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.
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Lynx is one of the best-written NPCs in the game. Even her voice acting works with the concept, where most of the voice work they've added so far just makes me cringe.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at November 03, 2009 11:09 AM (9Nz6c)
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.
I had maybe three or four with Vista when this machine was first new.
And the only time they happened was during wakeup from sleep. They stopped happening when I stopped leaving Agent running when I put the machine to sleep.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 02, 2009 09:49 PM (+rSRq)
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I've been running win7 since it was first available, and I've had maybe 4 blue-screens total, not counting a bunch caused by a failing video card when I was first installing. That's far superior to what I would get from XP in a similar period of time. I've never run Vista for that long to compare, but I suspect Win7 and Vista to be in the same ballpark.
Posted by: David at November 03, 2009 05:20 PM (rlE2m)
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.
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)
A worthwhile thing to remember is Mike Stackpole's take on fanfiction - if you are going to invest the time, effort, and imagination to write good fanfiction, you might as well use it to write your own original fiction and try to make some money off of it.
On the other hand, I do remember that at least one author chosen by Lucasfilm to write for their Star Wars novel line actually got notice because of her fanfiction writing.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at November 02, 2009 05:10 PM (Bhzsk)
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Whenever fanfic comes up, I tend to run screaming in the other direction. Except for one specific title: The More Things Change. For all intents and purposes, it's Azumanga Daioh in college, and it's just marvelous.
Posted by: Wonderduck at November 02, 2009 07:07 PM (4Mcos)
But I'm very surprised that you were able to find a referrer, since FF.net filters material heavily. The only place that takes URLs is the "homepage" field. So either someone used his "homepage" to point to Chizumatic, or it was a fake referrer (many tools allow to specify referrers, for example curl does).
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 02, 2009 07:23 PM (/ppBw)
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It's possible someone was spoofing the referer as a way of advertising their story. The page didn't contain a link to me.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 02, 2009 07:47 PM (+rSRq)
There are some strange people out there. There's a guy named Brian Carnell, who back in the day I linked to a few times. Starting a few months ago his server (!) started visiting mine every once in a while and accessing five or six randomly chosen pages, using his base URL as a refer on all of them.
The first time it happened I went and looked, and there were no refers to me on his front page. But it kept happening. Eventually I got tired of it and added his server's URL to my firewall block list.
Anyway, it's really easy for an individual to do that. Proxomitron can do it, for example.
In this case, the URL was to one of the Saki fanfics, and it came as a refer on an access to a page here which was about Saki. I suspect our friend set up a spoof refer, hit Google and searched for Saki, and started clicking links.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 02, 2009 08:19 PM (+rSRq)
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.
I just recently learned that Cyberlink programs their renderers to deliberately malfunction if they're being called by anything except PowerDVD. Isn't that vile?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 12, 2010 07:14 PM (+rSRq)
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.
Because he is first of the slaves. Whether he wants to or not, he has to stay with Sakura, because Yue is bound to her and Yuki only has free will to the extent that Yue allows it. Yuki isn't really alive; he's living off of Sakura's life energy, just as is the case with all the cards. Sure, he eats and drinks but he also has to siphon off some of Sakura's ki or he'll die stone dead no matter how much he eats. And he won't even leave a body behind.
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
Sakura and Shaoran but even that one is a bit creepy
given how young they are. 4th grade is just a bit too early for picking life partners.
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.
At this point I pretty much automatically assume that any show that CLAMP has touched will be very strange and disturbing in at least some ways.
Even Angelic Layer, and on that one the anime director seriously rewrote the ending. It's still quite disturbing in some ways, but the ending of the manga was a lot worse.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 06:02 PM (+rSRq)
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I think your analysis of CCS is correct, but it just doesn't upset me the way it upsets you. None of the characters gets a perfect deal--even Sakura pays a price for what she achieves--but they play the cards they were dealt, and are reasonably happy with the results. I don't consider that tragic.
As for Kobato, I'm not making any bets, except that whatever happens will probably be weird and unexpected.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at November 01, 2009 06:14 PM (7wFYN)
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Actually, on second thought I do disagree with part of your analysis: the idea that Sakura is enslaving cards who want to be free. To me their behavior suggests that they want a master who is capable of keeping them alive. They fight Sakura in order to test her, to see if she is strong enough to do the job. A weak master would be worse than useless to them.
That is why when Sakura and Shaoran compete for a card, the card voluntarily goes to the one it thinks defeated it.
Yue's behavior is more complex. He has other issues and initially doesn't want to survive.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at November 01, 2009 06:53 PM (7wFYN)
Some give up easily, like Wood. Some demand a contest, such as Power. A few of them are more like out-of-control machines, like Shot.
But there are a few who seem more like they're trying to kill Sakura than simply to test her.
Anyway, slavery is evil even if the slave wants to be a slave. The slave owner doesn't get an ethical by because of that.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 06:58 PM (+rSRq)
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The thing is, I know I didn't think of the Cards as being slaves at all. A hammer is a tool, not a slave, and the Cards to me came across as being just that: tools. Having them "locked in a cage" is no more troubling to me than putting my hammer back in the toolbox.
Magical tools that often showed signs of being aware and self-aware, but I never saw any true level of intelligence in them, except in the use of their powers.
I can see how someone can think of them as being more --quite easily in fact-- but I don't feel that much empathy towards them. YMMV, of course.
Posted by: Wonderduck at November 01, 2009 09:35 PM (4Mcos)
Wonderduck, how about the Mirror card?
Twice in the series, Sakura uses Mirror to create a double of herself so that she can go after a card without her brother knowing. Touya sees right through the deception, though, and the second time he buys Mirror a pair of ribbons for her hair, which ribbons appear on the card thereafter. And he thanks Mirror for helping Sakura.
For that matter, Light and Dark?
Once Sakura meets them, they converse with her before she captures them.
Many of the cards have intelligence at the level of an animal. I'm thinking of Jump, Fly, Dash. And some of them are more like machines e.g. Shield.
But Illusion was sufficiently intelligent to come up with a credible plan to kill Sakura, and damned near did. They vary a lot, and several of them clearly are of human-level intelligence.
I would argue that Fight has to be intelligent. Martial arts are not just about power and speed; it takes a lot of thinking, too.
That's all leaving aside the entire question of Yue and Keroberos, about whom there is no doubt at all.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 09:56 PM (+rSRq)
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Well, but you're answering your own question there. The majority of the cards are not moral actors.
Several of the cards are mischievous - they get Sakura's attention by doing what it is they do, usually in a pulling-pranks sort of way. But a lot of those pranks are scary or dangerous (Waty was trying to drown people right from the start, after all.) This isn't because Waty is malevolent or inherently violent or murderous. It's illustrative that Waty had a whole range of things it could be doing to pass the time, but what it actually WAS doing was dangerous to people.
As a class, the cards don't demonstrate any sense of morality. Jump jumps, that's what it does. Some of them are nice, or mean, but their dispositions don't seem to indicate a rational conclusion more than just a natural inclination. (Woody gives in immediately. Yet before it did, it was busily tearing apart Sakura's house...) As a class, they can't possibly be left alone; eventually they'll kill people, not because they want to, but because they do what they do irrespective of whether it hurts someone.
The real question is, what the heck was Clow thinking? He certainly wasn't doing Sakura any favors, arranging things like that. Of course, it's possible that Clow did actually arrange things so that nobody would get killed (in which case the cards are his train-a-magician machine). Alternately, it's possible that he knew that the Cards would run amok, and cause danger to people, but he thought that training Sakura as a magician (and in that fashion) was so important that endangering Sakura or some uninvolved bystanders would constitute an acceptable risk (in which case, the cards are still a train-a-magician machine, on Nightmare Mode).
The reason that slavery is evil is because the slave is also human - a moral being who can take responsibility for their own actions, in all important respects just like the owner. The cards clearly don't rise to this level. By contrast, we're perfectly okay with the ownership of animals, who can clearly "feel" and even do a little thinking.
There's also unique beings with tragic circumstances, but why take a dark view about it? Rather than forcing Yuki to move along with her in order to maintain the energy link to keep him alive, wouldn't it be more in character for Sakura to insist on staying close to where he was, so that he'd be able to live his life as best as possible? Even if she isn't formally obligated to do so, she's a good person, and would need a darned good reason to even ask Yuki to change his lifestyle to accommodate her, much less force him into it.
It'd be interesting to see what happens in Nanoha when a device decides it doesn't want to do what it's told. Clearly they're self-willed, and occasionally do things that they're not asked to do (even in cases where it means substituting their judgment for their master's.) But we don't ever see any devices which are just plain ornery. Do they exist? Is there a master-device matching service that tries to find good homes for disgruntled devices? Or do they just get stuffed in a bin somewhere (or more creepily, reprogrammed to be easier to get along with)? Apologies for the de-railing, but it's a related topic, wouldn't you say?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 01, 2009 11:26 PM (vGfoR)
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Avatar, the whole question of AI's in Nanoha is definitely interesting, and I started thinking about it early this evening. I think I'm going to do a post about it later. But not today, and let's not talk about it in this thread.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 01, 2009 11:32 PM (+rSRq)
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"I never saw any true level of intelligence in them, except in the use of their powers."
I said that in my first comment, and the examples you brought up relate directly to the part in bold.
Regarding Mirror, I've bought my hammer a better grip, something with a lot more texture to it than the stock one that came with it. But nobody who saw it would ever think it was anything other than an Estwing, no matter what grip I have on it.
Tools. Smart tools, but I've used saws that could cut wood on their own, too.
Posted by: Wonderduck at November 02, 2009 05:50 AM (4Mcos)
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OTOH, that begs the question: if a tool is smart enough that you can mistake it for a person, is it really just a tool?
I suspect this is a case of Fridge Logic that applies to *lots* of magical fiction, where you have spirit beings of some kind summoned and bound by wizards. How is it not indistinguishable from slavery?
There are ways you can set up the cosmology so that the issue doesn't apply. For instance, if the spirits are dreams or thought-forms drawn from the caster's own mind, then they aren't really independent beings, any more so than different moods and aspects of your personality are. Alternatively, if there is some sort of celestial hierarchy, it could be you *aren't* enslaving them; a summoning amounts to sending a proper job request up the hierarchy, which then assigns one of its employees to fulfill it.
A lot of stories just ignore the issue, sadly.
Posted by: metaphysician at November 02, 2009 07:32 AM (vM63Z)
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You guys are splitting the difference between Pokemon and Pokegirls.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 02, 2009 07:41 AM (/ppBw)
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Hey, now that you remind me, I find Pokemon *much* creepier than most stories and settings involving mystic summonings. . .
Posted by: metaphysician at November 02, 2009 05:21 PM (vM63Z)
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?
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!
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I had 2 visits so far (in our area they start after dark and run about until 9 p.m.). It's very cold outside, maybe that affects their endurance. BTW, one little girl about 2 or 3 years all dragged her candy bag because she was unable to lift it. Bet she cannot visit many houses.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 31, 2009 06:44 PM (/ppBw)
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8pm, and I've handed out at least 25 pounds of candy, a big handful at a time.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at October 31, 2009 07:03 PM (2XtN5)
One of the little girls that hit just now, I just about doubled what was in her bag. She didn't really have very much.
Problem with this complex is that it's negative feedback. Only a few kids visit, so people have gotten out of the habit of buying candy, so when kids do visit most of the doors don't answer. We don't have separate lights for each apartment we can turn on and off, so there's no way for the kids to know which places are open for business.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 31, 2009 07:07 PM (+rSRq)
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My neighborhood has a fair amount of kids around, and there is an elementary school just two blocks around. But my actual street is poorly lit and has no sidewalks, so all the candy harvesters have gravitated over to the newer streets by the school. So far I've had all of two kids come by, and both live just a few houses away. But when I took my dog for a walk, the streets a few blocks away were teeming with fairies, princesses, zombies, and clone troopers. Alas, no catgirls.
Posted by: David at October 31, 2009 07:16 PM (rlE2m)
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I've got the place lit up like a UFO landing site, with the front door open and the candy bin clearly visible from the street, and despite my best efforts, not a single one of the catgirls who's shown up has been old enough to drive.
Lots of very small kids this year; perhaps the neighborhood demographics have shifted a bit.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at October 31, 2009 07:22 PM (2XtN5)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 31, 2009 08:15 PM (+rSRq)
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My neighborhood has swung the other way. Used to be lots of little ones in cute outfits, now it's mostly too-cool-for-the-room early-teens assuming that jeans and a hoodie and eleven seconds applying vaguely-zombie-like facepaint counts as a costume. They shuffle up, ring the bell, stare at their shoes, mumble a "trigger treat", and shuffle away. Might get a "thangyuh" as they withdraw.
Suppose I can't complain too much, since the same kids probably were the kawaii little ones of 5-10 years ago...
And I still had about 60 kids show up. Burned through 5.5 of my 8 bags of candy. Might keep one bag of butterfingers for myself (pulverize and use as ice cream topping, yum), the rest I'll feed to my coworkers over the next couple weeks.
Posted by: Mikeski at November 01, 2009 01:19 AM (GbSQF)
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Several years ago, the crowd was about half teens, half tweens chaperoned by extremely pretty young mothers. This year, the kids were much younger, and there was only one smoking hot mamma witch (who had her own candy bag).
-j
Posted by: J Greely at November 01, 2009 11:35 AM (2XtN5)
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.
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: Pixy Misa at October 30, 2009 06:30 PM (PiXy!)
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Pixy, look at your post on the sidebar. The text of your link didn't come through.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 30, 2009 06:36 PM (+rSRq)
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Yeah, I noticed that. Problem with the way I used the [tvtropes] tag, since tags are stripped from the sidebar. I'll try again with a different form of the tag and see if that works better.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 30, 2009 06:40 PM (PiXy!)
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Ah, the other form of the tag doesn't work at all. I'll have to fix that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 30, 2009 06:40 PM (PiXy!)
Well, that's interesting. Your link refers to Natsume and Aki as Fuyuki's "shapely sister and mother." So maybe Natsumi has a figure after all.
And the ghost isn't the blond. I just looked it all up in Wikipedia. (The blond is Angol Moa. The ghost is Omiyo.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 30, 2009 06:46 PM (+rSRq)
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I haven't seen the anime, but it creeps me out that the manga is supposedly for kids. It's funny but there's suggestive and quirky stuff.
Posted by: Jaked at October 30, 2009 08:14 PM (EjkUJ)
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Natsume spends more than one chapter of the manga several years older, due to an encounter with an aging ray. And one as Lum, for somewhat similar reasons. (It's that kind of series.)
That's not a catch phrase. Keroro has a tendency to lapse into Japanese military grammar. It's hard to reflect in English - our military etiquette is sufficiently close to "normal" that it doesn't stick out in many circumstances. (Actually, it'd probably be fair to say that his language is more of a gross parody of Japanese military grammar than an accurate reflection...)
There's plenty of implied fan service, but not that much "there are naked girls everywhere"; you can't really calibrate it on the same scale as Aika (but you can't calibrate anything on that scale!) There's also a lot of otaku fan service, shout-outs to other series, Gundam references, seiyuu jokes, Gundam references, popular culture jokes, and Gundam references. You may also notice Gundam references...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at October 30, 2009 08:42 PM (vGfoR)
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.
1
Let me be Cap'n Obvious: no "Dance in theVampire Bund" for you. Vampires and Gore! And Lolis!
Posted by: Jaked at October 30, 2009 04:37 PM (QYYXN)
2
I think "Hanamaru Kindergarten" terrifies me even more than that one does. A Gainax show featuring three five-year-olds, one of whom has a crush on her teacher? Shoot me now.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 30, 2009 04:42 PM (+rSRq)
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Shoot, you're right. I hadn't noticed the Gainax label there. And I had thought it looked like a good choice. There's still interesting stuff like Prof. Layton and Yona Yona Penguin. There's also a Halo OVA. Wait, what?!
Posted by: Jaked at October 30, 2009 04:57 PM (QYYXN)
Strike Witches S2 doesn't sound like it'll be any good at all, so I'm not really eager for it. I'm also not expecting it any time soon, given the kind of economic trouble Gonzo is in.
They didn't have a show in the Fall season, and it looks like they won't have one in Winter, either. I think they're dead in all but name.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 30, 2009 05:08 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 30, 2009 06:53 PM (/ppBw)
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I can't believe they actually made a series from Baka to Test. It would have been cute and funny if it had actually made any sense.
Ok, I'm kidding. It would have been funny if they'd hauled the manga-ka out and beaten him with a ream of test papers, then sent him back to re-work the idea behind the fighting. The premise of the show was so thin as to deaden the imagination and the rules change by the minute.
In concept, it kind of reminds me of Maburaho, only stupider..
Posted by: ubu at October 30, 2009 10:16 PM (FxDET)
A show that's about underwear? It's got to be done by the studio that did Najica Blitz Tactics and Aika R-16. Who else in the industry knows more about panty shots than Studio Fantasia?
...yeah, Nomad would be fine, too...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 30, 2009 10:57 PM (+rSRq)
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I'm just saying that although models in Kampfer are not as tasteful as in Magikano, they sure are an improvement over Sekirei; mostly on the top because Sekirei was too grotesque there, but including bottom shots.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 31, 2009 08:06 AM (/ppBw)
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The character designs will have come from the manga, so that's not a function of the studio.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 31, 2009 08:19 AM (+rSRq)
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And for the record, I don't have an objection to the character designs in Sekirei! Well, ok, if you stripped Tskumimi out of her clothes, the way she's drawn with them would make me think she's insanely wasp-waisted and top-heavy, even moreso than Musubi. It could just be off-model drift though.
Posted by: ubu at October 31, 2009 01:46 PM (FxDET)
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Kazehana was the same, BTW. It's just not how a healthy fighting woman is supposed to look like. Ikki Tousen was head an shoulders above Sekirei.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 31, 2009 04:09 PM (/ppBw)