A Youkai, a Miko, and a Rabbi Walk Into a Bar...

Commando Miko Reimu?  I guess.
We still love you.  Note: this is probably
the only time you'll see me draw fanart.

The bartender runs away because he's never seen a youkai.  Poor bartender: these jokes never end well for him.  No wonder Moe was always so morose on The Simpsons.

I wonder how many decades that show has left, anyway.  Ah well, I don't know the last time I watched a currently running show on the television that wasn't Doctor Who or Top Gear, the two biggest English cultural achievements of the last few decades.

Seriously though, Doctor Who has been getting very popular over here in the States lately.  Not surprising at all, really: it may still be a guy going around in a space-time-traversing police box dealing with the monsters of the week, but it's got some pretty great writing, and a very charismatic main character.  Not to mention, some of the monsters of the week are actually pretty awesome.  The Weeping Angels is one of the best ideas for a monster I've ever heard.  But, no, there are actually people here that care about Doctor Who, and the rule of this blog is that I have to talk about a lot of crap that nobody gives a shit about...yet, of course.

Note: I originally intended to write about a couple other, non-Touhou related things, but it seems there was a lot more here to cover than I originally had anticipated, so you guys get another all Touhou megapost.  Sorry.  I still plan on writing all those things, but I'm going to have to put it off until at least Thursday.

The Touhou Project: It's Not a Game, It's a Lifestyle
Well, not really, but the thing about Touhou is that it has a large fanbase, a loosely defined canon, and lots of really creative people.  It's not like something like Star Trek fandom, where there's a set canon and the fans wedge their own ideas into it.  Here, the fans are actively building the canon.  And it's pretty cool.

Alstroemeria Records
You may remember the song Bad Apple!! from my last post.  I did not mention that it was the work of one Masayoshi Minoshima, a house composer who runs the Touhou doujin circle Alstroemeria Records.  A doujin circle is, for the lack of a better word, something akin to The Gorrilaz: a project with a revolving door of talented artists working along the same theme.  Like with The Gorrilaz, this leads to a very eclectic selection of music that can range from electro-house to Daft Punk-esque funky sort of house to tracks that, if the vocals were sung a few octaves lower, would qualify as tanz-metall (like Bad Apple!! itself).  Almost all of it is at the very least good, and quite a lot of it is downright awesome.

The reason this is even related to Touhou is that many of the tracks are based on compositions for the games' soundtracks.  How it works for Alstroemeria Records though, is that they tend to sample in the same way that Daft Punk does: most of the time, it's hard to even identify what song it's sampling.  The new track is so very different from the track being sampled, it's crazy to hold it against the artist for doing so.  The difference between Daft Punk and Alstroemeria is, of course, that Daft Punk normally samples rather unremarkable songs, while Touhou's soundtracks are already incredible.

Many tracks have vocal elements as well, and most of the Japanese lyrics are actually very well written.  Alstroemeria Records also has a habit of having Engrish samples that it's quite obvious neither the composer nor the vocalist actually understand, and have no clue how to pronounce.  It took me a while to even realize that Plain Asia was supposed to be English at all.  In retrospect, maybe I should have known better.

I'll explain more about the strengths and weaknesses of Alstroemeria's vocals later, but even though I'm sure that the concept of singing in an octave below C4 is not completely alien to Japan, I'm pretty sure the news hasn't reached Minoshima-san yet.  Tracks where Nomico sings, especially, seem to never go below C5.

Anyway, because ZUN - Touhou's sole creator - doesn't allow merchandise to be sold officially outside of Japan, there's no legitimate method of buying any of Alstroemeria's albums.  On the other hand, this just gives me a good reason to download them off of mediafire, so yay.  Here are my thoughts on the albums I've downloaded so far, in chronological order.

Pictured: Reisen Undongein Inaba.
Not pictured: batshit insanity.

Lovelight
Lovelight is a very good album in all, even if it has fewer truly awesome tracks than, say, Plastik World.  The first track, the eponymous Lovelight, reminds me a little of some of Daft Punk's early work, with the strong riff and looped (Engrish) sample, creating a catchy and atmospheric track, albeit not a particularly complicated one.  After that, we get the afforementioned Bad Apple!!  It's a very heavy track, even for Minoshima-san, with a compositional style and intensity that make me wonder seriously what would happen if Rammstein's Till Lindermann sung the vocal part.  The lyrics have an especially melodic quality to them, and even though Nomico "Helium Girl's" vocals are normally far too high for my tastes, her performance is emotional and sharp enough that it works exceedingly well.  It's still probably my favorite song from Alstroemeria I've heard so far.  The next track, Magic Girl, is another great reason not to sample English lyrics if you don't know what they mean.  Withered Leaf is an interesting instrumental piece with some very good use of synth and real instrumentation working together in a way that contributes to atmosphere instead of dissonance.  Silver That Can Be Crushed Like Crystal is a long, fast paced instrumental piece, fairly unremarkable except for the fact that it sounds a lot like a dance version of Excalibur from Ace Combat Zero in places, for some reason.  Ultimate Truth and Interlude are both pretty cool electro-house sort of tracks, as is Fractal Night, which is a pretty direct arrangement of Flowering Night, one of my favorite Touhou compositions.  Extend Ash doesn't have much going for it one way or another, except for the strange decision to use a synth choir, which just plain doesn't work, in an album that is at the very least competent at everything else.  How Is Your Eyes Crazy? is another pretty straight forward adaptation of a Touhou composition, this time Lunatic Eyes, but in the translation, it loses the power of the original's epic riffs, which could have been really cool to hear arranged Bad Apple!! style.  As a whole, Lovelight is a very good album to turn on and chill out to some house tunes.

...why is Keine wearing lipstick?  Oh fan
art, how I love you.

Plastik World

It's a pretty fantastik album, probably Alstroemeria's most consistently awesome.  It's a lot heavier as a whole than Lovelight, meaning more frequently complex, stronger tracks, but it's also slightly more pop-like.  The album opens with God Know Will You To Love From True [sic]/Plain Asia, an (completely original) intro track by Minoshima-san, followed seamlessly by Plain Asia, so that it's really very difficult to separate the two.  As the album is seamless, this applies to a lot of the songs to varying degrees, though not as much as on Haunted Dancehall.  Also, Engrish.  Wheel of Fortune follows, which is pretty standard Mei Ayakura material, which, fortunately, is pretty awesome.  It's followed by another track by Ayakura-san, Saigetsu, which is probably my favorite track of the album.  It's notable for having a very interesting call-and-response duet structure between two singers, one in C3/4, and one in C5/6.  It, along with the rest of the album really, reminds me a bit of Kaskade at his best (I still don't know who did the vocals for Angel on my Shoulder, but whoever she was, why the hell doesn't Kaskade use her more often dammit.)  The next track, the eponymous Plastik World, also reminds me of Kaskade, this time of what Kaskade vocals sound like most of the time.  Still, a pretty cool track.  The next one, m9, is a pretty funky Minoshima original that provides some nice variation on an album that, if nothing else, has a very strong and consistent style.  Times, a fast, lighter sort of track, also helps, though the sort of rudderless vocals do little for it.  Following that up is Twilight Tea Room, a...very oddly JPop sort of track by Nachi Sakagami, who as far as I know hasn't composed anything else for Alstroemeria Records.  It's actually a pretty good track, but it's very strange for something off an Alstroemeria Records album.  The next to last track is a light piano Outro...which isn't actually an outro, because it's immediately followed by Leading Phantasy, which sounds a lot like it should be an anime theme song.  Actually, hold on a second...I knew it!

Busy album cover is busy.

Exserens

"Selections of Alstroemeria Records" claims the cursive subtitle, presumably in a French accent.  C'est vrai, Monsieur Subtitle, c'est vrai, and it seems like Minoshima-san picked well.  Predictably, the first track is Bad Apple!!  Fair game.  The second track is Dark Road, a pretty straight forward adaptation of The Road of the Apotropaic God, and which is probably one of my favorites from Alstroemeria Records in general.  Both versions have very strong motifs and well considered instrumentations.  Crystalize Silver and Dreaming are why I don't like Nomico, but they're still not actually bad, nor are they extraordinary.  Just...really...helium-y.  The vocals for Dreaming are partially based on Reimu Hakurei's theme, Maiden's Capriccio, which has another, more well-known adaptation, Neko Miko Reimu, for which the high octave makes slightly more sense.  Eighteen Four is another track with Misato's vocals, which, if nothing else, provide a nice change.  The instrumental arrangement is pretty blasé for an Alstroemeria Records track though.  However, it's followed by Dolls, which is a far stronger track compositionally, and makes good use of Misato's range.  It's followed, however, by Shinto Shrine, which sounds like it should be playing over the end credits for something, but is still a pretty solid, downtempo sort of track...which is a good thing, because it's also a good seven and a half minutes.  Then it's Helium Voice again for Shanhai [sic] Alice in 1884, another not bad but also slightly less good downtempo track.  This is followed by the very trance influenced Voile, The Magic Library, based on the Touhou composition of the same name.  This is probably the closest Minoshima has ever come to a by-the-numbers track of any genre, but it works.  Another trance influenced piece, Scolded By The Princess, clocks in at nine minutes and six seconds of laid back dance beats, and comes immediately after, so I hope you like FM Synthesis baselines.  Then it's time for more Helium with Alice Maestra, a pretty solid but unremarkable track, and The Last Judgement, another trance-like track, and probably the strongest of it's type on the album.  It leads into another one of Minoshima's piano Outros (which I can't find on youtube), which brings the album to a nice piano and synth string conclusion.

Youmu Konpaku: half ghost, master
swordsman, gardener, and now,
Alstroemeria's most adorable vocalist.

Haunted Dancehall

Alstroemeria Record's Most recent album, subtitled Living Dead <Danceable>, is also, while maybe not their best, in my opinion, almost certainly their most fun.  It's a completely seamless album, with songs often flowing into each other so well that it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.  For this reason, here's a youtube video of the whole album.  This is something you could just turn on at a dance party, and just leave playing, and it'd work perfectly.  Like in Plastique World Plastik World, it opens with a short Minoshima original, featuring a single looping Engrish phrase (Only In the Morning Upside Down After Moonlight), followed seamlessly by a song that builds off of it (Ancient).  At least for Only in the Morning Upside Down After Moonlight, the English is actually grammatical.  Together, the two tracks make for a fun, dangerously catchy, and surprisingly complex opening section, and includes some very cool polyphony with Mei Ayakura's vocals.  The next section, Witching Dream, is a pretty bright, funky house track in true Minoshima style (including another helium girl who's not Nomico, and who actually has a pretty good range).  This leads into an instrumental section - the eponymous Haunted Dancefloor - that reminds me an awful lot of Daft Punk's Voyager done Minoshima style.  This is followed by Border of Life, another pretty cool, bright house track, after which comes Little Love Girl.  Note, this is Little Love Girl, not Little Girl Love, which is how I keep on reading it; I don't know if it's me or Minoshima who's subconsciously a pedophile.  Anyway, it's another pretty solid track, though probably the closest the album ever comes to pop.  It quotes Cirno's theme, Beloved Tomboyish Daughter, in the vocals, even though it's not an adaptation in the same way some previous tracks on other albums have.  In fact, unless I'm mistaken, a significant amount of material on Haunted Dancehall is completely original.  Little Love Girl also provides a great example of why you really shouldn't be taking large samples of English vocals if you don't what they mean.  Unless Minoshima-san is really wondering "Where my homies at?  Where my bitches at?"  Which he could be, I understand the sentiment completely; I loose track of my homies and bitches all the time.  Anyway, this is followed by the funky (I've been using that word a lot in describing this album, haven't I) instrumental interlude Crescent Dream.  After this is Sky Ruin, another very nice entry, even if the vocals, while for once down in C3 throughout the song, are pretty non-desrcript.  The album ends with with Your Smile, Your Face, Your Lies, Your Love, a very nice nice track with some very nice percussive synth piano in the composition, and English lyrics that are grammatical and actually mean something (mispronounced as they may be).  I say it's the end of the album, and it is the end of the album as a contiguous whole, but it's not technically true, because it also includes a remix of Plain Asia from Plastisch Welt Plastik World.  It's a much lighter track than the original, but it works about as well.  Lots of glitchy sounds.  Very much old Minoshima in Nu-Minoshima form.

Anyway, there are still a few more albums I haven't downloaded yet, so I get to do this again for them too.  And who knows, maybe Alstroemeria Records will have another one for Comiket 82 (or whatever the next one is).

On Touhou Anime

I mentioned in the last post that a Touhou anime could stand to be very interesting, only peripherally knowing that there were already two examples of doujin produced anime's based on Touhou already in existence, one with a second episode already in production.  This is not the one I'd have preferred a second episode be made of, but I'll get into that later.  Neither of the two examples are quite there: they both have their strengths and weaknesses (the first mainly weaknesses), but they're both very interesting.

The first one of these is A Summer Day's Dream, produced by the independent studio Maikaze, and featuring some very well known Japanese voice actresses.  Now, the article on the Touhou wiki says it's uncertain where the studio found the money and the connections to get these voice actors, but to me it's pretty simple: they took it out of the budget for the animation and the rest of the staff.  Perhaps that's a bit harsh, but the truth of the matter is, despite ZUN's concerns that with such well known seiyuus attached to the project that people would mistake it for an official Touhou anime, there is no mistaking this for anything but a doujin production.  That said, this is still better than a lot of real, television anime that still manages to make money...somehow...so even though this isn't the best possible world, I'm glad this exists.

Let's start with what this does right.  As I mentioned before, it has some high profile voice actors in it, and the voice acting is, if nothing else, professional and competent.  This is the level of work you'd expect out of your average television anime, even if besides for Reimu and Marisa, nobody delivers much beyond the baseline of this-is-convincing-enough-to-overlook.  To be fair, they do their best with the dialog and direction they're given.  And that's where the trouble starts.  In neither of the two examples is the dialog by any means great, but in the other example that I'll get to, the dialog is written for real people that fit the basic framework.  This show has dialog written for the basic framework.  Okay, that's unfair too: a few characters - especially Reimu - have moments where they not only act like a human being would probably act, but act specifically like the human beings that they'd ideally be acting like.  They have their moments.  But for the rest of the time, they have the same plausibility as Hetalia characters.  (cue nerd rage)

This is not completely the fault of the dialog though.  Another part of the problem here lies in the animation, specifically, the character animation.  Again, the problem is that these are not the expressions and emotions of real people, these are the expressions of tropes.  When someone is supposed to look nervous, they assume the standard this-is-what-a-nervous-person-looks-like-face, and when they're angry, the assume the standard this-is-what-an-angry-person-looks-like-face.  There is almost no subtlety here at all.  Of course, this is animation, and true subtlety in the same way a real actor can have subtlety is pretty much impossible, and in the end, all animated emotion is short hand for the real thing, but compare this to something like even the under-budgeted Neon Genesis Evangelion, or even the next example, and it becomes clear that something is deficient.  This isn't even counting the times that people look outright - and I swear I've tried to think of a better word, and this is the one that fits it most - derpy because the animators have gone off model.  The backgrounds at least are nice, if not particularly detailed.

All this is pretty important, but perhaps a bit nit-pickey compared to the overall lack of decent direction.  This seems to have been story-boarded, directed, and edited by someone who had maybe seen a bunch of anime before and picked up on a few things about how directors normally go about doing things like setting a scene, without really knowing why they do them that way.  This isn't (I sincerely hope) the work of someone who has actual experience making an anime.  Consider the first scene of the donation box being stolen, after the not-as-awkward-as-it-could-have-conceivably-been expository intro.  The camera pans down onto the forest near the Hakurei shrine at night to "crime happening at night" music.  There is a shadow moving through the trees.  There is a distance shot looking at the shrine, illuminated by...a spotlight?  Whatever.  It then cuts to a frame of the donation box, with the shadow approaching it, then cut to black.  Now, ask yourselves, even if you've never seen an anime in your life, how many times have you seen this exact sequence of shots before?  You know what it reminded me of?  Cyberchase, right down to the music.

Speaking of the music, for a game series so rich in truly great music, A Summer Day's Dream has some of the least inspired music I've ever seen used in an anime.  On the other hand, some of the sound usage is actually quite clever, and this is something that the next example gets wrong.  Using the sound of a distant jet for Aya's supersonic flight ability was actually pretty funny.  There are appropriate ambient sounds for most of the scenes, and very few stock sound effects that I recognized.

In fact, this all probably seems rather harsh.  This is not a great anime, but it is not unwatchable, and it has enough going for it that I genuinely want to see the next episode.  It's not a complete waste of 20 or so minutes.

On the other hand, we have Fantasy Kaleidoscope: Memories of Phantasm.  I've thought about it, and I've come to a conclusion.  You can, and I will, talk about how technically this is a far better constructed anime than A Summer Day's Dream, but the fact of the matter is that this version succeeds mainly because of the charisma of its main characters, but especially Marisa.  On paper, and especially in this version, both Marisa and, to a lesser extent, Reimu, are charismatic characters: they have strong personalities (if so far little true depth) and little real concern for what other people think of them.  People like this are fun to watch, and for a 16 minute adventure, very well suited.

Stanley Kubrick did not direct this anime.  However, the guy who did obviously had some idea of what he was doing.  This guy knows how to build images, how to use "camera" angles, and how to use little subtle things to do some pretty nice indirect characterization for what is, in terms of structure, essentially little more than a saturday morning cartoon.  I can only think of one poorly constructed shot or sequence in the entire thing, and that's the ending of the fight with Youmu, but to be fair, that was probably because animating energetic fights is time consuming, and therefore expensive (and the fight with Yuyuko makes up for it with a very cool depiction of danmaku combat).  There's also some very nice background detail.  Alice, in the ending scene, walks up and sees Marisa talking with Reimu, and watches with her normal cold expression.  Shanghai and Hourai - her animated dolls that accompany her everywhere - however, are ecstatic.  It's not quite subtle (and it doesn't have to be), but it's still a small detail that I highly doubt the director of the first example would have come up with, and it's the little details like these that help build up a living world and its characters.

The backgrounds themselves are very pretty, but what Memories of Phantasm does right that A Summer Day's Dream does not is character animation.  Here, we see plenty of hyperbole with face and body animation, as it should be, because these are hyperbolic people, but the difference here is that this hyperbole is used more sparingly, and to express more nuanced things than the previous example.  The shorthand doesn't say "this is what a frustrated person looks like; this frustrated person is Marisa," it says "this is what Marisa looks like right now; doesn't she look a bit frustrated for reasons that are uniquely Marisa's?"  It also gets points for depicting Marisa's confident grin absolutely perfectly (I use a cropped and resized screencap of Marisa from the anime as my avatar on ACS and Formspring, like a boss).

Visually, this anime works very well, but if it has a problem, it's with sound effects.  You see, I don't know much about who made this animation, and how it was made, but I do know this much: the original had no voices, just the Japanese subtitles, the music, and the sound effects.  It was, in essence, a silent film.  It was only dubbed later by another group of doujins, who, if what I read in the youtube comments section was true (hahaha), also did the dubbing for a Touhou parody of Castlevania.  I'll get to the voices and music later, but if this anime has a problem, it's with its use of sound effects.  For a silent film, there's no problem in having the occasional whacky sound effect to punctuate the silences.  It works when there's no dialog to go along with it, because it's a different dynamic.  However, having Cirno the idiot ice fairy get tossed outside with a whistle just doesn't work when you have Marisa and Reimu already talking away with background music as well.

The music, however, works great.  It's not hard to make a soundtrack for a Touhou anime: just use arrangements of ZUN's already awesome soundtrack.  This is what Memories of Phantasm does, and it's great.  I really wish I could find the version of Flowering Night they used with Sakuya's conversation with Reimu, because it's fantastic.  The opening and ending themes are pretty standard anime faire, but for standard faire they're both pretty good, and they work well enough for the show.  Quoting UN Owen Was Her at the very end of the closing credits was kind of funny though, in a "ha ha, I know this song, but why is it being used here" sort of way.

As for the voice acting, I don't know if any of these people are professional voice actors, but the ones playing Marisa and Reimu do a pretty good job.  Everybody else is on the verge of really sucking.  In fact, some of them actually do really suck.  Yuyuko's seiyuu in particular is pretty hilarious, and does nothing to improve her already questionable dialog.  Youmu's seiyuu is little better.  Still, Marisa and Reimu's do more than a decent job.  Marisa especially sounds pretty much exactly like Marisa should sound, even if she brings little actual subtlety or subtext to her performance.  Reimu probably gives a better one in terms of bringing subtext to the table that isn't made explicit in the dialog, but Reimu doesn't get as much screen time anyway.  This is a shame, because in something so short, subtext is a must if you're going to actually do things with these characters.

Of course, the script itself wasn't written to be read aloud.  As I said before, this was originally a silent film, only later dubbed by others, so there is some dialog in it that sounds sorta awkward when actually acted out.  Once again, poor Yuyuko gets the short straw, and she, along with Youmu get some really clunky lines that seem to be depicting them as card carrying villains.  This is very unfortunate, because Yuyuko has the potential to be a really, really interesting character, and yet, here is some real dialog that takes place between her and Youmu within the first few seconds of the anime:

Youmu: Lady Yuyuko, all is going according to plan.
Yuyuko: Heh.  Now, let's us begin, in this dark and unvisited land, the banquet of the Ghosts.

Yeah, I can totally see a real person saying this.  Really?  Really?  Oh well, at least Yuyuko has boobs, and that's all some people care about I guess.

Anyway, I guess Memories of Phantasm also runs into a bit of a structuring problem, wherein too much is going on where characters just sort of appear for the sake of them appearing.  It's made too much for people who are already familiar with Touhou, for them to go, "hey, it's Aya the reporter," or "hey, it's the Prismriver sisters."  Anyone who doesn't already know who the Prismriver sisters are is just going to scratch their head at the random klezmer band magical musicians floating around the entrance to Hakugyokurou.  This is all time that could be spent doing more productive things.

Anyway, I think the 16 minute run time structure is actually a very good fit for a Touhou anime.  It doesn't take as much money or time to produce, or to dub, and, lets face it, no matter what you do with it, these characters are never going to be the cast of the next Neon Genesis Evangelion, nor is the plot going to ever reach the sophistication of Legend of the Galactic Heroes.  This is as it should be.  Touhou is about these funny, interesting, sometimes whimsical characters doing things that threaten the balance of existence because they're bored, having crazy awesome danmaku fights, then all going back to crash at Reimu's place.  If you build up the characters enough, you can have some really great moments - the doujin manga The End of the Maiden's Illusion is a very good example - but it wouldn't work if you started out to do Le Samourai with Marisa Kirisame.

Memories of Phantasm is not there yet...but it's on the right track.  There is a short after-credits sequence that sets up for a second episode, even though I have not read anything official about one being in production.

I really hope there is a second episode in production.

FANBOI MODO, AKTEBEITO!

There fucking has to be a second episode in production, man!

And now for something completely different:

Addendum I - Games and Music

WHAT YOU SAY?
I realize the last post was quite a bit shorter and narrower in focus than normal.  This was only because I started writing it rather late at night, and had classes the next day and had to go to bed more or less within the hour.  That's also why it had so many typos, as you can imagine.  So, here's some more stuff nobody here will care about.

What Am I Playing?  (Related: What Am I Listening To)
Technically, the majority of this section will be about something I'm not actually playing, but is technically still a video game: Touhou.  The self-published top-down shooter is notable not as much for its gameplay, but for the huge cast of characters, the music, and the stories and videos that fans of the game have come up with.

People talk about games, movies, and books having "mythologies" all the time, but for few things does the term apply so very closely than to Touhou.  See, Touhou is popular for its very large cast of colorful characters.  These characters aren't given much more than a basic framework personality within the game, but the community has taken them almost as archetypes, and created their own stories involving these magicians, youkai (think Japanese equivalents to western myths of vampires and werewolves), and generally disreputable beings of god-like power.  This seems to me very similar to the way, for instance, the Greeks had their archetypical gods, and created stories around them.  Also like the Greeks, the interpretations of the characters and setting - and the quality - of these stories varied...a lot.

Perhaps my favorite interpretation of Touhou is the music video for the song Bad Apple!!  The video, which is done in a shadow art style, depicting various Touhou characters going about their daily business, evokes to me an atmosphere of intrigue, like a Masterpiece Mystery production.  An anime - or even live action, though that would be very hard to make look not corny on an average budget - based on the premise of the life and times of the denizens of Gensyouko could not only be very good, but also something very different from the average prodcution: not magical girl, not high fantasy, not slice-of-life, not mystery, but all of them at once.  The lyrics to Bad Apple!! itself deal with the idea of a youkai so old and full of ennui that she can no longer relate to the rest of the world, a theme that I happened to touch on in my previous story as a matter of fact.  Now I can't get the image of Ifekas going "ugoku no naraba, ugoku no naraba, subete kowasu wa, subete kowasu wa" (and should I make a move, and should I make a move, then I'd destroy it all, then I'd destroy it all) out of my head.  Parallel ideas are always weird.

Speaking of music, that's the other thing that's really cool about Touhou: the creator, Junya Ota, really should have been a composer.  The pieces he's composed for Touhou are very complex (very rarely entirely in 4/4 time) and energetic, yet always have a very good sense of tonality and cohesion.  I like to liken his most famous song, UN Owen Was Her (yay Engrish), to if Scott Joplin had sat down and decided to write a rag for player piano roll that would be physically impossible for a human to play.  The arrangement I've linked (technically, the version used in the game is this) would require six hands to play correctly.  If I ever get robotic arms, I know the first thing I'm doing.  In the mean time, we'll let the player pianos do the work.

In other news, Mass Effect 3 is still shaping up to be incredibly awesome.  The one thing I'm currently debating with myself is, come March 6th, whether or not I want to wait until break to get the game, or to reserve it at a Gamestop down hear and get it the first day.  I could make a joke about how I wouldn't get anything done for a good month afterwards, but that's not really true: I did play through Mass Effect 2 last semester without any problems, after all.

The only problem I can foresee is playing it on the TV I have here, but then again, I haven't actually tested to see if the way I have it set up works well or not, so I guess I'll just go and see.

A game that's not getting nearly as much widespread attention is Birds of Steel, a game developed by the same people who made IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey, but focusing on the pacific theatre of WWII.  Apparently, it's going to have MMO (massively multiplayer online) elements, and include not only the new planes for the US Naval Airforce and Imperial Japanese Naval Airforce, but also those from Birds of Prey.  On one hand, this makes it seem very much like this is basically going to be for all intents and purposes an expansion pack for Birds of Prey, but on the other hand, that's not a bad thing in the slightest.  If some of the recent trailers are to believed as well, German planes will finally be getting real cockpits too.  Which is cool, because it was annoying using the translucent nigh invisible hud in BoP, but also annoying, because German planes more often than not had really bad visibility, especially the -109.  Oh well, if you want to go flying for fun, you're probably going to be flying the Spitfire anyway.  I really want to fly it against the Zero to see which one handles better, because I think it'll be very close.

Incidentally, it's being published by Konami, which has given the Japanese version the name "Ao no Eiyuu," which means "Heroes of the Blue."  I dunno what to make of that one.

There's recently been news that the creative director for 343 Industries' new Halo game left due to health and creative differences.  Now, he said that he left not because he thought the game was shaping up to be bad, but that he and his team had very different visions of what they wanted the game to be, and he found it increasingly harder to be creatively exited about the project.  For this reason alone, I think the director made the right call.  A creative director not only has to impose his will on the rest of the team in order for the game not to end up - and I swear if I use a Randian term unironically again the world has no hope - a creative bromide, but also himself to have a strong vision of where he or she wants to go with the project.  Yet, at the same time, whenever a director of anything leaves, that creates its own set of problems.  The team has already produced a not inconsiderable amount of resources for a project that may or may not still even be relevant to the new director's vision.  If the new director tries to pick up where the old one left off in terms of ideas, especially if the old director's idea wasn't particularly strong, then again you run the risk of ending up with a creative bromide.  If the new director tries to star all over, then you get costly delays and angry investors.

I was never particularly confident about this new non Bungie developed Halo project, and this isn't helping things any.  On the other hand, a good part of what makes Halo a great series is the attention to balance and adaptability in the multiplayer, and that's not something that I think either the new director or 343 Industries will be taking lightly.  At least I hope not.

I said the first reason alone would have been good enough, but the second is even more compelling: the old creative director left was because he was diagnosed with depression.  The director definitely made the right decision, in that case.  Yet, in the back of my head, I can't help but wonder what a Halo Genesis Evangelion might have been like.  And that's terrible =P

On a side note, the more I think about it, the more I realize that, while Ayn Rand's concept of the human ideal is tragically insufficient, I agree with a lot, if not most, of what she had to say about art.  Art is the greatest achievement of man, and it's also by definition the most completely egotistical thing imaginable, because it can only ever be egotistical.  If not, it ceases to become a true expression, and ceases to become art.  Beauty may be found anywhere, but art can only ever be an uncompromising vision.  This is why things such as films, which require a great deal of artistic cooperation, only succeed if there is a strong central will behind the project.  I don't think this is something that Ayn Rand realized, with all her ridiculous posturing: it's not necessary that the man be uncompromising, but that the idea be.  I wonder if she ever considered film a worthy endeavor, if only because it requires cooperation.

Incidentally, this is also why so many auteurs are total jerkasses.

Anyway, back on topic, Civilization V is on sale on Steam, so I might be picking that up this weekend. I don't use Steam for hardly anything, and this will be the first time I ever buy something on it.  Civ IV is still one of my favorite games of all time, so lets hope that Civ V lives up to its franchise name and face FULL LIFE CONSEQUENCES.


I guess that's it for now.  Maybe I'll write something else later this next week.  Anything is possible.

A Blog...In The Rain...

The bottom of the water bottle was at the center of Rachel's vision, her concentration fixed as the water, gulp by gulp, disappeared.  "Now, what were you saying?"

Justin said the same words in the same tone as he did just a moment before.  "Postmodernism!  We're going to go for postmodernism!  And it'll be great!  And then..."  He had lost his words.

"Yeah, cool story bro."  Rachel stretched out on the couch.  "You realize I'll have no idea what I'm doing, if you just tell me to do something, eh?  You can't just tell me to go make something, and then assume it'll be brilliant just because I made it."  Rachel grabbed another water bottle.  "Besides, I dunno whose works you've been seeing, but I'm not actually that consistently good."

"But you do have an idea.  You may not like it, but in the back of your mind, you're already putting together the pieces.  Inception, eh?"

"That's not the point."

"No, but I know what your type is like.  If you get an idea, and you want to express it, you'll either produce a perfect expression, to your standards, or die trying."

Rachel took another very long sip of water, and again, her eyes were hidden behind the bottle.  "You really shouldn't have used that cliche: I don't think even you really know how real that possibility is.  That's the cost of being an artist, eh?"

"Eh?  Oh, no, that's not what I meant at all."  Justin's hand went into his jacket pocket.  "I meant we'll shoot you if you don't."

Rachel closed her eyes and smiled.  "You would."

What Am I Writing?

The above, in 15 minutes, because I was bored.  Instead of what I was supposed to be writing, which is the below.  I've also written the short story A Mage and her Friend, which is farther below, and isn't horrible.  Together with Two Hedgehogs Running and another story I'm probably going to write at some point, I'm going to call them the friendship trilogy.  D'aww...  No really, they're both kind of dark (nervous laugh), but at their heart, they are both about something far more optimistic.  It's just that people tend to die in horrible, horrible ways.  No hard feelings, it's just that as a writer, the easiest way to wrap something up is to kill off your characters.  I'm such a horrible person ^_^

Anyway, I kind of wanted to write more, but since my textbook readings wouldn't be too interesting to talk about, nor would Red Storm Rising (which I read almost a month ago now), and because it's getting late I have to choose between talking about something in detail, or a lot of things in a very vague and uninteresting way, I'll just talk about anime.

What Am I Watching?

If you saw my last post, you'll know I had been watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes.  I'm still, in fact, watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but I took a bit of a hiatus for a while.  Now that I'm settled in college, I think an episode or two a day sounds quite nice, even if I have more productive things I could be doing, like writing, or taking pictures, or drawing, or something.  Not that art isn't worthwhile, of course.

I'm also taking a bit of a hiatus from Tiger and Bunny, which I had been following as it was being simulcast, and I believe is actually just about to wrap up.  I say was, because it totally jumped the shark a bit I think two or so episodes ago, and that kind of shook me.  I still plan on finishing the series, because that sort of idea-centric mold-breaking show needs all the encouragement we the otaku can give it, even if it's not been exactly a classic.  It's still better than the indistinguishable harem and moe shows that still somehow make money regardless of execution.  What's more, I can easily see it being run here on Cartoon Network or something, and it'd probably be a success.  I mean, it's a superhero show, but with a really diverse array of interesting characters and a cool American-as-seen-by-the-Japanese art style.  Even better, it's already a very big success in Japan as well, so maybe the rooms full of Japanese businessmen will start to realize that sometimes the guy with the crazy idea sometimes comes up with something marketable.

Of course, if I got what I wanted, and Japanese studios let their directors try their own ideas with a freer hand, we'd end up with a similar situation to the OVA boom: a whole lot of very unique crap along with the good.  Still, I'd be willing to suffer many M.D. Geists for a single Akira.

Actually, scratch that, M.D. Geist is hilarious, give us some of those from time to time too.  What's that?  You'd do it for us anyway?  D'aww...

Anyway, just with Eden of the East, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Tiger & Bunny, and Ghost in the Shell (all of which I watched this past summer vacation), this would be a very good season for me and anime.  However, just about a week before I went back to college, I remembered this show that had a very popular run in Japan and with the American otaku just that previous winter, and that I had never gotten past the first episode on.  Puella Magi Madoka Magica, wasn't it?  Something about magical girls, and witches, and a cat-like thing called Kyubey.  Out of curiosity, I pulled up the second episode...then the third...then the fourth...

Yep, pretty much.

For those of you who are playing at home, this is what Madoka Magica is about: two middle school friends, Madoka Kaname and Sayaka Miki, find themselves offered a contract: to become magical girls and fight phantasmic witches for the adorable Kyubey, in exchange for having a wish granted.  Horrible, horrible things ensue.

I really want to write a full length analysis of Madoka Magica, which I will do eventually, but maybe this will do for now.  People seem to love comparing Madoka Magica to Neon Genesis Evangelion.  The main difference I see here is that Evangelion is a character study: a show about depression and the ways in which people relate to each other, and with themselves.  Madoka Magica, for all its deconstructive elements, is a tragedy first and foremost, albeit one that lives for its characters, and succeeds because of them.  Well, I say it's a deconstruction, and it is, at least until it at last, in a very literal way, become a reconstruction.  Which I love.  Still, while Madoka Magica may not plumb the strata of the human experience quite as much as Evangelion, for a tragedy to work, it has to have good characters.  It does, and more.  These characters are all unique people with their own motivations and arcs.  They are human enough that we can relate, and so that we can better understand their pain as these pretty horrible things happen to them and those around them.

Perhaps what makes the show so great can be summed up with one word: atmosphere.  Besides an episode or two of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, I haven't seen many of his other works, but I think I can safely say that Akiyuki Shinbo loves his superflat.  The nominal enemies of the show are these phantasmagorical, eldritch abominations called witches.  Each one of these witches creates around it a surreal maze and environment.  Now, I can throw around adjectives like "surreal" and "phantasmagorical" all I want, but the truth of the matter is, these environments the witches occupy are always drawn in art styles very different from the clean, digipaint, very cutesy style of the rest of the world.  The use of framing, color palette, sound, and juxtaposition here create some exceedingly creepy settings for the show's fights.

Of course, that's window dressing.  Some of the best use of atmosphere comes from the framing, coloring, and very uncanny-valley sort of architecture of the real world.  Everything is ludicrously clean and planned.  The school the main characters go to is a massive glass structure, its interior layout based on a prison in Australia.  There are a hundred little details in the cinematography that all point to the same conclusion: something's very wrong with this picture.

Unfortunately, this has the side effect of causing what I like to refer to as the Stanley Kubrick effect: the camera is so concerned with creating the atmosphere that it sometimes neglects characterization until it's almost too late.  By the time the series is reaching the middle, it's starting to do things that require us to be already understand and be attached to the characters, and though the writing is good enough and the cinematography not so negligent that it all comes crashing down, the show suffers a bit more than it should as a result.  Still, this seems a conscious decision on the director's part, so I can't really count it as a flaw, just an attribute.

I also kind of have to fault the series for having a rather useless first episode.  While it may have one of the most far out opening scenes I've seen in an anime yet, the rest of it doesn't do a whole lot.  We get introduced to the characters, but for the first episode, they get surprisingly little characterization.  They just...are.  This wouldn't be so bad - they do have some really witty conversations - if the first episode didn't also foreshadow or outright spoil a whole lot of things that would be much better off left unmentioned until later.  Most of these aren't even in the service of the plot, which doesn't hardly go anywhere either.  I watched it almost by accident from the second episode rather than the first, only later going back and watching it, and at the very least, nothing was lost.

One of the strongest aspects of the show, and one that contributes to its atmosphere and emotional weight is the brilliant soundtrack composed by Yuki Kajiura.  As I was watching the show, I noticed how well the music worked with the images, but besides for the wonderful closing theme, I more or less assumed that it would be like a lot of video game music: functional in the game, but meaningless to listen to on its own.  Of course, I listened to some of the tracks from the soundtrack on youtube, and they're almost all fantastic regardless of the context of the show.  When the soundtrack comes out in the US, I'm almost certainly going to buy it (but not before the soundtracks to Cowboy BeBop and Trigun, which I still haven't done).

In fact, I definitely plan on getting the DVDs when they come out here as well.  The unofficial fan subtitled version I watched is, after all, very legally ambiguous.  This is maybe my second favorite anime I've yet seen, right behind Evangelion, so to not get them would be remiss of me.

Which means I've had some good news: Aniplex has announced that they'll be releasing it in the US with an English dub.  To coincide with the announcement, they released this trailer.

And this is what the staff at Aniplex was doing when they uploaded the video.

Man, anyone buying the dvd after watching the trailer is going to be really in for it when they press play and this first scene starts rolling.

I can't wait.

A Mage And Her Friend

Okay, that's it, I'm forcing a two story moratorium on myself on writing depressing stories.  My next works will be wacky adventures, I swear.


Anyway, I just wrote this while the internet was down here, and because I promised myself I'd finish at least one story before going back to college.  It's in a high fantasy setting, but you won't be seeing any dark lords here.  Really, it has more in common with Touhou than it does Lord of the Rings, but hey, if it works, it works.


*This story will be subject to frequent edits.  'Cuz that's how I roll.

Ifekas walked quite calmly.  Yet, she might have been jogging for how swiftly she moved, even more than any other elf Fern had met in her travels.  Fern had to take very long strides to keep up, but she too was in no hurry.  The elf's cloak billowed blue and shiny with mud behind her, Fern's grey form sauntering aside.  The monsoon season had been very mild so far, and it was always nice exploring new towns.  Her eyes found the signs by the high windows above the street.

"Hey, look, another pub."

"Fern, the sarcasm, it gets old."

"Oh, no, I was just pointing out that even in this city, there's more pubs here than...than..."  She saw Ifekas gazing absent-mindedly into the dark shop window on the right and fell silent.

"Mmm, hmm."  Ifekas started in her stride.  "Oh, hey, no, really, I was listening.  I just felt something on the air here.  Too much electricity."  Ifekas licked her finger and felt the air with it.  Her hair perked up ever so slightly on an invisible wind, and her ears shivered a moment.  "Magic user, maybe users."

"Eh now?  You think elves?  Or yondák?"

"No, probably not elves, much too...oh, what's the word...human languages...  No, I think there must be a long history of a yondák proprietor here.  Lots of magical repairs.  Pretty strong magical reactions going on somewhere around here too.  Right now, even."

Fern cocked her head to the side as she thought.  "Yeah...yeah, that makes sense, really.  I guess what I was about to say was that there seem to be lots of very fancy pubs for an area like this.  I bet all the old immortals just love the idea of being here on the barrier islands as the rest of civilization dies back.  All those pretty sunrises on the water, contemplating the transience of shit."

"Hey!"  Ifekas grinned a cat-like grin.  "You ever see one of my kind try to pull that shit? No, Fern, you haven't."

"Contemplating the transience of shit?"

"Hell no, we do that all the time.  I mean just give up and open a quiet country café and let the world pass by.  When we elves get like that, we don't fade with the world, we become mages and screw shit up before we go!"

"Or you commit suicide."

"Yeah."  Ifekas shrugged.

It was Fern’s turn to grin.  "Man, I still don't understand you, Ife.  Nobody becomes a mage because they have a life wish."

"I dunno where you people get these ideas, seo.  Isn't being a mage enough?"  Ifekas gazed upwards.  "There's a good fight to be had here.  I feel like pulling my blade right here and jumping on that steeple over there, and calling out, and seeing what happens.  I'll fight them if they come, seo, and I'll destroy them all."

Fern eyed her wearily.  "You'll do it too.  Don't though; I don't want any more needless massacres.  They tend to follow you, even out here, even these days."  Ifekas still stared tensely off into space.  "Besides, old yondák communities have lots of old books and artifacts.  I want to see how many I can liberate and pass on to the institute."

"Oh yeah, I forgot you're still doing that."

"Well, not really.  I think they've written me off already."

"Cool, now you don't have to worry anymore about your job.  We can just roam and rob and roam and r..."

"I do get paid for that job, you know.  It's honest work, not like raiding old estates with you."

Ifekas was silent.

"You up for some food?"

"The next shop on the right."

"Sure."  Fern repeated quietly.  "Sure."

Ifekas stopped just short of the door.  She shivered slightly.  "You have good senses, Fern.  There's a lot of residual static clinging to this building.  The proprietor here is very strong, I think."

Fern shrugged.  "I guess.  I'd like to say I picked it because it looked important, but I actually overheard the tea is good here.  Nothing like some good tea to go with burglarizing."

The bricks of the building were grey, either made of an uncommon material or saturated by dye, forming a perfect face with the tall glass windows stretching many meters beyond the roof of the buildings around it.  The tall elf receptionist stopped fiddling with his unruly long-jacket collar as Fern stepped in.

"Afternoon, misses."  The Elf's accent was new to Fern.  "Are you both here for afternoon tea?"

"Yes." said Fern.

"Would you mind putting us at a window?"  Ifekas stepped closer.

"Not a problem, ma'am."

The table was silhouetted against the window now wet with the passing shower.  Fern's eyes traced the corners of the room as Ifekas willed her tea to cool faster.  Fern had plenty of experience with yondák art, but for all that, she couldn't tell what tribe the muted murals were from.  She didn't worry: she didn't have to know.  "Ife, I think these guys were on the wrong side."

"Hmm?"

"In the battle for existence."

"Sure.  Do I get to kill them?"

"No, but it makes me feel better, I guess.  I don't recognize the style of these murals, so I'm thinking they must have been on the other side of the Dentaras valley for the duration."  Fern tried her tea again.  Mint and yçhefor.

Ifekas stared absent-mindedly out the window.  "Fern?"

"Mm?"

"Why do you do this?"

"You mean rob?"

"Yeah."

"I guess I like it.  Lots of books about interesting things, lots of fascinating shit I don't even know what does."

Ifekas stretched her arms out.  "You don't like it though."

"No."  It was Fern's turn to stare worriedly out the window.  "I guess I don't at that."

"Well then why the hell do you keep doing it?"  Ifekas was leaning very far forward in her seat.

"I don't know.  Maybe I just do it because I get to do it with you."

Ifekas was tense and her eyes inscrutable.  "You don't like what I am though."

"No."  Fern thought.  "No, but I do like who you are.  What we do is horrible, but maybe that's enough."

The rain picked up again outside.  Its racket on the window made the silence more comfortable.

"So you already have a plan in mind?"

"Yes."  Fern pointed up the staircase in the back.  "We walk up there, take what we want, and leave."  Fern took another sip of tea.  "Well, probably we'll be running, but I don't suppose that matters too terribly."

Ifekas took another sip of tea, and her eyes fell on Fern.  "Well, shall we?"

Together, taking their cups and saucers with them, Fern and Ifekas rose from their seats and walked calmly up the flight of stairs, textured with the shadows projected from the massive window.  Fern's blade gauntlet was a matte grey outline against the soft glow of arcane heat and electricity Ifekas cast on her right.  The elf receptionist glanced at the monolithic sundial in the square outside and continued fiddling with his collar.

The top floor gave the impression of narrowness, though really it was a very large space with lines that converged at the end and drew the eye to the horned yondák woman standing and sketching at the window.  She was tall, and though sturdily built, gave the suggestion of the grace mortal races found so fitting to both the immortal ones.  "Good afternoon," she said.

Ifekas called her scythe and snapped it into readiness.  "Hey, we're here to rob you and kill you."

"Well, Ife is here to kill you.  I'm just here to rob you."  Fern wasted no time leafing through some of the old books the yondák proprietor had left open.

The yondák glanced back at the pair.  "Really?  Go away, don't you have anything better to do?"

Fern eyed her coldly.  "Oh come on, we know we're not dealing with just some restaurateur, lady.  I've seen a lot of yondák art in my time, but I've never seen anything like what I've seen downstairs, meaning you and your friends must have been on the wrong side of the..."

"Meaning I have no interest in other peoples' styles.  I'm an artist and entrepreneur.  You're one of those institute people, aren't you?"

Fern put a large volume on chemistry in her sack.

"That's a shame, I always liked their idea.  You must know then, they don't have every tribe on file, and they certainly don’t have me."  She turned back to her art.  "I’ve never been very noticeable."

"Well, yeah, but I'm no paladin.  I'm only robbing you because it's a challenge and I need the money."

Ifekas took another sip of her tea.  "I'm only here because I like fighting."

"Well great, doesn’t that makes you two sympathetic now?  I'm going to go to bed tonight feeling bad about killing you two.  Isn't the rest of civilization declining depressing enough?"

"Don't mind me, I'm just trying to help fix the world, not contemplate the transience of shit for the rest of my life."

"Where did you pick up that phrase, seo?"

"But you're robbing me because you like the challenge."

"Well, no."  Fern added a gyroscope in with the books.

"I hate you guys."  The yondák set down her charcoals.

A wave of blue light and heat rippled from Ifekas, stunning Fern a moment.  She couldn't be sure if Ifekas ran or flew at her opponent.  All she saw was a bolt of blue light slashing down with a scythe at the yondák, who was suddenly a meter away, and in her hands were two swords.  Many sparks arced high, though Fern couldn't tell if they were from steel striking steel, or the collision of arcane forces.  Though the blast of wind blew out the windows and opened giant holes in the roof, Fern stood tensed to engage; yet she knew she would be struck down in an instant.  This was not her battle.

Ifekas shot through the roof, high into the sky beyond, landing on nothing but floating on, blasts of heat and energy streaking back at where the yondák had been but milliseconds before.  In the air, they clashed in bursts of fire and lightning and arcane power, illuminating the grey bottoms of the monsoon season clouds with an impossible purple light.  Such unmitigated basic power was the true nature of magic; was why the sorcerers that walked beyond were no less than gods.  The yondák fought with such unexpected understanding and grace that even a mage, even the unrestrained abandon to destruction that darted and swung her scythe in great arcs, was given a worthy match. 

Down below, the streets were bathed in the phantasmic illumination.  It diffracted and refracted in the rain, on the tip of Fern's blade, and in the blood of the town's guard which now swarmed her below.  As she fought, she wondered at the light.  Her blade came around in quick jabs and slices, tracing in the rain never repeating patterns, flickering in the pulsing lights never in response, but in its own dancing ways.  No fight had seemed to her so pretty.  Fern wondered if Ife felt the same way.

Now in the sky, both fighters were slowing in their strikes, their blows less vigorous, and their attacks more circuitous.  Ifekas kept up the assault, watching the yondák move, calculating her energy, waiting for a chance.  And then she was there, her scythe a blue streak against the sky.  The heat and energy of the blow caught the yondák mid gasp, dead before the scythe's arc was complete.  Ifekas watched her tumble, and almost immediately, in victory, she herself started sinking downwards, the sandy earth below falling in closer.

She landed in a heap in a clearing near the town, naked and completely exhausted.  It was out of the corner of her eye that she saw Fern stumbling into the clearing after her, the grey blade red on its leading edge, loose at her side.

"Ah, there you are seo."  She propped herself up on her knee.  "I couldn't see you down below."  She saw Fern’s blade.  “You weren’t bored?”

"Oh, you would have loved it, Ife."  Fern knelt down next to her.  "It was very pretty from down here."

"It was a good fight, seo.  I'm glad you enjoyed yours.  It’s always different fighting with you there.”  She grinned.  “I have an excuse to use my cooler moves.”

"I’m glad, then, and I’m glad for my battle too.  Well, that’s not really true, I didn’t want my fight.  I didn't want to have to kill anyone, you know that.  But as they came, it seemed a little less sad, with you up there.  I had a good fight too, but in the end they killed me, Ife."  She turned to her and smiled.  "The bastards used poison blades."

Ifekas didn't even look at her.  She stared forward, stone.

"Sorry."

"Fuck you."  Ifekas still didn't move.  "Just, fuck you.  Don't you remember what you said about doing this because you got to share the adventure with me?"

"Ife..."

“Don’t you remember why you even do this?”

“I know.”  Fern nodded her head.  “I know.”

"I'm almost four millennia old now.  I barely even remember my mother's name.  All I know is that these last seven years have been the only years where my life has had any sort of relevance outside my own existence."

Fern chuckled.  "That's horrible, Ife.  And here I thought you elves don't live for anyone but yourselves.  That's why I liked you guys."

Ifekas tightened her grip against her knee.

"There's nothing stopping you now, is there?"  Fern was visibly shivering now, but somehow her voice came clean and normal.

"My life had context before, but only in the art of destruction.  Maybe these seven years gave it something more.  No, I know they did, and I liked it.”

“So I was right about you.  I didn’t give you a reason to fight, I gave you a reason to create.”

 “But I guess that too shall pass."

Fern smiled as her eyes started to glaze over.  "Then I feel sorry for the world."

Ifekas sat as the rain fell around her in the steadily strengthening gale for many minutes, unmoving, without tears, simply staring forward until slowly, naked to the world, she picked up her scythe.  Even as she walked calmly towards the town, her strides took her very swiftly.  She would be there before the storm.

Summer Breeze

Well, looks like my schedule slipped a little.  During this time, my first semester of college ended, I went to London, the US intervened in Libya, E3 began and ended, and I'm still not done with Shogun.  C'est la vie, except I really have no excuse for not writing anything.  Actually, that makes it sound like I'm obligated to do this: I'm not.  Luckily, since nobody actually reads this except friends and family, I can't say I feel all torn up about it.

However, since it's been so long, I have a lot that I could potentially talk about.  However, if I were to talk about everything, the post would be enormously long, and my patience would wear thin that by the time I got to the finish, I'd be at the point of saying "yeah, Eden of the East is good.  It's...cool.  Super 8 is good too.  I mean, yeah, it's...cool too."  Nobody wants to read that, and I really don't want to write it.

A good place to start might be talking a bit about Birds of Prey, since I mentioned it last article, and I'm still playing it.  In fact, guess what's on the TV screen to my right at this very moment?  If you guessed Birds of Prey, here's an internet cookie.  That way, I'll know you read this and will be able to keep track of your preferences too (sorry, I couldn't resist ^_^).

What Am I Playing?

Yep, still Birds of Prey.  During the intervening time, I played and finished Portal 2, Crysis 2, the DLC for Mass Effect 2, Galaxy on Fire 2, and the Cold War Crisis mod for C&C Generals.  Yet, every week or so, I'll pop in Birds of Prey and shoot down some hapless Tommies over the English Channel in my Bf-109 G6 (insert your own "like a G6" joke here).  This is not because it's any better than the other games, but because of an inherent quality in the game that illustrates a dichotomy in gaming that I'm kind of surprised nobody has really talked about much before.  All games have mechanics to them, but these mechanics can be used to two ends: to creating a game (without a context), or to tell a story.  Often, the same game will have single player and multiplayer components that do this within the same game.  However, some games, like Birds of Prey, largely eschew storytelling for the game aspects.  This is why you can sit down and play some Birds of Prey without much of a commitment, while with, for instance, Crysis 2, the (single player aspect) game is not divided in such a way that one can treat it as a game.

Birds of Prey does do something kind of interesting though: due to its realistic nature as a flight simulator, its single player campaign uses its mechanics to give the player an idea of what flying sorties during World War 2 might have actually been like.  Many World War 2 games use the Ken Burns voiceover device to drive their stories, with the same goal, but Birds of Prey is different in that it actually works.  This has never happened before, like, ever.  I'm not quite certain why it works; I'd have to play through the game's campaign again (which I may do eventually anyway).

The Xbox 360 controller has two joysticks, and one might think that because of this, a flight simulator would be rather natural to have on the system.  Nope.  Well, not perfectly, anyway.  The problem with this is, for a realistic flight model, the range of motion of the sticks is such that at normal sensitivity, every twitch sends your plane into a flat spin.  Birds of Prey has multiple levels of realism, and at simulator level, you have to be extremely careful to the point of distraction.  It's like the first prototypes of the F-16 must have been like: with the joystick purely pressure sensitive, and prone to over-rotation.  You also have to have very good eyes, because the same control stick that controls your rudder and throttle also controls your view.  At simulator realism, you can't ever have your thumb off the rudder, so between those two problems, Birds of Prey's highest realism setting is rather impractical.  

Fortunately, "realistic" seems to be a nice compromise.  It has a slightly less demanding flight model, allows you to lock your view onto enemy aircraft without having to stop using the rudder for a moment, and allows you to use the 3rd person view.  While using the view from the cockpit adds a certain level of badassery, third person better allows you to enjoy the pretty scenery (which is, indeed, quite pretty).

Of course, the scenery isn't so pretty that it couldn't stand some improvement.  I think some flaming debris would look lovely on that little foothill by the Longanus river.

Incidentally, I hear there'll be another similar game by the same developers, but set in the Pacific.  I'll definitely check it out, if I'm not too busy saving the galaxy from the Reapers...by which I mean, studying...studiously.

Another game I seem to be playing a lot recently is the Cold War Crisis mod for Command and Conquer Generals.  I say this is a new game, even though technically it's a free mod, because even though some of the basic assets are the same, the gameplay in Cold War Crisis is so dissimilar from that of Command and Conquer Generals (or any C&C game) that to call it the same game would be grossly inaccurate.  First of all, I suppose I should mention that the game is set in the 1980s, during a conventional war between NATO and the Soviet Union.  Tanks roll back and fourth as the two powers fight for control of cities and strategic points.  This is the war we were actually prepared to fight during the 70s, 80s, and 90s that so threw off our footing during the Vietnam War and all the bushfire incidents since that the big, heavy mechanized infantry forces were all but useless during.  Here though, you get to use your tanks as tanks and not mobile cover for your infantry.

Really, I'm kind of amazed they managed to pull off what they did within the confines of the SAGE engine.  As a modder myself, I'm very aware of the capabilities of the engine, and I can usually figure out how various unit abilities work, so I understand how difficult it must have been, for instance, to script the AI to go in and out of prone.  While this may sound simple, even this basic feature is rather difficult to execute, requiring the model animations, the module parameters in the unit, and the AI scripting.  It all adds up to a very polished game with some very nice tactical gameplay.

This isn't the first game I've played with this concept.  World in Conflict has a very similar premise, and I've played the demo several times.  The difference here is, the units in World in Conflict are interchangeable and without a certain personality.  They're balanced to the point where there's little strategy.  CWC is fairly well balanced, but the abilities of each unit are distinct, and the sides significantly divergent without it becoming the inevitable slaughter for NATO a real conventional war with the Soviet Union would have been.

Really, in many ways, CWC is a better game than Generals ever was.  The only thing Generals did inarguably better was music and voice acting.  CWC's soundtrack isn't so much bad as Generals' soundtrack is extraordinary.  I still don't think it gets quite enough recognition, though oddly enough I do occasionally hear a track being used in a commercial.  I've put together a sort of unofficial soundtrack of 80s German pop-rock that fits quite a bit better.  99 Luftballons is great music to have tank battles to.  As for the voice acting, it's vital to mention that CWC was developed by a team in Germany.  Not only are none of them voice actors, but none of them speak English or Russian natively.  The American units are mostly voiced by the same guy, who seems to be trying to speak with an "American" accent.  Actually, that's not quite right, he seems to be trying to do a Jimmy Stewart impression.  Combined with the fact that units seem to like telling trivia about themselves when clicked on, this makes for some very weird radio chatter.

What I'd really like to see though, is a similar game using the GEM 2 engine that's worked so well for Men of War.  The GEM 2 engine is capable of doing all the things that the coders working on CWC had to work so hard for naturally, and can do some things that the SAGE engine simply can't, like complex damage models and fuel.  Also, if it wouldn't hurt, a mac version might be nice.

Incidentally, I still haven't gotten to reading Red Storm Rising.  That'd be a good book to read on the beach, I think.

I would not call CWC a casual game, but I do tend to play it casually, while listening to podcasts, usually about anime.

What Am I Listening To?

There are many anime podcasts, and though I can't claim to have listened to all of them, I feel that I can make the dubious blanket statement that most anime podcasts really, really suck.  Perhaps it's just me, since I really can't honestly call myself an anime fan for the sake of anime as I am a fan of good visual storytelling, but a podcast should succeed and fail on its own merits, and most mumble their way into the fail category.  The best I've come across have been Anime World Order and ANNcast, and I like both for pretty much the same reason: they're interesting.  In both cases, the hosts are knowledgeable, have strong and interesting opinions, and most importantly have very obvious chemistry.  I especially like ANNcast primarily because of its two hosts: Zac Bertschy and Justin Sevakis.  Both are not only long time survivors of the anime industry, but also film nerds in their own right: they have a strong knowledge of how films are put together and well thought out review theory, and so they both are very adept at analyzing why certain shows, in their opinion, succeed and fail.  Moreover, their experience in the industry gives them a similar depth of insight into the production side of things, which is what they spend most of their time talking about with their various guests.  What really makes them a great team though, is the fact that they're actually very interesting people, with nuanced opinions and personalities that play off of each other in fascinating ways.

Since I seem to have somewhat similar tastes to Justin and Zac (but especially Justin), they're also a very good source of recommendations.  It's come to my attention that I still have not watched a single Satoshi Kon or Mamoru Oshii film, despite that from what I hear, their bodies of work are both extensive and have a large amount of material that I'd probably like.  Ghost in the Shell is on Netflix streaming, and that's next on my list after Grave of the Fireflies (I can't remember if I put that on there, or if my mom did).  Unfortunately, it seems Netflix doesn't have the rights to Patlabor 2.  Oh well.  Paprika and Perfect Blue are both in the queue.

Their interview with engineer/amateur historian/otaku Walter Amos also led me to Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

What Am I Watching?

Legend of the Galactic Heroes isn't a great name for any show, and it's really not a great name for this show.  Legend of the Galactic Heroes sounds like a shounen fighting anime from the 80s.  While the 80s part is accurate, the shounen fighting show is way off the mark, like a trebuchet operated by blind people launching water balloons at a wing of Persian calvary.  LoGH is a show about two tactical geniuses - Yang Wenli and Reinhard von Lohengramm - and the personal and political intrigue around them as they fight a meaningless war between Space Rome and Space Prussia the Alliance and the Empire.  It's a space opera, certainly, and as of episode 23, it's one of the best I've ever seen or read.

It's often said that Legend of the Galactic Heroes was never popular in the States because its natural audience isn't the typical anime fan, but the typical literary sci-fi fan.  LoGH has a reputation for being long, dry, and filled to the brim with talking heads.  Of these, it's certainly long (at a hundred and something episodes), and there are so many characters that their names are often subtitled a la Tora, Tora, Tora, but as for being dry and boring, though the combat action sequences are far between, it is not a show lacking in action.  The action of LoGH is in the many layers of motivations and relationships between its exceptionally well explored cast of characters.  I'm tempted to draw a parallel to the works of James Michener or James Clavell (the most common analogy is to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, but the focus and means of the two strike me as too disparate, the only commonality being the truckloads of dialog).

I initially feared the scope of the plot would swallow up any attempt at character development, what with the wide shots and the subtitles and shots of people looking contemplative at (two dimensional *facepalm*) displays of fleet formations.  At first glance, LoGH does seem to treat its characters like chess pieces rather than characters, like so many similar shows, films, and books do.  For the most part, these fears have been proven wrong.  While LoGH has more sedately plot and character development than other shows, it's quite good at layering subtext into its space opera...ness...so that it never really wastes any time on establishing the big picture because it never quite stops developing its characters.  Similarly, though it's a good hundred episodes or so long, I haven't yet encountered a single filler episode.  Everything eventually factors into the bigger picture: not a part is out of place.  As its source material is a long running novel series, this isn't as surprising as you might think.  It does, however, point out a rather apparent flaw in most long running anime: that nobody really knows how to plan a series long arc in a way that there aren't any loose hanging threads anymore.

When I watched the first episode, LoGH immediately earned the distinction of being one of the first shows in a while at made me look at the blank screen and go "I need to watch more of this, like, right now."  If it existed on DVD in America, I'd snap it up in an instant.  Of course, nobody wants to license it.  It's a really long show with 80s animation that has exactly 582 likes on facebook.  As respected as some of those 582 people are, 582 units moved does not a profit make.  For now, fansubs from some worn-out VHS transfer in youtube 480p are all we can get.

Actually, even in these days of cheap computer animation and adobe illustrator, I think there's something to be said for the matte, hand painted style of 80s shows.  Akira is the poster child for beautiful analog animation, but Legend of the Galactic Heroes still has a certain elegance to it, aided by its exceptional character designs and art style.  With a cast as large as LoGH's, a bunch of spiky haired bishounen is going to get really confusing, really fast.  This is the problem Starship Operators had (besides having really dull characters and bad voice actors).  Not only does LoGH succeed in making its characters visually distinct in subtle ways, but everyone has really awesome uniforms.  The Alliance gets cool berets, and the Empire gets...well...Prussian military uniforms IN SPAAAACE (which is cool too).

I Can't Think Of A Good Transition Right Now

Prussian military uniforms may be in space, but you know what's not in space?  The space shuttle.  Or at least, it won't be for much longer, and...I can't say I disagree with this move.  I'm convinced that, if we don't start moving out into space, humanity will end up without the resources to maintain our current level of technology, and can almost certainly never have the amount of resources to even support the sort of population we're heading towards.  We may well end up dying back so far in population and technology that it may be literally impossible to rebuild to anything like a present day quality of life.  Yet, the space shuttle program was very expensive, and produced no real returns.  Though I hate to say it, the government has better places to put its money than the space program, like China's pockets.  I actually feel a bit better now the program is ended.  However, private ventures into space flight may be the key to saving not only the space program, but eventually mankind itself.  If this were a serious blog, and I actually knew what I was talking about, I'd explore this line of inquiry to its logical conclusions.  However, this is not a serious blog, and I haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about, so let's talk about London a bit.

There was really good food.

Yeah, I had been planning on writing a long piece about my trip to London, but I really don't feel like recalling all my talking points right now.  Check back later.

Wow.  This blog is really, really shallow.  I'll have to think of something actually important to talk about.

Later.