After two preliminary rounds, Don has posted the 11 finalists in his "Scariest Girl in Anime" poll. One of my nominees made it to the final round, but I'm not going to vote for her. There's someone else far more terrifying, and she gets my vote.
After a lull, DiGiKerot is back to doing cartoons about anime again, and they're as good as always.
I just wanted to say that I particularly liked this one.
And this one is deserves some comment. The comparison of Dola from Castle in the Sky to the girl and her two minions in Fractale is more apt than I think he realized when he drew it. As of the second episode of Fractale I think it's pretty certain that the girl is a good-bad-guy, who starts as a clownish opponent but eventually becomes an ally, just as Miyazaki's Dola did.
Given that the art style in Fractale seems to be deliberately similar to Miyazaki's visuals, I wonder if Enri (that girl's name, I'm pretty sure) is a deliberate subversion of Dola? Note that they both use dirigibles to get around, for example.
Hmmm... and the people on the ground in Fractale are ruled by a super-science which is permanently aloft, which was once the case in CITS...
Actually, I'm a little bit afraid to watch the third episode. I've seen some hints about something in that episode, and if they're true, then this is not my kind of series.
Which is to say, that Mami gets killed by a witch in the third episode.
I suppose I could read someone else's summary of the episode to find out for sure.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 21, 2011 07:08 PM (+rSRq)
2
Yeah, I was right. I think I'll drop this. I really don't do well with horror shows.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 21, 2011 07:20 PM (+rSRq)
3
I'm giving it another episode or two, on the thought that this is essentially a demonstration of the real stakes at play. It's been very hard for me to take Kyubey seriously, to say nothing of the animation generally. Now, though, I have hopes there's a story worth sticking around for.
Tell you what, though: If I don't see some evidence soon that males in this universe have testicles that generate enough testosterone to allow them to declare how they want their eggs cooked, I'll probably bail no matter what.
Posted by: refugee at January 21, 2011 08:00 PM (auErC)
4
Remember when I said that the author, Gen Urobuchis, best known works were Lovecraftian horror?
Well, he just admitted that his claims that Madoka was going to be a nice, happy show were his attempt to mitigate the lack of shock value he felt his involvement would lead to (he didn't actually want his name in the promotional material, but it was leaked before hand). You're probably doing yourself a favour by dropping it now, because whilst I'm sure that Wishes are a great way to counter certain recent plot developments, I can't imagine it's going to end nicely.
Posted by: DiGiKerot at January 22, 2011 12:39 AM (C/9CU)
5
Well, if you've truly dropped it then I can remark
that at about the 2/3 point of the episode, I went, "oh s***, Mami just activated the Death Flag!"
No, this series is not fluff.
Posted by: ubu at January 22, 2011 02:40 PM (GfCSm)
PC to Mac, a progress report
No, not me. (Good Lord.) Jack Dunphy (a pseudonym for a cop in LA) decided to buy a Mac a few months ago. Here's his most recent progress report.
1
Just for a sec, the image of you wearing hip shorts, drinking organic
coffee and pontificating on the profoundness of FMA came to my mind.
Just for a sec.
Out of curiosity, have you ever tried the new macs? (I get the feeling you are familiar with the old Apple ones)
Posted by: Jaked at January 16, 2011 10:01 PM (501kt)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 16, 2011 11:40 PM (+rSRq)
3
Based on this post, I wasn't prepared for his verdict. It would have been a drink-spitting moment, so I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything.
Posted by: RickC at January 17, 2011 11:45 AM (v6IqI)
4
The funny thing about that thread was how quickly it seemed to turn into a Vista-bashing thread.
I used Vista for about a year (I have since given that computer to someone else) and I never really had any problems with it.
As for the current state of MacOS X: If I didn't have parallels installed and couldn't tap into the whole debian ecosystem, I'd probably be a lot more frustrated. There's just too much stuff in the "Macports" project that _almost_ works but doesn't. And the new app store is apparently carefully, exquisitely, and precisely nerfed to keep from being a for-pay equivalent of the debian app repositories.
Posted by: pgfraering at January 19, 2011 02:50 PM (1Bu4F)
5
Oh, and that reminds me of a question I've been meaning to ask our gracious host.
Do you ever use any virtual-machine apps, such as parallels or vmware or anything like that?
Posted by: pgfraering at January 19, 2011 02:50 PM (1Bu4F)
No, never have, except "DOSBox", which creates a virtual 8086 for old DOS games to run in.
It's a peculiar question. Why would you wonder about that?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 19, 2011 02:53 PM (+rSRq)
7
Because I'm interested in comparing notes with someone who's been using that sort of thing in Windows, and I thought you might be using them. (I hear it's useful for running old programs, or for security purposes, i.e. running potentially malicious code in a sandbox environment).
Posted by: pgfraering at January 19, 2011 04:52 PM (1Bu4F)
It doesn't come with Win7 Home Premium, the version of Win7 which came on Alcyone. I just checked, and an upgrade to Win7 pro is $90 and an upgrade to Win7 ultimate is $150, and that's what I'd have to do to get that feature.
And I really have no need for it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at January 19, 2011 05:14 PM (+rSRq)
When I was a kid, squirt guns and cap guns were made to look fairly realistic. It became something of a problem, in that some bank robberies were committed using realistic toys. And there was also the case of "The Assassination Game", something of a fad on college campuses in the 1980's IIRC. A student playing the game was stalking a dorm hallway carrying a toy assault rifle. A college security guard shot him dead.
So the toy companies began to make all their toy guns brightly colored, and that's why they're all now bright pink or bright green.
It seems that the Long Island statute in question, which banned ownership of real guns which were "non-traditionally colored". I wonder whether the motivation was to avoid a return to the ambiguity of my childhood. If real guns can be pink or green, then in a fighting situation where you have to make snap decisions, you (or the cops) can no longer rely on the fact that the whatever in his hands is colored green or pink to determine if he's got the capability of shooting you.
Fact remains, that kind of control really shouldn't be applied at the local level. Arguably it shouldn't be applied at any level, but turning the entire nation into a bewildering array of different rules which kick in at arbitrary unmarked boundaries certainly isn't a good thing.
James says that Ohio's Supreme Court recently decided that localities in that state don't have the legal authority to enact local ordnances relating to private ownership of guns or when/how/where they can be carried by those with legal concealed-carry licenses. (Such as James himself.)
Progress, folks. Progress! But lots left to do. We'll know we've really won when we start getting decisions like this in California. And that ain't gonna be any time soon.
Geek cheesecake
I do believe we're corrupting James. He's got some cheesecake from Japan posted. We'll have him watching Asobi ni Iku Yo in no time! (Naked girls firing automatic weapons -- what more could anyone ask for?)
