Genshiken (げんしけん or 現代視覺文化研究會) + Quiet: The Power of Introverts

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There's something endearing about watching a group of introverts and/or socially awkward college students united by common interests and bonding over the years...

Left: Kasukabe Saki, her boyfriend Kousaka Makoto... Center: Sasahara Kanji, Ogiue Chika... Right: Madarame Harunobu Giant head: Sue

The name of the club is a euphemistic wrapper that includes anime, mangas, video games based on aforementioned, and cosplaying. A mish-mash hodgepodge of these special interests. At the start of the series, all the members are social outcasts, mainly because the club is considered less serious, i.e. "inferior" to the anime club and the manga club. As the story progresses, the members develop a sense of identity by coming to terms with who they are and venture out of their comfort zone.

I see a part of me in all the main characters, perhaps less of Kasukabe Saki, the only one who is not an otaku. I actually don't consider myself an otaku in the purest sense because I'm not obsessive :-P I think. Saki is the counterpoint, the persuader, the challenger who pushes the characters out of their passive shells. She very reluctantly comes to the club initially because her boyfriend is a serious video game otaku, but gradually warms up and becomes good friends with the members... as she comes to accept the otaku-ness as being a part of them.

Perhaps I'm attempting to relive an idealized version of my undergrad years, during most of which I was lost in an internal maelstrom of angst and anxiety.

Ogiue's sudden wardrobe change shocks everyone

It's encouraging to see the characters grow and develop their persona and become more comfortable dealing with real-life. Granted it's fiction, but I went through a similar process which most resembles Ogiue Chika's experience... During much of the series, she exhibits self-loathing with a vengeance. And she escapes the bounded iterations in a rather similar way as I...    

I simply enjoy watching the characters interact with one another in their awkwardly adorable ways. They say "eto..." [translate: um...] a lot, or perhaps stutter, or chuckle when a wittier-type would roll out a repartee. They are pretty classic introverts from Susan Cain's newest book - Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. If I had read it during the early phases of undergrad, perhaps I would have been happier earlier...

But man, hiding out in nooks and crannies (numerous characters), discussing specialty topics in philosophical / analytical manners (Madarame, Sasahara, Tanaka, Kugayama), speaking volumes through silence (Ogiue), are just a few manifestations of such behavior. Not surprisingly, Saki (the main extrovert) dispels their inhibitions, often with lots of kicking and screaming. C'est la vie.

Biz school profs' (canine) personas

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I've been amusing myself lately by associating my recent profs with characteristic dogs, in some cases anthropomorphic ones.

P.C.R. - (a slightly loopy) German Shepherd. Claims to be serious and pedagogical, but secretly is not that serious and has a dark sense of humor. (He called me by different wrong names TWICE).

J.M.L. - the Tramp in Lady and the Tramp. Whimsical, laid-back, yet perceptive and shrewd. Reminds me of Robin Williams' characters.

J.D.S. - the Terrier in Lady and the Tramp. Energetic, snappy, yappy, inclined to provocative and dramatic flairs.

J.P. - a cross between a beagle and a Dachshund...? He's ex-military, has engineering degrees, and lots of hands-on mechanical design experience. Hard to place him so far.

Looking forward to adding more descriptions. I might have to expand my set to more animals later on...

Bakemonogatari - 2 of ??

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[[My previous blog entry about this anime]] 

This series has such high re-watch value for me... because it encourages endless pondering and rumination about nuances and intentions and the like. It's interesting to entertain the connection between the seemingly random scene insertions and the plot elements, e.g. the characters' dialogues, actions, and thoughts.

The insertions are often highly geometric constructs of street scenes, i.e. residential areas inside a city. Examples include generic apartment windows, playground swings, light rail tracks, power line towers, etc.


I feel like these inserts help set the mood and stimulate the viewers' train of thoughts in various Brownian directions... just as the black and red screens that flash for only a fraction of a second and read "Black (or Red) scene: animation number 'none'"... I have not yet figured out what they mean...

Actually, I think it could be either (1) animators got lazy (2) they're trolling the audience (3) simulating the old flickering film reels (4) black scenes for -_- or @_@ or =_= or ._. moments, and red scenes for O_O or intense bloody moments...

Fruity Loops (FL Studio 10) Producer's Edition... random songs

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Songs I recently wrote. I seem to like to write chill and loopy music.

The percussion for this one was a little hard. But I had fun with the sound effects. And the guitar. I totally heart the guitar. My personal favorite part is from 4:08 to the end. The piano part was fun to write too.



The percussion for this one was much easier, because I used the built-in beats! And more fun with the vocal tracks. And more sound effects mwahaha. Plus a nice deep bassline on the piano. What more is there to ask for... just kidding.

[Bones and Inception references] A dream...

... that was a blend of real and fictional people, complete with a soundtrack of lush strings. I swear I had heard the melody before but I can't place it. So frustrating...

In the dream, I'm an undercover agent trying to catch the perpetrator who kidnaps unsuspecting standardized test takers into an "alternate matrix" and then runs experiments on them. In religious terms, the "alternate matrix" is like... purgatory? Or the bridge between the physical world and the world of the dead, or something like that.

And... I'm working with Brennan and Booth on this case. (I think this is a sign that I watch too much Bones... and Mulder and Scully might have been a better fit for this :-P) They have already rounded up the accomplices outside the luxurious private school building/ castle/ mansion. Now I have to catch the main perp in the act.

However, he can teleport and switch rooms at will, and there is simultaneous testing going on in different rooms... so I remember dashing up and down the spiral stairs that are covered with elegant and ancient-looking carpets and sided with mahogany handles. What a stupid way to catch a teleporter, I know...

All the while I am running around, I keep hearing an ensemble of orchestral strings playing a melody with a overlay of (1) the Happy Birthday song progression Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8, Mvmt 1 (as I remembered hearing from Minority Report) and (2) Non Je Ne Regrette Rien (from Inception). I recall some students are taking solfege tests on the second floor, but they don't notice me when I poke my head in.

I myself have been taking a strange mix of GREs and SATII... marking an obscene number of Scantron ovals... the horror! I have to ask to leave the testing room to go to the restroom, but I put the proctor in a trance while attempting to catch the perp.

Long story short... I did not catch the perp in my dream because the soundtrack got louder and I felt some strange abdominal cramping and woke up just as I saw Booth frantically signalling me from outside the building...

Seriously... is this like fanfic fodder or what...

Will not quote MacBeth's soliloquy about sleep...

... living out the title of my blog.

And being an ever-expanding vortex of angst spinning out of control for basically all of November so far...

Trying to solve a many-body problem in finite time is fucking sucking right now...

FontForge looks like the answer to my restlessness... [NOT]

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Thanks to Fzz's link to a kerning game... that inspired this sudden concentrated exploration into typography :-P Tried my hands at the game and didn't do too badly I suppose.

Although the actual task of designing a font is rather involved!

I tried to install FontForge via Cygwin at first, then found it to be hopelessly and needlessly complicated. And then I realized, doh, I have Ubuntu. And then the installation was just one line -

    sudo apt-get install fontforge python-fontforge 

Admittedly, this is the first time I truly felt that my multi-OS machine has finally found its purpose... to be multi-OS... after the fiasco of trying to install Jacapo in Ubuntu (which is a lot more complicated than a single sudo command)

Maybe I can fiddle with the notion of my own usefulness for awhile. FontForge looks sufficiently complex to sustain my play for at least a few months.

[Edit] I impulsively upgraded my Ubuntu from 10.04 to 11.10 and now FontForge doesn't work anymore. Blerg! At least "Oneiric Ocelot" sounds cool. I wanted the next release to be called "Pensive Pelican" or "Pouncing Panther" or... "Peeing Poodle", which Fzz said was better than "Pooping Poodle" because it could be shortened to "PeePoo". The developers should make that an April Fool's joke or something...