Gormongous

I'm not sure of the implications, mostly because I'm not particularly acquainted with the dynamics of Japanese internet usage, but in terms of what's common in the United States at least, it seems like a rare phenomenon. It's also interesting that most of the people in the pictures (except some, like the guy or girl holding the "anime creator" sign) are allowing themselves to be photographed, which is really uncommon at any event where a person could be identified as otaku for attending. People have lost their jobs for that exact thing, especially at Comiket. I mean, to reference the quotation of Baudrillard used by Simon Pegg in the Ethics & Journalistic Integrity thread, almost all fiction is a distraction. If it's not outright infantilizing its audience with childish things, it's encouraging introspection and contemplation instead of action. No book (or movie or show or game) actively begs you to put it down and go do something else. They all want you to sit still and keep consuming, even the greatest works of fiction. But anyway, I do feel the dynamic on which you're focusing in anime, and it's something that bothered Anno enough that it dictates a large portion of the themes in Neon Genesis Evangelion. He felt (and probably still feels, I don't know) that being an otaku increasingly meant substituting relationships with media works for relationships with actual people, and that accordingly otaku had come to perceive flat characters as more human than actual humans. In addition to the other thematic elements to which they contribute, all of his characters are aggressive criticisms of different expectations for and by otaku in modern society. One of my friends, who is much more perceptive to interesting strains of thought in Evangelion, pointed out that the Children also represent the psychological problems of different generations (Rei is Taishou-era and early Shouwa-era passivity and receptivity to authoritarian control; Asuka is postwar positivism and obsession with success; Shinji is bubble-era anxiety, aimlessness, and anomie; Mari is... well, our generation, which means the poor man's Asuka) and I think that interpretation shows the flexibility and utility of Anno's cultural criticisms. Evangelion's just such a weird thing because Anno's deeply interested in criticizing a lot of the things that you've criticized, Blambo, but in the process of doing so, he kickstarted an even more vibrant phase of the moe trope's dominance, mostly because people just weren't interested in digesting his criticisms. Also, can you bring Kenny Loggins back? I miss him.

A small thing, but otaku came out in force earlier this month to counter a hate-speech demonstration in Akihabara. In response to signs and chants calling all foreigners "criminals" and urging the Japanese government to expel companies from overseas, otaku were carrying their own signs that said stuff like "Otaku have no borders." Like I said, it's a small thing, but with #GamerGate closing out its ninth month, it's nice to see a similar subculture that has been infantilized and demonized in the past respond to that marginalization by embracing social responsibility and positive action. More photos here.

"Stay a while and listen... but not longer than four years, I'll be dead after that."

I don't disagree with any of your points, but I think it's alarmist to say that the poor will suffer more from the neglect of the rich than from the greed and antipathy of the rich, no matter the economics of scale.

A little bit? There's an Asuka nude scene in 2.22 that closely parallels the Shinji nude scene from the original show, plus more flattering angles regarding plugsuits, but otherwise I don't particularly think so. Oh, right. Mari. Yeah, Mari's in there as fan service, definitely, but her scenes are so disjointed and unrelated to the movies proper, I barely even think of her. Anno started out saying that she would "destroy Eva," but after had three movies and countless rewrites, he still hasn't really built her into the plot. She's just kind of drifted into being a shitty meganekko Asuka who shows off her butt too much, suggesting that the "cool/confident/craven" triumvirate of character types in the original Evangelion is impossible to improve. Honestly, if you ignore the two minutes total that Mari appears in them Rebuild of Evangelion 1.11 and 2.22 make a good duology. They aren't as dense or intricate as the original series plus End of Evangelion, but they stand well on their own without much explanation. I'm still not sure I'd recommend it, because they spoil (or one-up) a lot about the original series, so if you end up liking the series' universe from the Rebuild movies and want to go back, you're kind of screwed there.

I agree with you here. When I imagine a near-singularity society, I can think of no reason that the rich would not turn on each other rather than keep exploiting the poor for an increasingly small payout. If labor is no longer a valuable resource, there's no need to control people further down on the socioeconomic ladder through oppression and exploitation anymore, except for funsies. They've got robots taking care of everything, so it's time to focus on other constraining factors to their power, whether that be land, technology, or mineral resources. Those are overwhelmingly in the hands of the rich, so why would they tamp down their greed in order to keep the implicit compact of the one percent?

Although I think the craft is a bit more practiced, and therefore a bit less resonant with me, I think that Rebuild of Evangelion 2.22 is the high point of synergy between Evangelion's themes and its plotting. I love that it changes some things completely from the original series and yet the thematic outcome is the same. Furthermore, I like that the thematic outcome being the same, regardless of the things inciting it, intensifies said thematic outcome. I know, I'm being obscure to the point of circularity. I'll stop. 1.11 is literally just the first six episodes of the original series. Besides a cameo from Mari and a few missing pieces of foreshadowing, virtually nothing's changed. After more than a year of careful consideration, I think that 3.33 is basically this: It's weird Kaworu piano seduction, all the way down. The timeskip, the schism in NERV, all of it is just to excuse the post-apocalyptic boy-love.

Love?

I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I think that the episode itself undermines the "just another day in Don's life" angle. The writing is chock full of signs that Don is reaching a vital decision point in the finale, something more than just making a successful ad. Don leaves McCann in the middle of a meeting because he feels "invisible" among "half the creative directors in the whole company," later reflected in his sudden and extreme connection with the lonely man in the circle. He tells the young con artist that once you make a decision that screws people over, you have to go your own way and "never come back to that place." He confesses to Peggy over the phone that he has "stolen a man's name and made nothing of it." Finally, the last words spoken in the show are the guru saying that the dawn brings "new hope," maybe even "a new you." With all of those lines in place, and without anything like Peggy's storyline about deciding between staying or going, it feels really unnatural that the endpoint for Don's character arc just in the past few episodes (not even taking into account his arc over the entire series) is a simple return to glory at McCann, doing what he's always done but perhaps with a bit more happiness on his side now. The crisis of Don's character has never been about his ability to make good ads, and earlier instances of him turning personal demons into quality product (like the "Carousel" ad) were all about the way that that work reflects on his personal life, so it doesn't follow for me that Don's character now is suddenly all about making the ad and that that's what he meant by "making something" of his borrowed life. I understand the literal interpretation of the finale is very popular, and will only become more so with Weiner's explicit endorsement, but I think it is the mostly weakly supported in the text of the show, out of the three possible interpretations that come to my mind (meta-commentary on modern culture, depiction of Don's mental state in the show, depiction of Don's subsequent actions in the show).

Well, thank heavens that the author is dead and more satisfying interpretations exist!

It was an odd feeling to listen to the Thumbs take less than five minutes of talking about The Witcher to reproduce all of the jokes from a decade-old Penny Arcade comic: Also, the Firearms mod for the original Half-Life (which was apparently based on a Quake mod of the same name) had a system where you could break one or both of your legs from falling too far, in addition to various other status ailments like bleeding out. There was no way to fix any of these, besides investing in a "medic" skill tree that everyone ignored in favor of skill trees that increased their reload speed or reduced weapon sway. When my friend and I figured this out, we had some of the best online FPS time of our lives running around public servers healing people, many of whom had never seen the "medic" skill tree in action and hence were surprisingly upset or confused at the prospect of being healed without their consent. I got shot more than a couple times while doing it, and another time there was this one hilarious guy who had broken his leg and was slowly bleeding out. If you hit the "medic" hotkey when you weren't in range of a player model, this mock-gruff VA would bellow, "Stop and I'll treat you!" Even though I could always catch up with the guy, he still kept crawling away from me, interrupting the "medic" animation at just the last second, leaving me to bark "Stop and I'll treat you!" several more times as I pursued him ten more feet to his new resting place. I was in tears with laughter by the end. The line plays about thirteen seconds in.

I mean, it's (at least) the second time that the show's runners have (blatantly) changed the plot from the books to add more rape (or to keep the rape from chapters otherwise cut). I don't blame them, but then again I'm reacting to the same thing as they are.

I mean, they didn't know they were going to be important. In the case of Neon Genesis Evangelion, GAINAX had been using their previous job's payday to pay the current job's expenses for almost a decade and, close to the time they started doing pre-production for Evangelion, had let go of all the staff members who were brave enough to admit that they couldn't go a month or more without getting paid. Following the expensive failures of Nadia, the "phantom project" Olympia, and the sequel to Royal Space Force Honneamise, GAINAX was really betting the farm on Evangelion and I'm sure there are more timelines in the multiverse where it didn't pay off than where it did. The desperation (or ignorance) that led them to give their first full-length television show to a mostly self-trained animator who only took part in other production roles under extreme duress and who was just recently out of an in-patient stay at a mental hospital must have been immense. I'm not nearly as well acquainted with the production details of Utena, but when Ikuhara did start getting huge production budgets over a decade later with Penguindrum and Yuri Kuma Arashi, they sadly did not result in better anime. Them's the breaks. - - - Actually, to change tack a little, I just finished reading The Notenki Memoirs, an autobiography by one of the founders of General Products and GAINAX, and overall I found it a really disappointing book. The first half, about the late-seventies and early-eighties explosion of sci-fi fandom in Japan, is really detailed and interesting. Takeda has a great memory for names, relationships, and moments, which he fearlessly assembles into a complete portrait of a bygone era. But then GP is founded and the narrative grinds to a halt. Takeda is simply unwilling to speak poorly about anyone with whom he ever had a professional relationship, making me wonder why he wanted to write a memoir at all. Even Sawamura, the former GAINAX president who cost them millions in tax fraud, is treated to a lengthy but vague apology from Takeda, who sincerely seems to believe that Sawamura wasn't aware his actions (like opening a company branch in Texas, which was a tax haven compared to Japan, and funneling hundreds of thousands through it) were illegal. It's really frustrating, because GAINAX was full of unspeakably brilliant and influential people in its early days, especially before the Gonzo split in 2002, and yet Takeda paints them all with the same blandly kind brush. When projects fail, like they did constantly in the first decade of the company's existence, it's because of external factors that are always vaguely defined. "Everyone was really excited for Olympia, especially Anno, and we all worked very hard on it, but this and that happened, so we had to halt production. It was unfortunate, but that was how business went." That's a paraphrase, but strikingly close to the actual way Takeda writes about his former colleagues, especially his repeated use of "this and that" to gloss over missing information. The closest he gets to any opinion is obliquely criticizing people who left the company when they weren't getting paid, as mentioned above, and a slightly hard edge when talking about his "friend" Okada Toshio, but at least with the latter, it's not like anyone really believes in the "Otaking" mystique anymore, so Takeda's really just softballing it there, too. I wasn't exactly expecting a tell-all memoir from someone who's clearly on good terms with everybody about whom he's writing, but I was expecting him to have some kind of opinion about him, at least. The editors include a brief interview with Akai Takami, Yamaga Hiroyuki, and Anno Hideaki about Yasuhiro Takeda, and they certainly don't pull punches, so it's not a Japanese thing or a GAINAX thing... I don't know.

I'd had a real revival on Game of Thrones with the fourth season, but I miss last week's episode of the fifth season just in time to be totally dissuaded from any desire to see it. I love A Song of Ice and Fire, despite its many failings, and I thought I loved Game of Thrones, but in fact I'm so goddamn sick of this gross show, which is too much in love with its own lack of accountability, being the face of medieval history, modern fantasy, and geek TV to the world. I'm ready for something to knock it over like it knocked over The Walking Dead.

Even if they aren't your bag, I always recommend that people watch Neon Genesis Evangelion and Revolutionary Girl Utena. More than any anime ever made, and more than most fictional works, they are About Something Big in a major way.

Man, no matter how good I thought I was at my job, if I were that guy, there'd always be a sizable shadow of doubt...

Man, that's not fair. There's a lot of considered stuff in Eva about mental illness and child psychology that's totally ignored in its intellectual imitators. I probably just need to stop bringing up Eva in this thread if I don't want to hear people slagging it off as overrated. I'll try to be better about that.

I just beat the game on Beginner (wow, the end comes fast, I can see the appeal of an endless mode) and it's a bit odd that Rob never beat it. I was not at all prepared for two-armor foes and seven-strength firewalls, but I still managed to beat it without any deaths on my team. The idea that Rob had never beat the game, when it was relatively simple on an easier difficulty, makes me feel weird.

I would be perfectly happy with any version of Interstate '76.

As a professional studying medieval history, I have to work harder than most to find particularly revisionist or re-interpretive scholarship. The closest thing that we've got is Susan Reynolds' and Elizabeth A.R. Brown's efforts to get "feudalism" thrown out as useless terminology that only describes a nonexistent ideal to which nothing ever fully conformed, but even that lost steam when it became clear that giving up on feudalism gave us a lot less about which to talk. In general, the arteries of medieval history are quite hard, since we don't have a lack of sources like ancient history (which encourages a deep and robust approach towards source analysis) or an overabundance of them like modern history (which allows for a variety of interpretive methods). Post-modernism is hard to distinguish from old-fashioned hyper-skepticism here, which is not nearly as seductive. I just follow the most current trends, which mostly focus on the accurate recreation of historical figures' mental states and belief systems, and wish for more. Sorry if that's not a satisfying answer.

As a teacher, I also just don't know how I'd grade it, even giving a lot of leeway with the hypothetical assignment. There is literally not a single sentence in either of the linked articles that is not at least a highly ideological half-truth, and I've never assigned anything where that'd pass. I'd just be crossing out every other word and just writing "Support!" and "Where did you get this?" in the margins. It'd be about as informative as going through The Hobbit with a red pen to grade its connection to reality. Right? I love that Simon Pegg thinks about Baudrillard hard enough to apply it to his professional milieu.

There was this brief period, ten or fifteen years ago, when every seinen show that had a reasonably dark or serious plot felt obligated to start out with a half-dozen episodes of shounen silliness. It was something that the genre eventually grew out of, probably because producers learned to trust the 15-21 male audience with adult themes, but it's definitely annoying to have to tell people to hang on through Trigun until the Gung-Ho Guns show up. Once you're past the moon ninjas in Planetes, the plot never dips close to that low again.

The Nadeko stuff has a big payoff that makes it all worth it in my opinion, more so than any other character, but yeah, she's gross and it's hard to watch her.

I generally don't like it when their first coverage of a game on TMA is an interview with the developer, especially just after release. Rob often gets caught up in the glow, although not nearly as much as Fraser, and doesn't really seem comfortable asking any hard questions except for "why is your game so difficult for me to beat," which is fine if the game is great, but not all games are great. Invisible, Inc seems great, but I'm just miffed that such a half-truth was agreed upon by everyone on the podcast.