Only my life is chaotic

It’s been a while since I’ve done a silly quiz. Here’s one that’s currently floating around the internet.

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Ranger/Cleric (4th/3rd Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-13
Dexterity-15
Constitution-13
Intelligence-18
Wisdom-16
Charisma-13

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Primary Class:
Rangers are skilled stalkers and hunters who make their home in the woods. Their martial skill is nearly the equal of the fighter, but they lack the latter’s dedication to the craft of fighting. Instead, the ranger focuses his skills and training on a specific enemy a type of creature he bears a vengeful grudge against and hunts above all others. Rangers often accept the role of protector, aiding those who live in or travel through the woods. His skills allow him to move quietly and stick to the shadows, especially in natural settings, and he also has special knowledge of certain types of creatures. Finally, an experienced ranger has such a tie to nature that he can actually draw on natural power to cast divine spells, much as a druid does, and like a druid he is often accompanied by animal companions. A ranger’s Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Secondary Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron’s vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity’s domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric’s Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

There were many “A or B” questions to which the accurate responses would have been “both” or “neither,” but those choices were not available. Other questions were problematic in other ways. The detailed results indicate that I’m as much a “lawful good elf” as a “neutral good human.” And contrary to the results, I ain’t got no charisma at all.

This was a revised version of an earlier quiz by “NeppyMan.” That one, which I suspect was more accurate, found me to be a “Lawful Good Elf Bard Ranger.” A truly accurate quiz would have determined that I am half elf and half Martian, or an Abh with hair dyed brown.

(Believe it or not, I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons. However, I spent enough time among D&D fanatics during my years in the SCA that I have a modest understanding of the game.)

Odds and ends

Little Arkansas River

After two summers of desert heat, we now have a summer of tropical monsoon rain. The Little Arkansas River, which runs north, west and south of my place, is the highest it’s been in years. More rain is predicted.

*****

It occurs to me that comparing Stella etc. to Girls und Panzer is misguided. Yura has more in common with such painfully self-conscious characters as Inu x Boku SS‘s Ririchiyo and Tsuritama‘s Yuki than with with Miho, and the story thus far has been more about Yura learning to play well with others than about girls playing with guns.

*****

Ryutaro Nakamura, who directed Serial Experiments Lain and Kino’s Journey, recently died. Jonathan Clements’ appreciation is here.

*****

Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita‘s Mediator should beware the dangers of undead hair.

*****

I generally consider “critic” to be a subset of the category “pompous fool.” Here’s an example why.

*****

ISON is approaching.

*****

One of my pictures was yesterday’s Botany Photo of the Day.

Notes, mostly off-key

The first round of the Anime Music Tournament is underway. The organizers have made all 256 nominated tunes available in a convenient two-gigabyte download. I’ve been working my way through it. Since they usually picked the full-length version of each song, there’s just a bit less that twenty hours of music. It’s going to take me a while to listen it all.

A few comments on what I’ve heard so far:

1. Is this the best anime has to offer? There are some good tunes, but the majority are forgettable.

2. About half the songs sound alike. You can tell them apart if you listen carefully: song A has a disco-ish rhythm section, song B has a particularly breathy singer; song C has piano and strings; song D has distorted guitar and strings; etc. But the similarities are greater than the differences. They’re all based on the same template, all feature nasal girl singers at the upper end of their ranges, all are overarranged and overproduced, and they all blur together in my mind.

3. Masumi Itou, by virtue of her superior songwriting skills, has earned the right to sing in a little-girl voice if she wants to. All other female vocalists need to learn to use their full vocal ranges and sing full-out.

4. Japan needs altos, baritones and basses.

5. I forbid all use of string sections, real or sampled, in popular music. Synth pads, too. After listening to hours of gooey music, it takes something like The Rodeo Carburettor to blast the slime out of my ears.

6. What the hell is Yes doing here? “Roundabout” is an old favorite, and I prefer it to the vast majority of the other nominees, but it’s an “anime” song only by the loosest possible definition. (Beware: the track included in the big download skips once near the end. If you have another recording — and you should — listen to that instead.) ((I have no problem with including such numbers as “Duvet” or “The Sore Feet Song,” since they are generally unknown outside of anime, but Yes has an enormous world-wide audience.)) ((Let me offer a deal to the tournament organizers: “Roundabout” can remain in the running if they can explicate the lyrics.))

7. Those who only know “The Sore Feet Song” from watching Mushishi are in for a surprise.

Collector’s item

Tsukimi

So Steven is looking for girls with red half-rim glasses? Here’s one he might have missed: Tsukimi, from Princess Jellyfish. ((The frames look brownish here, but elsewhere they’re clearly red.)) (It’s a good show, often very funny, that badly needs a second season, but I suspect that it’s not quite to Steven’s taste.)

Miscellaneous links

It’s taken years, but Miku is at last coming to the Mac.

What can you say about nothing? Quite a bit, actually.

Orwell is not the only writer who comes to mind when I read the news these days.

Iwo Jima, one of the less hospitable places on earth, might not be around much longer. Also, Kyushu is an exceptionally violent place, geologically speaking.

Anthony Weiner and his ilk would do well to consider the example of John Profumo.

Briefly noted

Stella 9

Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C3, is Gainax’s shameless attempt to capture the Girls und Panzer audience. It’s slightly more realistic: set in a high school that’s larger than some colleges, the girls fight with airguns rather than tanks. The first episode wasn’t bad, and the animators pointedly did not show any pantsu. I’ll probably continue watching. Update: In the second episode, one of the characters steps out of the shower wearing just a towel, and later bounces a bit; this is a Gainax show, after all. Still, it’s mild as fanservice goes. Stella etc. promises to be a pleasant entertainment featuring a bunch of (mostly) non-neurotic eccentrics, but it’s not another GuP.

By the way, if after watching Girls und Panzer you’ve got the yen to drive a tank, you can, if you’re in Georgia. (Via Borepatch.)

The Brickmuppet endured the entire first episode of Watamote and wondered where the punch line was. I only made it half-way through; this just isn’t my kind of humor.

Thomas McDonald has begun a series of posts on Tarot cards from a Catholic perspective. When I learned that il sole penetra le illusioni was a mahou shoujo series based on Tarot decks, I was curious to see how much the writers got right (very little). The show looks like it’s intended to be a dark fantasy in the vein of Madoka Magica, but between the bad botany and the middle-aged transvestite, the staff didn’t quite nail it. Still, parts of the first episode were odd enough to be intriguing, and I might watch the second episode. Or I might not.

The first episode of the current iteration of Genshiken was largely about a girl who was actually a boy. Never mind.

More screencaps from the first episode of Stella with the very long title below the fold.

Continue reading “Briefly noted”

Today’s quotes

Anthony Sacramone:

I was taken particularly aback by the first five minutes of the film [Pacific Rim]. It shows very neatly and succinctly how we in the First World do have this knack for turning even the worst catastrophes, the most vicious wars, the most horrific losses of life, into forms of entertainment. Call it our penchant for commercializing everything, or a neat psychological trick for distancing ourselves emotionally and psychologically from the evils of this world, we can turn even global genocide into a game show, a video game, or a set of collectibles.

Michael F. Bishop:

Norman is said to have his eyes on the Tory leadership; like Disraeli before him, he climbs the greasy pole with pen in hand. A product of Eton and Oxford, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he combines politics and scholarship in a manner more common in Westminster than Washington. Boris Johnson, mayor of London and a rival in the race for Downing Street, dashes off witty works of popular history with ease; the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has authored polished biographies of Pitt and Wilberforce. There is no equivalent in America; books by politicians here are almost invariably bland, ghostwritten policy tracts or memoirs. This impoverishes our politics—historical ignorance and inarticulacy preclude statesmanship. ((But is there any statemanship in England today?))

Ace:

Al Sharpton will interview Rachel Jeantel tonight.
The closed captioning guy just hanged himself. He left this note: “Avenge me.”

Bonus quote — Avatar:

You guys are thinking too small. For that kind of capital, robot catgirl maids could be a reality!

Bach times 377

Amazon.com is currently offering the complete harpsichord works of Bach, performed by Martin Galling, for 99 cents. This includes both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the partitas and French and English suites, and much else. Even if the recordings are not to your taste, you’re only risking a dollar for fifteen hours of music.

The performances, to my non-expert ears, are acceptable but not outstanding. Here’s Galling’s rendition of the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from the first book:


Compare it to Malcolm Hamilton’s


and Takahiro Sonoda’s


Galling is a plodder. I’m being unfair — he usually picks better tempos than he does in that prelude — but there is a reason why he is seldom mentioned in the same breath as Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Still, Galling generally does play Bach well enough to give pleasure, and the set is a good deal. You can indeed find better recordings of Bach, but they’ll cost you much more than one dollar.

For the heck of it, I found MIDI files of the prelude and fugue and ran them through a synthesized harpsichord on my computer:

Musical interlude

Just a few music videos that caught my ear recently.

Tim and Myles Thompson will be at Winfield this year.

Probably as painless an introduction to twelve-tone music as you’ll ever find. I’m less enthused by the philosophy, though — Josh calls it “rank nominalism.”

I experimented with some highly-simplified twelve tone techniques some years back. The results were not pretty. For the morbidly curious, “Twelve Toes” was probably the least unsuccessful.

Useful advice …

Missing: Porterhouse Blue

… should you ever find yourself in a South African jail, from Tom Sharpe:

“In prison they told me: ‘Make friends with the murderers,’” he told Britain’s Sunday Express. “‘Everybody else is afraid of them so if you’re with them the others leave you alone.’ That’s what I did. Good tip.”

Tom Sharpe, one of the funniest writers of the 20th century, died last month.

Born in 1928, he was the son of a British Nazi:

Years later, when Tom was a famous writer, he was invited to address a Jewish women’s group and began his talk with the memorable line, “You have probably not often been addressed by someone whose chief ambition, at age 15, was to be an SS officer.” Tom’s dad was the Ealing and Acton member of The Link (a pro-Nazi organisation) and also a member of the Nordic League. A loyal Nazi, he said he hated Jews “in the sense that I hate all corruption”. When the war began the family was on the run from the Special Branch, moving house time after time, always haunted by the fear that the minister would be consigned to the Isle of Man along with other Mosleyites. Tom’s father died in 1944, just too soon to see the film of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Belsen which utterly devastated Tom; he realised that everything he had been brought up to believe had been wrong and that Nazism was pure evil.

Continue reading “Useful advice …”

Free noisemakers

My old computer died last month. The hard drives are intact, so I didn’t lose any files. However, several frequently-used applications will not run on my middle-aged laptop, some because of technical incompatibilities, some because of tyrannical DRM. I spent a little time recently searching for freeware to substitute for missing soft synths, and I found a few.

Spicy Guitar

Spicy Guitar is a pretty good physically-modeled acoustic guitar. In a mix with with a pinch of reverb, it can pass for the real thing, and it’s a lot cheaper than the AAS Strum Acoustic.

Continue reading “Free noisemakers”

Exploding princesses, etc.

(Via Darwin Catholic.)

*****

Siegfried — Game of Thrones version

An unexpected Dragonball fan:

In my ballet training, I had no enemy but myself. Especially when I would watch myself in the mirror in the studio and execute my ballet routines, I often envisioned myself as Son-Goku struggling with the enemy. When I would fail, my hair would look darker; when I would triumph over a seemingly impossible task, my hair would appear blonder than it is.
Whenever people watch me dance, I hope they see the character I’m trying to impersonate onstage. I might be the noble prince from Swan Lake or the Prodigal Son; I might be a beggar or a soldier. In reality, I am just a geek owing everything I can do to an ape alien named Son-Goku.

*****

The Man Who Was Thursday was one of my favorite books years ago. I thought it was a fantasy, but apparently it is one of the most realistic spy novels ever written.

*****

Presenting George Herriman and Krazy Kat, with appearances by archie and mehitabel.

*****

Killer trees? Poisons aside, I don’t think so. Killer bromeliads? Perhaps.

*****

What is the worst Bob Dylan song? I’m tempted to say all of them — Zimmerman, to my ears, has a modest talent for doggerel and none whatsoever for music — but some of his songs are worse than others. I’ll nominate one that’s a bit obscure nowadays (though not obscure enough), “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.”

Well, up the stairs ran Frankie Lee
With a soulful bounding leap
And foaming at the mouth
He began to make his midnight creep
For sixteen nights and days he raved
But on the seventeenth he burst
Into the arms of Judas Priest
Which is where he died of thirst

If you perceive anything in the lyrics beyond the clanging rhyme, you need to detox.