Moom, er, Meme, from Marphod
Curiosity sucked the Kirin into the meme. It goes like this:
1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance if you want to propagate.
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions. (Or just respond in a comment, I don't care. Bah on self-replication.)
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post. (If you want.)
Asked of me by marphod:
1) What is your (short-list) of favorite anime from the last 10 years and why?
Oh lordy. Short, huh? And last decade? Tricky. Since I'd have trouble distinguishing between stuff that's, say, seven years old vs. fourteen, let's try sticking with "last few years" and see what I get. (I'm basically going with "more recent than Cowboy Bebop" here....)
- Gankutsuou: A re-telling of the Count of Monte Christo as a sci-fi story with an acid-trip design. Give it a couple episodes to settle down and internalize the style, and it's really great.
- Genshiken: This show may as well be about my anime club. You may not get much out of it without being "in the scene" as it were, but it's still a funny show about dorks in college.
- Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei: Takes the "high school girls" and "surrealist humor" genres and infuses them with a black humor that keeps it from getting grating. Pushes (past?) the boundaries of taste without being gross or stupid.
- Mushishi: Relaxed, beautiful, episodic. Ostensibly about nature spirits in ancient Japan, really a set of short stories about people and life and death.
- Victorian Romance Emma: Meticulously research period piece about a maid in love with a merchant family scion in Victorian England.
- Last Exile: Moves from steampunk fantasy to sci-fi, with great characters, intricate political plotting, and awesomely rendered airship battles.
- Runners up: Darker Than Black for a good take on the super-mutants genre, Dennou Coil looks like an interesting Augmented Reality story but I haven't seen enough of it yet, Black Lagoon if you like modern-day violence, Honey and Clover for slice-of-life with college students, Ghost in the Shell SAC for straight-up cyber-sci-fi, Planetes for *realistic* near-future space stuff. Also, everything by Studio Ghibli is still good, so recently that means Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, etc. And I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff.
2) After the years, how are you finding living in Chapel Hill, in comparison to Southern California and Missouri? Does teh conservatism of the state ever get to you, or are you too isolated by the college environment?
Being right next to a big college town (Chapel Hill) and an even more liberal hippy town (Carrboro) and some fairly mixed cities (Durham, Raleigh) certainly helps. You do get reminded you're in the South every so often, and it's certainly no San Francisco where you just *expect* everyone to be liberal geeks, but I don't find it oppressive.
Really the main drawback of being in the south is that my non-local friends are *really* non-local, since the nearest other liberal-ish places are probably DC or farther. Fortunately there's the interwebs.
(On a side note, either because it's changed or because I've started paying attention, it seems like these days Missouri is about as bad as much of the south outside of the immediate StLouis area...)
3) What would I need to cook to tempt you back to the NYEP?
Erk. Honestly it's more an issue of not being overwhelmed with other travel over the winter holidays. Which is more a problem for akiko than for me, but even I get burned out eventually.
Really, you already make tons of stuff I'd love to eat. Even if I'm a weirdo who doesn't like mushrooms.
4) Have you (or an obvious proxy for you) ever been featured in any of akiko's writing? Did/Would you want to be?
*Blink* I never really thought about it. Not that I know of. As far as I know she's written mostly either fanfic based on existing fictional characters, plus the one big novel she's working on, and I have no idea if its characters are drawn at all from real people.
I certainly wouldn't mind if she wanted to, though.
5) If you could live (as a happy citizen, outside the main plot lines) in any anime, manga or video game world, which would you choose and why?
Oh lordy again, that's even *more* ridiculously open-ended. Um. You realize I'm looking through a list of 384 titles I've seen every time you ask me an anime question like this?
Ok, let's start by discarding anything where being an ordinary citizen would be not much different from being in the real world, since that's not interesting beyond the chance to maybe meet some characters. I'll also want to avoid anything where you have a 90% chance of getting blown up or having the whole world destroyed or whatever. Let's see... in no order:
- Ghost in the Shell, though not a particularly happy vision of the future, would let me indulge my fantasy in living forever trans-humanist stuff.
- El Hazard (first series) always struck me as a nice, fun, fluffy fantasy setting. Plus people from Earth seem to get random superpowers there.
- I want to put in some setting where you get to explore the galaxy at will. Maybe Harlock? Except in the Matsumoto-verse you kind of have to be a main character to avoid being some poor down-trodden peasant, it seems like. Ooh, maybe later Macross continuity. Hmm.
- Some Final Fantasy world that doesn't get destroyed could be good just for the real magic and nifty airship tech and so on.
- Then there's always the old standby of Ranma1/2 for the sexual experimentation potential.
...ok, back to real work.
1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance if you want to propagate.
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions. (Or just respond in a comment, I don't care. Bah on self-replication.)
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post. (If you want.)
Asked of me by marphod:
1) What is your (short-list) of favorite anime from the last 10 years and why?
Oh lordy. Short, huh? And last decade? Tricky. Since I'd have trouble distinguishing between stuff that's, say, seven years old vs. fourteen, let's try sticking with "last few years" and see what I get. (I'm basically going with "more recent than Cowboy Bebop" here....)
- Gankutsuou: A re-telling of the Count of Monte Christo as a sci-fi story with an acid-trip design. Give it a couple episodes to settle down and internalize the style, and it's really great.
- Genshiken: This show may as well be about my anime club. You may not get much out of it without being "in the scene" as it were, but it's still a funny show about dorks in college.
- Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei: Takes the "high school girls" and "surrealist humor" genres and infuses them with a black humor that keeps it from getting grating. Pushes (past?) the boundaries of taste without being gross or stupid.
- Mushishi: Relaxed, beautiful, episodic. Ostensibly about nature spirits in ancient Japan, really a set of short stories about people and life and death.
- Victorian Romance Emma: Meticulously research period piece about a maid in love with a merchant family scion in Victorian England.
- Last Exile: Moves from steampunk fantasy to sci-fi, with great characters, intricate political plotting, and awesomely rendered airship battles.
- Runners up: Darker Than Black for a good take on the super-mutants genre, Dennou Coil looks like an interesting Augmented Reality story but I haven't seen enough of it yet, Black Lagoon if you like modern-day violence, Honey and Clover for slice-of-life with college students, Ghost in the Shell SAC for straight-up cyber-sci-fi, Planetes for *realistic* near-future space stuff. Also, everything by Studio Ghibli is still good, so recently that means Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, etc. And I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff.
2) After the years, how are you finding living in Chapel Hill, in comparison to Southern California and Missouri? Does teh conservatism of the state ever get to you, or are you too isolated by the college environment?
Being right next to a big college town (Chapel Hill) and an even more liberal hippy town (Carrboro) and some fairly mixed cities (Durham, Raleigh) certainly helps. You do get reminded you're in the South every so often, and it's certainly no San Francisco where you just *expect* everyone to be liberal geeks, but I don't find it oppressive.
Really the main drawback of being in the south is that my non-local friends are *really* non-local, since the nearest other liberal-ish places are probably DC or farther. Fortunately there's the interwebs.
(On a side note, either because it's changed or because I've started paying attention, it seems like these days Missouri is about as bad as much of the south outside of the immediate StLouis area...)
3) What would I need to cook to tempt you back to the NYEP?
Erk. Honestly it's more an issue of not being overwhelmed with other travel over the winter holidays. Which is more a problem for akiko than for me, but even I get burned out eventually.
Really, you already make tons of stuff I'd love to eat. Even if I'm a weirdo who doesn't like mushrooms.
4) Have you (or an obvious proxy for you) ever been featured in any of akiko's writing? Did/Would you want to be?
*Blink* I never really thought about it. Not that I know of. As far as I know she's written mostly either fanfic based on existing fictional characters, plus the one big novel she's working on, and I have no idea if its characters are drawn at all from real people.
I certainly wouldn't mind if she wanted to, though.
5) If you could live (as a happy citizen, outside the main plot lines) in any anime, manga or video game world, which would you choose and why?
Oh lordy again, that's even *more* ridiculously open-ended. Um. You realize I'm looking through a list of 384 titles I've seen every time you ask me an anime question like this?
Ok, let's start by discarding anything where being an ordinary citizen would be not much different from being in the real world, since that's not interesting beyond the chance to maybe meet some characters. I'll also want to avoid anything where you have a 90% chance of getting blown up or having the whole world destroyed or whatever. Let's see... in no order:
- Ghost in the Shell, though not a particularly happy vision of the future, would let me indulge my fantasy in living forever trans-humanist stuff.
- El Hazard (first series) always struck me as a nice, fun, fluffy fantasy setting. Plus people from Earth seem to get random superpowers there.
- I want to put in some setting where you get to explore the galaxy at will. Maybe Harlock? Except in the Matsumoto-verse you kind of have to be a main character to avoid being some poor down-trodden peasant, it seems like. Ooh, maybe later Macross continuity. Hmm.
- Some Final Fantasy world that doesn't get destroyed could be good just for the real magic and nifty airship tech and so on.
- Then there's always the old standby of Ranma1/2 for the sexual experimentation potential.
...ok, back to real work.