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30 Apr 09 – Why You Should Watch Mobile Suit Gundam

This is intended to be the first of a multi-part series where I write about each major animated work in the Gundam universe. I want people to know what each of these shows has to offer.

About spoilers: I won't tell you who dies, but this is a review of a 30-year-old show, for Pete's sake. Anything I write about here has long since been analyzed frame-by-frame on 2ch.

Mobile Suit Gundam, of course, is where it all began. The first Gundam show, which aired in 1979.

And that is the key aspect in appreciating this series. Mobile Suit Gundam (MSG) must be understood in its historical context. Before MSG, anime was aimed squarely at pre-teens and tweens. There was no anime aimed at teens or adults, except maybe Go Nagai's cheesy giant robot shows, depending on how you squint at them.

Mobile Suit Gundam was aimed at mid-teens, as evidenced by its 15-year-old protagonist (in most anime series, the protagonist is the same age as the target viewer). Heck, the only characters younger than that are the comic relief orphan children.

(Only in Gundam do you have comic relief orphan children.)

MSG also strove for realism. In previous mecha series, the titular giant robots almost always had ridiculous backstories—designed and built by a single scientist, usually. Transformation sequences often made no sense; the vehicles that made up Getter Robo melt together to form the giant robot.

Not so in MSG. There's certainly a magic technology—there has to be for giant robots to be practical—but it's placed on a different level, behind that of the giant robots. MSG introduced Minovsky particles, an otherwise undiscovered element that makes compact fusion drives possible and jams radar. This makes hand-to-hand combat critical, especially for large vehicles. And when one side adapted the arm-and-torso construction machines originally used for colony construction into fearsome humanoid war machines, they suddenly found themselves with an ideal war technology for space combat.

(Think about it: You need huge construction equipment to build something as big as a space colony. The construction equipment needs to be highly flexible and powerful. What sort of controls do you put on a highly complex piece of equipment like that? You make it as humanoid as possible, since people can more easily map controls to human movements.)

This is what you get in great science fiction—the magic technology suggests technological innovations and historical responses.

The two sides of MSG's conflict also stand out. The Earth Federation—the "good guys"—is simply Earth's government. It's not particularly noble or just; in fact, it's portrayed as bureaucratic and behind the times of modern warfare. The Principality of Zeon—the "bad guys"—objected to Earth's control of a fundamentally new civilization in space, and declared independence. Not only are several Zeon characters sympathetic and noble, one of them became one of the most popular anime characters of all time, Char Aznable¹.

Side note: Most folks see the Nazi-style uniforms of Zeon and read that Gundam's creator, Yoshiyuki Tomino, wanted MSG to feel like the German offensive in World War II, and call Zeon simple stand-ins for Nazis. Saalon and I disagree. Zeon is much more similar to Japan in WW2; motivated by a zeal for independence against an economic powerhouse that they see as oppressive. While I'm sure Tomino originally intended Zeon to be like the Germans, I think he ended up creating Japanese. While the upper-level Zeon nobility are clearly power-mad, most of the other Zeon characters are portrayed as soldiers doing what they think is right.²

Characters, too, elevate MSG above other anime of the time. I can list four main characters who behave significantly differently by the end of the series. And others explicitly don't change, to their detriment. I can't think of any other anime with that much character change.

And those characters! A few highlights:

Ramba Ral is a fat Zeon military genius who travels with his wife, leading his men into ridiculously dangerous battles in one of Earth's backwaters. Because he's crazy like a fox; he knows that extreme daring inspires soldiers and throws the enemy off-balance. The sequence where he assaults White Base, corridor by corridor, presages Evangelion's assault on NERV HQ by fifteen years.
Garma Zabi is a driven royal teenager who's been assigned an extremely safe area to hold, and desperately strives to prove himself. I felt bad for this proud, driven teenager, who could just sit back and enjoy the good life but insisted on doing something with his life, and suffered for it.
Then there's Char Aznable: Charming, handsome, mysterious, an incredible pilot, and extremely successful. Then he kills one of his friends, and bursts out in triumphant laughter.

How can you not be intrigued by these people?

MSG accomplishes so much, especially in 43 episodes in an era when most anime had the barest thread of a story arc over the course of 50-odd episodes. Characters evolve (and some die), technology changes, and the war builds up to a fever pitch. Heck, the unexpected early cancellation of the series helped it, as the show focused on its end game for the last six episodes, and drove straight for it at full speed.

I distinctly remember watching a sequence about two-thirds through the show, in which the narrator explains the current Federation offensive against a major Zeon supply base. There's a shot of White Base, followed by a shot of General Revil debating strategy options. I suddenly realized: I understand the overall course of the war, and the characters' exact strategic role in that war, and I know what the characters are going through (and they're going through a lot). I've seen this show only once (plus the recap movies), and I just turned to one side and rattled off the names of fifteen major characters. I know them that well. I literally can't think of any other anime that accomplishes this much; even later Gundam series sacrifice one of these levels of detail.

Downsides? In 1979, the Japanese still hadn't wrapped their heads (or their drawing hands) around fluid 2D animation. MSG can be painful to watch, unless you've seen a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

It's also uneven. Tomino felt compelled to include a mobile suit fight in every episode, and at times they feel unnecessary.

But it's worth it. Oh, it's worth it, if just for the experience of this futuristic war story, and the great characters you'll meet, and the choices they face.

¹ Char's popularity is according to polls in Newtype magazine, which consistently put Char Aznable in the Top 20 list of most popular anime characters.

² See Of Space Nazis, Gundam Sequels and the Horribly Underated MS Igloo for an excellent analysis of the Nazi design aesthetic in Gundam.

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27 Apr 09 – Skype

A few weeks ago, my role-playing group tried to add a virtual player.

Wait. Back up. One of our regular players went off to college. Worse, she's one of the best role-players in the group. I pined for her.

For those of you unfamiliar with tabletop role-playing: A bunch of friends sit around a table. One of them lays out a situation, while the others pretend to be people in that situation, and narrate their reactions to the situation.

So, physical presence is important. A simple phone call won't suffice. Moreover, we play with miniatures laid out on a wet-erase mat to illustrate everyones' physical placement in the scene (especially relative to the occasional nasty monster). You need to see.

So we decided to try setting up a Skype webcam-based video conference call with her. I brought my laptop, connected to Skype, and placed the laptop on a few books. She came online, I called, she accepted, and after a bit of fiddling with audio and video settings, her head filled the screen.

I was worried. Had been in the weeks leading up to it, and was while I set this up at our table. It's undoubtedly just my prejudice, but when I think "free videoconferencing," I think of jerky footage, stuttering audio, and a dropped call every ten minutes. Webcams still kinda suck, my geeky side declaims, and audio/video quality over a college network tends to sound and look like RealVideo streams from 1999. And if we had a mediocre experience, we'd soldier on through the session rather than drop one of our best players. I grit my teeth and prepared to wrestle with technology.

It worked perfectly.

Besides the aforementioned technology issues (especially when we switched laptops, and the second laptop had a microphone worse than mine), we played normally. The technology mainly faded into the background, and we just talked and narrated and had fun.

Of course, it wasn't exactly like having her in the room. Humans just aren't used to talking to a flat screen that's filled with a smiling human head, and she couldn't pick out everything we said.

This is now simply part of how we play; if you're physically not there, you can always call in via Skype. And with the second laptop (and a better microphone, hopefully), we can add another distant player.

The technology works.

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26 Apr 09 – Just A Geek Speaking at PAX

Wil Wheaton is an awesome person, and a great writer (I'm reading his latest book, Just a Geek, and am thoroughly sucked in. And it's an autobiography).

I heard last year that he gave the keynote speech at the Penny Arcade Expo (a.k.a. PAX). All I could find was an audio recording. I sat, dumbfounded, listening to it all, laughing at all the right moments. The speech was human, and emotional, and actually made important points about important things. And I enjoyed it consistently, all through its 55 minutes.

Well, video is now online, thanks to Google Video, so you can watch Wil give the entire speech as one uninterrupted sequence of awesomeness.

I'm embedding it below, and hopefully it'll show up for you (one never knows, these days).

(And, of course, now that I've given it that big introduction, you'll probably be disappointed, if you haven't listened to it already. And, granted, I can imagine there are people who just won't get it. But please give it a try, if just for the more important things he has to say. And if you ever have to give a speech, this will show you how to do it.)

I'm rewatching the speech now, actually. It's just that entertaining to me. Which is odd, since I'm not a gamer, which is what the keynote is all about. But that's the power of a speech like this.

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25 Apr 09 – Mixing It Up

You may have noticed a completely new homepage here. I've decided to make the homepage more of a central launching pad for my online content. This will undoubtedly change more over time (I'm already thinking of adding a Flickr stream).

The main advantage is that this new design will let you see more of what I do, all at once. It will also de-emphasize my blog, which I update less often now than in the past.

Please let me know what you think!

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24 Apr 09 – Tracking web traffic with Google Analytics

So, let's say you have a website. That means you're broadcasting information to the world, and presumably other people consume that information.

How do you know what people like about your content? How do you know what's popular?

Some web hosting companies will provide a few pages of hit tracking. Setting up your own hit tracker and integrating it onto your site is typically a pain.

Enter Google Analytics. It's a free service, tied into your Google account. When you create your Analytics account, the site displays a short snippet of HTML and Javascript code. All you have to do is paste that code into each webpage that you want to track.

Within a day or so, when you return to Google Analytics, it'll show you a huge range of statistics and data about your site—which pages are popular, where your visitors are coming from, etc.

Stats are updated once per day, and there's a wide range of ways to slice and dice the data. Very useful for getting a better idea of how your site's used, so you can better help the people you help.

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22 Apr 09 – Eulogizing Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive

There are a number of blog posts and articles about essential business books. "Ten books everyone entering the working world should read," and such.

I only have two.

One, Getting Things Done, I've already talked about quite a bit here. Just about everyone needs some way to organize their work. GTD does a great job of explaining what you need to track (and what you don't).

But today, I want to write about Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive. Drucker's the best writer on business and management I've ever read, and this is my favorite of his books. It's also the most directly helpful to regular workers.

First, an explanation: By "Executive," Drucker's referring to anyone in an organization who executes. So, the book's aimed at those who work with their brain, which seems to be a large majority of the work force these days.

The book is a rumination on—and a set of advice for—knowledge workers. We have to be responsible for our own work, while also fitting into a larger organization. We have to manage our own time, while respecting time restraints placed on us. We have to be independent and lead, appropriately.

Here are a few of his insights:

Effective executives ask "What needs to be done?" and "What's right for this company?"
Take responsibility for communicating
Take responsibility for decisions, and make some
Run highly efficient and productive meetings
Think "we" instead of "I"

Which sounds like standard business advice. But each one of these (and more) are accompanied by in-depth thought and advice. There's plenty of analysis of what this means, and all of it is clear and concise.

The book's amazingly valuable, if just to help one re-think one's place and responsibilities.

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21 Apr 09 – What is the City of Talon?

In the real world, The City of Talon is a role-playing setting. It's a 107-page PDF that describes a fantasy world, including physical locations within the city, well-known residents, the history of the city, etc. It can be used in pretty much any pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG, and is also a great inspiration for authors; Talon makes for a great setting for a story. The PDF is a US $5 download from DriveThruRPG.com.

Within that document, Talon is a bustling, hectic port-side city. It's relatively new, and highly mercantile. Duke Malinare runs the city with a strong and very involved hand, but does little to disrupt trade. For money is the lifeblood of Talon.

I've developed dozens of characters who live in Talon, from the influential judge Sirrah Mortiss, to commoners like the kind healer Sera, to killers like Alphonse the Slayer.

I've laid out dozens of places within Talon, from the elegant hills of Bloodoak Row to Ged's Slaughterhouse to the Sanctuary of the Nearly Damned to the sprawling Pits beneath the city.

I did it to create a tiny world, and to give people a chance to live in that tiny world for even a few short hours. I did it as a creative exercise, and a chance to make a little money.

And it's worked. I've made a few bucks, and a few folks have checked it out. I'm proud of the document, too; it's well-organized and contains quite a few helps to potential GMs (including character stats in several different systems). I made sure to include a number of things I find important, such as a full index, a full table-of-contents, and many links and references within the document. If one character description mentions another character, there's a hyperlink and a page reference right there. I also created some effective, full-color maps.

If you're interested, feel free to check it out, and let me know what you think.

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20 Apr 09 – A Japanese Noir French New Wave Black-and-White Yakuza Film

So imagine a Japanese film, set in the 1960's, involving a down-and-out Japanese private investigator named Maiku Hamma ("My real name," he says), who takes a missing-person case and winds up in the middle of a yakuza/triad turf war. He drives a convertible, wears a samurai-style jacket, and has an shoebox-sized office over a movie theater (you have to buy a ticket for the latest movie just to go up to see him).

It exists. It's called The Most Terrible Time In My Life.

The director, Kaizo Hayashi, was obviously influenced by French New Wave, American noir, samurai, and yakuza films. Everything's in black-and-white (almost), the characters are almost all tense (or hiding something, or both), and there's even a brief scene with Maiku's "mentor," who wears a white suit and uses a cane.

(If you're a die-hard MST3K fan, you'll be tickled to learn that the aforementioned white-suited mentor is played by the thick-jowled spaceship captain from "Star Force: Fugitive Alien" and "Fugitive Alien II," he of the maniacal laughter followed by "You're stuck here!")

See, this movie should be a terrible mess. This should be confusing. Instead, while the film certainly has its flaws, all of these elements work together.

Why? Because the director's influenced by all those disparate film styles; he's not trying to make a film that embodies all of them. He uses those styles to create effective scenes. They're all tools.

The result is a remarkably entertaining film. It starts out as simply great fun, then grows increasingly dark and brooding as the various plotlines accelerate towards the (inevitably bloody) end. Which is exactly as it should be for this sort of film. As long as you aren't expecting a mindless, high-speed action flick—Japanese movies rarely are—you'll probably get it.

And you'll find a weird, wonderful little gem. I can't wait to see the sequel.

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19 Apr 09 – The Kindle and Reading Late Into The Night

This is one of the insidious dangers of owning an Amazon Kindle: I stumbled upon yet another book, and read half of it without realizing.

The Kindle's ability to download a free sample chapter of almost any book in its library is akin to a free sample of anything in a restaurant. I can easily download half a dozen samples of books that interest me, and at least one will grab my interest.

So with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a wonderful book I'm now halfway through reading, after reading the first word earlier tonight. It's a (fictional) set of letters between an author and a group of British country folk who lived on the island of Guernsey when it was occupied by the Germans during World War II. Besides teaching me that British Channel islands were occupied by Germans during WW2, the book is increasingly complex. It reveals more and more about the characters and the situation; living under German occupation forced all sorts of subtle and complex choices on these simple people.

And yet, it remains light-hearted and high-spirited. No mean feat considering its letters are (fictionally) sent just after the end of the war, when British food was still rationed and British subjects still walked past bombed-out buildings every day. And while the book can get serious and downright melancholy at time, that's not the point, and the book knows it. The tone varies while remaining true.

Which is why I found myself reading the book for two hours tonight, heedless of the time going by. I certainly hope it ends well.

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14 Apr 09 – Gunwave Reborn

I really need to get to bed right now, but I just couldn't help sharing this. I've just released a serious upgrade to my mecha anime-inspired tabletop RPG system, Gunwave. It's a fast, fun, exciting game that lets you play angsty teens during an epic space war.

And it's all free. Check out the PDFs on gunwave.net, stop by the forum, and let me know what you think. It's still in beta—need to do a lot of playtesting and get lots of opinions and just generally add some more cool stuff—but it's playable and fun right now.

Hope you enjoy.

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7 Apr 09 – Midway Through a Media Fast

I'm almost halfway into my spring Media Fast. No TV, movies, DVDs, books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, or music.

I don't take this too seriously. I'll check out a blog article if someone insists, and I listen to certain music at work that puts me in the proper working mood.

But I've already gleaned 3 insights:

I spend huge amounts of my days consuming media.
Media is my default choice. If I don't have anything to do, and I want to relax, I turn to media. I don't meditate, or sit in my garden, or just daydream. I consume.
I'm much more productive during my Media Fasts, and all around, I'm happier. I think this is because I'm less distracted.

I now plan to conduct miniature Media Fasts every week. From now on, I plan to consume no media Fridays and Saturdays. Obviously, if I absolutely need to read or watch something to get other work done, I will. But those days will be mini-vacations from media consumption. Days when I can truly relax.

Or I'm completely misguided. Still worth trying, I think. Perhaps I'll have a very different opinion later this week!

Posted in Self-improvement - Permalink - comments

3 Apr 09 – The Novel of Metropolis

I've been reading Thea von Harbou's Metropolis, her novelization based on the original script she wrote with Fritz Lang. It was published before the movie was even completed, so this is their original vision.

I'm stunned. This is like Ray Bradbury at his best. The characters are memorable, the plot leaps forward like the best SF, the dialogue fills one with emotion. This is top-notch work. I'd love to know who translated it.

Here's a brief excerpt:

He had entered the cathedral as a child, not pious, yet not entirely free from shyness—prepared for reverence, but fearless. He heard, as his mother, the Kyrie Eleison of the stones and the Te Deum Laudamus—the De Profundis and the Jubilate. And he heard, as his mother, how the powerfully ringing stone chair was crowned by the Amen of the cross vault....

He looked for Maria, who was to have waited for him on the belfry steps; but he could not find her. He wandered through the cathedral, which seemed to be quite empty of people. Once he stopped. He was standing opposite Death.

The ghostly minstrel stood in a side-niche, carved in wood, in hat and wide cloak, scythe on shoulder, the hour-glass dangling from his girdle; and the minstrel was playing on a bone as though on a flute. The Seven Deadly Sins were his following.

Freder looked Death in the face. Then he said:

"If you had come earlier you would not have frightened me....Now I pray you: Keep away from me and my beloved!"

But the awful flute-player seemed to be listening to nothing but the song he was playing upon a bone.

This is not the best of it, because the novel uses repetition to drive its points home. You're reminded of past images and sequences, and the memory fills you with dread.

It may well be better than the movie, and I think the movie's one of the top 5 SF films made before Star Wars.

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	Pluto, volume 3 by Naoki Urasawa
	Pluto, volume 2 by Naoki Urasawa
	Puckoon by Spike Milligan
	Pluto, volume 1 by Naoki Urasawa

	Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick)
	Blade II (Wesley Snipes, Guillermo del Toro)
	Blade (Wesley Snipes)