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!
Peach-Time Capsule
While it’s customary(?) to post about Momotato’s update, it’s probably time to explain why I care about him so. It isn’t just because I am old and I know him from way back, although it helped a great deal. It is certainly not because I met him for the first time last year (and wishing I can do so yet again soon).
It’s hard to say, but of all the internet anime people who made a stand and dug a hole on the intarwebs to call it a blog that I have met, there is none as special as this guy (yet?). There’s just a mix of home-grown charm and Japanese sensibilities that capture some of what I like about anime, except it’s in a person.
It’s not so much he’s like an anime, of course not…but it’s a perspective and mentality that a lot of anime share between them that I find it comfortable to see it embodied in a man. It’s also because he is no GIFT to the internet, and that certainly helps to reach out and pull like-minded souls together around the man. Think of a Jeff Lawson that gets to the point and is much more precise, despite their obvious differences in the more tangible things.
And that only scratches the surface. And it isn’t like I get anything by sucking up to him. He’s just so adorable :wub:
Comments on Comments
1. Comments are just another part of a blog. Ultimately they are part of the expression in design for any blogger to customize his or her own space. So it’s fine to not have the ability for readers to post comments. It’s also fine to have capcha, or not, or require a user login, or what have you. The important thing is to realize the consequences of these decisions. Same applies to trackbacks and pingbacks.
2. While I have no empirical data, the anecdotes I have, I feel, should be well received. You probably would agree with me, in other words, as to what motivate people to leave comments. They are well laid-out elsewhere anyways, thanks Chris.
- Effort. Not everyone leaving a comment cares for blogging. One way to think of it is to think of them as contributing authors who writes one short post per every long post the blogger writes that interests them. I hope I don’t have to belabor this point. Even a bare-minimum reply/comment blog requires multitudes more effort. For someone who doesn’t believe in web 2.0 magic, he needs to understand at least the idea that time and money > meta comments. Chris points this out in a different way but this is the underlying idea. Lowering that barrier allows more information exchange, if you’d like that.
- Email is fail. While it is a veritable part of the internet, a growing generation of users rely on it less and less. In fact, to me it is one of the last resort for internet communication in some contexts. Being the most direct parallel to snail-mail letter (how often do we send those?), to me email smacks of formal communication, effort (see above), and some level of professionalism. I use it extensively at work, like many white-collar labor do, but things like Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, Youtube, forums on the web, blogs etc…that’s how people roll nowadays. We are a people who email less and less. It isn’t to say email doesn’t have its place, but it infers a different social context that may encourage or discourage certain kind of communication. It’s a filter to expression, and you have to be aware of its effect on your audience if you force them to communicate that way with you. Plus there’s also the issue that I personally dislike–public posting private communication. It isn’t to say you shouldn’t or you should, but I prefer to not having an expectation that email is non-private foisted against the illusion that it is private. It might be healthy to think of email that way, but email is still a private medium. It’s just not confidential.
- Community versus content. Smart social networking concepts focus on people and not on the platform. On the other hand, process-oriented thinkers (Author is as stellar of an example as any) probably don’t stress along these lines. While the idea that comments inflate a blogger’s ego is not off the mark, it isn’t the whole story in regards to ego padding. The comments, ultimately, satisfy the needs of some of a blog’s readers. There are many reasons why. People like attention (”first comment!”), it can be fun (”first comment!”), and it is one way to socialize (”hahah I got first comment!”) between one blog’s own readership. And ultimately, in a social setting, it is your relationships that floats your ego as well as the objective metrics (page views, ad revenue, comment counts, etc). For example, I don’t know, I think I prefer 100 comments talking about what I actually wrote in my post rather than 100 comments saying “ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH.” Not that there’s anything wrong with a fun and unobstructive meme. And both are better than seeing 100% of your comments reflecting disdain from your readers. In other words, comments help build readership and community, and not just in terms of stroking egos. Or it is all about the ego, but one needs to realize there are more than one way to stroke it.
- Discourse is dumb. Leave aside the Daily Kos, which I suspect Author think little of as far as free discourse, the important takeaway is to realize that discourse varies. And different people have different ideas as to what they like to read on a site. 99% of the blog posts on the aniblog scene are, frankly, not exactly intellectual material. [Those who produce such works are prone to taking hiatus after a short stint.] While I personally believe content is still the king of driving readers, most people aren’t actively looking for enlightenment. Actually, my real point here is that people who talk shop will talk to other people who talk the same shop as a natural tendency. The Daily Kos has a fairly clear political bias and agenda and it’s kind of duh to act like a social conservative in a sea of leftists. Discourse is artificial yet organic like that. Who cares about free speech if no one feels like talking? Let your readers help you by giving you feedback, and imbedded comments are obviously the #1 way to do so. Chris’s comments over yonder summarizes this point concisely as the #1 intended reader of most comments are the blogger him/herself.
3. I am aware that Author’s bones are primarily with the notion of “discussion” or as I read it, comments being some way to embellish and draw useful discourse. Silly Gia (but she knows how to have fun)! But anyways, it is actually the right take. Serious discourse on a topic lends itself to chain blogging, much like what I’m writing here is really commenting on Author’s chip on his shoulder. This is an automatic, natural response, folks. There are a lot of advantages to replying in such a format. From redundancy (don’t put all your good posts in the same basket) to volume to having a better grasp and context to build your reply to simply more of your own editorial control… But people know this, and we do it.
4. Speaking of editorial control, who gives a damn? This is the internet. The paradigm has always been that the reader is empowered and not the editor. If you don’t want to read something, you don’t have to read it. The problem only arises when you do because you are tricked or forced, such as a bad comment in a sea of good comments, or trying to find a good link in a list of bad links, or something like that. That’s when editorial control is helpful. It really should be used to dictate signal-to-noise-ratio and not to shape discourse, even if the two ideas overlap. That’s just my preference anyways. Some people are much more hammed about it, although I think my way gives the best bang for the buck–editing takes effort after all.
5. But the flip side is also true–you want to focus the signal, if that’s what you’re after. Comments (as blogs) that are dispersed across too many blogs increase chances of the readers missing out on good content. (It’s important to distinguish that from the blogger missing out on good content.) How you weight that risk is up to you, but one thing for sure is that I have no editorial control over other people’s blogs. Wouldn’t it be shrewd of me (and any blogger who wants to actually have real discourse) to try aggregate them? And what’s more effortless than just have people make comments on your blog directly? Balanced with the effort it takes to edit out the noise, there is some kind of happy medium where the right kinds of talks are recorded as blog comments and other, right kinds of talks are in different people’s blogs, in the right amount. I think?
Why do I suddenly want to build a RAID farm?
Weighting the positives and negatives, I hope it’s clear why most serious blogs allow for comments. It’s just that these factors do not apply to every blog or every blogger so I don’t see the problem either way as long as they thought it through. People will write blog posts about things that they think are worth writing about, so allowing for comments, at the least, doesn’t work against what Author is really championing for. Do whatever.
DTO DRM Versus Rental DRM
I was just thinking, but wouldn’t some of the practical arguments against DRM be invalid against rentals?
For one, when you say “rent” the implication is that of mere possession and not ownership. You “have” it but it’s not yours. Unless you are one of those people who think it’s within their right to Netflix and copy the DVDs and send it back. Which may be something that is legal somewhere, who knows. But it’s a very slippery ethical position.
Now we know (at least, you ought to) because of copyright, when you buy some movie you may “have” it, except you sort of don’t own it. You only own the physical copy. To really own the movie you have to own the copyright as well as the copy.
So in a sense, the way copyright items are monetized is just an elaborate rental scheme with variable rental periods? Which is why I think in some bizarro-alternate universe where laws made sense, it may be legal to Netflix all you want and copy every DVD you got in the mail. But let’s return to reality for now.
If we only rent and don’t “buy to own,” a lot of the fair use arguments people make suddenly have less traction. LOL @ time shifting? Do we have the right to make AMVs from rented source material, for example? It’s like, even if you created something original, you are keeping things beyond the time limitation you first agreed to. I’m not sure if those fair use arguments are any less valid overall (probably not), honestly, but it’s harder to swallow.
When it comes to download-to-own content, the analogy extends similarly with a DVD sold in a brick-and-mortar store. The media companies fear that people will copy it and distribute it (they will fear the man who copies every Netflix DVD he gets), so they slap DRMs on the stuff. It’s just like the Venetian manuscript sellers during the Renaissance that prompted the birth of copyright law in recorded history. [Or whatever the history buff that will correct me in the comments says.] But I bet most of them are comfortable if their readers were buying leases or rentals instead of permanent copies. They can probably forgo the DRM, at least with less resistance than without the time limit.
Cutting to the chase, there’s a disconnect between what we feel what we are entitled to do versus what we are programmed as right or wrong. It’s wrong to keep your movie rentals beyond the rental period, which is why Blockbuster got away with a business model for decades making $ off late fees. That’s money libraries use to supplement their income.
At the same time, rental is a concept that is foreign and disgusting to some. And these are the people who think rental is crappy value because you don’t own it when you part with your money and your rented video at the end of the day. I think that’s only because home videos is so cheap now? Do they always buy their own bowling shoes? Rollerblades? Skis? I can’t say. But it always puzzles me when people argue against a rental-based DRM video delivery platform because I convert that “it’s a rental” into a monetary equivalence. There’s nothing inherently bad or good about limited-time use with a fee. If you had to pay more to own something, that something being owned needs to convey value behind the price difference. That’s how you calculate if you want to retain your leased car, right? And if you only plan on watching something once, a rental is all you need. Watch and just be done with it.
But it makes sense why a subscription-based DRM delivery platform is the more palatable but equal alternative. Some people are less irked by it. But with the iTunes Music Store rising to its leadership position, it shows that people like quantized DTO rather than an all-you-can-eat buffet that probably cost just as much to the end user even if you have to give it up later? I don’t know.
Social engineering is a mysterious thing.
Charity 2008
Decision 2008 is like Saimoe 2008; sound, fury, and there are better way to spend your time and money.
One way is to play games. Penny Arcade makes charitable donation into a game itself. It’s a great cause and I know many of you do pitch in already like myself. Anyways, it’s called Child’s Play. They’re not open for business for 2008 yet, so it’s just a placeholder for now.
But to be honest sick kids don’t need games. They need health. However, poor kids do–at least they tend to be healthy enough to enjoy games, and it’s more satisfying when you give it to them. It’s like pouring water into a sand dune or something. Sick kids are more like, barren dirt I guess, but that doesn’t make them more or less deserving even if they just muck up your clothes. And having the opportunity to give gifts to abandoned kids for the past few years, I think it really is something that can make you feel like a better person.
November is actually the best time to talk about charitable giving. December is when all the seasonal givers dish out, and since it takes some time to prepare and get ready you have to do it right about now. Anyways, let me jump the gun a bit on this fine Election Day 2008.
Despite its religious affiliation, this is as wholesome giving as it gets: Operation Christmas Child is only one letter away from Out Of Character, but you actually get to pack a shoebox for the kid directly. It’s nuts. Sure, they screen stuff and you just can’t pack anything under the sun, but it offers a lot of flexibility for you to express yourself through your charity. Even if it’s to down-trodden African children who may not be so culturally tied to this subcultural niche you and I live within. Nonetheless it can be fun and rewarding.
Lastly–why donate? Because if you can fuel a drug habit like buying anime, you can spare the love to give that away as well. A copy of Yotsuba& can go a long way, for example. I mean, heck, if Ryu Moto think it’s one of the best Japan has to offer, it’s probably not a bad pick.
[edit: As of Nov. 7th, Child’s Play’s website is now back in business for 2008 and go ahead and donate away. I think they are preferring money donation this year, but anything is good. Also the Wii made it possible to bring games and health together. Imagine that.]
