Sensation and Suki

Last night's tweets;

To-day everyone skip school for John Hughes.
See that you drink quite enough tequila.
Forget your worries with alcohol fugues.
There is no true monster of the gila.

Just 59 years old, John Hughes died. It seems very strange.

A lot of people were twittering about it yesterday--maybe that's why I completely failed to see Amanda Palmer's tweet where she linked to my Comic-Con post about drawing her. No wonder my web site was getting more hits than usual from my live journal profile. I'm only following 112 people on twitter, and I barely have time to keep up. I don't know how people manage who follow more than 300. Anyway, it was very kind of Ms. Palmer, and if anyone reading who found me through that link would like to see more of my art, my current webcomic is called Venia's Travels. I just updated it last night, and a new chapter goes online every two weeks.

To-day I watched what turned out to finally be the last of the "Endless Eight" Haruhi Suzumiya episodes. The story went through all the same events shown in the previous iterations of the time loop, and I was digging again the sense of motionlessness and futility the repetition created. I won't ruin it for anyone who hasn't yet watched the episodes and intends to at some point, but I rather wish a larger portion of the episode had been devoted to the aftermath. Still, it kind of touched on Haruhi's inadvertent omniscience in an interesting way. "Inadvertent omniscience"--there's a good way of describing the whole appeal of her character, actually.

I also watched the fourth episode of Canaan, which is continuing to be a cut well above the average action anime. The director's instincts for sensual moments are far keener than average--in this latest episode, a POV shot of a sunset through cigarette smoke comes to mind, as does a moment where a jealous, sociopath spills wine on a transparent glass wall she presses against. And these moments aren't arbitrary--they accomplish a lot in communicating character and emotion. The story of a girl whose life is controlled entirely by her abnormal talent for violence is hardly unusual, but there's a genuine life to this narrative. Another great sensual moment involved Canaan's rival swiftly tearing her dress to draw a concealed pistol and confront Canaan about how her reaction had been slowed by her anger and desire for vengeance. Again, well trodden themes, but always worth exploring again when the people writing about them are feeling them.