House Calls in Big Houses

I started watching Doctor Who one year and nearly two months ago. Last night, I finished the original series run when I watched the final episode of the seventh Doctor serial Survival. At twenty six seasons, it's a remarkably cohesive story. Soap operas are known to run for decades, but those few characters who persist throughout the series are unrecognisable in their older episodes, plots frequently contradict as a writer's familiarity with older episodes isn't typically deemed important and there are even famous examples of characters who disappeared because the writers simply forgot about them. Despite some changes to his character both intentional (personality changes with regeneration) and possibly unintentional (whether or not he can do magic tricks, is a capable martial artist), the Doctor remains a clear thread throughout the series and despite some serials being similar, the show managed to never really repeat itself. It managed to continue with its own distinct identity while successfully incorporating new ideas--the more comedic second Doctor, the action oriented third, the more personable fourth.



Apparently the seventh Doctor's final three serials are referred to as the "Ace trilogy" because they all in some way deal with the personal life of the Doctor's companion Ace. Ghost Light was one of my favourite serials of the whole series, taking place entirely in a large house in the Victorian era, over a hundred years before Ace, as a child, encountered the, to her, haunted place which permanently marked her psyche. The serial successfully ties together themes of evolution, need, and fear of confrontation all while being atmospheric.



Curse of Fenric was somewhat less successful--the third seventh Doctor serial to feature references to Norse mythology, which I liked, it did have a great World War II meets supernatural pulp plot, nice location shots, and genuinely creepy underwater vampires. The foreboding in the Doctor's casual warning to Ace not to go into the water was nice, and it was a funny counterpoint when Ace refused to join her new friends in the water by saying, "Swimming is stupid!"

Her new friends were well cast, sturdy wartime broads.



The serial ended somewhat awkwardly with Ace's pathos card being played a little too far.

The final serial, Survival, featured the Master but was still a fairly smart story about the idea of life necessarily coming at the cost of other lives. In fact, the three serials seem to have an ongoing communism versus capitalism theme--or coexisting peacefully versus survival of the fittest. Ghost Light featuring a ruthless alien intelligence directing the evolution of some species for his own ends, Curse of Fenric waxes romantic about the Russian Revolution, and Survival discusses the idea of a better nature in humans overcoming the primal predator/prey dichotomy. The previous season had featured the anti-Margaret Thatcher story The Happiness Patrol, so it would seem to be a progression to a more overtly leftist ideology. That it's paired with explorations of Ace's character seems to me perhaps a statement about youth damaged by an adult society attached to hierarchies.



It's certainly interesting in light of the more positive perspective on the British establishment in the first and third Doctors' eras--though, again, it's nothing that would create real contradictions in the character of the Doctor in the different eras.

Wooden Amphibian

There's a good forty minute movie inside the two hour and three minute runtime of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Half of it is at the beginning of the movie, the other half is at the end. In between is mostly a frustrating political allegory with the rightwing represented by Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and the left represented by ship's doctor Maturin (Paul Bettany). Their ship, the HMS Surprise, acts as a sort of microcosm. The trouble is, the other plot, with the fantastically filmed action sequences and the effectively suspenseful pursuit of the French privateer Acheron, is so good that getting stuck in the broad political drama is just annoying. Yes, it's so sad Captain Aubrey's pursuit of battle comes at the cost of Doctor Maturin studying animals on the Galapagos Islands, I suppose ruining his chance of being Charles Darwin. Or something. It's like someone telling me to feel guilty about the Doctor on Doctor Who squandering his time on adventures when he could be in a lab somewhere curing cancer.

In real life, I'm a liberal. Not in my action movie fantasy life.

Maybe it would've felt more challenging and therefore interesting when George W. Bush was president. Now things are murkier with an imperfect liberal president so if a movie's going to play things broadly, it'd better be for escapism.



But as I said, the beginning and the ending were great. And despite the uninteresting main character relationship, the movie is quite good at creating a whole crew of characters you start to recognise so you feel it when cannonballs toss a bunch of guys and splinters into the air. I remembered, too, that I'd actually been aboard Aubrey's HMS Surprise--the replica is kept here in San Diego Bay, where I visited it last year.



I understand the French ship Acheron was an American ship in the book--in the movie, it's an American built ship under French control. Have we really not grown up enough yet to have American villains? At the time the story takes place, British ships would regularly take American vessels and impress American sailors into service, which would have been interesting to see. I suppose all that would've complicated our pretty little allegory of modern politics, though.

I Saw a New Duck

Twitter Sonnet #272

Pillows of dreams ignite with spiced black crust.
Hot Tamales burst from simulation.
Digits design an insubstantial bust.
Graceless faces peer from information.
A show's kingdom's fractured as a network.
Cover cg coxcombs airbrush a face.
Blustery madness drizzles glitt'ry murk.
Soft focus by amber potions feign grace.
Sunset felines dominate the fall frame.
An anxious three birds spitball worm ideas.
Styrofoam confines the spandex death game.
Secret lard gods bless the sad tortillas.
Gladiola fingers condemn chain link.
Disposal phlegm silenced the kitchen sink.



There aren't enough baby versions of things that end with "-ling". In the duck mob to-day, I spotted a few smaller, fuzzy headed ones. For some reason, I've never seen the rows of young ducklings, but to-day I did see these teenagers for the first time.

For the first time since November I drew a page of comic to-day. I'm a bit rusty, though it's not like I haven't been drawing in all that time. I have lots of doodles from class I've been meaning to post. My anthropology teacher used to stop his lecture to tell long, rambling stories or give the class his opinion on some topic or other. At one point I decided to see how many of Kakeshya's snakes I could draw in the space of time it took for him to finish one of these tangents.



Looks like I almost finished.

I also have been doing character designs for my new comic, of course. I finished the script last week--it looks like it might be a 22 page one shot, since I think I make my point well enough with that. Though I could see turning it into a two or three part series easily enough. Part of me's just happy to have something to do again while listening to The Howard Stern Show.

More photos I've taken lately;

More Space and Time

I've watched three Doctor Who serials since I last wrote about the show here--Silver Nemesis, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and Battlefield. The best of the three was Battlefield, Silver Nemesis was good, and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy was mostly lame.

Stephen Wyatt, who wrote The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, also wrote Paradise Towers and the two are similar, both involving the Doctor and his companion becoming involved with a small society of people living within a game or show, seemingly a post-modern commentary on the entertainment industry, which makes both similar to Vengeance on Varos and we can say I guess that this is a particular type of Doctor Who serial. One could even go back as far as the third Doctor serial Carnival of Monsters or perhaps the first Doctor's Celestial Toymaker. These sorts of episodes in sixth and seventh Doctor eras don't really work for me, though. There's a smugness about them that feels distinctly unearned, particularly with something like the faux-rapper Ringmaster in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.



Though The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is better than the previous two of the entertainment-commentary type in that it has Ace and the rapport between her and the seventh Doctor could probably make the worst ideas bearable. I also liked the werewolf chick with Siouxsie Sioux makeup.




But as I said, the other two serials were rather good. Silver Nemesis had one of the most unabashedly pulp plots with an almost Indiana Jones-ish tale of the Doctor versus the Cybermen versus the Nazis versus a Lady Peinforte from 17th century England.

Anton Diffring played the lead Nazi, who expressed an interesting perspective on Der Ring des Nibelungen, referring to the Cybermen as the Giants and the Nazis as the Supermen--I guess in this case meant to refer to the gods in the play. Maybe old fashioned translations of Wagner refrained from referring to any god but Jehovah?



I really liked seeing the Brigadier again in Battlefield, as well as Jean Marsh, playing Morgaine pretty much exactly the way she played Bavmorda in Willow. She'd appeared with Nicolas Courtney (who went on to play the Brigadier) in the mostly lost first Doctor serial The Daleks' Master Plan. I'd been watching the remaining episodes of The Invasion, a second Doctor serial, recently--it was the second serial to feature Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, and the contrast between The Invasion and Battlefield not only served to highlight the span of time evident from actor Nicolas Courtney's appearance, but also emphasised how much smaller the late 1980s production values made the show seem. Despite the far superior costumes and makeup in Battlefield, it's hampered by footage recorded entirely on video tape and a typical 80s synthesised score. Even though the existing recordings of The Invasion's episodes are in pretty bad shape, the fact that the episodes were originally filmed in 16mm with a score using actual instruments gives it greater scope.



Still, I loved the alternate universe King Arthur stuff in Battlefield--it felt like the show had been overdue for another medieval episode. I also have to say I liked the cosy ending with the Doctor making dinner at the Brigadier's house. I loved when Ace called the Brigadier "Colonel Blimp"--I'd just been thinking, actually, what a Colonel Blimp he is. As an older man, he's not far off from Roger Livesey's Major General Wynne-Candy.

Echoes of Something Unheard

In our fragile world, filled with questions, doubt, and fear, we have paragons, giants of moral integrity to provide gleaming examples of lives led with virtue and decency. These champions of all that is sacred we call "comedians".



For some reason I haven't been following the whole controversy about Tracy Morgan that's been happening over the past few days after Morgan went into what's been called a "disgusting homophobic rant" at a stand-up gig. When I finally decided to look into it, I found the thing that upset me most is that there's such a crusade going on when there doesn't appear to be any recording or transcript of what Morgan actually said. People are reacting to what one audience member wrote about the stand-up appearance on Facebook.

The fact that Morgan himself has not only apologised but apparently shed tears over what he said doesn't really go towards making believe his rant was sincerely homophobic. Being sorry for hurting people he says he has nothing against doesn't mean he meant to hurt them to begin with. Knowing Morgan's usual shtick, it's easy to imagine how he could have really pissed off a lot of people. Artie Lange said talking to Morgan is like "talking to a guy from 1882". The guy had put bling on his alcohol monitoring ankle bracelet--Morgan's shtick is to personify a parody of black stereotypes. He brags about his large penis, his pimped out lamborghini. The premise of his humour is to take preconceptions and take them to a further extreme. That fits with what I see on the only site I've found that has apparent quotes from his performance, TMZ;

"Gays need to quit being p**sies and not be whining about something as insignificant as bullying."

He actually seems like he's holding back on the usual persona to me--if he were playing off black stereotypes, he'd be on the side of the bullies. Instead he's saying to gay people, "Toughen up." Which of course is lowbrow and silly--that's the point of the joke, that Morgan's persona is so caught up in this testosterone one-upmanship that the solution he sees isn't to stop the bullies but to get the gay kids to be tougher.

What he seems to be saying about homosexuality being a choice rather than something one is born with isn't defensible, but at the same time it's possible to think, in context, "Gay is something that kids learn from the media and programming," might be a statement fitting in with the earlier premise, as would what he said about how he'd react if his son was gay, that the child, "better talk to me like a man and not in a gay voice or I'll pull out a knife and stab that little n**ger to death." He's not actually saying he'd kill his son for being gay, he's saying he'd kill his son for acting in a manner he associates with being gay. Which, no, isn't good, but I can very easily see how it might not have been meant to be "good".

I certainly don't think it warrants a response like this blog entry which calls not only for Morgan to be fired from 30 Rock, but also seems to point to his rant as evidence of a wider conspiracy;

Tracy Morgan's violent tirade unfortunately raises wider questions about the whole Lorne Michaels production machine. Why there has never been an 'out' SNL actor? Is there is some kind of odd sanction of gay bashing within the ranks of that outfit?

I kind of feel like it's the lack of hard data on Morgan's rant that's fuelling the uproar--now it can be whatever people imagine.

Anyway, the fact that homophobia is a real problem in modern society does tend to make jokes about gays less funny to me--I don't think there should be restrictions on who or what people can tell jokes about, but the fact that homosexuality is subject to so much inequitable treatment tends to makes jokes about gays just seem needlessly mean. Howard Stern expressed a similar reasoning behind why he wasn't entirely comfortable with insult comic Lisa Lampanelli's copious use of the word "fag" on his show a couple months ago, yet it was Lampanelli who decided to donate 1,000 dollars to the charity organisation Gay Men's Health Crises for every member of Westboro Baptist Church who protested her show. It's possible Tracy Morgan really is a homophobe, but I'd say it's hazardous to presume it from shtick.

Brittle Glory

Now mark me, how I will undo myself;
I give this heavy weight from off my head
And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,
The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;
With mine own tears I wash away my balm,
With mine own hands I give away my crown,
With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,
With mine own breath release all duty's rites

I've heard acute narcissism is often caused by childhood abuse. After watching a production of Richard II last night, the idea doesn't seem strange to me.

I'd never read the play or seen a production before I watched last night one from 1990 starring Michael Pennington as Richard. I wasn't strongly impressed by the first three acts--it seemed mainly to be manoeuvring of armies, like a lot of the plot business in Macbeth and King Lear only without the character study. Richard's serial bad decisions felt kind of like anti-Plantagenet propaganda and I wondered at Pennington's oddly preening performance. Then, in the deposition scene of Act IV, it suddenly made complete sense as the text became a brilliant portrait of self-destructive narcissism, and made sense of earlier portions of the play, including the King's waffling over how to deal with the dispute between Mowbray and Bolingbroke--first trying to make peace between the two, then allowing them to duel, then stopping the duel at the beginning to exile them both from England. I wondered at the weird indecision at the time, but it makes sense as someone constantly criticising himself, constantly consumed with his own image, more interested in being the great and divine King than in doing the right thing. His decisions have the ironic effect of making him first the image of a bad King, and then no longer a King at all. It's an impressive tangle of self-destruction as his attempts to look great have the opposite effect, thereby prompting him to make further attempts to improve his self-image, again resulting in the opposite effect.

I like Pennington's idea of how to play Richard maybe more than his execution. Sometimes it's very good, sometimes it seems a little too broad for me. I wish I could get my hands on the version with Ian McKellen in the role.



Twitter Sonnet #271

The old sprinkler toy spins for a nuked meal.
Sad stars sweep sensibly through blue columns.
Glass worlds drift at a goblin king's boot heel.
School proms continue for balloon golems.
Squeaky skin does bespeak a pink rubber.
The hunched quarry workers fear returned stones.
Heaven's gaslights use the angels' blubber.
Hell's built on azure cartoon hedgehog bones.
Duke Nukem's locked in a gunless gutter.
Lifeless bowling balls mislead the old Sith.
BioWare clothes always misuse colour.
It seems wardrobe qi is a Jedi myth.
Scorched moustaches remember Mexico.
Shell's Juliet gets gas from Texaco.

The Warmth of a Spider's Heart is Electric

It's amazing how much just a plain flashlight can add to a photo.




Is it just me or does this one look like he has a little, human-like face?




I went to feed the ducks yesterday and some lady was letting her big black dog play in the water and chase them. But the current all female crowd is so bold they merely swam circles en masse around the dog to get at the bread I threw for them.








This butterfly chased me around for a while. I took several pictures and this was the best I got. I feel like I could've gotten a better one.

Life's New Comedies

I just found this yesterday and, oh, how I love it (絶望 = Zetsubou = Despair);



My favourite part is how the Free Hugs guy clearly does not want to give him that second hug.

I don't know how much exposure most people have to them, but Free Hugs is an international campaign, people who stand in crowded places or at events holding signs reading "Free Hugs"--there're always a lot of them at Comic-Con and they always give me douche chills. Maybe I'm a misanthrope, but there's something a bit cloying about people who seek to diminish the importance of individual differences when bestowing affection and putting their faces against a thousand other faces in the process. I feel like they want to turn the world into a pillow.

I am starting to feel bad for Anthony Weiner. Maybe I wouldn't if I weren't starting to get bored with penis jokes. But it sounds to me like the case of a nerd trying to get his rocks off--he's the kind of guy busy most of his life, so doesn't have time to figure out how to be naughty in a hip way. There's the issue of him cheating on his wife, though supposedly she knew about what he was doing and I guess it's possible she'd didn't consider even graphic internet flirting to be the same thing as cheating. I found this bit from a blog entry Alec Baldwin wrote on the subject kind of interesting;

My friend Morgan Rank owned an art gallery in East Hampton several years ago. He moved to Italy, living in the quiet countryside there for nearly a decade. We had lost touch and then, at an art event in New York, someone approached me and said, "Morgan is back." I got a phone number and called him.

Morgan really lived off the grid. No internet. Little telephone usage. When we spoke awhile back, he commented on the digital age he found, in full force, upon his return. "Theses kids with these devices in their hands every minute of the day," he said. "They will never get to know each other the way we did. They will never stare at each other over a candle, jammed into a bottle of Mateus, on a red checkered table cloth in some restaurant."

I guess a lot of people sense the death of a certain aspect of human connectivity. I often cite as a virtue of the internet the ability for people to communicate without the weight of gender, age, race, or sex provoking preconceptions in others, so ideas can be transmitted and processed with less bias. Though of course, anonymity on the internet probably produces more harm than good, and not just due to the Greater Internet Fuckwad theory. Something that I've always thought was ultimately counterproductive is the tendency of some people to have several different alts in different kinds of forums. People who have strained relationships will sometimes attempt to reconnect with people without their knowing, people will use an alternate identity to troll, thereby creating the impression of multiple people disliking someone when in reality it's just one guy with an axe to grind. Usually I think the phenomenon is much worse than I can imagine, other times I think I'm being paranoid. Then something happens like what happened to me one day last week.

Something like fifty people are on my friends list in Second Life, basically because I don't usually turn down friend requests unless someone's being an overt asshole. Some fairly standard looking, bleach blond avatar with large breasts walked into one of the chess clubs I go to a few months ago and after some polite conversation she friended me and I accepted. We played one game of chess, I won, and though she didn't say much about it, I got the impression she didn't take losing very well.

I didn't see her at the chess club very much, but she had a tendency to send me teleports at random times to a Second Life movie theatre. I went a couple times to be friendly, but finally explained to her I don't like watching movies in Second Life--as the creepy hardcore movie fan I am, I need good sound and video quality and I don't like having people around me talking during a movie. The only reason to watch a movie in SL would be for a communal experience and I wasn't up for it.

Even before this, she'd seemed oddly resentful towards me. She would constantly end sentences by addressing me as "Buddy," which I thought maybe meant she'd clicked through my profile web site link and discovered I was a guy in real life and maybe she was one of those people upset by the idea of a guy using a female avatar. But then she changed her named to Joseph, so I supposed that couldn't be it. It didn't really occur to me she (or he) might be an alt of someone who had outstanding issues with me until, on one of the occasions when he was trying to talk me into going to the SL movie theatre he threatened me, saying that if I didn't watch a movie with him, "I'll hurt you worse than I did last time."

I laughed and asked what he was talking about but he wouldn't elaborate. And then I realised how much sense it made--someone with the kind of pent up resentment he was exhibited was very likely working off a more substantial history. I thought about all the people it could be and realised the list was much too long--as some googling will show, there are a lot of people who hate me and yet have enough of an apparent obsession with me to pull this kind of stunt. After a while, he stopped asking me to go to the movie theatre and began asking me to go "camping" with him. The second time he asked and I declined, he finally unfriended me and shot me some full-caps histrionics about how I was AN IGNORANT ASSHOLE saying that he'd asked me TEN TIMES NOW TO GO CAMPING WITH HIM and I each time refused. He even added that I was a horrible chess player and that he could easily beat me.

The fact that he'd only asked me twice to go "camping" in SL (I don't even like camping in real life) led me to realise . . . he thinks I'm an alt of someone else he knows. Something about me, something I must have done or said must have seemed like some incontrovertible tip-off to him. I was catching the tail end of some relationship that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

Gods. It's amazingly funny. It got me wondering how often this happens, and considering how much passion and bad grammar I see on the internet, my suspicion is that this kind of thing is quietly rampant. I thought about the potential for a book or movie, a writer taking it to the furthest extremes--maybe two people begin a relationship, then unknowingly pick it up again with two other people, and then those two people unknowingly fall in with the opposite two people of the original relationship . . . The possibilities are endless.

Not Gigantic

The orange spiders are getting bigger. The largest are about the size of a penny now. I'm looking forward to watching them grow over the summer--there are five I know of who rebuild their webs in the same places every day between five and six in the afternoon and remain in business throughout the night.



I've watched two Doctor Who serials since I last talked about the show here--"Remembrance of the Daleks" and "The Happiness Patrol", both of which I thought were very good. "Remembrance of the Daleks" had some of the best action sequences of the show so far--Jon Pertwee was a good physical actor for fight scenes, but the show never had the kind of effective action editing "Remembrance" has. I loved watching Ace rushing about the school beating Daleks with a baseball bat.

According to the Wikipedia entry, Ace makes a reference to the Pixies' song "Gigantic" in "The Happiness Patrol". If that's the case, I completely missed it. I did hear her reference a song about a woman getting hit by a train as she tried to retrieve a wedding ring on the railway track which sounded familiar to me--I feel like it's a real song that I've heard somewhere, but it's not "Gigantic". Otherwise, I liked the whole anti-Margaret Thatcher bent of "Happiness Patrol" and the Kandy Man turned out to be a surprisingly effectively creepy villain.



Twitter Sonnet #270

The world's filled with invisible children.
Sue Storm slept with the Shadow by mistake.
Ideas swarm like myths of Tippi Hedren.
Snow frosts the ancient continent corn flake.
Younger tourists take strange autographs home.
Green hoods vandalise the super markets.
Essential grain goes to the oatmeal dome.
Sexy genius light bulbs screw their sockets.
Orange fingers chill the already cold yam.
Tuber sprouts seek surface no longer there.
Sudden ennui strikes Yosemite Sam.
Sea shells desert the shotgun heart when bare.
Caramel waves of bucket seats peddle.
Juice galaxy's in a Fruity Pebble.

Cocks and Spells

So behave.

This title card appears at the beginning of 1948's The Woman in White, a Warner Brothers production of a Victorian novel where the only actor with an English accent plays an Italian Count. But I loved the movie--both for being a bit silly and for being genuinely effective at times.



It's a pleasure to look at, creating an environment of huge, shadowy fantasy Victorian houses peopled with beautiful women in gorgeous, slightly strange clothes. Gig Young, as the romantic male lead, isn't actually in the movie very much, which is well, since he's extremely stiff and ineffective. Top billing went to Alexis Smith, and she probably does get most of the screen time, is pretty and effective enough, but the brightest parts of the film are definitely Eleanor Parker and Sydney Greenstreet.



Greenstreet is the impressively sinister, manipulative Count Fosco, who considers himself above murdering people and yet somehow seems the more evil for his complicated machinations spanning years to manipulate people to horrible fates for his own profit and comfort. Parker's really amazing in two roles--the naive heiress, Laura, and her possibly crazy cousin Anne, the woman in white, who's kept hidden away in an asylum by the Count. In my favourite scene, the Count apparently hypnotises Laura into believing she's Anne. It's carried off with such a lovely spookiness.



With breakfast to-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest, which featured a vignette and a story. The vignette, "UNTITLED 35", is another nice description of a beautiful, bizarre sea creature. The story, "FIGUREHEAD", was far more interesting and caused me to ask a lot of questions. The narrator is rather conversational, offering opinions and suggestions to the reader, and I'm not sure it's meant to be a narrator Caitlin agrees with. There's a slight joke to the fact that the narrator takes pains in telling us the villain is not really "evil", usually after he's done something that seems really, well, evil. I'm not really sure why the narrator doesn't want us making up our own minds on the subject.

The story involves this not-evil guy coercing a dryad into having sex with him--the narrator seems to blame this at least partly on how irresistible the dryad is. Which I guess means this story wouldn't work as a movie--it's hard to imagine bark-like skin and tree sap for lube being irresistible, but all right. This "blame the victim" bit seems to speak to the narrator's dodgy character--I couldn't help thinking of the line from Tori Amos' "Me and a Gun", "Yes I wore a slinky red thing, does that mean I should spread?" Which in turn reminded me that Tori Amos appears as a tree in Neil Gaiman's Stardust. And a wood-nymph, who ran afoul of a man who didn't respect boundaries. Actually, now that I think about it, very similar to "FIGUREHEAD", though in Stardust there's nothing about how Amos' hotness was partly to blame for the behaviour of the prince.

Looking over that part of Stardust just now I'm reminded of how the book is so enormously better than the movie. I remember reading Gaiman's blog while the movie was being made and him talking about how director Matthew Vaughn was making changes, making Gaiman understand what works in a book isn't necessarily what works in a movie. Sometimes I think that's true (like when a dryad is supposed to be sexy), but I suspect a much more faithful adaptation would have made an enormously better movie.

Anyway, on the subject of guys thinking with their dicks, I can't believe this Anthony Weiner scandal. I mean, down to his very name--it's like a fairy tale about Dicky Penisworth shocking everyone by taking his cock out at the opera. Why, why, why are guys sending girls pictures of their dicks? When did they start thinking it was a good idea to send girls pictures of their faces, let alone their johnsons? What the fuck? It was great how Benjy from The Howard Stern Show pranked that guy's press conference, though. Not as funny as he usually is, but still, nicely done.

Sedative Mills

A snail sleeping on my window to-day.

It feels like it's been a while since I really talked about an anime series here. It's mainly because anime for past year or two has mostly been terrifically, pathetically bad. It's not a good sign that the only show I've seen that doesn't seem creepy and sexist on a fundamental level is called Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt.

It's this moé phenomenon. I keep thinking about the Hayao Miyazaki quote from the Wikipedia entry and how he seems increasingly right to me;

It's difficult. They immediately become the subjects of lolicon fetishism. In a sense, if we want to depict someone who is affirmative to us, we have no choice but to make them as lovely as possible. But now, there are too many people who shamelessly depict [such heroines] as if they just want [such girls] as pets, and things are escalating more and more.

I keep thinking of how I can explain moé to a western reader with limited experience with recent anime. Well, we can start by saying it's character types--imagine a lousy sitcom and there's the slacker, the ladies' man, the neat freak woman--you know, lousy in that the characters are utterly predictable copies of a million other examples of their type. Now imagine an audience that not only demands these types but is attracted to them in a sexual way and even sort of psychologically addicted to them. I guess you could say it's similar to the bad popular television we've always had, but moé seems to have a particular relationship to cultural gender dynamics.

This morning I watched the first episode of Fractale. The animation's not particularly good, the character designs are generic, but it seems to have an interesting idea about a reality inhabited half by people and half but something called "doppels", robots that look like they're made of random household objects. It seems like there might be an interesting commentary here on otaku culture, actually.

But the first episode also features yet another guileless female lead who innocently undresses in front of the chagrined male lead. This has happened in practically every premiere episode of every new anime I've watched in the past year. This and it seems like five or six other situations seems compulsory now--no matter what the show's about, it has to feature this stuff up front and boy, it's tedious, especially because I know more interesting shows like Natsu no Arashi or Maria Holic didn't last because they didn't cater to this treadmill.

Even Akiyuki Shinbo, who directed both those shows as well as Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and the insightful moé commentary series Bakemonogatari seems to have been forced to devoting himself to this stuff now to make ends meet. I watched the first episode of his new series Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko last night, and while it is cute and features some interesting ideas, it's mostly another soulless journey into a forest of safe female shaped "types". This obviously seems to be what the suits think is the saviour of the anime industry. I suspect it's really what's bringing it down--that may be optimism about human nature on my part, but I think otaku, like so many hardcore fan communities, don't have a clear idea of what they want. And, jeez, enough with the young women who look and act like five year olds.

A Clean Fight

My Doctor Who binging continued last night as I watched all three parts of "Dragonfire". Before I was cramming 'em because I wanted to swallow down all the sixth Doctor episodes without having to savour the taste of them, now I'm binging 'cause I'm enjoying them. "Dragonfire" was the first I really felt invested in in a long time and I think the new companion, Ace, is the best companion since Romana. Ace has a gimmick--she's an explosives expert--but she becomes more than it, unlike previous mere vessels of gimmick companions, with a performance by Sophie Aldred that expresses depth in much the way McCoy's performance betters Colin Baker's.

I didn't actually hate Mel, the companion who preceded Ace. I neither hated her nor liked her--she's introduced in "Terror of the Vervoids" as a person in the Doctor's future--so we never see the Doctor meeting her. As such, she felt like a sort of generic companion--the point of her seemed mostly to demonstrate that "Terror of the Vervoids" takes place in some future date when he's gotten another companion as is his wont. So Mel always seemed like a walking blank to me.

Heh. Mel Blanc.

I think this is also why, in "Dragonfire," where Mel spends a lot of time alone with Ace, Mel actually kind of works. Ace's development seems to cause some kind of feedback loop. I guess, like Chad Everett says in Mulholland Drive, acting is largely reacting.



I might also be binging on Doctor Who so I can finally be caught up with everyone else. I'd like to be able to discuss the new show with other fans at Comic-Con and say things like, "Oh, yes, that was a bit like Jon Pertwee's first season, wasn't it? ha ha ha," and watch as the eyes of the person I'm speaking to glaze over momentarily as they decide whether or not to pretend they know what I'm talking about. I hope I can be enough of a smug prick to finally earn some respect in this town. Every good boy deserves fudge. Don't know what that's a reference to? Then you lose everything!



Twitter Sonnet #269: Combat Edition

The lone half green pill stands centre bottle.
Glowing robots blush a ghostly emerald.
Spinach dreams make turkeys eat their wattle.
The cyborg dog's the metal bone herald.
Missile launchers dream of angel food cake.
Health sweets bid explosion lovers farewell.
Ordinance echoes for fine ideal's sake.
Unloaded guns have no secrets to tell.
Metal bubbles question rust fiend faces.
Lab coats lose status when they're made of wool.
Tall duellists often overstep paces.
Plastique lard breaks Patriot Cookbook rule.
Nitro cheers a lonely outer space flat.
Lasers lack the grace of a baseball bat.

Time and Memory Dovetail

Didn't sleep very well last night--it was my own fault for having a big margarita and then trying to get to sleep an hour and half early to be up in time for a chess tournament in Second Life. I placed my usual ninth, though, for which I thank coffee. I had black coffee for the first time in weeks--trying to cut down on caffeine lately, I finally relented to-day after about a week of perpetual fogginess.

While in the embrace of tequila last night, I watched all three parts of the Doctor Who serial "Delta and the Bannermen". Alcohol oddly makes me feel like a kid again, and watching the show recorded in 1987 I felt like I might have been in my childhood bedroom, in front of that old fashioned, one way bit of electronic entertainment. Of course, I'd never even heard of Doctor Who in 1987, but apparent efforts by producers to make the show more current made "Delta and the Bannermen", as well as the preceding serial "Paradise Towers", feel very much like products of their time, particularly in the synthesised soundtracks and these cheesy but sort of hot all female gangs of "Kangs";



I love the bamboo handle umbrella the Doctor has for apparently only one serial--it's replaced in the next serial by one with a more fragile looking question mark shaped handle. It was too bad--even before the bamboo handle umbrella, I was thinking there was something Chaplin-esque about McCoy's performance. His hat and face also recall Emmett Kelly. It's interesting how well McCoy seems to be succeeding where Colin Baker failed in terms of a somewhat clown-ish Doctor. McCoy seems to have more of a real background in the type of performance while Colin Baker seemed to be doing an amateur's imitation.



The chess tournament to-day was at some sort of art sim. Here're a few pics of my av wandering around the place, wearing an outfit from Vita's Boudoir;