Galilei Donna 9

 

 

 

by dm00

 

In episode nine of Galilei Donna, Hozuki travels back in time (it turns out goldfish are baited with wormholes) and meets Galileo, who has not only pioneered flight a couple of centuries early, but who has even invented statistical graphics a couple of centuries before Playfair. 

I think the creators of this series have confused him with the inconveniently childless Leonardo Davinci.

Sometimes I think I’m really only watching this series for Kazuki’s pageboy.

Gatchaman Crowds 3: [C]rowd sourcing utopia

by dm00

In episode three, Gatchaman Crowds brings crowd-sourcing to bear on the problem of contaminated milk distribution.

What a techno-utopian vision of post-scarcity anarchism. It’s a combination of massive central planning (the simulations the GALAX system was running, optimizing the allocation of crowd-sourced resources against probable outcomes) and anarchist pay-it-forward gift-economy pitching-in.

It’s sort of the opposite of Psycho Pass‘s Sybil system (and not just in its candy-coated color-scheme): here, it’s the older, pre-Sybil adults who are disempowered while the younger Sybilites feel empowered to act and solve problems on their own.

Or maybe it’s what the marketing brochures for the Sybil system looked like before the reality set in: the too-cheap-to-meter phase of atomic power before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the Declaration-of-the-Independence-of-Cyberspace phase before Amazon.com turned the Internet into a 21st century Sears Roebuck catalog.

Friedrich Hayek must be spinning in his grave. His contribution to economics was that it was impossible to gather the information required for the kind of resource-allocation that the GALAX system is doing, even leaving aside the fact that the GALAX system is working with resources solicited from the crowd. Markets win because prices can carry that information. But it’s tempting to wonder if technology might be nearing the point where it could provide an alternate mechanism to markets and prices. See Down and out in the Magic Kingdom, and “whuffie”.

(Though, see here for an alternate look at the need for whuffie in the GALAX system.)

I wonder where they’re going to go with this. I suspect the GALAX system has its darker side (or that there are people in Gatchaman’s world who will figure out how to exploit it for its darker side).

Update: corrected name of GALAX system, link to alternate view on whuffie.

Horizon on the edge of endurance

by dm00

tl;dr: You can find in a work what you go looking for.  When I wrote off Horizon on the middle of nowhere as fanservice fluff, friends suggested that there was more there.  I went looking, and was surprised at what I found.

If you’ve found your way to this blog backwater, you’ve probably seen the Blinded by the Tits project*. When I first looked at Horizon on the middle of nowhere, I made the same mistake as the titterers — I assumed that with its character designs, the series was putting its sole asset up front, that there was no substance behind those designs. Like the titterers, I didn’t even bother with a single episode of the series.

Friends, whose taste I trust, told me the series was better than that.  So I set aside my prejudices and took a look at it. This led to Horizon becoming one of my favorite series of the past few years. I’ve found subtlety and creativity in the series that I think rivals shows like Kaiba, Tatami Galaxy, and Mawaru Penguindrum.

Not the bimbo I mistook her for — reconsidering Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere

by dm00

It’s not just the busts of (only half, please notice) the female cast that are exaggerated.

There are a handful of series that I think make the mistake of hiding their light under a bushel of breasts. Horizon on (in?) the middle of nowhere may be one of them. If you’re like me, and find character designs with exaggerated breasts repellant, all I can tell you is that (1) only half the female cast are doomed to a life of back problems (though maybe they have microgravity control along with all the other magical tech?); and (2) you’ll probably stop noticing halfway through the first episode since there’s so much else going on.

I’d originally shrugged off Horizon as fan-servicey otaku-bait, and was prepared to leave it at that. But a few people I trust said positive things about it, so I took a look. Now, I find I’m approaching the end of a second look.

We all know stories about brilliantly intelligent women who find people don’t take them seriously because they’re too pretty to be smart. There are anime series like that, too (though Horizon isn’t to be taken too seriously).

Madoka Magica and the Weight(lessness?) of Expectations

By TheBigN

Given the amount of coverage this blog has had with this show, this won’t be the last you’ll hear from us for sure. Spoilers obviously abound here.

The Trump Cards Nichijou Holds For Me

By TheBigN

I was planning on watching Nichijou anyway, since the premise of the show with their comedic focus tends to be stuff that pique my interest. After watching the first episode, the humor is more or less hit or miss (more hit than miss so far), but the pacing of those jokes are quick enough that if one joke doesn’t work, it’s alright because it’s over quickly and chances the are that the next joke will be funny. The jokes and the characters themselves if you take them as they are so far won’t make this a memorable work for me, since as others have said, the concept has been done over and over again. That being said, what’s more important is less the fact that they reuse ideas, but how it’s done. In that sense, presentation plays a big part in our reception to this apparent variation of a “standard”, and Nichijou has those for me in the show’s animation and background music.

A Belated Welcome

To those of you who are here from The Aniblog Tourney visiting this blog for the first time, those of you who are constant return visitors despite the relative “lack” of “posts” on the blog from me  (medical school is a hell of a time sink, you know) and my fellow awesome authors, those of you who are fans of GAR GAR Stegosaurus (epic name of a blog, fun times to be had there as well) and want to check out the competition for this round, and so on, I graciously welcome you to Drastic My Anime Blog. There’s not necessarily a set purpose to this blog since it started in February 2007, and it ends up being a bunch of ramblings about anime from myself, TheBigN, and two others, dm00 and nomadotto, along with any other people interested in writing guest posts or writing for the blog in the future.  People say we write editorials in general, so let’s go with that in terms of what type of blog this is. Either way, these ramblings can be serious business or seriously random, and they can even just be about anime in a more tangential sense than the medium itself, but they’re definitely sincere, and I hope they’re entertaining or interesting to you.

As this is the first round (and possibly last) for DMAB in this tournament, I’m not sure what needs to be done to win this matchup and possibly face off against either Mistakes of Youth or AstroNerdBoy, so any suggestions to go for the win (since we’re in it, let’s do it!) are cool save for slander, which I don’t like and suck at (mutually ex clusive reasons) or sucking up to the Tourney organizers that be could be good.  Of course, writing more is always an option (thank you omo :v), and barring other obligations, lack of time, and access to internet among other things, there should be more writing here in the near future. But as for what is already here, if you’re interested in learning more about the authors or the blog itself, the respective links are here and here. There’s the tag cloud and list of categories on the right side of the page if something catches your fancy, and more specific examples follow.  If you’re looking for thoughts in some of the current titles of today, or of yesteryear, the musings category might be where it’s at. There’s some occasional posts on music and manga, posts that list our “gripes”, and posts where I think more about how we as anime fans go with our passions, and what comes with it. And of course, there is always random stuff, random looks back to time long past, random self-patting on the back posts, and random pictures… mostly of Shikieiki.

Like so. Picture by 柴. http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=10733683

One more thing. As someone who has helped try to run something like the Aniblog Tourney before, one of the things I like about efforts like these is getting people to learn more about blogs that they otherwise would not pay attention to beforehand, and I hope that this round is the same for others. And one thing that I also want is for people, regardless of whether you’ve been here before or not, to list any comments, critiques, criticisms, commendations, or any other forms of communication that they want to about this blog. It would be cool if we could use this week-long spotlight, if this is all we get, to see where we are in the eyes of others, as well as to see where the blog can go from here.

That being said, please vote for us from the kindness of your heart. 😛

Bakemonoguitarists

by dm00

With apologies to the artist who styles themself as “Kondou Mu”, who did the adaptation of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! image to Bakemonogatari.