… now “Hare Hare Yukai:”

(Via .clue.)

Oh! Edo Rocket #5

Bears, too.

… that make them attracted to anime in the first place.

I have an untested theory that anime fans tend to be… by disposition not attached to the physical world. They get by with the education mill and then join the workforce – some of them may do extraordinarily well, some less so. Their level of participation in society at large tends to stop at earning their bread – they are just not the type who get anxious in not participating in the mating rituals, climbing the greasy pole etc. I think it is mostly because their mental life is too occupied with something else better than the real world has to offer. It is not that they are maladjusted – they tend to do this by choice.

If you haven’t finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet, don’t click here. (Language, etc., advisory.)

(While I’m on the topic of Pötterdämerung, let me point out that there is a Potter-related poll in the sidebar. There is a similar poll, worded differently, on my other weblog.)

Update: J.K. Rowling tells all (spoilers, spoilers, spoilers),

*****

You might have wondered where this site was this morning, and several other mornings recently. I wondered, too. Apparently, whenever there is emergency maintenance to be done at the hosting service, or an outage or a kernel panic, the server where my site is currently stored is always affected. I guess if you go with a cheap hosting plan you get cheap service. Still, none of the other inexpensive web hosts I’ve used were as unreliable, not even my original free GeoCities site years ago.

*****

I knew Steven has a powerful mind, but I never realized just how mighty he is. According the the “recent comments” widget in Avatar’s sidebar, “… Steven Den Beste ‘… has a temper and can toss building-shattering attack spells around.’” For your own safety, do not nitpick.

*****

While browsing around the Anime Tropes Wiki, I came across this:

When A Modest Proposal was written a lot of people thought it was actually talking about eating babies.

Some years back, a friend wanted to write a satirical letter-to-the-editor. I suggested that he read Swift’s dispassionate discussion to see how it’s done. My friend mentioned it to his literature professor. The professor said, “What do you want to read that for? It’s about eating babies!” He was the head of the honors program at Wichita State.

*****

It may be a while until Guchuko plushies are available. Until then, there’s this.

I’ve watched Shingu twice now, and it was as good the second time as the first, even though I knew all the twists. But I’m as puzzled as ever by the great mystery of Shingu: why has the series never received the attention it deserves? There has to be a reason beyond the lame opening. (The following is mildly spoilerish.)

(more…)

I really didn’t need to know about this and this.

When I first started fooling around with music on computers, one of my projects was to make my own primitive version of Switched-on Bach. I arranged Bach’s two- and three-part inventions and a few other things for software synths and sequencer. I recently unearthed the CD I recorded. It hasn’t aged well, but some of it doesn’t hurt my ears. I’ve uploaded some selections to my music site for the curious. (Click on the little speaker icons next to the download link to preview the tunes.)

When I made these recordings five years ago, I used as wide a variety of synthesizers as possible. After making the selections, I was surprised to realize that the majority of arrangements I found still listenable used only one synth, FMHeaven, an emulation of the Yamaha DX7.

I’ve sampled a number of mahou shoujo series during the past year or so. Most are not particularly good, and the transformation sequences often are all that are worth watching. On my video weblog I’ve posted a half-dozen clips of mahou shoujo transformations that caught my eye for some reason or another.

Yep.

… or Denno Renmei?

(It occurs to me that there are significant parallels between the two Yukos, and Rakka and Reki.)

I generally don’t have much interest in plush toys, but this one is appealing.

(Via Steven the palaeontologist.)

• The third most annoying detail of Shingu, after the opening and closing: the sub consistently uses “I could care less” when a character means the opposite.

• The greatest weakness of digital photography is that it is too easy. Back in ancient times, i.e., five years ago, after shooting a roll of film, I’d either have to develop the film myself or drop it off at the lab. Then I’d scan the prints and spend several minutes on each image cleaning up the scan and tweaking the curves before cropping and resizing it for the web. While not a difficult process, it was laborious enough that I selected only the best or most interesting images for my websites.¹

Nowadays, it is possible to take five hundred or a thousand pictures in an afternoon and upload them all, unedited, to a photo-sharing site in the evening. Too many kids with cameras do just that when they attend conventions. I like to see pictures of well-made costumes, but I don’t have the patience to plow through hundreds of mediocre images, fifteen to a slow-loading page.

• I hate MKV. About half the time I can play a Matroska video with one of the versions of VLC that runs on my ancient Mac,² but even then the subtitles are often screwed up and the video is jerky. (H264 doesn’t do me a damn bit of good, either.) Someone has finally subtitled the third and fourth episodes of Oh! Edo Rocket, and I can’t watch them. Grrr. (Maybe I can see them during lunch at work tomorrow.)³

• I dread all nifty new video software. That elegant new codec may work beautifully on a brand-new machine running Windows or Linux, but it chokes my old Mac (which I can’t afford to upgrade at this time).⁴ Memo to fansubbers: I don’t need high definition. XviD avi files 640 pixels wide are fine, and there is nothing wrong with a hard sub.

Update: I really hate MKV:

1. It’s amazing how complicated photography used to be, and how much good work was done in spite of the difficulties. In the 19th century, Matthew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivan worked on battlefields and in the wilderness with portable darkrooms to develop their glass negatives. The most elaborate large-format projects I’ve ever done are trivial in comparison. [↩]
2. The most recent versions don’t work on my setup because of a conflict with Quicktime [↩]
3. Don’t tell me to get MPlayer. I’ve tried installing it several times, but I’ve never been able to get it to work. [↩]
4. Even if the codec does work on my Mac, the people encoding the fansub need to know what they’re doing, too. While I can watch the first episode of Master of Epic easily with either VLC or Quicktime, the second works only in Quicktime for me. To watch the third at home, I have to run VLC and Quicktime simultaneously, the former for the sound, the latter for the video. [↩]