24: redemption

And in a separate move of great surprisingness I watched a second film this weekend too!

The film in question was 24: Redemption.

It's intended as a bridge between seasons 6 and 7 of 24. I've obviously not seen season 7 yet, as it's only on satellite, but it comes out on DVD fairly soon.

Season 6 was a disappointing season, overall. Part of the problem 24 has is that it's built up a lot of baggage.

In the first season clearly everything and everyone was new. In the second season many of the characters returned; however one thing they did was to throw in some very neat twists involving those existing characters. The best and clearest of these involved a character called Nina who, in essence, turned out to be a bad guy where we all thought she was a good guy.

Now while that was a brilliant twist it ended up setting something of a tone for the show. Firstly, it started a big trend of treacherous women. Basically, if there's a woman on the show (and especially if she's involved with Jack Bauer) then she's almost certainly hiding something or is a full-on dirty terrorist.

Now that's okay, since a big part of 24 has always been the paranoia and not knowing who you can trust, but it does come across as a bit cynical at times.

The second tone it set was that any recurring character at some point will come under suspicion. Again, this goes along with the whole paranoia thing, but it does mean they set they end up doubling up on themselves a lot. Oh - he's a traitor now too. Is everyone a damn traitor?

It also created that expectation of recurring characters. In a way, 24 is better when it's dealing with new characters. It's one thing to find out that someone you've only just met is actually a traitor (or conversely turns out to be an undercover agent or something), it becomes cliché that everyone you knew and liked last season turns out to be a spy in this season.

The last tonal element that the Nina plotline set was a little more subtle. In season 1 it was pretty much the case that Jack was just doing what he did because he had too.

If he tortured some guy it was because he had to in order to get the Intel he needed (we'll leave the issue of torture being flawed and ineffective aside). However, because Nina was such a personal betrayal it created a vendetta.

Now if and when Jack pursued Nina and, indeed, got his hands on her, any nasty action he would take like torturing her or killing her was clearly now something eh wanted to do for personal reasons. It was about revenge and also hinted that he enjoyed torturing some people, in certain circumstances. He didn't just want to bring her to justice, he wanted to hurt her.

And that also strayed into the area of suggesting Jack might enjoy being a sadist. In other words, because his motives were muddied for Nina, they were generally muddied too.

But what about 24: Redemption?

Well, the basic idea is it's set in Africa. Jack is on the run from being called to justice in the US and nobody he encounters there is a recurring character.

Indeed, even in the stuff set in the States there's a sweep and clear tone to it - the old president is on the way out and a new one coming in. Plus there's a brand new bad guy.

It even looks like the bad guy in question is a proper, higher up bad guy. In previous seasons of 24 one of my frustrations is that Jack never really gets to grips with the proper bad guys. There's often a secret cabal of bad guys in the background who are pulling the strings, and Jack never even gets to know about them, let alone takes the fight to them.

The whole torture issue is somewhat addressed too. The character played by Robert Carlisle is a compatriot of Jack's and basically tortured to death someone who didn't actually know anything and therefore gave false info that resulted in a mission going pear-shaped.

This is good, but the problem in a sense is that although Jack has kind of tortured the wrong people on some occasions, it's never been that clear cut in the same way. It's almost saying Jack is 'better' than Carlisle's character, so it's okay for him to torture people.

They have ended up relying on physical torture a little too much for me in 24. I can see the problem - the show is set over 24 hours. That's not enough time to have him using proper interrogation techniques, which might take days. They also want to keep the show generally fast paced - dashing here and there, trying to capture/stop the terrorists rather than focusing on getting information out of people who have already been captured.

But it gets a little repetitive. I think they could do more in terms of psychological 'torture'. It's like there was one where killed a terrorist's family in front of him until he talked. I mean it was revealed they faked it, but still it's more interesting than just punching someone in the face or stabbing them or whatever.

Anyway, overall 24: Redemption is quite good. It's certainly nice to see some fresh places and people and I hope it continues into the 7th season.

hitman

The weekend rental was hitman.

It's based on a popular game series, though I've never personally played any of the games - indeed I know very little about the games as it goes.

Unfortunately, it did nothing to go against the general rule that film adaptations of games are poor.

The reasons for this were rather many and varied.

Hitman - as the name implies - features a hitman as its central character. The hitman in question, we're told, is the product of a secret organisation that takes lost and missing children and turns them into hired killers.

There's a hint that the organisation in question is of some religious nature, but we don't really find out anything about it, and this is one of the problems. Not so much that they don't tell us anything about the organisation, but it's more to do with how it relates to our main character.

See, the problem is I didn't really care about him.

In a game, empathy with the main character is sort of irrelevant, because you play the main character. In a film we need stuff to relate too. Or, of course, the opposite - if we're not supposed to like them we need to know why.

Now they sort of try to do that using a montage sequence over the credits. But, to be frank, it's piss poor. It's stylistically done and what elements of brutality there are are kinda hidden or have less impact because of it.

So it's failing from the get-go - why care about this kid and the grown up version? I've not enough to go on.

But there are also more fundamental problems. Naturally, the film is about a particular assassination. However, it's a little confusing how and what is going on. It also seems riddled with plot-holes and co-incidences.

There's one bit where another hitman from the organisation shows up and seems to try to shoot our guy. But our guy seems totally un-phased by this and instead of immediately assuming some sort of double-cross or problem, like a normal person would, it's only later that he seems to cotton on, and then apparently only because he's directly told he's in trouble. (Told by someone we've never met before and find out nothing about, btw - maybe if you've played the games it's a little bonus thing, but for us normal people it's just totally random.)

But the weird thing is that the plot, even though it's a little confusing, is also very generic. It's difficult to explain - it's like initially the filmmakers assume you know what's going on because they're re-using other people's plot devices, so they don't really explain. Instead, stuff just happens, but because you've not be told you get a bit confused.

Then, the filmmakers think to themselves "hmm, what if they didn't get that?" so they add in some explanatory dialogue after the fact. You hear that dialogue and realise what's going on. But you also realise that you've seen it before.

I'm sure that makes no real sense, but I know what I mean.

Another aspect of well-worn-ness is in the action. It really feels like it slipped out of the 1980s. Now that's okay, but a hallmark of 1980s action films is the one-line quip. This quip clues you in that they know it's all a bit daft too.

But because our hitman is basically a silent slab of muscle there are virtually no quips, so it just comes across as tastelessly ultra-violent.

It's quite poor.

Oh, and while the idea of a hitman wandering about with a barcode tatood on his totally bald head might seem like a cool conceit in the game it comes across as just plain daft in the film. i mean, if you're a hitman you don't want to be standign out like a soar thumb, right? Well a baldy with a barcode does stand out like a soar thumb. So much so that you wonder why members of the public aren't pointing and staring.

Also, no extras at all.

shock horror

In what I can only really describe as a shocking move of horror (or a horribly shocking move I think it's meant to be) I actually watched some anime on DVD this weekend!

Freedom is basically I gigantic advert for pot noodle (Well, not actually pot noodle the company, but another brand with the same basic idea - freeze-dried noodles in sauce you add boiling water too. They're very popular in Japan and kinda represent the default "instant food".). I'm pretty sure it uses cell-shaded animation, which is a type of computer animation.

Initially, it's slightly freaky to watch if I'm honest. The same technique was used in the Appleseed movies, but there they made it more obviously CG style. Here it still looks very anime, but has that computer animation vibe to it too. It works best with action and fast moving stuff, which there's plenty of here.

Unfortunately, however, I couldn't watch it all. Freedom was actually produced in high-def, but released on the HD-DVD format. It was right around the time this was coming out that HD-DVD bit the dust, and unfortunately the final, 7th, episode was never released on HD-DVD (it's actually on a dual format - DVD & HD-DVD, which is how I can watch it). They are putting out a complete DVD version sometime later in the year, though.

Oh and I didn't say - it's pretty good. It certainly looks nice, with high production values, and the story is enjoyable enough, if a little far-fetched. You do kinda end up with a hankering for pot noodles, though, which can't be a good thing.

Welcome to the NHK okay, so here the shock and horror kinda falls down a bit, because - truth be told - I only watched 1 episode. I liked it, but it's not really much to go on is it, so I'll kinda have to get back to you on this.

But I've also been reading lots of manga!

Kurohime I'd never heard of this before a few weeks ago. It popped up as a recommended title on Amazon and what intrigued me to have a look was the artwork - it looked remarkably similar to stuff by Masamune Shirow. Having got the book it was quite interesting - the title character, Kurohime, is drawn in a way very reminiscent of Shirow, but the rest of the artwork doesn't resemble Shirow's stuff at all.

It also gets off to an odd start - the second volume is almost like a 'reboot' (I gather from the notes it changed from one publication to another, hence the restart) of the series. And to be frank the story is not hugely great. I mean it's okay, it's just a little repetitive if I'm honest, although this did improve with the later volumes. The art pretty much saves it, though, even if there is that occasionally weird moment of feeling like Shirow is drawing it.

Kurokami (Black God). Initially I decided I was going to re-read the first volume of this before going ahead and buying any more volumes. Unfortunately I was a little impetuous and also a little mistaken and, figuring there were only 5 or so volumes out I'd actually ordered them all already. Unfortunately I wish I'd done what I said as I'm not hugely impressed. It's a bit like oh my goddess meets bleach with some guff about doppelgangers thrown in as well. I think I may be dropping this an e-baying what I've already got.

Keroro Gunsou (Sergeant Frog) is interesting. I picked it up because I'm a fan of Mine Yoshizaki's artwork - his cute and sexy girls are great. The story is a bit all over the place, if I'm honest. I'm currently undecided whether to continue buying it or not. It's a gigantically long series - something like 17 volumes out already and it's still going strong. I may well purchase a couple more volumes and see what I think of them.

Also not sure if I mentioned but I decided to buy the other volumes of the Full Metal Alchemist. I quite liked the first volume, especially as it wasn't quite what I expected.

more colonization

Bit of a non-weekend, truth be told.

I mean, I wasn't sat around doing nothing, but the stuff I did do was not particularly note-worthy. I'd hoped to summon up some willpower and do a load of scanning, attacking my last pile of "permanently unscanned" magazines. But in the end I was a bit fatigued after the horrible weeks I've been enduring recently, so instead I played a good wodge of Colonization.

It's an interesting game. One of the things about Civilization is that it's very open ended. There are always numerous ways to play and win - not least of all in the various victory conditions, but also different style of gaming. You can be aggressive and conquer your neighbours or work with them. You can spend all you time building up all your cities or you can focus on specialising each city. Or you can build a spaceship and fly off to Alpha Centauri.

However, colonization is much more focused. It's like a mod for civ with a cut down set of victory conditions and restricted rule set. It's not bad for that, it's just it's more limited. For example, in order to win you have to declare independence and beat the king's army. So you have to always plan ahead for that - you can't win in a peaceful way.

It's also in some ways strangely easy, but in others strangely difficult. It's easy because the best way to approach the game is to get lots of money. To get lots of money you need to do lots of trading and to do lots of trading you needs lots of resources. To get them you need to sprawl your settlements like a motheherfucker and build loads of wagon trains. You then only need to focus on having a few "manufacturing centres" in order to turn raw materials into processed goods that sell for much better prices.

But while that plan is pretty easy in theory it becomes a pedants playground of settlement micro-management. It's like it's best to have 1 city that you focus on tool production so you can have it pumping out loads of tools every turn. But in order to build stuff in your other cities (to do the manufacturing, for example) they need tools. That means you have to ship around all these tools, which can be mind-boggling complex given how many settlements the above mentioned plan suggests you need.

The good thing, though, is that I like the whole micr-management pedantry thing - it's why I love Civ - so I'm right in my element.

well now

I was in a really bad mood all day yesterday.

I'm guessing the root cause of this was the other day where I had a silly amount of work to do. But it was weird - initially when I got up in the morning I was in a really bright and chipper mood.

However, the journey to work was rubbish. I got stuck in a jam at the Shepherd & Flock roundabout. Now, one of the reasons I set off for work as early as I do is to avoid this roundabout's busiest period. But for some reason yesterday morning it was horrible - queueing like it always does at more normal rush-hour times. Contrast that with this morning, when I was slightly later getting there and yet drove straight through with literally only 1 car to wait behind.

Then, on the bit of the A31 that leads down from the traffic lights on the dual carriageway bit there was some woman whose car had packed up. It was just at a distance from the lights that everyone can get up to full speed (50 limit) so with people pulling into our lane to get around her (there's no hard shoulder) I had to slam on. There are a lot of trucks that use that bit in the morning, so I couldn't tell why we were slamming on until I was parallel with her car.

Then, when I was approaching the Alton roundabout some silly person in a red car was sat in my blind-spot not quite overtaking me, but not flashing to let me out either (I have to turn right at the roundabout into Alton). So I had to just pull out and pretty much cut her up.

As I'm then driving through the industrial estate the car is following me and it occurs to me - one of my work colleagues drives the same car. More thorough look in the mirror and yup, it's my work colleague who I'd cut up.

One of the things I like about being first in is the up-to half hour it gives me to settle in without anybody else there. Because of the bid needing to be in there were several other people in the office already. One of whom immediately asked me a question before I'd even gotten my cup of coffee.

Nobody should ever talk to me before I get my morning coffee.

And to cap it all off, when doing one of my morning jobs I grabbed the wrong thing and so had to run back upstairs to get the right thing, so I was really rather flustered.

So with all that crap I wasn't in a very bright mood. Though I'm also sure the reason I stayed in the bad mood was because I was so knackered.

I'm still not exactly recovered. I'm really looking to the weekend and having a good, hard sit down.

too much to do

Yesterday I did something like an 10-hour day at work.

Now, this wasn't a usual format day, wither. Usually I take an hour for lunch - I only took 45 mins yesterday. Also, I'll typically spend a good chunk of the day procrastinating. These are the usual things everyone does in an office day - it's why everyone should work 4 day weeks, because nobody can do 5 solid days of proper work.

Anyway, yesterday was different. From 8am I was pretty much heads down (I had my earphones in - a sure-fire sign I'm trying to not be distracted) until about 6:15pm. That pretty much means I must have done 8 solid hours of work if you factor in lunch, getting coffee, taking a pee, and a little bit of time uploading the blog here, for example (it's just not possible to work solid without breaks - when I'm busy those are only 5 minute chunks, though, just to remind myself I've not gone insane).

When I went home last night I could actually feel my mental faculties almost running on empty.

Today I'm therefore a little worse for wear.

My brain feels a little fuzzy and I'm already feeling myself getting distracted by stuff.

Hopefully I won't be needed to keep working on the thing I was doing yesterday. Maybe just a little bt of it. I've other stuff I can do, plus I'm apparantly supposed to be having a teleconference meeting thing at some point.

I hate teleconferences - I have a thing about phones in that I find them unpleasent to use. I don't know why, but I've always had it. It's a little difficult to describe, though, so I won't bother here. Maybe another day.

futurama-thon

This week's rental DVD was... well, actually nothing.

Owing to how the rentals work, I occasionally have weekends where there is no DVD for me to watch. Which is not necessarily a bad thing as it lets me catch up on other stuff.

The odd thing this time, though, was the lining up with my 4 day weekend. This meant I ended up basically spending an entire day watching futurama. Or more specifically, the straight-to-DVD feature-length futurama DVDs.

Yes, all four of them (though admittedly I'm still sorta watching the last one during the evenings of this week). So I thought I'd do some mini-reviews:

Bender's Big Score

Yeah.

There's a particularly funny bit at the beginning of this film that addresses the cancellation of the show. After that things get... complicated. And dense.

A while back I reviewed the Simpson's movie. I'm not sure if I actually said it then, but one of the problems it seemed to have was trying to cram in all the series characters. A bit like spot-the-famous face.

The problem with this was it ended up being a case of shoe-horning every one in. And it was a mistake. I can see the temptation: give all the fans of comic-book guy his one minute in the limelight, to make them happy, for example.

The trouble is that it's not how story works. Sticking in gags, especially non-sequitor ones involving random characters, works in a half-hour TV show, but it doesn't work in a feature-length movie.

The reason? Well imagine someone telling you a story about something that happened to them. If the whole story lasts two minutes, you'll forgive them if they went off on a tangent for 30 seconds. If the story lasts half an hour, you'll be pissed off if ten of those minutes were off on tangents.

Or at least, it's a problem here because you know the tangent only really exists to get that character into the movie. It's not a random tangent, it's a planned tangent.

Also, the story, being time travel, gets quite complicated, so it didn't really need time being lost on random tangents.

The Beast with a Billion Backs

Interestingly, this actually follows on directly from the previous film.

Well, no, actually that's not true - it follows on, but it would seem six-months or so have elapsed since the first film. Certainly, Fry acquires a new girlfriend... even though in the last film he was jealous over Leela and also their relationship was sort of affirmed in a weird way.

Anyway, a few slight oddities like that aside, it's a much better episode. The gag-per-minute rate is much, much higher and, crucially, it doesn't try to do too much. The story is of a reasonably sensible complexity, so it gives a bit more room for gags.

Also, it does genuinely feel like a sensible single, feature length episode. The others end up feeling a bit like three regular episodes stuck together - like a 3 parter edited together.

Bender's Game

If I was ranking the four movie this one would come in third - Big Score is at the bottom for the problems I mentioned. This one is second from last for different reasons.

First off it feels the most like several individual episodes stuck together. Especially since half way through it flips into a kind of alternate reality.

But the biggest problem is the alternate reality itself. Futurama is generally in that sphere of affectionate parody. Normally it's focused on science fiction, but occasionally veers into fantasy - specifically Dungeons & Dragons.

Now I'm not the biggest fan of fantasy, especially of the D&D type with orks and dragons and stuff. I mean, it's okay at times and in small doses, but often I find it a bit limited and therefore sometimes dull.

So to me Futurama doing D&D should be crammed full of good gags - there's so much potential material it's almost silly. And yet there's very little in the way of gaggery.

I think the problem was that on the whole the writers like D&D (some of the special features indicate it was popular amongst some) so they didn't go for it like they should have. Instead, the D&D stuff is mainly all about plot. I mean even the stuff at the beginning with the kids playing actual D&D didn't have gags in it - no-one even called them nerds.

Into the Wild Green Yonder

Of the four movies this was probably the closest to feeling like a proper Futurama episode.

The non-sequitor gag was back in abundance and while there were environmental and feminist themes, it did the thing of making gags about both sides.

I'd have to say the end was a bit hockey, though. It felt too much like a "neat wrapping up" where it could have done with a little sting or gag in there to let you know it's still Futurama.

Overall the four movies have bucket load of extras. I'm not sure that watching them all in such an intense fashion like I did is such a good idea, though - a bit of fatigue sets in. I'd say watch them over a few days, rather than all in one day.

slightly older, but no wiser

Well now, long time no blog.

Or at least it seems that way - really it's only been 4 days, 2 of which were the weekend in which I don't normally blog anyway. But still, feels like a long time.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it's because I'm now officially one year older.

I'm feeling thoroughly rested this morning. It was good to have the time off. As usual, I'd made a gigantic "to do" list. And as usual I only got about half of it done.

My normal to do lists I have for the weekend are honed and perfected things. I've learnt over the years what I can achieve in the given time. But when a long weekend pops up I suddenly start adding in loads of extra stuff.

Now really I could have achieve it all, however, that's not the issue. The issue is that a long weekend is there to relax - watch a bit of telly or a DVD, maybe clean the car - those sorts of things. So by adding in to many chore-like activities I'm defeating the purpose of that and I tend to rebel against it.

Anyway, the point is I didn't do everything I wanted to do, but did achieve everything I had to do and also a few I didn't have to but were kinda nice to do.

Specifically on Sunday I finally sat down and watched the last bit of telly recorded on my PVR - Red Riding. Throughout all of Sunday evening and Monday day it was totally empty. It did acquire a few things last night, admittedly, but those are the usual culprits.

And generally on the whole telly has calmed down a lot - there's only about 9 things across the entire week I'll watch, which is down to a third what it was. Plus three of those end this week or next week.

I may finally return to trawling through anime DVDs!

Anyway, I watched Red Riding as I say. It was a three-part job, each of which was adapted from a different book in a series and each of which was two hours long, so not a small amount of screen time.

If I'm honest and I'd watched part 1 at the time it was broadcast I'm not sure I would have watched the other two parts. It was kinda rubbish.

The filming style was very... stylistic, shall we say? I'm not sure there was a room that hadn't been filled with smoke from a dry ice machine in the entire thing. I get why - grim up north, gloomy, but it was a bit over the top.

Also, the narrative was confusing. Partly this was due to the style, but partly it was because we didn't really spend any time getting to know the main character. We were just dumped in at a certain point and left to figure things out. Now in some ways this is good writing, but in others it's confusing because we've also got to figure out the murders as well, and it's difficult to do both.

Certainly in the other two parts the main characters are introduced more normally - we get to see a little of their lives before they become wrapped up in the main mystery.

And that's one of the reasons the other two parts were much better. The other reason was that the mystery is more clearly framed in the other two parts.

In the first, the character is bumbling around not really knowing what he's doing. But then equally he's portrayed as being this go-getter reporter. And also as a womanising shag-monster.

Now I know complex characters are good, but as I say - this is a mystery crime drama thing, so if we're focusing on working out this complex character, then what happens to that part? It gets short shrift.

But as I say, the other two parts are much better.

Although there are some holes left. I think this is probably a reflection of the fact that it's adapting a series of books - I'd guess it would need to have been 12 hours long to get it all in, so it's inevitable that some bits get left out or fudged.

My last real criticism is that the timeline jumps around a lot. Now this isn't fundamentally a problem except it's jumping around by only a few years. So normally where you'd use things like fashion or hairstyle to clue you in as to when something is, those things aren't really changing all that much so it's difficult to tell.

For example, someone can get into their car in 1983 and then in the next scene they're getting out of their car in 1980. You can see how that might be confusing.

But overall it pretty much does what it says on the tin - horrible murders and appalling police corruption & incompetence.

it's my birthday

Well, actually tomorrow it's my birthday, but I'll be taking a much needed day off, so I'm posting here basically just to say that.

Yeah, that's about it really: a day off tomorrow and a bank holiday on Monday, so I'll see you on the flip-side.

beowulf

The next rentalage was beowulf.

It was okay.

According to the time counter it was the best part of two hours long, and it didn't really feel like that, and that's always a good sign. I think this was mainly a reflection of the story, which was quite interesting.

I've heard of Beowulf before as a kind of ancient heroic epic. From what I understood (and I can't even be arsed to go and google) it's written big-arse poem style and is Nordic in origin.

Which is why I found it odd that some of the characters were speaking with Welsh accents. Strangely it was only some of them though - as if they'd that it was a good idea and then half way through decided not to keep it up.

I've no idea how close the film was to original story then, but I guess my point is that it wasn't delivered in verse and it didn't seem to have a Nordic bone in its body. But for all that it was entertaining enough.

However, the main thing of note about Beowulf is that it was CG animation. Yes, yes, loads of stuff is CG animation, but this is CG animation of the type attempting to be as realistic as it can be. It's not toys or monsters (well, there are monsters, but not of the cute, simplified style) it's actual humans represented with proper proportions and realistic movement.

Well, that's its aspiration anyway. Unfortunately it kinda fell a long way short.

Don't get me wrong - it wasn't unwatachably bad - but it was a long way short of the point where you'd think "these are real people".

As a player of video games, to me, it resembled an extended cut-scene. A very high-end cut-scene where they've spent a big chunk of the budget, but a cut-scene nonetheless.

The problem really is that it's still incredibly difficult to capture the tiny subtleties of human movement and keep the process practical. Well, and affordable - it works way better if you're talking about short special effects sequences in a traditional film. An entire movie done like that has to take some shortcuts or it'll cost, like, five times as much as any other film ever.

To me it actually looked like they were using motion capture (with the white balls and people in green suits).

One of the weird things about motion capture is that most of the time it looks like what it is - a slightly simplified version of actually people moving about. However, occasionally, it'll capture some subtlety that cons you into thinking it's real. And that's its downside - these hits emphasise the more prevalent fails.

In a way it's where traditional animation excels. There's something about the way introducing a human brain into the process that captures the nuisances. Even though, ironically, they'll often actually be exaggerations.

Anyway, the point is Beowulf both shows how far this sort of animation has come, but also shows there's still a long way to go.

Productivity

So, the aforementioned productivity that I, er, mentioned... before.

Er, what?

Oh, yes - productive weekend.

I had a lot to do (chores mainly), and while I still felt a bit tired after the preceding week, I pushed through on Saturday and got it done in an efficient fashion.

One of the things I was pleased I kept on top of was the telly. There was both a MotoGP and a F1 GP to watch, as well as all the usual telly stuff I record and I managed to watch all of it.

I've still only got Red Riding waiting on my PVR and we now seem to be getting into the proper summer schedules. That means there will be far less on that I'll be interested in, which is a good thing.

I also did all the scanning I needed to and watched some fansubs while I worked:

Valkyria Chronicles, my first real show of the new season, was quite good - surprisingly so, actually.

I understand it's based on a game so I wasn't hoping for much and to be fair the plot is a bit on the tried and tested side (if not a bit played out). However, it does have some interesting characters, and they're what really count.

I mean, again, you've probably seen them before, but they're not done badly and are quite likeable. The main guy is especially interesting with a kind of blunt way of looking at things, but disarmingly charming with it.

Charady no Joke na Mainichi was bloody awful.

Well, maybe that's a bit harsh, but if something is called "daily joke" and then basically isn't actually all that funny, it's kinda failing from the get-go, isn't it?

Add into that the use of cheap CG animation and you've got something that's distinctly not my cup of tea.

And speaking of poor CG animation, Macross Fufonfia is right on up there with it. I've not got a link for it, btw, as I'm not sure it really counts as anime.

What they've basically done is take the Macross Frontier girls and put them in office jobs, but chuck in a few jokes relevant to the Macross world too.

It was pretty tedious.

Examurai Sengoku was quite good.

I never know what genre this sort of show falls into, but I tend to call it "hard-boiled samurai" in that it features lots of tough-guy samurais. In fact, I think mostly they're yakuza. At times they border on stereotypes, though I don't think it's being played for laughs (well, I didn't find it funny).

It was enjoyable enough if you didn't think too hard about it and took it just for entertainment value.

Kemono no Souja Erin was quite good. I'm pretty sure it's aimed at kids and has some rather obvious "message" bits, but they aren't too bad - certainly not up to the cringe worthy standards of kids cartoons in my youth.

The setting is also quite nice and there's an interesting conflict in the set up, in that the peaceful and pleasant village the main girl lives in trains fearsome beasts that are then used to fight wars. These wars being nasty, but also presumably why the village itself is so peaceful and pleasant.

One annoying thing I did discover is that GONZO's arrangement with Bost is now defunct. This means that having paid for Strike Witches I now can't watch it there.

I also discovered that the streaming of it on Crunchyroll is coming to an end - you can only get it by paying.

Perhaps I was being dumb, but I'd always assumed that one of the advantages of these download/streaming series is that the shows wouldn't expire in such a fashion. I'm not sure I'm as keen if it's entirely geared to people watching the shows week-on-week.

colonization

I had a very productive weekend.

I'll probably blather on about it a bit more tomorrow, but today I just wanted to mention I actually played a game! After months of buying them but never actually playing them, I sat down on Sunday afternoon and had a mini-session.

The game in question was Civ4: Colonization, which is a stand-alone expansion, if that makes any sense. It allows you to take on the roll of a colonist heading to the new world (the Americas) and setting up a new country.

What they've done is use the Civ4 engine, which is very pretty, to update a very old spin-off game. I never played the original, but so far I'm enjoying this version of it.

Although I do have to admit it's a little daunting to start with - unlike most Civ games there's no tech tree. That means you can access all units and improvements from the get-go, which is interesting, but it means there's a veritably bewildering list of options and stuff to get your head around.

It's a real vertical learning curve to start with, although after a while it becomes apparent that having mastered those basics, that's all there is to it - there's no new technology/resource going to come along and change everything.

So far, from my little toe-dip I've enjoyed it. Certainly more than I did the proper Civ4 game, which was shiny and pretty but seemed like "Civ-lite" to me.

But we'll see how I go. And whether I'll have any spare time to really play it!

Nope

No more energy today I'm afraid. In fact, quite the opposite - I'm proper bloody knackered. Dunno why, I had a pretty good night's sleep. I think I'm just generally worn out.

Let's see, what can I talk about?

I guess I've read a bit more manga.

I finished up to volume 10 of Claymore. Really enjoyed that - volumes 11 on are pending from amazon.

I've also read the first volume of Doujin Work. It's a bit of "hmm" one. I guess part of it is that it isn't quite what I was expecting. The Doujin Work anime was one of the first I discovered after I switched to blanket coverage of fansubs.

Before that I just used to check out stuff I thought I'd be interested in, but discovered I was missing a few hidden gems, so I adopted blanket coverage. Anyway, Doujin work was one of the first that I really had no inkling I would like, but then really did. It was a "shorts" type of anime with eps about 10 minutes long and followed a girl (and her oddball friends) as she tries to become a Doujin artist.

The manga is sort of the same. It's one of those 4-panel gag mangas, which means story flow becomes a bit difficult. Also, it seems to head off in some really diverse tangents. In a way it's actually more like Genshiken and explores otaku culture, where the anime is more squarely about girl makes doujins.

Which isn't to say I don't like the manga, just it wasn't what I expected.

Weirdly, I've been kinda having the same experience with the other two manga I've been reading.

First off is Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei. Another one I'd probably not have known about if not for the blanket coverage and another I really enjoyed. And also another where the manga isn't quite what I expected.

Mainly, unfortunately, because the manga isn't as good as the anime. It's a bit weird in a way - they're very similar, it's just... I dunno, it's difficult to explain. The anime version just works better - the gags are clearer, better developed somehow. It's almost like the anime gags work because of the delivery and you loose that in the manga - you don't know where to pause. Plus the panels are often jam packed with extraneous 'stuff' so you're busy reading/looking at them and you forget what the joke was supposed to be.

It's also very rooted in Japanese culture. Now the anime was too, obviously, but I dunno, it didn't matter so much in the anime for some reason.

I'm really struggling to say why, but essentially I much preferred the anime version, even though they're actually very similar. Odd.

It's a similar story for Yozakura Quartet. I'd never have checked it out if not for the blanket coverage, liked it a lot and am not so keen on the manga. However, here I know why much more clearly.

The anime is quite different to the manga. I mean, the core story is still the same and the characters and their personalities are still the same. What's different, to be frank, is the quality of the storytelling.

The manga is all over the place - it's like the artist really doesn't know what he's doing, veering from one thing to another with only the vaguest hint of an overall plan. Something I read suggests it focuses better in the later volumes, but the introduction of focus to the anime is what really makes it better.

A good example of this is in a story to do with a character, Hime, adopting a stray dog. In the manga it's only one chapter and is kinda half-hearted. It's quite a harsh story and it's like the author stepped back a bit from making it harsh. In the anime the same story is much more sizeably told (not sure, but I think it's two episodes) and also it doesn't shy away from the harshness - it nearly made me cry.

Still, the artwork's nice.

And I managed to do something half resembling a blog entry!

Strugglering

I've been struggling a bit with the old blog entries this week.

It's been a bit of a task to find any time to sit and do them for one thing - we're monumentally busy at work. Plus I've had some hectic weekends just recently and it's sucked the energy out of me a bit. It's like I've gotten on top of the telly stuff so I should really either have been watching anime DVDs or scanning the new anime mags, but I just can't be arsed.

I've only had the energy to read manga. And I can't be arsed to do mini-reviews of them either.

Maybe I'll have more energy tomorrow.

run, fat boy, run

This weekends DVD rentalage was Run, Fat Boy, Run.

It stars Simon Pegg, who was of course the creator of Spaced, the greatest sitcom ever.

He's pretty good in the film. The character he plays is a bit of an odd one, though. At the beginning he leaves his bride-to-be at the altar while she's pregnant.

Now here we have the films first and biggest real problem. Jilting your pregnant wife at the altar makes a humongous shit. A ginormous steaming turd of a man. Reasons are given and on some level they're understandable reasons, but they're not good reasons - that's the problem.

The reason boils down, essentially, to cowardice. Pegg's character needs to grow a pair - and that's the essence of the movie. He redeems himself by becoming a man, essentially. Except, as I say, the thing he did is so utterly appalling this isn't really satisfying.

I think if he'd been in a much worse position, or perhaps if people had acknowledged how big a shit he was a bit more then it would have compensated to some degree.

Anyway, when we pick up with him again he's become an over-weight security guard and his ex-fiancée is in a new relationship with a smarmy American twat. This spurs Pegg's character to enter a marathon - American twat being a marathon runner.

To some extent some of these things start to fall apart when examined to closely - how did ex-fiancée and American twat meet, for example? And how come their relationship is so advanced, yet Pegg hasn't met him before?

Especially since he keeps turning up to see his son. This story element is a mixed blessing - Pegg & son's relationship is screen gold, but it opens up more questions about why and how she let him see her. If Pegg is such a ginormous cowardly shit of a man, how did he have the stones to approach her?

Pegg and ex-fiancée's relationship also seems strangely cordial, given what a gigantic shit he was to her. And what about her family? Or his family?

Anyway, these things could be forgiveable - it's a romantic comedy, so the key elements are romance, which is pretty much there, and comedy, which is kinda there, some of the time.

I mean, there are a lot of good gags in the film, don't get me wrong, it's just they're unevenly paced. You can go twenty minutes without a single chuckle and then there's ten minutes of good belly laughs. And I don't think this is just me not getting the gags - there just aren't any.

Plus some of the gags are pretty much incidental - random funny stuff, that is unrelated to plot or anything else. If they were cut you wouldn't notice them going.

Still, it's an enjoyable enough watch, if you don't dwell too much on the plot holes.

No extras, though.

turned out nice again

Well the weather's taken something of a turn for the nice just recently.

There's been the occasional day of rain of course - it is April after all - but for the last couple of days it's been veritably summer-ish.

This is good news for me for a change. I'm not the biggest fan of summer and hot weather, being of the morbidly obese body-type, but the last few years seem to have brought a string of miserable summers followed by perishing winters. A bit of sun (even if it just reminds me of why I'm not keen on it!) will not go amiss, I think.

One interesting surprise on this front as well. The shining of the sun usually seems to bring out the ants that have been infesting my house. However, just recently I've virtually not seen them at all.

Now I've obviously got every finger and toe I possess crossed in saying that. The presence of irony in the world would tend to suggest that upon my return home I will be swamped in a surfeit of the little buggers.

However, in theory there's a reason for their disappearance. I recently bought a device that claims to act to repel insects, firstly by emitting a super-sonic squeal that insects find unpleasant, but also by making your mains wires produce an EM-filed that repels them.

Now when I first plugged this in it didn't seem to have much of an effect - the ants kept coming. However, a couple of days ago I tried changing the setting (as I say - it didn't seem to be working, so there seemed nothing to loose) and since then, almost ant free.

Here's hoping that when I return home tonight this is still the case!

I'm still blasting through Claymore. It's a really good manga and it's so easy to read.

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).