There She Is!!

Ah, one of my favorite internet created things has finally concluded.

A good while ago, maybe 2004, a Flash video appeared on Newgrounds called "There She Is!!" Curious why such a simply titled video was receiving such attention, I clicked on it and was treated to a wonderfully animated (And you know some of the crap that passes for animation with Flash) musical story about about a would be couple portrayed as a cat-person and a rabbit-person in a society where such a relationship is stricly forbidden (Like pre-1960's America inter-racial couples). Its a story of forbidden love, the cat-man's initial reluctantce based on societies rules and the rabbit-woman's dauntless enthusiasm in pursuing him, all set to an upbeat song. There are no words to the story, so don't worry about the fact that it was made in South Korea. Actions and universal symbols very effectively tell this story.

Anyhow, its 5 parts and I love it. I really think there's no reason not to see it. The site is SamBakZa and if you click on Amalloc (The blue profile) the five episode boxes should come up.

Enjoy it!

We made it

So, they were some good points to 2008: My brother got married, the first black president was elected (something previously delegated to 24 and bad sci-fi movies), Late Oct and Early Nov were AWESOME for gaming (Fable 2, Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, Mirror's Edge and Spore came out! And thats just part of it!), and political comedy had its best year ever. However, besides that the year sucked. Lets face it, the year long campaigns were preposterous circus acts eventually ending with (Surprise) the candidates early declared to be some of the least likely to succeed. I'm not even going to talk about it anymore, it doesn't deserve another word of attention. Then, the cherry on top, our wonderful economic crisis that everyone should have seen coming but didn't because everyone was shoving it under the rug. At the end of the year I'm not sure if I'm more glad that its a problem that affects more than our economy... Or not. I guess at least gas prices are down right? However long that lasts.

I'm really not sure how this year can be worse because our expectations for the year are already pretty dag low. See, that was the big problem, a lot of people were looking forward to 2008 like "Ah, finally Bush will be gone." and then so much mess happened and so expectations for 2009 are way down. So, when the few bright spots come up like the Star Trek movie being awesome and Watchmen coming out and not being terrible (Those are guarenteed by the way, you can return with your receipt to redeem for time spent at the end of the year if you find the statements untrue). Hopefully I'll get a goodly chunk of writing down. Hopefully I'll have a better idea of what I'm doing in life by then, because right now I'm pretty happy working with music and getting some writing done here and there with the possibility of publishing it someday. I'll really really try and get a cell phone.... Maybe. I also have another story idea that I want to a go on, but the trouble is that I don't know many people who would be interested in the genre, so its difficult to get an outside opinion on the subject.

Ah well, here's to a year of lowered expectations.

No good? Anime resurrection vitality!

So I want to put this post up on Facebook, but its a weird subject and I'm not sure if it would scare people too much. So instead I'm going to put it on here first, the thing nobody reads because I never post on it.

The subject of the post is an anime genre near and dear to my heart: Harem. This anime genre is the sympathetic man's ultimate fantasy: An average, but kind and well intentioned guy is inexplicably (Aside from the course of back story events revealed later and some convenient plot devices) surrounded by a variety of attractive ladies looking to be his one true love. The truly great thing about this genre is that, while naughty things may flit across the minds of the guy (Depending on the show) he would never do any of them because of his general nervousness around women and the fact that he doesn't or can't like any of the girls more than the other because either 1. He's fairly clueless, possibly to an unrealistic level. 2. He's too conscientious and realizes that if he chose one he would crush another. The ladies are representative of every possible type of love interest: Quiet, abrasive, studious, good at cooking, scandalously young, energetic, childhood friend, etc. etc. The possibilities are endless! Usually the show will have one girl who is the obvious choice for the main character, but sometimes its two (Tenchi Muyo anyone?) or in this most recent case 3! By most recent case I am referring to "Shuffle!" a show I've recently been watching on Hulu. Having just gotten through episode 7, its finally past the stage of introducing all of our vital young heroes potential prospects and presenting a case for why the three primary girls are so incredibly ideal while introducing two potential interests on the side whom both present themselves as unrealistic ventures, but deep down, you the viewer know that you could write a wonderful side story about their happy future.

Now, you the reader may be asking, "Okay, so I get the surrounded by women part. But what makes this better than some perverted/ridiculous reality show?" Ah, but I have not mentioned the most important aspects of these stories: Back story and "Our hero the problem solver". The first important aspect is that our hero has some past connection with the girl. Most commonly the hero encountered her at some point in childhood and made a very strong impression by playing with her when other people wouldn't, or by comforting her at a critical point in time. The variety is nearly endless especially since the supernatural or psychosis is often involved. This plays into "Our hero, the problem solver" Men want to rescue the woman they love from a problem, so the reason these shows are so popular with men (Thats right, romance for men) is that our hero is presented with a near endless supply of situations to either make a girl feel better or help her out a jam culminating in an episode in which he handles some deeply rooted problem finding its origins in the past. Now, this isn't always how things progress, for example the series Rumbling Hearts was a very difficult series in which the fellow is torn between a girl he loved and feels responsibility to love, and the woman he loves now. Solving a problem for one girl almost always hurt the other girl so it was an interesting turn in the formula, or maybe I just tend to watch too many of these shows from the same company?

Now you might be saying "Why is this guy interested in these girls at all? Aren't they a huge bother with all their problems?" Perhaps, but usually at least one of them takes care of him in some fashion by cooking for him or giving him a place to live, and really how cold would a guy have to be to turn down the sweet girls when they're so appreciative for his assistance? Plus, like I said, they're all interested in him, so they're all ponying for position in their own way, either by attempting to cook for him (In older shows, a classic plot point would be both girls try to cook for him, and both of them suck.) or some other kindness. The best part is they're adorably innocent, so none of them, except for the one whose characteristic it is to be aggressive, make any sort of perverse suggestions. Ah..... Its such a wonderful fantasy world. There are really so many facets to it.

Now you're probably worrying "Hey, you don't live with some warped sense of reality do you?" Ha ha, no no, I realized that the romantic situations that occur in these shows are utter fantasy many moons ago. That doesn't mean they don't have some good pointers though! Plus they're almost always entertaining, especially the ones from Kadokawa! (Shuffle, Air, Clannad, and my favorite Kanon). And, what was it my Philosophy professor talked on once, something like an emotional purging or something? Given my generally stoic nature I'm better able to release strong emotions into these scenarios due to the fact that interesting stuff very rarely occurs in my own life. If I released strong emotions into my everyday life, that could get messy! Oh, and I forgot to mention the whole Moe thing (pronounced Mo-ae) which is kind of a heavily nuanced thing. It literally means something like "To burn" and its basically some character that you support very passionately, generally based on some characteristic such as personality or attire. When they fall down you cry "Get up!" when they're downtrodden you cry "Don't give up!" and you cheer for their happiness! This is the purest aspect of Moe as I understand it.

Ah, now some of the ladies might be saying "Hmmm, I don't know about this ideal fantasy woman thing...." Oh ho, you think there aren't similar programs for women? Perhaps not so abundant, but I assure you they exist, and, at least in America, the women are far worse than the men. (Little known fact, females could very possibly outnumber males in the anime fan community) And don't try to BS me that women don't fantasize about the ideal man, I've met too many Jane Austen fans.

So, now this little writing is through. Will I post it on Facebook? Maybe, maybe not, I'll probably let it sit here for a while and see what happens. Maybe I'll come back and edit some thing, add some pictures. (Sure would help if I had my own frakking computer....)

Bye-nee!

A week of confusion.

So, apparently this whole $700 Billion problem started last Thursday, and while its certainly not resolved yet, at least today on C-SPAN they clarified what exactly this whole mess is about, and then tonight the president gave a brief clarification in a format that people might actually watch. As one of the representatives explained it to Paulson "There are a small group of people inside the beltway and on Wall Street who understand what is going on. When you throw a $700,000,000,000 figure out to the general public without explaining yourself, thats when you get 85% opposition." I'm paraphrasing of course, but that was the gist of it and I thought "Yes, finally they'll clarify this nonsense!" And they did, sort of. I had to watch and read some more stuff, but it seems like (In case you don't know) all those nasty foreclosures and bad loans and other real estate garbage we've been dealing with for the past year finally reached a breaking point with companies like AIG and Lehman Brothers and Fannie Mae, etc. being the "First Dominoes" if you will. Its like one of those cool displays where 1 tips 2, which tips 3, and soon you've got this giant cool looking V in the middle of your lair. From my understanding, the government wants to buy a good chunk of the foreclosures and such (Thus giving these dying companies that glutted on real estate some money) and then sell them back later for more money. In theory it seems like a good idea, but there's no guarentee it will work, and if this fails we really will be screwed. If we don't do it, tthen it seems like a whole bunch of companies and banks will go under which will also hurt a lot of people.

So the way I see it, and I could be wrong as I'm no expert, is that we're definitely going to have problems if we don't do it, we'll definitely still have relatively lesser problems even if we do (Thats the great thing, it won't really fix the problem, oi) but there's a possibility that the money and strings attatched oversight of that money won't fix the problem. Or we could use a quicksand analogy: We could stay in the quicksand and hope we touch bottom, or we could grab this thing that looks like a vine, but might be a snake and either way we'd have to move around in the quicksand which is going to sink us faster before we can even try to grab it.

To modify a familiar phrase: "Damned if we do maybe damned if we don't."

Excuse me, Unlce Sam?

You want HOW much money to help these fools keep London Bridge from falling down? Uncle Sam, would you like to explain to me and 300,000,000 of my dear fellow Americans why we should keep London Bridge up? Because you haven't done a very good job of that. It seems to us like you and your friends are the only people that really use it. I certainly don't understand why we should be spending $700,000,000,000 to build a giant golden support beam that you say your friends aren't going to steal bits and pieces of a few months down the road because you'll watch it, but don't you have other more important problems to look at Uncle Sam? Aren't there some disaster victims in the south, some kids failing school and a myriad of other problems you need to watch but haven't really been doing a good job of? Oh, and isn't their that scuffle going on in a far away land that we need to watch, and couldn't this money support that since apparently we're supporting it anyway? Thinking on it, couldn't we basically buy enough food to feed everyone in the US, heck the world for a week or longer? Or couldn't we pay tuition costs for just about every student in the US? Couldn't we do a lot of things that make sense to those of us who don't walk up on London Bridge? Oh, sorry, that tastes a little like Socialism doesn't it? I thought it was just a "bailout" for more people or some sort of super-sized "stimulus package". My mistake.