big food

This last Saturday a good friend of mine was having a mini birthday celebration.

She's not been very well for a while now, but seems to have been doing better recently. Anyway, she seemed in relatively good spirits at least and it was a good day. I hope she didn't tire herself out, though.

It was also a long day for me - I set off about 9:30am and got back about 9:30pm - and a very filling day. She'd made a lovely lunch, but the portions were a little on the large size, even for me. The cake actually defeated me - tasty though it was, I was just too full to finish.

Anyway, Sunday I just crashed out. I was knackered anyway because of all the work we've got on at the moment and Saturday just finished me off and I watched telly all day. About the only thing I achieved was doing the ironing, which is pretty much a necessity or I don't have anything to wear at work.

Still, it meant that I cleared huge swathes of the PVR madness. All I had left was that Red Riding drama I mentioned a while back. If things go to plan, I should be able to start watching DVDs again soon, which is good as I've been a bit silly and bought loads more.

manga-la

I've been ploughing through some manga recently - mainly over the Easter weekend because I took several volumes with me to read.

I read the latest volume of Ichigo 100% (or Strawberry 100% if you prefer), number 8. Ichicgo 100% is a pretty generic manga. I've actually done a review of it at trismugistus.com . My summary of it there is pretty much how I still feel about it. The main protagonist's inability to decide which girl to pursue is very annoying, but then if it wasn't for that it wouldn't be jam-packed with fan-service either, I guess.

I read the first volume of Black God (or Kurokami). I have to say I'm distinctly un-impressed - it's so generic as to be boring. Girl with Super powers. Big fights. Really annoying, arrogant, un-likeable protagonist. He's fawned on by his childhood friend, who's totally hot. Super-powered girl is 'bound' to him.

Also, people talk a hell of lot for an action manga and while the artwork is nice enough, it's nothing special. Bizarrely, the bonus chapter is actually way better than the main story.

I'm considering just dropping it - I could sell the 1st volume on e-bay and be done with it. I mean it's still an ongoing series, so if I was to collect it it could last for years, which I really don't fancy.

I'll give it another read and decide from there, I think.

Another new manga that I did start and like a lot is Claymore. I can't honestly say I'm that familiar with Berserk, but I'm reliably informed they're similar. Certainly the roughly-medieval setting is very similar and it's all about swordplay and monsters.

Claymore is very brutal - people are chopped up without a second thought and the blood really flies. But the clever thing about it is that it's really an exploration of the character of the Claymore's themselves. They're women who have undergone a sort of surgery to become half-human half-monster and they then hunt the real monsters. What Claymore explores then is the humanity (or otherwise) of these girls and how they're treated by real humans and the monsters.

The artwork is a little odd - some strange proportions and strange figure deformations, but it does seem to improve in later volumes where I've flicked through. It's also very fast-paced and so easy to read - there are big chunks of pages with no dialogue at all. That's not a criticism, by the way. Blame is one of the best manga ever and features entire volumes with next-to no talking.

I'm definitely going to be keeping up with Claymore.

What else have I read?

There was the latest volume of Battle Angel Alita: Last Orders.

The artist, Yukito Kishiro, is one of the best manga artists ever. The action sequences in Alita (and it's an action manga) are so perfectly realised, every page is like a master-class. Sometimes the story goes a bit wonky - he has a tendency to dive off on a tangent that can last several volumes.

These are generally of good quality, but it makes things confusing when you come back to the main story. You have to refresh yourself with what's gone on. Also, because of the big gap between this and the original, it can be confusing remembering who they're referring to sometimes.

It's always an entertaining read though - especially given that Kishiro drops in a lot of very black humour.

I've also relatively recently read the latest volumes of Rosario+Vampire (they seem to be pumping the volumes out for this in very short order), Princess Resurrection, Ikkitousen and Black Lagoon. I've not much to really say about them that I haven't said before either here or in trismugistus.com reviews.

The last thing of note is therefore that I've started Full Metal Alchemist. I've got to say, so far it's not what I was expecting.

So that you're aware, I've never seen any of the anime. I know it's extremely popular, but I've just never really got around to it - I believe it's one of those shows with 50-odd episodes, and that never really helps for me.

However, what I have seen are a lot of scans and wallpapers for the series and they predominantly depict it as being quite serious. Now that could obviously be a false impression since I've never watched it, but the point is the manga isn't like that at all.

So far, the manga is more like a gag-manga than a serious action manga or thriller. It's odd - I mean it's not bad, just not what I was expecting.

the bourne ultimatium

Owing to the hugely busy Easter weekend I didn't really get a chance to watch my next rental DVD over the weekend. So instead I've been watching it in the evenings this week.

The DVD itself was the Bourne Ultimatum, which is the third of the Bourne films. It also pretty much represents the end of the trilogy. They've managed to make the films into a proper trilogy - there's a good through-plot to them all.

Although that's also one of the problems of the third film. It's very reliant on you having seen the first two films. I mean, they've tried to make it generally accessible, but I really don't think you'd get this third film if you hadn't seen the others.

That's especially problematic here where they've set this film between the last two scenes of the second film. It's therefore very much a part of the second film.

It also has a bit of problem in that in each film they've tried to give them a proper end. This means that each time Bourne beats the bad guys, in the next film you get an odd moment of "well, no actually, there's these baddies who were, like, the bosses of the last film's baddies... or something... bear with us."

It gets a little old that this keeps happening. Also it comes across as a bit odd that these bad guys keeping trying to get Bourne, despite always failing. You'd think they'd try a different tack.

The third film also pretty much lacks any sort of love interest. This makes sense given the timing of the film and what happened in the last two, but it also means it looses that element. I mean, there is a girl in it and there's a suggestion Bourne has a past with her, but he doesn't remember and it's not rekindled.

There are also a few logical flaws. At one point Bourne is knocked unconscious, and rather than the baddy kill him, he heads off after someone else. There's also a section with a reporter and it seems bizarre that the CIA or anybody initially doesn't seem to know who he is and allows him to write the stuff he does, but then decides to kill him when Bourne tries to contact him.

But where it does well is in the action scenes. The Bourne films excel at visceral, physical action. There's a reliance on practical effects, rather than digital effects and clearly a misty-eyed nostalgia for the action thrillers of the seventies. And it really works.

One thing I'm getting sick of though is the whole hand-held camera thing. It's really jerky in thsi film and it makes me a little nauseous. I mean, it's okay as a thing, but they seem to have gone a bit over-the-top here and it's very distracting.

There are loads of extras. They're of a varying quality and most revolve around staging the stunts and fights and stuff.

Overall it was enjoyable when it was going full-on action, but the story seemed a little like retreading old ground.

Also, he totally failed to give anyone an ultimatum :/.

new mu 09

Well, it's properly April now, so that means a lot of new anime stuff has started in Japan.

April seems to represent the main big season, which I'd guess is tied into the new financial year and the refreshing of yearly budgets. The second season starts in six-months at around the beginning of October. There are also the half-season points in July and January, but those normally only see a handful of new shows come out.

I have to admit that, having perused some of the show descriptions there's not much that stands out as being my cup of tea so far. Of course, one of the reasons I watch fansubs is to sample all of the shows and find out for sure. There are often things that turn up that I'm pleasantly surprised by, and I've therefore learned not to make too many assumptions.

A big difference this year, though is that crunchyroll is picking up a good few shows.

I've mentioned crunchyroll before of course and my feelings are generally unchanged. I'm seriously unimpressed with the site itself. It's horribly laid out, horrible to navigate and pitifully slow to load most of the time.

It also relies predominantly on streaming, which I'm not the biggest fan of. Downloads are much better, I find, and that brings me to the main point - I think I'm going to have to become a member of crunchyroll in order to make the most out of it and download these new shows they've got.

It seems like relatively reasonable value from that point of view and I've said before I'm very much in favour of sites offering legal anime content, despite being a DVD man at heart.

The only thing I'm left worrying about is how practical it's goign to be. One of the biggest advantages to fansubs is the use of bittorrent, which I can just leave going while I'm at work and when I come home it's sorted its own life out. Direst downloads tend to need a bit more in the way of active management, especially on my connection, which can be a bit flaky.

Still, I'm going to take the plunge, I think. I can always cancel the subscription if it's not working out, after all.

New anime magazines turned up yesterday, which I wasn't expecting - I thought they'd not be here until next week, actually, so that was a nice surprise.

*yawn*

Pretty good weekend, but I'm really quite knackered.

I went down to Devon to visit my Dad and we gave him his birthday present. It was a digital camera. It was only a compact model, but we also got him lots of gubbins to go with it - a stand-alone printer, and inks and paper for it.

He's a bit of a photography fan and he's mentioned digital cameras to me several times before. I'd therefore initially wanted to get him a full-on digital SLR camera, but my sister convinced me that it would be better to get a compact.

She was quite right - this gives him a 'taste' of the digital world and a chance to play and investigate. Plus SLR's are not cheap. Well, good digital compacts aren't really 'cheap' either, but you know what I mean.

His actual birthday isn't until October, but we wanted to get it him now because of the whole trip to Monaco. It'll give him a chance to play with it before-hand and then he can use it there too.

I'm knackered because it was quite an intense weekend. It was actually one of my scheduled cleaning weekends and while I could have left it, with the ant problems I've been having I really wanted to at least have a wipe around.

I therefore had to cram all that into Friday morning and then drive down in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the trip down was horrible - I got stuck around Stonehenge and it meant the whole journey took five-and-a-half hours. I normally reckon on it being up to about 4 hours (which is what it took me on Monday). So that was tiring.

Then, on Saturday there was all the present stuff, which was fairly tiring as I had to explain everything to Dad. In the afternoon we then went for this huge long walk at Braunton Burrows, which is this area of sand-dunes.

I really need to get used to walking distances again for the Monaco trip, so it was good from that point of view, but it was still pretty tiring. On top of that on Sunday we went for another walk and that pretty much finished me off - Sunday afternoon I almost couldn't walk and had to take painkillers on Monday. I'm still aching in my calves now.

Monday was the drive back - I had to head off really early as I need to get back so that I could do all the other stuff I needed to, like ironing, etc.

So as you can see, it was a really rather busy and active weekend. I could almost do with a holiday to recover from my holiday!

4-day weekend!

Well now, who doesn't love a four-day weekend?

I most certainly do.

What would have been ideal is if I had absolutely no commitments for this Easter weekend. I could really do with some chill-out time.

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, although what is happening isn't exactly unpleasant. I'm going down to Devon to visit my dad. The specific reason is that me and my sister are going to be giving him his birthday present.

His birthday isn't actually until October, but we're getting him the presents now because they relate to our big trip in May.

I've not really mentioned the big trip in detail. Basically the family is going to the Monaco Grand Prix!

It should be really great, although it's costing me an absolute packet. It's costing my Dad even more as he's paying for the tickets and flights and stuff. It's kinda like a joint birthday present for me and my sister, I guess.

I'm also planning to surprise my sister and give her her gift as well this weekend.

The only nasty part this weekend might be the traffic, as it's coming warm and sunny now so many people may feel the desire to go for a bit of a trip down to Devon. Fingers crossed I don't get snarled up!

Anyway, I'll not be updating until after the weekend, so have a good one.

Not more to do!

Work's gone a bit bonkers.

The main problem is actually that we lack staff - several important people are away on contract and rather than ease back on bidding stuff we've been ploughing ahead. This has resulted in us having several bids to get out in a very short period of time.

Add in to that it's Easter and you can see how it's gotten silly.

One of the most annoying things about bidding is that people often give you utterly ridiculous timescales. Or rather, they give you utterly ridiculous timescales, but give themselves way more time than they need.

Basically, we often get bids that pay no regard to things like holidays (such as Christmas and Easter). It's like they're fully expecting you to work your arse off over those holidays.

Also, they'll give you horribly short deadlines - a couple of weeks to do an entire ITT, which is no mean feat I can tell you.

But then they'll give themselves months to assess those ITTs. Plus, they'll pay absolutely no regard to the deadlines they set themselves, meaning they'll be late. But you can't be late - if you're late, then you're out on your ear.

The worst ones are when they're late and in order to claw back the time they maintain your deadlines. "Oh, we were a month late, but we're not extending your deadline. That's alright isn't it?"

It's like these people don't live in the real world.

There was one a while back where they were asking for a huge piece of work to be done. It was literally man-months of effort that would be required to do it.

Now my personal dodgyness radar was already flagged by the really tight timescales they'd given for the work, but we proceeded with the initial phase anyway. When we got the final requirement they'd given an indication of budget of... £5,000.

That's nothing - we could easily spend that in a week - and it was a massive underestimate of the task they were asking for.

It'd be funny if it wasn't so annoying.

running out of stuff to do

I had a very weird mindset last night.

After the weekend where I got so much done I had this weird nagging sensation that I was going to run out of stuff to do. I mean this patently is just not the case - I've tonnes of stuff still to do. And besides, even if I was to finish doing those things, by the time I was finished a load of new stuff would come along to fill its place.

Still, I couldn't shake that nagging sensation - even when I looked over at the shelves groaning under the weight of unwatched DVDs and unread books.

Weird.

And speaking of weird stuff in my head I've been having a strange time with the old writing just recently. I've kinda ground to a halt with actually sitting down and typing, and yet my head is crammed full of ideas. I just keep coming up with new ideas, but for some reason I'm lackign the motivation to actually set them down on paper.

I'm not sure it helps that some of them are of a... er... more salacious flavour shall we say?

I've been taking a look at "How to Read Death Note". It's kinda like a 'making of' for the Death Note series and is a bit hit and miss. The majority of the book is taken up with analysing the plot and stuff like that, which is pretty dull. But there also interviews with the writer and artist. Plus there's the pilot manga at the back - that should be interesting.

and confusifying it was

Well it was indeed a very busy and confusing weekend.

I think I managed to do everything I had to do. I've burned all the anime series I can to DVD. That doesn't mean I've burned them all of course, because some are not finished, but those that are finished are all done. It's free up about half of the hard-drive I use.

I made some headway with all my recorded telly too. I now only have two things stacked up - a drama called Red Riding and the new episodes of Lewis. Everything else is cleared (I've decided to by the Wire on DVD, for example).

Plus, thankfully, the burden of new shows has lifted somewhat - according to my scheduling I've only about 12 hours or so of new shows due this week, where it was nearly double that last week.

I also scanned all of the regular magazines I had to, including the new megami. It'll be a few weeks before the other mags turn up so that's given me some breathing room there too.

I also took the opportunity to watch some of the last of the new anime shows from last season:


RideBack is awesome. I have to admit going in that it sounded a bit cheesy - ballerina (Rin) rides motorbike/robot thing :/ - but it's actually really good.

It helps that the animation is of a very high standard, I think. I'm guessing the robots have been done with CG, but if so it's some of the best blended CG I've ever seen. They'd look hand animated if not for a slight over-smoothness. But also the animation is generally anyway - very smooth and clear - with really great cinematography.

The story is also pretty well done. There's only one part I'm not sure about - there seems to be a war/revolution background to the world's setting that at the moment is quite divorced from the main story of Rin riding the robot-bike things. I guess it becomes more apparent later, but since I always only use fansubs to sample the first few eps it may be some time before I find out.


Viper's Creed is okay. Unfortunately, it feels a heck of a lot like Blassreiter meets Shirow. Now I'm sure that's just a coincidence (well, Blassreiter anyway). Anime takes years to develop and Blassreiter was only on recently, so it'll just be coincidental that they both featured mecha-bike riding teams.

The trouble is I love Shirow doing Shirow, but am not so keen on other people doing Shirow. And Blassreiter was distinctly 'okay' - it got better at the end, but was pretty generic at the start, and Viper's Creed seems to share the same problem at the front and my sample won't take me far enough to find out about the back end.

The only saving grace was that there was a nice focus on the characters at some points, so maybe there's hope for this too.


Genji Monogatari Sennenki - I only had one episode of this available to watch as that's all I could find fansub wise. I'm not particularly disappointed by that, though - it didn't really scream at me that it was my sort of show.

It seemed to basically be an overwrought romance for women. It certainly had the classic character design you get in those sorts of girls comics - weirdly proportioned men with enormous shoulders, tiny heads and scary-thin limbs, but vaguely androgynous too (think CLAMP).

Not that that's a criticism as such, more an observation that it seems to conform to type and it's not a type I am particularly bothered about; although I wouldn't say it was bad either. What I did find annoying is that half the screen always seemed to be shaded out to black. I've seen this done when they want to censor (cover over) things like gore, but there was no reason for it here. All it did was the pictures feel tiny.


Chrome Shelled Regios - er... whut?

I had almost no idea what the hell was going on in this series. My guess it that it's based on a Japanese RPG or something like that. Maybe one of those light novels they have in Japan. It certainly has the feel of something the audience is already supposed to be familiar with and doesn't really pay much regard to helping newbie's come along. It's like watching the second series of something having never even heard of the first.

It's also a type of fantasy that doesn't really appeal to me and features the classic (tedious) anime tropes of people shouting out their next special move. And that brings me to the battles - they're okay in and of themselves, but the problem I had with them was that they were backed up by this pounding dance/electronic soundtrack that's so aggressive it kinda browbeats you.

The only saving grace is that when it's not getting up to all those things it has some reasonably interesting character relationships. So if it wasn't for all that guff I'd probably like it more, but as it is it's not really for me.


That really only leaves a couple of shows unwatched, only one of which is fansubs. I do still need to watch Strike Witches and then there are a couple of things that were made available on Crunchyroll which I need to at least sample. Plus there's a couple of films I should watch.

Oh, and I also finished Death Note - it had a good couple of last chapters, but they should definitely have happened 6 volumes ago.

coming and going

It's going to be a confusing and rather busy weekend, I can tell.

There unfortunately seems to have come together a whole bunch of stuff that I need to do or want to get out of the way. It's all rather bit and all over the place, and what's worrying is I've tried to do some organising-type lists and each time they kinda break down or end up impossible to actually achieve.

For example, next weekend is Easter and me and my sister are going to be visiting our dad in order to give him his birthday present. Okay, so that's fine, but it means that the entire Easter weekend is basically a right off, so I need to get everything done now.

That includes buying the last part of Dad's present, wrapping all the bits (I'll need some paper) and buying him a birthday card as the more obvious stuff. However, it also includes less obvious stuff like making sure I'm fuelled up for the weekend and remembering to adjust my trip to the laundrette so that it ties in better.

So in other words, even the simple stuff involves multiple parts and multiple days.

And that's one of the simpler things. You also need to factor in I've got e-bay stuff to send, because people took a long time to pay, plus one of them is a cheque so I'll need to pay that in at the bank. Then you've got the fact that it's also my sister's birthday and I want to give her her present at Easter too.

Plus I've still got the scanning to finish off (new megami turned up - should I do that as well, or leave it until later). Then I've got the last few anime shows of last year to watch.

And mentioning them, the new anime season has started. Fansubs won't appear for about a week, I'd guesss, but the hard-drive I stor fansubs on is nearly full, so I need to burn them all to DVD.

Then it's the second F1 GP of the season, but it's on at a weird time in the morning :/. and of course I've got all that PVR'd stuff to catch up on still.

See - it's all little things that aren't int themselves, porblems, but they're all stacking up into a mighty confusing weekend.

*sigh*

My car's in for its service today. Fingers crossed there's nothign spectacularly wrong with it. I was afraid the tyres might need doing, and that won't be cheap. We will have to see.

more about bowels

I've been... well, I was going to say suffering, but I've not really been suffering as such, more inconvenienced, I guess. So I've been inconvenienced these last few days by my bowels.

It's not my intention to turn this into some sort of scatological blog all about my bowel movements, but it's kinda been occupying my attention and a lot of my time this last week, as you can imagine.

Basically, I think I ate something that didn't quite agree with me. That's pretty unusual for me - my bowels are normally like cast-iron. And what it was I don't know - I've not even really got any good culprits, it just started affecting me fairly swiftly on Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, as I say, I've not really felt ill as such, just the occasional abdominal pain and the occasional need to beat a retreat to the nearest lavatory.

Thankfully things seem to have calmed down somewhat now, but it means I've not really felt in the mood to do much of anything interesting. It's difficult to know when an 'attack' will come on.

Instead, I've been trying to keep on top of the television stuff. It's getting pretty tough, I must admit. The hard-drive on my PVR is constantly hovering around the one-third full mark, which is a lot of unwatched stuff. Fingers crossed that the burden of new shows eases a little.

One thing I've been thinking is that a new show starting on the BBC called the Wire isn't actually all that new and is available on DVD. The BBC is blitzing showing the first season - it's on every weeknight! - so I'm very tempted just to watch a couple and then if I like it get the DVDs.

In a way that's transference as it means yet more DVDs to watch, but at least I won't fill my PVR's hard drive.

Pearl Harbor

This weekend's DVD was the, quite frankly abysmal Pearl Harbor.

But let's start with the positives - the sequence depicting the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is quite spectacular. It's also surprisingly effective at getting over the carnage and loss of life without being overly gory.

It is sensationalist, giving a slightly distorted sense that the Americans somehow won Pearl Harbor, despite actually being dealt a crushing blow - kinda like 'victory in defeat' if you will.

But then this is a Hollywood film - so much so that the 'Hollywoodness' is ultimately to the film's detriment.

It's an enormously long film at just over 3 hours. The reason for that is that it tries to take in a large arc. The actual attack doesn't happen until half way through, and the last segment is taken up by the Doolittle raid, which was sort of like a revenge attack on the Japanese mainland.

Now, taking in that big sweep you'd expect it to be trying to layer in lots of back-story or meaning to the attack. Looking at it from a cultural or political point of view.

Instead what we get is the most shoddy love-triangle in modern cinema history. You notice I used the word "modern" there - I did that for a very specific reason. the romance in the film almost comes across as a pastiche of 40s Hollywood films.

It's overwrought and melodramatic and it's way too 'perfect' - both in the sense that you've seen it all before and the dialogue has such a sheen to it that it almost gleams (presumably in that shinning, white-toothed glint of an all-American smile type fashion). It's so over-done that it's nauseating to watch.

And that's kinda true of the film as a whole - this is film-making with primary colours, not the subtle pastel shades of life itself.

The film is also woefully inaccurate. To some extent I can forgive them some things - a lot of the hardware shown in the film is more modern, for example, but then the majority of the kit has been decommissioned or is in museums. The only other option would have been to use 100% CG and that would probably have taken silly amounts of time and money.

No, the bad inaccuracies come more from the wilful disregard for simple things like facts. For example, there's a distinct air to the film that the majority of the senior characters either knew in general that an attack was coming or had information telling them Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked, but that incompetence of their superiors or public opinion somehow prevented them from taking action.

This is so grossly inaccurate it's almost offensive and represents both an abuse of artistic licence and a complete (and worrying) retelling of history.

The worst losers on this front are the Japanese. I mean, there's some token attempt to depict them as slightly reticent about going to war with American (bizarrely this in itself is actually inaccurate - part of Japan's problem was their total blindness to reality) but you really do feel this is a token effort. There's a great amount of time paid to the unconvincing American love triangle, but very little paid to the Japanese at all.

My recommendation would be to skip to the attack bit and just watch that. It may not be 100% accurate, but it's well done and gets some sort of point across.

fallen out of love

I forgot to crack my gag I'd thought up for yesterday's mini anime reviews!

Basically it went: "White Album? Shite Album more like."

See, it's sort of punny and sort of references Spinal Tap.

Not that the anime was that bad, but still, can't forget the gags.

Anyway, as the title suggests I've fallen out of love. Specifically, I've fallen out of love with Death Note.

It seems it was an intense, but ultimately fleeting affair. The passion burned brightly, and quickly burned itself out.

Er, yeah.

Basically, Death Note appears to be divided into two arcs. The first arc is focused on the battle between two characters - Light Yagami and "L" - and takes the form of a game of cat and mouse, but one in which you're not sure who's really the cat and who's the mouse.

It's all about the two of them trying to outthink each other, and they're both super-genius. Oh, there's other stuff along the way, but that's the core.

Unfortunately, the second half tries to repeat the same sort of trick, but fails spectacularly. It's trying to make the story bigger - more about world events than just focusing on two characters.

You may remember I mentioned all the silly inaccuracies it was committing when I gave a mini-review last week? Well now, because the focus has changed to the world stage those errors have almost taken over the story.

If the first arc is all about a clever psychological battle with other stuff, the second arc is all about the other stuff with some half-arsed attempts to reignite the clever psychological battle.

And that also now means I'm struggling reading it. Both arcs are exposition heavy, but before I cared and was excited to read it, now all that dialogue feels like a millstone around my neck, dragging my enjoyment with it.

Ah well, it was enjoyable while it lasted.

crammed with stuff

Busy weekend.

I finally got my hair cut, so I no longer look like I've got an unruly mop stuck to my head. And the price has gone up again. When I first came here you used to get change from a tenner for a haircut. Now it costs £12.50. I know that's still not a massive amount, but it's a significant leap in a short period of time - especially when you include a tip.

And the Grand Prix season kicked off this weekend with the Australian Grand Prix. Now it may just be because there have been so many rule changes, rather than the nature of those changes, but it was a really good race - there was loads of overtaking. Hamilton, for example, started off at the back as he had to change his gearbox and ended up third.

Let's hope this bodes well for the season as a whole and is due to the cars now being able to overtake properly. Certainly there seemed ot be a lot of evidence for this with cars getting close behind and getting the traditional 'tow' followed by a burst around to overtake.

I also did some scanning. The main thing I needed to do was scan the covers of the DVD series I've watched recently, since I've had them up on e-bay for sale. I did manage to scan megami (the new one should be with me soon!) and animedia as well.

While I scanned I watched some anime (it's interesting doing it on my widescreen monitor - there's enough desktop real estate that I can have everything open without the windows overlapping).

White Album was distinctly okay. I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting of the show - I'd seen a few visuals and it seemed like it was set in the world of 'idols' which is a bizarre Japanese system, but what I hadn't been expecting was a harem anime.

And that's basically what it is when you decompose it - there's a central guy and lots of cute girls seem to be in love with him for no apparent reason. He's also got a hapless mate who fancies one of the girls.

But here's the thing - I think what they've tried to do is make a more 'adult' harem show. And I mean adult in the sense of a grown up story, rather than pornographic. Indeed, it pretty much lacks anything resembling fan-service, which is technically a core element of a proper harem show.

Now this might be okay, but there's a really weird ambience to the show. It's incredibly miserable all the time for no apparent reason. I mean, it's not like rubbish things actually happen to the characters, they're all just very melancholy. It's odd. And it affects the pacing too, which was very slow.

But then the show looks pretty - it's nicely animated and the character designs are nice. Also the characters seem quite interesting... apart from being miserable. Maybe I'm being too harsh.

Maria + Holic was disappointing. It's by the same studio that did Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei (SHAFT) and more than that it's directed by the same guy. It's also an adaptation of a slightly demented manga. They also appear to have used a lot of the same tricks that they pulled on zetsubo sensei and so visually Maria Holic is absolutely nothing to complain about (it has possibly the greatest opening credit animation ever).

Maybe, therefore, the problem was that I was expecting too much, but overall I found the series flat. I kept waiting for the gags to happen, but it seemed to lack anything resembling punchlines. As I say, maybe a bit of time and distance will make me like it more if I ever get the chance to watch it on DVD or something.

Hetalia - Axis Powers was really quite poor.

Maybe it was another show where I was also hoping for a bit much and maybe my knowledge of world history is a bit lacking, but the show doesn't really make a lot of sense.

It's also kinda offensive, but the problem is it's not wilfully offensive and neither is it being ironic. How can I explain? It's a bit like things like golliwogs and black & white minstrels. Looking back on them they're appallingly offensive and I'm sure to black people at the time they were offensive, but for most white people they just didn't think about it.

It's more like a general ignorance and thoughtlessness, rather than either deliberately being nasty or being ironic.

tris go plop-plop

I hate pooing at work (now there's an opening sentence to a blog!).

There are two basic problems:

1. It smells and makes noise. There's little you can do about these - shit smells and you've really no way of controlling the noise.

2. It's obvious you've been for one. It takes at least twice as long as going for a slash, so there's no real way to hide it. Plus when you come back your clothes are re-arranged/tidied in a way they wouldn't normally be. Combine these with point 1 and it's pretty damn obvious what you've just done.

My issue with it is that this is kinda embarrassing. I mean, obviously everyone poos, but you wouldn't walk up to someone on the street and say "Hi, I've just defecated!" would you? But that's effectively what you're doing at work.

There's lots of evidence and potentially some embarrassing smells and noise.

Anyway, hopefully it'll be a somewhat productive weekend (I'm off the subject of poo now).

I've been trying to get stuff done during the week a bit - watching telly and tidying up for example where I have been leaving these to the weekend. That should mean a bit of free time.

I'm desperate for a haircut - it looks like I've got a mop on my head. Plus the Australian Grand Prix is on so I need to have a few spare hours to watch that. I really need to get this scanning done too as it won't be long before I get the next lot of magazines.

Unfortunately it's also a cleaning weekend this weekend so I'll have to clean the flat too, so we'll see how it goes.

teribi

I've been banging on a bit about all the telly I've been watching, but I've not really been that specific about it.

I tend to watch a lot of documentaries and what I call pseudo-documentaries. Just recently there have been a lot of nature documentaries in particular.

Nature's Great Events was one. It's featured some beautiful photography, although I have to admit I've not really learned anything new. There were some bits - the artic one had some interesting stuff, but others like the Serengeti have kinda been covered before. Not that I'm saying it was bad, just not particularly new.

There's also a new series on Yellowstone. This one has been really interesting and also features much in the way of spectacular photography. Plus I really didn't know much about Yellowstone other than it's a really big volcano and one day it'll erupt and wipe out most life in North America and the dust thrown up will plunge the Earth into a mini ice age.

The other documentaries I've been watching have mainly been about Darwin and his theory of Evolution as part of a Darwin season (it's 200 years since his birth). Now whilst I greatly admire Darwin and think the Theory of Evolution is quite brilliant, these programs have kinda been running into two problems.

The first problem is that Darwin himself and his life isn't actually all that interesting. Darwin was independently wealthy and essentially devoted his entire life to gathering evidence for his Theory of Evolution. He didn't have any affairs, wasn't particularly scandalous and was a methodical and patient scientist. Which is all good, but there's only so many times you can hear that without it getting a bit repetitive.

I think that's also why people make so much out of the Galapagos trip. The reality was that he didn't really have any kind of "Eureka" moment on the Galapagos - his theory was really developed much later, it's just that people like Eureka moments.

The second problem they're having is that the Theory of Evolution is actually pretty simple. So that means documentaries explaining it are kinda all treading on the same ground.

The most successful of the docs have been those looking at the Theory at a more oblique angle - either looking at it from an oblique angle or looking at it in the context of society at the time or how people have misused, abused, misinterpreted or misunderstood it.

I also mentioned pseudo-documentaries - what do I mean by those?

Well, they're basically entertainment masquerading as a documentary. That's not meant as a criticism - I wouldn't watch them if I didn't like them - but it does make them separate. The distinction is that a documentary entertains while educating, a pseudo-doc entertains with a veneer of education.

A good example is Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares, where old sweary-chops goes to kitchens, tells everyone they're doing a shit job and then makes them do a better job.

Specifically they're currently showing the American variant - Kitchen Nightmares USA. To be frank it's a hugely inferior product. It's amazing how different the style is to the British version.

The British version feels more real and organic to me, somehow. I mean, every week always follows the same basic pattern, but somehow in the British version it feels more like he gets to the heart of the problem and focuses on changing those, whereas in the US version it's more like they have a broader list of problems that are given equal weight. There's also a lot less swearing in the US version, interestingly, although the US version works more in the way of sound bites, they're not ones with lots of effing and geoffing in.

Another good pseudo-documentary is Grand Designs. This is all about people building their own homes or doing bespoke conversions. You get some truly bonkers ideas on the show and some of the homes are real ugly things when they're finished in my opinion. Still it's kinda nice to watch people living their dreams, especially if those dreams end up a bit nightmarish.

Britain's Best Drives has been another entertaining pseudo-doc. This one features Richard Wilson driving around bits of Britain in 50s cars. It's gentle fair, but entertaining nonetheless. Though I'm not sure how it sits with Global Warming...

What else?

Oh yeah, BBC4 has started a new season on Japan. I've not watched much of that yet, but it's all been PVRd (this is where I get into trouble you see - all the normal shows above and these come along and suddenly I've hours of unwatched telly to catch up on).

A new series of The Gadget Show has just started. I do love the Gadget Show - it's a good mixture of fun stuff and actual practical advice and reviews. Sort of like half way between old Top Gear and new Top Gear but with gadgets instead of cars, obviously.

Some new comedy shows have just started. Horne and Cordon which is by the Gavin and Stacey guys. It's a sketch show and I've got to say it's more miss than it is hit. There's a few good laughs, but lets put it this way - when you're parodying the pottery bit in the film ghost you know you're in some serious old ground.

Then there's Genius Dave Gorman's new one. It's surprisingly funny, though I have a soft spot for Dave Gorman (I know what you're thinking - you're thinking what that's done to the Graph?)

There's load of other stuff too, but this entry is way too long already!

inconweebleant

The weekend DVD rental was An Inconvenient Truth, which was the documentary on Global Warming presented by Al Gore.

There's not really a lot I can say about it, tbh.

It's well worth watching the documentary as the case for Global Warming is well presented. There's also no particular howlers in terms of the scene used - there are a few things that are over-simplified, but it's basically all there.

I'd say go and watch it, hopefully it'll do its job.

Anyway, in the absence of a proper film review I thought I'd talk about Death Note http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/manga.php?id=4354 instead.

I may have mentioned it before, but the point is I've been reading Death Note.

Well, reading it is something of an understatement - "obsessively ploughing through it" would be a better description, tbh :/.

I did a similar thing with Genshiken - I'd bought all of the 9 volumes and once I'd started reading I really got that 'can't put it down' vibe and read it all in a week or two. It was really addictive, and it was also kinda a bad idea as I ended up going to bed really late and being shattered at work all day.

I've been a bit more sensible with Death Note, but I'm really enjoying it.

Weird thing is, though, until quite near the end of volume 1 I wasn't actually enjoying it that much. I dunno, it's odd and a little difficult to describe.

Basically, I've occasionally found with manga and anime that the portrayals of things can be utterly unrealistic. Now, obviously some stuff is meant to be 'unrealistic', like in Death Note, the existence of Shinigami or whatever, but those things are fine. I've no problem with them because they're genuine fantasy elements or things from the writers imagination or similar.

The problem is more stuff that's meant to be real or believable but is blatantly just wrong or silly or stupid.

In the case of Death Note, for example, there's this bizarre relationship between the NPA (Japan's FBI), the regular Japanese police, the FBI, Interpol and the G8 nations. These relationships are clearly wrong, but also made up in weird and illogical ways.

So in other words, my problem is almost that the writer hasn't bothered to do any real research and has instead made it up and got it badly wrong. The reason I have a problem with that is it's incredibly distracting to suddenly have something so jarringly wrong when you're otherwise enjoying what's going on. Normally it would really affect my enjoyment.

Ah, but I did say I was really enjoying Death Note, yes? Well I am and it's because the central plot and the relationship between the two main characters is extremely well done and incredibly interesting.

As such, despite my misgivings over the occasional "reality goof" I've still been enjoying it.

What's more it's full of really big twists. It's really not afraid to throw hefty spanners into the workings of its own story. The really clever thing is it then pick up the cogs and builds something even more intriguing each time it does.

weekend of nothing in particular

Well I feel better after yesterday's rant. As you can tell, I was unimpressed with the changes to say the least.

As you'll probably guess I put some stuff up on e-bay at the weekend. There was a bit more than I'd expected, actually as I thought I'd sell one or two things I'd held back on the last time I was doing an e-bay session. Hopefully it'll generate a bit of cashola and basically pay for getting my car taxed/serviced/insured.

However, the e-baying was about the only success I had at the weekend. I really didn't do very much at all.

I've a couple of reasons (excuses?) for that. The first was last Friday. It was an appalling day and I was utterly shattered when I got home and basically didn't really start to feel recovered until Sunday afternoon :/.

Second excuse was it turned out it was Mother's day on Sunday. I'd totally forgotten and while it doesn't affect me directly (my mother having passed away) it meant I deliberately had to put a few things off because it would be choka-block in town.

Which was also something I couldn't do. Because I'd forgotten I hadn't gone shopping on Friday and instead found myself having to go to buy a few bits on Saturday otherwise I wouldn't have had anything to eat. That meant several hours basically wasted because I didn't plan things properly.

Lastly, this week's rental DVD turned out to have 2 commentary tracks so that took a lot longer to watch than I was anticipating.

Anyway, whether they're reasons or excuses the basic point is I haven't started any scanning and I didn't watch any anime. I didn't actually get fully caught up on my recorded TV.

In fact, there's such a lot of recorded TV for me to watch I'm at serious risk of getting snowed under by it. I need to decide what the best order to do stuff in is.

a big fat fuck you to e-bay

I normally try to keep swearing to a minimum in my blogs - just to keep them basically polite, as if I'm talking to an acquaintance, rather than a friend.

I'm not going to do that in this entry, because I'm extremely annoyed.

E-bay are a bunch of cunts.

Why the rage?

Because e-bay have done something extraordinarily retarded - they've capped postage costs.

Now fair enough, you may think, people that charge £20 on postage for a single DVD are clearly arseholes. But the problem is the way they've gone about it.

Rather than have some simple system of maximum charges based on weight of the item (since that's what the cost actually depends on) they've set a single maximum price.

What's more, like a bunch of douches, some of these max prices are ZERO - notably on DVDs. That's right, you have to have a free postage option for DVDs.

How fucking stupid is that?

So someone like me who specialises in things like box sets and collections of manga now has to have a free postage option? When it can cost up to £10 to send the thing?! I don't fucking think so, you bunch of shit-eating mother-fuckers.

It becomes patently obvious how retarded this system is if you think about sending a single DVD.

If you put a DVD on at a starting price of less than £1 e-bay doesn't charge you a listing fee. However, popular DVDs (so there's lots of copies in circulation) can often sell for less than a £1. Guess what? It costs more than £1 to send the thing.

I think many e-bayers are reasonable enough people to not mind selling DVDs cheaply so long as it doesn't cost them anything. They've already bought the DVD after all!

But with e-bays new retarded system you have to add the postage cost into your initial price, which is bound to make it more than £1. That means you get charged an insertion fee.

It then becomes patently obvious what they're doing - they're trying to suck even more cash out of buyers and sellers.

Because not only are their insertion fees, remember, e-bay also charge you % of the final cost. Plus they own paypal, which if your buyer uses that will also charge you a % fee! Now previously they couldn't charge for the postage, but by forcing you to include it in the initial price, they can charge you.

Plus they're screwing you up the arse because buyers will see that your initial bis is somethign silly like £2.50 but with free postage. Psychologically people will instinctively not go for this - I've found this in my own experiences that I've blogged about before.

What a bunch of cunts.

I think I've found a way around it, though, by using the "courier" option. This seems to allow me to not have silly starting prices, though I've no idea if I will then get charged at the end. I probably will.

I mean seriously - if they wanted to make even more money (not that they aren't dripping with it already) then they should have just put the fees up. Be honest about it. Being stealthy just makes you seem like a bunch of cunts. Which they are.

Oh - and btw, just to add insult to injury they've done this under the pretext (i.e. total fabrication) that buyers "have told them they want these maximum prices". Any buyer that thinks this is a good idea is a bigger retard than e-bay and should clearly be disregarded (if not shot out of a big cannon into the middle of the Atlantic).

shitty day

I'm having a shitty day.

There's a bid I'm doing and it's not going well. I kinda guessed it wouldn't and it's clearly a total mess and an utter waste of time.

What makes it worse is that I have no idea why we're bidding it - it holds almost no relevance for us and we won't hardly do any of the work I imagine.

What makes it annoying is that the people who will do all the work have utterly dropped the ball. They were given extremely clear instructions on what to do and what they returned to us utterly failed to meet those instructions.

Plus it was late and considering they've done virtually fuck all, that lateness is just plain insulting.

What I was really hoping was my boss would just say fuck it - don't bother. These people haven't held up their end so why are we bending over backwards to get the bid done?

It's times like this I wish I could just fuck off somewhere and get drunk.

an uneventful week

So I've totally failed to do any scanning. I've no particular excuse - I just couldn't be bothered is the truth. This weekend seems the best candidate for getting it done (or started at least).

I'm also planning to do a bit of e-baying this weekend. I've a few things I can flog and I need to generate a bit of cash to help out over the coming months. It's an expensive time of year what with things like car tax and car insurance due.

I've been watching Rocket Girls in the evenings. It's a quirky little show that's kinda difficult to describe.

It's ostensibly about a bunch of oddballs and their attempts to get a Japanese manned space programme going. Now that premise could easily be done in a deadly serious way, but with Rocket Girls there's a much lighter approach taken.

But the key to it is that it does also keep the serious side intact. So the space programme isn't SF type space flight - it's orbiter modules strapped to solid-fuel rockets and there's weightlesness and no sound in space, etc. But then equally it maintains the lighter anime side - the girls wear fan-service approved skin tight costumes, for example.

And yes I did say girls and the 'girls' in the title are actual high-school girls. And that's exactly what I mean - it's anime so they're cute girls, but it's not as daft as it sounds - girls weigh less and these are basically smart kids so they're not just eye candy.

It actually reminds me of a programme I once saw that basically said that women make far better astronauts than men. Because they're smaller and less bulky they're easier to get up there, but also from a weightlessness point of view having bigger muscles is actually useless. In fact, it can be more problematic, not least of all because bigger muscles suffer worse in terms of wasting away under zero-g conditions.

So it's not as daft as it sounds, but equally, it is kinda daft. Which is all good, because it's a comedy series at heart.

I also acquired the comic version of Wanted the other day and have started on it. I've gotta say I'm not hugely impressed. It gives the distinct impression of trying to be a Watchmen for Super-villains, but, well, simpler and less well written if I'm honest.

I also started on the Death Note manga. I'd only ordered volume 1 so that if it was dire I wasn't really loosing out too much - I could just flog it on e-bay and forget about it. I've ordered the other volumes so I guess that means it's not dire, although I'm not entirely sure it's as good as people seem to have been saying it is.

I'll reserve judgement for until I've read more, but I dunno, it seems almost to be moving too fast for its own good.

wanted

This weeks rental DVD was... nothing. I didn't have one for some reason. I've generally found lovefilm to be pretty good - certainly they've maintained quicker turn-around times than I used to get with the old Amazon system.

However, this week, even though I sent the disc back on Monday there was no sign of my next rental. I checked it at the end of the week and was going to report it as a problem, but it said to give it 4 days. I then got my "it's been sent" e-mail on Saturday.

Dunno why there was the delay, but either way it meant I didn't have a rental disk to watch. This was advantageous in a way as it meant I watched more telly shows, but it also gave me the chance to watch a purchased DVD - in this case wanted.

Overall, it's a pretty fun movie.

The basic idea is that the hero is a super-assassin with special powers but at the start of the movie he doesn't know that. During the course of the movie he learns all about his powers as well as the Fraternity, a secret cabal of assassins who shape fate.

I won't do a full review here as I'll leave that for trismugistus.com at a later date, but overall I'd recommend watching it.

I wouldn't say the plot was all that great, but it's a real roller coaster action film that provides a lot of really enjoyable fights and chases. After it finished I had quite a lots of bits where I thought "that didn't make any sense" or "why did that happen?" but it's that sort of movie.

Visually it's stunning, especially since it doesn't do anything too over-the-top with the camera. Often you can watch these films and feel ill because the camera's swirling about all over the place. Here, although there are plenty of stylistic flourishes, the action is filmed in a much more straight way and so it's much easier to watch and enjoy.

---

I finished Derren Brown's book "Tricks of the Mind" over the weekend. I think I mentioned this when I started reading it and it's not that it's taken me months to read, more that I read the first half really quickly, then left it on the shelf for months and then picked it up again a little while ago.

Not sure why I did that - I've enjoyed the book - I just, I don't know, kinda got distracted, maybe?

Anyway, it's a real mish-mash of stuff, which is cool. I mean as an example there's a section on techniques for improving your memory but there's also a bit on debunking pseudo-science/mysticism and why Derren is no longer a Christian. It's quite a range of subjects, but then also it's a range of styles - memory stuff is verging on self-help (that's the wrong word, but you get the idea) whereas the debunking is more polemic.

But then you've also got humorous stories and anecdotes that border on making the book auto-biographical and stuff on how to do hypnosis as well as a fascinating discussion on why hypnosis doesn't actually exist mixed in there as well. As I say, weird mix, but it certainly works.

or not 200

That's odd - according to the side bar over there that post wasn't the 200th. It says I made 147 posts in 2008 and 48 posts in 2009, which is only 195 :/. But according to the back-end dashboard thing I've made 200 posts. Odd.

Yesterday was a bit rubbish.

In the morning, as I was going out to my car, I realised I'd forgotten to fill my windscreen fluid, so I had to dash back in and get the fluid and some water. But as I did that I knocked over a bottle of oil I keep for frying chips.

It didn't quite 'go everywhere' but it made a mess on the floor, so I wiped up most of it, but had to leave properly cleaning it until I got back. I was slightly afraid the bottle of oil had cracked and would leak everywhere while I was at work.

Anyway, putting the fluid in (and the clean-up) took about 10 minutes and that meant I set off a lot later than I would normally, so I hit more traffic, which meant the journey to work was rubbish.

It was also quite warm yesterday - so much so that I didn't have to turn my heating on at all at home until just before bed. But at work, the heating was still on full blast and even though I turned down the radiator closest to me that didn't help much. So I had a fan on for most of the day but still sweated like a pig. Of course that's partially my fault for not getting my bloody hair cut at the weekend.

Then last night I had to clean up the oil mess properly, put my shopping away and cook dinner. Only for some reason I'd decided to have a fry-up - well, I know the reason, it was because I'd all sorts of random left overs. But the point is a fry-up is hardly a quick meal to do.

That meant I didn't eat until 8-ish and that obviously wrote off starting any scanning. But also I watched a documentary on peter kay's comic relief song while I had my dinner but for some reason it was all broken up due to poor reception. That wouldn't have been surprising if it was on 5, but this was channel 4 where I normally have good reception :/.

Anyway, I decided to watch the Red Garden OAV instead, so I've now finished all of that.

I guess I should warn for spoilers as I'm going to discuss the OAV which is a sequel to the show.

It's rather confusing. It's set several hundred years into the future and all of the 4 girls are still alive. This was fine - at the end of the series it's made clear that their bodies won't age and they'll live forever.

What isn't at all clear is how come all of the secondary characters in the original series are there too? Is that supposed to be based on the idea that we look like our ancestors? Well okay, but it becomes more bizarre when you see these descendants still in the same jobs as their ancestors or at the same school, or still friends, etc.

Then you have the added weirdness that the bad guy is there too, but now Lise is his 'sister' only she's not his sister she's a robot/cyborg... where the heck did that come from? And where did the other robots on Roosevelt island come from anyway? Did he make them? Why?

It was all just sort of random. I mean, it wasn't actually bad as such. It was more like they'd planned to do a fll proper sequel, but it got cancelled during production and they decided to compress the story and put it out as an OAV.

Still, it didn't really spoil my enjoyment of the series as a whole.

So that was the cap to the rubbish day - a rather disappointing OAV.

What makes it worse is I've woken up this morning knackered (I didn't stay up late) and therefore in a bad mood. We've got a quality inspection today and I really hope I don't get picked on as part of it as I'm really not up for it.

200th post

Just thought I'd do a specific celebratory post to mark my 200th blog entry!

Not that it really means anything, it just sort of sounds like it does - 200 entries in my blog.

So hurrah for me spouting drivel 200 times in a row!

pulled muscle

I've pulled a muscle in my back. It's sort of in the middle on my right side, a bit below the bottom of my shoulder blade. It doesn't hurt if I just sit still but when I move in a particular way it gives me a bad twinge.

I think I pulled it yesterday while I was re-arranging all my computer gear. I've tried to put all of it on the desk where the actual PCs were on the floor before. Not sure if this is a good idea or not - it means the fans are going to be closer to me so it may be louder. I'll have to see.

I was a bit lazy with doing the desk actually - I should have done it on Saturday as part of cleaning, but I couldn't be arsed. Well, I say that, I was pretty damn knackered by mid-afternoon Saturday so maybe I couldn't have done it.

Anyway, the re-arranging took a lot longer than I thought (such things always do - you forget haw many cables and bits there are too sort out) so I did no scanning whatsoever.

That leaves me something of a quandary for the week - do I spend my evenings scanning? Or do I keep up the pace with watching anime DVDs? Either way I will watch anime, but when scanning I watch fansubs. I guess watching fansubs will be good too - the spring anime season is rapidly approaching and there will be loads of shows to catch up on. It will be good to be ahead of the game a bit.

Anyway, speaking of watching anime I finished Red Garden. The end was pretty good. There was one scene in particular that was very effective in a brutal horror kind of way. I was a little disappointed not to find out more detail about the history/back-story. It sounded quite interesting and it would have been nice to maybe have a flashback or two fleshing it out.

I haven't watched the OAV yet. I started, but it was quite late at night and having just watched the end of of the main series it was kinda jarring, because it suddenly seemed to leap forward in time and become all sci-fi, but, weirdly, with the same characters. I'm sure watching it with fresh eyes it will make more sense, but it did leave me puzzled.

I made some more of those carrot and pineapple muffins on Friday as well. Last weeks were something of a success in that they didn't collapse or explode and I didn't burn them or anything; however I found them to be very cinamony. Now don't get me wrong I love me some cinnamon, but if you're making carrot and pineapple muffins you at least want to taste the carrot and pineapple a bit.

Anyway, I therefore decided to make some more this week and drastically reduce the cinammon (just a dash instead of a teaspoon full) and, bizarrely, they still don't taste much of pineapple or cinammon. I even chucked in most of the juice the pineapples were in, but it doesn't seem to have helped the taste, only made them a bit too soggy.

Still, they're quite nice. The recipe contains raisins and I love how raisins become plump and juicy when you bake them in cakes and stuff. It's weird, normally they're kind dry things, but baked in cakes they're much nice.

I also made my spag-bol. I made a bit fi a tactical error with that, though as I started it a bit late. The recipe is phenomenal if it's given 3 or 4 hours to bubble away and reduce down, but I only had about 2 hours. It's still really nice, but in the back of my mind I know it could be even better.

romic celief

Today is "Red Nose Day" - the day devoted to people engaging in hilarious antics in a bid to raise oodles of cash for Comic Relief.

I've no particular beef with comic relief. I used to watch it years ago, even did a bit of fundraising, although my general interest has waned.

I'm not a big believer in charity. It's always felt a bit wrong to me - not so much because I don't think the causes are worthy, but more because I don't think there should be any need for it. In other words, I think those things done by charity are often so important that they should be being paid for by Governments. My take on the issue is that part of the reason I pay taxes is so that the government will take care of most, if not all of that stuff.

But anyway, I did actually donate this year. Nothing huge, but I texted in a few times in support of the Kilimanjaro climb. I did this mainly because fellow lard-arse, Chris Moyles was dragging his arse up the mountain, so I thought I'd show my support.

The anime mags turned up yesterday, which was nice, so I'll get to scan them in this weekend. I should also really get my hair cut - it's starting to get a bit unweildy. If I ever won the lottery one of the odder things I would do is start trimming my hair again.

I've had a variety of very bad haircuts over the years, btu the one I really liked most was having my hair trimmed "number 1" all over. That's a bit like a longer skin-head type cut if you've never seen one. I just foudn it so much easier not having hair, but the problem was it made me look "evil" or "like a thug" (the words of my friends) and since that's not a good thing when you're having business meetings, etc, I basically try to maintain a 'short, side-parting' type cut.

I splattered a lot of ant powder mid-week and since then I've not seen a single ant. I don't know that it's actually finished them off, so I think I'll stock up on powder just in case they find some other way in. I've still no actual idea how they're getting in or if they've nested somewhere close by, so I'll just have to maintain vigalence.

My other plan for the weekend is to sort out my computer desk. Since I got the big LCD monitor I've freed up a lot of desk real-estate so I can have a re-arrange. But also it's exposed a lot of nooks and crannies so I need to give it a good dust around as well.

more mu

I've been watching Red Garden this week. I'm about half the way through - interestingly, the show is only about 22 eps, although there's also an OAV which is thankfully on the disks too.

Red Garden was one of those shows that got poxed up by ADVs implosion a while back: the last disk was unreleased when it all happened and initially funimation weren't going to put it out - they were fixed on doing half season box sets. Luckily they relented so I was able to get the last disk.

The other show that happened on was Welcome to NHK, which I'll probably watch next.

Anyway, RED Garden is pretty good.

It's firmly a horror show with just a smidge of fantasy thrown in. There are very few laughs and it's better for it. The show is really quite brutal, to be frank. Not in a gory way, though - it's more of a psychological brutality that these girls go through.

I have to admit for about the first six or so episodes I was a bit unsure about the show. In a way it's a bit difficult to love.

A good, obvious example is that the character designs are quite unappealing, if I'm honest - big bulbous noses, sharp angular, too-skinny bodies and horrible clothes are just a few of its crimes on this front. But after a whole you do get used to them. I'm not sure I'll ever like them as such, but I can certainly accept them.

I'll stop there as I'll start doing a full review, which would rob trismugistus.com of content - let's just say I've grown to enjoy it more than I initially did.

I'm expecting the anime magazines to turn up sometime this week - they may even be waiting for me when I get home. That should mean a weekend of scanning, so I should tackling the shows from January mid-season. Predictably I've got a bit behind with these - not least because of my determination to clear my unwatched anime DVDs, of course!

And speaking of DVDs I've been buying some more (eek). Baccano disk 2 has turned up. Can't wait to have all of the disks so I can watch it - I really liked that show when I sampled it on fansubs.

I've also been collecting Claymore and Darker than Black and they're about half way through the disks. But I also bought Rocket Girls, which is another show I really liked on fansub.

Plus I recently got the last disks for Code Geass (the error the company made was swiftly rectified, as I knew it would be) so I'll have to make sure I watch that too. I've not heard anything about the second series coming out yet, but I'm sure it must be pending.

the unbearable lightness of being

It's a title and a half is that isn't it? The Unbearable Lightness of Being. You could get half a dozen regular titles out of it. I'm going to call it TULB.

The film itself is long - the best part of 3 hours. I'm not sure that entirely endeared me to it. I have to admit it seemed a bit too long if I'm honest.

Y'know, the problem here is I'm a little worried I'm going to come across as something of a philistine. You see TULB is a proper film.

I don't tend to think of myself as a snob. I'm perfectly happy to enjoy low-brow entertainment as much as I am high-brow. I'm not one of those people who will dismiss an action film simply because it is an action film.

But then equally I wouldn't hesitate to criticise it either, and the same goes for higher art as well. To be frank I both enjoyed TULB about as much as I didn't enjoy it.

The film is mostly set in Prague atthe end fo the 60s. If you know anything of history you'll realise that's when the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia. However, the film isn't really about that, as such.

I mean on one level it is, but on another level it isn't. The events affect the characters, but I dunno, it almost seemed like the characters didn't quite engage properly with the events. It's like sometimes they seemed really involved in the politics, but at other points it was reduced to a backdrop.

I was reminded a lot of Dr Zhivago actually, which is set during the whole tumultuous period of the first world war and the Russian revolution. But at it's heart it's a complicated love story - a romantic story; a tragedy.

But in Dr Zhivago the events of the time genuinely seemed to actually impact the character, whereas here that was less apparent.

Also, Dr Zhivago doesn't have a lot of tits and ass.

I'm not sure how I felt about the tits and ass. I mean on one level it's real, and realistic, and makes an important point, but on the other it gave the whole film a sort of artificial European-ness. The film isn't European - it was made by an American studio and is in English, etc, but it seemed to adopting a faux-European style.

Not wanting to be harsh, but it was like someone had watched a lot of European films and tried to mimic them without quite 'getting it'.

But then to be fair I could almost level the same criticism at European cinema. It can be quite pretentious at time. "We're showing you these nipples, because this is totally serious 'art'... phwoar, look, nipples!"

I'm being over-critical - a lot of the film worked. The characters were wonderfully deep and complex, for example. They felt quite real a lot of the time. The ending is particularly poignant, and the whole storyline with the dog was beautifully realised.

It just felt a bit too disconnected from the whole soviet invasion = bad and communism = bad things, I think. Like they were more of a boorish imposition than genuinely scary things.

return of the ants

Worrying sign yesterday - there were a few ants running along the floor.

It seems a bit early in the year for them to have appeared, as it's still pretty cold, but I guess it is spring now.

I put down these "ant trap" things that I bought a while back. They're supposed to have stuff in them that they take back to nest and it kills the queen or something. I couldn't see much evidence of the ants taking much interest in them, though.

I had a really difficult time trying to find anything to deal with the ants last year - everywhere I thought would sell ant powder didn't for some reason. I've a few more ideas now and may try looking on the interwebs.

Part of the problem is I have no idea where the nest is or how they're getting in. Every time I see them they seemed to be in a different place, and what's more it was illogical where they were. It's like at one point they were in a particular cupboard. They'd obviously got in because my tin of golden syrup was there and they were after the sugar.

But when I looked around the edges of the cupboard I couldn't see a trail of them going in or out. However, the cupboard is attached to the wall, but it's not an external wall - it's an internal wall. Does that mean the nest is in the wall? That seems bizarre - how the hell would they have got in there?

Bloody things.

I watched Gatekeepers 21 last night.

It's pretty good. I mentioned I've seen it before, but I hadn't watched the original gatekeepers, so I don't think I really understood it. Gatekeepers 21 is a short 6-part OAV and is set closer tot he present day, so it actually stars the descendents of the original gatekeepers.

My only real criticism is that they did bugger about with some aspects of the original. Some of these meant the show made more sense, but others just seemed a bit random. It's a bit more adult - if Gatekeepers is basically a Japanese shounen action show, then gatekeepers 21 shares more in common with dark American superhero comics. The hero is a bit maladjusted and dislikes the world around her.

The animation was pretty good, but then you tend to get that with OAVs. Overall I quite enjoyed it, and it's a good sequel.

goggle box

So this weekend I watched telly.

Seriously - that's pretty much all I did all weekend.

As I mentioned last week the problem with watching anime at the exclusion of everything else is that it means I get a PVR jammed with stuff. I easily had more than 20hours of stuff recorded and this weekend I watched all of it. It didn't help that this weeks rental DVD was 3 hours long (!) and also had a commentary track (so six hours total!).

I did manage to watch some anime, though. I watched Koharu Biyori (Indian Summer). It's actually a really quick turn around - the show only came out in Japan at the end of 2007, and it's a 3-part OAV with the last part coming out March 2008, so that's less than a year for the US DVD coming out.

It lacks a dub, but that's no great loss as I don't really care about dubs, but there are no extras to speak of. That doesn't make it great value as there are only 3 eps at about 30 minutes each.

It was also not quite as good as I remembered it from fansubs. I think partly it was my own fault - I was clearly knackered from watching all that telly, and it's a high energy, slightly zany show, so I perhaps wasn't in the best mood to watch it. It was okay, though.

It's a fan-service packed comedy, btw. Perhaps the most annoying thing was the female voices - they were very high pitched (another thing I didn't really remember from watching it on fansubs). They were also really fast talking (again, maybe it was more me being a bit goggle-eyed from all the telly, though) and it was difficult to read the subs... especially when stuff was jiggling.

Dunno - "okay" is my verdict, I think.

I'll be trying to watch lots more anime this week too. Luckily several of the telly programs I've been watching have either ended or were 1-off documentary types. Also, comic relief is this Friday so I think a lot of shows are taking a break while they put specials on and stuff.

animu challenge

Well I finished gatekeepers.

I've got to say I'm mildly impressed. I don't think it's the greatest anime ever made, but it's a long way from the worst as well. There are a few niggley points I had - especially with the main bad guy - but expect a basically positive review some time in the future over on trismugistus.com.

The animu challenge of actually sitting down and watching DVDs has got off to a reasonable start then. I guess I averaged 2 disks a night (gatekeepers was 24 eps across 8 disks) so about 6 episodes-ish a night. That's not at all bad given all the stuff I have to do.

Now to watch the sequel - gatekeepers 21. Only, I've actually already seen it. I know, that's a bit odd, isn't it? But I kinda ended up buying without realising it was a sequel. I'm guessing now, having seen the original show it will make more sense, though :).

All this anime watching does sorta mean I lost a bit of momentum on the script I was writing. This kinda opened a slot for me to do one of the more frustrating things I do. Rather than finish the script and then think about redrafts I got suckered into reading some "how to" sites.

One is written by a very successful screenwriter so he knows what he's talking about.

The slightly odd thing is that I kinda managed to tick lots of boxes without having really read these before. However, the annoying this is I've now started to pick my work apart and find flaws with it before I've even finished it. Clearly this is bad because to be a writer, first you must write, and you can only say you've written if you finish.

Ah well, I'm sure I'll crack this one day.

I'll possibly get my hair cut this weekend. I'm also planning to have a crack at making soem carrot and pineapple muffins.

I've been on something of a cooking spree lately. I'm not sure what's inspired it, but I've been making stuff like spaghetti bolognese, liver and bacon, toad in the hole - this is rather than relying on buying pre-made / microwave meals type stuff.

It's been pretty successful, actually, so this weekend I though I might tackle some muffin recipe. I've found muffins to be tricky in the past. Cakes are pretty easy - all cake recipes rely on using a fixed 1:1:1 ratio of eggs, S.R. flour and sugar. Muffins replace the eggs with things like vegetable oil and you use plain flour but with bicarbonate of soda instead of S.R. flour. They're more complicated, in other words, so fingers crossed.

abandoned ideas 4

Given that I've been religiously watching Gatekeepers in the evenings I've not really been up to much. And also since I can't be arsed discussing it at the mo, I thought I'd do what is probably the last of these abandoned ideas:

charlotte

This ides was abandoned for a very specific reason - it was almost plagiarism.

Not sure if you know what Chobits is - it's a manga originally by Clamp and there's an anime adaptation to. Now, I'm not actually a big fan of Chobits as it's a bit sick in the head in my opinion.

But anyway, the story wasn't really a rip-off of Chobits as much as that whole sort of area.

The main character was a scientist working for some weapons manufacturer in their R&D department. He has no real life, as such.

Anyway, one day he goes home (it's pouring with rain) and sees the police searching for something. As he gets into his apartment he sees something but then dismisses it.

He then goes home and I wasn't sure - he gets knocked out, maybe? Essentially he needed to meet a robot girl (she's a weapon, natch) that's escaped from his facility and is hiding in his apartment. He'd end up unconscious or go to sleep or something and then there would be the classic "it was just a dream" wake up sequence followed by a "omg, she's real".

The android would then continue to hide/live in his apartment and try to be his wife/girlfriend... or something like that. Basically, although he didn't work on her specifically she'd seen him do some act of kindness and fallen in love.

Which was kinda where I stopped as it was basically just ripping off about a dozen anime :/.

the wintersmith

So I finished The Wintersmith. It's a good read.

I think if I was criticising, I would pick on two things. First off, it starts with a later event in the narrative and then the next three quarters of the book are effectively flashback.

The trouble with this is it kinda robs it of tension. I mean, the book still has it because the bit it starts with isn't the end, but it is close. If you know up-front that characters are alive and well at the end, then you also know they're not going to die in a flashback. That's a bit extreme, but you see what I mean.

Also there was a bit of a lack of Wee Free Men. I guess that's sensible in the fact that this is the third novel, so there's not much left in the way of surprises, but they're so entertaining it could have done with a bit more of them.

A bit more of them on there own, I mean - they were present in a lot of scenes, but didn't really do much of anything.

However, saying that, what had replaced them was all good stuff. It was a lot more 'witchy' than the previous books, as Tiffany had grown up a bit and done more training, etc. It was especially nice to see plenty of the elder witches - Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, etc - as they're such great character.

The book did leave a few sort-of loose ends that could be carried over into new books, but equally don't really matter or could easily be explored by your own imagination.

The plan to watch some anime has got off to a good start. I started on Gatekeepers.
For some reason I thought this was a very old anime, but it seems it was only broadcast in Japan in 2000. If you allow the normal couple of years for it to make it across from Japan it's not that old at all.

It's a good show as well - I was kinda unsure what to expect. It's basically a shounen action / monster-of-the-week show with some harem type elements so it's not hugely innovative in that sense, but there's a mean streak of wit and imagination runnign through it. Some of the monster designs are particularly clever, for example.

the simpson's movie

This week's rental was The Simpson's Movie.

I totally avoided this at the time it was released in the cinemas. The Simpson's kinda stopped being funny about 4 or five years ago, if not longer. The real problem was that they ran out of jokes. When a comedy show has been going for something like 20 years that's pretty much inevitable.

They've been repeating and recycling the same things for a good while now. And worst of all they seem to have taken their own format to a point beyond ridiculousness.

When the Simpsons started it was actually fairly standard in terms of its storytelling. For example it often tended to have "morals". Now I don't mean that in terms of it having morality - a sense of right and wrong - I mean that in the sense of having a bit at the end where someone goes "and the moral of the story is".

I've nothing wrong with cartoons educating, but I've always hated when they deliberately explain the point. It smacks of very poor story telling for one thing.

Anyway, from about the second season on they started to play with this format a lot. They stopped having "moral of the story" bits and instead just go with the flow. If anything characterised the Simpsons it was this flexibility of the format.

Some of would follow fairly normal narrative structure, but other stories would be totally non-sequitur in nature. You'd start off with one thing (homer trashes Lisa's saxophone) then end up somewhere else (homer stopping an alien invasion).

But generally these were kept in check. However, as the show progressed and they ran out of normal narratives, they all became non-sequitur. Recent shows it's like they're coming up with random gags (that they've probably already done) and short stories and simply trying to weld these together to make 22 minutes of screen time.

My fear then was that the film would be like this too and from that standpoint they succeeded. There is a much more consistent narrative story in the film - a plot you can follow and understand.

The problem is that they've done all of those, so it also feels like a mash-up of plots they've already done.

Also, there are a lot of logical failures. The most obvious is that the town ends up under a big glass dome. How comes they don't all suffocate? They hint that they run out of food and water, but it doesn't really seem like it. Why does no-one else in the country notice?

But worst of all, the dome doesn't go underground - it's just on the surface. So why doesn't anyone think of tunnelling out? Alright there's a bit where they say to put guards on, but that's is later on. Plus the residents of Springfield rebel later on and they try to crack the glass - none of them think to tunnel under? Especially when the end part comes and they could all dies. What, they just sort of stand and watch?

This is the problem with telling a story - if that's what you're doing it needs to make sense, and this didn't.

There are lots of other problems too. A severe lack of good jokes, for example. All of the good ones are in the trailers - that can't be a good sign.

Also there seemed to be too much of a desire to shoe-horn in all of the secondary characters from the series. I guess it's okay when they're in the crowd, but having little 'bits' for some of them feels very artificial when it's a plot-driven film.

One of the mistakes I think they made was testing the movie to audiences. It's almost like the fact it was animation acted against them. In a movie you couldn't reshoot the entire thing - just bits, but with animation you potentially could.

And from the commentaries it's sounds like they did. A lot. It also sounded like this toned down or removed a lot of the jokes and if nothing else a Simpsons Movie needs to be funny.

erm

Bit of a non-weekend to be honest.

Saturday I got swamped with stuff I had to do - shopping, cleaning, fill the car up with petrol, loads of ironing, etc.

I'm also trying to close down my aol account. I kept the dial-up "just in case" but never used it. Unfortunately I've had a dickens of a time changing e-mails on a lot of sites. They're often ones I only visit occasionally, if rarely, but are important.

The trouble is you forget your passwords or usernames or whatever and you need to get them sent to your old e-mail. That means you can't get rid of it just yet otherwise you'll never get the e-mail changed or access to it again :/.

The other problem was I was knackered, so most of these jobs took longer than they should as I just couldn't be arsed.

I was knackered for a very specific reason - last week I was working on a movie script. What I was trying to do was see how far I could get, see how much I could do. The answer was the best part of half of it.

The problem was it totally drained me. By the end of the week I was basically a dribbling moron with no thoughts left in my head. This wasn't good for work, let alone keeping going with the script. I may deliberately avoid working on it this week to try to get the juices refreshed.

Which feeds into my other plan. The amount of unwatched anime I've got stacking up is silly - my shelves are literally overflowing. I've therefore decided I'm going to force myself to sit down and watch loads of anime DVDs.

This probably means at the cost of watching normal telly. As I mentioned on Friday there's quite a bit I'm watching at the moment, so really I'm creating some problems for myself down the line. But really the key point is that I can't flog stuff on telly on e-bay, whereas I need to do that with the anime DVDs.

Sunday was then a non-event. I was still knackered and just watched some recorded telly and finished off the Wintersmith.

I'm really loving my new monitor, btw. Sometimes I catch myself just looking at the desktop - a good wall on a big widescreen monitor is a thing of wonder.

telly annoyance

So this week I've not really gotten up to much - well, other than spending all that money I don't really have that is. I've been trying to watch more of the telly shows I normally record and then watch over the weekend.

I don't normally talk about all the telly I watch on here for some reason. I think that's partly because I'm such a PVR-whore. A PVR if you don't know is basically the digital/modern world equivalent of a VCR. It stands for Personal Video Recorder and does pretty much what it says - records programmes for you.

Only unlike a VCR, which uses magnetic tape, it does so to a hard drive. PVRs are actually the miracle that has spawned the modern anime fansub industry. In Japan, the fans PVR the anime shows (one thing we don't often realise in the west is that even though anime is on TV, it's often shown very late at night) and then make them available via peer-2-peer networks and Usenet type services.

Generally speaking they don't do this for western fans, though I understand there are some who do it on behalf of us westerners, but those are mainly western ex-pats. The Japanese fans do it to share with each other and the fansubbers just make use of the availability of it and add the subtitles.

Anyway, the point is that a while back I got digital telly. I bought quite an expensive model of decoder and it has a PVR built into it. Now during the week there are a variety of shows on that I want to watch, but because of a combination of work, eating, the time I go to bed and the types of stuff I actually fancy doing in the evenings, I tend to PVR everything.

That then means that I'm out of step with programmes, but it also means that at the weekends I watch a huge amount of telly. So much in fact that on the average Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning that's essentially all I do.

It's at its worst over the winter months as you get a lot more stuff on during winter. Over summer you get more sports stuff for one thing, but because people are expected to be out more in the evening, dramas and stuff tend to dry up too.

But this week I've been trying to get ahead of myself, watch more stuff as it's aired, rather than have a big stack at the weekend. Hopefully that'll free up some time at the weekend as I've a couple things I need to get done.

Anyway, the point of this blog wasn't really all of the above - what I wanted to do was moan about something.

Basically, two of my favourite shows are The Shield, which is a sorta-cop show and 30Rock a comedy show. They're both American and both air on channel 5. Or at least they used to - now they're being aired on 5Us (or something like that).

See as I mentioned there are more channels on digital, but quite a few of them are from the same broadcasters, so you have E4 and More4 and BBC3 and BBC4 and one of five's is 5US.

Now that's all well and good, except that my reception of 5's channels is really touch-and-go.

At the moment the digital broadcasts are "turned down" - they're not as powerful as they will be when they turn the analogue broadcasts off, because otherwise they'd interfere.

So that means that 5's signal strength is really borderline. I dunno if you've ever tried to watch poor-signal digital telly but it's impossible. With normal analogue what happens is it gets static and maybe the sound hisses, but it's still just about watchable. With digital it's more like a threshold - it'll be fine and then suddenly *boom* it's totally unwatchable because the picture and sound break up.

And that's what I've discovered with The Shield and 30Rock.

Now I would be buying DVDs of them anyway, admittedly, but they won't be out for months I imagine. What a pain in the arse.