BobbyBesar

Have I mentioned Kacho O-ji (Legend of Black Heaven) here before? Its an anime that I have affection for, but objectively probably isn't very good. Its built around music, but aside from two key songs, I don't remember any of the background soundtrack stuff. I should probably re-watch it, but I'm afraid it will be terrible. Also, the music is only good if you like a particular kind of 80s metal. Uhhh...so its not really a recommendation.

My favorite non-Persona SMT was Strange Journey on the DS, but if the 3DS's pixels bother you, it could be an issue. SMT IV was pretty good, I guess. I stop playing SMT games in one of two ways: A (usually the final) boss is impossibly hard, or I forget to save for a really long time (or save over a slot that I needed to go back to), and don't want to replay several hours all over again, and then forget what I was doing. I did the latter on SMT IV, but I was pretty far into it.

Well, the other signficant 80's girls' franchise was My Little Pony, which, a) internet weirdos aside, got a pretty strong revival, and b ) would be incredibly terrifying if re-imagined as a live action film.

I wonder if there's an intentional parallel between the cannibalism aspect being pointedly left out of the story, and what Don pointedly left out of his own story. And whether the implication is that everybody at the table recognizes the horrors that are unsaid in both cases. Seems like a bit of a reach though.

I couldn't hear what he said, and I also assumed the story was about cannibalism.

Don didn't actually admit to anything terrible. Despite his initially poor phrasing ("I killed my CO"), this wasn't a fragging situation. Don's story clearly labels it as an accident. It's possible that if Don had described what he had _actually_ done, they might have taken umbrage. But I don't think there's anything suggesting that happened in this case.

Yeah, I'm bizarrely fascinated by Hatsune Miku in general, but that's mostly because I think it's the first step in Japan realizing the Macross-future it's been waiting for. Project Diva sounds like it has pretty standard rhythm game mechanics, and I do enjoy weird creepy digital hair-combing. I only got a Vita recently, so I'm still plowing through P4G and a backlog of free PS+ games, so it'll be a while before I need anything else.

Is there a reason you have to even mention the content? It sounds like you're an independent contractor, so can't you just say "Sorry, I don't currently have the bandwidth for this job, but please contact me with any future projects?"

Man, Archie is just the weirdest thing.

As far as I can tell, the usual "Next Time on Mad Men" slot was filled with an AMC title card just telling me to watch the finale. I'm bummed that we missed out on one final installment of non-sequitur reaction shots theater.

Oof. I'm pretty good at engrish, but that article is rough reading, partially just because of the length. BTW, he seems to have a sort of mission statement here, which give some context to the kind of industry self-censorship that he alludes to in his GG comments. While I'm not super up on the industry, I imagine there's a lot to object to in the way the anime industry selects projects. http://roninworksjapan.tumblr.com/post/89698117731/who-are-we-and-our-goal

One of the shots of Betty in the doctor's office reminded me of shots of her from one of the earlier seasons in a doctor's office, probably when she was pregnant with Gene. (Looks like it was S2E13, Meditations in an Emergency). I doubt it's an intentional reference though. The only reason I really remember it was the deer painting.

While this entire season has been about the recalling or repeating the past, this episode really piled a lot of that stuff on. This isn't the first time that Don has been in a sort of purgatorial twilight existence by the pool (season 2's The Jet Set), or the first time he's been grifted by teenagers and beaten in a cheap motel (season 3's Seven Twenty Three). This isn't even the first time he's had a blonde ex-wife with whom he has a surprisingly healthy relationship dying of cancer. I'm interested to see if Pete's "happy" end is actually anything of the sort. I wouldn't trust Duck as far as I could throw him, so the entire time I was expecting that deal to come crashing down as an elaborate scam. Not to mention there are all kinds of reasons that Pete could screw up his fresh start (albeit a couple of reasons he won't). There's some clear groundwork being laid that Don may be going to commit suicide. I suspect he's heading to California, where he'll say good bye to Anna Draper (whose engagement ring was pointedly returned to him by Meredith). I suspect he's going to say goodbye to Don Draper as well, possibly as a re-enactment of the ambiguously suicidal-themed Hawaii pitch, to enact yet another reference from the past. Personally, I don't think he's going to commit suicide, just as Don didn't see why people thought the pitch was suicidal. I think that the veterans provided Dick Whitman with an absolution for his original sin, and for all the identities that Don has tried on over the years, he's never really worn Dick Whitman. So, I suspect that we'll see will be not suicide, but a rebirth. Maybe if Don is able to acknowledge his own true self (as Pete seems to have done), and act in accordance with that, his existential dilemma will be over. That seems a little too tidy for Mad Men, but assuming that we've seen the last of Peggy or Pete, they both got relatively tidy "endings" as well.

Since I'm only vaguely aware of Hatsune Miku as a "personality", what are the games like? Any interesting mechanics, any specific edition with standout music?

Obviously there are a bunch of discounted prices here, but I think electroplankton is worth significantly more than you're charging.

"Over There" has been a punchline song for me since...well, probably 1990.

I love Christmas Cake*, because nobody ever gets it until you explain the metaphor. *From a wordplay perspective. The concept itself, of course, is very problematic.

Yeah, I'm sure everybody has their own little list of those childhood sounds. is a noise I miss in the mornings. I lived a block away from a mosque for a while as a kid, and find a distant call to prayer pretty lovely, too.

Yeah, cicadas have specific associations of childhood and summer. As you note, it isn't hard to learn that association even simply by watching anime, but to Blambo's comments above, really feeling it on a personal level can be give it a real gut-punch force. While I agree about about the general thematic content, there are a lot of individual elements in FLCL that I find very difficult for me to tie into those themes. I'd be interested to read that article if you can manage to find it.

Sorry about the fairly extreme pivot, it's something I've thinking about a lot, but never really mentioned because it never really seemed like the right time. My wife actually does have a degree in Japanese cultural studies, so it's a conversation we have together kind of a lot. I don't disagree with much of what Blambo says, but to expand a little bit: this is also entirely in the context of trying to read these things very closely, which can have tremendously varying returns depending on the media being approached regardless of the source. There are many gradations in between "Haha pantyshot" and Japanese Media Studies PhD, and the appropriate threshold for any particular work and audience is going to be somewhere in between. Really, I think that a lot of it is just a "show your work" aspect: if you want to have a conversation about the meaning of a piece, the more context and justification you can give your analysis the better it will be received by others. Which isn't to say that other interpretations aren't valid for you, just that they may be more difficult to communicate. So, it's exploring the axis of "analysis", which is almost entirely orthogonal to "enjoyment". If you enjoy I Dream of Red Chamber for the beauty of the prose, or the emotions it stirs in you, or an appreciation for the elegant construction of the narrative, or whatever else, that's great. If you enjoyed it for it's contemporary political commentary without understanding the contemporary political commentary, things would start to get shakier. On a personal level, I DO think there can be something inappropriate about ignoring the fact that other cultures have distinct cultural contexts which inform how those pieces were created (in general - I'm not saying anybody here is doing that). But there's also value in cross-cultural media studies. Also, on a personal level, I feel it's totally okay for elements of something to be self-contradictory: for example, the answer to "is Kill La Kill exploitative or empowering?" can be "Yes." Also, I want to talk to you about how think FLCL is coherent. The last time I watched it, I concluded that it's a sort of tone-poem about the way childhood feels, but didn't really have a point. Speaking of FLCL, there's a good example from FLCL (along with so many other sources) with regards to the cultural context that Blambo mentioned above: How do you feel about the sound of cicadas?

Wait, is your contention that those titles do stand up to close scrutiny? Or that they don't? I don't really understand your comment here, but I think it's just the phrasing. Either way, I'm not sure the relative maturity of the medium is relevant here. I think that anime is fairly mature as a medium, but uniformity of message just isn't something that the medium values. Anime is a fundamentally foreign medium from a distinct culture with distinct goals. It feels familiar due to appropriation and ubiquity, but i think it's a mistake to treat it as though westerners can consume and interpret it devoid of that context. Sorry if this sounds kind of pompous.

To give credit where it's due, it took him a decade but he did finally figure out how to draw Amanda Waller. I kid, I kid. I love his work, and honestly superhero body types are largely just interchangeable action-figure molds in general, so it doesn't bother me all that much.

Well, the "dirty old man" trope is very well established in both anime and Japanese culture in general. It's got slightly more to it than just slapstick. It speaks to what a culture built around maintaining the structures of masculinity and virility does to men who no longer exist along that axis.

Kill La Kill:

Alternately, because her body is identical to every other woman Bruce Timm has ever drawn.