Happy Chinese New Year

[petronia]

Watched:

1) Five episodes of Xam'd I downloaded from kickinpants about two months back. ^^; Is it just me or is television getting more and more difficult? A few weeks ago we had a CSI Miami marathon at T's apartment, of all things; Hitchcock might have found the plots mildly convoluted. High-production-value anime series drop you in the middle of everything plus the kitchen sink, then leave you there to paddle. It's war mecha, it's Miyazaki fantasy, it's steampunk picaresque, it's slice-of-daily-life drama... Heterogeneity of convention has always been my end goal in genre fiction, but now that I have it I'm not sure I like it.

No - I still like the series (some great characters there), but thinking about the framework is tiring. Like mashup nights where you dance to one 30-second hook after another without ever encountering a full song. All orgasms and no sex; ringtone culture. For some reason it goes down easier with a series like Code Geass, which is blatantly over-the-top and self-knowing.

2) 2.5 episodes of Doctor Who (2005). (helvetius sent me - I think - the entirety of New Doctor Who extant, plus all manner of other things I will not list. XD) There doesn't seem to be a way on Douban to log the fact that one is a few episodes into a multi-season TV series: UNSATISFACTORY. One would've thought they'd have a page for each season, or at least each DVD release or something... This one I'm watching with my sister, the other one was with T. The writing's smart and the general tenor lighthearted, which is probably what I need right now.

Reading:

1) Thomas Kuhn, "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" [Google Books full text] for koganbot's discussion group. Basically, a 20-page essay that sketches out the concept of a "paradigm shift", although it's never called that.

What came to mind reading this: the scene in Brideshead Revisited where Charles converses with Cordelia, and there's that moment where he realises he's being faced with a totally alien mindset and conception of the universe, rather than - yanno - a normal person with some private spiritual beliefs. XD;;

2) Which segues nicely into: The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop. This was on the Buyer Behaviour class reading list but it's about American demographics and politics rather than marketing per se (although the marketing applications are easily derived). Compact thesis with a great deal of ramifications to sift through.

Comments

[triestine.livejournal.com]

ringtone culture

Must remember this!

[kuroraka.livejournal.com]

Xam'd broke my heart and brain many times and it's not even finished, yet...i'm fully expecting a trainwreck ending by now, but it will still be one of the most remarkable series of 2008/2009.

[dipping_sauce]

Pfft. CSI Miami isn't convoluted, it's just bad XD

[troisroyaumes]

Ooh, thanks for the link to Kuhn; didn't realize it was available online.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Have you read it? What do you think? XD

[troisroyaumes]

Finally got around to reading it now. I've heard him referenced so often in "philosophy of science" posts that it's nice to read what he actually wrote on the matter, though it's a little anticlimactic as a result. Blogged about it here though not with any particularly profound thoughts.

[kit-sin.livejournal.com]

"It's war mecha, it's Miyazaki fantasy, it's steampunk picaresque, it's slice-of-daily-life drama... Heterogeneity of convention has always been my end goal in genre fiction, but now that I have it I'm not sure I like it"
The feeling I got after watching Xam'd (and some other new anime series)was like getting a coloring book, but discovering that everything has already been colored in...

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I expect (like Geass) that aspect will become less relevant/niggling as the story gets going.

But now to get hold of more of it... ^^;

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

XDD Doctor Who is so long, it's scary!

[kickinpants.livejournal.com]

I'm still really digging Xam'd. (Only two more episodes to go!) I like the richness of the characters, and how side characters have their own necessary weight. It and Natsume Yuujichou are my favoes for 2008 (and now into 2009...)

[koganbot]

I'm thinking that even if Bill Bishop is right (haven't read his book, but let's say we are breaking up into taste and affinity communities), nonetheless if we were to take two North Americans at random, they'd be more likely to be able to figure out what's what with each other than if we'd taken two at random in 1960. So while it's easier to find ourselves in micro communities and experience people near to us on the social map as having all sorts of specialized knowledge that passes us by (e.g., I know almost nothing about video games), and so get the feeling that culture is fragmenting - I don't know if there's anyone with the cultural ubiquitousness that Walter Cronkite and I Love Lucy had when I was a kid - I think it's a lot harder to shield ourselves from cultural knowledge of people and cultural events that are at a social distance from us. So even if we experience ourselves as breaking into ever smaller subgroups, we're still fundamentally more cosmopolitan and interconnected.

Not that I have anyway of backing up this feeling.

(And to counter what I just said, until a couple of weeks ago I had no idea that Canada was in the midst of a constitutional crisis; the way I found out wasn't through the conventional news media and wasn't through reading political blogs either; rather I discovered it by clicking at random, out of curiosity, on some philosophy blogs, at one of which I discovered a couple people discussing the issue.)

[koganbot]

(Not that I think he's talking about our breaking into subgroups, but rather about Dems and Repubs finding it easier to avoid each other. But I think it's harder for a liberal like me to avoid knowledge of libertarians and fundamentalists and black churches and so forth than it would have been for an equivalent white liberal like me 50 years ago. Not that I know much about such things, but I can't quite avoid being clueless.)