January 25, 2014
Our hero is an ordinay school boy, Jimon Asuta, and we open with him fighting with his dad on the phone, and essentially running away from home, for which he is ill-prepared (Starting off broke and hungry). But before you think the world is ordinary, outside a convenience store he meets a classmate who reminds him that "Martial Law level 2" is in effect. And it's Curfew time. And she's gone, and the stores all shutter instantly before he can buy something to eat.
Evading police patrols, he runs into a very strange little girl with what he thinks are delusions of world conquest and being the leader of a secret organization. Hoshimiya Kate AKA Lady Venera, leader of the evil secret society Zvezda. With nothing better to do, he follows her around, and that's when we discover that not only aren't we in Kansas any more, it's not even on the same map! Explosions go off and it looks like the military is fighting some giant monster, that can only be seen for the moment by the flashes of the explosions.
They continue to wander the empty streets, but they aren't entirely empty, as some strange individuals are around. Jimon gets a little tired of the game and gives Kate a dose of what he thinks is reality. She zooms off on her little bike, and feeling regret, he chases off after her, only to nearly be run down by a police car (more of an APC). Nearly, only because one of those strange individuals cuts the damned thing in half with her sword so she can interrogate him about the whereabouts of Kate. A second stranger appears, and they argue while Jimon slips away.
He finds himself in a park, and then he finds himself underneath the giant monster as Apache Gunships launch missiles. He also find himself in front of a company of tanks, and he finds the stuffed animal Kate was out looking for. And then he's really lost. The stuffed animal, along with a boatload of these little fuzzy ball creatures were what the monster was made from, and the tanks managed to blow it up, releasing them all. A deluge of thousands upon thousands of tribbles.
For some reason, he braves the charging tanks to scoop up the doll, and they surround him. The mask he's carrying that Kate game him makes them think he's the enemy who was controlling the monster (It was actually another guy he encountered in the park). The tank company are about to capture him at the orders of their general when SHE steps in. The Primary Target, the Leader of Zvezda. It's the little girl, in a costume change. And the tank commander takes the initiative and fires at her, point blank. She stops the shell with her fingertip (with a large floating glowing magical symbol at the tip). Jimon is speechless, thought-free, and probably this close to involuntary incontinence.
The stuffed animal is, apparently some kind of power focus, and Kate uses it to manifest a giant hand, and smash the tank company. The shattered tanks and the unconscious tank commander are thoughtfully labelled with a symbol indicating they've been "Conquered".
Later, after the strangers chastise their member who unleashed the monster too early, Kate joins with them and introduces Jimon as their newest member. He does not take it too well, but what's he going to do?
This was just so over the top, full of weirdness, I loved it. If you liked Kill la Kill, give this a try.
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January 21, 2014
Himawari started with a 2 T Seagate, which was divided in 2 for historic reasons (C: and D:). And got a second 2T for backups (E:) and to help me save all my stuff from the painful process of the Win XP-7 upgrade process. Well, the D: partition was where the torrents were going, and it was filling up, and the backups of C: and D; were filling up E:. I pondered aiming the torrents at the new drive, but really, with E: freed up, 2T should hold the torrents and future downloads, D: could be freed up for who knows what (C: has scads of space too). F: now will comfortably hold the backup that was filling E: up.
The real painful process though was getting uTorrent to point at the new folder. I copied the CompletedDLs folder in the File explorer, and changed the directories in the preferences, but to get the torrents to point to the new location was painful (one thing that helped was renaming the original directory on the D: drive, because uTorrent then defaulted to the new folder, saving a lot of hunting). Basically I would select a bunch of torrents, chose "Advanced>Set download location" and then say no when it asked to overwrite the existing file. However, about a dozen torrents didn't like having their download directory changed. It didn't seem to "Take" for the files inside them. The common factor was that they were torrents with directories inside them, ones where the torrent name and the directory name didn't necessarily match, and typically ones that had been altered by some torrent echoing service that likes to add little text files saying they were the source to them. Some were easier to fix than others, but some ended up needing the individual files set to the right location, which often would result in the files in the torrent getting names with a fully qualified path. I never could get them to look the way they did originally, which probably means the torrent's structure was mangled from the beginning.
Well, everything points in the right place now - running Force Re-check on everything is a good way to make sure. but some of them are still ugly.
Would it have been better to let uTorrent relocate the files, I don't know. It probably did help to not start anything new until everything had finished seeding.
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January 12, 2014
Voodoo is probably a better term for it, since the single hardest thing to get right is the starting location, and even then, half of the viewing tools don't seem to honor it (Calibre doesn't, Amazon's online Kindle simulator doesn't, their PC reader does, and the Kindle itself does, IF it's set properly, but nobody seems to agree what properly is).
A lot of the process is centered around using Microsoft Word. I don't use Word, I use OpenOffice, and while it's mostly compatible, I think there must be a subtle difference in the bookmarking feature. So instead of trying to directly upload .docx format, I found a nice tool called Alkinea that can translate .odt into .ePub format. It can supposedly run the .ePub directly into KindleGen to get a .mobi file, but I can't make that work. Amazon can take either the .ePub or the .mobi format. Or hey, you can even try to use Calibre to go all the way to AZW3, the main Kindle format.
But in any case, you need to unzip the .ePub into its respective .xhtml files to make some edits, since the first file will be your front matter (copyright statement etc) and you want it to start at the second one, then zip it up again. PeaZip has an advantage over 7-Zip in that it has a context menu for opening any file as an archive, saving you from one extension change (but you need to change extensions on the way back, alas). PeaZip can also open .cab files, which isn't relevant here, but it saved me once for a driver install.
Amazon's uploader can take .docx, .ePub, and .mobi. But even though KindleGen takes the same .ePub that Amazon would convert into a .mobi, uploading the two files produces a different final product. .mobi seems to remain a little more faithful to one's intent.
The author of Alkinea has put out a new version in response to my issues, but I haven't gotten to try it yet.
And somewhere in the fighting I managed to let Calibre "Smarten" my quotes and turn my scene breaks from --- into a single em-dash, but since that file worked, I quit while I was ahead. So I don't exactly have a tool-chain per se, at least I can eventually get where I'm going.
Oh, I suppose I should put a link here. This is Kiwi on Amazon (For those outside the US, it should be the same ASIN with your local Amazon domain substituted). It's about a rather bigoted human who gets locked up with a female alien criminal. While the expected eventually happens, it does not work out well for either of them. In the week it's been up I've sold 6 copies. Woohoo! (And I had one jerk from the UK buy it, read it, and return it the next day. Apparently that's legal, and little can stop him from keeping a copy anyway.)
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December 30, 2013

With bonus awkward fall.



"You can introduce me to Gendo Sensei?"


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December 29, 2013
Until I delete them.
In the Queue: Accel World. I decided to pick it up because of an AMV. Yeah, I know I hate Arena combat, but something about the interaction with the pudgy, loser main character and the school princess makes me want to find out what's going on.
Two episodes in though and I'm seeing one flaw with the design. New users of the Brain Burst program get 100 points. Every time they enter it they lose one, and every time they lose a fight, they lose 10 (or win 10 if they win). There may be a greater prize if they beat a higher level player, as unlikely as that is. If they're wiped out, they're locked out of ever using it again. So it's kinda like AmWay, to get anywhere you have to keep bringing new people in and wipe them out. Thus it CAN'T be such a secret society like they're making it out to be, and their count must be off. Especially since other players seem to enter the burst mode just to watch the fights.
Update: Okay, Spectating doesn't count, but still, the point economy only has transfers and losses, so the only way to add to the economy is new members.
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December 27, 2013
I try to be a good guy, and when something is commercially available, I get it from Netflix instead of torrents. Well, usually. But some schmuck lost or destroyed disk 4, and they are probably never going to get it replaced. Surprisingly there are a couple of active torrents (one is insanely big, BD dumps and tons of extras (but who really needs 6 meg png files?) 27 gig is just too much.)
The show is near-is future, 2075, Earth orbit is very commercialized, and very full of junk. Our heroes work in the very lowly-regarded Debris Collection department of one of the space companies, Technora. Tanabe Ai is a young girl who just got her job with the company, and as she and her three other friends who came up with her go to their new departments, she begins to realize that her low test scores have literally landed her at the bottom. But in spite of the weird crew of misfits she's been assigned to, she takes her work of making space safe very seriously.
Hachimaki - Hachirota Hoshino is their ace EVA guy, Fee Carmichael is the pilot of the Toy Box, a retrieval vessel with a big cargo bay that opens, for the big stuff, and a compliment of "Fishbones" bare-bones crew transport sleds for the smaller bits. Yuri Mihairokoh is another crew member, who has a side business running a kennel for people's pets, plus there's an assistant manager who is a bit of a clown, but always eager to make sure he's licking the shoes of the company superiors properly, and a manager who is thoroughly inept but very close to retirement. Fortunately they have a temp worker secretary who is utterly by the books to keep the paperwork straight.
In 26 episodes the manage to cover a LOT of story arcs. There is a good amount of soap opera, Office politics, international politics, Space terrorism, disasters, philosophy, and a mission to Jupiter.
Some of the characters are tropes, of course, Ai is naive, but outspoken, and true to her name believes in the power of love, even when she's screaming at Hachimaki for being such a sullen lump. He has a pilot buddy who is moving up in the world, graduating from freighters to a passenger shuttle, while he's been in neutral collecting debris for the last three years. Fee is an excellent pilot, but nothing had better come between her and her cigarettes. Yuri's personal arc starts with him getting into debris collection because he and his new wife were on a shuttle that got hit by a very fast-moving bolt. She and her effects weren't found, but he's hoping to find something of hers. He does, a Compass she was wearing around her neck, and while that helps, it's not until it gets crushed in an accident that he's finally able to let go of his grief.
The Terrorists, the Space Defense Force, don't like it that first world countries benefit the most from space resources, they want mankind out of space and the money spent on them and their problems. By odd chance, it's the crew of the Toy Box that fouls their plans again and again. But this isn't low-comedy, Saturday morning "Curses, Foiled again" plot foiling. At one point the Toy Box is destroyed on re-entry, almost taking Fee with it when a satellite designated as junk turns out to be a powered kinetic kill vehicle aimed at the big twin-wheel station that is their home. The resulting debris field will take out the other 11 stations, and pollute orbit with enough junk to basically confine mankind to the surface.
This is a show that loves space, and in spite of the politics of resource allocation in the backdrop, it unabashedly promotes the idea that humanity's future is out there, although it is a cruel and unforgiving mistress.
Yeah, I can recommend this. I watched it straight through over the course of two days.
The Deadfish torrent is 6.84 gigs, contains just the 26 episodes in 720p, but, alas is hardsubbed.
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December 24, 2013
I will give the series credit on one point. It did NOT devolve into endless arena combat, but it does switch gears halfway through. After two fights, there's a bit of a wrap-up to the Takami Yoh arc - his sister it turns out is one of the "Deadmen" and he deliberately got into the prison to amass a huge amount of the Cast Points in order to buy his sister's sentence out. Unfortunately, once he tracks her down to the hidden G-block, he's told that prisoners there can not buy their sentences off. He is moved almost completely off the chessboard by having the living snot beaten out of him by one of the anti-deadman enforcers they suddenly introduce, called Undertakers.
Ganta falls in with a crew planning to bust out. And this introduces the reason I decided to finish watching, there's a girl with dark skin and almost-white hair. I really like that combination in Anime girls, I have ever since I saw Pirotess in The Legend Lodoss War. Doesn't hurt that she's fairly stacked, and she's the second in command of the group. Her blood power forms an impenetrable shield on her skin. It's kind of improbable that they had a sort of bar to hang out in off the G-block.

A little the worse for the wear after the big fight.
The plotters are taking advantage of a week-long inspection tour of the prison, during which a lot of the skeevier elements are hidden away. They have one super-hacker on the crew, and he's prepared a data drive full of evidence that will bring the place down. All they have to do is break out far enough to get it into the hands of a government official or member of the press.
Ah, they're so naive.
Their data expert is a traitor, actually a member of the undertakers, and it's all a setup. The data drive is not only a fake, it's an explosive device. They don't know this. While the leader and the hacker breach the control room to open the freight elevator for the others, the Undertakers make their move.
And at this point, they introduce one of the most improbable of characters, my disbelief had to be suspended by the neck until it stopped twitching. Clearly they must be borrowing from Bleach or something. The undertaker who shows up to take out the leader of the escape crew is a little 7-year old girl with a giant chain-blade axe twice her size that has no respect for the laws of physics. She has a background in punishment that makes Mommie Dearest look like Teletubbies, and apparently this led her to kill all of her kindergarten classmates for their deficiencies.
The leader manages to knock out the hacker, and drive off the girl and activate the freight elevator, which the rest of the crew takes, and which, naturally, leads them to a slaughter. He gets on the coms to warn anyone listening at the clubhouse about the data drive, but of course, nobody's there. Well, except Shiro, who, not having any blood powers (that anyone knows about) has been left out of the plot. With most of the crew dead, for some reason the Undertakers and their troops retreat. Shiro arrives via an alternate route, grabs the drive from Ganta's hand, and chucks it in a burning storeroom where it explodes. The fact that the store-room was full of flammables disguises the reason for the explosion, and Shiro's nutgirl logic is unable to explain why she did what she did. All Ganta can figure out is that she just ruined the escape plot, he punches her and they have a falling out.
There's a bit of business where the leader of the Undertakers captures and brainwashes the leader to be one of them, while the remains of the crew are held hostage to ensure his co-operation. The data guy comes in to gloat, reveals that the USB-like data chip was a fake AND a bomb, and that he was the one who edited the video that convicted Ganta, among other things. He also has a dislike for Ganta and wants him killed first, by two thug-like Undertakers who are given brief flash-back introductions (one raised by bears in the woods, the other an Ed Gein-like serial killer). The first guy Ganta fought, who wasn't in on the escape plot, whose blood forms sword blades on his arms, crashes in, kills the two thugs, and Says something about wanting to get in on the fight. "Who are their toughest guys?" he asks. One of the crew points to the floor, "I think they were." He looks very disappointed. Melee ensues, the squad is killed, that Data guy captured and beaten for intel. Dark/White announces they're going to break out anyway, and that demonstrating their powers would be enough to prove that something hinky is going on in the prison. Ganta is left out of the plan.

It's a prison, you'd think they'd have handcuffs or something, but no, he's HOLDING her hands behind her back. A fatal tactical error.
At some point, Dark/White is captured (after switching into some captured Undertaker armor - but her voice gives her away), along with Shiro, and unspeakable things are going to be done to them if they don't all surrender. But the crew sticks to the plan. Ganta, being out of the deal, goes to the rescue, and basically gets his clock cleaned. Dark/White is nearly killed by the brainwashed leader, who goes on to massacre basically everyone in the room, but Ganta interposes himself as a human punching bag when he comes after Shiro. Eventually though, he snaps out of it (cued by a bell Dark/White wears around her neck), and the leader of the Undertakers is defeated.
Three of the crew escape. The director doesn't quite care since none of them are on the official roll of the prison. Major Boobs, er, Makina, who with her data girl managed to get the goods on the director slyly agrees that everything is okay, but well, if there's a season 2, something might happen with that.
Of course, there was no season 2, and I suppose the Manga may even still be going. So it stops, but it doesn't end. Ganta and Shiro are reconciled, but they don't escape. Shiro had been revealed to have also been the Red Man responsible for it all, but only to the viewers. I guess she wanted Ganta to be with her to "play".
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December 21, 2013
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December 13, 2013
Anyway, I've been trying to work my way through the various series I've downloaded and never watched over the past few years, and decided to take them on alphabetically. (And this came first because the circle was Ayako.)
And the verdict is, "Man, I should have recovered that drive space ages ago."
What a MESS this show is. Clearly they expected a second season or something, or else they just dropped plot lines left and right for lack of attention span. They certainly didn't pay much attention to what they were doing. I mean, they set up one big bad, and then halfway through, they completely forgot about him to play with another big bad who was cuter and more psychotic.
So, the Hero is a guy who can see auras when he looks through his thumb and forefinger, and predict people's dreams, and he meets Merry, who is a girl from the dream realm somehow lost in the real world. Our hero is haunted in his dreams by a dream villain who has an army of anthropomorphic cats who chase him through his dreams. But this isn't too important, since they drop him after a couple of episodes.
Our Hero can somehow forcefully enter the "Daydream" state, and bring Merry with him, where she fights off the other dream creatures, called Muma, who are taking over humans, making them their "Vessels."
And this is where the concept breaks down. Because there are about four different factions here. There's an organized Big Bad, who acts as a "Lighthouse" drawing Muma towards the real world, where they can lodge themselves in people's dreams, another crazy one called alternatively "Mistilteinn" (Mistleteen in the subs) or "Sea of Trees." She's a very powerful Muma who basically murders other Muma for kicks. There's another girl who is the vessel for a sort of dream cop who wants revenge on Mistleteen, and another girl who is the host of yet another revenge-seeker named Engi who is after the first big bad for luring her sister off to her death.
One of the side effects of killing off a Muma who has successfully infested the dreams of someone is they become listless and unmotivated and lose their dream in life. (Now, sometimes this is actually a positive, symbiotic relationship, but the big bad has perverted this). BUT, in the first few episodes, Merry does this exact thing, making her just as bad, although the results aren't shown. Engi is also out slaughtering Muma who are part of the Big Bad's plot, with similar devastating results for the victims.
But the worst of the worst is Mistilteinn, since her host is the school's guidance councilor who is equally as evil and hateful as her. He builds up the dreams of his students so that they will be a much tastier slaughter for Mistilteinn, and it's also implied that he has brought to her some new things to do in the dream state that involve tearing off her clothes. Together, they are a really nasty piece of work.
The Cop type tends to run his vessel's life into the ground, she lives in a filthy apartment filled with the cans of coffee which is her only sustenance, has no friends, and she slips into the dream state because the Cop's gun which supposedly can kill Mistilteinn runs on the deaths of dreams, they're saving up enough for one "bullet."
Eventually Merry and Engi, who have allied, realize they can't just keep killing off other Muma, which puts them at the typical good guys' dilemma. Especially when it turns out that our hero's sister, whose passion is art, has attracted a cute little Muma of her own, making her a delicious target for the guidance councilor. They battle Mistilteinn a couple of times to protect her, but avoid letting her in on the secret battle through the mechanism of having her unconscious all the time.
The final battle (and remember, the big bad is forgotten by this point) results in Mistilteinn thoroughly kicking everybody's ass, the gun failing to kill her, and even our hero, who has been utterly useless in a fight so far getting his ass handed to him. BUT, he has one thing going for him, "heart" and that inspires Merry to revival, and eventually to beating Mistilteinn. It is WEAK storytelling at best, and so many things get lost along the way, like our hero's quest to help Merry get back to the dream world, or the explanation about how she got to the real world without a vessel, or even why the cat guy makes a brief appearance as a useful source of information after an eight episode absence.
There are only a few bright spots about it. First is that they DON'T feel compelled to suddenly make Merry start going to our hero's school (Although they do get her to work briefly in the family cafe). Engi is a rather attractive character with her ball gown and crystal swords (and the oddest opera-length ... mittens ... ever), and when the cat guy for some reason helps spiritually heal our hero in the dream world, it is with the helpful ministrations of a couple of cat-girls.
Sorry, no screen shots. I was watching it on Etna, and I don't feel like going through this mess again to find a few shots. (although, if I get enough requests, I might pick a few things.)
There is a beach episode that is the most poorly justified excuse of a beach episode ever. For the plot holes, abandoned plot threads, the obvious openings for a second season that never came, and the heroine who is the least special Muma in the show (seemingly the only one without powers), I'm ashamed I allowed this trash to take up my drive space for two years. It's just utterly unsatisfying.
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October 17, 2013
Towards dealing with this, he goes to visit her at her apartment. After the debacle in the arcade, she has shut herself in her room, and her borrowed facade is turned up to Eleven. Through the door she insists that she intentionally let them trick her as a way of shedding herself of their unwanted friendship. Unsuccessful at getting through to her, he ends up chatting with her mom. It's not terribly productive, but he learns that Tukiko has also visited, and when he talks to her, he learns that she was similarly rebuffed.
They sit at the one cedar in front of the cat and have a bit of a chat (There's a cute bit of business where she denies him access to the bag of meat buns. There's a very definite limit she has when it comes to sharing her snacks). She gives him some advice about talking to Azusa, although he has some trouble wrestling with what it is he really wants to say - even with his compulsive honesty.

MINE!
The next day, he tracks down the bullies, and they swear, they weren't really bullying Azusa, but they did tease her a lot out of affection, perhaps too much sometimes. The breaking point though was when they told her the wrong destination for the school trip, sending her to Hokkaido instead of Okinawa, immediately after which she transferred schools. They intended to catch her and correct her at the airport so they could all go on the trip together, but she made her own way as far as Sapporo so they totally missed her. They're sorry, but Youto berates them for fools for not saying anything to Azusa.

With enemies like these, who needs friends?
Next stop, Azusa's apartment again, where mom unlocks her bedroom door and allows Youta to remove her bodily from the premises. She's summoned them a cab and he takes her to the cat statue. During the trip, they have a bit of a heart to heart, where he shows he's actually figured her out, and persuades her to go through with the ritual. Although because of that honesty problem he's got, he confesses to her that he's totally not into her at all, at least not that way. After the prayer, the choker she's wearing disappears, and Youta gets back the belt that disappeared from around the body pillow he had tried to sacrifice. He does manage to convince her that he does at least want to be friends with her. It's not a total cure for her social anxiety, but he can lie to encourage her now.
After the break, we get what at first I thought was a dream, but turned out to be a flashback. Tsukiko is standing on a sort of concrete igloo thing in a playground, wearing an oni mask. Youto pokes through the hedge and they chat. She's wearing the mask because her emotions play across her face too easily. She wants to be a kindergarten teacher, but while her open emotions make it easier to bond with the children, she feels she can't be taken seriously as a teacher. The Oni mask though, has alienated her from the kids. He suggests that perhaps she should try a different mask. And later on, she tries a really cute kitty mask, which goes over well. They apparently had several conversations on that playground, but he never saw her without a mask, and they never exchanged names. But recalling these visits in her flashback, Tsukiko realizes it was Youto she'd been talking with back then.

The kitty mask is much cuter.
Azusa catches up with Youto in the breezeway between the school buildings and stammers out a request that perhaps they hang out or go on a date or something, and Youto agrees. Tsukiko, standing behind the doorframe, overhears, but of course, we can't see how she feels about this on her face.
Shortly afterward, Youto comes into a classroom where Tsukiko is working on a picture story presentation for the kids. She comments on how she saw how he and Azusa seem to have made up. (She also wants to make up with Azusa, but in spite of the turtle plush with a note attached to it that she had staged at the cat statue for Azusa to find, nothing has come of it so far). Youto thanks her for her help, and she suggests that if he wants to thank her, he should go on a date with her. She's a very conflicted girl, hating his being a perv, but apparently still liking him even though she can't express it. She reads him her story, but while the illustrations are great (she did them herself and he compliments her talent) the delivery was totally flat.
Through the window, they see the track team running and Tsukushi "motivating" them with a kendo sword. He asks about her relationship with her older sister, and she tells him that Tsukushi hates her. This revelation shocks him (although he should already know what a cast iron bitch she is from his time on the track team).
(Ack! Just realized that screenshots are capturing the subtitles. It didn't do that before. Gotta figure out a fix for the future.)
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