Posts Tagged “Random”

Just very unmotivated to talk about anime. Maybe the offer of the winter will motivate me. Moreover, my time was burnt playing EVE Online, trying to beat Touhou UFO and reading Dungeons & Dragons 4.

More than TVTropes, Badass of the Week is my favorite time sinker when it comes to… waste my time reading.

Just to make sure you are not mistaken. The fictional badasses featured in this site are few and very deeply rooted in pop culture (Godzilla, Indiana Jones, Darth Vader Kefka…), and none of them are from anime. I’d like to think that Ben would hate it if the entirety of /a/ and /m/ email him about Sasuke or Kamina being end-all be-all parangons of badassitude. Myself, I’d be very annoyed if that happened. SaiGAR was ugly enough, BoTW need not to be spoiled with that.

What make Badass of the Week a badass read are the hilarious descriptions of the featured weekly badass.
Here a few samples

On the Viking of Stanford Bridge

:

Standing astride the bridge was one man. A giant Norse berserker silently surveyed the Saxon army, firmly clutching a massive double-bladed Greataxe in his weathered, calloused hands. A lone Viking hero granted permission by his King to die honorably in combat, tasked with defending the narrow bridge and buying time for his brethren to reorganize. His face was concealed by an imposing horned helm – metal plates reinforcing a mask constructed from the bleached bone remains of a fearsome animal skull, his wild eyes peering through the darkness like searing orbs of white-hot flame. A living demon, sent forth from the darkest recesses of Hell itself to exact brutal vengeance on any mortal brave or foolish enough to cross him, defying anyone with more balls than sense to test his wrath.

The full might of the Anglo-Saxon army charged the bridge, determined to extricate this colossal beast from his post through the sheer weight of their numbers, but the narrow walkway above the raging waters of the River Derwent was only wide enough for four men to stand abreast, and its guardian was unwavering in his resolve. The first rank of fighting men crashed full-speed into the Norseman like a school bus full of insolent teenagers being hurled face-first into a wall of unflinching spikes.

About Simo Häyhä

In the winter of 1939, the Soviet Union was dicks. Russian Premier Josef Stalin thought it would be really fucking hilarious if he all of a sudden sent like two million of his dudes over to nearby Finland to start kicking everyone’s asses and seizing whatever land he could get his borsch-covered hands on, while simultaneously kicking puppies and shouting profanities at inanimate objects in a vodka-and-caviar induced roid rage. While this may have been a laugh riot for Stalin and his numbnuts cronies, the Finnish people obviously were a little unhappy with the prospect of having all their cross-country skis, Winter Olympics gold medals and salmon fishing boats captured by a rampaging horde of godless commie bastards, so they decided to open an extra-large can of whoop-ass and give the Russkies the ballsack kicking they were apparently looking for.

Now when you think of Finland, the phrase “military powerhouse” isn’t exactly the first thing that pops into your head. Likewise, when you looked at Simo Häyhä, a slight-framed Finnish farmer who didn’t stand an inch over five feet tall, you also probably didn’t think “total fucking unstoppable badass”.

Let’s just say, you have over five years of weekly articles, enough to sink your time if you just caught the wagon. And it is well worth it.

Why do I write about it?

Well, the webmaster just released a book. I am considering whether I should buy it. Perhaps as a christmas gift? ;3

Before 9/11/2001, I was hoping for something to happen on the 12/31/1999, something interesting. Of course, nothing happened.

Forward to 9/11/2001. I went through two months of night shift work in the security, something like 15 hours a day for five days by night. It was very difficult and it messed up my sleep schedule for the years to come. Four days earlier, my boss told me that I had to grab my paycheck from his office, in a lost city in the north of Paris, something like Saint-Leu La Foret.

This day, I left my home to run to the train station at 1:00PM. Then I found that it was indeed in the middle of NOWHERE! Saint-Leu La Foret was a craphole lost somewhere in the nostril of France, my boss’ desk was very far, somewhere in the industrial distrinct of Saint-Leu, where there was no freaking bus. Cue a long walk of two hours to reach the office, knowing that I had left my home two hours ago. Then I reached the desk and nobody was here. I called my boss on his mobile phone from a phone booth that was stuck in the middle of that industrial district for whatever reason. I had to wait one more hour before he came back to his office.

Finally, he was here and gave me my pay. It was not a check, instead it was 7000 francs, in money paper. Something I should better hide quick in my bag.

Cue another TWO HOURS walk back to the train station, THIRTY MINUTES waiting for the train to come. Then I decided to turn on my walkman, the old school one with tape and radio tuner. I tuned to my favorite station to enjoy some good old rock music. Then I heard the journalist talking about something about NYC. I did think it was some kind of prank, something they usually do.

The train came and on my way back to Paris, I gazed over the french landscape from the window of the train, while listening a tape where I recorded some X Japan. Back in the station that would bring me back home, I listened the radio again, there was still some of these rather worrying news. To myself, I thought, “It must be something really serious.”, the quality of reception of the radio was crappy, so it was kinda jammed.

Back in my hometown, I walked, having run after the bus way too late. Then I finally reached my home, my youngest brother and youngest sister rushed up to me and told me, “Brother! Brother! There were two planes that crashed over NYC!”

Then I stared at the black & white old computer monitor that served us as TV after our old TV died on us one year earlier.

This was how serious the events reported by my radio were.

A lot of people from 9 to 70+ (on 2001) remembers what they did on the 9/11/2001.

This is what I did on that day.

I am trying to put what I feel about Endless Eight in simple words. However, I can’t. Just saying it is shit is not enough. To me, it is the same effect as watching Roland Garros tennis tournament where I bet on how long before all french players get kicked out of the tournament, before we get to the more interesting matches.

I would try to justify with, “Well, KyoAni always had pacing problems, just as Makoto arc showed.” However, the pacing issue have nothing to do about it. Laziness? Not really. I mean, while they reanimate the same scenes and revoice the same dialogues, lights, frames and general cinematography are different. With varying degrees of quality.

Whoever thought that it was a good idea to stretch of 30ish pages short story up to… eight episodes until now was very wrong. That guy deserves to be have all kind of unspeakable things done to him. It’s an idea on the level of “let’s bungee jump off the Effeil Tower! Without the bungee cord!”, or “Let’s wear the same board as Bruce Willis in Die Hard 3 in the middle of a ghetto!” You think it is a good idea because it requires sheer balls of titanium, until reality comes to hit you in the face, HARD. However, it appears that the ones behind that idea had NOT realized it, or just did the ostriche trick: stick one’s head in a hole to not confront the reality. There is a difference between productive audacity and vain audacity. Guess on which side I think Endless Eight is sitting.

As for the publicity side of the thing, I think it is on the same level as New Coke in the 1980s or the arrogant advertisement french campain for the Nintendo 64 in the mid 1990s. It promises you it is going to be a great thing, something like reinvented steel, then you see it is not the case.

It is unnecessary. What is sad about it is that I LOVED Endless Eight in its printed form. And they managed to make Sighs, my least favorite of the series, all the more desirable! And people stated that K-on! is the most cynical work by KyoAni as hard cold fact! Personally, I do see the ugly head of mercantile cynicism way more in Endless Eight.

The bottom line, screw Endless Eight, wake me up when it is over. I’ll be somewhere, doing pew pew in Eve Online.

Freedom on french internet is NOT dead yet.
In an unexpected turn of fortune, the law had been censored after the Constitutional Council judged that the punishment part of the HADOPI law was against the constitution.
French web users are waiting for Albanel to resign as she had promised. After all, a secretary of Culture who said that Open Office have a firewall have NO place in the governement and clearly is not competent to write laws about internet.

Source

The mere act of posting your own anime top 10 may butthurt the Good Taste Police, even if you have Baccano and Kara no Kyoukai in it. <3

This is my new timesink. Use the left and right arrow keys to lead Tenshi’s perpetual hop, and hope to crash in a blazing glory for the greatest pleasure of our favorite masochist. You may want to use the ability to switch to the other side of the game screen to reach platforms that appears impossible to reach. The cloud stage and the UFOs stages were difficult to me. However, I heard from Tempest from Asuki that it does get worse, he did 40k km after all. So, hopefully you will do better than me.

Caught by rl matters. I was thinking about posting something for the last day of April. But, no, my brain is feeling like goo.

Instead have some adult Chiaki.

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When I was a teenager, when I moved away from Dragon Ball. I was looking for the one anime, that would deliver something that would make me look at life under another light. The kind of thing that anime fans, especially one particular kind, always talk about. The one anime that change your outlook on humakind, yourself, the society, the universe. Some will answer Evangelion, other will answer Gundam, I had sat through the former, watched some of the latter. But none of them did it to me. In turn, as the end of the century came to a closure, I STOPPED enjoyed anime. A really bad timing because France was facing its dark age of anime, where the only anime you could watch on mainstream TV was Pokemon.

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On a day of february 2008, I have the insane idea of moving away from Livejournal to a wordpress style blog. For one thing, wordpress is free, customizable, unlike livejournal where you have to pay for more customizable features. Moreover, it is fairly easy to use, unlike some other blogs that require your to know CSS or HTML.

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