1
Yeah, next week definitely looks like it will reveal some of the secrets that have been lurking since the first episode. I also have my own theory about
mysterious hooded figure at the bar. Could it be that the rumors of his death were slightly exaggerated?And, as always, the next episode is too far away...
Posted by: Siergen at May 19, 2012 10:28 AM (PuIGa)
They used the plural for "Kato", right? That implies more than one. Now, this could be Ririka, but she doesn't seem too worried about her own safety.
So, the idea is that the hooded figure is either Gozaemon or, what I'd actually guess, Marika's uncle. And if it was an uncle, if Marika died, he'd suddenly be pressed into service, right? Lots of interesting possibilities.
The council itself looked like it had military and government officials among them. That'd make a lot of sense. And maintaining the power & utility of a Pirate ship that bases there would be really important. So the truce, while always a very logical thing, finally gets confirmation of why it's operating. It's nice all of the speculation paid off.
Oh, Kane was riffing as "Coach" from Gunbuster. You kind of had to expect that send up to eventually happen in a space series like this.
On the episode as a whole:
Obviously, they're setting up Ai-chan to be a major player in the final story arc. She's still something of our Chiaki stand in, as someone at school with a level of skills that Marika can interact with. Yet, she's quite enjoyable. Seems both realistic and determined to do what she likes. Can appreciate that in an anime character.
Yeah, our "fan service" was Kane, ripped, in a speedo. The body shots of the girls were more revealing in the space suits. Which just kind of goes with this series and doesn't bother me in the least. Oh, and poor Lynn & company, haha. (That was another Gunbuster reference, btw. Running laps was used as punishment by Coach there.)
Plus, a wonderful cameo by Show. He's always trying to steal the show.
The last thing was a little moment at the end. After Kane had finished his whole run as "Coach", Marika corrected him and forced him back into addressing her as Captain. Really subtle moment, but one of those details that is actually really important. I liked that they were mindful of that.
Further thoughts on the "Fairy Godmothers":
It strikes me that the Truce has as much to do with future influence. Since Marika will have a considerable amount of local power when she goes full time, who she aligns with can have major repercussions. If she sides against a set of companies/organizations, she can do significant damage to them.
That would explain a lot of what is going on. And why so many people suddenly showed up in episode 1. They all wanted influence with Marika, but they were likely going to end up fighting each other more than anything else, so they made a mutual decision to let her get up to speed and just save the bidding war for later.
That and Ririka kept a not terribly small arsenal and could make their lives hell if she decided to go against whoever. At the end of the day, she's still Blaster Ririka and a notable pirate in her own right.
Posted by: sqa at May 19, 2012 12:04 PM (fYnLL)
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If anything, the deferred conflict is even more stark now.
With the Bentenmaru now having the Silent Whisper, it has even more varied and more valuable abilities.
It's easy to see why various factions would want to be on Marika's good side. It isn't so obvious why any of them would want to kill her, unless it's because they fear she might align with their enemies. Bentenmaru's assets are potentially also a threat.
As privateers, and de facto mercenaries, Bentenmaru is a loose cannon.
Marika has already made some serious friends in high places, and I don't just mean Gruier and Grunhilde. The government of Sea of the Morningstar has already done well by her in a lot of ways.
But she's also already made some blood enemies. Taking down Robert Dolittle probably seriously inconveniences some people not to mention frightening them, and maybe that's the story with "The Bisque Company". I hope we find out more about that soon.
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About the truce:
I think I understand it now. If the conflict was among different groups jockeying for future influence with her, then they must have realized that they were potentially killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Too much violence and/or intrigue too early might well have convinced her she wanted nothing to do with it, and in that case the game would be over.
The original truce term was until she got her Letter of Marque, but now it seems to have been extended to when she graduates from high school. And I think it's for the same reason: by that point she's going to be firmly committed to the job. Before then, she still might decide to chuck the whole thing.
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sqa, in the first episode Misa said that only the
previous captain's "direct descendent" could become the new captain, so if the new face is Marika's uncle, he sounds as though he couldn't become captain.
By the way, I just rewatched the first episode, and there's a lot going on that I missed at first. Little glances and facial expressions that hint at things only revealed later. It also seemed that
the way that Misa and Marika's mother greeted each other was some sort of pass-code. I also got the impression that they were sharing some secret that Kane was not in on.
Posted by: Siergen at May 19, 2012 01:44 PM (PuIGa)
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I don't buy the idea of
an uncle. It's way too late to be introducing previously-unknown relatives. It's also lousy storytelling, and this author seems to be better than that.
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I've always thought the
"food poisoning" bit was a little hard to -- ahem -- swallow. Also, as much as I like Marika's ability to solve problems peacefully, if she's going to continue on as a pirate, at some point she's going to come up against the necessity of using genuinely "deadly" force. I've wondered if they would deal with that in this show, given the fairly light tone it's maintained. But it looks like we might see some of that play out next week.
Posted by: Dave Young at May 19, 2012 03:30 PM (ZAk0Z)
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Dave, nice choice of words there. I only wish I'd thought of it first. As to the use of
deadly force, I've been wondering that myself. Marika seems to understand that her decisions could put her and her crew (and fellow students) into grave danger, but I don't think she has yet needed to "fire in anger". As I recall, it appeared that the ship that she "flashed" with the Odette's solar sails was left disabled, then driven off by the arrival of other ships.
I can't wait to see if she needs to face that, and if so, will it change her? Will she still be light-hearted and innocent afterwards, or will she become more her like mother?
Posted by: Siergen at May 19, 2012 03:51 PM (PuIGa)
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Based on the preview,
Marika may go into a killing rage next episode. Basically, someone will be shooting at one of her friends in an unarmed dinghy and Marika will be flying the Silent Whisper, which I assume has rapid fire lasers or some equivalent. The look on Marika's face in one clip was terrifying, and the voiceover suggested she might be in a killing mood.
I don't think a member of the yacht club is doing to die. And I suspect that Marika won't actually kill anyone herself. But she'll try, and then afterwards she's going to do a lot of thinking.
Which parallels Gruier's "I almost killed this baby!" moment, and I suspect Gruier is going to talk her through it, having already been there.
And so, in this episode, we meet the princess and prince. They send their doggy-girl maid to the bakery to get some bread:
Her name is Rouna and she's a dojikko. In fact, the other characters call her that after she stumbles and falls one time. But she's also very handy with knives -- in more ways than one.
She delivers a very special order, which has to be specially made, and she helps them prepare it, and it turns out she's very good in the kitchen. Afterwards, all five go to the castle to deliver it.
The princess seems nice enough, but the prince comes off as being a little dark, like maybe he's a villain. He's a bishie, so he has to be a bad guy, doesn't he?
At the very least he clearly has an agenda of some kind. (The kind of show this is, he probably isn't a bad guy and his agenda will probably eventually be revealed as being praiseworthy.)
The law on the island is that anything that come from the sea that isn't edible -- or alive -- has to be turned over to the castle to be evaluated. When Rick was washed ashore, the castle invoked that rule to take his armor and his sword. That's why he hasn't had them until now.
Seems that the castle has been getting robbed. Security there is very tight, with lots of soldiers patrolling, but the thief is way too good for them and they haven't caught him (her). They rather telegraph her identity; I guessed it immediately. Anyway, the prince talked Rick into helping. Rick is a master swordsman. The prince knew this from the stuff he was wearing when he washed ashore. The prince gave him his armor back, plus gave him a standard-issue sword.
Neris turns out to be a master archer. And even though she's clumsy, Rouna knows the castle and is extremely skilled throwing knives. So the three of them patrol the castle that night, and damned near catch the thief. She escapes just at the last moment, but Rick saw her clearly and knows who it is. (He kept it secret; next episode he's going to confront her.)
The fight scenes were pretty cool, and Rick really does seem to know his stuff. I suspect it will turn out that he's the best swordsman on the island, especially once he gets his own blade back. It's pretty clear that the prince thinks he is.
At the end our heroes got some sort of reward from the Prince, which we didn't get to see. Whatever it was, the girls liked it. My guess is that it's money and they'll be able to pay to get their oven repaired. Hank the Dwarf is in the next episode, and I bet they hire him to rebuild it.
UPDATE: The princess, on the other hand, is presenting a nicely calibrated zettai ryouiki, so obviously she's not a bad guy. Right?
I think I need to buy this. A rip of it came by and I took a look. The second BD is four episodes, 03-06. That covers the Lightning 11 arc, and I was curious about something. Spoilers below the fold.
1
DiGi said they fixed up iM@S in weird ways too. It seems like the thing they do. I remember that Rocket Girls were changed quite a bit as well.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 17, 2012 09:30 PM (5OBKC)
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Yeah, home release corrections like this aren't particularly uncommon these days - I mean, they actually spelt Materialise wrong in the first broadcast episode of My-ZHiME if my memory serves me correctly...
Posted by: DiGiKerot at May 17, 2012 10:01 PM (PTuw/)
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Another thing they did: I listened to some of the audio. Some parts of that sounds a lot cleaner. There were places in like ep 3 in the Odette II when they originally put a bit of reverb in, but on the BD they took that back out again.
4
I wonder if it's the result of feedback from the American translators, or just from Japanese fans nitpicking it on message boards?
Posted by: Boviate at May 18, 2012 11:19 AM (63JPq)
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We're not sure which systems on the enemy ship she was attacking, nor
how. If she was able to set the mobile phones in their pockets to
"vibrate", that screen display may in fact be spelled correctly...
Posted by: Siergen at May 18, 2012 05:45 PM (PuIGa)
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I knew someone would go there. I just knew it. Bleah.
I've been sitting here all day watching as I get huge numbers of refers from all over, to 8+ year old posts on USS Clueless. And the IP is always the same: 111.13.8.19
He crawled kuro5hin.org, and followed the few links there to me. He crawled janegalt.net. He crawled freerepublic.com. He crawled drweevil.org. johnquiggin.com. gnxp.com.
And he just found ai.mee.nu. I fear he's eventually going to crawl my server and hammer it into the ground.
So who is this wonderful person? A reverse DNS fails. APNIC says it belongs to China Mobile Communications Corporation. So is it a gutsy user with lots of money to pay for bandwidth? Or is it the government of China looking for things to block in the Great Firewall? Or maybe some native Chinese search engine's crawler.
Christ knows. I was seriously considering blocking him in my firewall, but if it's really a citizen in China, looking at conservative web sites, I don't really want to exclude him.
UPDATE: You know, you can hunt all through the APNIC web site and if you can find any indication of where in hell it's located, you're better than I am. Even the job listings don't say where they are.
I had to visit Wikipedia to find out that it's in Brisbane.
UPDATE: Our friend just found bojack.org and samizdata.net. Also perfidy.org. ashbrook.org.
It's running way to fast for it to be someone sitting at a browser. But it's not impossible that it's someone's personal computer running a massive crawler.
I think it's far more likely to be someone gathering information for a search engine, though. It doesn't seem like the government would use an IP from that block.
4
It's most likely just a spambot or fake site bot, looking for raw materials. These days spambots can generate seemingly intelligible spam posts according to content of the blog it's posting on; and fake sites with entirely copied content have been around for some time, generally used to affect search engine results.
Posted by: cuc at May 18, 2012 12:00 AM (AOjlv)
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And the majority of blog comment spam I see these days originated from China.
Posted by: cuc at May 18, 2012 12:01 AM (AOjlv)
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I've known page sucking/Mirroring programs that if not set up correctly will try to download the entire internet. They can be particularly annoying if they hit a sort of infinite loop (common with the CopperMine photo gallery) and really suck up your bandwidth allotment.
Posted by: Mauser at May 18, 2012 12:25 AM (cZPoz)
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I'd be interested to know if it's just getting the HTML, or if it's actually requesting the images as well. If it's ignoring the images, it's probably a search engine.
Posted by: David at May 18, 2012 08:12 AM (+yn5x)
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No, it isn't taking pictures. But that doesn't preclude it from being the Chinese government.
One time I decided to watch Mai HiME, and I think I got up to ep 7. But it just seemed too silly and strange, and somehow I never got back to it.
It had a lot of omake when it was released on BD. 28 of 'em. But they aren't fully animated. Mostly voices over still images, sometimes with camera motions. Tonight I went through them all. The vast majority of them are either fan service or angst, if not both. But there were a couple which were weird.
Presented without comment:
Even weirder is that Arika makes a cameo appearance in one of them:
Which has me confused. Mai HiME came out before Mai Otome. Were they in the planning stages for the latter when they were working on the BD release of the former? How could Arika Yumemiya show up, not to mention Mashiro Blan de Windbloom? (Also, how is Arika flying without her robe?)
As to the show itself, I have a feeling I'm not going to watch any more of it. It just doesn't appeal to me. I am vaguely curious about what the heck is going on, but not enough to invest the time to find out.
1
IIRC, unnamed Arika originally showed up in the closing scene of the final episode as a new student. Speculation at the time was that she'd be the protagonist of a direct sequel.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at May 16, 2012 08:52 PM (2XtN5)
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When Mai Hime came out, BluRays weren't common at all. It's a 2004 series, after all.
If the specials are BluRay-only, then they were made after both series. If they were on the DVDs, the DVDs weren't finished releasing when Mai Otome released. (There was only a 6 month gap)
Still, nothing quite beats the Black Lagoon omakes.
I haven't seen those. Right now my nominee for champion omakes is the ones from Fight Ippatsu Juuden-chan. Tremendously ecchi, but also very witty. The second one gave us tentacles. The fourth one gave us nude food. The fifth was a nude catfight. And the sixth? well, they pulled out the stops for that one.
I just found the first Black Lagoon omake on youtube and took a look at it. No thanks!
In case you want to see the NSFW Juuden-chan omakes, here are my posts about them:
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The problem with the Black Lagoon omakes is that I can't watch anything involving the vampire twins and really find it funny. Their arc set the standard for senseless violence and tragic brutality in anime.
Not to mention over the top. A loli who carries a BAR under her skirt?
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The omake features were on the original Japanese DVDs, one per episode.
That scene with Mai and Arika wasn't on the main My-HiME DVD release,
though - it was originally released on the My-HiME Fandisk DVD that was
put out alongside the last DVD volume of the show, by which point ZHiME
had already been announced.
Posted by: DiGiKerot at May 17, 2012 09:44 PM (PTuw/)
I don't understand what it was that they did to the algorithm that decides where to spend its allocation of uplink.
Back in the days of uTorrent 2.2, it would try to divide its bandwidth equally among a large number of recipients. My usual traffic when I wasn't downloading was to have maybe 15 uplinks active, and each of them was being sent maybe 14Kbytes per second.
What seems to happen now is that the scheduler picks one particular guy, taps him with a magic wand, and gives him nearly everything. As I write this, I have 139 torrents enabled and seeding. Five of them are active, and 95% of my bandwidth is going to one particular guy in the Netherlands who is grabbing Chu-bra. Nine other leeches on the other four torrents are getting about 2 KB/s each.
If it actually stayed that way, and saturated my uplink, it would still be fine. Over the whole swarmiverse it would even out. But it doesn't. Once the NL guy gets done, then uTorrent may wait as much as half an hour before finally finding someone else it thinks is worthy of being tapped with the wand. In the mean time, my uplink will be about 30 KB/s, with 170 KB/s going to waste.
It's really strange.
Ah! The guy in the NL is off my charts now, and some guy who is downloading Satoshi Urushihara is getting about 180 KB/s. At least he has better taste than the NL guy.
3
Maybe it's seeding to the swarms with the least overall bandwidth per leecher? A change in the bittorrent protocol? I wouldn't know. I'm still on 2.2.1 myself, as I didn't like what they changed when 3.0 came out.
If you really want to know, I suppose you could just read the changelogs of their releases.
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Interesting, every once in a while, I'm downloading a torrent at a moderate pace (alas, not hitting my bandwidth) and suddenly someone will turn on the firehose and I'll start getting a lot closer to 4 MBit.
(Other times I notice that I won't break 60K, and I just KNOW that's my ISP, who has figured out how to restrict torrents, but will allow Youtube to get through. It's very odd, Toggling the enable on UTP often changes things up enough to break through.)
Posted by: Mauser at May 15, 2012 11:16 PM (cZPoz)
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My understanding is that the protocol change was driven by a combination of more people having large upload bandwidth, and a desire to minimize exposure of who's seeding. If one "fairy godmother" seeder is sufficient to the needs of a client, then it makes sense to use that bandwidth, and let other potential seeders remain private. I believe the new algorithms also track how many hops there are between a seeder and client, and strives to minimize that, preferring to heavily load a local seeder, as opposed to lightly loading several distant seeders.
Before I get very far, I need to make sure I'm not doing something stupid.
How do I make sure that BakaBT knows that this instance of uTorrent is me? In other words, how do I log in?
I thought that if the browser was logged in when I downloaded the torrent file and started it, that would do it. But I'm not sure that's right. Is there something I have to do in uTorrent itself in order to be logged in to BakaBT?
UPDATE: This changeover has turned out to be a lot less painful than I thought it was going to be. I figured it was going to take days to achieve what I've already done.
Merope is an amazing value for just $450.
UPDATE: OK, I have about two thirds of my previous torrents running, and I'm going to let the others go.
uTorrent 3.1.3 is acting the way the earlier version of uTorrent 3 did when I tried it before. It's doing something odd in how it decides when and to whom to do uploading. uTorrent 2.2.1 routinely saturated my uplink. I had an uplink cap of 200 KB/s and that's what it used.
But uTorrent 3.1.3 doesn't do that. It's also got a cap of 200 KB/s but it's been averaging less than half that, and I can't figure out why. I've tried messing with the various setup options but I can't find anything that makes any difference.
UPDATE: Maybe one of the things I did made a difference, because now it's saturating the uplink bandwidth.
3
The originating .torrent has your user ID for the tracker in it. The tracker registers your "cookies" for your account information.
It works this way for truly private trackers, BakaBT just uses it for is registered users. (Though you actually connect to a different part of the tracker. Non-registered torrents work off a set of sub-trackers that deactivate every month)
UPDATE: I need for Firefox to not slide out a "download complete" notification at the lower left corner of the screen when I get a torrent file. How do I make it not do that?
UPDATE: uTorrent 313 only calculates the hash on one torrent at a time, and it only uses one CPU thread to do so. And it only uses about half of that one. I suspect it's limited by the rate that it can read the files from Deneb, which is where they're all stored.
But I can start a whole bunch of torrents, and it'll hash them in turn. Which is good enough; it means I don't have to babysit the thing and start each one only after the previous one is complete.
They made a bunch of changes to the UI. Again. I don't like how it looks. It may be possible to get the older version, but for the moment I'll live with it.
