Moroha　諸刃

Some of you might have seen this video last year as a promotional video for the up-coming star wars mmorpg, Star Wars: the Old Republic by Bioware. I have little to say about the game because I doubt that I will ever in my life play a mmorpg. I find the concept of having to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of playing a game I’ve already bought to be downright insulting. However I have to say that the cinematic trailer that Bioware made for the game is absolutely awesome, and is (to me at least) the most entertaining thing to come out of the Star Wars universe since Genndy Tartakovsky did the Clone Wars cartoon back in 2003 (not the current one, which is quite inferior, imho), and much better than anything in the prequels.

Well, Bioware just released another cinematic trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. After watching it, all I can say is this: can we just have Bioware make a movie set in the Star Wars universe?

I read this rant over at i09 on why all vampire fiction is is completely lame now. I have to agree with pretty much all of it. I find it interesting that the author never even once mentions Twilight, although she does mention sparkly vampires. It’s more of the entire genre (and yes, there is enough of it now that it can be called a genre, in my opinion) of post-Twilight vampire fiction: everyone is beautiful and handsome and all-around awesome, and they are sad about being vampires even though there is not a single detriment to being a vampire anymore.

To review, let’s look at the pros and cons of the traditional vampire (which I define as the most commonly accepted traits of vampires in various pre-Twilight fiction):
Pros:
Never grow old
Live forever
Superhuman strength, speed, etc.

Cons:
Never see the sun or sunlight again
Have to drink the blood of humans in order to survive
Killed by a stake in the heart
Sterility
Slowly become more and more detached from human emotion and the cares of mortals and their world
Having to avoid or kill vampire hunters or other groups that consider your very existence an abomination
Weakness to garlic (this has been steadily relaxed in more recent vampire mythoi, even before Twilight)
Weakness to crosses/holy symbols/faith (also steadily relaxed, although I thought that White Wolf’s World of Darkness dealt with this one well. It depended on the faith of the wielder of the holy symbol vs. the strength of will of the vampire.)

So you see there was a real serious price to pay for immortality, hence all vampires being crippled by some combination of guilt and ennui.

Now lets take the post-Twilight vampire:
Pros:
Never grow old
Live Forever
Superhuman strength, speed, etc.
Always be handsome and youthful
You sparkle!

Cons:
Have to drink the blood of humans in order to survive Not anymore! Now most mythoi have them either be vegetarians (i.e. drink animal blood), vampire researchers have developed an artificial ‘blood substitute’, or vampires run the blood bank.
….

And that’s it. There are really no cons to being a vampire anymore. So as the author of the rant points out, if there are no cons to being a vampire anymore, why are they all so angtsy and mopey! It just becomes poor fiction when characters have no motivation to act the way they do.

You may or may not recall the PC game Stunts back from the early 90′s. It was a fairly basic driving game, but the fun part was it had a track editor that allowed you to make your own tracks that you could share and race on. I remember being stuck in the back of a suburban on long family vacations, playing Stunts on my father’s borrowed-from-work laptop.

According to the Wikipedia article there still is an active community on the internet on Stunts. They make unofficial patches to keep it working on newer OSes, and have hacked the code to enable putting in new car models. There are also 2 free clones of the game currently being produced.

However, there is a much newer game that I am calling the spiritual successor to Stunts. Like Stunts, it is a free racing game with a track editor. However, it is much newer and very awesome. It’s called Trackmania, and since I started playing it a few weeks ago I have spent far too much time on it. There are several versions available, the free one being Trackmania Nations. As far as I can tell, the only thing that you get by purchasing the paid version is customizable cars and paint jobs. Otherwise it seems to have the exact same functionality.

For solo play the game has several dozen tracks for you to try out. Many of them have to be unlocked though: you have to score certain times on previous tracks to unlock subsequent ones. It seems to be a pretty good system, because by forcing you to improve your times on the previous tracks, it prepares you for the more difficult tracks ahead. And I must say, some of them are unbelievably difficult.

There is a large online presence to the game, and there are many servers across the world that you can connect to and race against others. One interesting thing that the developers have chosen is to make collisions nonexistent: essentially every other car on the track is a ghost: you can see it, but cannot interact with it in any way. Of course the track itself is a different story, and collisions there are all too frequent. At first I thought this system was a little strange, but then I saw the wisdom in it: without collisions, it means that it doesn’t matter what your ping time or lag is. Basically the server uploads the track to everyone connected to it, everyone races at (about) the same time, and then the server compares times at the end to declare the rankings. The only thing a fast connection with the server changes is how often your position is updated on everyone else’s screens. Also due to this lack of direct interaction, cheating is extremely rare, as is trash-talking.

Since the game also has a track editor, you can go here and download literally thousands of fan-made tracks or of course make your own.

Finally, here is an example track in a youtube video:

Any geek that grew up in the 80′s or 90′s probably remembers the X-men cartoon that was on during the 90′s. The animation wasn’t all that great, but it was still entertaining for this teenager at the time. The intro here may bring back a few memories:

I just saw something that blew my mind though. In a rare exception to the norm, the X-men cartoon was ported and re-dubbed for a Japanese release. Here is the Japanese intro:

First of all, that heavy guitar J-pop totally reminds me of the theme to Fist of the North Star, which I have blogged about before, even starting with “Shock!” which is all too similar to Fist of the North Star’s “You are shock!”. There are also some weird inconsistencies like Magneto summoning the Brood, Cable in power armor, etc., but I’m not familiar enough with the Marvel universe to comment on them.

I can however, comment on the lyrics for the theme song. According to Wikipedia, the song is ライジング (Rising), by the Japanese band アンビエンス (Ambiance). Here are the lyrics and my attempted translation in parenthesis:

Shock!　嘘で固めたナイフ切り付け (Shock! Cut with the knife hardened by lies)
Shock!　夢を飲み込み街は輝く (Shock! Catch the dream as the city shines)
争いや憎しみで　その身削られてゆく (The conflict and hatred cut away at you)
真夜中襲いくる　人知れぬまま (They attack unseen in the night)
Break Out!
ライムライト　光るざわめき (Commotion in the limelight)
リアルタイム　濡れた幻 (Real-time wet illusion)
Cry for the moon

The translation is quite hard (for me, at least) because as often happens in song lyrics and poetry in general is that many particles (similar to prepositions, they identify the part of speech the word or phrase is) are completely omitted, so I have to guess what the relationship is between the different words. Those last two lines are the hardest, as they don’t make any sense to me, especially the 濡れた幻 (wet illusion). What in the world is that supposed to mean?

Although, that “Cry for the moon” at the end is pretty awesome.

Sometimes you see something on the interblags that is so awesome you have to share it, even though everyone has probably already seen it before you. This is one of those things. Yesterday I discovered the music videos of L. B. Rayne. He’s like some kind of parody/homage to 80′s adventure movies and electronic music. So far he only has two videos that I can find though. The first is Indiana Jones: The Lost Theme Song:

I first heard about L. B. Rayne over at TR though, where they showed his newest video, Skywalking.

One of the things that I enjoy about going back to Japan for a few weeks each summer is that it allows me go to to the bookstore and purchase some new reading material in Japanese. Now my Japanese is decent but not great (I would guess if I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test that I could pass the level 3 easily without studying, but I would need to do a bit of studying to pass the level 2), so I can’t just pick up any book and start reading it. For me reading “real” Japanese is still a fairly laborious affair with a dictionary, and it goes pretty slow.

That’s why I like the light novels. They are very similar to young adult fiction here in the U.S. in that they are (more so in the U.S.) generally marketed towards a younger audience, the books are shorter, and the language is simpler than what you would find in a real ‘literature’ novel or a newspaper article or such. Another nice feature is that many of the more difficult words it does contain also have furigana, which gives the phonetic pronunciation of words using kanji, making it easier to read, or at least much quicker to look it up in a dictionary.

What got me started reading them was when Ryoko started buying and reading the novels for Full Metal Panic!, because she loved the anime so much. I started reading them myself and found that although I read them much slower (It can take me several days or weeks to finish what she can do in 4~5 hours) I was able to pretty much fully comprehend everything with frequent help from a dictionary.

So when we went back to Japan, I decided I would try some other series. The problem is though, there is almost too much to choose from. The light novel section in any bookstore is quite large, and is generally surpassed only by the manga section. (Helpful tip: while most bookstores have taken to shrink-wrapping the manga to keep loiterers from spending hours just reading manga in the bookstore, they don’t do that with the light novels. Yet.) Without knowing what to look for, I just kind of chose some at random. (Although I was able to avoid the ones that are more risque, they’re easy to spot by their cover art.)

The three I picked (this was last year) were all the first book from 3 different series. The first was a vampire story called Black Blood Brothers, the second was a high fantasy series called ダークエルフの口付け (Kiss of the Dark Elf), and the third was called とある魔術の禁書目録（インデックス） (A Certain Magical Index).

Those of you in the know on anime will recognize the first and the third since they have subsequently been produced as anime series, but probably not the second since it doesn’t exist in any other form.

This may actually be unfortunate for Black Blood Brothers, because the consensus I’ve heard about the anime (I haven’t seen the anime myself, only the novels) is that it was done cheaply by a low-quality studio and hence pretty much sucked. I think that’s too bad because from what I’ve read so far (the 1st 2 volumes, and there are many more to go) it has a lot of potential. The author sets up a really interesting premise (read the blurb in the wikipedia page linked above) and goes with it. I think this author’s strong point it the action scenes: they were really exciting and fun to read, and I kept on cursing my slow eyeballs, wishing I could read the Japanese faster.

As for Index, the premise is a little strange. The protagonist is your typical “Ordinary High School Student“, but lives in a world where psychic powers and actual magic seem to exist simultaneously. I’ve heard the anime based off of this series was done pretty well, so I’m looking forward to watching it after I’ve read it.

The Dark Elf series has two protagonists: The title character is a dark elf named Bela (they always use the word ‘dark elf’, it seems that the word ‘drow’ has never made it over into Japanese fantasy vocabulary), and Amadeo, your typical young, eager, and inexperienced human male adventurer. I should mention that this story takes pace in the Sword World official campaign world, similar to how here in the US we have fantasy books that take place in the Forgotten Realms or Dragon Lance world. The author spins a very complicated web of intrigue and conspiracy that involves the two characters. In fact it gets so complex that by the second novel in the series, the author provides a diagram so that you can keep track of the characters and their relations with each other. (Oh how I wish the Wheel of Time had such a study aid. A google search for ["wheel of time" "too many characters"] gives 387,000 hits.)

So these books aren’t exactly Nobel Prize quality literature, but they are good for my level of Japanese. I can read them just fast enough that I’m able to stay interested in the story.

As a speaker of Japanese and English, I find this hilarious. Translation Party is a site that uses the Google automatic translation to hilarious effect. Now the basis is nothing new. Ever since Babelfish came out, people have been using it to translate phrases from one language to another and then back again to hilarious effect. Where this one differs though, is that it repeats the double-translation until the English phrase it gets back is the same as the one it used in the previous iteration. In other words, it translates until it reaches convergence.

For simple phrases it does pretty well. But for more complicated ones it can come up with some really bizarre results. Here’s a tough one I gave it, a couple of lines from the Camelot song in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

“In war we’re tough and able, quite indefatigable, between our quests we sequin vests, and impersonate Clark Gable.”

The result? “Patience in the war, KURAKUGEBURU spangles to impersonate a good idea to explore is difficult.”

The all-caps KURAKUGEBURU is just Clark Gable. For the first Eng->Jap step it does a pretty good job translating the proper noun into its katakana equivalent, but evidently the English dictionary does not have Clark Gable in it, so it just leaves it in all caps and anglicizes the Japanese pronunciation.

Except for my quest to find an internet connection, the first few days here in Imazu were pretty uneventful. Usually we’re too jet-lagged to do much anyway, so it’s fine with us. Yesterday though, we took a trip to Fukui Prefecture with Ryoko’s aunt and uncle.

I’ve blogged a little about Fukui Prefecture before a few years ago, when we went to visit the nuclear power plant located on one of the many peninsulas there. Interestingly enough, that is right next to the city of Obama, which has gained some notoriety due to the name of the U.S. President. We didn’t go to Obama (I’ve been there before though when my father came to meet Ryoko’s parents. There isn’t much to the city, to tell you the truth), but I did manage to take the following picture as we were driving through Tsuruga, a nearby town:

That’s an advertisement for Obama Ramen. Unfortunately my timing was a bit off and the right edge is cut off by a telephone pole.

The first place we went to was the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum. It turns out the only place where dinosaur fossils have been found in Japan are in Fukui Prefecture, and to commemorate it the prefecture has built what I can only call a truly, truly excellent museum. I like to go to natural history museums anywhere I go, and this is one of the best I have ever seen. It’s built inside of a giant metallic sphere, which makes the museum easy to spot from several miles away, and makes for a really impressive ceiling once you get into the main body of the museum.
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Ryoko and I have recently just finished watching an anime series, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s called Seirei no Moribito, which translates as Guardian of the Sacred Spirit. It takes place in a fantasy world that is strikingly similar to Heian-era Japan. This shouldn’t seem too surprising, since most of Western fantasy takes place in a world that is strikingly similar to medieval Europe.

The one thing that I really, really liked about this series is that it has just about the best production values of any anime I’ve ever seen. All the backgrounds are fully drawn, all scenes are fully animated, and they really went the extra mile on the action scenes. The voice acting is top-notch, and the music is excellent as well. There are some digital effects interspersed which are also done very well.

So don’t take my word for it, here’s a link to watch episode 1 online:

You can see all the episodes online here (scroll down towards the bottom), but to really appreciate how beautifully done this anime is, I would recommend downloading the full series via bittorrent.

After a bit of google searching, it turns out the Moribito was done by Production I.G., the same studio that did the also excellent Ghost in the Shell series.

Also, there is another series that I’m starting, but I can’t give it a full-hearted recommendation like I can for Moribito. It’s called GARO, accompanied by Japanese characters of the same pronunciation that read ‘fanged wolf’. It is not an anime per se, but falls smack withing the tokusatsu genre (i.e. Power Rangers and their derivatives). However, it’s not really a kid’s show, at least not in my opinion. I happily watched last years Power Ranger incarnation, Jyuken Sentai Gekiranger, with my daughters, but there is no way I am letting them see GARO. It is simply way too dark for young children.

One thing that interested me in this series is that the action is done on an obviously limited budget, but I think they do pretty well with what they have. The fighting sequences are what I would describe as ‘anime-esque’ even though it is filmed and not animated. So overall this show is not as high of a recommendation because I have a soft spot for tokusastu shows that most people don’t share, but if you are interested here is the first episode:

Watch Garo ep 1 eng subs in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

I was at the Liberal Arts library at UT for the first time in probably 2 years the other day, since I was looking for a book that Porter had recommended to me: The Name of the Wind. The card catalog said there was a copy on the shelf, but when I hunted it down it wasn’t there. I didn’t want to waste the trip (it is a long way from the Chemical Engineering building), so I figured I would pick up something else to read. I found the shelf that had most of Robert Heinlein’s books on them, so I looked for something of his I hadn’t read (I’ve probably only read 5~6 of his books, so there were things to choose from).

I ended up getting 2 books with some of his short stories, and I also got Variable Star: by Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson. I had heard of this a couple of years ago, how Heinlein had 4~5 pages of notes on an idea for a children’s novel that he never go around to writing, and Spider Robinson got permission to write a book based on the notes.

I won’t give a summary or even set up the book because it’s pretty much impossible to go over any part of the plot without majorly spoiling it. There are some other aspects about the book I can discuss, however.

I think overall Spider did a good job of making a decent SF story, and it does have the feel of Heinlein in many ways. I haven’t read much by Spider so I can’t really say how much of it is his influence. What I can say though, is that I think he maybe tried a little to hard to make it ‘Heinlein-y’. For example, all of the following are mentioned in the story: TANSTAAFL and line marriages as found in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, polyamory and free love as found in, well, almost every book of his after 1960, and a society where everyone has come to realize how silly and unproductive organized religion are. The thing is though, absolutely none of these things are particularly important to the story. All of these things could be removed from the story and it wouldn’t effect the plot in the least.

Especially since this was intended by Heinlein as a children’s novel (like Have Spacesuit Will Travel or Citizen of the Galaxy), those aspects I mentioned in the previous paragraph were almost certainly not in the original notes and were instead added by Robinson. I can see some reasons why he might have added them, they certainly are themes that are ever-present in a lot of Heinlein’s work. However since they aren’t necessary to the story or the plot, I think it would have been better without them.

There is a throwaway reference to 9/11, but I think it was done pretty well. Spider also takes a potshot at current U.S. foreign policy, but it doesn’t detract too much from (or add to, in my opinion) the story.

Ignoring these minor complaints though, the story itself is very interesting and well-done. The end was very surprising, and satisfying. It’s hard to ask for much more than that from a fiction book.