Wis[s]e Words – Page 67 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

On new music

Published on May 21, 2020Leave a comment

What do we mean when we talk about listening to new music? I’m currently listening to the album the song below was taken off, ABC’s 1987 comeback attempt, Alphabet City. I do have the vinyl of that, but this is the first time I’ve listened to it in decades. Arguable this is new music to me, but is it?

Probably not, eh? But I have never listened to ABC’s sophomore album, Beauty Stab. When I play it today, does that mean I’m listening to new music, or is there more to it? The idea after all is that you stop listening to new music after a certain age (thirty, thirtyfive, in any case an age I passed a while ago). You no longer have the mental flexibility to appreciate new things, and are forever doomed to wallow in the nostalgia of the music of your youth. A horrible fate.

But what does count as listening to new music? Ont he one hand Beauty Stab is new music for me. On the other hand it’s more of the same music from a band I already know I like. Not very adventurous. But what if you discover an overlooked artist or group in the same genre of pop music? Is that new music? Or does that still fall under nostalgic wallowing? Surely discovering an entire new (sub)genre of music does count, right?

Alcest is a French band/project driven by metal prodigy Neige, which with its first EP created a new genre: blackgaze. A hideous mutant recombination of black metal and shoegaze and I’d be surprised if you can find two more unlikely musical genres to merge. Nevertheless it’s ultimately still heavy metal, a music genre I’m well familiar with. Alcest sounds a lot different from the Iron Maiden and Anthrax I grew up with, but ultimately it’s still metal. And to be honest, it is rare for me to start listening to any kind of music that is completely alien to me. Getting into Japanese pop and rock music by way of anime was the last major discovery for me, but even that is not that alien.

Ironically, the newest sort of music I may have listened to recently is actually the oldest piece of music we know how to play, a hymn to Nikkal, the goddes of orchards and fertility from Ugarit, an ancient port city in what is now Syria. Almost 3500 years old, it’s oldest discovered song with surviving musical notation. It’s older than anything we know, a product from an almost alien world, yet put a synth under it or use the right sort of guitar and it could just as well be a modern noise or gothic song.

That Lilo & Stich discourse: racism wrapped up in ‘woke’ language

Published on April 30, 2020Leave a comment

Somebody having a real normal one about Lilo & Stitch:

Apparantly Lilo is a brat and an abuser for being angry and upset her parents have died

Now while this may read like tumblresque pseudowokeness, it turns out the writer is a rightwing creep who wants to keep children in cages. But it gets worse. In a follow-up post their friend describes how the movie isn’t Hawaiian enough because it doesn’t engage with the anti-white racism supposedly rife in Hawaii:

The absolute worst example of this was using Myrtle as a bully figure. The 1970’s were the peak of the Kill Haole Day tradition in Hawaiian schools, something you won’t find in any textbook, but any true Hawaiian knows about. You’ll also find a lot of non-natives that claim “Kill Haole Day” is fake, or an urban legend. My Mom had the broken arms and black eyes to prove it. She was a 2-time State Championship paddler for the Outrigger Canoe Club, and a Punahou school athletic scholar (yes, the same Punahou that President Obama attended). Definitely not your cliché tourist caricature. A ginger haole girl like Myrtle would have been getting her teeth kicked in on the regular, so to see her picking on a local girl is about as ridiculous as a mouse taking down a cat. Funny gag for the general public, insultingly deaf for any local, especially kama’aina.

All of which is nonsense of course. These certified brain geniuses are so smart they completely miss that Lilo & Stitch is set in the present, not the seventies, then go off how it’s not an accurate portrayal of 70s Hawaii because of lies their mum told them about being bullied for being white. Note that the tumblr post actually uses a slur for native Hawaiian people as well, just in case you thought this criticism wasn’t rooted in racism.

As we all know, rightwingers are forever taking left language and twist it to dress up racism, sexism or transphobia in appropriate language, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used so unconsciously. These are Tumblr children, using Tumblr’s language and doing so unironically. It’s just that they use that language to describe rightwing bogey men.

So in the original tweet Lilo is called a bully, abusive and the moral of “family means nobody gets left behind” is twisted to mean abusers should be forgiven. But while that sounds vaguely woke, their real concern is about ‘responsibility’, pretty much always a rightwing shibboleth. Lilo, a six year old child who has lost her parents not long before the story starts, is held entirely responsible for acting out, with no regard to her circumstances. No empathy whatsover, no acknowledgment of what had happened to her, just cold condemnation dressed up as social justice.

Needless to say her opinions got a bit of a backlash and she ultimately deleted her tweets about it, though still blocks everyone that mentions them to her. Typical.

Jack in for adventure — First Impressions

Published on April 8, 2020Leave a comment

Why is this boy lifting up the skirt of the girl he just rescued from being buried in a garbage dump, to show his sister her hole?

Listeners: It Is! This hole is just like I saw in the books!

Because this amnesiac girl is a Player and he’s not looking at what the anime wants you to think he’s looking at. He’s looking at her output jack, something only Players have. It’s what controls the giant mecha they fight the Earless with, the shadow monsters that are slowly destroying the world. Echo Rec, our hero, is a bit of a Players fanboy so he’s …less than tactful when it comes to sharing his enthusiasm. But he knows his place. He’s just a lowly trash collecter in Liverchester, a run down town almost destroyed in battle ten years ago, now only surviving as the garbage dump for the rest of the world. No way somebody like him can have anything to do with Players. Even when they turn up unconscious and amnesiac at his workplace.

Listeners: Echo and Mu on their giant robot

Imagine my surprise when by the end of the episode, he was fighting the monsters! Though he spent most of the episode insisting he was happy where he was, at the end he rode into the sunset with the Player girl. Who is now called μ/Mu ~~because she’s a big Love Live fan~~ for the symbol on her neck chain. A bit predictable, but executed well. I like that Echo isn’t the usual hot headed idiot champing at the bit to go on an adventure. His hesitation and attempts of talking himself into in staying put rather than go on adventure when it’s thrown in his lap are relatable. I would like to have a pretty amnesiac girl take me on an adventure, but if push came to shove?

Listeners: plug into the amplifiers

Every other anime reviewer seems to compare this to Eureka Seven, mainly because the main writer for that series also worked on this one. But since I never got further than episode three, what it reminded me off instead was Megalo Box. Same slightly gritty feel, same sort of slum setting. And like that series protagonist, Echo here seems to be a person of colour? Or at least not quite looking like the usual anime protagonist. There’s also an obvious rock undertone to the show: Players plug into amplifiers, the Earless are defeated by bursts of loud noises, a lot of retro tech like vacuum tubes on display. And finally, do we need to mention the obvious sexual imagery of Mu plugging in Echo’s jack?

Not all that original, but if the quality of the series stays this high, I’ll take it.

Dog in a manger — First Impressions

Published on April 6, 2020Leave a comment

Gleipnir is beautiful trash:

As Bless tweeted, Gleipnir has great character designs even for minor characters, well animated and with a great physicality to its setting. You can almost feel the summer heat through the screen. If only it was in service to a better story. From the first episode it looks like Gleipnir is just another edgy death game story, with an extra helping of fanservice. Of the four girls with speaking parts this episode, we got pantyshots of three of them.

Gleipnir: xtreme furry

Kagaya Shuichi is the sort of protagonist who wants nothing more than to lead a normal life, self effacing to the point of being a doormat. Too bad he has recently gotten the dubious power of being able to transform into a monstreous dog like mascot figure, complete with zipper on his back. As a side effect his eye sight has become perfect, he’s super strong when in mascot form and his sense of smell has improved. A lot. It’s just that this means he can smell the dead tanuki laying at the side of the road even from within the class room. So he’s not too happy about his powers and he seems to punish himself for having them.

Gleipnir: nice smile

But one night it comes in handy when he notices a fire on the hills behind his hometown, goes to check it out and discovers a girl lying unconscious in the middle of it. He saves her, but his animal instincts (?) play up and he starts to sniff his panties before stopping himself. The next morning she tracks him down at school and blackmails him into coming home with her. It turns out she’s been looking for a monster like him for a long time. No sooner are they at her flat, when they’re attacked by a girl with the same powers as him. Who looks a bit like the protagonist from Killing Bites. The game is on…

Gleipnir: strip in front of the loser protagonist

Gleipnir was originally a manga. I read the first few chapters of that a couple of years ago and what bothered me then is bothering me with the anime adaptation too. I just can’t care about Shuichi. He’s a boring doormat with no personality who spents the entire episode being sad. Is it too much to ask if we could’ve gotten this series with Claire, the blackmailing girl he saves, as the protagonis? Because she’s awesome. Few people would be so mad as to push a boy off a school building just to see if he transforms into a monster. She’s driven, tough and doesn’t let anything get in the way of her goal. But Claire is not entirely free of anime bullshit. We get the old “let’s strip in front of him to see how little I think of him” routine and it’s as exploitative as it ever is. Guilt free fanservice because the protagonist couldn’t help it.

So. Technically excellent, but ultimately trash. A loser protagonist I’d rather not spent time with, but a good supporting cast and Claire is awesome. Will I keep watching?

Azur Lane: ‘a hornier KanColle”

Published on April 5, 2020Leave a comment

That’s how Azur Lane was introduced to me when I started playing it in September 2018 and they were not wrong:

Atago bikini skin

What with the anime version of it having finished recently, I thought it was a good time to talk about why I like it. I realise a “hornier KanColle” doesn’t mean anything to most of y’all, so let’s explain a little bit of backstory. KanColle, or “Kantai Collection” (Fleet Collection) is a browser game that was the result of some clever clog realising that if otaku liked WWII warships and otaku liked cute girls, they’ll love WWII warships reimagined as cute girls. Which they did. Released in 2013, KanColle dominated Japanese fandom for a good number of years, spawning off manga adaptations, an anime series and movies and tonnes and tonnes of fan mader material, often lewd.

Cleveland: knight of the sea

Azur Lane took the core idea from KanColle, traded in the nationalism of the original game for 200 percent more horniness and made the game mobile native rather than browser based. What it also did, unlike the original, was included WWII ships of all nationalities, not just Japan and made the Allied countries the explicit good guys. Kancolle always had a bit too many hairy handed nationalists as its fans, Azur Lane just has an international community of moral degenerates. and while all the loli FBI jokes grow tiresome quickly, I prefer it to WII revisionism.

Light cruiser Chapayev of the Northern Parliament

Azur Lane’s core gameplay is as a bullet hell side scrolling shoot-em-up. You have a fleet of six ship girls, three in the frontline (either destroyers, light or heavy cruisers) with three backline (battleships/cruisers and aircraft carriers) ships off screen you can call in for support. You manoeuvre your ships to avoid as much as possible enemy fire while they shoot automatically at them, then call in an air strike or bombardment when ready, or launch torpedoes. If you’re lazy like me and your fleet is strong enough, you can do this on autopilot. Ships level up through battle and each won battle drops loot of various kinds which you can use to strengthen the ship or their equipment. You can also get new ships this way. The main story has thirteen chapters, each with four maps, each of which needs three to six or seven battles to resolve. Combat is relatively easy as long as you level your ships properly, make sure their equipment is decent quality and you have upgraded their skills. There’s a lot of min-maxing you can do if you’re so inclined, or you can just brute force your way through by over levelling.

Laffy is best bunny

But of course the true gameplay isn’t the battling; it’s the collecting. If you play this long enough, most of the time you will do the battles on autopilot while doing other things. The combat is fun, but the real pleasure for me is growing my collection, getting that little dopamine hit when a new ship girl is acquired. Fortunately Azur Lane makes it relatively pain free. The gacha currencies (‘wisdom cubes’ and coins) can be easily harvested in game and buying new ships is cheap, either 1 cube/600 coins for the light pool (destroyers/light cruisers) or 2 cubes/1500 coins for the other pools (heavy cruisers, battleships, carriers and subs). There are also the event pools, which is where you usually do your gacha once you’ve played the game for a while. This is where the limited event ships can be got, usually at a slightly higher percentage than normal.

Dido is very insecure and needs headpats

Apart from that, you can also get news ships from drops during combat, with some being exclusive map drops event. Most infamous are the fox sisters, Kaga and Akagi, who drop from level 3-4, so you will encounter them relatively early in your playing. With only a 0.75 percent change of either of them dropping, you’ll spent a long time there if you want them both. It took me four, five months to get them. And they’re just the first of several good map drop only ships you want to have. In total the English version of the game has 438 ships, though a fair few of those are retrofits, leveled up ships that get new artwork and sometimes voice lines.

Ryuuhou: legs for days

I’ll admit, I’m just playing this for the sake of collecting all the ships and because of the cute ship girls. There isn’t that much depth to Azur Lane; the actual story is a mess. But it’s entertaining, hits that collecting bug I got and the content is diverse enough to keep interesting. Be aware though that it’s very heteronormative and full of the usual unsavoury elements you can expect with any otaku orientated game like this.