three double u's

Does that make six u's or three w's?

Anyway, my entire bank holiday weekend can be summed up as Watching, Walking and... er... Scanning... Widiculous amounts of scanning?

Er, yeah, no, it doesn't really work. But it's still true.

On Saturday and Sunday I essentially spent all my time watching stuff. It was the Belgium Grand Prix, so that involved loads of hours of watching practice, qualifying and the race (I'm going to miss this depth of coverage when it's gone).

But I also had loads of stuff recorded from the past week that I watched. If I'm totally honest I'm not entirely sure how I managed to stack up quite so much unwatched stuff last week. I mean, it's not like I watched loads of anime DVDs and I didn't do any scanning during the week.

I think the honest truth is a high degree of fatigue brought on by work. It's been so manic these last few weeks I think basically I was getting home quite late, having something to eat, doing only a little bit of stuff and then going to bed. Either that or somebody shaved a few hours off each day.

Going for more extended walks is something I like to do at weekends, but I figured this weekend would be a good chance to really pump in the steps. As I've discussed before I use a pedometer to try to keep an eye on the number of steps I do.

This weekend I went for three long walks - one each on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. The Saturday and Sunday walks were two of my normal walks, but on Monday I did one of the super long/hard ones that I'd been doing before I went to the British Grand Prix.

It was quite knackering, I have to say. The Monday walk on its own was about 8,500 steps, which is quite a way. When you add in the steps I do as part of normal weekend stuff, I was a good way above 10,000 steps each day.

I think most people have heard of the 10,000 steps thing before. To be frank, it's actually a huge distance - if each step is just 50cm, it's around 5km, which is a big way. My steps are about 60cm, so that's more like 6km, which is a long way. Also, I walk at about 100 steps a minute, so it's about 100 minutes or 1h40mins of walking.

I think you can pick up from the above that the suggestions of doing 10,000 every day are a little unrealistic in the modern world. Spending more than an hour and a half every day walking is quite unlikely for anyone who works in an office and has to commute to work. I therefore use 10,000 as my guide for the weekends/days off and 5,000 for normal days, which I (roughly) manage to achieve.

I hadn't actually thought I'd get round to scanning at all this weekend. And if it had been a normal weekend I wouldn't. Basically, I spent a good number of hours at it on Monday, having managed to watch most of what I needed to across the weekend. I could have watched torchwood, which I've been recording but not got the chance to start yet, but I was a bit sick of watching telly so scanned, instead (where I obviously watched anime while I scanned... is that ironic or just me being daft?).

animu

Thought I'd do a broad update on the animu situation.

I've actually been watching loads recently, and most of it has been DVDs. I could probably have watched more, but not a lot more. And to be fair, it has been part of the reason I've not done so much scanning or some other bits - there are only a finite number of hours in the week, after all.

One thing I did try to do was re-arrange my shelves in order to make it easy to access the stuff I think I should watch first. This didn't really work properly as my shelves have so much stuff on them there's two layers of stuff - one in front of the other. I therefore couldn't decide whether I should do it in terms of height (top shelf is to watch first, second next, etc) or depth (stuff in front is to watch first). In the end it was a bit of a mix of both.

What made this more confusing is I decided to try to include both books and non-anime DVDs in the mix as well. When you factor in that I've got two sets of shelves of very different dimensions it all proved too much for my brain and the short amount of time I'd allowed to do it, so really it's just a mess now. I think I may have another go and take a slightly different approach.

What I have hit upon s a strategy for watching stuff. Basically what I've done is picked out a couple of series and stacked them up right next to my DVD player. The key innovation is that I watch 1 DVD from series 1, then 1 from series 2, then back to series 1, then back to series 2.

I've also blended together half and full seasons. This is really made possible by the fact that most of the series I've got are of the new variety where 13 episodes are covered in just 2 disks. It helps me because it gives me decent chunks of series to watch (I can watch half a disk (3 eps - about an hour) or a full disk (6/7 eps - about 2 hours)) but I don't tend to suffer series fatigue where I become disinterested because I've watched 9 episodes on a row or similar.

One of the things I found with crunchyroll is I get a bit lost if I try to watch multiple series a single episode at a time each week. Instead, I found it better to watch a bunch of eps of 1 series 1 week, then a bunch of another series the next week and so on and so forth until I get back the first series where there's now a new stack of episodes to watch.

Of course I've let crunchyroll slip. I obviously had the period where I didn't have a shower and I talked at the time about how that poxed me up. I then broke my scanner lid and while I could have limped on it was horribly annoying to use, so I just bought another one.

I'm therefore well behind with the latest stuff. Indeed, I'm still behind with last season and have barely registered the new season stuff. One thing I have noticed is that a whole bunch of shows that were supposedly picked up by Anime-on-Demand with a big "we've got these shows, they'll start NEXT WEEK" seems to have resulted in nothing. Certainly none of the shows they announced have started and that announcement was at least a month ago.

I mean, I don't fundamentally mind the delay, but if you announce they'll start NEXT WEEK and a month later they're nowhere in sight, that's a bit off.

And it doesn't help that the AOD site seems to be crushingly slow just recently. I know they're part of ANN and ANN had horrible hosting troubles and since they came back they've been really poor too, but it's really obviously a bad thing when you're tying to stream content.

I was actually intending to do some rounds up of the actual shows I've watched, but I guess this is already super long. I actually think I'm going to try to sit down and do a bunch of reviews at the weekend - I've now loads of long reviews that I should do and loads of short reviews too.

I was actually think I should come up with a plan for my websites. I can't possibly afford to get hosting for them at the moment, but it would be quite nice to have a fully 'working' site ready to go when I do eventually decide to bring them back.

broke my scanner

The other week I mentioned about how F1 is on its summer break.

A particular hope I had is/was that I would be able to use this increase in spare time to get a bit of scanning done. As an added 'bonus' I actually dropped a couple of TV shows that hadn't really turned out to be as interesting as I'd hoped.

These were "The Hour" which I'd thought was going to be about the founding of a TV show back in the 50s at the BBC, but seemed to be intent on becoming a conspiracy thriller. This might have been okay, but didn't really appeal, to be frank.

The other was The Killing, which was also okay, but didn't really grab me. It was a murder mystery thing, but was taking the approach of having the one murder that was heavily investigated across the whole length of the show. This would probably be okay, but I have so say it did seem to be trying overly hard to throw lots of red herrings at you. Also, the surrounding elements felt a bit tired to me - political campaign and cop obsessed with their job over their life... yawn.

Anyway, I dutifully sat down to do a bit of scanning last week... and promptly broke my scanner :/.

Id' actually broken it a while back - basically, I'd put a crack in the hinge that you use to lift up the lid for the scanner. The lid had been listing badly as a result for ages, and I guess it chose that day to finally make its way all the way through and break off.

The bit that had broken off was itself not too bad a problem, but, and this is a bit difficult to explain, with it missing it made the whole process of scanning really difficult.

Basically, I was having to slot the lid back into place every time I put the lid down, which was difficult to get right. Also, it made the pages prone to slipping around once I'd put it on, meaning I was missing bits of the pages and having to re-adjust.

You may think why not scan without it, well I tried that too. The real problem is you need some way of evenly applying pressure to the page so it all sits totally flat on the bed of the scanner. If it doesn't you get bits out of focus and distortion effects. The scanner lid generally has a nice, flat, padded surface designed for the job.

Eventually I tried to break the other bit of the hinge off so I could use it and this worked better, but I also ordered a new scanner as it's still not very efficient.

This was particularly annoying, given the point I made the other day about how efficient I was at the weekend - I could have gotten loads down, but it was only possible to do a little bit.

how does that work?

So as mentioned I didn't do much exercise last weekend and I drank beer on Saturday and we ate takeaway pizza.

And yet I'd still lost 1 pound when I weighed myself on Sunday. It hadn't even been a particularly good week to compensate. I guess there's the possibility I was horribly dehydrated when I weighed myself, but I didn't feel that way - more tired than dehydrated.

Still, happy to take a 1 pound loss and won't be too harsh on myself if the "bad living" shows up next weekend instead.

It feels like I've gotten way behind with the scanning. I seem to have lost a bit of momentum with it.

I mean, I have done quite a lot of catching up - I'm no longer 15 months behind, I'm now only about 6 months behind - but I've been feeling like I'm never going to catch up, so why even bother trying?

I mean, it's not that bad, but you get what I mean. I think to myself that I've so much of it to do, doing x instead of some scanning is hardly going to hurt. trouble is all that adds up and I'll soon be a stupid amount behind again.

Part of the problem I think was the all problems I had with the cable internet connection. That coincided with me being off around Easter and meant I couldn't watch crunchyroll stuff. At the time the new UK one - Anime On Demand - was just getting going too and those were what I really wanted to watch while I scanned.

Instead I watched (older) fansubs I'd downloaded, and while that was good and needed doing, it meant I've gotten some way behind with new season stuff where I'd hoped I was going to be fully up to date.

As mentioned there's also this AOD thing and while I have subscribed to it, I'm not hugely impressed. It only seems to work in either a small window or full-screen, even if you adjust the resolution setting. This really doesn't work for me with watching it while I'm scanning, because the window is too small to easily watch and read the subtitles and of course full screen means you can't practically do anything else at the same time.

It's also all over the place in terms of episode numbers. To be fair they launched it just when the earthquake hit Japan and it's a brand new thing, so it's understandable, but it's a bit confusing with the episode numbers they're on and how big a delay they have from Japanese screening.

Also I'm unsure about the whole "season pass" model.

I hope what they're getting at is a quarterly subscription model that's basically a similar idea to crunchyroll. What I'm slightly worried about is that once the season is over, the videos will basically expire. That's a pain for me because I watch anime quite randomly, so it might be several weeks before I get around to watching some things.

The advantage with crunchyroll's model is that they try to keep things on for as long as possible. So if you come along several seasons later you can still watch stuff. A "season pass" implies that previous season's content will not be available to you.

post holiday round up

Got a bit better sleep last night, though I'm still tired as I'm effectively running at a deficit, but I thought I should post about what I got up to over the last few weeks and during my holiday and that.

As is my usual way, I put together a gigantic to do list / schedule thing. And as is my usual way there was way too much on it.

Usually with these lists I make two errors. Firstly, I underestimate the time things will take, and so think I can cram in more on any given day than I can, but also I'll usually make some fundamental error that then scuppers everything. That big error in this case was not allowing enough time for 'fun'.

By that I mean generic entertainment of any kind, be it watching telly or going out with friends. For some reason I put enough stuff in the schedule to (more than) fill all the available time so when it came to it I didn't have that time available because I was busy enjoying myself, if you see what I mean.

One thing that did surprise me, though, was that over the Easter weekend I'd assigned to giving my bedsit a spring clean and I managed to do this in the time. Usually with these sorts of cleans they're a classic example of my underestimating the time, winding up taking way longer than I think. But no, actually I managed to fit it all in, no problems.

The same can't be said about my main objective for the holiday, which was to get all my 2010 anime magazines scanned. To be fair, this did start well, as I scanned a load of mags in the first couple of days. However, I basically filled up my hard drive as a result and that meant I had to spend quite a lot of time processing the scans (using photostitch to stick them together).

This did give me an opportunity to play with photostitch and I've worked out how to make it give good results when it runs up against a scan it makes an arse of. I also think I've managed to tweak my technique such that it makes an arse of far less to start with. The root cause seems to be that at the edges of the scanner the bending of the page causes a brightening and a distortion of the image. So, by trimming that away, it does a better job. However, you still have to maintain enough overlap for it to work, so it's a bit of a black art.

I also established that it will work perfectly well with jpgs and that I can save the initial scans as maximum quality jpgs, stick them together then save the result as high quality jpgs and the end result is indistinguishable from my purer original method.

Of course all these took time and with my other errors over time allocation I'm still a fair way short of scanning all the 2010 magazines. I've basically got 3 new types (which always has the most things to scan) and 4 animages (which is always the easiest to scan) and then 2010 is done.

Of course that then means I have to move onto 2011, but assuming I get the above done by the middle of the year that will mean I'm effectively two thirds of the way through my backlog. Which gives you an idea of just how big the backlog was.

i forgetted

I forgot to post a blog post yesterday.

No particular reason. I did get wrapped up in some stuff at work, but I could probably have made the time, I just forgot.

It was a very bitty weekend, doing all sorts of odds and sods that generally didn't take very long but also aren't particularly interesting.

For example, I put a bunch of stuff on e-bay. This meant taking it out of the shed and sorting through it and taking and editing photos and writing the description and posting them up. None of which, as I say, is very interesting, but it took quite a while to do, all told.

I also spent quite a while editing together scans with photo stitch. I'm not sure I'll actually follow through with it, but I had the notion of processing all the scans I've done so far. I basically scanned the last magazine that means I've now finished two thirds of 2010. Or, to put it another way, I've done up to the end of august-2010.

This seemed like a fairly good point to stop and do all the stitching together. I've already done quite a lot of it, but despite spending several hours at it I probably only got through about a quarter of what I've got to do. I was pleased that photo stitch only threw one wobbly during that time, though. Why it worked fine for so long I still have no idea, though.

I also watched a lot of telly. In fact, I basically watched all of the recorded telly I had saved up. Well, actually I've still got the entire third series of Being Human to watch, but I'm deliberately leaving that for the Easter and other holiday period at the end of this month.

The amount f new telly also generally appears to be thinning out a bit. I'm very hopeful that the summer will be minimal in terms of telly worth watching and I'll use the time to watch animu.

At the moment, while I'm watching a lot of stuff, most of it has been via crunchyroll. I've also been downloading a handful of fansubs as some series either aren't available in the UK as streaming (boo) or nobody has them for streaming (double boo). I'll probably do a round up of fansub stuff tomorrow.

So yeah, bit of a rubbish, bitty weekend. To be honest, I think I did a bit much, as I felt knackered all yesterday and am tired today too. I also didn't go for my afternoon walk on Sunday as I was feeling knackered.

scanning or not

As with most weekends recently, I had "do lots of scanning" on my to do list.

However, actually I only scanned three things, although I did spend an awful lot of hours working on the scans. Basically, I realised I was rapidly running out of hard-drive space, espcially since I try to keep multiple copies of things, in case of drive crashes.

I therefore attached the stack of scans that I need to run through photostitch in order to stick them together. This is something I've not been looking forward to, although I think now I have a strategy for doign them that is about as efficient as it gets.

Basically, I run through them all, trying to stich them together as they are, with no processing at all. This is one of those tasks that becomes mechanistic, as in, click this button, type here, click that button, wait a moment, check the result, click here, type there, rinse and repeat.

The key part is that I've now managed to work out a way for the checking to be done as quickly and simply as possible. However, it's still the case that the bit where it's processing the scans is still too short for me to practically whatch anime, like I do when I'm doing the scanning. Also, it's not the sort of job that I can do both pretty much simultaneously as the checking does require my full attention.

Anyway, point is I run through the scans liek that, which succesfully sticks together probably 80%. One thing I did discover is that I appear to have missed a few scans, so I had to scan those. This was made slightly difficult as I did them a while ago and couldn't remmeber the scan settings I was using - I've been experimentign with the settings to see what reults I liked best.

With the remaning 20% the results can be very random, which has been the source of my main frustration, because I just can't work out why it's stumbling over them. And the degree of stumble seems utterly random as well - sometimes it will align things not quite right, but then other times it will horribly distort everything so that it looks like some sort of weird piece of modern art.

What I usually do at this point is close photoshop down, so it clears out the RAM (I've noticed it tends to fill up the RAM with junk like a total bastard). I then restart and give the remainder another go. This usually gives me good results for aroudn half that are left - for some reason if you give it a second go like this on some scans, it will make a much better go of it.

The remainder that are left need manual intervention and thankfully I seem to have now hit upon a method that works consistently.

It can roughly be summed up as consistent cropping. Essecnailly, what I do is pick a particular edge (so along the right side of the magazine, for example) and crop the images such that this edge is consistent and parrallel across the two images. I also try to trim off the very edge of all of the scans where the pages break across the page.

For some reason, this manual lining up combined with giving the program a "fresh start" seems to consistenly give good results. Of course, when you think about it I'm actually doing half the job of the program for the pictures, so it's not surprising it works, just surprising that the program falls over then doing it on those images, but not the rest.

I managed to process 4 Nyan Types and 3 animages over the course of the weekend. Now to be fair, if I'd been scanning I'd have speant more time doing it and I had alreayd processed a chunk of the scans for those magazines, but I think it takes roughly a third of the time to stitch the scans as it does to scan them in the first place.

That's adds quite a lot, but is better than I feared.

(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.

you mean I don't have to work?

So this weekend I actually got a weekend and didn't have to work.

It was a pretty busy weekend as I had to catch up on stuff that I obviously hadn't been able to do having lost my previous weekend to work.

I had intended to 'relax' this weekend, which I'd mainly meant to be sitting and catching up with some of the TV I'd not found the time to watch. However, actually I went for some fairly long walks and also spent most of my time scanning.

I've really been making an effort to catch up with the scanning and have also been consciously making an effort to watch stuff on crunchyroll. On one level this is daft as I should really be watching DVDs so I can put them on e-bay.

On another it's daft that I've been paying for crunchyroll and not watching it. Especially now that CR has been showing just about every new anime each season, but some of them only for limited times. This means I've discovered quite a few series that I probably would have liked and had a legal avenue to watch, but that opportunity has now past.

It has, however, presented me with an odd problem. Because I'm so far behind there's a glut of stuff available for me to watch and I've found myself struggling to pick something to watch. Should I watch all the new stuff and 'keep up' or should I go for the oldest shows and work my way forward? Or maybe I should watch shows from recent seasons and that could be removed (I'm working on assumption that if a show's been up ages, the license means it will be there for a while yet)?

In the end I've ended up going for a bit of a mix - there's some new shows I'm 'following' (I think that's the phrase - my watching habits tend to mean I prefer to watch complete series all in one go), some old shows I've decided to watch ASAP and some more recent shows I marathoned.

I have to confess I'm still not a big fan of the CR site itself and the community aspect of it seems to be pretty much passing me by, but I have been finding the actual show streaming and watching to be a success. I guess having access to fast cable has its uses.

In terms of the scanning I ploughed through 3 Nyan types over the weekend, which is really good. I've actually only been focusing on doing the scanning itself. The whole thing of stitching the scans together will have to come later, my aim is solely on eating up the pile of unscanned magazines for now.

Plus the stitching process seems to fit poorly with watching fansubs - it wither takes too much active attention or is too short a process to fit chunks of anime around. Leaving it does mean I'm taking up huge chunks of disk space, though, so I may have to have a big session of just scan-stitching at some point, in order to clear some room.

bits and bobs

Kind of a bits and bobs weekend this last weekend.

Which was good - after last week's huge physical exertions I didn't really fancy doing anything much. I got my hair cut, which is good, dumped a load of cardboard at the local tip and did some shopping and a load of ironing and those were pretty much all of the fixed tasks I had to do.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much spent watching telly, walking and scanning while watching anime.

I seem to be getting a bit of a backlog of telly shows and I was initially puzzled as to why, but I think it's to do with the time of year - there's always more of interest to me on during winter - and the fact I'm spending a lot of my time scanning. As discussed last week, the new scanning process is a lot slower, so although I'm spending a lot of time doing it, I am only proceeding at a steady pace with the actual scans.

I must confess I'm in two minds about this. A part of me thinks the results are sufficiently better that I should keep going, another part of me thinks that I'm so far behind that I should dust off the old scanner and use it to get caught up.

To give you some idea of the scale of how far behind I am, I need to scan one more nyan type and then I'll be a third of the way through 2010. In other words I'll still have 8 months of 2010 and everything so far from 2011 to do just in order to catch up to the present day.

Of course it's bound to take several months to get through them - more at my current pace - so that will add quite a few mags onto the back end.

I dunno - really am in two minds. Which I have to confess aren't helped by the fact that, in order to use my old scanner I will have to buy a new heat sink for my old computer. Due to what can only be described as a double-header of stupidity and incompetence, the old heat sink is both knackered and doesn't fit into the case my old machine ended up in anyway.

Trouble there is we're talking seriously old bits of kit. That does actually mean the heat sinks I looked at were really cheap, but also most of the models weren't actually in-stock.

I'm also rather worried that the photstitch thing seems to be really erratic, especially when it comes to posters. A lot of the magazines give away large posters and two of them - megami and nyan type - are almost nothing but posters. With the A4 scanner I have to break these up into at least 4 bits and sticking these together seems to cause real problems for photostitch.

I've a horrible feeling the best solution is going to be to scan magazine pages via the new method and posters via the old. That way I'll either be able to scan them as one like I used to or do them in halves so that only 2 bits need stitching together.

So yeah, decisions to make.

short sack and bides

I really need a haircut - I'm getting a serious case of mop-hair - so hopefully I'll get the chance to pop down the barbers this weekend and get a trim.

My landlord has been away on his winter holiday for the last two weeks and should be getting back today. Not sure what time, but I guess he'll back by the time I get back from work.

He actually went to Sharm El Sheikh, which is where they had all those shark attacks a while ago. I recommended avoiding swimming, as you would.

His absence was actually what spurred me into sorting through the boxes last weekend, as it can be rather disruptive with me leaving them all over the place, so I tend to like to use the opportunity of them going away to sort through them. Rather annoyingly, though, although he's been away for the best part of two weeks, his holiday only overlapped with one weekend.

He went on a Monday and is coming back today - a Friday, so that's only weekend. It'd have been better for my aching muscles (it took until Wednesday before I could really say they were feeling okay again) if I'd been able to spread it over two weekends.

The only other thing I've got to do this weekend is tackle the huge pile of ironing that's built up. This shouldn't be too great a task and I can watch telly while I iron, so it's no great shakes. What I'm hoping to do is more scanning, probably doing a few more animages.

If I'm honest I'm not wholly enamoured of the new scanning process.

Basically, the post-computer update situation means that I've now got a new, reasonably powerful PC running windows 7 as my regular machine. I've bought and installed Photoshop CS5 and a new Cannon scanner.

The big problem I had was that my old A3 scanner is not compatible with windows 7. But also, I was never really happy with the quality of the scans it produced. It was massively convenient to be able to scan an entire poster that the Japanese magazines give away in one go, but the end result was not that brilliant. It was also relatively slow and obviously quite cumbersome piece of kit. To be fair, it was a cheap scanner, so I shouldn't be too harsh given the advantages it gave me.

Anyway, point is that the new system involves using an A4 scanner, but making use of the photo-stitching tool that was introduced some time around CS2. The results are mixed.

First off, the scanner is a lot quicker and gives better image quality than the old A4 scanner. But I now have to scan every page at least twice - 4 times for the posters. The reason fro this (and why I bought an A3 scanner in the first place) is that all of the Japanese anime magazines are in weird sizes - they're all slightly bigger than A4, so you can't scan a page in a single go.

The net effect then is that scanning takes longer because although it's quicker it's not that much quicker, but also because I'm having to crop and save twice as many pictures.

However, there's also a whole new step where I have to load up the images and put them through the photostich process to stick them together. This obviously add a whole load of extra time, but also the results are really random.

Sometime you load things up and set it going and the results are perfect. Other times, they're rubbish. Most of the time they need some manual tweak - a slight nudge of one of the pictures to get it to line up properly. And of course this is even more time consuming, but also can be very frustrating.

So yeah - it's a real mixed bag.

got ahead of myself

One of the slightly annoying things about not meeting my weight target is that I'd actually pre-written a whole load of celebratory posts.

I'd basically done a weeks worth that discussed how much I'd lost, how I'd done it and what the plan was for the coming year. Obviously these became rather scuppered, because I didn't actually meet my target (by some way) and so hadn't lost what I said and it somewhat ballsed up the plan for the future.

I think what I'll do is re-work these and post them when I do finally meet that target, as the target is a bit of a milestone anyway, since it represents a transition from morbid obesity to just plain old obesity. Still not a good weight to be, and there's some debate as to how accurate and representative the indicator I'm using is, but I think it's good to mark these things.

As I think I mentioned before Christmas, I did basically loose some 40 pounds, which is the best part of 3 stones, which is great, although it does highlight how big I was that this still didn't take me out of the morbid obesity zone.

I also completely failed to do a lot of the stuff I'd planned to over Chrimbo.

Usually, I try to ensure I do a back up of my electronic files when I have these holidays (usually I do it at Chrimbo, Easter and then my 'summer' holiday, which is usually actually more like an autumn holiday). I did do the essential backing up, but it's usually accompanied by some specific sorting and tidying as well as some redundancy stuff (having multiple copies in case both the original and other copies go tits-up).

It was this stuff that I failed to do. I also failed to watch much in the way of DVDs (anime or regular), which was another thing I'd decided was important. I'd thought I really should watch stuff, because at the least, if the weather stays improved I can start e-baying again.

But I didn't do that either. What I did do was sort of inspired by the back up and another thing I've been crap at - scanning.

Basically, the back-ups I did took absolutely ages - several days. The reason was because I've got so much stuff on my hard-drives it takes yonks to copy it all. But also, there's a hell of a lot of duplication, and some stuff in particular I know isn't properly organised.

The thing I ended up focusing on were my scans - all those scans I've done of Japanese magazines over the last 4 years. I thought if I could properly sort them out I'd be able to go through them and see what I could perhaps upload to animepaper and possibly even my own scan site.

The big problem I'd given myself was that I hadn't named things properly. A lot of scans were just numbered sequentially, so I couldn't search to see what Sengoku Basara scans I had, for example. But also, I'd been horribly inconsistent in terms of how I'd named things and then there was the age old problem of not being able to identify series at the time.

So I thought Id' go through and sort them. Only it turned out this was the job of weeks, not hours as I'd initially hoped. And that was with the discovery that windows 7 actually has some features that make the process pretty damn smooth.

Anyway, the point is I did manage to go through all the scans and rename and standardise everything but a small handful of stuff. And it seems to have done the trick a bit - I'm quite keen to get caught up with my backlog of magazines and have so far scanned 4 animages over the last week or so.

return of the quiet weekend

So on Friday I mentioned that there were no plans for the weekend, and that would only be partially true.

Being me, I had prepared my usual list of stuff to do. What I really meant was there was no specifically interesting activity planned. I did have a few things I thought it might be nice to try to achieve, including:

• Finish Claymore (did this);
• Watch the first few eps of The Big Bang Theory s4, which I'd managed to get all across with in terms of order, having not realised it had started (did this);
• Finish CoD: Black Ops, assuming I was already a good chunk of the way through (did this);
• Play Anno 1404 (did this... a bit too much, which resulted in me not doing the next thing) and
• Scanning stuff (didn't do this, but see below).

Otherwise, it was a flat-cleaning weekend and I went food shopping and caught up generally on recorded telly programmes, plus I went for my usual weekend walks (pleasingly, I'm keeping up with doing 10,000 steps at the weekend, so the fact the weekday walking has suffered due to daylight and the weather doesn't make me feel too guilty).

Anyway, about the scanning.

As I discussed last week, I've been building a new computer (I may actually have got it fixed and it definitely looking like it's the loose RAM module theory I had - I may even have identified the culprit, which leaves me the real problem of how I get the company to believe me and accept a return :). And that means that I have the problem of hand-down.

See, I've built the new computer exclusively for gaming. What I like to do is keep that computer clean and not install any crap on it, so that games will run smoothly and as quickly as possible. I even try to remove any un-necessary windows components and it gets completely reinstalled on a regular basis.

But that sort of regime is not helpful for more normal stuff. I don't know about you, but I have all sorts of crap on my machines - random programmes that where maybe useful at the time and documents saved in what seemed like sensible places at the time. All that sort of stuff. So I also have a machine for general use.

And that machine is where I do my scanning. Or I would if I wasn't a lazy bugger (just recently I have a myriad of proper reasons I haven't been doing scanning, but before that it was definitely a list of excuses).

Anyway, the point is that I've ended up in the tricky situation of having to re-purpose my machines. What was my old games rig can now become my new desktop, etc. The big problem is that I want to also end up with a machine I can put by my TV that I use to watch blu-rays on (well, and all sorts of other stuff too - but essentially I'll end up with a PC there, rather than a DVD and other players).

I'm getting way off the point, which is that I found my A3 scanner does not have a windows 7 driver. But I've also heard that later versions of Photoshop have a really good photo stitching algorithm. But Photoshop is incredibly expensive (£600!) so I was hoping to get a cracked version of it.

This will allow me to at least test out how good the photo stitching is. If it's good then I can look at buying a new scanner (a regular size one, rather than the A3 one) and possibly getting a legit copy of CS5 (ouch) and then that will allow me to completely upgrade to windows 7.

Except I've given myself another headache, because in my attempts to fix my games rig by throwing money at the problem I've kinda ended up with half another machine, and it's a really powerful one. So do I try to sell this stuff (I've no idea how well it will e-bay, especially as it's without original boxes)? Or do I go the whole hog and get the last few bits to build yet another machine? And what do I do with a fourth PC? I know my dad is frustrated by the age and slowness of the machine he has - perhaps I should donate it to him?

little bit of a scan

I've not really been getting stuck into the scanning like I'd hoped.

The hope was that with my getting to the animage's, which relatively easy and quick to scan, I'd blast through them. The flaw is of course that the hope in question is entirely dependent on me actually sitting down and doing some scanning - quicker to scan they may be, but if I'm watching telly or reading a book, they ain't quicker at all.

I have done a bit, though, so I've done some mini-reviews of the fansubs I watched. I'm actually rapidly approaching the point where I'm going to run out of fansubs. I'm guessing I'll probably have a proper crack at the series that are on Crunchyroll until the new season rolls around.


Amagami SS

I wasn't entirely sure what to make of this.

It seemed to be one of those series you get occasionally that tries to do the more standard anime plotlines in a more serious way. The last one I remember like this was White Album, which seemed to be to be trying to be a harem show, but a kind of grown-up harem show.

So, in other words, the male protagonist seemed to have a bevy of hot chicks (idols, no less) in love with him, but it did away with the 'childish' fan-service. I didn't really like it and initially I didn't really like Amagami SS either.

I'm not sure if White Album was, but Amagami appears to be based on one of those girl-chasing/dating type games and so you've got that element of their being lots of girls around. However, the boy appears to really only be interested in the one girl. Well, I say that - there's something of a suggestion that there are going to be multiple 'arcs', but I didn't watch far enough to be sure.

Anyway, I guess the point is that this is a fairly gentle, fan-service light romance anime with a dash of humour. It didn't strike me as ground-breaking, but also didn't really offend me either.


Asobi Ni Ikuyo

Asobi seemed to be a bit of a mess.

The distinct impression I got was that the writer wanted to make a proper science fiction show with aliens and conspiracies and all sort of stuff like that, but it's also a fairly generic romantic-comedy harem & instant girlfriend type of show.

Whether this was because the writer genuinely wanted to combine the two, or he felt he had to include the harem stuff to give it appeal I don't know. It could even have been at his editors insistence (from what I understand editor's are pretty powerful in Japan). Or of course, because the anime is based on a series of light novels and I've expressed before that the majority of light novels are clearly generic crap, it could be because of that.

Anyway, the point is that the series ends up being a horrible mish-mash of the genres that just doesn't really work.

It also manages to completely ignore what are clearly story telling requirements. It's like when people are meeting the alien cat girl (oh no - more cat girls, like there haven't been enough of those in recent seasons!) no-one really questions that she's got cat ears and a tail (note that she's got cat ears and normal ears :/) or what she's wearing or anything.

And normally they at least try to give some reason why the cat girl likes the milquetoast lead, but here there's nothing - he's not specifically kind to her or anything, she basically just gets in to bed with him and that's it. There's also no reason given why all his friends set out to rescue her - you'd expect her to have done them a favour or been nice to them or something, but nope - they just decide to rescue her.

To add insult to injury, even though this is clearly meant to be a fan-service heavy show they're doing that horribly annoying thing of obscuring the fan-service really badly with beams of sunlight, etc. This therefore renders the only remaining reason you might have kept watching null and void. Especially since there doesn't seem to be an uncensored version kicking about either.

odds and sods

Bit of an odds and sods weekend.

The Hungarian Grand Prix was on Sunday, but I generally also watch the practice sessions and qualifying as well as the build-up on the BBC. This means a Grand Prix weekend actually means roughly an additional 8 hours of TV viewing. To be fair, I often watch it only in the sense of having it on while I'm also engaged in other stuff too - especially for the practice sessions.

And when it's something like the Hungarian Grand Prix I'll also do stuff during the actual race too, using the PVR pause function to build up a buffer and skip-back if I miss anything important. The reason for this is that Hungary is usually pretty dull. It's really difficult to overtake - they call it Monaco without the buildings - and so it often processional, although it's apparently a good one to actually go to as a spectator.

It's saying something about this season that even this year's Hungarian and Monaco GPs have been quite good.

Another thing I did was lots of scanning. I've now finished all the New Types. Actually that's not at all true - I finished the New Types that I'd put together in a batch about 4 months ago, so I've still got all the New Types I've received since then to do.

I also unglued all the animage's in the same big batch. This takes ages, but once done I'm hoping my old memories of blasting through animages proves true and I can get them done surprisingly quickly.

Anyway, point is I watched some more fansubs while I scanned.


Hime Chen! Otogi Chikku Idol Lilpri

This is one of those shows aimed at little girls. And when I say aimed at, I mean I get the distinct impression it's aimed at relieving them of their pocket money to buy toys and stuff.

I have to be honest - I didn't really get much further than about half way through as it's just not my cup of tea. But then it would be a bit weird


Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru

I wasn't really impressed by this wither. Not because it was another kid's shows - let's put it this way: If it had said it was written by CLAMP, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Actually, I would have been surprised, because although CLAMP constantly (and annoyingly) recycle their character designs, they don't tend to recycle their plots. Which is to say, this is seemed to be pretty much exactly the same as CLAMP's X series.

It was also clearly a very shoujo series with a lot of bishounen, so you can see why it just wasn't my cup of tea.


Giant Killing

I think I might secretly be a sports anime fan.

Considering I don't really like the majority of sports, this is something of a surprise for me, but I can't argue with the facts. Over the last few months I've sampled a good few sports based anime and I've pretty much enjoyed them all. I mean Giant Killing is a football anime of all things, and I even enjoyed that.

To be fair, I think this is actually because the sports anime I've watched bear little to no resemblance to the actual sports depicted. I think there's a tendency for what I've sampled to depict everything as if it was a game of chess, rather than as the actual sport. So since I like chess, I'm using that as my excuse


Senkou no Night Raid

Surprisingly, this was the last anime (well, fansubbed anime) of the spring season I've watched and usually the last few shows I watch are the dregs - stuff I didn't fancy so left until last.

I knew next to nothing about Senko and was surprised to find it's a bit of a hybrid between a spy thriller and a psychic powers fantasy, all set in 1930s China. This is the only dodgy element - as I understand it, China in the 1930s was occupied by the Japanese and they were not a particularly pleasant occupying force, so I'm slightly worried there's a bit of a revisionist slant, because the Japanese aren't exactly being portrayed in a bad light.

Still, setting that aside this seems like an intelligent and engaging story, so I think on balance it gets the thumbs up.

more scanning

I've been doing some scanning in the evenings this week.

I didn't really get the chance to do any scanning last weekend. Actually, that's not true - I did some scanning, what I mean is, I didn't get the chance to scan any of the magazine backlog.

What I scanned instead were the covers of a whole bunch of manga and some DVDs. These scans will accompany some forthcoming reviews over on trismugistus.com.

I actually found the evening scanning went quite smoothly and I got more done in less time than I was expecting. I actually remember this effect from before I stopped scanning - it's like a classic example of practice makes perfect. The more I do, the easier and quicker it becomes.

I think there are two main reasons for this. First off, you get better at the whole position thing. See, all of the Japanese magazines are slightly bigger than A4 in size. To resolve this I ended up buying a cheap A3 scanner, but A3 is way bigger than the magazines.

That means I have to use the controls to select only a chunk of the full-area to scan and it also means I have to make sure that the page I'm scanning is lined up in that area. So you can easily see how with practice I get better at doing that.

The second one is more difficult to explain as it's basically that it becomes more like second nature. So where when I start I had to think about it, as I've done more of it, it's not something I have to think as much about, which seems to make it quicker.

Anyway, I've been checking out some more fansubs as I've scanned:


Mayoi Neko Overrun

Oh dear.

I think pretty much every season there's at least one harem type show. Sometimes there are several, but in other seasons it'll be just one. I think this is because there are some studios that basically specialise in this type of show and then there are those that dabble in them.

Plus of course they're perennially popular in Japan. They wouldn't keep making them if the Japanese Otaku didn't lap them up. And you get a lot of manga that falls into this bracket as well, so there's plenty of raw material available for adaptation.

What's interesting about these types of shows recently is they all seem to be adopting a cat theme. I dunno why, but there's loads of them been cropping up either featuring cats directly or cat-girls or characters obsessed with cats. It seems to be the in-thing.

And that's part of the problem with Mayoi Neko Overrun - it's coming at a point where it's main gimmick - cats - has already been done several times just recently. What kills it is that everything in the show has been done recently (and loads of times before in fairness).

I mean, it doesn't really even manage to have loads of fan-service or anything like that so it can appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's just a collection of clichés.


Occult Academy

I wasn't quite sure about Occult Academy after the first episode.

See, I'd stumbled across a few things that had basically said it was hilarious, and watching the first episode I didn't really find it all that funny. Now don't get me wrong here - I enjoyed it, but the point is I think I only actually laughed our loud once.

And the bit I laughed at came right at the end and I'm pretty sure the hilarious tag wasn't pinned entirely on a silhouette of a dude's cock falling across a girl's face (you have to watch it for that to make sense). However, while I still wouldn't classify the show as hilarious I did find the second episode a lot funnier.

There were some possible sources of worry, though. For example, Maya, the heroine, kept slapping, hitting and throwing things at the man guy, Fumiaki. Which is a gag that, as the world of harem anime has proven, tends to get a bit tiresome after a while. And if it's also a hint that the show is really just a high school (academy = high-school) rom-com with more garnish than usual, that would be a worry.

But overall, I enjoyed what I watched.


Toriko (the link is to the manga, as the OAV doesn't seem to have a page)

Right, imagine something like Fist of the North Star or Dragonball Z - an anime where it's basically all about the fisticuffs, and then cross that with a fishing program. Chuck in a little bit of Ray Mears style surviving and cooking in the wild and then add in a sous-son of Jamie Oliver, and, if you can get your head around it, that's pretty much Toriko.

It's kinda bonkers, but bonkers in a fun and amusing way.

I think really this is the sort of thing that could only exist in Japan. The Japanese are not at all squeamish about their food, which isn't uncommon in Asia, but they also aspire to high gastronomy as well.

So out of that you've got a series that's basically about a huge, muscle-bound dude going around beating up plants and animals... so that he can eat them.

I did enjoy it, but I would imagine it's one of those things that repeats itself over-and-over, so could get tiresome in the long run.

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?

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.

one and a half newtypes

So this last weekend I had a decision to make as to how to spend a chunk of my leisure time.

I could have sat and watched a bunch of DVDs, or I could have read some comics/manga or I could do some scanning (and watch some fansubs). In the end I decided to go down the scanning route and scanned one and a half new types.

That doesn't sound a lot, but a normal newtype has about 60 scannable pages, so we're talking the best part of a hundred scans. You can get some idea how long this took from the fact that I watched a total of 8 fansub episodes (2 episodes each of 4 series). A single anime episode runs about 25 minutes with the opening and ending animations, so we're talking about 3.5 hours there alone.

But then you have to think that I'm continuously stopping and starting when I'm scanning (I can't read subtitles if I'm putting the next page into the scanner).

Anyway, the point is I've got some of those small anime reviews I like to do:


Angel Beats!

The first episode of Angel Beats is terrible.

One thing I learned when I was starting to write was that info dumps are very bad things. An info dump is when you have loads of paragraphs that just explain stuff. They're most common in fantasy and SF because there's all sorts of things the writer feels he needs to explain to his readers about the world he's created.

Now they're not forbidden, but they are a tricky thing to master. Usually because while the stuff seems cool and interesting and clever to the writer, generally, the reader will find it boring. Especially like here when it's all a bunch of stuff you've seen before.

The standard trick for discussing info dumps is to do it in dialogue. You have your lead character or someone else who doesn't know any of this stuff ask questions, then your other characters can simply explain it.

Wow - amazing and simple solution, right?

Well no, because boring, clichés are still boring clichés when your character says them. The best solution is to utilise show don't tell - you don't have your characters talk about stuff, you have them do stuff that demonstrates the point.

The difficulty with anime of course is that it's quite expansive to anime things that show, but quite cheap to animate lip flaps. And to be fair, Angel Beats does show us stuff, but it has far too much info dumping to be enjoyable.

Or it does in the first episode. The second episode was a lot more fun - perhaps they'd decided to cram it all into the first episode and the rest of the series is more enjoyable?

My instinct is to give it the benefit of the doubt.


Working!!

Clearly exclamation points (ugh) are the vogue in anime titles at the moment - the second season of K-ON!(ugh) has also had the temerity to go for a double exclamation point. It's sort of all right there, because it's the second season, so it's sort of a gag. Here you've got wanton double exclamation point use.

What makes it worse is that the series is also a bit poor.

The problem is similar to that of Angel Beats!(ugh) - it feels like the cobbling together of a bunch of anime clichés and tropes. Witness: lolis, menial part-time jobs, cut uniforms, tsundere, fear of the opposite sex, hot chick inflicting violence on male lead; disinterested manager, cool chef... hands up if you can't name half a dozen series featuring each of those.

Although the real problem here is a lack of mojo. Where Angel Beats!(ugh) at least tries to be fun, Working!!(ugh) is dull and flaccid. It also doesn't help that it keeps repeating the same basic jokes over and over - oh look, the loli girl is short, hilarious; oh no, wait, she's denying her shortness - I LOLd (the first time). Oh no, the tsundere has punched him in the face again for no apparent reason other than his hormones - I've never seen such japery.


Arakawa Under the Bridge

Ah, SHAFT, how plain and boring many anime would be without your visual chicanery.

Yes, it's this seasons SHAFT show and it's a good one. In this case, they're back to their bonkers best, as Arakawa is a rather unhinged series.

It's good, though.


Hakuouki Shinsengumi Kitan

I'm pretty sure this series fits squarely into the reverse harem genre.

In case you don't know that means there's a single girl surrounded by loads of men (i.e. the opposite of a guy surrounded by lots of girls, hence the name). Here, the series is set back in feudal times, so the guys are all samurai, but there's all sorts of physical and personality types.

The only show I've watched that I really liked in this genre was Ouran High School Host Club and while I didn't like this sufficiently to keep watching, I did think it was okay. I'd say if this sort of show is your bag then this, from my perspective, seems like a good example.

The only weird thing was the pacing - weeks seem to suddenly elapse between scenes for no real reason. Considering the girl is searching for her father, who we assume is in some trouble, she doesn't seem to cause much of a fuss if two weeks drift by.

tired but not knackered

As the heading suggests, today I feel tired, but not knackered.

This is a little odd, because the weekend was intensely knackering, and I'd normally expect that sort of thing to carry over.

The knackering bits started with me having to clean bed-sit, having not cleaned it in several weeks. I've spent most of the last few weekends trying to sort stuff and that's not left a lot of time to do any cleaning, so things were rather grimy - I had to Hoover the floor twice, for example.

I then decided to take the bull by the horns and do some scanning. Something my sorting out again highlighted was the huge pile of un-scanned magazines, which keeps growing. I realised that my heroic trudge through all the megamis was so long ago that I'd actually received two new issue of megami since then.

The result of this horn-bull paradigm thingy was that I ploughed through 8 or 9 (I actually lost track :/) issues of animedia. Now animedia of course is the famously light anime mag, generally having the fewest scannable images, but we're still taking what must have been the best part of 10 hours of scanning across the weekend.

That also means I watched a heck of a lot of anime on fansubs - I'd do the summaries tomorrow - which is all rather mentally exhausting.

And on top of that I went for another walk on Sunday! Now I can't speak for the entire country, but down here in southern England is was a veritable scorcher yesterday (supposedly it'll be even hotter today).

For some reason, although this made me slightly trepidatious about the walk, I still went out wearing my jeans. I dunno why I did that - I have plenty of shorts I could have worn that I'm sure would have been cooler.

In the end the walk wasn't as bad as I'd feared, even with the unsuitable attire. I think what helped was that there was quite a lot of shade and the bit that's up the hill had a nice breeze.

I still can't walk up that hill without a couple of pauses to catch my breath, but I guess the point is that it was not much worse given the elevated temperature. Also, it didn't seem to take me as long to recover when I got back as it has done in the past, which I hope is a good sign.

The last entry on the list was the temperature last night. As is often the way when the temperature suddenly goes up I haven't had a hair cut in ages, which is never a help. Of course the new thinner duvet I bought in Friday's spending spree is not here yet, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't turn up until the end of the week

I therefore decide to take matters into my own hands a bit and I used some ice packs to pre-cool my bed and to cool my pillow especially (think hot water bottle but in reverse). It was pretty successful as I got off fairly quickly.

The ultimate solution of course is to get the air conditioner out, but there are two problems there. First off the temperature is apparently going to drop for later in the week, but also with my sorting out still ongoing, it's going to be something like a logistical nightmare to get it out.

I therefore put down the fact that I'm tired to the fact that I did a lot of stuff over the weekend and the fact that I'm not knackered to the fact that you tend to sleep better if you've tired yourself out.