Blambo

I just realized how weird his body language is when he talks to actual people. Keeping your hand on your coffee looks super tense.

Yeah also twitter can be a crazy echo chamber of your thoughts without anyone writing a word. You can have 100 reply tweets making arguments against you but you would still feel right if you have your 5 favorites and 5 retweets.Also the more I imagine gaters as frustrated lonely manchildren the more I want to give them out hugs and books.

Completed Non Non Biyori. Don't really know what I expected. It's just moe moe moe, just at a slower pace than usual. I kept watching because even though the characters are all sort of cliché, they're watered down because the focus of the series is the ambience of the countryside, and the low-key tone allowed for some funny dry humor. Though it would be much more convincing as a naturalistic stroll in the countryside if the characters seemed like actual children, rather than porcelain dolls meant to look and act like someone's idea of what elementary to middle school girls are like. I guess I'm still not over the creepy feeling I get when watching moe. It just seems too engineered and transparent for me to latch on at all. A series with a similar tone, Barakamon (thanks for the recommendation, thread), pulled off the "cute kids in the country are funny" thing way better and with decidedly less conventional moe. Though anyway I'm starting to really like anime with ambience art and atmosphere as a priority over plot. I'm looking into Mushishi which looks incredibly relaxing. Basically right now I'm only watching anime that are exactly like the first half of any Ghibli film.

I've been groaning mighty hard at the titles lately, haha.

I thought Toy Story 3 was "denying death is delusional", Toy Story 2 was "the dangers of rejecting life in the face of inevitable death", and Toy Story was "belonging is life affirming and always mutual, and uniqueness is overrated". The first movie serves as thematic bedrock for the two sequels in that the problems/villains of the sequels were caused by a lack of belonging, and they're both opposites on the what-do-we-do-about-dying spectrum. Or it's about toys that come to life and how wacky that is

I'm having problems running for longer periods of time. It might be because of my posture or technique but I've only ever managed to do 1.5 miles per hour of rest/weight training, and my calves and joints feel a lot of pressure when I run. Anyone here experienced in endurance training or long distance running? I used to swim competitively, so I thought I'd at least have the cardiovascular ability to run for a while but I guess it's a totally different beast.

Just completed Kids on the Slope, and rewatched From up on Poppy Hill. I really like the setting of postwar Japan because it's a slightly edgy, rejuvenative period of a country in transition after a major conflict, with people banding together and working towards some semblance of peace and community. The respective plots of both pieces are pretty generic and clichéd but the setting and tone really carry them, especially Poppy Hill which has this weird ability to invoke nostalgia even though I've never set foot in Japan. I really want more of this kind of stuff, but a quick google search doesn't net me much. Watching kids get together and achieve something positive in a realistic setting is cool cause it displays idealism without hiding reality.

God this is ushering in a new era of Star Wars S&M cosplay to rival "chained Leia"

Whoa...have fun animating flailing arms. Actually I'm kinda into seeing arms pumping frantically during a first person run, versus either invisible hands or a swaying gun. Awesome work!

Yeah, seriously.

I read that book a while ago so I'm...probably really really misinformed about a lot of things (I'm also not an anthropology or history person in any right so feel free to shred my post up). Also this is all coming from scattered readings and faded memories of AP World History so please take it all with an industrial pinch of salt. I seem to recall that the argument was that environmental factors that led to the specific western colonial motivation were only advantageous in that the results gave European powers a predilection to adapt and evolve. One of the arguments I remember was that the close proximity and diversity of consolidated nation-units (which form because of the political structure enabled by surplus farming) made competing and adapting against neighboring, often hostile nation-units fairly frequent. This was the result of fertile but limited agrarian resources and non-contiguous spaces, and acts against monolithic dogma of technology and military. Western political culture and military around the age of discovery is not monolithic, and its only internal similarity is its agility. If the only advantage that nation-states in the west had was this abstract notion of abundance and technological superiority, the Roman empire might've lasted a couple hundred years or more. It didn't partly because it overextended, couldn't mutate its once adaptive military culture to new conditions, and held onto an antiquated and disadvantageous political system. The specific economic and geographical conditions that enabled organized nation-states were only instrumental to the development of a flexible, competitive, and atomized economic and political culture. It is context dependent in that this is but one way in which this is possible (your example of Mongolian dominance is a really cool instance of an adaptable and powerful society not based on bureaucracy or surplus farming), and I seem to remember that Jared Diamond hit upon that in the book but maybe didn't emphasize enough, probably because the first few chapters were admittedly really really focused on the differences in natural abundance and agrarian superiority between the West and the rest of the world. The organization of competing nation-states also likely gave way to the morally abhorrent justification of expansion. If you try to expand an economy that's based on limited domestic diversity and relies on out-competing your neighbors, gaining trade superiority via colonizing areas with abundant non-european resources is essential. The western styled sedentary specialization/bureaucracy economy that Diamond outlines in the book and that Peter Stearns writes about in his textbooks is not actually sustainable as population increases, and so requires expansion to support itself, which I see as a huge disadvantage rather than an advantage. The way of life itself is not what fueled western "dominance" but the mindset it created. It doesn't exempt western powers from moral scrutiny or say that domination of non-Western civilizations was "meant to happen" (which is an interpretation I see a lot of this kind of thing), but it provides background on the specific twisted warmongering brainwaves that allowed it to happen. Anyway I might be giving Diamond too much credit, but I seem to remember his book depicting the trend of western dominance to be a colossal, devastating, and almost coincidental fallout of a broken Western dogma trying to support itself, producing the worst human behavior possible. I really hope I don't come off as way too confident with potentially wrong facts, because I'm super dubious about my own understanding and I'm looking forward to hearing from someone who actually studies this and knows what they're talking about.

The Wizard of Oz triggered a lifelong fear of weird colored skin in movies. Something about a completely realistic human being with one off but very obvious thing wrong with it gives me horrible chills. There's no damn reason for that witch to be fucking green. I can't watch the Mask or Big Fat Liar for this reason. It's given me the seed of alien prejudice.

lol

Everyone looks like Phil fish at indiecade

I dunno, a lot of the stuff I like about 2d animation versus the current style of 3d animation is its willingness to be incredibly dynamic and wild with shapes and silhouettes, which working with 3d stuff seems to be less catered toward. The short that tegan posted shows 2d style animation sense using 3d art, and I think it looks pretty great and keeps with the spirit.

One of the talks is " We Are Drugs: on New Indie Game Dev Tools for Psychedelic Hologram Futures". Anyone not in NY this Saturday is missing out.

Ohh someone inside the college admissions thinger. I have a question: when you give recommendations for rejection, do you experience pushback if your main point is that the applicant displays a form of prejudice that could contribute to a negative social environment in the university? Is that kind of thing ever considered in earnest?

From what I've read, it's a bigger problem in cities because the law is more loosely enforced in rural areas, but the preference for males stays about the same. The dynamic where it's predominantly male is that despite a scarcity of females, cultural factors make them only valued in a position of little power. Explains why despite the population weirdness in the most extreme cases, Chinese people still remain monogamous.

Whenever I see something like the word "spirit" in this kind of context I sort of just silently insert "as a shorthand for overall pathos of a thing". I keep feeling like there's always some kind of less fantastical or new age intent in using it if it's obviously part of some complex or formed idea. Like maybe it's talking about the "spirit" of this kind of organization being a reflection of a certain mindset in doing things, ie. being thorough for mundane tasks even if it's not the bare minimum you have to do, which forces you to focus on your actions in the present. Or some such thing; I haven't read any of the book (though it looks interesting) so the author might be completely weird and new age, I dunno. Mundane aesthetic and living habit as enforcing or reflecting an abstract idea or philosophy I think is pretty Japanese, at least. Anyway I think words that have other, nebulous superstitious connotations often make the reader kind of just dismiss stuff without a thought because of (understandable) skepticism around weird spiritual stuff, but I also think that this isn't giving the author enough credit and kind of betrays a kind of prejudice. I'm not into "spirituality" either in that stereotypical or popular sense but maybe the opaque and weird language masks actual, practical, grounded ideas?

Wartune is classic:

I'm probably gonna be at indiecade east listening to talks, come by come by

Anybody have examples of stories in games, books, films, TV shows etc that effectively use coincidences to drive a plot forward in a way that doesn't feel contrived? I see them in Coen films a lot and they usually seem to be done for the purpose of comedy or to show some theme about fate or chaos. Cowboy Bebop does it a lot too, but in that instance it constantly feels artificial and convenient.

The episodic thing isn't really what bothered me, it was the lack of direction of the story in the episode itself. I really really enjoyed Cowboy Bebop which I think has very self contained episodes, but each plot had elements that felt purposeful rather than decorative. It kind of just had a weird, listless feeling to it despite being extremely wacky and over the top in its characters. I haven't actually continued watching it.Speaking of Cowboy Bebop, I super like it so far. Every creative decision and juxtaposition seems to serve some overarching aesthetic or narrative goal rather than being checkboxes for certain character tropes and demographics, in a way that feels really wholesome and organic to take in. I'm probably making undue assumptions about a medium that I've had limited exposure to but from my experience of anime, the particular anime series I've seen have things that I like that are encapsulated from each other and develop in silos. They seem like they were developed to hit very specific notes for the audience and lumped together in a way that doesn't really care about the overall feeling of the show. These are slice of life rather than action but Princess Jellyfish and Welcome to the NHK both felt like this to me. "Unique" (or "overdesigned") character design, one dimensional but distinct personalities, gratuitous manzai routines, the use of generic background art and extremely diluted or purposeless music made it feel disjointed in plots that seem to be obvious attempts at conveying specific themes and feelings. It constantly feela like I'm being shown a world as a set piece rather than specific stories that take place in the world, like all the energy was spent in making cool characters and settings and none went into presenting them in an artful way. It might have to do with the business being focused on creating franchises and characters with continuous presence (thanks for the business info guys) rather than creating stories and cohesive peices of art. I dunno. I still like them but it's just a specific feeling I have.

I'm watching Space Dandy. I'm only on episode 1, but so far the animation and music is amazing, and the voice acting is great, but the direction, dialogue, and pacing feel somewhat bland and monotonous, as if I was just watching lights flashing on and off for 30 minutes. I like its wacky theme and such but the way that the story is presented so far feels really straightforward and uninteresting. I hope it gets better cause I love the animation and art style to death.

Beast Coast represent!