Category: looky

Or “why Tokyopop cannot be trusted”

Kino no Tabi (“Kino” is a name, tabi = “journey” not socks-with-toes) is “Kino’s Journey” or “travels”… it’s a light novel where this girl and her talking motorcycle visit a new city in each chapter, most of which have succumbed to some bizarre social disaster in the recent past. Like the place where the total democracy voted to kill all dissenters until there were only 2 people left, or the place where everyone took a magic telepathy drug that wiped out civilization.

They made a anime out of it… I was thinking I’d read the books. Tokyopop translated and printed volume 1. It turned out to be slightly controversial, because Kino’s gender is meant to be ambiguous at first, and this was lost by Tokyopop changing the chapter order.

But it turns out “volume 1” that Tokyopop made is really “the one and only volume” because they couldn’t get it together to ever make a volume 2. There are 8 hypothetical volumes. Bastids.

Fortunately there is a fan translation project which will… slowly… translate the other books.

I saw this cool thing on ThinkGeek: the 360 Puzzle Sphere. It sure looks familiar…

Oh wait. It’s because I’ve seen it before: The original was called the Superplexus, and it was designed by artist Michael McGinnis. Here’s an article in the chron about the saga involved in bringing his dream to market.

At one point McGinnis made a giant one (6 feet in diameter!) and had it displayed at the 2007 Maker Faire.

So what is the deal? Is it a rip-off? Is McGinnis getting paid? I sure hope so!

• Wikipedia article

Okay, so now that we’re back after 8 years,

I remember in the mid 1990s there were a ton of female-targetted ads. Stronger, aggressive women. Not lesbians, but not defined by a male identity.

I’m trying to find two in particular; eventually YouTube will find them. They both had remixes of old songs done in a new style. Compare to the Grand Theft Auto coke commercial where he “puts everything back again,” with a remix/cover of Paul Williams’ “You Give a Little Love.”

• A remix of “This little light of mine,” done in a overproduced singer-songwriter style, set to animation. I think it was for jeans.
• A remix of “I am woman,” done in a riot grrl style, like L7 or something. The commercial was for Nike or possibly for Gatorade.

I bought a few of these fancy shmancy grape juices called First Blush. They are in a glass bottle, grape juice from wine grapes.

The only disappointing one so far was when I got the “cabernet white” flavor– it has some white tea in it, and I can barely taste the grape juice.

At a few dollars a pop, they are a bit pricey. However, their cylindrical bottle is pretty, and uses a metal cap, instead of the plastic Voss water cap. This all-recyclable container is good enviro-karma. I’ve been using the bottles as water bottles for my night stand, since they wash in the dishwasher and have a screw cap so I don’t spill if I knock them over in the dark.

The labels are plastic, rather than printed on glass, so I guess they are not entirely recyclable. The wrapper comes off after a couple washings, which is part of the reason I bought them… We had a party and used a bottle for some incredibly strong herbal infusions we made with grain alcohol; a guest almost mistook the bottle’s contents for the original grape juice and took a giant gulp, which would have been Real Bad.

I’m watching The Passion of Joan of Arc, durected by Carl Theodor Dreyer. It’s a silent movie from 1928 and obviously all in black and white.

St. Joan is pretty weird lookin in this one. Played by Maria Falconetti (aka Renée Jeanne Falconetti), she’s described as “haunting” in the dust jacket, and I’d have to go with that. Many of her shots are from below, and she has a giant round face. She has very short hair that makes her look like an androgynous man. Her eyes are glazed over with a manic, spacey look that makes her seem like a cult victim. Which I guess arguably she was. They eye-light every shot of her, which gives her eyes a glossy and watery look.

This film has a history – it was heavily censored, and then entirely lost, while the director was still alive. That must have been terrible. He died thinking his movie was gone forever; he tried to cut together another copy made from alternate takes, basically from scraps. Come to think of it, that would be pretty awesome to see also. It could be the lost lost film.

Anyway, recently in 1981 someone found a copy in a closet in a mental institution in Oslo. Uh yeah. The skeptic in me wonders whether this is really the original, since no one alive is around who could tell the diffference.

One nice thing about this release – it has a soundtrack, which is awesome, since obviously the original was lost. The one that comes with the movie is Richard Einhorn’s 1994 “Voices of Light”. However something that is kind of crazy: there are at least two other “soundtracks” for this movie, including two different versions by electronica groups “The Nursery” and “Ugress.” I’m not sure if they’d fit directly with the movie or not.

I saw “Z Channel – A Magnificent Obsession,” which was pretty cool. I wonder if there are copies of the magazine Z Channel used to put out, floating around on ebay?

Here’s a list of movies mentioned in “Z Channel” that sounded interesting.

• A Safe Place (Jack Nicholson)
• Images (Altman)
• Welcome to LA (1976)
• Madchen in Uniform (1931)
• 400 Blows
• Dance of the Vampires
• Overlord (1975) – Stuart Cooper
• Fingers (Harvey Keitel)
• (Andrei Rublev)
• Heaven’s Gate (1980)
• Decline of Western Civilization
• Bad Timing (1980)
• The Important Thing Is to Love (Main thing?)
• McCabe & Mrs. Miller
• Le Magnefique
• Berlin Alexanderplatz (it’s 12 hours!)
• 1900 (5 1/2 hours!)
• (director Sam Peckinpah)
• (director Claude Chabrol)
• Once Upon A Time In America
• Wife Mistress
• Lady on the Bus
• Turkish Delight (Verhoven)
• The 4th Man (Verhoven)
• Soldier of Orange (Verhoven)
• Flesh & Blood (Verhoven)
• Spetters (Verhoven)
• Katie Tippel (Verhoven – Kaetje?)
• Salvadore (James Woods)
• Something of Value (1957)

UPDATE: Looks like Wikipedia has a page with a more complete list