Friday, 25. January 2008, 01:27:31
diary, photography
I didn’t have my camera with me today so instead I will describe what I saw (which to be honest was not unlike many a day). After days of semi-darkness and rain it was nice to see the sun again, however weak. As we left the station I gazed towards the sun, and noticed low in the sky a line of three small fluffy clouds of almost identical shape. Pale grey clouds picked out by their silvery edges against a pale grey sky. As the clouds were the same colour as the sky, my first thought was that they might almost have been shapes embossed on a grey background. But as I continued to look at them, or perhaps as the weak sun beyond them strengthened slightly, I realised that the background sky was not really uniform grey but a blurry graduated tone like you can make in a image editor, running from light grey to a subtley darker grey. The clouds meanwhile had a very slight modelling which made them look almost, but not quite, three dimensional.
Just above the horizon, the outlines of more distant clouds were also like embossed shapes that became more and more indistinct as they approached the horizon, fading into the bluish atmospheric haze, like shapes that had been partly rubbed out by an indecisive artist.
But the train was moving on. A large dark building whizzed by in a couple of seconds and was gone. But from those few seconds I was left with an impression of charcoal-grey walls filled with rows of matching grey-tinted windows through which I caught a glimpse of dimly lit office interiors alternating with closed curtains. Had the windows not had bright red frames they would have been indistinguishable from the dark walls, like the clouds against the sky.
Presently the city skyline was replaced by high tree-filled embankments, denuded silver birch trees alternating with anonymous ivy-wrapped trees whose leafless forms might have been either dead or alive, it was hard to tell in winter.
And then my journey was over at a deceptively rustic suburban station with wooden canopies and bare patches on the grassy embankments awaiting the spring flowers; it had only taken ten minutes but as usual I was late for work.
Monday, 7. January 2008, 04:04:26
photograph, diary, rain, photography
The good thing about rain is that it makes the rivers swell! This is a photograph I took at Aysgarth Falls in Yorkshire over the Xmas hols. I found that keeping exposures to 1/10th sec or slower blurred the water nicely. The falls are quite small in height, more like a series of rapids really, but they are very picturesque and extend over quite a large area. The light and shade on the water was very interesting, I couldn’t decide whether the lighter area around the rock in the middle was due to whiter foam or some trick of the light. It reminded me of the sort of thing you see in old oil paintings, where some feature has been accentuated by putting it in a pool of light.
The bad thing about rain is your camera gets wet! Due to worries about raindrops on the lens barrel getting sucked into the camera when the zoom lens retracted, I had to keep my wideangle adaptor (which totally encloses the zoom lens) in place the whole time. Next time I buy a camera I think I’ll pay more attention to its weatherproof qualities! Still I got some nice pictures, though I was fussing so much over the water on the camera and trying to keep it dry that I didn’t notice I had the exposure metering in the wrong mode (I was in spot metering mode, which is not a good idea when white water is filling the centre of the image).
Sunday, 28. October 2007, 18:59:05
Psychic Academy, photograph, diary, manga
...
Here in the land of the Angles we’ve just rejoined the main time stream (Greenwich Mean Time) after living in a dimension one hour removed from real time for the last six months or so. Here’s a photograph to commemorate the now-lost alternate time stream of Summertime, the full moon rising along with a flock of birds as the recent rain clears away.
The thought of the moon rising has suddenly reminded me of the manga
Psychic Academy, where part of the story revolves around memories of a mysterious landscape where the sun is setting and the moon is rising.
(NB all the panels below read from right to left)
Anyway, there were some comments I’ve been meaning to make about the translations of this 11 volume manga.
I originally read it in scanlated form, then decided to buy the official English version which I discovered was available. However suddenly the publisher changed, to Tokyopop, whose slogan is “100% authentic manga”. Well let me beg to differ. The first thing I noticed was that the new version no longer had a gatefold colour image inside the front cover of each volume, a bit of cheapskate cost-cutting which I don’t appreciate when I’m being asked to pay £7 a volume for something printed on cheap paper. Then I began to notice the translation itself, notably that the characters had become more self-centered and aggressive (more American, I guess). And literary quality had seemingly taken a back seat to “attitude”.
I can only be bothered to quote one example in detail, but perhaps it will suffice. This is from volume five. The delinquent character Ren is a boy with a surprising secret. He inhabits a girl’s body, that of his sister Fafa. She had a weak heart, and in transplant operation was given his heart after he had some kind of accident. But his spirit lived on in his heart, and he took control of her body. By tying her long hair back and wearing a baggy jacket he disguises the fact that he has breasts and passes for a male. However sometimes she reasserts control over her body and reverts to type as a cute girl. Anyhow this long precie is just so you can understand the panel below, where Ai Shiomi (the boy on the right) has been told that Ren is going to be kipping on his bedroom floor. First we have the scanlated version. The guy who translated it often struggles to write grammatical English so I have to assume the literary qualities come from the original manga and not from some innate flair for writing. (These read right to left again).
Now read the Tokyopop version:
I mean, WTF? they just lost a fantastic line! It worked on so many levels! “I have a man’s heart...” On the face of it, it sounds like typical macho rhetoric, but we know in Ren’s case it’s literally true! In fact he only has a man’s heart: the rest of him is a girl. How can he be “pure testosterone” as Tokyopop puts it, when he doesn’t have any balls?! Moreover, in the original his statement also serves to assert the primacy of the only thing he has left in the world. Finally, Ai’s dialogue is simply wrong. Ren doesn’t ‘sometimes’ have a girl’s body, he always has a girl’s body, it’s just he usually manages to disguise it.
Maybe it seems like I’m picking hairs here, but I happen to think literary quality is just as important as the quality of the drawings. It’s one of the things that turns a good story into a great story. The Tokyopop version is littered with examples of people’s characters being twisted into something they weren’t, and although it doesn’t ruin the story it tarnishes it, and considering the expense of manga (which in the UK is about twice the price of regular books) and the fact that you need to buy eleven volumes, it’s enough to deter me from buying the whole set. I just don’t have the money to throw at what seems to me to be a substandard version, one which has been Americanised by giving the characters an in-your-face attitude beyond what they were meant to have. So much for “100% authentic manga”.
Thursday, 4. October 2007, 21:17:37
community, css, opera, diary
We often see error messages that tell us MyOpera works by monkey power, but there seems to be no official credit given to them. Well now there is something you can do about it! Take a look at the bottom of this page, next to "RSS, WIDGETIZE" etc!
If you too want a "powered by monkeys" message, add this to your user-css:
#meta:before {
content:"POWERED BY MONKEYS" url(http://my.opera.com/community/graphics/smilies/monkey.gif) " "
}
Note: the message will appear at the bottom of
all your pages—About, Links, Friends, etc!
Friday, 14. September 2007, 20:09:32
html, diary
Suddenly the sidebar options page is letting me choose "about me", which it didn't before, so the pretty picture of moi is back again! Weird.
Other news today: nothing happened.
I was wondering what I could use the "Countdown" feature for, and decided to introduce a Countdown to tomorrow. It should always say "1 day until tomorrow", but unfortunately I have to reset it each day when tomorrow becomes today. (Of course, on the stroke of midnight, it should show "0 days until tomorrow" for just a moment.)
I tried to think of something else I am waiting for, but there is nothing. Is it sad that there is nothing in my life I am counting the days to? Well perhaps there are things I am waiting for, but I don't know when they will happen. Wouldn't birthdays and other celebrations be more fun if they were not fixed but happened unexpectedly?
Sunday, 13. May 2007, 19:56:53
diary, anime, makoto shinkai, tokikake
...
It seems to be 2007 already! You know I really should write more entries.... but does the world really need more boring ramblings?
....Well maybe it does so here's some random musings... too much anime with cutesy voices recently, but two little oases of beauty this year have been Makoto Shinkai's
5 centimetres per second (秒速5センチメートル) and, oddly enough, a SF film about a girl also called Makoto,
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (時をかける少女) a.k.a.
Tokikake. Despite being wowed by the beauty and pathos of 5cm/sec, I have to say that Tokikake has a more substantial story, bearing in mind that 5cm/sec is basically a rerun of Shinkai's "long distance relationship" hobby horse. Moreover I have yet to read a single negative comment about Tokikake, the worst comment being from someone who felt it had been overhyped and said they themselves "only" rated it 8.5/10.
The question I've been pondering about
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is, is it a comedy? This sounds like an odd question, but what I noticed was that although the time leaping in the first part of the film is really funny, by the end of the film I'd quite forgetten about all the laughter and instead remembered it as a deeply moving and rather tragic story. It was only when someone on a forum asked "hey, why is no-one mentioning the funny parts?" that this schizoid nature of the film struck me.
So what was going on? Mulling it over, I realised that the style of the film follows the mood of the heroine: at first the film is simply mysterious, as Makoto is mystified. Then on discovering her ability to leap through time she becomes elated, and comments to her aunt that she can't stop laughing because every day has become such fun. At this point the film is a comedy, mathcing her own feelings. Then everything starts to go wrong, and the comedy fizzles out. So throughout the film we are cleverly made to empathise with Makoto, our mood follows hers because the mood of the film follows her mood. It's a very powerful device, and through clever storytelling we are swept along with her and experience her highs and lows, and share her surprise (and at times, horror) at the plot twists, since we're never given the time to think over all the little clues as to what is going on - and there are many such clues which emerge on re-watching the film. This is certainly one you need to watch twice.
Well, that's it for my first post of 2007!
WIDGETIZE