John Zeitler

This may be one of the most awesome rock performances ever. I’m not even kidding.

Essay Week 2010 runs from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Every year I take a week and write about some topics of interest to me that run slightly more serious than the usual fare on the blog. That’s not to say that games and anime won’t enter into it, but the predominant theme is that this week skews a bit more literary than epistolary. After a bit of a hard-edged start, we move to a more fluid topic.

A few years back, Mike Doughty, lead singer for Soul Coughing, released a cover of Kenny Rogers’ iconic song “The Gambler”. The cover transposes the song to a more alt-rock style, leaning more heavily on the drums than the original (which was dominated by acoustic guitar), and it drops half of one of the narrative verses in favor of starting with the legendary and infinitely-memorable chorus. In many respects the cover is good, but it loses something in the retelling, particularly without the missing section.

“The Gambler”, at its core, is a fairly standard country-western song. ( Country as a rule tends to be more narrative than other genres… » )

This is Bad. Eurogamer discovered some stuff about the upcoming Michael Jackson game that they just couldn’t keep In The Closet, and because they had to Say Say Say it, I’m finding the game looks better than The Man in the Mirror could have ever thought. Specifically the DS version, which looks to borrow some of its gameplay elements from Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents. On reading this, though, I cried, “Eurogamer, The Way You Make Me Feel about this game leaves me Speechless.” Honestly, Diana (I assume the author’s name was Diana), you obviously Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ by comparing this game, which might not be appropriate given that MJ’s Gone Too Soon, to the Dangerous duo of EBA and Ouendan. You make me feel Dirty, Diana, ’cause I Remember The Time Ubisoft did Raving Rabbids for the Wii and how buggy it was. They Don’t Care About Us, Diana, and that makes me wanna Scream.

Then again, it’s Human Nature to assume the worst, and if you don’t view the world as Black or White, there’s still the possibility that this game could be a P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing). Really, since we are talking about some of the greatest pop music of the twentieth century (despite MJ’s weirdness prompting his calls to “Leave Me Alone!”), I’m willing to give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt This Time Around. I’ll likely be at the store at the Break of Dawn to pick it up, Jam it in my portable, and– hopefully– be the first person I know to Beat It.

Sha’mon.

I started off this post with a rather poor attempt to review BT’s latest album, These Hopeful Machines, but as you can no doubt see, I’ve scrapped it. The reasons are many, but mostly they boil down to “I’m not a music reviewer, so anything I say is going to be hopelessly shallow and pedantic”, and “even if I was a music reviewer I literally cannot find the words to describe how this album makes me feel beyond ‘profoundly reflective’, but that’s mostly for personal reasons completely unrelated to the album itself”. I suppose the best I can do, really, is to say that it’s really good, and that anyone who likes electronic music is going to absolutely love it.

If that in fact turns out to be old news, then blame Amazon. I know I do.

Anyway. The word “hope” is a bit appropriate this week, as it turns out, as the Apple WWDC came on Monday and the big video game hoopla, E3, is next week. In both cases the internet has done what it does best: ruined the surprises. We knew about the iPhone 4 months ago, and “leaks” are coming faster and faster as the console “pre-conferences” come closer. I’ll cover these two events one at a time.

First, the iPhone. I found Penny Arcade’s assessment of the technical difficulties a bit… well, anticlimactic. I mean, come on. We all know what really happened. Grey Davis was accompanied on the altar by the employees responsible for the foulups, and together they were all sacrificed by The Jobs to The Beast That Has Naught But Two-Dollar Bills, He Who Thirsts For Quicksilver And The Blood of Interns, Great Bearded Geek With A Thousand-Dollar Computer, W’oz-Loggoth. For Gabe and Tycho to whitewash this just shows you how far lost they are in The Dark Faith of Cupertino. That said, the iPhone 4 was, literally, nothing surprising. I don’t mean that in light of the advances that were known based on the Gizmodo leak, and I don’t mean that it wasn’t technologically impressive. It was, in all respects, exactly what I was betting the 4.0 version of the iPhone would be when I signed on for the 3G two years ago.

See, the only people really getting bent out of shape are the fanbrats who are, either willfully or through sheer stupidity, failing to realize that the iPhone is not a computer and is not beholden to the same product lifecycles as one. It is a smartphone, and as such the decision to purchase or to skip it must be made from that paradigm. Phones are updated on an almost weekly basis. I’ve lost track of how many “phone X running Android-/Palm-flavored OS version Y is now available on carrier Z” posts I’ve seen in the last year. Hell, I couldn’t tell you how many I’ve seen this week. The point being that it doesn’t matter which phone you buy, or which platform you commit to. You need only blink before something “better” comes along. If you’re going into the iPhone, or an Android handset thinking that you’ll be hip and completely up-to-date, think again. Also please hit yourself on the head with a hammer, repeatedly, until the stupid leaks out of your ears. It’ll be a gray color, you’ll know it when you see it.

I can’t speak for everyone, and I certainly can’t speak for someone who’s taking this opportunity to jump from iPhone to an Android set. Who I can speak for is myself, and I’m going by the same rules I’ve had for cell phones since the very beginning– altering them, in point of fact. I started with a fairly basic clamshell phone back in early 2004, and limited myself to one upgrade per year until I made the jump to the iPhone two years ago. I did so knowing that I could not keep up that pace, and that it was entirely likely that I would not need to– remember, the first-gen iPhones shared in a lot of the features that the 3G version did back in ’08. It was not an altogether wild leap to assume that it would be merely one year between each version of the phone, and it turned out that I was right. The 4.0 handset has features that I want, and makes upgrading an attractive option– and since I was planning to do so anyway, there’s no problem. (If the 4.0 had, in fact, not been announced this year– I would have waited until the end of summer– I’d have gone to the 3GS for the extra storage space anyway.)

As for people dealing with the advertising and marketing campaign surrounding, well, all of Apple’s products, I refer you to the dissertation available on this weblog dated the twenty-eighth of February, Anno Domini Twenty-Ten, and shall leave it at that.

This ran a bit longer than I expected, and got a little ranty and preachy near the end. I’ll skip the E3 discussion until tomorrow, but I have a lot to say about that, too.

Happy birthday, mom. I’ll call ASAP.

In 2002, I started what would eventually become the capitalized “The Collection” from some pretty humble beginnings: I had a single “CD tower” of Playstation 1 and 2 games, probably about four feet tall and barely a foot wide. I also had a handful of boxed up retro systems, and maybe a dozen or so anime DVDs (with a modest amount of VHS tapes as well). Obviously, I expanded; as most of you all know, I also had to sell off roughly 95% of my games and anime during a downturn between jobs. Today, the Collection is the largest it’s ever been, and it’s in no danger of having to be sold off anytime soon.

I don’t like to brag– particularly not about stuff that I own– so that’s not the purpose of this post. Most folks don’t see their piles of video games and movies and suchlike as collections– they see them, primarily, as just “stuff”. If they want to get fancy, they may refer to it as a “library”. Really, though, these are cop-outs: if one is really serious about becoming a collector, then there can never be a point where you just have a pile of discs. You have to start early, so that it doesn’t get away from you. I’ve been throwing around terms like the Reclamation List and all that for years now without really explaining the thought process behind it all; I figure, now that the majority of the work is behind me, it would be a good time to take a look at how I built up even this modest collection and how I go about expanding it.

I should note, though, that it’s perfectly okay if you don’t want to be a collector of DVDs, games, whatever. That’s fine. It’s not something that everyone can do or has an interest in doing. The thing is, of course, that some folks out there do want to be collectors, and there’s some stuff that I wish I knew when I was setting out. That’s the purpose of this post (actually, by the time I’m done, it’ll probably feel more like a lecture).

So, without further delay, let’s start with ( The Ten Commandments Of Collecting… » )

In the end, taking up media collecting as a serious hobby can be rewarding and fun, but it can also be really nerve-wracking if you’re not prepared for it. Obviously, I’m not setting myself up as an authority or anything, but these are all just stuff I’ve found out since starting the Reclamation project. It all comes down to what you get out of it; if you want it just to have it, or if you want it to watch/read/play it all at some point.

Now that I can talk about trademark stuff again, there’s a lot that I want to talk about– mostly because it seems like a ton of really awesome things happened while I restricted myself from mentioning them. So, while I know that in internet terms this news is mostly so old it’s ancient, dead and buried, there’re a few topics worth going over. This post is just a quick little list; some of it might be expanded on in the future (if I don’t go into ridiculous detail enough here).

1) The K-On! manga was licensed. I still need to see the anime. Or perhaps I should say I still need to see the animoe?
2) NIS America enters the NA anime market with Persona and Toradora!, online-only sales. I think it’s a pretty smart move, in point of fact. It certainly makes as much sense, if not moe, as K-On.
3) Halo 3: ODST didn’t suck. Well, okay, it’s just too short, but with Nathan Fillion as your commanding officer (and playable character in certain circumstances) it’s hard for the game to suck. Also, Halo: Reach continues to look interesting, though rumors are it’ll retcon some if not all of the Fall of Reach novel.
4) Video Games Live! Bonus Round wasn’t quite as good as the first time it landed in Pittsburgh– I think they were using a different choir last July, and unfortunately this one just seemed to be phoning in their performance. The rest of the orchestra was good for the material they were working with (they picked some weak selections, I think).
5) Watching the Olympics at my family’s house was fascinating. I made mention of how curling is such an interesting sport to begin with– and I reiterate that my interest is completely without irony– but hearing the genuine Canadian commentary on it was a real treat. Sometimes I miss living near the northern border.
6) I read through all of Miyuki Miyabe’s The Book of Heroes over that same trip; overall I thought it was a little weaker than Brave Story was, but still enjoyable. It has this weird metafiction-meets-Lovecraft-meets-juvie-lit thing going on, and I kinda think it should have been about a hundred pages longer. Might be worth grabbing from the library if you liked the other book.
7) Speaking of books, my late-Christmas gift arrived. I now own a Nook e-reader, and so far I really like it. I loaded The Baroque Cycle onto it first thing, and am going through that– it’s nowhere near as easy reading as anything Miyabe writes. Hell, it makes The Lord of the Rings look like The Cat in the Hat by comparison. Fortunately I’m not carting around three monstrous tomes to read all of Stephenson’s big show. It reads PDFs as well, with a minimal amount of fuss; this basically means that I have a new tool to bend to my will in interesting and unique ways.
8) Funimation announced that they’re re-releasing Trigun, with its original (Pioneer) dub. That’s good news for folks who don’t yet have it (I managed to swing a good deal on it at the beginning of ’08). Now moe folks can watch Milly being her inimitable self!
(Call this “8A”: Come to think of it, there was another interesting Pioneer-related moment, but restricted to being just me: I managed to locate the El-Hazard OVA set for extra-cheap. The first VHS episode of El-Hazard was the very first anime tape I bought– $30 for a half-hour episode, dubbed, that was practically not even engaging enough to get me to get the rest of the series. Fortunately I got to see it marathonned at Tekkoshocon a year or so ago and loved it, and so when I found it in Erie, I only hesitated slightly.)
9) Once my sister figured out how to play completely broken card combos in Munchkin Cthulhu, she became uber. Once my mother figured out the scoring in Carcassonne, she became vicious.
(9A: The iPhone spell-checker recognizes “Cthulhu”, but Firefox does not.)
10) Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei was licensed by Media Blasters. At the time, there was no news whether or not a dub would be produced. Insert remark about uncertainty leaving many people in DESPAIR!!!, but honestly I think it’s still pretty damn good news no matter what (well, it would be better if there was a season set instead of old-style single-disc releases, but I’ll take my Pink Supervisor where I can get it).
11) I am totally not sorry about all the moe puns up top. In fact, there’s gonna be a whole lot moe. (No, there’s not. Yes, I know how it’s really pronounced with two syllables.)
12) Media Blasters also managed to rescue Record of Lodoss War from the defunct-company pile. I haven’t seen the OVA series, but do have CPM’s DVD set of the TV series– and have not seen the ending to that, either. If Media Blasters does a decent job repackaging the OVAs I may pick them up.
13) On a slightly related note, remember all that nonsense I wrote up about how the anime market in Japan worked? Turns out it’s really skewed towards DVD sales… and, in some somewhat unsurprising news, revenues from those sales, both domestic and foreign (read: Japan and not-Japan), are dropping sharply. Japanator estimates that a core market of only about 300K North Americans can be counted on for sales. Honestly? That’s more than I expected. At least NA localizers offer their series in reasonably-priced sets– the two-episodes-per-disc model still reigns supreme in Japan.
14) Working with the Nook a little bit more, I managed to find Calibre, which converts pretty much every document format into the open ePub format used by most portable readers. I’m gauging the interest for an e-book release of A Civics Lesson; keep your eyes on Linguankery to see if and when it’s available for purchase/download.
15) My rant on the 24th was directed at Wal-Mart. Trust me, folks, as soon as I move, I’ll be making a concerted effort to never shop there again. The problem lies in that it’s close to my house and I tend to value time pretty highly, so long trips out are “costly” to me. Gonna find a new apartment close to a grocery store, or at least a bus line to somewhere decent.
16) The reason I was in Wal-Mart, though, was to get passport photos. (Won’t make that mistake again.) I fudged my travel plans a bit– I’m planning a trip to Canada for a day or so in the immediate, but will probably wind up planning a trip further abroad later on– but odds are good that within a month or so I’ll be prepped to go fully mobile.
17) The 24th was rough. But it was all made up for by the Nintendo summit. In (extreme) brief, and in descending order of OMGs: Cave Story Wii has a date for March 22nd (three weeks from today– mark your calendars, there will be a test on it); Picross 3D lands on the DS on May 3rd; Super Mario Galaxy 2 hits May 23rd; the end of June sees the release of Metroid: Other M; and Monster Hunter Tri lands on NA shores on April 20 (free-to-play, Wii Speak integration (for the three people worldwide who own Wii Speak units), and a March 8 demo disc and a $5 Nintendo Points card for GameStop preorderers). I think I speak for everyone when I say “yay gaming”.
18) Oh, and on the 25th, Grandia became available on PSN for the PS3 and PSP. It’s a great game, easily one of the best of the PS1/Saturn-era RPGs, and unfortunately it didn’t age well… and its sequels got overlooked (II) or sucked (III). I reclaimed the first game in early ’09 and have the second one, on Dreamcast, on order as I write this– more on that in a bit.
19) Just as I hit the 14K mark on Gamerscore, Pez decided he wasn’t gonna play 360 all during Lent. This makes him, officially, more Catholic than me, ’cause I’m not exactly sacrificing anything this season. I don’t know how that’s really making me feel, honestly. Also, there’s the question of, can he play if it’s on someone else’s profile (ie Rock Band nights which we have to get back to doing)?
20) For some silly reason, whenever I wanted to kill some time gaming, I spent a not-insignificant portion of time playing Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer. I’ve said before that I’m not a huge fan of multiplayer gaming, first-person shooters in particular; but for some strange reason, I just wanted to play this. Anyway, the solution was quite simple: I sold off the two CoD games yesterday towards my FF13 and Pokemon SoulSilver pre-orders (which was a good time to do it given the 50% bonus value promotion going on). I really only wanted Call of Duty for the single-player story; by the time I get the itch to play them again (read: near the end of the 360′s life span) they’ll be ludicrously cheap because the market will be flooded with copies.
21) Oh yeah, the Grandia II thing. See, I was out of town during the middle of February, and unfortunately that’s when an order of mine was sent out. The USPS says it landed on my door on the 19th; when I got in on the 21st, there was no package. I’d assumed it hadn’t arrived yet and waited until the 25th to talk to the sender… and that’s when I realized someone stole it. Long story short, it’s amazing what threatening to call the police and then feigning actually going through with it will do; the package spontaneously generated itself on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. Who knows, maybe I’ll run Grandia II as my next game before FF13!
22) But probably not, because yesterday I also managed to swing an incredible deal on Borderlands. The best phrase that can describe the game is “first-person gleeful redneckery”. It’s not immediately obvious that the game is going for the sci-fi-western thing that Trigun pulled off, at least not until you’re actually playing the game, but when they say “bazillions of guns” on the back of the case, you better believe it. You get guns for anything in this game. My only gripe right now is the excruciatingly dumb pickup system: when you pick up a new gun it’s automatically equipped, and whatever gun you were using gets put back in your very limited inventory space– or dropped, if your bag is full. I hit level 10 (it’s got RPG elements, but then again these days what doesn’t?) and I’ve had my bag full on more than one occasion, which cost me a really nice shotgun that was a quest reward (yeah, it takes its cues from MMOs). While some folks may not have cared for the single-player campaign, I think it’s pretty damn good, and I might give it a second run as a different character class once I’m through; nor would I terribly mind mixing it up in the online co-op mode.

That really about covers it… I know, far from “quick” or “little”. But honestly, that’s all, there ain’t no moe. (You knew I had to sneak one more in there.) From here on out, I should be up to “current” with my talking points, so let’s just get into March, folks.

(I didn’t create this video… I’m not nearly this good. Still, given tomorrow’s topic…)

So, last week we learned how to tell time in Japanese. Part of this lesson was, of course, the vocabulary involved, which included a very remarkable word: 今. いま is the word in hiragana, and transliterated it’s (as I bet you’ve guessed by now) ima. Literally, the word translates to “now”. It’s a bit more than that, though.

Many different forms of Buddhism, including my preferred flavor of Zen, have at their core the thought of the present moment. Past and future are but illusions– memories and fantasies, respectively. All that truly exists, all that can be controlled (if at all) is the present moment. Right now. That’s not to discount the importance of the past and the future, of course, but you must never value them nearly as highly as you do this moment, or this one, or this one now. Right now.

I tend to think of myself as overplanning for the future, but sometimes– some days, like today– I get thrown into a situation that reminds me of this fact. All there is is the present moment, the right now. To plan beyond it and hinge your hopes on the future is folly, because all there is right now, is right now.

On a completely unrelated note, 今 is also a very good album by BT. Which is how I first came across the word, but the concept– that’s been with me all along.

Finally, kanji is a huge pain in the ass to type into WordPress.

Tomorrow, The Beatles: Rock Band comes out, allowing me to realize in full my dream of embarrassing myself indelibly in front of actual people while butchering some of the greatest songs ever penned. Seriously, I have always wanted to make an atonal trainwreck of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in front of my three best male friends.

With any luck, it will be on Youtube within hours of the incident, and the police will be by to press charges shortly thereafter.