Tolkien’s Legacy

All fantastical literature is not inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien. Just most of it. While the old Oxford pro was totally absorbed in his works, a huge fan base-which would only continue to grow innumerably after his death-was coming to realize what unique and provocative work Tolkien was doing.

Most anime involving fantasy-as well as a lot that doesn’t-and most modern fantasy novels, any show on T.V. with fantastical element, and about a million other things all have likely had direct or indirect inspiration from Tolkien’s works. So where did Tolkien get his inspiration from? I mean, even he did have some, didn’t he?

Yes, he actually did. One large source was his interest in languages, which coincidentally led him into the need for a story, a world in which all of his invented languages could exist. As well, he encountered numerous folk and fairy tales in his studies, alongside poetry and epic stories. In particular, Finnish folklore and language caught his eye, eventually giving rise to Gandalf (modeled on a Finnish folk hero) and the Elven language he used in his Lord of the Rings universe.

Cultural Reasons for Petering Out?

Why did we give up on space travel? We used to be passionate about it, reaching far, far beyond our ordinary scientific, personal, imaginative and even financial limits to attempt space travel. It disturbs me to think that it has ended, but it would seem that we don’t really care anymore.

What happened to all of our goals as a society? Why don’t we seem to be striving toward anything? It’s like we just want to run the endless treadmill. People often say we need to fix things here on Earth before attempting space travel for real. I say that’s a terrible excuse. We’ll always have problems here so long as human rule persists-poverty, disease, homelessness and war. If however humanity had something to strive toward collectively, it would energize us. We would reach out and discover, build, grow and mature. Much like an infant with a need to walk, or an out-of-college student in need of a job.

The Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley… what is it? Essentially, the uncanny valley is the sharp valley on a graph of human acceptance of humanity-real or simulated-as the likeness becomes more and more human. Things that are sorta human-like but definitely not human see slowly climbing acceptance as they become more human-like. However, they then eventually hit the valley. Right before interaction with real human beings on the graph is a sharp downturn (the valley) accompanied by “uncanny” repulsiveness to the human observer. Something almost human, almost intelligent is perceived as absolutely terrifying or utterly repulsive by apparently all of humanity. Robots that aren’t quite human and the idea of zombies fit within the valley. Think about how scary it would be to interact with such things, on the threshold of intelligence, on the threshold of humanness and just a hair away from what we would inevitably refer to as having a soul…

I Didn’t See Any Mecha

Now wait a minute, wasn’t Japan supposed to be replete with robots and armatures and Gaufs?? Where were all of the supposedly Shinto-inspired androids and talking head tour guides?

I always loved mecha shows, even if the story lines were often convoluted or completely awful. There’s a classic, action-packed theme to the stuff, and I remember playing MechWarrior 2 with great fondness. There’s also a sort of romance that goes along with it all-whether it’s in space or terrestrial-and I really like that, too. I was hoping to see some of the devices that inspired or were inspired by Japan’s embrace of the robotic, but alas, I came up empty.

I’m sure it will happen some day though. Unless the uncanny valley can’t be overcome… then we’ll just have mindless machines rather than thinking ones. What’s the uncanny valley you ask? Ready the above post to find out!

Legend of the Trashcan

Since everyone else did it, so am I. Oh no!

Japan truly has very few trashcans. They are a virtual aberration, ephemeral to the traveler and revered by the locals. Indeed, though very few have ever been so fortunate as to have their vision grazed by the steely goodness so close to relief from waste transport, rumors persist in quiet taverns (or were they izakaya??) that claim the legend of the trashcan is no mere legend at’all.

I do believe I once saw one-it passed through my vision in a blur-and disappeared as quick as it came. The locals say that the reason for the extreme elusiveness of the small receptical stems from the pollution crimes of the far-reaching past, stretching all the way back to the very first day of the rising sun. Back then, people were oftentimes messy and littering. The trashcan…

Ok, that’s quite enough. I can’t take this anymore.

If anyone calls into question the academic integrity of this post, just remember that this is a metacultural art piece and therefore in line with the course requirements.

(loltrashposts4gradekthx)

Gashapon

What are gashapon? Some of the finest miniatures in the world!

Gashapon (or Gachapon) is actually composed of two onomatopoeias. In Japan, “gasha” is the noise a crank on a vending machine makes, and “pon” is sound of a plastic capsule as it drops out of the machine. Typically, gashapon are small figurines which customers are randomly dealt from capsule toy machines. They’re similar to the ones we have in the U.S., albeit usually of much higher quality.

Gashapon show up in video games and anime frequently (Genshiken, Shenmue, etc.). We saw quite a few of these machines scattered about the cities we visited on our trip, though I’m not sure anyone noticed them. They look a bit unassuming when they’re off by themselves.

However, I’m sure everyone is familiar with this sight:

That’s right-column upon column of endless Gashapon machines. And, just for the edification of the reader, some examples of how finely crafted and detailed Gashapon toys can be:

I can truly appreciate the Japanese sensibility of detailed, quality-driven design inherent in things that most Americans would disregard as being “pointless”.

Porco Rosso

As luck would have it, while I’ve been at home for the summer, my mom rented Porco Rosso, one of Hayao Miyazaki’s older films. I was actually quite impressed with it. Though not as carefully planned or grandly acted as Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke, it was nonetheless quite pleasant and colorful.

Porco and his engineer sidekick, Fio.

The protagonist, whose name is actually Porco, is a middle-aged sea boat pilot in the Adriatic Sea. For some unfathomable reason, he’s also half-human, half-pig. In the old days, he was an ace pilot fighting for the Italians in World War I, but after a particularly devastating battle, he decided to hire himself out as a mercenary. A mercenary against what, you ask? Air pirates. That’s right.

A bunch of air pirates with their treasure hoard.

In typical Miyazaki fashion, the dream of flight is realized beyond most conventional limits, and the sky is filled with all manner of flying contraptions. Air piracy, therefore, is common and indeed quite profitable. The pirates in this part of the world, however, appear to have strict codes of honor which tend to include chivalrous and romantic elements not uncommon in pirate tales. This allows the movie to maintain a surprising balance between actual, serious danger and what one might term “good-spirited fun”. At first I thought the use of soft, almost childish “adventure” would be embarrassing to watch, yet this film somehow made it attractive. That alone seems to make it worth watching. It draws heavily on the adventure sensibility of the 1920’s and 30’s which makes for a pleasant, rather than ultra-violent, sequence of conflicts and plot twists.

The personality of each character is slightly archetypical, yet each one feels uniquely alive. All of the characters seem to have odd quirks and colorful lines that allow them to travel beyond being mere puppets of the stereotype. Porco in particular is quite entertaining; he always has a sober, yet slightly sarcastic, view on things that keeps the movie on an even keel given everyone else’s apparent enthusiasm.

As well, the scenery and a few particular visual sequences were extremely provocative and perhaps even ingenious. I won’t spoil them, but if the viewer possesses even a slight hermeneutic of sensitivity and openness, they will doubtless be stunned.

Porco’s island hideout, with his famous red Savoia S-21sea-plane docked near the shore.

After having seen the film twice, I am confident that it’s second only to my all-time favorite Miyazaki production, Princess Mononoke. I would urge anyone that liked Miyazaki’s other films to rent this one post-haste.

MMO Design

When Everquest first came out in 1999, it was a ground-breaking online game. It featured an immense, three-dimensional world and highly diverse options for play. It appealed to both men and women, young and old. So how did it fall into being only a distant memory?

When World of Warcraft came out, it was as if the floodgates of online gaming were opened. WoW still has record numbers of subscribers and seems to be going strong. But after having played it off and on since a few months after the release in 2005, I’m starting to think that it’s become dated. Why? The game has always been known for a strict visual design sensibility, yet that very thing is started to feel inflexible and stale. The quests are still sort of fun, but how about more tasks that don’t require grinding through scores of monsters/pirates/cultists etc.?

The end game content has always been a bit hokey and somewhat… well, pointless. With a new expansion always around the corner, why spend hundreds of hours trying to gain the ultimate weapons and armor when the very first quests on Draenor or in Northrend will give you much better for only a half hour’s toil? The arena system seemed sort of lame, too. I know a lot of people really love it, which is fine, but it’s just so… tacked-on? What about the rest of the game? It were as if instances had fallen right off the map. And seriously… why do the arena goblins have items as good as or better than Illidan and Kael’Thas?

I also feel the need to start doing away with clunky MMO movement and battle systems. I loved the teamwork required to execute moves in Final Fantasy XI, so I’d personally want to see more of that in future games and content. I want to see some real-time physics and weapons contact. I want to see actual sieges rather than having buildings pop a pre-rendered explosion when they lose all their hit points due to lame projectile attacks. How about making the game dynamic and interesting, please? We have the bandwidth and processing power; it’s time to use it.

Age of Conan showcases a few promising ideas, both old and new, that the MMO community is rightly excited about. Much like Star Wars Galaxies before it, players can actually build new communities out in the wilderness and forge their own economies. People can be elected into leadership to run things, everyone can take on different professions, and player-made communities can actually make a difference.

Actually, Age of Conan’s environments look really immersive and open. I’m itching to give the game a try even just to be able to run off in a random direction and see where it takes me. For now, I’ll play my Draenei warrior in my boxed-in swamp with the funny Flintstones building textures… for now.

The Lingering Radiation at Hiroshima and Worldwide Radiation Levels

When I heard we would be travelling to Hiroshima, I was both elated and a bit terrified. After all, being one of the few cities in human history to be struck by a nuclear weapon (actually… Nagasaki was the only other), Hiroshima must still have a few free radicals floating around-right? Was this place actually safe?

A man at the Hiroshima Museum told me that the radiation had dissipated pretty fast. Upon conducting a bit of research, it seems the guy at the museum was right. The reason, of course, is that the Little Boy detonated in the air above the city and very few “heavy” particles of rock and soil were directly blasted and uprooted. Still, what about the irradiation of the metal in the buildings and on the surface of the landscape? Was that A-Dome fenced off to preserve both it and us? What about the other structures that were kept partially or totally intact? Everyone’s living there, so it must be safe, right? Most of the rubble was scraped from the ground and most of the radioactive particles have been blown and washed away, disseminated into the atmosphere and oceans. The irradiation of the A-Dome itself used to be dangerous, but apparently the radioactivity (mainly caused by the addition of neutrons rather than gamma rays and whatnot). I was a bit fearful of the trolleys we were riding because it wasn’t clear if they had been replaced since being moved in only days after the blast in order to keep the victims and supplies moving where they needed to be. Unfortunately, there are some things the internet just won’t tell you. If only I had had a Geiger counter with me, I might have been able to draw some basic conclusions. As it turns out, though, Hiroshima isn’t really the thing we should be worried about.

Indeed, everyone seems to think that Japan was the first country to experience radioactive fallout. This, however, is technically incorrect.

The Trinity bomb test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945 is generally considered the beginning of the atomic age, and was in fact the proof-of-concept test for the plutonium implosion bomb, the Fat Man, later dropped on Nagasaki. What few people realize is that the fallout from the test was tremendous. We’ve all heard how scientists and soldiers were unwittingly exposed to the phantasmal danger of the radiation both during and after the blast, as well as how poorly understood this danger was at the time. Directly after the bomb exploded, radioactive clouds drifted to the northeast, blanketing especially Santa Rosa and Santa Fe with abnormal amounts of radiation. There were also many far-travelling clouds which eventually touched down in New York due to becoming concentrated in heavy rain storms that were occurring there at the time. A telling sign of this radioactive contact was that aberrations in film development rose sharply for a few days. No one can say what the human cost over time has been due to such issues as contaminated ground water in New York and exposure to the dust clouds in New Mexico, but the government seems to believe radiation levels are quite safe in these areas. Just don’t be the one to drink that one wrong glass of water-ha, just kidding. Or am I?

Ever since Trinity, nuclear tests both in the U.S. and Russia (followed by a slew of others) have created large amounts of fallout, carried on the wind and in the water. Eastern Russia is especially hard-hit. Check out this link illustrating U.S. fallout concentrations. I wouldn’t want to be Montana:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_fallout_exposure.png

Artificial sources of radiation are actually quite abundant. Many older camera lenses and printing inks contained radioactive metals. Many people fear nuclear power facilities, yet even with radioactive waste included, coal plants apparently still produce more environmental radioactivity due to the release of radioactive elements when their coal is burned. Conventional CRT monitors and televisions also jack up the yearly rad count of nearby organisms, as does porcelain, many types of food and those vicious medical scans (PET, CAT, x-ray etc.), among a host of other vectors, including humans themselves.

So was a visit to Hiroshima a bit exceeding when it came to our recommended yearly dosage of radiation? Many sources seem to indicate that background radiation is much higher than that caused by artificial effects. Apparently, the beaches in parts of India and Brazil are filled with radioactive elements and yearly exposure in these places is unusually high. Likewise, ambient radiation throughout the world varies greatly; the Rocky Mountains and surrounding areas have a relatively high amount of ambient radiation in general, as do the Andes Mountains. Here’s a link showing geographic radiation levels in the U.S.:

http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/radon/usagamma.gif

More on geographic and everyday sources of radiation:

http://www.blackcatsystems.com/GM/safe_radiation.html

Hiroshima’s radiation is about twice that of other sea-level areas; actually, going to Yellowstone National Park is more radiation intensive than going to Hiroshima because of the elevation and geological conditions there (the elevation lacking a great deal of protection against the sun’s radiation).

I may as well just go live in Hiroshima. It would probably be less radioactive than eating U.S. food grown in radioactive soil and living in a moderate fallout area like Michigan, not to mention sucking in the occasional stray radon cloud, which doesn’t happen much in coastal areas. How sad. The terrible thing about higher radiation levels is the fact that human fetuses are so sensitive to them; IQ is irreparably damaged or lowered in many cases, and mysterious illnesses, glandular problems and yes, cancer, are more likely to appear over a person’s lifetime in the modern era. Reproductive tissues and DNA are often altered and damaged, leaving potential offspring a lotto chance at normal development. Naturally, it’s difficult to measure the impact of radiation in different areas due to the existence of so many other potentially correlated factors. But radiation must have some effect. Radiation is great at getting concentrated in a mother’s milk, and so even after birth, many babies are still being bushwhacked by rogue particles. Our parents had it the worst-they were being born when the fallout was totally fresh. All of this means that we probably got more of an atomic experience as infants (or, at least, a more damaging one) and on our family vacations out west than on our trip to the site of an atomic bombing. Did I mention that riding planes is also quite radioactive?