Otakusphere Digest

Onegai, My Noble Lord!

It was with some amusement that I listened the radio newsreader’s description of real-life twincest over my delicious homemade lentil curry. One shouldn’t laugh, but the only alternative would be to cry. Sea Slugs! Anime Blog covered this in a little more detail.

In fact, the story was raised in the House of Lords as part of an argument over how much information about their natural parents adopted children should be able to access. I suspect that the Peer who brought this case up, Lord Alton of Liverpool, was seeking to garner some press attention via a sensational story; he can rest assured that siscons the world over now know just that little bit more about the tangled legal and ethical issues surrounding adoption.

But if you think that story’s wierd, try intentional incest or giving birth to your own sibling for size.

Today I also noticed that J-List advertises itself as a home of ‘hentai culture’. I find that statement a little hard to swallow – but then Lord Alton’s domain was just proclaimed ‘European Capital of Culture 2008’; the world truly is mad.

This is no Gundam, boy! No Gundam!

Yesterday also brought us the news that a ‘Gundam-like’ weapon would cost around 79 billion, 521 million yen (c. 729,700,000 of those dollar thingies) to build. However, if you examine that article in a little more detail, you will find that it’s a decidedly cut-price version. Aluminium armour? Aluminium? One could put the boot of one’s Zaku through that with very little effort.

Furthermore, this hypothetical robot

would probably need to have very wide feet (to distribute the pressure over a larger area) and walk very very slowly

. . . so we’re really looking at a massively expensive, militarily useless one-mile-an-hour travesty with flat feet. Way to crush my childish dreams, reality.

In Other News . . .

• Omonomono kicked off a new twist in the endless copyright/fansubs saga with this post. The varying reactions on other blogs it provoked are interesting because various people who Know Things wrote persuasive arguments as opposed to anodyne wobbliness. Something must be wrong.
• Hidoshi, who has recently given up on humanity, was outraged by the (mis)use of loanwords. I think I disagree, but then again what do I know?

MANLY TEA Update

While I’m still basing my tea-drinking around the old standard, Earl Grey, someone left a box of Budgens‘ ‘Superior Tea’ out so I’ve been sampling that too. It claims to be superior, but then so did Nero; thus far I’m unimpressed.