The muh-muh-muh-music of 2009:

Former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi:
A. Has amazing hair.
B. Is a kick-ass mahjong player.
C. Can pilot an F-15.
D. All of the above.

Please visit the Gaming Intelligence Agency for all your Dreamcast2 launch news.

I love time loops and I hate The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Correction: I’m indifferent towards the Haruhi anime; it’s the fans I hate. So this summer’s Endless Eight arc has been like Christmas every day. Some background:

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is about a high school girl, Haruhi Suzumiya, and her high school club, the S.O.S. Brigade. Except not really; Haruhi, unbeknownst to her, is a Godlike-being with the power to recreate the universe on a whim, and the other club members are actually robots/time travelers/Espers/dimension shifters sent to this point in time to study and/or placate her. If this sounds like an interesting set-up, you’re mistaken; what should be It’s a Good Life: The High School Years just turns into so much unflavored moe. The anime is based on a series of light novels, giving fans a convenient list of things to complain got left out.

Endless Eight is a 30-page short story about a two-week time loop at the end of August, right before school starts. Haruhi, you see, doesn’t want summer vacation to end – she’d rather enjoy the Obon festival, go to the beach, visit hot spring, etc. – anything with a costume change, basically. And because Haruhi gets what she wants, the S.O.S. Brigade has endured these two weeks over 15,000 times – almost 600 years. The key to breaking this loop turns out to be one of the characters finally doing his homework. But until he learns to hit the books? (Bell)

The first episode of the Endless Eight arc was a straightforward adaptation of the short story. Everyone has fun in the sun, a few characters are suspicious this might have happened before, nothing is resolved, and Kyon fails to do his homework. It’s not until the next episode that things start to go awry.

It’s the exact same episode as last week. The same script, the same characters, the same scenes, the same ending. Nobody learns anything new. No one is any closer to uncovering the secret of how to break out of this time loop. It’s just last week … this week.

Except – and this is the greatest “except” in the history of both anime and time loop fiction – it’s not. The script has been re-envisioned by a new director. The characters have been redesigned with new outfits. The show has been reanimated from scratch. Even the voice actors have rerecorded all their lines. By another way of thinking, it’s a completely new episode — albeit, one with absolutely no new content.

Episode three does the same thing. So does episode four. Fans, amused at first, have turned sour. They were looking forward to seeing the The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya arc animated, and at the rate KyoAni is burning through episodes, that’s never going to happen.

Five, six, seven, eight.

After two months, it ends. A once-thriving fanbase has been reduced to ashes and tears. Most have long since declared the series anathema; the few that toughed it out are filled with self-loathing at their capacity for abuse. Nobody knows why Endless Eight continued as long as it did. Intentional sabotage from within? An producer with an unchecked artistic bent? A misjudged thought experiment? Tens of millions of yen and thousands of man hours were spent … on what, exactly? It’s over, now, but nobody knows for sure.

Endless Eight is beautiful.

I installed a plugin that claims to update my Twitter account with a link to my blog everytime I make a blogpost. This is a test of that plugin.

I figure this will notify anyone only using Twitter these days when I update my blog – though the idea of not using Google Reader in 2009 is, frankly, baffling. Plus, it’s excellent revenge for all the unblockable Facebook forwarding I have to suffer through these days.

So, dear everyone who is visiting from Twitter, I invite you to come over, stretch your legs a little, and to leave a comment on my blog. Please don’t write me or leave comments on Twitter. I will never “tweet” you back and, like everything related to Twitter, receiving a personal message will just irritate me. Just remember – your 140-character-plus feedback is always welcome here!

SIC SEMPER TWITTERVERSE! etc. etc.

I thought about writing a post about how much I detest #hashtagged Twitterpiles as a substitute for actual discourse and how the whole #amazonfail brouhaha represents the Internet hivemind at its knee-jerk worst, but it’s probably just best to remember: “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”

So, congratulations to Amazon on a boner so huge it took Web 2.0 and microblogging to make it happen. And the French.

The new Metric, Fantasies, is astounding.

Stream the entire album over at MySpace, then buy it in whatever size fits best.

If you’re at all interested in the making of games (and you probably are), then you should read this former NCSoft CTO’s personal Tabula Rasa post-mortem and chase it with Lum the Mad’s personal musings. 7-year, $100 million failures don’t happen so often; it’s worth finding out how they look from the inside.

Indie 103.1 is shutting down. The station is endlessly looping The Buzzcocks’ Harmony in my Head, Black Flag’s Gimme Gimme Gimme, and the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK while a prerecorded bumper directs people to their website. It’s over.

To say I’m depressed by this news is putting it mildly – listening to Indie 103.1 while driving was one of the top 5 things that made my life in Orange County bearable (number one is probably the pupusas from El Chinaco). The standard format could be a bit repetitive (as all stations are), but it was still the first place I heard “mainstream indie” artists like Santogold, Cut Copy and Silversun Pickups.

Where the station really thrived, however, was with its personality-driven radio shows. The best of these, Jonesy’s Jukebox, gave former Sex Pistol Steve Jones an unedited two hour block (12 PM – 2 PM) during which he could play, well, whatever he wanted. He could even not play music, if he’d rather chat with his guest or drone at the audience. Sometimes he’d bring out his guitar and cover a song he liked, or maybe write a new one. Jonesy was beholden to no one, and you literally had no idea what you might hear whenever you tuned in.

Other shows I loved were the Britpop/shoegaze focused Big Sonic Heaven, Henry Rollins’ stream-of-consciousness sociopolitical rock show, Harmony in My Head, and the overseas-focused Passport Approved. Every Friday I got to hear Joe Escalante hand out free entertainment legal advice to Los Angeles baristas on Barely Legal Radio. As he frequently reminded us, free advice is worth every penny.

As former host Chris Morris laments in his obituary, Indie 103.1 was the last bastion personality-driven radio, where the music you heard reflected the passions and taste of the DJ running the show. And that friendly trust between host and listener is something no amount of trawling MP3 blogs can replace.

I finally joined last.fm. Four reasons: I want good music to stream at work, I want another way to learn about new music, I want to share my music with my friends, and – perhaps most of all – I want a strong record at the end of the year of what I actually listened to.

My most-listened artists are pretty representative. Sufjan hasn’t gotten much play outside of Christmas for the past 2 years. Also, last.fm is missing all my pre-2005 listens, which means that U2, Tori Amos, The Smiths, Talking Heads and Outkast are significantly undersampled.

If you scrobble, please post your username in the comments so I can add you. Thanks!

Last year’s premiere five-minute interactive meditation on life, death, and everything in between was the strangely affecting Passage. This year, the most moving mini-indie I’ve played is the just-released Rara Racer. Don’t let the screenshot fool you – give it a try.

If the game’s a joke, then we’re the punchline.

(Thanks to Raph Koster.)

I should mention that I started another blog with some friends a few weeks ago. Thorp Force Five is a daily love letter to the most surreal and humorous daily comic strip in the newspaper. That strip is, of course, Gil Thorp.