Gormongous

Being obsessed with Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei was actually a big catalyst for me to become a lot more educated in Japanese culture as a whole. Looking at it from the other end of that process, I can say with certainty that a lot of what seem to be pop-culture references are intentional nonsense or repetitive harping on local politics and sports. It's not as overwhelming as it is in the manga, where every volume has at least one jab at the stylish glasses-wearing architect or the manga-reading prime minister whose names I can't remember right now, but there definitely is a lot of noise in the anime that Shinbo's incredibly talented direction makes seem like signal. I really recommend you just watch it and ignore the pop-culture stuff that you don't immediately get. The best bits (Kafuka Fuura singing "lyrics" to Traumerei in the first episode of the second season, for example) are almost always culture-agnostic, anyway.

Hey, the podcast we're starting needs a theme song...

Yeah, I'm not entirely against that, but the 3x3 is a long segment that obviously fatigues the hosts some weeks, so I'm not willing to commit us to something like that, especially with a rotating panel, until we've had at least one session that gives me a feel for our vibe. One of the biggest reasons I haven't gotten on board with any podcast on anime thus far has been a near-ubiquitous obsession with segments-based content, as if there isn't enough to talk about in anime itself, so I definitely want to prioritize the "free talk" and "spotlight" segments over anything more contrived... which is not to say that I'll veto everything, I just don't want a bunch of "bits" there to fill up time.

Good call! Abenobashi is one of the two golden-age GAINAX anime that I haven't seen. I'll be looking forward to your comments, very much. I'm really wary of "bits" in podcasts. I'm fine with reader mail or "if you like this" recommendations, but anything more formalized would rub me the wrong way. Also, it helps no one for me to have to murder Twig!

Well, I think it looks good to me. We need room for stuff to happen in between the demands of the format, right? If four or five of us take five minutes each to talk about what we've been watching, that's twenty or twenty-five minutes. It'll be fine!

Thanks!

Someone should tell Adam Jensen that he accidentally ejected his magazine.

Hey, what's the episode where Chris gets distracted by a guy rapping about him and runs into a tree branch?

No problem! As great as the Laughing Man is, second season is the better season overall. Saito's character episode, the fourteenth one I think, is a particular standout for the entire show, even though it's nominally not a part of the main plot.

Okay, the reason that I think Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is so great is because it's the best (and pretty much the only) attempt to do a traditional police procedural in a futuristic sci-fi setting. Because of that structure, the changes and consequences of the technology in the series have to be plotted out in sufficient breadth and depth to withstand repeated scrutiny, leaving us with an incredibly coherent world. With the Arise prequel, you can see what an accomplishment it really is, because the attempt to walk back the timeline without sacrificing any distinctive elements of the universe leaves a world a lot more silly, like ghost-dubbing being much more widespread and not that big a deal despite being virtually identical to a process that was an unspeakable crime in SAC. I also like that both seasons of the anime have seemingly unrelated cases in different episodes gradually build the picture of a widespread societal ill, like corporate corruption surrounding cybernetics-related medical treatments, that each season's "big bad" comes to embody. I think the Individual Eleven are objectively a slightly weaker through-line than the Laughing Man, but both are fascinating and iconic. Finally, I enjoy the balance of the ensemble cast, none of which match the competency of the Major overall, but all of which have specialties in given areas that make them together incredibly effective. There's no dead weight or drama in Section 9 (the closest things to useless members are Boma and Saito, the demolition man and sniper, which is not the norm among shows with guns) and that feels a little special to me. As for your critiques: Yeah, the density and delivery of dialogue in all Ghost in the Shell properties is a genuine stumbling block for some people. Generally speaking, you like the universe enough to develop an ear for it or you stop watching and become one of those people who calls Ghost in the Shell: Innocence "massively overrated CGI porn." I honestly prefer the English dub three times out of five, because I feel that the Major's seiyuu is weirdly indistinct in Japanese, but like every dub track except the generic garbage that FUNi does, it's all to taste. Also, the question of subs or dubs is complicated in Ghost in the Shell: SAC by the fact that the subs are the literal translation of the Japanese and the dubs are substantially rewritten to take up more or less time, to fit the length of the scenes. If you want to be totally confused, watch the dubs with subtitles on and everyone's saying two different things at once! It sounds like a cop-out, but every flaw in Ghost in the Shell: SAC is from the manga and the first movie. The pervasive use of the word "ghost" is from the first movie, where there's an in-depth explanation of it, and I kind of like that they don't retread it, but it does mean that you have to watch a fictionally unrelated movie to understand an invented lexicon for this show. I also hate the monokini/leotard, which is from the manga and the first movie, but the Major increasingly wears a jacket and shorts over it, so it's not something with which you have to put up for the entire run of the anime. It's definitely one of Yoko Kanno's more restrained soundtracks, for sure. There's a bit more daring stuff in the second season, but it's just not a music-driven anime for Yoko Kanno, like Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo. The biggest flaw about Wolf Children, which actually isn't a flaw, is that it's called "Wolf Children" and therefore is a little hard to sell to complete anime-phobes as a powerful tale of parenthood and responsibility. All of Hosoda's work is great like that. For me, I love Summer Wars the most, because it was what I needed when I needed it, but all three of his movie offerings are excellent. Makoto Shinkai is a tougher nut. I did a rewatch project of his entire oeuvre last year and was bothered by the sameness, but I think there are truly excellent things in The Place Promised in Our Early Days, Five Centimeters per Second, and The Garden of Words that reward repeat viewing. It definitely would help for him to bring on someone else to help him write his stuff, because not everyone has the chops for being a traditional-style auteur, but at the very least, his thematic obsessions resonated really deeply with me in 5 cm/s and that's good enough for me, even if the rest of his career (like that goddamn Children who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below) turns out to be a damp squib.

Surprise! The Ghost in the Shell: Arise anime on TV is really just the four-episode OVA series recut into twenty-minute chunks, with some "bonus content" here and there. I'm having trouble not calling this unconscionable. Apparently Arise was a success as an OVA, so they profit off of that not by making more Arise, but by repackaging what they've already released for a technically different audience that has almost complete overlap? Fuck that.

I have it at sections right now, but I stopped breaking it down there because my outline was getting increasingly speculative, to the point that it was not helping me make progress. I've now redesignated it in my head as three linked articles with a bookending introduction and conclusion, which is much more effective at getting work out of me. The narrative focus of the central chapters, as well as the amount of non-narrative material I have to synthesize into that narrative, is probably what blew your tried-and-true method off the rails for me. I do like hearing from people who've finished a thesis or dissertation, whatever their advice. It makes it seem more doable than hailing my advisor from his seat on Mount Olympus.

I'm sure I'll get preempted at some point in this discussion, but my understanding is this: "objectification" is the reduction or outright denial of the agency of a person or group, in order to justify control, abuse, or disregard of said person or group, while "eroticization" is the introduction or reinterpretation of sexual characteristics for a person or group, ostensibly in order to titillate or exploit, but usually ultimately to justify control, abuse, or disregard. I might be entirely wrong, but I see it as the difference between reducing a woman to some kind of sex worker versus reducing her to some kind of doll, in that one doesn't imply the other but both sides of the Möbius strip tend to join up at some point along the way.

Oops! Deleted a "however" somewhere along the way. Luckily, it being only half a page, it's easy to proof my dissertation right now. I've had a really ambivalent relationship with writing it, honestly. On the one hand, I thrive on feedback, so working with an advisor who's only interesting in seeing full drafts of chapters is intimidating just in concept. On the other, it really is nice just to hold in my head the prospect of writing thirty-odd pages at a go on whatever I want and without any real pressure for it to mean something right away. I'm glad I've made even a nominal gesture towards starting, even though I have a couple of articles that will technically be part of my dissertation someday soon, too. Yay, that's a relief! Hopefully, you can make it through the rest of the month on teleological thinking: "No matter what happens, in three weeks it won't be my problem anymore." That is my number-one coping technique most days.

I agree with you, insofar as I think that the problems with mandatory voting are the same as those with voluntary voting, only brought to a head. Being effectively denied your rights through socioeconomic forces is just farther down the same continuum from the denial of those rights being used to put you further under the control of those socioeconomic forces, if that makes sense. It was really interesting to watch the good and the bad of a similar process while serving on jury duty last week. The juries drawn from both pools of which I was a part were almost entirely drawn from lower-class minorities, paid a paltry eighteen dollars a day if they were selected, while the largely middle- and upper-class white members of the pool not only avoided selection through their higher levels of personal education and political awareness, but were usually compensated generously by their places of work for jury duty anyway. It's yet another political system that's good in theory, but...

Twig, between you and me, half the podcast is going to be self-deprecating comments about ourselves. I put 1:00 to 3:00 in the morning because it's the latest I could possibly do, but I know that that makes it insanely early in the morning for anyone further east than me.

I've only really seen mandatory voting while I was in Greece for half a year and, at least with the neighborhood in which I lived, it mostly served as an excuse to round up the poor and indigent, either for not voting or not having a valid license with which to vote, in order to squeeze a little more money out of them. Oh, and also as an excuse for fringe groups to act with even more certainty that their election to office represented some kind of mandate. There are, of course, solutions to that problem too, but I'm not certain that the US government would be interested in them

I left out morning slots CST because I am really really not a morning person (unless I'm seeing the dawn from staying up too late), but I can also add those to the polls, because I realize how dickish it is to leave out options I'd rather not have but that might work for other people.

I have a plan to watch Space Runaway Ideon, the biggest anime influence on Neon Genesis Evangelion, in celebration of 2015, year of the Third Impact, so giant robots from the early eighties will get some discussion at some point, if only in the "free talk" segment of the podcast.

Wow, I love Chris' observation about Don's lack of an arc. Don has no life, because he left it behind when he joined the army and then abandoned it when he stole his CO's identity, which makes him exceptionally good at selling other people ready-made "lives" through commercial advertising. He can commodify it, but he can't understand it, because understanding it would cheapen or destroy the "life" he's built at Sterling-Cooper. Also, I had the same assumption as Jake and his girlfriend about Diana. I was sure enough that Diana was played by the same actress as Midge that I didn't bother to look up the show's IMDB listing, which is good because it put me on the same page as the characters themselves.

Those are the times I entered, with time zones factored in!

I checked the box for it to factor in time zones, but obviously I have no way of testing it. If the first option isn't Friday, April 10 at 5:00 pm, let me know and I'll go back to poking it. Also, yes, this'll be a dry run to feel everything out. If it's amazing (it won't be) we'll post it later.

Okay, so we're recording next weekend. Here's a checklist: Title: Mouth Flaps Participants: Gormongous, Twig, N1njaSquirrel, and whoever else answers the poll below Time: This weekend, April 10-12, vote for a two-hour bloc here Spotlight: Little Witch Academia Communication Software: Google Chat Recording Software: Audacity Editor: Codicier Anything else I'm missing? I'll update this list as need be, because nothing's set in stone, even the time slots on the poll. As much as I think Lip Flaps is the grosser-sounding option, it doesn't have the problem with sibilance. Maybe that should be our choice, instead?

I created a Word document, wrote a hundred words, and saved it as "Dissertation.doc." It's a big step that I'm having trouble processing. Bonus! My first footnote, which is a hundred and forty-eight words and hence outnumbers what I've written in the body: Just looking at that mess there, I feel like I'm already in trouble, but it also feels a little good?

Yeah, I don't really know that Mizushima is trying to make "art" or even really cares about it. As far as I'm willing to argue, he's an exceptional career director who's not afraid to take the piss on a property if he thinks it's more interesting that way, although he doesn't always have the interest in (or the ability for) seeing it through. Even with something like Blood-C, which I despised through and through, he committed himself into eleven unbelievably boring episodes of slice-of-life-cum-monster-hunting, with a shy-girl protagonist verging on moé-blob, only to slaughter every last character in the twelfth episode in what is quite possibly the least cathartic blood-orgy that I've ever watched. I don't know what he wanted to do there, but something's going on... Really, he's always doing something weird or unexpected, even with the blander licenses and adaptations that he directs, but I don't know that it's out of any kind of conviction. The interview about Blood-C that I mentioned above did have him saying (paraphrased) he's sorry that people find Blood-C boring, but it's a lot of work listening to fans, so he'd rather just focus his effort on doing what he wants the best way he can. That's kind of cool, I don't know.