This ‘N That

Tracking with Close-Ups: Anime

Anime, This 'N That
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Let’s nick another nifty post title from John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar for this round-up of anime focused links. Considering the time of year we end with two best of twentytwo lists, but first there’s a look back at the 2000s cult classic Vandread, a review of Godzilla Singular Point, an indepth look at how the 86 series uses letterboxing and a neat little Spotify playlist for o.g. IdolM@ster tracks.

  • Vandread
    Vandread was an anime that came out in the year 2000 and it’s a bit tricky to introduce because everything it is it’s also not quite. It’s a harem anime, but not quite. It’s a space giant robot anime, but not quite. It’s a science fiction anthology anime, but not quite. It’s about genders, but not quite, about relationships, but not quite, and about identity, but not quite. In a lot of ways, Vandread is a really confused piece, a gem of its time.
  • The Jet Jaguar Show
    Godzilla Singular Point is a gorgeously designed, beautifully animated sci-fi show that often feels like arriving mid-lecture to a physics class. This, somehow, is part of the appeal. The 13-episode anime series is weird and dense if not weird because it is so dense, cramming a prodigious amount of information into a franchise that historically just kind of waves its hands around whenever the science comes up. Stories about stopping some rampaging giant monsters tend not to foreground this much math. But to summarize exactly how granular the series gets about concepts like the passage of time would require me to dive into ideas that I only half-understand myself, so to give a quicker and more digestible impression for just how odd, how left-field/galaxy-brain out there the first Godzilla TV anime is, we need to talk about Jet Jaguar.
  • Bringing Letterboxes To Life: Toshimasa Ishii, Tomohiko Ito & Eighty-Six Episode Twenty-Two’s Use Of The 21:9 Aspect Ratio
    Episode Twenty-Two is predominantly shot in the 21:9 aspect ratio or what some may call a 21:9 ‘letterbox’ since there are two horizontal bars that clasp the animation from above and below. 86 has opened up the door to experimenting with aspect ratios before. Fido’s flashback in 4:3 within Hirotaka Mori and Satsuki Takahashi’s episode (Episode Ten), as well as Ken Yamamoto’s use of 21:9 in the second cour’s opening, are examples of how they can be mobilised to add to the anime’s ongoing discussion on the multiple perspectives that are present during times of conflict. Shifting to a different aspect ratio represents a shift in worldview and provides viewers with an alternative lens to interpret what is going on in front of them. So what exactly makes Ishii’s experiment in ‘Shin’ different from the ones that preceded it? In my view, the use of 21:9 helps to express the pent-up emotions felt by the characters. The director breathes life into the bars and makes them responsive to the feelings of the subjects.
  • Million Live — Essenti@ls
    music from the idolmaster million live (アイドルマスターミリオンライブ) sorted in categorical, then chronological order! all songs are included except solo/unit mixes & off vocal. playlists will be updated frequently as new albums get released. WELCOME to 765PRO’s theater! | missing: VARIETY 02
  • Top Anime of 2022 (and Year in Review)
    “Alright, great, I can always count on you for cynicism about art and culture, but didn’t you say something about being invigorated in your anime viewing?” Sorry, yes, I got away from myself a bit there. I include all this doomsaying preamble merely to say that while I understand the industry’s situation isn’t great, my own year in anime has been littered with reasons to hope. I’ve leapt backwards across anime history, and discovered that the early shows of Miyazaki and Takahata are just as enchanting as their film work (to say nothing of the fantastic early Toei Doga films). I’ve rediscovered the unique joy of group watching, and have munched through hundreds of episodes with my housemates cheering beside me. Hell, I’ve even watched some currently airing anime; this year lacked a “this is what I watch anime for” production on the level of Heike Monogatari, but it’s made up for that with an altogether wider spread of commendable shows, alongside One Piece’s preposterously consistent adaptation of its most ambitious arc so far.
  • The Backlog, Year… 5? And a half?? A Hiatus in Review
    Counting everything together, I do only come to a mere 48 new shows to run down, barely more than half of my busier years, even though we’re counting almost six more months in here than I usually would. I can’t even bother to put the usual “watched in rotation”, “watched off rotation” brackets in, because there’s really only four rotation shows here, and I finished none of them! Yet. But you know what? I’m still gonna put my all into it. If there’s one thing this girl here cares about, it’s lists, right?

Your Happening World (December browser tab amnesty)

Cinema, Football, Gender, Science, socialism, This 'N That
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Here are some interesting articles cluttering up my browser tabs:

    Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests) — The internalisation of this false binary in Western narratives risks resulting in misreading the Chinese protests by interpreting the protesters’ rejection of the authoritarian biopolitics of zero covid as a tacit demand for the necropolitics of the United States. At the same time, this type of binary thinking severely constrains our ability to comprehend the global lessons of the pandemic as we enter an age of collective crisis.
  • Victoria 3 Players Think Communism Is Too OP — Victoria 3 is a political simulation game that plays like accounting software. And currently, apparently even the game’s numbers agree with the so-called radical left that communism is the most economically efficient government system. Victoria 3 players have taken to the internet to complain that there aren’t any other ways of playing that are better than Marxism.
  • New dates suggest Oceania’s megafauna lived until 25,000 years ago, implying coexistence with people for 40,000 years — The U-series dating provides minimum age estimates, which means the fossils could be older. But since our estimates are supported by previous accelerated mass spectrometry dating, collectively the data provide a compelling case for the existence of megafauna in Sahul as recently as 25,000 years ago.
  • Thorsday Thoughts 276 – Thursday December 8, 2022 — While I tend to view Thunderstrike as a continuation of this run, it’s also its own thing. This is the final issue of Thor by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz after taking over at the end of 1987. They did two unrelated issues, one an untold story from Secret Wars focusing on Thor and the Enchantress, and one introducing Dargo, the possible Thor of the future. After a one-off by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, Erik Larsen, and Vince Colletta, the run proper began and lasted for just over five years. It’s hard to sum up those five years in a simple statement, because, if there was one thing constant throughout those years, it was how willing Frenz and DeFalco were to change things up.
  • Scientists Identify 208 Natural Minerals That Formed From Human Activity — A new study has found that the incredible upsurge of new minerals around the time of the industrial revolution led to the unprecedented diversification of crystals on Earth, eclipsing even the Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago as the “greatest increase in the history of the globe”.
  • ‘Murder game’ cinema: Rollerball, its precursors and influences — here’s a list of Rollerball related movies I need to watch as well. Recommended fodder for those interested in dystopian sevneties sci-fi. (Some of the less obvious movies on here are by the same director.)
  • AND WHO DO YOU HIT? Three West German films on familial and economic violence in the Märkisches Viertel — examing and screening several socialist, realistic documentary movies coming out of seventies West-Germany depicting the life in a particular apartment building. Entirely different from the glitzy Hollywood sci-fi of the above list, but you can see some continuity here, can’t you?
  • My Stepfather Became My Dad the Day He Took Me to My First Football Match — My dad, Barrie, isn’t technically my dad. He’s my stepdad, but he became my dad on 12 November 1988 when Southampton beat Aston Villa 3-1 at The Dell, the club’s dilapidated former home. My birth father had effectively disappeared by then, leaving my mum with two sons, one of whom was football mad. That was the first game of football Barrie took me to.

I especially recommend Tom Williams’ very personal account of the way football brought him and his dad together.

Your Happening World (2)

This 'N That, Your Happening World
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  • A modest proposal: WhoseKidAreYou “a Web site to monitor nepotism, and backscratching influence-peddling more generally […] we’ve got bitterness and resentment on our side”. Google groups mailing list.
  • Agricultural royalism.
  • SEK is much more patient with idiots than I could ever be.
  • (Related.)
  • Oh looky here. The Farepak compensation is finally being paid out, three years too late and no thanks to Labour. The moral? Governments will pump billions in failing banks and let the scumbags who destroyed them walk free but balk at spending 38 million to help 100,000 of the poorest families in the country to get some form of Christmas after Farepak fucked them over.
  • Read this.

Watch this:



More Peter Fox.

More on hunting

This 'N That
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Palau’s comment on last week’s hunting post is too good not to quote in full*:

Revoke the Enclosure Acts! See, there’s your trouble, right there, the rich dispossessing the poor. It always is.

I think part of the motivation for the current leftish rethink on hunting is coming from miserabilists like me who’ve been predicting an eventual return to subsistence living as the whole economic system collapses.

The prospect of bankrupt nations falling like dominoes plus worldwide unemployment and depression does set one remembering all those WWII recipes and Ray Mears survival tips.

One of the little headgames I play when I’m bored or can’t sleep is ‘what would you do if…’ say, there were no supermarkets? If Russia cuts off the gas? We get flooded by rising sea levels?

I’ve even caught myself musing on the utility of a crossbow vs a shotgun while listening to the news and idly wondering how much protein there might be in the wood pigeon in the garden that I’ve been feeding. I’ve got a nice recipe for rook pie too…

But on the whole I blame the hunting rethink on posh trendies [like] Hugh Fearnley-bloody-Whittingstall.

Poor pigeon…

* Beside, makes for an easy post…