Monday, September 27, 2010

Hilarious Anime recommendation: "Azumanga Daioh" (The fluffy temptation of wheat!)

In brief, Azumanga Daioh is a hilarious and adorable anime series about a group of girls in high school in Japan. It mostly revolves around the normal day to day events of school and the strange things kids talk about, not about giant robots or anything epic. It's "a show about nothing" that takes place in a Japanese school. Years ago I watched it with my anime group, and last monday I randomly picked up the DVDs off my shelf and watched some, and discovered it was so much better than I remembered.

I first discovered Azumanga Daioh through a fanvid (oh look, fan promotion that lead to me buying the product!) I was looking through popular videos at animemusicvideos.org, and watched the highest rated AMV that was listed as having multiple sources I recognized. Here it is, to Blowing for Soup's "1985".



As it turns out, the majority of the footage is from AD with cameo shots from other shows, but I was intrigued by what I saw. I showed the AMV to many of my friends (mostly for the NERVana jokes), and went to youtube to find the show. I watched the first half of the first episode, and then ordered the DVDs. I didn't want to buy them without knowing anything about the show, and I had no legal way to see it. I have really never understood why all shows don't have their first episode online. I'm never going to buy a DVD without seeing at least one episode, and I have no desire to just watch a random episode from the fourth season of a show to decide if I want to watch it. Lots of shows have their most recent 5 episodes on hulu these days, why not the first episode? I can't imagine it possibly decreasing DVD sales. I suppose this is a tangent, but I always think of my experience with Azumanga Daioh as the perfect example of this use case that I think should be totally reasonable from everyone's perspective.

The main character in the AMV is Yukari, the homeroom teacher for the protagonists of AD. Her life bares very little resemblance to the lyrics of the song. She's a single Japanese woman who teaches English and is more immature than some of her students. She's very... enthusiastic, and spazzy in a traditional anime way. In my opinion, the real star is Chiyo-chan, a young prodigy who has skipped middle school and gone straight to high school. She is kind and earnest, but quite naive and susceptible to being lead astray by strange ideas. "Osaka" is the transfer student from the Japanese city of Osaka, who is slow witted and speaks slowly with a strong accent that the subtitles try to portray. In the dubbed version, she speaks with a Southern drawl. We also have the tall, attractive and athletic girl who is considered "cool" and "mysterious" by the other girls, when she is really just shy. She desperately wants to play with animals, but they usually bite her. One of the other girls is desperately in love with her, but of course unable to say anything. There's the smart overachiever and her slacker best friend who she pretends to hate but really loves, there's the athletic girl... the characters can all be fairly easily summarized, and there is nothing particularly deep about the show, but it is rich and delightful.

Each season repeats the same general events, like summer vacation at Osaka's house and the school field day, but each one manages to be funny and charming. There isn't much in the way of continuing plot arcs, just life continuing on. There's no graphic violence, scatological humor, or strong sexual content. I'm not sure at what age kids would start enjoying the show, but it's totally acceptable for all ages in my mind. Well, there's a male teacher who seems to have creepy crushes on students, which I can't imagine ever airing on a similar American show, but that's the creepiest thing.

In conclusion, it's delightful, you should watch it. You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001VFM5YM/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B000ADKWNM&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0CY50CS320QZ8NYJCVWF

Monday, September 20, 2010

Top Chef: Just Desserts

Top Chef: Just Desserts is on the air, and I am super excited! The first episode aired last Wednesday, and I think this is a great addition to the Top Chef family. Host Gail Simmons is a long time judge from the main Top Chef, and Head Judge Johnny Iuzzini and his crazy pompadour appeared on this past season of Top Chef. (I have to admit, watching him as head judge is making me imagine super-bald Tom Collichio, Head Judge of Top Chef, with a pompadour. Someone should photoshop that.) When I found out that (DJ) Hubert Keller is one of the recurring judges, I literally got up and did a little dance. I fell in love with Hubert Keller during the first season of Top Chef: Masters, and my love only deepened when I saw pictures of him DJing at a festival in San Francisco, the city I was living in while falling for him.

But enough about the judges! This season starts out with only tweleve contestants, compared to I think seventeen in most seasons of Top Chef. Did Bravo not want to commit to as many episodes? Honestly, I find it hard to keep track of everyone when there are seventeen chefs running around. As with the other shows, they start with a short "Quickfire" challenge, where the loser suffers no peanlty but shame and the winner gets immunity from elimination for the episode (at least in the early episodes). This week's elimination was all about chocolate, and my sweet tooth is begging to be fed now. For me, the biggest downside of cooking competitions is that we the viewers can't actually taste the food, and just need to take the judges' opinions, as opposed to something like fashion or singing shows where the audience has most of the information the judges do. However, I think with pastries, presentation will be much more explicitly part of the challenge, so we viewers will have more information to judge the contestants with.

One of the big issues in the cooking world is gender. For ages women have had a terrible time working their way up the ladder, with men to this day still openly saying that women belong making pastries, which of course drives me crazy. Top Chef season six was particularly annoying in seeming to have selected a lot more talented men than women, so that something like the first six people eliminated were women. Season seven was better in this regard, but I am excited to see the competition in what is traditionally considered the female side of cooking. (There are tons of talented chefs of all genders, races, sexualities, et cetera, and I do hold Bravo responsible for their selections. No, I don't know much about how they select contestants, but when it is obvious to the audience on day one that some people are vastly outclassed, I can't believe that the show runners did not have some idea going in.)

Also, I lost count of how many out gay men there are this season, and of course I do love out people on TV. Season seven didn't have any, and I really loved season six's gay male-Ash and lesbian Ash buddy comedy in the background. (Favorite moment of the reunion show: They ask if there were any romances, profound awkward silence, and the two Ashes said they switched teams for each other. Wonderful stuff.)

I watched the preview for the rest of the season, and it looks like one of the stronger chefs is clearly going to be the "bad guy" for the season, which I am not looking forward to. There also seemed to be straight up sabotage, with someone hiding all the butter from the rest of the chefs? Ugh. I have no interest in those kinds of shenanigans. I do watch Top Chef for the people, and not just the food, but I don't like when people are too horrible. Season six of Top Chef featured a lot of people hating on one contestant to a degree that I found extremely unpleasant and reminiscient of the bullying and cruelty I faced in middle school, and one especially loud mouthed and offensive contestant who drove me up the wall. Right in the first episode he started off with comments about how women shouldn't be at his level (and that particular woman outlasted him and was the final one eliminated before the finale!) and I just hated him all season and cheered when he was eliminated. I also had a lot of affection for one of the season's finalists, and several people who lasted much of the season.

This past season just never caught my attention the way season six did. I think a lot of it was that most of my favorite contestants were eliminated early on, but perhaps the lack of strong conflict actually mattered to me more than I thought? I really don't know. We'll see. The two seasons of Top Chef: Masters have never had any nastiness (well, expect Ludo's... I don't even know what to call it, delusions of something) and I adored those seasons. Top Chef: Masters is like the celebrity Jeopardy of Top Chef, with chefs who are older and well established, usually with multiple restaurants of their own, and their winnings all go to charity. Most of those contestants are just much more secure in themselves and their careers, without the desperation of some of the Top Chef contestants, some of whom have very unsure futures. The prize money for Top Chef is $100,000, which is clearly intented to "further their culinary dreams" or something like that, but the apparent "bad guy" of this season of Just Desserts has a mother with over $100,000 in medical debt, so that puts an entirely different spin on that. (To any European readers: Please enjoy your lack of bankruptcy from health care costs!) Hopefully that won't color the season too much.

I think I've said more than enough for a show I've seen less an hour of, so, Top Chef: Just Desserts! Wednesdays on Bravo, with episodes available on their website! http://www.bravotv.com/top-chef-just-desserts

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Dragon*Con: Or why I missed posting last week

Last Sunday I ruined my streak of blogging because I was partying in Atlanta at Dragon*Con, "the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe". It runs Friday-Monday every Labor Day Weekend, and will have its 25th anniversary next year. This was my third year going.

Most unfortunately, I was sick during the con. I still had fun, I just had fewer hours of fun than I would have had otherwise. One of my con roommates was getting about four hours sleep each night. The con rule as I know it is 5-2-1, for 5 hours of sleep a day, 2 meals, and one shower, but she swore by 3-2-1. Even if I had been in full health I couldn't have pulled that off, but she's only 23. ;-)

Dragon*Con is really big. It runs basically non-stop all weekend. I don't believe there are any scheduled events between 6 am and 9 am, but otherwise, there are usually at least twenty things going on. I don't know the official attendance numbers, but it is some multiple tens of thousands of people, which just sounds utterly ridiculous. The minimum I usually hear is thirty thousand people... and yet I still managed to randomly run into people who I didn't even know were at the convention. D*C is basically twenty different conventions all happening in the same five hotels over the same weekend. There are some events that are run by the main convention staff, like the costume parade and the masquerade, but most events come from the fan run tracks. Some of them are pretty standard, like the Star Trek, Star Wars, and anime tracks, but some tracks have a larger showing at Dragon*Con than at most normal cons, like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series or Anne McCaffrey's Pern series. I think it's self fulfilling, Pern fans know that Dragon*Con is big for Pern, so they keep coming, and it stays big. (It does help that the author used to come to the con and not to most other American cons.) I like that bottom-up feel to Dragon*Con, even if I don't go to most of the more niche tracks, I am glad they are there and the programming isn't all determined by corporate interests. (*cough* San Diego Comic-Con *cough*) I've been to a *lot* of cons, and I really do love Dragon*Con. One of my other favorite conventions is just a few weeks before D*C every year, and that one is only 140 people, so I really do experience a wide range of conventions. :-)

Dragon*Con is like Burning Man in that you have to resign yourself to the fact that there will always be cool things you are missing, no matter what you do. I actually have compared D*C and BM a lot. They are of roughly similar sizes in terms of attendance, happen at the same time, there are many people who are devoted to going every year, people plan for it all year, people show up in crazy costumes and get very intoxicated and many of them seek out (and find!) casual hookups amongst the other attendees. I've been to both, and I have to say I really do love the air conditioning at Dragon*Con. :-) I'm considering trying to do several days of Burning Man next year then heading straight to Dragon*Con, which my friends all say is ridiculous, but it's the kind of crazy idea I like.

Dragon*Con is full of crazy costumes. Would you like some pictures? This year I was too tired to attend the costume parade, but I did catch a rebroadcast on TV. The police shut down several blocks of downtown Atlanta, and I think something like 2700 people participated this year. It's quite the scene, and you can see my 2008 Parade pictures on flickr.

Axe Cop and Unibaby

Bar2-D2



Pimp Storm Trooper

I couldn't even fit the whole group in my picture

This one is perhaps not quite worksafe if you look closely, so you'll have to click.

I organized a group of ten people from Boston this year, here are three of them in their Steampunk versions of Team Fortress 2.
IMG_4069

Rum cake is a tradition for me at d*c. I might have gone overboard this year?

Mini Rum Cakes!

Alice in Wonderland