ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOSAGAN [Spray and Pray]

Original joke by Matt P via GRS.


[01:55:17] Shawn: That is incredibly scary
[01:55:39] Bryan: hypnosagan?
[01:55:42] Shawn: Yes
[01:55:53] Bryan: did you forget he saved the free world from communism?
[01:56:12] Shawn: I must've missed that part in my cold war studies
[01:57:36] Bryan: yeah, he was in talks about a movie deal with vin diesel but vin backed down out of respect



Needless

Jesus fucking another Jesus. This show is a complete wash if you can't appreciate the meta. First if all, Eve is an expy for, ugh, Eve from Black Cat and Yami from To Love Ru. There. I watched both of those shows, and fuck you you watched them too. An underdeveloped teenage girl with the power of shapeshifting, only in a male-driven audience would that character not be the main lead, and serve only as comic relief and an odd fundoshi fetish object (yeah I don't quite understand that either). Well Needless is good if only for its own genre awareness. With callbacks, running self-referencials, and about half the show dedicated to "SETSUMEI SHIRO" moments, it's painfully cognizant of its media peers and manages to eke out some slapstick comedy. I hear the manga has more guro and fewer pantyshots (a fact the anime actually acknowledges) but I plan to finish the season and never watch it again. Unless it's for a drinking game, then it's, you know, ironic.

Some additional meta for you to chew on: Adam Blade is played by the same man who was Sasuke in Sengoku Basara, Zastin in To Love Ru (because fail comes full circle), and Luck Gandor of Baccano! (the man has done many other roles you'll recognize but that's what AnimeNFO is for), Eve is Arwarwarwarwagi Karen (who was Tsukihi then?) from Bakemonogatari, Saya from Blood+, and Ami from Toradora!. Cruz is Sheryl Nome from Macross Frontier (there, I just ruined both shows at the same time), Matsu from Sekirei (Sekirei is like the Kevin Bacon of shitty anime), and Kinue Crossroad from Gundam 00 (FALCON...).

Kimi no Todoke

Been catching up on this series, which recently got picked up for a live action pilot. The visual gags that staccatto the anime should really work well in live action, so my main concern is their picking a male lead for Kazehaya--he needs to be convincingly embarassed, which is pretty hard to feign (unless he did all the scenes with no pants on, which would be impressive). He's played by the same guy who did Rock in Black Lagoon and Michael Trinity in Gundam 00 (...PUUUUUNCH) --and in an obvious troll to make Nathan hate himself, is also the BANCHOU from Persona 4--so if you've at all watched anime or cutscenes in the past few years, you've probably heard his work and probably dismissed it as lackluster in delivery.  This may not fly in live action since part of establishing a believable two-way romance in media is successfully forming mancrushes in the male viewership.  For those of you keeping score at home, our ugly duckling female lead is voiced by Mamiko Fucking Noto (she's like, one of Japan's national treasures). I'm mostly looking forward to Kurumi's character, mostly because the anime and manga show her to be an obvious frenemy (wow, spellcheck didn't explode on that word) in the mimesis using staple anime emotes (veiled shock and aggression towards Sawako's naivette). If we were to consume it as a dialogue-only piece, it would come off as a display of self-sabotage and completely retool Kurumi from a heel-face-turn character to a reluctant confidant. I'm not convinced an adaptation show would have the budget to pull the talent for this to really work, so I'm expecting a rewrite for several critical scenes. Now that we're in the midseason, Ryu is shaping up to be some sort of midboss-esque frenemy (sorta like H2 but minus the baseball and minus Satomi Ishihara). I call it, A Midseason Night's Facepalm. 


KnT Drinking Game:

• Sawako scares normal people: 1 shot
• Kazehaya blushes: 1 shot
• Background art fades away because pastel bubbles are more important: chug a beer
• Morally uplifting reaffirmation of group friendship: chug a beer
• You feel inspired to be more inclusive and a better person: get the hell out, we're not drinking with you anymore

Bloc Party - Mercury

This song is on the Midnight Club: LA soundtrack.  It's one of the songs that had staying power for me, and I'll be honest, it's mostly because it's Bloc Party.  The sound is slowly converging on Prodigy's Slap My Bitch Up (Prodigy is like Outkast--you'll eventually sound like them so just fucking give up).  Shit, I just thought up of a mashup.  MAKE IT SO.  Anyway, the phrase "Mercury's in retrograde" in astrology is a indicator of events having a nature interpretable as a loss of agency--so we're going to interpret the video as some sort of narrative possessing an external locus of control, but ultimately fail because the video constructs a different narrative.  So these damn dirty apes create a clawed moose thing (like Megaman or Zoidberg, both equally awesome) in what we presume to be a reference to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and like Adam, Smith goes out into the world attempting to find completion of his soul in a deli, which, as you may recall, is Mecca for bacon lovers and thus is a hamfisted caricature of Hajj.  But this is where we encounter a departure--Smith is intentionally under control of the apes, fulfilling the role of the Manchurian Candidate whereas Adam is motivated by internal forces.  But we have a co-co-combo breaker because the original Manchurian Candidate was an attempt by Warsaw Pact intelligence to subvert Western military strength, and so this narrative is more consistent with the Denzel-infused remake, where the puppeteers are an American PMC.  The ultimate goal seems to be a jingoistic power play on Brazil (seriously?) to acquire bananas and I can only presume their hot hot sambo music (google for Marcio Local). Oh look, a commentary on American expansionism.  How original.  Yeah, that was just a really long way of saying the lyrics and video have nothing to do with each other.


Bonus:  Watch this video:
Aesop Rock ft. John Darnielle - Coffee

Similar visual vocabulary  (I wouldn't be surprised if they had the same director).  Eh, let's not talk about the plot.  I have no idea what's going on but John Romero's probably getting a parsh.

The Qemists - S.W.A.G.

Wow, so all your pandoran box does is make your entire band dance like a bunch of scenesters? Really fucking impressed. But D&B makes everything better--hell just hire Dieselboy to remix Evanescence and we'll have this music video.  I get the feeling this music video was shot in one day in someone's loft.  Plus, why the hell do you need a 4-piece band when you're a D&B act?  I mean, the frontman is pretty hot and all, and I bet their concerts are awesome, but trying to mimic a Daughtry aesthetic probably is a little misleading as to the act's style.  And it's not even an ironic mismatch, so I'm sort of disappointed.


Castle

You know the rule about never talking to an ex if things fell apart spectacularly? That's what happened to Drive. I'd all but accepted that we should shoot Nathan Fillion into space so he'd always be remembered for a role that didn't suck, and then revive him again in some Futurama episode. Well, the fact that I don't have a rocket capable of orbital insertion (yet) worked out for the better because Castle is a great show. It's essentially a personality vehicle for Fillion and practically written to cure our Firefly withdrawl symptoms. That said, the plots are subpar for the police procedural genre but it more than makes up for it with humorous character interaction. Whereas a similar show NCIS requires dedicated watching to understand all the jokes (as well as get movie suggestions, thanks Eyes Only (go watch Angel if you haven't seen Michael Weatherly not being a smug bastard for once)), Castle is better for casual viewing but offers a similar value proposition. 


Recommended Reading:  Duga-3 + Pirate Radio

Way to get complete tools to represent the legal side. They practically oozed smug superiority. Look, there are legal reasons for restricting radio bandwidth. But once it becomes a matter of national security, things like the Duga-3 get a virtually unlimited operating license. Duga-3, for the more astute and masochistic of you, was the Brain Scorcher in STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Video link if you want to hear how it worked:


In-game:

One of my favorite FPS moments by the way.  I didn't know the ghosts couldn't hurt you a la The Pain boss fight from Metal Gear Solid 3 but the game does such a great job training you to avoid psychic entities and mutants much less the unholy union of the two.  I recommend STALKER Classic, as I call it, to anyone who thought Fallout 3 was too much charisma and wanted a less forgiving environment.

Real life:

Okay, the conspiracy nut is just another quack, but lemme give you a little background: The Duga-3 was a series of multistatic over-the-horizon frequency-hopping radars that scanned from Chernobyl all the way to Maryland with a resolution of 150 feet by sending 31-bit pseudorandom chirps at 10Hz (what this guy extracted is likely the binary chirp). It was intended as an early warning system but ended up jamming radio, television, radio telescopes, and generally pissing EVERYONE off, the Russians themselves included. Point is, pirate radios transmit on usually unused bands and get prosecuted, whereas a wartime radar that makes legitimate broadcasts unsuable gets A SECOND ONE BUILT?


"In Soviet Russia, radar jams you!" just popped into my head, shit. 


Bonus video:
So Solid Crew - 21 Seconds

So Solid Crew is fucking awesome. Sorta like Ruff Riders with shittier special effects. (How cute, matching uniforms!) 


IFGU.