Thursday, January 19, 2006

But do they spit fireballs?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060119/sc_nm/environment_japan_jellyfish_dc

In a bizarre twist, actual giant jellyfish have invaded Japan's coastal waters. Where's Rentarou when you need him?

Friday, January 06, 2006

Comics and Books (you know, the kind without pictures)

Again, I'd like to point out that these are my favorites. Not necessarily what I consider the best, but what I enjoy the most.

Continuing from yesterday:

Top 5

Comic Runs (American)
1) Ostrander and Yale on Suicide Squad and Manhunter- A 90's comic before they were everywhere, Ostrander and Yale dealt with difficult questions about how supervillains should actually pay their debt to society, long before anyone else thought to look at the system. Manhunter took it a step further, showing a villain who had honestly rehabilitated and showing what his life was like.
2) Dark Horse Conan - Busiek does an amazing job of not only putting Howard's works into some semblence of order, but also manages to blend in his original stories with the Howard adaptations so seamlessly that you can't really tell which is which without knowing beforehand.
3) Claremont and Davis on Excalibur - A really fun vibe between the two, which was the X men comic that wasn't really much like an X Men comic, dealing more with Captain Britain and his plot points than the ones that were going on in the other X Men comics. Hilarious and touching with all of the angsty bits that Claremont loved to throw in.
4) DC's Forgotten Realms and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons comics - Weird and punctuated with a number of silly things that can only happen in a comic based on the Dungeons and Dragons game, but I loved the way the two series weaved back and forth between each other, and through the novels TSR was publishing at the time.
5) Bendis' and Bagley's Ultimate Spider Man - Yes, it's a huge run. But it is punctuated with some of the most real dialogue in any comic book, ever. Yes, that means that sometimes they repeat things back and forth to each other. Every time that I think this team is starting to lose a little of their magic, they bring another story that is full of great bits.

Manga series
1) Negima! - It started off as a clone of Love Hina (which, for me, wasn't necessarily a bad thing), and has morphed into a completely different story about a boy's search for his father and what it means to be an adult. Always funny and cute, often touching or sad, if it can just manage to avoid the pitfall of shoe-horning Negi and Asuna into a romantic relationship, I will enjoy it far more than just about anything I've ever read.
2) School Rumble - Funny and absurd all at the same time. You might be noticing that I have kind of a love/love relationship with Kodansha, you would be correct. Other series that I love include Tsubasa Chronicles, XXXholic, and Suzuka. Shonen magazine is where it's at!
3) Love Hina - Already mentioned, but worth repeating, the one piece of entertainment that has transformed my ideas about what I enjoy more than anything else. I walked in fully prepared to hate it with preconceived notions about how bad harem series were, how bad most manga was, and how little I enjoyed comedy and romance. A few short years later and I now find harem series to be the funniest thing on the planet.
4) Kare Kano - A relaxed slow-paced story about the kind of person we all can identify with. Everyone has put on a public face to deal with whomever and dealt with when that public face starts to take over your life. I dread the last english volumes of this series, as it was the series that showed me that just because something is marketed for females, it doesn't mean that I can't enjoy it as well.
5) Ai Yori Aoshi/Tsubasa Chronicles/Fullmetal Alchemist (tie) - It's hard for me to pick one at this spot, but all three of these series manage to reserve fairly high spots in my reading stack whenever a new volume comes out.

Novels
1) The Wheel of Time series - Robert Jordan's maxi-series fills up pretty much an entire shelf. And I've still read them all at least three times, some of the earlier ones I've read more than a dozen times.
2) The Amber series - Roger Zelazny's foray into a series of novels comes split into two pieces, one five piece series about Corwin and his attempt to be king of the immortal city of Amber, and one about his son, Merlin, trying to find out about his father. This was the first book series that I read to pieces, literally. I had to replace them with the new omnibus edition because sections would fall out of my original copies.
3) The works of HP Lovecraft - My all time favorite horror writer. He manages the difficult feat of making everything seem connected and together (he wrote short stories) without making it all feel as if he has it written down in notes somewhere. It just seems conversational and behind the scenes you can piece together things that tie into other works.
4) The Bourne trilogy - I can respect that a lot of people enjoy Tom Clancy, but his writing has never done much for me. Generally real world thrillers aren't my thing, but these three stories about a man suffering from memory loss who tries to discover who he really is are definitely my favorites in the genre. Ludlum manages to capture the desparation of not knowing who you are and of being unable to reconcile all the pieces of your past.
5) A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin's fantasy epic is gut wrenching. Every time I think I've established who precisely the hero is, someone betrays them in gut wrenching fashion. I don't think any book has ever made me cry as much as the scene when Robb is betrayed and killed.

Thursday, January 05, 2006

So, what do I like?

It's complicated to look at what types of things I like, sometimes I'll like a show for being realistic, and then pass on another one because it's too realistic. In short, I'll include some top five lists.

Top Five:

American TV shows (live action)
1) Babylon 5 - The granddaddy. Just wish they had passed on season 5.
2) Smallville - Each season has had something good to take away from it. I wish they would incorporate a little more Superman mythos. And I wish that they had cut the Lana character and renamed the Chloe character Lana, but other than that, I'm good.
3) Battlestar Galactica (the new one) - A lot of promise in Season 1, Season 2 was a bit of a letdown. I'm not very fond of shows that hit the reset switch.
4) M*A*S*H - Weird. I know. By this point a lot of you are thinking that I don't like old TV. That's mostly true, but I've always enjoyed M*A*S*H. It's the first show where I felt like things were happening to the characters, people went home, people died, relationships changed. It just felt more real. The only other sitcom that cracks the top 20 would be Friends, for a lot of the same reasons.
5) Firefly - If it hadn't been aborted just as it was getting started, this might have been #1.

American TV Shows (animated)
1) Batman: The Animated Series - Loved it, the actors were great, the scripts were occasionally amusing, often touching, and they managed to play in a pretty big gamut of the Bat-verse without tripping up. This is pretty difficult, as Batman's villains run the gamut of sympathetic to despicable. It even manages to keep it's little sequential bits going, Harvey Dent changes into Two Face, Robin grows up and leaves.
2) Gargoyles - I know. It's Toon Disney fodder, but the story for those first two seasons was incredible. Gargoyles was actually my introduction to the "Previously, on ..." line. I'd never really noticed it before, but it was a must for watching the show. Too bad they went for the Goliath Chronicles episodes.
3) Justice League/Justice League Unlimited - This series is actually more of a successor to the Superman series than the Batman series, but I still love it. I didn't have anything against the Superman series, in fact, I enjoyed the way they set up the Darkseid plot for three years before really bringing it out for the series finale, but there were two few episodes dealing with that, and too many dealing with random Lois getting into trouble. Justice League follows a lot of those plot points that were left dangling, with almost no damsel in distress.
4) The Simpsons - Hard not to love the Simpsons, who manage to come up with funny, culturally relevant gags after so many years.
5) Teen Titans - Seasons 1, 2, and 4 were outstanding. 3 put me a bit into snooze mode, and 5 has yet to show me why I should be caring that it's getting cancelled. But the best moments of 1, 2 and 4, I would stack up against any other series I've seen. Terra turning traitor, Robin joining Slade to save Raven, great stuff.

Top Five Anime series
1) R.O.D. the TV - Helps that it features bibliophiles so prominently, love the characters and the animation. I especially love the attention to detail (people change clothes, but items in locations are always in the same spots). Even the dub isn't so bad.
2) Noir - I freely admit I'm an idiot. I missed the whole yuri thing until it was explicitly pointed out in the letter. Didn't detract from what I feel is a darn fine show about discovering who you really are. Kind of like the Bourne Identity (the real written one, not the one they put on film) in a way.
3) Full Metal Panic (including Fumoffu) - Funny, touching, absurd all at the same time. I like my shows to run the gamut on emotions and to really dig into what makes characters work. Full Metal Panic manages to do all of that while including giant robots (something I normally can't stand).
4) Fullmetal Alchemist - 51 episodes. No filler. Caused me to cry in at least four different spots that I can think of, off the top of my head. Though nothing surpasses the death of Maes.
5) Shuffle! - Interestingly, there was a time when I would have said that there was no harem anime that was worth the time of day (I don't think I'd seen one at the time). Then I read Love Hina and saw the anime. I justified it to myself by saying, "It's not a harem anime, he's only ever interested in the one girl." Then I saw Ai Yori Aoshi and someone pointed me to Da Capo, both shows I enjoyed immensely. I have now realized I'm a fan of this entire genre. Shuffle! manages to transend a genre that I like by breaking some of the conventions that irritate me the most (there are other ones that I can live with). And, finally, someone besides the childhood friend gets the boy. Drama, romance, and comedy, all wrapped up with a pretty character-centric bow. Though it has emotionally scarred me from ever entering the Animesuki forum on it ever again.

Top Five Movies
1) John Carpenter's The Thing - Bizarre out of left field movie, but there's something about it that truly tries to evoke H.P. Lovecraft (one of my favorite authors of all time).
2) Aliens - Amazing how what was a very simple scary movie (very good also, but I didn't want to put both in the top five) can have it's concept tweaked only slightly to produce a great, suspenseful action movie instead. "Game over, man!"
3) The Fellowship of the Ring - I know Return is most people's favorite, but all of the truly great moments, for me, happen in the first one. Gandalf's sacrifice at the bridge, Boromir's defense of Merry and Pippin at the ford, even the Nine are best in the first movie.
4) 2001 - Blade Runner could get this spot, Conan (the Barbarian of course, there was NO other Conan movie) could also, but 2001 is, for me, quite simply one of the best science fiction movies of all time.
5) The Princess Bride - True Love, miracle workers and mostly dead. The first "fantasy" movie that I really got into, though later I would go back and watch some earlier ones that I also greatly enjoyed. Plus the fencing was very nicely handled.


Next time we'll take a look at the written stuff.

ARGH!

Cannot believe the Reggie Bush lateral.

In fact, I would have killed myself if it hadn't been for the fact that I just don't care that much about college football.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Yay for me!

Huzzah for my first entry in my new blog!
Sequential Thoughts is intended to be reminiscent of the term "Sequential Art" (for those of you who don't know, that's the fancy way of saying "comic book"). See, I enjoy comic books. And unlike a lot of people, I don't draw much of a distinguishing mark based on where they come from. I enjoy comics from Japan, Europe and the United States. I also enjoy cartoons (including anime), books, video and computer games, sports, and, of course, movies and TV shows. Sometimes I enjoy one more than the other. Two years ago I was big on American comics, video games, and novels. Now I'm enjoying TV, manga and anime more, but these things come in cycles, and I expect that at some point I'll be more interested in talking about the others.

As you might be able to tell, Sequential Thoughts is going to be my rambling discourse on things I like. I noticed last week that all of the media I enjoy has something in common, it builds up elements sequentially. Not necessarily the plot (though that's usually the way it is), but some elements of the story are built up over time.

For example, two years ago I was no longer following anime and/or manga. It seemed like there wasn't really anything in it for me anymore (up until this point, I had enjoyed Cowboy Bebop, Gundam and other anime shows). As a matter of fact, pretty much the only animated shows I was watching anymore were the Dini/Timm DC Animated Universe (Batman: TAS, Superman: TAS, Batman Beyond, Justice League, Teen Titans). I went to the library one day and checked out the first five volumes of Love Hina and the first three or four of Oh My Goddess. Now I should point out that I already knew the broad strokes of what each series was about. I had assumed that neither would be my cup of tea. I read the Oh My Goddess volumes, and wasn't especially surprised. It wasn't for me. After the first volume of Love Hina I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be for me either.

However, by the end of the third volume something strange happened, I was laughing out loud while reading. My sense of humor is a little bit dry and ironic, so I usually don't find comedy especially funny. I know when to laugh, and I include (what I like to call) my polite laugh in the appropriate parts of shows I watch, but up until this point I had never really laughed at something before. My wife would look at me strangely because I couldn't stop laughing while reading. The thing about Love Hina is that the gags build up. By the fourth volume you have seen pretty much the punchline to almost every joke Love Hina is going to give you; however, the inventive build ups and elaborate ways the jokes are staged are what make it so funny. And even funnier are the moments where you keep waiting and waiting for the joke but it never comes.

It's important to note how this is different from something like Looney Tunes (not that there's anything wrong with Looney Tunes either). In Looney Tunes they use a lot of the same gags over and over, but the gag is basically repeated (the same for Tom and Jerry or other, non-sequential comedy shows). In Love Hina, the gags are escalating, each one provokes a reaction that builds on the previous reactions. The difference is that one is intended to be watched in a certain order, and the other is designed to be watched in a random piece by itself. Note that I'm not saying there's anything with the Looney Tunes way, I just happen to prefer mine the Love Hina way.

Similarly, one of my favorite TV shows was Babylon 5. In order to watch (and understand) Babylon 5, you have to see the earlier episodes. The plot is layered over seasons. This is different than the way a TV show like (for example) Star Trek works. Though later versions of Star Trek included more layered plot elements than earlier ones, for the most part you can pick out any episode of Star Trek and watch it with someone else without having to explain what happened in the earlier episodes. Again, there's nothing wrong with either approach, I just prefer mine the Babylon 5 way.

For my next entry, I'll probably include an idea of my favorites from each genre. Which will give us an interesting starting point to begin discussions of the things I'm watching/reading now in comparison.