Posts Tagged ‘anime’
May 24th, 2010
Warning: the following contains spoilers for the endings of Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Battlestar Galactica, LOST, Supernatural (current) and The Prisoner.
I’ve noticed an alarming trend in television finales, lately: God.
March 27th, 2010
And you can read it here.
I’m slowly figuring out the Tor.com backend. It may sound strange, but at this point I think I’ve worked with just about every major blogging platform there is at one time or another. (I should put that on a CV somewhere, now that I think of it.) Even so, I find that I write most of my posts (for everyone, not just Tor) in HTML. It’s just easier, once you know the tags. Not that I can do anything fancy, but for my purposes it suits.
One thing that’s really surprised me about my posting at Tor is the enthusiasm of the response. When I started, I was a little worried that no one would care. But no — people are commenting, and hauling out their DVD’s, and watching right along with me. Then again, this is Cowboy Bebop, a show everyone loves. (I know there are people out there who don’t get it — those people are psychopaths incapable of empathy.) The real test might come when I write about a show that doesn’t have such a firmly-established audience. Luckily, I have over twenty episodes between then and now to hone my skills.
Speaking of which, I’m really enjoying how re-watching each episode forces me to dissect the plot. I noticed it especially this time, but I hope it continues as a trend. One of the things my own stories get criticized for sometimes is their lack of apparent logic. The plot is clear to me, but not to other people. So hopefully this will prove a useful exercise for me in understanding the gestures of plot and how to clarify the links between events.
I’ve been fighting a cold all week, so there isn’t much more to say. I feel like I’ve spent the latter half of the week wrapped up in a fog, and I spent yesterday afternoon in class coughing and sneezing. I fell asleep last night at 9:30. 9:30. That didn’t even happen when I was a child. Clearly, there’s something wrong. I think it’s in everyone’s best interest if I just go back to bed and try to read until I can go to sleep.
March 17th, 2010
You can read it here at Tor.com.
It’s been really hard to sit on this news. I’ve only told a handful of people, so it feels really good to show this post off to everyone. For a post regarding a series I’ve watched over and over, it took a surprisingly long amount of time. Frequently, I found myself wanting to cram in another detail or observation, feeling frustrated that I couldn’t talk about everything that makes Bebop as wonderful with anything resembling efficiency or eloquence. Luckily, I have twenty-five more episodes and an OVA to continue commenting on, so hopefully my skills will improve.
January 26th, 2010
I had a really interesting meeting today. I talked with Justin Ferrato, a student of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, about a project that he and his fellow Media Lab students are working on for Nuit Blanche 2010.
I don’t want to give away the content of the project, but it sounds really interesting and I’m excited to see the final result. I was asked by a Media Lab faculty member, Susan LK Gorbet, (who I know from OCAD’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program) to talk about SF anime, something that I’ve discussed at length at other blogs. It was one of the first times I’d been asked to share my expertise anywhere outside the contexts of academia or fandom. I realized this halfway through explaining the visual metaphors at play in a specific and beloved film clip. By that point I was really enjoying myself: my meeting felt like all the fun parts of teaching (which I really miss, sometimes) wrapped up with all the best parts of panel discussions at cons (without the sleep deprivation). I always forget how much niche data I have stored until I watch someone taking notes on what I say. It’s a nice feeling, like suddenly realizing that the ground underneath you really is solid after all.
At WorldCon in Montreal, I said that the best part of workshopping is when someone tells you that your suggestion is a helpful one. I hold with that sentiment. There’s something really affirming about alleviating someone else’s creative frustrations so they can go ahead and solve the rest of the puzzle on their own. It means that their own contributions make it into the public eye that much faster, enriching the community as a whole. Being part of that process — or being asked to be part of it — is really special. I hope I get asked again, soon.
January 20th, 2010
A while ago, I proposed an SF Signal MindMeld column on anime, and this is the result.
My section is by far the longest, but that’s because I spent the weekend watching anime and was feeling re-invigorated about the medium. I had lots to talk about, and I was still pinging about the subject on Monday. I felt a little embarrassed about how long-winded I was, but it’s also heartening to realize how engaged I still am about the topic. I’m glad that my enjoyment of the medium hasn’t diminished, because after writing a master’s thesis on it, I suspected it might. But no — after watching some new films this weekend, and perusing some old favourites, I felt oddly centred. My faith in live-action television has been renewed by series like Supernatural and Chuck, but for a long time I just wasn’t watching a lot of fleshy TV. (That came out wrong. Moving on.) I think that means that anime is sort of my “home” media in a way that it isn’t for a lot of people outside Japan.
On Monday, I had a meeting with my co-writer for a paper on fansubbing, and we talked about how fannish trends in the consumption of global media makes diasporans of us all. The oldest scholarship on anime fandom talks about how, when fansubs first became popular in the 80’s and 90’s, white kids entered Chinese, Japanese, and Korean corner stores for the first time. Suddenly they were living one tiny slice of immigrant life: finding your home media at the store that sells goods from home. I think that’s a small but important consequence of globalization as a whole. Globalization in general is easy to characterize as the homogenization of the planet, but the flipside is that moment when people go outside their comfort zone and then expand it to include new territory.
December 24th, 2009
Merry Xmas. Please enjoy.
These are the Frosty Zombies. They come courtesy of Dave, who shows them to me every year.
This clip is from one of my favourite Supernatural episodes:
November 20th, 2009
I’m going away to finish this book. I have a lot of work to do. Luckily, as of this morning I feel energized to do it. For too long I had been languishing, fretting, freaking. Then I spent yesterday with a rather large cephalopod watching Fullmetal Alchemist. (Because that’s our life: we write and read all day and then break for eight-hour marathon viewings of good anime. It’s a good life. A great life. I suspect what people want when they want to write is not the signings and promotions and cons, but this kind of life.) As I was describing the series as a whole (we got through a quarter, yesterday) I said: “Really, this story is about two kids who make a really bad mistake and find out that they can’t rectify it. They can’t fix it. They can’t get back to normal. And every movement the story makes is about proving that, and proving how powerful our mistakes can make us.”
And then I realized I was describing my novel.
Sometime this afternoon, I’m going to get into a car with my best friend and head up toward lake country. With any luck, we’ll get horribly lost — those times make the best stories. But eventually we’ll find our way, and there will be food waiting for us, and friends, and a hell of a lot of work. And then we’ll come home to the city, and there will be people who love us and support us and whose breathing puts us to sleep every night. This is our life (and it’s ending one minute at a time) and it’s the best goddamn life anyone could ask for. I’m grateful every day. I know how lucky I am. I know how little, in some ways, that I deserve it.
It just gives me all the more reason to rock my shit.
So here’s to long trips, wherever they may take us. Fuck normal. Get lost. Make mistakes. Whistle past the graveyard. Just get started.
September 26th, 2009
A while ago, I Tweeted this message in reply to Adam Rakunas: “While you were reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion.” The initial conversation was about contemporary science fiction fandom, readership, and our influences as writers. During my teenage years, when I was “supposed” to be reading Tolkien, I was watching Evangelion. Adam pronounced this statement a big fat “WIN,” and then he made a button out of it:
Adam is in fact such a nice guy that he decided to let me keep any and all cash from this little endeavour. That’s right, me. At $2.45 each, if you buy five you will have bought me a six pack of Tankhouse Ale. If you buy ten, you will have bought me one bar of Pacifica soap and 8 oz of their body butter, just in time for the cruel Toronto winter (Mediterranean Fig scent, so I’ll smell nice for my next con). If for some obscure reason you decide to buy twenty of these puppies, I’ll go really crazy and buy the Mushi-shi boxed set. Or a season of Supernatural. Or, or, or…the mind boggles.
Please, support my frivolous spending. Buy the buttons. Thank you.
August 30th, 2009
This super-fast robot hand dribbles, throws, and tweezes more effectively than I do. If you could observe the current state of my eyebrows, you would know this to be true.
You’ve probably already seen this footage, so I thought I’d show you some eventual applications for super-fast robot hands. (Oh, shut up. That would chafe and you know it.) Warning: Major spoilers below for Stand Alone Complex.
In all seriousness, I get really excited when I see stuff like the top video. I’m not sure where our brains mark the Uncanny Valley, but when I see these machines doing so well I feel a great upsurge of pride in human ingenuity and dedication. Lots of work went into creating that robot hand’s ability to tweeze. And why? So that it might one day use a pair of forceps or clamps while cleaning out your arteries, that’s why. The sensitivity and dexterity required to catch and grip a mobile phone might seem simple to us, but they’re the first things we lose to arthritis and stroke. Robotics is not only about improving the conditions for “artificial” life, it’s about improving the quality of human life, too. Too often, I think media outlets can perpetrate an image of roboticists as mad geniuses more interested in their machines than their fellow men. But the majority of advances in Japanese AI and robotics — from software to hardware — are now aimed at caring for children and the elderly in a safe, dignified manner. The end goals are almost banal in their humanity.
Speaking of which, where is my tweeze-bot? I’m sick of plucking these damn things myself.
August 28th, 2009
They totally revitalize pop songs that were overplayed in their first week by enmeshing them with meaningful content. Of course, it helps that this vid is probably the best editing job I’ve seen in quite some time. Coming from me that means something; I probably watch at least a vid or two a day on average, with frequent binge sessions when I’m trying to figure out something in a story without consciously thinking about it. In fact, the one con I’m sad I missed this year is VividCon, and I don’t even edit the things.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time ripped my heart out completely, the first time I watched it. It’s a fairly flimsy tale about time travel, the choices that come after high school, and the everyday coincidences that can change our lives. As SF is fails on the level of, say, the latest Star Trek movie. But as a work of art, and a work of truth, it succeeds utterly. I defy you to watch it and not be at least a little bit moved.
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