Anime for everyman and Yegge’s Minefield
I’m a programmer, so I read a lot about programming. One of the writers I always end up coming back to is Steve Yegge. He works for Google, and I hear they only hire geniuses, so I must have good taste in bloggers.
In a somewhat recent post, Steve talked about how he and his wife discoved Anime, or Japanese animation. This might not be shock to most people, since programmer == nerd == likes cartoons with robots, but it was interesting to me for two reasons: first, because he tried to clue everyone in to Sturgeon’s Revelation, and second, because he asked for recommendations and got a flood of comments.
I want to give some recommendations (Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain) and talk a little about the odd position Anime has in American culture. First, though, is Theodore Sturgeon’s* famous Revelation: 90 percent of everything is crud.