Posted by baudattitude on February 9, 2010
Dear Diary:
Today, in an effort to be more “in tune” with modern anime fandom, I watched all of “School Days” in one sitting.
As a result, I now feel slightly more up-to-date, so desired effect achieved and all that.
Unintended minor side effect: I’m convinced that the world is a bleak and uncaring wasteland devoid of any hope for the future. It’s not that the characters didn’t get what was coming to them or anything, but woof.
I mean, WOOF.
I need to scrub my brain with something now.
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Posted by baudattitude on February 8, 2010
The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina makes a damn fine candy bar.
That is all.
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Posted by baudattitude on February 7, 2010
I had a few posts last week about video encoding, mostly because I’ve been on a quest to take .mkv files with soft subtitles, which is the Current Popular Format, and crunch them into Yesterday’s Popular Format of .avi or .m4v files with burned-in subtitles, so they can be played back on the AppleTV or PS3 hooked up to our TV.
I’ve had some success in this. Mind you, there’s an obvious quality drop because I know virtually nothing about how to encode video properly, so I’m more or less making things up as I go along, but I’ve managed to make it work.
In the process, I found out more than I wanted to know about h.264 video, and I found out that the AppleTV doesn’t display animation as well as the PS3, using the exact same files, but does seem to have the edge for live action stuff.
It’s also had the effect – since an awful lot of what I was reading was blog postings and forum posts and the like – of catching me up to date on the anime “scene”, which is one of those concepts I’d been vaguely aware of only in that I was pretty sure I wasn’t part of it and hadn’t been for at least the last decade.
Put simply: It’s ugly out there. Well, that is, it’s ugly if you’re a western anime licensor. Firefox claims that “licensor” isn’t a word, but I think it is so I’m going to leave it in there. I digress. Where was I? Oh, yes, it’s ugly out there.
The advances in technology over the last few years have made it so that a program broadcast in Japan can be grabbed from Japanese P2P networks, translated, subtitled, and put up for download in the US within a day, and popular programs will have three or four different groups of translators competing to be the first ones to put up their version.
Furthermore, the old “gentleman’s agreement” to do this only with shows that hadn’t been licensed for western release has been completely tossed out the window, because it gets in the way.
Obviously, groups wouldn’t be competing to put out fansubs faster faster faster if there weren’t demand for it, and ye gods is there ever demand.
I ran into several fans claiming to watch at least a thousand episodes a year – that’s something like forty complete series. Granted, that’s probably only a quarter to a third of the complete anime output of Japan over the same period, but it’s still a staggering amount. I’m not sure if I’ve watched forty complete series in the last five years.
These fans tend to have blogs – and there are a lot of anime blogs – that exist solely to recount the blog owner’s day-by-day watching of the Latest Hot Shows, with Brief Commentary and Extensive Screencapping of each episode to prove that they are, in fact, keeping up with the Joneses, and also of course that they are current with the latest memes and imported-from-2ch jargon.
I do much the same with video games, I suppose, the difference in my case being that most of the games I’m playing are at least five years old, so in my case I’m carefully chronicling how far behind the bleeding edge I’ve fallen. 
Anyway, lots of people trying to Keep Up With The Bleeding Edge combined with fansubbers that are competing for bragging rights and have lots of time on their hands means that the domestic distributors are in a boatload of trouble.
See, fansubs give their audience instant gratification in the form of HD-resolution video files (even if at pathetic bitrates), with soft subtitles, the day after the show airs in Japan, with no pesky copy protection, for free. It’s hard to turn that down in favor of waiting for a DVD release, or watching a low-resolution ad-supported stream.
Moreover, the industry doesn’t seem to have any personality, so there’s no sense of community. Back in the Good Old Days, by which I mean the days when we were paying sixty-five dollars for a laserdisc, or forty dollars for a tape with four episodes on it, there was kind of a sense that the anime companies were On Your Side, that we were all part of the same Grand Crusade to bring anime to the english-speaking world, and that actually charging money for it was just an unpleasant reality.
That was then. Now, the smaller, fan-run or fan-centric companies seem to have gotten out of the business, leaving a few big names – Funimation, AD Vision or whatever they’re calling themselves now, Bandai – to hold the reins. There’s no more sense that, say, bootlegging an Urusei Yatsura LD is taking money from Robert Woodhead’s pocket, now it’s that subtitling the new Full Metal Alchemist series before it can be streamed legally is putting one over on a giant, uncaring corporation.
I’m not going to hold myself up as any bright shining example of respecting copyright, mind you. I’m not deleting my fansubs and buying the DVD releases as soon as they’re announced; I got burned on THAT after I spent $70 buying the first two volumes of Welcome to the NHK and having the series get canceled. I do replace fansubs on occasion, but I have to admit that I wait for the entire series to be released, and then I wait for it to be collected in a thinpak version; the last show I went all-out on was the limited edition Haruhi discs.
Basically, back to the thing where I said that domestic licensors were in a pile o’ trouble: yeah, they are. I’m not going to predict The End Of The Industry here, but I think it’s fair – if sad – to say that, if every single American anime distributor went bankrupt tomorrow, it wouldn’t actually have much of an effect on the “anime scene”.
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Posted by baudattitude on February 6, 2010
A week or so ago, I ordered a hard drive enclosure from Newegg. This is a perfectly normal transaction, and nothing worthy of comment really.
Problem is, I’d never updated my address with Newegg. I didn’t realize this until the day it was delivered, however, when I looked at the UPS tracking page and saw “Delivered: Portland, OR”
And I cursed a bit.
Fortunately, when I called my old apartment building, they were willing to put the package aside for me and not hand it over to the current residents of the apartment, who presumably don’t need any hard drive enclosures.
Then I just had to drive two hours to go and pick it up, which meant that I was going to be in the Portland area anyway, which meant that I could do stuff like shopping at Uwajimaya and H-Mart and Fry’s Electronics and having lunch at Marinepolis in Beaverton.
So I guess it wasn’t a total loss of a day.
Anyway, last term in Japanese class – and I promise this is all leading somewhere – I was in a small group project team with a woman from the Ukraine. As a side note, this is the single unluckiest student in the world, because her last name happens to be one of the most vulgar words in Japanese slang and I am constantly torn between finding a way to subtly warn her and being afraid to mention it lest she already know.
At this point, you have all gotten entirely the wrong idea about what the title of this blog post refers to.
Anyway, when we were working on our project together, she’d mentioned that she really missed, of all things, candy from her home country, and I remembered while I was having sushi that there was a European market and deli in the same shopping complex as the sushi place, so I decided that I would go there and get their business card to pass on to her so she could potentially get her fix of the taste of home.
I didn’t, you know, pick her up any snacks, because that might have been inappropriate and I’m a cheap bastard and to be honest I don’t know how to tell Russian candy from Ukranian candy and I think I might get beaten up if I made a mistake there.
On the other hand, I wasn’t going to leave empty-handed, so I browsed the snacks & candy selection until I found a few things that looked promising, and bought them:
Basically, I wound up with two packages of cookies from Poland and two candy bars. The largest is also Polish, the smaller is from Tomislavgrad, a city in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Wikipedia tells me is one of two political entities that comprise the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Wikipedia then tells me is one of six former Federal units of the former Yugoslavia.
Let me get one thing straight: That second candy bar there is the single most educational piece of candy I have ever purchased.
Anyway, I’m saving the chocolate for another day because I suspect it’s going to be pretty similar to chocolate from pretty much any country in the world. That is to say, any country outside of the US, because the rest of the world considers our chocolate to be one step above brown candle wax and I’m hard pressed to fault them on this topic considering news stories like this one.
On the other hand, the cookies looked tempting.
In adherence to the universal laws of snack food, they looked a little better on the package than they did once I’d gotten them out:
The vanilla, I’m sad to report, was nothing extraordinary. It didn’t seem worth the trouble that had been taken to ship it all the way from Poland to Portland. I suspect that any Polish expatriate needing a fix of vanilla-flavored “Delicje Impresie” would be well served by any number of vanilla cookies available in the United States. Let me be clear – it was good, it just wasn’t exotic. I expected more from the 9th largest country in Europe.
Again, thank you Wikipedia for turning this into an educational experience.
The cherry, however, was really good. It was almost exactly the flavor of black forest cake, or Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, the traditional dessert from southern Germany.
And thank you again Wikipedia.
Now, I don’t know your personal views on Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, but speaking only for myself I’m a big fan. So having it in cookie form is a Big Win, and I now have a generally favorable view of Poland and each and every one of its 38,130,302 (estimated) inhabitants.
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Posted by baudattitude on February 5, 2010
After taking some breaks due to class, I finally finished Red Alert 3 tonight, and I plan to start on Uprising before I forget what all the units are and what they do.
I tackled the Rising Sun campaign last, and I’m glad to have done so. Compared to the other two factions, it took a LOT of micromanaging of units to get through, and it took me quite a while to get used to how closely I needed to watch things. Also, of course, you don’t get the REALLY cool units until the last mission or two, so you get the new shiny toys and only get to play with them for an hour or so before the end.
Particularly cruel is how long the game makes you wait until you get to play with the Rising Sun’s commando unit, Yuriko, who is just a ton of destructive fun wrapped up in a plaid skirt & pigtails. She also takes more micromanaging than any other unit, because she dies an awful lot. Fortunately, a new Yuriko is always just a button press away.
Hmm. That having been said, “dying an awful lot” is a common quality among the commando units for the various sides, but I just never felt the need to bother with either the Russian or Allied commando units. So I can’t single Yuriko out in that regard.
Anyway, making you wait to play with the more powerful units makes sense, of course. If you had access to every unit at the start of the campaigns, the game would be insanely complex. Easing you into it is the only sane way to do things, and ramping you up slowly is a good way of getting you ready to jump into the online multiplayer.
Which I don’t play. So it’s kind of a waste, I guess.
Even if you do look at the single player campaign as “just a training mode”, though, it IS 27 missions long and they’re joined together by delightfully cheesy cut-scenes, and it does have a surprising amount of fanservice. Can’t go wrong with fanservice.
It’s not a quick game. With multiple failed missions – I EVENTUALLY learned that I should be saving often – it took me probably 40 hours to play through. If I’d played an RTS since Starcraft, I might have done a better job at that.
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Posted by baudattitude on February 3, 2010
These make a divx-encoded avi file that plays on a PS3, but I’m still working on the AppleTV:
Working steps to make PS3 playable AVI:
mplayer -ass -ao pcm -vo yuv4mpeg toradora01.mkv
mencoder -of avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=0:br=256 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1:cartoon -o /dev/null -audiofile audiodump.wav stream.yuv
mencoder -of avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=0:br=256 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=2500 -o toradora01.avi -audiofile audiodump.wav stream.yuv
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Posted by baudattitude on February 2, 2010
Edit: For the record, the steps below aren’t working yet. I get a file with x264 video and aac audio which mplayer and movist will play back just fine, but iTunes won’t import it to send to the AppleTV and it’s mute when played on the PS3. I’m still sorting out the kinks; I wanted to keep this post up so I can refer back to it but I also didn’t want it to cause problems for anyone finding this through Google.
I’ll start by saying that I really don’t have anything against the mkv container, it’s just a little inconvenient.
Hooked up to our TV right now, we have a PS3 (that can play back divx and mp4 files) and an AppleTV (which can play back .mp4, .m4v and .mov) files. This is a big step forward from only a couple of years ago: companies are starting to accept that video file playback is important to consumers.
Problem is, a couple of years ago is when everything was distributed as divx video in an avi container. Now it’s all .mkv and nothing we have hooked up to the TV knows what to do with an .mkv file.
So I’ve been looking at converting .mkv files to .m4v so I can import them into iTunes on the Mac Mini that feeds the AppleTV.
This isn’t actually that hard. I use mencoder to move them from .mkv to x264 video and faac audio wrapped in an avi container, because mencoder seems to crash whenever I ask it to write anything that isn’t an avi file, and then I use ffmpeg to move them into a .m4v container.
I use -acodec=copy and -vcodec=copy on this second step, so there’s no transcoding required and no more loss of quality.
This breaks down if the .mkv file includes soft subtitles, which is most fansubbed anime. Mencoder CAN burn subtitles into its output file, but doesn’t know how to handle ass/ssa style subtitles, so you get plain white subtitles with no formatting.
This is a pain.
I did, however, come up with a workaround. Not a good workaround, but at least a starting point.
See, first I take the .mkv file and play it in Mplayer with the -vo yuv4mpeg and -ao pcm options. This tells Mplayer (which knows how to handle ass/ssa style subtitles) to render every frame of video to a YUV stream file and dump the audio to a .WAV file.
FYI, the YUV stream file for a single 22 minute episode is 47 GB. As in, forty-seven gigabytes.
THEN I take Mencoder and hand it the YUV file, hand it the WAV file, and tell it to make me a .x264 / faac encoded .avi file out of them, which I can then convert using ffmpeg.
It’s not exactly the most direct solution, and I haven’t worked all the kinks out, but if I can figure out how to get it humming along smoothly and then automate it, I’ll have solved all my pesky .mkv problems. That’ll be good.
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Posted by baudattitude on January 31, 2010
So, a couple of years ago, on one of my trips to Japan, I recorded (audio only) a complete circuit of the Yamanote line. It didn’t actually come out very well, since I wasn’t using a very good microphone and most of the “interesting” stuff – station jingles and the like – were outside the train and therefore very muffled when heard inside the train.
Nonetheless, I had an audio recording of a train going around a loop. Exciting. So I went through in Audacity and cleaned up the bigger clicks and pops, and then I had a slightly cleaner audio recording of a train going around a loop, which was – lemme tell ya – just as exciting.
I had an idea pop into my head on Friday, though, and it was this:
I would take the audio recording, toss it in to iMovie, and then add still photos of the outside of each of the stations on the Yamanote line, synchronized to the train pulling into each station. It would still be pretty dull, but it would be a little more interesting.
This actually started off pretty well. I had photos of a few stations myself, and I figured the rest would just be a matter of quick Google Image Searches.
I mean, how hard could it be?
Come to find out, it’s not hard to find photos of, oh, Shibuya-eki or Harajuku-eki.
It’s when you get down to Nishi-Nippori-eki and, of course, Uguisudani-eki… then, then you run into trouble, because nobody seems to go to Japan with the intent of going to Uguisudani, let alone taking photographs of the train station there.
It also made me realize that, since I’ve never gotten off the Yamanote at Uguisudani, even when I did find a photo of the station there, it wasn’t exactly nostalgia-inducing. Not to single out Uguisudani here, I’ve never gotten off at Meguro or Takananobaba or, well, most of the stations on the loop if you’re going to be picky.
Still, it was kind of an interesting project to undertake. I managed to find at least some photo for every station or neighborhood, and I dropped them into the same iMovie project as the audio file. Now I just need to sync them up properly, which will take the real time. Figure I’ll tackle that another weekend.
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Posted by baudattitude on January 26, 2010
So I’ve gone a few days without a backlog status update, which isn’t that much of a surprise since I do have, you know, classes and all that.
That’s not the only reason, though. See, I’ve been experimenting with an RTS game, which is a genre that I haven’t touched since the original Starcraft. I understand that there’ve been one or two since then.
Wait. I did play through Giants: Citizen Kabuto, which had some kinda RTS-like sequences. I’m not going to count it, though.
The one I’m banging away at right now is Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3. It’s something like the dozenth Command and Conquer game released since 1995, and since I’ve never played any of the previous games I’m sure I’m missing something. The story revolves around time travel and Tim Curry acting goofy and a whole lot of attractive female actors/models who have been hired to wear their shirts unbuttoned and lean forward at the camera a lot. Also, George Takei is in it, and he’s pretty awesome. It’s not the World’s Deepest Story, but I’m liking it.
Each faction – and here I’ll admit that I’ve only played through about half the game, so I’m not even to the Japanese faction yet – has an array of vehicles representing the best of B-grade Science Fiction movies and 1980s transforming mecha anime designs. You also get a few different types of infantry, and they’re thankfully imbued with personality. I’m particularly found of the Engineer classes each faction gets.
The missions are extremely varied – there are missions where your objective is to build up a massive tank force and steamroll an enemy base, there are missions where you’re escorting unarmed British superspies past cybernetically enhanced Russian bear soldiers.
I’m making it a little harder on myself than it could be, by refusing to switch to “easy”. The option’s right there on the mission select screens, but damn if I’m not trying to play through the whole thing on Normal so I can feel just a little more manly.
Probably not much more manly. But some.
Anyway, feeling manly is coming at a price: time. I’ve been playing a mission or two every night for the last 9 nights, and I don’t always win. If I’m honest, I probably get stuck in an unwinnable situation about half the time I play, so I’m only at around 60% of the way through the game. If I wrap it up in the next week, I’ll be quite surprised.
I have the mini-expansion, “Uprising”, that I could play through after I finish the main game. That’s something I don’t usually like to do, go right from a game into its sequel, but I think it might be better to do it before I’ve forgotten how to play.
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Posted by baudattitude on January 25, 2010
So a few months ago, my wife decided that, since she was going to be working from home full-time, she needed a new laptop, and if we were buying her a new laptop anyway, it might as well be one that could run the occasional game.
So she wound up with a monstrosity that sported an 18.4″ 1920×1080 screen, an Nvidia 9700GT mobile graphics chip, blu-ray playback, a quad core processor, four gigs of RAM and a 500 gig hard drive.
She played quite a bit of LoTRO on it, as that was her MMORPG flavor of the time, but then she got massive amounts of overtime dumped on her at work and didn’t have time for hardcore MMO play.
She switched mostly to Nintendo DS games, and started chewing through them like crisps, by the way, it’s kind of scary.
Anyway, her job calmed down a little bit and she caught the MMO bug again and reinstalled Dark Age of Camelot, which is notable mostly for being one of the MMOs that got brought out as direct competitors to Everquest before Blizzard stomped every other MMO into the ground with WoW. It’s actually quite a fun game. We played it for a bit together, but I kept getting sucked back into EQ and now I simply don’t have time for MMOs.
Problem is, it crashed a lot. And when I say crashed, I mean that her machine would, after about a half hour of play, simply power down.
I tried a few things. Updating video drivers, setting processor affinity, running disk integrity scans… nothing worked.
I came to the conclusion that the only thing that would cause a laptop to crash in the way hers was crashing was that the system was shutting itself down in order to protect itself from burning up, but I needed a way to test this.
I decided to install Crysis, let it decide what settings were best for itself (it suggested “High” settings, by the way – her laptop really is a beast), and try running it for a half hour or so to see if it would crash the laptop.
It actually took right about four minutes to crash the laptop. It didn’t even make it through the opening movie.
So my diagnosis – that it was a hardware issue, not anything to do with DAoC – seemed like it had some merit.
I decided to open it up, look sagely at the innards, and say “hmm” a lot. I don’t know much about laptop hardware, so I didn’t think this would lead to anything in particular, but I figured it would look cool inside and saying “hmm” might make it seem like I knew what I was looking at.
I popped the bottom off, and things were pretty much as expected. Lots of neat stuff crammed into a very small space with inadequate ventilation. Cooling was handled by a pair of heat pipes; one from the CPU and one from the GPU, both moving heat to a fairly small fan responsible for blowing it all out of the machine.
It didn’t seem like anything was, you know, user serviceable, but I got out a mini screwdriver and started poking at things anyway, because just saying “hmm” wasn’t having the effect I’d hoped for – which is to say, it wasn’t making me look very smart or like I knew anything about what I was doing.
hmm.
Anyway, I was quite surprised when I tried to tighten the screws holding the heat pipe down to the CPU, because it actually tightened quite a lot. It seems like the screws, over the last few months, had worked themselves loose from thermal expansion and contraction, and they needed to be cinched up a bit to bring the thermal transfer plate back into contact with the CPU. A few turns of the screwdriver later, it was snugly fitted again, the laptop was reassembled, and I cheerfully played Crysis for 40 minutes before declaring the machine resurrected,
Anyway, long story summed up: My wife’s laptop broke, I opened it up without any actual hopes of fixing anything, I lucked out and it was a really simple problem, I get to feel really gleeful about it for at least a week.
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