{"id":1876,"date":"2009-10-10T11:13:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-10T17:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tancos.net\/wp\/?p=1876"},"modified":"2009-10-10T11:13:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-10T17:13:00","slug":"odds-and-ends-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/odds-and-ends-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Odds and ends"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\nSpoiler\n<\/div>\n
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

[collapse]<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

Several otherwise<\/a> sane<\/a> and sensible<\/a> people<\/a> recently have been posting their Champions Online or City of Heroes characters. I thought I’d check the games out. Fortunately for me, the former is Windows-only, but the latter does have a Mac client and a free trial period, so that’s how I spent a couple of lunch hours this past week. (Actually, I spent the first lunch twiddling my thumbs while the client downloaded nearly three gigabytes of additional content \u2014 if I had realized that it would do that, I wouldn’t have bothered.) It is fun to play with the character creator; you can make a (rather skanky-looking) schoolgirl, which isn’t possible with such sites as Hero Machine<\/a>. The game itself, though, looks as dull as every other MMORPG I’ve visited, as far as I could judge from the tutorials (I tried both the heroic and villainous options). It’s nifty to design colorful avatars, but “jogging heroically” to fight random enemies is tedious. I’d rather listen to music \u2014<\/p>\n

\u2014 which is what I do in Second Life. My initial impressions of SL were rather negative<\/a>, and if you want to find intelligent people to discuss anime with, you’ll do better hanging around Steven’s place<\/a>. But there is lots of music there, some of it good, and there are other people with tastes as wide-ranging as mine. It’s possible to stream music from your computer to sites within Second Life, which I’ll be doing Saturday evenings for while. If you have a SL account, stop by Grizzy’s Caf\u00e9 between 6 and 8 p.m. SL time (i.e., California time; between 8 and 10 p.m. in the central USA time zone). Tonight I’ll be playing very miscellaneous Japanese music, from Yoko Kanno to Hatsune Miku.<\/p>\n

\"There<\/a>
There is a tremendous range of ready-made avatars available in Second Life, such as this Super S Sailor Moon (to my eye, the most elegant of all mahou shoujo<\/i> costumes). You can also design your own from scratch, if you're handy with Photoshop and virtual 3-D manipulation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

*****<\/p>\n

I’ve sampled some random examples from the fall anime season. So far I haven’t finished a single episode. Surprisingly, the one I watched longest was K\u00e4mpfer<\/em><\/strong>, this season’s attempt to create the ultimate anime. Let’s see … we have<\/p>\n

\u2022 high school students<\/p>\n

\u2022 fighting
\n\u2014 with guns
\n\u2014 with swords
\n\u2014 with magic
\n(… but no forks)<\/p>\n

\u2022 sailor fuku<\/p>\n

\u2022 panties<\/p>\n

\u2022 sexual ambiguity (question of definition: is a guy who actually changes to a girl truly a “trap”?)<\/p>\n

\u2022 a meganekko<\/p>\n

\u2022 henshin<\/p>\n

\u2022 absolute territory<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0.4 Rushunas \u2014 and that’s the hero. He also runs like a girl.<\/p>\n

I hesitate to say whether there are any moeblobs or tsunderes in the show. I think one character qualifies on both counts, but that isn’t my field of expertise.<\/p>\n

That’s in just the first fifteen minutes or so. There are also hints of a developing harem, a ridiculously powerful student government and perhaps a vast conspiracy. I expect future episodes will include copious steam. There are unlikely to be nekomimi, mecha or winged people, but I wouldn’t put it past the writers \u2014 it really is a silly show. Sad girls in snow are probably too much to hope for.<\/p>\n

My only hope for the fall season is Kuuchuu Buranko<\/a><\/em><\/strong>, or Trapeze<\/em><\/strong>, whose crew includes Kenji Nakamura and Manabu Ishikawa of Mononoke<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

A couple of odd links:<\/p>\n

A “green” F1 vehicle.<\/a><\/p>\n

Carbon-free sugar.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Several otherwise sane and sensible people recently have been posting their Champions Online or City of Heroes characters. I thought I’d check the games out. Fortunately for me, the former is Windows-only, but the latter does have a Mac client and a free trial period, so that’s how I spent a couple of lunch hours … Continue reading “Odds and ends”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8,33,34],"tags":[491,503],"class_list":["post-1876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-curiosities-and-silly-stuff","category-weird-world-web","category-whatever","tag-sailor-moon","tag-second-life"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-ug","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}