The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi

So I just watched this Disappearance of Haruhi movie (that's what it says up there)

Haruhi as a series has gone through an interesting arc. When I first watched the series, my only reaction was 'wow fucking awesome'. There you had this really weird and meta series, told out of order with quirky characters. Sure a lot of its ideas were lifted from some of the pillars of western science fiction, but it's okay to take ideas and recontextualize them. As far as I was concerned, that was a great series.

After that I hit the novels and discovered the uncomfortable fact that they were awful. The majority of the Haruhi novels, regardless of translation quality, are absolute unfiltered shit and the author is a talentless hack. The author tells obscure time travel stories and has characters say things like 'you wouldn't really understand' to paper over the glaring plot holes he introduces. Rather than exploring concepts he introduces, he leaves them half baked and starts throwing in new ones. The whole series is a complete fucking mess and was only made presentable by a really savvy director who knew how to spin lead into gold.

But the one time I would say that the guy almost got it right was in the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. After watching the movie version, I am reminded of what the key word in that statement is: Almost.


So the basic plot of Disappearance is that someone (guess who?) has modified the universe so that Haruhi's disappeared and the rest of the SOS Brigade are all normal. Everyone's lost all memory of how things were except for Kyon, who is doing his best to restore the universe to the way it used to be somehow, though as he does so he's confronted by a 'normal' Nagato who quite obviously likes him.

So let's be clear: there's only one genuinely good character in Haruhi.


Mikuru is always just Mikuru, Koizumi never breaks out of his basic 'fruity esper-with-no-real-powers exposition boy' role and Kyon is just an (extra whiny) everyman. Haruhi herself is often described as being an unpredictable eccentric, but she's so predictably and unchangingly eccentric that to me she's just really a brat that's used to always getting her way without fail.

Nagato on the other hand is a character that actually has had some development as a character, or so I thought. She's this alien robot superlady that's confronted with human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon) for the first time and having trouble dealing with them. Recipe for success right there. So Disappearance, which is about her, should have been a winner.

It's not. At least not mostly.

The problem with Disappearance is that it's fucking terribly written. The first Haruhi season prospered because for the most part the author's storytelling style was set aside in favour of a more meta approach. This movie was basically a one to one conversion of the novel to the big screen and as a result it is absolutely terrible.


The pacing is a mess. The movie will move between Kyon wallowing in self pity, not knowing what to do, before arbitrarily stumbling on a clue and springing awkwardly into action. A good 30 minutes of the movie is dedicated to Kyon agonizing over whether or not he wants to stay in the peaceful 'normal' universe or go back to the crazy Haruhi universe and each moaning session comes to the exact same conclusion (he wants to go back to Haruhi world, I fucking get it).


The plot is incoherent. So much of the time travel mumbo jumbo is explained away with 'you wouldn't understand' that it just pisses me off. How did the time travelers even remain unaffected by Nagato's time warp? Why does Mikuru Senior know to expect Kyon?

But even beyond that, there's little dramatic unity in Disappearance. Sometimes it's a Nagato love story, sometimes it's about Haruhi and sometimes (when it gets really bad) it plays at being a sci fi thriller. All the disparate elements don't jive together at all and considering that literally nothing is resolved in the story (this is only novel 4 of 10 after all) it's really not a very satisfying film to watch.


Don't get me wrong, there are some great scenes in there. I'll be honest: I really do adore Nagato. The idea of an alien artificial intelligence going through Data's classic struggle to attain humanity (except with the romance angle thrown in) appeals to me greatly. Her character design is spot on and the voice of Chihara Minori is as powerful as it's always been.



Seeing those ideas explored thoroughly, even if it's only for about fifteen minutes in a 180 minute movie, was worth it I think. All of it is sloppily stuffed back into an arbitrary status quo shortly after that, but for that one shining moment Disappearance becomes a good movie.


That moment, however, is fleeting. Every character in Haruhi is stagnant and the story as a whole doesn't go anywhere. Six novels from now, Yuki will still be an android alien intelligence struggling with her human emotions (particularly her feelings for Kyon), with no real progression. Everyone else stays as everyone else. More bullshit is introduced, but the status quo remains uncontested.

And that just isn't good enough. There's more ...

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Scott Pilgrim was bloody great.

Comedy and action. Amazing direction and fantastic writing. Fun music, great nerdcore references and spot-on acting. I really don't have anything bad to say about this movie. The only thing I can say against it is that occasionally people in the theater were laughing too hard, which made it hard to hear some of the jokes. But that is not a cause for serious concern.

If you have any sense, you'll see this movie. Everything you want in a movie is in this film. A guy fighting against seven evil ex-boyfriends for the sake of the love of his life. It's honestly the best movie of 2010. Yeah that's right, fuck Inception. And if you're from Toronto it's basically mandatory viewing.

Watch it immediately.

Anyhow let's talk about it...

First of all, I've pointed this out to many people before but it bears repeating for those of us who weren't raised on Super Mario Brothers.

This is a Bob-Omb (of the non-sexual variety):


That aside, I've been a fan of the comics since a friend introduced me to them in the Second Cup that Scott's sister works at. After I read the first volume there, we went to the park where Ramona and Scott go to (the one with the swingset). Close to home, no?


It's great to see Toronto moving up the cultural ladder a bit. This is really a city that gets no damn respect. It's always New York or LA or Paris or London. When a city in Canada is used it's going to be fucking Vancouver or Montreal or something. Unless it's a fucking Robert J. Sawyer novel or something, Toronto doesn't really exist. And Robert J. Sawyer's portrayal of Toronto is just really a name with no soul. Scott Pilgrim is probably the first thing I've seen that's really captured the spirit of my city.


Emphasis on the word spirit. It's not just a matter of familiar locales and landmarks, it's a matter of actually showing the character of the people who live here. Scott Pilgrim's brand of a shy/sincere nerdy/somehow cool sort of guy is a prime Toronto specimen. Scott Pilgrim could easily be the guy I bought this computer from or one of the assholes I play Left 4 Dead with. I guess in the comic he's more plain old crazy, but in the movie that's less apparent. But the point I'm trying to make is that this is that this is the first work of fiction set in Toronto made by someone that seems to really love Toronto in a non-superficial way. The movie is sort of a love letter to the entire city.



I don't think it's just the Toronto thing that made it good though. My favourite part of the movie was the fight with Lucas Lee. It's a brilliant scene for a lot of reasons... the stunt doubles thing, Lucas' awesome lines ("The first click will be me hanging up... the second will be me shooting you dead!") and the awesome direction to name a few. When he went for coffee as the stunt doubles beat on Scott I was just cracking up.


That's an amazing scene no matter what the context is. The fact that that was Casa Loma and that I sometimes go and sit on the steps Lucas skateboards to read sometimes is just really an extra bonus.

I kind of like that. This is Toronto's movie. Anyone else can see Scott Pilgrim and love it. But only people from this city can truly appreciate it. And even among that select few, not many can appreciate the way I can. I mean, I live just down the street from Scott after all.

But anyhow, Toronto aside...

One thing I especially liked was getting to hear the music. A comic can't really convey what a song is supposed to sound like. I'm listening to the soundtrack right now and it's actually kind of bad, but that actually fits the fiction quite well. The Sex Bob-Ombs are supposed to suck. That's explicitly spelled out in the canon. I see that Beck did a bunch of the songs, which is a band that's big enough for me to actually know of them in spite of my obscure musical tastes. I imagine that they thus weren't actually trying to suck. But well, in spite of their best efforts, things worked out!

Plus this thing was fucking awesome.

Knives Chau was done brilliantly, but I think they made her click with Scott a bit too much at the end. It made it feel just weird when she just gave up in the end. If there's one thing I think the movie didn't handle too well, it's probably that. But that is extremely minor.


I think Ramona was pretty perfect. That sort of elusive air they gave her was nice and I liked the actress. I didn't think I would when I first saw her, but she more or less was the way I always imagined Ramona to be. Tough, smart independent, bit bitchy but still very cool. Pretty enough to justify the infatuation too. I think the problem with the trailers is they mostly showed the pink haired incarnation rather than blue or green.

The text stuff worked really well. Really kept the story going along at a good pace. I'm not sure how someone who hasn't read the comic would react to it, but I felt the pacing was pretty much perfect.


They also started to the Ninja Gaiden showdown a few times, but never did the finish. That was in the comics once or twice (I think that's how he finished the girl, I can't remember). They should've gone all the way with it. It's a classic.

So yeah, overall Scott Pilgrim was a great movie that everyone should see, particularly anyone that lives in Toronto. It was made for us and we should appreciate it. There's more ...

Inception

Going to make this one quick.

I liked the movie, but I feel like I'm still going to end up being a bit of a killjoy here because I'm going to mainly be talking about why I didn't like it that much. So let's first talk about why I liked the movie in a quick and dirty 1-2-3 list.

1) It's nice that Nolan trusts in the intelligence of his audience. The dream scenes got pretty complicated with the different time frames and time going slower in one scene than it is in the next. It was fun to keep track of all that without too many stupid visual clues with close ups of watches and shit.

2) The fight scenes were neat. I liked how the physics of the dreamworlds overlapped, with the van in freefall resulting in no gravity in the hotel and all that stuff. That was pretty unique and tense, although somewhat subverted by the fact that if the guy on the upper layers actually lost the other scenes would just collapse (and you knew it wouldn't end like that).

3) Witty banter, good music and a fairly original premise kept me interested. Little funny moments like the firefight that Eames ended abruptly with a grenade launcher helped piece this together.

So in other words, it was a popcorn flick. A few hours of good honest fun. If you want to see a movie that you can spend a few harmless hours enjoying, then Inception is a good pick.

Here's why it's nothing more than that:

1) Leonardo DiCaprio.

At no point in the movie did I find Cobb's character to be convincing. The story with his wife and kids, his emotional problems, his character as a smart dream spy guy... really everything about the guy just seemed so flat and artificial. I think he was a fine character on paper, but the problem is that Leonardo DiCaprio is a ham actor who had no business playing this kind of part.

The whole movie I was wondering why Nolan hadn't gotten Aaron Eckhart or raised Heath Ledger back from the dead or at least hired some sort of actor instead of a damn aging pretty boy that can read a script in an Acting Voice. It's especially weird since everyone else in the cast put on a fairly strong and convincing performance. Did Nolan think people wouldn't notice how fucking terrible DiCaprio is if he surrounded him with talent perhaps?

2) "You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling" is a nice line, but the movie really did seem to be quite afraid to dream a little bigger.

Everyone has a different way of dreaming. When I dream (and remember it) it is usually a long tragic narrative, but other people just see images of sheep eating grass or something. What more or less everyone agrees upon, however, is that in a dream anything is possible. You can fly, you can breathe underwater, you can shoot lasers out of your eyes and lightning out of your fingers.

In Inception, everyone used guns. Nothing else. There's one instance where that one guy used dream magic to use those 'paradox' stairs to get the drop on a projection, but that's really just about it. You could argue that they can only use the things that the architect provides before they go in and that she isn't supposed to twist the world too much lest they attract the attention of the projections, but she's shown to have the ability to affect dreams on the fly. Why didn't she just manifest a fucking giant fire breathing robot dragon when things started getting ugly? What was stopping her? She could have hidden the thing when Fischer was around.

It feels to me that Nolan just wanted dream gun battles and nothing else and so nothing else was put in.

3)It was predictable.
I feared at the very beginning of the movie that it would end with some bullshit 'it was a dream the ENTIRE TIME and he was just trying to get the last secret from the Japanese guy' ending. I was relieved when it was apparent that that wasn't the case, but everything else was fairly predictable and straightforward. DiCaprio's wife being the first inception target and the entire story with her could really be traced twenty minutes in advanced.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when you combine it with the fact that I never gave a fuck about Cobb or anything related to Cobb thanks to the ham acting of Leo DiCaprio you get certain stretches of the movie that are really fucking boring. If I'd had control in the theater, I would have skipped a bunch of those fucking scenes and just gotten back to the people with funny accents shooting assholes.

And that's about all I've gotta say about that. There's more ...

The Gentlemen Bastard Sequence

Scott Lynch's The Lies of Lamora Locke and Red Seas Under Red Skies are a really good pair of books, which is surprising considering how much they do wrong.

The basic plot is that you have a Thief Priesthood preying on a fantasy city with a whole lot of alchemy and such cramed in. The main characters Locke and his gang, who are a group of con-artists that prey on the rich with elaborate confidence schemes who then get caught up in underworld politics and tangled in all manner of complications.

The characters are well-realized and human. The plot twists and turns in surprising ways and the books are most certainly page turners. I read the second one cover to cover in one sitting. But unfortunately, Lynch suffers from an affliction that many Fantasy authors suffer from. Mainly: the guy loves his fucking world building and refuses to put that shit down.



World building is an exercise that every bit of speculative fiction needs to go through. Readers need some context if they aren't going to be in some form of Earth that they're roughly familiar with. If Earth has been enslaved by alien crabs you need to establish that much before starting the rebellion against the crabs. But the problem of the last decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy is that world building was been placed at the forefront when it's supposed to be in the background.

In my opinion, nothing illustrates this trend better than Lynch. Every three chapters or so, the man would call a halt to his actual story and do some world building. He'll literally leave the real plot on a coathanger somewhere and go on for twenty pages about a random world building detail that he apparently feels is more important than his actual fucking story. It's almost always unnecessary and breaks the immersion like a crying baby in the middle of the Dark Knight.

Some examples of the shit Lynch foists on the reader in the middle of his narrative:

- The cruel aristocratic Chess-with-peasants-as-pieces game of some obscure palace
- How a bunch of hookers rebelled against their pimps
- The rituals of the freaky death goddess cult

There was one part of the second book where Locke and his friend Jean are getting trained to be seamen. The first worldbuilding detail Lynch put into that sequence was something that I liked... a seaman superstition that it was deathly bad luck to go out to sea without a cat aboard the ship, lest you offend the Iono the Lord of the Grasping Waters who apparently is very fond of cats. That was a cool detail that I thought was hilarious at the same time. I mean it's not often you see a Fantasy author taking inspiration from lolcats



But nevertheless, that one good moment was soured somewhat by the fifty fucking pages of fantasy sailor jargon ("Hard to Larsboard!") that followed it. Fuck.

Don't get me wrong, the world that Lynch has put together is pretty cool. It's got a really interesting set of political institutions, a nuanced criminal underworld, a well-realized religious angle, alchemy, clockwork machines, elaborate poisons and even a bit of diplomatic intrigue. Lynch even knows when to hold things back and keep them mysterious, as he does with a certain society of sorcerers for instance.

And fuck, he has cats in pirate ships:



But world building should be context. World building should be background. World building should be subordinate to everything else that's in the fucking story. World building should never be the story itself.

That said, the book has many virtues to make make up for this flaw. Let me go through them quickly so that I'm not just writing a negative review for a pair of books that I actually liked.

#1: Strong characters.

I'm a big fan of trickster protagonists and as the title of the first book suggests, Locke sort of embodies that. Trying to guess when he's lying and when he's not is what keeps the pages turning for me. As you read along and get a feel for his value system and personality it becomes easier to tell (which takes a bit of the joy out of it) but well-told and surprising lies are still in great abundance.

Unfortunately his world building mania does cloud into some of the more minor characters in the story. Like the Pirates (Plural! More than one!) who love Poetry and have long discussions about it. But fortunately that shit is minimized

[Note to Lynch: I get it, by the way. Lucarno is Seneca/Roman poets. The other guys were Sophocles/Greek poets. Thank you for inserting the discussion you had in a first year Classic seminar into your book. That was a very necessary thing for you to do.]

#2: Good planning.

The first two books have all manner of references to a girl that broke Locke's heart and left him, with no details or explanation. One thing that kept me reading so quickly was my curiosity about who the hell she is and why/how she did that and where she is now. In two books, Lynch avoids giving any tangible details. That tells me that he has the next five books in the series tightly planned and I strongly approve of that.

#3: Excellent fight scenes.

This one speaks for itself. Dirty thief fighting is full of quick movements, with dodges and distractions and feints. Often a fight in fantasy will rely on a character's gimmick or feel DnDish. Lynch's fights on the other hand seemed very real, with good accounts of pain, fear, hesitation and rage. I always like an author who pays attention to the physical nature of combat.

#4: Pirate cats.



Seriously. There's more ...

Star Trek Online - "You betrayed your uniform!"

Star Trek Online is the best MMO ever made. But that doesn't mean it's good.

The game has two portions... a Starfleet Command style ship combat system that's fairly sophisticated and pretty fun, along with a ground combat system that is awful. Most of the game takes place in space however so it's good on average. Like Guild Wars, the game uses an instance system and thus I went through the majority of the beta playing by myself and eschewing any and all contact with my fellow human being.

The gameplay of the average MMO is not fun. WoW fights boil down to finding an enemy, attacking them, pressing your hotkeys for special skills and hoping to kill them before they killed you. Party play took that central concept and made it somewhat grander but did not change the fundamentals. Star Trek Online is thus unique in the sense that basic space combat is actually a fairly fun game in its own right.

But unfortunately, that in turn begs a simple question: Who the fuck got all this MMO into my single player game?

So the first thing you do in the game is create a character.


At first I was trying to make a girl that looks like Jadzia Dax, but while playing around with the sliders I noticed that it's perfectly possible for me to make a Starfleet officer that looks like she's maybe 12 or 13 years old. After thinking "I would totally watch that anime" I created the first lolita Starship Captain in order to see how long it took some Star Trek douche to hit on me.

Thus was Atera Kell born and the answer to the hit-on question was five minutes after completing the tutorial. Oh Star Trek fans, you guys are just so predictable.

In any case, the character of Atera Kell in my head was a Wesley-ish Child Prodigy that was given her own ship because really Starfleet's standards are THAT low nowadays. Anyhow, this was funny for a while but by the time I became a Commander I was a bit tired of looking like a 14 year old girl and thus broke out the char creator again and aged her...


I actually really like the way you can change your look at a moment's notice. You can also hide things like body armour and such so that you can make a nice customized Federation uniform as I did above. It lets you really feel like you're progressing as you go along and makes your character feel a bit more consistent. You don a different uniform as you rank up, rather than simply put on whatever you find on Klingon corpses. I actually thought it was pretty cool when I became a Captain and changed my look to this:



Neat.


You can also customize the look of your crewmembers. From left to right there you have Ensign Kayla, Lieut Commander Olox (my Security Chief), me, Chief Engineer Takara and my medical officer Sha'kar. I spent a fair bit of time tweaking their appearances.



I especially like how Olox came out. Imposing Bolians are cool.

Anyhow, so this is pretty solid so far, I'd say. You have a ship... you have a crew... you fly around the galaxy shooting other ships and beaming down to planets to shoot dudes. Why's it so bad?

Reason #1: It's an MMO.



A random crewmate will be selected to read some quest dialogue ("Sir there are some Klingons here, let's kill them). I suppose the reason for this is that you aren't supposed to be chatting with NPCs, you're supposed to be chatting with other players. But that isn't how Star Trek is. In Star Trek social development is directed inside the ship, with only occasional appearances by Admirals and other Captains. In this you're in a fleet battle against 10 Borg Cubes every few moments.

That's not what Star Trek is like! Voyager sucked! Stop ruining the Borg!

I rarely grouped up in the game because that's how Star Trek should be: a single ship going around the galaxy, having its own little adventures. But at no point will you get any genuine personality from your officers. They're literally just upgrades for your ship that you take down on away teams.

I would really prefer a single player game with that sort of interaction. I'd like to be able to hear about how Olox lost his barber father during a Borg attack on the Enterprise or whatnot. I don't really have much interest in having five ship Captains beam down to a shitty planet to scan for microbes.

Which brings me to...

Reason #2: Scanning for Microbes.


Or rocks. Or lava. Or archeological artifacts. Or... whatever. Exploration is the essence of Star Trek and they tried to put it into this. This turned out to be just beaming down to a planet, finding a couple of rocks (usually 5), hitting 'scan' and then leaving. It's really boring and really pointless. Sometimes they'll be some random enemies loitering around the microbes which you have to kill before you scan, which isn't really how Picard did it in my memory.

What would be better is if they did what is done in the shows and used these silly missions to develop some of those bridge characters. When you do the missions with other people it's just a bit of the other dudes like 'this sucks' as everyone runs in every direction to find the shit. I would kill to have them use it as a platform for character development, but that sort of thing is possible only in a single player game.

Reason #3: The story is bad.

It's set thirty years after Nemesis. In true nerdish overcomplexity tradition, let me explain reason #3 in three parts.

#1: Bending over backwards to make references and connections to the original series. Stuff like this:

Ich.

#2: Complete unoriginality.

Almost all the missions are rehashes of old Star Trek episodes. There was a Section 31 mission that involved a long 'test' exercise on the Holodeck, like that Bashir episode of DS9. There was a mission about the Hirogen doing some bullshit that was not far removed from the shit they did to Voyager. There's a mission that's like that episode of DS9 where some Jem'Hadr have a Gateway. It's like they think that if something can't be directly connected with an episode, the fans will revolt. I guess this must be what Star Trek novels are like.

#3: It's stupid.

The game is based around combat. You can't hail a Romulan vessel and do a bit of cowboy diplomacy to get them to cut out their shit. You have to open fire immediately and the way they try to justify your doing that is often just retarded. Without going into the painful details, let's just say that there is no fucking 'neutral' zone anymore if I'm going into Romulan territory and destroying their ships.

And honestly:


Holographic ships? Fuck if you can have those why bother doing anything else ever.

#4: Ground Combat


It's really bad.

It has two issues that I would think any developer would be able to catch. The first issue is that the enemy does not deal enough damage. I didn't put much thought into my away teams. Two Tactical Officers, an Engineer, and a Doctor (I'm also a Doctor). The enemy could never even put a dent in me.


The second issue the worst possible thing you could combined with the first. They have WAY too many hitpoints. It takes FOREVER to kill ANYTHING. So you have a situation where fights last a good 5-10 minutes where you're struggling to whittle an enemy armed with frickin' dart guns down. Awful awful awful.

Your away team is also retarded. They can get stuck on anything. Open doors... chairs... a bit of debris... a knee high rock... you name it, they get stuck. It's fucking terrible and it seemed like I spent almost as much time trying to get my away team from room to room as I did fighting. A simple solution would be to have the idiots teleport to you if they got too far, but simple solutions don't belong in MMOs.

#5: PvP


Someone working at this studio needs to play Team Fortress 2. If they did, they would see that there are certain things that team-based PvP needs in order to succeed.

They are:
- Spawn points/safe rooms that cannot be camped
- Objectives to discourage turtling strategies.
- A setup phase to let people load the map so that you don't have 5 Klingon ships loading while there's only one Federation vessel.
- Autoteaming. There's no point in playing a medic without easy access to the team's health bars.
- Voice commands (i.e. "BEHIND US!") that can be broadcast with a press of a button.

The game has none of these. Space PvP missions thus boil down to Federation ships drifting around in a circle waiting for the Klingons to decloak and attack. If the Klingon ambush is good enough they win and get spawn camped. If the Feddies hold them off, Feddies win. Terrible.

In conclusion:


I had a fair bit of fun with this over the last week or so. It's certainly better than WoW. But it just suffers from the fact that it's an MMO in a universe that really just isn't an MMO universe. I thus will not be giving it any of my coin. There's more ...

2009 - A Year of Unity

So it's a new year and in two weeks it'll be one year of Unity Plaza. One of those two things is probably worth making a post about, but probably not both. So let's just say this is the joint 'one year' post.

Unity Plaza has turned out pretty much the way I intended. It doesn't get updated every couple of weeks infrequently, has attracted not so much in the way of readership but has given me a venue to talk about some of my more obscure tastes without cluttering my writing blog. Some might call these are rather modest goals, but I never have liked the idea of having a popular blog. Blogs are meant to just let a person sound off as an individual without having to worry about people yapping at them. If there were 20 comments on every post, I'd probably turn comments off.

So yes, Unity Plaza is a success and will hopefully continue to be a success in 2010. But since this is a year thing, let's do a review of 2009.

I have no idea why this fucking Haruhi pic is showing up on the front page. It's not supposed to be there. Fuck Blogger.

So it says at the top of the website that this is a place to sound off about books, anime, gaming and whatever else comes to mind. So let's take those things in order.

Books:

I'd say that the best book I read this year was probably...



With powerful writing and a gripping storyline, the Kite Runner was the one book that I didn't just sort of slog through during the year, but rather actually enjoyed and went through with great interest. The post about it is here, so no need to say so much about it, but in terms of Books-I-Read in 2009, this was probably at the top.

The runner up...



Not technically a book, but certainly a story that I shall remember forever more. Reverie is still my desktop wallpaper and I have no intention of removing her.

The worst book I read this year...


I didn't make a post about this. It's about communists in space. I read most of the book thinking it was a tongue-in-cheek parody of communist propaganda and that the author was laughing with me. In the last few chapters it became clear that he actually believed what he wrote. This just made me sad. God damn commies.

Anime:

The best anime I saw this year...

Assuming that I do this next year, Gintama will win next year too. And, so long as it continues, the year after that and the year after that. I tried to make a post about Gintama once upon a time, but I found that words could not adequately express my feelings for this series. It's basically a sci-fi comedy series about a freelancer samurai and his two wacky sidekicks. But those words do not do it justice. What Gintama truly is is the pinnacle of anime and perhaps of human endeavour itself. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it does everything that a work of art is supposed to do without ever taking itself seriously.

Thus do I salute Gintama and sing its praises.

The second best...



Of course. Awesome storytelling + wacky characters + unique setting = one damn good series.

The worst...

Ignoring the series that I watched one episode of and shut off in disgust...


I don't know who thought it was a good idea to do 8 different versions of 1 episode, but that guy needs to be shot in the fucking face. And then following that travesty up with fucking Sighs, which is the biggest load of bullshit in Haruhi's damn universe? Fuck. There are no words to adequately describe how angry I am. Not even that Disappearance movie can placate my anger.

Games:

The best game I played this year...


The game has many virtues, too many to list here. What makes Arkham Asylum the best though is that it brings the player the experience of actually being Batman. One feels everything from Bruce Wayne's silly morality to the confidence of being able to beat the crap out of everyone that looks at you the wrong way as you stride about Arkham in this Metroidvania-style opus. Long story short, I cannot wait for the sequel.

The second best...



Persona 4 is just one of those rocking and unique experiences that leaves you wanting more. Mystery, romance, drama, fantasy and a dash of horror... it's just got everything. With the undub version providing a stellar Japanese cast, it's just an experience that you carry with you after it's done. Hell, I should play the thing again sometime.

The worst...

Puzzles are stupid, especially time puzzles based on rather arbitrary and illogical game mechanics. And just because a story is hard to understand and keep track of doesn't make it smart or deep. Fuck this game, it should go to hell. At least it only cost 2.50, but frankly a bag of chips would've been a worthier investment.

And everything else:

Favourite movie:
District 9

Second favourite:
Sherlock Holmes

Favourite song:
Warsaw Philharmonic Choir - Lapis Philosophorum

Favourite song that people who aren't like me are likely to know:
The Decemberists - the Rake's Song

Favourite Comic:
Bad Machinery by John Allison

Second Favourite:
Penny Arcade

Preliminary Unity Plaza-related goals for the year:

Read:
American Gods
Stardust
1984 (I was reading about it on wikipedia the other day and it's been so long)
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Dracula (I started it but never got through)
The Sandman Graphic Novels
Sherlock Holmes
Look for more good Visual Novels like Planetarian
A good adult fantasy series would be nice

Watch:
Gintama
Monster
Akagi (as soon as I learn Mahjong's rules)

Play:
Team Fortress 2
Jade Empire
Edgeworth's game

Swear at:
Patrick Rothfuss
Hideo Kojima
Andres Franco
Stephen Harper

Stop:
Reading bad webcomics
Watching animes recommended by Fradener

There, done.

Happy twenty ten! There's more ...