WP seems to lend itself more to mega-posts rather than “blitz posting” but maybe that’s my style, not the software, because I can’t think of any feature that makes it that way. So I’m going to string together some random thoughts and stick them all here, (with updates if more come along) just to keep from making multiple small posts.
Spambots are getting more on target. I just cleaned out my Akismet buffer and at least a quarter of the spam had a term related to anime in some way. This seems to be the week for shady commercial “opportunities” and sex sites/aids. Nice to know I can get a penis extension; all the better to enjoy myself while watching stuff I won’t mention here because it would get picked up by search bots. Except one: “vomit fetish.” Ewww. Just ewww. I dunno what’s sicker, that, or that there’s a market for it. Reminds me of the time I was drunk at a party at DrHeinous’ place, and typed a joke URL that returned an entirely unexpected (scatological) result. As noted, I was drunk, so I completely freaked out, which brought everyone’s attention to it… Bad times. Very bad times.
I guess we’ll be back to casinos next week, and insurance the week after.
Being sick stinks. I’m not badly ill, just exhausted. Think I’ve pushed myself too hard lately.
I’m not working very hard on the Honorable Mentions post. It’s hard to be coherent & funny the way I feel right now. Not that I can ever tell about humor; it’s always the jokes I think of as mundane that crack people up, and the ones where I think I’m being really clever that leave them going, “uh, right.”
I’m making death threats against Pixy’s software. There’s actually a causal link between this and the spambot information above; this was what made me think, “Oh yeah, I need to go clean the buffer again…” Note that because my IP changes randomly (since it’s assigned by AT&T), so does my hash, which is why no one made that connection before.
I watched the first episode of Wolf and Spice this morning. Nothing very exceptional, although I think there are a number of interesting themes at work here. Think 17th century European village. Horo is the village’s grain goddess, only the old ways are fading; new crop farming techniques mean the villagers are less dependent on her, and people don’t believe in her so much any more. So she’s decided it’s time to move on, and hitches a ride with a traveling trader that passes through, by name of Lawrence. She wants to back north, to her homeland. Not sure where the conflict or long-term plot is going to come from. Maybe there’s not one; it’s got a very serene and deliberately-paced feel to it. It could end up being about almost anything, though I’d put a small amount of money on the changes wrought by time, and those of a society shifting to early (pre-steam) industrialism being themes in play. Horo is odd, a mix of youthful naiveté and old cynicism. However, I have a few words of advice for Lawrence: Go for the human girl; they’re lower maintenance in the long run.
Finding that Baka-Wolf has episodes available for straight download rather than bit-torrenting was really nice. BT still seems to give my router hiccups unless I control the settings carefully. The regular downloads are much faster, and don’t disrupt other online activities. It’s not amusing to see how short their donations keep falling though. Some people just can’t be bothered to pay for anything, they’re just leeches. I’m in the process of signing up so I can use their Paypal link as I’m probably pushing a GB of downloads from them already. You ask me, their DL policy is a bit too generous.
Maybe more in an update later.
Update: So much for Australia as the place to go when the USA takes that last spin around the toilet bowl.
Update 2: I, Otaku.
Update 3: Something I thought I’d never hear: Japanese rap music. OP to Ayakashi.
Update 4: aaaaaaaaand, that’s not the OP to Ayakashi, unless that’s from a raw of the 3rd ep. or later. Anyway, that last swirl around the bowl referenced in Update 1 is not so far off. Businesses seem to be in too much hurry to take away our rights to speech and firearms. Yes, I know that AT&T is saying “copyright,” but seriously, do you think that’s all it would be? And think how badly would it get exploited.
I guess there’re genres and forms of spam. Which sets me thinking: if you’re going to create a spambot, why not create one which splices various rhyming elements together to create rudimentary poetry? A little coding and some quality time spent with a rhyming dictionary would surely yield results.
As for vomit fetishism (emetophilia, in fact), nothing new under the sun. The internet’s really just a giant, crowdsourced version of the Marquis de Sade.
Should I be concerned that you know the correct term for it, or should I admire your google-fu?
The last part of the OP for Misaki Chronicles is rap.
Now that you mention it, yeah. Of course, with a female singer, I just put it down to pop music. What I know about music could be inscribed on a thimble… the inside, with a large font.
However, I’ll note that based on watching the first two episodes, that’s not the OP or the ED to Ayakashi, unless they change radically with the third episode; I have no idea what it’s from. Some of the folks uploading to Youtube seem to be a little weak on the concept of OP and ED anyway; Rosario’s ED was labeled as an OP.
Japanese rap is actually quite common. As the older folks move out of anime production, expect to see a lot more of it. Gurren Lagann has at least 4 variations of the same rap theme in the CD soundtrack (and a few that were in the show but never put to disc).
1 is has a lot of classical insrumentation mixed in.
2 is a style I can’t quite pin down. It’s more like normal rap, but has a lot of rock guitar and a few jazz riffs on sax and trumpet.
3 is a very mellow version with the lyrics dialed down under a slow piano accompaniment.
4 is where they turn things up to 11 by alternating the rap verses/beat with Latin opera and classical instrumentation. The last minute overlays everything, and it’s sounds really good to my ear. But it probably has more impact when you know the scenes that song plays in.
As an English student, I would have to commit ritual suicide if I didn’t know a word with more syllables for every fetish. I jest, actually, it was wiki-fu. Google might give me more than I bargained for, after all. The real fun is sitting down with a Classical Greek dictionary and inventing new paraphilias and fetishes. And then Googling to see if communities already exist for them.
Regarding Will’s comment on rap and TTGL, I’m in the same boat: having seen the series, I can’t tell whether the music’s good or whether I just like the associations it brings to mind.
Rap for Japanese is problematic, since cadence is semantically significant. The difference between short syllables and long syllables can change the meaning of a word. Yet rap requires you to speak according to a cadence driven by the musical background.
We can do that in English because cadence is not semantically significant. But what do you do in Japanese when your word requires a long syllable but the music doesn’t permit it? Would they spell it, like they do when they sing? The rap in the Misaki Chronicles OP didn’t sound like they were doing that, but I admit I wasn’t paying close attention so I can’t be sure.
I’d assume the cadence problem is taken into account when writing lyrics: if your word needs a long syllable but the music won’t permit it, use a different word.
The Youtube video you linked is indeed the OP for Ayakashi, though not the Ayakashi you’re thinking of. The series Ayakashi [怪] – Classic Japanese Horror aired a couple of years back and is an anthology of, well, classic Japanese horror stories. The currently-airing Ayakashi [アヤカシ] is based on an h-game.
It doesn’t really count as Japanese rap music, but the Kanon ED has a neat rap interlude near the end of the full-length version (you can hear it played over the Prelude trailer). It’s actually in English, though at times it’s so unintelligible that it takes a couple of listens to even guess at what’s being sung. There are no official lyrics available, so fansub groups were stuck transcribing it by ear, which led to gems such as (from memory):
Get up close
With a toad
Grab a toad
But you can’t mangle a good thing
You can have a rope
Well, one way they get around it is to make a lot of their rap engrishy.
I’ve also seen many cases where they just ignore the cadence problem and break words up anyway. They’ll hold out the vowel on a character to match the music, even though it’s not a long vowel. Or if a break needs to happen in a word like kekko, they’ll just break it up into kek…ko. A trained or native ear would hear the difference between that and ke…ko.
With the way most bands over on this side of the ocean scream, mumble, or garble their lyrics into the mic anymore, I can’t even figure out what they’re saying. I imagine the problem is no different in Japan.
Ah, anime, and the inspiration it brings to blogs. Where else can you find in-depth discussions of the intricacies of musical style, along with a discussion of women’s breasts and maid fetishes?