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petroniaNot in Japan at the right time for anyone or anything, and will not be in Europe at the right time either. But I suppose things like family and job come first. >_<
Montreal has been off-and-on rainy for more than a week. Sometimes it's cold rain, sometimes it's warm. The grass is green, trees and bushes misted over with bud, too many drowned worms on the sidewalk to count or save. Unusually I don't mind: it makes an appropriate backdrop to the Wolf's Rain OST on my mp3 player. Yesterday afternoon I ran out without an umbrella to get some fresh air, and had a coffee at the new Brûlerie Saint-Denis around the block by way of excuse. Along with coffee and coffee-related apparatus, they sell those little glass teapots with a cylinder thingy in the middle to keep the tea leaves separate, like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moderntime had (I say this because in all honesty I've never seen one in anyone else's home XD). I'm quite tempted. What I have now is good-quality English Breakfast tea, but it's mad to leave English Breakfast loose in the bottom of one's mug like it was jasmine green. I should also remember to buy myself a lemon and keep it in the fridge at work.
As for Wolf's Rain I'm up to episode 19, but that doesn't mean as much as it seems because 15-18 are all recaps. That was Monday. Last night T and I watched Yukikaze, because the trailer was on the first Wolf's Rain DVD last week and she asked what it was and I said I have no idea but the flist's talking my ear off about it (only not really because I don't click through the spoiler links XD). So on Monday she called me to tell me she had more WR and "that fairy air force anime".
"Tania," I said, "not even the Japanese would call a serious anime about futuristic fighter planes 'fairy air force'."
"But that's what it says on the DVD!"
Of course then I watched it and was like, "...Oh, right. =_=" (It should rightly be "Feerie", though; "Fairy" isn't a proper place name.)
It's a gorgeous anime, of its kind. Basically it gives off the sense that not only is it based on a novel, but on a famous novel: that the target audience is both fan and hardcore aviation otaku, and the anime had better live up to what they've been picturing in their heads or else. Which - I mean, I can't imagine that it wouldn't. The designs are jaw-dropping, and the animation is Gonzo digimation at its very sleekest. And it's somehow... how to put it... there's nothing remotely retro about it on a surface level, but Tania and I were looking at each other guessing, late-seventies? Early-eighties? The story reminded me of something but I couldn't put my finger on what. When I got home I realised it was Ender's Game. Maybe early-eighties SF preceding cyberpunk's advent just has a "feel", because in fact that's what it was, according to the interview with the author at the end of the DVD making-of (which is awesome if you like to watch mech designers geeking out over planes, and if not, you have to sit through it to get to the seiyuu freetalks at the end. Jack is played by Nakata Johji id est Hijikata-san XD).
Post-humanism, right enough! Here's a good one: humanity increasingly has to turn its critical decision-making over to AIs, because AIs fight the war better: the enemy doesn't wear a human face, their learning curve is steeper, their reaction time faster. They mimic, they evolve. Human defenses have to do the same, but this of course means humans rapidly lose the ability to keep a lid on their weapons systems. And therein lies the catch: we don't trust them. The characters don't quite trust them, the readers/viewers certainly don't. We expect the berserk friendly fire. But the AI-gone-amok cliché ignores the second of what is in fact two possibilities: the AI loses the ability to distinguish friend from foe, or the humans do. How do we know the enemy doesn't wear a human face?
Part of it is subversion of unconscious literary expectation, I think. XD In other words if you see Macross you don't think you're going to get Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and there's an end to it.
(Are JAM machine intelligences? They certainly don't seem biologically-based. It would be funny if it were a time warp like Planet of the Apes, wouldn't it, and JAM the future descendants of Yukikaze and her kin - hence Planet Fairy. Haha maybe I should just read the book or something. XD I can't conceive of all the Top Gun jargon being anything other than dry in Japanese, though; I'd read it in a second if it were English.)
Skipping around, Yukikaze-the-plane is awesome. XD I think it's the nagging suspicion that it's the smartest character in the OAV. I want to call it slashy but it's not precisely that, it's more that the story only makes sense if you read it as a sort of love triangle between Jack, Rei, and Rei's plane. XD;;
I have this obnoxious desire to rescore the entire anime with, like, progressive house/breaks/trance.
I don't think you want me to retrace the train of thought and online research that led me from Yukikaze to the discovery that artist Jeffrey Jones has undergone gender-reassignment therapy and is now Jeffrey Katherine Jones. Well... damn. To me it's sort of like finding out that Whistler was a woman, somebody like that.
Neil Gaiman takes a question about BookCrossing the very day after I find a Free Book in the metro (Patricia Highsmith in French). Serendipity huh. XD
Montreal has been off-and-on rainy for more than a week. Sometimes it's cold rain, sometimes it's warm. The grass is green, trees and bushes misted over with bud, too many drowned worms on the sidewalk to count or save. Unusually I don't mind: it makes an appropriate backdrop to the Wolf's Rain OST on my mp3 player. Yesterday afternoon I ran out without an umbrella to get some fresh air, and had a coffee at the new Brûlerie Saint-Denis around the block by way of excuse. Along with coffee and coffee-related apparatus, they sell those little glass teapots with a cylinder thingy in the middle to keep the tea leaves separate, like
moderntime had (I say this because in all honesty I've never seen one in anyone else's home XD). I'm quite tempted. What I have now is good-quality English Breakfast tea, but it's mad to leave English Breakfast loose in the bottom of one's mug like it was jasmine green. I should also remember to buy myself a lemon and keep it in the fridge at work.As for Wolf's Rain I'm up to episode 19, but that doesn't mean as much as it seems because 15-18 are all recaps. That was Monday. Last night T and I watched Yukikaze, because the trailer was on the first Wolf's Rain DVD last week and she asked what it was and I said I have no idea but the flist's talking my ear off about it (only not really because I don't click through the spoiler links XD). So on Monday she called me to tell me she had more WR and "that fairy air force anime".
"Tania," I said, "not even the Japanese would call a serious anime about futuristic fighter planes 'fairy air force'."
"But that's what it says on the DVD!"
Of course then I watched it and was like, "...Oh, right. =_=" (It should rightly be "Feerie", though; "Fairy" isn't a proper place name.)
It's a gorgeous anime, of its kind. Basically it gives off the sense that not only is it based on a novel, but on a famous novel: that the target audience is both fan and hardcore aviation otaku, and the anime had better live up to what they've been picturing in their heads or else. Which - I mean, I can't imagine that it wouldn't. The designs are jaw-dropping, and the animation is Gonzo digimation at its very sleekest. And it's somehow... how to put it... there's nothing remotely retro about it on a surface level, but Tania and I were looking at each other guessing, late-seventies? Early-eighties? The story reminded me of something but I couldn't put my finger on what. When I got home I realised it was Ender's Game. Maybe early-eighties SF preceding cyberpunk's advent just has a "feel", because in fact that's what it was, according to the interview with the author at the end of the DVD making-of (which is awesome if you like to watch mech designers geeking out over planes, and if not, you have to sit through it to get to the seiyuu freetalks at the end. Jack is played by Nakata Johji id est Hijikata-san XD).
Post-humanism, right enough! Here's a good one: humanity increasingly has to turn its critical decision-making over to AIs, because AIs fight the war better: the enemy doesn't wear a human face, their learning curve is steeper, their reaction time faster. They mimic, they evolve. Human defenses have to do the same, but this of course means humans rapidly lose the ability to keep a lid on their weapons systems. And therein lies the catch: we don't trust them. The characters don't quite trust them, the readers/viewers certainly don't. We expect the berserk friendly fire. But the AI-gone-amok cliché ignores the second of what is in fact two possibilities: the AI loses the ability to distinguish friend from foe, or the humans do. How do we know the enemy doesn't wear a human face?
Part of it is subversion of unconscious literary expectation, I think. XD In other words if you see Macross you don't think you're going to get Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and there's an end to it.
(Are JAM machine intelligences? They certainly don't seem biologically-based. It would be funny if it were a time warp like Planet of the Apes, wouldn't it, and JAM the future descendants of Yukikaze and her kin - hence Planet Fairy. Haha maybe I should just read the book or something. XD I can't conceive of all the Top Gun jargon being anything other than dry in Japanese, though; I'd read it in a second if it were English.)
Skipping around, Yukikaze-the-plane is awesome. XD I think it's the nagging suspicion that it's the smartest character in the OAV. I want to call it slashy but it's not precisely that, it's more that the story only makes sense if you read it as a sort of love triangle between Jack, Rei, and Rei's plane. XD;;
I have this obnoxious desire to rescore the entire anime with, like, progressive house/breaks/trance.
I don't think you want me to retrace the train of thought and online research that led me from Yukikaze to the discovery that artist Jeffrey Jones has undergone gender-reassignment therapy and is now Jeffrey Katherine Jones. Well... damn. To me it's sort of like finding out that Whistler was a woman, somebody like that.
Neil Gaiman takes a question about BookCrossing the very day after I find a Free Book in the metro (Patricia Highsmith in French). Serendipity huh. XD
