Darker than Black shareholder applauds Serious Business

(Progress: 25/25)

But disapproves of child labour soldiers.


Of the mysteries surrounding Hei, be it his lack of a payment scheme although he ate a lot, or his un-Contractor-like irrationalities, it never occurred to me that he is the only Contractor in the series to wear a mask. I shrugged it off for the usual reasons, like he might be recognized by the authorities, but he didn't commence operations starting episode one, and no other Contractor took measures to hide their face.

In the beginning, there was a clear distinction between Hei as a regular person and Hei as a Contractor. The lightning bolt on the mask isn't some dishonest bluff. When he puts on the mask, he puts on lightning, on at least two levels. Later on, we see that he uses his abilities without the mask, a symbolic blurring of divisions.

People have long feared corporations. Images come to mind of mindless drones, the stereotypical company man defined only through his work, labouring under the equally dispassionate leadership that rules with an iron fist and is concerned only about its immediate interests. What is a Contractor if not a model cog, supposed to carry out orders unquestionably and without regard for the effects it may have on others?

How ironic is it then, that the reaction against Contractors is embodied in a group that is organized and called the Syndicate. With that knowledge, many of the missions that take place can be framed in the context of dealing with rogue Contractors or any objects related to the Hell's Gate.

Darker than Black has been open-ended on a number of items, one of them being the Syndicate/Organization/Illuminati. It is claimed that they essentially own the world's intelligence agencies, and yet the Russian FSB had sent out two Contractors to gather intelligence on the Syndicate.

What was the Syndicate attempting to accomplish by smuggling Dolls? When would this supposedly all-powerful organization resort to that kind of means for fund-raising?

The series concludes with an incomplete view of the world and its major players. Partial pictures have a disadvantage to more fleshed out views, partly because there is the suspicion that even the writers don't have a definitive idea of where things are going. It also allows such things as the springing of arbitrary surprises at the last minute, like Hei's sister's full abilities and the mechanism behind the disappearance of the Heaven's Gate.

At the end of the day, Darker than Black is not a series with instant appeal. There are no broke bounty hunters to instantly relate to (the broke part, of course). Its subject matter touches upon issues that can hit a little too close to home at times, pointing out things that we may not wish to acknowledge - let alone discuss - about ourselves or others in general. There isn't much in the way of answers, either, just a push to consider and compare their world and ours. I think I did see one message, which may or may not have some relevance outside of the series:

Behind every Contractor there is a human. One only has to afford them the dignity of being one to see that.

Miscellaneous

DtB 25 was the first episode watched on my new system, in a resolution exceeding 704x400. I could get used to this. When in doubt, just throw more hardware at the problem.

Or new hardware. I witnessed first-hand the bursty activity that compressed video can generate when trying to watch video sourced from external storage over USB 1.1. In scenes with either lots of movement (Gurren-Lagann ED) or localized high-speed motion (Gurren-Lagann OP with the circling Mugans) over many frames, the USB 1.1 connection is saturated.

The high-level reason is that something like DivX is unable employ large amounts of prediction between frames. The other extreme is a still shot, with will compress much better. It's easy to predict the position of a motionless object.

704x400 can still saturate the poky USB 1.1 connection on occasion, but in general it requires a pause to fill up the buffer and clear the bottleneck, so I've generally stuck to 704x400 resolution in the past. Of course, there's no problem with USB 2.0.

What about moving higher resolution media to internal storage for playback? I had never de-fragmented my old hard drive, and since it is more or less at capacity in addition to being almost four years old, it can have a hard time serving up the necessary bandwidth for stall-free playback. Yes, it was that fragmented. Playing back live performances, at relatively uncompressed 10,000 kbps MPEG-2, was not a good experience, if it could be called even that.

On the topic of new stuff, this current theme is broken in my latest installation Firefox, with grey flooding into the sidebar. It looks like the hunt is on for something different, unless I can get this resolved.

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It depends on how one defines deterrance

(ZnT II complete)

I suppose it's easier to non-fatally deter an army of 70,000 as opposed to an army of 7,000,000 [1]. It's also a lot harder to pick out commanders in such a crowd. Sometimes, one just has to kill a bunch of Red Shirts. Or put them to sleep. Who knows. I've stopped caring.

An otherwise powerful finale ruined at the end, etc. I have nothing further to add.

[1] Maybe it was a typo on the translator's part. What's two zeros anyway? Myths tack on a zero every time they're past from one generation to another. Enron did it for lulz.

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Code-E: About token conspiracies and sock puppets

(Progress: Complete, 12/12)

Eleven episodes later, I still can't let go of the fact that I'm watching a puppet show a good amount of the time. And people complain about Escaflowne noses. Try no noses.

There are two somewhat major components to Code-E's story. The first is coping with being different (an understatement). The second is a typical love triangle with teen angst which, when combined with being different, leads to cheap special effects attempting to depict the disruption of anything that utilizes electrons.

Notice how neither of the above include anything remotely cool or novel. Sure, being a walking EMP weapon is kind of neat in a sadistic sort of way, but the number of instances where it was used for neat is exactly three, all of which involved restoration of well-being. Last time I checked, electromagnetic radiation may or may not increase the risk of developing cancer, so even that is a bit of a stretch.

This is hardly a comparison, but two things that Read or Die (the OVA) and Code-E have in common, besides being produced by the same studio, is that they have glasses-wearing female leads with special abilities. And maybe a spy-type soundtrack. The similarities end there.

Yomiko Readman manipulated paper for seemingly mundane uses like making a paper plane. Did I mention it was a giant paper plane? Capable of supporting two adults, one of whom was carrying a rifle? Now that is neat. Also neat is creating a blade out of paper currency, and a crowbar to swing around pipes. Paper kills people! Who would have thought?

Chinami Ebihara is insecure but not so easily pushed around, because anyone putting the screws on her backs away when they see every single electronic device around them go haywire. Unless you're the resident stereotypical socially inept science nerd. Intense electromagnetic radiation disrupts electronics! Who would have thought?

Sorry, but watching a weak lead freak out and create QUALITY sparks day in and day out gets old fast.

Love triangle. Awkward adolescents suffer copious amounts of teen angst. QUALITY sparks! Behave immaturely. Incredibly juvenile. Running out of synonyms. Repeating self. Moving on.

If there was a second season and if that second season gave some answers and background on a slew of mysteries, then go watch this series. There is no closure at the conclusion. Chinami is pursued by shady foreigners and…? Some guy sabotages (my own impression) a new town development because…? The development had a violent resonance response to E/M because…? And so on.

Code-E just leaves viewers dangling. It could use that second season, but I question whether it deserves one.

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Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann: This surreal moment brought to you by the letter J

(Progress: Episode 26)

Some people have a fear of clowns. Me? I get weirded out when seeing the PBS logo, especially when set against a black background like in the above. I don't have any bad childhood memories of PBS programming, although I can't say the same for the National Film Board of Canada (and Boards of Canada seem to agree); it's just the logo that I have always found disconcerting.

Maybe it's the notion that I was bearing witness to a severed human head, or rather, the suggestion of one. At the age of 4 or so, it was hard enough trying to deal with the latest virus or bacterial infection, and now I was multi-tasking trying to make sense of vaguely humanoid outlines. It had the components of a face, but it lacked emotion. Having only seen human faces with expression up till then, it was something that I struggled to reconcile. I may or may not have curled up into a ball and started muttering to myself.

The Anti-Spiral figure elicits a similar response. Instead of muttering to myself, I'm writing, which is basically the same thing. Its design is generic, yes, but just like the PBS logo, I find its genericness to be disturbing. There's something sinister, not elegant, in the simplistic design of both.

Animated as a sketchy outline, the Anti-Spiral goes one better, hinting at an unknowable, unseeable, pulsing chaos. It is an entropy that defies current understanding, the same random movement that gives rise to quantum mechanics.

Emotions that are unknown, a form that is unknown, and mastery of the unknown. Anti-Spirals keep me awake at night.

On a marginally related note

The entire last half of episode 27 was quite surreal. Seeing the first channel surfing scene, I thought I might have been watching an episode of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Of the several references Gainax got in, I only picked up on one, much to my chagrin.

Yoko Bebop

Who knew that Yoko dreamed of being a bounty hunter with a jazz background?

Channel surfing part two, the drastic shift in dress and scenery, Yoko's discarding of her alternate reality was wonderfully wtf. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but I get the sense that what she wanted was avoiding coming to grips with Kamina's death, so it was necessarily Kamina that held the TV showing her all these happy scenes. The one scene that she finally returns to, though, is not bright and clear, but the muted and smoky site of Kamina's death. This is her reality, the one that she accepts before rejoining the fight.

Simon's scene was much more straightforward, with a weak Kamina targeting Simon's insecurities. A parallel is drawn between a fictional outcome of the earlier war and the battle going on now. It's okay to stop fighting, as long as a simple life can be made out of view of the ruling class. Beastmen and Anti-Spirals alike are merciful so long as their power is not challenged.

In the end, Simon reaffirms that he does things not for Kamina, but for himself. Problem solved, for the second time. He then proceeds to turn into Megaman, assimilating all of his surviving comrades. When the next episode preview features a familiar looking sniper rifle, what other explanation is there?

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Darker than Black: The Hell's Gate Cult

(Progress: Episode 24)

In addition to Tensai Okamura and Yoko Kanno, add Bones and falling stars to the list of things that Cowboy Bebop and Darker than Black have in common.

Maybe I'm a little late in making the connection — the South American entity was called Heaven's Gate, after all. In my defence, 10 years ago is a long time, and I had a narrow(er) world view back then. Budget cuts and teacher's strike were terms that were infinitely more relevant at the time, as they lead to no school.

The term works on a couple levels, like how there was a cult, the fact that millions died (although who knows if that's the case if they can't set foot in the area around the gate), and how a war was fought around and possibly over Heaven's Gate.

Contractors are an odd sort. They are generally described in the vaguest of terms as self-interested and having no conscience. Neither trait is special. One would have to have no conscience to take on killing people as a job, and being self-interested and apathetic to most other things unrelated to survival comes with the turf.

What is curious is how Contractors have continued to put up with killing each other and important people for over a decade. I'm not quite sure how risking one's neck to kill someone else serves one's interests better than, say, a cushy desk job. I suppose being in essence a mercenary does have a pigeon-holing effect.

The fact that there's a chicken and egg problem — that if you just quit then others Contractors will come after you, so no one is particularly inclined to leave — may also have something to do with it. And if nothing else, non-Contractor special forces teams have proved perfectly capable of taking their marks to the cleaners, although those can turn into messy affairs.

It seems that the amount of free-will that a Contractor exercises is proportional to their effectiveness as a killer. Wei is so bad-ass that he develops pride and ambition. The irony is that like Maki, that ridiculously powerful bomber kid, the human flaws he exhibits on the job lead to his downfall.

Hei's situation is blurred by the possibility that he may have inherited his powers as opposed to being arbitrarily assigned them along with a shiny new star, and thus may not have signed the boilerplate employment agreement (unless his payment is to eat a ton and never get fat), but he's still one of the best Contractors in the field. How does he demonstrate his free-will? By rescuing his teammates, because he can.

I don't think that most of the sub-ordinates of Evening Primrose have free-will so much as they are rational people acting on the information given to them. If someone went up to Mai and told her, That accelerator you're defending will kill you if switched on, she would surely think twice about toasting Amagiri and Brita. Enlightened self-interest does have enlightenment as a prerequisite.

As the show gets set to conclude, we see Contractors serving their true employer. They may do so only reluctantly and without the zealotry one might expect of a cult, but they are inextricably bound to its existence. It's the worst kind of working relationship.

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Zero no Tsukaima Futatsuki no Kishi: A whiff of betrayal

When Zero no Tsukaima's first season was still airing, I stumbled across a thread that summarized events in the light novel up to its seventh volume. Since they never took place in the first season's run, and with no guarantee of a second season at the time, I proceeded to forget about most of it.

What did stick with me was the underlying conflict that pervaded the later volumes, which boils down to pacifists against warmongers when set in a comparatively backward and primitive era. This may or may not sound something like the premise of Zipang.

In other words, Zero no Tsukaima Futatsuki no Kishi could have had a promising, coherent, plot, except J.C. Staff has generally chosen service over serious, backing away from the darker undercurrent that began to take hold in the later episodes of the first season.

Sure, service sells and trivializing the overall story with undeveloped side plots has probably turned out to be pretty profitable for all involved, but I do get a sense of frustration having seen even a high-level view of what things could have been. I think I understand a bit what it must feel like for a fan of the source material to watch such a gutted adaptation.

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Lucky Star: An animated kind of stand-up

Kyoto Animation takes the season off, although if one only had the above screenshot to go on, they might be inclined to disagree. Why must they tease us so? They're KyoAni: It's because they can.

Likewise, they were (rightfully) confident that their random Shiraishi endings would be mostly tolerated, being no worse than the terrible singing or fireworks kicking found on YouTube, and people watch that stuff in droves.

Lucky Star is easy: easy-going given its slice of life nature, probably easy to produce given KyoAni's magic, and easy like taking a picture given today's digital cameras. The series as a whole is a well-executed snapshot, of the lives of the characters over the course of a year (or two?), of (Japanese) fandom, even the state of technology, although Blogger and other publishing systems now have caching mechanisms so timeouts don't toast a post.


It seems incredibly convenient, art imitating reality in a more extreme sense, but I welcome it as it speaks of and points out things that I'm aware of but wouldn't usually speak to others about, much less form a conversation around. It need not be about geeky things, although a lot of them are. For example, I personally wouldn't feel comfortable talking about how much of a slacker I am (and hearing about how much of a slacker the other person is) with just anyone. I also can't get away with a thirty second rant about how difficult it is to crawl out of bed in the morning. Even though many would nod their heads in agreement, what follows from such a declaration?

Where one can get away with this, though, is stand-up comedy. Punchlines are expected to be copious and frequent, and there are many instances where situational jokes are short, to the point, and have little to no correlation with the one that came before and the one that will follow.

Lucky Star only has some structural and pacing similarities to stand-up, so the comparison is somewhat superficial. For me it's not even funny most of the time, although what many find at least chuckle-inducing I just find clever or amusing. At the end of the day, Lucky Star dares to codify many observations into scenes and dialog that are not totally absurd, and for that it was an interesting watch.

So will Lucky Star stand the test of time? If nothing changes in a decade or more, perhaps. More likely is that years from now, it will be watched like one would watch archival footage: with merely academic interest. What was it like to be an otaku, Japanese or otherwise, circa 2007? More to the point, what were we like? Lucky Star would shed some light on those questions, covering such topics as the popular character tropes, series, gaming habits, food, and the immense response to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

The IRONY

The last item on the list may suffer from bias via conflict of interest. Just a tad.

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