20080420

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

More MMA goodness today. Today we trained with a well known Dutch Sanda trainer Lou Hoyer and his son Danny, concentrating mostly on striking, sprawling and quick throws. I can see bruises forming all along my arms again, and there’s a welt on my upper leg from some low-kicks I received. I am so exhausted right now, because I haven’t been sleeping well, and because of that grueling training but I feel…accomplished. I wouldn’t want to say good, because I hurt so much that even the balls of my feet hurt when I stand on them. Come to think of it, I have some nasty blood-blisters on them that I should be taking care of.

In other news, last night I picked up my mother from the hospital, which was one of the scariest experiences of my life. She had gone through her second chemo-therapy, and for some reason she was completely out of it. She had been feeling under the weather when she went in on thursday, and she’s been sleeping for almost all the time she was there, which resulted in her missing some of her scheduled medication times, but she couldn’t even stand on her feet by the time I got her to take her home. She kept falling asleep, and when she wasn’t she was rocking back and forth, not really as lucid as I would’ve liked her to be, and just moaning in pain. Everyone who knows my mother knows she’s fucking hardcore, but this was something else. In the car over, she kept falling asleep, and I kept wondering if something horrible was going to happen, that’s how bad she looked. At one point I thought we might have to turn around and go back to the hospital. My fears weren’t exactly calmed by the fact that she had been vomiting up blood recently, which I can’t imagine is a good sign in any situation. Anyway, we got home, where she wanted nothing more than to sit on the sofa and nod in and out of sleep while listening to her children talk and watch television. We got her to drink something and finally put her to bed. I slept on the sofa (yay, another bad night’s sleep) but kept waking up at the slightest sounds to check on my mother upstairs (yay, no sleep at all!) so all in all I’m pretty dead right now. Luckily, when my mother woke up this morning, she was feeling a lot better than she did last night. I’m not sure if she can survive another chemo-run, but this friday they’re going to scan her to see what the results of the first two treatments have been.

Luckily the weather’s nice, so I’m enjoying a nice cup of tea sitting near my open window, listening to the people downstairs, outside on the terrace of L’Affiche.

Tired

by Dennis••5•Posted inJournal

It’s not that I have trouble sleeping, I just don’t. Sleep, that is. When I eventually go to bed I fall asleep almost instantly, which my mother claims is not very good for you since you need some time to let yourself unwind, and is a sign that I’m suffering from exhaustion. I don’t know if that’s true, but as it stands, I sleep no more than 7 hours, and when I go to bed late usually less than that. When I wake up I am perhaps unable, but probably unwilling to go back to sleep. As a result I often feel very tired, and I’m not even sure if I really know what it feels like to be rested. I’m getting used to the constant inability to concentrate, the deteriorated short term memory and the nagging discomfort (especially when I should be feeling comfortable, because I might fall asleep at any moment. The more comfort, the less comfortable.) I have to trick my body into staying awake by constantly moving. That’s not easy when you have a sedentary job. Whenever I feel my eyelids getting heavy, I do fourty push-ups to get my blood flowing and I continue working. All that and still I refuse to sleep. Even now, it’s almost three and I know I’ll probably get about five hours of sleep, but still I just don’t feel like going. I literally have to force myself, which is exactly what I’m about to do. Here goes…

Mother

by Dennis••0•Posted inJournal

My mother is in the hospital again for her second chemo treatment. She’s nervous and afraid because the first treatment took so much out of her and made her terribly ill. When I called her this morning she sounded like she didn’t want to go through with it. She had also been ill the night before, had vomitted up bile and blood, and had a slight fever. I’m bracing myself for bad news soon. It was very hard to stay strong while I had her on the phone, regardless of being at work. Usually I keep my world strictly separate, but this thing has me so high strung I can’t help it anymore.

Appleseed: Ex Machina

by Dennis••0•Posted inFilms

Appleseed: Ex Machina [2007]

Director: Shinji Aramaki
Writer: Masamune Shirow
Producer: John Woo

The first time I saw the original Appleseed was with Sam, by accident, because I had heard that the writer of Appleseed was also responsible for that piece of wank called Dominion Tank Police. Of course, I hadn’t realised that the guy was also responsible for all the Ghost in the Shell stuff, which is, arguably, the best damned anime I’ve ever seen. It was much like GitS in the way that it was fast-paced, gritty, mature, and dealt with some deeply philosophical subject matter. It did, however, deviate a little bit into Dominion Tank Police land, where the biggest Japanese, cultural mystery lies; their facination with the combination of super-cute and hyper-violent. It’s something that I can’t wrap my head around too well. In my experience, everything that’s hyper-violent is hardly ever cute, but those guys gobble that shit up like it’s eggs on toast. The cuter and deadlier the jailbait, the better. Anyway, Appleseed certainly had a tendecy to go there at times, but luckily they kept it to a minimum and focused more on the ravaged world, the rebuilt society, the constant threat of terrorism, and the introduction of so-called “bioroids,” synthetically generated humans, gengineered to have none of the negative human emotions, like greed, anger, jealousy, etc.

In this episode of Appleseed the story still revolves around Deunan Knute, the young, brash but gifted officer at ES.W.A.T., a paramilitary organisation working hard to keep the streets of Olympus safe in the year 2199. The world has been ravaged by decades of war and a vast majority of the world’s population has perished. In order to replenish the global population to a workable level gengineered humans, or Bioriods, are created, who are indistinguishable from humans, except that they have no propensity for violence.

Deunan’s partner at ES.W.A.T. is Briareos, a cyborg, and her lover. Before Briareos was critically injured trying to save Deunan from an enemy grenade, they loved eachother deeply but had yet to really start admitting that to one another. After that tragic incident, Briareos’ radically altered physique was always a barrier for them to get truly romantically involved. After Briareos gets injured while on a mission (see movie below), the Olympus council decide to use his genetic tissue to start making Bioriods, and the first to come off the assembly line is Tereus, who looks and acts exactly like Briareos, which confuses Deunan deeply, especially when she is partnered with him during Briareos’ recovery period.

When the Olympus council tries to get a hold of every remaining nation’s sattelite system, in order to combine it into a sophisticated network of sattelites to counter terrorism they get unexpected support from one of the largest industrial corporations left on the planet; Poseidon. One of their newest products, Connexus, a small, portable, wireless device that allows users any number of conveniences (think a VR-Blackberry on steroids), has shown some glitches and they are willing to make repairs in order to safe their corporate backsides. Secretely, unbeknownst even to Poseidon, a disgruntled employee is using these devices to link every consciousness on the planet together into one big hive-mind. Cue rapid violence and stunning visuals.

As said, the visuals are absolutely stunning. As with the first Appleseed, which wasn’t fully 3D yet, a lot of the visuals are there simply to impress the fuck out of you, and you know what? It does just that! The only thing they haven’t really mastered yet is how to make people look a) detailed, b) ugly. I’m sure that in 2199 there are some women left without a perfect 10 body and some men left with a beer-gut.

The story gets a little confusing sometimes, especially when you’re watching the Japanese version, as I did, and you’re watching it with horrible subtitles. In the end it all makes sense, logically, but the jarring things are mostly those things that are way out of proportion. A secret Poseidon laboratory the size of a city, hovering half a kilometer above the ground like some massive conglomerates of Borg ships. “Oh, I remember that place, I know where it is,” Briareos says like he drives past it on his way to work every day. Yeah, it’s a massive upside down pyramid made of Borg ships hovering half a kilometer above the ground, eclipsing the sun for miles around, I’m sure you have!

Anyway, as far as the quality of the anime, I prefer GitS, but there’s little that can touch that gem. Appleseed isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it does lack a certain depth. It has about the same depth as an average Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex episode, for those of you who know what that means. :)