Trivia that matter
I felt like re-reading Cordwainer Smith’s “Western Science Is So Wonderful,” the tale of a local Chinese demon with strong pro-Communist sentiments who wants to study engineering. Rather than climb the stairs to the main library, I found it online here. Smith wrote science fiction on a grand scale, but he could do comedy, too.
The Kelly Freas illustration for the story here.
Don’t click here if you have work to do.
(Via Pergelator.)
Update: Beware — Fillyjonk notes that there is a Pony version, too.
Flip Flappers is the most interesting series I’ve seen since Kill la Kill and Shin Sekai Yori, conceptually and artistically. Each episode is different from every other episode. Much of it is pure fun, with frequent shout-outs and parodies, but there are depths and eccentricities and mysteries enough to inspire reams of speculation and analysis in the otakusphere. If there are twelve episodes, there are only three left to explain just what is going on. While the writers seem to know exactly what they are doing, I’m still concerned that it could fall apart at the end, or end with nothing resolved. We’ll see.
I reviewed the first episode, looking for Mimi. Do you see her in any of these screencaps?
Something else I wonder about: Is Cocona asking the right question above? Consider these names: Cocona, Mimi, Papika, Toto, Yayaka, Yuyu. One doesn’t fit the pattern. Throughout the show, Papika’s behaviour has reminded me of a playful Labrador retriever, sniff sniff. What is she? What would happen if the band around her ankle were removed? She and Cocona may be a complementary pair, but a pair of what?
There are actually only three seasons: lawnmower season, leafblower season and snowblower season.1
Recent snapshots from my little go-everywhere camera.
Enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend. This is probably the last time you can turn the radio on or go out without being assaulted by Xmas muzak until December 26.
One of the dealers at last week’s orchid show had an impressive display of carnivorous plants.
Can schadenfreude be virtuous? Edward Feser considers the question.
Meanwhile, Daniil Simkin heads to work:
As this lousy year nears its end, it’s time to shop for next year’s calendar. I looked for Japanese anime calendars and found a number worth considering. These are some that caught my eye.
J Greely has a pleasant, not quite safe-for-work little puzzle for you.
No matter who wins tomorrow, we lose. Still, things aren’t as bad as they could be. Yet.
Update:
Update 2:
I’ve been waiting for years to post that.
Update the morning after: So, is this good news? Only in the sense that a stage II carcinoma is better news than stage IV.
P.S.: Good riddance.
Many orchids have attractive flowers. Others are bizarre, such as the bulbophyllum sticking its tongues out at you that I saw at the annual orchid show today.
Update: more pictures below the fold. Click to embiggen.
Update II: Welcome, visitors from AoSHQ. Orchids are here. You can find other botanical pictures here and here. Ballet and modern dance are here; contra dancing is with the other Walnut Valley Festival pictures. Stereo pictures, stacked focus and other photographic stunts are here. There are interactive panoramas here.
The first episode of Miss Bernard Said. mentioned Yasutaka Tsutsui, and I checked to see if any more of his books have been translated into English. A quick search showed nothing new. However, I did find translations of a few of his stories online:
The first two are satirical; the third is strange.
I also looked for Henry Kuttner’s “The Twonky.” I couldn’t find the text online, but I did find a podcast. (Scroll down to the bottom.)
I discovered Chizumatic 1.0 when I looked for commentary on Serial Experiments Lain. What Steven Den Beste wrote made more sense than anything else I’d read, so I made Chizumatic a regular stop on my internet rounds. When he praised Haibane Renmei, I watched it and was impressed, and duly mentioned him on my weblog. To my surprise, he linked back to me, complaining that I had misspelled his name. Thereafter we occasionally posted links to each other’s sites, and during the past ten years he left many, many comments at my various websites, far more than anyone else. He wrote his last comment here the day before his last post.
It may be presumptuous of me to think so, but I came to regard him as a friend, albeit one whom I was unlikely ever to meet. I was glad whenever I could do him a favor, such as download an unlicensed series he was interested in. Through him I found such eccentric characters as Ubu, the Brickmuppet, Wonderduck, J Greely, Aziz, Pete, and many others. Steven was notoriously prickly and seemingly unsociable, but I think he enjoyed being part of an online community, as demonstrated by his enthusiastic particpation in our comment boxes.
I knew Steven was in failing health and near the end of his life, but losing him hurts. Still, I’m grateful for ten years of engineer’s disease, perceptive discussions of anime, music, history, technology and whatever was on his mind, accounts of beaver engineering and waterfowl behavior, and everything else, all expressed in clear, logical, readable prose.
Various tributes to and memories of Steven can be found aggregated here and here.
Those of us with blogs, we need to post cheesecake in [Steven Den Beste’s] memory. I think he’d like that.
Steven did indeed like pictures of pretty girls. However, I don’t share his taste for cheesecake. Instead, I grabbed several thousand of the pictures from the header at Chizumatic and assembled them into a slide show with music from Girls und Panzer. The pictures flash by at a rate of five per second; epileptics beware.
Good bye, Steven, and thank you.
Cocona’s green rabbit in Flip Flappers is named “Uexküll” in both the Crunchyroll and Viewster subtitles. That doesn’t seem like a traditional Japanese name, so I did a little searching and discovered theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll. According to Wikipedia,
Uexküll was interested in how living beings perceive their environment(s). Uexküll argued that organisms perceived the experience of living in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, ‘self-in-world’ subjective reference frames that he called Umwelt (translated as milieu, situation, embedding-lit. German for environment). These Umwelten (plural of Umwelt) are distinctive from what Uexküll termed the “Umgebung” which would be the living being’s surroundings as seen from the likewise peculiar perspective or Umwelt of the observer. The umwelt is composed of two parts, the innenwelt or self-oriented features, and the Umgebung, or world-oriented features. Together, they describe the individual’s subjective viewpoint, or embedding, which has the property of being ubiquitous, as compared to the observer’s objective viewpoint, which has the property of being universal.
Um, okay. Possibly Uexküll’s Umwelt and Umgebung lurk in Pure Illusion as Faust does in Madoka Magica, though it will take someone with more patience with modern philosophy than I have to explain it all.
Incidentally, Flip Flappers is the only current series I’m still watching, unless you count the shorts Miss Bernard Said and Ninja Girl & Samurai Master.
Medieval Otaku thinks I have one lovely blog and has tasked me with the following:
You must thank person who nominated you and include a link to their blog
You must list the rules and display the award
You must add 7 facts about yourself
You must nominate 15 other bloggers
Um, gee, thanks, I think, M.O.
Over the years, I’ve written about myself perhaps more often than is healthy, and it is difficult to find seven fresh facts worth mentioning. I’ll start with a little recycling. In the past, I’ve written
1. this
and
2. that.
There’s more about me
3. here.
What else? Let’s see….
A couple of links for a tedious Wednesday morning:
The winners of the 2017 Nobel physics prize have been leaked. I’m disappointed that there was no acknowledgement of the pioneering work of Eddy and Dale.
If you ever wanted a scarf like that of Doctor #4, knitting directions are here.
1. Who of the following were awarded the Nobel prize for literature?
W.H. Auden
Jorge Luis Borges
Anton Chekhov
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Robert Frost
Henrik Ibsen
Henry James
Leo Tolstoy
James Joyce
Ursula K. Le Guin
Stanislaw Lem
Vladimir Nabokov
Flannery O’Connor
George Orwell
Terry Pratchett
Mark Twain
John Updike
Gene Wolfe
Virgina Woolf
Robert Allen Zimmerman (a.k.a. “Elston Gunn”)
2. What does the Nobel prize for literature signify?