In the blogosphere, we frequently find links to stories like this, this and this, which are just damned appalling.

Its's important to remember however, that while rare, there are stories from the opposite end of the spectrum as well.

Read the whole thing. There's more here.

These are two really impressive people.

_{Hat tip to Cdr. Salamander .}

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Nazi-Acquired Buddha Statue Came From Space

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Colleen Doran has a post on the importance of trademark and I must say that...I cannot unsee it.  To assure us that this atrocity IS personal she also links to this.

In other news, there is a pending bacon shortage. A BACON SHORTAGE!

Not only that, I realized that I'm fresh out of tar and feathers.

With the car in the shop, I'm unable to stock up so I decided to check on the Japan/China situation and blundered into this.

I then decided to put my bagel to the side indefinitely and just look for images to use for reaction shots and macros for the blo....

...OH HELL NO!

^{If you don't get this piece by Poly-M...Congratulations. It was a test and you passed.}

We'll ask an artist for her opinion on these matters.


I think I'm in agreement with Mio on this.

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^{Art by Ramune}

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Wonderduck has a poignant post on the impact a well written comic can have. Go read the whole thing.


...then go buy Yotsuba@!.

It really is that good.

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Star Turtle Village is in Peril!

We don't have enough ninjas!

Now is a most excellent time to start playing Billy Versus Snakeman as Star Turtle Village needs Ninjas. With its huge number of options it is ideal for a beginning player and has all sorts of bonuses and perks for established players as well.

Just click on this here banner here

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

For established players or new players that just want to be at a village from the very beginning, then Fractale Village is the place for you! Established and ruled by the benevolent Pixy Misa, Fractale is a quiet, serene village hidden deep in the heart of math.

...Oh and all the nonjas are cute girls (well, except for Archie).

Just click on this banner if you want to learn math ninjutsu...

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

Billy Versus Snakeman is a simple browser based MMOG in which is set in a universe composed of offbeat parodies of anime shows. You start as a lowly genin, dreaming of ninja awesomenes. However, as you rise up the ninja ranks, you gain new goals that take you on bizarre adventures, involving, wasteland scavenging, soul reaping,  monster fighting.  hanafuda, majong and darts as well as exciting careers in the fast food industry. It has a limit on how much you play a day ( you have a very limited amount of stamina) so you are only on about 15 minutes a day. Thus there is no danger of one getting eaten by the game and becoming one of those online gamer after-school specials..unless one were to play multiple characters.

Oh, wait...

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Japanese Coast Guard cutters have intercepted Chinese fishing vessels and patrol boats making a run for the Senkaku islands and engaged them with watercannon.

However, the Chinese vessels were not PRC, they were ROC.

Yes, the REPUBLIC of China, better known as Taiwan, also lays claim to the islets. and a small task force of patriotic Taiwanese fishermen sallied forth to make sure that this unspeakable mess got even more complicated. Taiwanese patrol boats, which had been escorting the flotilla gave covering fire with their own watercannon.  It appears that no one was injured.

Chen Chun-sheng, chairman of the Su'ao District Fishermen's Association, emphasised that the purpose of the operation is to protest Japan's "nationalisation” of the island chain and also to advocate the rights of Taiwanese fishermen. The operation was made possible with a NT$5 million (US$170,500) donation to subsidise fuel costs, Chen said.

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Really?

I don't even...

Filched from Don who nicked it from RSM who despite being a journalism major knows basic chemistry better than the people at Dominoe. This is of concern because if their chemistry is THIS bad then they might think Zyklon B is a vitamin.

Buyer beware.

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The Chinese media is claiming that the fishing fleet that left for the Senkaku Islands mentioned in this post was apocryphal.

Information that a large number of Chinese fishing boats are heading for the Senkaku Islands in Okinawa Prefecture is false, the chief of a Japan Coast Guard office in the southern prefecture said Tuesday.

A senior official of the Japan Coast Guard said the agency was already braced for a more aggressive maritime offensive from China, considering the moves it has recently taken.

"We need to deal with it,” the official said.

The primary duty of fishery monitoring ships is to prevent illegal operations by fishing boats.

But a source close to the Japan Coast Guard said the reality is different. The source said Chinese fishing boats tend to move upon the instructions of a monitoring ship.

"With a single command, fishing boats could head southward (to the Senkakus) all at once,” the source said.

The Japan Coast Guard has assembled 50 patrol boats around the Senkaku Islands in case Chinese government ships or fishing boats enter Japanese territorial waters. Many of the vessels have been sent by regional coast guard headquarters across the country.

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...all ye hearties.
Come let me tell you a tale.
I searched so far fer treasure,
that ah've seen the whale.


^{Smartly dressed Cut-lass be Chikaki from Bodacious Space Pirates.}

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From one of the more uninspiring series concepts in an uninspiring season comes...a surprise!

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1 I've held that the strength of this story is not in a concept that we've seen before, but in the psychology of the players.  From the fate of the Black Cats, to murder mystery, to the relationship between Asuna and Kirito -- the characters are the strength of the story. 

With the latest episode, they've gone into uncharted waters with an anime original plot.  I'd expected this much earlier, but they raced through the two  years to get Asuna back into the story, I guess. 

Posted by: ubu at Tue Sep 18 16:43:54 2012 (e9h6K)

2 Thanks for the recommendation - I'll try to make time to watch it..

As I recall, Hack//Sign also had a player who could not log-out of the game world (just one), but the story never really went anywhere, at least not in the anime...

Posted by: Siergen at Tue Sep 18 19:19:46 2012 (Bv5ty)

3 I didn't think this latest one was anime-original; people on a number of forums were waiting for her to show up. Or did they make significant changes to her story?

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Tue Sep 18 19:26:51 2012 (fpXGN)

4 I'm judiciously avoiding spoilerses...of course it seems that there are only 2 eps left which I find worrisome from a plot/pacing standpoint.


@ Seirgen: Yes. The "stuck in a video game" plot has been a very reliable indicator of fail. On the other hand this show doesn't have the sumptuous art direction and Yuki Kaijiura score...but it tells engaging stories and has characters I give a damn about...so advantage SAO.

@ No One in Particular
  I liked how they had Sachi in the opening credits all the way through...which really led me to not expect what happened . I fully expected her to make it.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Sep 18 19:57:40 2012 (e9h6K)

5 It's not a 13-episode series. AT-X has episode 17 airing on 10/30 on their calendar, and ANN thinks it will be 25.

(and if that length has you worried about the pacing, well, I've read a few spoilers that make it sound reasonable)


-j

Posted by: J Greely at Tue Sep 18 20:53:12 2012 (fpXGN)

6 Oh...it wasn't in any of the fall previews.... Cool!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Sep 18 21:34:26 2012 (e9h6K)

7

Hack//Sign ended where the first game began. It was a prequel to the game. That's why nothing important was resolved.

This sounds strange coming from someone who is a big fan of Strike Witches, I know, but I just can't get past the stupidity of the concept for this series. I can't take it seriously. For one thing, I'm having a hard time believing that people in the outside world haven't figured out how to get people out of the game safely in two years of elapsed time. Don't they have access to the servers? Access to all the design notes? Access to the whole development team? Even if the lead guy is keeping his mouth shut, a project like this has to have included dozens or hundreds of other engineers and I don't buy that all of them are so dedicated to this plot that none of them are willing to cooperate with authorities on trying to shut it down.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Sep 18 21:38:28 2012 (+rSRq)

8 By the way, any engineer who refuses to cooperate can be prosecuted for capital murder. That threat isn't going to shake anyone loose? I don't believe it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Sep 18 21:40:59 2012 (+rSRq)

9 Steven, how about a disgruntled programmer embedding hidden code just before the final compile, then deleting his source code before going into hiding and/or faking his own death?  Or an external group hitting the game severs with a subtle virus that attacks a flaw in the low-level hardware?

Also, if any of the trapped players are relatives of powerful politicians, you can bet that any attempts to interfere with the game servers will be met with tons of government oversight, legislative committee meetings, and associated red tape.

If those arguments don't sway you, suppose the game is hosted on the same "cloud" as the software which is used to design next-generation strike witch boots?  Surely we can't risk any action that might imperil the war effort...

Posted by: Siergen at Tue Sep 18 21:56:12 2012 (Bv5ty)

10

Siergen, you obviously haven't  been involved in any major software development efforts lately.

All large development projects use source control systems. That means that when you want to make a change, you have to check out the source module, make your alteration, and then check it back in. There's an audit trail, and every change is tracked. Furthermore, the source control system permits the development group to retreat to any point during the entire development process if need be.

RCS is ancient at this point but it's an example of such things. Modern source control systems are far more elaborate and capable.

In other words, it isn't possible for someone to "sneak in a change" and then sneak it back out again with no way for anyone else to know it happened.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Sep 18 22:02:02 2012 (+rSRq)

11 The premise is quite dumb. More to the point, how does the device determine you've lost your connection to the server? How does it distinguish that from lag? Two seconds is plenty long to cut a couple cables, but it's -nothing- in lag terms.

I think it also suffers from rushing things a little. We go straight from "here is Kirito and a handful of other beta testers, and the great unwashed of regular players in mostly starting gear" to "here is Kirito the loner, and also several hostile self-organized guilds". Exactly how you go from A to B would have been pretty interesting; instead we get convenient comic-book-cutout villains when the plot calls for them (and they even look like ugly villains, despite the conceit that everyone is playing characters that look like themselves.)

Even saying all that, though, it still turned out pretty well. Kirito's got his stuff together, generally speaking - he'd make a good harem lead (by Steven's criteria) if it was that kind of show. It's not a great show - there's still some highly-selective stupidity when it's convenient for the plot - but it'll do, it'll do.

If I were going to write this plot (and I'm not expecting it to come out like this!), I'd set it up such that the fry-your-brain thing wasn't correct, and that casualties don't actually die, but that players are told that to keep them engaged (and families compensated handsomely to keep them agreeable). The big question is "why", but I don't want to place a guess that's too close to what might be actually happening in the show...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tue Sep 18 22:02:47 2012 (pWQz4)

12

Damn it. RCS

Plus... the whole development environment gets backed up nightly to off-line storage. 

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Sep 18 22:03:16 2012 (+rSRq)

13 I work on software development for the US Navy.  In theory, we have strict code reviews, source/version controls, nightly backups, disaster recovery plans, etc.  And one of these years, we may actually attempt to put that theory into practice...

Posted by: Siergen at Tue Sep 18 22:16:28 2012 (Bv5ty)

14 I heartily grant you that the premise is dubious. However,  there are a couple of reasons that the government might not be able to get the people out.

1: Perhaps he pulled an Ozymandias and killed his whole development team. (The man is a psychopath after all). design notes and such might have been purged...obviously he had 2 sets anyway, one without the crazy for government and public consumption.

2: the fact that the first run of helmets sell out after only 10,000 copies and sell out in less than a day. Presumably the full run would have been in the millions, yet this special first edition was limited to 10,000. Why? Hype officially but a short run with no shelf time might give him a better opportunity to add nasties and booby-traps undetected by the Japanese equivalent of UL...who had presumably checked the prototypes and any safe helmets he provided them. This is 2022 so the manufacturing process may well be 3-D printing meaning that
    A: he could have surreptitiously installed his own modifications.
   B: The helmets are unitary designs even less tinker friendly than my iMac.

3: 200 or so people died when relatives tried to pull them out. It is likely that more died later when the government did. If the helmets are booby trapped (and they are explicitly stated to have backup battery supplies in the helmet )ANY tampering will set it off. Given that the remaining people are physically OK a  risk adverse administration might just put everyone in a hospital with IV feed and try to negotiate with the terrorist.

4: Hacking the system might involve similar risks..if the system crashes or tampering is detected everyone will likely be fried.

5: Finally, there might be a social stigma against gaming otaku sufficient to inhibit efforts. After all these 'losers' got them selves into this. This is unlikely but possible.

So it doesn't beggar belief that the people could be trapped.

The same cannot be said for an interface so amazing that ones cooking skill is important because the food you eat in game to keep your stats gives the same sensations as eating....
...but out of respect to the catgirls I'll speak no more of that.

This show not hard Sci-Fi, it's fantasy and it's about relationships and charachter development rather than Verneian extrapolation.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Sep 18 23:00:18 2012 (e9h6K)

15 If I were involved, I would have gone techno-magic and said a wizard did it.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Wed Sep 19 09:24:09 2012 (jwKxK)

16 One of my coworkers has been specializing in software forensics.  She's seen a case where it was claimed that a developer had injected malware into the product before being terminated.  All the review mechanisms Steven talked about were performed, and nothing was found.  It was eventually discovered (after LOTS of headscratching) that they were using open source version control and build systems, and the rogue developer had simply compiled his own rogue versions of those tools and put them into the development environments, giving him the ability to inject code that didn't appear in the source files anywhere.  Clever, hard to detect, and once detected, you still don't have the source available for analysis.

Posted by: David at Wed Sep 19 12:43:40 2012 (+yn5x)

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While the Arab world burns, the China/Japan dispute over the Senkakus is heating up.

Japanese factories in China were shut down yesterday as the anti-Japanese riots escalated. More here and here.

^{Nicked from Ampotan}

Meanwhile 1000 Chinese fishing boats are sailing to the Senkaku Islands and daring the Japanese Coast Guard to stop them.

More on the Senkaku dispute here and here. Scary stuff.

...but wait...there's more...

This photo appeared on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. Photographs such as these don’t last long on the Net in China. It reads: Chinese people! What should we oppose? No wage increases. Public officials make large profits from illegal land transactions. We can’t buy a home. We die because we can’t go to a hospital. We can’t die because graves are too expensive. We use all our assets to graduate from college and still can’t get a job.

There are 30 grievances in all. I don’t see any about the Japanese.

"The Mao Zedong era was better, because most people were equal. The methods of the current government are ugly.”

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This VOCALOID concert from a couple of years ago was an glorious bit of stagecraft and still impresses.
However, I liked this particular song a heck of a lot more before I found out what the lyrics meant.

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It seems there really are none on teh internets.


From Sword Art Online episode one, which, despite its uninspiring premise, is actually turning out to be kind of interesting.

UPDATE:
OK maybe a few.
Also: Why haven't they starved?

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I noted this in passing the other day on YouTube and I wondered..."How?"
The second opening credits song to Nichijou simply does not seem to lend itself to a trance version in any way shape or form.

Turns out, it's easy as pie...

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Crunchyroll has now started streaming Bakemonogatari in a possibly futile attempt to have its sequel (Nisemonogatari) make sense.

I'd heard generally good things about this series so I'm giving it a shot. I must say I was unprepared for the sheer SHAFTacular SHAFTieness of this SHAFT production.

How SHAFTy is it?

This is the staircase at the school....
This is a hallway in the same school...
Yes, SHAFT tends to be aggressively surrealist in its art direction and this show rather maxes that out. It's quirky look accentuates the otherworldly feel of the story. The use of "lighting" is particularly effective.

Despite its striking visuals this is not a show that relies on imagery to tell a tale. It is VERY dialog heavy...and text heavy...with episode one having several flashes of 'textposition' that are onscreen for such a short period of time that they frequently defy even the pause button. Despite this one annoyance and opening with one of the most gratuitous panty-shots I have ever seen this is a pretty intelligent and intriguing show.

Our hero, Kyomi Araragi...
 ...is a senior at the academically challenging and architecturally improbable Naoetsu High School. He's your typical high school senior with the minor exceptions that he's smart and organized enough to be vice president of the student council and he's a former vampire, having spent much of his junior/senior vacation as a blood sucking creature of the night. He's better now, but struggles with lingering eosophobia which frequently makes getting to first period on time a challenge. 
His closest thing to a friend in school is...

 Tsubasa Hyakawa, the student council president. She she is helpful, smart, adventurous in her choice of undergarments, frighteningly well organized, an exceptional student and quite down to earth. Araragi has immense respect for her. She shares homeroom with...
Hitagi Senjogahara, who our hero recently saved by catching her when she fell down the schools spectacular stairshaft....a kindness for which she is less than grateful.
Hitagi is never without adequate school supplies despite never carrying a bookbag or purse and indeed is a very good student notwithstanding a lingering illness that has caused her to miss much school. Hitagi is a bit underweight and is not particularly sociable. In fact she's a very private person to the point that one might consider her a bit crabby. Despite this, our hero attempts to befriend her which sets in motion a series of bizarre and painful events.

   This is an odd show, but it is a clever and even thoughtful supernatural adventure and thus far I'm really liking it.

Next ep streams in 4 days.

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I guess it HAS been that long.

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My contribution to the quickmeme of the moment.

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I must commend our newest spammer for his choice in handles.
To Be A Tool is more than appropriate.

 ^{Emi  agrees.}

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