My Big Fat Eva Post

My roommate has promised to watch Neon Genesis: Evangelion because I recommended it to him, and because I think he wants to know exactly why that series destroyed my personal narrative framework and caused weeks of pained emo soulsearching.

Because it did that. I didn't know why, at first, all I knew was that I watched the two movies that end the series and for a long time after felt weirdly hollow. And while the series initially appears to be yet another entry in the now-world-crushingly-huge panopoly of Giant Robot Anime, the big robot fights turn out the merely be the mechanism for moving a larger story forward, which is the death and rebirth of the entire human race.

Spoilers. Right. Eva impresses me first in how horribly flawed every single character is. They are unapologetically fucked up. It gives these people a depth that is difficult for most other shows to even approach, and it's one of the key things that draws you into their world. Their flaws are manifested and explored and exploited, they are the driving force behind many of these character's actions. It's a rarely used but super-effective narrative tool, and it's brilliant.

Second. The bad guys actually win. They get everything they want and more. They end the human race totally in the belief that it will lead to something more glorious, and despite all their efforts our erstwhile heros can do nothing but watch, and sometimes die. It's one of those rare teevee gems that not only doesn't pull it's punches, but kicks you a few extra times while it's got you on your back. So many other series have had huge build-ups to some great world-ending change or enterprise, only to hit the reset button at the last minute and put everyone in a Happy Place so the viewer gets fuzzy warm feelings. Which is bullshit, and dishonest, and makes me angry. Worlds get made and broken and remade, and there had better be fucking consequences. In Eva, plucky heros fight for the future of mankind, and when they lose, humanity is destroyed. That's the way it works.

The english dub is almost better in every way, and I think at least better in a lot of ways, than reading the Japanese subtitles. I don't care how much anime you watch, (and I've watched a whooooole bunch) there is always a slight delay between listening to the characters and processing what they say after you've read it. In some cases, the voice of the character is such an important part of them that trying to find an english voice actor to fill the same role is impossible (see Ergo Proxy, for just one example). In other cases, english is used so extensively in the series that the whole thing might as well be english anyway (see BECK, or Black Lagoon) and the actors do just as well in the roles as the original japanese cast.

I challenge anyone to listen to the english dub and tell me Shinji's screaming, pleading with his father as his Eva is remote-controlled and forced to fight the hijacker angel isn't painful and touching. Listen to Rei after Asuka confronts her in the elevator and yells, "I'll bet you'd even go off an die if Commander Ikari ordered you to!" and Rei responds, "Of course I would," and tell me that isn't the most beautifully understated and sad performance you've ever heard. This experience is superior, in the case of Eva, to living with the processing delay that subtitles introduce.

We must come now to the end of the story, because this post is getting long. The end of the story is so monstrously huge, so epic in scale and execution that I honestly am hesitant to describe it in words. The religious imagery is thick enough that several books have been written about it, some more serious than others. The decisions our characters are forced to make, the doubts that continue to plague them, are all metaphors for how each of us live our own lives. It made me think of my own life on the same scale, the relationships I've made and undone, and how it would all be different if I had just a bit more courage. I'm not even done thinking about it, and it's been a month. I suspect I never will be, just as I told my friends when I had watched the movies, "I don't think I'll ever truly be done watching Eva."

And that is what makes a series great.

Midnight in the Red Garden

Continuing my trend of reviewing anime for myself, and also overly clever blog titles. Red Garden I like for a number of reasons, foremost being that it just doesn't look like any other anime I've ever seen, or at least can remember. It is also set entirely in New York, at a fictional private high school on Roosevelt Island. This makes it an interesting study in how Japanese people percieve us, and what misconceptions they have about what high school life is like over here.

Plot Time: Two families are fighting an ancient blood feud in which they have each placed some sort of curse on the other. One family has a bad habit of developing "complications," which basically turn them into the fast agressive type of zombie after a certain age. In the females, it almost always happens well before they're able to have children, which means that the family is slowly dying. To fight them, the other family recruits young women by first killing them, then reanimating them in a "borrowed" body that develops super-hero style strength and speed.

Okay, that makes it sound a lot weirder than it is. Actually, wait, it is really weird. What keeps the story from being an exercise in absurdity are the characters and the development of the plot. All we're told for the first half of the show is that the four girls chosen to be the main characters, Rose, Rachel, Claire, and Kate, must fight these zombies whenever they are summoned if they want to continue to live, or have a chance of getting their old bodies - their old lives - back. The characters, and the way in which they each change as they develop relationships with each other, are what make this anime special. The writers took the simple yet bold step of introducing us to people that we already know from our own lives, slamming them into an impossibly strange situation, and letting them grow up in a way that is touchingly honest.

It's hard to know what more to say about it. The costumes bear mentioning, if only because they are another aspect of the series that is entirely unique. Everyone dresses with a sort of extravagance or attention to detail that you'd only see from a professional clothing designer, even the "plain" girls and guys. The only thing about the series that got on my nerves was their attempt to add musical-style numbers to the first dozen or so episodes. They are angsty and contemplative and are abandoned when the story starts to demand all of the show's time, which makes them rather superfluous in my opinion. Best to avoid them, unless you really like karoke.

The end of the series is intense, with much action and drama played out. It is incredibly satisfying to see the girls faced with a difficult choice at the end - live immortaly in the bodies they have, or go back to their old ones with no memory of the trials they faced - and actually make the hard decision. Red Garden is like nothing else out there. It is unique and lovingly crafted, and employs some novel ideas about using anime as a storytelling medium. For these reasons, I do recommend it.

Mai How It Makes Me Sad

Anime on my mind a lot, probably for the whole escapist-fantasy aspect. Also, as I have stated before many a time, writing about a series helps me to sort out exactly how I felt about it. This is important, because as with all good television / movies, you'll think and feel just a tiny bit differently about the world at the end of it, if the story touched you in any way.

Therefore, let us move into the profound disappointment that was Mai HiME. Yes, I know it's sort of old and I'm behind the times, but honestly, to keep up with every freaking anime that gets released, you'd have to make it a full time job. I have no desire to do so, and I do not necessarily pay attention to every Magical Girl High School Teen Squad show that comes across the internet.

I was surprised to find this series available for download since it came from 2004, which seats it firmly in the "old but not outdated" category. The animation and character designs are straight-up old school, where nearly every female character regardless of storyline importance has enormous breasts, giant magical mechs duke it out with extensive super-power charge up pose times, and cute doe-eyed kids glomp on everyone. One notable exception is one of the main characters, Kuga Natsuki, whom everyone says is beautiful but actually appears to be normally proportioned. Not that any of this matters to the story, but I do find it a tad annoying that animators seem incapable of drawing normal-looking women, in almost any series.

Story sum-up: Every 300 years or so, 12 Magical High School Teen Girls, or HiME's, are gathered together to duke it out in a cosmic battle so that one of them can emerge as the strongest and save the world from certain doom. You don't know this for the first half of the series, but that's the line. In fact, you spend the first season watching the girls fight monsters called Orphans. Each girl has an Element, which is their personal weapon of magical might, and a Child, basically a semi-mecha animal-like summon creature. The girls fight the monsters using their own monsters and it's all part of a plot that doesn't really matter except as a means to move along the character development, which essentially ends up uniting the girls as a squad who vow to save their school, and possibly the world.

Then, through a series of brilliant plot devices and twists, they are forced to fight each other to the death. And it's not necessarily their own deaths, no, because in order to use their powers at all they must put the person who is most dear to them on the line. If a girl loses, their loved one dies, which ends up fucking with basically everyone on a very raw emotional level. This is the most brilliant part of the series, in my opinion, the idea that to use your powers to save the world you must willingly sacrifice the one person you love most. In some cases, this actually means that they must sacrifice each other, or themselves. In others, it's their first love, sometimes a person that they never really admitted they loved until it was too late for them to hear it. This results in a series of events that is powerful and emotionally devastating, as our lead heroine Mai has everything in this world she cares about methodically torn away from her.

It shows us how true love can so easily be turned into hate. It shows us how obsession and love are quite different, but easy to mistake for one another. It shows us that our time really is short on this earth, and that to make the most of it we must understand our own feelings and make our love known, no matter the risk to ourselves. And it shows us that the greatest love, in the end, is truly that which allows us to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of another.

All of this is brilliant and perfect until, in another series of twists, everything is soft-reset and everyone who had died comes back and the school (which has taken quite a beating with all the magical fighting going on) is rebuilt and the world is saved without any long-term consequences at all. Thus my sadness at a cheap deus ex machina finale that forced a truly heart-wrenching series to say to it's audience, essentially, "Wow that was all super crazy. Hey let's forget about it and go get ice cream because the world is such a happy place!" I can't go into the details without making this post super-long, but suffice it to say, it saddened me. All the growth and pain and love and death Mai lives through goes for naught, all the characters who found themselves and found it in their hearts to give themselves up to death willingly for the sake of mankind are brought back. The series treats itself like a bad dream, and we see no consequences spill from an apocalyptic battle for the fate of the world.

Boo.

Pittsburgh II

So what does all this bleating have to do with, say, Iraq? It matters because the utter dependency on cars we have fostered makes us, in turn, dependent on the fuel that runs the cars. That fuel no longer really comes from America, Mexico's biggest field (Cantarell) is depleting so rapidly that we might as well treat it as empty, constant disruptions in the Middle East and Africa have made production there static or declining, and the remaining nations that export (Russia, China, etc) are seeing such growth in internal demand that they can no longer export nearly what they used to.

So, really, we're glimpsing more than just the tip of the iceberg that I fully expect to sink our current civilisation. There are whole groups of geologists and oil men running through the streets screaming that we need to find a new way of doing things right goddamn now which does not involve using natural gas to turn tar and corn into crappy gasoline substitutes. Their warnings of a dire storm will go unheeded until said storm is flooding the streets and people realise too late that using a bucket to bail yourself out of a river just doesn't work.

Wow, is it just me or is that a really slick metaphor? It probably is just me. Dammit.

Right, Iraq. Raise your hand if you think we'd have even bothered if they didn't have one of the largest remaining untapped oil fields anywhere on the planet. And if you do raise your hand, you're a fucking moron and I don't want your eyeballs polluting my journal anymore. Not since we've had it proven for years now that there were no WMD and no links to Al-Qaida and that the faulty intelligence was almost entirely the result of Dick Cheney's stovepiping questionable reports straight past all the people who knew what they were doing and into the Prez's waiting arms.

We are there because an epic cadre of neoconservatives saw their chance to secure all that oil using the false pretense of spreading democracy. You think Cheney gives one tiny fuck about democracy, where his former company would have to compete with other contractors to provide reconstruction services in that ruined wasteland? There's a reason Halliburton was given a golden wheelbarrow full of our retirement savings, kids, and it ain't because they won a bidding process.

All of this falls back to the way we live our lives. Our food is trucked over thousands of miles of asphalt in plastic packages from mechanised preparation factories that are fed chemically-raised crops, every step of which requires an enormous amount of fossile fuels. Our computers are full of parts made in energy-intensive processes that spill chemicals into the countryside, and they run on electricity that sucks down even more fossile fuels. Most of our housing is arranged such that you literally cannot walk anywhere. Our way of life, even compared to Europeans who suffer no real loss of comfort in comparison to ourselves, is so horrifically wasteful that the only way to sustain it is to burn the collected energy of millions of years of sunlight, absorbed and compacted into plants and animals that have decayed over millenia into oil.

And that source of ancient sunlight is beginning to run dry. Once it is gone, or too expensive to use, we will have to find another way to live, because no amount of "alternative" fuels or energy sources will ever compare to the energy density, portability, and safety of oil. It is not thermodynamically possible.

Welcome to the future. Power up.

Pittsburgh

People expressed quite a bit of surprise at the recent poll ranking Pittsburgh as the country's most liveable city. If Pittsburgh is all you've known, it certainly would seem surprising that other people would move here voluntarily. I myself moved from Colorado Springs, an old west town on the line between the mountains and the desert, full of natural wonders and beauty. People often ask me, "And why did you move here?"

I wondered myself what instinct led me here, until a recent trip to the exurban "asteroid belt" of Atlanta, an old city choked and shriveling inside an ever-growing knot of super-highways and new housing developments. I now know what makes a place liveable. I know why the religious right has grown in numbers and power over the past few decades, why marketing and law are more popular professions than science and engineering. I know why we are spilling our blood in Iraq. I know why we, as a people, feel lost as though our destiny were being taken from us one day at a time.

The answer lies in the way we have built our environment. The answer, in one word, is suburbia. Human beings, like all other animals, seek an environment that is conducive to their way of life. Where we cannot find one that exists, we build it. This is natural. What is unnatural is the way our creation has taken over our lives to the point that there seems to be no other way of life possible. The monster of suburbia has grown from an innocent idea into a juggernaut, riding it's own momentum into a future of endless expansion. But no machine can be run forever. Every system, small or large, simple or complex, breaks down eventually. There is no such thing as endless growth.

As you drive down the roads you see no houses, only the entraces to communities with names like Willow Run and Shady Brook Estates. But these are not real communities. There is nowhere to walk when you're behind these gates and signs, except in an endless loop between houses built exactly like your own. To enter or to leave you must be in a car, which means that these environments were not built for humans, but for cars. The shops and businesses that would normally be a gathering place for humans are only accessable by car, being too far removed from the housing lots and, in general, not even connected by sidewalks. Here and there you see an aborted attempt to place a walkway, only to have it end or run itself literally into nowhere. The concrete is there for decoration, a vestigial remnant of places where walking used to matter. Places like the old neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.

There is nothing worth caring about in suburban settlements like this. Alpharetta, the region just outside Atlanta where I am staying, isn't really a city or even a borough the way that Swissvale or Oakland or Shadyside are. There is no civic center because there is no civic society here, there are only boxes, identical to the boxes in every other suburban area and built only for cars. In fact, the closest thing to a civic center these places have is churches, and given the lack of other real options it is not surprising that people would feel a strong desire to go there. A sense of belonging comes from having a sense of place, and that comes from living in a place worth caring about. And if you can't care about the place you live, then you need something else to believe in. Megachurches fill that gap nicely.

More thoughts later. I need to let this digest.

Emo Proxy

Lots of meditation today on the end of the industrial world. Partly because I decided to watch all of Ergo Proxy again, since episode 15 was finally released with subtitles. Lots of reading about energy sources and environmental devistation, brought on by my roommate and his friend's disdain for the "theory" of global warming. And I get to the end of episode 15 and discover that the reason the world is depicted as a frozen wasteland where only domed cities can sustain life is that humans tried to tap and ended up releasing all the stored methane hydrates.

Pay attention to the people making noise about our current energy crisis and in particular the looming natural gas shortage, and you'll quickly discover that methane hydrates are supposed to save civilisation. If they're used properly. If they're not, and all that methan escapes, it'll be a hundred times worse than if we burned all the coal on earth straight into the sky.

It doesn't help that today was the greyest of days in Pittsburgh. Though I don't know that the bluest of days would have made much of a difference.

Soukou no Strain

is a show about young men and women who pilot robots IN THE FUTURE. It is ostensibly about war, sibling rivalry, and cool mechs blowing each other up, but for the three episodes that I've seen so far there's another, darker theme that runs the course.

Most every mecha anime stereotype is touched on here, and a few more generic ones for good measure. The heroine grows up worshiping her older brother, the greatest Giant Robot Pilot in the Super Space Robot Pilot Corps or whatever it's called. Naturally she vows to someday be as ultra-cool as he is. Brother goes off to fight in the Big War, and sis is left behind to train up and sail through the military academy.

Spoilers follow, in the off chance that anyone but me is reading this. Ya right.

A few mechanical details must be cleared up first: the mechs are called STRAINs, at least, the cool ones are. They're made of glass, you see, and it glows and looks cool when they're all flying around cutting up target drones. I actually kind of like the design, it looks more like something an elf would build than a super-giga-Transformer thingie. In order to pilot these STRAINs, the young whippersnappers use MIMICs which are cloned from their tissues at birth - you lose your MIMIC, you never fly again. At least, not the cool ones.

Our Girl Sara is a top pilot at the academy when next we see her. She has many friends who are all top pilots too, and they all have secret crushes and whatnots. Drama and relationships are hinted at. Training is all well and good, until the Bad Guys open a can of Surprise You've Been Betrayed By Someone Whoop-Ass on the home planet and Sara's friends are the only pilots who can fight back against the sneak attack. So gallantly they go a-running to their STRAINs, suit up, and head out into danger and the first real chance to prove themselves.

THEN THEY ALL FUCKING DIE. No shit. That other theme I mentioned earlier? No amount of pluck and pep and talent will keep you from getting your ass killed on the battlefield in a war. The entire first episode is a set-up where you're introduced to all the sterotypical anime hero characters, they're thrown into an impossible situation and have to fight against overwhelming odds, and they completely fail to save the day. Even Sara, the bestest of her merry band, barely escapes alive, and still she ends up with a Giant Robot Spike Arm right through her MIMIC, ensuring that she'll never ever be the best Giant Robot Pilot like her brother. Things are further complicated when a semi-predictable plot twist reveals that it's Sara's bro (back with a genuine Bad Guy Scar) that betrayed the Corp, killed her friends, destroyed her future, and disgraced her and her family.

That's all just the first episode. In order to stay in the military, Sara changes her name and joins up to pilot GAMBEEs, the slower, uglier, shittier mechs that you don't need a second-brain-in-a-jar to fly. The rest is a heartwarming story about how Sara now has to beat the odds, rise through the ranks, defy expectations and regain her once-secure spot on the top Giant Robot Pilot list. And defeat her brother, the best GRP ever who has the best Giant Robot ever and is also evil.

There, that was fun. A semi-regular Anime Series Review. Maybe I'll write more about it... IN THE FUTURE!

Ramshackle + grey skies

= wow depressing. Or maybe not. I'll call this sensation "slowing," as in the odd instinctive need, based on the circumstances, to do things at a snails pace. The flickering street lamp, barren foliage, and cloud cover all add up to Stay Inside Today, Don't Bother and don't get yourself bothered about anything in particular.

I have a final today, so I'm procrastinating, essentially. I should be studying my eyeballs out, but a disturbingly loud part of me wants to fail this class just to fuck everyone. Not smart, but it's the truth.

Someone told me art history was a much easier major, and I would honestly rather take art classes than language classes. I wonder what I'd have to do to switch...

And no sooner

was the preceeding post written than a handful of the wrong kind of crackers brought me absolutely to my knees. My diet is so regulated that it's pretty easy to tell when something upsets the order, so I can say with relative certainty that Honey Sesame TLC's are a no-go for me. Which is too bad, because they were tasty.

All those little aches and pains, eventually, they add up to something. Body, mind, body, mind, they gotta work together or they don't work at all. You gotta take care of your body. You gotta take care of your mind. You gotta love your body. Most people don't. Most people hate their bodies. You gotta get your mind to love your body. Even if you're fat around the middle, even if things don't work like they're supposed to you have got to love your body. 'Cause it's all you got to hold on to. It's all you got. I'll make a deal with you. I'll love your body if you love mine.

I missed half of work and all of a review for my upcoming Irish final because my body doesn't work right. It's like a dog that's constantly shitting on your couch. From day one since that mutt came in your door it's been leaving a steaming pile there fresh every morning. In all other respects it's a wonderful dog, but the little fucker won't stop shitting no matter what you do. At the end of the day you think to yourself, "well, I guess everything might be allright after all." Then you wake up 8 hours later and guess what?

Nothing's changed.

A Doozy

is what one might call that last post. For now I am feeling better, though an odd mental psyche-out remains. I still get nervous right before I have to leave the house for any sort of trip, especially if I'm going with other people. The odds say that nothing will go wrong, but there is always the chance that something will.

I came across something weird and transcendent this morning while searching for a Dr. Seuss video on that font of raw humanity, YouTube. Though it's hard not to feel like a stalker while you watch it, I reccommed it for the bit that begins at 3:02.

Kelsey's Video Loglette

This Midnight Sun caught me way off guard. Followed by The Lorax? Wow. Either this girl is brilliant and bored, or desperately starved for attention. Or any combination therein. I have a terrible feeling that I'm going to watch them all at some point too, since I'm in between Netflix shipments. And I'll feel guilty for doing it, for the forementioned stalker reasons, and also because no matter what someone seems to be on the internet, the are almost invariably not. Although there is a bit more honesty in posting a video feed of yourself than say, posting anonymously in a forum.

What Do You Want

out of life? I used to think that small moments of beauty, and the prospect of a better future for humanity were worth it.

Mainly, I am disappointed with myself for seeking answers where there are none. Intellectually I know that the universe owes me squat. I am so small that it's not even worth charting. And yet I still feel aggrieved and cheated out of a normal life when it's so completely unnecessary. There is no good goddamned reason that someone's body should work to reject and destroy one of it's own organs, but it happens all the time. It is happening to me, and above all things in this lifetime I would like it to stop.

I get depressed and angry over how completely this disease dominates my life. When I fight it I lose, and when I let it go it punishes me anyway. I can't eat anything, apparently, without blowing up into a huge ball of pain every afternoon. I have a huge mental block about going to class now, because those chairs are so damned uncomfortable and the room is so stuffy and I still can't bring myself to care about the subject. I made a promise that I would finish my degree here at Pitt, but the prospect of learning more about something that never interested me to begin with is depressing.

And I'm mad at myself for getting so depressed and emotional. I want so badly to believe that there's something that I can do, some hope that in the future I'll be able to walk around the world and not have this fear in my belly, but it's hard to fight the feeling that I'm just doomed to a life of pain and marginalization. And I can't even vent my rage properly now because my arms have seized up and the tendons are all inflamed and even my knee still crackles whenever I walk up stairs and I just can't fucking do ANYTHING but sit in my room and watch anime.

This is no way to live. I have to find a way to accept what I am, that it may never change, but still have some hope so that getting up in the morning isn't such an empty exercise.

Fuck.

Not being

a religious man, it pains me to admit that I think there might actually be some super-known force out there. I will not call it supernatural because it might be entirely natural, but it is not currently understood, thus my odd mash-up.

This week I recieved in the mail a used Mac Mini, a 19" LCD widescreen monitor, a new Core 2 Duo processor, and 1 gig of RAM. Arriving from disperate sources, I worried for it's quality and reliability.

It all works together perfectly. It's a wonderful setup and the most powerful desktop addition to our computer room, known alternately as Lanconistan or The Cancer Dome. So I would just like to give props to the Goddess of the Silk Tie, who watches over t3h internets, delivering tracking information and ensuring that the series of tubes is kept clean with horses and poker chips, occasionally blessing the lucky Geek with 1337ness. Give me a few days to come up with a suitable sacrifice.

Today would

appear to be the most perfect sort of fall day that there can be. For posterity, I shall elucidate.

The foliage is now more than 50% converted, with just a few trees bare. There is a low haze around the horizon that fades to a perfect blue above, and there's enough humidity in the air to make it inviting and warm instead of barren and cold. The air is crisp and cool enough to make a sweater a good idea, but the sun still warms your face and shoulders. I even slept in and feel well rested.

There are all sorts of things that could go horribly wrong today, of course, this being a cruel and indifferent universe. I know that the very foundations of the luxuries I enjoy today are unraveling, and that years hence this sort of simple pleasure will seem like a silly waste of time. There is such monsterous injustice in this world that it seems criminal for me to sit here in a climate-controlled bakery and sip a cappuccino and watch the season turn.

Maybe it will mean something later on. For now, at this moment, today is the perfect sort of day.

Allright Captain Alzheimers

Either your brain is turning spongy or you're just unnaturally preoccupied with stupid shit.

These periods of complete brainlessness are starting to get scary, but it's not something that can't be countered with a little concentration and shedding of worldly concerns. Like "OMGS I can't wait to spend my paycheck on shit!" I thought we had agreed that the accumulation of crap was not something to be proud of? And here you go daydreaming about all the crap you're going to accumulate.

It's an easy trap to fall into, especially with the winter approaching and the human need to stock up taking hold of the brain. Your behaviour might even be excused as somewhat natural. But it's also scaring you pretty bad, so let's take a breather and lay off the incessant buying, allright?

On Bombs

I've been trying all morning to figure out why I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the Google Bomb. While I applaud all efforts to alert people to the remarkable rash of scandal and ne'er-do-well-ness that has gripped the GOP for the last six years, this feels too much like gaming the system. A lot of people make a living on the internets because it's an open, democratic system that shows no inherent bias, which makes it one of the last places a person can go if they're seeking honest information (although this can be a lot harder than it sounds sometimes). We all use search engines, and to a degree we trust that the results we get from them have some merit, that they're ranked by frequency of use, as with Google, or by actual humans who have analyzed the source material, like LookSmart.

This "bombing campaign" seeks to skew the results if anyone should seek information on a particular set of Republican candidates and direct the searcher to one particular article alleging corruption on the part of the candidate. It certainly doesn't prevent you from reading other articles, nor does it necessarily make it more difficult to find other sources of information. What it does is manipulate a system that is ostensibly based on merit in order to steer people towards a set of articles that have been selected by a group of liberal bloggers as being more important than others. It removes one of the reasons that people use and trust Google, that it's results are based on the number of people that have individually linked to an article based on their own conclusions, rather than what one group of people has decided to focus on.

I am not opposed to individual bloggers linking to these articles. That certainly happens enough on it's own, and usually with a good reason. But any campaign to force a result that you want to arise from a system that is normally a meritocracy feels too much like playing with the Dark Side. Replace the word "system" in the preceeding sentence with "election" and you'll get what I mean.

Plus, I'm just not down with the whole bombing metaphor. If we weren't as a nation responsible for the continued mass bombing of civilians in Iraq it might be more fun. As it stands, I just don't feel that Democrats should adopt martial imagery in order to sell an idea or a platform. We are ostensibly the anti-aggressive war party, after all.

If you're unfamiliar

with Pittsburgh, well, it rains here. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes as late as October 17th, which would be today. A number of people on my buddy list have away messages bemoaning this rain, but I keep trying to tell myself that I should be grateful to live in a place where it still does rain. Apparently, drought is going to start killing people in places other than Africa.

Being upbeat about anything has been difficult lately, mostly because it's becoming clearer every day that the world has actually passed the maximum limit of oil production (85 million barrels every day. Visualise that in your mind, then try to understand that we used every drop of it.) I'm almost finished with The Fourth Turning, which was written in 1997 and has made some worryingly accurate predictions about where we are in 2006. Their thesis can be summarised thusly: history repeats itself. That's a bit oversimplified, but based on my own adventures as a history major it's true that certain patterns emerge if you're willing to see them. The authors explore history through the lense of a repeating four-part cycle which lasts between 80-100 years, or a long human life. Each part of this cycle they call a turning, and each one has been repeated in the same order throughout western history with the sole exception of the Civil War, which condensed two turnings into one incredibly violent period.

I find this compelling for two reasons. One, I've always believed that people are more a product of their circumstances than their gifts. And two, we are most definitely reaching the apex of a crisis. These November elections might crystalize the mood of the American public, most particularly if there are widespread allegations of vote tampering and fraud (which is almost a given at this point). Add to the political troubles the above fact (FACT, kids, not theory) that we have passed "peak oil" and are well on our way to cooking half the species right off the planet, and you've got a brew that will test the moxie of the generation just beginning to take power - we 13's, Gen X, the New Lost.

Oh, throw in an increasingly crazy Fundamentalist minority grabbing for power. And North Korea's apparent nuclear test. Hmmm, am I missing anything?

Well, here's a little good news. Casey has a 10-point lead over Santorum, and Rendell leads Swann by over 17. That cheers me a bit.

Those Pig

Fuckers at Target. They want digital downloads to cost as much as a physical copy of a movie, except that -

A. The logistical distribution line for DVDs, from the factory that produces and packages them to the warehouses where they're stored to the stores they're sold at, and all the trucking/hauling in between, adds a lot of overhead to the cost of distribution. This is why bulk wholesalers are cheaper than small corner stores.

B. The logistical distribution line for digital downloads consists of wire and server space, which uses considerably less energy and is far far far faster than a fleet of diesel trucks.

C. They're threatening to remove shelf space from DVDs and give it to... what? More bathmats and tacky table lamps? Who cares?

D. If legal digital downloads replace DVDs on a 1:1 basis, the savings in distribution overhead will more than make up for the loss in physical sales numbers.

E. What they're really afraid of is people downloading movies for free, which will happen no matter what they do with the physical or digital versions. If retailers stop selling DVDs then that will merely push the studios to embrace another avenue of distribution, like say, digital downloads.

Just had to get that bit of anger out today. School is frustrating me and there's clearly some rantage building up that needs a release.

Sticky Crisis 2040

Having a hard time sending the last disc of Bubblegum Crisis 2040 back to Netflix. Watching the last four episodes makes me want to turn off all the internets and televisions and radios and just sit and stare and think, which might be why I want to keep it around.

See, I knew just starting to write about it would help work this out. There are plenty of scifi stories out there about the line between man and machine and what happens when people cross it IN THE FUTURE. I think this one stands out because you care about what happens to the characters in the end, thanks to good development throughout the series. There were many times when I thought, "well, that's it. they're hosed now." And it kinda made me sad to think that The Good Guys might not actually win this time.

But of course they do. And the conclusion to the series is about as perfect an end as I've ever seen. It's touching. It's well paced and lit with the proper musical background. It leaves you feeling like the job was done, but with enough questions left unanswered that you continue to ponder after the credits roll. Just what is the nature of man's relationship with it's machines? What are the qualities that define humanity? And could God be eternal and still know what it means to die?

It did leave me wishing I could redo the entire soundtrack. I found the main character's singing gigs more annoying than anything, if only because they lacked the polish of say, BECK or Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu ep. 12 (which might be expecting a bit much, since this single episode reset the bar for animation quality in a televised anime). And hearing all the same voices on the english dub that were in Nadesico, particularly having the same seiyuu for both Maki and Akito, was somewhat jarring, although Linna and Nene's were very well done.

Nigel's was just awful.

Oh well. Now I've clarified all that for myself. Time to rip!

One of those dreams

I had this morning between my alarm going off and me getting up was extraordinarily detailed. It was my family's upcoming trip to Ireland, and it's only the second time I've been able to recall distinct physical sensations that accompanied events in the dream. The airplane accelerating and decelerating, in particular, and at one point I leapt for a white metal walkway perched above a blue harbour, my hand slipped, and I felt myself fall into the water and then rise to float on top of it.

But reading my daily dose of peak oil news reminded me of another dream I'd had before that one, where the population of the world was crashing and it led to anarchy and massive death all around. It was scary stuff. Too much is building at this point in history to allow us to keep living the way we do. I fear we will induce a self-genocide through ignorance, greed, fear, corruption, and stupidity. But mostly, I fear that it is coming much sooner than anticipated.

Every time

I hear the song "The Sea" by Morcheeba, I can't help but feel that's where I should be right now. It never fails to evoke still-oddly-clear memories of the Baltimore dockside, Charleston S.C. and the Yorktown memorial, San Diego and the Midway, driving over the bay in New Orleans. At times like these I mourn my lost life. Then, when one of my former classmates puts up an away message that says they're being sent to Panama at the end of the summer, and I think about Panama for a few minutes, I don't feel so bad.

Actually, I do. That was a lie. Despite everything I've learned about our great military machine and our rotting country and our unrepentant succling of oil from corrupt muslim kingdoms, I still miss the Navy and the people I would have served with. I'm playing EVE Online, which feels okay, I get to say things like "target is twenty cilcks out" and "i'm taking fire! shields down fourty percent!" There's comraderie, I get to accomplish missions with friends and break the ships and bases of bad guys.

But I don't get to live on the ocean.