I wonder if the reason that so many characters in The Wind Rises smoke so much is that Miyazaki wanted to annoy health nazis, such as the ones who placed the full-page ad above in The Hollywood Reporter.
Off to battle
It’s another blasted Monday morning. Here’s a concert performance of music from Girls und Panzer to wake you up.
Accordion crimes, part two
Recently we heard Japan’s Charan Po Rantan. Today we have the Russian band Nol’ providing the soundtrack for a not-quite-safe-for-work animation.
(Via Willy or Won’t He)
A tale of 1970 2070
Aside from GATE, none of the current shows that I’ve sampled thus far are worth mentioning. Fortunately, Crunchyroll this week added one I can unreservedly recommend, Shingu. Tatsuo Sato has directed much noteworthy anime, including Martian Successor Nadesico and Mouretsu Pirates (both recommended), and Shingu is his best. It’s long been one of my favorites, and I’ve probably rewatched it more often than any other show, anime or not. If none of the new series catch your interest, spend a little time with Hajime and his family and friends, human and alien, in quiet town of Tenmo.
Here’s Ubu on what didn’t happen when Shingu was made.
Notes, mostly musical
The French-Canadian company Plogue has entered the vocal synthesizer business. So far, no occidental virtual singer is serious competition for the Vocaloids, 1 but Plogue’s Alter/Ego shows promise. The software is free and runs on both Macintosh and Windows. (Yamaha’s Vocaloid software is still Windows-only, though Hatsune Miku and her family are usable on Macs with Crypton’s PiaPro software.) “Daisy,” the first Alter/Ego voice bank, is also free. It’s not particularly expressive, but its English is generally intelligible. Alter/Ego is also easier to use than Miku.
Recently, VoxWave announced ALYS, a voice bank for Alter/Ego, which is intended to be a French counterpart to the Japanese Vocaloids. ALYS’s languages are French and Japanese, but according to the CEO of VoxWave, “… we also ALYS to sing in English too thanks to an alias system” (sic). If ALYS’ English is tolerable, it might be worth considering when it’s released in March.
Wolfgang Palm’s entry into vocal synthesis also looks very interesting, and rather different from the other systems I’ve looked at. Then there’s Plogue’s chipspeech for old-style computer voices.
*****
Here’s a list of common chord progressions with numerous examples from popular music. The site features partial analyses of a wide range of music. I was particularly interested in the many Touhou tunes.
If you’re interested in what’s going on in Beatle tunes, go here.
*****
Marty Friedman, formerly of Cacaphony and Megadeth, got bored with metal, learned Japanese and became part of the J-pop scene. Here’s a brief, unsatisfactory but interesting NPR interview with him I recently came across.
*****
See how many tunes you can identify:
(Via Dustbury.)
Timely note
Every January I visit the calendar shop at the regional shopping mall and pick up a few at half-price to provide a variety of art on my walls for the coming year. This year, I struck out. Everything of any interest was gone — no medieval or renaissance art, no pre-Raphaelites, no Edward Gorey, not even Ansel Adams. There were plenty of puppies, of course, but I prefer dogs as friends, not as artistic subjects. Fortunately, I earlier ordered this year’s Girls und Panzer calendar, so I do have a way to keep track of passing time.
Although there are only six pages (seven if you count the cover), they are poster-sized, 24″ tall (including the binding strip at the top) and 16.5″ wide. (Right-click and open the links in new windows to see the images at high resolution.)
Show me to the fainting couch
While going through my archives, I came across an egregious example of cultural appropriation, recorded several years ago at a performance by a local ballet troupe. Be sure you’re sitting down before you view the horror, lest the shock stagger you.
Eye protection advised
[collapse]
Unsurprisingly, a search online for “peter pan cultural appropriation” turns up many exposés and testimonies, from The Smithsonian on down.
It’s not just Native Americans who are victimized in Peter Pan. Pirate culture is treated without utterly without respect. An otherkin is labeled a “fairy” and reduced to an object of moe. This toxic tale in its various forms has warped the sensibilities of innumerable impressionable children for generations.
It gets worse
[collapse]
76 pictures of Miku
More fun with Helicon Focus. The picture of Hatsune Miku below the fold was composed from a stack of 76 f/5.6 slices. The figurine is eight inches tall, including the base.
I recently discovered that LED light bulbs are available in “daylight” varieties, with a color temperature of 5000 K. I used them in taking these pictures, and I didn’t need to do any color correction. Previously, when I did series of pictures indoors, I had the choice of using flash and waiting increasingly long periods as the flash recycled between shots, or using incandescent lights and fixing the colors in Photoshop.
Working plants
Years ago I grew cacti and other succulents under lights in the kitchen, all of which I started from seed. The collection eventually became too large to maintain, and the plants are long gone. Recently I’ve been considering starting another indoor garden, on a smaller scale and focusing on the more diminutive mammillarias and turbinicarpus and perhaps some mesembs. If I do, I’ll order the seeds from the same source as before, Mesa Garden in New Mexico.
I came across the above interview with Mesa Garden’s Steve Brack earlier today. It’s an amateurish video, hand-held and ending abruptly, and the soft-spoken Brack is often difficult to hear, but it does offer a glimpse of a fascinating place.
A Christmas troll
The ancient Yuletide carol, illustrated.
Request
If you ever encounter someone who hacks websites, shoot to kill.
I’m back, but it’s going to take a while to restore everything.
Update: A Christmas present from my ISP:
(I’m posting this from the office where the internet does work on this lovely brown Christmas morning.)
Recursive excursions
I recently checked out some more fractal generators for Macs. The most capable of this batch was Fractal Domains, which has numerous options for stylizing and coloring the fractal. It costs $20 if you want to export the results, though you can grab screen captures if you’re really cheap. The creator’s to-do list includes adding the capability of recording animations, but that is probably two updates away.
Fraqtive only does Mandelbrot and Julia sets, and it has fewer options for coloring. However, it’s free. The most recent version is capable of recording animations, but that version hasn’t been ported to the Mac yet.
The images Fractal Architect generates look more like abstract expressionism than mathematics. There is a free version, but it has severe limits on exporting. The interface is confusing, and trial-and-error doesn’t quickly yield interesting results.
Fractal Domains and Fraqtive are worth trying if you are interested in psychedelic paisley and endlessly intricate designs. However, the generators I looked at previously are probably better choices, and both of them, Xaos and Ultra Fractal, are capable of recording animations.
More stacks
It’s going to be a few months before I return to the botanical garden, so here’s a toy soldier instead. Helicon Focus‘ RAW-to-DNG feature let me get decent exposures despite the miserable lighting.
Today’s quote
A parenthetical comment from Eve Tushnet’s review of Krampus:
(The script also relies heavily on foul language for humor. Censorship is the mother of creativity, people.)
From Holland to Japan
Remember this?
Michael Dudok de Wit, who made it, is working on his first feature film, The Red Turtle, due out next September. Studio Ghibli is co-producing it.
Another de Wit short, “Father & Daughter,” won an Oscar. It’s a bit weepy for my taste, though pleasing to the eye.
Observation
“Tidy” and “organized” are not synonyms.
Wunderbar
Coming soon, but probably not to Wichita.
Apropos of nothing in particular
Natsume Yuujin-cho, episode 9.
Today’s quote
Our unraveling as a nation draws ever nearer. When we can no longer look at the deaths of others without seeing whether those deaths can be bent to serve some political narrative, time has pretty well run out.
See also Professor Mondo.
That old tanuki feeling
Here’s yet another Touhou arrangement, this one of Mamizou Futatsuiwa’s theme from Ten Desires. I’m not entirely happy with this and may revisit it someday, but I want to move on to fresh disasters.