Tuesday, December 23, 2003

First, for perhaps the first time, Tolkien gets more credit than he deserves, rather than less.

Spent last night curled up in bed, watching MST3K and anime.

The MST3K was The Hellcats, an incomprehensible film about wild 1960’s biker culture, impressively padded with shots of people riding bikes and tense confrontations that are resolved with feats of manliness and have no impact whatever on the plot.

Then came two episodes of Please Teacher!, an anime which every reviewer seems to describe the same. It’s a silly, horny teen comedy in which is embedded an amazingly strong romance. The protagonists stumble through an increasingly complicated relationship, doing their best to do the right thing by each other. Interspersed with “Oops, I grabbed the wrong person’s breast” scenarios. Oddly enough, it works.

Then I tried two episodes of One, an anime OVA that I picked up fansubbed because it looked interesting. I can only assume it’s based on a dating sim; it has that classic “tons of cute girls all interested in the same mysterious guy” plot. The mysterious guy is even drawn half-shadowed a lot of the time, which is common in dating sims.

The plot of One is completely incomprehensible at this point, though I think that’s intentional. Apparently, a bunch of girls all knew one guy at various points in their lives, but their memory of him has been erased some time in the past year. He’s entering their lives again now, and they’re beginning to remember their histories with him.

Unfortunately, the director favored extremely lengthy shots in an apparent effort to make it more moody (and pad the anime); I shouted “Do something!” at the screen a few times. Worse, the animation is often inept; a character will shrink way too fast as she runs away from us, or a character’s hand will leap all over a violin as he plays it. Still, it’s an interesting little show.

In other news, I’m somewhat depressed. This is due mostly to an ongoing crisis with somebody close to me. I’m not directly involved, but it’s still a weight on my heart.

As a result, I’m not writing. I haven’t written a thing since Friday, despite my commitment to write 300 words a day. Well, no writing over the weekend was understandable, but nothing yesterday? This is bad.

On the other hand, what would I write?