Let's talk about the apocalypse! It's kind of a scary thing that a lot of people are way too worried about, but if you're into action-fantasy entertainment, you probably know about all the creative things that people have done with the idea. It's an artistic and stylistic way of wiping the Earthy slate clean and present the world we know and love -- or knew and loved, I guess? -- in a different light. The muscle-bound, anarchic power struggles of Fist of the North Star. The desperate and seemingly futile wars for survival of Mad Max. There's something inherently fascinating about the end of the world, and what surviving the end would do to people and culture.
... oh!
Welcome to the other end of the spectrum. Say hello to Girls' Last Tour, which I can only describe as a post apocalyptic slice of life??? It follows the journey of two girls, Chito and Yuuri, as they explore dead landscapes and abandoned cities in search of food and fuel. That's it. That's the plot. Occasionally, they'll see something interesting in the distance and decide to head in that direction. The show is less about the journey and more about the bizarrely philosophical conversations between these girls.
Chito is an analytic, tactically-minded girl. She's knowledgeable of the old world, but has little to no understanding of it. She seems to prefer quiet, but will always humor Yuuri's boundless curiosity with the best answer she can muster. Her expression doesn't change much throughout the show, and her look in general is plain and uninteresting, which work well to reflect her thoughtful, introverted nature.
Compare that to Yuuri. The way her eyes are drawn suggest a carefree, possibly vacant personality. And, indeed, she is a little stupid. Unlike Chito, she is illiterate, and struggles with understanding simple concepts that, to us, would be common knowledge. However, it's this same lack of knowledge that makes her curious, and her curiosity is what drives almost every conversation and discovery in the show.
These two work well with each other. Chito is smart, but physically weak. Yuuri is stupid, but isn't afraid to take risks. Putting their strengths and weaknesses together, you come to understand that these two need each other, because without one, the other would be unable to survive on her own.
The world these girls explore is a character in itself. It's long dead, indifferent, and, as the show progresses, it becomes more and more bizarre, almost abstract. It gives the viewer a sense of unease and confusion; just what happened to this world? Why is the city built like this? It creates a stark and terrifying backdrop to the cute and philosophical explorations of the foreground, and adds a feeling of urgency to the adventure. Danger is real. Food is limited. There is no destination. There is no hope. And the city doesn't care.
It's cute, charming, and funny, and it's easy to forget just how bleak and terrifying the setting really is. The world is dead, and there's no fixing that. It's a strange and surreal environment for such a light-hearted adventure, to be sure; when we think about the end of the world, do we usually stop to consider the world we'll leave behind? What if society never rebuilds? What if what's left of humanity doesn't know how to rebuild? It's scary to think about the world we understand and, frankly, take for granted being stripped down to a search for essentials, where humanity is given a time limit based on how much food is left. Pop culture has made us see the post apocalypse as an anarchic fight for survival, jam packed with explosions and gunfire, and it's partly in subverting expectations that Girls' Last Tour really gets it's message across: cherish what you have, because nothing lasts forever.
In a less literal way, Girls' Last Tour is also a show about growing up in a world that truly doesn't make sense. I can relate to this, personally: it's been a struggle for me to learn and understand how to simply live on my own, let alone understand how our societies, governments, and laws got to be so confusing. If you've ever struggled with life, be it little things like paying bills, or big things like finding a job without a college education or finding your place in a demanding and unforgiving world, it's easy to put yourself in the shoes of these girls: truly understanding how the world around you works is a herculean task, but in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't really matter. What matters is the moment. If you know enough to get by, and you can find joy in little things, even simple, aimless conversation with a loved one, you can be happy. There's beauty in the world, no matter how bleak it might seem.
At just twelve total episodes, Girls' Last Tour is easily digestible, and it gets its' message across without taking too much of your time. Honestly, this meager blog entry hardly does this show the justice it deserves. This show had my full attention from episode one, and it didn't let me down. It takes it's time, has no action whatsoever, and consists almost entirely of conversation between just two characters. If you're okay with that, then this is definitely worth a watch. Also, the show gets gay at the end, and I'm a sucker for cute gay things.
This is why I like the thing! Girls' Last Tour.
Oh man! It's another entry of Spooky's Animal Kingdom! I'm gonna talk about several animals today, called the Bremen Town Musicians. Or the Musicians of Bremen Town. Or the Town of Bremen's Musicians. Or the Town Musicians of Bremen. Or... I give up.
Yes, dear friends. This is an artist's horrifying interpretation of the Bremen Town Musicians doing what they do best: standing on top of each other and screaming at people. They hail from a darker time in history, from a time before women could vote and back when people would drink mercury to cure their hiccups. The Grimm brothers left a record of their many accomplishments, for they were truly heroes of their time.
The Bremen Town Musicians consist of a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster. They each came from different farms and had good paying jobs with wicked dental plans, until their masters, the farmers, all simultaneously decided to lay them off. So, rather than sticking around to be made into food or tacky taxidermy statues, they left their farms and talked amongst themselves about what to do next. They'd heard that Bremen Town was a place known for its freedom, and decided to go there. Along the way, they found a house in the middle of nowhere. The lights were on, and they decided to go inside, as animals tend to do. Inside, they found a gang of thieves, scoundrels, and roustabouts making fun of the people they'd robbed. The animals did what any upstanding animal would do in this situation: they stood on top of each other and screamed. The criminals were terrified. A manticore was in their house! So they fled into the night. Later that night, one of the thieves came back to see whether or not it really was a manticore, and the dog, the cat, and the donkey beat him half to death while the rooster screamed at his face. The man hobbled away, and the day was saved.
The Bremen Town Musicians never actually went to Bremen Town, nor were they ever really musicians at all. They beat up some dudes and lived happily ever after in a stolen house, living a good life with fancy food and nice swag they stole from the guys who stole the stuff to begin with.
The lesson of the story here is... um... hm.
Go to college.
Hello and welcome to another installment of Spooky's Animal Kingdom, where I talk about animals. Last time, I introduced you fine folks to the wonderful Axolotl and their secret plan to dominate the internet. I also said I'd be talking about an ugly and useless sea animal in the next installment, but its ugliness is proving to be formidable. It's a really horrible dumb thing.
So I'm gonna talk about a super cool dumb thing instead! Meet the platypus!
No, that's the wrong one.
Yeah! There we go! The platypus!
Chances are, everyone knows what a platypus is. But who really knows what a platypus is, y'know? Well, take a seat, and I'll tell you all about this gnarly dude.
This thing is cool right off the bat. Platypi... platypuses? ... Platypuses are what's known as monotremes, which are egg-laying mammals. The only other monotremes in the world are four species of echidna. That makes our friend here pretty unique, y'know. They're also a semi-aquatic mammal, like otters and beavers. They're pretty goofy looking animals, so watching them swim would probably be pretty hilarious.
ANIMAL FACT! Platypuses don't mind when people laugh at them. They would too.
What else is cool about these fellas? Well... what if I told you that they don't have nipples? Now, you're probably asking yourself "But Spooky! Every mammal has nipples, don't they? How do they feed their young?" That's just one of those things about monotremes; they're odd. Yes, platypuses do have mammary glands, but no nipples to feed their young with. Instead, they secrete milk from special pores in their skin, and the platypus babies drink up from mama's fat folds. Remember those Gatorade ads where athletes would sweat colorful energy drinks? Platypuses did it first.
There is another thing I want to mention about the platypus. It's this thing here:
This spike is located on the back of the platypus's hind feet. This cute little thing is used to inject a platypus's opponent with a hideously painful paralyzing agent. Platypuses are venomous, y'see. However, the venom is only seasonally active; it's really only used during mating season. Most animals make loud noises or puff out their chests. Alligators just spin, I guess? Meanwhile, male platypuses are out injecting their friends with horrible pain juice so that female platypuses see what cool tough guys they are. These things are crazy, yo.
These guys are native to eastern Australia: large chunks of Queensland and New South Wales, most of Victoria, and all of Tasmania. When Europeans first encountered it, they thought it was some kind of horrible mutant monster. Nobody even believed them at first, probably due to Europe's history of lying about animals.
Although, in the interest of fairness, they weren't too far off. This duck bill and beaver tail-having, egg-laying, otter hair-wearing, mole-looking-like venomous milk-sweating dude is pretty weird. In fantasy, I think people call that a chimera.
Can you tell the difference?
Our pal here has got it good. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the platypus as "least concern". They ain't even worried! Platypuses got survival on lock! Pollution is still an issue, though, so don't pour energy drinks into your local rivers. Platypuses would not be thrilled about that.
So if you've ever heard anyone say that the platypus is the weirdest creature on Earth, or that it's proof that God has a sense of humor, or whatever... they're pretty much right. But what those people don't tell you is that the platypus is awesome! Just goes to show you to never judge a book by it's cover. Or an animal by it's weirdness, for that matter.
Hope ya learned something today. Thanks for reading.
<3
Hello and welcome to Spooky's Animal Kingdom, where I talk about animals! Animals are beautiful, stupid monsters that live outside your house. Sometimes, you'll see them on your front lawn. Unlike humans, they don't need iPhones or socialized infrastructure! How cool is that!
Today's subject is the Abystoma mexicanum, better known as the axolotl. That's pronounced exactly how it looks, according to this guy who sounds
. According to the comments, though, he's also super wrong. Regardless of how it's pronounced, the name translates to 'water monster', so it's probably something stupid and disgusti--
D'aww! What fresh hell is this adorable thing from?
The fresh hell this adorable thing is from is Lake Xochimilco, a former lake, now series of canals located in Mexico City, Mexico. Locals claim that these canals are home to soul-eating mermaids and at least one massive demon fish. It's also the home of an artificial island called the Island of the Dolls, which is... um...
... yyyyyyyyyyyyoooooooooooooooooo...
So yeah! Living in a crazy place like this, you gotta be hardcore! Fortunately for our friends, the axolotls, hard is the only core they know. A fully mature axolotl grows to be a whopping average length of twenty-three centimeters! That's about nine inches, for Americans who don't like the metric system. They prey on weaklings like worms and baby fish to show the world who's boss. That's how they got to be so tough in the first place.
I'm being facetious, of course. Axolotls know what it's like to struggle. They're a naturally paedomorphic species, which means that they retain traits of their youth, even into adulthood. Kind of like frogs staying tadpoles forever, y'see. That's why they have such short and stubby legs, and why they also keep their vestigial teeth. They have to eat by breathing so hard that they create a vacuum, and swallowing whatever they get in their mouth. This normally wouldn't be a problem with most other animals, but our friends were pretty much cheated in the thyroid stimulating hormone department, so metamorphosis never really happens. These poor guys never even reach puberty! Weird.
Unfortunately, these little guys are considered to be critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Urbanization and idiot tourists continue to pollute the waters of the Xochimilco, which has led to these poor things being almost completely wiped out, and non-native fish have all but kicked them out of their natural habitat. It's tough going for the axolotls.
However! Axolotls have that fighting spirit! They're going to survive, albeit by, er... unconventional means. You ready? Here's the strategy. Pay close attention, or you might miss it:
Do you see it? They're SO CUTE! Despite all the setbacks, despite all the hardships and hurdles in their way, despite being super low on Nature's Tier List, they have their cuteness. I mean, heck! Look at cats! Look at how popular they are! Axolotl isn't exactly a household name, but a lot of people would at least recognize the way they look. They've got a severely underdeveloped foot in the door already! So say a little prayer for these cuties before you go to bed, and hope for the best. They could use the encouragement.
Thanks for taking the time to read this barely coherent mess about neotenic salamanders. Next up is another kind of water monster. One that's supposed to be scary, but is actually pretty much useless. It'll be a doozy.
You're all wonderful.
Welcome to the new installation of "This Is Awesome"! It's been a while since my last post, but I've been very busy and I couldn't decide what to write about next. So, I gave it some thought, and, uh... how about Akira?
Akira is a movie directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. It's based on a manga of the same name, also made by Otomo. It was released in Japan by Toho on July 16th, 1988. On December 25th, 1989, it had a very limited theatrical release in North America. It was received well and enjoyed fairly high scores from critics, and it's become a massive cult classic ever since it's release.
Don't let the promotional art here fool you. This isn't a racing movie, and it doesn't even have all that much to do with motorcycles. This is social commentary painted with a coat of blood and crazy. This movie is nuts, but it's so cool! It's also very violent (never explicitly gory, though), but it really fits the mood and themes of the movie.
Unfortunately, there isn't much I can say about the plot. It's there, for sure, it's just very hard to follow and there are some places where it feels incomplete. So, instead of the plot, I want to talk about what makes Akira rad: the animations. Here's a scene from early in the movie. YouTube does the movie's framerate no favors, but this should still help to illustrate just how visually stimulating Akira's animations can be. Quick warning, though: there is coarse language here. Not much, but it's there.
And this is just the start of the movie. The entire movie is animated to this standard. At the beginning, there's something else to take note of. See the sheer amount of animation frames there are to accompany dialogue? Most anime at the time, and even a lot today, accompany dialogue with static characters and two, three, maybe four frames of animation on the character's mouth. Akira did away with this with something called "pre-scoring", where the original Japanese voice actors actually spoke all of the dialogue before animating work began. This way, the animators would be able to sync a character's lip movement, frame by frame, to match the voice actor's speech patterns, facial expressions, and vocal inflections. This is an effect that's very, very rarely seen, even today. The 2002 English re-dub attempted to emulate this pre-scoring approach using individual pre-existing animation frames to match up with the English voices, and for the most part, they succeeded. There are a few places where the mouth movements don't quite match up, but it's always very close when they don't.
This movie is huge; it helped to popularize anime in the United States, and it was a landmark in animated films. It inspired things like The Matrix, Shin Megami Tensei, and Final Fantasy 7, just to name a few. Here, let me sum up its cultural influence with a single image. That's Masahiro Sakurai, dressed like the main character and mounted on a replica of his motorcycle. The guy who made Kirby and Smash Bros. Yeah, it's a pretty big deal.
Seriously, if you want to watch a gorgeously animated movie and you don't mind the occasional F-word, violence, and moments where you're like "Whaaaaaaaat?", then check out Akira. You owe it to yourself.
So thanks, Katsuhiro Otomo! You made an awesome movie! Everyone reading this is awesome, too.
TETSUOOOOOOOO!!
I started a blog. So that's cool. I could fill a paragraph explaining what this blog is and all that formality nonsense, but I'll just let it speak for itself.
With that out of the way, welcome to the first part of This Is Awesome, where I share awesome things and tell you why they're awesome. It's kind of like reviews, I guess, but I do reviews very differently from most of the internet celebrity reviewers out there. I'm not just limiting it to video games, either; it could be anything. That being said, I want to introduce a special something from my childhood: Courage the Cowardly Dog.
Courage the Cowardly Dog was a series that premiered on Cartoon Network on November 12, 1999. The show was received very well, and lasted until November 22, 2002, where it ended with four seasons and 52 episodes. It was my favorite show growing up, and the one I have the fondest memories of. It was only recently that I started revisiting it, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. It still holds up, even after the thirteen years since it ended. One episode in particular stood out in my memory for a long time, and it's this one: "The Tower of Dr. Zalost".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzdEtUUUiuc
Season 2's finale says everything that needs to be said about Courage the Cowardly Dog. It's a slapstick dark comedy about the misadventures of the titular hero, Courage, trying to protect his family from strange and often supernatural threats. The slapstick nature of the show is enough to keep children entertained, but it never detracts from the themes of the show. The series is about courage, and what it means to be courageous. Courage isn't acting without fear; it's acting in spite of fear. The show is about standing up to your fears and protecting what you love. A great message for a cartoon, if you ask me.
This episode in particular presents themes of sadness and anger. It's never explained why Dr. Zalost is so upset; all we need to know is that he's taking his anger out on others. The sound direction in this episode hints towards something dark, maybe even tragic. Dr. Zalost is set up as the villain of the episode, but between the music, how he's treated, and his interactions with Rat, you can't help but feel bad for the guy. He's not a bad person, he's just angry and he doesn't know what else to do, so he sets out to make everybody else unhappy in a desperate hope to remedy his loneliness. This episode, more than many others, establishes a powerful threat for Courage to overcome, as well as tension, since Muriel's happiness is at stake. Even though the climax is reaching a bit, what with the happy plums and their magical power to make literally anything happy (well, except for Eustace, I guess), the message is what's important: everyone needs love. Happiness is one of the most important things in the world, and it makes the world a better place. I like this kind of thing, and it offers a brand of satisfaction that I don't get from many things these days.
It's also worth mentioning that this episode was nominated for a Golden Reel Award for best sound editing in an animated series, and it's pretty easy to see why.
Unfortunately, most episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog aren't like this. There are great episodes, and most of them are funny and enjoyable, but for the most part, The Tower of Dr. Zalost is unique, not only for its story and atmosphere, but also for the themes is presents. Still, Courage the Cowardly Dog is awesome, and you're awesome too.
