T w e n t y S i d e d
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I’ve mentioned before how I’ve had trouble with coaxing players to rest. You have to watch these guys: They will do everything they can to escape the finely crafted rails you’ve put them on.
DM of the Rings IV:
Anime: Simple Pleasures
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If a woman is taking a bath, it’s so that the plot can show her getting walked in on / being murdered / being spied on. If someone eats, they do it to show us what sort of person they are. A puffy, addled cop will eat doughnuts. A corrupt rich man will eat something decadent and gross to the average middle – class viewer. The slobby fat guy will eat fast food. If someone lays down to sleep, it’s because they are about to be attacked or have a nightmare. If a family eats, it’s so they can have a conversation that serves the plot. We rarely see what they are eating. We certainly never see close-ups of the food.
Now, all of this is perfectly reasonable. Western writers have learned that everything needs to serve the plot and character development. If a character has to do something mundane, then it needs to tell us about them or advance the plot, otherwise you’re just wasting screen time, right?
But anime seems to have a different take on this. Sometimes they show us people doing these things just for the sake of showing us how much they are (or are not) enjoying themselves. When a meal happens on-screen, we get closeups of the food, and of the character’s reaction to it. We know what they are having and how they feel about it. Then they eat some of it, and we get a reaction shot: How does it taste, do they like it, how does the cook (if they are around) feel about the reaction? We are shown all of this before the characters get down to the business of having real dialog. Sometimes this serves the plot, but sometimes it’s just there to show us how happy everyone is.
Sometimes we see a character go to bed, stretch and comment on how tired they are, and remark to themselves about how comfortable their bed it. Then it cuts to the next day. As an American viewer I used to get confused by this. What was that scene for? Am I missing something?
Sometimes we’ll have a scene where someone takes a bath, and nothing happens except that they were having a hard day and feel much better now. This could have been revealed by dialog later, but the writers often show this on-screen anyway. The point seems to be to allow the audience to enjoy this stuff vicariously. The writers don’t want us to know that the food is good, the bath is warm, or the bed is soft and relaxing, they want us to experience this along with the character.
This sort of thing is most common in romantic comedies. Ai Yori Aoshi is like this. Everything between the first few episodes and the last disc is just a buffet of slice-of-life moments, little joys and pleasures, and lighthearted comedy based on mostly mundane events. A Little Snow Fairy, Sugar did this as well. Many times the scene would linger on as the characters talked about getting a waffle, what flavor they wanted, how it tasted, and how they should share.
After getting used to it, I’ve really come to enjoy this aspect of %anime. It’s unexpected and different. It’s unhurried. It only works when we really care about the characters, though. Nothing is more tiresome or laborous than a show that drags on showing uninteresting characters doing uninteresting things. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it really works.
Martin Successor Nabisco
To add to my earlier idea about not blogging while suffering from a fever, I’m starting to think using the internet in general is a bad idea in this condition:
Well, maybe there weren’t any pages with “Martin Successor Nabisco” before, but now there is!
LATER: Let’s see how long it takes for this phrase to show up.
Mega 64
From the site info for Mega 64:
In the not too distant future, a former videogame programmer and mad scientist Dr. Poque grows weary of the world’s games. Shunned from society, he invents the most powerful videogame console ever created- The Mega64; A machine powerful enough to download old videogames into users’ brains, making them embarrassingly real. To prove himself to the reluctant public, he captures ordinary teenagers to beta test the machine 24/7 and document their progress within his secret compound… beneath his apartment building. Lead by the brave duo of Rocko and Derek, this kidnapped crew must endure the digital insanity and learn why video games and the real world should never mix.
Witness the results:
So they go out in public and enact various videogame scenarios to the annoyance of random onlookers, none of which ever show signs of being familiar with the game or having any idea what these goofs are doing. It’s basically “Jackass” for nerds, which is a very strange idea.
Their video of Resident Evil 4 is pretty funny, mostly because the game is just begging to be lampooned. I find these hard to watch. I keep getting embarrased on their behalf.
Netflix: Missing Succesor Nadesco
Based on Steven‘s suggestion that Martian Succesor Nadesco is a good series for the anime newcomer (which I guess I still am) I decided to check it out. So I jumped over to Netflix and looked it up:
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What the heck? On disc 5, that green “Save” button means the disc is not available. Not that everyone else has it out already, but that Netflix does not own a single copy of MSN, disc 5, anwhere in any of their warehouses all over the country. How does that work? This usually only appears for movies which are in the system, but have not yet been released on DVD. But clearly the entire series is out by now. Disc 6 is available and Steven watched the whole thing ages ago.
Even worse is the fact that they have “unknown” for the release date. So, they don’t have disc 5 and they don’t know when (if ever) they might get more. What a stupid waste. Grrr.
Lymphocyte Justice!
For whatever reason, a bunch of pathogens have decided that my body is a great place to hang out and look for cells to break into. What jerks.
A little breaking & entering is bad enough, but once inside these guys use the cell contents to make free copies, which are then sent all over the place. These cellular spammers have been at it for at least a couple of days. I didn’t know about the problem until I got a few complaints (from my lungs and head) letting me know that things were not ok and that I needed to Do Something about it. I am, of course, mounting an appropriate response, which includes cranking out a bunch of new dendritic cells to round up these guys and haul them off to the lymph nodes. That process is largely automated. My more direct response has been to drink tea and complain, which never seems to help, but I do it anyway because I’m a man of action.
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| Above: One of my body’s cytotoxic T-cells gets ready to show that punk virus the meaning of justice. |
On the upside, cellular pillaging is a capital crime and justice is swift for the captured. Enzymes come in an chop the guilty into smaller pieces as a warning to the others. (Which they never heed. They always have to do things the hard way.)
In the process of rounding up and killing these outlaws, we are taking a very close look at them and making some custom B-cells that will stick around long-term. They will walk a beat, keep an eye on things, and sound the alarm if they spot any of these types trying to sneak in again.
Which they will. Their kind never learns.
LATER: On further reflection, I think I shouldn’t blog while nursing a fever.
DM of the Rings III:
Small Town Blues
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I think I’ll post these M-W-F until I get tired of them.
From The Archives:
Marvel's Civil War
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
The Middle Ages
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Borderlands Series
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?