flemmings | Entries tagged with anime

Lying with one's legs up against a wall can get very boring unless you're an experienced meditator which lord knows I'm not, so I rousted out my luddite's walkman and listened to a random tape instead. (I can't do mp3s or whatever the latest digital is. Most of my tapes were made from obscure records in the 80s and 90s. Best I could do now is get one of those players that records to digital, but the state of my records after 30 years is not to be considered, and I have nothing to play the files on even if I did.)

Random tape turned out to be the Harlock sound track. That dates to the late 90s, that half decade lost to reverse culture shock, but references a much earlier fannish golden age. Not that I was personally involved in it. My sister was, and American friends in Tokyo, and I caught sideways glimpses of those mid-80s glorious days from her APAs and their conversation. The reality may have been excruciating- raw tapes if you were lucky, appalling butchered dubs as the norm- but the ethos, as reflected both in the fans' recollections and, oddly, in the gung-ho Harlock music itself, is of a brave new world and an immense buoyancy.

The complete ending theme is at
https://youtu.be/u7BFIAn9wug

Translation text here, from .mit.edu. Fannish, as I say.
http://www.mit.edu/~rei/MANGA/harlock-song

* More Than a Feeling was roundly panned when it first came out-- lightweight, lacking musical complexity, blah blah blah, as if anything 70s had depth-- but now it's a locus classicus of some kind.

So there's an animated version of Untamed, and I watched the first episode on my tablet last night. Would like to use my desktop but WinXP's browser doesn't play nicely with youtube, so zannen, tiny screen it is for me. Am still not feeling the Untamed love, nd it's also very dark/ difficult to follow, but the animation is pretty.

The day after acupuncture I'm always a kilo or half kilo lighter and happily shrunk in the knees and elbows. Would really like to keep this up the rest of the week, but mug is mug and doesn't work like that.

Finished Tristram Shandy, finally. Doubtless there are those who enjoyed it more than I. They're all over at Goodreads writing their reviews in what they take to be a pastiche of Sterne's style, which works as well as these things usually do ie not at all. Cf Geoffrey Willans, Nigel Molesworth, etc.

Made it to the greengrocer's yesterday and indulged in asparagus (much better than Loblaws' reedy woody offerings), cherries (non-existent there) and a small cabbage (the supermarkets have nothing but gargantuan ones, presumably to feed a horde of Hungarians.) Using cabbage is a dicey proposition for me, but I steamed a quarter of it with some carrots and slathered it with leftover peanut sauce from the pad thai I ordered on Friday. Next step is to make my own sauce, but experience suggests one can't do it with the soy-substitute pb I use. So must buy the real thing, and then try not to eat it.

Veg indulgence is with a view to losing another pound if I can. The hot weather bloat is most dispiriting when I step on the scales every morning. The other trick I've read about is to take your weight, halve it, and drink that many ounces of water each day. In my case that's pushing eight large glasses. Tried it yesterday with little results, because yesterday was hot, and gadding about, even on the bike, had me sodden with sweat. Like bicycling in Spain in the hottest summer in 80 years: I drank litres of water and it transpired at once, bypassing my kidneys completely.

Someone on tumblr has been live blogging Utena and reached the last episode today. What a wild ride. Utena ran from April to December of 1997. Finder Jean taped it for me, but the last ep was shown on Christmas Eve, she was out celebrating that day, and forgot to set her timer to record. It was months before the local Japanese store got it in, and as you may recall, the next to last episode ends hanging off the most precipitous of cliffs. Could barely stand to watch it once I got my hands on it, but Ikuhara, bless him, didn't blink once, though chasms of romantic tropes opened up all around him and begged him to fall into them.

1. If I set out to do housekeeping, thinking 'I really must clean this room', it doesn't get done since I am not the boss of me. But if I'm loose-ending in the afternoon, waiting for an acupuncture appointment at the new place and worrying it will rain, well look, the vacuum's already here, just a once-over; and at the end I've moved the futon platform and taken out the drawers and sucked up 1.5 canisters' worth of dust elephants. I'm sure I haven't done that any time this year, but there was actually surprisingly little dust for a year's neglect. And for once my back didn't ache and hips didn't twinge doing it, so yay my intermittent yoga stretching.

2. My local is closed so I went to Starbucks up the street for a chai latte. They really shouldn't put calorie counts on things: A slice of lemon loaf is 90 calories less than an egg-cheese muffin, so guess which one I had? Starbucks was pleasantly empty for a holiday Monday: enough people to be cheerful but tables and chairs for the asking. Weekends leave me contact-deprived anyway and long weekends throw in a Monday, so it was nice to have people around me for a change. Especially since one of them was a guy in one of the armchairs, cradling a very few weeks' old scrap of humanity in a pink sleeper against his chest with one hand and drinking coffee with the other.

3. One of the old studio's acupuncturists works Mondays at a place just south of the grossly misnamed Chinatown Centre. Back in 2000- which I can now scarce recall- it was a busy enough place, when I went there to shell out $25Can for a single Saiyuuki tank at Kikiwai. But for the last ten years it's been going downhill. Now a good third of the store spaces are empty and the rest all sell identical tat- shoes, hats, garish fancy dresses for little girls. The bootleg DVD stores are gone, as are almost all the anime guzu ones: the one place with anime keychains (among other kinds) was still Dragonball and One Piece and Naruto. Sic transit and all. A bit sad, because this weekend is the 17th anniversary of my induction into Saiyuuki fandom (celebrated: it was actually a gradual process) and I heave a nostalgic sigh for those halcyon days.

4. The new-to-me acupuncture studio is in an old factory building, which gives you high ceilings and windows, even if they only look out on a cinder block wall. It too has comfy chairs but they aren't as comfy as my old studio's. But still, I must be grateful that it exists at all, so I will be. And as ever, being in some place totally new makes the world feel larger. If I could only travel again, I think half my megrims would vanish.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/878827.html

Dreamed I was in sort of an Edo-period chanbara, all properly dressed in Edo-period kimono, at a probably *not* Edo-period restaurant with present-day shoji booths etc (that now I think might owe to Samurai Champloo) in the company of a bunch of Japanese dream-friends. Had to use the bathroom down the hall, which is very not Edo. The toilet was western but it sat in a long earthen pit which was six inches deep in muddy water. 'Use the toilet slippers!' my friends were saying, but I was all 'What about my socks!!???'

My mind is now trained to recognize toilet dreams as the sign of a full bladder, so I woke up and limped down the hall. Then viewed the grey light out the study window, checked clock- 8:15- and remembered that the 'We are currently experiencing extremely high volumes of calls' tax dep't starts answering their phones at eight. (And not 'available 24 hours' as the recorded message likes to tell you. That's for minor city stuff other than property taxes- well, maybe for downed power lines; I dunno. But not taxes what everyone wants to ask about.)

At 8:15 everyone doesn't want to ask. Got a clerk right away and inquired why they hadn't taken their money from me this month. After I'd answered the usual skill-testing questions, she clicked through to my account. Property Tax Increase Rebate, which last year sent me a grateful cheque, this year is applied directly to my taxes. 'You'll be receiving a letter from the city.' I bet I will; information is not the bureaucracy's strongest suit. So October's installment is cancelled, November's is reduced, and it's back to normal in December.

Which means I have five hundred dollars more than I thought I did. So maybe I *will* get a tablet after all.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/819375.html

I had the morning off, aside from an ill-timed chiropractor appointment. Intended to go down to the Art Gallery and take in the Lawren Harris exhibit, or maybe go to Old Navy and buy what I'm assured are the only large-sized tank tops that last. But the day was muggy stinky, the sun was hot, and I had a touch of summer stomach from, well, eating when it's hot. So I bought a waterpic instead, as I've long intended to do, and may some day get around to using it.

Then did my charitable shift (for a worker who'd already put in a full day) after which my back hurt as it does when I stand for any period of time. I did at least go out for the 8:30 showing of Mononoke Hime for which I had a ticket, was assured that the doors would open at 7:30 or a little later, stood in line till nearly 8; and then asked myself, did I want to sit in a narrow chair in a full house (ticket holder line went around one corner, rush ticket line went around the opposite one) on an aching hip for two hours while watching a film I wasn't crazy about to begin with? No, I would rather go and have coffee and read my book. Which did. Tomorrow I know I can come later and still get a balcony seat for Howl, and I will be armed with muscle relaxants and cough syrup to combat the two present seasonal evils. Also, possibly, the world and its brother won't want to see Howl's Moving Castle, though I bet they do.

But it was nice, actually, to be out of an evening, watching the light fade behind the patio trees at Aroma. Last time I did that the sun was still shining when I left at 8 p.m. June does have its uses.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/806629.html

Unusually warm days are either uplifting or fantoddy, and today alas was the latter. Mostly because I went up to my sister's house to scarfle various things she doesn't want to take to her new place and found it stripped and empty and unwontedly clean. I'd expected to revisit a few happy memories from Christmas of '93, when I was newly into anime and reading through her stacks of thick anime APAs, which felt then like fragmentary relics of ancient civilizations- mentions of Seiya, Macross, GoShogun, and the granddaddy of them all, Gatachaman, all fandoms my sister was into in the far-off days of the mid-80s. But what I got instead was a flashback to '88 when she first moved in, that ghastly hot summer after we'd emptied and sold the family house and were all suffering various forms of PTSD from it. Yuck.

So I had recourse to the time-honoured depression buster: I vacuumed the downstairs, did a load of laundry, and slow-cooked a free-range chicken with carrots and potatoes. Yumm, that was good. One shouldn't eat at 10 pm, but slow-cooking is slow-cooking.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/767135.html

I wonder if youtube has the NHK2 evening sign-off? Slowly turning globe, portentous version of Kimi ga Yo*, sweet motherly voice at end telling you to beware of fires. Trouble is I don't know what one calls the sign-off: it'd be the closing or end theme in anime. (Googling which got me the end theme to an anime called Welcome to the NHK. How out of loop I am, now that nobody tapes shows off TV, and one must have an updated OS to troll the anime channels.)

Of course, it's probably changed since the 90s.

*I mean, all versions of Kimi ga yo are portentous, but some more than others.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/752374.html

Watched a few more eps of Otogizoushi last night. Quite aside from the unfortunate choice of voice actors-- the two major male leads grate on me hideously, and only Miki Shin'ichi is worth listening to, but natch-- I find an unplaceable sense of oppression and iya da! in the thing. It ran in late 2004 and I got eps from Katchan usually a month or six weeks later: and I fancy that's what I was watching in the wake of the tsunami, which would explain the yuckies I associate with it.

Finished something called The Tibetan Book of Meditation which of course is not by a Tibetan but by 'Lama Christie McNally.' It has the virtue, if it is, of presenting doctrine straight, not elided for westerners as other western presenters do to some extent. So everything that happens, and that means *everything*, is because of karma. It snowed on me today because of something I did once; I'm myopic because of something I did once; I'm solvent because of something I did once. And the reason Americans are wealthy and prosperous, and Mexicans are not? 'Once upon a time the Americans did something wonderful and generous, and the Mexicans didn't.' Uh yeah. Sure.

It would have been a fine day even if I'd accomplished nothing, being one of those sunny blue and yellow October jobbies with red maples and big white clouds, whose mere beauty justifies its existence. But I also finally got to play about with the cement I bought a month ago, patching some of the earthquake-deep rifts in the back concrete pad so as to get an idea of the proper consistency. Two packages doesn't go very far and I'm not sure if this is what I need to brace the progressively more crumbling front stoop, but I bought two more packs and shall probably have a go at it tomorrow. Alas that my wooden form is a silly millimetre too high to fit on the side. OTOH, I'm obviously going to be doing this in stages, so can start with just an ordinary piece of wood.

Then watched two eps of Otougizoushi. Been two years since I used my DVD player and had to replace batteries in all the remotes. Begin to find my screen too small after all the huge flat screens people have now. But I'm so not a watcher that buying one is pointless, especially since I don't have cable or even a digital antenna.

Wish I hadn't learned that Charles Todd is American. Not to be chauvinistic, but now I'll be wondering more about things like that respectable woman in the 1920-set one who's walkng outside bareheaded. I know people get their own historical details wrong, but it's that much likelier when you write another culture.

1. Thanks to my sister I knew there was an anime fleamarket at the central reference library here, fundraising for the Judith Merrill SFF collection at the library down the street from work. And because I note things on my calendar and then don't go, and because it's really autumn out there, I made myself bicycle over in the rain, through the 'changing, fearfully changing' Yorkville of my adolescence to condo-surrounded Yonge St.

A small venue-- this is your notion of an auditorium, TLS?-- with less than 20 tables, offering the usual used manga and used goods and other oddities, like a bunch of BBoy Gold magazines in pristine condition from 2000 that the vendor offered to sell in bulk. I probably have them, or had them, and politely declined; I'm nostalgic for many things from 2000 but BBoy Gold isn't one of them. (Nor do I know why, but the same old same old of BL and the frankly less than professional standard of many Biblos artists probably comes into it.) What I did buy for $20 was the six DVDs of Otogizoushi, that I saw random eps of ten years back, because I never figured how the modern episodes linked with the Heian ones, and because the modern eps were oh so exactly Tokyo.

Yes, I could probably see them on crunchyroll or something, but my OS and browser are both out of date. Also I got a trojan some years back from, I think, the Kohri no Mamono manga page, and have been antsy ever since about online fannish works.
( Read more... )

Harry Dresden is teaching me to speed read. You only have to read the first sentence of a paragraph, then run an eye through the rest in case any important words jump out, then the next first sentence, and so on. I can't say the exercise is worth it. This is very Campbell soup fantasy-- all the usual ingredients tasting much the same no matter what the label says. Not sure why he's such a big hit; the Night Side is at least enjoyable fluff.

I was going to say But at least there are no vampires, only of course there are vampires. What there isn't is vampires as written by women writers. I picked up something by Nalini Singh, figuring that an Indo-New Zealander would have a different take on things. Nope. The same as Kittredge and McLeod: double whammy female something (in this case a vampire hunter turned angel-with-wings) with 'too many hawt boyfriends' problems and err 'default urban fantasy vocabulary' problems. "She sucked in a breath as she felt the temptation of Dmitri's scent wrap around her in a glide of fur and sex and wanton indulgence." Dmitri is a vampire, of course.

There's a problem when you begin with the best, as I did in the genre which I have to call 21st Century Urban Fantasy, to distinguish it from the folksy likes of Huff and de Lint. Aaronovitch and Griffin are about the urbs, not the genre tropes; but why is no one else?
( And speaking of starting with the best )

My television dates from 1996, my VCR from the same date, my DVD player from 2003. I am not, to put it mildly, a visual person. That's why they've all been gathering dust since approximately 2008, the last time I marathoned anything. (That, and the fiddly vexatious resetting of channels etc needed because I don't have cable and do have frequent brief blackouts that unset everything.) But I figured that I was wasting my life playing online solitaire, and so every half hour of Addiction Solitaire (and there are many such during my day) must be matched by a half hour of DVDs or whatever.

Thus I am watching the last disk of Twelve Kingdoms, the one I didn't want to watch until I'd read the book. I don't think I'll ever read the book now, since 2010's half-blind foray into the series left me scarred for life, so might as well watch. But 12K gives me the oogies, frankly, and not merely because reading the books tends to coincide with unhappy periods in my life. As I say every time I talk about 12K, that world is not a happy place. So I shall be very happy when Upright But Not-The-King is safely murdered by Wastrel Is-The-King and everyone can take their hard feelings to bed with them.

OTOH it *is* very nostalgic to be watching anime again, in a sort of 1997 Utena or 2000 Saiyuuki fashion.

A post on the saiyuki LJ sent me off to youtube in nostalgic search of Hakkai and Gojou. There I found eps subtitled in French (anything from vostFR, basically.) It's heaven. I finally have that bland but useful s'en vouloir construction pinned down. And kiyou binbou turns into a literal 'pauvre mais débrouillard'. I must watch all of season 2 this way.

I'm sure it's impossible, but Yahoo's Addiction Solitaire viewed on IE is far more difficult than the same site viewed in Firefox. Besides, FF has ads before the game and IE doesn't. Also, why can I go straight to the Yahoo addiction solitaire site but must login and do captchas to get to Pyramid? I need a higher quality of time waster. Ah well-- see above.

My doctor told me Monday 'You have a virus. Sleep as much as possible, have a little walk for exercise, then take a nap.' Have been doing that, only substituting 'work' for 'walk.' My paycheque will be a pittance this week. She was adamant about the need to wear a face mask to work so as not to pass my virus on to the kidlings. 'But they gave it to *me*!' cut no ice with her. Luckily I was with the pre-schoolers who think face masks utterly hilarious, and not with the babies who'd have screamed in terror.
( Viri leave little time for fascinating life, hence this lacks fascination )

Reading Melissa Scott's A Choice of Destinies, which is A/U Alexander the Great, of all things. I see echoes of Nicholas and Phillip in Alexander and Hephaistion, or maybe more, Nicholas and Phillip are both Hephaistion to the latent Alexander in the other. Alexander is not my man at all at all, and the book reads straightforward history, but I'm reading it with enjoyment still, so it must be good. Though I'd like it less without the little flashforward scenes from the future that evolved from Alexander not trying to conquer India, but turning back to deal with a Greek rebellion-- and then Syracuse-- and then the tribes of mainland Italy...
( Read more... )

(I dreamed a CLAMP manga last night, or anime, I suppose, because there was action. But *CLAMP*, all big eyes and feathers. I am displeased with my subconscious.)
( News from the tech wars )

( Some moons, at any rate )

No no no, Weather network. It is not 'slightly overcast'. It is *snowing*. And if this winter is as it looks to be, I shall be buying my third pair of new boots in as many years to ensure ankle support and happy orthotics fit.

bk1 regrets their supplier cannot supply my missing Yakumo volumes. S'OK, I have scans, and felt a mean (all senses of the word) relief at saving the money. The scans alas just got us to Kumano, dark and atmospheric again, and um yeah I would like a paper copy of same. (No. Am supposed to be letting go of the own-the-book habit.) But still there's beNippon. (There's also another visit to NY maybe...)

There are umbrellas that look like ninja swords. Am fiercely fighting the temptation to buy one, because I could never hold on to it.
( Cut for various weirdnesses )

I watched my Utena raw on VHSes taped in Japan. If I'd watched it on a computer screen I might have seen all the bits (literally speaking, occasionally) included in this clip. Still can't believe all those are from the series; surely the bare bum rubbing comes from the OVA?

(Utena music is instant time travel. OMG 1997, I'd forgotten you entirely.)

I dunno. Gatchaman in digital looks all wrong to me. Compared to this, say.

Old fogeydom, that's me.

(Ohh, I see lj now has a drop-down menu for tags. Which would annoy me except that now I can easily distinguish between 'japan' and 'japanese'. Except the drop-down doesn't work in 'edit entries.' Bugs in the system, lj. Keep working on it.)

Nor will I detail the train of thought that led me to googling Captain Harlock lyrics on youtube and finding the OP and ED. (The ED isn't as all stops out as it could be; not as much as the OP certainly.)(Subbed OP is here)

To reduce you to puddles, Mayu's Theme, famously played on an ocarina.

Kanji-kanji-kanji-kanji Rai's OP. Thunder Jet, you say? That's 'Three Kingdoms in Space' to you. Well actually it's 銀河戦国群雄伝ライ, but you know what I mean.

In fact I prefer Rai's ED. But you can have both in much cleaner Japanese versions here.

They don't make them like that any more. For sure.

1. Carl Macek was younger than me?

2. Robotech was only released in 1985? Then pray tell, what anime was my sister watching on what TV station to get into anime in 1983 or '84? Yes yes I know-- go ask her. But everyone else?

Ahh,

feliciter led me astray. There's no anime scene where Adashino has red bows in his hair. Watched all the Adashino eps at animeseason yesterday, and I know.

I may eventually get into the way of watching anime online. Is no worse than solitaire and counts as ear training.

About as comprehensive a list of cross-dressing manga, manhwa and anime as one could wish.

Almost. As in, why mention Ageha's cross-dress dance and omit Tatara entirely? Why mention Fisheye in Sailor Moon and not Haruka? Where's RoV and Utena? The OP asked for any kind of cross, but this poster answered with m->f crosses, and only included female crossdressing if there was already a male.

And she thinks Count D crossdresses. Which is... odd, given that she seems to be literate in Japanese and Korean. (Literate enough to read the Saiyuki novels, which is pretty literate.)

Discovered while trying to find English language pages about Touring Express minor characters whose Russian and French names are driving me bats in the TE sidestory I'm currently reading. There are none.

Sinuses have me down.

Good stuff: Happy story from the FFL.

Bad stuff:
( youtube link so under the cut it goes )
Though I gather much gladness was had by the geeks present when the hearing test turned out to be a passage from Evangelion.

~~100~~ 50 Female Characters I Love Meme

Maybe I read the wrong stuff or don't watch the right things, or maybe I take that 'love' too seriously, because there aren't that many characters anywhere I actually *love*. Even here, a number are 'strongly like.' You observe there's nobody from Utena, an *anime* I love, nor from Amelia Peabody, whom I still find perfectly readable, but less so as the kids grow up and turn the whole thing into a romance series.

Might be enlightening to make a list of characters I really do love and see what that looks like. You see that Ya Yu tops my female list, but neither Gou Jian nor Fan Li would make it to a male one. Fascinating, absorbing, provocative, but I don't love them. I love Wen Zhong.
( In no particular order )

Please note that I read a book in a day. In something like two hours, in fact. It was vol 3 of the Ai no Kusabi translation and seriously weirded me out.

Of course I'd have started at vol 1 if The Beguiling had had it, but they didn't. 'S'ok, I read the first part in Japanese,' I told the guy cheerfully, and went off to read. I think I got about two-thirds through the Japanese before giving up, so I figured even vol 3 of the English must be before that-- 165 smallish pages a volume when English always expands the Japanese. And there, yes, are passages I remember-- the pet laws, the game of gigolo-- but in the middle of this is stuff I have no memory of at all. Robby? Thor? Jeeks? My Japanese was that bad? My katakana was that bad? We're farther along than I thought? No, because vol 3 ends with Guy's kidnapping and I got much farther than that; but I know I never met any red-haired Thors with funny eyes. And here's an afterword from the author written in... 2004? What?

Then I read the small print on the back of the cover: 'revised and expanded since its original publication.' Oh. Dear. Because red-haired Thors apart, what's been added is umpty-many reiterations of the same sex scene, and a total screw around with the continuity, according to the infamous 'note each event on a stack of cards, throw them up in the air, write the book in the sequence they fall down' technique. Novelists need to be told they're not mangaka: there are no black borders to tip the readers off that we're into flashback.

There's no editor or rewriter listed for this one, and it shows. The combination of street English and stilt, sometimes in the same sentence, is dizzying. "The desire stuck like a hot shiv in his gut." "Getting in their faces and taking them down a few notches didn't do the job, so he preferred to mix things up with the security guards and vent that way. He'd seriously thrown down with them once, no holds barred, and caught sheer hell for it."

(Just glanced at the Japanese version. The passage of nine years has rendered it a lot easier to read than I'd thought. Maybe I'll have another stab at it after all.)
( Read more... )

OK, I believe you. Sakurai Takahiro has never played a role that I've seen which uses the Fakir voice from Princess Tutu. I've heard him as sweet young thing or genki young thing, as per (Meine Liebe and KKM) and *possibly* in the last he *occasionally* dropped into those achingly familiar low velvet registers that I heard on Saturday. (Though if he did, I wasn't paying attention, because KKM raw has sound problems.) But he never played the seme role that I at once associated the voice with, or if he did I never heard him do it.
( On the Pratchett front )

A small not unpleasant melancholy all yesterday, caused I think by going through my Saiyuuki guzu/ freebie files to find properly resonant homoerotic stickers to adorn Tav and Kiro's wedding poem. They come from ancient copies of Animage, mostly, in a 'Yes Virginia there was a time when I had a subscription to Animage and bicycled down to Sanko every month, or every few months, to pick up my copies' way; and there was a time when my main squeeze was an anime that featured prominently in Animage, which consequently offered many posters and postcards and seal sets of the anime version of the guys. All this happened in some sunny far off era, eight years ago, when I still copied my raw tapes for people because there was no other way then to get hold of them. That's all gone now, become infinitely distant and hence dear. I can't even remember when I cancelled my Animage subscription. Probably when

shiny_monkey came home in '06 and I no longer had a source for the stuff.

But those little stickers capped from the second season closing credits and all the pre-Kamisama episodes reminded me of what it was all about, way back when.

1. If you want, comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose name starts with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

deepfryerfire gave me a K. Much can be done with a K when you're in Japanese fandoms. ( And Chinese ones as well )

Dou shiyou, dou shiyou?

My feet have been like rising breadloaves all week and my knee screams in sympathy, so I promised me a weekend lying on the sofa with my leg up doing nothing until things shrank. Even got anime and wuxia to watch if I didn't feel like reading: which I don't, in my dark living room that needs a 200 watt lightbulb to render text remotely legible. But it's stupid to be sitting inside reading under a lightbulb- or even watching Samurai Deeper Kyo with the lights off- on a warm sunny day when I want to be out on a patio somewhere drinking iced coffee and reading by the reflected sunlight. Alas, sitting is the one thing my knee does *not* want me to do. As I know because, if I must be indoors, the thing I want to do -and do do, alas- is play Addiction Solitaire here at the computer. A very little of that and I can't even stand up afterwards.

Now if only it were grey and typhoony (though I'm glad it's not because Caribana gets hit with bad weather far too often) I'd be happy to sit on the sofa. I was doing that until 1 am Thursday night, going through my FMA eps from last October on. I could have read all night- I could have read all night- and still have begged for more. ( One of life's distinct pleasures... )

Must get an outdoor mailbox. Iwase has processed my Gangan order at least (and sheesh does it cost: $20 a hit for a 450 yen magazine, before within-Canada postage) and because of the gigantic size of the thing it comes parcel delivery. Our insane PO has decided my area is not a safe drop-and-leave zone, even though I routinely leave my doors unlocked, because people can take things from between the doors if they like. I'd have thought they could equally take them from the mailbox, which unlike my screen door comes with a 'Goodies inside!!!' supposition attached; but you do not argue with the PO.
( But to the heart of the matter: FMA, men and women, and slash; with possible spoilers for the August ep )

Spring melancholy. The 20-somethings squeeing over Peter and Harriet make me feel old. I too squeed once. Then I reread the books twenty years later and thought 'what an odious unlikable pair.' Nothing comes as it came before, and everything looks worse second time around...

( But is for others undiminished somewhere. )

Everything looks worse second time around except for Miyazaki maybe. I finally watched Howl in a decent copy, not pirated with crappy sound and surrreal subtitles. Followed it with a reread of the book. I like the Miyazaki better than before, naturally, but I'm surprised to find it edging the book out as well. Miyazaki's WTF interpolations- the war, the bird, that disconcertingly story-book disguised prince- who gave me the creeps BTW- are on balance no more WTF than Jones' own trademark and casual WTFs- like the dog man who's actually two people, that I still can't figure out precisely what happened to him where, and what was going on between Howl and the Witch and why, and all that stuff in the last quarter of the book that's just there, deal with it. There's a lot of thready loose-endedness in Jones, which is doubtless a change from the common run with every last blessed detail explicated into the dust, but it does annoy the tidy-minded, like me.

And of course Miyazaki has his landscapes, straight out of 1920's children's books with the colours intact. This is no fair because he's a master of landscapes and wins with them over just about anyone I can think of.

Advent Children gives me, yes again, the fantods. It's the colours, mostly, and the shimmery grey skies, *so* like the polluted sky of Tokyo in 105F July. (reminiscent shudder) Remember I saw it first without exposure to what

luxetumbra calls the Lego people of FFVII in their brite primary colours, so there's no sense of a corrective happening. It's creepy, and the idea of writing fic about it is creepier still. (I'm not saying it isn't beautiful. But it's creepy. And full of sulky children, which to someone of my profession is not a plus.)

The anime is more to my tastes. But if FFVII in all its avatars looked like the anime, would it be as popular as it is? ( Possibly offensive musings )

I shall mention that I watched Advent Children tonight in an odd stop-and-go DVD with English and Swedish subtitles. All I know of FF7 comes from translating djs lo these many years ago. (So many years ago that I feel quite nostalgic about it now.) This is a good thing because, as I discovered while googling for extra info without which the film is just a tad obscure, yes? the original graphics for the game are little short of giggle-worthy. The unsettling eerieness of AC's look is still preferable to these cute chibi guys in their brite colours.

Also no-one commenting on Gojou's five most lovable traits mentions that he reads on the john, but we actually have Minekura's word for that.

Also my mouse has gotten quite genki all of a sudden and overhighlights whenever I highlight. I have dark suspicions that this is somehow linked to the computer having arbitrarily decided that it will once again turn off screen and hard drive after 30 minutes as instructed. It used to, then it stopped, now it does again. HAL approaches sentience. Tremble.

After watching the first ep of Gankutsu-ou, I'm tentatively of the opinion that the Count comes across as a much more appealing figure later if you don't watch the first ep of Gankutsu-ou. I see how the action fits thematically with stuff the Count says later- and it sends a chill down my spine- but in the end it has a distancing effect on the whole after-relationship. To the extent that Franz x Albert looks not merely cast in concrete (another side-effect of ep 1; start from ep 3 and it looks quite arbitrary) it seems the OTP. And the Count dwindles into Mephistopheles.

I don't know why I'm watching the Mirage of Blaze anime. If I want to hear people going bwah-hah-hah like that I can go read Zakuro. Who isn't drawn in hommage to CLAMP style either.

Did a fast rewatch of Samurai Champloo 2, 2 day loan from the video store that I didn't get around to viewing the last two evenings because I was- uhh, well, reading, actually. The gay westerner who decides on the basis of reading Saikaku that Japan is a paradise of manly love is, in terms of statistical probability, probably not a poke at western fangirls and their vision of Japan, though just about everything else gets poked in that episode. Ahh, shakuhachi-playing basket-wearing monks who turn out to be-- OK, no spoilers-- but when you've watched as much jidai-geki as I have you know that all basket-wearing monks are agents in disguise. (Also that when you blow the house the ninja are in to smithereens via barrels of gunpowder, the ninja always emerge unharmed, and that eating fugu can be cured by burying people up to their chins in sand.) Anyway that episode tickles me mightily, and tickles me more because the VA who gets his Japanese pitch accents in all the wrong places (like me hem-hem) also does Nii.

I'd like to buy that one, save that the other eps on it aren't quite in the same league. I'd like to buy the rest of the SC DVDs, but I'll be pissed if they turn out to be heavy on the Reloadish filler stuff.

( And on another note )

Finished Houshin Engi. Yes, it does wander off into the wilderness, complete with characters dropped in out of nowhere. I suppose it's all in the manga. I still feel a bit bilious after it, though, for no particular reason.

Finished also the latest volume (13) of Night Roaming Demons. This one is good good good. And creepy. And as chance would have it I kept starting a new story every night around midnight which is not recommended. Also twisty in her classic way of Ohhkay let's go read the whole thing again now that I know what we're talking about. The subjectless Japanese sentence makes this kind of misdirection far too easy, the way Italian makes terza rima almost inevitable. English speakers can only weep when dealing with either.

The afterword tells how Ima Ichiko missed the first deadline of her life, is why the last story is told in two parts (I think- it's late and I only had five hours' sleep last night.) I like it-- continuity between her stories is a rare thing but welcome. It certainly feels like this one will get carried on in the next volume. So here's to the next volume. Strange Tales for Sleepless Nights is not only the neatest imprint name ever, it publishes Rainy Willow and an interesting-looking Seimei manga as well. I'd like to peruse that section of a Japanese bookstore some time.

An English-language fandom operates in English, no matter what the original language may have been. OK, fine, I understand. I'll just say, if it were anywhere indicated on the covers of the Soul Hunter DVDs that the thing is actually Houshin Engi, I'd have been watching it six months ago. It's pure accident that I decided to look at the first disk. And as I find the manga impenetrable in French and thus probably in Japanese as well, all to the good that I have the anime; though I seem to recall some dissatisfaction with it in various quarters.

Meanwhile congrats to

incandescens and

nojojojo, and hippo birdies to

mvrdrk. Go you-tachi.

Happiness is...

a four-day weekend (yes, it was supposed to be a whole week off but I'm an adult who doesn't believe in the Holiday Fairy, at least not in August) and seven volumes of Papuwa Redivivus and eleven volumes of FMA/ Hagaren and...

the first Hagaren DVD, come across by accident at the rental place. See, I read Hagaren 1 a while ago and found rereading it an exercise in both squint and futility (I've read this and I know what happens only there's stuff I probably missed so I suppose I should read it again only it takes time mumble grumble.) But here's a fast refresher, with subtitles and nice colours and nice music. I can see why people'd fall for the series from the anime: I probably would too.
( Cut for arrant elitism )

paleaswater said she found X resonant of Tokyo so I watched some X. And it /is/ Tokyo, pretty much, the generic Tokyo of pedestrian overpasses and schools and construction sites; but for me it lacks the distinct sense of place that the second Otogizoushi arc has. X is prettier than (the determinedly ugly) Otogizoushi, of course-- it's CLAMP-- but I find that a drawback. It rains in X but you don't feel the rain: it's just generic Tokyo rain. Whereas boy do you feel the heat and smell the unsavoury Ogikubo smells in Otogizoushi. I haven't seen that one right through, and as far as I did see it, it looked rather a mess narrative-wise; its unprettiness extends to the VAs who all manage the neat trick of making my skin crawl; but its version of Tokyo is the real thing. Ugly and in your face and take it or leave it. It's a world away from CLAMP's ethos.
( 'easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting' )

It is much easier to watch anime than to write fic. Just thought I'd mention. Especially when watching anime doubles as Consoling the Cat. I discover you can't read and console cats because cats want to be exactly where the book is.
( Gourmand musings )

Going from the sublime of Samurai Champloo (no really, anything that works in The Great Mirror of Manly Love, Mito Komon chanbara, real Dutchmen and classic ukiyo-e in the same episode deserves props) to the letussay unsublime, I'm also watching random Inuyasha to see what the fuss is about. I'm still unsure what the fuss is about but I suspect it's got to do with being 40 years beyond the target age group.
( Partly. And partly because it reminds me of Sailor Moon )

Since I'm mostly indoors this weekend thanks partly to the scattered thundershowers and partly to the temporary Where-is-here? (please don't piss on my sofa) Cat, I got vol 2 of Samurai Champloo to watch with Cat while sitting on the sofa I hope he doesn't piss on. SC has style in spades, I grant you that, but doesn't press any other of my buttons so far. However, episode 6 is the kind of thing that just warms the cockles of my allusive soul. I leave the meta of the thing to those who like doing it; I'll merely say I've never seen a Mito Komon reference worked in so beautifully or with such panache. And the Dutch speakers were speaking Dutch, except the accented-Japanese Isaac who seems to have been done by a Japanese.
( mild fuman )

There are no Japanese Kenshin tapes to be had in the rental shops of Toronto. There aren't even Chinese pirates unless you order them. So I went to The Beguiling (situated dangerously close to my house) to price individual import DVDs. They were out of Kyoto arc eps, naturally. But they did have the boxed set. And as I hesitated, calculating that I could view the whole arc for a mere $25 at zip.ca, there came to me the hideous tones of the dub Hiko talking about the Ahmah-KAkeROO-ri-yoo(hoo)-No-Hirameki. I can almost live with Ki-o-to, though it still makes my skin crawl. But one damned riyoo-sen after another has broken my spirit. (Insult to injury, it's the dragon ryuu.) I bought the bloody set. Somebody owes me, is what I say.

Abandoned fandoms may be the best after all, now there's no such thing as an undiscovered one. The local video store had some Kenshin DVDs so I watched a couple last weekend- the first two OVAs (western packaging is immensely uninformative about just what you're getting) and several eps from first season. The artwork is better than good and anyway, you know, Kenshin. An institution. (I know, so is Gundam an institution and you don't see me watching any of it. I am large, I contain multitudes.)

So I took them back on Sunday and went to see what else they might have in the series. The smallish anime section was being blocked by three large young and talkative otaku of various sexes who needed to comment on every cover they pulled out, which was trying; but said otaku also revealed that the unlabelled drawers below the counter held the VHS selection. So I scuse-me'd and grabbed the Rurou section to peruse elsewhere.
( Yappari )

Courtesy of

shiny_monkey I am currently watching Kyou Kara Maou, which is evidently being rebroadcast somewhere that doesn't have commercials. This is nice. It's about the only thing that is nice because otherwise I have never /met/ a more irritating anime; or rather, one that irritates in this particular way.
( Sons of Toshiro Mifune )

Can you tell I'm avoiding doing anything? I suppose these are as much great moments in watching/ reading (aka you hadda be there) as they are great moments inherent in the series, but no matter.
( No real order )

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