I finally got 100% completion on Dragon’s Dogma. More importantly, I managed to get a shot of my character where she looks like Che Guevara.
This needs to be on t-shirts and posters everywhere.
Stranger in a strange land
Damn it, I have something in my eye.
Anthropology Professor Jack Weatherford Honored in Mongolia
Q: You and your wife, Walker Weatherford, spend your summers in Mongolia. What makes Mongolia so special to you both?
A: Walker and I are now legal residents of Mongolia and spend five months a year in our home there. I have learned more from seeing how the Mongolians deal with Walker, who has multiple sclerosis, than from all the books I’ve read. She is in a wheelchair, mostly paralyzed, and barely able to speak. Of course, in Mongolia there are no special facilities for disabled people; the streets and sidewalks are a jumble of broken cement and open holes. Yet when we step out of our building, hands always appear. No one says, “May I help you?” They simply do it and disappear, expecting no thanks. I never have to ask for help. Every week a few musicians come by to play the horse-head fiddle and sing for Walker, in the belief that music is the best medicine. Pop singers and hip-hop groups have come for the same purpose, saying that it will keep our home warm. One singer who spoke no English learned to sing “Only You” by The Platters because it’s a song Walker loves. People from all over the countryside send us dairy products. Our kitchen is usually full of yoghurt, hard cream, curds, mare’s milk, mutton, horse ribs, and wild berries. Lamas, shamans, and healers come by to offer prayers, incense, herbal teas, chants, massage, and other forms of traditional treatments. Even strangers send camel wool or cashmere blankets, shawls, and socks to keep Walker warm. Mongolia has welcomed us with a care and warmth I can scarcely comprehend. The greatest honor for the two of us is not any official recognition but these daily acts of concern, along with the young parents who have asked us to name their newborn children. Their request illustrates how much they want to keep the connection with their past and pass it on to their children. I feel that through these children whom we have named, Walker and I will be a part of Mongolia for another generation, long after we are gone.
The master of lying
I asked around a bit. Do you remember this book the protagonist of Your Lie in April was reading in the fifth episode?
I’d mistaken it for The Little Prince, but my informants tell me that it’s actually Usotsuki no tensai (The Genius Liar) by Ulf Stark. It doesn’t appear to have ever had an English translation, so I’m not certain what the thematic significance of the book is, but the title suggests that the book was deliberately chosen to convey, well, something. I’ll do some more digging and see if I can find out more.
The festival of dolls
Hinamatsuri is a manga about a powerful young psychic who’s adopted by a yakuza gang member. You might think it’s an action series fill of violent battles, secret conspiracies, and barely disguised metaphors comparing child soldiers to the academic pressure placed on modern Japanese kids. However, it’s actually a comedy about the daily nothings in the lives of a group of slackers and screw-ups.
The main character mostly eats, sleeps, and watches TV, while she uses her powers to move her video game controller so she can keep her hands free for eating potato chips. Of the people sent to capture her, one ends up homeless and sleeping in the park, while the other almost starves to death in a crappy apartment because she ran out of money. Her adoptive yakuza father accidentally gets her to attack a rival gang, but otherwise the most he’s done to exploit her is to use her existence to elicit a sympathy date from a woman he was pursuing.
Wisely, the author knows how superb the side characters are and does not hesitate to shift focus to them. Over time the series becomes more of an ensemble comedy. For instance, there’s a running gag about the protagonist’s 13 year old classmate that begins with her accidentally getting a job as a bartender and slowly builds up over time, culminating in the classmate being trained as a sniper at a Special Forces boot camp.
Karma chameleon
I logged on to the Dragon’s Dogma website for the first time since August. Apparently one of my characters essentially won a beauty contest and was featured on the game newsletter by Capcom. On the one hand, yay me. On the other hand, that particular look is being copied by other players, judging from the screenshots being submitted.
What the hell, people? Get your own look. It took me hours to coordinate that outfit, not to mention the time I spent picking the hairstyle and fine tuning the bone structure and body type for that character. And I don’t want to think of how many goblins and bandits I had to kill for that cape.
Anyway, I’m thinking of playing this game for a third time and getting all the trophies. There are only three left and they don’t look that hard. One quick run should do it.
April showers and May flowers
I just watched all the episodes of Your Lie In April that have been broadcast so far. I rather liked this teen-romance-between-classical-musicians thing. At first I was afraid it would be too much like Nodame Cantabile, where a free-spirited pianist slowly teaches her fellow student how to appreciate music again, but this show is different enough to be interesting on its own (nice shout-out to Nodame, by the way). Anyway, I don’t really have a review so much as a bunch of scattered thoughts.
First, there’s a lot of crying on this show. Do classical musicians cry this much in real life?
Second, I had no idea that Peanuts was that widely read in Japan. Teenagers can actually quote Charlie Brown out of the blue without having to explain where the line is from? Although “I’m not always going to be around to help you” sounds more ominous in the show.
Third, I think the book that the protagonist is reading in one of the early episodes is The Little Prince. The illustration on the cover looks familiar.
And fourth, I can’t tell the difference between a good or bad performance in classical music. Well, maybe if something was egregiously terrible and dissonant, but otherwise I have no idea what the characters mean when they say one rendition is rough and another is full of honest yearning. This reaction is to be expected, of course, since classical music is an elite pastime specifically meant to exclude those without the proper background, but what that means is that I’m watching the show for the characters instead of the music. I do kind of want to take up piano again, though.
Addendum: Based on further research (i.e., asking people who can read Japanese) the book in question is actually The Genius Liar by Ulf Stark.
The gray world
I’m currently reading Ran and the Gray World, which is a manga about a girl growing up in a family of sorcerers. It’s a whimsical and beautiful magical realist story, like one of the more child-oriented Hayao Miyazaki films. The manga contains scenes of childlike exuberance on the one hand, and scenes of terror and crushing sorrow on the other, but the tone never feels dissonant. Describing more of the plot would make the story sound nonsensical – like I said, it’s magical realist – but it does hold together with its own internal logic.
I think the series does a good job of showing how kids can handle more than adults tend to give them credit for. The art is wonderful, so the manga is enjoyable just on the visual level, but I do like how well it shows the eternal resiliency of children. I can see why it’s big in Japan.
Animazing
Okay, it’s been kind of quiet on the anime front lately. Let me just give a quick roundup of what I’m watching which is worthy of remark:
Durarara x2
I’m only a couple of episodes behind. It’s basically more of what we got in season 1, which is great because I liked season 1. “More of what you liked” is a pretty damn good thing for a show’s second season. It could just as well have been a decline in quality, after all (see: Sleepy Hollow). I’m still missing the first opening, though this new one is starting to grow on me.
Log Horizon
There was a Ghostbusters reference in the most recent episode. Earlier on in the present season, there was a character modelled after Leonardo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Is the writer of the light novels a connoisseur of American cartoon shows from the eighties? I do know there was some influence from West to East – The Big O and its noir aesthetic owes a very great debt to Batman: The Animated Series, after all – but I always appreciate a nod to non-Japanese cartoons.
I’m also watching Saekano, of course, but I think it deserves deeper analysis than a quick paragraph. I may end up referring to Baudrillard and the hyper-real, so watch out for that.
The end of the world and what happens after
Archive of Our Own recently discussed something that I’ve never given much thought: what happens to our online presence after we die.
Okay, say you get run over by a bus. Hard luck, but death is that greatest of levellers which brings low the mighty and the weak. But there’s that Facebook account, the Gmail address, the blog, that thing of yours on Tumblr, the YouTube Let’s Play videos you’ve uploaded, and all the rest of the digital works that you leave behind as an online reminder that the world once contained you. What happens to all of that when you’re gone?
Nothing consistent, that’s what. Different sites have different policies, and it is likely that they won’t match exactly what you would want to be done after your death.
Well and good. This is the 21st century, after all, so why not write a social media will? Your executor will need to do all sorts of things that you’ve instructed them, after all, so why not include a few lines about your Facebook account on your will?
But there’s the rather sensitive sticking point of fanfiction. Maybe your executor isn’t someone you want reading your embarrassing works, which you were only comfortable sharing with anonymous people online instead of the aunt who knew you when you were in diapers. Even if you’re not leery of having the person responsible for selling your possessions handle your Transformers fics, they won’t necessarily be a fan of the same things you were and won’t understand exactly what to do with your stuff.
Enter the fannish next of kin. They’ll understand which fics you wanted deleted and which fics you were okay with leaving for future generations to peruse (and maybe laugh at). It’s a nice idea, and it’s one I’m glad Archive of Our Own came up with.
For myself, as someone who’s studied history I say preserve my fics until the heat death of the universe. I admit that they aren’t great literature, but there’s something to be learned even from the most unassuming of writings – linguistic quirks, the zeitgeist of a specific era, how ideas are propagated, and many more things I am unable to imagine.
Enjoy my fics, future people. I poured my heart and soul into them, once upon a time.
On meeting the 100% perfect girl
I started watching Saekano, which is about high school kids trying to make a video game. The show is rather metafictional in its presentation; the comments that the characters make about the game they’re working on usually apply to the anime they’re in as well. It’s not Grant Morrison so the fourth wall is never broken but the show is clever enough in that regard.
It’s also a harem anime, with the first episode full of fanservice and girls competing for the attention of the male protagonist. Still, the only relationship I’m actually interested in is the sole human relationship in the anime, which is the one between the protagonist and his muse.
See, our protagonist meets a girl on the road one spring day in a moment straight out of a romance. The girl could easily have been a blank and perfect catalyst for male actualization but she quickly destroys our hero’s expectations the first time they talk. I’m intrigued by where this thing is going so I’ll stick with it some more. This could very very easily turn to crap but I hope the show is self-aware enough to realize that the criticisms it makes of clichés can also be applied to itself.