Not another one...
An artist I've known personally since the 1980's, Taral Wayne has just announced that he's recently suffered a stroke. I don't know much more than that. He had a friend type that for him in his DeviantArt Status.
1
With the proviso that my tastes are not mainstream, I'm thinking 1) Demi-chan, 2) ACCA, 3) Gabriel Dropout. In addition, Seiren is supposedly Amagami S2. It's a very full season. I've also read the Kobayashi-san manga and it was too gay for me, as well as not particularly comedic for the premise. So I'm going to pass upon the anime. But it may be interesting for those not poisoned by the source.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 22, 2017 08:24 AM (XOPVE)
2
Demi-Chan. Just looked at the first. Seems to be taking a much more tentative tack than say Everyday Life with Monster Girls. They're all basically humanoid types, but it has a certain charm, so I'll try that.
Now to work through the others. I kinda depended on Steven to link to the charts and previews back then, because I don't read THAT many other anime blogs. Seeing things like the Math Teacher's red half-rims just reminds me of our falling out, which kinda wrecks what could have been a fun thing to notice.
Posted by: Mauser at January 27, 2017 06:10 PM (5Ktpu)
3
Acca: No.Political intrigue in a bureaucracy in a fictional country. Pretty dry stuff, and I don't like the faces.
Posted by: Mauser at January 27, 2017 06:46 PM (5Ktpu)
4
Gabriel Dropout. At first I thought they were going to play it straight, and it was so saccharine, I was gonna quit, but then I skipped ahead. I'll give it a try.
Posted by: Mauser at January 27, 2017 07:07 PM (5Ktpu)
5
I'd suggest you to look at Miao's Thin Slicing post, but it requires a certain habit. This season's post feels much too counterfactual, except where he starts raging about Seiren's poor character design and animation quality.
I forgot to mention Fuuka.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 29, 2017 05:15 PM (XOPVE)
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 01, 2017 06:46 PM (XOPVE)
9
Wasn't aware of that one. What happened? (And is it any good? That's not the 5 minute one with the chibi catgirls, right?)
Posted by: Mauser at March 01, 2017 08:51 PM (5Ktpu)
10
All my Japanese friends go bananas about Kemono Friends (including IRL -- met some at a trade conference), and it's all over Twitter and Pixiv. I appended the explanations by the brightest bulbs in animeblogging to the post at Ani-nouto.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at March 07, 2017 09:35 AM (XOPVE)
11
Oh, and after enjoying Shuumatsu no Izetta, I've just run across another WWI military sorceress series running currently, "Youjo Senki", also known as "The Saga of Tanya the Evil." And yeah, she is really, really horrible!
Posted by: Mauser at March 11, 2017 09:29 PM (5Ktpu)
Miss Daicon revisited
One of my first introductions to anime back at the Philadelphia Animation Society in the mid '80's, was a fun little convention opening animation set to ELO's "Twilight" from the album Time. It had been degraded from many generations of recopying, but it was pretty amazing, and showed what Fans were capable of. Plus it was an homage to everything that was good in fandom back then.
Lately on Youtube I've been getting an amateur (hardly!) video series suggested to me. But this one, "Cassette Girl" is especially worthy, since it hearkens back to that Daicon IV Opening Animation. Although I still don't understand the fascination with Betamax....
1
Betamax was, in many ways, vastly superior to VHS which ended up winning the "war" due to a combination of chicanery by JVC and Sony's tight patent policies on the Betamax. Another factor was movies were increasingly released on VHS (due in part to the latter's somewhat inferior re-copy quality, a crude form of DRM). Note that BetaMax was officially adopted by the Japanese government as the standard videocassette of Japan, which led to a lot of people buying it and feeling burned when it faceplanted.
So there's a bit of nostalgia there amongst lots of people of a certain age for the format.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at January 28, 2017 11:54 PM (KicmI)
2
Sadly, that particular ability was never demonstrated publicly, which might have altered the outcome of the product competition....and/or shortened the cold war.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at January 29, 2017 12:04 AM (KicmI)
The big problem with Beta, IIRC, was also the recording length that didn't match typical program lengths.
I also ran into an issue once with my old Mac 8600 that had AV inputs. The VCR I had hooked up to it had Macrovision, which I could SEE injecting a signal into the colorburst interval (I have an oscilloscope) which a TV could ignore but the computer would not. It had the effect of fooling the AGC and brightening and dimming the signal.
These days, a simple circuit that could have blanked out that part of the signal is illegal, thanks to the DMCA, although certain home video mixers would do that as well.
Posted by: Mauser at January 29, 2017 01:33 AM (5Ktpu)
Wheee! Another Instalanche!
For "Who Goes There?!" basically a failed writer goes on HuffPo and writes a piece about how all Self-Pub books are shit because they don't pass through the NYC Publisher's gatekeepers. Larry Correia fisked the living shit out of the post, but I had a different insight that started as a comment and turned into an essay. My theory is that thanks to the way Sales ranking and reviews and also-boughts work on a site like Amazon, plus blogs and social media, the "Gatekeepers" have been Crowdsourced.
Posted by: Wonderduck at December 26, 2016 07:19 PM (UDOXQ)
2
Yeah, he may not be as glorious as the Smug Duck from Wakfu (the creators actually called him that!) but as obscure as this show was, I thought you'd miss it, and I know you must have All the Ducks.
Posted by: Mauser at December 26, 2016 09:04 PM (5Ktpu)
Posted by: Wonderduck at December 26, 2016 07:17 PM (UDOXQ)
2
For a 5 minute cartoon about an Otaku and his mundane wife working things out, it did an amazing job of both being funny and poking you in the feels, but in a gentle and hopeful way.
Posted by: Mauser at December 26, 2016 09:03 PM (5Ktpu)
Which makes it hard to come up with a good Uke-lele pun.
Posted by: Mauser at December 29, 2016 01:05 AM (5Ktpu)
5
I thought you were more in with the community than I, yet I knew what yaoi paddles were from my convention days.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 02, 2017 07:17 PM (XOPVE)
6
I didn't do a lot of (any) cons in the 2000's, so thankfully I totally missed out on that particular phenomenon. Lately the only Con I've attended is LibertyCon. (I went two years ago and I'm going again this year.)
Posted by: Mauser at January 02, 2017 08:42 PM (5Ktpu)
7
Duuuuuude. Sakuracon is your local con and they had Yoko Ishida and KOTOKO (IIRC). I think you missed out. Although of course every man has own interests.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 09, 2017 07:47 PM (XOPVE)
8
I haven't been to SakuraCon since around 2000 (or 1999, I forget) where they guested me because I lent them (and set up and tore down ) ConiFur NorthWest's art show panels (Which I built).
They used to be called BakaCon, and had trouble getting guests from Japan for some strange reason....
Posted by: Mauser at January 10, 2017 08:48 PM (5Ktpu)
How I spent my Thanksgiving Vacation
Basically, other than eating and sleeping, and a couple of errands, I spent it grinding 70,000 XP on World of Warships to finish the last two parts of the Takao mission. And it was astonishingly frustrating, because the only qualifying ships I had were the ARP Haguro and the Ryujo carrier. And damned if I can tell what actually equates to XP, because I had one amazing round where I sank three ships and did over 53K in damage, and got only 7-800 XP, and others where I did a lot less, but got a lot more (and it wasn't just the difference between winning or losing, but god did I lose a lot!)
Most frustrating thing with a carrier is getting that last torpedo run perfectly lined up, a guaranteed kill... and the game ends. That happened way too often. With the Cruiser, it was ammo selection. All the general rules of what to use didn't seem to apply. Plus I got stuck in some high tier matches. I actually had one match where I died fairly early. I had 0 Damage, but I didn't get the "You have not proven yourself in this battle" message. I had a hit on one ship with AP for zero damage, and a hit on another with HE, also for no damage. And don't get me started on Haguro's torpedoes....
Still, I won the Takao. I finished attaching all the upgrades, but I haven't allocated her 10 skill points yet.
1
And now, to add insult to injury, they're running a giveaway for the complete set, and the requirements are exactly the same as what I went through to earn Takao! On the plus side, Takao is raking in the XP for me, and you get an extra slot if you win a ship you've already got, and an extra copy of the captain, with 10 skill points.
Posted by: Mauser at December 04, 2016 07:19 PM (5Ktpu)
2...damned if I can tell what actually equates to XP...
I discovered this completely by accident a few days ago m'self: for the ARP challenges, it's base XP only, before bonuses. So if you're wearing a hot camo that gives you a 300% bonus, and the 50% first win, and the Veterans flag, and earn 3000xp total from a match... you'd probably still only accrue ~800xp towards the total.
Posted by: Wonderduck at December 26, 2016 07:16 PM (UDOXQ)
3
They're actually making this explicit now, saying "Before Modifiers" and "After Modifiers" on the tasks, so that clearly was a source of confusion before.
Posted by: Mauser at December 27, 2016 02:25 PM (5Ktpu)
4
But also, doing damage alone doesn't earn you XP. there are apparently a lot of other factors that contribute to Base XP, they just don't disclose all of them.
Posted by: Mauser at December 27, 2016 02:27 PM (5Ktpu)
Catsuit....
So apparently the way to draw traffic and interest is to post pictures, and I've been way remiss in that department.
Way
back when I was reviewing Deadman Wonderland, I mentioned a scene where
the security chief of the prison went and donned a catsuit to explore a
part of the prison that was secret to her, even though her own uniform
would have served her better. There was a delightful shot of her zipping
it up. I remember asking other people what they were using to make
animated .gifs, but no advice was forthcoming. I was never able to
compile one.
I still can't, but someone else did make one of the aforementioned scene, so I present that in all its mesmerizing glory.
I know some would rather see it go down than up, but I'm weird that way.
Posted by: J Greely at November 14, 2016 08:16 PM (ZlYZd)
4
Should only be twice as big, unless something is creating extra frames. the animated .gif spec allows you to set the timing, I thought.
Posted by: Mauser at November 15, 2016 06:09 PM (5Ktpu)
5
Yup. Original 5.72 MB, reversed 4.97 MB, up-and-down 9.95 MB; it looks like gifsicle did a better job of calculating the differences between frames than whatever the original poster used.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at November 15, 2016 11:01 PM (ZlYZd)
6
I didn't realize just how big that file was. If I had more traffic, Pixy would prolly demand I put it behind the more tab...
Posted by: Mauser at November 16, 2016 07:49 PM (5Ktpu)
Posted by: Mauser at November 16, 2016 10:06 PM (5Ktpu)
8Command-line tool available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, for manipulating regular and animated GIFs. I used it to split the animation into individual frames, then reversed the list of file names and reassembled it.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at November 16, 2016 10:24 PM (ZlYZd)
9
Hmmm, somewhere I have a copy of the Microsoft GIF making tool, and ifranview has a command for saving off all the individual frames of an animated .gif (but not frame stepping controls, like the old Mac program GraphicConverter).
It's odd that such an old format does not have a better suite of tools.
Posted by: Mauser at November 17, 2016 08:41 PM (5Ktpu)
10Software patents. By the time they expired, lots of people had moved on to PNG, etc, and had no reason to write new tools.
Something I didn't know until just now is that sites like imgur are now auto-converting animated GIFs to MP4 video, reducing the file size to around 5%. I just tried it on the 10MB GIF I made, and the size dropped to 423 KB. The downside is that you have to wrap it in a 'video' tag with the 'autoplay' and 'loop' attributes set.
Tumblr needs to start doing this, preferably without the autoplay tag...
-j
Posted by: J Greely at November 17, 2016 11:00 PM (ZlYZd)
11
Twitter does something like that, the downside being, you can't save them.
Posted by: Mauser at November 18, 2016 05:16 PM (5Ktpu)
12
I'm sure there's a way to bypass their trick, much the way youtube downloading tools do it. Honestly, the way they start auto-playing videos and gifs on your phone as you scroll through tweets is almost as annoying as their Left-handed censorship, and with so many people abandoning the platform, soon I won't care how Twitter does anything. :-)
-j
Posted by: J Greely at November 18, 2016 09:49 PM (ZlYZd)
13
Perhaps, but have you noticed that the YouTube downloaders have turned into crap lately? I had one that holds off its high rez versions for paid users.
Posted by: Mauser at November 19, 2016 09:50 PM (5Ktpu)
14
BTW, the source is episode 8, about 7 minutes in. It actually goes a little higher than the .gif shows. No idea why they cut it short, other than file size.
Posted by: Mauser at December 26, 2016 09:47 PM (5Ktpu)
Posted by: Mauser at October 31, 2016 06:46 PM (5Ktpu)
3
Hmmm, Shuumatsu no Izetta seems possibly interesting based on the site there. (Downloads first three eps in 5 minutes, and is thankful he's not on ClearWire any more).
More to come.
Posted by: Mauser at October 31, 2016 07:10 PM (5Ktpu)
4
From what I head, Izetta is a bit of too much of a caricature, e.g. everyone on the good side is beautiful and righteous, and everyone on the bad side is ugly and deceitful. Also, they are basically Germans. And in general, I am not into witches screwing up with tanks. Well, except maybe DBZ.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at October 31, 2016 07:37 PM (XOPVE)
5
Oddly, I've rather liked witches in anime a lot lately. First episode was rather pretty to look at too. CG tanks and such actually blended in very well. I also like Genre Blending (Which is very different from Gender Bending).
Posted by: Mauser at November 01, 2016 03:27 PM (5Ktpu)
Puff piece
So, this windstorm of the century we were supposed to have today was a bust. the nearest weather station to me did report sustained winds in the upper 20's with a gusts in the 30's. But nothing like the apocalypse the news stations were touting on Friday. The blow on Thursday was harder than today.
Maybe someday people will learn that the time to do disaster preparedness is not the day before a disaster is predicted, but well in advance. You won't be fighting over D-Cells you won't need, and you'll actually have gas for that new generator you've never tried out before.
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