sethkills

I'm going to try to return to my journaling in the form of unfocused technical rambling. I have vowed, over the past many months, not to write any journal entries composed entirely of complaints about my life, my job, or the world in general. This has had the unsurprising effect of me ceasing to write altogether. As the age-old mantra goes, “If you have nothing good to say, don't say anything at all.”

I'm also going to start with this post by tagging everything I write appropriately, and hiding gory levels of detail behind tersely descriptive cuts, so that those of you who aren't interested can easily filter it out as you scroll down your friends list, and we'll all remain on speaking terms.

Is anybody else thinking of going to Devo / Bow Wow Wow / A Flock Of Seagulls / When In Rome / Animotion?

Damn, PLANETES keeps amazing me with how deep it is for such a simple premise. Basically, the main character is an astronaut in his mid 20's who works with a squad of space-debris collectors. It's about his attitudes towards living and working in space, his interactions with his coworkers, and his aspirations of one day owning his own spacecraft.

I've been watching the animé and reading the manga concurrently. The focus of the manga is a little bit more on Hachimaki's preoccupations and internalizations of his everday circumstances, and the animé deals a lot more with his human relationships. That's not to say that the supporting characters are just “satellites” for him to play against. They are all very rich and interesting too, although completely different from him.

Hachimaki seems to embrace the unforgiving vacuum of space, integrating it into his overly serious demeanor. He doesn't seem to really enjoy anything besides the struggle to survive in such a harsh and unnatural environment. I'm on the 4th graphic novel and the 4th DVD, and the existential themes are finally starting to really converge between the two.