Concatenation

I played World of Warcraft, off and on, for about a year back around 2006.  I quit because it was expensive, addictive, and not even fun.  Around 2008 or 2009, I became interested in watching machinima—videos made using games, especially but not exclusively World of Warcraft.  I watched a lot of Oxhorn.  I still follow Cranius, who makes videos with Legs.

Probably the most impressive machinima I saw turned out not to be a machinima at all, but rendered animation.  You can watch it here:
The Craft of War: BLIND from percula on Vimeo.

The song is jpop singer Namie Amuro’s “Hide and Seek.”  I have a friend, whom I’ll call Ruby, who is a huge Namie Amuro fan, but I was just uninterested. My elder sister is a huge fan of the Japanese rock group L’arc en Ciel, which I never liked and probably biased me against Namie Amuro. 

Then I saw this video again and again, and the song really grew on me.  I wanted to hear more by the artist, but the few clips I looked up sounded nothing like “Hide and Seek,” and the story might have ended there, except that I became roommates with Ruby.  We lived together almost three years, and in that time, I watching all of Namie Amuro’s music videos and concert DVDs and acquired about eight of her albums and was generally converted into a fan.

Although most of her music still sounds nothing like “Hide and Seek.”  In fact, I get the impression (from her concert DVDs) that she doesn’t even like the song.  Oh, well.

So what was the point of all this?

Namie Amuro recently turned 40 and, after a 25-year music career, decided to retire.  I guess dancing energetically for three hours straight in high heels while singing flawlessly is pretty tough on a body, and one might want to do something different.

Anyway, I received an email from Ruby that had been sent at about 2am saying that Namie Amuro’s ~Finally~ concert was sold out in Japan, but that there were plenty of tickets left in Taipei, Taiwan, in about a month, and would I like to go?

Which is how and why I was in Taiwan for a week.

And it was amazing.