I wanted to make this post to simply reiterate my thanks for the kindness of both Angelus and Crusader who have financially supported me in my bid for what was my holy grail of vintage video games. Obtaining the Palmtex Super Micro would have been impossible without their help. One of the recent listings on eBay for the Super Micro was sold at more than twice the price I bought it, after all:

Granted, this was with all three games, but still ... the price is no joke.

Thanks a lot for both the trust and the financial assistance.

(By the way, I watched the first episode of Madoka. I’ll finish it in two weeks’ time, probably. )

This write-up is not remotely related to anime. But then, as I’ve already paid for my hosting dues, I think I should be given a bit more free rein in the topics I’d like to broach. Although I will never say that I lost my love for anime, I have to admit that my mind has been weighed upon by things rather removed from anime. These two write-ups are relatively polished drafts of mine that address certain thoughts that have pressed upon me over the course of the past month. I’ve had a lot more drafts, but these two seem to be the better ones.

I wrote the two articles on the same topic but tried to be light-hearted in one, and grave in the other. I’m not sure whether this made the intended effect, but publishing it somewhere (anywhere!) would at least give me some closure regarding it. I’m sometimes consumed in the things I’ve overly passionate about, and if I didn’t put an end on it I would probably give ten more renditions on the same topic (not that I haven’t already written ten different renditions).

I hope you guys enjoy this artistic experiment. If not, then forgive me. I do know I’m repeating myself. Read the rest of this entry »

As one of my close friends told me, I make too many excuses. So I won’t make one right now (although in the future, I just might). I didn’t watch any anime, or much television, for that matter, because I spent the first few days of my vacation here in Davao to read 1Q84 intently and conscientiously. I finished it four days ago. I wish Murakami wins the Nobel Prize next year, because I really think he deserves it. 1Q84 may not be as good as Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but he sure proved his worth as a raconteur, telling stories of two different people that gradually converge through the course of the novel. I find that while there were some overwritten parts, the ending was probably one of the best ones I’ve read from him. I also like the novel because it seemed like a continuation, if not a fulfillment, of his short story ‘On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning.’ The book is filled with colorful and quirky characters only Murakami can paint, but one of the differences between this most recent novel of his and his other works is the hopefulness of the ending in contrast to the rather bittersweet (with emphasis on the bitter) endings his past major novels had.

I highly recommend the novel, not only for Murakami fans, but for all fans of good literature. For the Murakami speculator, however, I suggest that one starts with either Norwegian Wood or Hard Boiled Wonderland, seeing that those are shorter works that also pack a lot of punch. I frankly have no regrets: I will most likely be unable to read any novel after March next year for a whole year, so I made sure by finishing the most recent novel by one of my favorite authors.

I admixed sauntering with purchasing gifts after those four days, leaving me with little time to simply sit down and enjoy anime. Currently, I’m trying to finish Naked Lunch before the necessity of studying for our upcoming exams this January 2. I didn’t lose my love for anime, but I think it would be infinitely easier to enjoy than reading pithy literature, especially during class days. I’ve been there before, after all. With that said, I’m sorry for my belated greetings, although I do wish everyone who reads this blog despite its intermittent updates a very happy Christmas and a joyful New Year. At least I made sure to fulfill one of my New Year’s Resolutions: I made a promise to myself to read 1Q84 prior to my clerkship, and I’m glad I’ve done so even before the New Year arrived! Like 1Q84, I may only offer questions sometimes, but I pray that these questions and positions are interesting to the reader. I also hope that I can keep positing those questions to the readers who have been continually loyal to my site despite everything.

(And yes, I will watch Madoka.)

I haven’t watched any anime lately. It’s quite sad because I’ve had to chase a failed test, so I had to study a lot more than I usually do. I’ll just have to wait for the ending of Mawaru Penguindrum before I continue with it, seeing as I still haven’t watched past the third episode all this time. I was initially planning to write an end-of-the-year post, but it seems I can’t even do that with the dearth of anime I’ve seen this year. I’ve still seen a considerable amount, but I wonder if I have anything to write home about other than Steins;Gate. Madoka’s still on my backburner, and I haven’t really watched a series other than Raimuiro Senkitan in a month. That’ll change when I come back home, however.

What other anime should I marathon, or watch? After the batch of Mawaru Penguindrum arrives, I’ll download it, and I have Usagi Drop waiting for the Christmas break, which is quite near. Any suggestions? I have about a week to download and obtain series that seem to be notable this year, and I have about two weeks to make sense of everything and organize a top five list of anime for 2011.

P.S. I really realized I’ve gotten a good deal older when the people I know marry and get pregnant on purpose. haha!

I purchased a relatively inexpensive Game and Watch clone after roughly a year of abstinence, and the reason is that my pangs for vintage video games have returned once more. I found the purchase of the Super Micro (with the help of Angelus and Crusader) to be sensible, because it represented something truly novel in the world of handheld gaming and Othello never really gets boring, especially if one loves to think abstractedly. The profligate part of my mind is currently calling for me to purchase the Romtec Colorvision. It’s a system that I’ve been attracted to for quite some time already. Over the past year I have been able to save a considerable amount, enough for me to be able to purchase it. If I did, however, it would bite in to roughly half of my entire savings, because the system is also quite rare (though not as rare as the Super Micro, I believe).

Sometimes I wonder why I'm so brainless at times.

What prevents me from purchasing it is the fact that it’s just another LCD game, and I have quite a few of those. It’s quite similar to the Donkey Kong, Kingman, and Mario’s Cement Factory tabletops in that gameplay is extremely repetitive: in the Colorvision’s permutation, the mission is to get certain items from the tips of the screen, and then use those to beat the evil witch on the top while avoiding attacking bats. It’s practically the storyline of Kingman being rehashed: while I was able to spend about thirty minutes at a time to play that LCD game, that was an extreme circumstance and I would usually be bored out of my mind by then. I know how those types of LCD games play, and I also know how stupid it would be of me to spend for something as expensive as that. There are renditions of those classic games in Flash; there are also emulators around to sate me. It’s just the irrational side of my brain beckoning me to waste money on something I do not need.

There are other things that I desire that would be more useful to me: I could probably spend a bit of my savings on Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, or on Christmas gifts. I just can’t see myself spending more than a hundred British pounds for a game like that, even though I want to. I guess that’s why the rational part of my head made a compromise with the avaricious and mindless part: I instead paid for a Game and Watch that was less than a tenth of the cost of the Colorvision. I hope that could tide me over. Because as much as the shirts I’ve bought over the previous months were also a strain, I knew I was going to use them until they fit me no more; and although the Super Micro was more expensive than the Colorvision, I could rest assured that its gameplay would never be repetitive, because such are board games that stimulate the mind. I have none of that security with the Colorvision.

I may entertain the thought once more, perhaps after graduating from medical school, I guess. It really just doesn’t make sense to buy it right now. I should try for that chess book instead. Please, don’t let this stupidity persist.

School wasn’t supposed to start last week: it was, after all, time for our University Sportsfest, and to allow students to focus purely on the friendly competition classes were suspended. The information was disseminated to our dean, however, a day before classes started. It was thus unavoidable that we had to have classes: doctors follow a rigid schedule, and to have an absence of classes during the week was going to make that a certainty.

I have been a fixture in the university chess competitions for the past three years. Aside from the fact that I was champion for my first two years in medicine, I just love playing chess. This year, however, I was beaten by a freshman: he ended up representing the first board in our round-robin competitions, and I didn’t mind that. I played second board last year as well, even when there were no other players on our team except me and my friend Kenneth.

It was honestly exhilarating. The previous two years I competed were merely excursions, especially because it wasn’t even a competition: I couldn’t even compete, because I was going solo in a team competition. Although I had good results, it didn’t translate to the record. The same happened last year: we were glad to have gleaned even just one point from it, because that one point was hard-earned. Of course, we lost horribly.

This year was different. The freshmen are a talented crew, and their representatives in chess are very good players. We were in the running for second place up to the very last battle, which unfortunately ended up in a draw because I lost. We needed a win I couldn’t give our team, and for that I was disappointed in myself. Finishing fourth place is no joke, however, and it was the best competition I have had for the past three years. Even though I had three losses, I had one of the best wins I ever had in my life, and that’s something no one could ever take away from me. Still, it would have been nice to be second or third and have a banner I could parade and be proud of. But at +6 -3 =1, there’s really nothing to be ashamed of.

Yes, I do recognize I fell a little short. When it was over I lost a bit of sleep just turning the game over and over again in my mind, hoping that I could have seen the mate coming, or hoping I could have moved better. There are just some things I could never change, and that’s one of them.

I actually think I still haven’t got over it, despite how perky I’m feeling nowadays. School’s already in its second week, and I still really haven’t even read any one page of my books. I don’t know why there’s this feeling of lethargy, but I think I just want to get medical school over with. I don’t even know if I’d pass that exam I just took, although I will try my best to make up for it the following week.

I haven’t watched anime over the weekend. I should change that.

I’ve been more productive as regards my blogging lately because we had a short, two-week break from class. In that span of time, I read four books, watched some Korean drama series, and watched Steins;Gate, in addition to some episodes of American serials. I think I have been quite productive. I am behind my anime, however, that I still hadn’t finished Ano Hana until today. I realized that I truly preferred [C] to the drama in Ano Hana despite the fact that Ano Hana is the better anime in terms of its technical aspects and tightly-wound story. That’s probably because I’ve been accustomed and conditioned to the plots found in Korean dramas, and the best among them (like My Girlfriend is a Nine-Tailed Fox) more seamlessly integrate the supernatural to mundane problems such as love and romance. I’m not saying that Ano Hana is terrible or bad: I’m just saying that I find [C] to be a more original series despite Ano Hana’s excellence.

Forgive me for thinking this scene funny.

I think what made me jaded with regard to Ano Hana’s last episodes were the fact that the most well-rated Korean dramas were just a lot more evocative, and these were what I was watching for the past few weeks that when I saw the last episode, I was laughing instead of being in tears when they confided in one another that they had their own selfish reasons for wishing that Menma would go to heaven. In addition to the emotional dramas I’ve seen, I was also finishing up on Saturnalia, which is a collection of excerpts from classic perverse masterpieces. Perhaps that was the reason why I wasn’t affected as I should have been: after reading excerpts featuring the coprolalia of Sade and the perversions of Li Yu, Swinburne and von Sacher-Masoch, romance probably tends to be funny instead of affective.

But in all honesty, the ending just didn’t affect me as much as I wanted. Despite being disappointed with the ending of [C], it attempted to make sense out of its limited time and budget, and did it valiantly despite a multitude of flaws. Ano Hana’s ending wasn’t really flawed: it was just beyond the melodrama that I expected, although I still wouldn’t classify it as bathetic. I’m glad Menma was finally able to go to heaven, don’t get me wrong, but the ending was indeed a wake-up call: I recall that Honey and Clover‘s ending had Takemoto confess to Hagu after he had found himself through touring Japan in a bicycle. I didn’t think that was melodramatic: in fact, the way he confessed to her seemed so natural to me. It was what he simply wanted to say after realizing that he liked her, after all. This was in stark contrast with the saturnalia of tears and crying in the final episode of Ano Hana: I thought that it was a bit overdone.

The series was still a decent show, however, but I stand corrected in even comparing it to Honey and Clover. What did you guys think of Ano Hana?

After seven pages of drafts from my notebook, I decided to scratch all those and just write. After all, this isn’t a literary publication or a research paper: it’s just a place to share my insights and reflections on different objects or people in my life.

James Joyce has been an intermittent topic in this blog. I was introduced to him during my first year of university, in my literature class. We were then tasked to read and analyze ‘The Boarding House.’ Truth be told, I wasn’t too impressed with the story: it was only later when I found out that he had authored two of the top five novels in the 20th century as ranked by critics and editors. It was during this time that my madness for Joyce began: what else could it be called, really? In today’s world, would any young adult willingly dare to read his later works without being a little mad himself?

I have no regrets whatsoever, because reading ALL of his major works gives me the privilege to lambast his works without any hypocrisy. I did read them, after all, so I’m free to hate on them. This is not to say that I think Joyce was talentless as a writer: in fact, I think he remains to be brilliant. Many critics regard Dubliners to be one of the greatest short story collections ever written, and I’m wont to agree with them: ‘The Dead’ alone can make up for the rest of the collection, but the other stories are no pushovers. ‘Araby’ is a great coming-of-age tale, and ‘The Boarding House’ wasn’t too shabby.

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man was also quite good. It wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, but it belongs to the category of books I have read more than once, so I have much respect for it. My respect for Joyce has increased after I finished re-reading Stephen Hero: before Portrait came to be, it had Stephen Hero as its predecessor. Instead of the stream-of-consciousness writing that Joyce started to apply in Portrait, Stephen Hero was written linearly, and more formally. Despite being an apocrypha, it does still remain part of his major prose works; in actuality, I prefer it to the rest. While SH is more languid than the leaner Portrait, it explicates upon the philosophy that encompassed Joyce’s life. Because Dublin could not accept him, he had to follow silence, exile, and unbelief. Instead of focusing on the characters, SH focused on the progression of ideas within the plot, and I liked that.

I liked that because it posited questions more directly, and a lot of these were quite thought-provoking. Why, indeed, would Christ be tempted to be the ruler in a kingdom of idiots? I’m just saddened at how his later works turned out, because I frankly believe Joyce could have been universally celebrated. Had he instead focused on writing intriguing and potent stories without relying on gimmickry and the invention of a new language only he could understand, he would be more respected. As it stands most contemporary critics mock his Finnegans Wake: yes, I think it’s utter shit, too.

I think works in general, after all, are only brilliant when they possess some heart in them. Tatami Galaxy was a kaleidoscope of ideas, but it was all about finding oneself despite being thrown into an unwelcoming world; Steins;Gate was, beyond all the science and physics, ultimately a series about filial piety and love. Had S;G been all about physics, I doubt it would have maintained the attention of its viewers until its final episode. It was more about sacrifice for the ones you love and care for.

What would the use of coalescing the languages of the world be if no one understood what you were writing? What would be the use of being so brilliant and yet ultimately soulless? Soullessness, after all, was Joyce’s fatal flaw. His stories had heart prior to Finnegans Wake, although they had become lesser and lesser as he got older. This is an example series should follow: it’s all right to be technically mediocre. Maison Ikkoku was indeed that. It’s a lot more important to tell a story that appeals to the soul of people: the rest will ultimately follow.

Before I start with the article proper, shout-out goes to Conor, Angelus, and Ryan A for sticking with me even though I haven’t been updating much lately. I really appreciate your reading my posts, Conor. I’m downloading Madoka next, Angelus.

One of my earliest introductions to classic literature was Poe’s ‘Casque of Amontillado.’ My father badgered me into reading it, and I obeyed in due time. I’m glad I obeyed, because I started reading good literature at an age significantly earlier than my contemporaries. I was about 10 during that time. When I was 11, I decided to read more of Poe’s works, because I liked the horror stories he wrote. To my surprise, however, I discovered that he also wrote detective stories and was arguably the first auteur of modern detective stories. I had heard of Sherlock Holmes, but the detective that introduced me to the mystery story was clearly Auguste Dupin in The Murders of the Rue Morgue.

Although I moved away from mystery stories and focused on realistic classics, I have never stopped appreciating the sophistication and the apollonian artistry found in the detective story. In fact, through the years I find that the classics I end up liking the most have significant elements of a detective story: there is the initial confusion and obfuscation, followed by piecemeal plot development that culminates in the story fitting everything together beautifully in the end. I certainly think this can be said about Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Bely’s Petersburg: while the stories are extremely jarring and disorientating early on, the pieces of the puzzle slowly fit into the big picture. When the big picture is finally seen, the scenery is explosive, moving, and cathartic.

They're so destined for one another, the space between their kiss forms a heart.

I think it’s not coincidental that the two works are also recognized to be challenging works of literature precisely because of the novels’ method of narration. Temporal shifts occur without warning, and the reader is left to figure things out with few guides. The non-linear technique further makes things difficult: much effort has to be expended to understand the flux of the plot, but there is also much reward when one figures it out, as behind the confusion lies a truly potent story.

This is where the beauty of Steins;Gate lies in, as well. I’m actually reminded of one of my most favorite series, Tatami Galaxy. And yes, while eyes of some readers are rolling, one can’t help but admit of the similarities with its methods of narration: both tell the story non-linearly, with highly intelligent and kind female deuteragonists, and initially conceited but ultimately endearing protagonists. There is the Groundhog Day rewinds found in both series, as well. Although there wasn’t a physical establishment of a time machine in Tatami Galaxy, both series tackled the immutable and tragic alternate realities suffered through by its protagonists while seeking for a solution to their pressing problems. Tatami Galaxy was simply more of a series of internal catharsis than Steins;Gate: it focused on self-transcendence and self-realization more than it did on the concept of transcendent filial and romantic love in S;G.

Steins;Gate, given that it had more time for explication, was more patient and deliberate than Tatami Galaxy. It was afforded more time in the development of its world than Tatami Galaxy: I simply prefer the primacy and immediacy of Tatami Galaxy, however; but I do admit that the execution and finesse of Steins;Gate is at the apex of anime series.

The central reason why I think quite highly of both these series, however, lies in the fact that these two execute their stories with such intelligence and sophistication without pandering to its viewers. Tatami Galaxy is the more brusque, artistic entity, whereas Steins;Gate is the more refined, aristocratic one. I prefer the rawness of Tatami Galaxy particularly because its roughness allows more interpretation within established limits: it’s more secretive and mystical than the polished, structured glamor found within Steins;Gate. It simply takes a certain kind of prescience and artistry to properly map out a series so beautifully and so accurately that everything coalesces at the end of it all. It takes even more to execute this beautifully, and both series have done so majestically without foregoing of the emotional drive that is pivotal to any series’s success.

At first glance, people may be very mistaken about Steins;Gate. After all, it has a 3:1 ratio of ladies to men (considering that Ruka’s actuations are heavily feminine despite her sex). I’ve been among those people who have prejudged the series to be little more than fluff, as I have read about what happened to Chaos;Head. I didn’t expect anything, and I still don’t, despite countless reviews and ratings probably proving me otherwise.

I have to see and adjudge for myself before jumping to conclusions, after all. I knew it was something quite palpably good even when I followed its earlier episodes as they aired because they held the technical aspects of the show in high accord. While the physics is of course, lacking, what was presented in the show was not incorrect, at least based on my previous physics subjects. Time travel is, at this point, a parascience rather than a true science, and Kurisu’s objections were not unfounded.

Yes, please be my professor.

I may be wrong, however, seeing that it’s been years since my last physics subject. Credit must, however, be given to the show because of its attention to detail: case in point would be the possibility of time travel is black holes could be synthesized at will. While I can’t present the specific publication, I have read about that in the past. The problem with this hypothesis is that, of course, black holes can’t be made perfunctorily: they can’t be made from out of the blue. It’s these small things that heighten my enjoyment of the show alongside the highly attractive Kurisu Makise.

I was also impressed with the commentary of Titor (and seemingly the enactment of time travel in the series) on how people could actually meet themselves in the past because the one coming from the future is actually on a different world line. It somehow reminded me of the Schrodinger’s Cat phenomenon, that one can never really know whether the cat is alive or dead in the different universes unless one opens the sealed pillbox. Since I’m not knowledgeable at quantum physics, I hope people can explain this idea to me.

On a tangential note, I loved the idea of time-travel that The Prestige held: there was something symbolic in Hugh Jackman’s character killing his clone just to execute his trick well. His teleportation came at the cost of his soul.

I may write about characters who have situations oddly similar to Okarin’s. Seeing that I’m just in the earlier parts, that will have to wait until later on.