November 03, 2009

Canada! Ah, Canada!

Shamus is writing about how everything he needs to know, he learns from Champions Online. In this edition he writes about Canada, America's Neighbor to the North.

He encountered a catgirl. I find myself wanting to call her "foxy", except that she's a catgirl, not a doggy girl. Anyway, she really looks good. She also looks like she ought to be freezing to death, considering how skimpy her costume is and the fact that there's snow all over everything. I get the impression that the national flower of Canada is the snowflake.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Entertainment at 09:46 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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November 02, 2009

Dragonaut -- the stupiding

It's a trash show. Everyone who watched it says so. I popped the first DVD in my drive tonight and started scanning through it, because I was pretty certain I didn't want to watch the show.

But after about 4 episodes I am intrigued. I am going to go back and watch it. We'll see how long I last.

UPDATE: So now I've genuinely watched four episodes. And yeah, it's really dumb.

By far the biggest complaint is that the CG stinks. Particularly the designs of the dragons, and the rendering of them, and the animation of them, are all so crummy as to break immersion whenever they're on screen.

And since they're the heart of the show, that doesn't leave a whole lot.

Hearing Gio's voice was a shock. That seiyuu is a really good one. But he was the voice of one of the most wonderful and kind men I've ever seen in anime, and he was also the voice of just about the worst, most despicable, most terrifying villain I've ever seen, in another show. Which is to say respectively that he was Oyamada-sensei in Someday's Dreamers and Friagne in Shakugan no Shana.

So his voice tells me the character will be an important one, but will he be a good guy or a bad guy? At first there was no way to know. At the end of the 4th episode I'm still not really sure.

There's a lot of X-files type intrigue going on in this, and that can collapse in on itself if it isn't handled well. I have no faith that Gonzo did a good job, so I'm expecting it all to get even more stupid before it's all over.

I'm not sure I'm going to last that long, myself. I want to watch ep 5, for sure, because presumably Jin and Toa will meet again. And whether I keep going after that will depend a lot on what results from that.

The big disappointment? There's one hell of a lot less fan service than I expected. Major surprise, considering the reputation the show has and the fact that it's from Gonzo.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:50 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Win 7 -- (un)reliable

I just had Windows Explorer crash and restart. A few days ago I got the first blue screen I've seen in months. Fun!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:10 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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DBZ -- Bardock

One of the BDs I bought last time was a collection of two of the movies. They're both real downers, but unlike most of the movies, these are both part of the series canon. Which, I guess, is why they're called "Specials" and not "Movies". (Well, except that the "movie" about Garlic Junior is also part of canon. But never mind that.)

The first is "History of Trunks" and I'd already seen it. It's about the alternate time line from which Mirai no Trunks comes and shows how it was that he ended up alone against 17 and 18. It starts with Goku dying of the heart virus, and it ends just as Trunks is about to enter the time machine for his first visit to the past.

The other I hadn't seen before and was quite curious about. It's titled "Bardock, Father of Goku". More, including frame grabs and spoilers, below the fold.

more...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Is there anything lower than furries? Well, yeah...

I feel a bit soiled. I just found a refer to one of my posts from a site that posts fanfic. Specifically, it was from a fanfic about Saki.

Is there anything lower than fanfic authors? Well, there's always filkers...

UPDATE: Yeesh. 179 stories about Ultra Maniac. 49,310 about Yu-Gi-Oh.

And there are 10 about Those Who Hunt Elves.

213,303 about Naruto. (Wonder how much of that is slash? I'm not curious enough to find out.)

At least furries know how to draw good porn.

UPDATE: A search of the site for the string "Mary Sue" yields 5140 hits. So there's hope for at least a few of those lost souls, I believe.

It includes this: "The Mary Sue Test". (It's under "Teen Titans" and seems pretty specific to that, but it's still fun.)

THE CLASSIC: Does the character ever single-handedly save the lives of all the Titans? (2)
...Does s/he become hurt or gravely ill in the process? (2)
...Does s/he die? (3)
...If so, does s/he come back to life? (3)
... ...Through the power of love? (4)
... ...In a later fic? (1)

OH yeah...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:47 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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November 01, 2009

AC3, is it?

The file associations on my system still connect MKV files to Zoom Player. I had an urge to watch the beginning of Saki again, and opened that directory and clicked on it, and Zoom Player fired up, and played it properly.

Wait a minute, I thought; Zoom Player dies on MKV files now, doesn't it? I remembered having trouble with a late DBK ep locking it up, so I tried that one, and yup, Zoom Player went CPU bound. So what was the difference between them?

I dumped the full MediaInfo output on each file and compared them. (By the way, that sucker is worth its weight in gold, especially since it's free.) There were some minor differences in the video encoding (the DBK ep was running a lot higher bit rate) but the big thing that stood out was that the DBK ep used AC3 for its audio, whereas Saki was AAC.

So I just ran through a whole bunch of different files from different series, checking each with MediaInfo to see what sound codec it used and then trying it out.

The result is conclusive: three using AC3 all locked up. 10 using MP3 all played. 5 using AAC all played. 4 using Vorbis all played. Something is fouled up in how Zoom Player is trying to handle AC3.

So now I have a clue to chase. I think it's time to visit the CCCP control panel.

UPDATE: Indeed! I went into Zoom Player's "Playback:Audio" menu and changed the audio renderer from "Cyberlink Audio Renderer (PDVD8)" to "Speakers (ASUS Xonar U1 Audio D)" -- the Xonar being the external USB sound module my headphone is connected to.

And now that DBK episode works, too. I'm going to do some more testing to see if anything else got broken.

UPDATE: Sora Kake Girl (VOrbis) works
Smash Hit (MP3) works
Saki (AAC) works

So Zoom Player is now fixed. Media Player is a good program, but it doesn't have bookmarks that I found, and it doesn't have a one-button "skip 20 second" function that I found. I'll keep it around for special occasions, but it looks like Zoom Player is now completely rehabilitated! Yay!

UPDATE: Media Player still looks to be the preferred tool for taking frame grabs from BDs.

UPDATE: I just had it lock up on an AAC file, so there's still mysteries going on.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 06:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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They can get big, can't they?

Recently someone posted a torrent over at BakaBT. They proudly declared that it was a BD rip of the entire Card Captor Sakura series. However, for some strange reason, they reduced the video to 640*480. Which seems to really miss the point. Even so, the 70 episodes of the series came in at 20.5 gigabytes.

But I can top that. I just downloaded the whole series as a BD rip, only it was full sized.

I say "just downloaded"; what that means is I started it last Wednesday, and it finished this morning some time. 80.8 gigabytes. Ye Gods. I had to delete a few of my existing torrents to make room for it on my sacrificial lamb machine, since it needed 25% of the new big HD. (Bye, Hayate 1 & 2! Farewell, To aru majutsu no Index!)

I haven't decided if I'm going to leave it up perpetually. I'll leave it up for now, however; the swarm has 24 seeds and 287 leeches, and my ratio on that torrent is only 0.66 right now. So I'll at least leave it running until I top 1.0 -- which is to say at least another 27 gigabytes. If I saturate my 200 KB/s uplink, it'll be 39 more hours. But it's sharing my pipe with dozens of other torrents and right now it isn't even half of my bandwidth.

That one is using Nyaa Torrents as a tracker. This morning it was the only torrent I was running that had a green icon. BakaBT's main hard drive died, and the system was down until late this afternoon.

One time when I tried visiting it, accessing the main URL brought up the text "It's working!" but there wasn't anything else out there. I guess that was a test in preparation for recovering from backups.

Anyway, everything's copacetic again. Meanwhile, now that I've downloaded the BD rip of Card Captor Sakura, what in hell am I going to do with it? I don't really feel any great urge to watch the series again.

Some series grow on you. Pete has had that experience with Shingu; after he watched it the first time, he didn't think it was all that good. But it improved over time and now it's one of his favorites.

CCS had the opposite effect on me. After I first watched it I was tremendously enthusiastic, and when I wrote my review I gave it 4 stars. But it hasn't been a show I've wanted to rewatch, and over a few years what has happened is that what stayed with me was just how creepy CLAMP is, deep down. CCS isn't wholesome. It has a lot of very warped undertones. And in some ways the story is very cruel to some very sympathetic characters.

Certainly all the weird sexuality is creepy. But the fundamental story concept bothers me quite a lot now. The story in the first part of the series is, effectively, that Sakura has to capture a whole lot of escaped slaves, many of whom do not want to go back into captivity.

It doesn't matter that Clow Reed created them originally rather than capturing them. The fact remains that when he died he locked them all in a cage, and once they had a chance to escape from the cage and taste freedom, Sakura was out there finding them one by one and reimprisoning them -- in that same exact cage.

Certainly, if they had remained free, the energy would have run out and they would have perished. But is that any different from you and me? We're not immortal either. All lives come to an end. And isn't it better to die free than to live as a slave?

Sakura is too sweet a little girl to really understand the full implications of what she's doing, but I'm not a sweet little girl and I understand all too well what's going on. Sakura is a sweet little girl, but what she's doing is deeply evil. It certainly isn't heroic.

Of all the sins committed by CLAMP against characters in that series, surely Yuki comes in first. He gets a happy ending, of sorts, but it's a strange life he'll lead from then on.

Or rather, he will be living off of Sakura's life energy. For the moment, Yue's existence is maintained by using up the energy they took from Touya. That was a one-time event, and Touya gave it up willingly. But Touya has lost something special, something very important and valuable to him. Touya blinded himself to save Yuki's life. He's yet another victim of CLAMP's warped love, and warped views about love.

Anyway, eventually that energy will get used up, and then Yue really will have to plug into Sakura and start drawing energy from her. And thus Yuki will have to stay near Sakura, no matter where she decides to go or what she decides to do. If she marries Shaoran, which seems likely, and if his mother convinces Sakura to move to Hong Kong, which also seems likely, then Yuki has to go along whether he likes it or not.

Because if he doesn't, he'll die in just a few weeks.

In the mean time, whenever Sakura needs Yue, Yuki goes into a coma.

I wonder what kind of shock it must have been to Yuki to discover that most of his memories were false. And to learn that the grandparents he remembers, and thinks he lives with, don't exist.

Knowing the truth about Yuki makes it so that I can't really watch the early part of the series with the same innocent eyes that I did the first time I watched. Yuki's situation is really quite tragic. And what happens to Touya ain't a whole lot better.

There are a whole lot of romantic relationships in the series, ultimately, and not one of them is normal. ("Normal" defined as "heterosexual, between consenting adults". And don't give me any grief about it.) The closest we come to a normal relationship is but even that one is a bit creepy

There are a few episodes I might rewatch, sometime. But there's no great urgency, and a lot of other things to watch instead. I don't regret downloading it, and I won't delete it, but in the end it's pretty much a waste of disk space.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 05:17 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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October 31, 2009

Daylight Savings Time ends

Change your clocks back an hour, sometime before tomorrow.

I don't usually keep track of when this is supposed to happen. I notice that it's happened when my computers all change, and then I change such few non-computer timekeepers as are around here (basically, the microwave oven).

On other subjects, I'm in serious pain today. Enough so that I hauled out the emergency measures and took an ibuprofen. I think that's the first NSAID I've taken in about five years; it's just not something I use.

My neck right now gives me major pain signals every time I move my head in any direction, and I don't have any idea what I did to it to make it so awful. Presumably it'll get better in a couple of days, and it's not so bad as to make me scream, so I'll just put up with it. But it wasn't fun last night and it ain't gonna be fun tonight, because I can't find a position laying down which isn't continuously painful. Not impossible, though; I was able to knock out for a nap this afternoon for a while.

UPDATE: I wonder if any kids will knock on my door this year. A couple of years I got none. Last year it was just once, two girls. I had a big basket of candy, so each of them got a big handfull. The basket this year is even bigger, and any kid who braves our apartment complex will be glad.

But I bet I don't get any. Times change, I guess. When I was little, and living in this same area, we used to go around about 8:00 or even later, and there were always a lot of kids around. These days people are afraid to leave their kids out after dark, I guess. It's sad; something has died. Halloween is supposed to be about pretending to be afraid, not about really genuinely being afraid.

It's after dark now, which probably means the window is closed.

UPDATE: My neck doesn't hurt as much as it did this afternoon. Whether that's the ibuprofen or just that it's getting better, I don't know, but it's certainly a relief.

1945 and no kids yet. Probably won't be any at all. What in hell am I supposed to do with all this candy?

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At the rate I eat it, that'll last a year. (And I shouldn't eat it any faster, because I"m trying to lose weight.)

UPDATE: 2000, and I'm saved. I just got a big bunch of kids, and managed to get rid of about two thirds of that basket. Whew!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 04:41 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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October 30, 2009

Sergeant Frog -- ep 1

I think that Keroro Gunsou is probably going to be the kind of lunatic series that I will enjoy more in small doses. Lots of energy, and interesting characters, and lots of 4th wall breaks, and plenty of manic energy. But I can see where it could wear if I try to watch too much of it at one time.

It's actually a 15-minute series with two 15-minute episodes bundled together to fit a half hour time slot. Which is a format that works pretty well for certain kinds of series, most notably Ninja Nonsense. The big benefit of the format is that a lot of kinds of comic contrivances become tedious if spread to a full half hour, but can be fresh and amusing as long as they're shorter.

The second half of the first episode is a flashback to the first meeting of Keroro Gunsou with the Hinata family. Natsumi, older sister, is the sane and responsible one of the family. Aki, the mother, is editor of a kid's manga magazine and is quite weird. Fuyuki, the younger brother, kind of splits the difference between the two, being not as rational as Natsumi and not as nutso as Aki.

The first half was also series foundation, in a sense. Aki reveals that the house they're living in has a basement and offers a room down there to Keroro to live in. He accepts joyously. Aki later tells the kids that there are stories that the basement used to be a jail, and that a girl died down there, and that there are stories that her ghost haunts the place -- and she does. We saw her, but they didn't tell any more about her story than that.

Is she the blonde? The blonde and the ninja both show up in the OP, and I know they're both regular characters. But in the early stages of a show like this they're not in any hurry to roll out characters. The next half-hour episode is about two more, a girl named Momoka and a frog named Tamama.

The translator made an interesting choice. Keroro has a catch-phrase with which he ends most of his sentences, that being de arimasu. (I heard one sentence that he ended de aru de arimasu. Which is really weird.) The translator decided to translate that trailing de arimasu as "Sir, yes, sir!" Which ain't too bad, in character.

4th wall breaks can be fun, too, and I think they broke the 4th wall at least 5 times in the first half hour.

The dreaded Space Frog Invasion turned out to be an anticlimax. Keroro and 4 others came down from the fleet to scout the situation out. And after Natsume discovered Keroro, by accident, the commander of the fleet decided the whole thing was a bad job and retreated, leaving the five behind. Wussy, I say. Wussy!

Of course, if I had Natsumi mad at me, I'd be terrified too.

UPDATE: I'm not just sure what the prospects are for fan service in this. I assume little-to-none, since it was intended to be a kid show. But the picture on the cover of one of the DVD cases shows Natsume in a bikini, and she looks rather more shapely up top than I thought she was. Also, Aki is definitely an adult.

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Probably that's just some artist taking liberties. But she's definitely her mother's little girl.

UPDATE: Ep 2 proves that some jokes really can't carry a full half hour. A whole half hour of Momoka trying to confess to Fuyuki alternating with Momoka beating the crap out of Tamama ceased to be funny about half way through.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:20 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Great News! Winter 2009

As the birds leave for the south (except for a dozen ducks who are probably going to spend the winter in our yard) I got first sight of the Winter season roster.

Chu-Bra is on it! YAY!

UPDATE: Here's the NSFW Homepage.

UPDATE: ANN's got a page for it now. The voice of Nagato Yuki is in it.

And the voice of Segawa Izumi from Hayate is in it. I don't know that series or that character.

Official production house is ZEXCS, who did Macademi Wasshoi. This is sounding better by the minute.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:27 PM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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