Everyone seems to agree that the Sugar Summer Special was extremely well done, and provided needed closure to the series. It's one of the best anime "extras" that I've seen.

But what's the worst? My nomination goes to Fushigi Yuugi Eikoden, which manages to negate every major plot point of the series. Wonderduck suggests the Elfen Lied special (which I haven't seen).

Anyone?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:02 PM | Comments (41) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

The current issue of New Scientist has a cover story about water: You Need It, But You Won't Believe Why: Water's Quantum Secret. It's mostly about the hydrogen bonds between water molecules, and how they make water act quite unlike otherwise similar compounds. It's not anything new, but interesting enough if you haven't run into the topic before.

And then the article suddenly careers off the cliff into the Great Homeopathic Swamp:

That there is something more to water than hydrogen and oxygen is something many researchers welcome. But Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park goes further. He thinks it is time for a radical overhaul of the scientific view of water - one which, he believes, has been dominated by chemistry for too long. [Oy. — Ed.] "It's absurd to say that chemical composition dictates everything," he says. "Take carbon, for example - the same atoms can give you graphite or diamond."

In a review paper published in Materials Research Innovations in December, Roy and a team of collaborators called for a re-examination of the case against the most controversial of all claims made for water: that it has a "memory".

The physical nature of water is quite straightforward: It does not have a memory. This has been verified experimentally so often that only the very deeply stupid and outright frauds suggest otherwise.

The idea that water can retain some kind of imprint of compounds dissolved in it has long been cited as a possible mechanism for homeopathy

which claims to treat ailments using solutions of certain compounds.

Some homeopathic remedies are so dilute they no longer contain a single molecule of the original compound -

- prompting many scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary.

What has prompted all competent and honest scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary is that it doesn't do anything. It's been tested. It doesn't do anything. Yes, all physical, chemical and biological theory tells us that it won't do anything, but that pales beside the experimental evidence for it not doing anything.

Roy believes that by taking homeopathy seriously scientists may find out more about water's fundamental properties.

The present editors of New Scientist, though, are merely an irresponsible bunch of scoundrels in it for the money.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:40 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Just finished watching this one too. (And I found time to unpack some more stuff, do the laundry, and go grocery shopping. Gotta love long weekends.)

I was absolutely entranced when I first saw the opening credits to this show, more than three years ago. Even on a crappy RealPlayer video clip the kawaii genius of the creators came through. But then, though I bought all the DVDs, I foundered on the early episodes. The first episode is wonderful, but then it gets silly for a while. If I'd kept watching just a little longer I would have gotten to the good bit - the last 80% of the show - but, well, too much anime, too little time.

There's not a lot I like in the present anime season (Karin being the prime exception) so I've finally been catching up. And no doubt about it, Sugar is a gem. Highly recommended.

Chizumatic review here.

Some spoilers follow. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:30 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I have Monday off as well. (I actually forgot that until just now.) And then next weekend is Easter, so another four-day weekend. And then the 25th is ANZAC Day, and I'm taking the 24th off, so I get another four-day weekend.

You would almost think I planned it that way.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:49 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Punk Sugar!

Speaking of which: She's not invisible; she's got a natural SEP field.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:38 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Y'know, I thought I had more DVDs than that.

To explain: I moved house twice last year. Once by choice (mostly), once not. So my smaller possessions are rather scrambled right now. Last move I filled two large-ish boxes with DVDs, and I had unpacked those (to the extent of sticking them all in a closet, which at least gets the boxes out of my way). But that only produced four of the six Sugar DVDs - specifically 2, 3, 4 and 6.

But when I was packing books (I have about 3000 of the blasted things) I would often fill a box part-way with hardcovers and then top it off with paperbacks or CDs or tapes or DVDs - the boxes get too heavy otherwise. So I started pulling every box open just to see if that one had DVDs in it. I found Sugar volume 1 pretty quickly, but no volume 5.

I did find lots of other things, though, including DVDs I'd forgotten I had (I haven't seen all my DVDs since, oh, last May). The most recent box contained ten volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and piled on top of those, four stacks of twelve DVDs. Let's look at one stack:

Haibane Renmei volumes 2 and 3. I bought the box set last year thinking I only had the first volume; looks like I may have two complete copies.
Inu Yasha volume 12.
Nuku Nuku Dash volume 1.
Pulp Fiction
Futurama season 2, disc 2.
Princess Mononoke
Jawbreaker (No, I don't know why.)
His Girl Friday
Yamamoto Yohko: The Perfect Collection
The Avengers '63 disc 4 (Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale)
Monty Python's Flying Circus disc 5
Magic User's Club disc 5

Volume 5 of Sugar was in the next stack. Unopened, like volume 6.

I'm trying to turn them into AVIs so I can easily watch them on my notebook, but my computer isn't co-operating. I might have to live with DVDShrink, which works just fine.

And I still have 30 boxes to open.

(Also found: Two cartons of wine, which may or may not be drinkable; the keyboards for my SGI and Sun workstations; the mouse for my Wacom graphics tablet; my N64 and Playstation (one) and their respective controllers; a whole lot of SCSI cables; the grand unified remote control collection; The Maltese Falcon; a pretty complete set of AD&D 2nd Edition rules (about 40-50 volumes); a 120GB hard disk, which I assume doesn't work; my toaster; the controller for my Logitech speaker system (which has led a rough life this past year); my Sony Vaio; a pair of binoculars; my Dalek apron; a Sailor Mercury doll; a Life on Mars Lego set; my spare pair of glasses (and a reminder why they are my spare pair: instant migraine); and 125 blank DVD-Rs. Oh, and rather a lot of books.)

Update: Ooh, Pom Poko!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:52 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Okay, I just finished watching it, and then read Steven's too many words. (Contains spoilers.)

And I cracked up.

There's a time for analysis, and there's a time to go with the story as it's presented. Sometimes a fairy is just a fairy.

I call the Calvin and Hobbes defense here: All of it is true, particularly the parts that are impossible.

P.S. Steven, whatever you do, don't watch Mahoraba.

(Analysis of my own follows.) more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:13 PM | Comments (34) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 No, it makes perfect sense.She puts the fairy dolls into the bowl.

Besides which, we see events through her eyes, and she's delusional.

Still, I think I myself said that not everyone is going to find that alternate explanation convincing or even interesting. I'm glad you didn't, because it spoiled the series for me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 09, 2006 12:35 AM (+rSRq)

2 Mmph.

It would make more sense to assume that the last episode was a dream sequence. It's not the first time we saw the fairies dream that they'd grown up. I mean, if you're assuming that everything we see is false, why go for the darkest possible interpretation?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 09, 2006 01:01 AM (lLRbG)

3 I should add -

When you have a fun little anime about magic fairies, it is most likely a fun little anime about fairies.

Because if it was about a girl who was suffering from trauma-induced multiple-personality disorder, and they indicated this by having her eyes change colour when she changed personalities, then they wouldn't bother with the fairies.

Trust me on this.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 09, 2006 04:51 AM (oyvZL)

4 Actually, I'm coming around to the idea that it's autism.
But I'm not the only person who's had this reaction.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 09, 2006 11:28 AM (+rSRq)

5 I'm not sure autism fits, because the fairies have as many problems dealing with the natural world as they do dealing with other people.

Anyway, the main reason I think it is to be taken literally is that there is already a whole Shoujo-brain-damage genre. For example, Nanaka 6/17, Midori no Hibi, and Mahoraba ~ Heartful Days ~. The text of the latter is precisely what you think the subtext of Bottle Fairy is, right down to the eye-colour changes.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 09, 2006 12:02 PM (oyvZL)

6
And Ai Yori Aoshi. Lovely girl, but obviously the brain-damaged result of a warped upbringing.

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Had the day off today, because I was needed at work all the past week and couldn't take any time off sick.

Slept.

I needed that.

Now I'm going to see if I can find the rest of my DVDs. I know they're in one of these boxes...

Update: Have found volumes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 of Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar. There'd better be another box of DVDs here somewhere.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:07 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

When I first started watching anime as anime rather than as cartoons that just happened to come from Japan, one of the things I most looked forward to was the new releases from ADV every month. For a simple reason: The ADV tapes (and this was back in the middle ages, so all we had was tapes) had trailers on them.

Trailers that did not suck.

This was an art that had escaped most of the anime distributors of the time, though watching even a handful of ADV's trailers made the techniques involved obvious. All they did was take the opening theme (or in some cases, the closing theme if it was catchier or if there was no opening theme) and a selection of clips from the show. Even without a real-time NLE (which were in short supply in the 12th century) you could put something like that together in an hour or two. Add titles with your handy-dandy character generator (anyone remember the outrage when ADV changed their subtitle font?) and you're done. A 90 second promotional spot that your customers will actually want to watch made for practically nothing.

(The secret part that most of their competitors didn't get was what they didn't do. No voice-over. They let the anime speak for itself.)

Well, that's what I want to talk to you all about; endings.

I love the opening and closing sequences of anime shows because this is exactly what they are designed to do. They have to sell the show, and they have just 90 seconds to do it.

The job is very different to the opening credits of most western TV shows. Look at something like, say, Buffy or Stargate. Yes, you have theme music (or in the case of Buffy, a crappy pointless noisy riff), and you have some action shots, but the big point is to show and name the cast. Because... Well, I don't actually know exactly why. But that's what they do. With a live-action show, the cast is important; not many TV series can get away with replacing their stars (Dr Who being the notable exception).

Live action TV shows live or die to a large degree by their casts. The stories are secondary - which is why so much of what we get on our screens is crap.

Animation doesn't. I might be interested if a series has a character voiced by Megumi Hayashibara, still a favourite of mine, or if it has music composed by Yoko Kanno. A film from Hayao Miyazaki is a must see. But for the most part, the names of the seiyuu (voice actors), composers, directors, and writers don't register all that strongly. It's not about the stars.

Now, endings normally happen at the end.

It's about the story. Most anime is developed from existing manga*, comic books, and manga are usually the work of just one or two people. They're almost always black-and-white, so there's not even the need for the type of teams of artists that produce many Western comics. (Does Rumiko Takahashi have an inker and a letterer? I have no idea.)

And when a show is story-driven, what you have to do is tell the story. If you have 12 episodes worth of story, you can't run the series for seven years.** So next year, next season in fact, you have to come up with another story to tell.

And you have to persuade people to watch it.

And you have ninety seconds to do so.

You have ninety seconds to say, these are my characters. This is my artistic style, this is my animation, this is my music. This is my story. Please watch it so that the advertisers will keep funding me and I can afford something more than instant ramen now and then.

But as we all know, endings are just beginnings.

Given that requirement, it's not surprising that a lot of thought and effort goes into the opening and closing credits in anime. I have a couple of laser discs (uh, somewhere) of the credits for all the seasons of Urusei Yatsura and Ranma ½. That such a thing could be produced and sold means that I'm not the only person to notice this.***

Hence this, and this:

My friend (a 2nd generation Japanese) who has seen far more anime than all other people I know (and myself) combined, has come up with an heuristic for judging whether something is worth getting an actual viewing. There are far too many series around competing for attention, even more so for him since he can watch region 2 releases (no need for English). Time and resources are finite, so some sort of prioritization must be used. Basically it is this:

Watch the opening and the closing.
- If both are good, then the series is, more likely than not, also good and worth watching.
- If one is good but the other so-so, then the final opinion could go either way. (Openings are worth more points.)
- If both are bad, don't watch.

But it works - for me - far more often than not.

And that's why I'm archiving them here. A reviewer can tell you that the animation is fluid (or stilted, as it may be); the music joyous or inspired or achingly beautiful or, well, none of the above. But in ninety seconds, you can determine that for yourself.

* Most anime series that aren't adaptations of manga are adaptations of computer games. But they almost invariably suck, so I'll ignore them.

** Ranma ½ notwithstanding.

*** And if you thought that the closing themes for Popotan or Happy Lesson were ear worms, just writing the name of Urusei Yatsura has got Lum no Love Song stuck in my head.

Hoshitachi ga kagayaku yofuke
Yumemiru no anata no subete.
Aishite mo anata wa shiramburi de.
Imagoro wa dare ka ni muchuu.

Oh yes, here, in case you were wondering.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:07 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

And set to purée for five and a half hours.

Haibane Renmei.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:12 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Trackback spam capital of the universe.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:32 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Moron.

I know that you didn't expect or want an answer, Doug, and were merely seeking an opportunity to parade your ignorance and arrogance in front of the world, but you did ask:

...wait a minute, you're telling me that scientists have been preaching Godless evolution all this time without a legit fish-to-tetrapod missing link?! Well what were you using all this time on the fossil tree, science fiction? Luckily, no gap is so great between species that can make some scientists lose their faith in a dogmatic fundamentalist allegience to Materialist Darwinism.

Moron.

You're welcome.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:03 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I think someone put drugs in my drugs.

Maybe I should go to bed now.

Hmm.

Which way is the bedroom? Down? Down is good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Just to clear one thing up - munu is not a commercial service. It's not just non-profit, it's non-revenue. That may change in the future, but at the moment we have a gross profit of zilch on an annual turnover of nothing.

Now, on the subject of web spiders: By default, Movable Type 2.6 creates CGI links for the comments and trackbacks for every post.

We have over 160,000 posts here at munu. (Just in MT 2.6.)

Back in November when we moved servers, we had about 140,000 posts. As it happens, when you dump and reload a MySQL database it loses all its indexing statistics. And with no statistics, it simply doesn't use the indexes.

So along came a spider, and decided to index all 280,000 CGI pages against a database with no working indexes causing a near meltdown of a pair of dual-processor 2.8GHz servers.

Web spiders are now banned from our CGI directory.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:10 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Annika will be overjoyed!

Posted by: Susie at April 05, 2006 12:03 PM (a0oF7)

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333.25 mph? Sure, that's fast - for a boat.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:34 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Caught the boss at a good moment and he signed off on the new server we needed. It will replace two old servers - which means that I get a dual Athlon with 4GB of memory for my desk.

With that much memory I can easily run three instances of Linux under VMware, which means that I can then retire the development box, the test box, and my personal Linux box.

Server consolidation: Coming soon to a desktop near you.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:53 PM | Comments (32) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Cool beans. New gear. About time.

Server consolidation is a good thing ^tm. But what are you going to do with all the existing boxes that the old server will replace ?

Posted by: Andrew at April 05, 2006 09:58 AM (RWEVY)

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Coolness:

In answer to your question (I am a Dirty Pair affciando from way back) the original Dirty Pair tv series 1-24 and 25 and 26 which were released as ova's were never licensed or released in the US except as fansubs. I recently got all of the dvds for this series from Japan and am in the process of subbing them. I have the same fansub scripts as you do and was wondering what in the heck JACO subs were. Now I know. Wish me luck, I'm doing this as my homage to Kei and Yuri as they were the ones responsible for getiing me in anime.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:16 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

For a forum devoted to high-end video systems, this is mind-bogglingly hideous.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:51 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Eeek. Thats pretty nasty.

Have you seen the revised Slashdot ? Its colour is chosen to entice a section of the population that doesn't read it.

Posted by: Andrew at April 01, 2006 05:55 PM (0585Z)

2 OMG!!! Ponies!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 01, 2006 07:35 PM (S6OAx)

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My throat hurts, my head feels like it's being squoze in a vice, my brain is made of boiled cabbage, my nose is runny, my ears are stuffed up, my voice is gone, and now I have a stomach ache - but I've stopped coughing!

It really works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Theobromine is an antitussive.

Woohoo!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:09 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Two more lunatics dot their T's and cross their I's for us: Charlie Sheen and Mark Morford.

Wonderfully to-the-point article in the Guardian (of all places):

Pay attention, civilians. Actor Charlie Sheen has been focusing his mind on the official explanation for 9/11. And you know what? He’s not buying it. “It just didn’t look like any commercial jetliner I’ve flown on any time in my life,” the Hotshots Part Deux star told a US radio station this week, “and then when the buildings came down later on that day, I said to my brother ‘call me insane’, but did it sorta look like those buildings came down in a controlled demolition?"

You’re insane. Next.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:37 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Why does the label have to say "Whiskey flavoured" when the flavouring used to impart the whiskey flavour is... Whiskey?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:43 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Tim Blair and Brian Tiemann have commented on Robert Fisk's remarks suggesting that the collapse of the World Trade Centre was due to a conspiracy.

Well, of course it was, but that's not the conspiracy that Fisk and a small army of other deeply confused individuals are thinking of. No; planes full of jet fuel could not do it; it had to be controlled demolition involving explosive charges

Never mind that this is completely impossible for a thousand reasons, such as, for example, the fact that there weren't any such charges. Logic and fact mean nothing to these people; if you explain all the reasons why explosives could not have been put in place without it becoming open knowledge, they will suggest (this is a real example) that the explosives were mixed in with the concrete when the towers were first built.

...

What we are dealing with here is people who are blindingly stupid and wilfully ignorant, to the point where they are in effect functionally insane. That is, they are unable to apprehend or deal with the world as it is, and instead attempt to deal with the world as the imagine it to be. I mean, we knew that already; Fisk's conspiracy ramblings are really just a case of running an orange highlighter over a significant paragraph.

Given that Robert Fisk is quite obviously crazy, his broad popularity with the left is yet another indication of the deep and growing separation from reality on that side of the divide. I have no particular insight on what to do about this. Making fun of them seems to offer the best return on one's effort, though it is of course lost on the targets themselves. I'm open to suggestions.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:34 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I've got the closing theme for Happy Lesson stuck in my head now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:14 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

My regular antihistamines contain dexchlorpheniramine maleate, but these flu capsules* contain just plain chlorpheniramine maleate. There could be leftist amino acids infiltrating my system right now.

This seemed terribly significant at 4 am.

* Actually Cold & Flu + Cough capsules. Two diseases and a symptom all for one low low price!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:57 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)