For a long time now I have been primarily watching anime in Japanese with subtitles. The belief being that Japan has the best trained voice actors in the world… and the majority of American voice actors who do anime are aging nerds with no other job skills. But there is a problem I ran into last night while watching “The girl who Leapt Though Time” english dub. Not only was not… not bad. But I enjoyed it more and understood it with less effort. Reading subtitles adds more work when I’m already listening to the music, looking for visual clues, and hearing the actors. So now I’m at a crossroads. I’m sure most of the anime watching I’m going to do will be in Subtitles (fansubs, FTW) but I’m going to be at least testing out the English dubs more often. There can only be positives. I can watch anime while doing something else that doesn’t consume a lot of my attention (like reorganizing my file system, downloading files for class or formating documents for homework I haven’t started yet. And I’ll get a lot more anime watched because I don’t have to keep 100% of my attention glued onto the TV.

This is also a little conflicted with most of my values and belief about anime as a medium and an art form… but values are easily thrown out the window.

I baked cookies today! I don’t know why I just had the urge to bake. I’m going to try it a few more times. It was enjoyable to start with a munch of ingredients and wind up with a tasty finished project at the end.

I’m also debating if I should just buy Season 4 and the next few after that. I’m consuming them extremely fast and having a great time doing it. But Netflix can be slow… and I’ll probably end up buying them anyway. They really aren’t that expensive. A whole season costs $23 on Amazon. That is about what a movie costs, and an entire Simpsons season provides more than 5X the amount of entertainment.

I hate to admit this but for the first time a fansub has failed me. At least… I hope it was a fansub and not the DVD rip. My Tenchi GXP files, which I have had for years but never watched, went from being very good to awful in a single episode. The person who compiled the torrent must have pulled them from two, or more, different groups. After episode 9 the subs go from comprehensible to something that looks like it was translated by a computer. It seemed like a literal translation from the Japanese into English and because of that it lacked even basic sentence construction. Some examples:

These weren’t hard to find either. These errors made the series unwatchable. The next step was to go over to netflix and get the series there. But they only had half the DVDs. Ultimately I decided to buy the DVDs in order to finish watching the series. Which isn’t too much of a tragedy. I just don’t like buying an entire series when I don’t know if it’s any good. The show has been getting a lot better over the last few episodes and hopefully it’ll continue to improve in quality. But without knowing how it ends this might turn into a huge mistake at any moment.

Sure this revelation comes about five years too late. But Tenchi Muyo GXP, while it has some of it’s own decent qualities, looks as if it was designed to fail. The animation is substandard for the time it was produced, the music is terrible, the main character looks exactly like Tenchi, and there is a space Pirate named Ryoko. They had a chance to really explore and develop the areas of the Tenchi universe that are only background details in the three OVAs, and they still might. I’ve only watched four episodes out of the 26th episode series.

I don’t know they thought this show could attempt to stand on its own while relaying on visual and dialog reminds the viewer of the original. I want to see if they are able to capture some of the qualities of Tenchi, the humor; the well developed characters; or the awesome villains. These four episodes seemed to only have established the premise and set everything up. So hopefully now that they are entering into the actual meat of the story some of those characteristics will start to bleed though.

I can’t help but think there might be a flaw in exploring the greater universe of Tenchi. Leaving the actions of the background and focusing on the actions of these very important and powerful characters in this rural Earth setting is what made the show fantastic. The great space operatic events were set in the background, except when the threat breached the peace of the Misaki household. Which is strange considering that normally the viewer demands to see those epic moments. The viewer demands to know details about this interesting Universe that he is only given a small taste.

It makes me want to go back and watch the OVA and really look at the narrative style in depth. Meanwhile I’ll be making my way though Tenchi Muyo GXP, hopefully under my own will.

I have a serious problem with organization and getting work done this semester. I somehow manage to get everything done in the classes that I care about, English classes, but I find myself slacking in Italian (which is a nightmare) and Logic. Could I have developed seniroitis (fun fact: Seniroitis does have a Wikipedia article! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senioritis That means it’s a read thing!) or is this just a lack of motivation in those specific classes. I just want to be done with school. I feel that I’ve completely transformed myself after High School. I went from almost not graduating from High School to an honors student at a State level University. This took two years of Community College and maintaining a job (full time during summer, part time during school) in order to achieve. Now I feel like I’m just going though the motions. Working towards walking out of the institution with a piece of paper that says I’m good enough to enter the work force. But I’m tired of the structure and requirements of an academic world. I want to start improving myself and move on to building a career afterwards. Those areas I think I really need to work on in order to make myself a complete person, like Health and mastering the English language, are being hindered by University requirements.

I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t enjoy College. I like my Literature classes and the environment of being in the English department of a University that is focused on the Major. I’m a first rate citizen! Small class room size, nice Professors, and a common room that looks out above the rest of the campus all make the experience worth it. I just don’t want to build a skill in a Foreign Language that I’m never going to use. I don’t want to spend the better part of my formative years just trying to get by in a subject in which I have no practical need.

Oh well, I soldier on.

More importantly: