Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • enjoying Gedo Senki

    I was pleasantly surprised, and not from low expectations either. I actually enjoyed this movie. In fact it reminded me in some ways of Princess Mononoke. It was a visual feast of course, but the key to its value was in realizing that this was just a tale within the Earthsea universe. You enter the world with its history intact, and that history is referenced but not fully detailed. Of course we see Ged and Tenar, but they are truly peripheral. The film engages you in the main characters, Arren and Therru. And even the villain has a motive that makes you at least partly pity him. And I certainly wasn’t expecting either of the two great shocking events, one at the start and the other at the end, to occur.

    I dont know what else to say, other than I truly expected to hate this film but it’s certainly better than Howl’s Moving Castle. Guess I’ll setup that Gedo Senki category after all.

    Some screenshots below the fold.

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  • BSG season 4 spoilers

    You know you can’t resist. Original article here; Spoiler summary below the fold.

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  • road trip!

    Can’t take government services for granted: driving to Wisconsin Rapids to get a SSN card for the baby today. Will be an adventure in patience.

    UPDATE: back. pretty easy jaunt, about 36 miles and 45 minutes each way. For perspective, that’s like driving from Dickinson to Houston and back. Except this was almost entirely on county roads. Google’s suggested route turned out to be no timesaver; I came back the simpler way, a straight shot up Route 13. I’m glad I took different routes there and back, though – I need to develop my geographic intuition for this region a bit more. Note to self: don’t rely on the lettered county roads to be continuous.

    Scarily, though I was careful to pack a freezer bag with a bottle of breastmilk along, I’d forgotten to take the nipple cap. Luckily she slept the entire time. She’s still asleep in fact. Strike that… she’s waking up. diaper and feeding time.

  • downloading

    I’ve posted my excuses and rationalizations for downloading elsewhere; no need to re-hash. I just grabbed torrents for Shingu, Firefly, and (to my shame) Gedo Senki – the latter on a tip from Don.

    I’ve also finished a first run through The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and frankly, it ranks up there with Sugar, Someday’s Dreamers, and Haibane Renmei on my list of favorites. However I had a lot of trouble with the subtitles scrolling off the screen in VLC, any help in managing the subtitle display would be appreciated. I want to do a second run through and snag some screen shots this time around.

  • Movie screenshot game: round VI

    I won the previous round, hosted by Mark, so it’s my turn for round 6. Without further ado, guess this movie:

    mystery movie screenshot

    Guess the movie in comments. Winner gets to host the next round 🙂 For those of you wondering what the heck this is and how to play, here are the rules.

    UPDATE: Roosta wins! (see comments) Visit his blog for the next round.

  • I think I’ll have a heart attack and die from not-surprise

    Sony announces a price cut for the Playstation 3:

    Effectively immediately, the price of the PS3 has been dropped to $500 for the 60GB unit, and a $600 80GB model bundled with Motorstorm is coming this August. Pricing is for North America only.

    As Ars notes, this erases the price difference between the low-end PS3 and the high-end XBox, but of course you do get a BluRay player too. Of course, Microsoft might cut prices for the holidays, too. In my opinion the ideal counter-move would be to keep teh price the same but bundle the HD-DVD addon drive for free.

    All of this is moot, however. Because the Wii is going to get lightsaber combat. ‘Nuff said.

  • all atwitter about Twitter

    Josh analyzes the relative merits of Twitter vs newcomer Pownce, and finds Pownce wanting. Pownce is essentially an online chat application, which has essentially one unique feature:

    instead of being boxed into 1:1 communication (IM) or X:X (chat) or 1:X (Twitter), Pownce offers all of it in one package. Want to send a picture to your family, but not all your friends? Easy: select recepients and send away. Try to do the same thing in any IM client and you’ll see that it usually doesn’t work and/or takes quite a few steps.

    However, as Josh points out, Pownce lacks the public API which makes sites like twitterfeed possible, vastly increasing the utility of Twitter. Frankly, 140 chars of plaintext is enough; I still rue the day that email became html-enabled.

    It’s sad but true that the vast majority of Twitterers employ the service for banal ends. However, there’s a lot more you can do. Josh uses it to tie together all his output, from Flickr to blogs. I use it as a roadtrip real-time journal (though twittering while driving/TWD has earned me some deserved reprimands). I also just added the feeds from the “stranger than fiction” and the “marshfield” categories here at Haibane.info to my twitter, to liven it up without flooding it too much. The key is not to overdo it.

    The best thing about Twitter is that it’s input is device-agnostic; you can twitter from pretty much anywhere. Until global wifi becomes a reality (ie, never) or EVDO becomes affordable (ie, someday), you simply can’t expect access to the Internet from anywhere, even in the continental US. And more to the point, you aren’t limited to consuming content; you can also create content from anywhere.

    Is Twitter perfect? obviously not. A simple feature request would be the ability to send pictures as well as text. That would increase the utility of twitter by another order of magnitude. But as it is, it’s still a novel service with genuine potential for creativity.

    Incidentally, if anyone wants a Pownce invite, I’ve got 6 to hand out. Leave a comment with your email address.

  • iPhone speculations

    pace, Brian – I don’t think the iPhone has been nor will ever be a “flop”. But neither will Apple grow to dominate the cell phone industry the way it has the MP3 portable music player market.

    Here’s how I think things will play out. For one thing, the iPhone will probably see a price drop. The markup on the phone (on the basis of components alone, not counting labor or licenses etc) is about 50% for the 8GB model, and Apple is running what can only be called a scam with regards to battery replacement. Only the Apple true believers will tolerate this, and that’s a miniscule audience compared to the market size (for reference, Motorola sold about 10 million RAZR phones in third quarter 2006 alone).

    It’s also pretty obvious that a video-iPod using the iPhone multitouch interface is inevitable. The question is, will Apple sell a WiFi version, too? A device that does everything that iPhone does – except for the phone – would be a supremely compelling purchase. Especially with Wifi and ditching EDGE in favor of EV-DO. Of course, Apple would need to permit users to install third-party apps – like Skype – for it to really catch on. Imagine for a moment just what you could do with something like that. It would be a VOIP-phone, a handheld PC, chat device, video player, everything. Personally I think that device convergence is impossible; no matter what happens, you always will have to carry two. Let those be your cell phone and the uberPod. That might be a potent enough combo to banish notebook PCs to… well, the desktop.

  • I knew it!

    via Steven, a page that finally reveals the truth about Calvin and Hobbes:

    Mr. Bun is the only real character. In case you’ve forgotten, Mr. Bun appears only once or twice in the entire run of the comic, as Susie Derkin’s stuffed rabbit. Unlike Hobbes, Mr. Bun shows no sign, within the comic, of ever being “real.” (“Mr. Bun seems comatose,” comments Hobbes, after attending a tea party with Susie and Mr. Bun.) Naturally, this is strong evidence that Mr. Bun is the only “real” character, and everything else is occurring in Mr. Bun’s imagination. If Mr. Bun doesn’t actively particpate in his expansive fantasy world, it’s only because he prefers to just sit back and admire his work.

    I suspected as much all along.

  • not much more than meets the eye

    the basic premise of the Transformers movie in a nutshell: giant f*&king robots from another planet showed up to kick the sh&t out of each other. This is exactly as unbearably awesome as it sounds, even to those who have no history with the classic cartoon. This movie is going to be Exhibit A for why I invented the term, geek service. After all,

    It was awesome. It was like a big honking slice of Awesome-toast buttered on both sides with awesome. It was a double serving of Hell F&^king Yeah with a side order of OMFG. If you are pumped for this, if you are ready to embrace this, if you want nothing more than to see mind blowing action unlike anything you have ever witnessed, then you will sh&t your shorts and giggle like a f&^king school girl.

    The audience went absolutely apesh&t for this.

    That said, there’s is a solid critique of the film that goes beyond “Michael Bay sucks” and gets more to the lost opportunity for genuine epic storytelling. Harry says it very well here:

    Now TRANSFORMERS isn’t IRON GIANT. It could have been better than IRON GIANT. It could have been a Boy discovering just how vast the universe was… Bonding with BumbleBee, who introduces him to the hidden world around us… But then, just how terrifying that discovery is when you realize it isn’t just about the benevolent robots, but there’s another point of view. A breed of robots that’s out to destroy not just the boy’s robot… not just Optimus and the others… but all living creatures.

    The film needed to escalate, not just with battles, but the ideas behind the battles.

    There is indeed a kind of wonder to boy-meets-universe films. My all-time favorite of these is not Iron Giant but rather Explorers, a small-budget flick that starred some pretty big-name future stars, including River Phoenix. That Transformers went more for the nail-balls-to-the-wall than sense-of-awe route is of ocurse a direct result of having Bay as director; still, I have to confess that on a purely primal level, I’d rather see giant robots tear each other apart than talk sympathetically to children. I’ll go rent Explorers later as penance.