Getting to the Bones of Google Reader
In celebration of, oh I don’t know, Otou-san’s balls or Google’s new Sidewiki launch (which is unfortunate that it works only w/ Google Toolbar thus far), here above is the next leg of the joke.
Japan 2009
It’s a little odd, but I think of going to Japan for the sake of some live performances, shopping and hanging out with friends just like what I do at an anime convention. I might or might not bring my camera; I might or might not go to a maid cafe; I might or might not see cosplayers; I might or might not care about any of that.
However, I will definitely try to eat my way around. I guess that part is something unique to international traveling. Food culture is something integral to the human life experience. It’s diverse, nourishing, and a great way to appreciate culture using most of the sensory perception methods you have. It’s one place where America is on equal grounds with Japan, that both incorporates foreign culinary concepts and spin them into strange, delicious but nonetheless interesting eats. While I can’t really say who does it better, but this is one free market exercise that make us all winners.
Putting 2 and 2 together we get…Japanese food con in America? Seems like a good idea to me! Someone’s done this already, right?
Breaking bread among friends is one of the larger guilty pleasure I share, even if they’re just random guys from the internets! Over Anime Expo this weekend I hope those who are going will take that opportunity as well. People looking to replicate the same thing at Otakon? Looks like the Anime Diet guys are trying to do something. At least one of them anyways.
If there’s a point to this post, it is that if for some reason you read an Evangelion 2.0 review on this blog, you’d know it was because I was somewhere out of town catching a film of said thing. Same with going to a certain concert. Or maybe even this other one… And (more likely?) if you don’t see anything, you know what’s going on.
An Instrumental Rock Music Detour
I’m not a huge fan of Explosions in the Sky, but I rather liked their live shows that I’m more than willing to go to them repeatedly. It’s definitely a very different experience than listening to their music as one normally do nowadays–from headphones off a PMP. I guess it would probably be more accurate to say that I’m a big fan of live music in general.
But at the same time why instrumental rock? I get the feeling there’s some kind of affinity between the people I run into that digs anime and people I run into that digs, say, World’s End Girlfriend. If by affinity I mean the power to combine and create singular people who like both. In one body. This gentleman over here is an upstanding example.
Well, I mean I guess I could write a post about people liking sandwiches and liking anime, but somehow post rock just hasn’t gotten that much headway into the mainstream, despite the small successes a band like Explosions may have had. I don’t even think this is the kind of music your average music lover would get into, even if they can appreciate it. In other words, it’s not an arbitrary match; it’s no mere correlation between post-rock fans and English-language anime otaku online. There has to be some reason besides statistical collision of a large thing against a small thing. I suppose anime is pretty large?
I wish I can offer something other than my anecdotes, but I cannot. Instead I’ll talk about how Mono, which is probably one of the more notable Japanese group in the genre, rocks out with an orchestra. This detour is brought to you by Twitter, which now consumes probably more attention than it deserves out of my life.
My Loss Is Your Information, MeGUI Says Yes We Can
A slightly different approach with this post. Because I don’t want to write five pages worth of nonsense. You hear that, you train freak?
Today’s Recipe:
How to encode hardsubs for your PS3/Xbox/PSP/iCrap/etc.
Eminent Off-Topic List
Originally I was going to write a list, but I got too TL;DR with the first item so the rest will not come, at least for now. It’s hard enough for me to work myself to talk about off-topic things as is…
I just got the Echo of War Legendary edition in the mail the other day. Finally got through listening to it right now and a prompt response seems somewhat useful.
Again, let me recite again (with emotion!) who Eminence Symphony Orchestra is–they are these Australian youngins, lead by Akiba-kei-type Hiroaki Yura, that plays anime and game music relevant to them. Being inherently non-Japanese, they actually have a taste for western games like what (Activision-)Blizzard puts out. In fact, Yura himself raids. This goes along with the reason why I like them; it’s not just because the orchestra’s main members have anime and gamer creds, but also they are a group formed from the ground up to do this kind of music specifically. To that end they are behind the likes of Valkyria Chronicles (maybe also for the anime?) and Tower of Druaga (imagine that) and Romeo x Juliet. That’s not to mention what songs they’ve played at their shows (Can I has Beyond the Clouds?) and some of the CDs they’ve released.
Anyways, with blessing from Blizzard, Eminence produced two CD’s worth of orchestral arrangements–some old and popular, some never-heard-of, and some spanking new music. They worked with the music talents both within and outside of Blizzard for these rearrangements. The result is Echoes of War. It comes in two versions, one normal and the other, heh, Legendary. The Legendary edition, a 2-CD + 1-DVD box set with some bonus items, comes with a thick booklet full of notes that I haven’t even gotten a chance to closely comb over. Come to think of it, someone has to have written something about the one main theme to Starcraft: Ghost that is now a part of a publicly-released work.
That’s right. Starcraft: Ghost. And that was a nice track too…
Disc 1 contains the music mostly from the Warcraft world, bulk of them lifted from the three World of Warcraft releases. I personally enjoyed the Burning Crusade tracks the most as I spent the most amount of time playing that… It’s the shorter disc of the two, with just 6 tracks and clocking just over 35 minutes.
Disc 2 is where the fun starts, clocking in at around 55 minutes. Track one hit me really hard because, well, back in the days I played Terran a lot. [The first 3 tracks of disc 2 are Terran, Protoss and Zerg rearranged from the classic Starcraft game.] I’m not sure why, but probably because I was the best micro player with the group of folks I picked up the game with back in ‘98. Has it really been only 10-11 years? It felt longer. Anyways, that song cracked me up because of the memories that came back rushing.
However, my favorites were the Zerg and Protoss tracks, as well as the main tracks to Ghost and Starcraft II. Yep, it’s all there. And the Diablo II and Diablo III stuff. They sounded better than I imagined.
I’m already ranting for longer than I’d like, so I defer to quoting a better review…
[I]f you like game music at all, this is a necessary addition to your collection; even if it’s your very first album, it’s worth it. I’ve heard other songs from Eminence[], and this is easily the best thing they’ve ever recorded. The guest arrangers also make this album a unique merging of East and West, something we rarely see in the realm of game music. It’s my firm belief that Eminence deserves our support, if only because they could probably repeat this success with any game developer/publisher that cares to cooperate… and I’d love to see more of this stuff for other franchises.
Who are the guest arrangers? Ko Otani, Hironori Osone, Natsumi Kameoka and Go Shiina. Actually Otani even wrote an image song for the Diablo series. Must be a Japanese thing…? I’ll take originality when and where it comes :-)
I guess, if anything, let me just end with one comment. American and western animation generally have budgets multitudes larger than we see in TV and direct-to-video anime. But why do I care about anime soundtracks and not so much with American cartoon soundtracks? I mean, there’s the caveat that American animated movies often do have great sounds, as with Japanese animated movies. But why the disjoint off the movie screen? Am I just not listening, or do people just don’t take it seriously in the US so they don’t put any money in it? I know in video games, this is a gap that is being narrowed, but certainly not for animation. Regardless, this is a very cool East-meets-West. We can use more of this, for reals, and in all sorts of other things about this weeaboo-but-kinda-mainstream culture. And imagine that, it’s thanks to a bunch of Australians!
