Archive for the 'Culture' Category

OS-Tan

Published
by
Cineris
on September 6, 2007
in Anime, Art, Culture and Technology
. 0 Comments

or, “People Scare Me (especially Japanese people)”

I remember seeing this image awhile ago and thinking how crazy someone must be to make something as weird and fetishistic as this.

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Apparently though, there’s a whole genre of fetishization of software, operating systems, machines, and all that kind of fun stuff. It’s called “OS-tan” in Japan. Gigantic surprise — yet another crazy Japanese fad. I found this link over on Reddit to a repository of this madness.

This second one isn’t quite as technically good, but at least it’s not quite as strange. I have to admit I find the concept of a fox-girl holding a giant ball between her legs a little … questionable, but, at least it’s not as overtly sexual.

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The weirdest one I’ve come across is this one. I dunno, just the combination of the prepubescent little girl with the text blaring you to “Try!” … Yikes.

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Getting Jazz

Published
by
Cineris
on September 5, 2007
in Culture and Music
. 0 Comments

Over at 2Blowhards Michael made a rather long and involved post dealing with elitism, snobbery, high and low arts, America, Europe, and all that. Definitely a great post, and worth checking out.

Michael talks about Jazz as an example of the sort of eclectic American mix of low/high art, and how these categories that have developed in the European art world lose relevance when talking about the American arts world. I’m not entirely in agreement with this sort of thing, as I’m a major elitist, but I’m also in favor of poking the academic arts world in the eye now and again. What I can appreciate about the so-called “low” arts in America is the raw vitality, the in-touchness with human themes and emotions, whereas so much of the academic world seems to be caught up in the pure cerebral.

As usual, the comments on any 2Blowhards post are half the fun. After reading some 50 comments or so, what strikes me is how many people seem to accept as a given that jazz is a “Great Art Form”. Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t get jazz. Maybe I haven’t listened to enough, or only to the wrong people. For me, Jazz seems to fall into roughly three categories. The first is as background music that might be part of an enjoyable experience so long as it’s not the central focus of the activity or action. A recent example for me is the music in Taxi Driver, which I found to have great, evocative and moody music without being overpowering to the rest of the movie. The second is sleep-inducing. I’ve listened to a fair amount of jazz, and half the time where I’m simply listening to jazz it seems to induce narcolepsy in me. It’s actually quite astounding, because I can be feeling perfectly fine one minute, then put on some Miles Davis or Charlie Parker and I’ll be napping in no time. The third is just painful. Maybe it’s the academic-bent of the artists that’ve been recommended to me, but a good quarter to half of the jazz I’ve heard is legitimately painful for me to listen to. Whether it’s the brass instrumentation, the poor recording quality, overemphasis on cerebral stimulation, the atonal and dissonant qualities just overwhelm my ears.

To delve into pure nerditude for a moment, it always struck me as beyond belief that Will Riker from Star Trek: TNG would be a big fan of jazz some four hundred years in the future. Jazz today strikes me as a relic that’s pretty much only sustained by academics who use jazz as a form of boosterism for credibility. Mix and match buzzwords like improvisation, syncopation, polyrhythms, throw in a few mentions of dead musicians or fifty year old albums and, voila! Instantly you’re a hip cat with something relevant to say.

Or not. Personally, I think jazz is dead. Whatever historical forces aligned to allow the creation and appreciation of jazz are over, at least in my eyes. In four hundred years jazz is going to be as widely appreciated as medieval folk music is now — And I generally like medieval folk music. But lets not pretend like jazz is something special or enduring. I’m over the “magical negro” formulation, over “soul” being used as a code-word for black, and over the white-guilt appreciation of jazz. I’m over musical scholarship playing its stupid political games using jazz as its knight in shining armor for its neo-Marxist “post-Colonialist” narratives. I’m over people tossing around names of techniques used in the creation of music, to build up its aura of mystique and respectability. Why should I care if I don’t enjoy the music?

On Fantasy

Published
by
Cineris
on August 12, 2007
in Culture and Literature
. 2 Comments

A couple days ago when I was jotting down my thoughts on The Hobbit I came across this interesting post by Andrea on Fantasy as a genre. I really wanted to incorporate it somehow into my Hobbit post, but I couldn’t think of a direct way to link it in and still discuss my reading experiences and impressions.

I’m refraining from endorsing Andrea’s perspective — I honestly don’t think I’ve read enough fantasy lately to have an opinion one way or the other — but I do find her demolition of a lot of modern fantasy books interesting and entertaining. She tears into David Eddings, a writer who I haven’t read but who I’ve heard about secondhand and seems pretty mediocre from everything I’ve heard:

Edding’s is the kind of writer who would have Frodo say to Gandalf when he was safe in Minas Tirath, “You used me, you bastard. You knew I’d claim the ring, and so you told Sam to kill me and toss me in the Pit of Doom when I did. You didn’t have the balls you needed to do what you and your masters needed to do ages ago, so you arranged for a poor dumb schlub like me to take the fall for you. If it weren’t for Gollum I’d be a dead hero and nobody would be the wiser.”

If this is the impression Eddings gives his fans, he’s even worse at writing fantasy than I remember.

I find this little bit pretty interesting on a couple of levels. I’ve never really looked at what happened to Frodo in the context of Gandalf “using” him, but that’s actually a pretty valid possible interpretation. Now, we know Gandalf is a good guy, so that doesn’t work in any sensible reading of the books as a whole, but kind of curious nonetheless.

I do see Andrea’s point in rejecting that interpretation as being valid for “Fantasy” — Gandalf isn’t a character who inhabits a grey moral area. He’s white. He’s good. That’s all quite clear without needing any explanation. If we had a Frodo that came back to us after the events on Mt. Doom embittered with Gandalf for being “used” then we’d feel very confused indeed, because the majority of three books would have been cast in doubt with such a turn.

On the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced that Fantasy must inhabit a world of stark moral choice between good and evil. The one fantasy series I have been reading recently, A Song of Fire and Ice by George R. R. Martin, is pretty much the opposite of this. One could argue that the lines of moral choice haven’t been drawn yet — There seems to be a gathering storm in Martin’s universe, but it’s not quite clear what the sides will look like or who will be on what side. I’m not even convinced that the series will have a fulfilling ending, as the series does give the impression it could go on in a soap-operatic neverending series.

Now, even though I’m sort of vacillating between agreement and disagreement, I do think Andrea’s observation on the end result of all this is spot on:

I could go on and on. (In fact, I have.) But I’ll end with the effect all of this downgrading, flattening out, and fluffing has on the fantasy story: it breaks the wall. It jolts the reader awake from the dream. It reveals the gold and scarlet gems to be tinsel and plastic.

A lot of modern fantasy does really give me a cheap feeling. I read about a page or two of Eragon before I had to put it down. Any modern game or videogame in a fantasy setting is pretty much just an excuse to collect hundreds of magical items and get caught up in gee-whiz spell effects. I like spectacle, but I need substance as well. The last fantasy series I tried to read, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, gave me the same feeling. I enjoyed Dragonball Z in a sort of guilty pleasure sort of way, but I find it depressing that Rand, Jordan’s main character, kept giving me flashbacks to Goku as I was reading. It seems ridiculous to look at the Mary Sue/ power trip nature of a lot of this sort of writing with any sort of objectivity.

(I suppose one might argue for a distinction between Fantasy as a thematic genre, and Fantasy / pseudo-Medievalism as a setting. But that’d probably be pointless, as people in general aren’t going to bother making that distinction.)

The Hobbit

Published
by
Cineris
on August 8, 2007
in Culture, Literature and Personal
. 2 Comments

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I mentioned awhile ago that I’d been meaning to go back to Tolkein and give him a re-read. Shamus‘ web-comic has been a constant dose of exposure, and it’s made me really want to revisit that world.

So the past week or so I’ve been spending my downtime going through The Hobbit. I’m about halfway through right now and enjoying it, though I’m struck by a couple of things.

1. How self-conscious the writing is. Well, perhaps self-conscious isn’t the right term for it, as it strikes me at once as self-conscious, but also naturalistic. The style seems to be that you’d encounter from an oral storyteller, interjecting himself, observations, and references to the world outside of the story into the tale.
2. How episodic a structure the story has. It kind of makes me want to start drafting up my own plot outlines, given the easiness which Tolkein seems to display in filling out a segment of the plot, then moving on to the next event. This is kind of expected, as reading something good always makes me want to write. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to pick up more writing these days.
3. Style. These days I can’t help but notice style, though I suppose this dovetails with #1. It’s odd to me to see sentence fragments, internal dialogue, and all sorts of things. In my own writing I’m constantly analyzing whether I want to use these techniques (and usually saying no, for the prototypical writer’s advice being “Show, don’t tell”). A lot of people have criticised Tolkein’s writing for being stodgy, but I really don’t see any of that here.
4. Prevalence of magic. Trolls turning to stone at sunlight, Gandalf’s voices, magical swords, … It’s a lot more prevalent than I remember. Of course, half of what we see is only apparent magic. Gandalf fries some goblins and wolves with, presumably, magic… But one could make a convincing argument that he was using chemical fires as well. The character of the Elves in Rivendell in particular, was very much “faerie” elf and not what I expect from Tolkein Elves. I’m not a Tolkein-ologist, so I can’t say how developed Middle Earth was at the time he wrote The Hobbit, but it seems like he altered much by the time he sat down to write the Lord of the Rings.
5. Characters. The only real characters in the book so far seem to be Bilbo, and maybe Gandalf. Since the thought of a Peter Jackson Hobbit movie is lingering in the back of my mind, I wonder how a film would handle a travelling party as big as Thorin & Company, most of whom are Dwarves and probably indistinguishable except for clothing. Tolkein hasn’t really given any of the Dwarves a big part yet, they’re pretty much along for the ride acting as foils to show Bilbo’s growth in courage and confidence.

More later, probably. I’m just barely getting into the meat of it.

Mind Control with Derren Brown

Published
by
Cineris
on July 28, 2007
in Culture and Visual
. 0 Comments

To round out its summer lineup, the Sci Fi channel has been pushing a new show called Mind Control with Derren Brown. According to the advertisements, he’s “not a psychic” and “has no supernatural powers” but can still perform amazing feats by manipulating his own, or his audience’s minds. All the while we see a montage of strange and unusual events, such as Derren throwing a punch at a man and having his fist stop several inches away, yet the man still doubles up in pain.

I’m a bit skeptical of this sort of thing, so I went ahead and browsed YouTube for a couple of videos of Derren’s show in Britain. Presumably, he is very popular over there and is only now making his American debut. I watched a couple of videos, which had me somewhat impressed. The first involved Derren debunking psychic readings by investigating his audience’s backgrounds and using an earpiece to receive messages as he tossed out words and impressions to solicit his audience to give him something to work with. The second involved a pair of advertisers who, presumably, had been unconsciously primed with words and images before being instructed to draw up some sample ads for a fictitious company. The resulting ads were almost identical, in many aspects, to the images and words which they had been primed with — This example was a stretch, but stranger things have happened.

So, after investigating a little bit I was intrigued. I figured I’d give the show a shot, and I did last Thursday. Big mistake.

After about ten or fifteen minutes I was so incredulous that I could barely stand to sit through the remainder of the program. I did watch it through to the end, in the hopes that we might get some sort of “This is how it was done” segment that explained the principles behind how the tricks worked. There wasn’t any.* The Sci Fi channel has been pushing this program as scientific and the result of Derren Brown’s psychological insights, but all we got was Derren Brown on a microphone, presumably influencing people to raise their hands in a shopping mall, Derren Brown presumably paying for items in stores with blank paper, Derren Brown presumably tricking people out of their wallets on the street, Derren Brown presumably guessing songs and numbers and dollar bills with no clues.

If this is all scientific then we should be able to have a segment for each trick going step-by-step through the motions needed to get reproducible results. But we don’t, and we won’t. Not only are these tricks not scientific, but whether they’re really taking place or staged with actors is in serious doubt. The only feasible way I can see some of the tricks he pulls off as being performed with real, random, off-the-street strangers is if he tried each trick thousands of times and only selected the miniscule few with whom it worked — And even then, if your trick only works once in a hundred, once in a thousand times, could it be said to even work at all?

I’m pretty disappointed in the Sci Fi Channel for carrying this dreck, but more importantly I’m disappointed that they present it in a factual manner. I may not like some of the ridiculous crap they show, like Ghost Hunters, but at least the advertisements for it don’t try to trick me into believing the premise that Ghost Hunters is some sort of respectable, factual documentary show. I won’t be tuning in again.

The Fountain

Published
by
Cineris
on July 14, 2007
in Culture and Visual
. 2 Comments

I finally got around to watching The Fountain recently — I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out on DVD ever since it was released in theaters last fall. Apparently, it was only running in the local movieplexes for about a week before they decided to push it out for your standard mindless Hollywood comedies and seasonal films.

Spoilers below, you have been warned.

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After waiting a couple of months for the film, it’s kind of inevitable that I was a bit disappointed in it. Still, I’m glad I got around to watching it, and I’m still bitter about the ridiculousness that pushes an ambitious (if flawed) film out of the theaters for your run of the mill tripe.

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One of the problems with this movie is that it’s premise is at once immediately obvious, and yet frustratingly obtuse. Philosophically, the theme of the movie is that death is not something to be feared, it is a natural part of life and continues the cycle of creation in the universe. But, to me, there’s no obvious connection between this philosophical idea and the way the story in the movie is told, via three different timelines, all three of which are tied together by the presence of Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz’s characters.

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Why is this done? Why do we skip from Inquisition era Spain, modern day New York, and some unspecified future? One of the big failings of the movie is that the narrative device here seems largely superfluous. The past timeline, for example, is tied into the story loosely by having it be a story that Rachel Weisz’s character writes — But I believe we’re intended to think that the events in that timeline are real. Are they or aren’t they? It’s never explained.

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Then we have the future timeline, which is actually a continuation of the present timeline, but forwarded at least several hundred, and more likely a thousand or more, years into the future. Maybe it’s just me, but I have a hard time believing that a character who has lived several hundred, or possibly thousand years would not get over the death of his wife.

I feel that, philosophically, the idea that death should be embraced, if actually internalized by Hugh Jackman’s character, would have led him to bury the memory of his dead wife in his mind. His grief would fade, his emotions would fade, and, in time, the very recollection of her existence would fade. He would not be haunted by her death, but would instead be free to continue to live his life. Despite that, I’m willing to handwave that away, as we could say that the character’s insistence on holding on to his life beyond all natural limits has given him a similarly unnatural persistence of memory and emotional attachment.

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Even ignoring the plausibility issues of having a future timeline so far removed from the present one, but so dependent on fickle emotion, one could argue that it’s the character’s very stubbornness in resisting death that makes the whole narrative of the movie possible — I find it really hard to take away the intended meaning of the film when so much of it hinges on resisting the movie’s message.

In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the movie is self-undermining. Aronofsky is an atheist, so we can assume that in the movie here he is not suggesting that death leads to an afterlife, but rather that the death and dissolution of one creature, one object, will allow something new to be created with its physical remains. Although trivially true, this really doesn’t address the issue of why any particular extant being should sacrifice itself for the creation of something new. The issue is sidestepped in the movie by presenting Jackman’s character in the future as gaunt and hollow, like a man who has spread his vitality thin across too long a life. But I don’t see that as any kind of necessary condition.

Furthermore, the issue of presenting two distinct stories, that of the Conquistador and Isabel, and of the modern characters (and their story as it progresses a thousand years in the future), confuses the issue. Is Aronofsky positing some kind of reincarnation? The past storyline is one that I find particularly problematic because of the presence of a genuine villain character, in this case, the Inquisitor who we discover is threatening to kill Isabel for her heresy. The issue I have with this subplot is that it is the Inquisitor character which both the Conquistador and Isabel are attempting to fight, and yet in terms of philosophy, a pseudo-Gnostic Christianity focused on spiritual matters in opposition to the body, strikes me as not particularly different from the message promoted by the movie. Sure, you can split hairs about doctrinal matters, but it seems to me that in a day-to-day situation you’d have a similar end behavior.

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All in all, I enjoyed the movie, but it wasn’t nearly what I was expecting, nor as good as I was hoping. As I was watching I could definitely enjoy the visuals, which were frequently spectacular (though I wasn’t too thrilled with the aesthetics of the modern storyline, particularly how the actors were made to look). Although I think it’s confused in its message, I found it at least engaging enough to think about it myself and look at where I think its message falls apart. At times I really felt like there were scenes missing, things that I imagine would make this a stronger movie but were cut for time constraints. I’m betting we will see a director’s cut of this movie, and I’m tentatively looking forward to it. No matter how beautiful a movie Aronofsky makes, I don’t think that he’s going to convince me that we should all just accept death and not resist it, but I can still enjoy the movie.

Mercedes Lackey

Published
by
Cineris
on July 9, 2007
in Literature
. 5 Comments

I was listening to Fear the Boot (Episode 13 if you care) and the show’s hosts were talking about novels written in a game universe. Dawn, a guest co-host, mentioned she had some Mercedes Lackey books…

I’d forgotten entirely about Mercedes Lackey, but once I heard that name I immediately, no exaggeration, paused the podcast and opened up a new browser window just to write this rant in.

I picked up three Mercedes Lackey books about five or so years ago. Two of my good friends had gotten into Mercedes Lackey and had been raving about some of her novels — I don’t know if I’m remembering correctly, but I believe the novels that were getting ravers were Brightly Burning and the Magic’s Pawn/Promise/Price series. I went to a local bookstore with the intention of picking up some of these books, but they didn’t have any of the specific ones I was looking for. I bought the bullet and picked up another series of her books that was there, the Vows and Honor series.

This has got to be one of the worst series of books I’ve ever read. My strongest memory of the books has been thinking that this is the kind of book someone might take to the beach because you wouldn’t care if you ruined the pages with lotion. Considering how much of a perfectionist I am about all of my books, trying to keep them all in pristine condition, I consider that extremely damning. Probably the highest praise I’d be willing to give to Mercedes Lackey is to say that she can put enough words down on a page to fill up a book.

The series I read, Vows and Honor, is about two female characters Tarma and Kethry. [I'm refreshing my memory from the back of the books right now, as the only thing that wasn't forgettable about them was how horrible they were.] One of them is some Native American style swordswoman, the other is an ex-noblewoman turned Mage. Both are servants of “the Goddess,” which should be a pretty big indicator of where this series begins and ends. Another indicator comes in browsing the preface of one of these books, Mercedes Lackey begins talking about the state of the genre of fantasy fiction and talks about Conan by saying “C*n*n.” Who does that?

The big question in my mind is how someone like Mercedes Lackey, who’s, from all the signs I’ve seen, a no-talent hack, able to become a name of sorts in the fantasy genre. It really boggles my mind, I didn’t think the genre was that barren. Guess I was wrong

No Boy Is An Island

Published
by
Cineris
on June 18, 2007
in Culture, Miscellaneous and Politics
. 0 Comments

Except at Kilmer Middle School in Virginia.

All I can say is that I’m glad my kid isn’t attending this school. If he were, I’d be compelled to schedule a meeting with the Principal’s skull and a blunt object.

I can’t say I’m too surprised to find out that the Principal of this school is a woman. This sort of reductio ad absurdum policy is straight out of feminist modalities: Touching can be both good and bad, but using rationality and observation of reality to determine which is which is insufficient. Since we can never truly know whether a touch was good or bad, we must ban them all. This is not to say that a male principal couldn’t be just a empty-headed and nannyish so as to want a ridiculous policy like this, but I’d like to think that a man who’s so craven so as to think this would be a good idea would also be too spineless to actually try and implement such a policy.

This story found via Reddit. Although the Reddit comments are usually a cesspool of anti-Bush, anti-Religion, and whatever other banalities I can’t be bothered to dredge up in my memory right now, there are a few interesting tidbits here. Check out these comments:

Actually I attended Fairfax County schools (where Kilmer is located) and distinctly remember getting in trouble for sneezing during a school assembly in the 5th grade. I wish I were joking…

Oh yeah, I know exactly what you mean. In Northley Middle School, outside of Philadelphia, a kid would receive detention for sneezing during class presentations.

I distinctly recall learning that year how to suppress a sneeze.

It’s things like this that make me consider that the human mind is the enemy of reason.

Detached

Published
by
Cineris
on June 14, 2007
in Culture and Games
. 0 Comments

In my usual daily browsings I came across this article on PopURLs, which purports to explain the answer to the eternal question, “Why are there so many World War 2 games?”

Unfortunately, the article is absolute trash. What does this article set forth as the reason why WW2 games are so popular? That (a) soldiering is a ‘core fantasy,’ that (b) WW2 is the most important and largest scale war the world has ever known, with a dash of (c) it’s much easier to develop games with backgrounds people are already familiar with.

It’s absurd to me that we’ve got a full page article on why World War 2 games are popular and yet we don’t have even one reference to the elephant in the room: World War 2 games are popular because they present a clear moral universe. There are technical reasons relating to style of the game and historical versimilitude which make WW2 a ripe period for exploitation in game universes (Mostly about the level of technology at the time and why WW2 era technology works better for that style gameplay than, say, holding a spear in a Greek phalanx, or being a supersoldier from the 22nd century), but absent the grounding a clear moral imperative provides there’s not much to differentiate, say, World War 2 from Korea or Vietnam.

Why is this important? Because storytelling in videogames is still in its infancy, and modern cultural biases rail against portrayals of historical conflicts other than WW2, as having a clear moral angle. Because game storytelling is tapping into primal and undeveloped energies of play, e.g. “Cowboys vs. Indians” or “Cops vs. Robbers” it needs to have the moral angle to justify the conflict. Most games are simply too superficial to deal with any sort of deeper motivation than these delineations to tell their story, and our cultural vocabulary is so impoverished anyway that we struggle to provide compelling rationales for villains — Today’s most common constructed narrative for understanding, say, political opponents, is paranoid conspiracy-theory thinking.