A Last-Minute, Visual Review of 2009
I wasn’t able to squeeze in these “year in review” pictures in my earlier posts, but here they are anyways. These are some screen caps w/ captions that somehow I have kpet around this year. Minor spoilers are present. Enjoy at your own risk. I may have an odd sense of humor, but I believe it’s at least backward compatible!
Why I watch Bakemonogatari in a nutshell.
This Just In: The Internet Schemes to Let Everyone Know about K-ON Season 2
The second season of K-ON, a hot Japanese television series about a music club, has been confirmed on December, 30th during a live event at Yokohama, Japan. Little did the attendees of that concert know, it was just the beginning of a massive conspiracy being revealed.
The news of the second season of K-ON spread by word-of-mouth and using Japan’s extensive electronic and internet communication network as concert goers go online to affirmed of what they saw and heard on the show. TBS Japan’s website for the animated sit-com updated its graphic and reaffirmed the news. However, that was a trigger of something worse.
Cyber-investigators world-wide have been studying a newly-discovered botnet, a network of computers that are hijacked by malware or worm. While traditionally botnets are used to send spam messages, this new botnet, named Kado.3, not only send spam messages, but also compose viral marketing news posts about whatever is deemed the latest fad.
“You know all that chatter about Kanye West’s ‘Imma gonna let you finish’? Kado.3 was responsible for about 5-10% of the talk you see out there, mostly in the form of Twitter messages and pointless Tumblr posts,” said internet security expert Dr. Brian Conflick. Dr. Conflick is one of the first researchers who discovered the new bug, and what they saw might mark a new age in internet attacks.
“Kado.3 is smart enough to act completely autonomously and meaningfully compared to older botnets. Rather than just indiscriminately target its victims when spamming by generating email addresses randomly, Kado.3’s new design allows it to target specific individuals and access a wide variety of network types.” Dr. Conflict showed a real-life example in which a particular Twitter account was suddenly gaining thousands of followers within the matter of several hours. The Twitter account, undisclosed here to protect the privacy of the individual, was a musician who was already on Twitter for many months prior to the attack, and had only a few hundred followers at the time of the attack.
According to experts, like most modern botnets, Kado.3 will dial into pre-determined internet addresses to get software updates and instructions for further activities. Many of these internet addresses, as researchers have determined through reverse-engineering the botnet worm, originates from Japan. Further reverse engineering have revealed even more shocking effects.
“What makes Kado.3 incredible is that it can behave via triggers on the web, and they don’t have to be tied to these pre-determined update sites.” Dr. Conflick said. “We’ve discovered that certain fragments of code that passes through the infected computers’ web browsers can trigger a new set of behavior in Kado.3. It could be used to orchestrate a cascading attack in which the internet in general picks up these stray triggers innocuously, spread them around, but computers infected that consequently downloads the trigger will execute a new set of instructions, further spreading these triggers along the same transmission method that the infected computer was first infected. These triggers could be images. The first one we’ve found was a curious logo of some club that called itself ‘SOS.’ Thankfully from what we can tell, it did not trigger Kado.3 to become anything different, as if it was a test of some sort.”
What does this have to do with a Japanese TV show? Internet researchers discovered that a combination of the words and images of K-ON and its protagonist, Yui Hirasawa, as used by TBS’s website to announce the new season of the television show, is the next trigger of the Kado.3 worm. As expected, upon the first hours of the news breaking online, researchers detected a burst of activity of the Kado.3 botnet, causing an undetermined numbers of suspect blogs to suddenly parrot the news. Investigators are currently working on determining as to who could be behind this latest attack, even if it seems relatively innocuous.
“This is the biggest break we’ve had since discovering Kado.3,” James Torpi, a federal investigator working with various internet security institutions, described the developing situation. “Traditionally botnets are controlled via IRC or in the later cases, Twitter and other social networking sites. This is the first botnet that could be controlled from any plain website. It is of utmost importance that we get to the root of it and put an end to this new threat.”
[The above is fabricated, if you didn’t know.]
Year In Review: N-Squared List
Just like last year, I guess some things have not changed. This could be a reference.
Year In Review: Track List 2009 from #MALKeionbu
One thing I did recently was compile eighteen tracks cherry-picked anime music, and it results in a bunch of files that you can download (at your own peril). It represents a successful and experimental 26 weeks worth of activity for zzeroparticle’s MyAnimeList club, in which the participants discuss anime music. As I write, the club is on its merry way to week 33.
If you know me well enough you’d know music is my favorite niche within the fandom that is related to anime. Some cosplay, others fap to games, I attend Yoko Kanno’s concerts. In fact this may very well be why I am not big on manga: no music! And I go beyond that J-Pop or J-Rock stuff–I care also about anime songs and BGM.
The actual name that #MALKeionbu stands for is “Anime Music Piece of the Week club.” As you can see it isn’t really all that of a name, so the nickname is preferable IMO. It’s also no surprise it coincided with K-ON’s airing. I’ve already talked at some length about K-ON’s appeal from the strength of its source material, so I will not repeat it here. From another perspective, what we do at #MALKeionbu is precisely what Yui and the girls do at their club meets. It’s not serious business.
Still, it is like joining a club. I have to check the club site on a regular basis and listen to the entries when they are posted. I also opt to write and post my opinion each week, but that is optional. It’s another social circle, except these people shares this anisong fetish, and that’s always fun just being able to chat about things nobody pay attention to while watching anime.
Short of turning this into yet another recruit post, I will just tell you about the “best of” collection. Methodologically it is composed of the winning entries we’ve had from weeks 1 to 26. Members then can opt to rank the list, and I compile everyone’s preferences into a finalized track list by trimming it down to less than 80 minutes and arranging the ordering of the tracks. The gang helped put together a liner note file with the track names and credits, plus some notes.
Not bad for 3 weeks’ worth of work. I hope you enjoy it; it might very well be the weirdest set of 18 anisongs that you only know ~30-70% of. And I mean everybody would know 30-70% of it, regardless how unfamiliar or how expert you are with anisong! It’s the oddest thing. If you care to give it a spin, make sure you read the liner notes for some randomness!
Seitokai no Ichizon And the Next Level
Let’s be more precise. Age and knowledge do not impart perspective. It is the hidden cost of outsourcing your code and planning your primary education curriculum mainly on an elevator system of rote memorization of data and formulas.
Which is to say, when Kurogane says however-many-years, he is just estimating some amount of accumulated experience. I imagine there are as many jokes shooting past above my head as the ones that hit, full on or glancing blows, coming from Seitokai no Ichizon. The same could be said that even I do not understand many of the jokes in Lucky Star, and I suspect (or rather, ani-nouto might have confirmed as much) that most of us enjoy Lucky Star despite our ignorance. Despite decades of anime watching, that is.
Seitokai no Ichizon plays without the fail safe that Lucky Star does (as with many others). A typical anime or manga comedy aims to pander wide, which is a matter of your sense of humor, I suppose. Sense of humor, though, is a finicky thing. When the joke can be appreciated both by a lower, commonly understood sense of humor as well as having multiple level of funniness to it, the joke may be more successful to a wider number of people. My personal measuring bar for this is Akitaro Daichi’s style, who masterfully combines in-jokes with just-plain-funny execution consistently. That is the fail safe.
(Contrast this also with Akiyuki Shinbo’s shotgun style, that lowers the significance and the transactional cost jokes so that even if the audience do not get many of them, it detracts little from the overall experience. It is a low risk, low probability but high reward gamble. Some might confuse that style with Seizon.)
But I am not sure that is what Seitokai no Ichizon is about. From the very beginning, it is a novel adaptation involving a bunch of people talking inside a room, diced up into short skits. There is an over-arching story, but at the same time the story telling style is almost non-linear as different plot threads weave into the back drop of a simple, episodic narrative. Maybe this is what is “healing,” and maybe this is Seizon’s true safety net. However, I think it is something that only works once you are sufficiently disarmed from laughing your butt off.
And yes, I enjoy Seizon because:
- I laughed my butts off.
- It is like reading the blog of a Japanese anime/manga/stuff fan.
There is a simple pleasure to see how some things just don’t change regardless of what language you speak and where you were born, too.
Well, so the question turns to: why are some people indifferent, despite having perhaps similar experience and knowledge with anime? The simple answer is that Author and I have very different sense of humor, maybe. Perhaps I get some jokes that he does not. Maybe I enjoy this kind of aimless 5-way manzai skit just because, and he doesn’t?I don’t know, as all or some of the above could be true. To some extent, I don’t really care either, because in the end something enjoyable was made into an anime, and even if I didn’t read the original works, it may very well preserved the spirit of the thing.
Chalk one up for further genre fine-line specification! Especially when it is a risky work that may very well be one of a kind.
Now I just need to come up with a better explanation other than to describe Seizon like reading an anime blog, since nobody knows what that means as applied to a work in of itself. Yes, one of the jokes about Seizon isn’t so much that the fourth wall has broken down, but the narrative is running naked down the street, out of the cage. In fact, it is as if Satoshi Kon was making an episode of Paranoia Agent about making Paranoia Agent. In Seizon the guise is much better, but as a result it’s much more difficult to pick up because the point isn’t so sharp. For starters, our four Student Council girls represent each of the four seasons, not just by name, but also by motif and personality flares. Their relationship with Sukisaki is not unlike the relationship of its intended audience with Seizon itself. Why the four seasons? Maybe they’re inspired by KEY games, I don’t know. Maybe Key-kun knows?
What I described in the above paragraph isn’t so much what is Seizon is about, but it is an example of the kind of thinking that underlies what makes Seizon enjoyable (and perhaps one could even say that is Seizon). A part of understanding is knowing the material it evokes, but ultimately it is a matter of perspective, and no amount of aging or anime watching can help you with that.
Changing gears complete, let’s ponder on something unusual. We might have a clue as to how nonsensical this was, in of itself. So how odd was it when someone whips up a blog that you saw from the show? Would it be even more weird if the blog was Out Of Character? Too bad they didn’t get that far, so in the end we just have a reference from the show made post-hoc on the web. Still, go take a look!
