I have a natural wake-sleep cycle of about 28 hours. Left to my own devices, I'll go to bed and wake up about four hours later every day. Which means that once a week I sync up with the rest of the world.
Obviously this means Pixy's ancestors evolved on a planet with a longer day/night cycle.
Explains a lot, doesn't it?
UPDATE: I wonder if Pixy can become a super-saiyajin?
Wonderduck's internet connection is down.
I just received an email from Wonderduck saying his internet connection went out Sunday morning, and hasn't been repaired yet. He isn't sure when it will get fixed, and the powers that be don't seem to be in any hurry to fix it.
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I seem to have some sporadic and intermittent interwebs right now. Kinda. It's dropped away twice whilst I've attempted to write this comment. I'm not saying it's back yet, but it's more than I've had.
No promises on if it'll be working tomorrow.
Posted by: Wonderduck at June 24, 2014 08:34 PM (4JrvP)
Chizumatic friend Ubu Roi has suffered a stroke. That's always a very bad thing, but it sounds like it isn't as bad as it could have been. Here's hoping for a full recovery!
He's awake, he knows who he is, he knows who we are, and he knows who Marika is. So there's hope.
PDB used to run a game store, and blogged about the more "interesting" clients he had. But that ended in August and now he's got an honest job. Because he doesn't feel comfortable blogging about his employer, posts have fallen off quite a lot.
But now he's got a new subject to cover, one that should be even more interesting than obnoxious-customers-at-a-video-store.
Attn Ubu Roi
Something has happened to your password stuff. I can't leave comments now. I'm told I'm not logged in, and when I tried to log in using the last password I was sent, it bounced. So I had it mail me a new one, and that one didn't work either.
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I'll email you a new password after a manual reset. But what I'm wondering is if it's just you... I've noticed a major drop-off in comments, and Brickmuppet had issues a while back also. I'm *really* getting annoyed with HM's e-mail folibles too.
Posted by: ubu at October 14, 2007 03:40 PM (u0M4H)
UPDATE: Man, the 3D episode sure is dark. People die, and there's blood, and body parts, and not a lot of laughs. Sheesh!
It looks like it is the beginning of a series, but of course there was never any more of it. I would guess it was a pilot and they decided against further funding.
I think I can understand why. Doing a road-story in 3D would be painful. You would completely overload your model makers and scene creators; there's simply no way you could turn out one episode per week. And as the story was presented, there would only be three continuing characters. You'd have to come up with models for major guest characters and crowd characters for each episode. It couldn't be done on that kind of schedule without a ridiculously large staff of 3D artists, and there's no way they could put together a team like that. The people just don't exist in the industry. Not yet, anyway.
As I was watching the anime, and even more when I was watching the 3D episode, I got flashes of Dai Mahou Touge, the black comedy in which the the world of bunny-rabbits and flowers of a magical girl is a thin veneer on top of a world of horrors and pain and suffering. We see at least a few hints of that in the Magical Play anime, and they don't make any bones of it in the 3D episode. Only they're not playing it for laughs. The 3D episode is only about two steps away from being a horror show.
Beckoning Chasm wrote to me the other day asking if I had a frame grab which included the standard "sigh" cloud-puff. I said I'd keep my eye open and post one if I saw it.
As to the show story, it's a spoiler:
Padudu gets lost in a forest and falls in a river. Since her cloak is a magical fish, she isn't in danger of drowning, but the river takes her into a town. It's not a very nice place. The mayor, a weird fat woman named "Coffee", feels some sort of gratitude or obligation to Purilun, the queen of the realm, and because of that thinks she need to kill all magical girls, such as Padudu. So Padudu ends up in jail, and is eventually condemned to death by combat in an arena.
Nonononn is in the same cell, chained up. Flashbacks suggest that at one time she and Purilun were friends, but Purilun crossed her. Since then, there's been a price on her head. Coffee decides to off them both at the same time, in front of her cheering citizens.
To carry out the execution is Coffee's pet panther, and I'm not speaking figuratively. Nononn is chained up and Padudu tries to fight the cat, but doesn't succeed. She eventually frees Nonononn, who knocks out the cat with one blow. For reasons not worth explaining, Padudu had been trying to use Nonononn's staff, and once she took possession of it, she used it to kill the cat.
The promise had been that if they won they'd go free, but of course Coffee has no intention of honoring that pledge. She pops out a magical microphone and uses it to battle Nonononn. Nonononn's staff has guns built into it, and eventually she kills Coffee by putting a bullet into the middle of Coffee's forehead. But this leaves Nonononn falling a distance that will surely kill her. At the last moment Padudu swoops in and grabs her, and they fly to safety. Seems that Padudu's cloak-fish gives her the ability to glide, even carrying a weight like Nonononn.
There's a lot of blood. Really rather disturbing for something that on its surface looks like a kid's show. And there isn't anything funny about what happens. Padudu is cute and idealistic and naive and a bit foolish, and Nonononn is older, wiser, more cynical, and thoroughly burned out. At the end Nonononn tells Padudu to go home and give up her dream, but instead we see them walking together, presumably to embark on further adventures.
It's described as an "alternate retelling", so it's not part of the continuity of the anime.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 12, 2007 07:10 PM (+rSRq)
All right, I'm famous for having no taste--on the INTERNET! Awesome!
I may give Magical Play another chance, although to be honest I think I'd prefer to drink a gallon of gasoline (regular gas--I'm not that dim).
I will readily grant that the designs were pretty cool, and some of the ideas were interesting, and some of the jokes even made me laugh (moreso because they were so stupid than because they were really funny).
Overall though, I'm glad you liked it; I wish I had.
Posted by: BeckoningChasm at October 13, 2007 04:35 PM (pGYvN)
(Not his fault. I just fixed a bug in the stylesheet, and the setting he was using to get a grey sidebar is now doing what it should do, and turning the entire page grey...)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 04, 2007 03:25 AM (PiXy!)
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Well, there appears to be something wrong with his header, now--the anigif on the top seems weird, and there's some antialiasing issues that probably need fixing.
Posted by: RickC at October 04, 2007 05:53 AM (Y2q0r)
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I'm going to replace that animated gif. (If it's the ducky one, it looks weird on his site; if it's the other one, it's off by a couple of pixels in different frames.)
Not sure what you mean about the antialiasing issues. There's some minor artifacting and what looks like artifacting but isn't (the bottom menu bar looks a bit odd because there are some ripples in the water in the original image).
The banner is generated by the software - you feed it an image and push some buttons. So if there's something not right, I'll fix it!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 04, 2007 06:15 AM (PiXy!)
Meh, it looks ok now. What I saw before was some text that had been antialiased for a light background, and was now on a dark one, so it had sort of a halo around it. Seems to be gone now.
Posted by: RickC at October 04, 2007 06:09 PM (PoCOp)
Back when The Pond first moved to mu.nu, I was having health problems, but didn't really realize it. One of the problems was with my eyes; black on white wasn't as readable as light on dark (I used to "select all" on every website I read, just to get that effect).
Since I never expected to have anybody other than Official First Reader Mallory visiting my site, I set it up so I could read it... then after I started to have a couple of visitors, I realized that the light-on-dark scheme was different from every other blog out there. At least that'd stick in people's minds, right?
Now that I've moved to Minx, I realize that I don't need the added contrast, and the banner doesn't look good on a dark background... that's a very nice duck.
Posted by: Wonderduck at October 04, 2007 06:15 PM (CJ5+Y)
I have heavy astigmatism, and it isn't possible to fully correct it with glasses. Light characters on a black background are surrounded with whispy frills. Black characters on a white background don't have that problem. (And that's why stars look particularly starry to me. It's not just that they twinkle; they're affected by my astigmatism.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 04, 2007 07:08 PM (+rSRq)
What I saw before was some text that had been antialiased for a light
background, and was now on a dark one, so it had sort of a halo around
it. Seems to be gone now.
Okay. It's possible Wonderduck was fiddling with the settings in the banner generator. The default options are set to do decent antialiasing, but you can get odd-looking results if you play around.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 04, 2007 09:22 PM (PiXy!)
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Not intentionally, though in trying to get the banner to do what I wanted (and I never did accomplish... it took a Pixy Intervention), I may have done something accidentally.
Posted by: Wonderduck at October 04, 2007 10:10 PM (fEnUg)
Wonderduck is running a caption contest for a fan service picture. Surely your interest is piqued by that?
UPDATE: While I'm just tossing weird links around, here's a creepy one. The last episode of the series School Days got yanked at the last minute and was replaced by 28 minutes of scenery shots, things like German castles.
Why? Well, probably because it involved some sort of bloody murder, and yesterday in RL a Japanese school girl murdered her father with an axe.
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Wikipedia already mentions it. According to Mainichi News (in the comments in the original link), the last ep has been shelved permanently. There are only three bad ending out of 20, but they're pretty bloody. The male lead is such an indecisive womanizer that some fans of the game that the anime is based on consider the "good ending" to be the one where he dies. Some of the comments seem to be on the same wavelength.
Posted by: Jim Burdo at September 20, 2007 01:52 AM (Nmago)
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Arrgh no! no! I've been waiting for that episode! Damn it all to hell! I need to know who died and how! Arrgh!!!
Posted by: atomic_fungus at September 20, 2007 03:54 AM (09bA0)
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Sorry for the second post, but I hit "post" by mistake before I was finished....
I've been watching "School Days" and I think you're right, SDB: I know you don't like angst, and this one required about a truckload of it. As a longtime "Marmalade Boy" and "Hana Yori Dango" fan, tho, I can take it!
But the way ep 11 ended, there isn't so much as a clue as to what comes next, and I was anticipating a bad end for the male lead, who is a jerk. (I wrote a couple spoiler-laden blog entries about the series.)
The good news is that the producers of the show apparently didn't go for the ending of maximum cheesitude, anyway. That is some (small) consolation. For not getting to see the end! Argh
Posted by: atomic_fungus at September 20, 2007 04:05 AM (09bA0)
Having the last episode be bloody is hardly a surprise. We're talking about a game for which the first licensed goods included a cleaver and a butcher knife monogrammed with the game's logo (in fact, I saw the cutlery before I ever saw the game.)
Apparently some of the scenery shots ended up on 4chan, where one anonymous wag posted "Nice boat." as his entire comment on the situation, along with a shot of a boat in the scenery.
In a bizarre twist, somebody took a screen shot and back-imported it into Japan, where it has rapidly become a meme - the Nico video of the scenery program now has dozens of "NICE BOAT" comments on it. I guess it's the funniest thing in the world if you're Japanese. ;p Good to know that they're keeping a sense of humor about the whole thing...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at September 20, 2007 04:24 AM (LMDdY)
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A bad ending, indeed... and a little disappointing, as I'm watching the show. C'mon, AT-X!
Posted by: Wonderduck at September 20, 2007 04:44 AM (CJ5+Y)
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At least, they'll include it in the DVD. It'll probably be the "good ending" from the speculation on the thread. If anyone likes the char designs but doesn't want the violence, there's an alternate version of the h-game the anime is based on called Summer Days, with no bloodshed and Setsuna as the main female. Maybe someone will make an anime of that. And there's always School Rumble, with no real violence and no angst.
Posted by: Jim Burdo at September 20, 2007 05:35 AM (Nmago)
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argh! I can't believe I put up with this show and they're not even going to show us the money shot!
I'm pretty sure we were going to get the "good (horrific) ending" but still, imagining it isn't enough - I want to see that SOB get what he so richly deserves.
Posted by: mparker762 at September 20, 2007 03:32 PM (v3OTF)
