Nethernet and Mr.Brain

The title to today's post sounds a lot like a title to some quirky Japanese NT novel (really, maybe I should write one). I love the NT/light novel scene in Japan. While vast majority of the works being printed out are of rather dubious quality (to put it mildly), the scene is a sort of youth oriented counterculture to the traditional literature scene which is also as stale as it can get despite the significant volume of works being put out to marketplace. It gives many of the genre writers certain degree of freedom in choice of characters and scenario, which often ends up producing easy-to-read works of Borges-ish fantasy coupled with an eye for modern trends definitely influenced by Murakami Haruki's style. It means fantasy novels that are called such because they are removed from conventional reality, not because they follow 'conventions of fantasy' like it is in the American publishing industry. The first time I looked through the American fantasy novel market after arriving from Korea/Japan cultural sphere was certainly a memorable moment in a very bad way. Hundreds, if not thousands of novels set in roughly the similar worldscape, so similar that they could easily interchange characters and settings between each other and it still wouldn't feel out of place. I felt as if I was standing in middle of a desert, a desert of dry, parched books filled with apathetic heroes all cloned from the same gene pool. And this was back in the late 90's, when Japanese mangas and animes were still a very underground thing, with major T.V. stations airing any kind of anime being some kind of wet dream. It is during those days that I gave up on fantasy entirely and instead turned to fantasy-like literature novels of European and South American variety, namely Neil Gaiman, Michael Ende and Jorge Luis Borges. I can't believe anyone would choose to read those dry fantasy novels when they can choose from any of the three authors I linked to above, and get lost in the true epitomes of human imagination, fantasy as it was meant to be. But I digress.

Nethernet in the title of the post is in fact a name of a weird mmorpg-like game that you play through an add-on toolbar on top of your firefox browser. It's a weird game where the majority of the action takes place in form of exploration of webpages, with different character classes capable of laying traps or countertraps through various websites, or leaving portals and lamp-posts forming missions and stories by piecing together the random components of the web into a structured whole. Some of the missions created by the Pathmaker class include 'the most amazing temples in the world', 'the list of unusual inventions', 'Jabberwocky' and 'brief history of the tubes.' In many ways the game reminds me of everything2,  a predecessor service to our current wiki-dominated landscape, though they were much more whimsier than some of the wikipedians who seem to think they know everything (hint: they don't). All in all, a very interesting experience, and I can see it's utility as a very useful learning tool for kids and adults alike. I also love the steampunk inspired design of the characters and terms within the game. For someone like me who doesn't really have time to devote to a full-length game anymore the nethernet certainly provides an interesting alternative.

I've always been partial to j-dramas due to their quirkiness. I think it's some sort of side-effect of having real actors imitate manga or anime situations and premises, but despite some corny moments here and there the experience tend to have some weird, addictive joy to it here and there. My interest in j drama was recently rekindled by my cousin's visit a while ago. She's a serious j drama nut, and she brought me a gift of dvd box set of a series called Nodame Cantabile. It's just as quirky as the rest and serious fun. I love classical music and comedy, the show has both. You would have to be one pretentious piece of work to not to enjoy it.

Well I've run across another j drama on the web that I plan on following through. It's about a neurologist working in Tokyo metropolitan science department's criminal sciences laboratory, a setting obviously influenced by the likes of CSI, with the important difference being that this show doesn't really take itself too seriously (just like vast majority of j drama out there). I've only seen the first episode so far so I don't really know what to make of it right now, but if this show's only half as good as Nodame I'm good. It's really refreshing to see drama series that doesn't take itself too seriously. So many people these days seem to suffer from the disease of pretentious philosophizing without any depth, you might as well get some laugh out of it.