Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Squee!

I have my first follower! A very kind Moron, of the AoSHq variety, has taken pity upon my humble postings. I hope this means that I'll post more, the whole "someone out there's listening thing" you know.

I wonder if this is the time to admit that I mostly use the blog as a way to organize my reading material?

17 comments:

  1. Got any favorite anime/manga you are going to write about?

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  2. Glah! Two lost reply posts. Let's try again.

    I am thrilled and honored to have you comment here Ymarsakar. What non-political reading/watching I post about is generally found at my other blog Princess Mommykitten. I have to admit there isn't much there since I post _very_ erratically.

    I do like anime and manga quite a bit and have ever since I saw Robotech as an adolescent. My favorite style is shonen as I don't care for shoujo eyes, and Shonen Jump seems to create most of the content for Cartoon Network and other English language outlets.

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  3. I'm familiar with Robotech.

    The anime shows on CN were licensed from previous seasons. What about watching current anime seasons on Japanese tv?

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  4. I really prefer dubbed shows as I often listen to the dialog while working on needlework. If I watch a show that is sub-titled I can only work on spinning and eventually I have enough yarn and need to do something with it.

    I've been watching a lot on Hulu lately, as well as Netflix instant view and disks. I realize that by the time shows are available in these venues they're hardly cutting edge, but since I'm not exactly cutting edge either I can live with that.

    I've seen you reccommend Crossgame before. Do you have any other reccommendations?

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  5. Cross Game is what I consider a drama classic, so to speak. I wouldn't recommend it to people who only like action.

    However, in your case, if you have only watched anime and associate it with the shonen genre, but have not experienced the various different genre in anime, then I would say Cross Game is a good anime to see what is possible in anime for a dramatic setting and in a sports setting.

    If you like quality dubs, then I recommend Sayuki. http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=965

    And Baccano.

    http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=7492

    In Baccano, the English actors reproduced correct vintage accents and what not. Interesting to listen to. It is worth mentioning because it merges seamlessly with the setting of the story.

    Sayuki has English VAs that know how to be funny and have a good team chemistry. Unfortunately, the English actors are not with the entire series, only the first season from what I saw. The company signed on different English VAs after the first season. American companies still don't understand the concept of character voice copyrights.

    Geneon and Bang Zoom are some of the worst offenders in this respect. With FunAnimation being the better business model to emulate.

    For other anime recommendations, read the anime section on my blog.

    http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/category/anime/

    I usually only write about anime I rate as 5/5 stars. Meaning 100% epics.

    One of the more interesting aspects about anime is that it caters to all age groups. From child, to teenager, to young adult, to adult, to middle age, to the elderly. Of course, shonen demographics make the most money, given the numbers involved.

    http://www.anime-planet.com/users/Ymarsakar/anime

    Has a list of my ratings.

    Btw, Polly, copying and pasting was the right thing to do. Always better than people finding out that they have been misspelling it for awhile and I just didn't happen to mention it to them ; )

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  6. Lol about the copy/paste. I wouldn't have mentioned it except that the auto-link made it pretty obvious.

    I've watched and enjoyed Sayuki but am unfamiliar with Baccano. The idea of correct accents is interesting.

    I actually like a nice blend of action and drama since it's very hard to follow a big action sequence with only sound to go by. Of course, as I list Inuyasha, Rerouni Kenshin,and One Piece, as examples of what I've watched there seems to be a pretty heavy action componant. Right now my oldest daughter is watching/reading a wide variety on-line but I tend to do everything erraticaly(sp?) and am currently reading regular novels and watching the entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.

    Since I saw them marked "want to watch" at animeplanet, I enjoyed Darker Than Black, Devil May Cry, and D. Grayman all quite a bit. I don't think I'd let my kids watch the first two yet, but then again I've been letting the seven year-old watch Bleach with her siblings so it may not be too long.

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  7. All the shonen genre animes have a lot of action sequences. Although sometimes the anime draws things out way too long just to take up screen time. (The manga original source goes pretty fast with the action sequences, since they don't print out a lot of paper)

    Baccano is rated around M, 17 or older, due to the accurate portrayal of violence.

    If you like Buffy, what about Firefly, also a creation of Joss Wheldon?

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  8. How come you haven't mentioned Naruto along with Bleach, even though they both share the same general themes?

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  9. Firefly was good as well. Two of my favorite current shows are Castle and Chuck due, at least in part, to the actors from Firefly.

    I read a web-comic called WereGeek, I think there's a reason.

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  10. I've only seen portions of Naruto Shippuden, but have generally enjoyed what I have seen, and the original as well.

    The two abortive attempts at my original reply covered some of this that got left out of the surviving post. Given that the other part of those was embarassing fangirl gushing that _you_ had posted a comment I'm not all sad about their disappearance.

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  11. Oh I see. Rest assured, I appreciate the sentiment, both said and unsaid.

    However, I'm unaware of why you would find it a special occasion for me to write a comment to you. Was there something in the past that I had written which you found particularly interesting?

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  12. I have seen your comments on several blogs I read and was impressed with the way you express a fairly amazing range and depth of information.

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  13. I'm glad you found my words to be of some worthwhile use.

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  14. Even though Naruto is marketed for the shonen age demographic, I often caught segments of more mature themes interspersed amongst the various story arcs.

    Shikamaru, the ninja that uses shadows, once had his first mission where he was the captain of the unit. In Japan, there's an expectation that the young should start taking responsibility for their actions during high school, not after college like it is in some American parts. Naruto's ninja world exemplifies this little meta-cultural trend.

    Then there was the Pain Arc at the end, which is pretty accurate if you apply it to geo-politics or historical wars.

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  15. I find that as a parent I am much more into the idea of adolescents and teen shouldering responsibility than I was in my own teen years.

    I don't believe I'm familiar with the Pain Arc, but I don't always differentiate(sp?) between sections of a series.

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  16. In America, schools have been trending towards a sort of child garden rather than preparing students to be junior members of adult hierarchies, work places, social circles.

    So when you tell kids to be responsible, there's a conflict of interests. Should they be responsible to the school's social circle and fashion expectations of their peers, decided by who the most popular girl/guy is and the people they hang around with? Or should they be responsible to the adults, the school teachers or parents?

    You see, in a system that trains the children to be junior members of the adult hierarchy, that question never pops up. There is no "separate" teenager hierarchy vs the "adult hierarchy". It is one and the same. Teachers at the top, student council president near the middle, classroom representatives at the lower end, and the student that isn't in any clubs, dead last.

    It's all very well structured in such a fashion that everybody knows their place. It used to be such in America. Now no longer.

    Also, I always wondered why high school students weren't expected to pick up their own trash. Instead you have janitors hired on, instead of a school classroom being expected to rotate the work by themselves. Instead of one classroom that stays together all the time, now you have rotating classrooms where the students are broken apart based upon subject matter and dispersed amongst the various teachers, who stay in one place. More convenient for the teachers not to have to go anywhere, but it is also destructive of good social order amongst the students. There is no classroom solidarity. No sense of identity to pull people together so they can work together for a common goal. Instead, you have different cliques that form on their own. And the most powerful clique, then becomes the dominant faction in a school and everybody either follows the rules they set or they ignore them and separate themselves into their own little circle of friends.

    The issue is, if you put students at the top of a hierarchy, they will often make crazy as hell rules for people to follow. What tends to happen is called "chaos" or better known as peer pressure. Retarded actions result.

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  17. [Broke it up because blogger doesn't like too long stuff. I have a Copy memory program.]

    This can be found even in well structured schools that have discipline. But the trend in America has been to help push this chaotic situation along so that it blossoms. Part of the reason why teachers can't control students now a days is because that's the whole point that the teacher unions were working towards. For teachers to control students means that teachers have authority over students. But the teacher unions don't want teachers to have any authority, nor do they give a damn about the students either. So the best way, they thought, to make a favorable status quo was to strip responsibility from both teachers and students.

    The successful model, you can see in many average high schools in the inner cities.

    While schools have been used often as testing builds for social activism and experimentation, you can also see the same thing happening in greater America. Politically, economically, and election wise, you can see the results of people who deliberately introduced chaos causing ingredients into the system by breaking up the fail safes and balance equalizers that made the system work.

    Children can be easily made dysfunctional by causing havoc in their inexperienced social systems. Adults take a bit more work, but as witnessed recently, not that much more. Adult society can be made just as crazy, if not more so, via similar methods.

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