Grimoire of Zero

I'm not entirely sure why Grimoire of Zero was a fun watch, but I sure did enjoy it.

Grimoire of Zero is a very familiar story. It's a medieval world where magic is real, and our heroes are a mercenary fighter and a witch. They should be enemies, but find a way to work together. There's a girl disguised as a boy, witch hunts by ignorant/frightened people, and an evil mastermind. About all that makes this setup different from a thousand others is that the fighter is a beastman, but really any kind of defect/failing that made him a bit of an outcast from society would have worked just as well. And to be fair, the story in the last couple of episodes does veer a bit off the "defeat the evil mastermind" track.

Usually I don't really enjoy shows/books/etc that are very predictable or derivative. But something makes Grimoire of Zero work for me. I think most of it is the relationship between the main characters. It progresses from mutual suspicion to a business arrangement to respect to real friendship (with bumps along the way, of course). That relationship progression is still very predictable, but it's handled nicely and both parties are likable.

It also helps that Grimoire of Zero is well produced, with good artwork and voice acting. And there's very little fluff - at only twelve episodes, there's not a lot of room for anything that isn't part of the main story. There's some minor digressions in the usual anime way - jokes about food, annoying middle-school-level sexual innuendo - but they're short. I'm fairly sure I'd have liked it much less if there had been lots of filler, but keeping the storyline moving meant I didn't have time to lose interest.

If you like the sword-and-sorcery anime genre, it's worth giving Grimoire of Zero a try.

Representative Amash Town Hall (May 2018)

My congressional representative Justin Amash held a town hall meeting in Caledonia at the high school just after Memorial Day. Nice location choice, since it's about a 4 minute drive from home for me.

As always, I appreciate Amash's willingness to hold these public town hall meetings. So many politicians just don't bother, and it doesn't seem to matter much since they keep getting re-elected anyway. Amash conducts his business professionally and in a courteous manner, so no matter how much I may disagree with some of his positions, I respect how he carries out his responsibilities.

The meeting started with the congressman talking about how the legislative process is broken. This isn't new...he's been making the same points in one form or another since I started attending these things several years ago. The short version is that party leadership (both Republican and Democrat) controls the process of writing and amending legislation so tightly that rank-and-file representatives have no real control over what is brought up for votes. That means compromise legislation that might actually be able to pass is never created (via the amendment process) and/or brought to the floor for a vote. Most representatives go along with this because the party leaders control a lot of their election campaign funding, plus it means they don't have to go on the record on controversial issues.

I don't disagree with this assessment, but I feel like Amash is preaching to the choir. We're the district that elected a guy who bucks the system. (Well, not me personally, I didn't vote for him. But the district did.) Telling us about it doesn't help much. What he needs to be doing is using his platform as a member of Congress to reach a national audience, if he really believes that going back to a more open legislative process is a key component to improving how Congress works. Convince voters in other districts to get after their representatives about joining Amash in making changes.

After that came the Q&A session, which was scheduled for about 40 minutes but lasted more like 90. That's pretty common for Amash, in my experience, and very much not what you see from other politicians. He seems to genuinely want to hear from as many constituents as possible. A lot of the questions were about current news items and he didn't say anything really unexpected. Yes, Mueller should finish his investigation into Russia and the 2016 presidential election; no, immigrant children should not be separated from their parents at the border; yes, we should hold our leaders to a standard of telling the truth. He was careful not to call out President Trump directly on any of these things, but otherwise it was fairly standard stuff like you might read in any news story.

One question that was a bit different brought up Amash's vote for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act back in December 2017. In his response, Amash claimed that the tax cuts were progressive, moving the tax burden toward wealthier Americans. I have no idea what he's referring to. A quick web search will give you any number of opposite assertions, including this one from the Tax Policy Center. And if you add in the corporate tax cuts, which mostly benefit the wealthier folks that can afford to own those companies, it's even more tilted to favor the wealthy. I don't know if Amash was confused, misinformed, or what...I choose to believe he wasn't intentionally lying since he's not done so in other areas to the best of my knowledge.

It's good to hear directly from my representative, even if the answers aren't always exactly what you'd want to hear. It would be nice if my Senators and state legislators would do the same someday.

A Handmaid's Tale (season one)

There's a great movie or 3-4 hour mini-series in the first season of A Handmaid's Tale. Unfortunately it's spread out over about 10 hours of excruciating repetition.

The series takes place in an alternate timeline where world-wide fertility rates have been falling for many years, and finally reached crisis levels in the present day. A group calling itself the Sons of Jacob takes over the continental United States and turns it into a military state called Gilead, where women have no rights except through their male relatives. Fertile women are singled out and made into "handmaids" who are assigned to Gilead leaders to bear their children.

The story follows a woman named June who attempts to escape to Canada with her husband and daughter, but fails and is captured. Her daughter is taken away and June is assigned to Gilead Commander Waterford as a handmaid named Offred. The series splits time following June and the other handmaids in their lives in Boston, and flashing back to how things changed from the world we know to this dystopia.

I enjoyed the first couple of episodes of A Handmaid's Tale. It takes some time to figure out the world that they've built, and for June's terrible situation to really sink in. But then it's pretty much just more of the same. Hours of filling in details about the past which were already implied by prior flashbacks, conflicts between June and Mrs. Waterford, handmaids attempting rebellion and being caught, and so on. You might get 5-10 minutes of actual new information in each episode. The rest is largely just emotional manipulation...sex, oppression, fear, and occasional glimpses of kindness...so the viewer feels like something is happening when it's really just the same stuff over and over. We got all that already, thanks, it's not necessary to beat us over the head with it.

Oh, there are twists, but they're incredibly obvious. I suppose this is technically spoiler territory, but was anyone really surprised that June ends up sleeping with the household driver? Or that one of the handmaids, after giving birth in her assigned household, goes crazy when they take her away to a different household? Or that her husband who was conveniently off-screen when June heard shots that "killed" him turns out to be alive in Canada?

I suspect a lot of the reason that A Handmaid's Tale was received so well is the social commentary. The entire premise is based on misogyny and the twisting of religion to justify it. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to draw a line from the present day to the events in the alternate timeline shown in the series. But to my mind, the fact that the series says some good things doesn't excuse the fact that it gets repetitive and boring.

There's a second season of A Handmaid's Tale being released gradually on Hulu, but I can't say I'm particularly enthusiastic about it. Maybe someday I'll consider finishing it, but I suspect I'll end up just reading the summaries and saving myself a few hours.

NBC's Timeless

There were quite a few time travel shows that popped up 2-3 years ago. I've written about DC's Legends of Tomorrow on the CW (which has improved greatly since a weak season 1) and Netflix's Travelers. Frequency on the CW was pretty good, but only lasted one season. And on NBC, we have Timeless.

The world of Timeless: Time travel has been invented with the backing of deep pockets from a shadowy organization called Rittenhouse. They want to use the time ship to entrench their own positions and mold society to their ideals, which needless to say aren't progressive or friendly to anyone outside their group. A small team of uncorrupted government agents and civilians use a prototype time ship to thwart those schemes.

Like most shows based on time travel, you can't think too deeply about the premise of Timeless. The only real restriction is that you can't travel to place where you already exist, and there's ways around that (like recruiting others). The show establishes pretty early that changes made in the past do affect the future, so you have to ignore the fact that it would be incredibly easy to make a mistake that would wipe out your desired result, the development of time travel, or even all life on Earth. So watching Timeless definitely requires you to turn off the bit of your brain that tries to make sense of the whole time travel aspect.

Once you've got that suspension of disbelief going, Timeless is a lot of fun. I like pretty much all the characters, particularly Jiya and Rufus since they're nerds like me. (Younger and smarter and better looking, but then, who on TV isn't?) There's a decent amount of family and interpersonal drama that for the most part doesn't detract from the overall storyline, and in fact usually plays into it. Nice to have writers that make an effort to integrate the emotional drama, not just tossing it in on the side.

But my favorite part of Timeless is the historical characters. Pretty much every week, the crew goes to a different part of history and meets one or more pivotal persons. There's plenty of the usual suspects: the Alamo with Bowie and Crockett, Bonnie and Clyde, the revolutionary war with Benedict Arnold and George Washington, Al Capone and Eliot Ness in Chicago, etc. But some of the best stories are with lesser known characters, like Katherine Johnson at NASA (better known now after Hidden Figures) or blues musician Robert Johnson. Timeless does a fine job of bringing these characters to life, generally with a minimum of deviation from what we know from history. (The Smithsonian does a weekly blog post checking the facts.)

The second season wrapped up recently, with a cliffhanger that shows that the writers are ready to go for season 3. Hopefully NBC lets them keep going, or someone else picks it up.

In This Moment and Halestorm at the Deltaplex in Grand Rapids

Stitched Up Heart, New Year's Day, In This Moment, and Halestorm...four female-fronted rock/metal bands on the same night at a venue close to home. Not an opportunity I was going to pass up.

The Deltaplex here in the Grand Rapids area is basically a gymnasium with some warehouse-like open space next to it. It generally hosts basketball games for the Grand Rapids Drive and merchandise shows, so it's not exactly built as a concert venue. I was pleasantly surprised that the acoustics weren't terrible, though it still wasn't nearly as good as a place like 20 Monroe Live that's built for concerts.

Probably just as well that they booked the Deltaplex, though, because they had a good-sized crowd. It wasn't completely sold out, but still, it would have been a tight fit in a smaller venue. And there were a lot of women in attendance. Most rock/metal shows are slanted toward men by 2:1 or more, but in this case it was even, or possibly tilted a bit the other way. It was great to see that many women out in support of this all-female-fronted lineup.

I was a little late getting out to the show, plus there was some confusion over the process for getting my ticket redeemed (had to go to the box office since I bought it through Groupon), so I ended up missing all but about half of the last song from Stitched Up Heart. But I heard the complete sets for the other three acts. Logistically, the only real complaint I had was the same I have at almost every show with multiple openers...it takes forever to switch sets. Ended up with more than an hour and a half wait time by the end of the night.

Both New Year's Day and Halestorm were great, though neither are on my usual playlists so I only knew a few songs during their sets. Since New Year's Day was on early, they had a bit less crowd energy to work with, but I thought they did a fine job with stage presence and I enjoyed their set. And Halestorm really knows their way around a stage, which makes sense after 20 years. Particularly the Hale siblings (front-woman Lzzy and drummer Arejay), both of whom took some solo time as well as playing with the band.

For me, though, In This Moment was the highlight of the show. Which was initially because I knew their work best going in, but the stage show certainly cemented that feeling for me. Several big video screens were right behind the band, and lead singer Maria Brink was dancing as much as singing, usually with one or two other dancers alongside (including New Year's Day lead singer Ash Costello on one song). This was a kind of interpretive dance that went along with the music, not the over-sexualized twerking that passes for dancing in much of today's popular music. They didn't stint on props either - several costume changes, some kind of glowing ball thing, a sort of pulpit on one song, and they even launched a bunch of balloons in the audience near the end of the set. Good set list, too - I liked Big Bad Wolf in particular, but they hit most of their most popular songs.

I'd love to see more tours like this one, focused on bands with female members. Judging from the turnout for this one, there's certainly a market for it. Count me in for the next one!

Stories: The Path of Destinies

This game has a great story and I really enjoyed seeing it unfold. Wish I could say the same about the combat gameplay.

Stories: The Path of Destinies takes place in a world populated by animals, in Aesop's Fables style. You play as Reynardo the fox, fighting against an evil Emperor (who is a toad) on the side of rebels against his army of ravens. It's a swashbuckling setting where Reynardo fights with magic swords in settings ranging from forests to mountains to leaping across the decks of battling airships.

It doesn't take long to get through the story...once. Reynardo has many choices to make as he heads towards a confrontation with the Emperor. Inevitably, the fox falls in the final confrontation. At which point he wakes up, back at the beginning, but with the knowledge he gained in his earlier failure. Each failure teaches our hero one of four truths, and once he knows them all, he can navigate towards a successful ending.

The story is told largely through a narrator, who not only tells you what's happening along the way, but also comments on how you go about your business. It reminds me a lot of Bastion. For example, if you're destroying barrels and crates, expect some snarky remarks about how destructive you are. And of course he has something to say when you die.

Which happens a lot, at least if you're as bad at these kind of games as I am. The combat expects you to fight a bunch of enemies at once, reacting quickly to impending attacks with blocking and using special moves against specific enemies. My twitch-reaction is awful, and it doesn't help that attacking with Reynardo's sword locks you into an animation, so you can't move until it's done. Also, you can't do the special moves at all times...I'd hit the dash button to get away from an explosion, for instance, and Reynardo would just stand there and die even if I had the stamina necessary for the skill. I did OK through the early game, but around the time I found the second truth, battles became a real pain.

It doesn't help that it's very difficult to heal Reynardo. There's a health-stealing sword, but you can't use it much before running out of energy. Occasionally you can find health in the environment, but you have to waste time breaking crates and such. That takes forever due to the aforementioned attack animation lock...move to a crate, break it, wait for Reynardo to finish his follow-through, pick up loot, repeat. It's tedious enough that I gave up after the first couple of levels and just waded into battle without full health. Which means that I died even more, of course. Fortunately you revive at the start of the battle and can retry it as many times as needed, but each time you start at half health, not full. During the entire second half of the game, I don't think I ever had more than half health.

The game is also very slow to start up. I've got plenty of computing power that runs most games easily, but this one took several minutes to load and switch between areas. I assume that's a result of the cross-platform nature of the programming, since the game was released for both Windows and PS4. It's a minor thing, but annoying. Add to that the fact that there's no way to skip the narration at the start of each area, even if you've heard it several times before, and the wait time before actually playing gets pretty tedious.

I really liked the concept behind Stories: The Path of Destinies, with the different ways that Reynardo's story could unfold. If it wasn't such a pain to actually play the game, I'd probably have seen more of those different stories. As it is, one time through was enough.

Princess Principal

Cold War-style spy adventures set in a steampunk world is a fine background, if not one that you'd expect from the title of Princess Principal.

The princess in the title is one of a group of five teenage girls who act as spies in London, which is a divided city much like real-world Cold War-era Berlin. She's fourth in line to the throne of one side, the Kingdom of Albion, but acting in cooperation with intelligence operatives of the other side, the Commonwealth of Albion.

The steampunk part of the setting comes from a substance called Cavorite, used to construct airships and generally used in miraculous machines. Including one that allows one of the girls to fly and do various other amazing feats. The world at large is at early 20th century levels of technology and culture, but those Cavorite-based machines are highly advanced. All of it is beautifully drawn - the artwork is top-notch, whether drawing steampunk tech or the rest of the world.

Once you get past the usual suspension-of-disbelief about very young characters doing all these crazy things (which is necessary to almost all anime series and almost second nature for me by now), the overall story and individual episode plots in Princess Principal hang together pretty well. I like the world design, and I found the world-building history aspects interesting. Each episode generally follows a single spy mission, always going wrong in some way, as one would expect from this type of premise.

Chronology in the series is a bit odd, with the timeline jumping around with each episode. First you see a mission with all five girls, then we jump back and see how four of them first met, then a few more missions, before finally meeting the fifth member. And so on, until the last few episodes finally wrap things up in order.

For such a short series (twelve episodes), the character design is very good. Each of the five girls has some time devoted to their individual stories. Character growth is a bit odd because of the jumps back and forth in time across the episodes, but you can definitely see changes as time progresses. And of course the story of the princess and her closest friends is a big part of the overall storyline.

I greatly enjoyed Princess Principal and wish it had been longer. I see they're planning a film series next year, which I'll definitely be looking for.