The Week That Was

Sitting here and typing that it is Friday night seems strange, because it seems like Sunday was only a day or two ago. Time flies when there are things getting done and this week was a better one than I had experience in some time.

I took advantage of the warm weather to get a 2.5 mile walk in yesterday and thought I would never make it back up the hill. That bug last month really knocked the stuffing out of me. The good news is that I managed to be functional today.

While it looks like I did not do much with the blog, I updated two reviews, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe and Gamera 2: Advent of Legion with sections on the bonus features. If you ever wondered what making a big monster movie was like before CGI took over everything, there are some good glimpses of the work involved. Next up will be the concluding movie to the trilogy, but that will wait until next week.

One thing I did not get done was re-entering my contacts data on my CyPad tablet. Despite buying Titanium Backup Pro, it failed to save that data in its pre-Ice Cream Sandwich backup. Everything else worked fairly well, but I need to check the settings.

Why Hollywood is Evil, Part 1,345,798,221

The production and licensing company that owns rights to The Hobbit are suing an English pub that has been named The Hobbit Free House for twenty years. Read the article and ponder the stupidity of the money grubbers sitting in the USA going after small fry in another land. If the name Zaentz sounds familiar, he is the one who screwed over John Fogarty and prevented him from recording for years after Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up.

Odds and Ends 3-13-2012

It was a nice day out today and tomorrow promises to be even better. While I was dead tired today after a tiring, but interesting Sunday, it turned out to be a day to get things done.

After much wrangling, ranting, research, trial and error, I managed to get a Sylvania 7” Android tablet working again for a friend. It was a Christmas present for his oldest boy and locked up when they first used it. I count that as a victory.

The upgrade to Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich on my Iview CyTab went relatively smoothly last week. While slightly slower in some ways, the stability is an immense improvement. So far I like it a lot and the various Web browsers seem to be happier than on Gingerbread. The keyboard is a huge improvement and nearly worth the upgrade alone.

It is hard to believe that Sunday was the one year anniversary of the tsunami that hit Japan. Their economy is still affected by it and I read that a lot of a manufacturing that had not already left is now going to China. It is a strange thing to watch because I remember when all the cheap knockoffs had “Made in Japan” stamped on them.

We had a township election today and for the second time in a row it came down to a tied vote decided by drawing cards from a deck. Yucatan Township is an interesting place to live, that is for sure.

The massacre in Afghanistan by a renegade soldier may turn out to be an even bigger tragedy than reported. There has been a report that he had suffered a brain injury while serving in Iraq in 2010. It used to be that was an automatic discharge, but he was sent back into combat duty. If true, careers need to end for the officers involved in the decision.

I finished Mass Effect 3 and found the ending to be interesting. Other people are incensed by it, but a happy ending never seemed to be in the cards to me. This series is gritty and serious science fiction, not Star Wars or Star Trek. In fact, it felt a lot like how Babylon 5 ended in some ways. Come to think of it, the Reapers remind me of a cross between the Shadows and the Borg.

Bleach Ep. 15: Kon’s Great Plan

The first season takes a breather and slows down in this comedy centric episode starring Kon, the stuffed lion. When Kon can no longer take being treated like a toy, he runs away from home to find a better place. But there is a moody parallel story as Rukia finds herself becoming too attached to others in the mortal world. So what does a mysterious black cat appearing mean for our heroes?

Bleach’s comedy is not for everyone and is often over the top. This is one of those episodes, but is leavened by a growing melancholy that quickly becomes foreboding. There are no fights, but plot development is carefully advanced as the next big storyline is setup.

The duality of the episode is introduced early on with a brooding Rukia in bed and a crying Kon dealing with having been put in a ridiculous dress by Ichigo’s sister, Yuzu. Both are suffering for very different reasons and each handles their problems quite differently. At least on the face of it…

Another Year Older, Another Year Wiser?

My birthday was a low key affair, which has become the norm for many years now. While we all get older, the real trick is becoming wiser as the years go by. In a culture devoted to perpetual adolescence, wisdom is dwindling. Not that we ever had enough of that valuable resource, but it is becoming even rarer.

So I hope I have learned a few things in the past year and that they have or in the future will benefit others. It does not seem I learn much for my own gain as time goes by. Since I believe we are here to serve others, it is probably for the best in the eternal scheme of things.

This week I decided to take for myself though. Using my birthday as an excuse, I have focused on me and entertaining myself instead of being productive. This is something someone healthy cannot do and probably does not need to do, but being disabled means you live a life most cannot understand. While I rant against being in a culture of “mass distraction,” it has been a deliberate exercise in it this week.

Being distracted was made easy by the release of Mass Effect 3, the conclusion of the Commander Shepherd trilogy and my present to myself. Some of the content I do not like, but the finale is a worthy ending to the epic story and the conclusion that angered a lot of fans is fine with me. Especially since it appears to be more open ended than they perceive to allow for DLC packs to come. It is a grim story, with the destruction of worlds making that unavoidable. Fortunately, that sense of friendship and personal intimacy with other characters is still intact. Hate the new cover system, it got me killed more times than I can count.

As is tradition, my dad and I went out for crab legs on my birthday. Back when my mother was alive, our birthdays were slightly more than a week apart so we would celebrate that way between them. Amazingly, I did not overstuff myself this year.

Thanks to my sister, I have the Blu-ray of my all time favorite movie coming. Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is a true masterpiece and, in my eyes, superior to Seven Samurai. My first DVD purchase was of this movie, more than a year before I had a DVD-ROM player to view it with. It cost a pretty penny back then, around $35.00 and looked like it was lifted from a VHS tape. No anamorphic widescreen here, just a letterboxed scan wedged into 4:3 ratio. I tried watching it on the new 40” HDTV and it looked awful. So it will be nice to see it in high definition glory.

After we succeeded in out quest for snow crab legs, we went to Blaine’s Farm and Fleet for more wood pellets. There I ran into the deluxe two disc DVD edition of Lawrence of Arabia, the one with the cloth cover on the case. It was in the surplus rack of discount DVDs and was on sale at an additional discount. Paying four dollars to replace my no frills bargain DVD was a no brainer and capped off a nice birthday.

The Long Arm of Uncle Sam

This article on Wired (via Instapundit) caught my attention today. It may surprise people to see just how absolute the Fed’s power over the Internet really is. So any website ending in com, org, or net is claimed to be under United States jurisdiction. What does that mean? It means they can legally shut down any website in the world that ends with those suffixes.

Meanwhile, Anonymous are in a tizzy after one of their own rolled over to the Feds. Language warning for the article, BTW. LulzSec is pretty much done, but there are still quite a few in Anonymous who are sweating bullets at this point.

I am afraid a lot of people assume they can do whatever they want and get away with it due to government incompetence. The thing to remember is that governments are slow and ponderous, but not oblivious. Eventually they will get around to pursuing cyber criminals if they draw enough attention to themselves. With Anonymous constantly making declarations, they might as well be wearing blinking neon signs. Their time is running out.

No deep thoughts on any of this today, because it is merely interesting data for the moment.

Squid Girl Episode 9

UPDATE September 4, 2018

More DMCA take downs have hit the blog despite screen captures long being considered fair use. Due to my not being able to afford a lawyer, I have no choice but to remove them or have the blog suspended. Only the words will be left.

TVTokyo is proving to be foolishly draconian in targeting posts meant to get people interested in seeing the Squid Girl anime and perhaps even purchasing it on DVD or Blu-ray. Being anti-piracy myself this is infuriating that they are targeting posts I wrote hoping to encourage people to try out a delightful show.

In the space of one episode, the show goes from sweetly silly to lunacy. Squid Girl discovers makeup, the dangers of doorbell ditching, and that being fought over is not as much fun as it sounds. But things are not all bad as she makes a friend.

The misadventures of Ika Musume aka Squid Girl are at their best when they mix a dash of sentimentality into the antics. Since most of the stories have a basis in every day events, there is ample opportunity to do so. It is the first story that uses this recipe to best effect and I judge it the most memorable in the episode.

Want to Ring and Jet?

I knew other kids who doorbell ditched when I was younger, but I never found it amusing. Usually the targets were old folks who would become very confused and flustered, which irked me. So when the episode opened with Takeru and his friend doing it, I was prepared to be annoyed. Especially when Squid Girl is taunted into playing “ring and run.”

Seen ringing the doorbell by Chizuru, the hapless girl freezes. Luckily for her, the woman answering the door provides her an out by assuming she a friend of her daughter’s. Bluffing her way out of it, it almost works – until the girl shows up.

Panicked, Ika yanks the girl to a neighboring park and begs for her help in covering up the lie. Kiyomi turns out to be a bright and sweet girl, not to mention forgiving. Her solution to Squid Girl’s dilemma is clever, very clever indeed.

Having made her first friend around her own age, Ika gets carried away and invites Kiyomi to her house the next day. Just one little problem: she never asked for permission from Chizuru, the one person capable of annihilating her. Guilt ridden and paranoid, the big question is whether or not Squid Girl will survive long enough to be friends with Kiyomi.

Do Mollusks Wear Makeup?

The discovery of a tube of lipstick belonging to Eiko awakens the girly side of Squid Girl who cannot wait to experiment with her new look. Delighted that makeup can attract more attention, she finds that it draws even more unwanted advances from the ever annoying Sannae. There is power to be found in style though.

But what style should she go for? Looking around the Lemon Beach House, Ika and Eiko find a wide menagerie of styles. Some are amusing riffs based on other animes, but others are horrific examples from reality. Overhearing a pair of girls talk about how they wrap men around their fingers piques the fish out of water’s interest.

But just how far will Squid Girl take things in her quest for power? And who else in the cast will receive a dramatic makeover?

Aren’t You Armed with a Secret Weapon?

The sudden appearance of Cindy the alien researcher on a sweltering hot day unnerves the staff of the restaurant. Her persistent efforts to haul Ika Musame off to be studied draws the attention of the tentacle haired girl’s main stalker. Yes, Sannae has shown up and will brook no competition. Soon a fight is brewing, complicated by jealousy of Eiko’s spending time with Squid Girl.

As if that was not insane enough, the three idiots from MIT show up in beach wear. Of course, for them that also means lab coats so that the nerds can carry their experiments with them. A very dangerous, if seductive, offer is made to Ika and things escalate out of control quickly.

What horrific events could lead to the above screen captures? What could enrage Chizuru so? It is time for the cast to find out just how deadly the mild mannered young woman can be…

Thoughts

Episode 9 is one of the better entries in the series, mainly due to the first segment that introduces Kiyomi to the ever growing cast of characters. The friendship that starts there becomes a source of some of the sweeter stories later on. One has to like Kiyomi, since she is a refreshingly nice girl without any odd quirks. Her assumption that Eiko and Chizuru are Ika’s sisters is never refuted and the sense that they are family has grown quite strong by this point.

The makeup focused story is great fun too. It serves as a chance to make fun of extreme styles, while also showing Ika becoming a little more normal. But only a little, as the ending shows. I really enjoyed Goro’s lines and the odd relationship he has with his fellow protector of the sea.

Sheer insanity dominates the final story and the ridiculous spectacle of Sannae and Cindy competing over Squid Girl is mad enough, but then the mad scientists drive sanity right over the cliff. But the real star of this segment is Chizuru.

This review is brought to you by Chizuru’s death glare. You really do not want to upset her enough for her to open her eyes.