There are mysteries to bittorrent that I am not privy to.
As I write this, I'm downloading the Shana movie. I found a link to a torrent file on a website that a friend told me about, and right now the torrent has 7 seeds and 11 leeches. I'm hooked to most of them.
But there isn't any tracker. The torrent is flagged red, and uTorrent says "hostname not found". So how the heck did uTorrent find those 7 seeds and 11 leeches? (Presumably once it found the first of them, that one told uTorrent about all the others. But how did uTorrent find the first one?)
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I think the link you click on downloads the .torrent file. That file tells your system where the first seed is located ("IP address x, port y, server path z"). What I don't understand is how your copy of uTorrent found the others. Does the downloading uTorrent client act as a mini-tracker by keeping track of everyone that has ever downloaded from it, and pinging them occasionally to see if they're still available as other seeds?
Posted by: ubu at September 01, 2010 08:45 PM (GfCSm)
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In addition to dedicated trackers, BitTorrent supports distributed hash tables and peer exchange. When you can't reach the tracker for one torrent, it can ask the peers you can reach for a different torrent if they know anything about it. Once it finds one peer that knows about the lost torrent, it can ask it for a list of other peers, and so connect to the swarm even though there's no tracker available.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 01, 2010 08:56 PM (PiXy!)
Beach episode! But it's also a character building ep for Perrine, and makes her very sympathetic.
The core of the story is a dungeon-crawl, and it's a lot of fun. And Sakamoto does something... unexpected.
The first series had two eps which were fan-service trifles (6 and 8) and this one does too (7 and now 9).
Anyway, some borderline NSFW pics below the fold.
UPDATE: Rewatching this episode, it seems to me that the girls are unreasonably good at holding their breaths underwater.
Then it occurred to me that one of the medieval tests for witches was to see if they'd drown. If the suspected witch did drown, well, then you knew she wasn't a witch.
If she didn't drown, then you knew she was a witch, and you'd burn her. (Cue Monty Python sound clip...)
Anyhoo, given that the witches didn't suffocate high in the stratosphere, maybe they don't have the same vulnerability to loss of oxygen that normal folks do. Maybe they can't drown.
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To be honest, at first look I didn't thought they were nsfw, let alone borderline. Thinking a second time, I was wondering, am I losing perspective because I've seen anime almost all of my life? Or is it because of their age? (haven't seen Strike Witches so don't know if they resemble their age)
Posted by: Jaked at September 01, 2010 05:25 PM (EjkUJ)
I can't understand this. It's like you're speaking some other language or something. I know what the words mean; they just don't make sense that way.
Eh? What's that, Luna? Um hmm...oh.
My cat has just explained it to me. Sorry, but I'm going to have to move at the next union meeting that you be stripped of your card, Mr. Den Beste. Can't have otaku using those two words together that way, I'm afraid. People might get the wrong idea.
Posted by: atomic_fungus at September 02, 2010 02:43 AM (vKZ0t)
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I do not think you are justified in knocking Miya's maturity. Even if we ignore running the sodom of the appartment, no first-grader would be able to maintain the balance with all the powerful villains of other 3 quarters. And she was married for real, too.
It's not all that simple anyway. Sure Matsu looks like a hikki (who is supposed to be immature and getting her education from Internet pr0n). What about Kurasuba, then? At #04 she is younger than Matsu.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 01, 2010 11:22 AM (9KseV)
I am assuming you realize that Miya is #01 and that is why you placed the suspicious braces around the reference.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 01, 2010 11:55 AM (9KseV)
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It's fair to say that they're underdeveloped mentally, given that they were raised in labs, and probably are not as old as they appear. But don't take them all for children. There are three of them I'd rate as having the maturity of a young adult, at least, and all are in Izumo House. Arguably, four, as Kazehana is capable of acting like an adult when she feels the need.
Also, Matsu isn't exactly a hikkimori; she's in hiding for a reason that will probably be exposed within the next two episodes at the most.
Posted by: ubu at September 01, 2010 04:13 PM (GfCSm)
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Actually I'm wondering how to explain the wide diversity among Sekirei, as opposed to clone troopers of Star Wars, for example.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at September 01, 2010 06:40 PM (9KseV)
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Pete, you probably can't since we don't have any idea where they came from, or who created them, or why.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 01, 2010 08:00 PM (+rSRq)
I just made another post to Hot Air. Unfortunately, I'm dumping on yet another "alternative energy" proposal, and I expect howls of anger and nitpicking on details.
It's about time for me to make at least a partial update of the top rotation, rather than putting it off for a full year like I did last time. So tonight I started going through Sekirei looking for appropriate stuff.
There's some stuff I cannot use, even though fully clothed.
I'd like to use this, but I probably won't. I've found that night scenes don't really work very well. Also, standing alone without knowing the context from the show, it isn't really a very interesting image.
We'll just pretend that episode 7 never happened, OK? Moving right along to episode 8, it begins with Aoi, Manami, and Kio up in the Cathean ship, using the holodeck for training purposes. It's a gun range, and Aoi is explaining how Cathean antimatter ammunition works.
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Totally buying the DVDs when this one comes out. Sadly it's doing the stupid Japanese release schedule of "2 eps a month, and 80$ a disc" that seems designed to drive sales as low as possible.
Posted by: tellu541 at August 31, 2010 10:05 AM (pJ1uW)
I sometimes wonder whether the reason they release the DVDs/BDs so slowly is that if they were to release on a weekly schedule, the sucker-base would run out of money. By releasing monthly, they give the sucker-base time to save more for the next round.
If they were doing significant reanimation for the DVD/BD release, a longer release schedule might be justified. That has been known to happen, but I think that these days it isn't very common. For fanservice shows they do remaster (in order to remove fog and fronds and beams of light and shadows etc) but with digital production that takes negligible time.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head on why the Japanese release large numbers of low episode count DVDs for a given series. The loss on potential sales (And thus the potential margin.) is why the Japanese have been reacting very badly to importing R1 DVDs into Japan for the same series. It is also a clinching explanation on why DVD releases in R1 take as long as it does to actually happen - to prevent loss of sales in the domestic (Japanese) market.
You see a few exceptions (Date and day release of Gundam Unicorn in both Japan and R1, though it is an OVA.), but unless US licensors want to go through the trouble of funding and participating in the production side of anime titles - which is not going to happen for most things - date and day DVD/Blu-Ray releases are just not going to happen very much, especially since R1 is now in boxset releases. IMHO, it is that limitation that has Navarre looking to sell FUNimation, because their current parent company does not want to spend the resources on financing anime production, and participating in production is the only way to get better licensing deals (I love to see the terms of the license for the non-Gonzo stuff FUNimation got, because it is almost certain they had to pay premiums for getting such good terms.).
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at August 31, 2010 12:49 PM (OOAmN)
We are now in the thick of the most interesting part of the entire series. In ep 68, Piccolo merged with Kami in order to gain power. In ep 69, he began his first battle with Cell. And in ep 70, with one of his arms withered, he convinces Cell to talk, or rather to boast.
It's been 20 years since the original and I had been wondering how Wakamoto Norio's acting would have changed. I think his performance as Imperfect Cell is even better this time. Cell is such an arrogant bastard, and Wakamoto is playing it to the hilt. When Cell gloats over Piccolo, Wakamoto's heart is in it. Just magnificent! Even if you're not a fan of DBZ, if you like listening to Wakamoto it's worth watching the first half of ep 70.
I love Cell. I've long been of the opinion that Cell and Friagne are the two best villains in all the anime I've watched. But Cell is better.
UPDATE: I wish I could watch the Shana movie. But the only torrent I can find for it, the tracker is returning error 403. I'll leave it going for a day or two and see if it gets fixed.
Reading the various articles, it looks as if it hasn't been updated much since the second season began. For instance, it describes Perrine as having strong antagonism towards Yoshika, which was true in the first season but definitely is not true in the second. In the second season, Perrine considers Lynne and Yoshika to be her closest friends in the unit.
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This may be one of those questions that only a linguist (or a fluent speaker of Japanese) can answer, but I thought the word for "magic" was mahou. But then I see that the word for magic when referring to Sanya's yagis is "madou".
Is that a misspelling? Or a word for a different type of magic? Or is it used the same way? Or should I just relax?
Posted by: Wonderduck at August 28, 2010 07:25 PM (ODvBe)
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There are several words you might see: mahou, madou, majutsu. The first kanji is the same for all, 魔 = witch/demon/evil spirit, but the second one carries the flavor of what sort of magic it is: hou = 法 = method/system; dou = 導 = guidance/leading; jutsu = 術 = art/skill. Majutsu is often used for stage magicians and jugglers, but mahou implies real magic.
Madou wasn't common enough to have an entry in GG4 in the Seventies, but it's in more recent references; in this case I suspect it was used for its similarity to dendou = 伝導 = conduction/transmission, given the "antenna" reference.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at August 28, 2010 08:19 PM (2XtN5)
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The ma J mentions is the same one used in daimaou 大魔王, which means "great demon lord".
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At this point there's really no difference; they're more or less interchangable. The Fate/Stay Night universe draws a distinction between Majutsu and Mahou, and a few other works of fiction do as well, but most don't, really.
I guess one thing to note is that Madou is never used a stand-alone noun, it's always part of a compound like madoushi (Mage) or madousho (Spellbook).
Posted by: tellu541 at August 29, 2010 04:11 AM (pJ1uW)
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I found a few standalone uses of madou (魔導の宝物庫, 大魔導の結界), but yeah, it's much more likely to be the beginning of a compound word (the single most popular use seems to be the game Madou Monogatari).
Oh, and if your search leads you to the Artificial Magical Girl doujin manga (人工魔導少女), NSFW!
-j
Posted by: J Greely at August 29, 2010 08:36 AM (2XtN5)
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Eh, yeah. Maybe 'compound' was unclear. What I was trying to say is you can't use it as a stand-alone word. You can 'mahou wo tsukaeru' (Use magic) but you can't 'madou wo tsukaeru'.
Posted by: tellu541 at August 29, 2010 03:29 PM (pJ1uW)
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I've found maybe half a dozen examples where it really was used as the noun "magic" ("madou demo ii janai", "madou o meguru arasoi", etc), compared to a few thousand where it was used to modify another noun. So, grammatically a noun, but not the one people usually think of when they want to talk about magic itself.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at August 29, 2010 10:10 PM (2XtN5)
