Lord Matt

Following from: “Anime isn’t deep, it’s just entertainment”: Themes and symbolism in Darker than Black, and Anime is more than “just” entertainment.

I figure I ought to blog my replies to a blogger sometime. That’s what bloggers do, right? The great thing about Tim O’Reilly’s platformic web (TM, me) is that I can claim my own trademarks on derived buzzwords, and even spout off a thing or two about my anime knowledge! But I’m not going to do either, today.

What I’m going to do is beg the question of deepness. The answer is drugs. What were we just talking about?

From a young age, we’re all taught not only to pick out the subtle nuances of a work of fiction, but also to believe that the creators were veritable genius for sticking all those layers in there, like an ogre. (The term used is “analysis”, as if the process somehow resembles science — or its results carry authority.) Sometimes there’s a good chance that belief is right on the money, but it’s irrelevant. The real question is whether anime is capable of flipping your inner switches, which only you can answer.

This isn’t to say that authors don’t try to create depth artificially, through careful plotting. Intrigue building (what I sometimes call “the tease”) is a perfectly normal approach to creating an illusion of depth. There must be something worth seeing if the author is hiding it from us so carefully, right? But when we come to view the full picture, it telescopes into nothingness as if sunlight is toxic to it. The thing that is revealed afterward — is it meaningful?

We can certainly define depth as complexity of plot, but that’s not too useful to us. A plot is just a tool; all complexity is intentional or accidental, but never essential to the story being crafted, which is why we train ourselves to look past it. It might not be useful to define what we then see as depth, either, because we only perceive it; it doesn’t exist in any real sense.

I think that what we see as meaningful is essentially some kind of self recognition (or denial). The snobbish food critic in Ratatouille tastes a dish and sees his childhood, a connection which only he could understand, and possibly doesn’t. What, too, is meant by depth of character in fiction? Maybe we recognize some facet of that character in ourselves, or in somebody we know. Maybe a character’s actions represent something you admire or despise — indeed, we often view real people in the metaphoric sense too.

Many authors describe writing as a process of discovery. The nuggets of wisdom spread throughout a work aren’t engineered into it, but instead are emergent properties of the process. It is somehow easy to believe that this is the truth — that wisdom can’t be willed into a story, but can be found within, both by the author and reader, and in different ways.

Perhaps depth can best be expressed as a state of mental growth. In that sense it’s elusive — clearly that which is seen as deep in one instance no longer is, after repeated exposure, though different discoveries are possible. This might explain why we react so strongly to sentiment, but it never changes us. Sentiment is only capable of causing ripples in the pool. Seeing depth changes the pool.

I realize I didn’t get a good start on this blog. And none of the Fred Gallagher excuses will work at all for me, so I’ll just apologize and move on. That was me apologizing.

I split this site into subdomains using a plugin that isn’t officially supported by Wordpress 2. I’m sure this will mean real fun for us all. In theory, if you’re only interested in my anime posts you can hit up anime.lordmatt.com. Or software.lordmatt.com. Or the others, but if you hit them up, you might not see too many updates.

There’s an amusing online test at www.dontvote.org, that tells you whether your political knowledge is sufficient enough to cast a ballot. The test shows you a series of pictures, and you are to identify the person in the picture (one question), and their occupation (another question). They threw in some non-political players to trip people up.

I didn’t flunk the test, but let’s say my score was “below average” on the general academic scale.

My first thought was, “What a stupid test! How could it possibly matter whether I can pick political leaders and actors out of a police lineup?” There is some truth in that. I certainly know who Nancy Pelosi, Bill Frist, Harry Reid, etc. are, but I didn’t know what they look like.

Then I thought, how ironic is it that I can’t identify influential members of my own party by sight (except John Kerry, who as of late is the man, and a couple others), but I know what a number of the opposition party look like. Mostly, it’s because the Dems just don’t get a lot of love from the news media these days.

What may be the most amusing thing about this test, however, is the seriousness with which dontvote.org’s mission statement is written. It seems as though they really believe that identifying politicians by sight is the most accurate barometer of an informed citizen, which is patently ludicrous.

I will know what I’m doing on November 7th. For those of you who don’t, vote Democrat! :-)

I finished listening to Rie Fu’s “Rose Album” a few minutes ago, and I’m in love. The response of the emotions is so simple, considering that I’m an English-speaking American listening to a Japanese singer who studied music in England. The simple truth is: her music knows no borders.

Music has always had a certain romanticism to it. Whether it was the mathematic nature of harmony or pop culture, music is touted as a common language among the world’s peoples. Math helps explain the universal appeal of classic melodies, but the addition of lyrics impose a cultural separation once again. It’s difficult to admit but clearly obvious that a person’s musical experience can be hampered by language, despite the sound of foreign words to music having a marginal appeal. I notice the language gap most acutely with my favorite foreign musicians, such as The Indigo, with which I sing along without a clue as to the source of that wonderful feeling. Not so with Rie Fu.

Her gift, or skill as one may call it, is the ability to mesh Japanese and English to form a lyrical flow so smooth that it feels as though she has created a new language all her own. Suddenly one finds a common ground between cultures through a simple song, as only music can do. Whereas I feel a distinct disadvantage listening to The Indigo, love them as I do, with Rie I feel no such separation. I don’t know Rie’s japanese any better than Miki Taoka’s (they both have a wonderful sound), but Rie’s songs have enough english lyric to forge a sense of understanding of the whole.

It certainly helps that she’s good at it — the characteristic omission of abrupt consonants and the difficulty with r and l are all but nonexistent in Rie’s songs. I attribute her sound not just to practice, but a natural talent for music. Pronounciation is musical in nature, after all. Much like Brazilian singer Joyce’s lovely accent of French, Rie’s English is a testament to a musician’s acute listening ear.

More than talent, Rie’s music is much like an enabling technology. Already we see additional talent following up with wonderful music — like Angela Aki, the latest Final Fantasy diva, having a lovely western accent to her English, and not afraid to use it. Even if I end up wrong about this being a trend, the truth is I love Japanese music much more than before Rie Fu took the stage.

Enclosed is a picture of my cat. Consider this a grand opening.

Forgive me, I’m still getting used to this blog thing, so I didn’t notice that I had some comments! Doesn’t help that I can’t tweak wordpress to use the right SMTP server & account to tell me I have comments, but excuses are beneath me. Even though I just used one.

Update: looks like the wpPHPMailer plugin takes care of that problem. I’m in business!

This is a story about how you should appreciate those people in your life that aren’t afraid to say, “You should know better.”

I maintain and contribute to Anime Dream, a web site founded by my friend Nicole as the japanese-animation arm to RPGFan.com. I came on board shortly after AD became a standalone web site, despite the fact that I had just graduated with a computer science degree and knew nothing about the entertainment business. But hey, my job at the site was technical, so my reviews for the site were a bonus!

I think entertainment is a natural source of curiosity for people of all ages, but that’s a low-level emotion that tends to cause trouble. I had no idea what I was getting into, and wouldn’t for a couple years.

Entertainment reviews are simple in form and content, but the gap between good-enough reviews and good reviews is difficult to cross. A person can become a competent reviewer quickly, but spend many reviews getting good at it. Content-management software is fundamentally simple, but the gap between doing the right function and facilitating users is difficult to cross. A programmer can glue some logic to a database quickly, and spend years trying to make the thing useful. Image editing appears to be simple at first, but in practice is difficult in every way imaginable.

Today I attempt all of those things at once, to keep Anime Dream producing content as well as attempting to improve efficiency. Even ignoring the irregular burden of server maintenance and archivals, it’s not difficult to fathom that any one of these activities is a full-time job. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and wasted a lot of effort. I have at least learned an important lesson from it: don’t go into any activity with curiosity or interest alone. Put differently, don’t lose time relearning what you already know.

Anime Dream’s first news updater was a duct-tape solution to the bigger problem of maintaining static content. It made pages well enough, but didn’t keep the unformatted source material in a safe place. Just as photographers save their negatives (or raw digital images) for making visually different prints, a webmaster should save unformatted content for when visual changes are effected on the site. Four years and many days of data entry later, I’ve learned that lesson with AD. I should have known better.

The current content management software is a rewrite of an older updates application. It brings several architectural improvements, to its credit and mine, but unfortunately the ironclad rule that rewrites make software worse applies. Three iterations into the project, the news updates tool doesn’t facilitate news submissions as well as its predecessor. It will take another release before the improvements bear fruit. I should have known better.

Learning not to do what you’ve already done is a hard lesson, and there’s a harder one: learning to use what you already know in a new undertaking. Most of us do so partially, or not at all. Healthy enthusiasm comes not from curious interest, but from a convergence of principles. There’s no harm in being curious about the experience of contributing to an anime web site, if you don’t plan to actually do it. If crossing the threshold into action seems attractive, only disciplined practice gets results. I already knew how to write a review before ever doing it, but I didn’t consider that I might know how. It’s sort of like peddling backward while going uphill. Careful you don’t lose ground.

The good news is it’s not that hard to make continuous progress, even in the face of something new and inviting. There are reusable, efficient practices that will apply in many activities, and you already know how to use them. All it takes to keep growing is conscious effort and a sense of where you are. To relearn everything would be a lot like revisiting childhood — an idea that has appeal to many, but who has the time?

I’ve seen rockets fly upwards into space, and the pictures don’t do them justice. At the moment of ignition, there’s a flash of light so brilliant that it nearly paralyzes you. It’s as if the world has been rewritten, and the subsequent thundering sound from the explosion is your wake up call for the future. Whatever the outcome, the human spirit lives in the journey’s beginning.

There’s a whole class of experiences that can’t be replicated on screen, though we certainly try. We can recreate the colors of the sky, but not its depth, curvature, or luminosity. We can show the wind blowing through a field, but absent is the effect of friction and the scent of charged air. A waterfall looks impressive on the screen, but your expensive home theater speakers won’t tell you the whole story.

The missing factor is energy.

Film can effectively capture or simulate motion, but not the energy of motion, because energy cannot be created from nothing. The energy of the waterfall is way out of the speakers’ league, and the screen can’t compete with the energy of solid rocket fuel ignition. The effect of experiencing these things first-hand has permanence and meaning.

So says the guy who’s typing away at a corporate workstation and hasn’t heard crickets chirping in a forest for more than 3 years. :-)

I’ve been watching The West Wing a lot lately, and it occurs to me that I’m guilty, frequently, of bullshitting people on a topic to avoid exposing my lack of knowledge thereof. It’s a fire-and-forget attitude that can get a person in trouble, not to mention burning the wrong information into the brain. It seems inexcusable for a person in a technical (some say scientific) profession, but the quest for knowledge produces results only so fast, and time is money.

So we lie, not completely aware that we’re even doing so. Nobody wants to look like a dope, even though everybody knows that nobody knows everything. We lie, perhaps because finding all the answers we need to conduct an informed discussion is a long and frustrating process. Or maybe it’s because nobody wants to feel defeated, regardless of the facts. There’s quite a lot of this in software development, where almost nobody knows anything up front and just about the entire process is an experiment.

It’s not as though all of this suddenly came to the surface by seeing Martin Sheen on television. But the show makes firm one important idea: that there are things far more important than winning an argument.

Hello, Web!

My name is Matt Brown, and I’m starting this weblog as an outlet for my thoughts on (primarily) the topics of film, literature, and sometimes creativity in general. I am a software tester and developer by trade, and run Anime Dream as a hobby.

My first article for this blog is on art appreciation, and the lack thereof. It’s an important topic when writing reviews of creative works, because the critic’s own creative desires can get the best of him. Unless caught early, it’s a degenerative disorder that can rob him of self worth. On the other hand, putting art in the proper context preserves its contribution to our lives.