Ginger Rogers has a reputation as being one of the big name actresses from the 30's and 40's, but I've never been very impressed. Most (if not all) of her best movies were famous because she was dancing with Fred Astaire.
But Fred Astaire could dance with a hatrack and make it look good. I know this because he did. He had all the talent. As long as she didn't stumble and fall, the dance was going to look good.
I believe I've seen that fourth one in non-animated form before.
Maybe a bit different spot in the sequence; I'm not sure if there was a trampled neko-arc in the background or not. (I may not have been paying attention to the background.)
Posted by: Mikeski at May 23, 2013 05:05 PM (Zlc1W)
5
A still from that sequence is in the top rotation.
Posted by: Wonderduck at May 22, 2013 06:58 PM (lpH3d)
3
Eris is always fun, though her Google-fu lacked... a lot to be desired. Though going to a diplomatic meeting in slight-too-tight school swimsuits was pretty awesome.
I also forgot to comment that Yukikaze was in the first picture. When Steve said he was going to hit up Dog Days, I pretty much knew that meant "We need more Yukikaze in the top rotation!". Good to know I'm psychic!
This is a horrible thing. Obviously it was intended to be horrible. (UPDATE: Two black guys in the UK captured a British soldier and beheaded him in public, then waited around for the police to show up, exchanged fire with them, and both were hit. Of course, they were yelling "Allahu Akbar". No word on whether either of them died.)
When I was reading it, there were two sentences that stood out for me and hit me in the head:
1: "They took 20 minutes to arrive, the police – the armed response."
2: "There were people passing by who were screaming and running away."
This was in the UK somewhere. What struck me when I read those things was, Here in Cowboy USA that's not what would have happened. At least some people who observed the situation would have gotten involved. If there had been someone with a concealed-carry they'd have stopped it.
And a 20-minute police response time to something like this is totally scandalous. If you disarm your citizenry, you should protect them better than that.
This is the result of draconian gun control. The bad guys have guns, the civilians are helpless, and when seconds count the police are about half an hour away.
Tell me again why, exactly, the British approach to this is better than ours?
2
Hrmm... blank comment. Didn't know you could do that on accident.
Anyway, reason the British system is better? So those damn Yanks can't go and rebel at will! (Their actual gun control insanity is actually a far more recent thing)
Posted by: sqa at May 22, 2013 12:10 PM (KuPSx)
3
Another incentive to get my own permit once my I can afford the classes.
I hope the killers get the punishment they deserve, but from the news I've read from Britain lately, I suspect they won't...
Posted by: Siergen at May 22, 2013 12:16 PM (Ao4Kw)
4
Given the course the UK has been heading over the decades, it may be possible that if any bystander had intervened in the killing, it would have been the Good Samaritan(s) who would be prosecuted by the Crown, not the attackers. Indeed, if the Good Samaritans had injured either of the attackers during the attempt to stop the murder, the Good Samaritans would been considered at greater risk of legal actions from the Crown than the two attackers who were trying to kill!
Britain is a classic example of what happens when you combine firearms prohibition AND the criminalizing of defense of self/property, with a state that lacks a monopoly on armed force. For firearms prohibition to 'work', the state has to provide absolute protection of its citizens from criminals and enemies. If a state will not allow you to defend yourself, and is not able to defend you, than it has fail the most basic responsibility of a state.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 22, 2013 03:46 PM (HWMXn)
6
In the US, no official would DARE state that the attack was motivated by radical Islam.
Posted by: Mauser at May 23, 2013 04:35 AM (cZPoz)
7
In the article I read, there was a reference to some women that threw themselves over the body of the soldier to protect him and fears that they would be attacked also, but no further details.
If so, Britain's women are braver than their men. This may explain their politics.
8
I don't understand why you have to mentioned that the murderers were black. (NO, I am definitely not PC). Their color had nothing to do with this murder. It was Islam which drove them not racism.
BTW about that 20 minutes lag. Remember, this is *NOT* a far away place where it takes ages for the cops to arrive. This was in the thick of London, one of the world's biggest cities, and definitely one of the (if not the very one) top cities in the world. How bad is the British state, if even in their own capital, it takes 20 minutes for the cops to show up?
Also, the murderers said that it was in the name of Islam, and David Cameron, Britain's Prime Minister said it had nothing to do with Islam. Question. What qualifications Cameron has to make that statement? If Muslims go to protest against this murder with the same vehemence they protested against the Danish cartoons, I will believe that. If not, then ... I started to have some respect for him for standing up for the west in the past, but that respect is dissipating fast.
Vilmos
Posted by: vilmos at May 23, 2013 07:42 AM (yHm+k)
9
Regarding the 20 minutes: Actually, ordinary police showed up far sooner. But ordinary police in the UK don't carry firearms. It took 20 minutes for what amounts to a SWAT team to show up, with rifles, to take the guys down.
That thing where some site in China tries to access all kinds of paths looking for somewhere to log in? Starting a few days ago that went into high gear on my home server, and now it's happening several times per day.
Strangely, sometimes it's been the same IP giving it several tries. You'd think that if it fails once they'd mark me off and give up, wouldn't you?
By hand, one at a time. It's the main reason I switched from Zoom Player to MPC. I use single-step to move forward to each successive frame that I want, then store it manually. With MPC, I get what I'm looking at. Zoom Player always steps forward once before storing, for some strange reason.
Even with MPC the process isn't all that painful. The most time consuming aspect of it all is finding appropriate sequences in the first place. I just went through the first four episodes of Dog Days 2 and didn't find anything, for instance.
That's why I went after Senran Kagura yesterday; I knew that it was a target-rich environment. Or so I thought; I still ended up going through several episodes just to find the two segments I ended up using. I captured about five other sequences, but when I went back to look at them I decided they weren't any good.
6
Those other two I did a long time ago; they've been sitting on my disk for about a year. I thought of doing this way back, but only now am I getting to it.
7
What are you using to string them together? Somewhere I have the old MS Animated Gif program, but an animated PNG would suit my purposes very well (I have a perfect sequence in mind.)
Posted by: Mauser at May 21, 2013 11:03 PM (cZPoz)
I approve of this update. A very educational study of the physics of animation. Or something like that.
Mauser: Animated .png isn't quite a thing yet. Safari and IE don't support them at all, and Chrome and iOS only do with a plug-in (according to the wikipedia page), so a good number of your viewers won't know you did it.
Posted by: Mikeski at May 22, 2013 11:28 AM (Zlc1W)
10
Hmmm, Firefox supported it when (Brickmuppet?) ran some animated PNG's. But I thought you could only create .swfs with expensive Adobe Flash products.... I'd be happy to find out otherwise.
Posted by: Mauser at May 23, 2013 04:37 AM (cZPoz)
11
Mauser, there is, or at least used to be, a free Adobe SDK that would let you make SWFs. Presumably it lacks some feature and/or polish that the paid product has.
Posted by: RickC at May 23, 2013 05:30 AM (A9FNw)
12
Mozilla and all her children (Opera, Firefox) support them, yes. They're rebels like that.
Posted by: Mikeski at May 24, 2013 04:12 PM (Zlc1W)
6
My guess would be that the school employs a security guard, and he dropped it. Or it fell out of some mother's purse or car door. I'd have picked it up, and if there was nowhere nearby to turn it in to, throw it in a trash can a safe distance away, where some kid wouldn't find it.
Posted by: David at May 21, 2013 01:49 PM (qw+UI)
7
I think it probably was broken. Someone was monkeying with one of the teeth; they're not symmetrical.
8
I noticed that, but I thought the twisted prong was part of the branch.
Posted by: Wonderduck at May 21, 2013 04:29 PM (lpH3d)
9
Nah, if you do an image search, you'll see that each plastic horn has a pair of teeth at right-angles. the inner ones are test probes so you can verify there's a charge, and the outer ones are the business end. Looks like someone bent one of the test prongs and ripped off the corresponding attack prong. I sure wouldn't want to touch the thing at this point so I don't blame Steven for not trying to dispose of it himself.
Steven, have you complained to Verizon about how much your phone doesn't work? Seems like you might even have grounds to get out of your contract and try a different carrier, if you're having this much trouble with it.
I think it's broken. My brother is out of town, but he's going to be back on Saturday and he said he'd take me to the Verizon office.
I thought for a while it was the local cell, but I ran into one of my neighbors who has a Verizon phone and he said he was having no problems.
It's strange, since the GUI is working normally and the phone isn't displaying any error messages. So whatever the problem is, I'll find out Saturday.
It makes me a bit nervous not to have it. I got it in December so that I could keep it close to hand. In case I lost my balance and fell, I could use it to call for help. But now I can't.
Low probability danger, anyway. I haven't fallen once since I returned from the rehab. But it was also to be there in case I had another stroke, and I have no idea how likely or unlikely that might be.
11
It could certainly be the case that only part of it's gone bad. I had a flip phone a few years ago that was fine for about 6 months, and actually continued to work except it would get hot--much hotter than it should. I contacted AT&T and they replaced it, and of course smartphones are even more complex in terms of the number of discrete components.
Posted by: RickC at May 22, 2013 03:55 PM (WQ6Vb)
12
It's pointless to speculate about it. I'll find out in a few days.
So it turns out that a "whale squid" is genetically identical to a "Hideauze", and Ledo's war has come to the Earth. Maybe.
What in hell is a combat mech doing with genetic analysis equipment, anyway? And the comfortable feeling I had with this series just got tossed in a basket. Maybe it'll be back, maybe not.
3
Did I miss the battlefield use of biowar weaponry? It doesn't have analysis gear onboard, but it does have a NBC defensive system built
Posted by: Wonderduck at May 19, 2013 08:50 PM (Axk8h)
4
I got the feeling that Chamber is a mass produced unit, which has scouting capabilities. It seems a little odd, but it's not something that takes too much hand waving to believe. Though it does seem a little strange.
...it DOES have NBC protective systems built in, just in case. Since we don't seem to be facing biowar attacks, and it's not like analysis gear is exactly small to date, the Abrams doesn't need to carry it.
Posted by: Wonderduck at May 19, 2013 08:53 PM (Axk8h)
6
Not totally beyond the pale, really. Can it travel through space? Can it land on a planet? If so, something onboard better be able to tell the pilot if he can breathe the air, drink the water, and metabolize the flora and fauna... and the last one of those three takes a pretty sophisticated sensor suite.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at May 20, 2013 02:42 AM (GJQTS)
7
I haven't seen anything past the first episode yet (except the bountiful cheesecake...), but given the capabilities that Chamber displays there, I'm not surprised he's capable of genetic analysis. It's got to be easier than including a self-contained cold-sleep facility with hypnotic indoctrination capability.
Chamber doesn't make sense as a dedicated combat mech built to fight in a desperate war against an enemy that's well on the way to exterminating humanity. If anything in the propaganda video is true, then he's ridiculously overbuilt for front-line cannon fodder. And yet the carrier ships are specifically designed to deploy large numbers of them, and Ledo's been paired with Chamber for as long as he can remember. (side note: 145,000 hours of service? Is Chamber counting from birth, counting cold-sleep time, or is something even odder going on?)
-j
Posted by: J Greely at May 20, 2013 08:54 AM (+cEg2)
8
I suppose you could hand-wave
some sort of awesome replication technology which can duplicate pretty much anything rapidly and cheaply, and if you have that then there isn't any obvious cost to loading up the mechs with fancy gizmos. If they have that, then the limiting factor on their war is people.
I'm entertaining the possibility that the entire war is a hoax, an excuse for the people on top to maintain a police state. Not that I think there isn't any war, but I think the humans started it, and I think the bosses are deliberately not fighting it to their full ability. I think the bosses want a stalemate.
The problem with the 1984 setup is that Ledo appears to be genetically engineered in the first place, with Spartan-like ruthlessness in child selection. That seems like a strange way to keep a society working without some actual existential threat around.
If they have no problem with genetic engineering, culling "less than effective" humans and sleep-indoctrination systems, I really doubt the humans "in charge" would have much issue keeping their position with that Power already established.
A few people have suggested that Gargantia is, itself, an acclimation program for Avalon. That Ledo actually made it home and this is the system used to become less of a solider and more of a human. The problem with that thinking is that they've spent a lot of time on the side characters and world building, with a massive amount of independent action by characters. The series should be much more focused on Ledo than it is, if that was the case. The Gargantia itself is a bit too much of a character in the show for that to really work, other than for a big twist at the end.
I think, though, that we might have a sign of what the actual problem is with Avalon. The Computers are actually in charge. So they keep fighting against the Hideaze because that's what they're supposed to do. They're a life-like AI, not actually sentient. This is pretty much the "Terra e" construction.
Actually, no, this series almost IS "Terra e", which would imply that Chamber is both a problem and a solution.
Mostly plot exposition this time. And as with the other episodes, I have no urge to rewatch it. (On the other hand, I've rewatched Gargantia about five times. Is it Monday yet?)
3
Amy and her friends, and pretty much the Gargantia in general, feels quite "normal" for people. What a concept, a society filled with mostly decent people, though a bit more colorful for a fictional presentation.
