Trivia that matter
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?
I checked out a few more first episodes.
In Flip Flappers, serious-minded student Cocona sees a red-haired girl flying on a powered surfboard. Later the girl pops up behind Cocona, sniffs her, and introduces herself as “Papika” before they fall down the rabbit hole concrete pipe into Wonderland “Pure Illusion,” accompanied by a small yellow robot/cyborg. There they find themselves in a winter landscape, but it’s apparently not very cold, and the snow is sweet. More odd things happen for no obvious reason. Cocona loses her glasses, which Papika retrieves with considerable difficulty. Cocona’s eye change color, her short black hair becomes long and purple, and she finds a glowing blue object in her hand. A variety of other characters are introduced, including some who observe Papika remotely through laboratory equipment.
Flip Flappers reminds me of Kyousougiga in its anything-can-happen eccentricity, but whether it’s as well thought-out as the earlier series remains to be seen. Masumi Itou is part of the music crew; her presence is clearly discernable in the ending theme. I’ll probably keep watching Flip Flappers unless it turns stupid.
Update: You can also watch Flip Flappers here. The translation is different from Crunchyroll’s and makes a little more sense in some places.
Three of the students in Miss Bernard Said read a lot; the fourth one would rather talk about books than read them. It’s a flimsy framework even for a short, but it is about books, which compensates for a lot.
I know I watched Kiitaro’s Yokai Picture Diary, but I don’t remember anything about it — which might be all you need to know.
Against my better judgement, I tried ClassicaLoid but didn’t last long. It was a dumb as I had feared.
I watched three minutes of Drifters, which was a bloody mess, and I mean that literally. Ick. It seems that the gore might not be its greatest failing. Other shows that I quit in five minutes or less include Soul Buster and Occultic;Nine.
In Matoi the Sacred Slayer, men get silly when they see a little cleavage, and women take advantage of it. Meh. There might be a good mahou shoujo story beyond the fanservice, but I don’t have the patience to find out. (Steven has a more positive take.)
The protagonist of Nazotokine is a flat-chested secretary at an advertising agency who finds herself trapped in a strange place until she solves some riddles. She’s no longer a kid, but she nevertheless undergoes a mahou shoujo-style transformation into a decidedly non-secretarial outfit. Suddenly she is no longer flat. Even though it’s another short, it felt stretched out. I might watch another episode to see if the riddles are of any interest.
Sengoku Chōjū Giga is yet another short. This one uses the style of the proto-manga Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to tell silly tales of Odo Nobunaga. Here Nobunaga is a cuckoo, and is cuckoo. The art is distinctive, but otherwise this is an ordinary gag anime.
Many more screencaps below the fold. Click to embiggenate.
I watched an episode of Ninja Nonsense, which turned out to be oddly topical.
(Ninja Nonsense is often funny, but it is too off-color to generally recommend. Not even Norio Wakamoto can make Onsokumaru tolerable for long.)
Update: Here’s a list of write-in candidates for president. Those running include
• Raff, Riff, of Notre Dame, Indiana
• Bunny, Soul, of Williams Bay, Wisconsin
• Vader, Darth, of Spokane, Washington
• Mouse, Mickey, of Anaheim, California
• The Elf, Buddy, of North Pole, Alaska
• Hydrox, Cookie, of Newport Coast, California
These and the others on the list are all better choices than any of those offered by the political parties.
(Via the Professor.)
Here a few pictures from one of the ballets performed at last night’s rehearsal at Friends University. The dancers put their telephones aside for the other pieces. I took about 100 gigabytes of photos altogether (including raws), which will take some time to go through. Click to embiggen.
It looks like the Brickmuppet will get a reprieve from Matthew. Down in Orlando, William Luse might not be as lucky. He links back to his posts from 2004, when Charley and friends paid visits to the Florida peninsula.
Update: The Brickmuppet’s luck ran out.
Derek Lowe recently added another post to his “Things I won’t work with” file, this one dealing with a feisty nitrogen compound (“Recall that this is the compound whose cocrystal with TNT is actually less dangerous than the pure starting material itself….”) and anhydrous hydrogen peroxide.
I am told that I barely talked at all until I was nearly four, though when I did start chattering, it was in complete sentences. I was perhaps fortunate that this was back in the dark ages, when autism was a rare and exotic affliction and few people had even heard of Asperger’s.
I looked at random first episodes of the fall shows debuting on Crunchyroll. Overall it looks like another season for watching old favorites and working on my backlog, but a couple show promise.
Easily the best is The Ancient Magus’ Bride. Chise, a girl without a family who sees yokai, lives with a sorcerer in the English (I think) countryside. Her guardian/owner/future husband has an animal skull for a head, but he seems to be a decent, caring fellow who enjoys a cup of tea. At various times I was remineded of Spirited Away, Natsume Yuujin-cho, Diana Wynne Jones, Neil Gaiman and The Twelve Kingdoms. It’s worth checking out if any of these names mean something to you.
Unfortunately, The Ancient Magus’ Bride is an OVA rather than a regular series. There will be two more episodes released six months apart. If you want more, the manga might be worth tracking down.
Izetta: The Last Witch is yet another alternate history of WWII. This time, the principal characters are a strong-willed and capable princess from a small country in central Europe, and a “white witch” with red hair. What particularly interested me was the music. One scene is set at a performance of The Magic Flute, and we hear parts of both of the Queen of Night’s arias. It’s probably too much to hope for more Mozart in future episodes, but I’ll likely will watch another episode or two to see how the story develops. The ending art hints that there will be yuri; if that happens, I’ll drop the show.
Other shows I sampled:
Nyanbo! features CG cardboard cats doing cardboard cat things during its brief episodes. A character I would rather watch appears momentarily at the end.
Kaiju Girls is a sort of mahou shoujo parody with very short episodes, except that the chibi girls transform into chibi monsters. It’s almost too light to call “fluff,” as is Ninja Girl and Samurai Master.
I watched five minutes of Tiger Mask. Ugh. The hell with it.
To my astonishment, I made it all the way through the first episode of the latest iteration of Time Bokan. It straddles the border of silly and stupid, but it might be tolerable for those who occasionally enjoy a little dumb humor.
Magical Girl Raising Project looks like an attempt to be another Madoka Magica, this time pitting the girls against each other in a battle royale. Without Shaft, Akiyuki Shinbo, Gen Urobuchi and Yuki Kajiura, though, it’s not likely to work. The black and white parti-colored mascot is probably a shout-out to Danganronpa, a show I have zero interest in. Ubu is watching it; I’ll check in a few weeks to see what he thinks of it.
Magical Girl Raising Project is populated by girls. (People obsessed with “gender identity” will be pleased to learn that one of the girls is not a traditional female.) Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru is populated entirely by young men with pointy chins, many of whom also wear red eyeliner or dangly earrings. Gee, I never realized that swords are so effeminate. It’s not quite as bad as it sounds, and it’s rendered innocuous by horseplay and slapstick, but it’s not for me and probably not for you, either.
One curious note: both Time Bokan and Touken Ranbu – Hanamaru deal with historical revisionism. Neither do it as well as Peabody and Sherman.
Additional screencaps below the fold. Click to embiggen.
There were a few “Bernie” yard signs in the area earlier this year, but they are gone now. I had not seen a single sign for any presidential candidate since the conventions until this week, when I spotted the above on my way to work. I still have yet to see anyone advocating for either the Democrat or Republican embarrassments in his front yard.
(Courtesy of Dr. Boli.)
I believe this is the sketch that Steven refers to:
There actually is an [Official Monster Raving] Loony Party. They take themselves a little too seriously.
The only political party in which I have even the slightest interest is the Wet Blanket Party, who are not running any candidates this election.
There is no sensible party.
A young friend of mine named Roger had a nice little racket going. He’d enter the old time fiddle competition at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, take second or third place, and go home with a shiny new fiddle. This year he goofed and took first. It will be five years before he can enter the fiddle competition again.1 Perhaps he’ll start collecting mandolins.