Tokyo Godfathers (2003) is in many ways the perfect Christmas film. It’s an antidote to both the saccharine holiday specials each network feels compelled to churn out this time of year, and the holiday “comedy” films about finding or delivering the right toys to the right kids at the right time. It takes place on Christmas Eve, but it is not, strictly speaking, about Christmas. It’s about three homeless people finding an abandoned baby. But it’s really about the families we lose, the families we choose, the mistakes we make and the things we say, and the back alleys we wander through on the long road to redemption.

I watched Akira (1988) for the first time at an LAN party at a friend’s house, sometime around the turn of the century. Then as now, I was a terrible shot and more concerned with cels than polygons, so I stretched out in front of the household’s last tube TV, and watched a copy of Katsuhiro Otomo’s film taped from cable. It ghosted across the screen like the Ring video, blurry and beige and riddled with tracking errors. A year or two later, my dad rented it on DVD. He wanted to see it, and I wanted to see a good print.

[I watched it for the next three days.]

I grew up near Twin Peaks. Actually, I grew up in a suburb of Seattle. But it was closer to Twin Peaks (better known as Snoqualmie Falls, WA) than Seattle. And my suburb, with its looming trees and truck-mounted gun racks, was a lot scarier than the big city. In elementary school, we thought the old man who tended barrel fires outside his modular home killed children. Knowing that somewhere out there, the Green River Killer was still active likely informed that suspicion. Deep down, we all knew that we could wind up like Laura Palmer: violated, dead, wrapped in plastic. The fact that an entire generation of middle class American parents had fled concrete jungles for engineered greenbelts meant nothing. In the suburbs, no one can hear you scream.

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“There’s nothing as pure and cruel as a child.” - Jet Black, Cowboy Bebop, “Pierrot Le Fou.”

In the rampaging horde of vampires, werewolves, zombies, fae, ghosts, geists, creatures and crawlers that daily swarm our pages and screens, it’s easy to forget the ankle-biters. After all, the grown-up versions are so much sexier and more exciting. But even Grendel was somebody’s baby, once. Won’t somebody please think of the children?

[Creepy kids]

For a while now, I’ve been trying to understand what bothers me so much about Hatsune Miku. She’s a virtual idol not unlike Rei Toei in Idoru, who I have no trouble with. She’s a program developed by Crypton Future Media with a Yamaha Vocaloid 2 sound rendering engine. She’s a fictional persona with millions of fans. Her projected performances regularly sell out stadiums across Asia. Everyone loves her. Everyone but me.

The spring and summer of 2011 seem to have been dominated by uprisings of all sorts, and governments who appeared to be deeply confused about how the technology enabling them works. From the response to Wikileaks to the Arab Spring to the U.K. riots to the shutdown of mobile phone service in certain San Franscisco transit stations, the authoritarian response to civic protest is little more than hapless, n00bish button-mashing. Who do I blame for these FAILs? Not the button-mashers. Me, I blame Hackers.

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The Third Man is director Carol Reed’s 1949 noir starring (among others) Joseph Cotten, and is adapted from Graham Greene’s novella of the same name. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s about a pulp writer. He’s named Holly Martin and visits Vienna after the second World War, and discovers that neither the city (split between the English, the French, the Russians, and the Americans) nor his friend Harry Lime (who offered him a job in Vienna before dying in a hit-and-run) are what they seem. Spoilers ahead!

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“I have a surprise,” Dave said. “It’s two things you enjoy separately, but put together.”

“Oh, you bought the Supernatural anime?”

“...You are very smart.”

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You are one of those odd reviewers who prefers Charlie’s diary to his fiction. Yes, you know, you know. You’re weird. You know. But it’s for that exact reason that you jumped at the chance to read Rule 34: because it’s the man doing something different, something that challenges him, something near-future about sex and crime and real humans, not the kind who quit their skins or express themselves in differential equations. You wanted to read about people with balls—and not buckyballs, either.

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It’s election night in Canada and I just sent in manuscript revisions, returned from Seattle, and started a new phase of my current strategic foresight project. Naturally, this means it’s time for another re-watch post! Welcome to the next phase of Cowboy Bebop, the gradual closure of the story’s plot and thematic arcs. Starting with “My Funny Valentine,” in which we learn more about the mysterious Faye Valentine’s past, the series begins to answer some of the questions it started out asking. Along the way, it teaches a crash course in how to do a classic science fiction story.

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Early in 2009, my friend and fellow Cecil Street Irregular Karl Schroeder suggested I submit an application to the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at the Ontario College of Art & Design. Karl knew that I would soon be finished writing my first Master’s thesis, on anime, fan culture, and cyborg theory. “But traditional academia won’t work for you,” he said. “You need to be a consultant, and do the kind of work I do for the army.”

[How dystopias can influence your future]

Like certain anime characters I could mention, your erstwhile Bebop blogger has a nasty habit of coming back from almost certain disaster to wreak further havoc. In that spirit: HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?

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Before I started watching anime, and before I knew that the series I grew up watching were partially animated in Japan or Korea, I waited for Friday afternoon at 5:30 on FOX, when I could watch a new episode of Batman: The Animated Series. My ritual involved shutting off all the lights, locking myself in the basement, and carefully munching sour cream n’onion potato chips one by one, each dune-like ripple of starch vanishing steadily between my fresh-grown adult teeth.

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Once again, I am blogging the Blog of Shame for not re-watching with you more reliably. As penance, I’m offering you a two-fer: the entire “Jupiter Jazz” series in one post!

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There’s this custom in anime, which TV Tropes calls the “Beach Episode” or “Onsen Episode.” Usually it involves the characters doing something fun and fluffy like putting on bikinis and frolicking, and happens right before or after seriously heavy stuff goes down in the plot. For most anime, this is limited to battling sand crabs. For Cowboy Bebop, it means fighting an alien. This is the lesson behind “Toys in the Attic,” which is both Aerosmith’s third album and a slang term for “crazy” that shows up in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In space, no one can hear you procrastinate. Don’t leave things in the fridge.

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I can remember the exact moment I realized that Cowboy Bebop was different from other shows. Not just other shows, other anime. Period. It was while watching “Ganymede Elegy.” Halfway through the episode, Jet Black is sitting at the bar his former lover owns. He speaks his piece, telling her humbly what it did to him when she left.

“For some reason, I didn’t feel sad or broken up—it just didn’t seem real. But slowly I realized that it was real; that you were gone. And little by little I felt something inside of me go numb. After six months I made a kind of bet with myself; a pledge, that I would leave this planet and start a new life if you didn’t return by the time the watch stopped. I didn’t come here to blame you, I…I just wanted to know why. Why you disappeared like that.”

He sets his drink down. Inside his empty glass, the ice cubes melt, shift, and come to a new resting place. This is how it is with grief.

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Shucks howdy, it’s time to break out your Piyokos and watch another episode of Cowboy Bebop! Today we’re watching session number nine (number nine...number nine...number nine...), “Jamming With Edward,” one of the many episodes titled after a Rolling Stones property. (Jamming With Edward! is a six-song EP featuring three members of the Stones plus Ry Cooder and Nicky Hopkins, comprised of songs written during the Let It Bleed era and produced by longtime Stones collaborator Glyn Johns.) With this episode, the final crew member of the Bebop hops aboard: ace hacker and goggle-phile Edward Wong Hau Pepulu Tivrusky IV.

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Howdy, folks! How y’all doin’? I’m blogging the Blog of Shame today after far too long spent away. While I was away, my site got hacked, I had a job interview, participated in a media foresight excercise, recorded two podcasts, and celebrated Independence Day by finishing my re-writes—though not necessarily in that order. But now I’m back from outer space and it’s high time I wrote about the next session of Cowboy Bebop, “Waltz for Venus.”

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Hi, there! I apologize for the tardiness of this post. I’ve been busy with those pesky re-writes, and writing a call for papers on Avatar: The Last Airbender. In between, though, I managed to re-watch episode 7, “Heavy Metal Queen.”

I can summarize this episode for you fairly quickly: the Bebop crew loses a bounty, meets a kick-ass trucker, trashes some ships, and almost gets blown up. Oh, and there’s a cat.

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