Wis[s]e Words – Page 68 – Ceci N'est pas Un Blog

Not even an 8th son of an 8th son — First Impressions

Published on April 5, 2020Leave a comment

With Hachi-Nan Tte, Sore Wa Nai Deshou!, isekai anime has evolved! Truck-kun is no longer needed. This time our protagonist is reincarnated in another world by the simple method of coming home dead tired one night, cooking a very good looking dinner for himself, then falling asleep at the dinner table before he can even start to eat. The next moment he’s a six year old boy in an aristocratic family in your typical Medeivaloid fantasy world. Hey, at least the food is good when you’re a noble.

Hachi-Nan: Well looks with joy at the high class steak in front of him

Well, that only turned out to be the case because his older brother is getting married and the family has to keep up appearances. His cozy life as a noble turns out to be not so cozy when your family is rich in tradition but not so much in actual wealth. Worse, your prospects as the youngest brother are so low you’ll have to leave the family altogether at some point and make your way in the world as just a lowly commoner, just like your brothers before. And in the meantime, your daily meal looks like this…

Hachi-Nan: stale bread and watery soup

But we don’t need to worry too much about our hero. The series went out of its way to make sure we knew from the start young Well (full name: Wendelin von Benno Baumeister) will avoid this ghastly fate. Before we get to the actual story this episode, we got an intro scene with him all grown up, a powerful magicial and Count, with the usual Isekai harem waiting on him. Nice to remove all narrative tension from the start, so we can just vegetate while watching this. From this and the opening, shown halfway through the episode, we can conclude this will turn into a typical battle isekai. How long Well’s socio-economic concerns will remain relevant is unclear.

Hachi-Nan: Well and his battle harem

Animation and character design are typically budget isekai, not very interesting. Lots of shots of characters standing in front of a low detail background. A great many talking heads delivering exposition. Action scenes mainly having characters point and shooting beams. That sort of thing. But there are some interesting little hints that the team behind this is capable of more. Having Well open a door in his mansion in the intro scene to flashback to him opening the door of his flat in real life is a neat touch. The joy with which Well eats was fun too. And whle most of the scenery is medievaloid beige, every now and again a background is actually pretty. Low bars for sure.

To be honest, a low bar is all an isekai needs to clear for me anyway. As long as the protagonist isn’t a total douchebag, the story isn’t too dull, I’m happy. I may drop this in two episodes, but for now let’s keep watching.

Nuclear Nightmares — Nigel Calder

Published on March 31, 2020Leave a comment

Cover of Nuclear Nightmares

Nuclear Nightmares: an Investigation into Possible Wars
Nigel Calder
168 pages including index
published in 1979

To distract myself from the current state of the covid-19 ravaged world, I read this cheery little treatise on the machinery for nuclear war. Many many years ago, sometime in the early eighties, I bought the Dutch edition for a guilder at a church fair. And boy was it worth it: I had nightmares for years. Not that you needed much to have nuclear nightmares in the early eighties; if you ever wonder why late Gen-Xers and early millennials are so cynical, it’s because we grew up with the idea that the nuclear holocaust could happen every minute just because some world leader was a bit too gung ho. Or some seemingly small mistake makes the Soviets think an American missile barage is on its way and this time there isn’t a junior officer brave enough to wait for confirmation before he launches a counterstrike…

But that is not the nightmare that Nigel Calder sketches in this book. His is a technocratic world, a world of rational men tending carefully balanced machinery designed to deliver megadeath on the enemy. Men who do not want to murder millions of people, but who will do so if and when it is asked of them. A world full of acronym littered dry, bureaucratic language that conceals the existentialist horror at the heart of it. An orderly world that calmly makes plan to destory or cripple the enemy’s ability to wage nuclear war, that worries about the vulnerability of MIRVED Minutemen III and whether they were safe enough and good enough to hit back at the Soviets after a first strike. Can we depend on the survivability of our systesm to give our leaders time enough to think about whether they want to strike back?

Any hedgehog can be buggered

Published on March 28, 2020Leave a comment

The Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest doing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy while its members are stuck at home is lovely:

But thanks to a certain traumatic performance at a long ago Clarecraft Discworld Event I keep hearing this:

Any hedgehog can be buggered
It just takes a little will
Just locate the proper entrance
And apply a little skill.

Then shave off those blasted prickles…
They’re quite painful on your crotch.
Don’t do this in public places
If you don’t want crowds to watch!

AO3 blocked in China

Published on March 1, 2020Leave a comment

On Twitter, Izzy reports that Archive of Our Own is now blocked in China:

THREAD: Sad day for Chinese internet users: Ao3, archive of our own, was reportedly blocked on Feb 29, 2020. I can’t begin to describe its importance to its Chinese users. It’s not mainstream like douban, but in China it‘s a refuge for literature created by and for women.

Censorship in China is capricious at the best of times, but according to Izzy, people suspect this was the result of a deliberate campaign by fans of the Chinese idol Xiao Zhan, who has a fair bit of fic written about him. Not so much that they wanted to take AO3 offline, as rather that the offending stories would be removed and/or the writers punished. However, you can protest as much as you want that nobody ever wanted AO3 to be blocked and that saying that these fans caused it is a lie, but you have to take the consequences of your actions. If you complain to the Chinese censors about a website, get it on their radar, what did you expect would happen? They can’t force AO# to actually remove these stories, nor are they known for their subtlety handling a ‘problem’. This was always going to happen.

The Death of Stalin

Published on February 28, 2020Leave a comment

It took this clip on Reddit to prod me to go watch The Death of Stalin today. It only needed eleven seconds to convey the mood of the movie rather better than the awful official trailer above, which simultaneously tries to make it all more serious than it should be and leans too hard into nudging you in the side for the humourous bits. But this is Armando Iannucci bringing the same energy of the thick of It and In the Loop; eleven seconds of Zhukov dramatically taking of his coat works so much better.

Zhukov, with Khrushchev and rather nauseatingly, Beria, is the hero of the movie after all and gets that heroic entrance. They’re the ones who act, who get things done while the rest of the cast bumble around. These are all as venal and crooked and steeped in blood as the rest of them, but Iannucci still likes them the way he liked Malcolm Tucker. They’re fun, they get to do things and they get to curse.

This is just a romp of course, a mockery. Russia was right to ban it. It tramples right on the neo-Soviet myth making of Putin and his cretins, while it makes that whole gulag business look a jolly jape too. The victims are nameless, shot of screen; the executioners get to tell jokes. The villains at the heart of it all are humanised, the same way the asshole politicians of Iannucci’s early works were. And because it is a romp, don’t take its historical inaccuracies so seriously.

Is there anything more to it than just a spectacle piece for a group of good actors to get their teeth in? Not really.