Friday 7 November 2014
Blizzcon Starting Today
I will mark it with funnies and the opening 80 seconds summing up what I feel is the ideal explanation about the gaming community and how we'll accept anybody with open arms. Even if recent events might have skewed that perception...
An Argument For More Personal Profiling on the Internet
Well, on YouTube at least.
I watch a lot of videos - there's nothing on TV during the daytime for an Englishman in France who also doesn't have a TV - typically things like catching up on Let's Plays like a previously missed Yogscast series, hijinx Jesse Cox has gotten into or how people are not "getting" the point of Jim F-ing Sterling, son!
These past two days, I'm getting one particular advert an overwhelming amount of the time (with no exaggeration, no less than 8 out of 10 times) which is a commercial for car safety and not checking your phone. It ends with a small boy being killed in a car accident due to his father looking at the phone message. It's in muted tones, the child holding up his colouring book to try and urge his father to turn around to look even seems flat, blah blah, man looks at phone ding, ends with wreckage and man crying about the torn up picture his kid had drawn.
Cheerful stuff and not something that you want to see when in the middle of the first waves of depression.
Anyway, my point is that a deeper profile of us would have the potential to skip past any unnecessary stuff, things which would not be for us, things we don't want or have any need for and make things much more efficient. Even with the Google AdSence personalisation set up, I'll get perfume adverts once in a while. A more comprehensive understanding would show I don't have or want a car, housewares are not my thing, I don't need beauty creams and I should not be subjected to distressing imagery. You would have your own list of dos and don'ts as well as things you've already had and wished you did not.
Give me the ones for games, music, food, movies. You can keep your perfumes, fashion and car crashes. I'll keep the strange animated shorts about safety with social networking and identity/data protection though, those are fairly entertaining and I'm hopeful it's informative to people.
So I cheered myself up with some delicious comedy. Now you can too!:
and a bonus:
I watch a lot of videos - there's nothing on TV during the daytime for an Englishman in France who also doesn't have a TV - typically things like catching up on Let's Plays like a previously missed Yogscast series, hijinx Jesse Cox has gotten into or how people are not "getting" the point of Jim F-ing Sterling, son!
These past two days, I'm getting one particular advert an overwhelming amount of the time (with no exaggeration, no less than 8 out of 10 times) which is a commercial for car safety and not checking your phone. It ends with a small boy being killed in a car accident due to his father looking at the phone message. It's in muted tones, the child holding up his colouring book to try and urge his father to turn around to look even seems flat, blah blah, man looks at phone ding, ends with wreckage and man crying about the torn up picture his kid had drawn.
Cheerful stuff and not something that you want to see when in the middle of the first waves of depression.
Anyway, my point is that a deeper profile of us would have the potential to skip past any unnecessary stuff, things which would not be for us, things we don't want or have any need for and make things much more efficient. Even with the Google AdSence personalisation set up, I'll get perfume adverts once in a while. A more comprehensive understanding would show I don't have or want a car, housewares are not my thing, I don't need beauty creams and I should not be subjected to distressing imagery. You would have your own list of dos and don'ts as well as things you've already had and wished you did not.
Give me the ones for games, music, food, movies. You can keep your perfumes, fashion and car crashes. I'll keep the strange animated shorts about safety with social networking and identity/data protection though, those are fairly entertaining and I'm hopeful it's informative to people.
So I cheered myself up with some delicious comedy. Now you can too!:
and a bonus:
Friday 24 October 2014
A Long Time Coming
Super serious face for a minute.
And you know how little I like serious. Those that know me do anyway, many of you might be unacquainted with me (I won't say you are strangers, it's not how I like to see the world) and a few that do know me will be lightly acquainted with the little eccentricities that come about in the later portion of the year. There are a few quirks that I have and of course so does everybody, it's what makes life a little more interesting - indeed, in a spin on the view of Penn Jillette and his stance on liking it when people have stories, if you don't have some quirk, flaw, twist or kink then I can't really see wanting to talk to you - but there is one which I'm specifically alluring to when mentioning the time of year. This is my pretty severe Seasonal Affective Disorder.
It wasn't really something that became a thing until the last 6 or 7 years - there were times beforehand but mild and manageable - and for the last 4 or so it's been painful. It's not the most severe disorder somebody can have (things like schizophrenia or bipolar ranking up there) yet I have been encouraged by people to actually regard it as a pretty heavy one to have, one which is dangerous to people, that is not a sing of me being weak, and that has consequences. I would have said a couple years ago that is also comes with responsibilities but that's perhaps not the exact frame of mind or turn of phrase which describes what my view of it was. It's also less relevant as others have assured me I should feel no burden. My tendency towards having a kind of guilt complex about things has meant it difficult to "let go" of that notion but to my credit I've achieved great progress there.
I don't really like to call it a "disorder" yet it is the best classification available for it and certainly not as degrading as I first thought it sounded. I refuse to refer to it as a disease though, that's reserved for communicable infections in my mind. Same reason when hearing bad news about something that has happened to somebody else I cannot say "I'm sorry" unless it was me that caused it. Whenever I hear something like "my pet was hit by a car yesterday" and the person replies back "Aww, I'm sorry..." I expect the first to lunge at them yelling "You mean it was you?!".
Wait, yes, serious face...
I've got the lamp for simulating sunlight, bottle of vitamin D pills which are 1250% the daily values, bright colours, happy music playlists, yet still I will be floored. Literally on the floor sometimes, struggling to breathe, dry heaving, very occasional and unprovoked sobbing, hallucinations, disorientation, insomnia, waking nightmares (oh, the stories that I have about those...), confusion, short attention span, unable to think or even understand. My mood takes drastic swings usually towards the impatient and aggressive before returning to a quiet and sombre void. To some limited degree I become bipolar and schizophrenic. I cook food which pretty much comes in packages that just need to be put in the oven then eaten, so that I don't have to use knives, even goes as far as to hide them behind a pile of other stuff. Not that I'm any kind of risk to myself but think of it as more somebody who was quitting smoking or are on a diet; they're fine so far with sticking to the plan but you wouldn't light up a cigarette around them or start eating a piece of cake as, while they may still hold true, it still gives them that unwanted thought they they'd prefer not to have.
My "happy place" would be escape into Minecraft, yet some server instability left me adrift more than a few times. I also took a great joy in being part of a sadly short-lived series. For a short time though, while pushing through over a month on pure willpower, I had a small reprieve with medication when after a varied sampling we found Xanax evened me out to a functional level. I was not better, I was not good, but I would operate.
And after the 8 days supply was exhausted, I was not given a refill. The doctor was spouting cases where some people would get addicted and how hypnotherapy would be a better option; coincidentally his specialisation. Also my insurance would not cover it so I'd have to pay him, up front, about 100 euros a session. For multiple sessions. It may even take many and there was no guarantee of any kind of result.
You can imagine my response to that, then soon came the descent as the last of the Xanax left my system, dropping me back down into the pit. I'm still not sure if that made it all the more worse, to come up for air, only to be drug back under again.
And you know how little I like serious. Those that know me do anyway, many of you might be unacquainted with me (I won't say you are strangers, it's not how I like to see the world) and a few that do know me will be lightly acquainted with the little eccentricities that come about in the later portion of the year. There are a few quirks that I have and of course so does everybody, it's what makes life a little more interesting - indeed, in a spin on the view of Penn Jillette and his stance on liking it when people have stories, if you don't have some quirk, flaw, twist or kink then I can't really see wanting to talk to you - but there is one which I'm specifically alluring to when mentioning the time of year. This is my pretty severe Seasonal Affective Disorder.
It wasn't really something that became a thing until the last 6 or 7 years - there were times beforehand but mild and manageable - and for the last 4 or so it's been painful. It's not the most severe disorder somebody can have (things like schizophrenia or bipolar ranking up there) yet I have been encouraged by people to actually regard it as a pretty heavy one to have, one which is dangerous to people, that is not a sing of me being weak, and that has consequences. I would have said a couple years ago that is also comes with responsibilities but that's perhaps not the exact frame of mind or turn of phrase which describes what my view of it was. It's also less relevant as others have assured me I should feel no burden. My tendency towards having a kind of guilt complex about things has meant it difficult to "let go" of that notion but to my credit I've achieved great progress there.
I don't really like to call it a "disorder" yet it is the best classification available for it and certainly not as degrading as I first thought it sounded. I refuse to refer to it as a disease though, that's reserved for communicable infections in my mind. Same reason when hearing bad news about something that has happened to somebody else I cannot say "I'm sorry" unless it was me that caused it. Whenever I hear something like "my pet was hit by a car yesterday" and the person replies back "Aww, I'm sorry..." I expect the first to lunge at them yelling "You mean it was you?!".
Wait, yes, serious face...
I've got the lamp for simulating sunlight, bottle of vitamin D pills which are 1250% the daily values, bright colours, happy music playlists, yet still I will be floored. Literally on the floor sometimes, struggling to breathe, dry heaving, very occasional and unprovoked sobbing, hallucinations, disorientation, insomnia, waking nightmares (oh, the stories that I have about those...), confusion, short attention span, unable to think or even understand. My mood takes drastic swings usually towards the impatient and aggressive before returning to a quiet and sombre void. To some limited degree I become bipolar and schizophrenic. I cook food which pretty much comes in packages that just need to be put in the oven then eaten, so that I don't have to use knives, even goes as far as to hide them behind a pile of other stuff. Not that I'm any kind of risk to myself but think of it as more somebody who was quitting smoking or are on a diet; they're fine so far with sticking to the plan but you wouldn't light up a cigarette around them or start eating a piece of cake as, while they may still hold true, it still gives them that unwanted thought they they'd prefer not to have.
My "happy place" would be escape into Minecraft, yet some server instability left me adrift more than a few times. I also took a great joy in being part of a sadly short-lived series. For a short time though, while pushing through over a month on pure willpower, I had a small reprieve with medication when after a varied sampling we found Xanax evened me out to a functional level. I was not better, I was not good, but I would operate.
And after the 8 days supply was exhausted, I was not given a refill. The doctor was spouting cases where some people would get addicted and how hypnotherapy would be a better option; coincidentally his specialisation. Also my insurance would not cover it so I'd have to pay him, up front, about 100 euros a session. For multiple sessions. It may even take many and there was no guarantee of any kind of result.
You can imagine my response to that, then soon came the descent as the last of the Xanax left my system, dropping me back down into the pit. I'm still not sure if that made it all the more worse, to come up for air, only to be drug back under again.
To say I don't want sympathy is not a complete lie, yet any people give is certainly welcome as a selfish comfort, but it's more wanting it understood that I'm going to be a bit of a grumpybottom for a while and if I'm unpleasant to you or somebody else it is not anything personal and all that jazz. Others have arguably more heavier circumstances, be it dealing with other depression or illness or life circumstances, and I never like to think of myself as a special snowflake but I have carved out this little corner of my existence as my own that I have come to accept as going to be with me and part of what I am. Even plant a little flag on it.
Sunday 9 February 2014
Truism vs Nerdism
I'm going to make an assumption that if reading this, you didn't have a stellar time in school. Not that you had a bad time, per se, just that some parts were maybe lacking. I reach this conclusion based on probability; odds are that most people didn't. This can be from actual evidence where somebody didn't have the best time, purely that they only felt they had a hard time based on their own perspective, or maybe a mix of both as is what can happen.
I was that quiet kid, eccentric, smarter than for me own good (even if I do say so myself).
Anyway, point is that for all peoples assumptions I hadn't been one to watch Star Trek The Next Generation. Other people had and would talk about it, but I never got the time to catch it. Then along Netflix came - my one luxury at the moment and after a while it came up as a recommendation in my list. Seven seasons long, that's something to take up the time. It's been interesting on how self-knowing it is about what it's doing, a wink to the audience here and there. It was mostly background viewing to begin with while I was doing other things, but then a little into the first season that they were down on a planet with somebody was trying to get information from them and they asked what ship it was.
"Enterprise?"
"...No...it's the Lollipop"
"The Lollipop?"
"Yes. It's a good ship..."
Okay, Star Trek. You got me. I like you now. Just another 6 and a half seasons of it to go.
Question is what to do next. I mean House of Cards seems a bit serious, much more feeling like the more lighthearted, self-aware wink from Supernatural but the new season's not listed yet. There's always the lighthearted, self-aware wink from Leverage. Or the lighthearted, self-aware wink fro---wait, I'm starting to sense a pattern here...
I was that quiet kid, eccentric, smarter than for me own good (even if I do say so myself).
Anyway, point is that for all peoples assumptions I hadn't been one to watch Star Trek The Next Generation. Other people had and would talk about it, but I never got the time to catch it. Then along Netflix came - my one luxury at the moment and after a while it came up as a recommendation in my list. Seven seasons long, that's something to take up the time. It's been interesting on how self-knowing it is about what it's doing, a wink to the audience here and there. It was mostly background viewing to begin with while I was doing other things, but then a little into the first season that they were down on a planet with somebody was trying to get information from them and they asked what ship it was.
"Enterprise?"
"...No...it's the Lollipop"
"The Lollipop?"
"Yes. It's a good ship..."
Okay, Star Trek. You got me. I like you now. Just another 6 and a half seasons of it to go.
Question is what to do next. I mean House of Cards seems a bit serious, much more feeling like the more lighthearted, self-aware wink from Supernatural but the new season's not listed yet. There's always the lighthearted, self-aware wink from Leverage. Or the lighthearted, self-aware wink fro---wait, I'm starting to sense a pattern here...
Thursday 26 December 2013
A Chistmas tune
My sister used to host a show on the hospital radio as a volunteer for what was basically for requests. I'd help out by sending over things like music for bedding tracks (the music playing underneath when talking) and rarer songs that she couldn't find in their library.
Coming up to the holidays what must be around 10 years ago, I included on the CD the track Fairytale of New York. There were some guidelines/restrictions on what could be played on the hospital radio such as no offensive content - which makes sense - and anybody that knows the song will know the part where Kirsty sings "you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot; happy Christmas your arse, I pray god it's our last."
I edited out the middle part, obviously, keeping the part about praying it's their last as it wasn't particularly hinting at death or anything so was safe enough.
I overlooked something though.
During this time of year you've probably heard the song a dozen times or more and may know the part where there's the line "lying there almost dead with that drip in that bed." It had totally slipped my mind that it was in there, but surely the professional my sister was she'd check songs first. She didn't. It went out on the hospital radio. She heard the line then. So did her "boss" who of course had a few words for her afterwards.
Whoospie.
Anytime I hear the song on TV now though, they only play the first half before any of this comes up, cutting away to something else instead. Years before this, they'd play the whole thing in its entirety. There's no connection and it's all coincidence of course. Just funny how things seem to all work like that.
Coming up to the holidays what must be around 10 years ago, I included on the CD the track Fairytale of New York. There were some guidelines/restrictions on what could be played on the hospital radio such as no offensive content - which makes sense - and anybody that knows the song will know the part where Kirsty sings "you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot; happy Christmas your arse, I pray god it's our last."
I edited out the middle part, obviously, keeping the part about praying it's their last as it wasn't particularly hinting at death or anything so was safe enough.
I overlooked something though.
During this time of year you've probably heard the song a dozen times or more and may know the part where there's the line "lying there almost dead with that drip in that bed." It had totally slipped my mind that it was in there, but surely the professional my sister was she'd check songs first. She didn't. It went out on the hospital radio. She heard the line then. So did her "boss" who of course had a few words for her afterwards.
Whoospie.
Anytime I hear the song on TV now though, they only play the first half before any of this comes up, cutting away to something else instead. Years before this, they'd play the whole thing in its entirety. There's no connection and it's all coincidence of course. Just funny how things seem to all work like that.
Monday 16 December 2013
Get off my lawn, you damned kids!
It's been happening for a couple years now. Not just to myself but some friends as well. I'd have said that anyone 30 or over will have done this but some friends who are in their mid-20s have also been guilty of this and it's something you'll do as well. It is a universal truth which binds us all.
We've done the "old man" rant.
Kids today don't know how good they have it. I got on this train of thought again after thinking about Ranma 1/2. Mentioned briefly on my Twitter, I had been waiting to get on a plane and in the bright departure gate lounge there was an exciting mood lift that came over me. For some odd reason it took me back to the early years of university where I had first knowingly been exposed to anime. It was a series of coincidences and happenstance where we'd got on to some topic of conversation - sadly I cannot recall what - but it came to one of us mentioning how they remember one show where the main character was playing cards against somebody dressed as something like the King of Hearts and they were trying to trick each other but just as bad as each other at doing it. The focus of the scene came to the fact the King had a [bad] Scottish accent, which he then promptly performed, and that the show was funny and pretty good. University being the time for open-mindedness and trying new things, and that we had more than enough time to kill being our first year, finding this show was a new goal. Being 2000 there were no torrents, just a mix of IRC, public FTP servers, and even some direct download sites (which is where 2 years later I'd be one of the first to discover the show .hack//Sign). These were not really feasible but one of us had heard of a funky sharing program called LimeWire and it was there where we had great fortune in finding many episodes.
For those who may not be aware of the old days, to put some perspective on what we had to work with, the university had a standard of using Zip disks - chunky floppy disks which had limits of 100MB - and all the computers had these installed in the front. Home CD-burning drives were around though and soon the switch from ZIP disks to CDs would come, but for getting the files we downloaded over to a computer in our Halls we were stuck using these 100MB storage disks and while I sat in the library and collected the files, two others would take one of the two full disks, run over to the Halls, transfer the files off, and then come back for more, crossing over in the middle. "But 100MB is too small to fit the 250MB-350MB .avi files!" you cry out. That's right. But you'd almost be lucky to have a computer that could play such a file, let along storage to transport it. No, no, back then the format which was commonly used by fansubbers, as well as people who'd rip and share Western shows like Family Guy, was a little something called Real Media.
It might be a little akin to how people would trade VHS tapes, with poor quality image, distorted sounds, and sometimes quality corruption compounded even more by tapes being a copy of a copy of a copy. These Real Media files were pretty commonly of a fairly poor quality, glitching sound that might cut out of you tried to jump forward/back, and corruption elements being something that you just got used to and accepted. But when a 25 minute episode came in at around 30MB then you get an idea of what to perhaps expect.
Over the space of a couple weekends we managed to collect a fair chunk of the show, and we were happy enough with the English dub as it was (a) all that there was out there, and (b) we'd not really had experience with anything other than dubs. I was a newcomer to this, as were most of our group, and even our fairly experienced member had a 50/50 mix of subs and dubs under his belt. Stores in the town did have a small anime section tucked away quietly - one had it sharing shelves with what looked to be C-grade martial arts movies and softcore porn - where they would carry a few sparse VHS tapes of the few shows which made it to UK domestic release. At the time this would pretty much be Bubblegum Crisis 2040 and Martian Successor Nadesico, with an occasional 3X3 Eyes or Akira. Releases of these were still coming out with a new tape every 2-3 months and it wouldn't even be until the next year when we'd finally complete BGC2040 and Nadesico, after the majority of our circle had finished and left. English dub, glaring English language overlays (Nadesico being a regularly frequent offender), sound distortion (Nadesico only an occasional offender with low base engine sounds drowning out a line), you'd take what you could get. And it was still better than Real Media files.
After the move to the house for what would be the following 3 years, we were reduced to dial-up Internet. I guess it's no wonder the weekly trips to look through the VHS tapes were so common. Sometimes even more than once a week. However it was not too long until we heard word of the city getting read to bring in ADSL Internet and we were down in their offices asking about early sign-up the first moment we could get. Our time away from being able to explore the Internet to any large degree had given it time to advance and the arrival of DIVX was seeing the .avi file starting to take over as the format of choice. We were still with having to use IRC, FTP servers and the very rare direct download, but soon word came of a peer-to-peer tool known as Direct Connect. It worked like the others but was a little more friendly and easy to use and soon we were all set up. Then the ISP announced they were putting a download cap on. I can't remember if it was weekly or monthly, but it was only a couple days before we had hit the limit, had our service cut, and when going right to their offices was told we'd get it back if we wrote a letter promising not to go over the cap again. I think we had this happen twice, actually, but it's been a little over eleven years and I have trouble remembering what I did even last month.
Direct Connect was interesting where in, like IRC, the rooms would have a community and soon I'd become part of one of these and have some fun times with people there. We'd get to play some Neverwinter Nights a couple times, we even ran a god damned radio station using ShoutCast where I'd jump in and host for a couple hours every other night, and even got into CD trading with two others in our channel whom were also in the UK. I must still have a little under 100 empty double-CD cases boxed up in the house. For one of these people I burned around 40 discs, boxed them up and sent off then in return was given...all of Card Captor Sakura. It was pretty much all they had but I'm more than open to trying new things. One early morning in the summer I had been awake all night and had gone off very early in the morning to the 24 hour supermarket that was about 6 miles away and had walked back in the bright 7am sun, I was feeling pretty cool, upbeat, relaxed and I dare to say almost spiritual. I was at peace with the world. I saw the CDs in the rack and decided it was time. I think I got about 6 episodes in before something shiny came along and distracted me. I think it was one of my housemates coming down and starting coffee.
I made an Anime Music Video back then. It was in a small depression during a Christmas party at a local pub, I decided to leave a little early and just started tinkering around. It was using TV rips of Love Hina, had the subtitles showing in parts, and when it was done there was no YouTube to post it. It was for personal amusement. AMVs were only known to exist because of listings on "database" websites such as AnimeMusicVideos.org and some of the more famous ones were only known because they'd be shown at conventions. Even to me that's an odd thought.
A few years later I'd update it with DVD rips and footage from the OVAs that later came. I'll link it at the bottom because why not.
Skip forward 10 years and we have high-def widescreen 1080p surround sound with 10bit encoding, softsubs in multiple languages, and connections where we can not only download the 500MB file in under a week but even stream it while we wait. Sites like CrunchyRoll have become official and have releases available alongside the broadcasts, Netflix and Hulu have anime categories, and Blu-Ray releases are out a few months after broadcast instead of almost a year (admittedly Japan releases, not Western, but kind people usually have these up on the Internetiverse a day or two after out) a little like how the home release of movies will be 3-4 months after they have been in theatres instead of what was almost a year back in VHS times. You can even get box set collections from main retailers rather than having to know of some smaller retailer whose stock if half imported from America (the DVD player I bought back in 2000 was specifically because it was one of the first which was affordable and still easy to hack into being region free).
Which is where the "old man" rants will arise. If a DVD rip from some fansub group has some slight artifacting or colour bleeding then somebody will flip a table and decry about how terrible they are. If something is a day late in coming out there are flocks of people to jump over to another group who put theirs out, and then complain about how now things like the font used doesn't match up. Myself, I'm more than okay with waiting 6 months for the Blu-Ray version to show up, get the 720 instead of the 1080 and be as happy as pie. Of course, finding the Blu-Ray versions is a whole new thing as people will focus on the TV broadcasts while the show's hot and then perhaps, perhaps, look to home release rip should there be any heavy censoring. I think most people would only look to those if they were after an uncensored version as well and are fine enough with the TV rips for most shows.
I doubt may of these people know there was a time before the Internet, that CDs were once too expensive for home use and if they heard the sound of dial-up would think it was the intro to a new Skrillex track.
They don't know how good they have it. I don't know how good *I* have it, even with all this context. And it's going to happen to you, too. You will have your own "old man" rant. Maybe it'll be a while, perhaps about how we used to have to sit still for up to 2 hours while watching a movie with our eyes instead of neural interfaces that let you beam the experiences into your head. And where you had other people play the part of the main character instead of it being yourself transposed into the role. But it will happen.
Enjoy it. Savour it. Run with it, make it your own and if you have to cope by turning it into self-aware parody then so be it. But let it happen. It's good for you, both for letting out some of the frustration, but also for allowing you to explore a little nostalgia and memories of things that you used to do. You can even do as I do and use it as therapy and post it on the Internet.
We've done the "old man" rant.
Kids today don't know how good they have it. I got on this train of thought again after thinking about Ranma 1/2. Mentioned briefly on my Twitter, I had been waiting to get on a plane and in the bright departure gate lounge there was an exciting mood lift that came over me. For some odd reason it took me back to the early years of university where I had first knowingly been exposed to anime. It was a series of coincidences and happenstance where we'd got on to some topic of conversation - sadly I cannot recall what - but it came to one of us mentioning how they remember one show where the main character was playing cards against somebody dressed as something like the King of Hearts and they were trying to trick each other but just as bad as each other at doing it. The focus of the scene came to the fact the King had a [bad] Scottish accent, which he then promptly performed, and that the show was funny and pretty good. University being the time for open-mindedness and trying new things, and that we had more than enough time to kill being our first year, finding this show was a new goal. Being 2000 there were no torrents, just a mix of IRC, public FTP servers, and even some direct download sites (which is where 2 years later I'd be one of the first to discover the show .hack//Sign). These were not really feasible but one of us had heard of a funky sharing program called LimeWire and it was there where we had great fortune in finding many episodes.
For those who may not be aware of the old days, to put some perspective on what we had to work with, the university had a standard of using Zip disks - chunky floppy disks which had limits of 100MB - and all the computers had these installed in the front. Home CD-burning drives were around though and soon the switch from ZIP disks to CDs would come, but for getting the files we downloaded over to a computer in our Halls we were stuck using these 100MB storage disks and while I sat in the library and collected the files, two others would take one of the two full disks, run over to the Halls, transfer the files off, and then come back for more, crossing over in the middle. "But 100MB is too small to fit the 250MB-350MB .avi files!" you cry out. That's right. But you'd almost be lucky to have a computer that could play such a file, let along storage to transport it. No, no, back then the format which was commonly used by fansubbers, as well as people who'd rip and share Western shows like Family Guy, was a little something called Real Media.
It might be a little akin to how people would trade VHS tapes, with poor quality image, distorted sounds, and sometimes quality corruption compounded even more by tapes being a copy of a copy of a copy. These Real Media files were pretty commonly of a fairly poor quality, glitching sound that might cut out of you tried to jump forward/back, and corruption elements being something that you just got used to and accepted. But when a 25 minute episode came in at around 30MB then you get an idea of what to perhaps expect.
Over the space of a couple weekends we managed to collect a fair chunk of the show, and we were happy enough with the English dub as it was (a) all that there was out there, and (b) we'd not really had experience with anything other than dubs. I was a newcomer to this, as were most of our group, and even our fairly experienced member had a 50/50 mix of subs and dubs under his belt. Stores in the town did have a small anime section tucked away quietly - one had it sharing shelves with what looked to be C-grade martial arts movies and softcore porn - where they would carry a few sparse VHS tapes of the few shows which made it to UK domestic release. At the time this would pretty much be Bubblegum Crisis 2040 and Martian Successor Nadesico, with an occasional 3X3 Eyes or Akira. Releases of these were still coming out with a new tape every 2-3 months and it wouldn't even be until the next year when we'd finally complete BGC2040 and Nadesico, after the majority of our circle had finished and left. English dub, glaring English language overlays (Nadesico being a regularly frequent offender), sound distortion (Nadesico only an occasional offender with low base engine sounds drowning out a line), you'd take what you could get. And it was still better than Real Media files.
After the move to the house for what would be the following 3 years, we were reduced to dial-up Internet. I guess it's no wonder the weekly trips to look through the VHS tapes were so common. Sometimes even more than once a week. However it was not too long until we heard word of the city getting read to bring in ADSL Internet and we were down in their offices asking about early sign-up the first moment we could get. Our time away from being able to explore the Internet to any large degree had given it time to advance and the arrival of DIVX was seeing the .avi file starting to take over as the format of choice. We were still with having to use IRC, FTP servers and the very rare direct download, but soon word came of a peer-to-peer tool known as Direct Connect. It worked like the others but was a little more friendly and easy to use and soon we were all set up. Then the ISP announced they were putting a download cap on. I can't remember if it was weekly or monthly, but it was only a couple days before we had hit the limit, had our service cut, and when going right to their offices was told we'd get it back if we wrote a letter promising not to go over the cap again. I think we had this happen twice, actually, but it's been a little over eleven years and I have trouble remembering what I did even last month.
Direct Connect was interesting where in, like IRC, the rooms would have a community and soon I'd become part of one of these and have some fun times with people there. We'd get to play some Neverwinter Nights a couple times, we even ran a god damned radio station using ShoutCast where I'd jump in and host for a couple hours every other night, and even got into CD trading with two others in our channel whom were also in the UK. I must still have a little under 100 empty double-CD cases boxed up in the house. For one of these people I burned around 40 discs, boxed them up and sent off then in return was given...all of Card Captor Sakura. It was pretty much all they had but I'm more than open to trying new things. One early morning in the summer I had been awake all night and had gone off very early in the morning to the 24 hour supermarket that was about 6 miles away and had walked back in the bright 7am sun, I was feeling pretty cool, upbeat, relaxed and I dare to say almost spiritual. I was at peace with the world. I saw the CDs in the rack and decided it was time. I think I got about 6 episodes in before something shiny came along and distracted me. I think it was one of my housemates coming down and starting coffee.
I made an Anime Music Video back then. It was in a small depression during a Christmas party at a local pub, I decided to leave a little early and just started tinkering around. It was using TV rips of Love Hina, had the subtitles showing in parts, and when it was done there was no YouTube to post it. It was for personal amusement. AMVs were only known to exist because of listings on "database" websites such as AnimeMusicVideos.org and some of the more famous ones were only known because they'd be shown at conventions. Even to me that's an odd thought.
A few years later I'd update it with DVD rips and footage from the OVAs that later came. I'll link it at the bottom because why not.
Skip forward 10 years and we have high-def widescreen 1080p surround sound with 10bit encoding, softsubs in multiple languages, and connections where we can not only download the 500MB file in under a week but even stream it while we wait. Sites like CrunchyRoll have become official and have releases available alongside the broadcasts, Netflix and Hulu have anime categories, and Blu-Ray releases are out a few months after broadcast instead of almost a year (admittedly Japan releases, not Western, but kind people usually have these up on the Internetiverse a day or two after out) a little like how the home release of movies will be 3-4 months after they have been in theatres instead of what was almost a year back in VHS times. You can even get box set collections from main retailers rather than having to know of some smaller retailer whose stock if half imported from America (the DVD player I bought back in 2000 was specifically because it was one of the first which was affordable and still easy to hack into being region free).
Which is where the "old man" rants will arise. If a DVD rip from some fansub group has some slight artifacting or colour bleeding then somebody will flip a table and decry about how terrible they are. If something is a day late in coming out there are flocks of people to jump over to another group who put theirs out, and then complain about how now things like the font used doesn't match up. Myself, I'm more than okay with waiting 6 months for the Blu-Ray version to show up, get the 720 instead of the 1080 and be as happy as pie. Of course, finding the Blu-Ray versions is a whole new thing as people will focus on the TV broadcasts while the show's hot and then perhaps, perhaps, look to home release rip should there be any heavy censoring. I think most people would only look to those if they were after an uncensored version as well and are fine enough with the TV rips for most shows.
I doubt may of these people know there was a time before the Internet, that CDs were once too expensive for home use and if they heard the sound of dial-up would think it was the intro to a new Skrillex track.
They don't know how good they have it. I don't know how good *I* have it, even with all this context. And it's going to happen to you, too. You will have your own "old man" rant. Maybe it'll be a while, perhaps about how we used to have to sit still for up to 2 hours while watching a movie with our eyes instead of neural interfaces that let you beam the experiences into your head. And where you had other people play the part of the main character instead of it being yourself transposed into the role. But it will happen.
Enjoy it. Savour it. Run with it, make it your own and if you have to cope by turning it into self-aware parody then so be it. But let it happen. It's good for you, both for letting out some of the frustration, but also for allowing you to explore a little nostalgia and memories of things that you used to do. You can even do as I do and use it as therapy and post it on the Internet.
Sunday 15 December 2013
Flight
One sunny Sunday, what must be 6 years
ago now, we were having lunch at the pizza restaurant near our office
– it was not really the best, but your options in a business park
are limited on a Sunday – and it had gotten to the topic of “if
you could have any superpower, what would it be?”
While my two friends would soon start
to out-do each other with their powers, I'd gone for what some might
call a clichéd choice of teleportation. There was some minor
additional discussion over the preservation of momentum and if I'd
have to know exactly where in the world something was, if I ever had
to have been there before, and so on, but on the whole it was decreed
as a good choice – if just for the savings on time and bus/plane
fares.
As the plane lifted off and I started
to look down on the land as the rare sun beamed down, I think I want
to change my choice.
Flight was perhaps underrated and while
I had considered it briefly at that restaurant the lazy benefits of
teleportation had won out. After all, why spend 30 minutes flying
somewhere when you can reach it instantly. Thinking about it more
though, there would be risks with teleportation such as if somebody
had put something where you were going to arrive. Flight would be far
safer a means of transportation. And arguably cooler. Teleporting
away in a blink would sure shock people, for both people seeing you
blip out and for those where you blip back in, but imagining to be
able to float off and the spectacle of it with people watching. That
sounds pretty cool. We're not even talking about how fast either and
even if not going at Superman-level supersonic speeds and being
limited to, say, the same as terminal velocity of falling vertically
with all the wind drag that entails this still all sounds appealing.
Advertising opportunities abound, just as the movie Mystery Men
parodied, with the first thing coming to mind being those banners
small planes would drag behind them. Skywriting would be impractical
but perhaps still possible with practice. Delivery service and
courier are obvious and can even save on having to deal with building
security and elevators. Why stop with that when instead can save
people from the upper floors of buildings in danger?
As the plane banks right and the angle
of the sun sends the warmth through my window seat window, the
feeling of that freedom of flight escalates. Of course, I'm nicely
inside in this warm glow and the wind chill outside would be a
challenge that needs consideration. Even in this fantasy you need to
keep your feet a little grounded.
Monday 2 September 2013
Chill
Just a short one, not to worry. It's almost 1am on a Sunday night/Monday morning (different people will view it as different things, just as I see the first day of the week as Monday while others say that role is a Sunday).
Normally at this time I'd have already long-prepared to go to bed and then stayed up way past to get as much of the Travelcast as I can before succumbing to fatigue. Instead, I'm finishing the opening episode to the second season of The Newsroom on one screen while on the other CptWow's Minecraft stream.
It's quite something to behold, as much as I detest using cliched phrases, and it had dawned on me recently on why I found it captivating and enthralling.
The silence.
It was not my immediate reaction to the stream when I first encountered it a couple months ago and, truth be told I had not kept up as they were either not streaming when I was looking or I was otherwise occupied with the aforementioned Travelcast. No, the first thing you shall notice is the shaders in use; the waving tree leaves, swaying grass stems, the shadows moving to the sun which itself will burst through breaks in the walls and wash out the colours if looking in that direction. Translucent water with reflections, depth of field, the interiors bathed in the warm colours of the glowstone lighting, bloody gorgeous frame rate, then there will be the chirping birds, cricket sounds, leaves being blown by the wind. Barely any music (subtle, quiet, understated to the point where you may barely notice it) and no talking (save for the very occasional text-to-speech interaction); just this world in front of us, basically speaking for itself, and showing us just what it can be by simply existing there for us.
At 1am it's a pretty chill and relaxing place to be. Probably when not 1am as well, really, but I don't get to make these decisions.
Normally at this time I'd have already long-prepared to go to bed and then stayed up way past to get as much of the Travelcast as I can before succumbing to fatigue. Instead, I'm finishing the opening episode to the second season of The Newsroom on one screen while on the other CptWow's Minecraft stream.
It's quite something to behold, as much as I detest using cliched phrases, and it had dawned on me recently on why I found it captivating and enthralling.
The silence.
It was not my immediate reaction to the stream when I first encountered it a couple months ago and, truth be told I had not kept up as they were either not streaming when I was looking or I was otherwise occupied with the aforementioned Travelcast. No, the first thing you shall notice is the shaders in use; the waving tree leaves, swaying grass stems, the shadows moving to the sun which itself will burst through breaks in the walls and wash out the colours if looking in that direction. Translucent water with reflections, depth of field, the interiors bathed in the warm colours of the glowstone lighting, bloody gorgeous frame rate, then there will be the chirping birds, cricket sounds, leaves being blown by the wind. Barely any music (subtle, quiet, understated to the point where you may barely notice it) and no talking (save for the very occasional text-to-speech interaction); just this world in front of us, basically speaking for itself, and showing us just what it can be by simply existing there for us.
At 1am it's a pretty chill and relaxing place to be. Probably when not 1am as well, really, but I don't get to make these decisions.
Monday 22 April 2013
Strange things are afoot at the Circle K
"The times they are a changin'," as the song goes. There are plans. Big plans. Some may even say ambitious. So much so, many aspects will fail, the scope altered, focus refined, parts dropped and the end product be pretty different from the initial idea.
It's almost like I've done this kind of thing before?
A large portion will be based on other people though, and then I take that source material and tinker with it. The tinkering is the relatively easy part, the bottleneck is getting that source in the first place.
It will start with the new computer, half of it already ordered and the rest coming in the next couple weeks or so.
More news to come. Naturally. But it's past 1am and that'll do for now.
It's almost like I've done this kind of thing before?
A large portion will be based on other people though, and then I take that source material and tinker with it. The tinkering is the relatively easy part, the bottleneck is getting that source in the first place.
It will start with the new computer, half of it already ordered and the rest coming in the next couple weeks or so.
More news to come. Naturally. But it's past 1am and that'll do for now.
Tuesday 30 October 2012
Remake II: Return of the Nostalgia
So X-COM: Enemy Unknown is out and we've all been playing it. We all know that *spoilers* it's good. So let's skip that part.
I played the first one back in 1994, and frankly it terrified me. It's perhaps not the exact word for it but it's suitable enough. It was dark, both in tone and colour, with shadows and areas hidden from sight where anything could be hiding - this felt like such a departure from most of the stuff people where doing at the time that it stuck in my mind. I can't recall anything gripping my attention at much until Carmageddon in 1997. I'm sure there were but they don't come to mind.
Remakes and reboots and spiritaul sequels are not new, of course, but it seems as though they are more prevalent each wave and sometimes more dividing.
I'm down with the new Tomb Raider, I've given $100 to the new Carmageddon, X-COM worked out well and is undoubtedly going to lead to more, I still even have/had hopes for the X-COM 3rd-person shooter (whether it ever comes back to life and gets done or not). Let's do this stuff, people. Let it ride. There can be bad results, as there will be with everything people do, and if so then let's learn from those mistakes and make the next one better. If they work out, let's expand on those.
I'm envisioned (and mostly written) masses and masses about this, but cut it to the short version; not everybody will like remakes, preferring the original. Others with welcome new things with open arms. Both are fine and you don't have to yell at the other side if you don't agree with them.
I played the first one back in 1994, and frankly it terrified me. It's perhaps not the exact word for it but it's suitable enough. It was dark, both in tone and colour, with shadows and areas hidden from sight where anything could be hiding - this felt like such a departure from most of the stuff people where doing at the time that it stuck in my mind. I can't recall anything gripping my attention at much until Carmageddon in 1997. I'm sure there were but they don't come to mind.
Remakes and reboots and spiritaul sequels are not new, of course, but it seems as though they are more prevalent each wave and sometimes more dividing.
I'm down with the new Tomb Raider, I've given $100 to the new Carmageddon, X-COM worked out well and is undoubtedly going to lead to more, I still even have/had hopes for the X-COM 3rd-person shooter (whether it ever comes back to life and gets done or not). Let's do this stuff, people. Let it ride. There can be bad results, as there will be with everything people do, and if so then let's learn from those mistakes and make the next one better. If they work out, let's expand on those.
I'm envisioned (and mostly written) masses and masses about this, but cut it to the short version; not everybody will like remakes, preferring the original. Others with welcome new things with open arms. Both are fine and you don't have to yell at the other side if you don't agree with them.
Tuesday 9 October 2012
...Paved With Good Intentions
I really should write more.
We all have things we mean to do but don't for some reason or another.
An immediate example is I should be asleep 3 hours ago.
So we've got Dishonored out today, and XCOM is coming in a few days (for those of us outside of North America). I've still to play more Sleeping Dogs and Borderlands 2 and may do some of the tonight, which was kind of my plan for last night but I ended up staying in Minecraft for far longer than planned after thinking up a method of producing a shaped lake with ice, then making the contraption to produce said ice in a sustainable fashion. Which did not work due to some version inconsistencies (our server is a version behind the current which would have allowed the functionality desired). I've barely touched Torchlight II.
There's a long list in my Steam games of similar stories. Sometimes I joke to myself that I'm saving it all for retirement; something to do to pass the days. Then again, will Steam be around? Will the games work with whatever OS we're using? Would the tech be compatible? Would I want to play them, when we'd be plugging the new ones right into our brains?
We all have things we mean to do but don't for some reason or another.
An immediate example is I should be asleep 3 hours ago.
So we've got Dishonored out today, and XCOM is coming in a few days (for those of us outside of North America). I've still to play more Sleeping Dogs and Borderlands 2 and may do some of the tonight, which was kind of my plan for last night but I ended up staying in Minecraft for far longer than planned after thinking up a method of producing a shaped lake with ice, then making the contraption to produce said ice in a sustainable fashion. Which did not work due to some version inconsistencies (our server is a version behind the current which would have allowed the functionality desired). I've barely touched Torchlight II.
There's a long list in my Steam games of similar stories. Sometimes I joke to myself that I'm saving it all for retirement; something to do to pass the days. Then again, will Steam be around? Will the games work with whatever OS we're using? Would the tech be compatible? Would I want to play them, when we'd be plugging the new ones right into our brains?
Monday 30 July 2012
Eating Flesh Is No Longer Fresh
I think I might be a little done with zombies.
Actually I'm going to engage in some bad writing as I'm making a statement before then immediately contradicting it, because that's maybe not exactly true.
I'm mostly done with zombies.
It had come to be a couple months ago after I'd noticed there was a continued release of things zombie themed and yet there wasn't much excitement to go with them. It's not that I don't appreciate their appeal, of course - they are perhaps one of the few, maybe the only, bad guy that we can all agree on. We can accept that what they do is bad, their motives are bad, there's no compromise or reasoning, nobody is going to be too annoyed if we kill them as they're already dead.
I can't think of anything since Left 4 Dead 2 where I can say I was really interested in zombies, but even then zombies could be replaced by something else and you'd nearly have the same deal. You just need something to shoot at - let's say slime aliens from Dimension F - you'll still have the guns, decisions over which bombs to take and when to use them, and wondering why that one guy it trying to use a first aid kit at 80% during the gauntlet run. It wouldn't be the same, granted, but you get my point.
Then we have The Walking Dead.
I've read some of the graphics novels (yes, I use that term rather than comics, where appropriate) and a little of the TV show but not much. I have planned to go back to them, but again that sense of "ah, yes, zombies again" lodges itself in my "it's not A.D.D. but it might as well be" centre of my delicious, juicy brains. Time passed, as it will do so when you're putting things off for no reason, and soon after The Walking Dead game from TellTale Games appeared I'd checked in with one of my favourite Minecraft video creators for his Let's Play with himself and his wife and I very much dug how it was not so much about the zombies but the people. One Steam Summer Sale later and it was time to get stuck in. I especially like it's altering storyline stemming from your choices in what you say and what you do. A lot of games with decisions to make, I'll not have much interest in going back to and trying out other things, yet with this I was playing through and even in the first few events I'm catching me thinking maybe I should have told somebody to go screw themselves instead of asking them where they got such a swell hat, or wondering what would happen if took the wax lips from the tremendous dangerous-looking yak rather than hypnotising the quarrelsome rhinoceros. Will I go do these things? I'm thinking probably not right away, but I will do at some time, perhaps after the final chapter is out.
I was going to analyse cliches and easy-outs, but it's 3am and I'm done for now. So time for something relaxed...
Thursday 23 February 2012
Discussing discourse
I don't feel right refering to Dear Esther as a game. Not even an interactive story, as there's not any interaction. You walk the path, it will queue narrative. It will sometimes be different narrative, but the destination is the same.
I'd played--er, run throu--WALKED through the original mod years ago and it stuck with me. I was annoyed with the slow walking back then as I still am now, and a few set pieces are a little different than I seem to recall, but the new one didn't seem to resonate with me as much as the original. Was it because the increased fidelity perhaps didn't mesh with the starkness of theme as much as the original version did? Maybe since I knew where it was going it didn't have the same effect as it would have otherwise.
It's still a fine product, mind. I'd be interested in seeing more things in this style as time goes on. I just don't think it's something we'll be seeing much of.
I'd played--er, run throu--WALKED through the original mod years ago and it stuck with me. I was annoyed with the slow walking back then as I still am now, and a few set pieces are a little different than I seem to recall, but the new one didn't seem to resonate with me as much as the original. Was it because the increased fidelity perhaps didn't mesh with the starkness of theme as much as the original version did? Maybe since I knew where it was going it didn't have the same effect as it would have otherwise.
It's still a fine product, mind. I'd be interested in seeing more things in this style as time goes on. I just don't think it's something we'll be seeing much of.
Monday 19 December 2011
PEBKAC
I find it amusing that, dispite my role of a high-profile and caring customer service, I sure do have a lot of shirts that I wouldn't say are endearing to the position. Some are not friendly at all.
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