men in black

DVD rentalage was a bit of a retro-trip this week with Men In Black.

The reason for the rental was that I've never properly watched MiB all the way through. I mean, I think I've pretty much seen most of it at one time or another, but I don't recall ever managing to sit and watch it all the way through.

However, I'm guessing that most people have seen it by now, so I'm not sure I really need to go into much depth here. Especially since I basically agree with what other people have said - it's a really funny film.

What makes it so good is that the comedy is very well played. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones make for a really good pairing. Jones is a really good straight man who plays it so straight it would seem almost weird if it wasn't contrasted by Smith who's performance is very high energy.

It's also quite clever. I must admit one thing I didn't appreciate was that it was based on a comic book. I don't think it was a direct adaptation, more taking the general ideas and working them into a film.

The rental edition I watched was boosted by a couple of really good commentaries. By the looks of things it was a special edition 2-disk thing as there's clearly more content on a second disk (this wasn't sent to me and was separately listed on my rental list, but I removed it).

Anyway, one of the commentaries is sort of a Mystery Theatre 3000 thing. That won't make much sense to most people, but basically silhouettes of the director and Tommy Lee Jones are projected at the bottom of the screen (a bit like subtitles) and stuff is drawn on the screen too.

It doesn't really enhance the actual commentary track as such, but it was a nice little feature I'd not seen before.

Anyway, the basic point is that I really enjoyed the film and if you've never seen it before it's well worth a watch.

telly trimming

The other night I surveyed my DVD shelves.

I discovered I have the following to watch:

18 Full anime series (meaning 20+episode long series)
16 Half anime series (meaning around 13 episode long series)
10 Anime films and OAV sets
21 Feature films
23 British TV series (normally 6 episodes)
27 American TV series (normally 20+ episodes)

If you do some simple maths and don't get hung up on details, that means I have at least 600 solid hours of stuff to watch. Or, to put it another way, if I were to spend 6 hours a day watching stuff (i.e. approximately a 'working day') it would take 100 solid days to get through it all.

Or, to keep with the working week thing, it would take approximately 6-months operating on a 9-to-5 Monday-to-Friday schedule to watch all of the DVDs I have on my shelves.

And that's just to watch the primary content. Part of the reason I buy TV show and film DVDs is because of extras. If you therefore say that for every hour of normal stuff there's half an hour of extras it could mean an extra 3 months just spent watching extras.

Also, I think that's a massive underestimate, because I'm mostly rounding down. Plus, if you include things like annual leave and Bank Holidays, I reckon it would take an entire working year to plough through my unwatched DVDs.

(Presumably in this fictional job I'm spending my free time reading books and manga :/.)

Or, to put things in a monetary vein, if you say each film cost an average of £10, a US/British TV series an average of £40, and that an anime series costs an average of £60 for a half series and £100 for a full series (this one is complicated because of the modern trend of releasing things in economical box sets, but most of my stuff isn't in said box sets) then that gives a monetary value of:

31 * £10 = £310
50 * £40 = £2000
60 * £60 = £3600
18 * £100 = £1800

That's approximately £8,000

I reckon I can probably average a return (meaning profit after all the fees and postage) of 25% on e-bay, so that means I could be sitting on about £2,000.

I wasn't intending to go on like that, but the basic point is I have tonnes of DVDs to watch and suddenly a couple of weeks ago loads of new shows I was interested in started on the TV.

As such, with the above situation brought into focus I've decided to stop watching some of them. (It also kinda puts my decision to subscribe to Crunchyroll into a whole knew light doesn't it? I mean, I've tonnes of stuff to watch, yet I'm subscribing (yes, that means paying) for even more stuff. I'm insane.)

The casualties include True Blood, Generation Kill and Flash Forward.

I have to say I'm a little bit regretful that I have to drop them, but with the backlog and all the other stuff that's on I just don't think I can justify spending the time they require to watch. Especially since none of them blew me away.

True Blood was probably the one I was most disappointed with. The main problem I had with it was the tone seemed to be all over the place. One minute it was kooky comedy, the next a veritable "bodice ripper" and then it would shift into high school type humour.

I dunno, it was like it was meant to be a parody that forgot it was a parody.

Generation Kill was, quite frankly, a bit dull and Flash Forward just felt like a low-rent Lost.

And speaking of lost, season 5 has just been sent to me.

Which is where I start to get annoyed with myself, because I bet I'll start marathoning Lost this evening and I'll probably have it finished by the end of the weekend.

That's annoying because if I can do it with Lost, why the hell don't I do it in a more general sense and plough though all these DVDs?

The answer is "because I'm an idiot," obviously.

recovering

The pain in my back eased a bit through the weekend.

The weirdest thing was that on Saturday I had a load of cleaning to do and it seemed that the more activity I did, the better my back felt. So having done loads on Saturday, on Sunday I woke up and it was almost gone. But then, during the day I spent quite a few hours playing Anno (naughty me!) and my back started aching again.

I mean it might be the chair I've got at home I guess. It's quite a good one, but it may not be set up properly or something. Not that I really know how to set it up properly :/.

Sunday saw Valantino Rossi win the 2009 MotoGP championship (that's the bike equivalent of F1 for the uninitiated) so congrats are due to him. It was actually his 7th world championship in that class, which is quite the record. While it's not necessarily appropriate to compare across vehicle types, it puts him up there in the topmost ranks of the best drivers and riders ever, if not at the very top, so well done that man. Not sure what the whole chicken/egg thing was about, though.

And speaking of motor racing, the British F1 GP looks to be going through more turmoil.

In theory, Donnington was going to be hosting the event this year, but unfortunately they seem to have had a bit of bad timing in that just as they were planning to take it on, the whole financial crisis broke. And given that they needed a heck of a lot of cash to update the facilities, this was a big problem. They've had quite a few extensions but it looks like they've just not been able to raise the required cash.

Silverstone has put itself forward as the only other potential venue, but the problem there is that they've not been willing to stump up the cash to pay Bernie to host the event. Indeed, that's almost where the whole Donnington thing came from - Silverstone were after a discount and Bernie said no.

The discount isn't without precedent - both Monaco and Monza get discounts as the 'traditional homes' of F1. And given that most of the teams are located in Britain and Silverstone was the first circuit ever to hold a formula 1 championship race in 1950, it's not an unreasonable claim.

Bernie's stance? Sign it and pay up, because we don't need a British F1 GP.

I do hope they get it sorted - it would be a shame if it didn't happen and if it is going to happen then they need to get it sorted quick so whoever hosts it can start selling tickets!

jeebus that hurts

I was in the shower yesterday when I felt my back go.

Several years ago I trapped a nerve in my back. It was total agony and I ended up taking several days off work.

Ever since then I've suffered with my back, getting twinges of discomfort every so often. It's never been as bad as when it originally went, but it can be pretty damn uncomfortable.

The nerve in question seems to run down my right buttock and I get the most discomfort at the very top of my bum, in what I think is roughly called the small of my back. The twinges are usually helped by changing the way I've been sitting or having a good lay down.

However, while bending in the shower to wash my legs, I felt that familiar sharp stab of pain that I had when I first trapped the nerve.

Being in the shower may sound like a rubbish/naff place to be putting your back out, but it's nothing compared to when I originally did it. That first time I cleaning my car, of all things.

I'd basically been bending over to wash the right front wheel of my car and as I straightened up there was a feeling like a rubber band snapping and then a surge of agonising pain. It actually took my breath away for a few moments and then I went and laid down for days.

This time wasn't quite that bad. I felt the twinge and a stab of pain, but it wasn't on a par with the first time.

I'm hopping that by being careful and taking a few pain killers I should be able to avoid the same scale of problem.

a little more on the roll

'the roll' meaning Crunchyroll, that is.

I basically forgot to mention this on Tuesday, but the thing I'd quite like Crunchyroll to have more of is downloadable content.

As I mentioned, the streaming thing is not always the best option for me, but if I was able to download episodes that would be great.

I wouldn't even mind if they were relative small files (as in the video size - pixel width and height) or lower quality, I'd just much prefer that as a method of delivery to streaming. It would give me the flexibility that fansub downloads give me, and if this is really meant to be a fansub 'killer' I don't see any other way it can achieve that.

Which isn't to say that you can't download stuff on Crunchyroll. There are several series where you can download episodes. The difficulty with these is that you have to effectively buy the episodes. On some of them it's actually done as a 'donation', which is a bit of a weird phrase, because it's a mandatory donation :/.

The problem there is a bit chicken and egg - I don't know what the dl is going to be like, so it's risky to pay for it. While, as mentioned, I'm happy that free dl's could be poor quality and small files, if I'm paying directly for it, then I'd prefer to get a good product.

This is made a little worse with some of the show's streaming having expired, so now you can't even sample the show via streaming to see if it's worth buying.

In other words, it seems to me there's still some way to go before Crunchyroll truly becomes a 'pirate breaker'. Plus of course they'd need to have all the new shows on there, and I can't ever see that happening, though I guess could be possible if other companies offered other shows via different routes.

stealth

Militarily, stealth means not being detected.

A stealth plane is designed such that normal modes of detection are rendered difficult, if not impossible. So it means things like reducing heat signatures, in order than thermal imaging can't see you. It means designing your plane such that radar beams are bounced away, rather than back towards the sender. It means coating your plane in radar absorbent material. Stuff like that.

As such, the first ten minutes of the film kinda show you that 'stealth' is perhaps the poorest name for the film Stealth as you could get. Within those first ten minutes, the supposedly stealthy aircraft get locked onto by two missiles and fired at with reasonable accuracy by various radar-guided AAA.

They also fly so low as to be easily visible to their targets. Not to mention the aerobatic, stunt-like antics they engage in on that mission.

It's fair to say then that stealth isn't the most militarily accurate film. But then, to be really fair, I don't think it was the goal of stealth to be militarily accurate. The goal was more one of entertainment.

And in this regard it generally succeeds. The action stuff is thrilling; Jessica Biel's bottom is a delight to behold and the plot is passable.

Passable is about all I'd give it, though. The problem is it feels a bit too sanitized and a bit too familiar.

So there's a bit of a rather predictable romantic frisson between Biel's bottom and the main character. The other guy in the team is black and, well, let's just say it's fairly predictable what happens to him.

There's also an AI system in one of the planes that, and I don't want to get too spoilery here, 'goes haywire'. Then there's the team's boss who, again, not wanting to get too spoilery, but kinda does what you might expect him to do.

And that's the problem I had - there's nothing here that you haven't seen plenty of times before. Admittedly it doesn't do it badly, and the film is very pretty to look at (especially in the Alba department), but ultimately it's a fairly vacuous experience.

But it was the sanitisation that pushed things over the edge for me.

The point of these planes, it would seem, is that they're fighter-bombers. So as well as all the dog fighting they do, their role is also one of dropping bombs on bad guys.

In this case, the bad guys are nondescript 'terrorists'. Ooh, nasty men. Not that we're given any actual evidence that they're nasty men. We're just told they're terrorists and then the 'good guys' drop bombs on them.

We know they're good guys because a) they're all-American pilots and b) they go to extraordinary lengths to avoid killing civilians/non-combatants.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind them showing soldiers disobeying orders, it's just here it seems a bit extreme here. The issue of collateral damage and civilian deaths seems to be ignored by the commanding officers, when in reality they'd not be like that.

It just leaves an odd taste in the mouth

the leap of doom

I took the plunge this last weekend and got myself a Crunchyroll subscription.

Currently I'm in the two-week free-trial period, but after that they start billing me $6.99 a month. I reckon should be about £4 a year, or it's probably best to think about it as £50 a year.

Now that's not cheap as such, but the point is to watch plenty of stuff in order that it starts to represent good value for money. My inaugural viewing under my subscription was the first four eps of Chi's New Address, which is a super-cute show about a young kitten.

Four episodes sounds a lot, but it's not that much, as each episode is only about 3 minutes long.

I've actually been a member of crunchyroll for ages - I joined slightly before it went legit, I think. I've also blogged about it before and I won't bother repeating my hatred of the site's structure and layout, the point is that I didn't really need to subscribe.

You can watch stuff on crunchyroll just by being a member. But the subscription gains you access to shows a week earlier and to a HQ version.

Now for me these are not necessarily the greatest of gains. Given my schedule, I don't generally have the spare time to follow shows in a fashion that would mean getting episodes a week earlier was a good thing. Also, when you add to that the fact that I actually prefer to watch shows in blocks, if not as whole seasons right through, then this really isn't a great gain.

The HQ versions are also not so useful.

For anyone that doesn't know, crunchyroll is a streaming site. Now, there appear to be two types of streaming - firstly, there's what I call 'pre-load' screening, which is how YouTube works.

You go to a video and it loads the video up once you press play. This gives you the option to pause the video and wait for it to load completely before starting. This is the best type of streaming if you're on a relatively slow connection like me.

Crunchyroll uses what I call iPlayer-style streaming. For this type of streaming, you simply get delivered what it is you're watching as you're watching it. So if you pause, it doesn't load up any more, it just waits until you press play again.

Now don't get me wrong, I love iPlayer and it's a system that does work for me. Just. If I'm watching iPlayer I can't do anything else on the interwebs. And it does have advantages - you can skip straight to where you want and it doesn't go bonkers, for example. I'd also guess it helps the company from a bandwidth point of view, as it's not sending you loads of stuff that you may then not watch because you closed the video or whatever.

The problem is that it's not as good as iPlayer. Even with a fair-wind, it can still stutter for me on the lower quality feeds. The higher quality therefore seems to be a constantly-stuttering nightmare. I'm guessing this has something to do with the relative size and quality of infrastructure available to the BBC compared to crunchyroll.

So why did I subscribe if these things aren't particularly beneficial to me?

Well, mainly because it means I'm contributing cash towards a hobby I love. The whole point of sites like this is that they're aimed at doing away with fansubs and all the illegality that involves.

It's a conscience saver, basically.

But there is also anther reason.

I was actually considering subscribing last year when loads of new shows were announced on crunchyroll. But the problem was that many of these, including some it turned out I really liked, were not licensed for anywhere other than the US.

This meant I couldn't watch them. And that really annoyed me.

Well this year there are even more shows are available on crunchyroll. Plus, more of them appear to be available in the UK (as far as I can work out only 2 of the new season shows aren't available in the UK), so I decided to subscribe and to actively try to watch stuff on there.

Of course the region problem remains, in general. If you go here then all the stuff in light grey is not available in the UK (assuming, that is, you're in the UK - if not, light grey still means not available in your region, but I've no idea how many there will be, if any).

But at least there's plenty I can watch now.

well done that man

So Jenson Button has been crowned F1 World Champion 2009.

It was a cracking race. Interlagos (Brazil) usually is a cracker, with incidents a plenty and the sort of circuit where overtaking is a very real option.

And Jenson had a truly great drive that pretty much put paid to the criticisms that have been floating about. Whilst I wouldn't really count myself as properly critical, I've certainly thought Jenson's performance had gone off the boil a bit in the last few races.

It's one thing if your car is a bit crap or deosn't suit the circuit when everyone else's does, it's quite another when your team-mate, who's in an almost identical car, is regularly beating you in qualifying and during the race.

It's difficult to know quite what the issue was - a desire to play-it-safe that resulted in over-caution, or a loss of nerves or confidence generally, but Jenson's really not been actively winning the championship so much as others have been failing to catch him up.

But he put an end to such criticism this last weekend with a stellar drive and some excellent over-taking manoeuvres. I mean, he didn't win, but after a another dismal qualifying he did a really good job when it counted and got the points he needed. So many congratulations to him and the team, who've become the first new-entrant team to win the constructor's championship in their first year (I bet Honda are really kicking themselves).

Oh and speaking of qualifying - that was a dismal effort. I mean, it was exciting and interesting (they've really cracked qualifying this year - as Eddie Jordan pointed out, it's often been better than the race itself) when the cars where out, but it took 2 and 3/4 hour to get through 45 mins of actual track action.

From what Bernie Eccleston said the implication was there's no contingency plan in the rules for when something like this happens. In theory, they just keep going until it's finished, but what if it ends up getting dark?

I thinkt hey need to sort that out.

manga update

I' started watching Baccano! at the weekend, but I've not managed to carry it through this week. There seems to be quite a lot of new stuff on telly, so I've been trying to keep on top of that, plus with Dad phoning yesterday that blew a couple of hours.

I'll hopefully watch a bit more this weekend, though.

I have been reading manga, though, so I thought I'd give a quick update today as to my thoughts.


Hayate the Combat Butler

I was a little surprised by this one.

It appears the manga is weekly in Japan and the chapters are quite short. I'd actually encountered Hayate in anime form and the initial chapters matched the first couple of episodes quite well.

However, in the anime the pace is a bit faster. I mean within the short fansub sample I did, they went back to school, but it was several volumes before this happened in the manga. The slightly odd thing was that this meant a lot of content was skipped.

Given that the anime eats content at a much faster rate, this seemed a bit odd, but what it did mean was that the anime and manga weren't identical and it gave me a chance to appreciate the manga more.

And appreciate it I did, as it's quite funny.

It also breaks the fourth wall a lot and I like things that do that.

I mean if I'm honest there are a few niggles. For example, there's a lot of referencing of other anime/manga and so I don't know what they're talking about sometimes. This isn't helped because they part-censor the references, making it difficult to decode sometimes, even when I know what it's referring to.

Also, it's a little bit light-weight, story-wise, but then it is primarily a gag manga so that's not a huge criticism.

So yeah, overall, I like it.


Note that the rest of these are first volume impressions.


Bamboo Blade

Bamboo Blade seems quite enjoyable.

I liked the anime, though it looks like they've tweaked the story quite a bit. They've definitely tweaked the artwork and while I don't dislike the manga art, the anime's character designs are a bit better.

The manga has some quite good gags in it, and they definitely retained pretty much all of these.

It's definitely not high-brow entertainment, though, and if I hadn't liked the anime I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought this one was worth perusing.


Maria Holic

I'm not entirely sure why I bought this.

A while back an anime adaptation came out in Japan. It was made by SHAFT, who did Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and a few other things I liked, so I had high hopes, but in the end it was a bit of a disappointment.

I think the main problem was that the main character talked really fast and was shouty and a bit annoying. Also, the main point as I'd seen it was the cross-dressing boy, Maria, what with the title being Maria Holic and all. And yet she virtually wasn't in it.

It did have all the natty visual hall-marks of a SHAFT production that I love, but this wasn't enough to make up for the poor underlying story.

Well it turns out that this story is coming pretty much from the manga. In other words, unlike Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and Bakemonogatori, where they've clearly worked on the story as well, here, they left it alone. And unfortunately it needed work.

Still, I'm going to give it a few volumes to see if improves I think.


Gestalt

Here's a manga that flattered to deceive.

The cover art is gorgeous, but there's a reason for that - it's a modern picture drawn by the artist for a manga that must be around 20 years old. Certainly the art inside is unrecognisable from the cover art and fits very much with the styles prevalent in the eighties and early nineties.

If I'd done my homework I never would have picked it up as it's by Yun Kouga, who did Loveless. Simply put I hated the first volume of Loveless when I read - it was just so badly written.

This is worse. Not only is it badly written but the art, although pretty enough, is confusing. It's really difficult to tell some of the characters apart, not least of all because the hair colour of one of them is inconsistently portrayed.

It also has a tendency to spooge out tonnes of boring exposition and even has little boxes explaining stuff that nobody really cares about and, indeed, wouldn't need explaining if the art was clearer.

Rubbish.


Ichiroh

I was kinda surprised by this.

I bought it on a whim with Gestalt, mainly because the cover looked good, and given how bad that was I was prepared to be disappointed. But actually I quite enjoyed it.

It's another one of those four-panel gag mangas and it's actually quite funny. The artwork is nice too.

In terms of criticism the only real problem is a lack of originality, but it's quite good at doing what it does.


Kimikiss

Again, another one bought on a whim at the same time as Gestalt and Ichiroh. And oddly, this kinda sits somewhere between Gestalt and Ichiroh in that it was okay, but I decided to not keep buying it.

It's basically a romantic-comedy, but the comedy is very light, with the focus very much on the romance.

The problem was that it wasn't, well, it wasn't complicated. Basically, it makes romances more interesting if there are proper barriers or obstacles to overcome, but here these were so minimal it meant there was virtually no plot.

The art was pretty, but that wasn't enough to make me want to keep reading.


DMC

DMC stands for Detroit Metal City. It's meant to be a band name, but it's a bit of an odd title for a band. Especially when the band in question is meant to be a death metal band.

And just like the name, in theory, this manga should be rubbish. Let's look at what goes against it:

1) The artwork is awful. I mean really bad - it looks like a four-year old drew it.
2) Rather odd representation of death metal.
3) When you get down to it, the basic joke in each chapter is exactly the same.

And yet it's one of the best manga I've read in ages.

The reason is that one central joke has a heck of a lot of mileage. The basic idea is that the main character, Soichi, is a wimpy nerd musician who's into indi-pop, but has ended up the front-man of a death metal band called Krauser.

Now if I was to make one real criticism it's quite how he ended up in this position is not explained, nor does it seem like a sensible thing to happen. But then, this is a comedy so maybe over-analyzing it isn't the thing to do.

The real strength of DMC is that it pokes fun at everything, and yet there's also an affection there that makes it all seem like good fun, rather than nasty.

interweb problems

Last night my Dad phoned me.

Or, more accurately, rather late last night my Dad phoned me.

Or, more accurately still, rather late last night, midway through a really heavy week at work, my Dad phoned me.

The reason he phoned me was that it was his switch-on day for internet and he'd plugged everything in and it hadn't worked.

Now I mentioned recently that my Dad is not hugely computer literate and getting someone who knows very little about computers to work through menus and stuff is not much fun.

It also doesn't help that his computer has all the 'making it easier' crap that Microsoft introduced for XP enabled. The reason I left it on was because I was worried his experiences at his computer class may not match up with what he sees if I switch it all over to the settings I would have.

The problem he was experiencing, however, was a bit of a weird one that kinda stumped me.

Basically, with his internet they sent a CD that guides you through setting it up.

Well, one of the early stages is obviously setting the network card up and as part of that it detects the card.

And it couldn't detect the card.

This I had no real explanation for because the motherboard has LAN built-in. This morning I even checked the model number online and it definitely has built-in LAN.

I was kinda expecting maybe the driver hadn't been installed properly, but it's not even reporting it in the system config as an 'unknown device'.

Something I read online suggests that maybe it's de-activated in the BIOS, but that means the default BIOS setting is for it to be disabled, which seems highly weird.

It also means that I somehow have to get my Dad to go into the BIOS and adjust the settings. And his last excursion into the BIOS was the whole route of the problems he had that ended up with me wiping his hard-drive and re-installing :/.

This should be fun :/.

the transporter

I didn't really know what to expect from the transporter.

I know it's spawned a couple of sequels, so it must at least be popular. What I didn't know is that it's had heavy involvement from Luc Besson. That's no bad thing - Besson is quite an imaginative chap, after all - but it does kinda tell you a lot about the film.

Besson's films often have a very clever, witty streak to them, and the transporter is no exception. Except here we get a slightly odd flip-flop effect where one scene is clearly run-through with humour and the next will be plaid in a totally straight way.

Similarly, we get lots of action, and it's off the usual over-the-top and a deliberately silly variety, but then we also get lots of harder, more realistic/brutal action too. A classic example of this is if you contrast the car chase at the beginning, with its gags and impossible action against the fist-fight in the bus depot towards the end, where you can almost feel the bones breaking.

Also, another big criticism I'd make is that the plot is extremely... I was going to say cliché, but it's more that it's really tacky. I mean, it works as a structure to hang stuff like the action off of, but it just feels really cheesy.

Oh, and the guy who plays the main Chinese bad guy (weirdly it refers to them as Japanese in the hearing impaired subtitles when they're clearly not Japanese in terms of either how they look or the language they're speaking) is weird. His performance is just plain odd, but not in some deliberate way that they've camped it up to make it silly or anything - it just feels like he's suddenly going to lift his little finger to his mouth, Dr Evil style.

I appreciate that's a lot of criticism and some of it's undermining to the film as a whole, but despite that I still kinda enjoyed it. Statham in particular is enjoyable as an action hero in this sort of role and the action, with it's Besson-esque touches is generally quite good.

There are a few too silly things to be fair - all guns seem to fire a tracer rounds for some reason and the bit with the rocket launcher, although dramatic is kinda stupid, for example. But generally speaking it kinda works.

Plus they've not made the mistake of making the film too long - it's short, sharp, punchy and it moves along a suitably brisk pace.

So yeah, silly, but an enjoyable kinda silly.

steams good to me

I think I've mentioned this before but for my birthday my Dad bought me a Steamer and a Bread Maker.

I was pretty much straight into using the bread maker, but the steamer hasn't really seen much action until recently because, with it being summer, I didn't really feel like eating the sort of food you cook in a steamer.

The steamer is quite a good one, I believe - it certainly has a big capacity and is a good brand, but it's taken me quite a while to really figure it out properly. The main problems I've been having are cooking times and cleaning it.

Cooking times have been a problem because the guidelines given in the booklet seem to be way too short. I dunno if it's because I like my food well cooked or something, but if I use the booklet's cooking time, everything seems to come out almost raw :/.

About the only thing it seems to get right is chicken. Everything else is totally undercooked for me.

This is especially true for rice, but then to be fair I already know that what is nicely cooked rice for me is massively over-done by other people's standards. I mean, in the book I think it says as little as 15 minutes, but I actually cook it for about 40 minutes.

As I say, that's more because I like rice that's verging on mushy in consistency, but still, at 15 minutes I think most people would say the rice was underdone.

The cleaning problem is more tricky.

The basic issue is that when I cook chicken it drips juices and these juices seem to coagulate in the holes the steam comes through. The problems is that no amount of soaking and scrubbing seems to dislodge this gunk.

I'm not too fussed, as I'm sure the steam kills any germs, but it looks really unsightly to say the least.

Sorry, this was a bit of a naff post, wasn't it? It's because I couldn't really think of anything to talk about that wasn't going to become a marathon post and I'm really busy at work.

wib sites

I've recently been trying to cut down on my expenditures.

The primary reason for this is that I'm in a mountain of debt and have been for a very long time.

There are a few rays of hope in this cloud of gloom. One of the main ones is the huge pile of "stuff" that I own. For example, if and when I pull my finger out and watch all my unwatched stuff, selling it all on e-bay will (in theory), release some big old chunks of cash that should alleviate at least part of the debt.

Also, my attempts at reigning in my spending have, on the whole, been working. I now buy far fewer DVDs than I used to. I also don't buy so much random crap and I even try to by non-branded and generic products where I can.

As part of this "don't spend money you having got, you fucking idiot" crusade, one of my attempts has been to get cable. I know I've talked about this before, but I dunno how far I explained.

Basically, it turned out that they wouldn't allow two lots of cable at the same address, and my landlord already has cable. So what we did was run a very long network cable through the roof from his router and down into my place.

My plan was to try this out for about a month and if it worked fine then I'd cancel my existing broadband, saving me over £30 a month. I'd also look at stopping my telephone landline, potentially saving another £11 a month. That's the best part of £500 saved a year.

Unfortunately, early signs are that this may not be as successful as I'd hoped.

There are two basic problems.

The first is that it turns out cable broadband is subject to the same issues of dropping out as regular broadband. Now it doesn't happen as frequently, and it's solved just as easily, by unplugging the router and then plugging it back in. But the problem of course is that the router isn't in my house, so if my landlord is out, there's nothing I can do.

The other problem is that the connection is massively capped.

Basically, they only allow you about 1.5gb of bandwidth before they throttle the connection speed back. 1.5gb is nothing - I can get through that browsing websites, let alone all the downloading I do.

This is one of the things I have gotten used to with my current service. There are no bandwidth limits at all and I regularly get through over 100gb a month.

The other thing that weighs in here is that the cable connection isn't dramatically faster than my landline broadband. From the cable I get just under 2megabits (this is actually puzzling to me, because it's meant to be a 10meg line - dunno if it's been handicapped because of the giant network cable, but it seems quite a bit off of what it should be), whereas with the landline I can get about 1.4megabits.

Yes, it's faster, but once they throttle it, which happens often, it drops to less than 1megabit. If I keep using it, it also seems to slow down even more.

The other saving plan I've been mulling over is getting rid of some of my websites.

For example, the scan-city.org site has basically never been used properly and, having gone almost completely off of doing scanning, it seems an incredible waste of money.

I've also gone off of walling, so it also seems daft keeping digital-bondage.net. On top of which nobody likes my walls anyway, so it's not like the world would be missing anything. To be fair, scan-city doesn't cost much, so it wouldn't be a huge saving to get rid of it.

That leaves trismugistus.com. I don't think I'd ever get rid of it, but I've been thinking I should turn it into a straight review site, especially if I get rid of digital-bondage.net. I could also probably change the hosting as I wouldn't have the need to store all my big walling files.

That'd give me an excuse to tweak the site design as well. Not that I dislike the current design (just the opposite in fact) but it might be nice to give it a facelift. I could also go through and tidy up things like typos and errors I made.

short week

They're good short weeks like this. No sooner have you got into the swing than it's already the weekend and time for you to relax again.

Last night I finished watching the Welcome the NHK anime.

I have to say I liked it a lot more than the manga, but not enough to say I genuinely liked it.

I think part of the problem was that I was expecting it to be an out and out comedy and it isn't really. I mean in the last third it switches into straight drama so there's deliberately nothing funny in there.

Anyway, I'll do a full review at some point later.

I think I'm going to start watching Baccano next. I'm slightly afraid that mentally I've hyped this series up to much, but I remeber really loving the fansubs I sampled.

busman's holiday

As mentioned yesterday, the weekend was something of a Busman's holiday.

Quite a few years ago, I built my sister a PC. The details of how aren't really relevant, but it essentially found itself in my Dad's possession as his machine.

Well a few weeks back he mentioned that it had essentially 'gone wrong'. One of the things he mentioned essentially sounded like the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, but it's incredibly difficult to diagnose these sorts of things over the phone, so I agreed to have a look when I visited.

Well, when he showed me it in action it was kinda obvious things had gone distinctly pear-shaped as it was indeed giving the BSOD and then immediately re-booting, so it was locked in and endless loop.

One thing that instantly struck me was that it was giving 2 separate options for booting windows, which was very odd. But it also looked like it might be having trouble accessing something properly, as that's what the BSOD message implied.

So my first port of call was the BIOS set-up screen. The last time I encountered a similar problem the RAM was unseated and a quick look at the BIOS screen can instantly show you what's connected and active, etc.

But unfortunately there was a BIOS password, so I couldn't have a look around. Which in itself was weird, because I didn't set a BIOS password on the machine. However, I knew that my sister had had some problems before and so maybe whoever fixed those problems had put the BIOS password on.

So we tried a few things and failed. Then we tried calling my sister, but she didn't know.

Then something odd transpired. My dad recognised the BIOS screen.

This stunned me, and initially I didn't believe him because I couldn't see how he would have known how to get there. But he clearly did recognise it. This would later feed into what had apparently happened, but more on that later.

So anyway, I took the case apart and reset the BIOS. I had to set a few things up again of course, but it also showed me everything was properly connected.

Of course it didn't solve the problem, because the real problem was that he'd essentially tried to re-install windows.

Again, quite how he's managed to set it so that it'll boot from the CD I don't know, but he did. Now installing windows is of course a fairly straightforward thing, but of course you wouldn't normally try to install it onto a machine with it already on without either putting it over the top or deleting the old one.

He hadn't done that. Indeed, it looked like he'd stopped the installation part of the way through.

Of course I'm sure this is probably all reversible, but the easiest thing to do was just blank the machine and re-install windows, so that's what I did. I asked whether there was anything important on the machine or if my sister had left anything, but he seemed fairly sure it was all okay.

Really this isn't a bad thing anyway, because he's just started an 'introduction to computing' type course and a clean install with few distractions is therefore a good thing.

There was a slight complication though as it meant buying a new copy of office. We got a copy at PC-World for convenience's sake, but when I got back I couldn't install it. This was because the version of XP was so old it needed Service Pack 2 installing.

My dad is planning to get broadband, but luckily I happen to have SP2 on a CD, so I sent that down to him and he seems to have installed it okay.

The real plan, and why he's interested in doing this is he wants to get into digital photography. That's why we bought him a digital camera for his birthday and obviously, being more PC-savvy is part of the next step - he can hardly learn how to adjust photos if he doesn't know how to turn the machine on!

Now as we were going on throughout the day the truth actually emerged as to what happened. Basically, he wanted to adjust the user accounts.

As mentioned, the machine was my sisters and her friends also used it. Therefore, he was logging in under their accounts, so what he wanted to do was remove them and/or add himself.

Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do that.

But what he did stumble across was the BIOS. Whether he adjusted anything else I don't know, but I'm guessing he saw the "set password" and thought that was how you did it, so he set a BIOS password by accident.

Then, for some reason that I still can't quite figure out he's tried to use the Windows XP CD. This has lead to him part-installing a new copy of XP, which was not finished properly but also broke the existing XP install.

I've always said that doing is the best was of learning, but I guess sometimes a little knowledge is needed before attempting stuff.

gloomy

Back to work today.

:(

The weather was pretty miserable on the whole while I was on holiday, but then to be fair it is properly into Autumn now.

I didn't achieve half of the stuff I was hoping too. I mean, I did achieve some bits that were on my list, but I didn't get anywhere near doing some other stuff.

Mainly the 'sorty outy' stuff of packing away my aircon and tidying up my PCs was the type of things I ended up avoiding, but I also failed to do any scanning. I didn't even scan some DVD covers, which meant I also couldn't put together any more reviews for trismugistus.com.

I did watch some more Welcome to NHK, although I didn't finish the series.

I don't really have a proper excuse for failing to do these things - I even had a big chunk of spare time on the Tuesday when I could feasibly have done them. About as close as I can come to an excuse is that I was bloody knackered.

The reasons I was tired were multiple.

First off I've been finding work really tiring lately. I seem to be doing loads of extra hours without any benefit from it (I may blog about it later, but can't be arsed now). The upshot of this was that even though I wasn't driving down to Dad's until Friday afternoon I ended up doing very little in the morning as I was so tired.

This is also one of the big reasons I don't get much done at weekends generally - I feel really tired and so am a bit listless and un-enthusiastic. Indeed, for the last few weeks I've been going to bed really early at the weekends because I've been so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open.

I think this hasn't been helped by my general lack of holiday this year. Normally I try to take quite a few long-weekends, but with Monaco sucking up two full weeks of holiday so early in the year I've not managed to do that so much this year.

The other reason I was tired was that the drive to Devon and back was really knackering. The trip down was really busy, even though most of it was just ordinary Friday afternoon, not rush hour, although with it taking so long I did cop that too. The drive back on Sunday was better, although the traffic was surprisingly heavy again and I did get caught up at Stonehenge.

But the point is that, according to my trip computer thing, I spent nearly 8 hours driving to and from Devon - that's pretty tiring stuff by.

It also didn't help that I was basically having a bit of a "Busman's holiday". If you've not heard this expression before, it's when you go on holiday away from work somewhere and end up doing roughly what you would normally do at work.

In my case I had to fix Dad's PC (more on that tomorrow) which is something I have to do all the time. But the point here is that it's quite a tiring thing - certainly it's horribly long winded and involves having to concentrate a lot.

One of the sneakier parts though was that, with Friday, Saturday and Sunday all being written off by my visit to Devon, all the stuff I would usually do at the weekend wasn't done, so I had to do it Monday and Tuesday.

Now really, that was a big part of the reason I took Monday and Tuesday as well, but I always forget stuff like that, you see, so I add in more things and then end up getting annoyed with myself that I haven't done them all :/.

time off

Well, this will be the last blog post from me until Next Wednesday.

This weekend it's by Dad's Birthday. He's 65 and I'm going down to visit him.

Me and my sister actually both chipped in to buy him a digital camera earlier this year. That actually covers both his Birthday and Christmas, but it means I won't be giving him anything as such, but I though a visit would be a good idea.

I'm not actually going for all the time I'm on holiday, and I should be back on Monday. That then gives me two days to do... well, I'm not entirely sure what I'll do to be honest.

I'm hopping to get a lot of 'stuff' done. For example, when brought the cable for the broadband in they drilled a big whole and there's loads of debris left that I've still not got around to hoovering up (not least of all because it means unplugging all my PC gubbins.

It's also about time I put my aircon back into it's storage location, which is always a giant pain in the arse.

I should also do a load of archiving - fansubs need burning to DVD to make room for the upcoming season, for example.

So yeah, not exactly exciting, but very necessary.

I didn't manage to watch all of NHK, due mainly to some circumstances beyond my control, but I am about a third of the way through it.

I'd say that so far it's a lot better than the manga version, but not to the extent that it's brilliant. I'll talk more about it later, I guess.

quantum of solace

erm, whut?

The first outing for Daniel Craig's bond was something of a breath of fresh air.

Gone were the likes of Bond coolly dispatching the baddies without breaking a sweat and then delivering a witty one-liner. In came Bond getting nearly as beat up as the bad guy and not saying anything.

The Bond-girls remained, but they were sassy and feisty and Bond even fell in love with one of them. The flash car's also remained, but the weird gadgets were either gone altogether or massively toned down. Indeed, in an age where a phone can provide you with anything from e-mail to a GPS mapping tool, who really needs gadgets?

No, this was gritty, realistic (some may argue Jason Bourne inspired) Bond.

The second out for Craig as Bond is also something completely new - a direct sequel. This one follows on from the first film by perhaps as little as ten minutes.

It also keeps going with the other stuff - beat-up Bond, more realistic, no daft gadgets, feisty Bond girls.

Only that's where it kinda starts to crack. There are two Bond girls. The first is not really a new-mould Bond girl in that she doesn't really kick arse - she's a bit more ditsy and dainty. Bond also beds her in no seconds flat. But he doesn't care for her - she's bumped off and he hardly bats an eyelid.

So back to old-skool Bond then? Well, no. I mean, she doesn't have a double-entendre for a name for example. She also serves very little purpose - he doesn't bed her to get info like he used to bed Bond girls.

The second Bond girl is much more feisty. But she's also kinda incidental again. Plus he doesn't bed her and again, no silly name.

It's a very good example of what's wrong with the film - it's like they've tried to slip in a little flavour of old-skool Bond, but not got it right.

What makes this worse is that they've tried to also keep some of the new stuff that just doesn't mesh well with the old stuff. So, for example, you get new-style realistic fist-fights, but then there's a bit with a plane dog-fight that's right out of old Bond and is very unrealistic.

What compounds all of this is the film is very confusing. I'm still not 100% sure quite what was going on.

The only real plot seems to be that Bond is seeking revenge. The trouble is that he could have had revenge very quickly, but instead waits for no apparent reason. I guess it was because he was trying to uncover... I dunno, something about this big conspiratorial network of bad guys thing.

But they're so ephemeral and without substance it's impossible to get your teeth into. Even at the end you realise that the bad guy who Bond's been after clearly isn't the head of the organisation. So does that mean we're going to get another sequel?

In a way it just felt like an excuse to hang a bunch of cool action sequences off of.

That could have worked, but what made it less satisfying was how it was shot - the camera was all over the place and it tended to get really confusing really quickly.

I dunno - it was like they were tying to have their cake and eat it. Only the cake was half chocolate and half baked Alaska, so it gave a funny sort of texture in the mouth.

die hard 4.0

I have to say I wasn't expecting much from Die Hard 4.0.

The first Die Hard movie is an absolute classic. Indeed, it's certainly one of the best action films ever.

A big part of what makes it so good is that Willis takes a real pounding. Sure he wins, but he only just wins. He always has to react to situations and improvise solutions, rarely going in with a proper plan.

It also featured a great bad guy and a great supporting cast - most notably in the form of the beat cop on the other end of a walkie-talkie.

The second film was not so good. They ramped up the action, but they also failed to deliver a truly worthwhile villain. And they made a really big mistake, crashing a plane full of innocent victims with Willis unable to stop them.

The third film was a lot better. The villain was good and his plan was pretty clever. There was a also great sidekick again (weirdly, in the form of Samuel L Jackson, but it works). They also ramped the action up again - unfortunately to the extent that some of the stuff was a little odd. I seem to recall something like a huge slide down a metal wire that would have shredded Willis's hands, for example.

But the point is that somehow it still worked - the plot and characters were strong enough.

The same is pretty much true of the fourth one.

There are some things that don't quite hang true action-wise, but still, overall, it hangs together.

The worst offender on the action sequence front is when Bruce is attacked by an F35 Jet Fighter. He's driving a big rig truck and the really implausible bit is that the arsenal carried by the F35 would just obliterate the truck with no survivors. I mean, this is gear designed to take out hardened military targets - a big rig is like a small paper cup by comparison.

Still, if you suspend your disbelief a bit then it's still a fun sequence. I think actually what helps here is how it's been shot - there's a bit of tendency to go hand-held style nowadays and while it helps in certain things, in big action films it often feels more like a hindrance than a help to me.

If shit's blowing up I want to see it blowing up properly, not be confused and distracted by the camera jerking all over the place.

Anyway, the key things that work in Die Hard 4.0 are the characters. With the possible exception of the main bad guy, all the characters are enjoyable. A particular nod of appreciation has to go to Kevin Smith, who seems to be developing into something of a fine actor by all accounts. Certainly he pumped out what was a horrible quantity of expositional dialogue in a way that was both believable and convincing - no easy task.

The side-kick role of a hacker nerd is also well realised, even if they do tend to fall into some of the old nerds on film traps I've often bemoaned. McClane's feisty arse-kicking daughter was also a very nice touch.

The weak-point was the main bad guy. Which isn't to say it was badly acted or anything, it just seemed a bit arch to me. For one thing there was an implication of some sort of moral ambiguity to the character, but this wasn't backed up by how he was written/depicted.

I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so let's just say in the background to the film there's a suggestion he may be doing what he's doing to 'prove a point'. But then his actions, how he behaves, how he deals with his own minions - all that comes across more like he's a typical boo-hiss style bad guy.

Also, when the twist comes it's not actually all that big a twist. Indeed, it's exactly the same twist that they always have, in that it's really all about the money. The problem there is that part of what the bad guy is doing is totally trashing the US economy, so what he steals would surely become worthless wouldn't it?

goals are good

It's my goal this week to watch Welcome to the NHK through to completion.

For some reason I started it several weeks ago with the full intention of watching it, but then never actually sat down and watched anything past the first episode. Well, I re-watched ep 1 last night and hopefully I'll get a chance to keep going.

Certainly I hit my goal of watching everything telly-wise from last week over the weekend, and this week my scheduled viewing hours drop off quite dramatically since loads of stuff has now ended. I was tempted to fill this blog with some thoughts on what I've been watching, but decided against it in the end.

What I would say is it's weird how things have worked out in this weeks schedule. Basically there are about 12 things my PVR is set to record (I set everything to be recorded, even if I end up watching it live) across the whole week. But on Tuesday and Wednesday there's absolutely nothing and most other days it's one or two things.

The real culprit seems to be Monday - there's loads of stuff on Mondays for some reason, which, given what I was saying the other week about how Monday's are a bit of mare for me time-wise, is actually a bit inconvenient.

One thing that does look interesting is this new show Flash Forward that starts on 5 tonight. I've not heard much about it other than that it's by the same (or some of them?) people who did Lost. Since I'm a big fan of Lost I'm intrigued to check it out.

And mentioning Lost, it seems bloody ages since I last got to watch any - the box-set of the latest 7th season seems to be taking ages to come out. I mean surely the 8th season is about to start in the US?

Yup, new season time rapidly approaches. I'm not doing too badly with my big anime catch-up. It's not been accompanied by quite the same scanning catch-up I was hoping for

Ah well, hopefully I'll get some time this next weekend, as I've got a bit of a holiday, but for now I'm gonna focus on watching NHK. I was distinctly unimpressed with the manga, but even from the first episode it seems quite different to the manga, so maybe I'll like it more.

mr mop

God, I need a haircut.

My hair's got to the really annoying stage where it just looks shit however I wash or comb it. It's also acting as a massive heat blanket, making me hot and sweaty when it's not actually that warm.

I should have had it cut one the last few weekends, but I've mentioned before that I find having it cut really unpleasant. Plus it seems to cost more each time I go.

I've been doing some scanning through the week. I've actually been trying to stay on top of telly this week (loads of stuff I've been following ends this week so I'm kinda prepping for a spare-time boost to... well, I'm not sure - maybe I'll get on top of the scanning or watch some DVDs?), so it's perhaps not been as much as I could have done, but some is better than none.

I've also been watching anime independently as well as what I've watched while scanning, so here are the low-downs:

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

Wow.

I'm not really sure how to expand on that.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is about an earthquake. Well, no, actually it's about people being impacted by a really big earthquake.

How can I put this? Where you might have expected all the money and effort to have gone into getting the earthquake right and animating it well, it's quite clear that just as much effort has gone into developing the characters and plot. The characters feel real - now admittedly they're not things you won't have seen done before, but they're done so well and portrayed so vividly they feel totally real.

Indeed, the realness is such that I almost found myself blubbing at a few points. Indeed, I'm struggling not to compare it to the masterworks of Miyazaki - there's a real flavour of what he manages to capture in films like Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service.

This is probably one of the best anime I've seen in ages.


Bakemonogatori

For some while now I've been bemoaning the current fad in anime to adapt "Light Novels".

My main issue with these light novels is that they seem to almost completely lack originality. I've tended to assume this was because of the nature of the beast - light novels are, as the name suggests "easy readers" and tend to rely on heavily worn ideas. To say they're quite a clichéd bunch is to hit the nail on the head.

However, Bakemonogatari - which is another of the same ilk if you hadn't guessed already - seems to be offering something a bit different. But there's a bit of a catch - it's being made by SHAFT and a lot of what makes Bakemonogatari interesting is the visual style and presentation.

Since Light Novels are textual in nature, it's hard to see how this is coming from the book and not the company making it. But that said, the plot seems fairly interesting from what I sampled. Well, I say the plot - it's a little difficult to be sure quite what the plot is if I'm honest. I'm sure it'd become clearer later, but at the moment I'm not really sure what's going on.

So I guess really it's the characters that carried my interest in what I sampled.


Canaan

Y'know, something odd sometimes happens when I run through fansubs like this.

For some reason, I tend to get runs of good and bad shows. Why this happens I don't know - I'm selecting what to watch on about as random a basis as I can, yet I'll still end up watching several rubbish shows in a row and then several good ones in a row.

The upshot of which is that this is the third good show in a row.

I have to admit, though, that I found Canaan nearly as confusing as Bakemonogatari. I say nearly because there's clearly a plot kicking about in Canaan, it's just they're hiding it away to give some mystery. Bakemonogatari I just wasn't really sure where it was going.

But also like Bakemonogatari, there's enough other good stuff to keep my interest despite the confusingness of the plot. For example, Canaan also seems to be packed full of interesting characters and, most surprisingly, humour. I really wasn't expecting it to have anything funny in it from what I've seen magazine wise, but it was actually quite funny in places.


Kuruneko

Well this is a bit of an oddity. Apparently it's an anime based on a blog - you don't get that every day!

As the title suggests - neko means cat - the blog is about cats. The anime is a series of very short episodes - maybe about 2mins each - which you'd expect from a blog and they're pretty much random, humorous anecdotes about cat ownership.

The animation is relatively crude, in a Rhubarb and Custard sort of way, and like that cartoon it has a lot of charm for it.

Overall it's sort of Chii-esque, but where that has a narrative because it's a fictional story, this is a bit more random (and a bit more 'realistic') and therefore didn't quite peak my interest in the same way. I guess if it was freely streamed somewhere it'd be worth a watch, especially as it's so short.


Umi Monogatari ~Anata ga Ite Kureta Koto~

Wasn't 100% sure about this one.

The first episode was kinda okay. Certainly the blonde underwater chick (I'm hesitating to use the word mermaid as it wasn't entirely clear that's what she was supposed to be) was totally hot and the land-dwelling girl was an interesting character. It was also quite funny and the story seemed to be okay.

But then in episode two things went spectacularly downhill.

First off, it suddenly became a magical girl show. This seemed to be a bit left-field to me. But worse than that, the story became a bit dodgy - both in terms of what it was and how it was being told.

The main crime was that a talking turtle appeared and proceeded to talk full advantage of his ability to talk in order to cram tonnes of relatively uninteresting exposition into our lugholes. To make it worse, he didn't seem to explain some stuff that then got used later in the story.

So I dunno - I'd probably keep watching, but I've a strong feeling the scales would slowly tip towards it not being a very good show.


Souten Kouro

I actually quite enjoyed this.

It's loosely inspired by the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (they love a bit of Three Kingdoms in Japan) and it's probably fair to say that it's a bit on the melodramatic side.

It's also probably fair to say that the animation is of a fairly poor standard. If I was being kinda I'd go for highly stylised, but it's also fairly clear they were a bit strapped for cash.

Oh and it's all in the bloody dark again. Partly, I think to cover up the nasty and nudey bits for broadcast reasons, but also to hide the animation a bit. Plus of course, darkness = drama. I'm actually kinda surprised in didn't rain rose petals (or real rain even) during my sample, but then that is a bit girly and this is more melodrama for men in tone.

But setting those aside, I actually kinda liked it. Although I think I'd have to absorb it in small doses - I imagine watching this much melodrama in a short period of time might have a negative affect on your opinion of it.


AIKa ZERO

Let's do a short one: Basically if you've seen and liked the recent AIKa R16 then AIKa ZERO won't disappoint.

If you've not seen it you may like it if any of the following tickly your fancy: excessive fan-service, panty shots, hot young girls, panty shots, chick fights or panty shots. Plus, oddly for this sort of show, the story is okay too.

Oh, and there are quite a lot of panty-shots.

waking the dead

Waking the Dead has been running for quite a while now - something in the order of 10 years, maybe?

For those that are unaware, it's a mystery crime drama. The title comes from the fact that it's all about re-opening 'cold' cases - murders that were not solved at the time, mainly.

Generally speaking I enjoy it - the 'who done it?' aspect is usually quite strong and forms the main focus of the stories. Which isn't to say it's just about the cases - there's normally a fair bit of interpersonal stuff and character development kicking about.

Mainly the focus is on Boyd, the main in charge. Boyd is a bit of an odd character. He's very... loud I guess is the best word. He shouts at people a lot. It's also difficult to tell if he cares or not.

The reason he took the job was essentially because he was looking for his son, so there's a caring aspect there. But then he generally treats his work colleagues like shit. And he's not exactly kind to anyone he interviews - indeed, he's not above giving them a good slap now and again.

Which, for me, is where things start to go a bit wonky. How, in this day and age, has he kept his job? Some of the stuff he gets up to is way beyond legal, let alone acceptable, and yet he's never been fired.

The other week there was a storyline where he broke into someone's house to get evidence, for example. At the end the episode the internal investigation type people turned up and basically said "stop working on the case, we're investigating you."

Ah, I thought, next week will be about him being in trouble. But nope, it was apparently business as usual.

It's difficult to explain, but everything seems to be unravelling in a way. I mean, it's kinda supposed to be like that - the Boyd's son thing has actually been resolved, and I think he's meant to be spiralling out of control, and Spence, one of his team has left.

But the problem is they're not really being properly consistent and they're not really paying enough attention to the non-case story parts. For example, the girl on the team died in the first part.

Okay, fair enough, but it was done in such a random way - one minute she's okay, the next she's dead. And then there's basically no mention of her after that - Boyd treated her like shit, as per usual, but in these later episodes there's been no follow up to that. Grace, the psychologist, apparently hasn't even had a word with him or anything.

I dunno, it feels like while they're still doing interesting murders, the other aspects have gone a bit loose. Plus they're starting to interfere too much in the cases - it feels like none of the cases this year has been solved properly because of Boyd ballsing them up.

Which is fair enough, but where are the repercussions from that? He's not even gotten a bollocking from his boss.

It's difficult to explain, because it's always had that aspect of Boyd being a loose cannon, but this year it seems to have lost cohesion as an overall entity - the plot things running through the whole series seem to have gotten a bit mangled somewhere.

rambo

The name's Rambo. John Rambo.

I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about there. It makes no sense as a joke and offers absolutely no kind of commentary on the film itself.

So yeah, Rambo. Which, in complete disregard for the film's title is actually the fourth Rambo film.

But it's such a long distant sequel, it's kinda understandable why they didn't give it a more sequel arific name: Fourth Blood or something. But that isn't to say they've ignored the time gap.

Indeed, a key part of the film is how long Rambo has spent 'in the wilderness' as it were. If it had just been "here's more Rambo" it wouldn't have worked. But what they've done here means it does kinda work.

Which isn't to say the film entirely works, just that it's a good start. So what else about the film works?

A big success is the length. With credits it's only about 1hr25. This means that the pacing is really good - nothing drags here and also, nothing feels gratuitous. Well, okay, we'll get to the violence later, but I mean none of the scenes feel like they were unnecessary - it cuts right to the heart of the story.

Another success is Rambo himself - he feels real and understandable. It follows on logically from where he was in the previous films and makes sense.

And, perhaps surprisingly, one of the biggest successes is the depiction of a mercenary team in the film. Normally in this sort of film they would prove to be useless. Perhaps one of them would be good, but the rest would end up getting killed instantly and stupidly or need to be rescued by Rambo.

Well, even though one of those things does sort of happen, it happens in a way that you can believe and subsequently it shows the mercs doing a good job. These guys are just about as effectively as Rambo himself, which is really nice to see.

It's also pretty successful at portraying the absolute mess that is Burma. The story is fictional, but according to what the people they interview say and the research that was done it's not wholly unrealistic.

The last truly successful thing is the extras - a commentary from Sly himself and a veritable bucket load of extras make this a worthwhile disk from that standpoint.

A sort of successful thing is the way the violence is portrayed. It's... well, it works. On the commentary and interviews they keep talking about it being realistic. I'm not 100% sure on that myself.

For example, legs blown off by mortar rounds and grenades and people being shredded by 50 cal rounds I can believe. Similar levels of damage being inflicted by a handgun I'm not so sure about.

Also, it comes awfully close to being too much. The final sequence is quiet long and the violence and gore is at such a level it almost becomes too much. As pointed out in the extras, if it hadn't had a rousing, movie-style soundtrack behind it you'd have been vomiting in your popcorn. I mean, honestly it's worse than most horror movies.

But then there's the thing - that's sort of the point. War is horrible.

The main thing that didn't work so well for me was the bad guys. They were quite two dimensional bad guys - there was no suggestion of them being anything other than simply 'bad'. Also, the missionaries seemed a bit on the hyper-naive side to me. Especially since one of them claimed to have been into Burma 5 times before.

But overall those didn't really detract too much from the film itself, which I enjoyed. But I think you need a strong constitution to watch it!

erm

Y'know sometimes it's really difficult to think of anything to write in these blogs.

Sometimes on Monday I've got so much stuff to talk about that I actually rattle off three or four blog posts (writing them in word) that I then use until Wednesday, by which time I've got more to talk about.

But other times I can struggle to write the Monday and then don't have the time (or, sometimes, the inclination) to write any more.

It's one of the reasons I turned Wednesday into 'movie review' day. It gives me one day of guaranteed content, although sometimes I struggle there to if I'm unsure about a film or didn't watch one.

Anyway, the point is today I'm struggling quite a bit.

See, last night I did no more scanning and watched no more anime. I could talk about the manga I've been reading, but the majority of it has been continuing series, which I don't like to talk about as it's difficult to avoid spoilers. I have started several new series, but I've only read 1 volume and I like to give them more room for an opinion to form than that.

This is made worse by what happens on a Monday evening.

For some reason, Monday evenings always disappear in a flash. No sooner am I home than it's 8 or 9 'o'clock and I'm thinking about bed, not doing anything interesting.

There are several factors that contribute to this.

First off, I like to go shopping Monday lunch, so I have to put the shopping away. Also, all the prep I like to for the next day (I'm possibly the most anal person alive) is more complicated because it's all been 'paused' over the weekend. So that takes longer.

Also, over the weekend I don't dl any fansubs, so Sunday night I end up with an average of 20 fansubs to dl on Monday. So Monday evening, with these having dl'ed during the day, I've got to sort them out, putting them on external Hard Drives, etc.

Then there's telly.

Monday night is Gadget Show night, when it's on, and that's quite often - it seems to run almost continuously. That's no bad thing as I love the Gadget Show, but I like to watch it live.

Then, factor in things like making my dinner (being as Monday is shopping day I always have to make something proper - there's no possibility of just reheating yesterday's leftovers) and shaving (I shave at night) and you can see how before I know it, Monday evening is gone.

And that's why I've never anything interesting to talk about on Tuesdays.

a start

Well I think I can say I've officially "made a start" on the scanning backlog.

Over this last weekend I spent many hours scanning away. I have to admit I didn't seem to achieve as much as I'd hoped - I basically only scanning one animedia and one newtype. With the megami I scanned during the week that means I actually haven't quite finished the first month of the backlog.

To be frank, though, I think this is in part because the mags I was scanning were all quite heavy with scans. Sometimes each of the mags can go up and down in the number of things that can be scanned, and in the month I'm scanning I think they all hit a high.

Plus I'm a bit rusty, so that can't have helped.

Anyway, while I scanned, I also watched some anime:


Pandora Hearts

This was a bit of an odd one, as I wasn't entirely sure if I liked it or disliked it.

My problem was that for everything that seems interesting or intriguing there was something I found annoying or tedious.

In the end I had to come down on the side of not really liking it, though it'd be a show I would probably be willing to give a second go.


07-Ghost

It's a bishounen (pretty boy) show. Basically it's an action adventure type series, but with few to no women and all the men are pretty. So if that sort of thing sounds like your cup of tea your mileage may be better than mine.


Phantom ~ Requiem for the phantom ~

Well now, going into this I wasn't expecting much. It's by the same people that did El Cazador de la Bruga, Noir and Madlax. I've never seen Madlax, but I hated Noir. Cazador seemed like Noir but set in a pseudo-wild west and I understand the plot of Madlax is similar too, so I was expecting Phantom would be more of the same.

Well it is, but it also isn't. In those other series the formula is always one sassy chick and a girl whose lost her memories (and her personality with it). As the show goes on the bland one usually starts remembering stuff and coming out of her shell.

Well in this show they've got two main protagonists again, but one of them's a guy. Plus they're both without memory and slightly impassive, though the impassiveness appears to be closer to 'breaking' from the start.

What I'm basically saying was I quite enjoyed the start of this and I'd want to watch more, but my optimism is cautious and tempered by the knowledge of the previous shows.


Taisho Yakyuu Musume

Okay, first I should categorically state that baseball, like most sports, doesn't really hold any appeal for me. However, for the second time in this last few seasons (Cross Game being the first time) I've found myself really liking a baseball-based series.

Of course the fundamental point of all story telling is that it's all about characters, so I'm going to use that as my excuse as to how come I like 2 baseball shows.

To be fair, Taisho is a lot less 'about' Baseball than it is the girls in the show - and it is all girls. Indeed, if I had my cynical hat on I'd be banding around words like "Moe" and how it's all been done before.

Well this is true (although it's actually set during the inter-war period and you don't' get too many shows set then) but the point is it charmed the pants off me (get your mind out of the gutter). Indeed, so much so that I would actually put this towards the top of a 'recommended' list for this last couple of seasons.


Element Hunters

I found this to be quite tedious.

I think the idea is it's meant to be educational. It certainly has lots of science (chemistry mainly) related stuff in it. The problem on this front is it's got loads of ridiculous non-science and stupidness in it too.

But also it falls roughly into a sort of boy's (shounen) pokemon-eskue battle-based type genre that always leaves me cold.

I just found it very boring.

weird night

Last night was a bit weird.

During the day I was feeling quite good, but then when I got home I dunno - it was like my blood sugar crashed or something, but that wouldn't make sense as I had quite a large dinner (too large, really as I made a bit of an error).

It was weird. All I really ended up doing was reading a few comics :/.

Plans for the weekend are pretty low key.

Hopefully what I'll do is actually continue with the start I made at scanning my magazine backlog. Also I'd like to watch some proper anime on DVD, but recently there's been a bit of an increase in the number of shows that I've been watching on telly and I'd rather keep them in line.

Someone in the office has had swine flu!

My malaise is unrelated, as they have been working off site, although he's in today so I'm sure I'll be imagining symptoms throughout the weekend!

It's slightly weird when you actually know someone who's had this thing that the media has been banging on about for so long.

By the sound of things he's not been having much fun, though - quite a nasty little disease by the sounds of things!

almost unbelievable

I did some scanning!

Granted, not a lot of scanning, but "some" is, like, a million percent more than "none" isn't it?

I've also been continuing to watch anime fansubs. Some of this was while I scanned, but the majority was just randomly watched.

Guin Saga

Well I guess this show proves I haven't lost my disinterest in fantasy like I was afraid with Tear to Tiara. Guin Saga did very little for me.

It's a fantasy type story, in case you hadn't guessed, and, as far as I'm aware, it's another one based on an RPG and it again shows. But where Tiara had a bit of humour to lift it, this is played totally straight.

It's odd the parallels between the shows, actually - both involve royal siblings being saved/aided by people we're not quite sure about. In Tiara it was unclear if he was a good guy or bad guy, but in Guin it's more that it's unclear who and what he is.

Guin appears to have a leopard's head and has lost his memory. Unfortunately, the former makes him seem like some reject from a Mexican wresting match and the latter is a rather played out idea that isn't' given any real life here.

What I think I'm saying is that if fantasy is your bag then you might get more mileage, but it really wasn't for me. Oh, and whichever camp you're in, you need warning that the animation is pretty damn poor. It just about reached okay level during the fights, but otherwise it's really cheap stuff.


Shin Mazinger Shougeki! Z-Hen

Now there's a title and a half to get your gob around!

I've honestly not got a lot to say about this.

I mean, it's a Go Nagai series, and if you like Go Nagai's giant mecha stuff I see absolutely no reason you wouldn't like this.

My own personal take is somewhat of a cool distance. I have no problems with Giant Mecha (indeed, many of the shows I'd put up the top in my personal rankings would be Giant Mecha shows) but I'm not such a big fan of these "original" style shows.

It's difficult to explain - I like shows like Godannar or Gurren Lagann that pay affectionate homage to these types of shows, and I like shows like Eva that bugger about with them, but the shows themselves don't quite work for me. I think it's because there too earnest.

A knowing wink and a some sort of acknowledgement within the show itself that the whole thing is bizarre/silly goes a long way for me. I've no problem with the things they get up to, so long as there's a flavour of the creators themselves knowing that what they're doing is daft.

Plus, often-times the writing leaves a lot to be desired. And if I'm brutally honest, Go Nagai's character and mecha designs leave me a bit cold.

But if you're good with all that stuff, then this should be right up your alley.


Slap Up Party - Arad Senki

And here's another one with a bizarre name.

Also, rather bizarrely, it's yet another one where it opens in the dark. All of the series I've sampled just recently have either had all of their opening episodes set in the dark, or they've certainly opened in the dark.

Tears to Tiara the first two eps were at night, Guin Saga, the first ep was at night, Darker than Black had loads of night-time stuff, Mazinger, about 80% of what I watched was at night. And this opens in the dark too... weird. Although, to be fair, it does then proceed to being in bright daytime.

Plus, to cap things off, I believe it's another show adapted from a fantasy RPG game. I could be utterly wrong on that, as I've done no research at all, but it certainly feels like it is.

And it also feels like a show that just isn't my cup of tea.

I've never really thought much about it, but I think it's the fact that they're all really similar these fantasy RPG things. They involve a group going on a quest, often with the group acquiring allies and enemies as it goes.

They're all just Lord of the Rings with a variety of different characters.

So I guess if that sort of thing works for you, you might like it, but for me, this was a non-starter.


Princess Lover

Now this shows was a turn-up for the books.

Obviously I've seen the pictures that have been in the magazines and they rather stuck in my mind, shall we say? I mean, how could they not, given the melons quotient?

What I wasn't expecting was that the show was really rather good.

Well, the other thing I wasn't expecting was that all the fan-service would be heavily censored. And I mean all the fan-service. In the first couple of episodes the fan-service doesn't run to much more than a few panty shots and they're totally obscured by heavy black shadows.

It's a little odd - especially as in the second ep the hero actually refers to the colour of three of the girls knickers and we can't actually see them, because they're in black shadow.

Now I'm sort of used to this, in that I've seen quite a few fansubs that obviously had stuff censored out in this fashion and then later seen the DVD versions with stuff on show. But it's usually more reasonable - censoring out nipples on the broadcast TV version is understandable, knickers isn't, given how much anime has them in.

Maybe it's something to do with the time of day the show is broadcast? Or perhaps it gets more extreme later on? Certainly the show is apparently adapted from a hentai game.

But anyway, the point is that the stories actually not half bad. Or at least, it's being done in a not half bad way - I'm not sure there's anything here that I haven't seen before, but it looks like some care and attention has been put into making the plot a bit more substantial than the usual rom-com fair.


Gokujou!! Mecha Mote Iinchou

I only watched the one episode of this as it was obvious it was a show very much aimed at young girls. Plus I've only seen 2 eps subbed on the listing site I use.

I guess if you're a young girl this might work for you, but for me it was way too much into that whole genre. It's sort of wrong for me to say it was bad, as it's just not even something that's even vaguely aimed at me.

Although, and not wanting to get too deep here, I must admit, I do wonder whether this sort of thing would be produced outside of Japan. The focus the girls have on being 'pretty' seems a little disturbing to me.

I mean, on one level it rejects it, but at the same time sort of re-affirms it. It's a little odd.

Also, the animation was weird - it looked like some sort of bastard love-child of CG cell-shading and traditional hand-drawn animation. It was very odd looking.

shrek the third

If ever there was a series that accurately portrayed the law of diminishing returns it's Shrek.

The first one was brilliant - very funny, telling a heart-warming story and reaching a conclusion that managed to both have its cake and eat it.

The second one was okay. It had some funny high-points, a reasonable story that admittedly felt a bit like a re-tread of the first, but an okay conclusion. It was also a little hampered by a slightly too big scope and cast.

The third was distinctly average.

The jokes were rather thin on the ground, for starters. Not least of all because the central joke of having fantastical characters be real feels a little worn down now. I mean it's a good idea and all, but I do find myself picking holes in it.

I mean, why is the Arthur character depicted as an unpopular wimp? It doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially given he's quite handsome and reveals himself to be quite intelligent. Why would he be unpopular? It's never quite addressed.

Well, he's unpopular because it's high-school and it suits the theme of the Shrek films for self-discovery to be his arc.

And mentioning the high-school, man did it loose me during this section. First off - I'm not American, I never went to high-school, it's a frame of reference that means very little to me.

Plus the types of characters they had seemed like very old jokes. The nerds playing D&D, the popular girls speaking in valley girl speak. I mean it was hard to even tell they were jokes, to be honest.

And then you've got the idea about Prince Charming banding all the 'bad' fairytale characters together and taking over Never-never land. Okay, fair enough, but it was really badly executed.

I mean, they just seemed to sort of turn up, fly about on their brooms (where they heck they got them all from, I don't know) and then land and... they'd won. I don't recall seeing a single guard or military type, despite both of the previous films showing (and, to some extent, relying on) their respective cities having significant numbers of guards.

I dunno, it just didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Also, the characters didn't really seem to grow or develop a great deal. I mean, Shrek kinda became a father, but then the idea that he was not keen on being a Dad got a bit lost somewhere along the line. I think part of the problem is because they were aware they were essentially retreading the same plot beats.

But also it's one thing for him to be screwing up his relationship with his girlfriend in 2, it's quite another for that same plot-thread to be properly played out with regards to un-born children. What could they do? Have him suggest abortion? Or doing a runner? In a family/kids film?

So yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.

I did actually watch another film this last weekend - Tropic Thunder. I'd probably recommend that one more, but it also wasn't the best. I won't talk about it here much, as I'll do a full review for trismugistus.com I think.

eBay doesn't want me

I knew there was something I forgot yesterday! I had another figurine come from Japan, and as per usual it got hit with customs. I paid the customs and set the delivery date and it never showed up. So, in other words that made it a triumvirate of non-delivery things, hence the post.

Both animage and the figurine turned up yesterday, so I guess that's a tick in a couple of boxes at least. So now back to the scheduled post:

eBay has recently introduced a new policy that, by the looks of things, manages to top all of their previous idiocy by quite some considerable margin.

Last time I ranted on I hit the epoch of all swearing, describing them as a bunch of cunts. While this adequately and succinctly summed up my feeling at the time, it unfortunately leaves me with the situation that I have no higher level of swearitude to go to in order to express my displeasure.

I think what I'm going to do is use cunts^2 (or cunts squared - cunts multiplied by cunts) as I think it sums up the drastic increase in their cuntitude.

So what have they done?

Well, they've introduced a system used "DSR" which stands for "Detailed Seller Ratings" and are basically ratings out of 5 given by users on 4 elements:

• Item as Described
• Communication
• Dispatch Time
• Postage and Packaging Charges

And the idea is that if you get an average DSR in any of these below a particular threshold (4.3!) across either 12 months or 3 months, then you get 'punished'. Alternatively, they seem to have set some hard limits too, so that if you get 4 "low" DSRs (1s or 2s) you also get punished.

The punishments are that your item gets lowered in the search returns (don't really know how this works if your item is the only one or one of five in a search. Also, you can get suspended from e-bay - that is, they won't let you sell anything until your DSRs normalise.

If you've more than about 4 brain cells I reckon you can already pick about a million holes in this whole system, but let's focus on some particularly juicy points:

The scorecard is weighted. That is, you may think, like a normal, sensible and rational human being, that, on a scale of 5, 'average' is 3, 'good' is 4 and 'excellent' is 5. Well look at the number you're required to get - 4.3. That means that if all your customers rate your service as 'good' you get punished.

How in the name of fuck is that a sensible way to set your system up?

Unless you're a cunt^2, of course.

Then there's the punishments - my ratings get lowered or I get banned from e-bay because one or two douche bags give me low ratings?

Yeah, that's fair. Especially when I have absolutely no way to retaliate. For example, did you know it's actually now impossible for a seller to rate a buyer negatively?

What else?

Well, according to some postings around the web and on the support forums, your buyers don't actually even have to rate you low to fuck you over - if they don't leave any DSRs (so they just give you the normal rating) then that counts as a "0"!

So their laziness rapes me in the arse.

Also, reading around, everyone is getting low DSRs on postage and packaging. I've ranted on this before that people don't seem to have any idea of how much postage costs - they don't even go and look at the god-damn Royal Mail website and check, they just seem to think you're ripping them off automatically.

Well guess what - even people who have buckled to the previous shit-sandwich e-Bay served us sellers and started doing free postage are getting low DSRs for postage. I mean seriously, if you offer free postage, some people still won't give you a 5! Not that you need to be a genius to work that out, just a cunt^2 not to take it into account.

There's tonnes of other stuff and I could go on for ages, but the last thing I'd mention is what seems to be behind this.

There's a distinct air that what's motivating it is that e-bay wants to get rid of small-time sellers like me. By the sound of things they basically want to become a wholesalers outfit.

So they want to abandon their whole business model and shed the core customer base.

Bunch of cunts^2.

missing

So on Friday I mentioned I'd gotten e-mails telling me newtype, animedia and animage had been sent.

Well, when I got home I was a bit surprised to find that only two of them were there - newtype and animedia. Animage was nowhere to be found :/.

Quite why this was I don't know - TNT are the couriers and one of the guys I happened to talk to specifically mentioned delivering 3 at once, so it's not like they're unaware of it.

I hope it turns up of its own accord. With it being sent from Japan and them not providing tracking numbers I don't really fancy trying to find out what's happened to it. Not least of all because they always have those "it could take 12 weeks to arrive" disclaimers on. If I try to contact them, I'm sure I'll get some sort of response like that.

I had a similar experience with the Royal Mail. A DVD I sent that someone bought off me on e-bay has not been delivered, so I've sent a claim form. However I couldn't send it straight away because they don't consider things lost "until 15 days after it was sent".

It didn't help matters that they wanted loads of evidence. It was a total pain in the arse.

And guess what the things worth? 10p. Yup, that's right, it was one of those DVDs that went for way below a sensible price (if you take off the final valuation fee and PayPal charges I'll have lost money) and now it looks like it'll be costing me even more money.

There didn't seem to be a way to reclaim the packaging cost for starters, and I wouldn't be surprised if the claim is rejected, so I'll end up refunding without the compensation :(.

Postally, I'm not having much luck lately.