Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • Save the Kobayashi Maru

    It seems that a famous Starfleet exam will be making an appearance in the new Star Trek film. As will a famous episode of cheating on said exam. This news is doubtless going to annoy the heck out of Saavik in about 40 years.

    The real Saavik I mean, not that Kirstie Allie knockoff.

    UPDATE: Ugh. Kirk beat the Maru test on sex appeal? This is the problem with prequels that seek to make backstory explicit. I am still excited about this reboot of the Star Trek franchise, but it will require setting aside years of fan-driven spec, most of which is probably superior to the new canon being imposed upon us.

  • Red Princess Blues: The Book of Violence

    Another intriguing catch from AICN-Anime:

    The Book of Violence is an animated short, between six and seven minutes sans credits that serves as a prologue to Alex Ferrari’s upcoming feature film Red Princess Blues. The film is set to star Paula Garces, whose voice drives this animated project.

    Though there is a stated intention to pay homage to the great Japanese anime films of the past, an immediate impression suggests more North American initiatives, such as the Maxx, the animated Spawn, and the Do the Evolution music video. It has a rain soaked weight of dark, American comics and the surreal sense of noir gloom found in their animated adaptations.

    In the anime vocabulary, the closest comparison would be early digital aged late night fare, like Serial Experiments Lain, Boogiepop Phantom, and even to some extent Black Heaven. Book of Violence’s effects aren’t quite as raw as those early titles, but is has a similar, claustrophobic stillness in its 3d objects, and the short itself has that late night anime tension.

    They’ve put the trailer for the short online, so we can get a feel for the animation and style:

    Dunno what to think, but an interested enough to keep an eye out for it. If done right, it could have that Lair-esque atmosphere, Noir-esque violence, and a plot that actually moves forward and makes sense.

  • Folksonify!

    I’ve added ScottSM’s WP_Folksonomy plugin to this blog. This means that you, the readers, now have the power to tag any post you please. I realize that this is a bit like giving the inmates the keys to the asylum, but I’m the least sane among ye, so I look forward to your impositions of order on my chaos.

  • The first WordPress-based folksonomy

    I’ve added ScottSM’s WP_Folksonomy plugin to my Haibane.info blog. It seems to work like a charm, and is up to version 0.5. It’s a grand experiment of sorts, representing the very first WordPress-based true tagging folksonomy rather than the taxonomic implementation that WordPress features by default. Let’s see how it goes, I’ve allowed anyone to tag a post, not just registered users, so it really is a free-for-all. Exciting!

  • BlogFuse

    TechCrunch had a cool contest for free, lifetime Pro memberships to BlogFuse, a new service that lets you share your blog entries on Facebook. I tried several times to leave this comment in hopes to win, but to no avail, it seems I am running afoul of their Akismet filter. So, for posterity, I reproduce it here.

    The accursed TechCrunch blog software refuses to acknowledge the superiority of my links, hence I am reposting my comment without hyperlink goodness. I am confident that the sheer wit of my blog names and URLs will be sufficient to entice readers to copy and paste rather than click. Who can resist the siren call of righteousness?

    The reason I should permit TechCrunch to burden me with a Premium BlogFuse account for life is because I am, through the sheer acumen of my blogging-fu, attempting to save the world. As a matter of principle, I am obligated to encourage any and all who wish to also save the world to join me in my crusade to lift humanity above itself, and thus in alliance achieve even greater feats. Yes, I am the heavy lifter with the sheer weight and ponderousness of my prose, but as even the mouse carries one straw, so is the camel’s burden lighter and its back saved.

    Behold, TechCrunch, what a mighty engine of progress and salvation to which you shall ally yourselves! For at Haibane.info (www.haibane.info), I blog about all things Geek, Anime, and Art, and thus train the world to accept the timorous intellectual as the true saviours and warriors of civilization against the mindnumbing horde of paris-hilton worshipping, realiity TV enslaved dullards. At Nation-Building blog (dean2004.blogspot.com), formerly Dean Nation, I preach the righteousness of liberalism and purple politics, seeking to uplift our political discourse from the divisiveness of the partisan hacks who do the pundit rounds for their own gain rather than any allegiance to our Republic. And at City of Brass (cityofbrass.blogspot.com), I am at the vanguard of the battle against Islamic Fundamentalism, turning the twisted ijtihad of the Reavers against them and showing them the true power of Islam which shall obliterate their puny violence with purity and light of Truth. I even blog about Blogging itself at metaBlog (www.metablog.us) so that others may be inspired and take up verbal arms themselves on the great plain of Debate.

    In summary, I am a busy man, and I have a world to save. However, I’ll be happy to take the BlogFuse account off your hands. Should come in handy. Plus, why leave the legions of Facebook bereft of my wisdom and leadership?

  • pale blue pixel

    What would the Earth look like to aliens? A recent astrophysics paper suggests that it would stand out, even if it were only resolved as a single pixel:

    what if aliens were hunting life outside their own planet? Armed with telescopes only a bit bigger and more powerful than our own, could they peer through the vastness of space and lock in onto Earth as a likely home to life?

    That’s the question at the heart of paper co-authored by a University of Florida astronomer that appeared recently in the online edition of Astrophysical Journal. The answer, the authors say, is a qualified “yes.” With a space telescope larger than the Hubble Space Telescope pointed directly at our sun, they say, “hypothetical observers” could measure Earth’s 24-hour rotation period, leading to observations of oceans and the chance of life.

    “They would only be able to see Earth as a single pixel, rather than resolving it to take a picture,” said Eric Ford, a UF assistant professor of astronomy and one of five authors of the paper. “But that could be enough for them to identify our planet as one that likely contains clouds and oceans of liquid water.”

    pale blue pixel (zoom)As the writeup notes, the motivation for this line of inquiry is to optimize the earth-based search for extrasolar planets harboring life. It occurs to me however that we’ve already an example of a single-pixel view of earth – the famed Voyager 1 photo of the Earth from a distance of 4 billion miles, labeled by Carl Sagan as a “pale blue dot“. I’ve cropped the original photo at right, click to see the full field and appreciate just how tiny that dot is. At that distance, Earth is only 0.12 pixels in size. The streak is an chromatic artifact, and not “the view through Saturn’s rings” as some have erroneously described it.

    There’s a lot of data in that single, pale blue pixel.

  • Tokyo

    I spent all of one day in Tokyo on my trip to Japan a few years ago. In that day, I barely scratched the surface of Akihabara and Shinjuku, where I spent most of my time. It’s a city that is impossible to summarize or to understand. Prior to visiting Tokyo, the largest mega-metropol area I’d ever been in was New York City, and even as I felt awed by Manhattan I was still able to come to grips with it in a sense. Tokyo was just on another scale. This is why this travel article in the WaPo seems to familiar to me, even though I essentially saw zero of the Tokyo described therein. The introduction does a fine job of painting Tokyo in wide statistical swaths:

    As a megacity, Tokyo has no rival. It has more buying power than Brazil, more people than Canada, more concrete than can be imagined.

    With about 35 million people, greater Tokyo is by far the world’s most populous metro area, with nearly twice the people of greater New York. There are 80,000 restaurants here — six times as many as in New York.

    Although it is the political, economic and cultural center of Japan, Tokyo itself has no real center. It’s a jumble of densely populated districts that are themselves big cities, hubs for the frenetic inbound rush and exhausted homeward retreat of millions upon millions of subway and train commuters.

    The article itself is just a placeholder though, for three videos that focus on unique aspects of Tokyo micro-culture: Goth-Lolita girls, salarymen, and the Tokyu Food Show. In some ways, these videos give a better context for me to “fill in” the background of anime, supplementing my own personal experience.

  • the Honda Civic Hybrid is a failure

    because it isn’t visually distinctive enough from the non-hybrid version? Odd. My intuition says that the opposite should be true. Go figure.

  • goodbye, Astronomicon

    Astro has formally closed up shop:

    Over the years I’ve had a lot of fun with the Astronomicon. Via the discussions here I’ve met quite a few people whom I’ve never met face to face, yet I consider good friends. Several have emailed me to ask what was up with this site, so I decided to write this last post rather than just fade away. It is pretty clear that I have poor impulse control and will certainly be writing again sometime in the future. Just not here. I imagine that people who were interested in what I had to say will find me again eventually.

    Our web community is small enough that any blog departure is a noticeable one. Astro/John is a good guy and I hope to see him here and elsewhere in comments from time to time. And the next anime blog he starts has a reserved slot on my blogroll.

    Day of Flight

  • Glass Fleet

    AICN-Anime has another spotlight on a series that draws my interest:

    Glass Fleet

    Glass Fleet definitely isn’t a “steam punk space opera”, but that aggregate label suggests the general idea at work in the series. It opens with a well-heeled space-noble sipping tea in a monumental library as he philosophizes. From his wonderings at the number of lives lost to the capriciousness of the universe, the anime cuts to the decisive battle that set the stage for its central conflict. Squadron after squadron of battle ships form 100 vessel grids in front of a floating mountain range. Though the exteriors of these ships aren’t that far from the typical, metallic idea of a space ship, inside they are full of manual workings and Babbage style computer systems. Men in 18th century military regalia meet in marble chambers to make their final plans. Then, the opposing lines of ships begin to pass through each other, firing mid-20th century style turrets.

    When the battle ends, Vetti Lunard Sforza de Roselait has been declared Holy Emperor and a new oligarchy has replaced the defeated assembly of noble families. In response to the corruption of Vetti’s regime, Michel Volban de Cabelle raises up a People’s Army to revolt. Initially, this opposition is little more than a nuisance. The People’s Army is far outmatched by Vetti and his fleets. However, Michel becomes swept up with the motley crew of the titular (literally glass) ship, the captain of which is Cleo of the Wind, a pirate and claimed descendant of the exiled royal family, with intentions of supplanting the strongest party around.

    As the review notes, this invites comparisons with other series – Last Exile coming immediately to mind. Not least of which being the fact that the anime, in the reviewer’s estimation, is possessed of deep flaws, for trying too hard to be visually striking rather than exploring the genuinely innovative plot ideas and elements more fully. The praise however is enough to get me to give it a shot, at some point anyway.