Category: Grumbling and muttering

Unbooked

No more fox

So Mozilla is cracking down on thoughtcrime. I need to find an alternative to Firefox that runs on my Mac. ((Safari remains my primary browser, but there are some operations that Firefox does better, and I’ve kept both handy.)) I experimented with several yesterday, and while they mostly worked tolerably well for my purposes, none were astonishing — except for Opera. WTF? Am I missing something? What kind of browser doesn’t allow you to use bookmarks?! ((Yeah, there is a “bookmark bar,” but it’s useless for storing more than half a dozen sites.)) I have a large, organized and frequently edited collection of bookmarks, which I need. Why the hell is this joke is being recommended as a replacement for Firefox?

For what it’s worth, Chrome seems to be the least annoying. However, it’s part of Google, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with that particular borg than absolutely necessary.

Update: Show Mozilla your frowny face.

Ken the Brickmuppet recommends Epic.

Comparatives

Bad: 106°F (41°C).

Worse: Riding your bicycle home from work in 106°F.

Worser: Discovering that the air conditioner has quit working.

Worser still Rotten: Finding that the landlord is not answering the phone.

I am sitting in front of a fan, dripping sweat. I am not happy.

Update: The air conditioner decided to start working again. This is fortunate; the predicted high for tomorrow is 113°.

Oh yeah, anime

I used to write a lot about Japanese animation. I haven’t lately, partly because my obsessions vary with time, partly because I haven’t had opportunity to watch much of anything at all, animated or not. If nothing else goes wrong, ((While my luck isn’t Brickmuppet bad, the past 18 months have not been pleasant.)) there is a good chance that I will finally have my place back to myself again very soon, Then I will finally watch the rest of Dog Days and some more of Hyouge Mono, and see what else might be worth my time.

I don’t know if I will be able to afford maintaining an interest in anime, though. Katanagatari, a show high on my to-buy list, is offered in two Blue Ray/DVD “premium editions,” each containing half the series. These sets are available as “weekly specials” at RightStuf for $52 each. Katanagatari is good, but it’s not $100+ good. It wasn’t a Suzumiya Haruhi-level megahit, and I doubt that it will ever be released in an affordable DVD-only edition. Ditto Arakawa Under the Bridge, a series on my to-investigate list. Such prices seem to be what we can expect for most interesting series licensed during the next several years, until Blue Ray discs drive DVDs out entirely. When that happens, this might be what to expect. If so — well, good bye, anime.

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In other anime news, Dennou Coil remains unlicensed in America.

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Feline stroke of the week:

Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist ….

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You can read the grim details and take the quiz yourself, if you dare, here.

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Fear the Death Note.

Prelude to a sleepless night

I’d like to meet the man who invented the subwoofer. I don’t want to shake his hand; I want to slug him in the solar plexus. It is hard to think of any other innovation that has done as much to make life in the 21st century needlessly unpleasant. I feel lousy tonight, and I’d like to go to bed early. However, the inhabitants of my neighborhood believe that it is their inalienable right to party all night long on weekends, and that includes playing bad music loudly. I cannot not listen to music, no matter how stupid, and low bass notes can penetrate ten feet of concrete. Sometimes the neighbors will turn the garbage down or off if I ask them, but I have to get out bed and dress first, and when I get back home, it can be an hour before I’m drowsy enough to think about sleep again.

I’ve observed many times that the worse the music, the more loudly it is played. My hypothesis is that the chief pleasure in playing rap, techno ((“Disco for robots”)) and the like lies not in what minimal musical virtues the recordings might have — you’d have to be pretty damned stupid to find such drivel intellectually or aesthetically interesting — but in tormenting those who cannot escape the exaggerated, mindless beat.

Good news, bad news

The good news: There’s more Marie & Gali translated. Wasurenai is up to episode 27. That leaves 13 episodes to go of the first series, plus the 30 of Version 2.0.

Marika, a magenta-haired middle school student who favors EGL fashions and has no interest in science, finds herself marooned in Galihabara, an isolated town populated by famous scientists. They’re a little different there than they are in history books. Galileo is a buffoonish gonk, Newton is a snooty bishounen who only has eyes for his apple, Darwin is a robot, (John Ambrose) Fleming says “Yo!” a lot, etc. Fortunately for Marika, Madame Curie is relatively sane and provides her a place to stay.

Each of the five-minute episodes illustrates, sorta, a scientific principle. In the episode from which the screen captures above come, Archimedes, Hertz and Galileo compete in a fishing tournament. Through various ridiculous strategies, they catch enough fish and other aquatic creatures to capsize their boat, leaving them up lost at sea in a lifeboat with Marika. The episode ends with a brief lecture on bouyancy from Archimedes.

How much of the science kids watching the show will retain, I can’t say. It doesn’t really matter that much, though. Marie & Gali subordinates didacticism to broad, goofy humor, to its benefit.

The bad news: Captain Planet, the live-action movie. Please excuse me while I throw up.

500 errors

I’m tired of seeing this

and this

whenever I want to edit a post or check statistics. I plan to move my websites elsewhere soon. WordPress currently recommends Bluehost, DreamHost, MediaTemple and Laughing Squid. Does anyone have any experience with any of them? Thumbs up or thumbs down?

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After seeing the same henshin sequences recycled endlessly in typical mahou shoujo series, I’m not particularly scandalized by this:

Grrr

So I finally peeled the shrink-wrap off Gurren Lagann and put the first disc in the drive to see if it really is the greatest achievement of mankind since the invention of distilled spirits. The DVD player refused to play it. I took a close look at the disc, above, and I was not happy. One of the other discs in the set also has noticeable delamination, but it doesn’t extend into the data area.

Fortunately, Mac the Ripper was able to read enough of the disc to make a playable copy. Several hours later, I am wondering whether Kamina is the manliest of men, or the greatest of jackasses. Or both.

Not quite a rant

A comment on an earlier post:

There appear to be two underlying assumptions in your post.

1. Everyone or at least the majority of anime fans share your taste and thus would agree that everything in the first list are all very good to excellent while those in the second list range from mediocre to vile.

2. That if you believe that something is very good to excellent for you then you are entitled to it and if you can’t get it legally it is necessary for you to acquire it illegally.

1. No. The items on the first list are good, period. I don’t care what anime fans think. In anime, as in all other popular arts, there is at best a weak correlation between quality and popularity. I do not give a damn about bestseller lists, Nielsen ratings, ((I got a phone call from a Nielsen representative a few months ago. He was audibly startled when I told him that I don’t have a teevee.)) the top forty, box office rankings, Academy Awards, Emmys or the Nobel Peace Prize. They’re all meaningless. And I really don’t care how a show fares in the ANN ratings.

2. No. It would be good if the people and corporations that hold the rights to excellent anime were to make it freely available to all interested for a reasonable price. However, they can do any damned thing they want with it, including burying it forever, and I can claim no legal right to see it. There are also plenty of problems with licensing anime for sale outside Japan, some insoluble. The firms that do license anime choose what they think the typical anime fan will pay for. Disappointingly but understandably, they usually shy away from the eccentric and unclassifiable, preferring conventional series and fanservice. ((Fortunately, there are exceptions, e.g., Oh! Edo Rocket.)) I can only hope and wait, and wait.

But.

Back in ancient times, I read about a band called Gryphon. They were a progressive rock band influenced by Renaissance music, and they played recorders, krummhorns and bassoon as well as guitar, keyboards and drums. The description was interesting, and I wanted to hear them. ((They opened for Yes on an American tour. According to legend, at some concerts the audience booed when Yes took the stage because they wanted to hear more of Gryphon.)) Frustratingly, no record shop in town had any of their recordings, and of course no radio station played them. A few years later I found one album in a used record shop. Their other four records were not released in the USA. However, I could find plenty of records by such incomparable performers as The Rolling Stones, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and The Osmonds. ((Younger readers might not realize how difficult it was to find particular books and records in the dark ages before the internet. I made trips to every used book store and record shop within bicycle distance at least once a month, hoping to find the out-of-print books I wanted to read and the interesting music that radio stations couldn’t be bothered to play. It was possible to special-order some books and records through shops, but it often took months for your order to arrive, and the recording of “The Magic Flute” you requested was apt to mutate into a Mahler symphony by the time it finally arrived.))

There’s a happy ending to the story. Many years later, I got a 14,400 baud modem for my work computer. I found a dealer online specializing in old prog rock, and he had the CD reissues of four Gryphon albums. I found the fifth at Amazon.com. So, just a quarter-century after first learning about them — a mere instant in geological time — I finally had a complete set of Gryphon’s original recordings.

There might eventually be a happy ending to the anime story. Perhaps, like Gryphon, Dennou Coil will be available in North America after twenty-five years. Or it might take half a century, as did Tezuka’s Tales of a Streetcorner. I’ll be dead by then. And I have little hope that the animation of Masaaki Yuasa and Kenji Nakamura will ever be available in North America. ((It will be interesting to see if The Tatami Galaxy, currently being streamed by Funimation, will be licensed soon for download-to-own or disc in North America. I doubt that it will be, despite its excellences.)) I want to play by the rules, but I am tired of waiting.

Pedantic footnote

The sorta-official alternative title for Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica is “Puella Magi Madoka Magica.” Grrr. “Puella” (“girl,” nominative singular) is a feminine noun in Latin, so the proper form of the adjective “magus” (“magic”) is “maga,” not “magi.” I suppose whoever is responsible was trying to avoid calling the show “Magical Girl Magical Madoka.” I’d suggest either sticking with “Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica” or just calling the series “Magical Madoka.”

Update: Maureen interprets the title differently in the comments below. She may well be right, but I’m not convinced that it’s what the SHAFT staff had in mind.

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Irresponsible speculation: between whom will the final battle be?

A tale of two lists

Here’s a list:

Animal Yokocho
Binchou-tan
Dennou Coil
Hakaba Kitaro
Kaiba
Mind Game
Mononoke

Here’s another list:

Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan
Eiken
Galaxy Angel Rune
Ikki-Tousen
Otoboku: Maidens Are Falling For Me
Peach Girl
Princess Princess

The anime in the first list are all very good to excellent; those in the second list range from mediocre to vile. Guess which are commercially available in region one? Until the situation is reversed, fansubs will remain necessary.