Trivia that matter
St. Mary Cathedral, Wichita, Kansas in USA
While the rest of the inmates at the office were enduring the annual Christmas luncheon, I visited the cathedral again with my camera. I set the tripod up in the choir loft this time, and used a tripod head designed specifically for panoramas. The “Panosaurus” made a difference in the image quality. There are far fewer glitches than in my previous attempt, and they’re not as obvious.
When’s the next apocalypse?
The astounding thing about all the quackeries, fads, and movements of the past hundred years in America is that they were first accepted by superior people, by men and women of education, intelligence, breeding, wealth, and experience. Only after the upper classes had approved, the masses accepted each new thing.
—Gilbert Seldes, The Stammering Century (1928)
Perhaps it’s not that astounding; I long ago observed that high intelligence is not necessarily associated with common sense.
J.K. Rowling has been recognized in Thog’s Masterclass:
Dept of Trickle-Down. ‘There, in his poky office, Simon Price gazed covetously on a vacancy among the ranks of insiders to a place where cash was now trickling down onto an empty chair with no lap waiting to catch it.’ (J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy, 2012)
Daniel Barenboim also earns a mention in Ansible:
Pianist Daniel Barenboim is interviewed by Rosanna Greenstreet: Q. ‘What is your earliest memory?’ A. ‘In my mother’s belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.’ (Guardian, 2 November)
Christopher Tolkien doesn’t care for Peter Jackson’s movies:
Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25,” Christopher says regretfully. “And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.”
This divorce has been systematically driven by the logic of Hollywood. “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time,” Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. “The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.”
So is the world going to end tomorrow? Nah. I suppose you could marathon RahXephon if you’re feeling silly, but I suggest listening to Geddy, Alex and Neil instead.
These are the acceptable ways to end civilization:
… asteroid/comet, climate, massive volcanic eruption, zombie pandemic, Daleks, the Master, the Mayor turns into a giant snake monster, Gachnar (although that would be a very tiny apocalypse), gateway to Hell opens over Los Angeles, Anubis, Tripods, Triffids, Ragnarok and possibly a Farnsworth Doomsday Device.
Here are a few videos that recently caught my fancy.
There are no “gangnam” parodies because I’m sick of them.
US copyright law is stupid. Case in point: Girls und Panzer‘s eighth episode is missing about a minute in its Crunchyroll version. Unless you download a fansub, you are going to miss this 1938 song, the highlight of the episode.
Update: here’s the video, via Ivlin, who notes that “Copyright is demonstrably making art worse“.
The Twenty-First Amendment was ratified on this day in 1933, making this tasteful song possible. Here is an atmospheric, evocative performance by a chamber ensemble conducted by Lindley A. Jones.
… and Paragon City is no more.
I stayed up way too late last night to observe the end of City of Heroes. I spent most of that time getting in everyone’s way taking screenshots of all the players I had never met. It was the first time that the MMORPG actually was “massively multiplayer” in my few months of occasional visits.
There was a lot of sentimental gushing in the chat, with much affection expressed for the creators of CoH and contempt for their Korean overlords. I have a good deal of sympathy for the stranded players. Still, I came late to the game and never acquired any “friends” in it, so I have less emotional investment in CoH than most of the other players. For the sake of the people who spent up to eight years’ worth of free time in that online world, I hope that CoH is resurrected. However, I probably won’t be there if it is, even if there is another Mac version. I have other ways of connecting with people online, and I am just not that much of an RPGer. (On the other hand, it is fun to fly, and shoot exploding arrows, and wield a blazing sword.)
Screenshots are below the fold. They are all from the “Triumph” and “Infinity” servers.
Update: No surprise here.
St. Mary Cathedral, with pews in in USA
Renovations are nearly finished at the cathedral. Here’s a “spherical” panorama, with lots of glitches and bits of tripod legs, composited from 77 separate frames. When the construction is finally complete, I plan to rent a fisheye lens and see if I can make panoramas that stitch together better.
Steven isn’t enthusiastic about get-well cards, so here’s a nekomimi nurse.
It’s a bit odd to think that I’m decently educated for our time but would be functionally illiterate for two centuries back.
Some very good news: Steven is in rehab and is making good progress.
I expect that he will be pleased to learn that there will indeed be a third season of Dog Days.
Some years back I spent a lunch hour or two with City of Heroes. I was not terribly impressed. It was difficult to design an avatar that pleased my eye, and the game itself seemed to be just a lot of running around, blasting enemies and exchanging canned dialog with automatons. I lost interest before finishing the tutorial.
Although I didn’t find the game interesting, some writers of note did, notably Neil Gaiman and John C. Wright. From the latter I learned that the Korean company that owns City of Heroes is going to shut it down at the end of this month. Curious to see what Gaiman and Wright found in the game that I had missed, I gave it another try.
The game-play, frankly, is boring. It is still mostly just a lot of running (or flying) around, blasting enemies and exchanging canned dialogue with automatons. As Wright observes, the best part is creating your hero. As a non-paying member, I can only have two characters registered at a time, so I’ve created and deleted a number of avatars: the heavily-armored Carolus Ludovicus, slayer of Jabberwocks; MacCruiskeen, a plain Irish policeman whose toys make your brain hurt (Paragon City needs bicycles); the Mathematrix, a manager at Hilbert’s Hotel who strives to transform the world into a well-ordered set, by force if necessary.
My primary character, and the only one I’ve bothered to level up much, is The Remarkable Miss Sakura. (She became “remarkable” at level 12. I would have preferred an adjective such as “modest,” “unassuming,” or “polite,” but title choices are limited.) Originally a mahou shoujo, she eventually outgrew her frilly dress and retired from the magical girl business. She missed the excitement, though, and decided to make a place for herself as an occidental superheroine.
New characters advance rapidly for a while, and it is mildly addictive to acquire new powers every time you log on. Eventually your progress slows down, and leveling up becomes a grind of blasting gang members, abominations, robots, occultists and Chinese, ((I wonder if the real reason NCsoft is shutting City of Heroes down is that someone was offended by the villainous “Tsoo.”)) interspersed with frequent visits to hospitals. There is currently an alien invasion underway to spice things up, but it’s not enough to sustain my interest. I might log on once more on the last day, but I’m otherwise done with City of Heroes.
I may have missed an important part of the experience, though. There are many opportunities to form teams and many kinds of chat, but apparently I managed to pick the least popular servers to create my heroes on. More often than not, it seemed that I was the only player logged on. When I did receive team invitations, they were usually badly-timed, and the few occasions I was able to accept an invitation, the experiences were frustrating, sometimes for technical reasons, sometimes for human. Asocial though I am, I might have enjoyed City of Heroes better on a more populous server.
Which is why I’ll stick to Second Life for my MMO needs, even if City of Heroes gets a reprieve. It’s much easier to meet people from across the country and around the world, and there’s no RPG to get in the way. You can just find — or build — a congenial café where you can listen to music or play your own (it’s fairly easy to stream music from your computer into Second Life) and chat with friends.
*****
Superheroics of a different sort: Here’s a rather odd-looking Sailor Senshi.
Her colleagues can be seen here. There’a a different set of Sailor Avengers here.
… while a massive philosophical gulf separates J.R.R. Tolkien and Hayao Miyazaki, their works both come from a strange and unmodern place, and speak to the part of us which is unmodern and strange; which is to say the human part of us.
Gilbert Seldes in 1928, quoted by Helen Rittelmeyer:
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the word “reformer” meant one who wanted to give liberty to others; today it means, briefly, one who wants to take liberty away. The change in meaning is accompanied by a change in method. There is a dislocation of the center of fear. Laws, lobbies, censors, and spies have displaced God as the object of awe and veneration, sometimes even as the object of faith. The great social and religious movements of the middle of the last century were based on the belief that man could be made perfect. The current belief is that machinery, including the machinery of government, can be made perfect. . . .
The typical zealot of 1800 was a man fanatically busy about salvation; in the 1840s he was as fanatically busy about improving himself; later he turned to uplifting his fellowmen and later still to interfering with their pleasures. . . .
Eighty years ago, [a reformer] withdrew from society, founded his own community, and preached Abstention. Today, he passes laws and cries, I forbid.
When engineers sleep,
catgirl breeding runs amuck;
Steven, get well soon.
(This is in reference to this news.)
I long regarded James Fenimore Cooper as the worst writer ever published. I’m not a slow reader — I read Patricia McKillip’s entire Riddlemaster trilogy in one long evening — but it took me a full month to force my way through The Prairie. Mark Twain was too gentle in his assessment of Cooper.
But apparently there are worse than Cooper. Amanda McKittrick Ros, for instance. Here’s the opening of her poem “Visiting Westminster Abbey.”
Holy Moses! Take a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer.
According to Wikipedia, “The Oxford literary group the Inklings, which included C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, held competitions to see who could read Ros’ work for the longest length of time without laughing.” Her first novel, Irene Iddesleigh, is available at Project Gutenberg. I’ll leave it for readers with stronger stomachs to attempt.
Some of the niftiest software is free. For instance, Hugin, which stitches 360° panoramas together from your pictures. You can then upload the panoramas to 360 Cities for everyone to explore. The basic membership there is also free. The above is the interior of the Wichita cathedral last week.
Although the ideal camera for making panoramas is a full-frame DSLR with a fisheye lens, any camera that isn’t junk will work, possibly even cellphone cameras. Those who travel to picturesque places might want to keep an eye out for possible panoramas.
This video satisfies your minimum daily requirement for high culture.
(Via Eve Tushnet.)
What anime calendars are available for 2013? I did a little searching at YesAsia and found a few:
Mouretsu Pirates
Natsume Yujincho (times three)
Inu x Boku SS
To Aru Kagaku no Railgun
Moyashimon
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (times two)
Sword Art Online
Accel World
Idolm@ster
Osamu Tezuka
TV Anime
… plus the usual Naruto, Gintama, Bleach and One Piece products, and of course multiple Totoro calendars. There are also Hatsune Miku and Mount Fuji. I didn’t see any Strike Witches or Dog Days calendars; maybe next year.
And then there’s Karel Capek. In the western world, Capek is known for such works as R.U.R., War with the Newts, The Absolute at Large and The Insect Play, but in Japan, “Karel Capek” means tea.
