John Zeitler

So, today seems to be rather more open than I had initially anticipated. I’m not surprised, of course, but it does leave me in the interesting position of not really having that much direction for the evening and weekend. I do have some plans, though.

Before that, I should probably mention that I finally got around to seeing How To Train Your Dragon last night. It’s a gorgeous movie, and extremely well-paced. I had some serious issues with the voice acting– seriously, why does every Viking sound Scottish? Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson are great actors, but c’mon, there’s a freaking limit. And I have to wonder why Hiccup sounded like he was thirty-seven. But, in truth, all that was forgiveable by the fact that it was just so wonderfully written for the most part. The progress of Hiccup and Toothless’ friendship never feels forced and never feels one-sided; you can see that they’re genuine friends by the end of the film. The rest of the village children… not so much; Astrid in particular does a personality-180 at such dizzying speed that it completely wrecked her character. Still, the final battle was suitably impressive, and its resolution a nice change of pace from most other kids’ fantasy these days. I’d heard rumblings that there was to be a spinoff television series and possibly more movies, both moves I’d greatly support.

Speaking of well-written children’s fantasy, apparently Season 2 of Wakfu is also well underway. So that’s good. It’s appalling to me that there’s been no talk of a North American localization for the series, even as Square Enix is handling the MMO. Appalling, I tell you.

Anyway. Last April, after Tekkoshocon was over, I took on what I called the “Rush to Judgment”– a pair of posts where I went through a dozen anime series’ first episodes, and wrote down first impressions. This was the second Rush– the first one had been for video games, which unfortunately didn’t work out so well. Anyway, this weekend I’ll be doing a new Rush with ten series I haven’t seen the full first episodes of. It’s worth noting that, of the twelve I watched last year, I only got through three full series (Baccano!, Slayers Next, and Ah! My Goddess Season 2), so a 25% rate isn’t that bad.

The list for this year is as follows:
Day One: Key The Metal Idol, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Strike Witches, Nerima Daikon Brothers, Gao Gai Gar
Day Two: Slayers Try, Haibane Renmei, xxxHolic, Squid Girl, Shattered Angels

The posts should be up on Saturday and Sunday; I’ll likely be liveblogging them, so if you catch the first RSS feed update, be sure to come back later in the day.

Next, I set out my list of games that I was going to try to get through during 2012. I’m shooting for a goal of 40 Clears again, and I hope to get through one or more of them before the Tekkoshocon Flyer Rally on the 14th. I’ve also set up ten additional “Extra Credit” games. The thing is, fully 25 of the total games on the list are long-form RPGs or SRPGs, so I’m not entirely sure how I’ll manage to get even half of the number of expected clears. I have a backup, though, what I’m calling the “Trump Card”: Demon’s Souls. If I manage to complete that nightmare of a game, I’ll call the year an unqualified success. But first, though, I’m starting to get deeper into the new Professor Layton title.

As an addendum: there’s someone in my apartment complex with a 3DS as well. The only reason I know this is because I managed to get a StreetPass tag from this person when I left my machine at home in the charging cradle. This is a remarkable coincidence, I think. I kind of wonder if I know this person… probably not.

Finally, in addition to the nerdery nonfiction writing, I’m also going to take some time to revise some of my older fiction outlines in order to prep them for eventual rewriting. I took a look back at the very first NaNo I attempted to write, a fantasy story, and found that, while it was flawed, it was still salvageable; I just need to think back about some of the ideas that I’ve had in the meantime and see which are worth welding onto the original plot, and to see what bits that I patched on are no longer necessary. I also want to take another stab at fleshing out the sci-fi universe I was working on, and seeing if it should or already does fit in with the universe set forth in “A Civics Lesson” and “Frangible Time”. Actually, writing that last chapter of “Frangible Time” might be worth doing, too– likely in February.

Anyway, that’s the plan for this weekend. Things are going to get very busy very fast with regards to the rest of my activities, so this may be one of the last few weekends I get to myself before Tekko prep causes all hell to break loose. I intend to enjoy it.

Today I Learned that “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” isn’t just an old advertising slogan, but a very real phenomenon. I also learned that sometimes I should just go with my gut instinct instead of endlessly debating things.

On Monday, Bandai Entertainment announced that they were closing up shop in North America, leaving Funimation and Sentai/not-ADV as the last two “major” anime localizers left, with Viz and Nozomi/Right Stuf as niches to pick up the leftovers. Ordinarily this would be a very bad sign, and to a degree it isn’t exactly the best start to 2012 for aficionados of the medium. Bandai has been one of the biggest pushers of series in a long time, and they managed a couple of major coups– but even that came back to bite them in the ass.

I suspect they bet a lot of money on the Haruhi Suzumiya series and, well, when Endless Eight happened, ain’t nobody was happy about it. Couple that with the fact that Kadokawa started working on their own directly in the NA market, and diminishing returns on their bread and butter Gundam series, and you get the picture… But there’s another side to it that’s going to hurt the industry a LOT more.

See, Bandai was one of the last of the major distributors to still hold to the “individual disc” release model long after it had proven completely non-viable in today’s market. Gundam 00 sales suffered because it was an individual disc release, and people waited for the season sets– which, fortunately, are still coming. North America is pretty unreceptive to anything but half-season or full-season sets these days, and as a result if it’s not in that format initially, it’s not gonna sell. K-On is another great example of this: amazingly popular series within the fandom, I’ve been reading the manga as it comes out… Haven’t touched the disc releases beyond the first two because they’re too damn expensive. Probably going to ditch those in favor of a season set. I’m not the only one.

There’s also the matter of the “fad” being over… I don’t think it ever really was a fad, inasmuch as there was just a floodgate of opportunity for good stories to be released to a wider market, and now there’s not as much that’s nearly as compelling. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There are still great series coming out here and there: I loved Angel Beats, I can’t wait for Horou Musukou, and the Persona 4 series will have a special place in my heart. But there’s also a lot of crap. Worse, some of the good stuff isn’t getting as much interest as it should. You get that in every medium, and the “fad” was just the rest of the world catching up.

Is it really so bad for anime to be a niche market? I don’t think so. I think it works out better this way. Sure, it’s a little more frustrating when you don’t know if a title is going to be localized, but the smaller market means companies have to go the extra mile in order to earn the sales. Now, anime isn’t just competing against itself– it’s competing against domestic television and other media. Most fans already have what they want to see from the “anime” spectrum; if they can’t find a boxed set they like, they wander over to the next section of the store (or, more likely, run a search for a different product). This isn’t a time when fans can take a chance on a new series and not feel cheated if or when it sucks.

It pains me to see the market shrink and to see the fandom start to crumble like this, and not just for the fact that I wanted to see Turn A Gundam. But it’s not dead yet, and with a little bit of care, it can be saved and put into a self-sustaining state. Let’s hope the new year brings to the companies that have that power the insight needed to pull it off.

Oh yeah, now I remember why it’s difficult to do daily posts. Because every single time I stand at my desk and try to think about what I want to write about, I inevitably trawl through the archive of posts until, an hour later, I find I still haven’t even opened up the post window.

ANYWAY. Today’s the last day of my vacation, and I realize that aside from going home and coming back, I haven’t done much of anything that I really meant to accomplish over the break. Now, granted, what I did do was important and good. But the cleaning, the cooking, a few errands… they all are left to today. Back to the insane, hectic, unstoppable grind.

Bring it on.

When I was 14 or so, I was deeply into eschatology– the study of the end of the world. The general despair that was slowly accumulating in the world was being made obvious, and I was somehow picking up on this. Part of this meant I wound up reading a bit on the subject, and this included the notable book The Late, Great Planet Earth. With the benefit of hindsight I now know that it’s a load of horsecrap in printed form, but at the time I gleaned two very important facts from it; after all, every lie has about 80% truth to it.

The first is that the Mayan calendar doesn’t predict the end of the world this year– the calendar just runs out and starts a new cycle. This is like adding another digit to the Unix timestamp: it’s happened before and it doesn’t mean a damn thing, it’s just more time passing.

The other thing is that the word “apocalypse” didn’t always mean the end of the world. Its original definition was closer to the name of the book that ends the Bible. Some faiths still call it by the untranslated title of Apocalypse, but the Catholic Church at least calls it by a more accurate word in modern parlance: “Revelation”. (Yes, singular. It’s not plural when you talk about the book.)

Regardless of the etymology, I truly believe that there will be an apocalypse in 2012. There will be dozens of them. Myriad truths will come to light in our daily lives, with the world showing us more and more that we may or may not want to know. And that’s not even getting into the mudslinging and filthmongering that the Presidential election in the United States will engender. This is indeed the year of the apocalypse, but don’t think for a second that there won’t be a 2013. The world will go on. Hopefully some of the lies, small or great, in this world will die this year.

Oh, and the book? I can’t prove it, of course, but I think Dad came into my room some time and took it out from my bookshelf, along with the novelization of Doom (by Daffyd ab-Hugh). I’m more upset about the Doom book, really, as while it wasn’t great fiction, it’s an interesting piece of video game history.

Happy New Year, folks, and here’s to many more.

Écrire. Schreiben. Ír. ??. ??????. Ysgrifennu.

Write.

For being the thing that I say I do, I haven’t done a whole hell of a lot of it, and you have no idea how frustrating that gets for someone who has convinced himself that it’s what he does. Fortunately, I have a plan…. and I’m going to stick to it.

Part of why I’ve had trouble getting into a mindset for writing heretofore is because overall I’d been fighting some depression that had started to creep into me a few years back. It’s easy to say “get over it”, but until you step back and get some help for it, it can be impossible to “get over it”. Depression– the real, chronic kind, not post-con ennui or mere letdown at a poor turn of events– the big D is not something that you should fuck around with on your own. And yes, it warrants the F-bomb, because it can get fucking scary if you let it progress. So, get help if you have a funk that lasts more than four months. All joking aside, I’m not kidding here. See a doctor, or a priest, or other appropriate figure.

OK, PSA over, back to self-flagellation. I’d been depressed, and now I’m not. I feel motivated, more optimistic for the year ahead than I have in a very, very long time. That in and of itself should frighten the hell out of everyone, but the fact of the matter is, it also gave me an idea. I’ve been meaning to do a nonfiction book for a long time, and I honestly think it’s time that my preferred subject matter– nerdery– gets a close look at from the inside.

Think about it– 2011 was the Year of the Nerd. Steve Jobs died, and got a crapton of attention; Dennis Ritchie also died and should have got more. People weren’t just interested in the new Apple release this year, they were positively frothing with delight, when ten years ago knowing how to use a computer was akin to a sentence of life as a decaying cat lady or lonely old man. The Internet was no longer for porn, as somehow Zynga made it about annoying your friends with game requests. And technology news wasn’t released to the back pages or the end-of-hour Jeanne Moos pre-emption spots; it was front and center and two days late, judging by how many times my mom asked me about stuff in my sphere of interest.

But being a nerd is about more than that. I figured out a brilliant definition of how to tell if you’re a nerd: you’re a nerd if you like something openly. Somehow in the last thirty years it became uncool to like something. Doesn’t matter what– with few exceptions, if there was some aspect of culture and you liked it, and expressed that like, you were a nerd. You might as well be that nine year old kid in his Star Wars pajamas. That’s changed lately.

I’d have to say it has a lot to do with the work-life balance, and how it swung way out of whack since the 70s. People became increasingly focused on their jobs around the early 80s because of intense competition. This meant that there was less time for things that weren’t job-related, and you got people who could literally not function outside of their jobs. In social settings or leisure time these people were chained to their desks, metaphorically, and that’s why you have the stereotypical hyper-competent power-suited always-on-the-job überdork parents from countless 80s movies. Thing is, though, that’s a ludicrously unhealthy attitude to take, and while it’s obvious now, back then it was seen as the only way to get ahead.

Now, companies take great pains to make sure that they aren’t burning out the employees they’re not planning on laying off. The competitive nature of the market hasn’t changed, and the workload has done nothing but steadily increase. What’s changed is that the shortsighted nature of business has fallen by the wayside in the more successful companies, and there’s a chance for employees to actually have downtime and enjoy it. And, that dovetails nicely with how the workplace exists– a successful employee will feel more comfortable sharing his interests with coworkers. The myth of the interchangeable cog in a cubicle has been well and fully smashed in this day and age. Every piece is shaped differently, and effective managers don’t force their employees to change– they put the pieces together in the way that works, even if it’s not what worked before.

So, my plan both with some of the blog entries here and some other writing internally is to start gathering notes for that one-day nonfiction book I’m working on. I want to define what being a nerd is; why some people are seen as nerds, others aren’t, and still others embrace it; why being a nerd is a good thing; how being a nerd can be taken too far, and how it shouldn’t be; and the eventual plan for the elimination of the word and concept from the culture.

That last one is ambitious, but necessary, I think. Because as time goes by, it’s become obvious to me that everyone is a nerd for something or another– some hide it well, some don’t hide it at all, and still others don’t know what they can be a nerd about. But we are a planet of nerds, a whole great big species of them. We define our literal existence as separate from animals in terms that make us the biggest goddamn nerds in all of creation– “we’re smarter than them”. The word “nerd”, then, is kinda stating the obvious. It’s time we threw it away.

The year gone by has been… difficult for my gaming hobby. I’ve often railed against the idea that the strident cries of those individuals who feel the need to bitch and moan on various gaming blogs about every little thing should speak for all gamers, but it’s become increasingly obvious that either my opinion is wrong, or I’m fighting a losing battle.

The problem with just ignoring comments on the blogs has become akin to that which has plagued the comics companies– the inmates are running the asylum, and gaming news blogs are increasingly inflammatory. It’s not a matter of targeting one platform for ridicule, but the fact that the tone of the blogs have become dramatically more negative over the past few years. What makes it worse is the tacit approval of this trend while at the same time people decry that sort of behavior from mainstream news. I’ve even seen that behavior in the same damn comment– approving of the game blog’s bias while denouncing Fox News. This profoundly disturbs me.

However, there’s another aspect to it. I took a look at the trends for the games that I bought, and found that in many cases, by the time I got around to playing them, they were in the bargain bin. This was after buying the game at or near their launch date. I defend doing so in the past by supporting games that I wanted to do well, but it’s to a point where I don’t think it’s really worth the extra expenditure. Things happening in the foreground and the background are putting a little bit of a strain on my budgeting, and something’s gotta give.

The fact that my backlog is currently longer than the list of games that I’ve completed in my entire life to date only had a little to do with it. The fact that I even have a backlog notwithstanding.

So, in 2012, I’m declaring an amnesty program on my gaming purchases. I’ve been talking about this plan in certain circles, and I’m pretty much ready to set it in writing. I’m not going to buy any video games for myself in 2012 with two exceptions, and I’m limiting myself to a strict interpretation of my “paint it first” plan for miniatures figures. Board games won’t be restricted, per se, but there’s not much that I really want right now short of the next expansion for Super Dungeon Explore (which might actually count more as a minis game). I’m also shooting for 40 Game Clears again, even though I fell short this year. And, regardless, I’m unsubscribing from the gaming blogs’ RSS feeds on the 1st.

Note that I said “for myself”. My work with Tekkoshocon is as a purchasing agent and asset locator– my whole job right now is buying up games and equipment for the game room, under the expectation that I’ll be paid back later on. So, any buying I do will strictly be for the Tekko crew, and there’s some tricks up my sleeve that I can use to try to mitigate how far in the hole I get. More on that later.

But I did also say that there were two exceptions, and I think they’re reasonable: my birthday, and the end of summer. I’m restricting those to used games, though, and only if I’ve beaten at least 10 games since the last buy.

This is going to be a really hard thing to stick to, because there are actually a few games that I’m looking forward to in 2012: Kid Icarus Uprising, Metal Gear Rising, and others. Plus, missing out on immediate E3 news and the WiiU launch is going to sting. But, if I do stick to it, I’m confident I’ll be a lot less stressed about being up-to-date. Besides, being a year behind will save me money for other projects, and even if I don’t stick to it, I’ll have made a significant dent in the backlog, and won’t feel so overwhelmed by it.

That’s the plan, and we’ll see if it holds. Ciao, folks– more in a day or two.

I hope that everyone who celebrated it today had a merry Christmas, and that those among my readership who don’t had a nice day anyway.

This year was a bit more subdued, even though I have the rest of the year off and am planning on relaxing throughout most of it. It’s probably the first year where, even though we don’t have Dad, we found ourselves somewhat happy in spite of it. The past two Christmases were difficult, to say the least, and as a result I wasn’t expecting much out of this year. It’s not that we don’t miss him… But we’re learning to move on. And that’s not that bad.

As for what I usually do, I got sick during December and felt that sending out cards that contained well-wishes and germs to make the recipients unwell may not have been exactly in the spirit of the season. I’ve mentioned this on Facebook and other sites, but I’ll apologize here as well and say that next year, I’ll be starting the cards in November, if not sooner. Again, mea culpa, and I hope that this will be a satisfactory replacement for the time being.

I usually take this time as a point to stop and reflect on the year gone by, and to look ahead to what I’m going to plan on accomplishing in the future. Part of this includes the realization that it was five years ago that I managed my unbroken streak of a full year of daily posts. I did say that with the iPad, I’d be able to post more often, and to this point it hasn’t exactly been so. I’ve discovered a little bit about why that is, actually– 2007 had me in jobs where I had a little bit of free time during the day and could locate quirky things to comment on. I’m planning on spending some of this week locating tools so that I can more easily collect said quirky stuff in the smaller timeframes I have now, as well as have a stockpile of them for later use.

There’s also some site maintenance work that needs to be done, some code maintenance that I’ve been meaning to do for Beyond Madness & Genius, and some cleanup work in the apartment for the 1st or 2nd. But all that can wait– I have a few more days with my family, and that’s always of utmost importance.

Again, have a wonderful and peaceful holiday, and I’ll be in touch before the first of the year.

Allow me to be perfectly clear on one point.

Demonstrating peacefully is not terrorism.
Schoolyard bullying is.

There are a lot of advantages to having a very active social life, but there are also drawbacks. I’m certainly not the most outgoing person in the world, though, and I greatly admire my friends who seem to do so much more than I do.

Now, if they’d just lend me their time machines, things would be OK…