I’m not sure how many people will care but I figure that I at least owe The Null Set readers an explanation to the whereabouts of it’s author and to offer some anime related content already.
During the last week of October and the first couple of days of November, I was helping my sister to nurse her one pet guinea pig, Lucy, back to health – trying to entice her to eat her food and when that failed, I held Lucy so my sister could force feed her. This ate a lot of time up in the day – not that I minded, in the 2.5 years we’ve had Lucy, I grew fond of her and also because it was the big brotherly thing to do. On Halloween it seemed like she was getting a little better but that turned out to be fleeting and by Monday, Lucy had passed away. Since than I’ve felt sad over the passing and depressed because my younger sister is heart-broken so I haven’t felt like writing.
This is a picture of her. I called her the ninja guinea pig because of her fur color and also because she liked to hide under things and silently move between things.
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So that’s why I haven’t posted anything in a while and also why I didn’t respond to the nice comments I got on my last couple of posts, even though I wanted too (and now it’s been so long it feels weird to). I’m going to try to get myself to finish writing my fall impression posts as soon as possible but before I get to that, there’s been a few thoughts that I’ve had dealing with anime that I’ll mention now so I won’t feel bad about meta-blogging and off-topic blogging.
The first is that about Armed Librarians – The Book of Bantorra. I haven’t been entirely impressed with the storytelling but I love the setting of the show. After a couple episodes I remembered something that made the idea of people having “books” sound not so far-fetched. One of my favorite science fiction writers, Charles Stross figured that if a video camera was set to record in Divx format using the same resolution as a DVD, that camera could record an entire year of someone’s life for 10 TB. That’s 10000 TB if a person lives one hundred years – an absurdly large number today but probably not so in a couple of decades. He figures that if Moore’s Law continues to the point that we can encode a bit of information in a single atom of some super-durable material like synthetic diamond (using different isotopes of carbon to be the 1 and 0) that it would only take 600 grams (1.3 pounds) of synthetic diamond to record the lives of the entire planet’s population for a year (assuming 8 billion people) and 60 kilograms (132 pounds) to record the entire population for a century. Leaving aside the question if people will want to do this, it’s entirely possible that in the future it would be possible that people will leave behind records that detail their entire life and makes Armed Librarians a little plausible.
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Next, I’ve been making my way through Outlaw Star after seeing it used in an AMV and it’s a pretty good show. In some ways it’s hard to tell the series is 11 years old and in other ways it’s glaringly obvious (think fashion and music choice). The reason I’m bringing it up here is that it has to have the oddest set of ending song animations ever in the history of anime. The people shown have absolutely nothing to do with the series nor does many of the scenes shown fit into the universe of the series. Even after watching 19 episodes, I’m still not convinced these are the actual closings; I still think the greater possibility is that they are some type of troll.
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Since posting how episode 12 of Despair was better than a large part of the fall season, I’ve realized that I could have swapped out that episode for several other recently watched episodes and the analogy would hold up. There was episode 31 of Cross Game when Akane was introduced or episode 40 of Kemono no Souja Erin when all the plot threads get tied together and episode 13 of Bakemonogatari to name a few. In the case of Bakemonogatari this episode definitely did a good job of switching the flow from Senjougahara back to the Hanekawa (it is her story arc afterall). I thought it was an interesting choice to have Araragi’s conversation with Hanekawa take place in the same park that he had that long conversation with Senjougahara back in episode 3. This made it easy to compare the two different relationships and it also allowed us to see how the return of the cat spirit has affected the Hanekawa, namely she’s not the all-knowledgeable person she was. After all, if Araragi has to explain several jokes to you, something’s wrong. Also in this episode was a halfway plausible reason for how all of oddities that Araragi has encountered have been woman so far – this made my sister happy since that’s been bothering her.
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And speaking of Bakemonogatari and Despair, I’ve been wanting to mention for a while now that gg has become my favorite sub group. I like how they just provide the English translation during the opening and closing songs. I also like how they strive to keep the translation sounding natural and I even like how they sometimes keep one of the commercials in their sub of a show. Just today I was watching the latest episode of Kampfer and the only spot of laughter I had while watching it was from the commercial for some sort of microwaveable hotdog that has left in by gg.
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