chizumatic.mee.nu

April 05, 2012

Medaka Box -- ep 1

Man, that reeked. They say you can describe lousy shows with "X meets Y". Medaka Box is Haruhi meets Ikki Tousen. But it's more Haruhi than Hakufu.

Medaka is what Haruhi wants to be. She's Haruhi without the goddess powers; Haruhi with the biggest tits in the school.

/images/05064.jpg

The Student Council is what Haruhi wants the SOS Dan to be: solving lots of problems, big ones, all the time. No problem too big or small, and all of them getting solved. Medaka herself is super woman, and not just her figure. She's superhumanly fast, hyper confident. It's Haruhi's mania without the depression.

Medaka is Haruhi with Hakufu's figure, fighting skills, and confidence. And yeah, she gainaxes.

In fact, they showed us that, in closeup, before they showed us her face.

And Zenkichi is Kyon with blonde hair, and without the wit. He spends most of the show bitching.

I probably won't give this one a second episode. It looks like a total loss.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:04 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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1 So Medaka is Haruhi without all the things that make Haruhi Haruhi, and Zenkichi is Kyon without the pitch-perfect deadpan snark?

Sounds awful.

Reasonably nice artwork, but nothing one can't find elsewhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 05, 2012 03:54 PM (PiXy!)

Yeah, exactly. Medaka is an unbelievable character. She's just too damned good. She's better than everyone else, in every way.

It isn't me who says that; characters in the show say that about her. A review I saw elsewhere referred to her as being a Mary Sue, and I can understand why.

It's like she's on a pillar looking down on everyone from a great height. In fact, they used that concept visually at one point.

Now I suppose that could all be interpreted as satire, but while I can't say it comes off as totally serious, it doesn't have the edge of good satire. It just isn't funny.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 05, 2012 04:48 PM (+rSRq)

3 So, Ookami-san is not for you either, then.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 05, 2012 04:50 PM (5OBKC)

4 She looks more like a well-developed Konata than Haruhi though...

Posted by: EYanyo at April 05, 2012 05:39 PM (0HNgj)

5 Character-wise, you've nailed them except that Zenkichi is only a whiner at first. He's having a crisis because he's been dragged around by her since she was 5*, and he's really in love with her, even though he doesn't admit it. Also, bear in mind something else...

*Major spoiler:

But all that aside, I'd still only watch it for the tits and 'lulz.' The question isn't whether it's bad, it's whether it crosses the line into 'so bad it's good.' I don't think so.

Posted by: ubu at April 05, 2012 07:04 PM (GfCSm)

Ubu, that explanation sounds an awful lot like a retcon by the author, who created this monster and then had to figure out how to explain her.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 05, 2012 07:30 PM (+rSRq)

7 The author is a Class-A level troll of his die-hard fans. I wouldn't put it past him.

Posted by: sqa at April 05, 2012 08:15 PM (ZtkPH)

8 Oh good grief. I didn't realize the last chapter had been posted. I think he just elevated to class-AAA. That was... awful.

Spoiler for the end:

Posted by: ubu at April 05, 2012 10:34 PM (GfCSm)

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Kore wa Zombie desu ka take 2 -- ep 1

In a word? "Disappointing". Before watching it, I went back and rewatched eps 9-11 of the first series. (Ep 12 doesn't exist. Just wanted to let you know. There is no ep 12.)

And then I watched the first ep of the new series, and... well... it was disappointing.

more...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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April 04, 2012

Waiting for fansubs (snore)

Crunchyroll is in no hurry to admit which shows they're running this season. Five or six remaining to be identified.

Amongst the shows I want to watch, Crunchyroll so far has admitted to Upotte, Sengoku Collection, and the Saki sequel.

They don't seem to be carrying Medaka Box or the Zombie sequel, since today was broadcast day for the first episodes of both of those. Raws for both of those are out, but that does me no good. (And there's something that looks like a 480p with sub of Medaka Box, but I'll pass.)

So all I can do is sit, and wait, and check the listings every couple of hours. snore...

"Gainaxing" is a term-of-art in fandom, of course. Medaka Box is coming from Gainax itself, and Medaka is generously top heavy. Think she'll be Gainaxing? Will Gainax live up to its own reputation? I suppose I could download a raw just to see, but I'm not really that desperate for cheap thrills.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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April 03, 2012

Natural hazards

There's no place on this planet that's absolutely safe. No matter where you are, catastrophe awaits you -- eventually, in some form. Everywhere I've ever lived that's been the case, certainly.

In Massachusetts the big thing was huge blizzards. I got really tired of people telling me about the "Blizzard of '78" when I first moved there (early 1980's), but the reputation was deserved. It got so bad that people abandoned their cars on 128 and walked out. Once the snow melted it took a couple of days to clear all the cars out of the way so the highway could be used again.

I also lived for a few years in San Diego. You'd think the big thing there would be earthquakes, but not so much. San Diego isn't on the San Andreas, and anyway big earthquakes don't happen all that often. Yeah, we had some pretty interesting shakes, but I never saw any damage. No, the big thing I worried about there was wild fires. A couple of years after I moved away, there was a huge one that threatened the entire San Diego area. One part of the fire got within a mile of the place I used to live, and that area was evacuated.

Here in the Willamette valley, one of the big hazards is flooding. It doesn't snow here all that often, but once in a while we get quite a lot of snow, two or three feet. The danger in that case is a snap thaw, and that's happened twice in my life. Once was December 1964, and it's come down in local folklore as the "Christmas Flood". Another was when I was in college. At the time I lived in a small trailer house, and the trailer court was just south of Corvallis, right on the edge of the Mary's River. And my second year of college, we got a lot of snow and then there was a snap thaw. The Willamette and Mary's Rivers went out of their banks. Highway 99W was 2 feet deep in water, and my trailer court got flooded.

Some of the trailers got pretty seriously wrecked, though nothing got carried away. I found out that by sheer luck my own trailer was on the highest spot in the court, and in fact maybe the highest spot for a mile around, not counting the raised railroad track. There was maybe four inches of water on the ground below me, but it would have had to rise another two feet to get inside.

Of course, we also have to worry about the odd volcano blowing up, but that doesn't happen very often, and there's plenty of warning before it does. Still, that's pretty exciting when it happens. And about the only danger here from that is ash falls.

Up in Tacoma that's a nontrivial concern. They're NW of Mount Rainier, the biggest mountain in the Cascade Range, and one of the great mountains of the world. Like all the biggest mountains here, Rainier is a stratovolcano and it is not extinct. It doesn't erupt very often, but it can erupt. Next time Rainier wakes up, and it will eventually, it's gonna melt a major glacier and send a titanic mud flow down the Puyallup River valley, and a large part of Tacoma is going to be history. The whole area is set up with warning sirens, and they occasionally do evacuation drills.

It's easy to think, "Why do those people live in that awful dangerous place?" when some sort of disaster happens elsewhere, but that thought is bogus. Everywhere is a dangerous place. It's just that the dangers take different forms.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:58 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
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1 Yep. Where I am in Sydney, I had nothing to worry about in the recent floods, earthquakes are almost unknown, and storms are unlikely to do more than break some windows and dislodge a few roof tiles. And the local volcano has been extinct so long that even the "blue metal" quarry dug out of it has been abandoned.

Bushfires, though, are a real danger.

Plus of course this is Australia, where every living thing wants to kill you and wear you as a hat.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 03, 2012 10:37 PM (PiXy!)

2 We had very major flooding in 1953 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_flood_of_1953), but now we probably have the best flood protection in the world.

Nothing major has happened in terms of natural disasters since I was born though.

Posted by: Jordi Vermeulen at April 03, 2012 11:45 PM (AJZdn)

3 Tornadoes and snowstorms are the main fears here at Pond Central, and neither are particularly worrisome. Duckford proper hasn't been hit by a twister directly in... maybe ever, though the "suburbs" have, including one the week of Thanksgiving a couple years back.

We usually get one big snowfall a year, but it's never anything TERRIBLE... 16" is a lot of snow, but it's still navigable... and that's the heaviest fall we've had since 1982.

It's no Minnesota, that's for sure.

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 04, 2012 04:51 AM (AzTWp)

4 Down here in Florida, of course, the Big Threat is hurricanes, but at least hurricanes are polite enough to give plenty of warning of their arrival (thanks to today's technology). If you get caught in a hurricane, it's pretty much your fault. Tornados are pretty tame down here compared to some places I've lived (Ohio), but I still find them more worrisome simply because of their unpredictability.

Posted by: Dave Young at April 04, 2012 08:23 AM (gyQY/)

5 Up here in Maryland, hmm. . . I don't think we really have any singular natural disaster type. Flooding sometimes happens along rivers and shorelines, but not that often. Storms are a problem, though mostly along the coast. We get tornadoes.

The big worry is that a major hurricane will head right up the Chesapeake, which would be a catastrophe, but its pretty rare.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 04, 2012 09:03 AM (3GCAl)

Hmm, I thought if you live in the NW close to the coast you were also in danger of giant tsunamis.

I live in Austin, TX and the we're too far south for tornadoes and blizzards, too far inland for hurricanes, no volcanos anywhere closeand the local fault is inactive.The most serious threat here is allergies.

Posted by: TBlakely at April 04, 2012 09:21 AM (FrffM)

7 At this time of year, I remember that I'm east of Greensburg, west of Andover, south of Hesston, north of Moore (Oklahoma) and within an easy drive of Udall. So far I've been lucky. About 10 years ago there was an F4 10 miles due south of me heading due north. It swerved before it got much closer, but not before toppling a friend's old tree onto her roof.

Posted by: Don at April 04, 2012 09:30 AM (M0Ixe)

There are unusual threats everywhere. You don't think of Oregon as being the target of cyclones, but we got one in 1962.

My family was living in a trailer house on a lot we bought, while we built a house there. My dad designed the house, and he built it, evenings and weekends and vacations. My grandfather (a building foreman) came up all the time and helped, and sometimes other family friends would show up and work. My older brother helped a lot, and I helped as much as a 3rd grader can, which wasn't much.

We had the frame up, and it was all covered with plywood, but none of the internal partitions were in place yet. Then that storm hit. It picked up the roof and carried it about 75 feet and then dropped it on the ground.

It took us weeks to recover. We had to tear it all apart again, salvage as much of the lumber as we could, and buy replacements for all that was wrecked, and then put it all up again.

The Columbus Day Storm was a major disaster for this part of the country, mostly because such storms are incredibly rare. It's about like having a hurricane hitting Ireland -- it just doesn't happen. Except that in extremely freakish circumstances it can.

It took months before everything was back to normal. The phone company had crews in from most of the western half of the US restringing wire, and the power companies did the same.

There are places where you expect certain kinds of disasters. When you think Earthquake, you probably think California. But there's a huge fault in Missouri which has gone off in recorded history, and will again. When I think volcanoes, I think here, or Hawaii, or Iceland, or Japan. I don't think Wyoming. But the Yellowstone Caldera is a volcano which has explosive eruptions that make all those others look tiny. It doesn't go off very often (I think the period was 600,000 years) but it's due pretty soon, and when it happens it's going to devastate a large part of North America.

When I moved to Boston, I didn't expect hurricanes. But there were two while I lived there.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 04, 2012 10:18 AM (+rSRq)

9 In the Philly area, we have a wide variety of rare possible natural disasters. The most common is probably a Hurricane (or at least the remnants of one). Back in 99 (or 2000), my appartment complex was evacuated because of massive flooding from Hurricane Floyd. The hurricane itself wasn't really dangerous, but my apartment was in a weird location that flooded easily. I stayed at a friend's house that night, and when I came back the next morning there were cars that had floated away, and some that had landed on top of each other. First floor apartments were demolished.

We get the occasional tornado (nothing excessive) and we even had an earthquake last year (it was the damnedest thing... we only got a small bit of it, and it only lasted a couple seconds - no one realized what it was until it was over).

Posted by: Mark at April 04, 2012 12:01 PM (aUPJJ)

10 When I was in my early teens (and much thinner) I was at a local fair ground when a tornado passed just overhead. It took the top car off the Ferris wheel, which (thanks to the warning siren) they had time to shutdown and evacuate. The car was found the next morning a half mile away.

The tent I was in collapsed, so I foolishly took off running towards another tent a hundred yards away. The wind caught me me in mid-stride and my next foot did not touch ground. Luckily, I was grabbed by a very large man who was less aerodynamic than me, and he kept me grounded until the wind subsided.

Posted by: Siergen at April 04, 2012 02:26 PM (3/gGt)

Watching Mt. St. Helens erupt was spectacular, and awe-inspiring, but it wasn't particularly scary. The wind was blowing away from us, so we could clearly see the ash cloud which we didn't get any of.

Going through a 7.2 earthquake in San Diego one morning was interesting, but didn't really terrify me much. The epicenter was more than a hundred miles away, so my chandelier and venetian blinds swayed back and forth a lot, but nothing got broken. What was strangest about that one was how long it lasted. It was something like 3 minutes. But the ground motion was a slow sine wave, maybe 3-4 seconds period.

I think I was too young to really understand how scary the Columbus Day Storm really was, even during the time when we walked through it to go to the house next door. After our house blew down, my parents began to worry that the wind might topple our trailer, so we bailed out. My older brother walked alone. My dad carried my younger sister. I walked next to my mom, who held onto my hand very strongly, to the point where it almost hurt.

The flood in Corvallis had me a bit worried for a while, but that's really all it amounted to.

I haven't been through a natural disaster which outright terrified me. In fact, I don't think I've ever been in a situation where I was genuinely terrified. And I guess I'm lucky for that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 04, 2012 02:40 PM (+rSRq)

12 I never was in a natural disaster period, but my life was in danger from the street crime a few times. The only weather hazard that Central Russia offers is freezing, which is easy to control. Just pile things up and keep to shelter.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 04, 2012 03:10 PM (5OBKC)

13 I've never been through one that terrified me, but there was this storm a while back that kept me kind of worried for a few days....

Posted by: ubu at April 04, 2012 03:23 PM (GfCSm)

Yeah, Ubu, but there was a special reason why.

Pete, I thought you were from St. Petersburg. Am I remembering wrong? (Or did you serve in central Russia when you were in the army?)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 04, 2012 06:36 PM (+rSRq)

15 My father's side of the family is from St.Petersburg and I spent months at a time there. My mother is from Irkutsk. But we lived in Moscow region.

St.Petersburg is famous for floods, and they eventually built a giant dam going across the Bay of Finland that protects the city. I never was there when it flooded.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 04, 2012 06:58 PM (5OBKC)

16 During the Xenia tornado in Ohio, my sister and I (we were both in grade school) tried to make a shelter inside our house using giant tinkertoys.

Posted by: muon at April 05, 2012 03:26 AM (JXm2R)

17 I used to live (probably) within a few miles of Don. Tornadoes were the scary du jour at this time of the year. My best friend's house at the time was next to the Andover trailer park, and standing on his roof the day after that horrific tornado was... memorable. Until then, I never realized the main threat of the storm was the soup of 200MPH shrapnel flying everywhere.

I will note that the tornado you see is not nearly as scary* as the one which the news says is right on top of you, and you cannot see anything. (*unless it is heading toward you, of course).

Now I live in Colorado, a few miles NW of Denver (in Broomfield, if anyone cares). Things seem pretty calm here, although we are still ostensibly at risk of tornadoes.

Posted by: dkallen99 at April 05, 2012 08:10 AM (2lHZP)

I've lived my whole life in ND/MN.

When I was a kid, we went camping, and lightning struck a power pole near our campsite. Everything looked white for a couple seconds, and when I started thinking again, I was standing a good 10 feet from where I (thought I) was when the bolt hit.

Attended UND; in 5 years the university closed up shop 10 days, 5 for "there's too dang much snow" and 5 for "the windchill is too low to let students walk around outdoors".

Then the Red River of the North flood in 1997 leveled the whole town (whole region, really... the normally-40-yards wide river was covering 10-20 miles since the Red River "valley" is flat. Ruler-flat. Tsundere-imouto-flat.)

Moved to Minneapolis after college that year, and within a year had a tornado rip the shingles off my apartment building and the whole roof off the adjacent one.

I'm hoping that's enough disasters for one lifetime...

Posted by: Mikeski at April 05, 2012 10:38 AM (SWgny)

19 Steven, not denying that if it had been possible, we'd have evacuated, but remember, we weren't certain how the storm surge would go, and the windspeeds were right around the point where roofs start coming off and garage doors get punched in. And a lot of that happened.

I still wish I'd gone outside and looked up when the eye passed over, but whomever said the winds are calm in an eye meant "relatively."

Posted by: ubu at April 05, 2012 02:54 PM (GfCSm)

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Flying Car

This is what Pete wants for Christmas.

UPDATE: Well, this post has become about the Dallas tornados, and so be it. This post from a local TV station seems to be getting updated regularly.

Arlington TX reports 7 injured and 150 homes damaged. So far no fatalities reported, which is certainly a blessing.

There's a picture in that post of a hailstone the size of a baseball. If one of those hit you, it would really hurt! (If it hit your head, it might well kill you.)

/images/05063.jpg

Oh, and Avatar, please report in!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:19 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
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1 Specifications are amazing, only 970 lbs empty weight despite having 2 engines.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 03, 2012 08:39 AM (5OBKC)

2 It is at best, a novelty vehicle. Consider that you cannot afford to let it get in a vehicle accident on the highway. Not even the slightest bump.

Posted by: ubu at April 03, 2012 12:17 PM (GfCSm)

3 Here's a man who truly doesn't understand the Rule of Cool.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 03:00 PM (+rSRq)

4 Flying cars. How quaint.

FLYIN TRUKKS IZ AWSUM!!!

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 03, 2012 03:15 PM (AzTWp)

5 That's not really a laughing matter.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 03:55 PM (+rSRq)

6 Avatar, are you OK?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 03:55 PM (+rSRq)

7 The mee.nu data center is in Dallas, isn't it? Sure hope Pixy keeps off-site backups!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 04:08 PM (+rSRq)

8 Based on the reports, the worst tornadoes concentrated on the south side of Dallas, while some also hit around Arlington and due east of Dallas itself. IIRC, Avatar is further north, up near Dr. Heinous, whom I just talked to, and he didn't even realize the weather was that bad until the sirens went off.

Posted by: ubu at April 03, 2012 04:44 PM (GfCSm)

9 Oh, and I prefer my "rule of cool" to be in fiction. In real life, the "rule of practical" has a nasty way of trumping the really, really cool stuff. Which may be why we watch anime...ya think?

At least until science gives us flying magical catgirls.

Posted by: ubu at April 03, 2012 04:47 PM (GfCSm)

10 There haven't been any deaths reported so far, which is testimony to the effectiveness of the early warning system. Obviously that could change, but if there was carnage we'd be hearing about it already.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 04:54 PM (+rSRq)

11 Holy carp.
Do have off-site backups, but they're not up to date. Fixing that NOW.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 03, 2012 05:09 PM (PiXy!)

12 Ubu, you keep your head down. Looks like that storm front is going to hit Houston tomorrow.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 06:17 PM (+rSRq)

13 That's not really a laughing matter.

It's a case of laugh or sob uncontrollably, Steven.

(I'll also admit that I didn't realize just how bad the damage was...)

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 03, 2012 06:55 PM (AzTWp)

14 I'm okay, wasn't bad here. Sorry, had an endoscopy this morning, got back home right before the storm hit. Heard the siren going off... had some red on the weather radar but no hail and no damage. Got some excellent nap action going...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 03, 2012 07:06 PM (GJQTS)

15 Well, I'm glad you're OK!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 07:42 PM (+rSRq)

16 Avatar, if you can sleep through a tornado, I think you've taken napping a whole new level...

Posted by: Siergen at April 03, 2012 07:54 PM (3/gGt)

17 Well, when I woke up, there were some short union guys outside wanting to ask me about some kind of snack food. And everything's in color suddenly...

I did get a nice pair of slippers out of it, though.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 03, 2012 08:29 PM (GJQTS)

18 I have slept through a couple of hurricanes, but I've never been through a tornado. (And if I never do, that'll be just fine with me.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 03, 2012 09:29 PM (+rSRq)

19 Hmm. Looks like it will get here around 5-6am, at which point I'm likely to be asleep. Maybe I should invest in one of these. Sadly, not even Amazon could get it here in time, which is why we still have brick-and-mortar options. Not that Frys is open at this time of night either.

About 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to see first-hand what an F5 could do (after the fact). The only way we could tell where the homes were supposed to be as opposed to where the streets were, was that the streets were a little lower. Everything had been razed down to the slab--so much for "an interior room." Half a subdivision was turned into sticks and bricks - but not one person was killed.

Posted by: ubu at April 03, 2012 10:06 PM (GfCSm)

20 Link was supposed to be to weather alert radios at Amazon. Too tired to figure out what went wrong.

Posted by: ubu at April 03, 2012 10:08 PM (GfCSm)

21 I have an aviation handheld, Vertex VXA-220, which includes a bonus weather band. However, New Mexico essentially has no natural hazards. Also, there is no alert-trigger function, so I cannot keep it on all the time.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 04, 2012 06:13 AM (5OBKC)

22 I'm in north Dallas. I didn't even know the weather was running amuck yesterday until I heard the sirens. Of course, I was inside all day, at work on my computer, with the window shades drawn (the glare on my monitor irritates me).

In fact, if it hadn't been for the sirens,and people calling to see if I was ok I never would have known anything was happening.

Posted by: DrHeinous at April 04, 2012 10:48 AM (/Y+Yb)

23 It was lively here. Just as lively as the tornadoes that tore things up about five years ago. Granted, I'm on southwest Fort Wort side of things. The advantage there is that most storms form on the west side of the metroplex and get nasty about the middle/east side of Fort Worth and into Arlington/Dallas. Doesn't mean I don't get nervous when the sirens start going off. Survived a tornado as a young kid in South Dakota... never quite liked them since. (Friends needled me about not wanting to watch the movie Twister...)

Posted by: Tom Tjarks at April 04, 2012 03:14 PM (T5fuR)

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April 02, 2012

Times have changed

Forbes sez:

According to Billboard, MDNA had sales of 56,000â€“ very low for a number 1 album debut. In contrast, Bruce Springsteenâ€˜s Wrecking Ball hit number 1 two weeks ago with 74,000 copies. Here in the US, Billboard is reportingâ€“just as I did last weekâ€“that Lionel Richie is ahead of Madonna in the race for number 1. Those final numbers won't be in until late Tuesday. But Richie is substantially ahead of Madonna on ITunes and amazon.com, the two chief sellers of music at this point.

The hell you say. Amazon and iTunes are now the main sellers of music? When did that crossover occur?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 10:40 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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1 Madonna? Lionel Richie?? Bruce Springsteen??? What decade is this?!

Posted by: benzeen at April 03, 2012 12:39 AM (R9i5E)

2 Let's see - Wasteland, Leisure Suit Larry, SimCity - yep, it's the eighties again, only with faster computers and thinner monitors.

Be thankful. It could have been the seventies.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 03, 2012 03:12 AM (PiXy!)

3 Given gas prices, unemployment, and inflation (the way it used to be calculated), I rather thought it was.

Posted by: ubu at April 03, 2012 03:24 AM (GfCSm)

4 I only buy at Amazon, because it's DRM-free. Experimented with iTunes a few years ago when I received an iPod in present, and figured it wasn't for me.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 03, 2012 04:21 AM (5OBKC)

5 I think Apple began out-selling Columbia records a three or four years ago.

Don't know the date for sure.

Posted by: karrde at April 03, 2012 04:26 AM (Q1AmW)

6 It's not really surprising. For as ubiquitous as music is in our society & culture, the actual industry is tiny. Buying up every major catalog/company would cost between 4 to 5 billion. There's a reason people have thrown the idea out for Google or Apple to just buy the entire music industry.

There's also a reason why a shift to Live music is where the artists make their money. Records are just for promotion.

Posted by: sqa at April 03, 2012 05:13 AM (HclIG)

7 Interestingly, I'm told that radio is still what makes money for the songwriters behind most pop musicians. Their royalty for broadcasts earns them more than their live performance royalty.

Posted by: Boviate at April 03, 2012 05:31 AM (63JPq)

8 Anyone who's running an Internet radio can tell that royalties are pretty heavy.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 03, 2012 06:52 AM (5OBKC)

9 From news that was posted last week, the music industry has actually experienced its first annual increase in revenue in 2011 after seven years of decline, because of the growth in online music sales, both full albums and single song downloads. Last year also saw the first time annual CD sales increased since 2004.

Posted by: cxt217 at April 03, 2012 11:34 AM (P0CUo)

10 Now that it's in electronic format, and I can do what I want with it, listen to it where and on what I want to, I am buying music again for the first time in about ten years. Usually from Amazon. I think the last CD I bought was ELO's Greatest Hits. Early 00's?

Not only can the convenience not be beaten, the selection is insane. Yesterday I decided for some reason that I wanted to hear the main theme to a 1968 film again. 19 million songs. "Huh, well maybe they've got mine, then," I thought. Not only did they have it, they had multiple versions of it.

Beat that with a stick, will ya? Or in a store. I can't recall the last time I even saw a shop that had CD's as a major component of the floor space.

Posted by: ubu at April 03, 2012 11:58 AM (GfCSm)

11 Best Buy still does. In unrelated news, Best Buy is in serious trouble.

Posted by: Boviate at April 03, 2012 04:03 PM (63JPq)

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Spring 2012, the quaternary -- THAT

And... coming in at fourth place is THAT.

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The Newspaper Mandate

Another Hot Air Green Room post.

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Today is...

Today is the 25th anniversary of the first release of OS/2, I'm told.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 02:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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April 01, 2012

Dog Days season 2

The next season of Dog Days will begin in July.

But the "trailer" is made up entirely of clips from the first season. There's no new material in it at all.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:23 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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