FunBlog

I have spent the last few days trying to figure out the ending of Kanon, which may be a waste of time, but the damned show got stuck in my head like an annoying song.

Anyway I have decided that it does play fair with the audience, and it mostly makes sense. I think I have figured out the major puzzles, though other interpretations are possible. I have collected my notes here: Spoiler Notes for Kanon

WARNING: Don’t read this if you haven’t seen the series. This is not intended to make sense to anyone who is not familiar with the story, and reading it before watching the series will almost certainly ruin it for you.

American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
HarperTorch 2002

For thousands of years people have come to America, sometimes in small groups, sometimes in large numbers, across the Atlantic and the Pacific, from Europe, Africa and Asia. Some left quickly, others settled permanently. Always they brought their gods with them.

But the new land was not a hospitable place for gods. The gods from the old world were soon abandoned by their former followers, who created an array of shiny new gods to worship in their stead. Some of the old gods went mad, some killed themselves, but most continued to eke out an existence on the fringes of human society.
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This may be the most controversial of the many anime series adapted from CLAMP stories. Many people love it; others really hate it. Personally I like it. I find it clever and funny and poignant and only occasionally unsettling. But you may not react to it the same way.

I suspect that many people’s reaction depends on how they would answer the following multiple choice question.

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When I first set up this blog I selected the WordPress option to use “numeric” permalinks for posts, which just assigns a sequence number to each post. Over time I became increasingly unsatisfied with this. Among other things it makes it hard to interpret the http logs.

So I just switched to a date-name format. By default this would have the effect of breaking all the existing links to this blog, so I am also using Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration Plugin which should automatically redirect all the old URLs to the new ones.

So everything should work transparently without any problems, but if you notice that any links to or within this site seem to be broken, please give me a heads-up by replying to this post.

…so maybe I need to think about it some more.

Elliotte Rusty Harold proposes pirate radio as the solution to the problem posed by the Copyright Royalty Board decision (see The Death of Internet Radio.)

The RIAA’s Internet radio purge is a temporary glitch, nothing more. Uncensored, free Internet radio is here to stay. The most the RIAA can hope to do is inconvenience a few American hobbyists for a few weeks before they find better solutions. The most they will do is transfer airtime from their artists to independents. Heck, if that means we don’t have to endure quite so many headlines about Britney shaving her head, I can only applaud. Go RIAA Go! We could never destroy you as fast as you’re destroying yourself.

This may be too optimistic. If you live in the United States and operate a pirate radio station from a server in a “friendly” country, you may get away with it as long as you are obscure enough, but if you are too successful the RIAA and its friends would have many ways to retailiate against you.

If they can identify you they can bring civil and criminal charges against you, and past experience suggests that there are many ways that they could identify you. For one thing, the U.S. is constantly pressuring other countries to adopt American-style copyright laws, so that “friendly” country could become unfriendly without warning.

Even if they don’t identify you they can use the DMCA to keep U.S.-based web sites and search engines from linking to you. They might even get U.S. ISPs to block access to your IP address. This has never been done in the United States, but it is common in other countries.

What about the idea of making deals with the individual artists so that you can broadcast their songs legally? That’s fine if you have a team of lawyers working for you, but it’s probably impractical for low-budget garage operations. Remember, to be safe you would need to get a sign-off from everyone who might possibly be involved in the creation of a song or video. Just identifying the copyright holders is often impossible, even for big publishers. The only thing certain is that if you make enough money from a work, someone will eventually show up demanding it.

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
–Simonides of Ceos (Epitaph on the burial mound of the Spartans.)

There are few turning points in history as improbably and dramatic as the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC, and none of the events of those wars is more dramatic and improbable than the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. It might be interesting to see a move that told the story of that battle in an impartial and fair-minded way, with strict attention to historical accuracy.

300 has no intention of being that movie. Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, it avoids any pretense of realism, aiming for mythic power instead. To a large extent it succeeds, overwhelming the audience with amazing glorious images, graphic non-stop violence and most of the great lines from Herodotus.
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Doc Searls on Linux Journal describes a remarkable case of a new industry being regulated out of existence to please its old-style competitors.

In a move that recalls the Vogons’ decision to destroy Earth to clear the way for a highway bypass through space (a thankfully fictional premise of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), the judges comprising the Copyright Royalty Board have decided to destroy the Internet radio industry so the Recording Industry won’t be inconvenienced by something it doesn’t know, like or understand.
–Internet Radio on Death Row

via Linux Weekly News.

Cartoon Brew digs up an old article on the censorship regime that prevailed in the 1930s. (via. Wired).

Most of it seems ridiculous now, but some of the material would probably be banned today, though for different reasons.

After seeing a total of three episodes, I can’t get past the obvious problem that everyone else comments on: that the supposed high school students look ten years old (at most). Is this just a stupid and distracting drawing convention? Is the world of the future suffering from an epidemic of some terrible chibifying disease?

Probably not, since the students from the other high schools look like normal teenagers, as does Manabi’s brother. Here’s another possibility: perhaps Seiou High School is a special school for child prodigies, a school full of Chiyo-chans if you will.
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When they announced that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was going to be released in Region 1, my worst fear was that the clueless American distributors would ruin the story by releasing the episodes in chronological order, instead of the original broadcast order. Now it seems that my worst fear has been realized, but it is not the fault of the American distributor. Indeed they seem to be making an unusual effort to salvage the situation.

Here is my understanding of what happened, and what a long-suffering Anime fan can do about it.
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