yawns

I was knackered last night.

I think it was because I've been pushing quite hard to watch some anime, but also I've been pretty busy at work.

The work I've been doing should have been really simple, because the idea is that there's some tools that have been built where you just click the button and it pretty much does what you want.

Unfortunately, while these did some of what was needed, they didn't work properly for all of it. And to make things more complicated the person who built the tools no longer works for RED. Plus he wrote them in a stats language that only he knows, so they're effectively unfixable by me.

This meant that I had to build some workaround tools that did the missing parts of the process. Now normally I quite enjoy this sort of problem solving, but I've been quite aware that the deadline for the week was "as soon as possible" and I don't like working to that sort of deadline, because it means you make mistakes because you're rushing.

So yeah, I went to bed pretty early last night.

I'm planning to call my Dad this weekend, but now that he has broadband I thought I'd e-mail him and let him know.

It's weird communicating with my dad via e-mail. It's like he has a completely different online personality.

It's difficult to explain - I guess it's because I know him as my dad, rather than as a person? That doesn't make much sense does it? But it's like when he communicates via e-mail he does so as him, the person, rather than him, my dad, whereas when I talk to him or see him, he's in dad mode.

I guess part of it is that he really does have a "dad mode". This might be a bit deep considering how frivolous this blog is, but my dad's dad mode involves a lot of telling you what to do.

I don't mean he's an authoritarian, but you know how you can have a conversation about stuff with a normal person and maybe if they've had a similar experience, they might offer some advice or just there thoughts? Well, when I talk to my dad he always comes at things from a "here's what you do" slant.

There's an old Harry Enfield character that had the catchphrase "you don't want to do it like that, you want to do it like this..." and my dad is a lot like that character. It's the difference between offering advice, or telling you what happened to them, compared to giving you instruction.

My dad always gives instruction, he never offers advice.

Or that is to say, that's what he does in dad mode. When communicating via e-mail he doesn't do that, and it's a bit disconcerting.

even more anime watching

I've been keeping up with the anime watching. I was a little afraid I'd stop, but I haven't - I've kept going. And I'm also keen to keep going.

I think one thing that's really helped was hacking back my telly watching. I'm kinda at a stage where I've nothing to watch except anime. Now normally the risk there would be that I'd play Anno instead.

But I've also had a help there too - for a little while I've had quite a lot of pain in my right shoulder. I don't think it's from over-use of the mouse as I'm fairly sure I strained it, but I am finding that even mouse use at work has been a bit uncomfortable, which has discouraged me from doing much computer wise in the evening.

Unfortunately, extended periods of staring at subtitles has made something else apparent to me - I really need some new glasses. I've been getting headaches and so I think my prescription has changed. But even if it hasn't I'm not surprised - my current glasses are so covered in scratches, that it's like looking through frosted glass.

I've known for a while they were getting bad, but as I say, staring at subtitles that are blurry really brings it home.

Anyway, I finished Mnemosyne last night.

Overall I enjoyed it. There were a few plot holes, as is normal with anime, but overall it did wrap up pretty well. I'm going to do a full review of it on trismugistus.com later, so I won't go into too many details.

However, I also managed to find the time to sample more fansubs, so here's some mini reviews:


Seikon No Qwaser

Seikon No Qwaser is about the power of boobs.

Well, it's not entirely about boobs. It's also one of those shounen series of the D-Grayman type, where the creator has just taken a bunch of random stuff and his favourite series and blended it together.

Here we have some vaguely Christian religious stuff, some alchemy, plenty of fighting, a bit of magic and mystical powers, lashings of fan-service and the aforementioned boobs. Or rather, more specifically, what I think is roughly breast feeding where 'soma' is sucked out of a ladies chesticles.

I say 'think', because the censorship is a bit on the heavy side - it cuts to some random images or the shots are framed weirdly so that you can't see anything. Recent shows with heavy fanservice have tended to use extreme shadows to hide stuff, although you could still roughly see what was going on - here you're really left to guess.

So plenty of fan-service, but you can't see it. Also, it sits on that side of the line where the fan-service is wrapped up into a story element that's so artificial it just becomes annoying. I think shows like Ikki Tousen, Queens' Blade or Kanokon work for me because they're happy to ladle in the fanservice and don't feel guilty about it.

Fan-service is great, so they show it. They don't come up with bizarre and non-sensensical plot elements as an excuse to have it. Well, okay, they do, I suppose, but they don't pretend the fan-service is incidental to that.

I was rather surprised that this was based on a manga, rather than a light novel. Light novels seem to be the home of hackneyed cliché and this is that sort of show.


Kuchu Buranko (trapeze)

Er... okay.

This was a bit of an odd one - both in terms of animation style and what it's about.

The animation was an odd mix of purely drawn stuff, CG and real-world stuff that was either filtered or possibly rotoscoped. It's also a complete riot of psychedelic colours and patterns and there's plenty of weird symbolism going on.

The story is equally odd, being as it focuses on a psychiatrist who appears to be a kid dressed in a clown suit. And the people who come to see him have very weird problems.

I dunno - I can't really explain it, other than to say it kinda works. And it works because it's so weird, but in a consistent way. The weirdness of the style actually complements and enhances the weirdness of story, which is perfectly matched by the weird style.


Umineko No Naku Kori Ni

I don't really know much about Higurashi: When they Cry. I've never seen any of the episodes or read the manga (I think there's a manga? I have a weird notion it's actually a video game originally). I've never even read any summaries of it or anything like that.

I've seen some images via the Japanese anime mags and as scans and wallpapers of course, and from those I kinda picked up it was a horror job, but other than that, nothing.

As such I didn't know what to expect from Umineko - was it a sequel or prequel or side story or basically unrelated? Obviously I can't answer that question, but my guess is that it's thematically similar. In other words, it's a horror, mystery job.

Often I don't like the anime and manga horrors - the disconnect for it to be an animated character makes them less effective. However, I quite liked this. I mean I wouldn't say I was scarred by it, but it looked quite interesting and worth a go.

I'm even tempted to pick up Higurashi and see what that's like.


Aoi Bungaku

Aoi translates to blue. Bungaku appears to be something akin to literature that's written in the form of a diary. I'm guessing, but I therefore think the title roughly translates as Blue Diaries - the blue possibly being a reference to mood as well as the colour blue.

Perhaps that's more a western spin - I don't know if the Japanese regard blue as being a particularly melancholy colour or if they have an expression equivalent to "feeling a bit blue." If they don't it's quite a coincidence, because melancholic diaries would probably be quite a good title for this series.

I only sampled the first two episodes and apparently the series actually adapts 6 classical Japanese literature pieces across it's 12 episodes. As such, I can only really talk about the first of these and overall I enjoyed it. It was pretty miserable though, from what I watched. I dunno, maybe it has a happy ending of some description, but the first two eps aren't exactly a barrel of laughs.

Which isn't a bad thing - it's good to have all sorts of moods in stuff.

dara o'briain talks funny: live in london

Something a little different for the DVD rental this week - a live comedy DVD.

Also, I've actually seen this before. Well, sorta. Basically, it's been on telly and I watched it then.

I could have therefore not bothered with the DVD, but I've found before that they tend to trim live comedy DVDs down when they show them on telly. Often they don't remove a lot, but it does mean you get some new gags when you watch the full DVD.

Plus in this case, I enjoyed the telly viewing enough that watching the DVD was still funny. And there was some bonus stuff too - nearly an extra hour of material recorded in Dublin in Ireland on the same tour and a "kinda of" commentary which also had David Mitchell on it.

I'd been aware of O'Briain for a while, but mainly form him appearing on panel shows and other comedy stuff on telly. He also does Mock the Week, which I've seen a few times, but never really got into, I have to admit. I mean, I always found him quite funny, but it was on QI I think that I found out he was from my 'neck of the woods' as it were.

I don't mean literally in the way that phrase is often used - I'm not Irish or of Irish descent or anything - I just mean that he studied Physics at University and is also a proper atheist.

I'm a physics person and a proper atheist too, and I was glad to see that this does make it into his stand-up material. If I'm honest it did get a little bit preachy at one point and it wasn't the funniest bit of the show, but it's good when people stand-up and get counted, as it were.

Anyway, the funniest stuff on the DVD is when he's talking to the audience. I guess it's quite old school stuff, but I've not seen it done in a while. What he essentially does is ask people in the audience about themselves and what they do and things like that.

Now sometimes that can be done in quite a nasty way, but here, although O'Briain does kinda take the piss on occasion, but it's in a gentle ribbing fashion, rather than being nasty.

There are also a few more general questions he puts out to the audience in general and he either riffs on the answers or again talks with a particular audience member.

Which isn't to say the whole show is on that improv vein, there's plenty of pre-prepared material. It's also clear he has a kind of 'bank' of stuff that he can go to if the bits from the audience go in a particular direction.

So yeah, it's a good mix of different types of funny stuff and I enjoyed it a great deal.

The extras are also nice. The Dublin stuff is a bit Irish-centric, so some of it just doesn't work - a bit like if you'd never seen Star Wars and he did a Star Wars gag. Still, plenty of it is more general and he does explain some of it, knowing the cameras are there.

The chat/commentary/drinking game with David Mitchell is also quite good. It's a bit random if I'm honest, but there's some funny points and O'Briain is happy to mock his own stuff, so it works well.

off the boil a bit

Last night I was re-reading the latest Air Gear volume (the latest translated into English this is) and it occurred to me that Oh! Great's (OG's) stuff has gone off the boil a bit.

As well as Air Gear, OG does a manga called Tenjho Tenge. They're both very much in a similar vein, although TenTen is a bit more adult that Air Gear. Both are essentially that speciality of boy's manga - fighting/tournament series.

I won't go into too much detail as I've reviewed both over at trismugistus.com, but basically TenTen is about people properly fighting fisticuffs style and Air Gear is about skating teams who use special powered skates called Air Treks.

There are still plenty of things I like about both series. The artwork is amazing - OG's stuff seems to just get better and better. Going along with that, the echhi fan-service is also pretty top notch. OG's girls are pretty damn hot and there's plenty to enjoy on that front.

Also the way he draws the fights and battles is good and generally speaking I enjoy the characters. I have to admit that slightly oddly I tend to prefer his supporting characters to the main characters, but then to some degree these are ensemble series.

The problem is that both appear to be disappearing up their own backsides.

In TenTen there was a part where it flashed back to show you the recent history of some of the characters. We're not talking far - a couple of years, back when they first joined the high school.

Now this was a double-edged sword - he seemed to get really carried away and this flashback went on for loads of volumes. So may that when we got back to the present it was like he'd gotten bored of his original story and decided to bugger about with it.

Unfortunately this meant a flashback even further to Samurai times. One of the big problems here was it was involving all sorts of new characters who'd never been explained to us before. I think the main problem is that many of these were characters from proper Japanese history, and, never having studied it, I got completely lost. Plus it involved a hell of a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo.

And unfortunately this story is essentially now that the manga is back to the modern day. So we've not only got the original threads and the first flashback threads, there's now this mystical mumbo-jumbo thread.

And it's this mystical mumbo-jumbo-ness that is also making Air Gear a bit naff too.

Part of the problem here is that I hate what I think of Dragonball-type stories. In these, a new, more powerful enemy keeps appearing and in order to beat them, the hero must learn a new technique or otherwise "level up". I find this sort of thing predictable and rather tedious.

Now fair enough, Ten Ten and Air Gear have both always had that sort of aspect to them and I've just lived with it.

The problem now is that OG has gotten a bit carried away with it all. So where previously the hero might have had to simply practice a lot to learn how to jump high and build up his muscles, now he has to learn something that's mumbo-jumbo-ish about, I dunno, controlling the flow of chi or walking on air pressure or some other nonsense that OG has read in a book and made weird.

Now if this was just once n a while it wouldn't be too bad, but it seems to have gotten to that Dragonball Z stage where it's happening all the damn time.

nearly good, but not quite

I actually watched some anime this weekend.

I think it's the first thing I've watched at the weekend since the star of the year. And it was on DVD and everything.

Before I get to excited I should perhaps say that it was only 2 episodes, but then to be fair the episodes each run about 50 minutes in length and it's a 6-episode series, so I'm a third of the way through.

The anime in question is Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne, which is a suitably odd title. As far as I can work out the daughters of Mnemosyne are the muses from ancient Greek mythology. The muses are kinda like figures that inspire art, I believe. To some extent the title does make a bit of sense with the anime, but that doesn't mean it's really about a Muse as such (well, that I know of so far).

I actually sampled Rin via fansub and enjoyed it so I bought it when it came out recently. I've actually been having a bit of a bad time with my sampling, as most of the stuff I've then gone on to watch hasn't been all that good.

I don't know if that's because I mentally hype them, or because the conditions of sampling affect the outcome. Generally speaking I've been watching the fansubs while I'm scanning, and that means I watch them in a very stop-start fashion. When you're scanning, you have to keep switching the pages, but each scan can take a couple of minutes, which is why fansubs are ideal. Unlike, say, a DVD fansubs stop and start instantly with no problems.

But does that make them a true sample? Is being broken up into bits helping some shows that are actually a bit dull seem more interesting?

I think the answer might be yes in some cases, but also I think, any sampling can be prone problems. I mean, I've encountered quite a few shows fansub-wise where I enjoyed the first ep and then further eps weren't so good, so if my sample stops and a similar thing happens, I've no way of knowing.

Plus a lot of it depends on mood - if you're catching a show when you're in the mood for that type of thing then you'll look on it more favourably than if you watch it when you're not in the mood.

Also, I've noticed quite a few shows I've sampled, liked and bought but not watched have gotten some good reviews, so I think ultimately the problem is more I happen to have picked the duffers to watch on DVD. In other words, the giant pile of anime contains plenty of gems, I just haven't hit any.

Well, until now - I really quite enjoyed the two eps of Rin I watched and I'd only watched the first one on fansub, so that's a really good sign.

I also made a special effort this weekend to watch the things I'd recorded and, more importantly, to prune out stuff from my recording schedule. I've actually managed to get it down to only about a dozen shows that I'm mainly watching as ongoing series. That bodes really well both for the week ahead and next weekend.

Plus I actually feel really in the mood for watching some anime, which if I'm honest I'm not sure I have for quite a while.