T w e n t y S i d e d
To my Christian friends: Have a blessed Resurrection Day.
To my more secular friends: Happy Easter!
To everyone else: I hope you enjoy all the cut-rate candy the stores will be selling tomorrow!
I plan to do all three.
Last Exile
I’ve had very little luck looking for good anime on my own. Aside from Ai Yori Aoshi, every time I’ve tried a series about which I know nothing, I’ve been disappointed. I’ve been depending on Den Beste to do my filtering for me, which is sort of lame on my part.
Now I’m looking at Last Exile, and I’m tempted to go off on my own again. I like the OP. The series is not too long (seven discs). The art style looks good. So it passes my first-round elimination filter. It has a very Final Fantasy feel to it, (at least in the OP) which is a big plus in my book.
Problem is, as far as I can tell nobody has seen it. If they did, they didn’t think it was worth writing about. Either way, that’s bad.
Alexander Doneau at Anime Pilgrimage doesn’t have anything on it. Den Beste doesn’t list it. J. Greely at .clue can’t help me. Don McClane has not reviewed it at Mixolydian Mode. It’s highly rated at Netflix, but I’ve long since concluded those people are raving mad.
If anyone has any non-spoiler comments on this series, please drop a comment.
Fan Service
fledgling otaku posed a question in the comments of this post. He was asking about “fan service” vs. “geek service”. I started to write a response, went off topic, and then realized that the comment thread is already miles long. So I’m just going to move the discussion to a new post. This hits on something I’ve had in my list of stuff to write about for a while now anyway, and this gives me a good excuse to set it all down.
Personally, I don’t mind fan service as long as it is part of a good story and interesting characters. I watch anime with my wife, and she doesn’t mind it either – if the story is good. Fan service for its own sake isn’t something either of us cares to watch, but I think that’s true of most fans.
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Newcomers are sometimes shocked at fan service. (I was) It’s certainly unexpected to American viewers who grew up with the idea that cartoons are for kids. But after seeing quite a bit of anime I’m noticing that the Japanese have very different ideas on what should and should not be shown, and in some ways are more reserved than Americans. For example, despite the more lax standards the Japanese have towards nudity or revealing clothing, I can’t think of a single series where the characters actually had sex. I don’t think it has ever happened in any show I’ve watched, not even off-camera. Nobody talks about, or admits to, having sex. Compare this to many American shows where we don’t see the characters naked, but most of the sub-plots involve complex stories of who’s having sex with whom. Even American dramas aimed at young adults and teens (90210 or Dawson’s Creek type stuff) have webs of changing partners and continuous infidelity. I find this to be endlessly tiresome, so for me Anime is pretty refreshing and a lot less objectionable.
Another amusing thing about this is the way the Japanese handle the for-television shows where nudity is required by the story. Instead of using scenery to obscure the forbidden parts they sometimes simply leave them off. I’m thinking now to Ai Yori Aoshi, where the characters are built like Barbie and Ken when we see them “naked”. It’s an interesting way to handle things. Of course, it’s only possible using animation. You couldn’t get away with that in a live-action show. (ewwww)
We’re going to be watching Najica Blitz Tactics in a week or so. It looks enough like the excellent Noir to capture our interest, but the series is also notorious for its copious supply of panty shots. We’ll see how the balance plays out.
For my own site, I try to keep things more or less family friendly. My kids are sometimes in the room when I’m writing, so I don’t post stuff I wouldn’t want them to see. So, no Ecchi. Mireille and Kirika in short skits is fine, but I’m not going to be posting Mahoro deploying her brassiere launcher. I don’t think I want to try to explain that one to the kids. Or anyone else.
Wikipedia Meme
Random surfing led me to Tim Worstall, who had this idea:
Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your blog, including the year.
I won’t limit myself to the numbers above. Let’s just see what’s interesting about August 24:
Facts:
79 AD: Mount Vesuvius erupts.
1456: The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed.
1853: Potato chips are first prepared.
1891: Thomas Edison patents the motion picture camera.
1944: World War II: French and Allied troops start the attack on Paris.
1968: France explodes its first hydrogen bomb, thus becoming the world’s fifth nuclear power.
Births:
1817: Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
1929: Yasser Arafat
1973: David Chappelle
Deaths:
1042: Michael V, Byzantine Emperor
Spam Patterns
A few items to note about comment spam:
It seems to come in waves, or cycles. Yesterday I got more spam than I have in the past week. Normally this would lead you to believe that one spammer has started pounding away at the site, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I wasn’t keeping count until afternoon, but I’m guessing I got about twenty or thirty so spam comments a all day, and each one seemed to come from a different IP. There were a few common types, and for my own purposes I’ve categorized them:
- Mr. Brown-noser – Posts a plausible-looking comment like, “I agree! I hope others write about this as well! I love your site.”. It’s clumsy and generic enough to stand out, but I have to actually look at what URL they link before I chuck them in the bit bucket.
- Mr. Lotsa Links – Obvious spam. The posts are just page after page of keywords and links.
- Mr. Sneaky – Posts comments to really old posts with just one or two links, hoping they will escape my notice and remain for search engines to find. If I didn’t check the admin page I might miss these ones.
- Mr. Infomercial – Has lots of “helpful facts” about whatever he’s linking, which is usually generic meds.
Each of the above has just a few variants they re-use, but these are the four distinct types I see. (Each one has other characteristics, like what types of bogus usernames and emails they provide and the type of bold / italics tags they use.)
Anyway, I wonder why the cyclical nature? It is possible that the coming long weekend (which had already arrived in some parts of the world, like Australia) provided the spammers with time off from their normal day jobs. (Clubbing baby seals, most likely.)
Maybe its just a coincidence. Maybe my site has propigated to another group of them.
Sometimes I block the IP of one of these spammers if I already have the admin window open. However, I suspect this is a waste of time. I’m wondering if these changing IP’s aren’t from guys who are using wireless hotspots or internet cafes to do their dirty deeds. If this is the case, then blocking them is a waste of time, and in fact creates a (very, very slight) chance that a legit visitor will arrive on the same address at some point and get rejected.
Everyone else is doing it!
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Just about everyone knows that Steven Den Beste used to blog a lot about politics, but has since quit and started blogging about Anime.
I used to run this pseudohumorous political satire site, but gave it up and now run the goofy blog you are currently reading. Now I learn that the excellent haibane.info is run by Aziz Poonawalla, and it looks like Dean Esmay has joined him. What’s with all the political bloggers going geek? What’s next? Maybe Glenn Reynolds will give up on his regular blog and start a Najica Blitz Tactics-themed site: InstaPanties.com As if he needs any more readers. |
Lightsaber Duel
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You may remember the post from a few days ago where I had a major geek-out and mused about how real lightsabers might be used.
If that didn’t seem too geeky for you, then you may want to check out this movie.
A couple of hobbyists got together and produced a five-minute feature of the two of them having a lightsaber battle. Unlike some of the fan-made stuff I’ve seen, this has a lot of polish to it and is really exciting. Their movements are quick and sure, and the special effects look professional. My only quibble is the location. They are in some sort of industial setting (which is good) but it looks a little too bright in there. The overhead fluro lights conflict with the lightabers in the forground. If the background lights could have been dimmed, this would look even better.
Having said that, it’s amazing what these guys accomplished. They play it mostly straight (this isn’t a parody) but they inject a little humor into things, along with a nicely varied fight that keeps things interesting.
It amazes me how cheaply this can be done these days. The other interesting thing is that right now the software required is going to cost a lot more than the hardware. In every fan-made lightsaber movie I’ve seen, they use Adobe Premiere for editing, which costs a lot more than the average consumer-grade video camera. Still, for a little over a thousand bucks you can get the tools required to make a movie like this. After that, all you need is talent, hard work, money for props, a couple of actors and a near endless supply of free time.
From The Archives:
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.