RSS | karakuri babble http://i360.com/editorials/flash/ A lightly textured daily babble from the editors of i360.com en-US Anti-hero. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/250
Of course, the first one I got was Espgaluda II. I've been playing it quite a bit -- I'm something of a fan of the genre, and CAVE CO, LTD. are the acknowledged masters of the form. Their iDevice ports are also spot-on -- very impressive.

But this is the first chance I've had to see the story, and it's kind of shocking. To tell the truth, I'm not sure the player-character is the hero.

In the first game it was much clearer: you were one of a pair of siblings who acquired terrifying psychic powers as part of the evil emperor's weapons research. You escape, leaving behind a mountain of corpses, and live peacefully with your mother. Oh, and you left the planet a wasteland. In the backstory to the second game, everyone's pretty much just been trying to survive in the rubble of the first. Nice job breaking it, hero.

In the second game, it turns out the project continued, and they're still looking for you, so of course you go kill them all. Starting with the ten-year-old prince. In stage three you see his sister weeping over his corpse, and fight her to the death. She's eleven. The last boss is formed from their combined psychic remnants, driven to a last, desperate attack. (The in-game dialogue makes it pretty clear that they feel this option is suicide.) At the end of the game, you're kind of depressed about killing them (and your half-sister,) but as a consolation, you do have these immense psychic powers. (I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that's actually pretty close to how Ageha's ending plays out.)

To be sure, there are some other kids being used for weapons reseach, just as you were, and your antagonists don't seem like nice guys -- but I'm still not sure that you can be considered heroic in any sense of the term.]]> A better basis for judgment. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/249 Today's Penny-Arcade is pretty good. But, really, who goes by those descriptions? I learned a long time ago that the back cover blurbs (and surely Amazon's blurbs are their spiritual successors) were not to be trusted. The first line test is superior. Not infallible, but definitely better.

So, here are ten of my favorite first lines, presented without further comment.

  • The moment Scott and Harvey left the apartment, I began screeching. "Oscar! They're going to castrate us tomorrow!" I was horrified to hear myself say it. It made it seem all the more real. I found I couldn't stop looking at my balls, just to make sure they were still there.


  • As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.


  • My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.


  • The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel


  • Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.


  • It started in mud, as many things do. In a normal world, it would have been time for breakfast, but apparently breakfast was not served in hell; the bombardment that had begun before dawn showed no signs of letting up.


  • Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.


  • The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest.


  • It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.


  • It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.]]> Always redoing. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/248 Fanime 2012. I mean, we go to it every year, and it's always fun, but this year I think I really need a vacation.

    Personally, I plan on trying to find out stuff about Evangelion 3.0: you can (not) redo.

    Incidentally, I love that subtitle. The 繰り返す nature of Eva's been inherent since the original TV series, even if we only understood it in retrospect, through the lens of the alternate-universe side projects. Looking back through the Gainax canon, I sometimes wonder how important that theme is to them. You can go back and make amends, they say.

    Look at Gurren Lagann, for example -- the way it's split into two halves, with parallel choices and characters. There's room for typology in the Gainax canon.

    What I really wish they'd redo is KareKano. I've been reading some of that manga? Truly stellar. I can only imagine what they'd have done if the TV series hadn't gone off the rails midway through.]]>         Music of a different genre. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/247
    My favorite's probably their take on the Nausicaa requiem, but this version of "Country Road" is well worth hearing:



    Consider: It's a cover by an Italian band (with a Greek vocalist, incidentally) of a Japanese version of an American song. One of globalization's little gifts to the world.]]>         Game recommendation. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/246
    And, of course, it has a tower.

    May heaven grant you fortune.]]>         Yes, I know, I have no taste in music. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/245
    I know the song's an homage to Umineko. I've never actually watched the series, but I figured it out quickly enough. Went and listened to the song, and for some reason it just doesn't grab me. I'm not sure why. Something strange about Touhou music. (This is part of why I think my tastes might just be broken.)

    I've noticed the same thing with other songs -- by and large, I prefer a persons/group's Touhou works to their non-Touhou works. This is especially true of 岸田教団＆THE明星ロケッツ ("Kishida Kyodan and the Akeboshi Rockets,") who did some fantastic guitar-rock Touhou albums that I love, and the opening to High School of the Dead, which I just cannot manage to enjoy. It's very puzzling.

    One theory (that I think I've mentioned before) is that I've got a strong association with the original songs in-game. This holds true for a lot -- Youmu's theme, for example, served as the soundtrack to my introduction to serious dodging in Touhou. But it still doesn't explain why I like some of the music from stages I never played.

    But whatever. It really isn't very important at all, especially at the level of granularity with which I enjoy music. And one day I'll probably wake up and decide to listen to something different. This too must pass.]]>         Ninety percent of everything. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/244
    This included a bunch of Jpop. You know, normal otaku stuff. Nana Mizuki, a bunch of girl bands, lots of anime openings. I listened to a bunch of it, and it's kind of my style of music, but it just wasn't satisfying for some reason.

    I'm not sure why. It just feels like something's missing. It is, for want of a better word, somehow boring. And I listen to almost nothing but Touhou music. Pause for a moment, Gentle Reader, and wonder at this. I certainly did.

    But Touhou music's a world in itself, nowadays, and at its best it's as complex as any of the genres it takes its cues from. Today I was listening to a track by seventh-heaven MAXION:



    Stunning. It moves so quickly, introducing and dropping instruments, changing tempo, shifting between near-whispers and robust declamations. The fact that half of it's in Russian only adds to the sense of complete, overwhelming force. I really love that about music -- the sense that I'm running to catch up. I don't know whether that's just my lack of sophistication, that I can't perceive the simple tricks they're using, but my enjoyment is a real thing all the same.

    And so I'm not finding myself able to listen to a lot of the non-doujin music. I enjoy the brilliant green, as I mentioned the other day. I like the pillows, BUMP OF CHICKEN, and a host of other rock bands, but the electronic girl pop that's a staple of the Japanese scene just hasn't been doing much for me lately. I think that kind of music, since it relies less heavily on live performance, owes it to itself to be more dense, more layered. Production is everything.

    There's a moment that Glenn MCDONALD describes perfectly, that sums up the feeling that I'm not finding in Jpop:
    I forgive this album all its subjective faults, however, for two moments that only narrowly slipped off the end of my year-end best-song list. One is literally a moment, a single percussive noise at about 1:58 of the lithe, quasi-disco strut "When I Grow Up". The song has dropped into near a cappella, Shirley muttering "Blood and blisters / On my fingers, / Chaos rules when we're apart", and then suddenly there are two sharp noises that on a simpler record would probably just have been kick/snare combinations, but Garbage layer so many instruments into these pulses that no matter how high I turn up my stereo at the crucial moment, there always seems to be a little more detail in them that I can't quite discern. Gates to alternate universes have been less ornate.
    Of course, I went down the rabbit hole a long time ago. Maybe I just lost my ability to appreciate other music. Maybe I forgot all the cues. As XKCD said, "we only have one scale, and we resize all our experiences to fit."]]>         Well, I enjoy it. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/243
    (But man. I'm still kind of proud of that first sentence. It was kind of a marvel of impenetrability. And similarly, I see that there are some ways in which the syntax could have retained its tortured quality while making some concessions to comprehensibility. And there are some outright errors, for which I don't apologize.)

    Style's important. Even if it's not good, it's valuable to have something distinctly your own like that.]]>         pulling the brilliant green into the future. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/242 pace W. Gibson on Buzz Rickson's.) I'm just saying, their old stuff is still perfect. Crisp, beautifully produced, and KAWASE Tomoko sings like she could be a real girl if she just had ten thousand friends.

    It reminds me -- and I did have a point in writing this, never fear -- of their music videos. They're obscure, but worth tracking down. The thing that always grabbed me was that they seemed to have plots, but the precise meanings of those plots -- the motives of the characters, the settings, the conflicts and resolution -- always seemed just out of reach. They made no sense, but I felt that if I worked on them long enough -- perhaps if I were a good enough person -- I'd be able to figure them out. And I never did.

    Maybe there should be a statute of limitations. Maybe certain of the highly-designed ephemera of our everyday lives -- that brilliant, creative, disposable output that gets forgotten every season -- maybe that stuff should have an explanation that unlocks itself after some amount of time has passed. A reward, if you like, for those who still remember. And care. And wonder.]]>         Spoiler-free musings on Madoka. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/241
    But if they'd told me it was Utena 2.0, I would have worked much harder to watch it.

    Utena 2.0, you ask? I only have one answer for you, direct from the script: "That's power. With that power, anything is possible. You can even free her from her fate. But how that power is used. . . is my decision."

    Actually, two. Whose castle do you think that is, in Utena? Who is trapped there, and why?]]>         There's always a tomorrow. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/240 Kuragehime, Princess Jellyfish) does remind me of one thing: the infernal cussedness of the Japanese language.

    Check it: 海月, pronounced "kurage". Main character: 月海, pronounced "tsukimi". (A combination my IME doesn't bother to present, by the way.) Perfectly normal, you say. Of course kanji have more than one reading, some of them used only in names.

    But no! This is not the case in Chinese, where the vast majority of hanzi have only one reading, used in all situations. The written language is apparently less ambiguous than English. That might not be a very high bar, but it's one that Japanese misses without even noticing. Totally ludicrous. Maybe, just maybe, if the Japanese had invented their own writing system rather than trying to bolt on something completely different, we wouldn't have this problem. (See also: Korea.) But then we'd still have had to go through the Edo period, when I'm informed the language changed to such an extent that it's like cockney rhyming slang becoming standard English.

    Today's outrage: 明日, which I usually read as "ashita", probably because it always makes me think of the DDR announcer. But sometimes it's "asu", which is apparently more standard. Very irritating, especially when trying to do karaoke. (In some formal or archaic contexts it's "myounichi"? I've never seen that, although it's a plausible way to read it.)]]>         returning to normal. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/239
    Truthfully, the biggest thing to happen to me lately was watching Princess Jellyfish (Kuragehime). Great fun. I found that I couldn't stop thinking about it -- something about Tsukimi was so compelling that I had to see what she'd do next. (I have to admit, her housemates didn't do much for me, but I think that's one of the sacrifices they make to get it into 11 episodes.)

    It was really charming, and I think Tsukimi kind of approaches the absolute ideal of what "moe" means to serious otaku. She's likeable but comprehensible, limited in ways that we can understand.

    (This post is unabashed fluff. AX starts tomorrow. For some, it's started already.)]]>         The first rule is fixed-focus. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/238
    Or is it?

    There will be between 7 and 10 points, they will draw heavily on previous manifestos written by better, more creative people, and I think that I will rather enjoy trying to follow them. For a little while.

    Now I just need a suitably bombastic name.]]>         Fanime 2011, day 0. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/237
    (Bonus question: how do you pluralize a proper noun that's the same as a noun with an irregular plural? Would "Pantys" be better? Obviously this is shorthand for "people dressed as Panty" or "representations of Panty" or similar, but it's a common enough shorthand that the rules should account for it.)]]>         2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami. http://i360.com/editorials/flash/236
    Of course, there have been at least 5 major aftershocks as I write this, each of them large enough to be newsworthy by itself, so the shaking isn't over yet.

    But right now, the tsunamis are bad enough. The amazing thing is that, after the quake, you could watch the news come in with new videos showing buildings dissolving like sand castles in the surf. All very postmodern. It's also a funny feeling seeing the Wikipedia article, "2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami". It's as if we're looking back at the name that history will eventually apply to this disaster. And TBS's dead/missing counter is truly chilling.

    News ticker's showing the capacity of evacuation sites. Japan does have an impressive disaster response plan, and the citizens are much better trained than they would be in, say, the U.S. I didn't talk about this much when I was watching Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, but it was one of the most impressive things about the series, this massive and organic response at every level to a devastating earthquake. (Which, I should point out, was perhaps 1/25th the size. This could easily have been worse than the Great Kanto Earthquake.)

    Anyway. Tokyo Magnitude. It was almost like a government PSA for disaster response -- fast, efficient, pervasive. And now we're seeing how it translates to reality. Based on the news, looks pretty good.

    Unfortunately, though, looks like Reitaisai 8 is off until further notice. Good thing I didn't get it into my head to try to attend.]]>