Posted 23 May 2010
(This week’s Brocast turned out especially boring, so I won’t inflict it upon you. Instead, I offer you this Genshiken post, which is something of a followup to the last. If you’re especially interested in what we’ve been up to, the previous Brocast is still relevant.)
Ogiue’s appearance marks a shift in Genshiken from loosely organized slice of otaku life to something a little more like a recognizable romance plot — but, I emphasize, only a little more like a recognizable romance plot, as Genshiken has that fantastic way of maintaining absolute subtlety, subverting every trope in the book, and hitting a little too close to home all at once. Genshiken has a generally interesting structure, in fact, involving the buildup of overlapping styles, and I can only adequately represent it with one of those enigmatic graphics I so enjoy.
(Read the rest of this post.)
Posted in Genshiken (Manga) | 10 Comments
Posted 20 May 2010
I got the idea for this post while reading John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, but knowledge thereof isn’t required, and I’ll try not to spoil it too badly. Suffice to say that I’ll mostly deal with that Japanese stuff I’m always on about, as it’s full of counterexamples to things Scalzi does that I don’t especially like.
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Posted in Literature, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam | 4 Comments
Posted 16 May 2010
Or lack thereof.
What to say about this one? Well, it’s about as short as last week’s, though I’m not sure how that happened. And it ventures into some strange territory. Namely, you may be able to draw certain inferences about how much Harunobu Madarame and I have in common. But let’s put that aside for now and get right to it:
Brocast 5/16/2010 (14:24, 16.9MB)
Topics and links (and attempts at damage control) after the break.
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Posted in Brocast | 6 Comments
Posted 13 May 2010
A few months ago I took the first volume of Genshiken from my shelf, thinking the series deserved a re-read, and that I’d go through it at my leisure. As of now, I’m somewhere in the middle of the third volume. That’s leisurely enough, I think.
I picked up Genshiken for the first time back when I had only just gotten back into anime, manga, and all related accoutrements after a few years of Japanese pop-cultural drought. And it left quite an impression on me, to be sure, but my experience this time around is a bit different. Consider, for example, that, in terms of sheer hours watched, I’ve seen about twice as much anime now as I had when I finished Genshiken the first time — not to mention that the amount of manga I’ve consumed by now renders the amount I’d read at that point positively pitiful, and, in the greater scheme of things, I still haven’t read nearly as much as quite a lot of people.
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Posted in Figures, Genshiken (Manga) | 12 Comments
Posted 9 May 2010
The brevity of this week’s Brocast is largely a result of my having done little besides work for the past week or two. I’m beginning to figure out that these things have no set length; they’re as long as they want to be (my absolute upper limit is half an hour, but we have yet to reach that milestone). At any rate, if you’d like to know how I feel about One Manga’s recent removals, or whether smackin’ or whackin’ is the preferred method for dealing with a kraken, I invite you to click the prominent link below.
Brocast 5/9/2010 (14:29, 17MB)
Topics and links after the break.
(Read the rest of this post.)
Posted in Brocast | 4 Comments
Posted 6 May 2010
Here’s some like/(enjoy/appreciate) for you: I’m still reading Octave (a recommendation via TheBigN) even though it makes me feel terribly uncomfortable. So it must be doing something right.
But what might that be?
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Posted in Octave | 10 Comments
Posted 4 May 2010
The lesser of two evils is relegated to parenthesis today, as he mostly just agreed with me as I explained my ideal digital anime distribution service. And I don’t know if we could call it “ideal” in more practical terms, but I’d use it, anyway.
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Posted in Industry, Pontifus and Otouto-kun vs. | 2 Comments
Posted 2 May 2010
We’ll have to skip the Brocast again this week, as I’m presently applying my speed-research talents to the completion of my term papers. But of course we won’t allow you to spend this Sunday devoid of the comforts we provide.
Sometimes, while working on homework, I start talking to Otouto-kun. This is almost always A Bad Idea. But, occasionally, we end up having conversations which are…if not insightful, then at least entertaining. And this is, after all, what the Pontifus and Otouto-kun vs. series is about — isn’t it?
Below, my dialogue is indicated by the red ani (兄) kanji, and Otouto’s is indicated by the blue oto (弟). Yes, we’re experimenting with different ways of indicating who speaks when. We’ll see how this works out.
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Posted in Pontifus and Otouto-kun vs., Toradora! (Anime), Visual Novels | 14 Comments
Posted 29 April 2010
Martin wrote a post on K-ON! that may warrant some consideration. This is not a criticism of Martin’s way of doing things; I quite enjoy his Mono no Aware, generally. This is, rather, an examination of certain assumptions in Martin’s post which may apply to many (particularly western) fans, an attempt to reveal these assumptions as cultural constructs, and my best guess at what that implies.
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Posted in Fandom, K-ON! (Anime), Meta | 14 Comments
Posted 27 April 2010
No doubt you’ve encountered the disconnect between art one likes and art one enjoys; I mentioned it myself last Thursday. The basic principle here is that we might like something for its depth and complexity, but not enjoy it on a visceral level, or we might enjoy something viscerally without lauding its inherent structural mastery and societal influence, and of course overlap is frequent. It’s a simple concept, and I think we might benefit from complicating it a little. And when it comes to complicating things, you know I’m always up to the task.
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Posted in Meta, Theory | 11 Comments
