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Date-Based Archive An interesting weekend; a shitty Tuesday

This weekend I did a lot of fun stuff. On Friday I went to our company picnic at one of the partner's houses in Westchester. They bussed a bunch of us up there. I was kinda worried because none of my work-friends were going, due to a variety of excuses/reasons. But the lure of free lobster and alcohol was very strong, so I went to the picnic grudgingly. Despite myself, I had a nice time and talked to a lot of people I don't talk to very much, and met some people whom I hadn't talked to before.

Then I was back in the city Friday night in time for the ridiculous Critical Mass bike parade. It happens every month, but it's usually not 5,000 people (it's usually around 200 by my estimation, and 1,000 if you read the papers). Also the bike route is usually fixed and the parade short. This seemed to be neither, in that it went on for hours and there were a lot of angry altercations between cars and bikes.

N. and I ate at "Kenka" an excellent new restaurant on St. Mark's. Its the one with the giant tanuki statue out front. It was super-good and super cheap. I might post my full review here later.

Then we went to our new friend Zoe's belated housewarming party. She has an amazing apartment in the heart of Chinatown, with a couple of roommates. The place was huge inside - not really what I'd expect from Chinatown. She found it on craigslist. Zoe invited an interesting mix of people whom even N., who hates most people, had a good time talking to. Eventually the party moved up to the roof, which was very nice indeed.

On Saturday we played D&D, and played with Ken, and watched Horus, Prince of the Sun sometimes known as "Hols" or "The Little Norse Prince". The movie was super-great, but untranslated, so Kerry translated it on the fly, and did a decent job of it (as far as any of us could tell, anyway).

According to Maggie the D&D game was "super awesome". Even though, in Dan's words, we may have "gotten our asses handed to us." N. was very pleased, despite coming back with nearly everyone in the party blinded and at one or fewer hit points.

On Sunday while other people were protesting, N. and I went to Eugene's and watched Shaolin Soccer, which neither of us had seen before. It was super-good. Then we went to the Bohemian Beer Garden, where that guy who was going to kick N.'s ass was totally absent, so we were able to drink there after all, with people you might remember from other places, namely Joan and Anthony.

Monday was largely uneventful, except that Megazone 23 was on the Anime Network. Damn, it was pretty good, although it appeared to be Part 1 of a two part movie of some sort.

Tuesday has sucked ass. The start of my new job has been delayed for another week, throwing a monkey wrench into N. and I's plan to go to WorldCon. We probably won't get to go at all, now, which is upsetting, since I've been looking forward to it for like, eight months. WorldCon is freaking expensive. I mean, admission alone breaks the bank, never mind food and travel.

Posted by erin at 07:18 PM | Comments (3)

Date-Based Archive Forbes Article Calls Totoro a King Bunny

Here's the article. Mostly its about the president of ADV films, a major anime distributor in the US. ADV has probably over half of anime titles being released in the US, but only one third of the market share.

The article also refers to John Ledford as a "a 35-year-old college dropout who never stopped watching cartoons." That's pretty offensive to me. Its like, I know your six year old was watching Aeon Flux up until now, but isn't it about time he grew up and stopped watching cartoons?

Posted by erin at 06:43 PM | Comments (2)

Date-Based Archive The Olympics!

So I've written a small essay about women's "artistic" gymnastics, but I can't bring it to any conclusion, and I don't really care to read it again to edit it, so read forth at your own risk, really.

It is widely known that I am not a sports fan. I hate sports. That said, the Olympics don't count. I will watch certain Olympic events with a kind of glee that only the Olympics can generate. This glee is event-specific. I generally like the winter sports better, because you've got your curling and your biathlon, and the loge. Summer Olympics have track and best of all, women's gymnastics. I was kind of surprised when N. refused to watch gymnastics with me.

"That's sports!" he said, dejected, "I thought you hated sports!"

The next morning on NPR they did a segment explaining that the audience who watches the Olympics on TV are not sports fans. There's not much of a cross-over between the crowd following Yankee baseball games and the Olympic-watching audience.

Now, I have no interest in beach volleyball. I have a vested interest in hating volleyball specifically. But did you know that beach volleyball is played on two person teams? That seems really hard! Nevertheless, who cares, its beach volleyball. I didn't watch more than two minutes of that. I'm writing to you now about women's gymnastics.

Many, many years ago my friend Jen (who's wedding is in October) was into gymnastics. She quit after 8th grade, but when we started being friends in 7th grade, Jen could still do a no-handed cartwheel. It was pretty impressive. One time there was a pretty high level American gymnastics meet on TV, and I recorded it and watched it with Jen. Later I kind of regretted recording it, because she made me watch it with her several dozen times.

Anyway, several competitors from that meet when on to compete in the next Olympic games, and I couldn't help but feel like I knew them somehow. I'd seen them previously, and I felt like I had a vested interest in their success. I don't think anything memorable happened to that set of gymnast, and they're probably all retired now.

I missed the whole Kari Strugg incident in the last Olympics and I felt really left out for like, the next two years as Saturday Night Live parodied the incident.

This year my roommates recorded the girl's gymnastics on TiVo, so I got the chance to watch both the team competition and the individual all-around

It works like this - national teams compete on one night, where each gymnast does the four events, vault, uneven bars, balance beam, and floor (like a floor routine), and their collective scores determine the team metals. The next day, the gymnasts all compete again, but this time they're not on teams, so we get to find out who is the best individual gymnast in the world.

And that's where it gets really weird. In the team competition the Romanians kicked some serious ass. All of their performances were totally flawless. They "stuck" all their landings (more on this later). The NBC commentators were almost totally silent during every Romanian girl's performance because they never fucked up anything. The Romanian girls were like tiny gymnastic machines, and they took the gold they deserved.

But when it came to the individual competition the next night, only one Romanian chick was in the running for a medal. And although the previous night, she had given an error-free performance, she totally messed up on the balance beam, and was knocked out of medal contention all together.

What the hell happened!? The Romanians were like freaking Olympic terminators! Were they all under some kind of suicide pact for the team competition, and then utterly wiped out by the time the next day rolled around?

Also during the team competition, the Russian girls gave very dramatic performances. Apparently they barely made it into the medal competition, so they were really stoked to take the bronze, even though the previous year they were real jerks about "only" getting silver medals. I found out why later, but we'll get back to that.

The best girl on the Russian team was Svetlana Khorkina. I'd never heard of her before, but she's some kind of international super-star (of gymnastics). Svetlana is immediately striking because at 5'5", she towers like a giant over all of her fellow gymnasts. She's also very striking in that she looks a lot like The Bride in Kill Bill - not so much in that she resembles Uma Thurman, but more like she looks like she could (and maybe she has, or she's about to) kill a bunch of people. She really has a look in her eye all the time that screams out "I've taken human life before, and I'm not afraid to do it again!"

This is immediately very different from the other gymnast, all of whom are younger than Svetlana (who's 25, while the competition is 16 or less) and all of whom look deathly afraid through the bulk of their routines. During Svetlana's floor routine on both nights, she looked relaxed, as if this was actually fun, and she seemed to devour the crowd's attention. The crowd, in turn, seemed to be totally in love with her, and payed more attention to her events than any of the others.

It occurred to me later that maybe the scared-to-death look in most women gymnastic competitors might be why that sport appeals to me and the rest of the prime time non-sport-fan audience. By contrast, swimming events (which took place during the same broadcast, so I had to fast forward through them) were almost totally uninteresting. You can't see how the swimmers feel because their faces are underwater. When they get awards, and you get to really see the swimmers, they're all in their twenties at least, and most of them are sleek and muscular and confident.

In women's gymnastics, on the other had, the competitors are tiny kids. They're midgets, they're skinny, and it doesn't look like their bodies ought to be able to hurdle through the air like that. And, as I mentioned before, they're fucking scared to death to be there. That's how I would feel if I was there. I'd be pretty fucking nervous. But you don't get that from swimmers or the male gymnasts. They worked really hard and are quite confident in their abilities. Also some of the little gymnasts are cute.

Cute scared girls who have the ability to fly are way more interesting than some muscled guy on rings.

There are two or three really annoying things about watching women's gymnastics.

First of all, there's "sticking the landing". When the gymnast finishes a vault, or dismounts from the bars or the beam, they're expected to land with their feet together and to stick there - that is to say - not to take a tiny (or large) step for balance off to one side. Apparently this is really hard to do, because that's one thing that the commentators really harp on, and the gymnasts often fuck it up. It's worth about a tenth of a point deduction from the judges. It must be really difficult, because in the entire time I've been watching girl's Olympics, American girls seem to keep fucking it up. Thy just can't stick a landing 98% of the time. The Romanians and Russians have way less of a problem sticking their landings.

Maybe there's just some key difference, where if your countries economy blows, and you can't stick your landings, the KGB is going to fucking kill your parents. Whereas, you know, if you have a nice suburban home to go back to at night, it's not as big of a deal if you take a tiny step.

From what I know about basketball, sticking landings in gymnastics is kind of like the ability to make free-throws. Free-throws are worth two points, but you're not allowed to just over the line. That's an easy two points, because no one's allowed to interfere with the shot. If I were a basketball coach I'd make my team practice free-throws for like, two hours a day. If I were a gymnastics coach, I'd make my team stick their goddamn landings.

The second annoying thing about girl's gymnastics is the weird ass "dance elements" that get worked into the beam and floor routines. The "dance elements" are not like real dance moves. They're more like weird, militarist hand motions, or sometimes very precise pirouettes. It reminds me of when we did dance-type things in marching band. It was more important to be sharp and precise than it was to be graceful.

There were a couple of gymnasts who's "dance elements" didn't look freakish. An Australian individual competitor had a decent floor routine - so much so that the commentators were kissing her ass. But then the Australian's score sucked. I guess the judges are all about robotic precision. Svetlana's floor routine was also pretty graceful, whereas the winner, Carly Patterson (the American) had this irritatingly cheerleader-like choreographed moves that I hated, but the judges seemed to love.

These "dance elements" on beam and floor are often so cheesy that I can see where it would stop most people from bothering to watch girls' gymnastics at all. The bizarre hand gestures and weird-ass poses on the beam and floor just seem like annoying distractions from an otherwise bad-ass routine of flipping through the air. It's kind of like how in figure skating, their routines don't seem to follow the music at all. Figure skating out to be more like ballet. But gymnasts should really either stop trying to dance or make it more dance-like.

When I was looking up more information on Svetlana, I was really, really annoyed by one sports columnist's piece on the Olympic games. He claimed that watching girls' gymnastics was somewhat horrifying, because all of the girls in it are emaciated, probably have "eating disorders" and they wear too much eyeshadow. Who gives a shit about any of that?! Of course they're skinny, they're 16 year-olds on mad athletic diets. But we shouldn't be judging them on their eyeshadow, we ought to be judging them on their ability to flip through the air!

That got me to thinking about how women's Olympic gymnastics is one of the very few times in the year that teenage girls are portrayed in a positive light in the media. When you seen a teenage girl on television, she's usually a screaming fan of some band, or a cliche on a sitcom, or some starlet/singer who the public has a weird love-hate relationship with (like Britany Spears or Avril Lavine). Usually teenage girls are expected to be idiots and judged based on their looks. Everyone hates teenage girls in our society. I hated teenage girls when I was one (yes, including myself).

During women's Olympic gymnastics, girls are being judged based on their strength and agility. They are not ditzy, but are dead-serious about what they are doing. An Olympic gold metal is probably the highest honor any teenage girl could hope to receive. As a female athlete, those prime-time NBC high-ratings are also the most attention they could hope to receive in the US.

Now I'd like to take the time to talk about some of the individual competitors. Zhang Non from China did one of the awesome-est uneven bar routines I've ever seen. It was graceful and terrific, but apparently not a very high skill lever. Then Zhang screwed up on beam, so she was out of the medal contest. The other Chinese girl, Wand Tiantian, looked more nervous than Zhang, but after wobbling on beam, Zhang was able to recover (and take home a Bronze), where a lot of other girls weren't. One good slip-up on beam shook up so many girls so much that two of them fell on their asses during the dismount. A tiny step is one thing, but falling on your ass means no medal for you! I can't imagine it! I'd never be able to forgive my ass!

Anna Pavlova was the next best Russian girl after Svetlana. Anna is really cute, but not as cute as Zhang (after all I said about not judging them on appearance... gah...) Catalina Ponor put on an impressive performance, apparently a lot more impressive than I gave her credit for, since now she has three gold medals. I liked Oana Ban a lot, because she was very small but very good. I didn't really like Carly Patterson much at all - but she beat everyone by simply not fucking up on beam, and later, she took a gold for just the beam (I didn't see that competition).

Svetlana is supposed to be queen of the uneven bars but she also fucked up her performance in a competition I didn't see - one where the gymnasts get medals for the individual events (beam, floor, etc). She actually fell off the bars during an easy move, and then was too upset to recover, and placed last out of eight competitors in what was her last chance ever (she's retiring) to win Olympic Gold. She retires with a Bronze from the team event and a Silver from the individual all-around.

The press annoyed me by playing up Svetlana's troubles at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Apparently the vaulting horse was too low, and several gymnasts vaulted before anyone noticed it. It totally fucked up Svetlana, who fell on her knees after the vault. She was so shook up by that that she fell again on bars (back in 2000). Yes, that sucks, but I didn't want her to win gold this year out of pity (as the mass media would want me to). I wanted her to win because she's awesome.

I'd like to think that Olympic level competitors can recover after small mistakes in their performance. It's very tough to watch a girl slip a little on the beam, and then get so nervous about one mistake that she wobbles through the rest of her routine and blows her own score. Svetlana did get robbed in 2000, but she fucked up this year on her own. Maybe she couldn't ever recover from such an embarrassing incident. Maybe she got over-confident, being a self-proclaimed diva and all, and that's why she nearly stepped out of bounds on her floor-routine during the individual all-around.

Well.... this is where I trail off... This essay isn't really going anywhere anyway...

Posted by erin at 05:40 PM | Comments (9)

Date-Based Archive Shout out to Ryan

Hooray for Ryan! The robot-overlords are defeated!

Now I can post stupid crap on my blog all the time without worrying about spam. Here's some crap now! Look:

You are Mizuhara Koyomi! You are more of a loner
than everyone realizes, but you don't mind
having a bit of fun now and then. You are
pretty inteligent, and good at a wide range of
things, except music, even though you love it.
You have pretty bad luck though, and things
never seem to go your way.
The Azumanga Daioh Character Quiz
brought to you by Quizilla

Posted by erin at 01:58 PM | Comments (1)

Date-Based Archive Our Robot Overlords, JS2, Fun with Chronin, Yu-Gi-Oh the Movie

So my blog has been getting a lot of blog-spam lately. At first I tried to delete all of the fake comments, but it's been getting really out of hand lately. Ryan said he'd try to install his spam-blocking thingy on my blog. It makes users type in a number to prover they're no "one of our robot overlords," as Ryan put it. I thought that was pretty great... spam really is the product of our robot overlords.

Meanwhile, I've been mirroring this blog on livejournal.

Also meanwhile, Maggie finished Jerksquad version 2.0 over the weekend! Hooray! The two year wait is over, and the site is very nifty and color-coordinated, with new features and only a few small bugs. Surely I'll use Jerksquad more now!

Meanwhile^3, Alison and I finished the comic on Friday night, for the RSOM 4 contest. We totally look forward to losing again. In the end, we kept Hal's title "Chronin", which is a truncated "Chrono + Ronin". By far, the following are my favorite three panels, because the characters could be saying anything:

I encourage you, the reader, to fill in the blanks 1-5.

Also on Sunday I saw the Yu-Gi-Oh movie!!! Yesssss!!! It's been getting rotten reviews everywhere, including at Rotten Tomatoes. Here are some choice quotes:

"Adults: If your child forces you to go to Yu-Gi-Oh! , remember that there's no law against iPods in movie theaters."
-- Lily Burk ,L.A. WEEKLY

"I took one for the team this week ... If your kid is a Yu-Gi-Oh fan, then God help you."
-- Willie Waffle ,WAFFLEMOVIES.COM

I sacrificed 90 minutes of my life points to sit through this and nothing I can summon is going to make up for that."
-- Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone ,THEMOVIECHICKS.COM

These reviews were clearly written by parents and reviewers who had never bothered to watch the TV show - not even for five minutes. It's kind of like if you saw the Care Bears movie and never bothered finding out what Care Bears were. "I was totally unprepared for the upbeat and annoyingly sweet message the Care Bears film had to offer," one might say, "Like I never thought they'd be saccharin bears that actually 'care' and are clearly just a marketing ploy to sell stuffed animals."

The Yu-Gi-Oh TV series, is, by all means, one of the worst shows ever made. If it weren't animated it might be lower than Power Rangers. Every episode is marketing shill meant to sell more collectable Yu-Gi-Oh cards. The show is just 22 minutes of characters playing "Duel Monsters" which is a thin veil for the Yu-Gi-Oh card game itself. Every episode is, essentially, the "How to Buy Action Figure Man" episode. I pity the fool that walked into the movie theater thinking the Yu-Gi-Oh movie might somehow be different.

Now, I don't play collectable card games, let alone Yu-Gi-Oh, so its somewhat difficult for me to explain the appeal this show has for me. Once you get past the initial shock of watching such a ridiculous show (kind of like coming to terms with watch Sifl and Ollie - you have to get past the fact that they're sock puppets. Yes, sock puppets!), it turns out the Yu-Gi-Oh is mostly about nerds, arguing over the rules of a game. The rules are really complex, and I don't know them.

It's kind of like me playing D&D. After two years, I still haven't read the Player's Handbook. However, 90% of playing D&D is arguing about the rules, looking things up, knowing the exceptions to the rules and the exact statistics, and proving other players (or the DM) wrong. That's also 90% of Yu-Gi-Oh: "With this trap card in effect my monster has 350,000 attack points." "No! With my spell card, your monster only has 120,000 attack points, and if I sacrifice my dark magician, I can resurrect my Blue Eyes White Dragon Card from the graveyard, raising my attack points to 400,000 and my life points to..."

...you get the idea. Apparently in the Japanese version of the show there's also some homosexuality going on, but the TV series was sanitized for American television, leaving out the one thing of any interest in the show (this according to expert anime geezers at Otakon). Some of the sanitized-out elements are in tact in the movie. Pegasus (the man, no the horse) hits on Kaiba, for example. And Yugi totally gets stabbed in the back in a pretty violent scene. The dagger comes out of the front of his chest! This earns the movie a PG rating.

Pegasus is always drinking wine in the TV show (although the English script is careful not to call it that) but in the movie, he is drinking "white wine spritzers" or in another scene "red wine spritzer." That's something the voice actor who plays Joey kept making fun of when I was at that TMNT record - the specific line, "No more white wine spritzers before bed for me!"

So for me, as an armchair fan of the Yu-Gi-Oh TV series (in that same way my mom enjoys Power Rangers) I think the movie was alright. I expected to see some God Cards in play, and they were there. I expected some arguing about rules and super-rare ridiculous cards and even more ridiculous Egyptology, and the movie delivered. Some of the close-ups had this weird line-weight style, and some of the monster cards had weird or poor animation during their screen-time, but that was on par with the TV show.

A lot of the reviews complained about the scene where the characters harp on "the power of friendship", but that scene wasn't bad at all compared to a lot of children's programming. And it was, again, on par with the TV show, where in nearly every episode the characters keep saying that Yugi can win because his friends are cheering him on from the sideline (and to a lesser extent, he "believes in the heart of the cards") - we the viewers know that's obviously bullshit. Yugi can win because he's a skilled Duel Monsters player with the best deck (who's possessed by a Pharaoh's spirit), and not because his fairly wussy friends are cheering him on. The movie seems to try to drive home the point that Kaiba, even though he's the richest kid in the world, and even though he has three super-rare Blue Eyes White Dragon Cards (which I like to think of as the Frank Sinatra card) can't win because he's a jerk with no friends (and, to a lesser extent, doesn't believe in "the heart of the cards" enough). Kaiba even has a jet plane shaped like the Blue Eyes White Dragon. That's right - Kaiba has a robot dragon. But can he beat Yugi at cards? No.

The best part of this movie (and by best I mean, perhaps, funniest) is how they "raised the stakes" in the climactic scene. As is often the case in the series, all of Yugi's friends' souls are trapped in another dimension, leaving their bodies life-less and their eyes without pupils. Every time Yugi's monsters lost life points, Yugi's real body takes physical damage. Meanwhile the bad guy has a virus card that steals 10 cards from Yugi's hand in every turn. Yugi is down to two cards and only 150 life points (when he started with 4000). His last two cards are a spell card and a trap card - he doesn't even have any monsters left! Also the the fate of the world hangs in the balance - but who cares about that?! YUGI IS DOWN TO TWO CARDS! OH MY FREAKING GOD! That's a desperate situation if you're familiar with the TV show.

So that's my take on it. I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone who doesn't enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh the TV series on some level, whether that enjoyment is ironic or not, it doesn't really matter. If you don't like this movie, that's because it's not for you.

Posted by erin at 02:40 PM | Comments (7)

Date-Based Archive Breaking Even

Today I got to meet Andy Merrill, the voice of Brak. Live and in person.

So that was good.

However, I also found out that my new job's start date has been delayed by nearly a month. Instead of starting next Monday, I'm starting Sept. 7th. AAARRRRGGGG!!

I was looking forward to the money! The money!

On the plus side, this means its easier to schedule around World Con.

Or not... Several KND staffers are going on vacation at the same time at the end of August, which may have caused my manager to essentially die over the course of those two weeks. But now that I HAVE NOTHING TO DO I can actually work full time those two weeks. Which does interfere with World Con, a little bit.

However, thankfully I won't starve. But it is somewhat awkward to continually delay one's going-away lunch party.

Also this blog spam is a serious problem. I need to upgrade MT, but I lack the skill to do it. I had to delete 20 fake comments today and yesterday.

Posted by erin at 02:47 PM | Comments (3)

Date-Based Archive Otakon 2005, or, If you love Naruto so goddamn much, why don't you just marry him?!

Hooray! Otakon was totally great. Alison and I sold a ton of buttons in the art room, which allowed me to justify purchases such as this adorable Teto plushie:

I also got to meet people whom I'd only heard of online, such as the greatest AMV editor ever, Vlad G. Pohnert. It turns out he's also made Dr. Who music videos! I'm going to have to see those at some point.

Although I didn't take pictures at the con, lots of other people did. For a ton of cosplay pictures, look at the extended entry:

This year's most popular costume, by far, was any/every character ever from Naruto:

Naruto is unlicensed at this time, but the manga is in Shonen Jump, and the anime series, available all over the net, is pushing 70+ episodes. Here's a huge group of Naruto cosplayers:

If I see another Naruto cosplayer anytime soon I swear I'm going to puke. In case you don't know, Naruto is some show about ninjas. It looks like it turns into fighting tournaments after a while, but I've only seen the first epsiode, so what do I know?

Fortunately people also dressed as other characters. Here's the Baron from Whispers of the Heart and The Cat Returns:

This is Mama-chan from Kodocha No Omacha (a.k.a. Child's Toy):

I didn't actually see these Samurai Champloo cosplayers, but they clearly existed:

There were many fanatical Full Metal Alchemist cosplayers, most of them girls:

Alison dressed as Winry, and participated in this NewType Japan photo shoot of FMA cosplayers:

Winry was a very popular outfit.

At this year's Otakon, the tide of Vash's and Wolfwood's and Kenshin's Bebop characters seemed to have died down a bit, although the number of InuYasha characters was way up. People started to do costumes of more obscure characters from very popular shows, like some guy was the OVA version of Kenshin, one girl played Gendo's wife (Evangelion) and there was a little kid (spaceship) version of Vash. Here we can see some variations on Wolfwood:

Standard Wolfwood

Baby Wolfwood

Jewish Wolfwood

There were a lot of video game characters, and not just FFX this year. Here's someone from a game called "Fatal Frame 2":

It also seemed no longer enough to simply wear a chocobo outfit; this girl's costume is of herself riding a chocobo:

I don't know who this green fellow is from Final Fantasy, but many people were very excited to see him:

Finally, the cutest cosplayers I saw were these two five year old boys, dressed as ham-hams from Hamtaro:

Adorable!!

Posted by erin at 05:58 PM | Comments (6)