I' started watching Baccano! at the weekend, but I've not managed to carry it through this week. There seems to be quite a lot of new stuff on telly, so I've been trying to keep on top of that, plus with Dad phoning yesterday that blew a couple of hours.
I'll hopefully watch a bit more this weekend, though.
I have been reading manga, though, so I thought I'd give a quick update today as to my thoughts.
Hayate the Combat Butler
I was a little surprised by this one.
It appears the manga is weekly in Japan and the chapters are quite short. I'd actually encountered Hayate in anime form and the initial chapters matched the first couple of episodes quite well.
However, in the anime the pace is a bit faster. I mean within the short fansub sample I did, they went back to school, but it was several volumes before this happened in the manga. The slightly odd thing was that this meant a lot of content was skipped.
Given that the anime eats content at a much faster rate, this seemed a bit odd, but what it did mean was that the anime and manga weren't identical and it gave me a chance to appreciate the manga more.
And appreciate it I did, as it's quite funny.
It also breaks the fourth wall a lot and I like things that do that.
I mean if I'm honest there are a few niggles. For example, there's a lot of referencing of other anime/manga and so I don't know what they're talking about sometimes. This isn't helped because they part-censor the references, making it difficult to decode sometimes, even when I know what it's referring to.
Also, it's a little bit light-weight, story-wise, but then it is primarily a gag manga so that's not a huge criticism.
So yeah, overall, I like it.
Note that the rest of these are first volume impressions.
Bamboo Blade
Bamboo Blade seems quite enjoyable.
I liked the anime, though it looks like they've tweaked the story quite a bit. They've definitely tweaked the artwork and while I don't dislike the manga art, the anime's character designs are a bit better.
The manga has some quite good gags in it, and they definitely retained pretty much all of these.
It's definitely not high-brow entertainment, though, and if I hadn't liked the anime I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought this one was worth perusing.
Maria Holic
I'm not entirely sure why I bought this.
A while back an anime adaptation came out in Japan. It was made by SHAFT, who did Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and a few other things I liked, so I had high hopes, but in the end it was a bit of a disappointment.
I think the main problem was that the main character talked really fast and was shouty and a bit annoying. Also, the main point as I'd seen it was the cross-dressing boy, Maria, what with the title being Maria Holic and all. And yet she virtually wasn't in it.
It did have all the natty visual hall-marks of a SHAFT production that I love, but this wasn't enough to make up for the poor underlying story.
Well it turns out that this story is coming pretty much from the manga. In other words, unlike Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and Bakemonogatori, where they've clearly worked on the story as well, here, they left it alone. And unfortunately it needed work.
Still, I'm going to give it a few volumes to see if improves I think.
Gestalt
Here's a manga that flattered to deceive.
The cover art is gorgeous, but there's a reason for that - it's a modern picture drawn by the artist for a manga that must be around 20 years old. Certainly the art inside is unrecognisable from the cover art and fits very much with the styles prevalent in the eighties and early nineties.
If I'd done my homework I never would have picked it up as it's by Yun Kouga, who did Loveless. Simply put I hated the first volume of Loveless when I read - it was just so badly written.
This is worse. Not only is it badly written but the art, although pretty enough, is confusing. It's really difficult to tell some of the characters apart, not least of all because the hair colour of one of them is inconsistently portrayed.
It also has a tendency to spooge out tonnes of boring exposition and even has little boxes explaining stuff that nobody really cares about and, indeed, wouldn't need explaining if the art was clearer.
Rubbish.
Ichiroh
I was kinda surprised by this.
I bought it on a whim with Gestalt, mainly because the cover looked good, and given how bad that was I was prepared to be disappointed. But actually I quite enjoyed it.
It's another one of those four-panel gag mangas and it's actually quite funny. The artwork is nice too.
In terms of criticism the only real problem is a lack of originality, but it's quite good at doing what it does.
Kimikiss
Again, another one bought on a whim at the same time as Gestalt and Ichiroh. And oddly, this kinda sits somewhere between Gestalt and Ichiroh in that it was okay, but I decided to not keep buying it.
It's basically a romantic-comedy, but the comedy is very light, with the focus very much on the romance.
The problem was that it wasn't, well, it wasn't complicated. Basically, it makes romances more interesting if there are proper barriers or obstacles to overcome, but here these were so minimal it meant there was virtually no plot.
The art was pretty, but that wasn't enough to make me want to keep reading.
DMC
DMC stands for Detroit Metal City. It's meant to be a band name, but it's a bit of an odd title for a band. Especially when the band in question is meant to be a death metal band.
And just like the name, in theory, this manga should be rubbish. Let's look at what goes against it:
1) The artwork is awful. I mean really bad - it looks like a four-year old drew it.
2) Rather odd representation of death metal.
3) When you get down to it, the basic joke in each chapter is exactly the same.
And yet it's one of the best manga I've read in ages.
The reason is that one central joke has a heck of a lot of mileage. The basic idea is that the main character, Soichi, is a wimpy nerd musician who's into indi-pop, but has ended up the front-man of a death metal band called Krauser.
Now if I was to make one real criticism it's quite how he ended up in this position is not explained, nor does it seem like a sensible thing to happen. But then, this is a comedy so maybe over-analyzing it isn't the thing to do.
The real strength of DMC is that it pokes fun at everything, and yet there's also an affection there that makes it all seem like good fun, rather than nasty.
Friday 16 October 2009
Thursday 15 October 2009
interweb problems
Last night my Dad phoned me.
Or, more accurately, rather late last night my Dad phoned me.
Or, more accurately still, rather late last night, midway through a really heavy week at work, my Dad phoned me.
The reason he phoned me was that it was his switch-on day for internet and he'd plugged everything in and it hadn't worked.
Now I mentioned recently that my Dad is not hugely computer literate and getting someone who knows very little about computers to work through menus and stuff is not much fun.
It also doesn't help that his computer has all the 'making it easier' crap that Microsoft introduced for XP enabled. The reason I left it on was because I was worried his experiences at his computer class may not match up with what he sees if I switch it all over to the settings I would have.
The problem he was experiencing, however, was a bit of a weird one that kinda stumped me.
Basically, with his internet they sent a CD that guides you through setting it up.
Well, one of the early stages is obviously setting the network card up and as part of that it detects the card.
And it couldn't detect the card.
This I had no real explanation for because the motherboard has LAN built-in. This morning I even checked the model number online and it definitely has built-in LAN.
I was kinda expecting maybe the driver hadn't been installed properly, but it's not even reporting it in the system config as an 'unknown device'.
Something I read online suggests that maybe it's de-activated in the BIOS, but that means the default BIOS setting is for it to be disabled, which seems highly weird.
It also means that I somehow have to get my Dad to go into the BIOS and adjust the settings. And his last excursion into the BIOS was the whole route of the problems he had that ended up with me wiping his hard-drive and re-installing :/.
This should be fun :/.
Or, more accurately, rather late last night my Dad phoned me.
Or, more accurately still, rather late last night, midway through a really heavy week at work, my Dad phoned me.
The reason he phoned me was that it was his switch-on day for internet and he'd plugged everything in and it hadn't worked.
Now I mentioned recently that my Dad is not hugely computer literate and getting someone who knows very little about computers to work through menus and stuff is not much fun.
It also doesn't help that his computer has all the 'making it easier' crap that Microsoft introduced for XP enabled. The reason I left it on was because I was worried his experiences at his computer class may not match up with what he sees if I switch it all over to the settings I would have.
The problem he was experiencing, however, was a bit of a weird one that kinda stumped me.
Basically, with his internet they sent a CD that guides you through setting it up.
Well, one of the early stages is obviously setting the network card up and as part of that it detects the card.
And it couldn't detect the card.
This I had no real explanation for because the motherboard has LAN built-in. This morning I even checked the model number online and it definitely has built-in LAN.
I was kinda expecting maybe the driver hadn't been installed properly, but it's not even reporting it in the system config as an 'unknown device'.
Something I read online suggests that maybe it's de-activated in the BIOS, but that means the default BIOS setting is for it to be disabled, which seems highly weird.
It also means that I somehow have to get my Dad to go into the BIOS and adjust the settings. And his last excursion into the BIOS was the whole route of the problems he had that ended up with me wiping his hard-drive and re-installing :/.
This should be fun :/.
Wednesday 14 October 2009
the transporter
I didn't really know what to expect from the transporter.
I know it's spawned a couple of sequels, so it must at least be popular. What I didn't know is that it's had heavy involvement from Luc Besson. That's no bad thing - Besson is quite an imaginative chap, after all - but it does kinda tell you a lot about the film.
Besson's films often have a very clever, witty streak to them, and the transporter is no exception. Except here we get a slightly odd flip-flop effect where one scene is clearly run-through with humour and the next will be plaid in a totally straight way.
Similarly, we get lots of action, and it's off the usual over-the-top and a deliberately silly variety, but then we also get lots of harder, more realistic/brutal action too. A classic example of this is if you contrast the car chase at the beginning, with its gags and impossible action against the fist-fight in the bus depot towards the end, where you can almost feel the bones breaking.
Also, another big criticism I'd make is that the plot is extremely... I was going to say cliché, but it's more that it's really tacky. I mean, it works as a structure to hang stuff like the action off of, but it just feels really cheesy.
Oh, and the guy who plays the main Chinese bad guy (weirdly it refers to them as Japanese in the hearing impaired subtitles when they're clearly not Japanese in terms of either how they look or the language they're speaking) is weird. His performance is just plain odd, but not in some deliberate way that they've camped it up to make it silly or anything - it just feels like he's suddenly going to lift his little finger to his mouth, Dr Evil style.
I appreciate that's a lot of criticism and some of it's undermining to the film as a whole, but despite that I still kinda enjoyed it. Statham in particular is enjoyable as an action hero in this sort of role and the action, with it's Besson-esque touches is generally quite good.
There are a few too silly things to be fair - all guns seem to fire a tracer rounds for some reason and the bit with the rocket launcher, although dramatic is kinda stupid, for example. But generally speaking it kinda works.
Plus they've not made the mistake of making the film too long - it's short, sharp, punchy and it moves along a suitably brisk pace.
So yeah, silly, but an enjoyable kinda silly.
I know it's spawned a couple of sequels, so it must at least be popular. What I didn't know is that it's had heavy involvement from Luc Besson. That's no bad thing - Besson is quite an imaginative chap, after all - but it does kinda tell you a lot about the film.
Besson's films often have a very clever, witty streak to them, and the transporter is no exception. Except here we get a slightly odd flip-flop effect where one scene is clearly run-through with humour and the next will be plaid in a totally straight way.
Similarly, we get lots of action, and it's off the usual over-the-top and a deliberately silly variety, but then we also get lots of harder, more realistic/brutal action too. A classic example of this is if you contrast the car chase at the beginning, with its gags and impossible action against the fist-fight in the bus depot towards the end, where you can almost feel the bones breaking.
Also, another big criticism I'd make is that the plot is extremely... I was going to say cliché, but it's more that it's really tacky. I mean, it works as a structure to hang stuff like the action off of, but it just feels really cheesy.
Oh, and the guy who plays the main Chinese bad guy (weirdly it refers to them as Japanese in the hearing impaired subtitles when they're clearly not Japanese in terms of either how they look or the language they're speaking) is weird. His performance is just plain odd, but not in some deliberate way that they've camped it up to make it silly or anything - it just feels like he's suddenly going to lift his little finger to his mouth, Dr Evil style.
I appreciate that's a lot of criticism and some of it's undermining to the film as a whole, but despite that I still kinda enjoyed it. Statham in particular is enjoyable as an action hero in this sort of role and the action, with it's Besson-esque touches is generally quite good.
There are a few too silly things to be fair - all guns seem to fire a tracer rounds for some reason and the bit with the rocket launcher, although dramatic is kinda stupid, for example. But generally speaking it kinda works.
Plus they've not made the mistake of making the film too long - it's short, sharp, punchy and it moves along a suitably brisk pace.
So yeah, silly, but an enjoyable kinda silly.
Tuesday 13 October 2009
steams good to me
I think I've mentioned this before but for my birthday my Dad bought me a Steamer and a Bread Maker.
I was pretty much straight into using the bread maker, but the steamer hasn't really seen much action until recently because, with it being summer, I didn't really feel like eating the sort of food you cook in a steamer.
The steamer is quite a good one, I believe - it certainly has a big capacity and is a good brand, but it's taken me quite a while to really figure it out properly. The main problems I've been having are cooking times and cleaning it.
Cooking times have been a problem because the guidelines given in the booklet seem to be way too short. I dunno if it's because I like my food well cooked or something, but if I use the booklet's cooking time, everything seems to come out almost raw :/.
About the only thing it seems to get right is chicken. Everything else is totally undercooked for me.
This is especially true for rice, but then to be fair I already know that what is nicely cooked rice for me is massively over-done by other people's standards. I mean, in the book I think it says as little as 15 minutes, but I actually cook it for about 40 minutes.
As I say, that's more because I like rice that's verging on mushy in consistency, but still, at 15 minutes I think most people would say the rice was underdone.
The cleaning problem is more tricky.
The basic issue is that when I cook chicken it drips juices and these juices seem to coagulate in the holes the steam comes through. The problems is that no amount of soaking and scrubbing seems to dislodge this gunk.
I'm not too fussed, as I'm sure the steam kills any germs, but it looks really unsightly to say the least.
Sorry, this was a bit of a naff post, wasn't it? It's because I couldn't really think of anything to talk about that wasn't going to become a marathon post and I'm really busy at work.
I was pretty much straight into using the bread maker, but the steamer hasn't really seen much action until recently because, with it being summer, I didn't really feel like eating the sort of food you cook in a steamer.
The steamer is quite a good one, I believe - it certainly has a big capacity and is a good brand, but it's taken me quite a while to really figure it out properly. The main problems I've been having are cooking times and cleaning it.
Cooking times have been a problem because the guidelines given in the booklet seem to be way too short. I dunno if it's because I like my food well cooked or something, but if I use the booklet's cooking time, everything seems to come out almost raw :/.
About the only thing it seems to get right is chicken. Everything else is totally undercooked for me.
This is especially true for rice, but then to be fair I already know that what is nicely cooked rice for me is massively over-done by other people's standards. I mean, in the book I think it says as little as 15 minutes, but I actually cook it for about 40 minutes.
As I say, that's more because I like rice that's verging on mushy in consistency, but still, at 15 minutes I think most people would say the rice was underdone.
The cleaning problem is more tricky.
The basic issue is that when I cook chicken it drips juices and these juices seem to coagulate in the holes the steam comes through. The problems is that no amount of soaking and scrubbing seems to dislodge this gunk.
I'm not too fussed, as I'm sure the steam kills any germs, but it looks really unsightly to say the least.
Sorry, this was a bit of a naff post, wasn't it? It's because I couldn't really think of anything to talk about that wasn't going to become a marathon post and I'm really busy at work.
Monday 12 October 2009
wib sites
I've recently been trying to cut down on my expenditures.
The primary reason for this is that I'm in a mountain of debt and have been for a very long time.
There are a few rays of hope in this cloud of gloom. One of the main ones is the huge pile of "stuff" that I own. For example, if and when I pull my finger out and watch all my unwatched stuff, selling it all on e-bay will (in theory), release some big old chunks of cash that should alleviate at least part of the debt.
Also, my attempts at reigning in my spending have, on the whole, been working. I now buy far fewer DVDs than I used to. I also don't buy so much random crap and I even try to by non-branded and generic products where I can.
As part of this "don't spend money you having got, you fucking idiot" crusade, one of my attempts has been to get cable. I know I've talked about this before, but I dunno how far I explained.
Basically, it turned out that they wouldn't allow two lots of cable at the same address, and my landlord already has cable. So what we did was run a very long network cable through the roof from his router and down into my place.
My plan was to try this out for about a month and if it worked fine then I'd cancel my existing broadband, saving me over £30 a month. I'd also look at stopping my telephone landline, potentially saving another £11 a month. That's the best part of £500 saved a year.
Unfortunately, early signs are that this may not be as successful as I'd hoped.
There are two basic problems.
The first is that it turns out cable broadband is subject to the same issues of dropping out as regular broadband. Now it doesn't happen as frequently, and it's solved just as easily, by unplugging the router and then plugging it back in. But the problem of course is that the router isn't in my house, so if my landlord is out, there's nothing I can do.
The other problem is that the connection is massively capped.
Basically, they only allow you about 1.5gb of bandwidth before they throttle the connection speed back. 1.5gb is nothing - I can get through that browsing websites, let alone all the downloading I do.
This is one of the things I have gotten used to with my current service. There are no bandwidth limits at all and I regularly get through over 100gb a month.
The other thing that weighs in here is that the cable connection isn't dramatically faster than my landline broadband. From the cable I get just under 2megabits (this is actually puzzling to me, because it's meant to be a 10meg line - dunno if it's been handicapped because of the giant network cable, but it seems quite a bit off of what it should be), whereas with the landline I can get about 1.4megabits.
Yes, it's faster, but once they throttle it, which happens often, it drops to less than 1megabit. If I keep using it, it also seems to slow down even more.
The other saving plan I've been mulling over is getting rid of some of my websites.
For example, the scan-city.org site has basically never been used properly and, having gone almost completely off of doing scanning, it seems an incredible waste of money.
I've also gone off of walling, so it also seems daft keeping digital-bondage.net. On top of which nobody likes my walls anyway, so it's not like the world would be missing anything. To be fair, scan-city doesn't cost much, so it wouldn't be a huge saving to get rid of it.
That leaves trismugistus.com. I don't think I'd ever get rid of it, but I've been thinking I should turn it into a straight review site, especially if I get rid of digital-bondage.net. I could also probably change the hosting as I wouldn't have the need to store all my big walling files.
That'd give me an excuse to tweak the site design as well. Not that I dislike the current design (just the opposite in fact) but it might be nice to give it a facelift. I could also go through and tidy up things like typos and errors I made.
The primary reason for this is that I'm in a mountain of debt and have been for a very long time.
There are a few rays of hope in this cloud of gloom. One of the main ones is the huge pile of "stuff" that I own. For example, if and when I pull my finger out and watch all my unwatched stuff, selling it all on e-bay will (in theory), release some big old chunks of cash that should alleviate at least part of the debt.
Also, my attempts at reigning in my spending have, on the whole, been working. I now buy far fewer DVDs than I used to. I also don't buy so much random crap and I even try to by non-branded and generic products where I can.
As part of this "don't spend money you having got, you fucking idiot" crusade, one of my attempts has been to get cable. I know I've talked about this before, but I dunno how far I explained.
Basically, it turned out that they wouldn't allow two lots of cable at the same address, and my landlord already has cable. So what we did was run a very long network cable through the roof from his router and down into my place.
My plan was to try this out for about a month and if it worked fine then I'd cancel my existing broadband, saving me over £30 a month. I'd also look at stopping my telephone landline, potentially saving another £11 a month. That's the best part of £500 saved a year.
Unfortunately, early signs are that this may not be as successful as I'd hoped.
There are two basic problems.
The first is that it turns out cable broadband is subject to the same issues of dropping out as regular broadband. Now it doesn't happen as frequently, and it's solved just as easily, by unplugging the router and then plugging it back in. But the problem of course is that the router isn't in my house, so if my landlord is out, there's nothing I can do.
The other problem is that the connection is massively capped.
Basically, they only allow you about 1.5gb of bandwidth before they throttle the connection speed back. 1.5gb is nothing - I can get through that browsing websites, let alone all the downloading I do.
This is one of the things I have gotten used to with my current service. There are no bandwidth limits at all and I regularly get through over 100gb a month.
The other thing that weighs in here is that the cable connection isn't dramatically faster than my landline broadband. From the cable I get just under 2megabits (this is actually puzzling to me, because it's meant to be a 10meg line - dunno if it's been handicapped because of the giant network cable, but it seems quite a bit off of what it should be), whereas with the landline I can get about 1.4megabits.
Yes, it's faster, but once they throttle it, which happens often, it drops to less than 1megabit. If I keep using it, it also seems to slow down even more.
The other saving plan I've been mulling over is getting rid of some of my websites.
For example, the scan-city.org site has basically never been used properly and, having gone almost completely off of doing scanning, it seems an incredible waste of money.
I've also gone off of walling, so it also seems daft keeping digital-bondage.net. On top of which nobody likes my walls anyway, so it's not like the world would be missing anything. To be fair, scan-city doesn't cost much, so it wouldn't be a huge saving to get rid of it.
That leaves trismugistus.com. I don't think I'd ever get rid of it, but I've been thinking I should turn it into a straight review site, especially if I get rid of digital-bondage.net. I could also probably change the hosting as I wouldn't have the need to store all my big walling files.
That'd give me an excuse to tweak the site design as well. Not that I dislike the current design (just the opposite in fact) but it might be nice to give it a facelift. I could also go through and tidy up things like typos and errors I made.
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