Google Reader, New Feed Leaders
I’ve never truly lived without Google Reader. Before there was O-New, before there was blogging there were readers. OK, that’s actually not a chicken-or-egg thing, because actually, before there were readers of blogs there were blogs. WHATEVER.
Google Reader is cancelling its service after July 1st, 2013.
Being an ardent admirer of Google’s autocratic policies (can you please stop asking me to change my YouTube name because it looks fake?), I could never imagine life without Google Reader. So I waited, and waited, and waited until I stopped reading blogs. Then I continued to wait. Eventually I started weights and became really buff. Then I weighed myself and stopped weighing weights.
What was I weighting for? Did I really need to lose waits? How many watts could a lightbulb spin if it neither toils?
Others, of course. I’d never jump off a bridge unless all my friends do too, and since you’re my friends, I’m jumping now.
What feed readers are you using to replace Google? Is it desktop- or online-based? What’s the difference?
Perhaps I’m the only one still on the bridge. I think it’s apparently that I haven’t app parent for far too long (‘app parent’ means ‘read blogs’), but if there’s any other late stragglers, perhaps this will help. Assuming I get one comment from Flare.
Hack a Raccoon Maou-sama 5
Un choque español. Es la herencia de España que incluso en Japón, estas réplicas reverberan a través del espacio y el tiempo.
Observe Chiho’s state of mind. It is the province of the intellect that the prefectures of the brain know not of foreign tongues. Observe the devil hiding behind the fridge. His cool demeanour betrays his fiery heart, calmed only by the acclimatizing breeze of modern technology.
An Introduction to Introduction to Poetry
As part of our (frankly non-existent) poetry unit, our English class chose a poem to either analyze or recite. It’s our first and final poetry assignment. Yes, the entire unit lasts a week. Anywho, not being a literary person myself, I chose the traditional method: recitation.
What poem? Well, our only options came from this site, Poetry in Voice. (I think it’s part of a communist conspiracy between teachers to create a fake monopoly on poems.) The first poem I chose/am choosing is entitled ‘Introduction to Poetry’. Click on that link to read it (it’s literally a hundred words long).
There’s a second poem I’m choosing as a backup in case anybody recites this first, and I’ll talk about its overanalysis in tomorrow’s essay. But today, I’d like to ask: what do you guys think about poetic analysis?
This poem is ironic in itself: it cautions against overanalysis, yet people are still overanalyzing it. For example, this first guest analysis is simply wonderful. Thank god we have Google to let me understand how “the American world failed, so his culture. America is now melting or returning to his mother europe to cry together, those days.”
(Really, that comment is worth a read. I think it might be a copypasta, though.)
But really, come on. Six pages of analysis. The prime suspect of overanalysis is lengthiness; poetry majors just don’t understand brevity! Consider said link’s first page. A terse summary could be: “Collins teaches poetry reading. Every line begins with a different word.”
Consider this analysis. Poetry analysis isn’t actually deep. It’s trying to flesh out the simplest concepts as tortuously as possible. What did you think when you read the poem? You thought, “Wow, this guy really is frustrated with his students’ overanalysis.” That’s all the link above writes, but with a thousand more words.
What would happen with briefer poetic analysis? Or less nitpicky ones (sometimes, alliteration and assonance are accidental, as in all my articles)?
On one hand, we have this attitude. On the other hand, prose is shorter than verse, and thus, poets actually do have to mull over every single word! But does that mean every single word has meaning?
Twitter shows that the opinions on this run the gamut, and I guess it’s a fitting (no, not really) topic to reignite O-New’s lagging literary impact. Thoughts?
P.S. Obligatory f-bomb-laced video with the same poem title.
ST&RS 31
I can’t get over how their first reaction is, “HOW DO THEY KNOW SHIRAFUNE’S NAME?!?!” and not, “WHOSE SKIN ARE YOU WEARING!?!?”
Then again, even now we can’t understand other animals’ communication (maybe rats, but they’re the exception), so maybe it is a big achievement to a civilization that can create magical wasp tornadoes and TELEPATHICALLY CONTROL MIKURA’S VOICE.
I also like how the alien has a Japanese name and how its graphemes, by similarity, are phonemic and thus Japanese. This is conclusive proof that the Japanese are ACTUALLY ALIENS. They even look the same!
tl;dr: actually all of the alien’s limbs are highly sensitive penii
P.S. plot twist: the aliens are actually malevolent galactic pornographers, the true aliens who sent the kids THE POWER OF THE GALAXY was actually former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who remains alive on the moon even into 2034.
The Common Hero: Elevating Expression, Words Transcendent
[Because my mind hasn’t yet adjusted to normal post-writing processes, here’s another school essay in lieu of contemplative anime analysis. It’s a comparison of James Joyce’s Ulysses (of which I’ve only read the first three chapters!) and Homer’s Odyssey, which our entire class read previously. After getting some flak for dissing Dr. Campbell last time, I wax lyrical over his ‘accomplishments’ now. This time, the word limit really is 1000 words, which I’ve once again filled completely…]
In 1949, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell discovered a pattern in diverse cultural myths: the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey’s 17 stages encompass many mythological plot points, including Homer’s ancient epic, the Odyssey, and James Joyce’s modernist classic, Ulysses. While neither Telemachus nor Ulysses’s first protagonist Stephen Dedalus display heroic traits, their journeys still exemplify Campbell’s monomyth—a Hero’s Journey without a hero.
The Odyssey starts with Telemachus seeking information of his father. His house is overrun with rowdy suitors, and he feels powerless against them. He commences his own Hero’s Journey to find Odysseus. The main themes in the Telemachia are the suitors’ unwanted domestic occupation and Telemachus’s spiritual growth as he meets Nestor and Menelaus. When he returns, he has become a man.
Ulysses’s first part, also called the Telemachia, chronicles three hours of an ordinary, insignificant Dublin morning in 1904, as Dedalus contemplates life. Dedalus is an ordinary young man living with a ‘friend’ who insults his dead mother and snatches away the house key. The first chapter’s last line is “Usurper”; thus, Dedalus believes his ‘friend’ usurped his home (Joyce 35), like the suitors usurped Telemachus’s. He too embarks on a subdued ‘adventure’, meeting with his anti-Semitic employer, Deasy, and ruminating life along the beach. This parallels Telemachus’s fruitless meeting with Nestor and Proteus’s information about Odysseus. Deasy lectures that “a faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman O’Rourke” (Joyce 53). Actually, MacMurrough abducted O’Rourke’s wife, preceding the Norman Invasion of Ireland (Braín 1152.6). Nestor’s reputation for wisdom, yet lack of useful information, corresponds to Deasy’s historical ignorance. Proteus’s shape-shifting represents change, so Joyce’s interior monologue narrative style constantly changes direction, yet illuminates Dedalus’s perspectives on life and regret over not accomplishing childhood dreams.
The Telemachia displays many early monomythic plot points. Telemachus’s Call to Adventure is Odysseus’s disappearance. Athena aids Telemachus by spurring him on; after reaching Pylos, he has Crossed the First Threshold into the unknown, away from the his home’s safety. The Telemachia ends here; later, Telemachus’s Belly of the Whale is the suitors’ ambush, and he Atones with his Father in Eumaeus’s hut. Odysseus’s adventure is more overtly monomythic, but Dedalus corresponds only to Telemachus.
Dedalus’s Call to Adventure is his ‘friend’ demanding drinking money and the house key, paralleling the suitors’ thankless cadgering. A milk woman indirectly spurs his journey by exacerbating Dedalus’s scorn of his ‘friend’; Campbell observes that “the milk woman is the role of Athena, who comes to Telemachus when he is 22 and tells him to go forth, find his father” (Campbell Disc 3). He Crosses the First Threshold after his meeting with the obtuse sexist Deasy, who gives Dedalus thick racist remarks and his salary. Finally, he enters the ‘unknown’: his own mind. To readers, this is shocking: few writers would illustrate natural human thought with natural—illogical—first-person topic transitions. Readers are truly venturing where no man has gone before.
The Odyssey’s monomythic scope is more obvious than Ulysses’s. Telemachus sets out on a voyage, and Odysseus wanders the wine-dark sea for a decade, encountering fantastic creatures. Telemachus is not a hero. He starts weak, irresolute, and naïve, but grows through his journey. However, the monomyth is about the story, not the character: protagonists can even be morally repugnant ‘villains’, their Ultimate Boon perhaps being world destruction, as long as they venture into the unknown and return with an Ultimate Boon. Thus, the Odyssey, as a monomyth, transcends the Hero’s Journey—it is a journey without a hero.
Ulysses lacks the Odyssey’s scope, merely detailing an ordinary Dublin day. However, as the Odyssey transcends the Hero’s Journey, so does Ulysses. Joyce’s writing elevates Dedalus’s thoughts to a godlike level; the sheer breadth and range of his interior monologue’s allusions equate his commonplace musings to an epic. He sees midwives carrying a misbirth, and ponders about an unending chain of navel cords, linking all humanity back to Adam and Eve: “Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (Joyce 57). This connection to the Genesis broadens his monologue’s temporal scope; a typical day on the beach and Dedalus has already alluded to all human history.
The grandiosity gradually decreases over the chapter. He broods on what could have been in his own past: “Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves […]? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara […] You were going to do wonders, what?” (Joyce 61, 63). This shows his disgust with his past’s naïve optimism. Like all epics, the scope is first historical, and now personal. Eventually, reality overtakes his philosophical reverie, and his thoughts deal with the immediate: “My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up? […] He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock” (Joyce 76). This concludes the chapter, a tour de force from Eden to snot. Although the setting is a walk on the beach, Joyce’s purview transcends its humdrum nature: from molehill to mountain, from the mundane to the sublime.
Both Ulysses and its hypotext, the Odyssey, contain early monomythic plot points. The Odyssey transcends a Hero’s Journey because Telemachus is not heroic, yet his tale is still a monomyth. Ulysses transcends the monomyth because, although Dedalus’s ‘journey into the unknown’ is ordinary, Joyce’s interior monologue transforms his thoughts into a genuine adventure. Thus, both Ulysses and the Odyssey represent the monomyth.
It is only appropriate: Campbell, a Joyce scholar, borrowed the term ‘monomyth’ from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. These two works, Ulysses and the Odyssey, stand as a testament to the monomyth’s ubiquity—so many works embody the monomyth that we learn nothing from cross-comparison! Joyce creates an oxymoron—a common hero, shaping the power of literary form into a medium of literary expression. Stephen Dedalus’s Hero’s Journey has no hero, has no journey; Joyce elevates the everyman to create a hero, his words transcendent.
Word Count: 1000 (not including title)
Works Cited:
Braín, Tigernach U. The Annals of Tigenach. Edit. Corráin, Donnchadh Ó. Cork: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts, 1996. Web.
Campbell, Joseph J. On the Wings of Art: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce. New York: Highbridge Audio, 1995. Audiobook.
Joyce, James A. A. Ulysses. London: Random House, 1992. Print.
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1997. Print.
Re;Start
Three years ago, I made this post.
Since then, we at O-New have been pumping out one post, every day. For the past three years.
But of course, all that changed last month. Why? Nobody knows. A combination of homework-related stress, reignited interest in erstwhile pastimes, and the general inferiority of this season’s anime waned my blogging spirit, and thus, I stopped posting. For a month.
O-New’s not going to last. I’ll have even less time and less interest in anime next year. But before it all gets old, I’d like to try again. Just a few more months before the end. Who knows? Maybe O-New will continue.
Who knows why I bother? But my life just seems… off, without writing. Perhaps one day I’ll sever myself from the yoke of writer’s insecurity. Perhaps, one day, I’ll grow up a bit from this fantasy. Because blogging really is a fantasy: writing mindless opinions about children’s cartoons to a non-existent audience of children who watch those cartoons, in the vain hope that my opinions might matter.
They won’t. I’ve lost track of O-New’s original goal. And before this is over, I’ll find it. Then, it’ll finally be over.
(To reorganize this mess, I’ve moved all posts published after January 13th to other dates. Just like in 2010, there will be no posts between January 13th and February 15th.)
Btooom! Manga Quarterly Review 4
Hi guys. I’m really late on this because I had this as a draft for one and a half months.
Btooom! has a manga. I’ve followed it for one and a half years.
Btooom! also has an anime. I’ve followed it for one and a half months.
Thus, if you’re following the anime, there will probably be spoilers ahead; however, this is a shounen battle manga – you know that Sakamoto’s not going to die, and spoilers shouldn’t affect you at all. Unless you’re a 14-year-old psychotic teenager with a penchant for ravishing dead bodies. In which case you might be (excusably) shocked at my profoundly astute recognition of your identity:
C’est la vie
I wrote this abomination of mental diarrhea at the height of my fever-induced delerium last Wednesday; lethargy filled me from the crown to the toes, and I could do nothing but mope and whine and write. I left it on my computer in case I wanted to do something with it and decided, why the heck not: nobody’s going to read to the end anyways, so I’m just going to post it here.
In it, I somehow manage to cover all eight of my classes and their associated midterm exams/projects. If that doesn’t merit a literary achievement, it certainly was a mental one… it’s Hell Week right now for me, so this also explains the inexplicable lack of posts from my part. Mad props to redball for doing the first impressions post—solo—last week.
C’est la vie. Such is life and life is such. A life of lives lives lively. Liveishly? Livelylike? Livelily? Consider the livelilies in the field. They study not; neither do they write. So society spurns them, casts them aside. What use have we for lilies? C’est l’école. Senegal. Say lego. Lilies are unproductive. Humans would also be unproductive if we didn’t go to school. But school takes a long time and that time takes away from the time that it would take us to take a hike and make something. Few people live over a century. No lilies live over a century. We must maximize the work humans do in their lives. Each extra year of education increases productivity by 0.56. Transform into quadratic vertex form and calculate the vertex. (-b/2a, 4ac-b^2/4a) gives an optimum human productivity of x when years of education are increaseh by y. Calculate x and y in exact form.
Because we’re all just numbers, numbers in the face of the societal God that is optimization and industrialization and productifization and efficientization. We’re organic machines, vegetables to be harvested for fuel, lilies that toil in the field, spinning, spinning. Why do we work so God-approved hard? Is it worth it now? Sacrificing all those bloody midnight hours for an extra mark, that 0.56% away from getting an A, and now an entire week wasted. Everything ventured, nothing gained. Going to school at 7:00 in the morning to retake a math test because 75% just wasn’t good enough. Fuck me in the foot if I actually do better this time what with the world spinning around me as I spin and the teacher spins out another math test, a midterm this time, a midterm that I can’t retake because I already retook a test and the teacher’s too lazy to let anyone retake more than one test in a year. Anti-China policy #1: stop students from compulsively retaking tests in a futile effort to achieve more than they haven’t achieved. Am I Chinese enough now?
I blame the cold. I blame the fresh mountain air and the cool, clean breezes of trademark Vancouver Hospitality™ others call rain, liquid precipitation, the tears of God as he struggles to understand: why aren’t people being more productive? Why are so many people doing nothing in the rain? They’re just sitting there, not moving… what a waste of time! I blame the mandatory P.E. strip everybody has to wear. We had P.E. strip in elementary. The vice-principal had 13 words everybody must remember: something something be on time something something pee ee strip something something something. Memory serves me well as tennis serves me well or volleyball serves me well. Waiting outside an hour in the rain. Volleyball wasn’t outside, but for someone whose only shorts are emblazoned with the school’s currish emblem, coldness is to me as bad luck is to that girl in that anime. Which girl? Which anime? Why do anime girls never get sick despite always wearing less than I ever will?
I remember that look on the P.E. teacher? Assistant? His face when I told him I was sick this morning. “Go home! I was just sick last week! Don’t sic [sic] me again!” The verb, sic, was necessarily preferred to the adjective, sick. Which he used, I shall never know, and neither did context reveal to me. Was he a teacher or just the assistant? He seemed a sprightly young fellow, and hung out with the girls in our class. But he also lounged around the teachers’ lounge, where I found him lounging in the absence of the actual P.E. teacher who wasn’t my legal P.E. teacher, because my legal P.E. teacher was hit by a car over the summer, yet the school still decided to give her two classes in the same block to teach. She must’ve been a really good teacher to watch over two classes at once. I walk over to him during attendance as he converses with some generic girl and tell him, I’m leaving. Without missing a beat, he shoos me away with a pompous lack of reaction before catching me off-guard: “Wait, which one of them are you?”
Not, “Who are you,” but “Which one of them are you?” What did ‘them’ mean? The students? That wouldn’t make sense, because I’m none of them, I was physically separated from all of them by the direction I was in and by the condition I was in. Why ‘them’? It had to be something that included me, because I’m one of ‘them’, but didn’t include the P.E. teacher-assistant-hybrid. The P.E. assistant-teacher wasn’t a student, and he also wasn’t…
…Asian. Situated as it was, our entire school was entirely Asian, save the French Immersion minority. There were only two non-Asians in our P.E. class. Did he just refer to an entire continent of cultures as ‘them’? Could he really not tell the difference between ‘us’? The audacity of… and the tone of his voice, that half-laughing, half-mocking sneer that momentarily claimed his mouth, as if he had made a nice joke by deindividualizing the entire class he was supposed to assist-teach. It felt weird. It wasn’t like my non-Asian friends telling genuinely offensive anti-Asian jokes which should really get my blood boiling but doesn’t. Here was some stranger, directly insulting every essence of my first-world-raised being, us who are taught from birth in our ‘specialness’, how each of us is a little lily in our own special little lilyponds. Do not toil—you’re special! Do not spin. Do not pass Go. Collect $200 anyways. This wasn’t racism. This was life. C’est la vie. If this mild annoyance disturbed me like this mentally incapacitating headache, then true racism would be the chronic cancerous tumour of mental termination, an end of life as life knows it.
Then, I saw. Saw his eyes met nobody’s but his pencil, searching down the list. What did ‘them’ mean? The names. “Which one of these names are you?”
But even so, that’s all I’ve been thinking of. Why did I go to school? The response would have to be this. People would look at me disapprovingly, and when, by a stroke of fortune or a stroke of the major arteries, they themselves succumb to the disease of human incapacity, who’ll take the blame? Find the most ‘logical’ explanation. It’s common sense, right? But it’s Wednesday and on Friday, we submit our French film projects. A grand total of two scenes filmed over seven hours Sunday as I lay on the floor—the floor!—of that room with the dimmable lights and giant television set, while we waited for our camera to recharge itself. The camera was a literal potato wired up to a 4×4 red monochrome LCD display screen that approximated the red light shining backwards through the pinhole. We had four iPhone 9GS+s, but everybody was too busy playing 2004 Flash games ported to iOS.
I’d say it was all an excuse. We used ‘recharging battery’ as an excuse to not do shit. For three hours before I arrived (because nobody told me there’d be a meeting), three people did nothing but translate two scenes in already-written English into French. Each scene had three lines. One of those people was a native French speaker. I arrived, the fifth member arrived two years later, and while I lay on the warm, soft, disease-matted carpet, they clicked around on their iPhones and now I know how I got sick I know how I got sick now.
I’m a bloody idiot.
It’s due on Friday. We need to shoot eight more scenes, as well as finish writing the actual script for those scenes—in English, not French. Translating the script is another beast entirely. I know, I tried it, and promptly succumbed to a large dose of not-giving-a-fuck anymore. I have two more scenes with me in it, and then there’s dubbing the French because we shot those scenes not having translated the script yet. If we finish all that within two hours tomorrow because the only guy who knows how to edit has school plays going on every night this week from 5:30 until 10:00, then we can hand in our French project. But if I’m sick tomorrow then I’ll have to skip the next day and get a doctor’s note in the vain hope that the teacher gives us an extension instead of yelling in our faces that we should’ve started sooner WE SHOULD’VE STARTED SOONER
A lifetime of procrastination begs to differ. We should’ve started later. Look, they shot three scenes yesterday in two hours. Productivity! 3 scenes/2 hours with 4 people. Person A can shoot one scene in two hours. Person B can shoot one scene in four hours. How many hours will Person C and D take to shoot the entire movie together? The implication is that I shoot an average of negative one point two scenes every hour. Shoot. Skipping school has its advantages. If she gives us an extension, we just got three extra days. If she doesn’t, I will literally become the bloodiest of bloody pulps, the mushiest of mush, my bones ground into paste, my organs cut into bite-sized chunks, my meat stewed into gravy and served on a platter to appease Armok. Your arm OK? No soap, radio. My arm is paralyzed from the fingers down. Falling down, tripping, moving my foot up to stop the fall—wrong foot—crack. Hitting the pavement while accelerating at 9.8 metres a second. Blood red, crimson, palm not OK: four cuts, bandaid slips, too much blood. Now two warts on my fingers. Now lip bleeding. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Doctor, doctor! It’s OK, no apples here; come, Eirin, save me!
It’s midterm weak. Midterms are for the weak. The strong stay at home, lie in bed of an unknown delirium and appear all fine and well the day after the midterms to find out all their group projects have failed. Science fair? BAM! You just lost 25% from your term science mark! Planning project? BAM! You just failed the entire course because that’s the only assignment this entire term! In the teachers’ minds, spinning: “Let’s give these poor bastards more pointless projects because it’s midterm week and they need one project for every single course! That way, it’ll be a FULL-COURSE MEAL!” Strings field trip next week sounds nice, but that’s two hours of nonstop performing and lugging cousin-sized violas on ~public transit~ (poor bassists) in a class we could study in. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? This fever isn’t killing me. Am I stronger now? Can I lift, bro? Please?
The God of Blood answers from his omnipotent throne, made from the ashes of countless anvils He has wrought with his bare hands: “Has the Campbell opposition changed their stances?” It is a task, an ordeal that We must struggle through to find the light that He promises, the light of a Good Future™ where we might be Good Numbers that increase our productivity by 0.56 each year until the year of parabolic maximum. To appease the Blood God. It seems meaningless now, but someday, someone will ask you; “What do you think about the Campbell opposition during that year when they said those things?” And you might respond in the affirmative, or in the negative, and you’ll think back to those halcyon days when you were lying in bed with a fever, typing out these monotonous words while praying to God, let Him have mercy on me, let He that deals divine judgement on souls spare my marks! Take my sons, take my fathers! Leave my grades alone!
“wat a horrible time to be sick lol”
“do you have the note cards”
“o ya i should probably buy those lol”
So the God decreed, “And I shall require, on the 29th of January, a supply of note cards appropriately purchased from capitalist establishments, that one may take notes on; And notes on other media, shall by this day be—Prohibited.” Was he being sarcastic? Was he implying something there? What did the ‘lol’ mean? If he was being sarcastic, he could have not really meant ‘horrible’ and ‘sick’; maybe he thought I was faking it? For what? So I could possibly get an extension for a French project we already failed, by association with me, that failer of failures? Or was he genuinely sympathetic towards my slightly irritating plight? Regardless, I’d have to buy those note cards before I can start taking notes on that in-class essay on the 29th. Did the Campbell opposition change their stances? Tiger stance to a dragon stance?
Ineluctable modality of the audio-visual. He says these words with a digital accent, one with no sarcasm detection. We may lower-case no-punctuation caps-exclamations-maximum on twitter if we’re being sarcastic, but he cannot. The culture of texting vs. the culture of often-at-home twittering. He does not say these words, nor do I hear them. He types the words, no, the letters, on the keyboard with his fingers. He feels the words. Ineluctable modality of the sensual. Story of my life, à la Joyce. Is this how I think? Not with pictures or ideas—with words. Do you dream in words? What was the last image I image-ined?
Ulysses is a modern masterpiece. Even looking just through chapter three, you see the rich interwoven tapestry of words and language that Joyce bends to his will. He’s a master artisan that manipulates, carves, and molds language itself into expressing more than language. More than meets the eye, more than the ear hears, more than the conscious mind can ever process—Joyce paints a picture of THOUGHT itself, making his characters more than simply human. The characters become us, we become the characters as we’re literally swept into another’s shoes, and body, and mind. Have other books done this? Possibly, but none to the refined needle of trenchant wit and biting description that is Ulysses. And definitely none have its epic scope, flooded with allusions. I used to think allusions were pretentious bullshit—who cares if you’re referencing some dead white guy? But no: they add scope, each allusion is a new story that enhances a tale, and Ulysses is that tale, a tale of tales, a mundane epic about a common hero, the towering modernist achievement of the century.
Writing essays is fun when you don’t have a headache—but you need to choose a topic. That’s the hardest part, because choose a topic you don’t like, and you don’t have yourself an essay. Have another choose a topic for you, and you don’t have an author. “Compare Ulysses to the Odyssey,” so the God decreed, “Rough draft due Friday.”
Weighing the options in my head, weighing mentally a loaded die that flipped over, once, twice, heads, tails, spinning like the world around me and my head spinning around and the God of Blood weighed in with a shatter of the skull, a weight upon it that sent vibrations of nausea echoing down my throat. Consider the lilies of the field. They don’t have throats. That’s why they don’t toil. That’s why they don’t spin.
Skipping school tomorrow and the next day? Failing our French film project? Having no class time to prepare for midterm week?
C’est la vie.
If Maoyuu were a JRPG 1
![What will MAOU do? [FIGHT, POKéMON, BAG, RUN]](https://onewdesign.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/if-maoyuu-were-a-jrpg-1-pokemon-1.jpg?w=556&h=371)
Imagine if Maou were a evil zombie robot demon from hell who eats babies and farts death and disease. Would Yuusha still befriend him? Would they still work together? Would people still watch it?
I mean, c’mon, honestly why did Yuusha not kill Maou the moment she declared her identity? It wasn’t her calmness or willingness to bargain—it was ~boobs~
~boobs~ saved the world.
P.S. it’d actually be pretty funny if Maou were an evil zombie robot demon and Yuusha befriended… it. +1 would kickstart
Souma of the Food Odyssey 5
Souma is the most badass generic shounen protagonist of all time. His name really fits his stoned nature because souma sounds like soma sounds like somn- and that’s what somnifacient somnolent somnambulists do—sleep, drugs, and smoke weed every day.
seriously in every single frame he is stoned like in Brave New Soma. ten bucks says he doesn’t even know how to cook—he’s doing it all in his sleep. AND HE NEVER WOKE UP
This is how you make a protagonist. He’s not ordinary at all. Nobody can relate to his experiences. But his lower-class background appeals to everybody, and instead of being some untouchable moral model on a pedestal he’s arrogant as hell. WHICH MAKES HIM BADASS.
He’ll probably outgrow his hubris as he goes on ~an odyssey~ of food akin to Toriko’s adventures i-no
P.S. his catchphrase translation makes it really lame. no scratch that the entire translation is really lame. but that only makes the story funnier—it wasn’t much!
Souma of the LEBEIAN Halberd 3
The fanservice is pretty creative, but Koizumi’s epic mahjong hands are more grandiose and less metaphorical. Really, all you get with Souma’s metaphors is the taster’s feelings, whereas Koizumi’s metaphors are anything he wants. Siberian bullet trains. American freedom bombings. WWII operation re-enactments. The pope, being tempted by a metaphor of ADOLF HITLER AS THE DEVIL INCARNATE.
Nevertheless, Souma’s food explanations are better, namely because Koizumi has dogs to do with food. Better than Toriko’s, though, cause the food is actually real. Reminds me of Addicted to Curry’s actual curry recipes; I guess the writer has to be an actual good chef. Maybe he went to chefing school or something to learn how to chef, or maybe he chefs a chief chefing consultant to chef that everychef’s alchef.
I hope not everybody in the academy’s as spoiled as Nikaidou, though I also hope he reappears if only to randomly shout ‘LEBEIAN’ at important intersections. goddamn lebeians and their UNNATURAL behaviour. they should practice lebeiancy in private, not in the eyes and ears of innocent schoolechildrian. i don’t know what i’m saying but mitt romney opposes homo milk and I drink homo milk every single day
P.S. Erina is mean. tasukete erina
Souma of the PLEBEIAN HALBERD 2
IS THIS HYOUGE MONO REDUX
let’s see:
food porn – check
actual porn – check
awesome faces – check
PLEBEIANS – check
typical generic sexist shounen bakuman protagonist-incentive-object – not quite, she’s a tsundere ojou-sama too, and that takes a lot more creativity tha-
wait a minute hyouge mono didn’t have that
BY ALL COUNTS SOUMA OF THE PLEBEIAN HALBERD IS THE BETTER STORY
P.S. doesn’t beat legend of koizumi in terms of ‘faces teleported to outlandish situations’
P.P.S. ‘god’s tongue’ sounds like a really bad nickname only eroge artists would conjure
ST&RS 28
TWIST ENDING: WORLD ENDS DECEMBER TWENTY-FIRST,
no no no no no no no I wrote ten mouretsu pirates posts on this
in no gravity
hair does not flow down
also the ship can’t possibly be spinning because everybody’s floating
I THOUGHT YOU WERE A SCIENCE, ST&RS
YOUR SOLE SOUL-REDEEMING TRAIT HAS DISAPPEA-hey look moe heads
Btooom! 6
Comparing its manga to its anime, the similarities of Btooom! were quite striking. Indeed, it felt as if entire scenes were taken ‘verbatim’ from the manga panels, as all screenshots in this post will show. The pacing, timing, but not sound of Btooom!’s anime were exactly as I envisioned its manga while reading.
戸松遥 – Q&A リサイタル! (TV Size) Transcription
I’M A TRANSCRIBER, NOT A PERFORMER
The song here is Q&A Recital!, by Haruka Tomatsu; Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun’s first OP theme.
(Music sheets (.pdf) download link)
(MIDI file download link; what this cover would sound like if I weren’t so shit at playing)
(Makemusic Finale file download link; the only reason I said ‘Makemusic’ is because it starts with ‘m’, like all the other links do)
Sorry for the horrible quality and all those mistakes. They were the product of sleepless school-induced stress and mental delusion that I could transcribe something among mountains of homework. Two words: nope. nope. nope. (I was lying about it being two words. I also apologize in advance for my lack of capitalization.)
I’m also sorry about measure 13. The melody is in the right hand, but the chords obviously glossed it over. Then again, I think the bassline was actually more interesting than the melody so that could be a good thing orz
Musikalisches Bilderbuch, No. 5 Weisse Und Schwarze Tasten II
According to the German Wikipedia, István Szelényi (no, don’t ask me how to pronounce that) was a not-German and yes-Hungarian pianist and composer, born in 1904. He studied at the Budapest Academy of Music and liked performing and editing Liszt cause they’re both Hungarian and hungary for the satiater that is ~romantic music~. Except Szelényi had “the drive to write a tonal and intelligible, while contemporary music close.” Which means that he was actually an expressionist.
He composed Musikalisches Bilderbuch (Musical Picture-Book) in 1967, just 5 years before his death at 68 years old. This Reliable Source (totally not copied from German Wikipedia) suggests that Musical Picture-Book “is one of the most stimulating educational collections of piano music of the 20th century.”
So why does nobody have a numbered song list of it?!
2012 Autumn Anime First Impressions
Hi everybody. This First Impressions post is ordered alphabetically. My excuse for the quality of our product is that we weren’t prepared and GOD, IT HAS ALREADY STARTED
Hello! Also, Words About a Word
Hi everyone, my name is John Sato, and it looks like I’m the latest blogger to catch the Mushy bug! (Get it? ‘Cause a bug is like a virus, and “Mushy” sounds like “mushi” which is Japanese for “bug,” and. . .forget it.) I will supposedly be making the occasional post here on O-NEW, and since Mushy pretty much gave me free reign of topic, I guess you can probably expect something on anime, video games, and/or writing/grammar from me at some point.
Jumping right in to the post at hand, an otaku, for those of you who don’t know, is basically a huge fan of anime culture, probably on the adult side age-wise. The definition is a little more complex, of course, but for the most part, it’s basically the Japanese equivalent of a brony, if that helps (though bronies only apply to one show, whereas otaku are fans of any number). It’s a social stigmata: most otaku are already in or are entering adulthood, and yet they’re still watching cartoons. How weird is that? Cartoons are for kids. See, on either side of the Pacific, that seems to be the general thought process. Whether you’re in Japan or elsewhere, whether you’re called an otaku or a nerd or a brony, you are a cultural oddity. Obviously, the backlash and judgment differs from country to country, but in the end you’re the strange one, the one that’s different, no matter where you are. Mushy’s excellent post (yeah, I like O-NEW posts, I know I’m weird) from a couple of weeks ago went over some of this territory, so I feel that I don’t really need to discuss it any more here.
Here’s the weird thing about it, though; people brand themselves as otaku. Think about that for a second. People willingly give themselves a social stigma; they want to have it. Why? Why would someone intentionally want to be different (in a bad way)? I feel the answer lies in how you view the word. See, you can view “otaku” as an insult of sorts; I mean, it kind of is. But there are a couple of other ways you can look at the term, too. The first is as a challenge, of sorts. “I watch cartoons at 29, and I’m proud of it!” That kind of thing. By using it to identify yourself, you broadcast a message of your hobbies, and show you’re ready to stand up for them.
The second main view is in stark contrast to this conflict-ready approach, though I suppose they can also go hand in hand quite easily. By calling yourself an otaku, you’re telling everyone that you watch cartoons. That includes other otaku. You’re broadcasting an entirely different message. This one is sort of like, “Hey, you watch weird foreign cartoons? So do I! Don’t worry, I understand what it’s like.” You become part of a subculture, a community, whose purpose is more to build camaraderie and a sense of belonging than it is to actively defend the hobbies you share.
Either way, though, the thing that really interests me here is how the meaning of the word (or words, if you want to include the other terms) can change so drastically from person to person, even as the definition stays the same. An otaku is always an anime fan, no matter who says it. But whether it’s a positive term or a negative one depends almost entirely on how the speaker wants to use it.
tl;dr Otaku is a versatile word and oh lord Mushy is going to kill me I didn’t use capital letters for large amounts of this oh lord oh lord
Juryoku in Anime Posts
Today/Tuesday’s question: what will you write to represent Juryoku in your Shinsekai Yori posts?
Haven’t went through the second episodes of Shinsekai Yori yet, so dunno if the situation has changed. Hover over images for sub groups.
星のカービィ Transcription
What? A 星のカービィ Transcription?
Isn’t 星のカービィ (lit. Kirby of the Stars) the Japanese title of Kirby’s Dream Land? How can you transcribe that?
Not the game, sillies: the music. Made in 1992, Kirby’s Dream Land has been featured in dentists’ offices worldwide as the premier source of childhood despair. Damn you, Whispy Woods. Damn you.
Props to the Kirby Wikia for letting me illegally steal the original music (alternatively: all tracks in one video) and ninsheetm.us for letting me illegally steal others’ transcriptions. (Actually, they didn’t let me do those things, but moving on…)
Let’s start with the first track: the aptly named Title Theme.
Music of Our Time, Book 2, Twotone
(Yes, I’m digging through old RCM pieces now that it’s finally over. Do have a listen to Das Artige Kind, another simple study.)
The title of this post is somewhat misleading because Music of Our Time, Book 2 isn’t called ‘Twotone’. Twotone is one of the pieces in the book, but I don’t know which one. Imagine it as ‘Music of Our Time, Book 2, No. ???: Twotone,’ and it doesn’t seem as confusing. Of course, ‘No. ???’ looks appallingly ugly and I wouldn’t write such a travesty if my life depended on it, but…
Music of Our Time was actually a collaboration by renowned Canadian composer Jean Coulthard, and her two students David Duke and Joan Hansen. (I really don’t know how to properly Oxford comma this sentence, so I’ll just leave it as-is.) Twotone was written by Joan Hansen, an enigmatic mortgage sales representative-cum-composer.
…Yeah, that’s not the Joan Hansen we’re talking about. Probably shouldn’t go into so much detail on a composer when we have such a short little piece to talk about.
I really like the polytonality of this. (There’s… not much more to like. What can you like about 11 bars of music?) You can distinctly hear the two different hands, and the dissonances and parallel fifths actually sound alright. The key switch in the middle section seems a bit trivial, since the left hand F-major chord in bar 7 is still natural, and you don’t actually encounter any c-sharps in the right hand there. Actually, you don’t encounter any c-sharps in the entire piece…
If the dynamics aren’t contrasting enough, blame my camera: it automatically makes soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer. I think I did pretty well, though. I fessed up at bar 10 – there’s a two-beat rest, and I only rested for one. I hope nobody uses my recording to help them learn this piece… (which isn’t in the syllabus anymore, lol)
In two words, this piece is pretty cute.
Worse Larks Online 11
A modern epistolary article, by Mushyrulez.
Dr. Christian F. Clean
Argus Entertainment
666 Gr Ave.
Hell’s Gate, BC
April 1st, 2022
Mr. Mackenzie U. S. H. Zdrojkowski
555 Park St.
Vancouver, BC
Dear End-User Customer:
I am pleased to inform you that your application to be a Beta Tester for Sword Art Online has been approved by our customer services department. This letter summarizes your responsibilities in the implementation of this Beta Test. Attached please find the detailed Terms and Conditions of this Agreement. By creating an account for Sword Art Online, you accept these Terms and Conditions.
As a Beta Tester for Sword Art Online, you will:
1. Participate in Sword Art Online for a minimum of twenty (20) hours every week;
2. Agree to submit all physical/emotional usage statistics to Argus Entertainment, Inc.;
3. Actively search for ‘bugs’ existing in the Beta implementation of Sword Art Online;
4. Swear complete secrecy on all aspects of the Beta Implementation of Sword Art Online;
Argus Entertainment, Inc. waives responsibility for all nervous damage caused by the Beta Implementation of Argus Entertainment, Inc.’s revolutionary NerveGear™ product. By accepting the Terms and Conditions attached, you permanently suspend all prospective emotional damage lawsuits that may be caused by your imminent death by electromagnetic combustion. Argus Entertainment, Inc. permanently reserves all rights related to this Beta Implementation of Sword Art Online.
Sincerely yours,
Christian Felix Clean
[BUG REPORT #000023]
SUBMITTER: mzdrojkowski1
DATE: 20220402204022
VERSION: SAO0.000.092b
SUMMARY: Sword Art Online is not letting me be a moè girl with only one eyeball.
DESCRIPTION: I really want to be a moè girl with only one eyeball.
STATUS: WONTFIX
REPLY: You are a fucking retard.
If the World Ends, That’s Cool! [Completed]
This manhwa oneshot is something like 100 panels long. This is the size of two panels.
Is this a review? No; what’s there to say about 100 panels of that size (other than the mspaint’d backgrounds looking hilarious)? Instead, I highly recommend you read it immediately! (You can read the original Korean as well if you can read Korean. See, I’m supporting foreign mangaka! Manhwaka! 만화가! I don’t know…) It takes like two minutes off your time, and if those two minutes were extended with the same comedic quality for 12 episodes this would undoubtedly be my favourite show of all time. OK, I have shit comedic taste, go broil a duck.
Yeah. 4komas are so 00s. Manhwa is the new generation. Seriously, the assumption song‘s got nothing on this!
Overall Rating: 5/10 (Great)
Die Anfangs-Stunden, Op. 117, No. 19 Das Artige Kind
it is late I am late today we will talk about CORNELIUS GURLITT’s marvellous étude, DAS ARTIGE KIND.
cornelius gurlitt was a classmate of the son of the leipzig conservatory head (and subsequently studied with him). he was a pretty cool guy, became a Professor of Music at the accademia nazionale di santa cecilia (which is supposedly a pretty cool thing to get). he didn’t write music to entertain, but to educate, so he wrote many studies like das artige kind
‘das artige kind’ in english is ‘the good/kind/polite child’. i think. i don’t german, i don’t want to be guilty crown
‘die anfangs-stunden’ means ‘the first lessons’, and this collection in english is ‘the first lessons: 34 short pieces for the pianoforte (opus 117)’. as you expect, das artige kind is the 19th short piece in this collection
you can read the music right here but BEWARE it may possibly be illegal somewhere i don’t know this guy’s been dead for 111 years, alright
BUT WAIT
if you scroll down you’ll see a difference; it’s played up an octave on the second part. well my OFFICIAL ROYAL CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC NEW PIANO SERIES STUDIES ALBUM 1 & 2 suggests otherwise. what i play comes from my rcm studies book, not the gurlitt collection version (the publisher’s name isn’t even listed there…)
what’s more, i don’t even know when he composed this, or even when it was first published. that’s why for composition date i just wrote ‘between 1820-1901’, since it’s doubtful he composed this before his birth or after his death
anyways that is all. see if you can spot the bulbasaur hidden among my pants
O-New 