Friday 23 July 2010

i can't be bothered because i'm tired and it's tedious

Those where my exact thoughts last night when I was considering whether to continue scanning or not.

See, this week, in the evenings, I've been doing some more scanning. The reason was that I had a think about what I used to do and it occurred to me that I used to scan during the evenings and maybe if I started doing that again then I could catch-up quicker.

And on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that was fine, but last night I was just so tired I couldn't be arsed. I'd actually finished an issue of NewType across the three days before, so it wasn't too bad.

Anyway, as usual, while I scanned I sampled a couple of shows:


Kaicho wa Maid Sama

This didn't really do much for me. It's a shoujo series and it seemed rather typical of the genre.

Also, I found it slightly bizarre that the main character was basically tsundere. I must admit I'd pretty much always assumed that those moe personality types were pretty much only used in things that were meant to appeal to male otaku. I'd always assumed that shoujo has its own set of stereotypes - I'd never really considered that one of the moe ones would pop up in a shoujo series, though.

And it's actually part of the problem. The idea of a tsundere is they're initially hostile towards you, but then go on to reveal a softer side. Well, in this show that seems to keep happening over-and-over in each episode. It's like a giant reset button is pressed after the end credits.


Rainbow

Wow, this was rather brutal.

It reminded me a lot of Sleepers, which was a film about... well, about a bunch of kids that end up in a rather unpleasant jail, getting abused, beaten and sodomised by the guards.

The thing with Sleepers was that it was supposedly based on something that really happened. However, while the writer claims that to be so, the authorities say it isn't. Also, while the first part with them as kids is basically believable, the second part involving the trial feels like pure fabrication.

There's a similar sort of problem here - it's presenting something that it's not clear whether it's meant to be based on real events (or at least, inspired by them) or if it's entirely fabricated. Now don't get me wrong, I don't go dismissing things simply because they're fictional, it's more like, because it seems so exaggerated, is it giving a false impression?

Thursday 22 July 2010

da pageviews

That's 'DA' meaning DeviantArt, not 'da' as in "da boyz", by the way.

But speaking of stats and pageviews the other day, I've been a member of DA for a good while now (5 years according to my DA homepage) and somehow I've wracked up 6,300-odd pageviews.

I say somehow, because I'm not that good an artist. In fact, beyond writing, which I enjoy, and like to delude myself that I'm not half bad at, I'd say I was a pretty rubbish artist. And even if I was actually any good at writing, writing is not generally all that popular on DA, plus I haven't submitted anything at all now for the best part of 2 years.

So I've had the account 5 years and for the last two of them have submitted nothing. I've never posted on the forums and I don't use the blog on there. Plus, I only watch a small handful of artists and I generally don't comment very much on those artist's work, although I do fave plenty. I also don't go around randomly commenting or giving away the llamas that were such a hit recently.

In other words, I don't do anything that would get me particularly noticed, yet I've got more than 6,000 pageviews - that's more than 1,200 a year, or 100 a month, or around 3-4 visits a day!

However, what's even more puzzling is the stats on some of my deviations.

If you look at my gallery stats the first thing you notice is that the vast majority of my uploads have next to no views . The written stuff in particular rarely breaks past a dozen views. The wallpapers I did faired a little better. One in particular, called swords from when I was properly active on the site has about a 1,000 pageviews.

(What's really annoying about DA's latest, shittiest version, is that the above mentioned wall is meant to be a 1,600*1,200 res wall that people can download and use. But, because of how this shit new version works, you can't get at it as a 1,600*1,200 res image. What the fuck is that all about? I mean, it was uploaded as a 1,600*1,200 file originally, but somewhere in the shitifcation process they appear to have lost it. Or at least there's meant to be an "allow download" option in the back end, and it's not there. Fucking useless idiots.)

But what you also notice is that this version of the space scene wall has a massive 4,319 views and 3,401 downloads!

Now I appreciate that's not massive by properly popular artist standards, but in comparison to everything else in my gallery, it's the equivalent of a one-hit wonder. Especially when you consider that the other variants barely scraped past 500 page views combined.

The only thing I can think is that somewhere out there in the ether someone has linked to that wall and it still gets a trickle of click-throughs. And then a few randomly curious people click to see who this trismugistus fellow is.

It's all a bit bizarre really.

Wednesday 21 July 2010

baby mama

I've said before that I'm a big fan of 30Rock.

Along with The Big Bang Theory I think it's probably one of the best comedy shows around at the moment.

30Rock stars Tina Fey, who's also the head writer of a weekly comedy show, which is based loosely on her time as head writer of Saturday Night Live. We don't really have an equivalent to Saturday Night Live here in the UK, but the name is pretty self-explanatory.

Anyway, the point is I like Tina Fey and was therefore probably expecting more of this. Well, I say that, but I saw some stuff at the time of Baby Mama's release at the cinema saying it wasn't very good.

Broadly, I'd agree with that, I think.

To be totally fair to it, it is a comedy and I did find it funny in many places. However, there are long stretches without very many gags. And I don't mean there are bits where the gags aren't funny - it's more like it has a chunk of jokes, most of which are pretty good, and then there will be a fairly long bit where there just aren't any.

The comedic pacing seems a bit off, in other words. But this isn't what makes it not very good. That is a more difficult thing to really explain.

See, the basic plot of the film is that Fey's character is a successful career woman who's biological clock has started ticking. She tries to find a man, but scares them off. She tries using a sperm donor and artificial insemination, but it turns out she has a T-shaped uterus, making it a million to one shot. So she does to a surrogate agency.

And if you hadn't guessed one of the contributing factors to why this isn't very good by now, I'm not going to tell you. Actually, yes I am - it all feels too predictable. Is there anything in the above that you couldn't really guess? And can you guess how it goes on?

Well, okay, there are some bits that surprised me, but more because it didn't pick the options I was expecting it to - what it ended up picking wasn't really a surprise as such.

Another thing that didn't really help is that Fey's character isn't hugely likeable. She's a bit of a snob and doesn't really seem to learn much throughout the course of the course of the film. And generally the film is quite wimpish like that.

I mean here's a good example - she works for a 'big corporate' that produced natural fruit juices and smoothies. She then meets the owner of a small shop that also does natural juices and smoothies.

Now the implication is that his business is tanking, though this is never really explored. Also, Tina Fey is responsible for building a big mall/shopping centre thing (I didn't get this - they're a juice company building a mall. Eh?) down the road that's going to presumably destroy his business (his business that doesn't really seem to have any customers anyway).

Initially she deceives him about it, but when he finds out, he's not really all that bothered. Indeed, he starts dating her.

Which just comes off as sloppy writing. I mean, he doesn't really even seem all that bothered when he finds out she's using a surrogate and yet they seem to stop seeing each other. So if he's not bothered, why do they split up; if he is, why is he not more miffed when he finds out?

When you add into the mix the fact that Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver pop up and both give, quite frankly, scene stealing performances it all seems like a bit of a mess. Not a disaster, but a "tries hard could do better".

Tuesday 20 July 2010

you will all be my slaves

I stumbled across this the other day.

I've almost no real idea what this site is in any way shape or form (now, I'm hardly going to let that stop me, am I?), but if you scroll down a bit you'll see that it has a chart of some description. This chart is under a heading that clearly says "Ranking".

The only sensible guess (that I'm going to entrain since it lets me write this blog entry that I've already skilfully (okay, slap-dashedly) pre-crafted in my brains) is that it's indicating how amazingly popular and well loved my blog is.

If you hover over each of the points on the graph you can see some pretty big numbers, but they're clearly being charted on a monthly basis. And here's the key point - the numbers may be big, but they're getting smaller as the months go along.

Now normally, shrinkage is something I try to avoid (as it were), but in this case, that means my ranking is going up. I start way down at a paltry 16,537, but I end up an ever-so-slightly less paltry 13,678.

And now here's the clever bit. Using my amazing scientifical education, I can do all sorts of clever maths and work out my rate of ascension. So, by extrapolating into the future, I can predict that sometime in July 2014 - just 4 short years away - my blog will be the most highly ranked.

Although, if I continue the extrapolation, I find that by December of that year mine will officially be the -1,743rd most popular blog. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, so instead I'm choosing to ignore that bit and interpret my findings as meaning that in July 2014 I will officially be crowned king of the blogosphere. Which will definitely be a good thing. I hereby pledge to be a vaguely reasonable ruler that, when asked to recall my time as king, people look back and fondly say "Yeah, he was all right. I guess."

Isn't science a wonderful and marvellous thing?

Monday 19 July 2010

double header

So, having made a proclamation about doing stuff last Friday, did I carry it through across the weekend?

Well, kinda.

Friday and Saturday were good days - I ploughed through the to do list with a vigour that meant I was ticking off stuff way ahead of schedule. However, Saturday night I was up rather late and the knock on was that Sunday I was pretty tired.

And being tired meant I didn't really maximise my time. There was a bunch of options for stuff to do and I avoided any that seemed like too much effort. Also I kinda blew the entire morning playing compute games.

However, by the afternoon I'd decided I was being silly and so did some scanning. The truth is if I'd properly committed to scanning I could have done loads more, but even so I got through two issues of New Type, which is pretty good going.

Anyway, while I scanned, I watched some fansubs, so here's some mini reviews:


B Gata H Kei

Hmm, this is a weird one.

At the very start of the first episode the main character, a 15 year old girl, declares that it's her ambition to sleep with 100 guys.

Which, if I'm perfectly frank, did not sit well with me. It is worth bearing in mind that the Japanese age of consent works differently to ours. Here there's a single age, above which sex is basically illegal. In Japan I believe it's more like a tiered system, where people between something like 14 and 19 are allowed to sleep with people of a similar age.

So in other words, she's not underage, as such. However, what troubled me more was that no justification for it was given - why does she want to sleep with 100 guys? It makes little sense. Also, if a girl really had this ambition, would she also then be as naive and afraid of actual sex as this one is?

Plus, the show then moves on to essentially being a fairly standard romantic comedy. The fact she says she wants to sleep with 100 guys is almost irrelevant. If instead it had been about her falling for this guy and her continuing clumsy attempts to seduce him then that would have worked perfectly. So why the 100 sex partners crap?

Anyway, if you get past that element, this is actually a fairly okay romantic comedy.


Kiss x Sis

And speaking of bizarre shows, there's Kiss x Sis.

The basic idea of this show is that the main guy has two older twin sisters who both want to jump his bones. However, it's eventually revealed that they're not blood relatives - his father married their mother after they both had their respective children.

One of the main problems I have with a lot of romantic comedy anime is that there's no real reason why the hot chicks like the guy. Many of them just seem to work on assumptions, and this is another one - why do these girls love him? No reason is given.

However, where B Gata H Kei had a weird idea but then proceeded to actually be a fairly normal romantic comedy, this show just knocks that weird ball out of the park for a home run and never looks back. I mean, when it's revealed that they're not blood relatives, the father and mother actually do so with the aim of encouraging them to sleep together.

And in one scene, one of the girls fishes something out of a waste bin in his room and smells it. My assumption as to what's going on is that she's found a tissue he's used to wipe up his 'night-time emissions' and is taking a great big sniff.

No, this isn't a proper hentai anime, it's just very, very wrong.


Magic Kaito

I must confess that I know next to nothing about Detective Conan - or is it called Case Closed? The only things I do know are that the main character is a guy that's been turned into a kid and that he solves crimes.

It turns out that Magic Kaito (Magic Kid) is actually a side-story to Case Closed, and features a character in that show. Given that the Magic Kid in question steals stuff, my guess is that they're enemies.

But in a way this is beside the point. I only found this all out after I'd watched the OAV and I still enjoyed it. I'm not sure my enjoyment was sufficient to instantly rush out and buy Detective Conan, but I'd probably look into it if I didn't have a million other DVDs to watch already.


Tono to Issho

Tono to Issho means something like "my master and me" and appears to originally be a gag manga.

I'm completely unfamiliar with the manga and really didn't know what to expect going into this. My overall reaction is a somewhat mixed one.

Humour is always the most subjective of things and seems to be one of those truly cultural things. The French, for example, love slapstick comedy. This is relevant because Tono to Issho seems to be very Japanese.

And that's not only in terms of its humour - the show is set during the warring states period of Japan, which I have to confess I know very little about. This suggests that a lot of the gags would have more impact if you did know about it, which is to say you were Japanese.

To be fair, I did laugh at some of it, but I also have to say there were some long periods of not laughing, so very much a mixed bag.


Highschool of the Dead

HotD is pure fan service.

I think I've probably blathered on before about how fan-service is actually a fairly broad church, where a lot of people use it simply to refer to tits & ass. Now t&a is fan-service, of course, but fan-service also includes stuff like giant mecha and their transformation scenes or huge space battles and the like.

So when I say HotD is pure fan-service, not only do I mean it has a lot of jiggle, but it's also crammed full of top zombie horror action too.

HotD is actually based on a manga that I like. It's actually one of the very few manga I've read as scanslations, which are normally something I hate, but there didn't seem to be a western release on the horizon and the manga had been on hiatus for a good while, so I checked out the first few volumes.

The anime is faithful in terms of basic plot, but it seems to have added a few bits and pieces. All of these work well, and what also helps is that it's directed and presented in a really nice way. They also don't really skimp on the ultra-violence, although I guess for ratings reasons, some of the more shocking things tend to be just off camera, which doesn't really take anything away.

My only real fear is that because the manga is so short and seems to be a good way off having an end that when it gets to that point of the having to come up with its own end then it'll go off the rails a bit. What I'm hoping though is that the hiatus was because the writer was working with the anime guys to give it a good end.

Luckily, it turns out that this show has already been licensed, so hopefully there won't be too long a wait before it's out on DVD.