I was browsing through Netflix and noticed the following:
And I was like. . . Netflix is doing original anime?
It turns out that Netflix is just licensing and dubbing certain anime now. I like me some anime, so even though I'd never heard of this series, I decided to give it a shot. To this day, I've never looked up its history, so my knowledge is limited to the few dubbed episodes I watched before deciding it wasn't for me. I gathered that the story is set in generic anime fantasy Europe/Britain, where a squad of super powerful knights (that were also government officials?) called "The Seven Deadly Sins" plotted to take over the kingdom, and were then defeated by other super powerful "Holy Knights".
The story starts when a princess with a breathy voice (at least in the dub) stumbles into the main character's bar (the short blond guy on the banner above). Holy Knights are chasing her because they suspect that she's one of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it turns out that she's not. In fact, the short blond guy is actually Meliodas, The Dragon's Sin of Wrath and former captain of The Seven Deadly Sins. There's also this talking pig thing, a giant flying/travelling? turtle of some kind, and this weird Holy Knight who seems to have some backstory with both Meliodas and the princess with the breathy voice.
As I said earlier, I only watched a few episodes of this before calling it quits. The story line obviously didn't grab me as I have trouble recalling basic details, the female lead's voice grated on my nerves, and I was put off by the weird interactions between the female and male leads.
Eve Dallas married Irish prince charming last book, after defeating the evil villain with the magic anti-aging drug that kills users. This book starts when a young engineer with no history of depression or suicidality hangs himself in his room at Roarke's outer space resort, where Eve and Roarke are finishing their honeymoon. I think this might be the first time I read this installment because I remembered nothing of the plot. Except for one subplot I will get to in a minute, I quite enjoyed this book from beginning to end.
Since this series is set Twenty Minutes Into the Future but publication began in 1995, earlier installments have a decidedly retro-future feel to them. Most of the time, it's odd blips like state-of-the-art, futuristic computers running on "discs", or people remarking about how only certain professionals have "links" (cell phones) with them at all times. Other times, Robb includes moral dilemmas about "new" technologies and/or scientific advancements that hinge on outdated theories.
In this installment, Roberts tackles the controversy about "nature vs nurture" through the lens of "genetics vs. environment". I wouldn't say that this conflict has been settled already, but Rapture in Death was published in 1996 and the Human Genome Project was declared complete in 2003. The doctor that argues in favor of the genetics side of the debate in this book espouses ideas that would only be entertained in some weird neo-Nazi "scientific magazine" today. I'll let this quote speak for itself:
Not that Reeanna is an actual neo-Nazi, it's just that the scientific concensus today is that the relationship between genes and the environment is more complicated than "genes --> behavior"
I went to Connecticut this weekend to catch up with some of the more affluent members of my family. It was pretty fun. We went to a. . . semi-private? beach. It's hard to explain. I think only people who own houses and/or live in the area are accepted into the beach, so it was fairly clean. Best of all, it wasn't crowded at all. From what I understand, you can have barbecues in these types of little islets:
If you own a boat, of course.
Then we drove around the neighborhood to admire all the beach houses that my family members can't afford. (They own property about five minutes from the beach. I'd have asked how much it cost, but it would've been tacky. It's cool, though. One of my aunts asked and it was around 600k. Ten years ago).
Anyway, in all the talk about pretty things, my mother aunt started talking about a beautiful cousin I have who posts artsy pictures of herself on Facebook. I was only half-listening, but my ears perked up when one of my aunts lamented that my cousin looks way more beautiful in pictures than in real life. I didn't join in, but of course she does.
It's obvious that my cousin expends a lot of time on her pictures. I'm not knocking her. They're beautiful pictures. I wouldn't know how to make myself look like that even with filters and photoshop. But I wonder how she must feel like in person. Does she worry that her Facebook and Instagram posts set up a standard that she can never meet in real life? Does she enjoy posting those pictures even though she must know that people make snide comments about how they're "fake"?
I found trailers of The Purge: Election Yearjust intriguing enough to rent The Purgeon Amazon. The tagline "Keep America Great" was just unsubtle enough to work on me, I guess.
Yeah, this trailer would not have been enough to get me to watch The Purge. For what it's worth, the movie itself is better than this, especially the first hour or so. Unfortunately, it does little to change that this movie's premise is fundamentally broken. Even if we accept that people will just start murdering each other en masse if only murder were legal (which I'm not sure I do), the financial implications of such a policy for a society are hard to enumerate. America loses significant money when people call in sick for work because of the flu, for God's sake.
But it's the movie any good if you just stop thinking and enjoy the spectacle?
I'm not sure why certain sections of the internet hate Nickleback so much. It's possible that the lead singer, or someone else in the band, is a well-documented backside opening, but it's way more likely that there's some sort of meme going on about who can pretend that they've been the most severely victimized by Nickleback. I don't pretend have a research the origin of the hate.
I also don't pretend that Nickleback is particularly good either. I've said in previous posts that English music has to deal with the least musical language ever, or at least the least musical language that I know. And Nickleback's lead singer doesn't strike me much either. I think Seether's lead singer does a much better job of injecting some emotions into whatever lyrics he's singing (my tastes in rock music is that of a twelve-year-old girl's).
This might be the point where I lose any good taste rep that I might've had before, but here's my favorite Nickleback song:
And by "favorite Nickleback song", I mean "least likely to skip it if I run across it on the radio". Still, the mere fact that I don't pretend to fly into a rage whenever I hear their sound makes me feel like I might be an anomaly (though considering how they're still making music and money, chances are that they have tons and tons of fans).
Then, to regain some of my nonexistent hipster cred, I will share this cover by Alkistis Proptopsalti:
My friend Chris (who has way more hardcore music taste than I do) showed me this when I revealed that I didn't hate Nickleback. Well, I mostly just told since it's not like I hide it.
Anyway, I didn't do much research on this band (or is it just the singer?) because I like their name (her name?) so much. Protopsalti Alkistis sounds like some bird of prey that's about to descend upon you and strike at your carotid, then fly off with your larynx to display for its enemies. It might just be "Mary" in the original. . . whatever language this is. Either way, I choose to keep the mystery for now.
My original point, which I probably never got to, is that they sound much better than Nickleback. I don't know if this is Nickleback's fault, or English's fault.
