I was talking to an old friend at lunch at the other day, and we ended up talking about groups of friends that we've more or less lost contact with. I was pretty surprised to learn that there was a fair degree of animosity bubbling under the surface in one of the groups towards the person I was chatting to - I mean, once I had it pointed out to me, it made sense, but I wasn't really aware of it at all at the time. The friend had managed to piss off one member of the group, and that group as a whole gradually came to dislike them.
It sometimes worries me how oblivious I can be to this kind of thing - I mean, I can easily imagine working with someone for years and never realising that I grate on their nerves in the most irritating way imaginable. (I suspect I'd find me annoying to work with, if only because I tend to find faults I worry that I have to be much more irritating than they deserve to be. :) )
Of course, since I'm basically of a sunny disposish, and don't really think that often about what people are thinking very often, it doesn't worry me all that much. :)
***
Listening to crazy Japanese lounge music that one of the artists has brought in with him - they appear to be called Natsukashi no CM Song Daizen Vol 3 & 4, but it's pretty difficult to tell, and none of the tracks have English titles, or even English characters. Would I listen to this stuff if it was in my native language? There's a fairly good chance that I would - I've certainly listened to a fair bit of Astrud Gilberto and Yma Sumac[1]. But I'm not sure whether the same answer would be true for some of the anime I've been watching - if it had been put out by an English or American animation house, I don't think I'd have made it to the end. Or maybe I would; after all, I have a fairly strong completist streak, which is pretty much the only reason that I picked up the latest Phule book[2].
Ironically, the only reason that I ended up looking at this particular crazy japanese lounge music is because I can't get the theme tune to Steel Angel Kurumi out of my head. "Ririkaru, komikaru, koi suru torokeru" indeed. I've watched the first disk - the pacing is a bit uneven, and I'm not that keen on the fan service, but the changes to the artwork to denote mood (chibi for comical violence, lots of shading and crosshatching for "serious" violence) is kinda neat, and things like the boy dressed as a "modern girl" with a little cloche hat was pretty cool - of course, I have a weak spot for the 1920s.
Puggle suggested running a game where each character got a random infatuation at the beginning. I think the potential carnage would be fairly great, but I've tended to find that my players can generate any amount of complications with only minimal encouragement from me. :)
Goodness - a weird and crazy version of "Let It Be" with xylophones and sqeaky Japanese women has just turned up in my headphones. Huh. In case you're interested, I think it's from an album called Shang Shang Typhoon 2, though some of that may actually be the band name.
***
Argh. I've just tracked down the cause of a weird problem, and it's a mistake that I made, and didn't catch because I didn't test a solution to a different problem sufficiently. What's worse, the person who noticed the weird problem was the CTO. Oh, the humanity.
What's somewhat boggling is that the thing that was broken was something that I thought was pretty important, and it looks like it might have been broken for the whole time we've been doing Kong (three or four months), and no-one noticed. Which may indicate that this thing is not quite as vital as I thought. (Or we're only now starting to rely on it, which seems more likely.)
Maybe I'll slip off home now, before anything else goes wrong.
[1] Okay, technically Yma Sumac is Peruvian, and Astrud Gilberto is Brazillian... but at least some of their songs were in English, and I'd consider them part of mainstream Western music. Well, mainstream-ish. :)
[2] To those who aren't familiar with this Robert Asprin series, they follow the misfits of the Space Legion welded into an effective force by an officer who believes in them - and happens to be a multi-millionaire. (It's intended to be light sit-com, in case I hadn't made that clear.) The main problem that I have with Asprin's work is that his characters all tend to end up speaking and thinking alike (especially the "smart" ones)... given that he's trying to write an ensemble-style book, this is a bit of a problem. They're not a bad series, really - but if I didn't have a slight collector's streak, I probably wouldn't have got the latest one. :)
Posted by svend at October 20, 2004 5:36 PM