The Last Candle

The pledge I made earlier this month to update my page at least once a day continues without disturbance. The making of that public guarantee has worked wonders in my motivation to update, which usually involves noticing the time being past 11 PM and suddenly realizing that I have an hour to think up, write, and (maybe) edit an entry. An idea may need to be forcefully pushed out of the depths of my memory or interests for the purposes of hitting the post quota, but so far, I’m pleased with the result. The writing is enjoyable, and my skills about typing out something, ANYTHING in the face of a passive limit throws pick-and-choose out the window in the face of whatever comes first — and making it come out well. Deadlines? I feast on those every day. <p/> Now begins another attempt to kick-start another part of my life that I’ve been hoping to invigorate back into motion: practicing guitar. I picked up the instrument tonight and realized that it had been months since I’d played for any elongated period of time. In fact, the number of individual times spent practicing during the past year was probably not more than 30 or so. Fairly speaking, my skills at the guitar are hardly going anyway, and the instrument is almost going to waste. <p/> If Tod and I ever get our power metal band off the ground (or a name off the ground, for that matter), I’m going to need to get down to business, Luca Turilli-style. The damn plucky-thingy needs to be picked up at least once a day and given a musical massage. <p/> So every day for the next…whenever, I’m pledging to play at least a half-hour of guitar a day. Not a huge amount, but long enough to get situated into a habit, and a half-hour is good enough to play the “necessary” technical practices along with some tablature fun. <p/> Of course, others holding me accountable for my guitar playing is going to be a little more difficult than keeping up the web page. Then again, it’s probably not a bad thing that my practicing isn’t broadcast for the world to hear…

<p/> While it’s fun to take things out of context, this supposedly dirty-mouthed man is no-one to laugh about in regards to his, um, skill from a horror game fan’s perspective. He’s Masahiro Ito, art director for all of the Silent Hill games, and the screen capture was taken from a French Titled/English Narrated/Japanese Spoken featurette dubbed plainly “The Making of Silent Hill 3.” The featurette was a little short at about only 25 minutes, but it did offer some fairly valuable insight into the creation of the game, including the bit about bathrooms and scary toilets. <p/> No, really. Bathrooms are big points of interest in the town of Silent Hill, but for all the wrong reasons. If there’s one important adage concerning the locations in these games, it’s “Beware of the bathrooms.” In every game in the series, most any bathroom in any location is festered with one or two unique, nasty scares — no scatological innuendos implied. Corpses strung up on the wall, objects jumping out, doors creak open suddenly, and, of course, unseen demons crying or laughing and knocking/banging on the stall doors from within. When you get a new map for a location and see a bathroom, that’s the absolute last place you hope to need to send the character. (But the designers always put game-critical items there, so in you go.) <p/> We SH nuts had our theories about why the designers decided to single out the bathrooms as havens for evil: extremely close quarters, lots of little doors to hide people or monsters in, awful opportunities in a private and intimate location, and so on. That is to say, our speculation was nothing specific or highly probable. <p/> Ito-san, through the courtesy of The Making of Silent Hill 3, was able to shed some (dark) light on why bathrooms are given the extra-dirty treatment. In Japan, Ito-san says, there’s a specific folk tale of horror that takes place in that unholy place, the toilet, and “all Japanese children are familiar with this tale.” (We begin to get a tiny glimpse at what spawns the highly-unique Japanese social undercurrents.) In addition for bathrooms being connected to a frightening Japanese folk tale (which, to my disappointment, I haven’t been able to find anything specific about yet) toilets in the Land of the Rising Sun used to be simple devices that were nothing more than a seat made out of two footstools placed on either side of a hole. By legend, children would sometimes fall into these holes and disappear for good. This no doubt worried Japanese mothers to no end, but also drove the children absolutely mad having already been spooked out of their gourds from the folk tales. <p/> So there you have it: folk tales and holes in the ground spoken through the ages eventually breeds itself into a particularly nasty strain of occurances in the best horror series today. While us foreigners get the cr— uh, stuffing scared out of when unseens beasts go smashing around and scaring us out of our minds, the Japanese also have to deal with a real-life literary and legendary connection — a pretty darn powerful tactic for scaring. <p/> And I am now done talking about toilets for the next year or so — unless the toilets in mention involve Silent Hill, a topic which I can’t seem to stop blabbling about these days.

Received the Samurai Champloo box set w/ volume one today and limited edition bandanna. The bandanna is 23×23 inches, so it pretty much envelopes my head if I wear it. Pictures sometime? Oh, I don’t think so… <p/> Okay: the important stuff that’s not really important at all, but I’m going to pretend it is so I have something before I hit the 12 PM deadline. After listening for five minutes at the English dubbing, my verdict is that it’s awful. Overacting, poor translations, silly lines, the whole deal. Not only that, but David Lucas is the voice for the character Mugen, who looks a heck of a lot like another spikey-haired fellow who Lucas also acted (and part of a series by the same director). This time around, Lucas misses the quality of his performance he did for the voice of Spike, sounding in Champloo instead like he’s REALLY enthusiastic to play the part of the crazy vagrant samurai but coming out like a 16-year old discovering drugs for the first time. Examples tomorrow. <p/> The Japanese dub is, however, is excellent. <p/> Okay; good enough for me. Back to watching.

In one of those rare instances where the Internet is truly great, I have procured a copy of a complete run-through Silent Hill 3 in its absolute entirety. (Total cost in diskspace: 2.1 GB!) Having it in video, I was able to extract the spooky SH3 mannequin event that I mentioned in the scariest game moments ever post a couple days ago. <p/> Check it out here (encoded in XviD, ~3.5 MB size-wise). You won’t be able to mimic our original scream-inducing setting when we played — lights off, dark outside, volume up, and playing it for an hour or so already — but this is pretty good taste of the Silent Hill universe.

Joe received his DVD set of 24: Season One AKA The Jack Bauer Power Hour today, so I finally get to see what all the hooplah and excitement (especially noted at the Shack) is about. I’ve never seen an episode, but people are all crazy about it, including Joe who is heard howling frequently during a new show’s time. <p/> In other exciting news, Samurai Champloo: Volume 1 + box + awesome bandanna shipped today. Checking the details for the release, Geneon Entertainment (who I’m not familiar with as a distributor — I’m a Toriyama World kind of guy) is releasing the episodes in anamorphic widescreen AND 5.1 Dolby encoding with both English and Japanese. On top of that, reviews of the discs say that the transfer is really good: crisp edges, vibrant colors, good blacks, and no compression artifacts. Sounds perfect — except that we don’t have a 5.1 decoder here in the apartment. (My Dad has TWO receiver that decode at his house, though. So it’s just a matter of time…) <p/> Updates and thoughts on the JBPH in about 45 minutes (times two, maybe). <p/> UPDATE one hour later: Okay, that was pretty cool.