Still alive
So depressed lately. Been taking a vacation from pretty much everything. Also, feverishly trying to troll up a job on Craigslist, to no avail - the very few successful finds lose me once it's apparent that I have phone phobia. What a motherfucker this world of ours is. Finding a way to get income is so easy in MMOGs
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That's not Occitan, that's Latin - and it's Lorem ipsum! It's just placeholder text. That first post means nothing and will eventually be deleted. That blog still has a lot of work ahead of it. For now, I'll stick with my LJ.
Bakemonogatari is, in my opinion, easily the best anime series of the past decade. They say there's two basic types of otaku - the ones who like a good storyline, and the ones who like a good character design. Bakemonogatari has both, and that's pretty damned amazing. The series is just so rich will allegory, it's staggering. To put it quite simply, Bakemonogatari is a postmodern, abstract representation of a youth romance anime. The supernatural world where it all takes place is actually a sort of meta-reality. Araragi-kun isn't really a (former) vampire, Hitagi doesn't really weigh five kilograms (nor is she a tsundere, as she says!), Tsubasa doesn't actually metamorphose into a wicked awesome catgirl... It's based on a novel series by Nishio Ishin, as opposed to written on the spot by a commission; it's produced by Shaft who've made a name for themselves with sophisticated and bizarre story elements (e.g. KonoMini, Pani Poni Dash, Maria Holic); the director is Akiyuki Shinbo (which I immediately realized when watching the first episode), Akio Watanabe designed the characters (he's the guy who's responsible for Komugi Nakahara, among other things). All in all... I guess it's like high-quality caviar. If you don't like caviar, it'll taste nasty and unusual to you. Although, the otaku seem to agree with me, because despite having come out of nowhere, Bakemonogatari is strongly outselling K-On.
As far as the aforementioned allegory goes, consider this. Hitagi, the purple-haired stapler-wielding cooldere/yandere hybrid, weighs only five kilograms, and as a result has superhuman agility. She behaves in a calm and spooky manner and tells Araragi-kun that her "mass" (Japanese: "omoi", which is a word with two meanings: "mass" and "emotions/feelings/conscience") was stolen from her by a supernatural crab. Note that the stapler she uses is representative of a crab's claw. The "crab" did this after a series of traumatic childhood experiences where a cult leader that her mother admired tried to sexually assault her (curious note: in the end of the series, Hitagi's father is revealed, and he's like some kind of spooky MIB-type guy). The gist of it is, Hitagi's five-kilogram weight represents her "moral handicap" - that is, she isn't as handicapped as normal people, due to being a sociopath! Also, after they try to 'exorcise' Hitagi, the result is that she still weighs five kilograms, but Araragi-kun starts to weigh a hundred (due to acquired emotional burden, heh).
Aside from that, Bakemonogatari also has extremely good graphics. I was floored by some of the semi-3D sequences, and also the richness of detail in some shots. Oh man, I'll stop now, I'm rambling. This series makes me feel things I haven't felt in years.
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