Speed Grapher Doesn’t Have Speed or Graphing

The series’ animation doesn’t look nearly this good.

Speed Grapher, the 2005 anime series from Studio Gonzo, features neither speed nor graphing. The reason for the title remains a complete mystery. I suppose it should be chalked up to LOL ANIME and the medium’s penchant for giving things ridiculous names (e.g. Marmalade Boy, Cream Lemon, Tantei Opera Milky Holmes — it also seems they like to give their titles food-centric names as well). This series is an incomprehensible mish-mash of genres and themes, of half-baked ideas, and with, at best, half-assed execution. It has all the trappings of a terrible B-movie. Typically, when an anime or movie has crappy animation, crappy acting, crappy storyline, and crappy directing, it will get a score of Shitty. However, there is the rare occasion when all the elements come together to create something so terrible that it rises above its crappiness to become awesome. That is precisely what Speed Grapher does. It’s a perfect, shining example of a B-anime that’s so bad it’s good.

The premise of the series is that there is a virus that infects certain people, and when it becomes activated (activation involves getting kissed by a prepubescent loli — it’s Japan, remember) the virus allows a person’s deepest desire to come to fruition. Of course, everyone’s desire is to become a super-powered killing machine, but hey, if a virus gave me those kind of powers, I’d want to get infected, too. Our first taste of a desire come to life (referred to as Euphoria), is a photographer who can blow up anything he takes a picture of. If I was a photographer, I would want to blow up everything I took a picture of, too. In fact, as a blogger, I’d want every post I write to explode. But I digress…

Tale of the iPhone

iPhone, you are a magnificent bastard.

So I finally broke down and joined the legion of iPhone carriers. My girlfriend is Original Gangsta, as she has the 2G phone. I’ve seen her use it for quite a long time now, and I decided that it was cool and I should get one of my own. The only problem was that I was still under contract with Alltel. That cell phone company has amazing service, but the worst phones on the goddamn planet. All their phones are cheap plasticky crap from 4 fucking years ago. I mean, seriously, if they had at least one decent phone, they wouldn’t have been swallowed up by Verizon. Anyway, I digress…

My contract finally ended, and the next day I was all set to make the switch to AT&T so I could get an iPhone 3GS. The “S” is for “suck” — err, I mean “speed,” the S is for “speed.”