By Cuchlann on 24 June 2010 | Literature, Voice Module | 4 Comments
It’s time again for your dose of someone else’s agony. No, really, it’s all pretty fun. Except the actual reading. That’s terrible.
In this installment you’ll hear about the most terrible of omissions, stalking, and an old friend drawn up out of the mists of our childhoods for comparison.
Episode two!
Show notes are available below the cut. Please let us know what you think, or even ask questions! The moderators should be able to find a way to work them in.
Note: it’s a day late, sorry about that. A nine-ten hour drive caused that. It was actually ready on time, we swear! Next Wednesday… Cartesian dualism gone horribly wrong!
By Cuchlann on 16 June 2010 | Literature, Voice Module | 3 Comments
Well… This is odd, I assure you. But, because of what I perceive to be professional obligations (I study the Gothic and I’m a populist), I decided that eventually I would have to read Twilight. Being a rotten bastard, I’ve decided to take as many people down with me as I can. Here’s the recording of that down-going. Thekittymeister, Pontifus, and OGT join me in a Voice Module series of pain and hilarity. Herein you will hear us discuss the first four chapters of Twilight and all the problems we can identify with the book so far.
We explain it in the podcast itself, but here’s a quick guide: Thekittymeister and I have not read the books; Pontifus and OGT are familiar with them through classes. Thekittymeister and I are on a schedule to read four chapters for each podcast, which should be weekly; Pontifus and OGT are acting as moderators/commiserators. Good times are had by all, where we take easy potshots at a big target and wrestle with the political implications of vampires that sparkle.
Here’s the first episode.
Comments are welcome. Below the cut are the show notes, scanty as they are.
By Pontifus on 10 April 2010 | Anime, Art and Culture, Visual Novels | 25 Comments
Love Hina can be metafictional, too.
I found Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals at the university library — seven or so months ago. And, what do you know, it’s due back. Overdue, probably. So I suppose I should annotate this thing at long last, for your benefit and mine.
It’s a short book, but I won’t be entirely exhaustive here. I’ll omit basic overviews of things many of us would find intuitive anyway, and some of the more extreme postmodern/poststructural business, in the assumption that you’ll read the book yourself if you’re looking for that sort of thing. It must be said, though, that, while Azuma got his start as a Derrida scholar, Otaku is very readable even if you aren’t so familiar with Baudrillard, Lacan, and their ilk — and, that being the case, I suppose I ought to make this post more or less readable, too.
By Cuchlann on 8 April 2010 | Video Games | 4 Comments
or, the Always-Already Savior 
So I’m finally getting around to writing on Earthbound. I mean, for cereals. I wrote about it a little over on my personal blog, but I didn’t really have a driving idea, I just wanted to get some feelings out that I couldn’t phrase any better than that. The simplest way start, I suppose, is simply to ask, Dude, what’s up with the time travel in Earthbound?
By Kaiserpingvin on 4 April 2010 | Anime | 8 Comments
Silence your groaning, imagine how it was to actually type that odious title! Worry not, it is apt to reflect the quality of the equally odious post here under. In it I will be the worst kind of curmudgeon, the one who imagines to have a point.
The question “Where is moe?” is queer. If asked “Where is love?” or “Where is anger?”, I’d be consternated and profoundly confused what was being sought for, given lack of context. (Given right context, any arbitrary set of words could make sense.) Failing to establish one, shooting in the dark would be necessary. “In the courtyard” doesn’t seem admissible. “In the meetings between people” might work, but is false. “In the world” is perfectly true though uninformative. Whatever the answer, it’d be all metaphor and poetry, which of course is very much fine. Understanding does grow through it, if one seeks not to put too much stock in it. And it would naturally be wrong to interpret it literally, per definition.
By Pontifus on 30 March 2010 | SFCentral | 13 Comments
The promised project is on. Look over that page and let me know if I’ve left out anything essential. Then get out of here and start writing me an article on slice of life.
Also, if you can come up with a better title than “Life and its Slices,” please do so.
That’s about enough administrative business, I think. You’ll be surprised (and thrilled, no doubt) to know that I actually have a few legitimate posts planned for the near future.
By Pontifus on 17 February 2010 | SFCentral | 7 Comments
First, note the series page. There may be a better way to keep track of series, but I don’t especially feel like messing with our category/tag taxonomy too much, and a dedicated page allows more control over presentation. If I’ve missed anything (that is, any series of posts that exists primarily on Super Fanicom), let me know.
Second, I have this project in mind, and I need you (yes, you) to let me know how viable it is.
I’m envisioning a series of free ebooks of essays on various topics in fandom. The goal would be to produce something more “professional-looking” than blog work — that is, the things would be copy edited proper-like, and made to conform with some style manual or another, to a degree. But I’d want the “kinds” of essays present in each collection to vary quite a bit. That is, a theoretical analysis paper on franchise x might be followed by a personal account of franchise x’s impact on the writer’s viewing habits — the point being that, as we’re free of the constraints of what approaches are in vogue in the popular press and academia and so on, we should take advantage of the opportunity to present a tremendous variety of angles on the things we enjoy in one mighty document.
What I need to know is, would anyone — bloggers, commenters, readers, or otherwise — be interested in contributing articles/essays/papers (I’m thinking 2000 words and up) to such a thing? As it’d be offered for free, there’d be no monetary compensation involved, of course. But I think the effort at letting ourselves run with a topic and compiling the results in a nice-looking package could prove worthwhile.
By TheKittymeister on 17 February 2010 | Anime | 5 Comments
Hello all! You’ve likely seen me making a few stray comments here & there on the site, but, well, what follows became too much to put in any comment (& what post could I put it in?). Pontifus was gracious enough to let me take over…er, I mean, to let me post here. So today we’ll be taking a look at Cardcaptor Sakura.
By Cuchlann on 5 February 2010 | Anime, Literature | 27 Comments
Or, Whence the Urge to Burn and Protect?
I’ve been having odd thoughts lately, mostly when I walk to and from class — but also in the shower (both places from which ideas emerge). Where does moe come from? That’s the question underlying our work here today. I’m not going to quibble about the definitions of what moe is, I’m going to try to examine where it comes from.
By Pontifus on 30 December 2009 | Anime, Manga | 31 Comments
Here I shall finish what I began — namely, the listing of things that might’ve made my cadre of moments, but did not, for whatever reason. And then I shall rest, satisfied in my yearly contribution to the grand ambitions of Master CCY (or is it Master Canon these days?).
