Varia

If you see a “Tancos” in the comments at Chizumatic or other mee.nu weblogs, that’s me. There already is a “don” registered at mee.nu, so I’m using my Martian Hungarian alter-ego. I registered mainly so I can comment on the weblogs that require it, but as a consequence, I now have a mee.nu site of my own. I probably won’t post there often.

(Incidentally, the post editor doesn’t work in Safari (Macintosh OS 10.3.9). It works fine in Firefox, fortunately.)

*****

Wonderduck recently posted a quiz in which the viewer is challenged to identify Kyoto Animation characters by their eyes. If you find it easy, you might want to try this and this, which draw from all of anime. Good luck.

*****

More reviews of Shingu: Civilis and Jeff Lawson. I watched the first disc of Stellvia some months back and couldn’t decide whether to watch the rest. Maybe I will, after all.

Mundane and marvelous

Michiko Kakutani likes Harry Potter #7:

It is Ms. Rowling’s achievement in this series that she manages to make Harry both a familiar adolescent — coping with the banal frustrations of school and dating — and an epic hero, kin to everyone from the young King Arthur to Spider-Man and Luke Skywalker. This same magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.

In doing so, J. K. Rowling has created a world as fully detailed as L. Frank Baum’s Oz or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a world so minutely imagined in terms of its history and rituals and rules that it qualifies as an alternate universe, which may be one reason the “Potter” books have spawned such a passionate following and such fervent exegesis. With this volume, the reader realizes that small incidents and asides in earlier installments (hidden among a huge number of red herrings) create a breadcrumb trail of clues to the plot, that Ms. Rowling has fitted together the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of this long undertaking with Dickensian ingenuity and ardor.

Postscript: Although Kakutani is careful to avoid spoilers, her comments do imply an answer to one of the major questions in the series: does Harry ultimately survive? If you’re planning to read the book soon anyway, you might want to skip this (and other) reviews.

Cold fuzzies

potemayo02.jpg

Reaction to Potemayo: not enough Guchuko (above, left), too much Mikan (below). I could have done without the Brokeback Mountain reference, too. And the boys in skirts. And the incontinent chibi. Never mind.

potemayo03.jpg

By the way, Guchuko indeed wields an axe, not a scythe. This is a scythe:

gothhotaru.jpg

(Goth Hotaru via Ken.)

Post script: I probably am being a little unfair to Potemayo. The central character, Sunao, is quiet and level-headed, something I appreciate in anime as well as in real life. Although there is a definite whiff of shounen-ai, one of the boys involved is a gonk; i.e., the point is not titillation.

Nevertheless, I wonder just who the target audience is. Potemayo and Guchuko — I expect that the plushies are already heading to market — will likely fascinate pre-literate fans of Binchou-tan, but the satirical aspects of the show will go over their heads. Those who can spot the subverted tropes will likely suffer from a kawaii overdose from the title character/thing. I’m mildly curious to see if any explanation is eventually offered for the chibis’ presence in this universe, but there is a limit to how much cute (or Mikan) my system will tolerate.

Relics of a less-sensitive past

At WalMart today I spotted a collection of 150 Cartoon Classics in the $5 DVD bin. It’s, um, educational. Here are two before-and-after pairs of screen captures from “Redskin Blues,” a Tom and Jerry cartoon from 1932:

redskinblues01.jpg

redskinblues03.jpg

redskinblues04.jpg

redskinblues05.jpg

(Sorry about the quality. The DVD’s menus don’t work in VLC, and the Apple DVD player won’t allow screen grabs (thank you very much, Steve Jobs), so I had to snap the monitor screen with my toy camera.)

Testing, testing …

I haven’t been able to get the mp3 player that Astro uses to work, so I’m experimenting with the 1 Bit Audio Player. Here’s a piece from the Denno Coil soundtrack. There should be a little speaker icon after the link. Click on it to hear the tune. If you don’t see it, or if the music doesn’t play, please let me know.

Kodomo no Asobi

Here’s another possibility:

[mp3]http://tancos.net/audio/09-Kodomo-no-Asobi.mp3[/mp3]