Author: Don
111/365
Riverside Park.
Ducks in anime, part XVII
Oh! Edo Rocket #5
Bears, too.
What anime fans share in common …
… that make them attracted to anime in the first place.
I have an untested theory that anime fans tend to be… by disposition not attached to the physical world. They get by with the education mill and then join the workforce – some of them may do extraordinarily well, some less so. Their level of participation in society at large tends to stop at earning their bread – they are just not the type who get anxious in not participating in the mating rituals, climbing the greasy pole etc. I think it is mostly because their mental life is too occupied with something else better than the real world has to offer. It is not that they are maladjusted – they tend to do this by choice.
No, no, no
No fair. It’s August, dammit.
Protect your ID
Spy style. Shamus tells you how.
110/365
Central Steel, Inc. III
There are no grownups
Doug Marlette, the artist responsible for Kudzu, one of my favorite comic strips, died recently. I’ve been going though the posts on my old weblogs to see if anything is worth saving, and I came across this link to excerpts from a commencement address Marlette gave. It’s worth posting again.
109/365
108/365
Excuse me, I’m going to go listen to The Smiths
If you haven’t finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet, don’t click here. (Language, etc., advisory.)
(While I’m on the topic of Pötterdämerung, let me point out that there is a Potter-related poll in the sidebar. There is a similar poll, worded differently, on my other weblog.)
Update: J.K. Rowling tells all (spoilers, spoilers, spoilers),
*****
You might have wondered where this site was this morning, and several other mornings recently. I wondered, too. Apparently, whenever there is emergency maintenance to be done at the hosting service, or an outage or a kernel panic, the server where my site is currently stored is always affected. I guess if you go with a cheap hosting plan you get cheap service. Still, none of the other inexpensive web hosts I’ve used were as unreliable, not even my original free GeoCities site years ago.
*****
I knew Steven has a powerful mind, but I never realized just how mighty he is. According the the “recent comments” widget in Avatar’s sidebar, “… Steven Den Beste ‘… has a temper and can toss building-shattering attack spells around.'” For your own safety, do not nitpick.
*****
While browsing around the Anime Tropes Wiki, I came across this:
When A Modest Proposal was written a lot of people thought it was actually talking about eating babies.
Some years back, a friend wanted to write a satirical letter-to-the-editor. I suggested that he read Swift’s dispassionate discussion to see how it’s done. My friend mentioned it to his literature professor. The professor said, “What do you want to read that for? It’s about eating babies!” He was the head of the honors program at Wichita State.
*****
It may be a while until Guchuko plushies are available. Until then, there’s this.
Anime for grown-ups
I’ve watched Shingu twice now, and it was as good the second time as the first, even though I knew all the twists. But I’m as puzzled as ever by the great mystery of Shingu: why has the series never received the attention it deserves? There has to be a reason beyond the lame opening. (The following is mildly spoilerish.)
Ignorance was bliss
107/365
Grindelia.
Complicated noises
When I first started fooling around with music on computers, one of my projects was to make my own primitive version of Switched-on Bach. I arranged Bach’s two- and three-part inventions and a few other things for software synths and sequencer. I recently unearthed the CD I recorded. It hasn’t aged well, but some of it doesn’t hurt my ears. I’ve uploaded some selections to my music site for the curious. (Click on the little speaker icons next to the download link to preview the tunes.)
When I made these recordings five years ago, I used as wide a variety of synthesizers as possible. After making the selections, I was surprised to realize that the majority of arrangements I found still listenable used only one synth, FMHeaven, an emulation of the Yamaha DX7.
Two or three voices
When I first started fooling around with music on computers, one of my projects was to make my own primitive version of Switched-on Bach. I arranged Bach’s two- and three-part inventions and a few other things for software synths and sequencer. I recently unearthed the CD I recorded five years ago. Some of it didn’t hurt my ears. I’ve uploaded some selections to my music site for the curious. (Click on the little speaker icons next to the download link to preview the tunes.)