Year: 2012

Posted on

Bodacious Space Anime

http://dai.ly/xpm0un

Music video of the opening theme.

I’m currently doing a marathon of Bodacious Space Pirates, a sci-fi anime about a high school girl who becomes a pirate captain in space (the title is fairly self-explanatory). It is glorious. Don’t be put off by the cutesy opening. It reminds me of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in its oddball premise and in the way it firmly grounds its fantastical science fiction elements within an interesting narrative. It’s how science fiction should be done, but too often writers forget the “fiction” part and it becomes a three hundred page exegesis of the workings of blaster pistols.

It’s actually fairly hard sci-fi for something from the visual media (i.e., movies, tv, comics, etc). Not that I care about the consistency of fictional gibberish (one of my favourite science fiction writers is Ursula K. Le Guin), but the little details are still pretty neat, such as how the space suits have an attachment point for helmets on the back and how the bulkheads have to be manually cranked open after the power on a ship comes back on.

I even like the recap at the beginning of each episode. Normally I’d just fast forward through it (for instance, Bleach has freaking five minutes of recap and the opening before you actually get to the episode you want to watch) but this show’s recap usually has some kind of space philosophy being read to you while scenes from the previous episodes remind you of the gist of what happened before. Stuff like,

“In outer space there isn’t an absolute left, right, up, or down. It all depends on your relative position. Understand where you’ve come from and where you’re going, which way you’re facing and you’ll always know your current position. Confronted by the vastness of space, you may be disoriented by how small you are. But overcoming that feeling is your first step in outer space.”

All of this while the protagonist is shown on her training cruise and learning how to space walk. The recap even presents new background info which isn’t absolutely needed but is nice to have.

Anyway, I like this show. Watching it isn’t a bad way to say goodbye to 2012.

Posted on

It’s alive

Ok, done. Site looks pretty boss in mobile now. Also, congrats to everyone on not dying on the 21st. Here’s hoping we continue this streak to next year!

Posted on

Ecce homo

I am just now testing what my site looks like on a mobile device and unfortunately it looks like utter shit. I suck large for this oversight. Mea culpa. Expect fixings posthaste.

Posted on

Animal Castration and You: A How-To Video

Via Cracked, that strange competitor to Mad Magazine during the 1980s (and now a comedy website/time sink), I learned about the Sami practice of half-castration, where a reindeer’s testicles are crushed to remove its orneriness while leaving it enough male hormones in the form of squished testicles to give the animal plenty of muscle mass and preventing it from becoming decadent and eunuch-like. The traditional practice is to have the reindeer’s testicles crushed personally, that person being a woman using merely her teeth and jaw muscles.

Perhaps a video might help illustrate what I’m talking about. Incidentally, if you watch it with the sound on mute it becomes vaguely pornographic, especially with the final shot of a guy smoking a cigarette.

Posted on

Really, Dresden?

Maybe this was a male-female translation problem. I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they’re communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they’re actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person’s body language.

That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that’s like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we’re having a conversation. Singular. We’re paying attention to what is being said, considering that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been going on for the last several thousand years? I didn’t even know that they existed until I read that stupid article, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

I felt somewhat skeptical about the article’s grounding. There were probably a lot of women who didn’t communicate on multiple wavelengths at once. There were probably men who could handle that many just fine. I just wasn’t one of them.

So, ladies, if you ever have some conversation with your boyfriend or husband or brother or male friend, and you are telling him something perfectly obvious, and he comes away from it utterly clueless? I know it’s tempting to think to yourself, “The man can’t possibly be that stupid!”

But yes. Yes, he can.

Our innate strengths just aren’t the same. We are the mighty hunters, who are good at focusing on one thing at a time. For crying out loud, we have to turn down the radio in the car if we suspect we’re lost and need to figure out how to get where we’re going. That’s how impaired we are. I’m telling you, we have only the one conversation. Maybe some kind of relationship veteran like Michael Carpenter can do two, but that’s pushing the envelope. Five simultaneous conversations? Five?

Shah. That just isn’t going to happen. At least, not for me.

– From Cold Days by Jim Butcher

If you’ve ever wondered what it sounds like when someone’s talking out of their ass, well, here you go. There’s the vague appeal to an unspecified scholarly source (“this one article my cousin’s roommate read”), the Just So story grounded in the “Men are from Mars and Women are Screeching Harpies” school of pop evolutionary psychology, and the whole mealy-mouthed “I’m not a sexist but scientifically speaking women are fuckpuppets for men” defensive tone that permeates the entire passage. It’s been so long since the last Dresden Files book that I’d forgotten how tiresome the sexism could get.

Posted on

How to watch Bleach without dying of boredom

From the hero named zansabarshadow:

Guide to watching Bleach without the pointless filler:

Main Arc 1: Soul Society Arc
Watch episodes 1-32
Skip 33
Pick up at 34-49
Skip 50
Pick up at 51-63
Skip Bount Filler Arc

Main Arc 2: Hueco Mundo Arc
Pick up at 110-127
Skip 128-137
Pick up at 138-167
Skip Captain Shūsuke Amagai Filler Arc
Pick up at 190-203
Skip 204 & 205
Pick at up 206-212
Skip 213 & 214

Main Arc 3: Fake Karakura Town arc
Pick up at 215-225
Skip 226
Skip Zanpakutō: The Alternate Tales Filler Arcs
Pick up at 267-286
Skip 287
Pick up at 288-297
Skip 298-299
Pick up at 300-302
Skip 303-305
Pick up 306-310
Skip 311-341?

Main Arc 4: Substitute Soul Reaper Disappearance
Pick up at 342-354
Skip 355
Pick up at 356
FINISH THE SERIES AT 366

Just the essential anime episodes – no fuss, no muss, no stupid filler. Hooray!

Posted on

Are you fit to serve? (No.)

As part of the marketing campaign for Skyfall, the new James Bond movie, Sony Entertainment has released a browser-based text adventure game which is ostensibly a test to see if the player has the right stuff to become a spy for British intelligence. The last time games of this type were popular was in the 1980’s so it’s rather nostalgic to be playing this (admittedly, I’ve only played pure text adventure games as part of my retro-gaming hipster nostalgia freakery).

Still, it’s easy to forget that computers are goddamned stupid and are nowhere near ready to take commands phrased in natural language. Case in point:

Comprehension test: FAILED

AGENT: What’s my first move?

YOU: Hold on

AGENT: We have all day.

AGENT: It’s not like we have a problem with weapons of mass destruction in a Caribbean holiday resort to figure out.

AGENT: Anything like that.

YOU: Pull both white wires out at once

AGENT: Be as clear as you can. Appreciated.

YOU: Pull the white wires

AGENT: NO. Cutting wires at random is my last option. Want others first. Don’t care if you’re an expert. You’re not HERE. Ideas. Fast.

YOU: Call the bomb squad

AGENT: Device right in front of me. Five wires and a USB port. How to handle this?

YOU: Err

AGENT: Keep it simple. Say again.

TIME PENALTY: FIRST WARNING

YOU: Throw it into the river

AGENT: We’ve got the bomb. It’s even nastier in the flesh. Check the photo I sent and then advise me on how to proceed.

YOU: Plug the tablet into the USB port

AGENT: I can try plugging the tablet in. One second.

AGENT: Interesting. It’s displaying … hang on, I’ll transfer an image.

YOU: You need to pull out the white wires

AGENT: Explain your plan first. I’m not starting cutting until I know where we’re going with this.

YOU: The white wires are the main ones

AGENT: So you mean … actually, what do you mean?

YOU: THE WHITE ONES ARE IMPORTANT. CUT THEM

AGENT: No savvy. Re-state?

YOU: Cut the white wires NOW

AGENT: If you think you’ve figured out the image, tell me what you think it means. Then I’ll start cutting.

YOU: It means that all the coloured wires lead to the white one

AGENT: Not sure I understand. Put that another way?

YOU: The white one is the important wire

AGENT: Be as clear as you can. Appreciated.

YOU: The white wires power the bomb

AGENT: Put that another way? Sorry.

YOU: The colored wires aren’t important

AGENT: You’re right. The colours in the picture do match the wires. What do you think we should do?

YOU: Cut the white wires

AGENT: Sounds like you’ve got a plan. Spell it out. Don’t just tell me to start cutting wires.

YOU: CUT THE WHITE WIRES. THAT IS THE PLAN

AGENT: What’s your thinking? Not just going to cut arbitrary wires.

YOU: The white wires are key. You need to cut them first

AGENT: In other words…?

YOU: In other words, if you cut them the bomb won’t go off

AGENT: Keep it simple. Say again.

YOU: BOMB NO EXPLODEY IF WHITE WIRES NO WORKY

AGENT: Try and be concise.

Your progress is currently below average. The HELP command may offer ways for you to improve it.

TIME PENALTY: SECOND WARNING

YOU: Cut the white wires, because they are the important ones

AGENT: So you mean … actually, what do you mean?

YOU: The white wires detonate the bomb. Cut them

AGENT: Break that down for me once more. Please?

YOU: Forget it. You deserve to die

AGENT: So… put that another way?

Posted on

The mainstreaming of sci-fi

I just saw Looper. It was an okay bit of time travel narrative but I’m rather surprised so many people thought it was mind-bending. I thought the time travel aspect was fairly straightforward and can only assume that it was confusing mostly to people who didn’t see time travel being the main plot of like every fifth episode of The Next Generation.

In fact, the reception for Looper rather reminds me of that for Inception as far as its sci-fi bits go. Have we forgotten the lessons taught to us by both the Back to the Future franchise and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure?

Primer, now that was a genuine time travel headscrew. Be more like that, Looper. And as for the rest of you people, quit being so dazzled by sci-fi, these plots have been going round and round for decades by now. And while we’re at it also make me king of the world. Is any of that really too much to ask?

Posted on

The Sign

[T]o Squirrel Girl, greatest superhero ever. And, yes, she did defeat Thanos single-handedly. It’s in continuity. Deal with it.

— A. Lee Martinez, in the dedication to the novel Divine Misfortune

Squirrel Girl, vanquisher of the real Thanos and not a robot, clone, or simulacrum (as confirmed by Uatu the Watcher)