A few years ago, in an attempt to be social and meet other humans, I attended a few – half a dozen or so, probably – episodes of an anime club.

It didn’t turn out to be very interactive.  The club format was about 5 minutes of one of the officers standing up and talking before starting the night’s program, at which point everyone just sort of watched the screen or played video games in the back until the night was over.

So, it failed as a way to meet people, but it worked out pretty well at introducing me to new anime.  They had a habit of showing a single episode of a show every week and showing about 8 different programs, so I got to see quite a few different shows – just not very much of any of them.  In the years since, I’ve gone back and watched some of these shows from start to finish and they’ve generally been quite good, so whoever was making the programming up did have some taste.

Anyway, one of these shows was Stellvia of the Universe, which I only saw shown at the club meetings once and which I just got around to watching.  I’ve seen plenty of art from the show online, of course, and the DVD covers in stores, so I’ve been kind of aware of it without  knowing much about it.  My biggest question, going in to the program, was actually “which of these girls is Stellvia?”

Turns out, Stellvia is the space station.  So that was a pretty anticlimactic reveal.

It was a pretty excellent show, by the way.  I realize that I’m nine years late to the party on this but I wanted to put my two cents in.

It has a pretty good hook.  About two centuries ago, the electromagnetic shockwave of a supernova tore through the solar system, utterly trashing the Earth and killing most everyone.  The survivors managed to get back on their feet and learned that, while they’d survived the initial blast of EM, there was a wave of solid debris from the same explosion heading their way.  It was travelling much slower, mind you, but it basically meant the extinction of all life on earth.

To survive, they put aside the concepts of nations and started a massive space program designed to help humanity survive the “Second Wave”.

The show kicks off a few months before this Second Wave is due to hit earth and features the main character – whose name is not, as I mentioned, Stellvia – leaving her home on earth to train to become a pilot.  She’s, oh man, she’s a bit clumsy and a bit of a crybaby and a terrible pilot but is really good with computers, also there’s a boy that she seems to get along with pretty well.

By the end of the third episode, you know how things are going to end.  Over the course of a 26 episode series, she’s going to learn to become a great pilot, help save humanity from the second wave while learning lots of lessons about herself, and generally have all kinds of wacky adventures in the meantime.  Presumably, she’s going to get the boy and they’ll finally kiss in the last scene of episode 26.  It’s the sort of nice relaxed anime where you can just turn your brain off and float along in the comfort zone.

Without going too in-depth with the spoilers, everything mentioned above happens by the end of episode 10, at which point someone comments that the whole thing that’s been keeping humanity unified for the last two centuries has come and gone, there’s all these weapons lying around unused now, and oh gosh it’s been a long time since we’ve had a war .

That’s the point where I got dragged out of my comfort zone and the show really got its hooks in.

The series never actually turns into a grimdark humanity-turning-on-itself sort of story, but it certainly fooled me for a bit.  Strongly recommended if, like me, you’ve been under a rock for a few years now and somehow missed it up until now.

Anyway, at one point, we drove down Lum Road, and I thought that was a pretty neat name for a street but didn’t have a camera with me and neglected to note where we’d been at the time.

It’s been one of those things floating around in my head since.

To drag out my word count a little bit more, I took a couple of days off this last week and drove up to Seattle to go to the Kinokuniya bookstore and Uwajimaya and Daiso and all sorts of cool places we don’t have where I’m living now.  I also took the opportunity to spend the evening with an old friend that I hadn’t seen in about 8 years.

It was an excellent trip.

While I was driving south afterwards, I had a crazy notion.  What would happen, I wondered, if I entered “Lum Road” into my iPhone and told it to look for places nearby?

For the record: It’s in Centralia, Washington.  Sadly, though it’s out in an industrial district, I don’t think there are actually any electrical substations nearby which is a dreadful pity.

I tried watching FLCL tonight.  This is my third time trying to watch it, and I really WANT to watch it because it’s part of the canon, it’s something that you Should See and I’ve had lots of people speak very highly of it, even people who aren’t normally anime fans.  It’s also from Gainax and you’re kind of supposed to worship Gainax if you’re a fan of a certain age.

The first time I tried to watch it, however, I’d been up for well north of 24 hours and I’d packed a transatlantic flight into the middle of my day and I was trying to watch it so I could actually stay awake.

I fell asleep about five minutes in, as you might expect.

I tried again a couple of days later, made it to the first eyecatch, and put it down intending to get back to it.

That didn’t happen.

Tonight, though, I had several hours free and I was going to watch the whole thing.  Only six episodes, after all, less than three hours to finally know what all the hype was about.  I made it through Harmageddon, for crying out loud, and if I can watch that beginning to end I can probably watch anything.

So I thought.

2 episodes in, I was forced to conclude that, well, this simply wasn’t going to be for me.  I think I’m getting old, I just need a little more linearity in my storylines.  :)

Well, I said to myself, that didn’t turn out well but I still have about 2.5 hours before I should really head to bed, let’s look through this folder of movies that I haven’t watched yet.

I will confess here that I’m a bad person. I tend to get the netflix envelope in the mail, rip it so I can watch it later, and send the disc back.  If I was good at remembering to send discs back, this would probably be kind of abusive, but I’m terrible at remembering to send discs back so I’ll often rip something and find the disc still sitting in my backpack a week later.

Anyway, I decided that I would finally watch District 9 as I’d heard many good things about it and it was from that guy, you know, the one with all the hobbit movies.

It’s kind of an icky movie, but I was getting into it when I found myself coming to a rather unsettling conclusion.

See, early on in the movie there’s some human-alien interactions where the humans are talking english and the aliens are kind of gurgling at the humans and I’m kind of getting the sense of the conversation from the human side of things and I’d assumed that we weren’t supposed to understand the aliens so much as we were supposed to get the conversations from context.

It’s a fair ways into the movie before you start seeing fairly involved conversations with the aliens, and that’s about the point where I realized that something might have been awry.

A quick google search revealed that, well, the movie was SUPPOSED to have subtitles but that I hadn’t actually encoded them in.

So, that was pretty much that for my media consumption attempts.  I went to wikipedia and read the synopsis for the rest of the movie and it sounded pretty neat, so maybe I’ll give it another try sometime when I feel like I can make it through the icky bits.

I’ve also been looking for a new F2P kind of game, something that I can pick up and play for an hour or two at a time.  EQ2 is a great game, and I’m subscribed for the next year, but I’m at the point where getting something accomplished needs 11 to 23 other players and involves a fair time commitment.

I went back to Lucent Heart a week or so ago and found that it was just as incredibly cute as when I’d left it. I was level 30 and 90% into level so I killed a bunch of bees and anthropomorphic corn monsters and got to level 31.

Then I looked at my quest tracker, realized that I had no idea where any of these quests were trying to send me to, and further remembered that I’d quit playing in the first place because the process of getting new armor and weapons after level 25 involved doing crafting and/or group dungeons… and then I decided to call it quits and camp out for good.

It IS a really sweet game, though, I just don’t have the patience it takes to get very far in.

After that, I gave Rusty Hearts a try and had a good bit of fun with that.  It’s not really a MMORPG so much as a sort of persistant-world brawler or diablo thing, you choose a Character (of four) and then you can give that character a name and level them up and get new gear and so forth.

This lead to an odd conversation with my wife, where she asked me what class my on-screen avatar was and I told her “I’m an Angela” which lead to “no, that’s not my name, my name is X, I’m an Angela, and that person over there is also an Angela” and so on and so forth.

It falls down a little on the character customization is what I’m saying I guess.

Anyway, I strongly recommend it if you are the type of person who likes hitting your controller’s “A” button a lot and making things fall down.

So that was good but wasn’t QUITE what I was looking for.  It’s from a company called Perfect World, who does a bunch of different F2P games, and I figured that I’d already made an account with them to play Rusty Hearts, so trying out another of their games probably wouldn’t be too much of a hassle…

So now I’m downloading the inventively-named Perfect World International.  I’ll let you know how that goes – from the art I’ve seen, it’s super pretty and that’s a good start to things.

But for now, time for bed.

I originally typed “soft spot in my head” there, which may have been a Freudian slip.

Anyway. I was introduced to the genre through a friend in Japan who used to send me off-air tapes of various anime, and who decided that I should see this “Sailor Moon” thing that had just started airing.

I quite liked that, so he introduced me to some of the Pierrot anime from the early 80s and, well, one thing lead to another and I wound up owning an awful lot of laserdiscs of various magical girl anime.

Anyway, it struck me that, starting around the time of Card Captor Sakura and Fancy Lala, the characters in these shows were getting to be pretty self-aware. Rather than the oh-my-god-it’s-a-talking-cat characters of older shows, these girls knew that a talking plushie showing up and blabbing on and on about their destiny meant that it was time to make with the frilly outfits and transformation scenes.

So why, really, is this a problem? Let’s be up-front here, it’s probably a good thing to be prepared for the possibility of being turned into a magical warrior for love and/or justice. It gives you a better chance of negotiating, say, appropriate skirt length, less embarrassing magical chants, avoiding winding up in Wedding Peach, that sort of thing.

I’m going to get hate mail from Wedding Peach fans for that last comment, I just know it.

So, to be fair, I had thought that it was a Good Thing that Japanese girls were being prepped for the possibility from a very young age.

Then I started watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica and was forced to re-think this position.

I had been warned that this show was a little darker than your average magical girl show.

Around the time the first happy frilly-skirted warrior for love and justice got her head bitten off by a large clown-faced snake thingy, I came to realize that that may have been a bit of an understatement.

I’m not quite done with the show yet – I watched the first nine episodes in a bit of a marathon session last night – but, so far, every character save two has either been killed horribly, driven insane, or driven insane and THEN killed horribly, with the Adorable with-a-capital A mascot talking plushie looking on happily at the results.

So, girls of Japan, a caution: if an Adorable Fluffy Animal shows up at your bedroom window in the middle of the night saying that it’s your destiny/responsibility/just a really good idea to step into the High Heels Of Justice…

…close the window, draw the blinds, and maybe ask your parents if they wouldn’t mind moving.

This is probably going to break me.

But first, some backstory.

I went through a period of a few years where I kind of fell away from being an anime fan, for various reasons.  Lack of money, lack of time, lack of interest in the shows I saw on retailer shelves, disgust with fandom, and of course playing MMOs every waking moment of every day.

Still, there was enough residual fanboy in me to make me fly to Japan for a vacation in late 2005 after getting a deal on plane tickets that staggered belief.

That trip was really a sort of rebirth.  MMOs started seeming a lot less important afterwards, I started getting in better shape, and I started trying to pick through the last several years of anime to find the gems.  It was a good experience.

Anyway, we spent probably too much of our trip in Akihabara, and we just happened to be there in the month when Leaf launched two big titles: the PC version of ToHeart2 and the PSP version of Comic Party.

The result was that you saw Leaf characters pretty much anywhere you looked.

Not, mind you, that I really knew what I was looking at.  I’d seen the Comic Party anime but didn’t realize that it was based on a game (to be honest, I’m not sure I knew what a visual novel WAS at that point) and though I’d heard of ToHeart, it was in the context of “hey, it’s that anime that they kept talking about in the Comic Party anime” and I certainly didn’t know anything about the original game or its sequel.

Thing is, though, I kept running in to ToHeart2 in various media, and one thing lead to another and I eventually wound up buying a copy of the PC game just so I could get around to seeing what all the fuss was about.

Now, I had learned what a visual novel WAS by then, and I knew that, while it did have a fair bit of the “visual” in it, it also had an awful lot of the “novel” and that playing a visual novel consisted of doing a heckuva lot of reading and occasionally pressing the enter key to continue and not much else.  In addition, at the time (August 2007), spending $70 on a Japanese visual novel was basically spending $70 on a pretty box.  I’d taken a term and a half of college Japanese 8 years prior, but that was about it.

Four years later, I have my bachelor’s degree in Japanese under my belt, I have enough dictionaries to choke a horse, I have a vague understanding of grammar, and I am terrified that I am going to forget the Japanese that I spent four years and $40,000 learning, so I have finally started to play ToHeart2.

As I started off this post by saying, it might just break me.  I played it for about two hours tonight and all I’ve managed to do is wake up, realize that I’m alone in the house because my parents are away on a business trip, and had my house almost immediately invaded by the neighbor girl who my mother has given a key to so she can take care of me while they’re away.

It strikes me that guys in Japan must be seen as fairly helpless for quite a while.

Anyway, the thing that really slowed me down was the crazy idea that, whenever I hit a word I didn’t know, I’d write it down in a book.

I’ve revised that idea somewhat.  Now I’m only going to write down words if I have to look them up at least 3 times.

It’s STILL slow going.

I’ll see how long I last.

Before the recent boom in supernatural fiction, I never really thought much about the undead.  Sure, I’d hacked my way through my share of animated skeletons and zombies in many an RPG, but they were just sort of incidental monsters, the sorts of things you get thrown at you in the early levels of a game.

Since Zombies became The New Big Thing, however, it’s been hard to avoid them.

In the last few years, I’ve watched “28 Days Later” and “Shaun of the Dead”.  I read and quite enjoyed Mira Grant’s “Feed“, was somewhat less enthusiastic about Marvel Zombies, and I own a copy of the Zombie Survival Guide.  I’ve played games that took the whole zombie thing very seriously, games that take a bit of a lighter look at the living dead, and games that use the whole zombie apocalypse thing as an excuse to have half-naked girls running around with Big Damn Swords.

And yet I’ve barely scratched the surface of the whole Zombie genre of fiction, because I’m honestly not seeking it out – if I WAS seeking it out, I could probably spent every hour of free time on zombie-related activities.

Speaking of zombies as an excuse to have girls running around without many clothes on, I spent a few hours recently watching last year’s “Highschool of the Dead”, an anime which at first glance seemed designed to cater to the fetishes of, respectively, zombie porn, gun porn, and plain old porn porn.

Actually, it seemed that way at the second, third, and fourth glances too.  It centers around the struggle for survival, post-zombie-apocalypse, of a group of five high school students and their school nurse, with a male:improbably proportioned female ratio of 2:4, who manage to live through the infection of their high school and escape to find that the entire world is full of  groaning hordes of flesh-hungry zombies.

Through one contrivance and another, they stumble into a massive cache of military weaponry and a humvee – I’m not spoiling anything that isn’t in the opening credits, here – and spend the dozen episodes getting chased by zombies, killing zombies, dealing with the living who have used the whole zombie apocalypse thing as an excuse to shed the veneer of civilization and get with the murdering, finding the occasional refuge that is inevitably overrun…

You know, normal stuff for the genre.  There are a few tropes of the genre that seem mandatory in any treatment of the subject, and HotD does its best to hit them all.

I was also ready, four or five episodes in, to point out that it reused animation an awful lot – one episode runs through a 8-9 minute recap of What Has Come So Far before you get to any new animation, and in a show that’s only 24 minutes long and has to include an OP, and ED and a preview of next week’s episode, 8-9 minutes is almost half the episode.

Fortunately, the excessive reuse more-or-less stopped after that episode.

Toward the end, it gets quite a bit better.  With 12 episodes, it’s able to cover the main tropes, get the flounce and bounce out of the way and then get on to some actual character exploration and thinking about what it is that allows us to stay “human” in the face of extreme adversity.

Of course, that’s about when it ends.  Now, while the ending is actually a decent ending, rather than the “wow, you guys better hope we get to make a sequel” ending that has been rather prominent in recent years, it still somewhat grates that the producers could spend 12 episodes not really answering any of the questions that the story raised.

We do find out in the next-to-last episode why one of the main characters had to repeat a grade of school.  That’s something, I guess.

It’s a bit odd to be talking about “Sanctuary” now.  I mean, it’s not exactly a new release, it came out during the mid 1990s and is long out of print in this country as far as I can tell.

My wife bought all the volumes back when they were coming out and has occasionally mentioned to me that I should check it out, but I’ve always resisted.  To be honest, it was kind of intimidating – I mean, it’s a 12-volume series (bundled into 9 volumes for this country) all about Japanese politics and the mafia.  Sure, it’s got Ryoichi Ikegami art and the main pair of characters are Truly Magnificent Bastards, but I didn’t think I’d be able to follow it.

The other day, though, we were having a conversation that actually turned to Japanese politics and she said that she thought I could handle it by now and that I should give it a try.

So I read the first volume to humor her and then I read the next 8 volumes in about a day.

It’s really quite good, is the point I’m trying to get across with that last sentence.  It’s got the aforementioned pair of Magnificent Bastards, and a few more Magnificent Bastards to go with them and a couple more Magnificent Bastards just to liven things up.  There’s lots of heroic posing and Blazing Gunfights and elaborate schemes that inevitably lead to dramatic double crosses and so on and so forth.  It’s truly Manga For Men, though it has enough Improbably Attractive And Well Dressed Men to make it Something For The Ladies as well.

But, yeah, it’s also really dense and I’m glad I waited until I had some basic understanding of Japanese politics and post-war history and (to a great extent) basic geography and, well, I’m kind of startled that this actually got published outside of Japan.  Glad it did, though.

My cat: Internet Celebrity.

That reminds me, I took a bunch of food photos while I was in Japan over the summer and inasmuch as most of my traffic comes from people looking for same (or looking for pictures of Pokémon characters in compromising positions, but this isn’t that sort of blog), I should probably get to posting those.

But I digress.

Anyway, I noticed a new source on the referrer page, and following it led me to some deliciously-snarky writing about old videogames that nobody remembers.  I blew through a couple of hours reading almost everything there; it’s not a huge site but the content is of the “just one more article and I’ll get back to productive work” variety.

Then I went through the links on the bottom of the page and lost nearly a week’s free time to reading the entirety of the back archive of this guy’s site.

As a rule, I don’t follow the infighting and drama that surrounds anime fandom.  This poor bastard has made it his career – he can’t escape – but he’s spent an awful lot of time in chronicling the most horrific parts of the “scene” in terribly entertaining fashion, and I felt the better for having read through all of it.

Also he nearly got me to buy a Gamera pachislot machine just by mentioning that companies import them, but that didn’t pass the “wife test”, for which – a week later, and saner – I’m actually grateful.

That being said, there do seem to be an awful lot of shows about otaku lately.  I mean, sure, in the early 90s we had Otaku no Video, and then there was Otaku Planet a few years later – the latter of those two being something I know about only through seeing ads for the LDs in Animage; it seems to have vanished into the mists of history – but the last, oh, five years have given us Genshiken, Lucky Star, Welcome to the NHK, Densha Otoko, OreImo… and a couple of shows I’m going to talk about now.

I’ve watched an awful lot of shows recently that revolve around nice-but-relatively-personality-free young men that wind up in the center of a hurricane of cute girls.  Most of them, to be honest, involve aliens or anthropomorphic versions of Japanese myths, so it’s actually a bit refreshing to watch Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu, which is just high-school-slice-of-life.

Of course, even a pure slice-of-life show needs a “hook”, which in this case takes the form of a beautiful, cultured, fabulously rich – yet still going to a public school – girl who just happens to be a massive closeted otaku.  Of course, the main male character finds out her secret but – as the Nice Guy – swears to keep it private between the two of them, and you get twelve episodes of so-when-are-they-going-to-kiss, mixed in with the usual assortment of maids, rival girls, curiously precocious younger sisters, quirky childhood friends and so on and so forth.

Oh and it’s got a Comic Market Episode that actually comes close to the Comic Market experience; that is to say waiting in long lines in hot weather to buy comic books you probably wouldn’t show your parents.

It’s very much the paint-by-numbers approach to anime production, with the only unusual thing being that the main character is even more of an enigma than you usually get in these shows.  After watching twelve episodes, I couldn’t tell you a single one of his likes or dislikes, not even a favorite food.  To carry on with the paint-by-numbers metaphor, just because I like it, he’s the white space that isn’t numbered so you don’t paint it in.

The series – or more likely, the series of light novels it’s based on – was popular enough to get a second 12-episode run, anyway, which I will probably watch at some point just because I’m morbidly curious to see if they’ll ever give the guy a personality.

Kuragehime, on the other hand, is NOT aimed at young men desperately trying to imprint themselves on an onscreen avatar, and I liked it rather a lot.  It’s about five otaku women living in a run-down Taisho-era apartment house and having their peaceful routines disrupted horribly when a fashion-obsessed Shibuya-type joins the group.

Note that “otaku”, in this case, isn’t used in its typical sense of “obsessed with manga and anime”, but rather in the sense of being really just a little too much into a hobby.  The group includes a railfan, a Three Kingdoms geek, a woman obsessed with older men, a traditional-dress-and-doll nut, and, well, the main character, whose specialty is jellyfish.

I learned SO MANY THINGS about jellyfish from watching this show, it’s not even funny.

To be honest, it does drag a bit near the end and it never even comes close to hinting at resolutions for most of the story threads that it opens, but it’s only eleven episodes and based on a currently running manga – it’s designed to introduce you to the characters, set up an initial conflict, and resolve that initial conflict while still remaining open-ended, and it does that all quite well.

Oh, and most of the characters are in their thirties or older, which is pretty unusual but quite nice, it means that the show avoids the obligatory beach-trip and culture festival episodes that a high-school based show always seems to throw in.

Nothing against culture festival episodes, of course.  One of my favorite anime movies of all time is Beautiful Dreamer, which is an entire movie revolving around a culture festival.  For some reason, however, the culture festival episodes in Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu were giving me flashbacks to the culture festival episodes in School Days, and those are not flashbacks anyone wants to have.

But I digress.

The first two tapes I rented were the Dirty Pair movie and the first Bubblegum Crisis OVA, by the way.  I didn’t have a VCR of my own at home, so I watched them at work in the breakroom.  Yeah, I had no idea what a “career limiting move” was and I’m probably lucky that the only person who came in and boggled at the screen was a friend of mine.

Anyway, I watched what the comics store had to offer, and then a couple of other video stores in town started carrying anime tapes, and things were getting off to a pretty good start as far as I was concerned.

I also wasn’t spending TOO much money, because, well, the options I had to spend it on were pretty limited.  The comics shop had some translated manga to buy, but that was about it.

I did find out that one of the local records store could order CDs from Japan if I had a catalog number, so I asked them to order me the first Bubblegum Crisis Vocal Collection CD.  Several months after I placed the order, it actually arrived and I practically danced my way over to give them my thirty bucks for it.

Oh, and I bought my first VCR.  It was a Samsung 4-head job that didn’t do stereo and that wouldn’t play certain brands of tape and that cost me $240 (basically a week’s pay) … but it was MINE.

Then I saw a reference online to someplace called “Nikaku Animart“, which seems to still be open today, that sold stuff relevant to my interests and that would cheerfully send me a catalog from which I could make selections.

That catalog is reproduced below, mostly for my nostalgia.

Page 1: CDs.  Note that the CD I REALLY wanted to get, the Gunbuster soundtrack, is marked off in blue ’cause they were low on stock.  By the time I called, they were out of stock.  18 years later, I still don’t own this CD.

Page 2: Video.  This is mostly imported laserdiscs.  If you thought spending $20 on a four-episode DVD was expensive, imagine dropping 70 or 80 bucks on a single half-hour of animation.

For your elucidation, here’s a larger version of the important bit.  This represents the sum total of all the subtitled anime available as of February of 1992:

These prices were obviously bargains compared to importing the laserdiscs, and you even got a translation.

Page 3, 4, and 5: Models, books, magazines, manga.  English-translated manga is on page 5.  These were prices for single “issues”, which were usually two chapters from a given manga and about 32 pages long.  VERY expensive compared to the Japanese originals, but you could actually read them.

Page 6: Miscellany, posters, pencilboards, etc.  Looking at this now, I really wish I’d gotten some of the 10 Little Gall Force trinkets on offer, or those Ranma door curtains.

Pages 7 and 8: Obviously, you couldn’t be expected to buy a poster or pencilboard solely because it was from a particular show, so they thoughtfully provided these visual guides, if you can call them that.  Try to imagine making buying decisions from these sub-postage-stamp sized black-and-white examples, if you will.

On the other hand, looking back at these pages now, they must have represented a CRAZY amount of work.  Desktop publishing barely existed back in 1992, so someone must have been photographing these, then reducing the photographs, doing the paste-ups… Whoever it was was quite dedicated to making a sale, I’ll say that. 

Anyway, once this catalog hit my hands, it was pretty much over for me financially.  After Nikaku, I discovered Kimono My House and the Right Stuf, and, well, things happened.

No, I didn’t ACTUALLY declare bankruptcy at any point, that was just there for hyperbole.