Had a birthday a week or so ago. I’m getting old. But I decided I wanted a birthday present, so I got myself a PSP. The train ride really flies by when you’re watching about 40 minutes of tv shows or anime or playing video games for the whole trip, lemme tell ya. It’s nice.

Not a whole lot is going on in my life right now. I’m reading, gaming, working, and that’s about it. It’s … a bit dissatisfying, to be honest. I’m trying to knock out Persona 3 so I don’t have a game waiting for me to play it, and then I’m thinking of taking my evenings away from gaming, anime, tv and the internet all as a whole.

Incidentally, Persona 3 is pretty good, despite the whole “shooting yourselves in the head” aesthetic.

In other news, Freakonomics is good times. Blink is pretty interesting. The Kite Runner for some reason bored and disheartened me fairly early on in the story and I lost interest. By far, the best train book I’ve read so far is Apathy, and Other Small Victories, which comes highly recommended for anyone over the age of 18 or so with a slightly twisted sense of humor.

First of all, this is an excellent series. It’s got a cute romantic touch, it’s got action, it’s got inaction, it’s got a great ambling guitar melody, it’s got excellent character design and well-applied art styles.

But what really makes this series a big bag of win is the story itself. So here’s the story. Satou is a hikkikomori (basically an unemployed, drop-out shut-in, considered to be something of an epidemic in Japan these days, and also considered to be one of the lowest and most disgusting forms of social scum around). Very self-conscious of this fact, Satou has basically been hiding in his room for the last 3 or so years. One day, he answers a knock at his door, to find out that it’s an older lady handing out pamphlets and proselytizing, and a young girl who seems to take an interest in him.

Frustrated with his situation in life, Satou resolves to get a job, and ventures forth into the world, where the first place he walks into that’s hiring happens to be the same place that the girl, Misaki, works. Through an interesting series of events, she ends up counseling him to abandon his hikkikomori ways and become a functional person in the real world… and so begins the story.

The actual plot is … well … it doesn’t cover a lot of ground. But the portrayals… the way we get inside Satou’s head in particular…

Well, I guess one way to describe its impact on me is as area-of-effect artillery fire. There’s a lot of things in it … a lot of the things going on in Satou’s head, for example, that hit a bit close to home, to my own mindset. The anxious moments, the near-insurmountable hesitation to reach out, the paralyzing fear of the unfamiliar. As someone who is at least a little socially dysfunctional, I could identify with Satou quite a bit.

Anyway, the story progresses through a sometimes-charming, sometimes-dark series of events, which it would be spoiling to detail. But it’s definitely, definitely worth a watch, and comes with my highest recommendation. If you’re even remotely into drama, romance, or psychology, or dancing furniture and you want a story that shows realistic, attainable progress from people walking a very close-to-reality knife-edge over the gulf of despair, and on more than one occasion falling off of that edge… this show is for you.

So go. Download it. Watch it. If you’re into dubs, buy the ADVFilms R1′s when they start coming out in October. It’s one of those series that’s definitely worth it.

By the way, ending 1 is worth its weight in gold, and is the absolute best ending sequence of any anime ever, EVER.

This was … umm …

yes … what’s the word I’m looking for? ….

FUCKING INSANE. I … can’t quite express this very well. It’s freaking nuts.

Not to misrepresent the premise of the series, this is, in fact, a show about a fairly normal boy, a girl who likes him, and the angel from the future that comes to live with him and repeatedly kills him with her club Excaliborg, then revives him with her angel-magic.

That’s pretty much the premise.

I honestly can’t recommend the series. It’s short, but it goes pretty much nowhere and is basically an exercise in gratuitous cartoon violence in the vein of an hour and a half version of “Itchy and Scratchy”, which tries to inject a high school love triangle into the mix.

Spoilers and a hilarious and probably nsfw animation from the first minute and a half follow. Don’t keep reading if you think you’re actually going to go watch this…

Spoiler time… if you are thinking of actually going and finding the fansub of this, you should stop reading this paragraph. For reals. The moral of the story is, apparently, You can only crush someone’s skull with a giant spiked steel bat so many times before they fall in love with you.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth a watch, but it’s also definitely not for the squeamish (especially the second half of it, there’s some pretty gory images involving a killing floor that are not for the faint of heart).

On the anime front, I watched Coyote Ragtime Show today. It’s a nice short 12 episode series. Interesting storyline, and it’s a good balance of nearly-constant action and short but well-used quiet times. Sort of a non-episodic, non-depressed, non-insane and non-episodic rendition of Cowboy Bebop.

GG did a very good job subbing it, inasmuch as I have no particular complaints about the job they did and I thought their treatment of the credits typesetting was entertaining and well-crafted. AnY also subbed it apparently, and they tend to do good work. ADV also apparently owns the rights to it, but I’m too lazy to check if the dvds are out yet :p.

Round about page 111, Schwartz summmarizes a bit of Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty, explaining that in any situation in which you are unhappy, you have two choices: you can either walk away from the table or you can voice your problem. Schwartz points out that dealing with people in any way other than giving voice to the problem is pretty disagreeable.

Well, I’m thinking about Jigoku Shoujo. For those that don’t know (which I suspect is about everyone reading this :p), Jigoku Shoujo (“Hell Girl”) is an anime built around the premise that a young girl, Enma Ai (presumably the daughter of Enma, the judge of the dead and king of the underworld). She sets up a website, at which people can submit names (but only at midnight) and enter into contracts for revenge. The deal is, Enma Ai takes the victim’s soul to Hell right out, but in exchange the person who makes the contract forfeits their soul’s chances at anything but an eternity in Hell as well.

So far, most episodes have followed the same pattern: someone does something cruel to someone else (usually repeatedly), the victim asks Ai for revenge, Ai gives them a token (a straw doll of the person) and lets them enter into a contract if they pull the string around the doll’s neck. The person then thinks about it, gives “voice” a try, and when that doesn’t work and they get backed into a corner, they pull the string, the other person gets a taste of fitting revenge and shuffles off to hell.

Now, the biggest, most interesting thing I’ve noticed about this pattern is that almost the victim’s very first impulse is to go for the “exit” approach. Sort of like King Henry’s famous line, “who will rid me of this meddlesome … person”. Then when they find out that their soul will be taken for going through with the deal, they reconsider and try the “voice” route again.

I’m not really going anywhere with this, I just think it’s an interesting thing, how the route there is sort of messed up. I guess if there has to be anything to say abot it, maybe … “quitting another person shouldn’t be anything other than your very last choice among the list of possible choices you can make”. Something like that.

Anyway, the series is interesting, but a little slow and definitely not for everyone. It’s pretty though… very high quality artwork throughout. I’m hoping to see a little more storyline variation in upcoming episodes…