OK, it was a con, same as always, I guess. They're skewing older than they used to, and there were a lot of people, a little under a thousand, I think? Saturday morning and afternoon saw some significant snow squalls, and there was a bunch of furries running around in the snow playing around. Who knew that fursuits made for pretty good winter weather wear?

Geez, I almost forgot - there's an anime con in State College this weekend. I guess I'll do the one-day thing; I've no other plans today.

So I'm watching two completely unrelated and noncontemporary shows: the second season of Alias, and the last cour of Soul Eater. Alias is an early-Oughts J.J. Abrams big-budget spy-action-SF TV series affectionately known as "Spy Barbie". Soul Eater is a moderately well-budgeted two-season, four-cour shounen fantasy anime about meisters (sort of grim reapers, roughly speaking) fighting witches. They're both shows that rely heavily on stylistic flash & convoluted plotting and nested conspiracies, but you'd think they were otherwise unrelated.

Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself watching pretty much the same story:

1) a three-sided war between three organizations, at least one of which is unaware of the participation of the third in the fight -

the DWMA, Arachnophobia, and Medusa's coven

SD-6, Irina Derevko's clique, and the CIA

2) the war consists of a series of fights over semi-magical tchotkes, literal mcguffins created by a long-dead, legendary da Vinci figure -

Eibon and his Magic Tools

Milo Rambaldi and his deranged series of artifacts

3) a horrible, Medea-like harridan of a mother, murderous, vicious, sociopathic and dreadfully manipulative, walks into the figurative front-office of the "good guys" faction, and surrenders, in order to embody the Hannibal in a cage trope -

Medusa the Younger, having survived her own evisceration & possessed a random child, thus protecting herself from the whole "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" thing the DWMA has going by hiding inside her body-hostage; this after a half-dozen episodes of manipulating her seriously disturbed woobie of a son Crona from the shadows into betraying that faction

Irina Derevko, who after shooting her estranged daughter and then her own Dragon in the opening episode of the season, apparently decides that it'd be more fun to screw with the CIA from inside of a deeply buried jail cell than from within the nominally safe confines of her own faction

They both have peculiar, attraction-repulsion relationships with core figures within the "good guys" organizations, Medusa with the hanging-onto-sanity-with-his-fingertips Dr. Stein, and Irina with her estranged husband, Jack Bristow.

These are terrifying mother-figures - unloving, unblinking and menacing. Medusa had a child for the express purpose of moulding it into a science experiment, denying it love and affirmation & infecting it with a species of madness to see if she could breed a "Kishin" - sort of an evil god. Irina had a child for the sole purpose of cementing her role as a loving wife & mother to a CIA agent and his child, and seems entranced by the strange creature from her long-past stint as a sleeper agent & assassin; the first thing she does upon being reunited with her daughter is to muse about how easily she could have killed her in infancy. Both characters are expressions of the vulnerability of children in the hands of their mothers, and the potential for what some wags have called "retroactive abortion". They're avatars of Kali - the killing-mother who brought you into this world and could quite easily take you out of it again.

Ouch. January was not a cheap month for electricity. 2/3rds to twice again as much as last year's bill for January. I guess this is what happens when you try to heat a place the size of my condo with only electric baseboard heat. Oh, well, my propane heater is back online, hopefully the rest of the winter won't be nearly as bad.

I'm watching the first season of Justified today, and I was thinking that their version of eastern Kentucky looks an awful lot like Armstrong and Clarion Counties of western Pennsylvania. I apparently was off, but not by much - it was elsewhere in Murtha's old district, little Washington & other locales in shooting distance of Pittsburgh. Apparently film crews use convention centers to double as airports these days - I was watching the commentaries for the first season of Alias the other day, and they mentioned that not long after, Homeland Security cracked down on crews filming at actual airports, and sure enough, the commentary on the pilot of Justified identified the "airport" that the protagonist transits through on the way to Lexington as actually the new Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh.

I like the show so far, but then, I've always been a sucker for Elmore Leonard adaptations.

Oh, btw - Star Driver continues to be gorgeously, giddily nuts. Episode 15 went full-Groundhog Day. At this point, I don't care if it ever goes anywhere, the journey's too damn neat to worry about destinations.

I don't know why, but sometimes I'm more eloquent in other people's comments sections than I am on my own, nominal site. Maybe it's a species of unoriginality, maybe it's just basic bone laziness, but there it is. A day rarely goes by without my having left a comment on Rantburg, but I usually don't bother to bring it back to here.

But no, I didn't think that much of the first episode of Fractale. You can have ideas without having a story, and a story without having a show. The writer definitely has ideas, but the connection between those ideas and the execution isn't exactly setting my monitor on fire.

Now, Dream Eater Merry, on the other hand, isn't exactly a radical bundle of innovation. It's your standard magical-girlfriend show, of the serious fighting-fantasy sort. Think Shana meets Soul Eater, and you've got the feel to a first approximation. But it's well-constructed, it flows, it appeals to the eye, and it has a personality. It *works*. Anime is a medium for professional hacks, and Dream Eater Merry is obviously the product of some nameless coven of highly professional hacks; Fractale is the child of would-be artistes. I'm willing to bet that this will make all of the difference.

My hypothesis: great art is made when inspired artistes are trapped safely and securely under the iron control of highly professional hacks. This basic fact is why artists are generally inclined towards fascistic and authoritarian politics - they know, at a subconscious level, that they need a sort of führerprinzip to realize their potential. They either find a führer, or make one of themselves, by a sort of division of self. The latter path tends to kill their heart.

Or not; but it would explain the personality issues of individuals like Salvador Dali...

So, a significant snowfall last evening. I was out-and-about, and there was some fun driving to be had, especially in my narrow wheel-base putt-putt. Managed to stay out of ditches, so I win at winter driving. Well, this time anyways.

When I got back, one of the neighbors was clearing her usual parking stall, so I parked to the side, and started clearing mine. Another neighbor showed up while I was trying to dispose of the excess snow, and we started clearing the space in front of his house, and then a third neighbor came out, and in the end we cleared the whole lot & access road. It was like painting Tom Sawyer's fence without an actual, you know, Tom Sawyer. Spontaneous whitewashing.

The irony here is that we technically have a contract with a private snowplow guy. We didn't *have* to do that. When I got back in, I found that I had a full-lion's-beard of icicles, from my mustache to my beard up through sideburns to my forelock. If anyone could actually see anything in the half-light of the dimly-lit parking lot, I must have looked preposterous.

Meh. My section supervisor's two-weeks ran out today. I'm reporting directly to the head of operations. He's going to work for a competitor run by former employees, ones I'm not on good terms with. Not thrilled with that. This is the third supervisor I've lost in the last four years. Is it something I'm doing wrong?

In personal news, my house's propane heater was on the fritz, and I got a repairman in to look it over. Replaced some parts, got it working again. Wasn't cheap. But at least now if the power goes out, my place won't be an icebox.

Happy New Years, everybody!

I feel like I ought to be going to the shrine on hatsumode. Or playing badminton. My usual New-Years activities - going down to Norristown to see the college crowd, play nerd games & watch the fireworks, wasn't going to happen this year. I guess I'm "rusticating" this year. Or maybe just rusting?

Happy New Year, may it be better than the last two or three.

I want to work harder, talk to people more, and get out more often. I need a new hobby, something organized and group-oriented. Something in volunteering? I need something to fill the social void, the space which convention-organizing used to occupy in my life.

This entertaining if nihilistic essay by Patton Oswalt seems to demonstrate that he took his brief stint on Dollhouse way, way too much to heart. It's a geek rant by an off-brand Tyler Durden, plotting to destroy otaku-consumerist society via the trash-culture Singularity. Since he used to be a fixture on those VH1 list shows he's proposing to use for his plot to goad otaku-pop into eating itself, I'm not sure whether we're supposed to take it seriously, or not.

There's a clever observation in the comment section about "generational shovel envy" that probably addresses the serious concerns inside Oswalt's comedy. Otherwise, I'd note that if the otakuficiation of mundanity offends you, you either need to get over your need to be a special and unique snowflake, or grow up & start working on a connection with high culture - you've obviously got too much inherent pomposity to comfortably slum about in trash culture in the long run.

So I just finished watching Corpse Princess, or Shikabane Hime if you don't like the English title. It was the horror-moe Gainax show from a few years back, one of a number of shows in that period featuring dead girls killing monsters & providing male-oriented fanservice. I took a disliking to the show when I saw the first episode in fansubs, but went back this fall when the FUNimation half-season sets hit the semi-discount bins.

Most of the things I didn't like the first time were still there in the whole, two-cour, 26-episode series, plus a few more irritations which I'll get into later. But the whole ended up more engaging and likable than I first gave it credit for. They did themselves a real disservice by opening up the series with a charismatic-polygamist hipster-villain as the first "monster of the week". It gave the show the apparent character of extreme misogyny, which it didn't really deserve, I guess. Now, mind you, there's a lot of female villains, especially monstrous mother-figures. Since the whole show is about murderous, unnatural corpses and the virgin-sacrifice animate corpses who kill them, it's a little hard to avoid that sort of thing, but it definitely is a consistent undertone - not an overt, constant presence.

The story is about a Japanese esoteric Buddhist sect which is built around "handling the dead", which is, after all, one of the major functions of the real-world Buddhist faith in Japan. Traditionally, one is "born Shinto, married Christian, and die Buddhist". This came about because of the extreme revulsion and doctrinal incapacity of Shinto when it comes to death. The fundamental corruption and defilement of the dead is a core concept in "classic" Shinto, and the various folk-religion clusters which make up Shinto break down heavily in the face of the corruption of the dead. Basically, because Shinto was a religion which emphasizes purity over morality and sanctity, death and death-rites became by default the preserve of the imported Buddhist traditions which didn't really care about purity. But here in the real world, that "handling" is a ritual and practical thing, not the fantasy-world extermination of the revenant dead which this show plays around with.

Corpse Princess is nominally a Buddhist show, in that most of the characters are members or chattel of a rather hide-bound (made-up!) Buddhist sect, and the scripts are full of Buddhist terminology and (extremely twisted) Buddhist doctrine and ideology. The heart of the story is more Shinto than Buddhist, anyways, like a doctrinal skin of Buddhist cant over the decaying, rotting Shinto meat and bones. The characters talk Buddhist but act Shinto. There are a lot of furious ranting about defilement, which is a pretty non-Buddhist concept as I understand the faith.

As the show wears on, it's increasingly obvious that the Buddhist cant is, indeed, Marxist-definition ideology - intellectual super-structure constructed to justify necessary practices within an existing cultural tradition. The man who created the "Shikabane Hime" system existed within a culture and a period where radically esoteric Buddhist ideas were the "new wave", history-on-the-march. He built his demonic-corpse-combating system from the materials he had at hand - the "fact" of violent, sentient revenants, and the faith and doctrines which he felt to be true. "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man" - no doubt, if he had been a Soviet commissar, the Shikabane Hime system would have been built on tenuous palaver about the dictatorship of the mortal proletariat and the immaterial dialectic.

The animation was a shared production between the renowned (if problematic) Gainax, and some company I've never really noticed all the much before, feel. (That's the name, feel. Lower-case pretentious.) I seem to remember hearing before that Gainax did the first cour of 13 episodes - "Aka", and feel did the last cour, "Kuro". The two seasons don't really "look" different, and I'm guessing that the creative staff carried over for the whole production, and the division of labor was more of a management, production thing. The scripts waver between absolutely vicious, sharp material, and soppy, long-winded wittering on about feelings. It verges on schizophrenia, but when it's on, it's on.

Art slops around a bit at times, but visually, the worst sins are there at the beginning in the first episode - the fight-designs are too hyper and unfocused. There's a lot of swirling about & incoherent action. They chose to give the heroine a pair of sacrilized sub-machine guns (a gun otaku would have to tell you what they were, I'd class them as sort of "mini-Uzi" deals, but I'm not detail-fixated enough to go track down what they were supposed to be). This might have looked "cool" in the character-design stage, but what it does in animation is weaken impact and soften the fight scenes. "More dakka" may be a game-fanboy cliche that some people love, but in a supernatural monster-fighting show, SMG fire has all the dramatic impact of turning a garden-hose on a rabid dog. It just drops into the red-black swirl of the action, and ends up looking ineffective. It's the supernatural Buddhist-monster-hunter equivalent of sending in the tank battalions and fighter-bomber squadrons in a Godzilla movie, or dropping a nuke on an Angel in Evangelion.

Finally, not to be a spoiler, but the ending of the series is abrupt, incoherent, and disjointed. Second-to-last episode, we close out on heroine beating in the face of the Big Bad. Last episode? Flashback episode about two dead, secondary characters' origin stories. Total non sequitur. Don't get me wrong, as a standalone, that last episode was great, fired on all cylinders, did what it was written to do. It's just that this was *not* the place in the series for this particular show. It *should* have been placed fifteen episodes earlier. I don't know if it was actually a mis-labeled OAV pitchforked into the disc-set as "episode 26", but nothing in the presentation suggested it. The second-to-last episode declared "to be continued", which definitely suggests that *somebody* intended there to be a real episode 26.

Oh, well. It's worth watching, but it's not deathless art, or even particularly great.

Yeah, we're about due for the rapture. Pat Robertson has gotten to my left on drug legalization.

I just got a comment on a very old post asking what I thought of WikiLeaks & then chiding me for being inactive. When even the spambots think you've been too quiet, you've been too quiet. I'll try and come up with something later today... meanwhile, I think that Assange was born to hang, but he probably shouldn't be prosecuted. Just quietly abducted, shot, and buried in a saltmine somewhere.

Wow, it's official. Keith Olbermann is the second coming of Father Charles Coughlin, the ravening socialist-progressive for whom FDR's less-than-absolute dedication to nationalization, socialization, and blood-on-the-walls class warfare was a stinging betrayal. Imbeciles who claim an equivalence between Coughlin and Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh are apparently ignorant of Coughlin's original stance as one of FDR's most fervent supporters during the 1932 campaign and the early days of his first term in office. It was only after FDR failed to descend upon Wall Street, burning sword in hand, to scour the money-changers from the temple, that Coughlin turned on the second Roosevelt, foaming like a rabid beast.

h/t

These two connect-the-dots posts on Warren Buffett and his long-standing "altruistic" embrace of estate taxes are kind of devastating. Unless you have an ad hominem hostility to ideologically-oriented big-think blogs like the American Thinker and Human Events, I suppose. Now that I look at it, te American Thinker post is more of an ideological exclamation point, whereas the Human Events post is the meat of the matter.

Short form? The estate tax is the threat, Buffett's insurance company combine is the protection racket, and his distress-sale merger arm is a modified busting-out operation capitalizing on the chaos caused by the interaction of the first two scams.

My one concern with the Human Events post is the possibility that the forced-charity case may be weakened by a variation on Friedman's permanent income hypothesis - that the projected return of the estate tax means that charity strategies are largely unaffected because their purpose is long-term, and in the long term, the estate planners expect a return of the conditions which drive forced charity.

h/t

First snow of the season, just enough stuck to create ice patches here and there. Creeks are high, yesterday there was some flooding in some places. I'd say that winter is here. Relatively mild so far, hopefully all of our miserable has been rationed out to the mountain-west, greater Midwest, and England this year.

An update from Michael Yon, relaying an email response by Defense Sec'y Gates to the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable eruption. It pretty much says what needs to be said on the subject, barring any serious bombshells hidden deep under the manure pile.

The WikiLeaks people still need to hang, though. Not because they're "terrorists" - thank you, Rep. King, for reminding people of how damn foolish congressmen can be - but because they're spies. We don't hang spies as much as we used to do - but we ought to. Incentives matter, and the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.

So I remembered to open my monthly statement from the mortgage company. This month, there was a refund cheque attached to the statement, as well as a notice indicating that my escrow payment was increasing by about $10 a month. I was expecting the latter, as our property taxes are scheduled to creep up next year, and I've been reading stuff like this indicating that homeowners' insurance is also scheduled to balloon a bit. The former... why couldn't they have just left the money ride in the escrow account & cover the increases for the next two years or so? Since they don't seem to have figured any increase in the expected homeowners' insurance payment, they're probably going to hit me again next year for more; if they decide that I need to make some sort of mid-year additional payment to cover a deficit because they felt the need to take that surplus out of the account, I'm gonna be steamed.

Not as if I am going to get much of any interest income out of $345 of additional capital, even if I bother to take it out of my non-interest-bearing checking account & move it into savings.

Reading for the day: postwar German currency reform. Some guidance on how the American occupiers of Germany & the West Germans managed to get out from under the disastrous burden of destroyed German infrastructure & massive liquidity left over from inflationary wartime Nazi financial policies & debts.

Heavily politicized process, though. I kind of think it only worked *because* it was overseen by a foreign military occupation government. The potential for politically-directed corruption in the burden-equalization-fund and the escrow-account feature of the conversion law appears vast.