Did you know that semen contains a lot of mucus?  I guess in retrospect it’s obvious, but that makes me view certain emissions of my body with even more aversion than previous knowledge inspired.

I mean, really – ew.

The thing I hate most about being sick is the way that, when I am afflicted by a cold or similar illness, the mucus coats my throat.  it chokes me, makes it hard for me to feel like i can swallow, and when it drips down into my stomach it makes me nauseous and kills my appetite.  If only there were a way to treat that part of the cold – Mucinex™ helps, but towards the end of any upper respiratory infection i have the issue isn’t usually congestion for me, but mucus production at the back of my throat, and one thing it doesn’t seem to treat is that particular problem.

Curse you, phlegm!

Here’s something to consider, brought on by my class’s discussion of The Tempest – and it’s really a question our professor asked us, and which we’ll be discussing on Friday in class:

Is it possible for a flawed spokesperson to speak truth?

To just briefly go into what i hope ends up being the best discussion we’ve had all semester, my personal response to that is that, unequivocally, yes, it is possible for a flawed spokesperson to be representing the truth.  To be flawed is more than just to be an interesting character: it’s to be an accurate reflection of a human being, as opposed to a stereotyped larger-than-life hero.  The fact that Prospero is flawed, I think, makes him an even better spokesperson for the concepts of forgiveness and mercy than if he were an angelic man who has forgiven everyone for all the wrongs committed against him. The fact that it’s a struggle – or that we can at least envision it being a struggle – for him to decide that this is the truth, makes the view he espoused more real to me, more plausible, for lack of any better words coming to mind.

Something else to think of: name one person who, as a spokesperson for some truth, is not flawed in some way.  Can you do it?  I can’t.

And, as probably expected, the first (and to date only) comment on my blog is a spam comment.  The internet was so much better before spammers learned how to spam blogs.

In keeping with the general theme of the day here on American weblogs… Here we are two days past the ides of April (bet you didn’t know that April had ides, did you?), and the thought of every man or woman in the United States of America who is past their legal majority and has received income of some sort in the past year is directed towards one end: ensuring that the government gives you back as much of your paycheck as you can possibly force it to. I’m coming out more or less on top, having secured the release of every scrap of money the federal and California state governments have taken from me, less medicare, medicaid, and a couple of other things that I thikn law requires me to pay into and that are nonrefundable.

Oregon’s a different story. Those sly bastards don’t take a chunk out of every one of my paychecks the way that California and the feds do, and so for the first time in my modest history of filing, I find myself paying taxes. It’s absurd! I’m a poor college student, working part-time to pay for my food and other assorted pleasures (though mostly the food), and here Oregon is, taking food from my mouth, requiring the payment of…twelve whole dollars.

The good news is, between this and the e-filing fee I paid in California, my refund from California will just about cover that. Go me!

…to bring you the tale of a man charged with eating his ballot. The question that I immediately want to ask is: what sort of sentence is he going to recieve? A fine? and if so is it going to be more than just enough to cover the price of the destroyed ballot? I think anything more is excessive, and I think that taking him to court for that is going to cost more than could ever make it worth the while of the courts.

In other news, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is reminded why it’s a good idea to make sure all your sub-corporations conform to your good image, and happy mutants everywhere flip their shit. I’m not saying one or the other is wrong or right – I don’t know enough about the issue of net neutrality to have a very solidly formed opinion one way or the other – but something about the way Mr. Doctorow responds to things like this causes a knee-jerk reaction in me.

It would be cool if BoingBoing let you filter their blog by author.

…

And my god i want to attend this barbecue.

I once promised myself that I’d try to never get my general nerdiness on this blog and my love for various Anime mixed together. After all, there are plenty of Anime fans out there who I might have once been able to entice to read my blog (and i believe a small number did in fact read my blog, years ago and several iterations back) who would balk at the thought of reading posts that weren’t about the latest episodes of their favorite anime (ZOMG!). Likewise, there is a huge group of people out there with a love of sci-fi and fantasy who have no interest in Anime, or think that it is (to paraphrase a friend) “weeaboo bullshit.” And that, too, is too bad. It’s like denouncing all of movies just because a couple of them fall into a genre which you happen not to like.

But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about Shingu.

Shingu is one of those charming little titles that doesn’t fit neatly into one’s preconceptions about anime genres. Loosely it could be called a sci-fi series, a slice-of-life series, or even just a mecha series. It has elements of all of these, but out of the three I think that it falls most strongly into the slice-of-life series. It just happens to be a slice-of-life that takes place in a city where all of the native residents are hiding ancient alien technology, where diplomats from other world roam freely on the “last paradise” in the galaxy, and where the political maneuvering of the Galactic Federation, the Cosmos Alliance, and various unaffiliated planets has an almost daily impact on life. This is one of the three series by director Tatsuo Sato that I’ve seen, the other two being Martian Successor Nadesico and Stellvia of the Heavens. I think that it’s interesting to chart the similarities between the series, and especially between Stellvia and Shingu. Both series chart a story about a group of youth who have been entrusted with extraordinary power and responsibility, and chronicles their respective struggles both with this burden and with attempting to balance this burden with something like a real school life. I’m not going to go too deep into this part of the series, though, because Jeff Lawson did a great job of comparing the two – he’s one of the few anime bloggers that I’ve kept up with over the past chunk of time, and one of the only ones who likes looking at overall thematic elements as opposed to doing a very basic episode-by-episode trawl. If you want to learn about how it’s probably possible to accuse Sato of ripping off himself, i recommend you click through here.

Another point that Jeff brought up in his comparison is one that I want to talk about, however:

Also, both shows are willing to leave the unknown to the unknown. As much of Shingu’s story that is explained, there remains a fair amount that’s not. The same could be said for Stellvia. In both shows, the viewer is treated more as a direct observer – someone as involved in events as they unfold as the characters themselves – evidenced by, for example, Shingu’s repeated breaking of the fourth wall and Stellvia’s reluctance to explain any more about its world than what’s necessary to understand what’s going on.

This is an interesting point that I’ve seen brought up again and again with relation to Anime. Some people have made claims over the years that this style has to do more with the cultural conventions of storytelling in Japan, which is much more focused on the “what” than the “how” or the “why.” But I think that’s bull, to put it lightly. There are plenty of Anime where the infodump is central to the story: see, perhaps most prominently, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex with its episode-long back-story and concept dumps, to say nothing of the regular dense conversation between characters explaining concepts about the world. To a lesser degree Aim for the Top, known as Gunbuster here in America, did the same thing with its science explanation segments. On the opposite side of the coin, there are plenty of American Sci-Fi shows that never bothered to explain their technology until pressed for it by the fans (see Star-Trek’s pseudo-science gobbledygook), and a large section of the English-speaking Sci-Fi book market consists less of “Hard” Sci-Fi and more of intriguing examinations of character in the context of a more technologically progressed society than outs. I heartily approve of this kind of Sci-Fi, by the way, even if I don’t ready nearly enough of it.

Shingu is this sort of Sci-Fi, as my quoting of Jeff’s post probably makes clear. It’s a fairly slow-paced series which focuses less on the enormous battles between alien armadas and more on the way in which this interferes with the everyday life of the characters. When the main character is shown the history of the Galactic Federation through a night-long mental dump, we don’t see the info-dump except for small pieces here and there in the story. Instead we are shown the day after, when he is exhausted and falling asleep in school.  some people might complain that this – and the wealth of other scenes like it in the series – are boring, and detract from the overall seriousness of the situations these characters face.  After all, Hajime just had the entire history of galactic civilization revealed to him, and all he can do is fall asleep?  well, yes.  But then, Hajime is a middle-schooler, probably unused to being chased around or forced to stay up every night.  I respect that all he does is sleep, because that feels to me to be a much more natural reaction to something like that then freaking out, or descending into a depression, or any of the other ways in which they might have had him respond.

Complaints might also be made about the lack of any concrete detail about much of the back-story and world in Shingu.  I think that this actually ends up being a strength of the series.  the series doesn’t let the setting take precedence to the characters, and instead only tells you exactly what you need to know to understand the plot.  The rest is left to your imagination.  And I like that.  The fact is, I love reading stories where the workings of alien civilizations are explained in detail.  But to include that sort of complicated examination of some imaginary space club would have ruined Shingu.  It’s not a story about the aliens, though the aliens are in it – and though the aliens are important to the plot, they’re not vital.  This could have just have easily been a story without aliens.  The fact that it isn’t, and that the sci-fi parts of the story never feel particularly tacked-on, just go to show you how a series can take place in the future and not have its story and characters completely subsumed by the setting.

I’m not saying that Shingu is perfect.  But I am saying that a lot of Anime, and a lot of Sci-Fi, could learn a lot from it.

There’s a certain amount of exuberance in the material available on the internet that refers to Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song. People inevitably ignore the fact that to at least a certain extent, director Melvin Van Peebles wanted it to be a serious movie. By today’s standards, it’s a laughable movie: the costumes and the 70s-era jive alone makes for an absurd portrait of 70s life in south-central Los Angeles. When you throw in the added bonus that the movie is about a sex performer named Sweet Sweetback, it’s hard to take the movie seriously. as icing on the cake all of the actors in the movie were amateurs, and it shows. A lot.

But this movie isn’t supposed to be laughed at. Oh, I’m sure that some of the scenes in the movie are intentionally funny, but the movie itself is serious in tone. It’s a movie that is very seriously trying to address the issues at hand, and it’s a movie that insists on being taken seriously even as you cringe at the absurdity of all the details, from Sweetback’s pimp costume to the Hells Angels who force him to service their leader for his freedom.

Maybe that’s why I had such a hard time enjoying this movie. I wanted it to be funny, a movie fully conscious of its absurdity and reveling in it even as it gamely soldiered on through a storyline that could have been a serious piece of cinema. But instead it’s trapped in a sort of shadow realm, somewhere between a serious work and a work that is so amateurishly constructed that it’s just silly. It’s a sad place for the film to be, because that puts it precisely in the sweet-spot where I just have trouble enjoying the film at all. A movie like Kung Fu Contra as Bonecas is something I can love. A movie like Children of Men is a movie I can love – though for obviously completely different reasons.

But Sweet Sweetback? I just can’t find it in me to enjoy this film, and that is, in many ways, a shame.

This is the first post on the newly reconstituted Logomachy.  Hurrah!  I know my faceless masses missed me, and I promise that I’ll do my best to post a little more regularly this time around.  Other than promising that I’ll try to post more, I make no actual promises as to the regularity or content of my posts. Yes, I know that there’s a bowel-movements joke just waiting to be made right there, and I’m not going to be the one to make it.  That’s your job.  Go on: the comments are right there, waiting to be used.  I promise they won’t bite.

I want to have a little more content this time around.  I’m thinking of book reviews or something.  I don’t know; no decisions have been made.  We’re still in committee. &c &c &c.