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.

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.

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.

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.

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.