scanning the future

I got an e-mail this Tuesday or Wednesday telling me the new issues of Newtype, Animage and Animedia were on their way.

I'm not sure if they'll be here for the weekend - there's a good chance, based on previous experience that they'll turn up on Monday - but when they do arrive that will mean I'll have three straight months worth of un-scanned Japanese mags.

Those anime I mentioned yesterday - normally I would have watched those while scanning. But I've gotten so far behind and I've still not summoned the energy to do any scanning, so I've just watched them like they were normal episodes.

To be fair, there have been a lot of contributing factors to why I've not done any scanning in ages. For example, I watched BSG over the summer - that was a lot of episodes and therefore sucked up a lot of time.

Also, I've been doing loads of e-baying, and that always eats away a lot more time than you think. And then there was Monaco. I know it was ages ago, but it took ages to get stuff sorted out afterwards, plus it used up two whole weeks of holiday, so I've not really had many spare days over the summer.

Then there's been work. This last few months I've been so busy it's been really sucking up both my time and energy. It's like I've lost count of how many days this year I've worked really late.

So yeah, there are reasons, but that doesn't get to the core of the issue.

This core problem is I no longer really have anything to do with my scans.

When I started scanning mags I was a waller and also I had AP to upload them too. Both of those things are now gone, so it's like, why bother? What difference does it really make whether I scan stuff or not?

And the thing is I really don't have any answer to that other than "none". So I really am wondering whether I shouldn't just give up scanning altogether. It would certainly ease this sense of pressure and guilt I feel.

But then another side of me like the idea of scanning the mags. I mean, I can't read the text, so it's kinda nice thing to do with them. Plus I may find a future outlet for them, so better not to stop.

cock

Nearly forgot to post on here today!

Think I'll just give a round-up of the animu I've been watching - not done that in a long while!

Darker Than Black

I'll give it a proper review later over at trismugistus.com, but overall I've really been enjoying this show.

To be brutally honest it's not the most original show. But it does represent something of a breath of fresh air. I mean there's not one character in the show that could be said to be remotely moe, for example. How many shows a year are there where you can say that with genuine accuracy?

Which isn't to say the show doesn't feature a bevy of beauties, but these are beautiful women, not pretty girls. They also feel like genuine, real, grown-up characters, rather than caricatures.

Which is saying a lot when you consider it's one of those shows where characters die in their droves. It makes for a real sense of poignancy - you could easily do entire series about half the characters that killed off in Darker than Black and it's that strength of writing that really helps to carry the show.

They could easily have made them two-dimensional bit players, but they're not. Instead, they're (mostly) fleshed out people who feel like they could exist. Well, apart from the whole super-powers thing, obviously.


DOGS OAV

I actually started buying the DOGS manga recently. I've not read it yet, but I really liked the artwork, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I've therefore no idea how close these OAVs are to the original, but if they're anything like each other I'm thinking I'll enjoy the manga. However, I must admit the anime wasn't quite what I was expecting.

The thing that took me by surprise was the humour. The first episode was fairly serious, but the second was really quite amusing and I wasn't expecting that at all. I was also expecting more of a solid plot.

I guess with it only being four episodes (And four 15 minute episodes at that) that's a bit unfair, but I thought they'd try and include some kind of overarching plot across the four. Well, I say that - with my usual approach of watching only a sample of the episodes, maybe it turns out that there is more of a plot, but I certainly couldn't see any longer plot strand sin what I watched. It was more like a series of shorter stories involving the same characters, rather than an overall story.

Still, I enjoyed it, so let's hope the manga is as good and they pick this up for a full anime series.


Tears to Tiara

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this. I'm guessing I have seen some pics from the anime mags, but I've gotten so far behind with watching stuff that I have basically completely forgotten what they were.

When it started I have to admit I rolled my eyes a bit. Straight fantasy is generally not my thing and animes that are based on RPGs can get a bit tedious. They're also easy to spot a mile off - I could tell this was one before I even checked.

But then a while back I watched a show called Druaga that was really rather good, and that was a fantasy RPG game adaptation type anime too.

Tear to Tiara was also surprisingly good. Perhaps I've gone soft on fantasy? Or maybe it's more to do with the strength of the writing. One clever thing it's doing is to give you all the standard RPG tropes but to bugger about with them.

It's not quite subversion, but they're definitely tweaked enough to make them interesting. So in the first episode a "Demon King" god is resurrected, but he turns out to not really be evil/the bad guy (or at least not yet, from what I'd watched). So you've got a fairly standard fantasy element, but treated in a different-from-the-norm way.

It also has quite a bit of humour, and humour always goes a long way.

Oh, and it's interesting how bloody/violent it is as well - gore splatters all over the place. Not sure why, but it seems to add something to the show. They can be quite tepid these sorts of fantasies and it makes it a bit more... I dunno, weighty, for the violence to be more graphic.

the shock doctrine

This weeks film was...

Well, actually, this weeks film was going to be Domino, starring Keira Knightly, which I'd recorded off of Film4, but about half-way in it started breaking up and became unwatchable. Then I was going to watch Tales from Earthsea, which I'd also recorded off of Film4 (due to timings I've not had a rental DVD for the last two weekends), but that turned out to be a re-dub version and I didn't fancy it.

So I ended up deleting both of those and watching The Shock Doctrine (this actually meant that I yet again cleared my PVR down to empty, though I've a feeling that with the autumn and winter TV seasons approaching, this state of affairs won't last long).

I enjoyed The Shock Doctrine.

Though, to be fair , I'm both a bleeding heart liberal and socialist (maybe even communist) at heart.

If you're neither of those things then your mileage may vary.

However, I have to admit to some degree of confusion with the shock doctrine. The basic premise seems to be that some scientists did some work with electric shocks and/or sensory deprivation and this somehow lead to a bunch of economists deciding that the same thing would be a good idea for the economy.

Actually I don't think that's what it was saying at all, but that's kinda how one of its messages came across. What I actually think it was trying to do was draw a parallel - that a branch of economics called "shock economics" (Google it) can be seen to parallel this shock therapy.

The shock therapy was intended to use the electric shocks (not sure quite where the sensory deprivation came in, or, indeed, the CIA's torture bible came in) to blank out a person's personality, and in its place construct a new, better personality.

So it is with shock economics - some crisis allows a particular type of free market economics to be bullied through and forced upon a population while they're busy trying not to die in floods or be disappeared by a dodgy dictator or whatever.

Now here it made some good points and the evils that are totally free-market economies and unrestrained capitalism are things I too would whole-heartedly disagree with.

The problem was it got a bit confused. While it was making totally valid and good points, it also seemed to be joining the dots in a way that didn't quite make sense.

Which isn't to say I can see kinda what it was going for, it's just that I'm not sure that event a) could be quite so definitively proven to be the cause of event b). In other words, it seemed to be fining a big conspiracy where I'm not really sure there was one - not in the planned and organised way it was being suggested anyway.

What I think I'm going to do is buy the book it was based on and see if that makes more sense.

As for the film, I'd recommend it if you're already of a similar mind-frame as mentioned above, but if you're not, I don't think it would exactly convince you to change your mind.

payment... when?

Recently, I've been selling a fair old bit of stuff on e-bay.

Now, usually what happens with most auctions is that people pay really quickly. Even to the extent that perhaps two-thirds of my auctions the person pays on the day the auction ends - many within hours of it ending.

I guess people do this because they feel it's payment that seals the deal - I've paid you, so you can't go back on the deal. Which is fair enough, although technically it's the end of the auction when things become contractually binding.

However, it's always been the case that occasionally some people take a long time to pay.

This is a horrible pain in the arse.

I mean, it's okay if they take a while to pay because they're sending a cheque or postal orders. Indeed, I much prefer these payment methods because then paypal doesn't take an unreasonably large slice.

No, the problem ones are the people who clearly bid but don't actually have the money to-hand.

I've got one at the moment who even though the auction ended at the beginning of the month, couldn't pay me until the end of the month when he got paid. Why the hell is he even bidding if he can't afford to pay for it in a sensible timeframe?

What makes this one worse is that he also clearly hadn't factored in postage and when payment time came he couldn't actually pay anyway due to some problem or other.

I'll be seriously miffed if he ends up not paying at all.

But he's not the only one - I seem to have gotten a glut of them at the moment, to the extent that I'm owed well over £200. Considering a big motivator for me to sell is my need to realise capital, that's not a fun stat to have kicking about.

What I think isn't helping matters is my whole use of the "courier" option to get around the new (retarded) e-bay postage policy. For some reason, the system actually allows people to pay without the courier charge included.

Quite why it does this points to yet more retardedness on the part of e-bay, but has also flagged up to me that people aren't reading the item description.

I mean, I've gotten several messages asking me how much postage is for items when it's clearly stated down the bottom of the item description. So maybe it's not surprising some people who win are among those who've failed to read the description, but the point is I find that whole behaviour staggering.

Who bids on an item without reading the whole item description? It could literally say anything and you didn't bother reading it? Weird :/.

dubs

I think I mentioned last week that I started Darker Than Black.

Well, this weekend I had a veritable mini-anime fest and have now watched about two-thirds of it. That isn't to say this is a lot of anime. In the past I've watched entire series across a weekend and I'm sure many people consume anime at a much faster rate than that.

The point is that it represents a return to watching anime where recently I've been horribly flagging.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about in this blog. What I wanted to talk about was dubs. Or rather, re-dubs.

You see, as a rule I've always maintained that I prefer watching anime in subtitled form. That is, the original Japanese version with English subtitles, rather than the re-dubbing efforts of the American studios.

This was kinda my default position. I'd always at least sample the English re-dub, but it would tend to be a fairly quick thing. Maybe I'd watch one or two episodes, or flick over to see what the American Voice Actor sounded like compared to the Japanese ones.

I should make it clear that I'm not one of those people who hates all re-dubs on principle. Indeed, I've watched several dubs and found them to be better than the original Japanese and so continued watching the re-dub, rather than the original.

The one thing that has rankled me about re-dubs was when they change stuff. There's always a balancing act of course - the words spoken have to match the lip-flaps and, generally speaking, a literal translation of the Japanese won't do this.

I don't mind tweaks like that, to fit the lip flaps, but keeping the meaning and general jist. What I've had problems with is when lines are drastically changed or even added where they weren't there originally.

Two classic examples of these were the Generator Gawl dub and the dub for Kiki's Delivery Service. In Gen Gawl, right off the bat they complete change a piece of dialogue in the first scene to explain the entire plot, when part of the point of the show is that you don't really know what's going on until late on in the series. In Kiki's they add innumerable lines to try and "explain" things that, generally, don't need explaining.

I hate both of these things mainly because they treat the audience like they're simpletons.

Anyway, back to the point: I have a dirty confession to make.

I've basically been watching the re-dub of Darker than Black, rather than the original Japanese. Now it doesn't quite get up to the level of Gen Gawl and Kiki's with buggering about with stuff, but it has its moments. I spotted one definite example of an added line of dialogue that changed the meaning of a scene.

The dirty part is that I don't really care.

Maybe part of it's because DtB is one of those shows with quite dense/fast spoken dialogue that's difficult to read and maybe part of it is that the American VA performances are actually really rather good, but really I think it comes down to a degree of laziness on my part.

I guess I shouldn't beat myself up too much. After all, it's better that I'm watching some stuff, even in re-dub form, than not watching anything at all.