Reviews of movies, anime, and the occasional TV show mixed with warnings on Blogger spam. Also to be found are musings on whatever I am thinking about - all from the point of view of being left to watch everything from the sidelines of life.
I made a short trip out to get some things in a local town and came back to see Jazz, my part Siamese cat, carrying something with a suspiciously familiar tail dangling. He brought in the flying squirrel that surprised me on Saturday night to show off. So I took the corpse away from him and tossed it outside where he won’t find it again. It had the softest fur, sigh.
So much for the wonders of nature.
An utterly charming anime about a Japanese girl in Paris circa the late 1800s provides laughs, drama, and a severe case of the warm fuzzies. It has a gentle heart while still facing the hardships of life, for there are many challenges for little Yune to face while dealing with culture shock . Not the least of them is the proud young Frenchman she lives with.
This 2011 anime series was expected to be a breakout hit by a lot of people in Japan and other countries, so it was a huge shock when it bombed at home. Culture clashes and the most moe of main characters should have guaranteed success, but the otakus in Japan were not impressed. Thanks to Sentai Filmworks, Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth is now available to own in the United States. With the preordered set finally in my hands, I can review how Sentai did.
The main character is Yune, a very young looking girl brought to Paris by Oscar Claudel as part of the effort made by the Japanese to increase knowledge of the West after the Meiji Restoration. From her first entrance on screen, she is a delightful character, a bright, intelligent soul fascinated by everything. Sweet, but stubborn in her own way, she is destined to shake things up for the Claudels.
The latest round of spam showing up as blogger hits come from fr.netlog . com and appears to be actually a link from t . co instead. So far I have gotten sixteen “referrals” from there this week. While they show up on the Blogger dashboard’s stats, Google Analytics does not list the hits. Why Google does not filter them out for Blogger’s built in stats puzzles me.
So anyone getting hits from there, please do not clink on the links to investigate, that is what they want you to do. I would not be surprised if this is being done by the same people responsible for the aptratings spam.
UPDATED October 1, 2012
Yet another round of referral spam from Russia has been hitting my blog heavily. In this case adsresultpages . com links to a viagra ad. Out of curiosity, I looked up the website through whois and found out it gets about the same amount of visits I do a day. Not exactly a successful campaign, is it?
Funny thing is that referral spam has been around since at least 2002 when blogs started getting going in earnest and nobody can figure out how it can be profitable.
I was reading that the first CD came out thirty years ago today. Three decades ago. I remember hearing my first one circa 1987 since cassette tapes took awhile to be displaced. In fact, I did not have a CD player until around ten years after the first ones were released.
Now the Compact Disc is on its way out with sales having collapsed. Downloadable digital files have been the bulk of music sales for some time now and supposedly streaming subscriptions are the wave of the future. That I will believe when I see it.
Attempts to replace the CD with another hard medium all failed. SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc), DAT (Digital Audio Tape), and DVD-A (Digital Versatile Disc – Audio) never caught on with only DAT surviving in the studio environment.
While finishing up the Beowulf review tonight, I heard a loud impact on the air conditioner. Sometimes a panicked cat will jump up there, so I checked it out to see if there was an emergency. Instead, I beheld this:
I blinked multiple times because I had never seen anything like it. Then I realized what it was and was even more shocked. It was an honest to goodness flying squirrel!
For some reason I had always thought they were bigger than this little guy, but there was no mistaking the flat tail and membranes between the legs. I had no clue they even ranged into Minnesota.
Twenty-five minutes in and it is obvious the two men cannot stand each other. What surprised me is that Republican Alan Quist managed to get under Democrat Tim Walz’s skin and make him angry. Quist is always angry with prickly being the mellowest you ever see him. The whole tone of the debate is personal attacks, led by Quist -- and complained about by Quist. I thought Walz was slicker than this, but he has been red faced multiple times throughout the debate.
Wow, neither candidate looked good in this forum. This debate is the epitome of complaints about a lack of civility in politics these days. Only partisans on each side would declare their candidate the winner. Quist was hectoring, took constant nasty shots, and was constantly confused whether it was his time for rebuttal. Walz was flustered and increasingly angry while sticking to boilerplate talking points (Akin SQUAWK).
Herbert Lom always had the best scenes in the Pink Panther films, in my opinion. Perpetually chasing and trying to kill Clouseau, he appealed to me as a kid and as an adult. So I am a little sad to see that he died today.
I had no clue that he was a Czech refugee from the early days of WWII. At 95, he certainly lived a long life after making it to Britain. While he was best known for the comedies with Peter Sellers, he was in quite a few films spanning many genres usually as a supporting character. His roles in The Ladykillers, The Mysterious Island, The Phantom of the Opera, and Journey to the Far Side of the Sun were the ones I remember the most.
It strangely feels like another piece of my childhood has disappeared, even though the movies remain.
So here is Dreyfus speaking at Clouseau’s funeral, one of his best performances as an actor or character:
Now that I have a character approaching level 30 in the Second Act and have had some multiplayer time in, I feel like I can make some more comments.
First, FIX THE BUGS! I have had the disappearing stash and shared stash bug hit with me unable to access my gear online or offline. Mysteriously, it all reappeared late last night and so far I can use the rare and unique gear. We’ll see if that lasts. Saved game synchronizing to Steam’s cloud has been hit or miss for me. This is frustrating.
Second, this is a remake of Diablo II as far as the plot line goes and the settings. I do not view this as a bad thing, in fact I was happy to see the desert again. Enough has been changed to avoid lawsuits, but if you are a big Diablo II fan this is your game to play.
The performance of the game engine has been a pleasant surprise, with the only slowdowns I’ve encountered being in online play. Playing with others is a blast and incredibly fast moving due to people triggering fights left and right. The graphics are pretty with the cartoony/anime style of Torchlight looking better than ever.
Sound is well done and my pet cat purrs after he kills something. It reminds me of the best cat ever, my late pet Sid. So I have named the critter in my solo embermage build after him.
Loot is ridiculously plentiful. While there is an option to turn off seeing normal items, I cannot get that to work in solo games. It works fine in multiplayer. Inventory management is sleeker than ever, but it gets a constant workout due to all the goodies you find. Trading with others in your party is very easy.
Remember how frustrating it was to get your first complete set in Diablo II or Torchlight? Expect to have at least one by level 10 in my experience. I actually had two complete sets on my mage by level 12.
I really like the game, but advise people to wait for a couple of patches before completely committing. If you are willing to deal with bugs, buy it now if your are an old school Diablo fan.
I never did completely shake the cold symptoms from last weekend and they have only gotten worse. Today I am a total space cadet and am having to refrain from any serious decisions on anything due to an inability to function. It took me three tries to write the previous sentence and three to spell “sentence” just now. Bleh.
And now I just caught myself staring into space for a couple of minutes. Yep, I am not in.
In Libya, protests against the murders of American diplomat Chris Stevens resulted in a crowd attacking an Islamist militia headquarters. I had been aware of smaller groups protesting earlier in the week, but this is quite a surprise. It gives me some hope that Libya may pull it together in the end rather than disintegrating. As Totten points out, it is quite a contrast to Egypt.
Standing up to terrorists needs to be a priority around the world and good people should not allow evil to go unchecked. Frankly, it all needs to be done locally by local people in the first place. Let this be the start of something good, I pray.
Forget having to get bifocals, it is getting slower in video games that is getting to me. A couple of things have proven this to me the past week. While never one of the best, I could at least game on the hardest or second hardest settings the first time I played a game. With the release of Black Mesa, a remake of most of the original Half Life, I find myself having to continuously lower the difficulty in order to progress.
I did fine until the Marines showed up. Then it became a ridiculous exercise in getting killed twenty or thirty times just to clear one area and limping out of it with under ten health. And getting killed with one shot in the next area.
I used to waltz through Half Life at its hardest settings, so this is a body blow for me. Older games were harder than the current ones,yes -- but this is painful.
The second thing was talking to one of my younger friends I game with. He can’t understand why he beats me handily in PvP when I can run through single player games on difficulty levels he can’t handle. That is simple to answer: twitch reflexes will always dominate in PvP with tactics being a secondary factor. Guile and tactics often compensate against AI opponents who follow predictable paths. Humans are a lot more random.
Watching him play at his house, I was amazed at how fast he could flip through screens, type, and fight without missing a beat. That is simply beyond my ability these days.
At least Torchlight II is something I can still play at veteran level and not die very often, in fact only once so far and that was due to stupidity on my part. So far it is much more like Diablo II than the first game and the graphics look great with no slow downs on max settings despite amazing waves of enemies. The changes all work to the better from what I have tested through level 11 casual and level 7 veteran ember mage builds.
But…
It is buggy. Horrifically buggy. I have a friend who can’t launch it without completely locking up his computer. One side quest I accepted couldn’t be done because the entrance to it refused to trigger. Then there is the multiplayer which was not functioning because Runic Games could not handle the traffic. I could not even create an account last night.
It is as bad as the Diablo III rollout, which is incredibly ironic.
The final episode of Bleach’s first season contains every element that makes the series worth watching. Ichigo and his friends complete their training then take a time out before the assault on Soul Society. As an added bonus, a review of an extra from the season one box set is included.
When you see the title graphic, it does not fit where the story left off last episode. But no worries, it does fit this episode just not right away. With Ichigo having briefly turned into a hybrid of Hollow and Shinigami before regaining control, it is time for him to move to phase three of Urahara’s training. We have to wait a bit for that to resume, though.
A brief recap of Byakuya’s announcement of Rukia’s execution in 25 days starts the show and we get a further teaser of Soul Society. It appears to be inhabited by very shady characters, two of whom show up to needle Captain Kuchiki over his sister’s impending execution. One is a trickster type, Captain Gin Ichimaru of Squad 3 and the subject of the episode title. The other is Squad 11’s one eyed captain, who tries his best to provoke a duel with Kuchiki. All in all, Soul Society does not look like any kind of heaven and seems savage.
Things seem to be escalating quickly over a group of islands, with one Chinese general telling his troops to prepare for war with Japan. This looks awfully calculated given the other aggressive actions in the region, but there is a component to it that is not traditional posturing. Instead it is an aspect of asymmetrical warfare being given a test run with Japan as a proxy for the United States. Asymmetrical warfare involves using methods other than overt military force to bring down a foe perceived as more powerful. Propaganda, cyber warfare, and attacks on financial infrastructure are all key parts of this approach.
The latest tiff has led to threats of using Chinese ownership of Japanese government debt to bring them to their knees. Do not think this is disconnected from the U.S.A., for yesterday’s demonstrations briefly attacked the Ambassador to China’s car. The demonstrators knew what they were doing and chanted anti-American slogans during the incident.
With the two largest American bond holders in an intense war of words that could go hot to some degree (how hot? Ask the Chinese.), this is not something that should be ignored right now. The threats being made to undermine Japan’s economy can be made against us.
It should be noted that such a threat only works if a war does not actually follow. In war time, all debts to an enemy are declared void. Quite a tricky balancing act for China’s rulers, eh?
