Dose of Random
I absolutely enjoyed the 12-episode, WAFFy, lighthearted, endearing, low-key, make-me-laugh-out-loud, feel-good fest that is "Taishou Yakyuu Musume" (Taishou Baseball Girls). The light sprinkling of yuri elements was just a bonus. Thank you, TV Tropes, for alerting me to its existence.
On a side note, I find I tend to like works adapted from light novels, as "Taishou Yakyuu Musume" is. Other light novel→anime adaptations I've liked: Seikai no Monshou (Crest of the Stars), Kino no Tabi (Kino's Journey), Juuni Kokki (Twelve Kingdoms), Maria-sama ga Miteru (The Virgin Mary is Watching [creepy~]), and, though I have not gotten around to finishing it, Seirei no Moribito (Guardian of the Spirit). . . . Huh, with the possible exception of Marimite, all those particular series have badass(-in-making) female characters/protagonists: Lafiel, Kino, Yoko, and Balsa. My weakness! XD
My experience watching HBO's Game of Thrones can be summed up like this:
1: "Did this happen in the books? . . . I can't remember. It's been too goddamn long since I read the books. Not since high school. . . . D:"
2: "The contract of every actress includes a nudity clause." As actress begins to undress: "Yup, fulfilling her contract."
3: "There really are too many plot threads. How in the world are they going to adapt the subsequent books, which only get more convoluted?" We'll see!
(I always hesitate to recommend the HBO series to anyone because it really won't suit some sensibilities. All that nudity, sex, taboos, and gore. I was kind of shocked at the lack of some gore discretion shots. I have to admit that I'm surprise at how popular the show is because I figured the fantasy elements, which can at times feel just as tagged on as they are in the books, would turn a lot of viewers off. Guess not!)
Did you know you can watch "Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood" and "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" over at Hulu (if you are in the US)? FMA has both subbed and dubbed options! GitS: SAC is dub only, but you know what? The dub is enjoyable! If I could I'd watch it subbed, but this is more than acceptable. Yes, I've been feeling very nostalgic, why do you ask? (At this rate, I'm going to end up looking back at things like "Serial Experiments Lain" and "Haibane Renmei." My soft spot isn't for Reki/Rakka, actually, but Reki/Nemu. I know!)
I mentioned before I was reading Margaret Atwood's collection of essays, In Other Worlds. I did finish it and it gave me a lot of food for thought and left me a bit unsettled. I read the The Handmaid's Tale some time in college and actually don't remember all that much of it, but my brother recently read it independently of me. His reaction to it made me pause, as did this quote from Other Worlds that pertains to The Handmaid's Tale:
The Handmaid's Tale was published in Canada in the fall of 1985, and in the United States and the United Kingdom in the spring of 1986. In the United Kingdom, its first reviews treated it as a yarn rather than a warning: they'd already experienced Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan republic and seemed to hand no fear of re-enacting that scenario. In Canada, people asked, in anxious Canadian fashion, "Could it happen here?" In the United States, Mary McCarthy, writing in the New York Times, gave the book a largely negative review on the grounds that it lacked imagination, and anyway it was unlikely ever to take place, not in the secular society she perceived as the American reality. But on the West Coast, so attuned to eahrtquake tremors, switchboards on talk shows lit up like Las Vegas, and someone graffitied on the Venice Beach seawall: "The Handmaid's Tale Is Already Here!"
It wasn't already here, not quite, not then. I thought for a while in the 1990s that maybe it never would be. But now I'm wondering again. Of recent years, American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government. Approximately five years after The Handmaid's Tale was published, the Soviet Union disintegrated, the West slapped itself on the back and went shopping, and pundits proclaimed the end of history. It looked as if, in the race between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World--control by terror versus control through conditioning and consumption--the latter had won, and the world of The Handmaid's Tale appeared to recede. But now we see a United States weakened by two draining wars and a financial meltdown, and American appears to be losing faith in the basic premises of liberal democracy. After 9/11, the Patriot Act passed with barely a cough, and in Britain citizens have accepted a degree of state supervision that would have been unthinkable.
It's a truism that enemy states tend to mirror one another in organization and methods. When colonies were the coming thing, everyone wanted one. Atom bombs in the United States created the desire for some in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union was a large bureacratic centralized state, and so was the America of those times. What form will the United States assume now that it's opposed by unrelenting religious fanaticisms? Will it soon produce rule by the same kind of religious fanaticism, only of a different sect? Will the more repressive elements within it triumph, returning it to its origins as a Puritan theocracy and giving us The Handmaid's Tale in everything but the outfits?
-Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds, 89-90
Yeah. Food for thought.
In her Fresh Air interview, Rachel Maddow provided a frank description of her cyclical depression that took me aback simply because it was so straightforward and "That's just how it is. I deal with it. No shame." (Urg, I crush on this woman. Soothing radio voice~)
iacus linked me to this ridiculous Burial "Stolen Dogs" vs. Sisqo "Thong Song" mash up. It works ridiculously well. Go listen!
I just want to say: the individual photo albums for SNSD's new album, "I Got a Boy," are a hot mess. The artistic concept. (Is that even what we should call it?) The lighting. The styling. Just. What?
I totally skipped out on Season 2 of "Lost Girl." But I may have to take a look at Season 3 if Bo is going the Bad Girl Succubus route! Get that Doccubus, Lauren! (I'm not addressing Bo because she'll get action wherever she wants it. As she should.)
My brother got me a copy of Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant!! Best. Bathroom. Reading. Book. Ever. (Though the howling laughter that may emanate from behind the closed door might give alarm to others in the vicinity. So funny. Even though I've read many of the strips before!)
On a side note, I find I tend to like works adapted from light novels, as "Taishou Yakyuu Musume" is. Other light novel→anime adaptations I've liked: Seikai no Monshou (Crest of the Stars), Kino no Tabi (Kino's Journey), Juuni Kokki (Twelve Kingdoms), Maria-sama ga Miteru (The Virgin Mary is Watching [creepy~]), and, though I have not gotten around to finishing it, Seirei no Moribito (Guardian of the Spirit). . . . Huh, with the possible exception of Marimite, all those particular series have badass(-in-making) female characters/protagonists: Lafiel, Kino, Yoko, and Balsa. My weakness! XD
My experience watching HBO's Game of Thrones can be summed up like this:
1: "Did this happen in the books? . . . I can't remember. It's been too goddamn long since I read the books. Not since high school. . . . D:"
2: "The contract of every actress includes a nudity clause." As actress begins to undress: "Yup, fulfilling her contract."
3: "There really are too many plot threads. How in the world are they going to adapt the subsequent books, which only get more convoluted?" We'll see!
(I always hesitate to recommend the HBO series to anyone because it really won't suit some sensibilities. All that nudity, sex, taboos, and gore. I was kind of shocked at the lack of some gore discretion shots. I have to admit that I'm surprise at how popular the show is because I figured the fantasy elements, which can at times feel just as tagged on as they are in the books, would turn a lot of viewers off. Guess not!)
Did you know you can watch "Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood" and "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" over at Hulu (if you are in the US)? FMA has both subbed and dubbed options! GitS: SAC is dub only, but you know what? The dub is enjoyable! If I could I'd watch it subbed, but this is more than acceptable. Yes, I've been feeling very nostalgic, why do you ask? (At this rate, I'm going to end up looking back at things like "Serial Experiments Lain" and "Haibane Renmei." My soft spot isn't for Reki/Rakka, actually, but Reki/Nemu. I know!)
I mentioned before I was reading Margaret Atwood's collection of essays, In Other Worlds. I did finish it and it gave me a lot of food for thought and left me a bit unsettled. I read the The Handmaid's Tale some time in college and actually don't remember all that much of it, but my brother recently read it independently of me. His reaction to it made me pause, as did this quote from Other Worlds that pertains to The Handmaid's Tale:
The Handmaid's Tale was published in Canada in the fall of 1985, and in the United States and the United Kingdom in the spring of 1986. In the United Kingdom, its first reviews treated it as a yarn rather than a warning: they'd already experienced Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan republic and seemed to hand no fear of re-enacting that scenario. In Canada, people asked, in anxious Canadian fashion, "Could it happen here?" In the United States, Mary McCarthy, writing in the New York Times, gave the book a largely negative review on the grounds that it lacked imagination, and anyway it was unlikely ever to take place, not in the secular society she perceived as the American reality. But on the West Coast, so attuned to eahrtquake tremors, switchboards on talk shows lit up like Las Vegas, and someone graffitied on the Venice Beach seawall: "The Handmaid's Tale Is Already Here!"
It wasn't already here, not quite, not then. I thought for a while in the 1990s that maybe it never would be. But now I'm wondering again. Of recent years, American society has moved much closer to the conditions necessary for a takeover of its own power structures by an anti-democratic and repressive government. Approximately five years after The Handmaid's Tale was published, the Soviet Union disintegrated, the West slapped itself on the back and went shopping, and pundits proclaimed the end of history. It looked as if, in the race between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World--control by terror versus control through conditioning and consumption--the latter had won, and the world of The Handmaid's Tale appeared to recede. But now we see a United States weakened by two draining wars and a financial meltdown, and American appears to be losing faith in the basic premises of liberal democracy. After 9/11, the Patriot Act passed with barely a cough, and in Britain citizens have accepted a degree of state supervision that would have been unthinkable.
It's a truism that enemy states tend to mirror one another in organization and methods. When colonies were the coming thing, everyone wanted one. Atom bombs in the United States created the desire for some in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union was a large bureacratic centralized state, and so was the America of those times. What form will the United States assume now that it's opposed by unrelenting religious fanaticisms? Will it soon produce rule by the same kind of religious fanaticism, only of a different sect? Will the more repressive elements within it triumph, returning it to its origins as a Puritan theocracy and giving us The Handmaid's Tale in everything but the outfits?
-Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds, 89-90
Yeah. Food for thought.
In her Fresh Air interview, Rachel Maddow provided a frank description of her cyclical depression that took me aback simply because it was so straightforward and "That's just how it is. I deal with it. No shame." (Urg, I crush on this woman. Soothing radio voice~)
iacus linked me to this ridiculous Burial "Stolen Dogs" vs. Sisqo "Thong Song" mash up. It works ridiculously well. Go listen!
I just want to say: the individual photo albums for SNSD's new album, "I Got a Boy," are a hot mess. The artistic concept. (Is that even what we should call it?) The lighting. The styling. Just. What?
I totally skipped out on Season 2 of "Lost Girl." But I may have to take a look at Season 3 if Bo is going the Bad Girl Succubus route! Get that Doccubus, Lauren! (I'm not addressing Bo because she'll get action wherever she wants it. As she should.)
My brother got me a copy of Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant!! Best. Bathroom. Reading. Book. Ever. (Though the howling laughter that may emanate from behind the closed door might give alarm to others in the vicinity. So funny. Even though I've read many of the strips before!)