chilly

So this weekend I got my haircut.

I went for the shorter version, with the sides trimmed with trimmers, rather than a scissor cut all over, so it's pretty short (I normally get the trimmer haircut during summer). As such I can't work out whether it was proper cold this w/end or if it was just the sudden lack of hair.

I know I had the heating on all day Saturday, although it was only on at "1 bar" - which is half power - and then Sunday I only put it on in the evening. So it could well have been just chilly but with me feeling it more because of the lack of hair.

I also did a mega-shop on Saturday.

It was so big I used one of those proper full-size trolleys. Being single I never use those - but this time I had all sorts of big packs, like six-packs of pop and water and big value boxes of stuff. As I said, I was trying to get ahead of myself with Chrimbalo fast approaching. I've got loads of pasts and rice and stuff in the freezer now, so hopefully it should be more a job of making sure supplies don't get too low before then.

Then it was back to the gaff for cleaning duties. I thoroughly clean my bedsit every two-weeks. I think that's enough for a single person, but it does take me all day, especially with all the sundries like ironing and changing my towels and bins and stuff.

Anyway, the point is that I did that and all was going swimmingly - I was really cracking on and was going to have loads of time to do stuff, but I fell into a bit of a trap. Unfortunately, it took ages for the kitchen and bathroom floors to dry (it being cold) and I was totally stuck waiting while they did... so I thought I'd have a quick go on Civ3... and it kinda poxed up the whole rest of the weekend, so instead of doing more useful stuff, like scanning or walling or making new updates for my webstes, I basically just plaed Civ3. I didn't even really clear the backlog of TV I've got.

Bugger :(.

tiring

I think this week I've been continuing on with the whole being a bit tired from last week.

I was gallivanting around all over the shop last week, so it's hardly surprising, I guess. I have done a few things - most notably I've been working on a new wallpaper. It's nothing hugely complicated or clever - I'm basically just vectoring out a to love-ru scan - but it's been nice to work on a wall proper again. Hopefully I'll get a chance to finish it this weekend.

I've also been reading a Terry Pratchett book called 'Thud!'. I started reading it on the train goign up and coming back from the thing last Friday (I like to read on the train, but reading manga gets you funny looks).

It's a pretty good one - there have been a few of his recently that haven't quite hit the spot, but this one was good. The only sort of down-side to it is that it's another Sam Vimes and City Watch book. Which isn't to say I don't like his Sam Vimes and the Watch books - I liked this one - but I've been wishing he'd focus a bit more on some other stuff. A lot of the recent books seem to be all about the watch.

One of the problems of this is that Sam hates magic, so some Pratchett's best characters (the witches and wizards) are deliberately side-lined, if not excluded all together.

Still, this one was good and I decided to go ahead and buy the other more recent ones I'd been holding back on... though not until I make a significant dent in my pile of unread books.

Did a little scanning last night and watch one of the shows I have left over from the last season. I also have one I watched last week that I forgot to mention on the old blog:

• Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu - very good. I really wasn't expecting much of this - the images I'd seen for it in the magazines had all suggested it a fan-service heavy rom-com, but it turned out it was a bit more than that. The idea is that the girl in it is a school 'idol', but really she's a nerdy otaku and the male lead accidentally finds this out. Now that could have gone either way, but for the most part it's actually quite good, although there's a couple of elements I'm not sure about. But it's certainly better than I was expecting.
  
• Mahō Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora - awesome. Now this one was also a bit of a surprise. I'd seen some images from it and I was really not looking forward to it because of the style. It has almost photo-realistic backgrounds - I'm not sure f that's just because they've been painted that way or they've processed actual photos. Now, I'm really not a big fan of animation laid over the top of photos, but once I'd kinda adjusted to the style what was revealed was a lovely story underneath. If I was to say it had a sort of studio Ghibli feel to it I think you'll know what I mean.
  

Megadeth

I've been listening to a lot of Megadeth recently.

This has kinda been brought about by a "grand project" I've been attempting (more on that later), the upshot of which has meant I've had all my Megadeth CD on my MP3 player, and hence can listen at work.

I used to be really into music, back when I was in A-level and at University. Interestingly it's another demonstration of how I'm slightly obsessive. I'd buy lots of CDs from new bands and obscure bands and stuff.

My main music of choice was heavy metal - specifically thrash or speed metal, by bands like Metallica and Slayer. My favourite was always Megadeth, though. I still think Countdown to Extinction is the greatest album ever made.

The reason I kinda stopped was a triple whammy.

Firstly, once I graduated Uni my interest just generally faded. My peers were less into music than I was, so there were fewer people to talk about it with.

Second, I got back into anime and manga in a big way, so a heck of a lot of my time was spent watching and reading that. Plus of course, my money went on buying then, rather than CD.

But the other key part was that Megadeth ceased to be. My favourite band was no more, and my interest kinda evaporated with them.

The reason they stopped was that Dave Mustaine (Megadeth has always been his band) had a severe arm injury and the prognosis was that he would never play again.

However, unknown to me, as I wasn't really paying attention any more was that Dave got better and eventually several years later he released a new Megadeth album.

Now, whilst I wouldn't say I was really back into music as such I have been rediscovering Megadeth, as well as familiarising myself with their newer albums, and I've really been enjoying it.

Drowning in Telly

I've been a bit indiscriminate with my telly watching lately.

I was trying to hold back and be a bit more selective, but I've kinda been watching a random crap. Unfortunately, this also means I'm getting a sizeable back-log of unwatched shows. There are a good couple of shows I've got sat on the PVR waiting to be finished.

But on top of that I know at the end of this month Lost season 4 will be turning up (on DVD - I don't have satellite), plus I'm pretty sure the last season of Battlestar Galactica is knocking about sometime soon.

Lost season 4 will be one of those things that always show me up as a completely lazy bastard. When it arrives I'll almost certainly sit and watch it almost non-stop. It shows that, if I really wanted to, I could plough through all my back-logs of DVDs, manga, books, games, etc, it's just that I tend to distract myself with rubbish and do things half-arsed.

But then every so often something like Lost turns up and I go through it solidly with total dedication until it's finished - probably in less than a week. So if I can do that with Lost, why don't I do it with other stuff? As I say, it's because I'm a lazy bugger.

I've not watched any of the new Battlestar yet, but I've heard good things, so I thought I should check it out. Unfortunately I think that means I need to get through 4 seasons, a mini-series and a couple of films, I think. It's a lot of stuff, especially when I've got loads of other telly stuff to watch.

I think I'm going to have to rationalise a bit. Plus I know some things are coming to an end. For example, both the F1 and MotoGP seasons must be due to end soon, plus there's some short documentary things that are near the end.

The trick is to not start anything new.

mags, hair and shopping

This month's newtype, animage and animedia turned up yesterday.

Two of them - newtype and animage - are absolutely dripping with pictures from the new season of shows and I'm very impressed. The other, animedia, is actually kinda rubbish. I sometimes wonder why I keep buying it - it's always very poor in terms of scans. But then it's not like it's reprinting other scans - if I didn't get it I wouldn't see those images. Still, as the anime magazines go, it's definitely the worst one I get.

I'm in desperate need of a haircut - my hair is really rather long and I'm starting to get that uncomfortable sweaty thing I get when it gets this long. Of course that's also a factor of being morbidly obese, but that's no reason not to avoid a haircut.

Looks like I'll have a busy w/end as I'll have to get a haircut and go shopping on top of a bunch of stuff I've got to do anyway.

I should also start hoarding for Christmas. I know chrimbalo is a long way away, but I like to get stuff like fozen food, tins and pasta all hoarded up well in advance, because shopping around Christmas can be such a nightmare.

I remember once going to Sainsburys to get some food one Christmas and the queues were so long I didn't get to the front of queue before my lunch ended. I ended up having to buy some manky sarnis at the petrol station on the way home :/. So now I like to stock up the freezer and cupboards well in advance.

lazy weekend

Well I virtually did bugger all this last weekend - only the "life stuff" I can't get away without doing, like changing the sheets and putting the recycling out.

I just couldn't really be arsed - last week was so intense with visiting Dad, having to do a whole bid in three days and then going to the SPSS thing on Friday, I just felt like blowing the entire w/end on nothing in particular.

So what did I do with my time? I buggered about with Civ3... I know, I really shouldn't have as I've kinda rekindled my interest, but I didn't want to do anything that needed me to think particularly hard. By which I mean I didn't want to do anything 'new', like have to learn a new game or pay particular attention to something. With Civ3 I can almost put my brain on auto-pilot.

Speaking of the SPSS thing it was actually okay. I mean, it wasn't really hugely useful but then it wasn't utterly useless either. Bloody uncomfortable seats though. And they tried to cram way too much in - it ended very late.

giving it the hard sell

I've got to go to a thing tomorrow and basically it's going to be a company spending all day giving me the hard sell - as in trying to make me buy their product.

I'd really rather not go, but the problem is I don't want to seem overly negative. It's free and I think my boss thinks it's actually like a mini-course or something. I don't want to have that thing of me just pessimistically going "I don't want to go, it'll be rubbish." I worry about doing that as in I'm not a "team player" or something.

I mean, it may be useful, maybe I am being overly negative, but I've a feeling it won't be much fun. It also seems like a rather long day. It's up in London so I have to put up with the train journeys, so I doubt it'll really be any shorter than my normal work day.

some new artbooks

I know I kinda promised I wasn't gonna buy any more artbooks until I'd scanned the ones I've got, but I couldn't resist, I'm afraid.

One of the things I got was the latest edition of megami deluxe (volume 11 I think it is). It's the usual collection of cute girls from recent megami posters, with a few clean animedia spreads thrown in for good measure. It'll take the usual age to scan, I'm sure :/.

The other two books are a bit more interesting - they're both for Toshihiro Kawamoto, who was the character designer for things like Cowboy BeBop and Golden Boy. They're retrospective books on his career - each covers 10 years, from memory, and they're quite interesting.

It's one of those times I wish I could read Japanese as the commentary seems like it would be quite interesting. One of the big surprises for me was how much Gundam stuff he did in his early career.

I'm considering not scanning these books - they're really quite nice, thick books, of a high quality and it would be a shame to de-bind them. Also, most of the stuff in them is not big spreads, and it's almost a "sampler" book. Some shows have only one or two images.

I've a strong feeling I'll leave them as-is.

I also received the latest issue of normal megami while I was away. There's some lovely posters in it, so I'll need to scan that too.

I did some scanning last night, actually. I'm into the books that have a lot of pics in them. Last night was the Nagasarete Airantou artbook, and even though I scanned nearly 50 pages I only got half way through the book, so I'll finish it off tonight, I hope.

I also watched some fansubs while I scanned of course:

• World Destruction - okay. I gotta say this didn't really do much for me. I mean, it wasn't actively bad or anything, it's just it felt a little tired and cliched. It appears to be based on a sega video game property, so maybe that had some impact, but it's a show I had little interest in.

return of the tris

Well now, it's been a while since I posted on here. As mentioned that's because I've been away on holiday--I went down to Devon to visit my Dad, as it was his birthday last week.

It was a pretty expensive w/end all things considered. My new car has really great fuel economy. I can get around 50 miles per gallon if I "eco-drive" it, but of course if you're having to do around 400 miles, that still means you're going to use about 8 gallons, which is a full tank of petrol and so costs the best part of £40 or so :/.

Then there's eating on the road - unless you pack a lunch, which I can never be arsed to do, you'll inevitably have to get something to eat (the journey is the best part of 4 hours) and prices in rest stops are never cheap - I must have spent about £10, total.

Then there's the fact it's his birthday, so I spent about £35 or so on gifts. Plus I paid for a meal at the local restauranty-pub place, which was about £40.

So, all things considered that's about £125. Not the cheapest of week-ends :/.

And speaking of expensive, I've come back and seen some annoying news this morning. I've been buying the individual volumes for ADV's releases of Welcome to NHK and Red Garden.

However, a few months back, ADV essentially went tits-up. They've not actually folded, but, from what I've read, what happened was they made a dodgy move with a backer/investor in Japan. That all fell through and (for some reason) they lost all of the titles they'd licensed during that period.

Which included NHK and Red Garden.

But then, Funimation swooped to the rescue, picking up the licenses. Now it's taken them a while to catch up with stuff (they also picked up distribution of all the Geneon titles) and the announcement they've made is that they're releasing both series as collected volumes.

I must admit I was kinda expecting that as most all of the stuff they've released that they picked up has been in the form of collected volumes (sometimes as "part 1" and "part 2" sometimes as the full series) but it doesn't make it any less annoying.

I wouldn't mind so much if either series had only been at the 1 or 2 volume stage, but both were 1 volume away from completion. Factor into that the fact that the number of eps per disk always starts higher and then reduces and it means that in order to get the last 3 or 4 eps I have to not only buy several disks I've already got, but I have to pay a huge whack for just those last few eps.

It's pretty annoying, and pretty expensive too.

birthdays and long week-end

It's my Dad's birthday tomorrow, so I'm going down to visit him this w/end.

He lives in Devon and I live in Hampshire, so it's a good trek--about 3 or 4 hours, traffic depending.

I'm actually going down on Saturday and coming back on Monday, but I'm taking Thursday and Friday off as well so that I can get some personal stuff done as well.

It probably means the bloggage won't get any updates for a while, as I tend to write these first thing at work. So I'll see you next week (I dunno who I'm talking too--nobody actually reads this :/).

my little angel

Well, I finished that re-cg I was working on.

You can find the finished product over at AP here. It's not a whole lot different to the preview I posted in the previous blog, mainly because I got sick of doing the wings.

I think it's probably my best vector work ever. I've used every technique I have at my command to make it and I think the results are spectacular.

The only problem is I'm not sure I can do it justice in a wall. I had a few ideas, but I dunno, I think I may wimp out of actually walling it :(. What makes this a special shame is that I very much doubt anyone else will wall it either :(.

I made an appeal for someone to wall it in the notes on the AP page and I'm effectively repeating that appeal here, I guess. I'd love someone to wall it. I can also make a wingless version available if you want to make your own wings in your wall--just give me a shout over at AP.

Eventually the vector will go up on my own site of course, but that won't be for a while.

And speaking of my own sites I uploaded the last of the previous batch of updates this last w/end. It was a review of X--ostensibly the anime, but also the manga effectively. Check it out here.

I think I mentioned it before on the blog. I struggle with CLAMP stuff and I sometimes fear it's because I'm homophobic on some level. I don't think I am, but, for some reason I can never pin down, I never really quite like CLAMP's stuff. I tend to assume this is because of their story-telling, but I dunno, everyone else seems to love their stuff, so I wonder if there's not something more to it

Well, that was surprisingly deep for the old blog :/.

I've been working on some new site updates - I've got a bunch of reviews done as I mentioned before, but I like to keep things a bit more varied, which is where things like the vectors and walls come in. It should basically mean my sites will be updated into the New Year at least.

will it never end?

Well, I was a particularly good little boy this w/end and I did a shed load of scanning.

In fact, I actually did a count at the end of Sunday and I'd done a total of 189 scans. This was across 5 artbooks... One of which actually reminded me why the whole scanning thing had pretty much ground to a halt: of those 189 scans, it must have had about 89 of them. In one artbook.

I mean, that's great--everyone who buys artbooks loves it when they're jam-packed with pretty colour pictures--but it also kinda makes the book feel like a chore to scan. I mean, with a book like that, you can be going at it for 2 or 3 hours and then think to yourself "How am I doing? I must be nearly finished." Then you count up how many scans you've done and got left and you find you're only half way through :/.

Anyway, the good news is that the artbook pile is at least 1/3rd, if not half as big as it used to be.

I've been continuing in my game of anime catch-up while I've been scanning. I'm hopeful that if I can stick with the scanning during the next few weeks I can clear the entire backlog of series before the new (October) season's fansubs really get going.

This w/end I watched:

• Special A - very good. Another from the plethora of shoujo manga adaptations that seem to have exploded forth this season. But this one is distinctly different. I mean, it's got pretty-boy style art and the premise is daft, like most shoujo stuff, but this is more of a traditional romance job. And I was actually quite impressed. It's not really new or original as such--I've seen just about everything here before--but it's got gusto and puts a nice spin on the whole scenario. And it's pretty funny too.
  
• Tetsuwan Birdy Decode - okay/good. It's got an interesting premise, I'll give it that. And it does generally feel like it has the potential to be quite good--the bad-guys are quite interesting, especially. But I dunno, it just felt like it lacked something. I think maybe it's because the whole Birdy character wasn't really explored much at all. I only watched my usual 3 eps and maybe it gets a bit more involved later, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.
  
• Koihime†Musou - okay. It's basically the same idea as ikki tousen--taking the whole "romance of the three (four?) kingdoms" thing and replacing the characters with hot chicks. And hot chicks means boobs, jiggling and lots of baths, obviously. Yes, it's a fan-service show, as you can guess. I dunno--it didn't really do much for me other than the t&a, though.
  
• Natsume Yuujin-chou - awesome. Yujin-chou means "book of friends;" the friends in question being ayakashi, which are like spirits. It's based around that whole thing of knowing someone's "true name" gives you power over them. This was really very good indeed--it's the type of show that only anime does. Partly that's because it's routed in Eastern mystic traditions like I say, but also because it baulks all sorts of traditional story-telling structures and just does its own thing.
  

Maybe I've gone soft recently, but the above shows and a few others recently have kinda restored my faith in anime a bit. I mean, I never really lost my faith, but a little while ago we had Gurren Lagann and Code Geass in quick succession and I dunno, everything looked a little less good (and, possibly more importantly, like hoary old retreads) by comparison.

These shows have confirmed that they can still produce stuff that's interesting and different.

nody blackered

I'm bloody knackered.

Couple of nights ago I had a really broken sleep--it took me ages to get to sleep and then I was suddenly wide awake at 4'o'clock and I couldn't get back to sleep. I probably only got about 4 hours sleep, which is no where near enough. I need a good 7-8 hours a night and getting less really fucks me up for a good couple of days after.

I've not been helping myself, though. There's been a bit of a situation at work where I've not been able to start a piece of work that really needs to be done as soon as possible. As such, I've been doing all this prep work so that it's "ready to go" and it's been driving me a bit potty, tbh--I keep working myself round in loops :/.

I've also been getting really stuck into this new vector I've been working on. It's almost become an obsession and is really eating away what little spare time I have. But I'm literally only a few tweaks away from completing it. Here's a preview:



I've also been doing some scanning of a couple of artbooks (during the week--I know!) though they were deliberately ones with only a couple of good pics. I also sampled another of the new anime shows:

• Sekirei - goodish. I struggled a little with deciding whether I liked this or not. It's got a huge heap-load of fan-service, which is good, animation was pretty good too, but--and I feel weird when I have to say this about a fan-service show--the plot really needed to get a shift on. One of those I'd probably buy but then sell on.

The only plan I have for the weekend are to get my Dad a b'day present and card, as it's his birthday next week. I'll probably do some more scanning, though, as I feel a need to lift that particular "burden" from my shoulders.

i hate when that happens

I think I mentioned a little while back that I was starting to feel the old walling bug gripping me again.

I've been working on a Soul Eater wall after I found the series to me quite enjoyable the other week. It seemed to have some reasonable scans that I got some ideas for.

I've not really been experiencing wallers block--it's not so much that I've been stuck for ideas, it's more like the ideas I've been having have been way beyond my ability. Previously I'd probably have launched into them anyway, struggled for months and than been disappointed with the outcome.

Recently I've just been not starting.

But anyway, I saw some SE scans, got some ideas and started. I actually started with a simple one where I was basically just recreating the scan, just to get into the swing of things.

And someone's beaten me to the punch :(.

Basically, this wall by halcyontwilight is what I've been working on.

I mean, mine's different, but I've been doing the same idea--recreated the scan.

It kinda takes the momentum out of me continuing. I mean, one of the reasons I've often picked unpopular series to wall is because I basically know that no-one else will use the scan before me.

I'm not actually a very talented artist and have only a few skills when it comes to photoshop, so I'm very slow. That makes walling popular series dangerous, as there's a good chance someone will use the scan first.

Of course that doesn't stop me using it; it's just I always like to feel there's something exclusive or individual about my walls. I mean, heck, they're never actually any good, so at the least they can be unique on some level.

Ah well, I'll guess I'll finish it, but it's just annoying. Especially when the other person did such a good job :/.

rise of the wooden cgi 'actor'

So this last w/end I watched Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

As it goes it was a big improvement over the first film. Origin films are always tricky--the FF's origin especially is a bit on the ropey side, so they didn't have much to work with. Plus when you read the long-running comics the origin stuff is often quite different to how the characters are in their "steady state".

This film the FF where much more like the 'should be' as it were. The Thing and Johnny Storm especially were pretty much spot on.

Plus Jessica Alba is smoking hot (though I still think she looks weird with blonde hair--she should be less tanned to make it look better, I think).

Anyway, although it was better, the film was a little disappointing if I'm honest. The problem was the bad guys.

As the name suggests, the Silver Surfer was introduced, but also Galactus. Both were very disappointing.

The problem with Galactus was really that he was underused. Plus, being a reader of Marvel Comics I know what he's meant to look like so the way he was depicted here was just a slap in the face--he wasn't depicted. He was basically just a cloud.

The reason for that was made clear on the commentary tracks--they're doing a silver surfer film, so they wanted to leave it up to them how they depict Galactus.

Plus, as I say, he wasn't in it enough. He's there at the end trashing a planet, but they made the mistake of not showing us the planet's inhabitants--it was all done from space. That means there was nothing to really connect us to the danger.

The Silver Surfer looked spectacular and was in it plenty, but he was totally wooden. They said it was one of them virtual actors, but to me he actually looked like it was done with animatronics. His face was just totally blank throughout and he hardly moved.

self-pimpage: chika

Thought I'd do some shameless self-promotional type pimpage today :p.

This last w/end I uploaded a new vector of the main chika from Dragonaut - The Resonance. Can't remember her name for some reason, but you can dl a psd or jpg of the vector here.

You can also grab a png version over at AP here if that format suits you better.

I used the girl in two walls, which you can dl here. The walls aren't exactly spectacular, I have to admit. The planet became weirdly oversaturated with too bright colours. I did a version without it, but that's ended up looking a little plain, unfortunately.

I was working on some site updates over the w/end actually, although they were reviews, rather than walls or vectors.

I'm trying to get a bit more back into walling, etc (more on that later), but I've got 6 reviews set up as updates, plus one more left from the last batch.

Here's a weird statistic for you - once all those seven are up I will have a total of 60 reviews up on my site. That seems pretty impressive... well, to me at least :).

scannerific

Well, as I said on Friday I didn't have any specific plans, but a lot of options. I basically went for scanning and got through newtype, animedia and animage. Given that it's the cusp of a new season that meant there were loads of spreads and pics--I did over 150 scans in total, and my back could really feel it.

I also watched a few things while I was scanning:

• He is My Master: pretty good. It's not from the new season but an older show I dl'ed recently. I've read some of the manga and it was an interesting adaptation--they've tweaked it quite a bit (they being Gainax, I believe). But it's still chock full of fan-service, which can only be a good thing.
• Himitsu - Top Secret: very good. I was a bit surprised by this. I didn't know anything about it going in and was very pleasantly surprised. I've got to say the animation is a little ropey, but both the concept and story are very strong.
• Antique Bakery: very good. This I was also surprised about. I'd pegged this as yet another BL series (more on that below), but it wasn't really. I mean, it had elements of that in it, but there was more to it than that.
• Golgo 13: reasonable. Now this I did have expectations going into--those being that it would be utterly awful. And as far as that's concerned I was surprised... but that doesn't mean it was good, just that it wasn't awful. It was cheesy as hell, but I dunno, there was a certain appeal, I guess.

I've never really thought of myself as being anti-yaoi or Boy-Love or anything, but I must admit I've been rather amazed by the number of series that have been BL series (or at least have had elements of it) this last season (since April).

I dunno if it's just that I've ended up watching those ones first, but rather than the usual surfeit of high-school romantic comedies / harem and other shounen focused series, this last season we seem to be drowning in BL and shoujo.

On the one hand I'm glad about that--variety is the spice of life, even if generally BL doesn't appeal to me, but on the other hand it's a little annoying. I mean, why the sudden surge? It's like they're all trend chasing, which is a little disheartening.

choices, choices

I've no particular plans for the weekend, but a lot of options.

The only thing I do have to do is clean my bedsit and do a bunch of ironing. Otherwise I can do whatever.

There's certainly some scanning to do--newtype et al turned up at the beginning of the week, plus there's all the artbooks that need seeing to, as always. It never ends, scanning. I mean only the other day I was trawling through otaku.co.uk looking for new artbooks and I found about a dozen or so I'd like--I've not even cleared the 15 or so that I've got debound and waiting to go and I'm already planning my next purchases :/.

In the old days I would have just bought them there and then, but I think I'm learning a bit more discipline. Chopping up your credit cards has that effect on you using them :/.

Loads of anime to watch too, especially with the new season rapidly approaching. I think there's something like a dozen shows from this last season that I need to peruse--that's a good few hours there and would tie up well with the scanning.

Plus there's also all the anime I've bought. I really need to get into those piles so I can get e-baying again and generate some more 'bonus cash'.

Then there's all these reviews I've got written. I've got about 7 reviews stacked up and ready to go. By my reckoning that should take trismugistus.com the best part of the way to christmas alone.

Then there's my old scans - I should process them, get scan-city.org on track, as it's a total waste of money having it sat there doing nothing at all :/.

Plus on that front I think I might have caught a bit of a walling bug again--I've certainly got a good few projects in mind. My big stickler on walling has actually been vectoring. After that blog a while back where I was saying I really love it, the flip-side is I'm a bit of a perfectionist, which means it takes me bloody ages to finish a vector.

Which reminds me, I've been thinking about getting photoshop cs3. Well, actually I've been thinking about getting the full adobe "image product", which means photoshop, illustrate (which is for doing proper vectors) and some other programs. It's the best part of £1,000, though :/.

Plus I should finish off the Company of Heroes expansion. I should really tackle some more games, actually. Again, partly so I can e-bay some of them, but also because the chrimbalo season is approaching and there's quite a few new games I have on pre-order. Plus of course gaming is fun :).

collected volumes

I've been getting rather annoyed recently with the western anime companies.

The reason is that they keep putting out "collected volumes" almost immediately after releasing the last of the individual volumes. And guess what--the collected volumes are of course a lot cheaper than the individual volumes. I mean, they are different--the collected volumes are often thin packs and so have only one cover and no inserts, etc, but it's such a total pain in the arse.

The collected versions hack the resale potential of the individual volumes. I mean, if I buy 6 disks for £14 that's £84. Maybe you'd hope to resell at a third, so that's £28. Well if there's a collected set that's only £30 or so, then that's never going to happen, is it? You'll be lucky to clear £15, which is barely the cost of one disk.

I mean, collected volumes have always been a bit annoying for that affect, but they at least used to give it a year-or-so. Now, you can have just received the last volume and you can already buy the collected version. It gives you no opportunity to resell at a decent price.

But it actually looks like it's going in a good direction. Quite a few series are just being released in collected format to begin with--sometimes as half collections, with "part 1" and then "part 2" of a season. This is obviously a total win situation for us consumers. The collected volumes do represent excellent value for money and of course even if they're re-released as a complete collection the resale isn't so horribly impacted.

manga, manga everywhere

I'm a big fan of manga.

Manga are Japanese comic books, if you're not in the know. Manga is accepted in Japan in a way that comics aren't in the west, so it's basically okay to read manga over there, and it's very popular.

In fact, it's so popular that vast quantities of it are churned out every week. The format is different to American comics, where individual books have fairly small page counts and are published on their own. Manga comes out in huge collected volumes, with up to a dozen independent stories running at the same time in each of these books.

The books are themed, of course. So they may be aimed at young men (shounen) or young girls (shoujo). But, to some extent, the content within that varies. I mean, there are constraints, obviously, but it doesn't mean the mag that carries naruto is all about ninjas, although most its series are action oriented.

The schedules of manga can be quite punishing as I understand it--they're monthly or weekly. The weekly ones have fewer pages, but both schedules mean greater output is required from the artist than in the west, which is why they have assistants. The assistants take on similar roles to inkers and colourists (manga is black and white, so they use screen tone--probably digitally nowadays) in the west.

They also put out what are called tankobon, which are collected volumes of the particular series. These are what get translated and put out by the western companies, like Viz, Tokyopop or Dark Horse.

Anyway, the problem with these for me is that the companies are often playing catch-up when they first start putting out a series. So in Japan, the Tankobon basically might come out every six-months, or nine-months, or yearly or whatever. But for the western versions they almost never pick them up at the beginning.

Partly, or course, that's because manga in the west is still relatively knew, and with all that output in Japan you might license a series that's already git 17 tankobon out. That means you've a huge "backlog" of stuff to put out.

So they pump it out--one every other month isn't uncommon for the hit series. That can make it a pretty expensive undertaking for me.

It also means that at some point they will catch up with the Japanese manga. So, unless the series has already finished there comes a point where they suddenly change to a six/nine/twelve-month release schedule, which is then really frustrating.

What this means is that you end up with the weird situation where on my manga list I have around 20 series 'on the go'; but on my anime list I never have more than 3 or 4.

I just can't figure it

I'd never really been in to figures.

Figures (or figurines if you prefer) are sort of like half-way between dolls and models. A doll has moveable parts and is pretty much meant for playing with. A model has to be assembled, but once finished is more for decorative purposes.

A figurine doesn't have moveable parts and you don't assemble it. It's pre-moulded plastic and is assembled and painted at the factory. They're basically only for looking at.

Which is pretty much why I'd never been into them. I make models (well, I used to--I haven't done any actual modelling in years) and used to get dolls when I was a kid (well, actually, technically they're called action figures (Star Wars toys, basically) but really they're virtually the same thing--dolls for boys). But that whole "you just look at them" thing about figurines didn't really appeal.

I say didn't because I have loads of them now.

I dunno what it was that kick-started it. I think it was partly because I love Ugetsu Hakua's artwork so much, and especially his designs for BakuTen, that I wanted to get a couple of the figures. They were pretty cheap as well, I seem to remember.

Then it just sort of snowballed. I got those first figures from United Publications, but one of the sites I use the most (and would highly recommend), cd-japan, has a big section of its site devoted to figures. They also send out newsletters each week with all the pre-order figures and I dunno, I liked the BakuTen ones so much I just sort of bought more.

I like them all and I don't regret any of the purchases, but some of them are pretty expensive. Obviously, importing from Japan isn't cheap as such anyway, but some of the figures can be the best part of £100. That's a lot of money for something that you just sit and look at :/.

Anyway, I mention this because my latest purchase turned up last week--Ringo Noyamano from Air Gear dressed as the "Masked Hentai"--and it kinda occurred to me that this figure has sort of stepped past that line of displaying the figures and looking at them. What she's wearing is beyond "skimpy" and into pornographic (hence 'Masked Hentai' :/) so where can I put it that it wouldn't raise more than a few eyebrows?

Not that I specifically care what other people think about me, it's more to save them the embarrassment of seeing it :/.

row, row, fight da powah!

So the big plan for the w/end was to do lots of scanning, and for once things pretty much went as planned.

Over the w/end I'd estimate I did 150 scans. But here's the thing - I didn't scan any artbooks, as such. Obviously, the first thing I scanned was the new megami, but instead of then tackling artbooks I polished a few related things I needed to do.

One of them was scanning anime and manga covers. I do this partly because I sell a lot of things off on e-bay, but also, I like to use them as pics for my reviews over at trigsmugistus.com. There were quite a few to do. Over the last few weeks I've written reviews of Ai Yori Aoshi, GUNxSWORD, Witchblade, Girls Bravo (manga), Eiken (manga) and Genshiken (manga) and they all needs pics to accompany them, which meant scanning all the covers.

The other thing I scanned was megami deluxe 10. Megami deluxe is an odd mag - it's six-monthly and collects together all the posters in megami over the preceding months, plus a few things from animedia. So you're getting stuff you've already got and they're smaller, but they're also cleaner (i.e. there are no folds).

It's a huge undertaking scanning wise--there were around 80 pages to scan, so you can see why I didn't get any artbooks done as well.

Anyway, some long sessions scanning mean I've also been watching fansubs:

• Ikkitousen: Great Guardians - fairly good. Watch the 2nd ep (the fansubs seem to end there due to licensing) and it seems to continue being fairly decent. The decision to go with an original story seems to work better that when they're adapting the manga.
• Chocolate Underground - okay. I think this is a kid's show, actually, as it seems to have educational stuff in it about where chocolate is from, etc. It was fairly decent, but not hugely engaging.
• Chiko, Heiress of the Phantom Thief (Nijuu Mensou no Musume) - okay. I was only able to watch one episode of this, presumably due to licensing stuff, and it was also subbed in Italian (No, I don't speak Italian) :/. From what I saw it seemed okay, but as I say I couldn't really understand the dialogue, although the basics of what was happening were fairly clear.
• Gosenzosama Banbanzai! - this was awful. It's a really old show that happened to get some fansubs, but it was really poor. The problem was that the characters tended to stand still babbling on about crap for ten minutes at a time. And I really do mean ten minute stretches of them just standing there jabbering away and me falling asleep.
• Soul Eater - fairly good. I'd read somewhere this was just an animu version of Harry Potter. Now, I can't claim to be hugely familiar with Harry, having only seen the movies, but it didn't really seem that way to me. Overall, I'd probably buy it, tbh--some very funny stuff and the animation was really lovely.
• Slayers Revolution - good. More slayers, basically. Tonally it's the same stuff, character designs are unchanged. Voice actors seem different, but then I'm more used to the English dub actors, tbh. If you like other slayers stuff, you'll like this; and since I do, I did :).
• Penguin no Mondai - not very good, sorta. When I watched the first episode I initially thought I'd stumbled across a hidden gem. But after that first episode and an initial novelty factor, it really annoyed me. I think this might also have been a kids show, but what I do know is it's actually computer animation (it's filtered to make it look flat) and it didn't really look right.
  

But the other big thing I did--and the reason for the title of this entry--is I finished watching Tenden Toppa Gurren Lagann. Oh. My. God. What a truly awesome show this is. I must admit, the second 'arc' (episodes 10-18) had me a little worried as they were a bit all over the place, but this last 'arc' (episodes 19-27) was back to being totally awesome.

Row, row, fight da powah! indeed.

28 weeks later

So I watched 28 weeks later on rental last night, which is the sequel to 28 days later.

It was pretty good. There were some good scares and it was quite streamlined--there weren't many flat points. The ending especially was quite good, a nice sting that lent an irony to the rest of the film, although it was a little predictable.

It did sort of lack a point, though. In the first film, following the initial stuff there was a clear point of trying to escape to somewhere safe.

In this second one, I dunno, I guess there was a point, but it seemed a little random. The whole immunity of the mother thing almost seemed to be wrapped up in a suggestion that somehow she was somehow keeping the infection suppressed so that she could give it to her husband & family.

When you combine that with the husband's behaviour after infection (he seemed to be consciously targeting his kids), I dunno, it didn't chime well with the infection as established in the previous film as being about mindless rage. There was also almost a suggestion that the virus was somehow controlling them to act that way, or that the virus had come up with a grand plan to infect the world.

It was a little odd in that respect. A more traditional route to go might have been to have the US military conducting experiments on the infected to see if they could use them as weapons. I'd have bought that sort of plot-line, but the "rage family" thing didn't quite work for me. Still, it was quite good as a horror film.

so now it's winter?

I can't figure this weather out at all--summer seemed all over the place, with some days hot enough for me to break out the aircon, but a lot of rain and cold days too.

Now I think it's meant to be autumn, but it seems we've skipped that and gone straight to winter--the mornings are really dark and it's cold and rainy all the time. In fact, it's been so cold I've considered putting the heating on occasionally, but instead I've broken out the winter jumpers.

I've been catching up with a lot of telly this week. Some of the highlights have included "the hairy bakers" which is a play on words--the series is normally the hairy bikers, but this series has been about baking, which is a subject close to my heart.

I like the hairy bikers, but the show is an odd mix of stuff. It's basically a cookery show, but the way it's delivered is almost high camp, although the idea is that these are two big hairy blokes who ride motorcycles.

Another highlight has been "mutual friends". This is a comedy drama starring Alexander Armstrong and that skinny young fella off of Hustle as well as a bunch of other people who you don't initially recognise but then go "oh yeah, that's her/him off of...". I must admit I was expecting this to be utterly awful. I can't remember the last time I saw a comedy drama that was actually any good--it's been a while.

Which isn't to say mutual friends covers any new ground as such. It's not really innovative in terms of its subject matter, but the jokes are good and it's well done.

What else? Oh yeah, the other thing has been a series of shows around surgery. The quality of the shows has varied quite a bit, but they're mostly interesting. One thing I have liked about the shows is that they're fairly impartial in their outlook.

By that I mean they're not fawning over the doctors and they don't hesitate to make the point that maybe some new technique sounded like a good idea, but clearly wasn't (or was flawed) and several patients died.

They're not for the squeamish, though--the blood really flies in some of the shows.

I got the new megami last week and just got some e-mails saying newtype et al are on the way. I don't think that means I'll have them for the w/end, though. However, my big plan for the w/end is to do a lot of scanning, I think.

There's a bit of an ulterior motive to that, though--I'm way, way behind on the new anime season. It's getting to the stage where the external HDD I keep them on is nearly full and I really need to burn some off to DVD. Plus the new season of shows starts in October, which means there will be a flood of new fansubs in some six-weeks or so.

Extra, Extra!

Something else I did last w/end was properly finish off some of the anime I've been watching recently.

Slightly bizarrely, and I'm not sure I've ever been in this position before, I had loads of extras to plough through. I mean, that never happens with anime--extras generally just run to clean opening and closing credits.

Agent Aika R-16 had interviews with original Japanese cast members and director and character designed as well as interviews with the English dub actors.

Black Lagoon had a music video and an interview with the English dub casts (all a bit light for an entire separate disk :/).

But Witchblade had the most - interviews with the original Japanese cast members and a series of 20-minute-ish documentaries talking to the Top Cow people.

Not sure about Aika, but I'll definitely be reviewing the other too, although I may roll Black Lagoon up together with Second Barrage. I understand they're not really particularly 'distinct' as seasons--more like one of those full seasons done in two parts you get with anime. Plus it's several distinct individual story-lines anyway.

Plus Funimation are pumping Second Barrage out one disk a month so it makes sense. As I noted before, it's just the Geneon release, but distributed by Funimation. I'm also hopefully about to get my grubby mitts on the last part of Gurren Lagann too.

Funimation seems to be on the verge of taking over the world. I've mixed feelings about that--if it means I can get hold of anime DVDs then it has to be a good thing, but if I'm honest I've never been that big a fan of Funimation. They seem to be the company most responsible for buggered about translations, although they are also the company that often offers the most extras/freebies and best episode-per-disk count.

If they get the last Welcome to NHK and Red Garden disks out--and they're consistent with the old releases--then I may be swayed.

Black Dahlia

Watched Black Dahlia this last w/end - rental job.

I have to say, if I'm honest, I thought it was rubbish.

Now, the whole point of a crime-thriller/drama type thing is that it's about the murder(s). Yes, there will be personal stuff about the detectives or whatever, but the focus has to be on them trying to capture the murderer.

Black Dahlia seemed to be about anything but the murder. The whole plot just seemed to be tacked on to a bunch of hugely melodramatic (and rather implausible) relationships and shags there related. There were so many sub-plots and related goings-on it just lost all focus.

And what's worse is that most of these sub-plots were utterly irrelevant. I mean, a good sub-plot illuminates the main story in some way. These were all just useless.

The biggest crime it committed though was that in the 'last real' we get a whole series of ridiculous "plot twists" that just result in a totally bizarre explanation for the murder. I mean, seriously, it's just the most ludicrous solution ever. Especially since the body was mutilated--there's no real reason given for these mutilations, and that's got to be a part of the plot. If weird things are done to the body there has to be a reason given for them.

It's not real life, where bizarre stuff happens for no real reason, it's a story--you have to answer that stuff or you're taking the piss. And Black Dahlia was definitely taking the piss.

interweb? doesn't-ever-fucking-work-right-web more like

The internet here at work is shit.

It's impossible to go a week without the connection either grinding to halt, or just totally not working. And when it does work it's as slow as a geriatric snail.

I wouldn't mind (it's not like it's my connection) except I know the company pays a fortune for it and it rankles a bit knowing we pay so much for so very little.

Anyway, a fairly random w/end, if I'm honest. I'll do some more specific blog entries about some of the stuff later in the week, but I guess the main one following on from my last post is that I completed Company of Heroes.

My opinion is basically unchanged--pretty good game, but I felt a little disconnected. Interestingly I also started the sequel/expansion "Opposing Fronts" and this was much more personalised. You actually play one of the commanders and the briefings refer to you as that character, so I guess it must have been a common criticism.

Installing O.F. was a bit of a nightmare--there were something like six patches that it needed to download and install and all bar one of them was huge. Most were like 130-odd meg. Luckily my connection at home is a hell of a lot better than a t work so dl'ing files that size isn't hugely problematic.

But still, it was hugely frustrating. Mainly because why hadn't they rolled all the updates up into one patch? Maybe because it would have been nearly a gig, but I bet some of them overlapped.

Training Shmaining

My posting on here has been erratic this week--I've posted the posts I would have, but they've not really been one-a-day like usual.

The reason for that is because I have been working on a training course. And it's not been a whole lot of fun.

The idea is that one of the companies we do work for wants to get a better idea of how the work we do works... er, if you can unpick that sentence, more power to you :/. The training started off as a bit of a weird thing in the proposal we responded to. It was aimed at them essentially receiving enough training to do the work we do themselves.

That seemed like a very dumb idea to us. One of the fundamental points it ignores is that if you're not the sort of person who is adept at stats, then you're just never going to 'get it'.

I know in these ages of equality and stuff we're not supposed to say stuff like this, but the fundamental truth is that different people's brains are wired in different ways. And that means that some people will never be any good at some things. Sure, they might be able to work hard and gain some competency, but there's a huge gap between that and having a natural ability at something.

Anyway, it never quite panned out that way and so instead, we've given a mini "introductory" session. It's been hell putting it together--balancing elements of what the person will be able to grasp and actually covering some useful stuff.

And there were some worrying signs--asking of questions we'd actually answered in material we'd already covered, for example. But I think some of it sunk in.

It definitely put paid to any possible notion of me becoming a teacher. Not that I've ever wanted to be a teacher, but this confirmed it's definitely not something I have a natural affinity for.

And this joyous week of work has been capped off with me having to put myself forward for some SPSS seminar rubbish.

Basically, they're just a massive hard-sell for SPSS add-ons, but the boss seems to think it's going to be useful. Really I wanted to say 'no' to going, but I always worry about--being overly negative, not wanting to "advance" myself. Better to just grit my teeth and bear it and then say it was useless afterwards, I think.

Plus it's on a Friday, so it's not a bad day out of the office to have.

witche-brade-oh

Or witchblade if you're not hampered by Japanese phonetics :).

I finished watching this the other day. It was surprisingly good. It was yet another one of those shows I'd seen the first couple of eps of and then purchased blind.

I'm not sure it ever quite got to being great as there were a lot of niggles I had with the show. It's perfect review material from that point of view :).

What I would say, however, is it was extraordinarily good value for money. The disks all had slip-covers and booklets, there was a soundtrack free with the box set. Each disk also had several extras, and we're talking proper meaty extras--not just textless songs.

gamering-ism

I don't talk much in the old blog about gaming.

Well, there was that obsession with Civ3 a while back, but that was a separate issue. The main reason I don't talk about it is I don't do a lot of it.

I have a slightly love/hate relationship with gaming. There are a few reasons for that. One of the most important is that the types of games I enjoy tend to be those that you have to really get involved with to get the most out of.

I mainly play real-time strategy (RTS) and first-person shooters (FPS). Both of which generally have levels that last a long time. A good RTS level can take hours and so can an FPS level, especially if it's some way into the game and it's getting more difficult.

This means to really play the game you need a good few hours and I generally don't have that much free time kicking about.

Another reason is that I'm just not very good at games. It's not so much that I get annoyed with dying or anything, it's more that I'm just not very good. So I get shot a lot in FPS's for example, which if the game mechanics aren't kind means I die and then that means restarting.

Also, I can get annoyed at some of the bizarre attempts at realism. One of my "favourites" is the 'you can only carry two guns' thing. This just seems patently ridiculous to me--it' a game, just give me bigger pockets. I mean, how realistic is it that I can survive a shot-gun blast at point-blank range, and yet oh-no, I can only carry two guns.

I also worry slightly about gaming--I mean, is it a grown up activity or not? I mean, if I still played with toy trucks or Star Wars figures people would think I was werid right? So isn't playing computer games on a par with that? Shouldn't I just read a good book instead?

Anyway, this entry was a bit inspired because I spent most of Sunday gaming. I was playing Company of Heroes, which is an RTS.

I picked this up actually mainly because I understand that Dawn of War 2 will use the CoH game engine and I wanted to check it out.

I can't say I've been wonderfully enamoured. Not that it's a bad game or that it doesn't look gorgeous or play well, it's just I'm not really feeling it. I mean, I don't quite feel connected to it--there's no individual character that I can relate to.

The game uses an entire company of soldiers (Able company) and it's kind hard getting to feel that I have a vested stake in their activities. It's like the classic trick is to have 'hero' characters--leaders or special characters who stand out and give you that feeling, but here there aren't. If one unit gets mown down by machine guns, I just build another.

They also don't do the classic C&C trick of referring to me the player as "Commander" or anything. In fact the briefings are all phrased as "we need to do this stuff" not "you need to do this stuff" even though it's me that's controlling everything.

I just hope they include hero characters in DoW2 - the stuff I've seems to suggest they will.

who watches the watchers of the watchmen?

I finished reading Watchmen this last w/end.

I'm kinda unchanged in my opinions on Alan Moore, being that I'm not his biggest fan. I know a lot of people love his stuff, and more power to them, it's just for me he doesn't quite work.

The problem I find is he doesn't really seem to write comic books--he seems to write novellas that someone else then draws accompanying pictures for. They're very words and there's very little real reliance on visual story telling, which is really what comics are all about.

Really, the purest form of comics would have no speech at all. And it's like the decision in watchmen to not have sound effects--it's backwards, really to be a proper pure comics, s-fx should be the only text.

Which isn't to say that watchmen doesn't achieve what it set out to do--it's got a complex, interweaving plot and lots of sub-texts and all sorts of other clever things. I'm just not sure that makes it an entertaining comic book.

It's also far too dense as a 12-part comic book--really it's 24 part comic book (or novella, as a mentioned) that's been squeezed into 12 parts by the clever use of tiny panels.

I could go on with loads of other tiny quibbles, but those are my main feelings.

it's me, only not me

Have you ever searched for yourself on google?

There are two ways of doing this--you can search for your actual name or you can search for your username. Some people use a lot of different usernames (I've never quite seen why myself) so the second one is only really interesting if you keep the same username, like me.

I first did this when I got my first PC way back when. It was something of an eye opener. There's someone called Mark Sunderland who is a photographer (in the states, I think) and you can buy prints from him.

When I first discovered this I considered buying some of his stuff--it's not all that bad. I decided against it in the end, but it would have been kinda cool.

The search I tend to do is on my standard username, trismugistus. My website trismugistus.com always used to be the top result, but when I checked recently it had actually slipped to the second page. This seemed a little bizarre to me and makes me wonder quite how google does its rankings.

I mean, there's plenty of stuff on trismugistus.com and of course when I post in forums, etc, my website is in my sig, so it should all be interrelated. However, it occurs to me that as I've added more sites to my 'family' I've had to shrink the link. That is, it often says "trigs.com" or similar nowadays, so maybe that affects how google sees it all?

Anyway, one of the great things about google of course is you can also do image searches and that really does bring up a bizarre set of results. One of the things that's most interesting about my search results is all the scans that have been stolen from me. People don't change the filenames and since they got them from AP, that's why it finds them.

AP used to have actual stats visible--number of page views, number of dls, that sort of thing, but a while back they removed them. Now there's just the "popularity" ranking available via the gallery.

They've always had that too, and some of my stuff was up in the first ten pages, but I was always left wondering if people actually like my stuff. The google image results thing tends to suggest they kinda did :).

ripportage

There's a siterip of AP going about on 4han. I won't link to it--you can go there and find it if such things are of interest to you.

I've discussed before how horribly ungrateful people are about the efforts scanners go to, so I won't really focus on that, but as someone who used to "work" for AP I thought I'd discuss a couple of the weirder things.

It's strange sometimes the things people get in their heads. I mean, if you look at some of the things being posted, a lot of it is just plain wrong. As in factually wrong--I don't mean regarding people's opinions, I guess people are entitled to those, but some of the things people think just aren't correct.

What puzzles me is how people get these inaccurate opinions. It's like, when I was a mod there, I wrote the FAQ. Now, I don't mean it was all entirely my original work, a lot of it was cobbled together from other sources or the existing rules, but the point is I compiled it together.

So I know what it said. It hasn't really been updated in ages and so is inaccurate in a few places, but a lot of the stuff is still valid.

Therefore, simply reading the FAQ would give people the proper information. And yet they don't--and I'm not just talking about the 4chan thing any more, I mean in general.

One of the most frustrating and annoying things about the job was all the people that would basically try to say "no, I haven't broken the rules!" when clearly they had, it's just they hadn't even bothered to read the damn rules.

It's like, in terms of the AP rip, there's a lot of rage towards bantam as the demon that owns AP. I've not spoken to him about it, but I am fairly sure he doesn't really give a rat's arse about the rip. AP has never laid claim to owning anything on its site--it just needs some mechanisms for slowing down its bandwidth usage so that he doesn't get bankrupted.

And the fundamental point is that surely it's his site--he can do what he wants with it. I know I had my emo thing a while back and said some unfortunate things at the end, but in the end I backed down because, when I'd calmed down, I remembered that fact.

But one of the weirdest things is what the rip represents. All it really shows is how successful AP has become. It's the king of the heap and so everyone's focus is on it.

So the reality is it's actually a massive compliment :/.

mu of the moment

So yesterday I mentioned having watched Aegis of Uruk via download, so that also means I got a bunch of scanning done. Mostly this was the three outstanding anime mags, but I did also tackle a couple of artbooks.

I've sort of come to the realisation that part of the reason I've let the anime books pile up is because I started scanning them at 600dpi. To put this into context it took me the same time to scan two entire magazines at 400dpi as it did to scan one artbook at 600dpi. That's around 90 images compared to around 30. I think I may rationalise it a bit more--use the same criteria of just the pics I really like at 600dpi that I do for the mags. Anyway, the point of this post is that as well as watching the entirety of aegis of Uruk, I also watched a few of the old fansubs too:

• Kaiba - Hmm, I've a feeling this is brilliant. But unfortunately, I just didn't like it. There were a couple of reasons for that. First off, the art style was a real turn-off. If you've ever seen The Beatles Yellow Submarine film, or are familiar with some of the 60's psychedelic inspired art, it's like that, and it does nothing for me. But also, a lot of the story is quite abstract. This is why I suspect it's brilliant, but unfortunately I must admit I'm too stupid to work some of it out, so it just didn't do much for me.
• Monochrome Factor - This was, well, if not rubbish, then just plain dull. It just seemed like a rehash of bunch of shounen standards. It does appear to have a gay character in it, though, so I wasn't entirely sure who this was quite aimed--certainly not people who like well told stories (zing!). The third ep especially was terribly dull and horribly drawn out.
• Ikkitousen: Great Guardians - I've only seen the one ep, but I actually kinda liked it. The reason the previous animated versions of ikki tousen have failed is they've taken themselves too seriously. I know the English manga translation is all fucked up, but you can still tell that Yuji Shiozaki knows his manga is really all just about tits and arse. Great Guardians seems like it might finally have cottoned on to the same idea.

it's all legal like

Well, it's post weekend of doom.

Quite a good weekend in all--I got quite a lot done. I'm not sure I can be arsed to detail it all at the moment, but something of notable interest is that I did my first legal anime download.

I joined bost tv a while back when it was announced they were going to be one of the people carrying gonzo's stuff. The reason I went with bost is because it seemed pointless going for the youtube--I'm really not a fan of youtube at all--and crunchyroll just made my head hurt when I tried to work out how to use it.

Despite all that I was still a little nervous about taking the plunge. My fears were: what if I couldn't pay properly? or it needed some weird codec or other requirement and I couldn't get it to work? or the rental period expired before I got to watch it? or what if the dls didn't work properly? or it was horribly slow? or what happens if my connection flakes out?

What I decided to do was go for the Tower of Druage: The Aegis of Uruk. This seemed to be a short 12-episode show and it isn't quite in my normal preferred genres (i.e. it's a fantasy show) so it wouldn't hugely bother me if it went tits up.

The 12 ep show thing didn't quite work out--turns out it's one of those half season long shows that are really a full length season chopped into two parts for production reasons and it ends on a massive cliff-hanger.

But in terms of the actual viewing of the show it was very much a success.

First off, you can buy individual episodes or a season pass--I bought a season pass as they work out as slightly better value and it seems a little pointless just watching one or two eps.

The season pass basically does what it says--it lets you watch all the episodes in the season. But the key is you can still watch them when you want to. So if you go on holiday or something the pass doesn't expire. The episodes you've already watched do expire, because you're actually just "renting" them.

You rent them for 14 days and you can watch them as many times as you want in that period. That alleviated my concerns over my connection flaking out (which it did do several times) since I could just restart.

In terms of the streaming, the eps are actually broken up like DVD chapters--there's a gonzo splash then the opening credits, part 1, part 2, closing credits and next episode preview and you can skip through them or use the slider to move about.

Obviously, as it's streaming, you need to wait sometimes, but I found the streaming speed pretty quick. Basically, I found that if I start the thing going and then pause it and give it five or ten minutes to build up a buffer then I could watch pretty much un-interrupted and skip the credits.

So when watching eps in a row you can just start ep 1 and half way through open the link to ep 2. If you start and pause ep 2 then by the time you finish ep1, ep2 will be all streamed and you can watch it interrupted, plus start ep3 going in the same way.

Also, and I'm not entirely sure if this is just for season pass customers, you can properly dl the episodes. The dl is intended for ipods and PSPs, but the PSP one is just a regular mp4 file so you can watch it on your PC. I've no idea (yet) if these 'expire' in the same way as the streaming rental.

It's all pretty high quality files--they're not huge res like a lot of fansubs are, but they're a superior product to fansubs (e.g. image quality is better--there's no artifacting, the sound never goes out of sink and the translation is a proper translation, not the broken English you tend to get in fansubs).

As I say, I watched all of the Aegis of Uruk. It was actually pretty good--there's a slightly weird weird "meta" level to it, but as fantasy stuff goes it was okay. But here's the key: if I'd seen it via fansubs it wouldn't have gone on my list of DVDs to buy, so really Gonzo or anybody else wouldn't have seen a penny. But with the streaming, they do--it's a lot less per ep, obviously, but it's better than nothing, surely?

And, while I don't think I'll ever be a real fan of dl content over DVDs, at least if this is the way it all goes then I have found I can live with it.

weekend of dooooooooom

Well, not really.

I've yet another day off work tomorrow and Monday is one of the UK's few Bank Holidays so I've got a mega four-day weekend.

I'm not sure whether to put together a mega-plan or just play it by ear. There's quite a few things I want to do, but also I could do with just sitting down and chilling, tbh. One thing I definitely need to do is get a haircut and I need to pick some dry-cleaning up, so I will do those on Friday and I could turn it into something of a proper shopping trip--I need some new trainers, for example. Hmm.

Trouble is, after my whole going a bit nuts buying animu the other day I've now gone a bit nuts buying manga so I don't want to spend too much money. At least I had an excuse with the animu (ADV and Geneon going tits up). Here I really haven't, as the series I've ordered aren't old or going out of print or anything.

Speaking of Geneon--Black Lagoon disk1 turned up last night. I got the special edition with the steelcase book (as I did for the 1st Barrage) and guess what--it's got Geneon's name plastered all over it. Even though it's now being released by Funimation.

I'm guessing I had the wrong end of the stick a little. Basically, what I think has happened is that Funimation have simply taken over the distribution rights for the series that Geneon had on the go. Newer licences I guess may be treated differently, but at least it means good continuity of releases. I'd also guess that the ADV shows they picked up may be a little different as ADV properly lost the rights to those shows.

Oh, and also, the cover of the steelcase features photos of a model dressed as Revy, and man is it hawt.

making breakthrough

Watched me some more Gurren Lagann last night. The show just gets better and better is about all I can really say. Where I thought Godannar was like mecha anime given a massive dose of viagra, Gurren Lagann is like mecha anime given a massive does of testosterone.

Since I decided a while ago to tweak how my novel, MitL, is structured, I've been doing some work on it. What I've decided is to have the more traditional sci-fi elements regarding the "brain in the box" be contained in a prologue and epilogue. The main story then will be the two strands and the prologue and epilogue act to give those stories the other level.

That all sounds more complicated than it is, but basically I've been working on the prologue and it's all proving a bit of a 'mare. I've been trying to "workshop" the piece to some degree using urbis. I've been putting it up, getting crit and then reworking it.

The problem is that what I was really aiming at when I started was a stark, narrative style to the piece. Also, I wanted it to be quite short and to the point--the idea is that it's a mysterious little taster that is only really made clear in the prologue. The problem is that that's not really how you're supposed to write fiction nowadays.

What you're supposed to do is "show don't tell". Which is to say instead of having "He lost his brother at an early age--cancer, the big C. It coloured the rest of his formative years." You instead have proper scenes showing these things.

But it's a novel--if you expand everything up into scenes, you get an immense tome that documents every minutiae of your character lives. So there has to be compromise. If the brother's death is important to the story (and it sounds like it is) then it should be expanded on. If not, then telling is more okay, though obviously still not great.

This is especially true for sci-fi, where you get lots of "accoutrements". If I simply want there to be something that has anti-gravity capability jerry-rigged to it in my story then do I need to have an entire set of scenes devoted to its construction? Or do I just tell you that the something has "jerry-rigged small anti-gravity pods strapped to the sides"?

Well, unless it's key to the story, it's the latter, obviously--because really the above is more like description for sci-fi. It's more like me describing the surroundings than it is me 'telling' you the story. It's not really violating show don't tell.

various viewings

Watched the rest of Black Lagoon: First Barrage last night.

It really is very good. I can always tell by how quickly I get through it--some shows take me weeks and I can't watch more than a couple of ep's at a time. BL I've watched the whole thing in two evenings of 6 ep's each. One for a review in future I think, though obviously now it's a Funimation release, but one would hope they're essentially just re-releasing, rather than fiddling with it.

The animation is of a very high standard, which does seem to be one of the advantages of going the 12-episode seasons route. I wish the Japanese audio was 5.1, but there's an English 5.1 up-mix. The extras are a little wimpy for a whole separate disk, but I can understand why they went that route--3 releases but the steelcase book has 4 DVD slots.

One of the bizarre things is that just as Geneon packed up they were starting to release some really good stuff. Geneon always used to be stuck in that mode of squeezing as much cash out of the user as possible. 8 disk releases used to be their standard, with no extras and no frills. But just before the end they seemed to be releasing stuff with fewer disks, putting in plenty of extras, doing nice packs like the steelbooks.

I'm not sure if it's ironic or just annoying :/.

Last night I also watched "Britain from Above" which is a new short documentary series presented by Andrew Marr. It's quite entertaining if a little "documentary lite". There also weren't quite as many nice map views with stuff overlayed on them this time. But then it was mainly about agriculture and farm use, so it's not surprising there wasn't so much to show in that fashion.

Over the w/end I watched Pan's Labyrinth. It's a Spanish language film by Guillermo Del Toro. Apparently Del Toro likes to mix it up--he does one big Hollywood film (Hellboy, for example) and then one independent Spanish language film (I think he's actually Mexican, but I'm not sure).

It was good, but unfortunately it was a bit of a hype-victim for me. I'd heard quite a lot that it was amazing and read some good reviews and so it had that difficult job of living up to the hype in my head. Even so it was good--perhaps a smidge too long, but not exhaustingly so.

I'm guessing it was released as a 2-disker (I watched it on rental) as the extras were thin on the ground on this disk--just a commentary by Del Toro. But that's not a bad thing--Del Toro gives good commentary on the films of his I've seen before.

didn't quite do it

Bit of a weird weekend--had lots planned, but didn't quite do those specific things, but did closely related stuff instead.

I was planning to scan all the new mags, but haven't scanned any of them. But I did do some scanning--I scanned the DVD covers for Genshiken, Ai Yori Aoshi and GUNxSWORD, which I'll use for reviews and stuff. Also, I went through all my artbooks and unglued them so that I can scan them, which is a very tedious and time consuming process (you heat the spines with an iron to melt the glue and then pull out the pages).

I'd planned to phone my Dad, which I did, but due to circumstances I had to cut the call short and didn't quite get to talk to him about everything I'd wanted. Plus he had some questions about my freeview box, so that took most of the time up.

I'd also planned to go out to a particular pub for a few beers, and I did go out, but ended up around a friends place and was driving so didn't have any beers.

I'd planned to get a haircut, but due to needing to collect a parcel from Farnham Post Office and also wanting to send a couple of e-bay parcels I didn't get the chance. Plus it occurred to me I've got next Friday off, so I can just do it then.

The parcel I picked up had Gurren Lagann set 2 in it, but also had Aika R-16: Virgin Missions in it. As I'd mentioned before I'd planned to watch Black Lagoon this w/end. I was actually planning to cane it and watch the whole 1st season, but instead I watched the original Aika that I remembered I had still to watch as well as R-16.

Surprisingly, both shows turned out to be pretty good. The original is pretty old, so the animation is not the greatest, but what it does have--action, comedy and fan-service are there in spades. R-16 is meant to be a prequal, but it actually kinda doesn't quite make sense with the continuity, but it's no biggy as the show is also more of the same--action, comedy and fan-service.

I did also get stuck into Black Lagoon as well, though, and am now half way through. It's very good, though I've a feeling I still prefer the manga, but there's not much in it.

Dunno--I know I did stuff, but because I'm a list-oriented person because the stuff I didn't wasn't quite to plan it makes it feel like I've not achieved anything.

It's like, I put a load of stuff on e-bay too (I've been doing so much e-baying recently I'm almost out of stuff to sell :/) but because I put it all on in one day and (I now realise) a bit early in the day for my usual target audience, it doesn't quite feel like I've done it properly.

It only hurts when I...

I've done something to my left foot.

I don't know what I've done, but it hurts when I walk. It's basically the 'ball' of my foot (I dunno if that's the proper word--it's the forward part before your toes where your weight goes when you take a step). When I apply too much pressure, or pressure at a weird angle, like twisting on it, it's really quite painful.

It's a little sporadic though--it'll 'go' and walking is agony, but otherwise it's okay. It's a bit like as if two tendons are pushing against each other--so long as I don't put too much weight on it they're okay, but past a certain point and they become inflamed.

It started about a week ago and I've been trying to stay off it as much as I can, but then I'm not exactly active anyway, so it's not much different :/. Mainly I'm walking with a bit of a deliberate limp to avoid it.

I got a USB hub recently--it's been an absolute pain in the arse swapping cables over (and also kinda dodgy because of where I have to lean to get at them) so I figured a hub was the answer.

It's a 7 port one and it's pretty good. It seems a little slow when transferring data to my external HDDs, but nothing disastrous and it's not like I use the HDDs 24/7 or anything.

I've also finished off GUNxSWORD. The ending is satisfying--I'm often let down by anime endings, but this one was pretty good. It did leave quite a few things hanging though, as if they ran out of time a bit, but the main story was properly resolved.

Now I need to decide what to watch next. I was actually making something of a dent in my unwatched 'mu pile, but unfortunately I've been on a spending splurge following my loan coming through (I know, I know, but some of it is due to practicality--with ADV and Geneon going tits up I wanted to get some of their shows before they're completely sold out).

I should actually get Gurren Lagann Disk2 (actually disks 3&4--they're coming out in double packs) and the box for Code Geass (which has 2 DVDs in, I believe) this month, so I'll be watching them. But also, I believe funimation's release of Black Lagoon: Second Barrage is out this month too. I guess that means sitting down and properly watching the first season is the order of the day then :).

creepy crawleys

I seem to be infested with spiders this summer.

Everywhere I turn there's one hanging in the corner of the room. As soon as I set something down leaning against a wall a spider seems to set up a home in the crack that's formed.

Now, I'm not really arachnophobic, as such. I mean, I'll admit I'm not the hugest fan of bugs in general. But with spiders, I only don't like them when they're fairly large or they have fat bodies.

A lot of it's to do with all the legs--which is why I don't like bugs in general--but also when you get those spiders with the big fat bodies, I dunno, it weirds me out for some reason.

Luckily the ones I seem to get are more of the tiny body with long spindly legs variety, so I don't mind them too much. I get sick of having to clean up all the cobwebs, though.

And I also once heard that we each swallow several spiders (a year? in our lives?) while we sleep--occassionally they fall off of the roof (that's how they end up in the bath) and occassionally their fall happens to coincide with your open mouth. That's why I tend to pick them up and chuck them out the window when I find them in my living room/bedroom area.

Forgot to mention--newtype, animedia and animage turned up on Monday. Less than a week again, I believe. I really am impressed with cd-japan. Hopefully I'll get them scanned before the w/end, but if not I'll definitely do them then.

e-bay

I use e-bay quite a lot.

Generally with the restricted living arrangements I have, it's difficult to keep a lot of stuff. But I tend to buy a lot of stuff.

Throwing it away is a (heart-breaking) last resort. Car Boot sales are a waste of a day, plus you have to sell everything at, like 5p, which is just pointless. That means using e-bay is the only real option.

It's a lot better than it was--back when I started, getting your stuff up was like pushing red hot needles underneath your own fingernails--distinctly painful, and very slow going. Nowadays it's a lot smoother in that regard.

But it doesn't mean it's without its problems. People have totally unrealistic ideas about things.

Often is the time I've put things on at a reasonable "buy it now" price and loads of people will watch it, but no-one will actually buy. Then I'll put it on as a much lower "bid" type auction, and guess what? It'll often go for what I was asking the week before, if not slightly more.

Then there's postage. People seem to have no idea how much it actually costs to send something through the post.

The Royal Mail is expensive, unless your item is heavy. Since most of what I sell is single books and DVDs it makes it look really expensive.

But that's not me charging a lot--it's because those are the Royal Mail's prices. People have no idea. I mean all they need to do is just go an look at the Royal Mail website--it's all explained on there.

It's like padded envelopes--I add a pound to cover these. Because, averaged out, that's what they cost. Padded envelopes are not cheap--especially the really big ones, which are way more than £1. Then you've sellotape, pens to write the address on, the carpark charge so I can get into the post office. But people just don't seem to get this.

But my biggest gripe is paypal.

I have no problems with e-bay charging fees or taking a cut of what an item goes for. That's how auction houses work. They've got a big site that presumably costs a lot to maintain and run and develop, etc. I've no real problems there.

What I object to is that paypal charge a small fortune for doing almost nothing whatsoever. My banks don't even charge me for transferring money and they're a bunch of bandits--how the hell can paypal justify it? Plus, they're just part of e-bay who are already raking in a small fortune.

But you almost can't do auctions without offering paypal. I've tried with just postal order and personnel cheque, but those auctions never go anywhere.

It's almost like racketeering.

a home for my scans

Well, something of a new chapter in the continuing saga of my scans.

I discovered that you can buy extra space from google. This blog is actually hosted by google and I really like the interface and it randomly occurred to me that I should set up a blog for scan city.

I'd discovered that when you upload pictures to your blog, they go into something called picasa web folders, also a google product. Then I discoverd you could buy the extra space and a plan formed that I could buy a wodge and upload my magazine scans there. That way, I can still use the main scan-city site to host my artbook scans as I'd originally planned, but it means my magazine scans aren't 'going to waste' (not that they ever were--just after the whole AP thing they'd been left without a home).

So I've set it up here - scan-city blog. It took a little experimentation last night to get things to work as I'd hoped. What I hadn't appreciated is that pics you upload via the blog get resized to be a max of 1600 pixels high. But if you upload directly to picasa they can be a lot bigger, so I had to work all that out.

Also, what I don't want to do is upload my originals. Generally, I actually scan at 400ddpi and occasionally do 600dpi too. I also save as very high quality jpegs, making the individual files quite monster.

Also, things like posters I often take multiple angles of. My scanner is A3, but Japanese mags are generally slightly larger than A4, so when they do a 2-page size poster it's a little bigger than A3. That means as well as doing a full-page scan, if it's a series I like or an image I like, I often scan it in two halves as well.

But I don't want all of them on there, or at those sorts of sizes, so it means I'm going to have to go through and re-save everything. This also gives me the opportunity to add a "micro sig" I came up with to identify the scans as mine.

I'm kinda used to this--it's similar to what I used to do for upload to AP--but of course I never kept the versions I uploaded to AP (my thinking at the time was why bother--I've got bigger versions already :/) so it means over a years worth of stuff to plough through :(.

I've also decided to combine the spreads from now on, rather than do individual pages like they are for that first Animage that's up there at the moment. It means I can make the files smaller, there's physically less files to upload and I also think it looks better.

I also scanned the new megami this w/end and I actually scanned some other stuff too--a freebie book and 'groundwork of gurren lagann'. Not huge things with too many scans, but hopefully it sets a trend.

Nia book turned up on Friday--it's nice, although I'm not really into loli, so it's not quite in the same league as the yoko book was. I've also ordered a second copy of Geass Rebels following the successful completion of some e-bay auctions.

Obviously doing some scanning means I had a chance to watch some new 'mu:

• Allison & Lillia. Watched a couple more and my opinion is unchanged. It's really very good indeed. The story itself is quest like in nature, but it's also reminiscent of something like Kino's Journey. In fact, if you imagine Kino's, but with a central purpose as well as less reliance on the abstract and allegorical, you're pretty much there.
  
• Naisho no Tsubomi. Hmm, if I admit I thought this was good, it also kinda marks me out as a weirdo. This is what I could describe as a "coming of age" slice of life story. As in literally--it's about a girl changing into a young woman if you see what I mean. She enters puberty, gets a first crush on a boy, discovers what pregnancy is really all about (her mum). Really then this is more aimed at young teenage girls, but it's actually pretty well done--it has a strong air of reality to it and is sensitively done.
  
• Amatsuki. This was really very good. After something of a spate of Shounen Ai type shows I'd thought that this may be another, but it isn't at all really. It's about a kid that seems to have been time jumped back to the Edo period and has spirits and magic and stuff. That's not a very good sell, but I actually really enjoyed it--another stand out show of the season for me.
  
• xxxHOLIC - Kei. Kinda okay, I guess. I'm disadvantaged that I've not seen the original and I believe this is also somehow tied into Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, which I'm also unfamiliar with. I've an upcoming review of X where I kinda discuss how I don't quite "get" CLAMP, so I'll leave it there, I guess.
  

I've also got a long way into GUNxSWORD (which turns out has nothing to do with Gonzo as I said in a previous blog--dunno how I got that idea :/). It really is a cracking show. Definitely one for a future review.

What else? Oh yeah--having spent a fortune on cleaning products the other w/end I brought them to bear this w/end, and everything (well, most everything) is all sparkly fresh again.