Christopher Kincaid's Blog, page 9

Crunchyroll’s Western Anime Monopoly

Sony Pictures Entertainment, the owner of Funimation, bought Crunchyroll from AT&T for $1.175 billion in 2021 (Simons, 2021). In the past, Funimation and Crunchyroll worked together, distributing pieces of each other’s anime catalogs. Now, we have a vast, unified catalog, but we also don’t have real alternatives for anime consumption in the West. Okay, smaller, focused streaming services like HiDive exist along with anime offerings on Netflix and Disney. But Funimation’s purchase of Crunchyroll...

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Facing Death and Memory

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End goes deep. You won’t find philosophical musings like in Ghost in the Shell, nor does Frieren goes into the darkness that some stories dive deep into. No, the story retains hope and humor, while allowing death to permeate the story. Frieren, after the deaths of the human heroes who she had traveled with to save the world, retraces the journey. Her goal is the remember and to understand just how much that 10-year journey had meant to her. As an elf, her life span can ...

How Do You Know How to Know?

All knowledge is a matter of faith. You trust that I offer something worth your time and thought. I trust that you understand the words and my logic. We trust what we’ve been taught by our parents and teachers, and we trust our own judgment when we distrust information. Likewise, we have faith that we can understand the world through our own senses, that reality is understandable.

We also have faith that the information we recall is reasonable accurate. In short, faith is the ground of all know...

Anime I Keep Revisiting

Some stories continue to resonate years after you first watch them. I revisit few anime. Fewer still do I watch again and again. Every so many years, I feel an urge to revisit certain video games: Final Fantasy VI, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger, and various classic Mario games. The anime on this list pull a similar urge from me. No matter how many times I watch them, they don’t get stale. I tend notice one detail I hadn’t seen before with each watch. My changing experience...

In the Future, Human Skill Will [Increase | Decrease] in Value

The typed version of this hand-written article follows below the notebook scans.

 

In the future, the value a skillful human hand has will increase. As machine learning improves, digital art, music, writing, and other realms will demand higher skill. Mediocre to average quality art will be available to anyone with a modicum of technology ability. I even foresee in the near future music generated on-the-fly by models to meet the style the listeners want. Just as ChatGPT writing is already “g...

Revisiting Horimiya

When Horimiya: Pieces released, I decided to revisit the original season. My original observations still hold. The series offers a heartfelt, nostalgic feeling toward growing up. For those of us who, like me, worked all the time and didn’t have the social interactions of high school or college for that matter, there’s a pleasant vicariousness to the story. Of course, you have to be careful of this: it might make you feel regret or envy if you lack the right perspective with stories like this.

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Sweatshop Content and our Content Consumption Habits

 

After I resigned from my library position (I had moral and ethical problems with how I was expected to police policy), I started hunting for remote work. I enjoy writing, so I started hunting there. When I’m drafting a novel, I will write at least 1,000 words Monday through Friday. Weekends are left for JP articles, other essay projects, and now YouTube videos and scripts. I squeeze a little fun and hiking into that mess. With my days now free, I can produce 2,000 – 4,000 words a day dependin...

Revisiting Shuffle!

I had watched Shuffle! back at the beginning of my anime-watching career, and it was my first exposure to harem anime. For perspective, the anime released back in 2005. The story is based on a visual novel. I will include spoilers.

Enter Rin, a typical droll harem protagonist defined by his “niceness” and his, ahem, dumbassery. Like many harem protagonists, he has the emotional intelligence of a thrown brick. As I watched, I kept thinking of him as a, for lack of a better word, a dumbass. Much ...

Men Live in Despair. What Can Be Done?

It’s no secret that many men struggle with depression and despair. This desperation has many factors, such as lacking a sense of purpose. The problem also isn’t new. History likes to move in rhyming cycles. Each era stands unique yet still follows a cyclical pattern that Romans called the saeculum. This includes the current troubles many man face.

One of the factors of men’s desperation–women feel desperation too, but as a heterosexual man I can only comment on that experience–is the lack of ha...

A Personal Update

I’m no longer working as a librarian. I resigned from my position because my moral and ethical qualms. I’m not entirely innocent; my mistakes were adding up in my boss’s view. In the end, I couldn’t enforce the policies as strict as he wanted because doing so violated my Christian convictions. After about 26 years of working with the public, I’ve decided to look for remote, perhaps writing-focused, work. So what does that mean for JP, if anything?

When I’m not applying for work, I’ve been worki...