Post 'bout anime, and also Vocaloid.
- So, there's this cover of the Katy Perry song "ET", by Megurine Luka.
Please notice that Luka doesn't sound any more autotuned than Katy Perry does—she just sounds like she has a Japanese accent, because she does.
Only, Luka does not actually exist, she's a voice-synthesizer. I have said it before and I'll say it again, "The time of flesh is ended. The future belongs to the machines."
...At least, where pop music is concerned. - Transitioning to talking about Macross because the 3DPV of Megurine's song "Corruption Garden" features both Itano Circus mecha fights and the good ol' Macross Missile Massacre (which the makers of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica were proud of themselves for having...22 years after Studio Nue did it). I need to watch the first movie, which, though I dislike some of its revisions (the two sexes of Zentraedi are supposed to be rivals within the same military, not enemies, and I don't like the movie versions of Britai and Exedor's bodies). Why? The Zentraedi language, that's why. I also need to see if it's the same as the Marduk language from Macross II, which is apparently now non-canonical.
Interestingly, I'm surprised nobody ever came up with the obvious answer to why Zjentohlauedy and Vrlitwhai are pronounced Zentraedi and Britai—Tibetan. Tibetan is written all crazy-like, because its orthography is centuries out of date, e.g. how the 13th Dalai Lama's name was pronounced Tubdain Gyatso...but written Thub-bstan Rgya-mtsso. Maybe all those extra Ls and Js and Ws and Hs in Zentraedi represent obsolete sounds. (Alternatively, the voice-cast of the anime speak a language with 18 consonants that never puts more than one of them in a syllable, and just can't pronounce "Vrlitwhai" as written—speaking as a Slav, it ain't that hard to do. For your reference, English has 24 consonants and can put three of them in a syllable; Czech has 27, and not only can it put three of them—any three of them, practically—in a syllable, it can use most of the ones that aren't stops as vowels, e.g. prst "finger", vlk "wolf", z "from", v "in"). - I wonder if anyone has ever noticed the startling number of things in Warhammer 40K—damn near everything that isn't borrowed from Warhammer Fantasy, Aliens, or Dune—that are probably from Macross. The Eldar, having been made by the Old Ones, are basically the Zentraedi—making the Old Ones the Protoculture. They were made to fight the Necrons, who, of course, are the Protodeviln and Supervision Army (leave to one side that the Zentraedi pre-exist the Supervision Army).
Eldar mecha bear a striking resemblance to Meltran Queadluun-Rau mecha, albeit emaciated, with helmets that look a lot like the main body of Glaug and Regult battle-pods. There are, of course, two big differences between the Eldar and the Zentraedi, of course; Eldar are not sex-segregated test-tube babies (and using love-songs as psych warfare would probably just bring Slaanesh a-knocking)...and they're not 30 feet tall (neither can they change size, like Zentraedi can). Actually physically the Zentraedi are basically Imperial Marines on steroids (they have similarly reinforced bodies, and at one point Commander Britai fights a human mecha hand-to-hand in space...without so much as a breath-mask, because officer-class Zentrans are crazy modified). - Apparently, Guillermo del Toro wants to make a third Hellboy. Many suspect he's planning to use the Hobbit money for that (maybe that's why it's a trilogy now). Now, I liked the first one, little as it really resembles the comics, but the second was just awful. Then again, Pan's Labyrinth—Del Toro plainly does not grasp the fairies (neither does he get the Spanish Civil War—remember, the real Communists were worse than his fictional fascist—but "not knowing jack about history" is typical of the Mexican Left).
Personally (and this is how this relates to anime), I think animation is necessary, to do justice to Hellboy. But none of the animated Hellboys have been any great shakes, mostly by completely ignoring the extremely iconic art from the books. And don't say it doesn't work as animation. Know why? This:
It's the ending of the second season of Sayonara Zetsubô Sensei. I don't know, looks pretty good to me. This "can't do" attitude on the part of too many animators has left me in despair. - Pretty lackluster anime just now. Other than Binbougami ga!, is there anything worth watching, that's out now (in Japan, the summer TV season ends in September, and the fall one starts in October)? Lemme check. Nope.
As for the fall season (which starts in October)? Another season of Bakuman, if you were following that (I just read the manga). Same RE: Hayate the Combat Butler. Kamisama Hajimemashita is a manga by the lady what did Karakuri Odette; its anime oughtta be okay. I seem to recall Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun (Monster at the Next Desk) was all right, it's getting an anime. They're releasing an OAV of the Tenri arc of World God Only Knows, which, I mean, damn right they are.
So, continuations of some stuff that was all right, and some shojo series getting anime. Seriously, that's it? Come on, you're practically Hollywood. And no, I don't mean that in a good way. - My brother's finally seen Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. His current Team Fortress account is named Theophrastus Bombastus, and he's been devouring everything Wikipedia has about Hermeticism and alchemy, because, well, we're blood-related. But what's funny is, he tells me he keeps coming across people who think FMA is anti-religious or atheistic (generally, the people who think so are atheists—so, I guess "think" should be in quotes).
But, as my brother would point out to all these idjits, Hermetic alchemy is pantheism, not atheism. The Truth at the Gate is Poemandres, Mind of All-Mastery, the Teacher of Men...a divine emanation. The whole point of the entire series may be summed up with a quote from the Corpus Hermeticum—"Though Unmanifest, God Is Most Manifest".
It helps that Arakawa-sensei isn't as stupid as the dude who wrote Baccano. He actually uses a plot centered on Hermetic alchemy for atheist screeds. Only, dickweed, you actually have God as one of your characters. He's the reason for the immortality stuff. When he first shows up, he says, "I know all thy desires and am with thee everywhere"—he's Poemandres.
5 comments:
Minor point of pedantry: in Czech (and Slovak, which works similarly), "z" and "v" (and "s" and "k", for that matter)
are entire words, but aren't treated as vowels - they serve as stray consonants to be tacked onto the next word to come along.
(They all have vowel-containing versions as well - "zo", "vo", "so", "ku" - for cases where this isn't possible, e.g. "with cheese" is "so syrom" instead of "s syrom".)
Only "r" and "l" truly act as vowels, and hence can exist both in short and long form - not sure about Czech, but you see long r and l in Slovak in e.g. stĺp (pillar), vŕba (willow), sŕdc (of hearts).
(I live in Slovakia and am trying to learn the lingo, which is why I know this.)
Also, the animation of Amazing Screw-on Head looked really cool, and it looked exactly like the comic book. I wish they would make cartoon Hellboy movies. Also I like Mike Mignola as a production designer, with less of Del Toro's style. I like Del Toro's brand of scary, but Hellboy should be chunkier.
I didn't really care for the second Hellboy movie either, and it had steampunk elves! STEAMPUNK ELVES! They just weren't done well, and it seemed disjointed to me. What I don't understand about how they make movies of most comics is how they make up their stories. Especially with Hellboy, where there aren't lots of differetn versions and stories, just serialize the movies and make a movie of each comic. The writing is already done for you!
@godescalc: I don't think Czech marks the rs or ls for length; a lot of Indic languages do, though, just like Slovak does.
And while you're right that the West Slavic languages don't consider "z" and "v" to be vowels, some linguists consider any sound that forms a separate syllable to be a vowel. It's all basically an arbitrary question of where the classification-lines are drawn. E.g., I doubt very much that traditional Chinese linguistics considers "ng" or "m" to be vowels, but Cantonese can not only mark them for tone, they're actually words—"five" and "not", respectively, among other things.
@pennyfarthing: Amazing Screw-on Head! Proof that the Sci Fi channel was completely without a clue long before they changed the spelling of their name.
Vowel-free words in Czech and Slovak aren't syllables themselves, though; they become part of the next syllable in the sentence ("z neba", from heaven, is pronounced ZNE-ba) - and in case of difficulty people just break out the emergency vowel-containing versions rather than use "v" or "z" as vowels. (I don't speak them, but I gather French and Italian effectively do the same with "de", sticking the vowelless "d'" on the front of a word where possible and only using "de" where unavoidable.)
(While writing this I tested some coworkers by piling some consonant-heavy words together - "v stvrdnutom srdci", "in a hardened/cardiosclerotic heart" - where the first vowel is "r" so the first syllable would be "vstvrd". One coworker actually pronounced "vstvrd" more or less as a single syllable... but they commented this is difficult, and you'd normally say "vo stvrdnutom" for ease of speech.)
Czech seems to break them up a little more, though. I know my grandmother (none of the rest of us really speak Czech but she'll demonstrate how to say things for us) says, e.g., "v praze" (in Prague) as three syllables, "vf" and "praze". It might be because the voiced v is followed by an unvoiced stop, there, though—she might stretch the V out into its own syllable to keep it from sounding like "fpraze" or "vbraze", rather than sticking the vowel in there.
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