An absurd proposal

June 13, 2008 – 9:00 am

I’m not particularly well-read. I lie. I’m not well-read at all, having last studied any kind of literature in my last year of high school. Whoops, actually I did make an attempt at higher reading out of interest some time later, but more on that, later.

So back in high school, I read a number of works by Shakespeare, something I think most North American high school students do. I saw words and structures that I had never encountered previously, my text was filled with footnotes, sight reading in class was always a point for embarrassment, and formal instruction plus the threat of course failure was required to maintain something barely approaching enthusiasm. Things got progressively better, if slowly, but only because I was being prodded up the learning curve.

A while ago, I tried to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. I had a gift certificate, I’m cheap, it was in the bargain bin, and I had never encountered such stream of consciousness as I did in the first arc of that book. Not even while daydreaming, although I suppose that’s a bad example since I’m technically zoning out. How about, not even while trying to dodge grenades and shotgun blasts while returning fire, while my aim is swinging in figure-eights, while defending a flag and having my frame rate drop below 30 fps.

My comprehension abilities at the height of my iambic pentameter parsing powers probably clocked in at about half a page per minute. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty poor. School textbooks are larger than commercial paperback equivalents to accommodate my still shaky fine motor skills; this wasn’t densely packed text or anything. My comprehension abilities trying to parse someone else’s stream of consciousness? About one-eighth that. Clearly gift certificate credits well spent.

Maybe before people get all up in arms over literal translations in fansubs, we should try localizing some of this arcane or outright wrong English. It’s certainly doable. I mean, half of the assignments I received in English class were to express some passage in my own words, and because I don’t speak Shakespeare to this day, to me that meant “lay it out for the layman.” Coles Notes rakes in the dough for doing pretty much that. But instead of using a localized reference to study literature, we should just study localized literature.

Except any English teacher is well within their rights to smack you upside the head for suggesting that. It took me a couple minutes to find the iodine bottle. It’s English class, not English class for Idiots (is that book series taken already?). There are barriers to entry and, I suppose, enjoyment. Readers are held to a standard.

So why not viewers?

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged , , , | Comments (5)

Flattening pyramids

June 12, 2008 – 8:52 pm

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. I forgot to note the episode number.

There is a very real tendency for young and niche communities to go to war with, and amongst, each other. Linux versus BSD, FreeBSD versus OpenBSD, GNOME versus KDE, Ruby versus the world, not to mention globalization internationalization versus sterilization localization.

(But everybody knows that if you want to get anything done, you use C)

The ferocity of these wars abates only when the community matures, which is to say that mostly counter-productive bickering is replaced by wholly non-productive apathy and/or the bane of (de-facto) standards. The L in LAMP is generally uncontested these days, or it doesn’t really matter so much as the P, or whether that P should be an R, or E, or something.

When it comes to moving pictures, maybe I’m the worst kind of viewer in that unless there’s some extreme abuse, I can’t be bothered to get riled up. Screen clutter? You should see my desk, the most recent addition being an empty pack of gum, a half-used pack of gum, and the contents of my wallet as if I had tipped it upside down and given it a good shake. I can spot a partially buried headset, an unopened pack of playing cards, and newsletters dating back to last fall (or last summer? I can’t see the date).

So no, clutter and information overload don’t really bother me. I don’t strictly approve of mismanaged real estate, screen or desk, although my indifference does amount to tacit approval. My way of dealing with distractions is probably a common one: tune them out. I suspect that most people around my age are quite good at tuning out, to the extent that it takes a monumental effort to get them to tune back in, but that’s what enormous marketing budgets and hype machines are for.

There are some things that I don’t tune out, though. They could be incredibly useful bits of information, or ultimately frivolous ones. But for what they’re worth, I can’t tune out honorifics. In a sense, you could leave them in subtitles or take them out and I wouldn’t care, because I care. I can’t not hear them; they can’t be unheard. Why?

Part of it is a uniqueness factor associated with honorifics. More often than not, they’re preceded by a name and that’s just not how we roll over here. Surely the person we’re speaking to knows their own name, and even though people like to hear their name when addressed, I find that there’s a line between personal touch and discomfort, the kind experienced as if being addressed with a number instead of “you” when being spoken to. For whatever reason, this difference in mindset continues to be interesting instead of — I don’t know — repulsive.

By and large though, I think that I’m just interested in systems. I suppose that should have been obvious from the get-go, since a fair number of courses in the syllabus have the word, but honorifics as a system? It’s an efficient way of compressing and delivering relationship graphs, compacting the social hierarchy and letting everyone know where they stand on the ladder of life. And by constantly reminding others of their own status, perhaps it went some way towards maintaining social harmony.

I don’t pay much attention to pronouns, but should I? I see them as one part protocol, and one part loopback mechanism. After all, your relationship with yourself kind of falls into a special case. Self-esteem is essential to scaling any height, but at the end of the day how far you get is measured in the eyes of others. As they should be. Autobiographies excepted.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Augmented Realism

June 12, 2008 – 2:04 am

Director talks Dennou Coil, wao translates. Near the bottom of the first translation, amid the talk on realism or at least scientific/technological plausibility, is a perspective on how to draw.

At times, what’s in your mind’s eye sometimes carries more momentum than what’s in front of your real ones. But to think that this is something to be capitalized on, well how cool is that? The world may not be as simple as black and white, but perhaps our memories have striking shadows akin to line art, tinted with such vibrant shades as midnight blue and sunset pink.

And maybe I’m just crazy and dream in the palette of 5 cm/s. But I’d be okay with that.

I once bandied around the term hyperrealism without bothering to see if it was an actual term or not. Oops, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad guess.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

[Meh-ta] Aggregating aggregators

May 31, 2008 – 9:00 am

Antenna-Nano. Why?, Read on.

Let me describe my feed reading habits. Most of the entries I see originate from feed aggregators. I may not read every single entry I come across, but I will at least scan headlines and read summaries to get a sense of what others are interested in.

In terms of anime and related topics, Anime Nano or the AB Antenna are go-to sources, but if you’ve ever subscribed to the full feeds of either, then you know that the unread post count can and does accumulate rapidly.

I’m subscribed to both.

I think you can see how this might be a problem, but it’s actually not too bad most of the time. In fact, it’s roughly only half bad. There’s a lot of overlap between the two feeds since many sites have been admitted to both, and it’s also probably a major reason why many pick just one of the two, if they pick one at all.

It would be useful to me — and perhaps others — if I could take a union of sorts, with the resultant being a new set with the entries of both but devoid of duplicates. I thought that, if nothing else, it would be a rudimentary study in web services programming.

So I wrote Antenna-Nano, which periodically polls both aggregators, and maintains a list of all unique entries within a 10 hour window. There are actually two feeds that do the exact same thing, one being the main site and the other being a FeedBurner feed that acts as a kludge-tastic cron service whenever it refreshes.

As a result, expect updates every 30 minutes. I’d prefer every 10 minutes, but I don’t have much of a case griping over free cron for a hobby project. I’m pretty happy with it otherwise.

Those of you with more experience than me (it wouldn’t take much) are probably pointing to Yahoo Pipes right now while scratching your heads over my choice of Google App Engine. Actually, I do have a Yahoo Pipes version and it is indeed very easy to do what I want, but the output is ugly for the sole reason that it has sketchy Unicode support.

It may have been fine even a year ago when most used only the 7-bit subset of UTF-8, but these days, more people are using a couple non-ASCII characters to decorate their titles and post descriptions. But it’s not just exotic characters that Yahoo Pipes has trouble with: I’ve even seen something as mundane as the apostrophe encoded into its 3-byte equivalent.

Going with a pipe is more elegant, though, and I did try to make it work, but the result was me subjecting myself to a day’s worth of Unicode hell as I tried to build a custom filter to de-Yahoo the data. We can discuss the sordid details if you’re so inclined, but in the end I found no workarounds.

By introspect | Posted in meh-ta | Tagged , , | Comments (9)

Ethereal puffs tough to autopsy

May 10, 2008 – 4:21 pm

I finished Shakugan no Shana II a bit past midnight today, capping a roughly 5 hour run from episodes 14 to 24. The point where I took a break might have been purely coincidental - this winter has been blurrier than usual - but it made for a good dividing line anyway. A couple remarks below.

The “home stretch” was a lot more entertaining, with entertainment being proportional to the amount of time devoted to combat. At the same time, the lack of a body count was anti-climactic (I’m looking at you episode 22). I’m not sure if it’s because I was particularly jaded at the time, but I had no time for conveniences.

(That’s a cute way of putting it.)

Without a scattered collection of details resident in intermediate memory, I probably wouldn’t have guessed as to how the last fight would end. As it was, I kept thinking, “This is going to take more episodes than there are left, but if they really had to…” I go with the flow almost exclusively and speculation hardly ever comes to mind, but it did and it was validated, in much the same way that the conclusion tried to validate much of the time spent in the first fourteen episodes. I roll my eyes to both.

Episode 17: Eita FAILS

When the most positive thing that comes to mind is, “He bears a striking resemblance to the Cowardly Lion,” I know that some buttons are being pushed. I’ve been lucky in the past in that most of the characters I’ve stumbled across tend to do one of two things when faced with indecision: they tip-toed or otherwise walked in circles around it, or they struggled to escape its strange allure with varying degrees of success. Usually the latter follows after a ton of time spent in the first state, in a transition that is popularly called “development.”

But I’ve seen a third option in the past, where a character gleefully jumps in and proceeds to roll around wallow in it with something approaching enthusiasm. This guy is the latest addition to an unfortunate list of rare events.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

A call to rock on 8 years too late

May 3, 2008 – 3:27 am

Maybe 8 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, but I feel so old regardless. Why 8 years?

Utada Hikaru covering Living on My Own (1993 remix)

Whoo! That’s why.

Contrary to unpopular belief, my Hikki-tardation has limits, and one of those lines in the sand was Bohemian Summer 2000. It was something that I actually kind of avoided, and the ridiculous looking cover art had something to do with it. But I also heard way, way back that it bordered on sub-par, while her Unplugged performance just one year later was held up as one of her best recordings at the time, studio or otherwise. I’m listening to the audio stream right now, and it still is up there.

I’d better stop that. So firing up the performance at hand, maybe I’m just watching through Hikki goggles then, but it’s not nearly as bad as I was expecting. Oh sure, balance problems at the mixer board lead to instances where the band overpowers her voice; little things like inconsistent pitch control on the edge of her range and the tendency to just belt things out lead to an overall concert that isn’t as polished as her later ones.

And then there’s the occasion where she totally faked her high note in Wait and See, delegating it to pre-recorded vocals.

Yet it’s also the most entertaining. I don’t like having to choose between performance or perfection, but when presented with a barrel of fun, is it possible to say no?

Tony Royster Jr. in seifuku, smiling into the camera

You don’t see any of her other concert DVD’s featuring aerial footage of a baseball stadium. There’s just something about the scale of the event that makes it worth noting. Her backing instrumental section is probably second only to her Unplugged performance, but only because that had a string section. This was also the only time she had dancers, which generally just drove home the widely accepted fact that Hikki can’t dance.

Sound balance dissatisfaction is mitigated a bit by the fact that there’s some great drum work going on by John Blackwell and a 15 year old Tony Royster Jr. Many of the songs are percussion weighted and for good reason. Blackwell would later give the Unplugged performance its strong drive.

Highlights include the guest appearance of the arrangers of Wait and See towards the end, the drum duel between Blackwell and Royster, the best rendition of Amai Wana ~Paint it Black as well as pretty good performances of Take on Me, I Love You, Playback part2, and Living on My Own —

But none of the last four are her songs. In total she had 4.625 covers, if you count the John Luongo remix of First Love as a half, and her Shiina Ringo impression as an eighth.

Hilarious image of her jumping down as if holding a broken pogo stick aside, these covers are the reason for me lamenting about the good ol’ days that I never experienced. She exudes more attitude covering Freddie Mercury and Yamaguchi Momoe than she does in most of her own songs. The devil inside could be spotted four years prior.

The irony is that since 2000 her performances have retreated from the “I’m going to sing/do whatever the heck I want” attitude even as her songs incorporate more of it. You get the more tightly controlled performances as a result, but an equally controlled image comes with it. Bohemian Summer Hikki would step out swinging; by 2001 she was already beginning to pull her punches.

Utada Hikaru at Music Lovers, 2008

No more covers, no more crazy cosplaying band. In Hikaru no 5 she looked very much the diva; Utada United two of her elaborate costumes bordered on stuffy and immobile. About the only element that pressed forward unchanged was Kawano Kei, and his antics along with his presence were noticeably absent in 2006.

I think Hikki is one those artists that has always had their trypants on, it’s just that they’re a lot more apparent these days. Even when she’s trying to act casual, it comes across as forced more often than not. She’s fairly transparent, and there’s little reason to doubt that she’s holding back, for reasons that only she knows.

Paradoxically, she is better because of it. The same self-consciousness that makes her awkward on stage puts polish in the studio and fresh sounds on the staff paper. Can’t stage and studio peacefully co-exist? I suppose not: it was a struggle for Prisoner of Love — a product of a distant era (or DISTANCE era) — to be included into HEART STATION. My guess is that we will never see something quite like Bohemian Summer again.

But I hold out hope that one day she’ll devote a block of time to reclaiming a less obfuscated image of herself, forgoing the technological wizardry that propels her along today.

Kawano Kei approves, and so must I

Kawano Kei would approve. That ought to be enough for anybody.

By introspect | Posted in music | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Needs a third edge

May 2, 2008 – 2:50 pm

Is it strange that I haven’t seen the first broadcast episode of Macross Frontier, but I’ve listened to Triangler? The brand is strong with MS, and YK to a lesser extent, so while spare time is…spare, a bit of multi-tasking keeps me tuned in.

Feelings about the song are mixed. A bit of movement in the verse and a nice contrasting bounce in the bridge are pretty much negated by a chorus that is typical (as in middling) and tight (as in uptight). Given that the song opens with the chorus, the first thought was that Maaya was trying to do energetic rock, which for me has been a dicey hit-or-miss proposition in the past.

After the song was over not once, but five times, that impression still remained. Triangler is an imperfect trinity at best. But at least the lyrics rhyme at the beginning of both bridges.

Kotomichi is not a Yoko Kanno track, if that is a factor in anything. I think it’s been hammered into my head that airy voices are something to avoid, and there are a number of passages where Maaya’s voice is a weak whisper. But there are other places with signs of life strength, and on balance this is a decent ballad. It’s just that there are so many decent ballads, all very noticeably similar in style.

By introspect | Posted in music | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

[SSA] On links and incidentally, synchronicity

April 7, 2008 – 2:00 pm

This is more for my own assurance than anything else. In short, I see very few outgoing link hits when going over stats. Like, zero. Okay, on average one for text links, and a couple clicks on images. It may be FeedBurner not being able to track most cases or something else, but I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t bother me.

I’m not here to order people to click them (do what you want), nor to solicit feedback (this is a site service announcement after all). Some only serve to punctuate a statement, and these can usually be seen by looking at the destination address. The rest are generally background reading, which one might have no interest or time for and I understand that.

I just want to let everyone know that links do exist just in case, and at the risk of insulting your intelligence, they’re the ones highlighted blocks that get underlined on mouseover.

With that off my chest, the next order of business is to highlight a misuse of jargon. Synchronous doesn’t imply anything beyond running on a common clock. If anyone has fiddled around with S/PDIF coaxial back in the day, you’ve seen a synchronous standard.

It’s also serial. It presents data one bit at a time. So bits are coming in at a standard rate with fairly low deviation. Industry likes to call such a standard an SSI, short for synchronous serial interface.

The only thing one can surmise by the claim that arcs are being presented synchronously is that presentation is organized based on a fixed time slot. Things start at the beginning and, say, 3 episodes later, everything is wrapped up. It could be one character (serial), it could be many characters (parallel/concurrent), but the concept of a time slot implies neither.

So synchronous shouldn’t be confused with concurrent, or simply parallel. The way KimiKiss is described, it’s best to replace “synchronous” with a more recognizable “simultaneous” and leave it at that. Indeed, clocks are rather stodgy things that seem to be at loggerheads with organic development in general. A lot of things happen in the brain at the same time, but people will look at you funny if you were to claim that everyone’s brain ran on a clock.

Describing Clannad as hyper-threaded, or even multi-threaded, might be fair given the WRR / interleaved progression of events in Kanon 2006, but I haven’t progressed very far into the series so I can’t consider it at the moment.

By introspect | Posted in admin | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Fllng n th blnks

April 6, 2008 – 7:08 pm

Episode 13: Determination

I think that I have a new metric for evaluating a series. It’s not a practical one by any stretch, but there may be a lesson or two in it, and I would encourage everyone to apply that metric at least once in their viewing…careers.

Go through the dialog of each episode of a series, line by line.

At least twice.

Actually, the more the better.

If you come out of it still liking the whole thing, that show is a good match for you. I’m not claiming that it will have earned a special place in your heart, but there has got to be something keeping you watching.

I didn’t say that it was a good metric, and there are host of obvious reasons as to why it’s pretty bad. It’s time consuming, for one, but that can be mitigated somewhat by obtaining a script, although a bit of a technical or logistical hurdle in itself. Doing so may also simply ruin your enjoyment of an otherwise decent series.

true tears is one such decent series. Stepping back, it was fairly conventional right down to any lessons that might be derived, but the alchemy job that P.A. Works did was anything but.

So did applying this metric ruin my enjoyment of true tears? Nope, and therein lies perhaps a better metric, something that a lot of people know in the back of their heads but maybe haven’t articulated. I only got to thinking about it myself after staring at blocks of dialog. Doing so enabled me to take some thoroughly unscientific observations which resulted in the following thoroughly unscientific self-diagnosis.

Basically, I got through true tears, interest intact, because of line count. There are bad outliers where the line count spikes up, but a reasonable ballpark figure is about 270 lines of dialog for an episode. Is that low? It certainly feels comfortable. Like others, I have noticed the stretches where nothing gets said, and those stretches weren’t booked for fight scenes where nothing ought to be said (lame trash talk included).

Episode 12: Festival water colour

So low line count is good, high line count is bad? Am I not pushing this metric because I’m lazy and the less things to read, the better? No, and maybe. Line count is just an observation; weigh it in consideration with other factors, one of those being that the mind can sometimes be very active on relatively little input.

This comes from out of left field and several years back, but do you remember I Love Bees? There was a story, but it was not told by the game [1]. It wasn’t even shown, going beyond show don’t tell, a fact that would have continued to be lost on me were it not for BoingBoing, and this crystallizing quote in particular:

…[I]nstead of telling a story, we would present the evidence of that story, and let the players tell it to themselves.

I think the players did a darn good job. But it goes to show that there is a more powerful technique than show don’t tell, and perhaps one that we are innately comfortable with, because our survival as a species may be underpinned by it.

A simple approximation for cognition is that of a model builder. We might not always be building the best models, but we are always building them. The hope is that at some point, that model is close enough to a hidden truth [2] that one can make accurate predictions with it. Or maybe just tell the story behind the pieces of evidence scattered on the floor.

Dialog is often the uncorrupted truth. It is damning evidence, lecture material. Dialog makes model building redundant, and from that standpoint, dialog is lazy. So a reduction in line count tends to imply that the story has been shifted around to less accessible areas.

One thing about lots of dialog, though, is that it can be easy to tell if there is nothing substantial. The process of discovery requires a bit more effort, even if only to come up empty-handed.

Filling in the blanks, even intentionally placed ones, keeps us in the game. And to the credit of P.A. Works and true tears, the game is afoot.

Afterword

[1] It may go down in history as one of the greatest podcasts that wasn’t, a series of puzzles that quickly evolved into a weekly radio drama that had its initial distribution over hundreds of pay phones across the United States. As described by one of the game’s designers, it was also an incredible logistical effort on both the part of the creators and the audience.

[2] Yes, I called a hidden (Markov) model a truth. No, I don’t really know what that means, either.

By introspect | Posted in anime | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

Take 5 and God Speed

March 31, 2008 – 1:33 am

[Lyrics/Translations]

Take 5 is one of those tracks that I can loop over and over again. It tempers irrational exuberance some days and raises the spirit (or spirits) on others, both with a ghostly, dignified poise. Does life and death exist on a continuum, or does a line have to be drawn somewhere? Perhaps the latter.

That the line is drawn at 42 seconds is a point for mysterious coincidences and reading too much into things. After all, we should just enjoy the art of life.

But speaking of loops, a certain rainbow coloured bus is pretty loopy in an analog way. Whenever it comes on, I have a hankering for bubble gum. I can only wonder why.

More later on a great album.

By introspect | Posted in music | Tagged , , | Comments (1)