Cat Shit One anime

About four years ago, I discovered a manga called Apocalypse Meow. Think Maus meets Full Metal Jacket. If that doesn't sound crazy to you, you don't understand the situation.

When originally published in Japan, the story was called Cat Shit One, a pun itself on "dog shit one," a nickname for lower classmen at West Point.

The name is back in a full-on anime due in 2010. Here's the just-released trailer:

To me, the Japanese have always been fantastic kit bashers, slapping themes and motifs together, no mater how seemingly disparate. I love the feeling of new neural pathways forming as I figure out what's happening.

But sometimes they lose something in the mashup. Here, it looks like they've shifted the setting from Vietnam to the middle east, which perhaps makes it more topical, but less of a gritty 'Nam story.

Vietnam has a certain meaning and impact for Americans. It was an awakening for many civilians, that we weren't always the good guys, and that war is as horrific as the soldiers had always told us it was. The idea of cute, fluffy animals perpetrating the horror and senselessness is jarring and poignant, underlining our loss of innocence.

Our Gulf wars and military actions in the last couple of decades mean different things to us. Putting the same cute anthropomorphic critters there is still jarring, but less poignant. These wars are less about a loss of innocence, and more about attempts to reset the definition about what we are willing to fight for.

A quibble at best. I'll still watch it when it gets translated into English, because I love this crazy stuff!

Caring about what I'm doing here

Yesterday I was reading Wil Wheaton’s blog, and he had a post about how to run a good D&D game. It was solid information, but nothing groundbreaking. Anyone who’s been running D&D for a while could come up with the basics of that list.

But his comments section was full of people telling him what great ideas he had, and how awesome he was for having such great ideas.

Wil Wheaton has had enough going on in his life for lots of people, me included, to care. But this is an area where Wil is not an expert. I am more expert than he is in this area. Yet people seemed to care enough to post on the internet to tell him that they cared about what he thought.

My default assumption is that people do not care about what I have to say. Whatever I think has to be justifiable by some vague personal standard to ever say out loud, or post on a blog. It has to be funny enough or meaningful enough, or I have to establish myself as expert enough for me to think anyone will want to hear it.

Getting dressed this morning, it suddenly occurred to me that people might care what I have to say, whether or not I can justify myself to them. Readers/listeners might just intriniscally care. I might not have to prove myself.

An open letter to winter

Dear Winter,

It might be cold for a while longer, but I am through with my heavy jacket for a few months.

And tomorrow, I'll be warm, and you'll still be a season of death, personified.

Sincerely,
Jeff

Insight on doing what you "like"

I don't know nothing about Paul Graham. He appears to be some sort of venture capitalist or start-up expert, or something. I haven't bothered to research him. But as I continue on my drunken path toward becoming a person who works for himself and accomplishes things, his essays give good info I don't find anywhere else. For instance, this excerpt from an essay titled, How to Do What You Love:

It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.

But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Jim Cramer on Jon Stewart

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart is typically acerbic in his segments, but gentle in interviews. This is because the guy is genuinely uncomfortable with conflict. You would think this a strange trait for a man who professionally mocks powers and principalities.

But nobody ever got funny by being good at confrontation. You get funny by thinking around things, not through them. Listen to Stewart talk about himself; you consistently hear him mention discomfort at creating or withstanding awkwardness. Certain issues get Stewart to come out of his congenial motley though.

What got us here: Stewart recently did a segment on CNBC show hosts making bad calls on investment, mocking their self-proclaimed expertise. Standard, cutting Daily Show fare, which the powerful and noteworthy routinely ignore four days a week. Jim Cramer, one of several skewerees, took particular umbrage at this and (no doubt backed by the network) began an NBC tour of programs defending himself.

Of course, this peacock display prompted an invitation to appear on The Daily Show. The segment that appeared on the show yesterday was 3 minutes. Forget that.

Instead, view this unedited version, about 25 minutes total, and watch a man held to the fire from the knees down.

Having swum in the American TV journalism pool for so long, I'm used to interviewers playing catch and release. They ask a pointed question, the savvy interviewee deflects it, and because there are only 3 minutes allotted to this segment, everyone moves on. (For that reason alone, I have virtually no use for television journalism.)

I'm amazed at how this fails to happen here. Every time a normal TV interviewer would be done, Stewart keeps going. He has not just a tenacity, but a clarity of thinking that refuses to be sidelined by mealy-mouthed interview subjects.

Stewart is tricky, because he jumps around a lot in the interview. But his thrust is: As a member of the media, you have a responsibility to promote truth. You may not be complicit with the corrupt and powerful.

Cramer behaves in a chastised manner, but see, the guy's on TV in his normal TV costume.* ("My sleeves are rolled up really high, because I'm ready to WORK!") By the end of the interview, when they're both making their preparatory closing remarks, it strikes me that Cramer hasn't even fingered, much less grasped, Stewart's point.

So we don't get reform in the media. The best we get is a vision that this is how somebody should be doing journalism.

===

I've started to think of The Daily Show as the 5th estate, our current best answer to Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? He is the feudal-era jester, the guy who hung around important people and pointed out their flaws with a yuk and remained untouchable for it.

Therefore, it is wrong to call Stewart a journalist. As he himself will remind you (and as Cramer repeatedly crowed in the beginning stages of this dust-up), he's a comedian. But in the process of satire, he does journalist work. This is the distinction that people fail to make, and it's why young people and stoners (and some other notable demographics) love him like a folk hero. He's whipsmart funny. But if more journalists were doing journalist work, The Daily Show would be a footnote, not a keynote.

Link to full, uncut interview


* Compare his TV costume to the polo he's wearing in the clips Stewart runs -- watch how his persona is different out of his work clothes.

My great ideas

Not all of my ideas are great, but when you really get down to it, most of them are. Yet every year, dozens, maybe hundreds of people shoot down my great ideas because these so-called "other people" don't think my ideas are as great as I do.

I don't know how to keep moving after that. I'm better than I used to be -- I'm not sullen when someone shoots down my great ideas any more. But I don't know how to keep moving, how to create and participate after that happens.

This is not hypothetical for someone who ostensibly does creative work for a living. You must be able to route around blocks with minimal loss of velocity, and I'm craptastic at that. Someone tells me my idea isn't great (quite often the person who has the ability to green-light the thing) and I come to a juddering halt.

Creative work is frequently collaborative, never moreso than when you're using someone else's money. It is important to know how to do this. And yet. And yet and yet and yet.

Part of the problem is that most people are lousy collaborators -- including me. Still, I have to figure out how to work even around that block, the block of your co-creators fighting against you. I had a creative director canvas me for ideas, ignore them, and then criticize me for not contribuing enough. I've had directors encourage me to use my own judgment, and then methodically shoot down every word I wrote, telling me to copy and paste what I was given. Recently, outside of a professional environment, every good idea I offered on a project was accepted, and then after discussion, rejected. FRUSTRATING. However, you have to keep contributing when that happens.

More to the point, I have to keep contributing when that happens. Some days I want to punch faces instead. Most of the time, I shut down. This might be a worse choice than face punching. I like to think I'm being a team plsyer by acquiescing, but staying in the fight (or starting one) might be a better option sometimes.

This happened to me last week. I was feeling off kilter anyway, so I yelled. Wrote a frank email and bitched to a couple of people. It didn't keep my ideas afloat; they still went unused, and I created conflict that I would rather have done without. But I've decided being less accomodating about axeing my ideas was a good idea. Maybe even a great idea.

February Linkdump

Grammar of comic book lettering
This is the sort of detail that I read and try to memorize. I don't know what that says about me, but I'm afraid it might be bad.

Penn gets proselytized
My ground rule for evangelicals in America is, "Tell them you follow Jesus, and then don't be crazy." Here's a video of Penn telling a story about that guy.



Water that kills salmonella
According to the L.A. times, it's not too good to be true, but you'll think it is.

Kids these days: any other quests?

Ran an intro game of D&D for a couple of boys tonight, ages 12 and 10. I enjoy presenting D&D to brand new players, because they haven't been trained in roleplaying game-think yet.

When you've played enough of these demanding, complex games, you learn to see the game system first, and think in its framework. It's like learning art on a computer. Fantastically versatile programs exist to help you, but you wind up imagining inside the program's technical limitations.

So the D&D naif brings a jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. (One woman I played with, who had a perfectly competent character, spent an entire session hiding in a cabinet. Because holy crap, people are shooting guns and fire blasts outside! Better to just stay safe.)

This has been my standard thinking for a long time about new players. But tonight, these kids tricked me by bringing a different jarringly unexpected set of assumptions to the table. Having already played the crap out of Final Fantasy and half a dozen other console RPGs, these kids were not D&D naifs. They were tabletop naifs. Drawing on unmediated experience to inform their behavior was strange territory.

Excerpts:

Me: If you run out of hit points you fall unconscious.
Kid: What's that?
Me: You fall unconscious every day. What's it like then?

Kid: How much does a backpack hold?
Me: You've got a backpack at home, right? It holds that much.

The standout of the evening came after presenting entirely unsubtle clues that the Mad Alchemist's cave awaited exploration, and that there might be treasure. The boys then decided to ask around town to see if there were "any other quests." Thanks to computer games, they (quite reasonably) assumed there would be a handful of townsfolk loitering, with various problems to be solved. They would get to pick the most appealing one.

Also in a paean to overcaution:

• Long minutes were spent on Hide skill practice, followed by confirming Spot checks to see how well hidden they were.
• Rabbinical attention was paid to the number of arrows carried, and recovered, after combat.
• The sorcerer brought 20 torches, and the dwarf purchased flint and tinder for firestarting, despite the fact that he can see in the dark.
• They purchased a 10-foot pole and a mirror, and used them frequently, in ways that would make Gary Gygax proud.
  

I enjoy attempting this sort of thing, but every time, I am humbled. Improvisation is a hard skill, and understanding your own expectations is at least half the experience.

Movie: Pineapple Express

Pineapple Express
(official site | imdb)

I like Seth Rogen and James Franco. I've liked them since Freaks and Geeks. I wanted very much to like this movie.

And it's not that I disliked it. I just didn't like it like I'd like to like it. The movie was funny in certain places, and the action was fine. It was acceptable, and good in some places. Huey Lewis did the movie's theme song.

The movie relies on a sly familiarity with drug culture that I, and a majority of other viewers, don't have. On the commentary track, they discussed how the studio was not really into this movie, and I can see why. There's no clear audience. It's billed as a stoner/action movie. It pulls that hybrid off, but you're left wondering: Who asked for this?

In the same way that I still think well of Cop Rock, I appreciate that they tried something unconventional. But that's all I've got. I'll try to remember to look up Superbad and Knocked Up later this year to see these guys in their element, in a better-defined niche.

Movie: The Duchess

The Duchess
(official site | imbd)

M loves a period drama, especially when they involve spirited women making difficult choices! So The Duchess was a shoo-in.

The movie sort of meandered in the way that historical adaptions can... life seldom makes a great arc. The short version: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire in the late 1700s, has to put up with a lot of crap.

Kiera Knightley's face can do a lot more talking than some mouths. Ralph Fiennes has a tricky job of playing a guy who genuinely isn't interested. Tough job selling that and staying in the movie! But he did it.