I’m not a Pinkie Pie fan, so the wait for the upcoming Fluttershy and Twilight-centric episodes was only made more painful by an all-Pinkie-all-the-time episode last week.
That being said, it did have epic Twilight headdesk moment and someone went and made an animated GIF out of it which I can just watch loop over and over. It doesn’t seem to play when it’s embedded in a post, however, so you’ll need to click the image to enjoy.
I am no stranger to buying embarrassing things.
Back in the 90s, I became quite used to being the only non-Asian guy in the local Japanese bookstore and the only guy, period, in the shojo manga section. I’ve been the guy who got to the Software, Etc early on release day to pick up his copy of “Dead Or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball” and I will defend the cinematic glory of “Super Mario Brothers: The Movie” to anyone who will stand still to listen before they suddenly remember that they have somewhere to be.
I have no taste, no class, and (most importantly) NO SHAME.
It was therefore an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation to find myself walking past the “My Little Pony” aisle in my local toy store trying not to look like I was looking down the aisle.
Here’s what brought me to that sad state: I spent the week after Christmas sick as a dog. With little energy or ambition in me, I spent most of that time on the couch in front of the TV.
At one point, I decided that I would see what all the hype was about “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic”.
(This is the sort of decision I make when I’m hopped up on cold medication, you see.)
After three episodes, I wasn’t really seeing the reason for all the online enthusiasm surrounding the show, but I was also too addled to think of anything else to watch.
After a few more episodes, I couldn’t stop watching.
After 37 episodes, I found myself haunting the toy aisle looking for pony merch to make my own.
I am buying this for my niece, I decided, that’s what I would tell the cashier. She has a birthday in January, I would say if asked, an excellent reason to explain why a grown man might be shopping for his alleged niece after Christmas.
The cashier did not ask questions, so my elaborate fiction was unnecessary. She simply rang up the cotton-candy-pink box without question or comment. Perhaps she’d seen it all before, perhaps she simply didn’t want answers to the questions gnawing on her mind.
Once my new treasures were home, freed from their suffocating plastic shells to join a shelf of figurines dominated largely by catgirls and maids and catgirl maids and other figurines of dubious standing, I had time to reflect on what I had done and why a show about, well, magical ponies had kept me so glued to the television.
My first answer was, well, it’s a fantastically funny show. It has a good mix of slapstick and subtle humor – if you want to see a unicorn getting hit with an anvil, it’s got that (yes, really an anvil, always good to see an old Looney Tunes classic brought back for a modern cartoon), but it also rewards careful attention to dialogue and has enough background detail to reward judicious use of the pause and slow advance buttons.
It also has a lot of horse related puns, so your enjoyment may be directly tied to how many of those you can tolerate. Some of them are subtle enough that they will fly right past someone not raised in a pun-friendly household, anyway.
That was a start, but not really a complete explanation.
My next explanation was that it was, simply put, a change of pace. I’m a bit of a cynic on my best days and I can get downright gloomy given half a chance, so by all rights I should be writing off a show like this as a unabashed cash grab, designed to separate the parents of little girls from their hard-earned dollars.
And, well, it kind of is a cash grab, but it’s also an unrelentingly optimistic and positive show with a good message, something it somehow pulls off without crossing the line into preaching. There are a couple of early episodes where the obligatory moral of the show is hammered in with a lack of subtlety – and generally with a new character whose only purpose is to be a bad example – but those stand out because they are exceptions.
Tl;dr version: even if – especially if – you’re fundamentally bitter and cynical, sometimes it’s nice to watch something upbeat.
And then we have the online fandom, the “bronies” as it were, who stand out in online fandoms as being, well, nice. Downright civil, even, though I confess that I haven’t delved deep into the murky depths of the community and I’m sure that it has a few jerks scattered around.
Much of this general civility can be tied, I think, to the absurdity of it all. It’s hard to take things too seriously when you’re expressing your admiration for the exploits of a character named Fluttershy after all.
Just so we’re clear, though: Twilight Sparkle IS Best Pony.
Today has been one of those days at work where I look at the state of my savings account, look at my frequent flyer miles, and try to calculate how long my wife and I could live in a capsule hotel in Osaka if we ate at gyuudon restaurants and combini for every meal.
Right now, the answer is about six months.
But, they don’t take cats, also the whole student loans thing.
Oh, well.
A co-worker waylaid me with a question this morning.
Pointing at her computer monitor, she asked me “Can you read German?”
I looked at the screen, and it was plainly in German, but beyond that basic conclusion it was pretty incomprehensible.
So I said, “I’m sorry, high school German was a long time ago.”
and this didn’t seem enough, for some reason, so after a pause I added “in high school”.
this I thought was a little bit ridiculous, so after another pause I added “which was a good time to take high school classes I suppose.”
I don’t think I helped my case at any point.
One of the things about being a bit of a geek from an early age is that you’re exposed to the notion that other countries have things that are cooler than you can get at home. When I was a teenager, I used to hunt down British editions of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books in used bookstores, I bought Japanese versions of Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games, and of course I imported the very occasional laserdisc.
As long as I stuck to Japan and other NTSC countries, I was pretty comfortable importing media. The video game console manufacturers paid a sort of lip service to the idea that they didn’t want you playing games from other regions, but it was never difficult to circumvent; you could always get an adapter or fit a mod chip or some such. Of late, of course, I’ve taken to simply buying consoles from other regions, which neatly sidesteps the whole issue.
Europe, however, has always presented a bit of a problem, mostly because of PAL.
The first time I imported anything in PAL, it was because the powers-that-be had decided to delay broadcast of the last four episodes of season 2 of Babylon 5 for several months in the US, while airing them on schedule in the UK. I managed to find a chap on the net who wouldn’t mind taping them for me in exchange for a favor on my side and wound up with a tape that I couldn’t play but that represented me raising a middle finger to regional broadcast decisions.
Another friend tracked down a VCR that could play PAL tapes on an NTSC TV and we had a bit of a viewing night.
The quality was, simply put, dreadful. The technology to do on-the-fly conversions simply wasn’t quite there. Nonetheless, it was watchable.
Technology has advanced somewhat since the mid 1990s. Region locking is more omnipresent than ever, but technology for freeing your media from region locks has kept up.
Even more promisingly, the PS3 was released completely region-free and blu-rays are frequently (but not always) likewise released without the studios bothering to region code them.
Most importantly, the advent of high-def resolutions has freed us from worrying about PAL or NTSC or what have you.
Or so I thought.
When we were in Britain, we bought a batch of media, knowing full well that it would come with some hitches when we got home. For the most part, these hitches turned out not to be. The DVDs, well, they play just fine; we have a DVD player that was made region-free with a simple remote control code and our TV is smart enough to understand an incoming PAL signal and display it.
Likewise, the PS3 games I brought back – “Siren: Blood Curse” and “Arcana Heart 3” work without issue.
It’s this one Top Gear blu ray I brought back that gave me fits.
I was worried about region coding. I needn’t have been, it went right into the PS3 and spun up, played the studio logo, and then nothing. A simple black screen taunting me.
It turns out that, yes, 720P and 1080P and such are universal; they cross borders. 1080i at 50Hz, however, that is a different story and that happens to be how this disc was encoded.
I had never had occasion to rip a blu ray before, so I needed to get my toolbox up to date. Fortunately I ran across a lifehacker article that recommended a product called HD Decrypter, and it turned out to do just what it said on the tin. 30 minutes to rip, three hours to encode, and I was once again sneering at the thought that I could be thwarted by mere national boundaries.
It strikes me that a good 99% of the world probably goes through their day without worrying about stuff like this.
Some days, I kind of envy them. 🙂
It’s only been a few days since I got the mad idea to wage war on the AVI format by converting every such file on my server to nice AppleTV-friendly .m4vs and then importing them into iTunes to add art and do some basic tagging.
I’m not tagging every single file with, say, episode number and title and description, as that would be sheer madness, but getting them sorted by show and season is usually good enough, with the title generally being the same as the file name which almost always contains the episode number.
Anyway, I started with about 2,000 avi files. That’s rather a lot.
I have about 900 to go. That’s rather good progress by any measure.
I’m not running in to too many “problem” files, ones where I need to run them through VirtualDub or mencoder to get them in shape for ffmpeg. I was a bit worried to start, as I hit three or four in the first couple of shows I was converting and that would have meant an awful lot of extra work had it continued.
What I’m running into more often is perfectly well-encoded files that just had some poor choices. For example, avi files with stereo AC3 audio rather than mp3 or AAC.
There’s nothing wrong with AC3, of course, it’s a fine codec. It’s just that I don’t know how to get good encodes from files with AC3 audio. My attempts have sounded like, well, what it used to sound like when you put a CD-ROM into a CD player before CD players got smart enough not to try to play them.
Unfortunately it took me a little while to spot the pattern, so I did need to do some re-encoding of about 30 files, but I got it sorted out. I’m having to feed files with AC3 tracks through Handbrake, which is a little less fire-and-forget than my existing script but which is working all right to a point.
I did also have to make some encoding-quality tweaks. I’ve been doing most of my encodes in h264 with a crf of 19. This makes m4v files that are usually 10-15% larger than the source AVI files. This is a little inefficient, sure, but drive space is pretty cheap.
This breaks down if the source material is of poor quality. For example, we had a folder full of episodes of Time Trax that are in really bad shape. The source appears to have been VHS recordings in 6-hour mode, there’s tons of tracking noise and the VBI data is in the picture area.
Throwing these through libx264 at crf 19 is a BAD idea. In an effort to faithfully reproduce all the noise and snow from the original files, they balloon from 400MB files to well over a GB.
Drive space ain’t that cheap. I’ve had to go down to crf 22 for these and a few others.
My last problem is dealing with files with AC3 audio and external subtitle files, since Handbrake doesn’t like to burn SRT titles into video. That only affects about a dozen files though.
My bigger nightmare is mkv files with stylized subtitles, because my conversion process for those was reliant on some versions of mplayer and ffmpeg I compiled myself for OSX and I’m not sure I can reproduce them for Windows.
But that is for another time. For now, the heady glow of progress. 🙂
It’s not exactly news by now, but Sony is in the process of moving its current flagship fantasy MMO, Everquest 2, from its strictly pay-to-play (with a side server on f2p) status to a fully f2p game, allowing the Unwashed Masses on the same servers as the Loyal And Long Suffering Customers Who Are Being Slapped In The Face Or Punched In The Gut, At Least If You Believe Forum Posts.
This is pretty good news if you happen to want to try out a massively fleshed-out MMORPG with huge freaking swathes of content, and sets the bar pretty high for future entrants into the f2p marketplace. It should also be great for the population; right now the game is hopelessly top-heavy on most servers and I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone starting from scratch. F2P should mean lots of lower level people for new players to group with, and even if 9 in 10 of those quit before making it past 50, that’s still a influx of new blood that the game hasn’t seen in ages.
It’s less good for long-time players who are decrying the Impending Noob Apocalypse or doing the math on what it would cost to convert their accounts from month-to-month billing (what Sony calls “Gold” membership) to the pay-as-you-go “Silver” or “Free” plans.
For example, I have three characters and only one of them is a class/race combination that’s available for free. I’d need to pay $5 to unlock all the races and $5 to unlock all the classes so I could log the other two characters in. Fortunately, the Silver membership that I’m getting as a perk of being a current subscriber gives me three character slots, so I’m good there – nothing to buy!
Then, well, I’m kitted out in rather a lot of raid gear of the sort that you can’t equip as a free player, so I’d need to spend 30 cents per item for about 20 items.
So, after paying 16 bucks, I’d be able to use my current primary character for free from now on, and another few bucks would get Most Favored Alt up to speed, and after only a couple of months I’d actually start breaking even.
Now, if I wanted to switch main characters to Most Favored Alt, who just happens to be both a free race AND a free class, I’d only be out a few bucks to equip his few pieces of raid gear and then good to go from there.
I’m actually in a pretty good spot to consider this. If I happened to have 7 characters all kitted out in high end gear… Well, but I don’t and that’s a good thing. This plan definitely isn’t for those folks. 🙂
The other thing is that this is reminding me that I really ought to give DCUO a shot now that it’s F2P. It’s got to be worth at least an evening’s mucking about.
…but even having said that, there was a distinct problem with the “Classic Movies” category available on my recent United flight back from overseas:
I’m going to rank this somewhere between “faith in humanity failing” and “well, civilization has had a nice run, don’t forget to turn off the lights and lock up when you leave”
This blog has been a bit anglo-centric of late and I’m not making apologies for that; my wife and I spent a very enjoyable two weeks in the UK and it was a trip that consumed a lot of our attention for several months beforehand.
That said, I ought to get one big rambly post out of the way and then get on with what people really want to read about if my referral links are to be believed, which is mostly Pokemon characters in compromising positions.
That is tarring my readers with a rather wide brush, so I will relent a bit. You may be perverts, but you have a much wider range of interests than simply Pokemon.
But I digress.
Anyway, the first week of our trip was spent in London and I’m very glad for that. It’s probably the city that I’ve been in with the greatest sense of History-with-a-capital-H; Kyoto is just as old but doesn’t go in quite as much for slapping dates on everything. There’s something about wandering through Westminster Abbey, for example, and looking down to see that the memorial slab you’re standing on has a barely-visible date in the 1500s, and for a guy who went to college to study languages, there’s a particular impact to walking into the British Museum and coming face-to-face with the freakin’ Rosetta Stone.
Then too, if you happened to be a member of the idle rich and wanted to spend every night of your life attending operas or plays or concerts or what have you, London would be an excellent city to do it in. The buses and subways are lined with posters for upcoming events and performances, and even if some of them are in questionable taste there’s something to be said for quantity.
…OK, perhaps there are SOME lines humanity was not meant to cross…
But, putting aside the history and the culture, the great thing about London is that it’s full of all the things that you really want to see when you visit the UK. You’ve got your red double-decker buses, your black cabs, your Changing Of The Guard, takeaway fish and chips, a Big Damned Clocktower, a Biggest Damned Ferris Wheel, Piccadilly Circus lit up in neon, Harrods covered in lights, the Tube, Forbidden Planet, congestion fees, economical Vauxhall saloons, the occasional Reliant Robin still running about in the wild, the rare thrill of seeing an Aston Martin gliding by…
…It is possible that I have watched too much Top Gear.
But I did see a Reliant Robin, though it wasn’t in the process of being shot into space by three guys with more explosives than common sense:
On the other hand, it is a staggeringly expensive city to be a tourist in, there’s no two ways about it. I have spent a fair bit of time in Tokyo, which people call an expensive place to visit, and there is no comparing the two. It is unfortunately very easy to look at a price tag, think “well, that’s not too expensive”, and order, say, a 2.50 diet coke before you do the mental math and realize you’re paying 4 dollars for 8 ounces of cola, and a taxi ride you pay for with a single 20 pound note likewise seems quite reasonable until you do the maths.
It is also tremendously inconvenient if you are out for a day’s shopping and have no place to put your parcels, as there seem to be no coin lockers anywhere. To be fair, coin lockers have largely disappeared from the American landscape as well; the usual excuse given is “terrorism” but I couldn’t help but notice the plethora of “left luggage” services who would be happy to hold your items at 7 pounds per bag per day.
That, and the city shuts down almost entirely at 7 o’clock at night. That’s not an exaggeration; the shops and attractions close their doors and bring down the metal shutters at just about the time where things are getting going in, say, Los Angeles.
This is probably a boon if you happen to live in London and want to get off work at 5 and go down the pub by 6 and stay there the rest of the night, but if you are a tourist visiting London you should be aware that you will not get a full day’s worth of London out of any given day.
Also, the Tube, while very cool, tended to have a bad history of having stations out of order or down for construction or possibly on fire over the week we were trying to make use of it.
So there were some bits that were less fun than others, but I’m still going to give the city as a whole a B+. Do something about the shop hours and the general reliability of public transport and that’s looking more like an A- which is a pretty good place to be in my book.
My war on AVI is going astonishingly well, thanks to a piece of software called ffmpeg and a few minutes spend writing batch files.
ffmpeg is a tool that I’m scarcely scratching the surface of what I COULD do with it. I look at the documentation and I can’t actually fathom why I’d want to do some of the things it has to offer, but the thing I DO need – take a file in formats a, b, c, or d and convert them to format z, which is a format that our AppleTV can handle, it does quickly, reliably, and generally without complaint.
When it DOES complain, however, the error messages can be a bit… obscure.
For the record: “big_values too big, Buffer sizes too large” usually means that the mp3 audio track is corrupt in some fashion, and that I need to throw the file into VirtualDub – another fantastic tool – and re-encode the audio before passing it through ffmpeg again.
Which is OBVIOUS, I mean, it spells it right out right there.
Baud Attitude 