geekdom

We still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day

Anime, geekdom, video
Published on 1 Comment on We still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day

Anime right? Twenty years ago we all thought it was all adolescent power fantasies with teenage boys flying mecha power suits and heroines in stripperific costumes before we realised that we got them confused with superhero comics. Back then I was lucky in that the local videostore my parents had gotten a subscription to when we’d finally gotten a vcr ten years after everybody else (having had a black and white telly until long into the eighties and only the very very basic cable package) had one or two anime/manga enthusiasts working there and they managed to get all the classics. Akira, Legend of the Overfiend, Fist of the Northstar, Dominion Tank Police, Bubblegum Crisis, Macross, all courtesy of Manga UK and all of a certain consistency. Not bad series or movies by any means, but only a very small part of a much more diverse selection Japan had to offer, tailored to the tastes of western nerds and not too strange.



These days, even if the official supply is still somewhat limited, the internet and various not quite legal solutions can get the dedicated anime fan everything they want. Now myself I’ve never been a hardcover anime or manga fan, being fairly conservative in my tastes, depending on the recommendations of others for cool new series. Which is how I discovered things like FLCL or The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but not the anime series I’ve just started to watch: Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai or AnoHana for short, which means “we still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day” and which is somewhat different from most series I watch because it has gotten reactions like this

I accidently ran across some fan art for the series when googling something else, read the inevitable Wikipedia writeup and hunted down the episodes on the strength of it.

The story is simple: a group of childhood friends, young children, drift slowly apart as they grow into teenagers. One of them, Menta, never grew up however as she died in an accident on that day they found the flower. Now the guy who had been the closest to her, Jinta, is haunted by her memory, not to mention her ghost, who wants him to fulfill her wish she had asked him about the day she died. He needs to bring back the group to do so and move her spirit on, but this isn’t easy as they each have gone their own ways. How much do you have in common with the kids you played with when you were eight now that you no longer see them anymore and you’re in high school?



It’s a very adult in the proper sense of the word, low key, emotional and gut wrenching story about dealing with loss and memory. Any wonder it appeals to me right now?

Ask a simple question

geekdom, science fiction
Published on 3 Comments on Ask a simple question



James Nicoll wants to know when cyberpunk died, a question that isn’t that easy to answer. Cyberpunk was an eighties movement, but there are still cyberpunk novels being written and cyberpunk inspired movies being made. In one sense then it hasn’t died yet, but in another it’s clear that somewhere when the eighties turned into the nineties cyberpunk was mugged by reality.



As I said in my review of Trouble and Her Friends, that book came out just when the real internet broke into the mass consciousness, which is as good a place as any to mark cyberpunk’s passing, when its visions of what online life would be like were definatively proven wrong. Cyberspace moved from fiction to non-fiction, there was a small boom of silicon snake oil and that was it for the genre.



But that might be too late. Cyberpunk actually might have died early, at the end of the eighties, between 1989 and 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Gulf War made spectacle out of consensus reality and the political systems cyberpunk thrived on and took for granted collapsed. Let’s not forget that one of the casualties of the end of the Cold War was the Reaganite return to a manned space programme. Remember, the Shuttle and the ISS would’ve only been the beginning as America would go to Mars, while the Soviets were methologically working on extending their space programme as well, with Mir and all that. Cyberpunk always had in its background this idea that manned space exploration was not only important, but the inevitable future.



And then it turned out not to be…



Leaving books like Neuromancer (climax set on a space station big enough to have tourism), Frontera (set partially on Mars) and The Schismatrix (set in a Solar System ruled by O’Neil colonies) instantly outdated.

See also.

#$@&! Negroponte

geekdom, Numpties
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Nicholas Negroponte used to annoy me back in the nineties when I still took Wired seriously (we were all young once) when he’d bleat about his simplistic solutions to real problems in their backpages. These days he’s involved in doing crappy computers for third world countries, with the business plan there being something like

  1. create a new rugged tablet pc and drop them in Africa
  2. ????
  3. A whole continent achieves its true potential and becomes a free market paradise.

Jamie has the mindset behind this down pat:

Why do you want to do this? Because it’s a laptop. It will promote learning! How? Because its information technology with information in it. The child just switches on the laptop and gets the information out of it. Then it will be educated.They’ll just use it to play games. No they won’t, because it will be a special computer which won’t be able to play games. How are you going to make that work? because its new technology and new technology is flexible. Anyway, How can you deny a child a shiny new laptop, with a software package kindly provided to us by the manufacturers at only a third more than the normal retail price. What kind of progressive are you, anyway?

This is a vanity project to salve the conscience of guilty liberals, a solution in search of a problem, undertaken by people who don’t want to believe the problems their pet project is trying to solve are hard. It’s magic thinking.