I got a box of books today: Buck Godot PSmith, and the 3 volumes of the Crest of the Stars novels. I have now read all 4 items. I'd read the Godot before, not sure where, I hope I don't find a duplicate copy hiding somewhere.

( Mercy cut )

I've moved on from Crest of the Stars to Banner of the Stars. Observations: more battles, less character; OTOH, there are more characters, so the development is spread beyond Jinto and Lafiel. The Baronh opening voiceover doesn't change much -- the same for 8 episodes, then switched to a different sameness; this is vs. continually new information in Crest. There's a lot of countdowns from 10. A few episodes have overly-long recaps, of course that's aggravated by watching the episodes back to back, not separated by a week. Still, I'm liking it, and excited to watch it, as in "eeee I'm going to go home and watch Banner."

But some scenes of note, relevant to the subject:

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A draft, for the Bujold list, contrast of the Abh and Bujold's haut.
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I recently watched the anime Crest of the Stars, and liked it a lot. It's part space opera, part character romance, part worldbuilding regarding the Abh race by a wannabe science fictional Tolkien (we can has conlang). But I'm not out to specifically review it here; rather, I kept being reminded of Bujold as I watched, and I want to geek out about that.

(FWIW, the Crest of the Stars novels started in 1999, and Cetaganda came out in 1996.)
(Spoilers for backstory ahoy.)
(ETA: the Abh are allegedly all atheists. Cetagandan religious data is even scarcer than for other polities in Bujold's Nexus, but one guesses atheist.)
(ETA2: might be more accurate to say they're strongly non religious. "No belief in a Higher Power", "ridicule all organized religions", no belief in Heaven. I'd call the first one de facto atheist but people get nervous about labels.)

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We, alas, don't have gestation machines, and I wouldn't hold my breath for them. We do have a fair bit of fertility control -- planning, birth control, abortion -- which have had some social impacts already, and we might imagine might have more over evolutionary time. I've been thinking for the past day about the impact of widespread paternity testing, e.g. if such tests weren't used mostly only in cases of disputed child support but as a matter of course, even for married births, just to check for the father or as a side effect of genetic health screening. How does behavior change in the short term if fathers can be as certain as mothers of their children, and women (and men) know that reproductive cuckoldry just isn't possible? What are the long term selective pressures on human sexuality if such conditions (paternity testing and fertility control, and perhaps child support laws as well) are maintained for a long time?

This series I watched in a few days. Admittedly it's 13 episodes instead of 26, but that's not the real difference; the difference is that this one pressed most of my buttons. This, and the sequel Banner of the Stars, are minor classics in their own right. It can be described equally (if superficially) as "space opera with space elves", or "an understated teen romance/character piece". Compared to Bebop, I'd call it "consistent and coherent". Hell, it's that compared to a lot of science fiction, period. It reminds me a bit of Bujold's Cetagandans, too.

( That got long )

The purple-haired girl in my icon is not an Abh, but Zefiris, a 5000 year old sentient war machine in Scrapped Princess. Her model looks like ten year old girls when they're in low power mode. When armed, they look like dragons as rendered by Vorlons/Shadows.

I first saw some episodes of this in March 2008, at Fanw's. I bought the discs in May, and finished watching it... last week, a year later. I think this says something. It's a classic in terms of popularity, and got my interest at first, but didn't keep it. Perhaps a second and denseer viewing would go better, but... I never figured out what it was trying to be; it's like surreal bounty hunters in space. Some elements are relatively well grounded: warp gates are magic, but they let ships get around the Solar system quickly without buttloads of energy and drives not much more realistic than the warp gates. The space colonies are aesthetically awesome O'Neill colonies, Stanford torii, and domed over craters, and there's a nod to why space would be settled: an early warp accident wrecked the Earth, so people fled elsewhere. We get scenes in zero gee, though I don't think ever low-gee despite action on Mars and Ganymede, and I'm not sure the zero-gee-ness of the ship is consistent.

Mind you, it's a weak nod: Earth still has things like "free oxygen" and "atmospheric radiation shielding", vs. the warm comforts of *outer space*.

And then there's things like the old food in the fridge that mutated into an alien lifeform, and the weird kid who's a super uber hacker and otherwise something like a slow 3 year old.

It's mostly episodic, going after various bounties, with shallow arcs regarding Spike's ties with the Mafia and Faye's history as an amnesiac cryonics patient. No one, IMO, is particularly likeable or usefully talkative. It's sort of like a slice of life series, only instead of real families or idyllic Martian gondolas we have heavy weaponry and people who can fuel their ship but barely afford food.

Hey Ai! Got your letter. Took me a while to figure out how to open the Japanese envelope. :)

I had my first Balboa swing lesson tonight. I feel like a newb all over again. I'm reading Krugman's Pop Internationalism, on the myths and ignorance about international trade. It's good. Catchphrase: "A country is not like a corporation." Countries can't go bankrupt (in the close up shop sense), and corporations basically "export" everything. More later.

* Wired discovers Settlers of Catan, calls it a Monopoly killer, talks about German board games in general.
* Palestinian orchestra performs for Holocaust survivors. Outrage ensues.
* Mayotte votes to become fully French, abandon Islamic law.
* Waterboarding's failure. I'm sure we're all so shocked.
* New law on Afghan women passed. The patriarchy is dead, long live the patriarchy.
* Federal pension insurer switched to stocks before the crash.. Head was from Lehman, denied any additional risk. Fox, meet henhouse.
* ETA: I haven't been keeping up with the flap about Dawkins speaking at Oklahoma University. The legislature (of both parties) is still buzzing in outrage at his coming "to indoctrinate students in the theory of evolution."

* What if Atlas Shrugged were a trilogy?
* A thread started on pre-Flood Creationist Earth as an RPG setting. That led to this, which ascends to new levels of bizarre. Who knew the antediluvian Sun was hot pink?

* Scalzi on Modern YA SF
* http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/1714965.html
* Speaking of mellow anime, we seem to have found something with less plot or action than even Aria: Bartender. And I thought Aria was bad enough as "Maria-sama without the dramatic tension". Actually Bartender seems a bit like a cross of Master Keaton and Aria: the odd ubercareerist of one, the lack of... anything... of Aria. Except Aria had stunning visuals, cute girls, and the puzzle of "what the hell is that thing?", and the hints of science fiction (it's a flooded Mars, with what *has* to be a genetically engineered supercat.)

Books I've read recently: Krugman's Return to Depression Economics, Terry Pratchett's Nation, Bujold's Sharing Knife books. All good. The Pratchett isn't Discworld, or even particularly like Discworld; it's in a story-convenient alternate Earth, where history is almost the same, up to Darwin making a fuss, but there's been a really nasty flu, a tsunami in the Indian ocean (that might be historical), and a touch of subtle fantasy and some different biology (tree-climing octopus yay).

You may note my icon is much nicer now, thanks to lpetrazickis and Photoshop, bicubic algorithm instead of nearest neighbor scaling. Contrast with

( Link attack! )

I finally finished watching Planetes last night. It's a hard science fiction anime: 2075, Earth orbit, a team of people picking up debris. It took me a long time to get past the first 4 episodes, but I don't know if that was their quality or my enervated mood at the time; past few days saw me go from 5 to 26. Good mechanics, silence in space. Not perfect: given all the debris tracking, criminals shouldn't be able to even think about getting away, but that was just one minor plot, and to be fair they did use the words "active stealthing" even if they didn't justify them.

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Eugene Woodbury, best translator of the Juuni Kokki novels, occasionally blogs about other things.

On Plastic Little, and strong buttkicking but still sexual women in anime, vs. a minor presence on TV and near absence in modern movies.

The geopolitical sophistication of My Zhime/Mai Otome.

Geeks in love, rambling over to Japan's temporal closeness to its feudal roots, and un-fossilized tradition.

I've seen the end of the second Youko arc like four times, and I still wanted to applaud. And I'm not the only one who finds it surprisingly dense, in the good sense of "so much has happened surely this was 40 minutes, not 20?" Though as someone noted, in a sense nothing *happens*, action-wise; it's all talking or declarations or arrests. But awesome talking.

House: in process of being sold. Barring nothing going wrong.
House contents: sold to bookstores; taken away for auctioning; left behind for presumed next owner to pick over and have hauled away; taken away to long term storage; being FedExed to me. As of just yesterday for the last, and I came home today to find a delivery note on my door. That was fast!
Me: in need of a couple months of twelve-hour sleepnights. Funded for next year, and assigned to C/assembly language rather than "teaching HTML and Excel to the unwilling masses".

( After this, the deluge )

Just watched Laputa. Pretty good. Thoughts:

It's Gort!
Who attacks places that can make Gort? (This is later answered.)
It looks like Cagliostro! And now Nausicaa!
Gee, even when his heroines look different, they end up looking alike.
Oh no!
Oh, okay.

Then I checked the "Behind the Microphone" special, which taught me that:
the English dubs still make me cringe
the English dubs sound like they had a different translator than the subtitles
James van der Beek aka Dawson of the eponymous Creek is Pazu and doesn't sound too bad, unlike who ever did Lucita.
Mark Hamill aka Luke Skywalker plays Muska

IMDB tells me Hamill's done a lot of TV and voice actor work. (Including in Nausicaa.) I guess his performance as Luke didn't launch him onto a great acting career.
IMDB also tell me Lucita was Anna Paquin. Wait, I like Anna Paquin! She's Rogue! Now I need to listen to Laputa and X-Men together and see if I'm right that dubbing is meant to sound horrible.

One nice thing about the anime "Karin", about a blood-making vampire: it features a complete happy family. Karin has both parents and an older brother and a younger sister and they all live together and they all love her and each other, more or less. For that matter, they all have important roles in the show.

Not that the common pattern of dead parents is unrepresented: Usui's father is missing (I forget why, maybe a runaway), Wiener's mother may be dead, and Maki's just don't show up that I can remember, but at least Karin has a full set. And no, I won't count the parents as dead simply because they're all vampires.

(Context: the observation that TV shows tend to one or both parents of a young protagonist dead or disappeared. Buffy's father was distant and eventually gone, then mom died. Roswell had a single mom and two single dads, though a couple of sets, one even seen. Dawson's Creek had a lot of breakage. Commander Sisko of DS9 was a single dad. Scrapped Princess started with dead parents. Witch Hunter Robin was an orphan. Noein had a divorced and distant dad. Card Captor Sakura's mother is dead. Tsuki-yomi had two dead mothers and a dead father. The list could go on.)

(Hikaru turned out to have a father as well as a mother but this was after three seasons and surprised us all.)

(We never meet Suzumiya Haruhi's parents. I just wondered what they could possibly be like.)

(Thinking of Sisko made me realize one practical reason for killing parents might be to cut on cast size and costs.)

Arrive at the end of You're Under Arrest. Put on glasses. Note my vision seems extra blurry, assume it's grease. Go into the corridor, heading for the bathroom, take off glasses. Note that the frame is loose and one of the lenses is missing. Return to case, find lens there. After several minutes, manage to put lens back in, close frame, and screw tiny screw with fingernail. Make note to go to a glasses store anyway for checkup. Hope they do that sort of thing.

My Neighbor Totoro: happy cute movie, of a couple of girls moving to a new place and their relationship with the big "troll" mountain spirit and a giant cat-bus. Japan has the funnest religion ever.

Nausicaa of The Valley of the Wind: Good, but felt very different from the manga, though color made many of the visuals more intelligible. I think the plot is 1/4 of the manga, plus some God Warrior stuff which ended up being very different by the time Miyazaki finished the later volumes.

Josh showed us a title picture of Warriors of the Wind, some horrible Disney edit-dub of Nausicaa wherein they tried to turn it into an action flick; the picture has three men astride a God Warrior head, with the actual main character relegated to the upper right corner. This is why Miyazaki films didn't come to the US for a decade, I'm told.

Halfway through the anime club showings, actually near the end of a couple due to short runs, so what do I think?

A while back I listed the anime I'd seen at the time, including Lupin III: Castle Cagliostro. I thought I'd said more about it at the time, such as that I wish I could have been there when anima_mecanique saw the Grand Revelation for the first time, but apparently not. I liked it, though I wouldn't feel safe in analyzing why from memory. And I won't have to rely on memory, because somebody doing marketing for the newly released special edition (link is to a press release) contacted me, based on the earlier LJ entry, asking if I'd help out with their publicity in return for a free DVD, which arrived today. I smell viral marketing, but between open disclosure and the fact that I did like it (and all the other Miyazaki I've seen so far), I don't care.

Review to follow when I get a chance to watch it. Any locals want to join me?

I will make fun of the press release: I thought the big secret was rather older than 500 years and the Renaissance, though the protection mechanisms might have been Renaissance. I note the release French and Spanish get dubs, but no subtitles, which I'd have thought would be easier. And here's a wikipedia link on various releases of the film.

More breadcrumbs! Pollan, Sen, Chinese fantasies, manga, anime, webcrap, games.

Warm, light rain... kind of nice. I'm leaving my A/C on though, since without the rain it's just muggy. And of course there's a lower probability of a rainbow and a higher probability of a raging thunderstorm.

I feel like listing the anime, or cartoons in general, I've liked.

Childhood Saturday morning cartoons:
Robotech (anime-inspired) >> Transformers > everything else. I really liked that things happened on Robotech, there was a plot and drama, people changed, even died. Transformers, I dunno, there was a hint of change, and I liked the ambiguity between "Robots in Disguise" and "Robots in the Skies" as Decepticons flew over.