I am Damien Kellis, and I'm here to ask you a question:

Is not a man entitled to the moe in his anime?

No, says the critic in his reviews, it belongs to angst.
No, says the elitist in his blog, it belongs to us.
No, says the pilot in his mecha, it belongs to GAR.

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose#4Fc~[p[]]*kc3sla#O32C!2`~*Use934 autom#tic/.U

NO CARRIER

Way back when I still believed I could stick to episode summaries (oh, to make a hollow laughter), I hammered out a post for Mahou Shoujo Nanoha StrikerS and gave it a title which seemed to fit the primary focus of the episode as I saw it.

I never really thought about it again until recently, when a few Referring Domains entries in the admin console stood out for not being some sort of random spam-filled site, but instead the scarily mainstream Wikipedia. Tracking these back revealed that a few of the screencaps on that post were used as example images for articles (specifically Caro, Erio, and Teana).

Now, it's not like I'm complaining about this, especially since I am still in a state of some shock and awe that People Actually Read My Stuff. The images are free for whomever wishes to grab them to use as they see fit, since it's not like I own any of them as such. (It's a screenshot. I'm pretty sure that comes under Fair Use.)

No, the reason for all this worrying is because now, anyone who decides to check out the image attributions from Wikipedia will undoubtedly have a somewhat skewed view of what my blog is about, possibly involving soluble lingerie.

Now that Lucky Star has run its course, I figure that it might be a good time to rewatch the series one more time, and pointing out the individual scenes which have made me a fan of the show, despite nay-sayers and anti-fans. (I am one of those unfortunates greatly affected by the actions and words of others. I try not to be, with inconsistent success.) Think of it as a sort of distillation of the portions of each episode which bring me back for more: the "bits which worked", so to speak. Quite obviously, these are my opinions and mine alone, except for whoever shares them.

Now, it's not as though I would support simply deleting those scenes not chosen, as though they were dross to be discarded at first opportunity. For example, the "influenza is a levelled-up cold" bit is still a pleasure to watch and relax to, but it is not, as such, something that would keep me coming back for more. Like a D&D session, there are many highlights of quotable quotes and "you had to be there", but the more mundane dice-rolling and rules-checking are still very much part of the game.

Perhaps after all this I may hack together a more proper retrospective. Knowing my procrascinating tendencies, though, probably not.

Subs are used for my screenshots, partly because I find it more helpful to have some indication of what is being said, dialogue being such an important part of the anime, but mostly because I don't have the raws anymore.

Read the rest of this entry »

Technically my birthday was on the 17th, so this would be considered a rather belated congratulatory greeting to myself. But I spent most of that day without any form of connection to The Internets anyway, or any motivation to do anything whatsoever for that matter. This being the quarter-century mark of my life, I haven't a clue whether this is a good or a bad omen of things to come.

According To Anime, this age is when I would, if I were a woman (instead of being a member of Fanboius creepius), have but one more birthday to go before I am supposedly discarded, like the Christmas cake the trope gains its name from. Now, I am not certain precisely why this rule applies only to women and not men, but anime tends to focus more on the younger set of characters anyway, what with the whole Target Demographic and such. And with the professed focus of this particular blog, the characters being focused on (occasionally with high-speed cameras) are very young indeed.

My sister, one year older than I am, was married at this time last year, thus neatly avoiding the trope. I have yet to develop a social life robust enough to encompass at least one female acquaintance who understands, if not shares, my hobby. Considering the nature of the specifics of this hobby, I fear that it will be a long time yet, and will have to go through the unfortunate fact that for all my enthusiasm for moe~ and loli-ness, for actual theoretical romantic purposes, I kind of lean towards older women.

But we live in the Century of the Fruitbat New Millenium, and it is a sign of Moving Times that one may be happily single, largely through not thinking about it too much. The Media tends to emphasize how every normal right-thinking person desires a happy family life, which might be a skewed observation on my part from too many harem anime.

It should probably be of some concern to me that not only do I not know what I want to do with my life at age twenty-five, but also that I persist in thinking of myself as but a mere age sixteen and thus prone to mild surprise when being addressed as "sir" or "mister" instead of "kid" or "boy" or "hey, you". The demands for identification when buying alcoholic beverages even in Singapore (whereby the drinking age, officially, is age eighteen) may have something to do with this; apparently I still look like a high-school student to the casual eye. I should use this fact to my advantage, assuming I know how.

The problem with trying to decide if something qualifies as Nightmare Fuel is that it subsequently does.

One of the problems with being a blogger is that where a relatively normal person would have an idle thought and then dismiss it as trivial or irrelevant to the more substantial questions of life, the universe, and where the next meal is going to come from, a blogger would pick and poke at the thought like some hitherto unexplored sore tooth, seeing how far one can probe before pain happens.

I was, not too long ago, talking (via IRC, as my actual Real Life social life has dwindled to nonexistence) to a player of World of Warcraft who lamented the much-heard lament about the WoW community and its general unpleasantness. This is, by no means, a particularly new complaint or revelation, but it struck a certain note of familiarity from other sources, which once again brings me to a tangent: it is invaluable, I feel, for a member of any fandom to diversify, to broaden his or her interests, such that a sense of perspective is gained and one realizes that there truly is nothing new.

The word which brought me pause was "community". What made a community? Sociologists and those in related fields would probably have an answer for that, but I would not know where to start researching, and in any case this is a blog entry, not an academic paper. I hold myself to the utmost standards in spelling and punctuation, but calls for citations, because I have been online for too long and am thus incapable of functioning as a normal human being, rearrange themselves in my head as "SAUCE PLZ".

I thus reason, without any logical basis whatsoever, that a community in this sense consists of a group of people who recognize themselves via at least one (if not more) distinct identifier, whether geographical, idealogical, or (most commonly on the Internet) by their hobbies and interests.

This is a blog, and my job is to point out the stunningly obvious. It fills the wordcount, you understand.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I was most struck with in the US was that compared to Singapore, the bureaucratic maze which one needed to traverse before one receives a boon of some sort is far, far less onerous.

But this is merely a stopgap measure. I have managed to obtain a somewhat reliable means of accessing The Internets, but it is on an old laptop I have not used in a few years, and the haunting familiarity of the little sensations, such as the mere size of the keys on the keyboard (smaller than the usual desktop keyboard, obviously), leaves an odd feeling of unease that I would not be unhappy to see removed. To that end, I will either be using my desktop when it reaches its way to my doorstep via ocean freight, or buying a new and more powerful one. At this rate, what with Moore's Law, by the time I finally manage to settle down in one place for more than a few years at a time, I will probably be in possession of my very own Chobits.

The upshot of this is that while I may be in Singapore and technically able to resume my blogging schedule in a more rigid interpretation of ability, I would much rather be blogging on a computer I know that I will not be abandoning in a mere few weeks. And so I live in a sort of limbo, a digital purgatory where I can almost be able to blog to the full extent of my picture collection, but will still have the spectre of the looming move towards another computer, with only a CD-RW drive (no DVD burning capabilities, sadly) and a 128MB flash drive to mitigate the trauma.

Yes, I know I need to upgrade. That's why I got the new computer in the first place.

In any case, now that I'm back home in Singapore, I need to figure out what to do with this blog. (Well, I also need to figure out what to do with myself, but that's another matter, dreadfully lacking in anime concerns.) As previously mentioned, the large majority of my DVDs will be coming via ocean freight, and I am left with my CCS and Haruhi DVDs, which I did not want to leave to the vagaries of moving companies. Yes, they got severely banged about in luggage, but they're here and they're still quite intact.

After that, though, I am at a loss.

Read the rest of this entry »