chanson

A lot of people have started trying to use the recent and tragic rampage at Virginia Tech to further their own political agenda. Gun control, gun ownership, immigration, isolation, mental health advocates, tough-love advocates, everyone is just itching to do whatever they can to use this event to further their own cause.

As for myself, I just read Battle Royale by Koushun Takami. It was just last weekend that I decided to pick it up, and discovered that the Borders next door to the coffee shop I was at actually had a copy in stock even though their computer didn't even think they could order it.

Spoiler warning: Yeah, spoilers follow. If you're interested and don't want any plot details spoiled — and if you are interested, you should really go in as "cold" as you can — stop reading here.

Battle Royale is set in an alternate-history fascist Japan right around our own time that, as part of its enforcement of social order, every year or two runs The Program. In The Program, a third-year junior high class is — without their knowledge or consent — taken to a battleground, armed, and forced to fight each other to the death. That's 9th grade to Americans, 14-to-15-year-olds. They're forced to fight by means of electronic remote monitoring & explosive collars around their necks; if nobody dies over a 24-hour period, everyone dies. If there's more than one person left alive at the end of The Program, everyone dies.

It is, in short, some fucked up shit.

I won't spoil the ending, but I will point out that it was extremely controversial in Japan as a novel, and then as a film, and there are persistent stories that an American remake — rather than an American release — of the film are in the works.

So, how does this tie in to the Virginia Tech tragedy? I'm a pro-gun liberal; I think people have the right to a wide variety of weapons, and the right to carry them, and that those rights should be protected. However, I also happen to think that weapons do need some amount of control. Having lots of students carrying or having access to weapons at Virginia Tech wouldn't have helped any more than having very few armed; the situation was too extreme for people to deal with rationally. And the Battle Royale film's infamous lighthouse scene provides a very good illustration of this.

The problem is that while an armed society is a polite society, that's only true so long as everyone is polite. As soon as someone starts being rude it can quickly become a paranoid society. Is it better for everyone to be helpless in the face of extreme violence? No, but it's not entirely bad, either, that not everybody is ready to play Rambo at a moment's notice.

I just hope that this event doesn't remove what little rationality is left from the discussion of such issues. In either direction.

Demonstrate your adoration well, my subjects!

(Really, you don't have to get me anything. I know you all adore me already, and can't wait for me to take my rightful place as your Great Leader. This is more so I have links to my wish list somewhere "permanent" so I can pass them along to those who really do want it. Honest!)

One of the things that I've missed most at anime conventions has been the room parties. At none of Fanime, JTAF, and Anime Overdose were there any room parties; all of the partying was part of the con itself, which meant that things wound down quite a bit at night. At science fiction conventions like Windycon, Capricon, and Baycon, the partying is split between con events (masquerade, dance, con suite) and member-run room parties. And the room parties can be a blast.

Fortunately it looks like Con-X-Treme is going to try bucking that trend; their web site doesn't mention much, but it does mention room parties. It's also going to be held at the DoubleTree San Jose — the same hotel as Baycon — so it's in one of the best con hotels around.

Anyone planning on running a room party should check out the guide to throwing a large room party at a science fiction convention by Teresa Nielsen-Hayden. It's pretty familiar given all of the very well-run and well-attended GT suite parties I've been to over the years, which means that it'd be a good model to emulate.

In particular, let me restate this section:

Be a little wary of partygoers who aren't wearing convention badges, especially if they don't look like convention attendees. They may be perfectly all right, but you need to know who they are, and let them know they've been noticed. Shaking hands and asking their names will usually do it.

My position is that if they don't have a current convention membership, they don't get to join the party. There have been cons in Chicago which got reputations as places for particular social crowds to descend upon and drink and eat and be rowdy and, oh yeah, not contribute anything back — not even a con membership.

In other words, they're not interested in the con, but what the con has that they can consume like locusts. I'd hate to see the same thing happen in the anime community (which has at least a "generational" overlap with the locusts) so the folks running room parties should be pretty strict on badging.

All in all, room parties — and especially the GT suite at Chicago-area cons — are what I've really missed when I moved to the west coast and started attending anime instead of sci-fi cons. I hope they make a comeback.

From part 1:

I'm trying to work my way through my huge to-read pile. Well, piles. I have an end table dedicated to it, and boy howdy are there a lot of books on it. I need to not get any more books until I've worked through at least about a third of the pile.

I'm now maintaining my reading list on my personal web site, Eschatologist.net. So much to read...

Fanime + BayCon = Crazy Delicious

Must not read them all in one sitting. Too much to do to read them all in one sitting. Need too much sleep to read them all in one sitting.

I finally got the first three trades of The Maxx by Sam Keith, one of the seminal comics of my youth. The Maxx is the comic that really showed me, over a dozen years ago, that sequential art was a mature medium for mature readers. And now I own all of it in trade paperback, in addition to many (but not all) of the original issues (of the first storyline)!

If you haven't read it, and you like comics, or you think you might like comics, you need to read it. Get it at your local library, or have them order it via interlibrary loan. Someone is bound to have it since many libraries have surprisingly good graphic novel sections, though they're sometimes filed under "teen" or "young adult." And it's really, really good.

I also just got the first four volumes of the Shadow Star manga from Dark Horse. It's the manga upon which the anime Shadow Star Narutaru (which I mentioned a couple days ago) is based.

I finished watching the anime, which only sparsely covers a few volumes of the Japanese edition of the manga. And damn was it disturbing. So of course I needed more. I just need to be sure to pace myself.

I'm headed up to Japantown Anime Faire 3 in San Francisco today. I'm not planning on staying in the city, but I am planning on having a good time nonetheless!

Anyone who happens to read my blog and see me there should say hi. I should be fairly recognizable, what with the big pictures of me and all.

A few months back, I started reading a whole lot of manga. In fact, at the beginning of 2004 I had barely read any.

Yeah, I'm talking about me. Surprising, huh?

To have something to read during a couple plane flights, around the beginning of 2004 I picked up the FLCL adaptations. Cute, fun, but not the same as the anime. Then to have some reading material before my things arrived in California, I bought the first two Megatokyo books. That was it for a while, until I picked up the original Japanese editions of FLCL in September at JTAF. They had furigana, which meant that they were almost like a study aid, right? (Right.)

For some reason, a few months ago I got back into Chobits. I rented it not long after I moved out here, but this time I wanted more. So I picked up the manga. It was a bit deeper than the anime, and made a bit more sense. That's about the same time I started to get in touch with my inner Japanese schoolgirl. (Everyone has an inner Japanese schoolgirl, you know. Everyone.)

So I started looking for more. I didn't actually read the Azumanga Daioh manga (still haven't) but I think asperityq recommended Kare Kano. I rented the anime, I wanted to find out how the damn story ended and then I got hooked.

Now I have several series I'm reading: Kare Kano, Hot Gimmick, Doubt!!, Love Hina, and Saikano. Of them, my favories are Kare Kano, Hot Gimmick and Saikano. Saikano I just started, and it's all wistful and sad so I'm definitely going to be hooked. Doubt!! I'm less sure about. And yes, I like shoujo. A lot. Inner Japanese schoolgirl, remember? But I don't play dating sims, so don't start calling me Piro.

It has nothing to do with the lack of dating sims for Mac OS X. Really.

Today is Day 2 of FanimeCon, an anime convention in downtown San José. It's also Day 2 of BayCon, a science fiction convention in downtown San José. Decisions, decisions.

So I'm going to Fanime. This was a tough decision for me because I know a bunch of people attending BayCon, whereas I know only a few people going to Fanime. Plus I know exactly what to expect at a sci fi con, so I don't have any social nerves jangling. (Well, not many.) But I want to meet new and interesting people who are around my own age and Fanime will likely be the better place for that.

Why? There's a phrase that sums it up: "The graying of fandom." Science fiction fandom isn't attracting much new blood, and hasn't been for many years, for a number of reasons. Some of it has to do with media and specialty conventions — like Buffy cons, and anime cons — siphoning off the younger crowd.

But a large part of it, I think, has to do with finances. Science fiction conventions are simply getting too expensive for high school students, college students and recent graduates to attend, and if people don't start attending then there's a very low chance they'll start later. Anime cons aren't cheap but do tend to be cheaper, especially in their at-the-door rates. ($55 at the door for a weekend membership to Fanime, $75 for BayCon.)

Also, from the looks of them anime cons seem to have more of a DIY feel than sci fi cons these days. Sci fi cons are still fan-run, but the fans running any given con tends to be the same small group that ran it the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and... Since anime cons are still young, and new ones are springing up everywhere, they're new for everyone.

OK, enough writing. Time to go meet people and have fun!

Thanks to kasra_c and R&K Comics in Sunnyvale, I now have new Last Exile to watch!

I also have a copy of the second print volume of MegaTokyo.