Category: Media

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Tales of University

I just finished the first season of Moyashimon: Tales of Agriculture, an anime series about a student at an agricultural college who can see microbes with the naked eye. It’s not the kind of work that stirs great emotions or speaks timeless truths. Instead, it’s just pleasantly watchable.

Despite the premise, the protagonist’s supernatural ability isn’t actually very important to the show, and not a lot would be different if the main character were just another first year student freshly arrived in the big city campus from the countryside. However, this anime is one of the few fictional depictions of higher education I can think of that actually shows how much of the experience is taken up with academics.

Almost the entire show is taken up with hijinks and tomfoolery, but the shenanigans tend to revolve around the academic experience – frosh week stupidity, weird seminar partners, overbearing TAs, eccentric professors, and other such components of the university experience. It all looks like fun.

Of course, that should tell you right there that this show isn’t actually about depicting the university experience realistically. Who had fun all the time when they were a student? Lots of stuff wasn’t enjoyable for me. It seems silly to remember some of the things I used to freak out about, but they didn’t feel so minor at the time. The characters in this anime have problems as well, but the way the show depicts those problems makes clear just how ultimately minor they are.

What this show depicts, then, is not the experience of being a university student, but the recollection of being one. But this show is not a documentary about university, and is instead an anime set in one. A truly realistic depiction of the university experience would make for a boring show.

So what is Moyashimon about? It’s about the nostalgia of being a student.

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Who You Gonna Call?

I just saw the 2021 Oklahoma Ghostbusters (a.k.a. Ghostbusters: Afterlife). It’s about the grandkids of one of the original Ghostbusters who move to the farm their gramps owned. They never met old Egon Spengler, but he happened to die right when they were getting evicted from their New York apartment, so off the family goes to live in flyover country. As far as they know, he was just a crazy old geezer, but they quickly learn there was an apocalyptic reason a hunter of the supernatural moved to the middle of nowhere.

This movie is like other modern sequels in that it retreads the ground that its forebear covered. But somehow I didn’t find the nostalgia annoying, likely because instead of just making constant references to a movie from the 80s, it was directly trying to be a movie from the 80s – in its directing choices, in the design of its sets and props, and even in its CGI that mimics the look of the special effects from the first Ghostbusters. In fact the only real indication that it’s set in the 21st century – besides the fact that the characters say that the year is 2021 – is that smartphones and Youtube exist.

Anyway, the deliberate 80s throwback is obviously why the movie cast Wolf Gunblood or whoever the hell that kid is from Stranger Things. One character that did bug me was the kid who was named Podcast (ugh). Reminds me of Juno trying too hard to be with it (for example, the “honest to blog” line). Also Podcast’s actor was noticeably worse than everyone else. I know he’s just a kid but it kind of invites comparison when he’s constantly around another kid who’s a better actor than him.

Also, I didn’t realize the original cast from the first movie cameos, or as many of them that are still around (Ramis is dead, Moranis retired). Dan Aykroyd’s Canadian accent really comes out in the one long conversation he’s in.

Anyway, watching this made me think of the first movie and how in retrospect it’s clearly from when Reagan was president. I mean, small business owners save the world while the government’s representatives are either useless or actively harmful. I don’t think anyone involved in the movie was a Reaganite but it just goes to show how you can’t escape the times you live in.

As for the Ghostbusters of our current age, it’s decently entertaining. I’d say put it on if you’ve got a lot of laundry to fold.

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Today China, Tomorrow also China

Thanks to The Wandering Earth, I just read my first Cixin Liu text: his short story collection To Hold Up The Sky. I had tried reading The Three-Body Problem before but quit in the prologue.

It’s because like many other sci-fi writers, Liu is not good at social realism, and the prologue of Three-Body Problem really just could not grab me with its depiction of the Cultural Revolution. But thankfully I could skip the stories in this collection that showcased too much of the weaknesses of Liu’s writing and go with his real strength – the sci-fi crap. He’s very old school in that way.

For instance, the first story in the book is about a teacher in a dirt-poor mountain village and it was a struggle for me to keep reading until aliens finally showed up. I also completely skimmed the story about coal miners which had nothing science fictional until the really short epilogue with schoolkids in the future learning about why coalmining was dumb.

But the neat speculative stuff worked for me. A finance guy embezzling money to pay for life extension treatments? A quantum computer that allows perfect simulation of the universe and therefore perfect vision of all events past and present? Cryogenically-frozen refugees going further and further into the future to find a time that will take them in? All of that was my jam. Although the story about a near-future war between an invading NATO and the heroes of a Russia newly-returned to communism is kind of odd to read today until you realize it was published in 2001, when Russia had spent over a decade being carved up like a Christmas turkey by American consultants.

So yeah, Cixin Liu is a decent read if you’re aware that he’s very much into sci-fi being the genre of ideas and not the genre of well-written characters or compelling human drama.

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Snowball Earth

The Wandering Earth is an entertaining disaster movie. It’s got the stupid twists and sappy drama endemic to the genre. I mean, the sun is going to engulf the Earth so the world’s governments build giant engines move the planet to a different star? A wonderfully dumb premise. It’s even got a rebellious jerk who has to step up to help save the world.

I did especially like how consciously international the movie was. We had people speaking Bahasa Indonesian and Filipino while Sulawesi was where half the major action takes place. Also it’s hilarious how the one white guy was the comic relief. Well, there’s another white guy who’s more heroic but he’s there to supply the tragic death to motivate the protagonist to keep fighting. I think I liked it more than Armageddon. Two goddamn thumbs up!

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Love Don’t Cost A Thing?

Because This Is My First Life on Netflix is objectively a very sappy Korean drama. I’m watching it anyway because I find the female lead unbearably cute. Also I guess I’m a big sap at times.

The show is about a failed TV writer who enters into a fake marriage for a roof over her head and her landlord who goes for it so he can get help with his crushing mortgage payments (also tax breaks? I haven’t seen episode 1 in a while). If you’ve read South Korean romance comics before then you’ll know this is a very standard setup in that medium and the show is very much one of those comics but in live action form. I’m better able to accept the extraordinarily dumb events, though, possibly because real people can sell stupid twists better than a lifeless drawing.

The show is actually more of an ensemble piece and is really about three different couples who are friends with each other. One couple is a woman who wants nothing more than to be a housewife who’s working as a waitress to support her loser boyfriend who swears his app is going to be a hit any day now, and the other is two hard charger businessfolk where the woman just wants to be friends with benefits while the guy pretends he’s okay with that.

Money is essentially another character in the show because the lack of it hangs like a miasma over every interaction we see. It’s kind of operating in the same space as Friends in that it’s a comedy about people living and loving in the big city. However, Friends is basically about being a broke hipster but still being able to live a full romantic and social life in New York, while in this show there’s no handwaving about rent-controlled apartments in Seoul. Who you date and who you marry is always tangled up with money and I suspect half the characters secretly have stress-induced ulcers about it.

I haven’t finished watching the show yet but it’s obvious the main couple are going to end up together. I really hope at least one of the other couples doesn’t make it because that’s just realistic when it’s the 21st century and people with different ideas about their future are in a long-term relationship.

Anyway, this is me revealing myself as a big softie.

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Coming to America: A Horror Story

I just finished reading The Necessary Beggar by Susan Palwick. It’s about a family exiled from a parallel dimension who end up as refugees in post-9/11 Nevada. The blurb on Amazon compares it to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I think that’s going a tad too far (especially since that book is one of my favourites).

Frankly, the science fiction aspect of The Necessary Beggar doesn’t figure that strongly into the story. Ghosts and reincarnation figure very prominently in it so it could actually be more easily classified in the fantasy genre.

To be honest, the alternate dimension thing could have been cut out completely and it would have worked out just as well by being a magical realist story about refugees from like Afghanistan or Somalia. But doing the story that way requires a lot more research to get the culture right and I can’t help thinking that was the main reason the family came from a made-up country.

If you’ve read immigrant stories before then a lot of this book will be familiar – it’s got migrants going through the everyday trauma of navigating a foreign culture, feeling an aching and unquenchable yearning for a lost home, clashes between tradition and American modernity, that kind of thing. I feel like there’s a Salman Rushdie novel in here struggling to break through.

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Lost in space

I bought the solo journalling game Bucket of Bolts and I’m digging it so far. How it works is that it gives you some writing prompts as you create the story of a spaceship beginning from its construction, going through the many adventures it’s had with its different captains, and ending with its inevitable final journey.

THE SHIP A midsize freighter, rugged and adaptable. SHIP CREATION - You were constructed by a team of starship engineers—describe them, their design principles and political affiliations. - Add three Traits describing your Ship then draw it. Sketch out the layout of modules and its silhouette, considering the materials used. - Give your Ship a model name and simple factory designation. SHIP QUESTIONS Answer these during play. You don't need to answer them all. - Every ship needs a good name. What is it and why? - Across the galaxy there are spaceports in every shape, size and standing. Why do some feel like home more than others? - Your last Captain installed a secret modification that they never got to use. What does it do? - Your customised systems allow for a unique manoeuvre that many of your Captain's have attempted. What it is, and what does it come to be called by tale tellers and imitators?

It’s a fun way to get one’s creative juices flowing, while its guided structure prevents the stereotypical writer’s panic at being faced with a blank page. It even comes with a ship generator so you don’t get stuck with trying to imagine what your ship looks like and a soundtrack to listen to as you meditate on your choices. I mean, last night words were fairly flowing from my pen.

The Ship -constructed for exploration + science. -modification of existing template for university researchers. - -customized to survive high-pressure & high-radiation environments with the most expensive & most sensitive sensors available along with ample computer power for analysis -designed for year-long voyages -apolitical scientists unappreciative how their exploration directly aids the empire - public funding & grants subsidize the research Nimble, Sleek, Precise The Don Quixote (Raptor-class HX-1138) (sketch of ship vaguely resembling Defiant from Deep Space 9) The High Era A Science Expedition Captain Jacques Jazmere -Phd student who gathered fellow iconoclasts to find ancient alien civilization -records unclear where it was but crew is certain its remo are in a distant region of space - crew rigged a time travel antenna to pick up ancient sig Love & Triumph: Captain discovered a wormhole shortcut to deep space & named it the Cervantes wormhole The ship is named Don Quixote because of its romantic quest

You can even use this game to create the backstory for a spaceship your characters might use in a space RPG like Traveller or Starfinder.

Bottom line? It’s a fun structured way to get creative for a couple of hours.

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The Book of Tongues

This is definitely the end of popular science books for me, I’m three for three in disappointment with Languages Are Good For Us by Sophie Hardach. It’s about, uh, it’s actually kind of hard to explain because it goes all over the place. I guess it’s an overview of how humans use language and writing, but not in any systematic sense. It basically covers interesting language stuff from the author’s research interests.

And don’t get me wrong, there actually is interesting stuff here that I didn’t know about before or never looked into too deeply. It covers the development and use of cuneiform writing as well as the story of its decipherment, it examines the story of Hernan Cortes’ translator Malinche and her role in the conquest of the Aztecs, it covers the creation of the secret language Unserdeutsch by children who spoke Tok Pisin but were forced to speak only German at missionary boarding school, and maybe some other stuff I’m forgetting.

But there’s also stuff in there that I don’t really care about and I can’t even justify as forming necessary connective tissue in the book since the book doesn’t really have an intellectual framework. There’s a chapter about how the word “kamunun” in Akkadian over the millennia became “cumin” in English and the networks of trade by which the spice was spread around the world, there’s a part about how multilingual London’s children are which contains a lament from the German immigrant author about Brexit, there’s another chapter about the Eskimo-Aleut language family which mentions the author’s fears over COVID-19 and her wish that she could make a research trip to Canada instead of just reading about these languages, there’s a whole thing about Japanese sensitivity to the seasons and their relationship to seasonal foods which comes across to me as too Orientalist.

So if I take the stuff that I liked and balance it against stuff that I was lukewarm on then my final opinion on this book is that I wish I’d read something more technical about languages. Anyway, this really is it, no more popular science books for me.

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Rebeldía

I regret to inform you all that the trailer for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is better than the game. As you can expect, the gameplay is basically Elite, with you flying a spaceship around catching criminals, robbing interstellar traders, and buying and selling cargo across the stars.

The neo-Western aesthetic is kind of neat in the trailer but it got kind of annoying in the game. Haha, this lizard alien talks like an American long-haul trucker. Oh neat, all the star systems are named after US states and the planets are named after podunk towns and cities in the American West. Haha haha.

And speaking of aesthetics, the game would have done better to stick to the cartoon stylings of the trailer instead of the computer graphics in the actual gameplay because at best those computer graphics are just serviceable.

The starship combat stuff didn’t really grab me, either. It was just kind of there. I suppose I could have given it a bit longer to see if it would click with me but the aesthetic wasn’t doing it for me so I just had to give up. Oh well.

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Vive le roi

After three years and over 400 hours, I’ve finally finished Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

Good god, but this game really brings to the fore the colonialist and imperialist roots of the standard Dungeons and Dragons setting. “Exterminate native peoples so we can seize their land and resources for ourselves” is the explicit goal of the game, after all. Much easier to ignore this subtext in a typical tabletop adventure campaign since most players are at the “exterminate” part of the equation and the colonizing thing is usually just implied in the background.

Anyway, the goddamn final dungeon in Kingmaker is bullshit. The thing about teleporting between different versions of the dungeon sounds neat but in practice is annoying. The fights are also hard but in a grindy way, not a fun way. And there’s another quest after this dungeon if you want to fight the real mastermind behind your troubles, but that bit is at least a little better. I may go back to see what happens if I max out upgrading everything in my kingdom and just use a cheat to go through the boss fights.

However, I don’t really replay this kind of RPG so this is pretty much it. My kingdom is ruled by a lesbian tiefling queen with her tiefling consort commanding an army full of mercenary wizards. I feel like the ending presentation could have used a little more flair, but I got a lot of game out of that $35 I spent so I’m satisfied.

I’ve bought the semi-sequel Wrath of the Righteous but I’m not about to immediately jump into it, especially since I hear there’s another set of DLC that’s coming soon. Hopefully Owlcat Games has improved the annoying stuff from the first game. Incidentally, isn’t the studio in Russia? I wonder how they get paid what with all the Ukraine war sanctions.