyline that's best described as "glacial". I heard this on the Anime Counterpoint Podcast- that they switched from covering 2-3 manga chapters per episode as they did in Naruto proper, thus causing them to catch up and the massive filler glut to going to 1-1.5. They've halved the pace at which the anime adapts the manga, and it's falling into Dragonball Z-esque padding. Which is odd, because you look at what they've got left to cover- Jiraya's arc (substantial), the Sasuke-fest (far, far more substantial than I'd like), Sasuke's fight with Itachi (boo!), the showdown with the eight-tailed beast (short but awesome), and Pain's attack on Konoha (ho-lee shit!). And they're still really worried about catching up. So the filler right now is covering something that I think sounds really cool- a far more in-depth look at the other tailed beasts. They missed their chance to give a bit more of a focus on the two-tails, but I'm glad they decided to focus on the three-tails, as well as give Team 8 some more screentime. This is the type of filler they need to be doing- stuff that could (and possibly should) have been in the manga proper.

Edit: The site's schiziophrenic as hell. I just managed to watch another episode. Mmm, mindless fillery goodness... on the downside, Sasuke. Boo, Sasuke! And I don't know what the hell kinds of drugs the makers of the last anime ending were on, but I'm damn sure it was something.

Starting Right Out Here...

2009-02-03T11:34:00.000-08:00

Hey folks. I'm going to assume that most of the people reading this, if you're reading it at all, are going to be the people I talk with online at Giant In The Playground and TV Tropes. I'm going to keep this out of my Facebook and non-online life, so this is its own monster. If you stumble across this, hey! I'm Rogue 7, a general geek who tends to focus on Anime, Video Games, and tabletop games. I've got so much geek stuff that I tend to talk about that I feel the need to get this down somewhere, even if no one else is reading it. If anything, It'll be interesting to go back and read it.

This blog is gonna focus on anime and manga for the most part. I'll throw up reviews of stuff I like, and maybe gush about the new manga chapters coming out each week (or month in the case of Fullmetal Alchemist), and throw around a few recommendations of stuff I've found online.

So the trigger that I got to starting this blog was functionally two things. The first is that I was listening to the "Anime Counterpoint" podcast by a bunch of the guys behind various Abridged Series- MasakoX, Hbi2k, and KaiserNeko, who all collaborate on DragonBall Z Abridged, which is, by and large, the funniest thing I've seen in a good long while. Check it out. They're doing a general anime talk, which got me thinking. And anyone who knows me knows that I'm always thinking. So I'm putting things down in electronic form. (I'd say on paper, but I haven't really written anything seriously on paper in a damn long while)* But their podcast is really good, they've got a lot of insight into fandom and the industry, and a lot of the time they can be pretty damn funny.

The second is something I really want to advertise. I like Naruto quite a lot. It has some fantastic world building, some great action sequences, and some great characters. It's got problems, lord knows it's got problems- the pacing is bad, there used to be far too much focus on Sasuke (*shakes his fist in anger*), and several issues don't appear to be getting close to being resolved. I'm talking more about the manga here, as that's what I tend to focus on, particularly since Shippuden has dragged on a ridiculously long time. But I'll keep watching, I'll keep reading, and gorramit, I'll keep complaining! But that's getting a bit long-winded, and not really what I want to talk about. I'm sure that most people in the U.S. are familliar with Hulu for TV broadcasting online. It's got a ton of series, both new and old- they've got Firefly up there, which I will most certainly gush about at some point. But they've also got a good deal of Anime, most of it from Viz or Funimation (Funimation recently has really done a fantastic job of getting anime out- they released Nanoha for cripe's sake!), but I just looked and it turns out that they've somehow cut a deal with whoever it is does the Japanese broadcasts, and quite possibly the fansubbers over at Dattebayo** and have both the last filler arc of the original series (my favorite filler arc) and the new Shippuden episodes, one week delayed. It's free, it's legal, and you actually support Kishimoto and the official release. Plus, you don't have to deal with the assholes over at Dattebayo. You can wait one week, can't you? Please do.

I indulge in fansubs and scanslations myself (I can't live without my weekly Negima fix), but I've never had any illusions that it's legal. It's not. I'm not gonna condemn it, but I'm not gonna support it. I try to go out to buy series I watch fansubbed. (That reminds me, I've gotta pick up Nanoha)- Full Metal Panic and Haruhi Suzumiya being the two most recent (I'm a poor college student), but this is a big deal for the Anime industry, particularly since I think Cartoon Network dropped Shippuden- they're going to be back-releasing the episodes on Hulu, 8 per week. Naruto's freakin' huge. There are a ton of dub fans who watched it on Toonami (RIP) who now can't get their ninja fix, who probably went online and found it on Hulu or started getting fansubs. Now they've got a legal option to watch the series, and those who watched the fansubs now also have a legal means to watch without having to wait for the dub/DVDs to catch up. So if you like Naruto, make sure to watch it on Hulu. It's legal, and it's probably going to be better than the fansubs. Now Im'a go watch it. Later!

Ironic point- what I'm talking about here just came up on the Anime Counterpoint podcast I'm listening to. They're talking about fansubs and getting a quick legal version up on some site (this aired back in August '08, and here I am talking about the legal quicksub of Naruto up. Funny.

* I think I'll take this opportunity to mention that online, when I'm talking, I use parentheses a lot. I don't really know why, I certainly try not to do it when I write formally. I just tend to inject a sentence with tangential relevance into whatever I'm talking about, and the quickest way to do that is just stick in some parentheses.
** Those guys do a really good fansub job, but Dear Lord, they're assholes. I say this from just browsing around their site to get to the episodes. They're total assholes, really rude. I'm glad I don't have to use them if I want a Naruto fix.