that wasn't what i wanted to talk about

How posts end up being about something else.

Generally speaking I pre-write my blog entries.

I do this for a variety of reasons. Among them are the fact that some days I have a bit more spare time than others; the blog isn't structured such that it follows something on a daily basis - I very rarely mention current affairs, and when I do it tends to be in a more considered, after-the-fact way and it gives me a chance to self-edit and spell check.

What I find interesting, though, is the fact that despite pre-writing them in this way (I have a word document on a USB stick I keep it all on) and therefore, in theory, planning out what I want to talk about, I end up writing blogs that don't actually do this.

This week is a classic example.

Monday's blog was supposed to be about how I ended up with a mild case of jogger's nipple. Jogger's nipple is, as the name suggests, an ailment that affects joggers and is to do with how their shirts rub against their nipples as they run, chaffing their nipples and causing them discomfort.

I got a bit of that on my Sunday walk, but the reason was because of the rain. I got so wet that my shirt really chaffed my nipple and caused me said ailment. And that meant I had to explain about how heavy the rain was. But then I realised I would have to start with how come I was so far away from home that I got that wet in the first place.

By the time I'd written all the pre-amble I'd gone over a page and realised I was into too-long post territory.

What makes this worse is that really I was going to use the jogger's nipple to explain about how last week I seemed to spend the whole week either injured or injuring myself. I whacked my foot, did something to my urethra, bought some new shoes which rubbed my heals quite badly and my legs ached like bastards from Friday until Monday.

This was meant to act as something of a pre-amble to the fact that I only lost 1 pound last week. Hardly surprising as I therefore couldn't do my usual exercise and wasn't as strict with the diet as I can be (I didn't go nuts or anything, but did have a few little treats to celebrate reaching my first target).

As I mentioned yesterday, Tuesday was supposed to be about talking about the new anime season. I think this is the first season I've ever really followed anime shows as they've been broadcast, used crunchyroll properly and watched anime on my computer legally.

But the thing was I felt I should firstly briefly explain about my new scanning process, because I've watched it all while scanning. But that meant I gave myself the opportunity to talk about photostitch, which has become a bit of a pet frustration/rant topic of mine, because I just don't understand how to get it to produce consistently good results (oops - nearly went off again there).

So yeah, it can be funny sometimes how, even though I plan and pre-write I still end up going off-topic.

(sc)animu part 2

What I was actually intending to talk about on Tuesday was all the animu I've watched while I've been scanning.

Specifically I wanted to do a quick run through of the shows from the most recent couple of seasons that I'm either watching at the moment or watched a bit of and dropped. These are actually all via crunchyroll - a site I still dislike, but that I've gotten used to. I've actually also got quite a lot of fansubs I need to plough through too, but for the moment I've been concentrating on crunchyroll.

Gosick

The mysteries are duffers, but the relationship between the characters is interesting. It's also nice that it didn't go down the harem or even the fan-service routes. Not that I dislike either (au contraire), but it really wouldn't have worked for this show. It could do with introducing a Moriarty, though.

Hourou Musoku (Wandering Son)

I have to confess I've found this a little confusing - the anime dumps you right in the middle of things and I'm pretty sure would work 100 time better if you're already familiar with the manga (which, apparently, starts at the beginning). But it's a very sensitive, poignant story that's boosted by some staggeringly beautiful imagery.

Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? (Is this a zombie?)

This and the next show, Dragon Crisis are both based on Light Novels and it really shows - both are jam-packed with clichés and tropes so heavily used I could probably write them myself. However, I think over the years I've come to expect this from Light Novels, so my expectations have become suitably lowered, plus, and this is always a plus, they're available legally for free. If I was buying the shows, well, actually, no, I wouldn't buy them.

Dragon Crisis

Of the two, I think I prefer Zombie, because it takes itself less seriously, the fan-service is slightly better and the animation is more consistent. In Dragon Crisis you get bits of intensely good animation which have clearly been paid for by having entire episodes of people standing still and talking. However, Dragon Crisis does redeem itself by not really being a harem show. I think your mileage will vary, especially if you're a loli fan.

Level E

It turns out that Level E is a comedy/parody type show. Although I had no idea what it would be, I have to admit I wasn't expecting that. Neither was I expecting it to be so consistently good.

Beelzebub

Comedy is always the most subjective of things and unlike Level E, while a few things made me chuckle, the constant repeating of the same "baby cries and then electrocutes them" gag got very tedious, very quickly.

Rio Rainbow Gate

Oh dear. Looked like it was going to be a cheesecake fan-service show, and while that is there, it was weak, with poor character designs and cheap animation. The framing was also so cliché it was painful. this is one of those shows that's so average it's horrible - you can't even enjoy it for being bad.

Tantei Opera Milky Holmes

This really didn't do anything for me. It seemed to have a really jarring mix of fan-service and kid's-show style cutesy, but also it looked like it was going to involve mysteries (the "Holmes" in the title) but then didn't have any and was more like a crap magical girl show.

Demon King Daimao

I only watched one episode of this, as the crunchyroll is heavily and ham-fistedly censored. It seemed like it would be an okay fan-service / harem-comedy show without that, although the animation looked like a bit of a victim of a low budget.


I've also watched quite a lot of shows on crunchyroll that I've completed. I've decided to do more thorough reviews for these, almost certainly via this blog, rather than on trismugistus.com, but I though I'd do a bullet list and one sentence summary here:

• Giant Killing: Quite good, but flagged a bit towards the end. Also clearly a second season was intended.
• Asobi Ni Ikuyo: Didn't really get it. Is it meant to be parody? Poor one if it is. The ham-fisted fan-service censorship has the feel that it's meant to be a joke, but if so it's just an annoying one. Saved by a satisfactory conclusion.
• Occult Academy: Promising, but a little directionless.
• Omamori Himari: Enjoyable fan-service heavy harem show with a good conclusion.
• Chu-Bra: Rather weird - feels aimed at younger audience with a 'life lessons' style, but for perverts.
• Panty & Stocking: Meandering, unfunny, toilet-dwelling rubbish, frankly, until the demon sisters appear, and even then only really has flashes of quality.
• Fortune Arterial: When the vampire stuff kicks in it raises it above being a bit wet, but until then it's horribly dull. Even after it's not that much better. Rubbish ending.
• Time of Eve (Eve no Jikan): It's proper Isaac Asimov sci-fi stuff.
• Shinryaku! Ika Musume (Squid Girl): This is a fun, bubbly sort of comedy show, but I have to confess it all felt a bit aimless to me - if it had managed to get in some proper environmental stuff, which the first episode suggested might be a theme, then I think I might have liked it a bit more.
• Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai (The World God only Knows):- Manages to have it's cake and eat it - we get all sorts of moe tropes, but there's a clever, grown up element to it as well.

sherlock holmes

There was no rental DVD this weekend, so instead I watched the recent Guy Ritchie/Robert Downy Jr/Jude Law version of Sherlock Holmes.

This was actually my first proper Blu-Ray, having got my computer with a Blu-Ray set up a couple of weeks back (what a faff that was!) and I have to say it was, slightly surprisingly, a pleasant one.

This was slightly surprising, because I went in expecting not to like their version of Holmes. I'd heard talk of it being a "re-imagining" and that can be dangerous word. What I found was a rather entertaining and more faithful than expected version.

I can't pretend to be an expert on Sherlock Holmes. He's one of those characters where everybody knows who he is, but on the whole it's based mainly on acquired knowledge or the films they've seen. I do know that in films he's often presented as being older and less active than he was in the books. This is even more true of Watson, who's often depicted as being quite a lot older and fatter than Holmes.

In fact, when solving cases, Holmes and Watson were always dashing around and getting involved in fisticuffs. And Holmes of course is a master of disguises.

However, I'm not sure this was quite to the extent depicted in this film - there was clearly a desire to make Holmes something of an action hero, rather than spending all his time thinking about things and examining clues. Of course he does those too, but the focus is clearly on the running around and the fighting, rather than the thinking.

They've also tried to shoe-horn in a bit of a love interest and there's an interesting elevation of Watson to similar levels of deductive powers as Holmes. So they have changed stuff, but I think it all still works. The key is that this increased action and the sops to more conventional films all hang off a genuinely well thought out and executed plot with a reasonable mystery.

Visually and stylistically it all works - my first full Blu-Ray experience was good from this point of view.

If I was to make one criticism it would actually be with Downey Jr's accent. No, actually, that's not quite it - his accent is basically fine, my issue with more with how he's speaking.

For some reason they've gone for something akin to received pronunciation. You know all those old clips of people talking on the BBC where they speak in an oddly clear, almost accent-less way? That's received English.

Why I had a problem with this is because the whole point of it being received is that nobody actually ever spoke like that - it's an adopted style, so why would Holmes talk like that?

What also didn't help was that there seemed to be an attempt to include something of Johnny Depp's weird way of talking in Pirates of the Caribbean. This worked for that character, but doesn't make any sense for Holes.

It's a minor thing, really, but it did grate somewhat.

(sc)animu

This last few weeks I've been doing loads of scanning.

What's been good is I've really been sticking with it. Since the backlog started to grow I've had a couple of session where I did a few magazines, but nothing like I needed to in order to make a decent impression in it.

The backlog was getting really quite stupid - I had getting on for a years worth of magazines to scan by the time I decided to get my act together and by the time I got my new process flowing it had grown to around 15 months.

I've still got 15 months worth of new types, but for everything else I've taken it down to about 9 or 10 months. Of course, new types traditionally have the most images in them, so that's perhaps not quite as good as it sounds, but the main point is that I'm eating through the backlog at a much faster pace than I'm receiving new magazines.

In fact, my hope is that (barring any unforeseen problems) I'll be up to date by Easter. Given that Easter isn't until the weekend before my birthday this year, that's sounds closer than it is, but I think it's a goal that's strikes a good balance between realism and ambition.

I mean, even if I still have a few magazines left by then, all the bank holidays should give me the chance to finish them off. And there is a potentially big hurdle that could scupper my timings though.

That hurdle is the whole scan-stitching process.

My new scanning process is based around my new computer, which I ended up with after my games-machine update. I now use an A4 scanner, which means all of the magazine pages need scanning in two parts (all the Japanese anime mags are printed on pages larger than A4) and then using the automatic photostitch to stick them together.

Now I have been playing with my process, experimenting to see what works best in terms of input to the automatic photo-stitch thing in photoshop, but the results have been mixed. The main success has been that I've realised a lot of the pre-processing I've been doing is essentially un-necessary.

When I started with this new set up, I was making sure to crop and align each of the scans so that they would be 'easier' for it to stick together. However, it turns out that this is basically unnecessary - it doesn't appear to make a jot of difference to the end results.

This is good, because it's meant I've really been able to speed up the actual scanning. I managed to belt through 4 whole animedias in about a week, for example, which is really helping me catch up.

Except what it's also doing is creating a huge number of files that I'll then need to go back to in order to stick together and finish off. Now this would be okay, but it's a horribly tedious process.

But also, it's the type of job that can't be done while doing something else as well. While I scan I watch anime (which is what I'd intended this post to be about, but I've dribbled on so long I'm going to break the posts into two!), but I can't do that with photostitch. The actual automatic bit of the process is at that sort of length where it's not instant, but not long enough for you to let it run while you do something else.

But also, this is where the bad side to photo-stitch comes in - I can't for the life of me work out a way to get it to perform consistently. A lot of the time it's great, but then every so often it will just throw a total wobbler and repeatedly make a complete arse of sticking things together.

This wouldn't be bad if I could work out why and how to avoid it, but I can't. About the only thing that seems to consistently cause it a problem is when two images are quite simple (e.g. big block of colour), but even this doesn't universally cause it grief.

Anyway, the point is that I could end up in a situation where I simply transfer a backlog of unscanned magazines into a backlog of unstitched pictures.

mildly moist

At the weekend I like to go for several long walks.

In particular, I like to go for a reasonably long walk just after lunch on both Saturday and Sunday. I also try to go for a shorter walk on Saturday and Sunday morning, but this can be disrupted by my schedule or the weather or, to be frank, if I'm feeling tired or unwell.

However, these shorter walks are bonuses, and it's the main big walk that really counts. I've talked about them before, but roughly speaking they're always based around where I live, so that I can just grab my keys and my MP3 player and go. I like to do them without dragging loads of accoutrements around and by doing them around where I live I know I'm always a reasonably short distance from home should I need to go back.

Now one of the things I've been trying to do with the walks is build up my distance. In fact, distance is my primary concern, and I try not to clock watch. Of course, watching the clock is useful - walking faster burns more calories - but I don't tend to think along the lines of doing a 45 minute walk, it's more about doing a 5km walk, or whatever.

But if you think about it these aspirations are slightly contradictory - how can I increase my distance, but still keep within a reasonable distance of home? Well, I could walk round in circles, and generally speaking most of my routes do involve circles, but eventually you get into the situation of repeating the loops, which is boring.

As such, I've been trying to go down some new routes, which are also circles, but which are bigger circles. In particular, I've been exploring the roads that (broadly) lead down to Sainsbury's and Farnham.

However, I've hit a bit of a snag over the last few weekends, and it's to do with the weather.

This last Sunday I set off on my walk, but, at what I was intending to be half way, it suddenly started raining. And I mean properly raining. I got very wet, very quickly.

At one point I stopped and waited under a bus shelter, but after 5 minutes it was becoming apparent that it wasn't a quick shower. Indeed, it actually continued to rain until I went to bed, but it meant I'd have to head home. But of course I was half way out on quite a long walk. If I'd have simply turned round it would pretty much have been the same distance.

What made the situation worse this last Sunday was I'd only take my light coat and not my hat. When I'd set off it was sunny and the forecast I'd seen the day before had said it would be sunny all day.

When a similar situation happened a couple of weeks back, I at least had my heavy coat and my hat. On Sunday, my coat was rendered ineffective after about ten minutes and I got so wet rain was dribbling down my face and my glasses were completely obscured. It actually reminded me of the more miserable experiences of school sports.

Hopefully of course the weather will improve and it won't be an issue. Or at least, it won't be an issue until the summer, when, presumably, I'll be moaning that it's too hot :).

From my perspective at the moment, though, I'm praying for the warm weather to roll on. For now, I've had quite enough of all the bone-chilling weather and rain, to be frank.