1
Bah, it's no different from USSR really. Everything is prohibited, but enforcing is selective. If they don't find out or if your uncle is a police commissioner or a high-ranked Democrat, you're fiiiiine. Living in high Sierras or in Stockton lets you get away with anything.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Oct 16 09:58:47 2013 (qDzqR)
2
Forgot to add, my daughter's boyfriend was 1/32 Indian and lived out in Cali boonies. They pretty much spent their days blowing stuff up after school.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Oct 16 09:59:51 2013 (qDzqR)
9 new Dr. Who Episodes were discovered earlier this year in Nigeria. The remastered versions were screened recently and they will be available for sale this week on iTunes.
Amongst them are Web of Fear
... a well regarded 6 part story which is the first appearance of the Brigadier and is actually the direct prequel to certain recent plot points in the current series.
Also discovered was Enemy of the World.
...which looks quite silly.
Despite their limited budgets, several of the Troughton and early Pertwee episodes used the black and white medium to great effect.
UPDATE!:
In the comments to this post, the Mysterious Mr. Will informed us that I
was sufficiently behind the curve that my "This week" was actually last
week. This means that the recently discovered Dr. Who episodes are on
iTunes now!
1
These were released last Thursday, so I had marathon on Saturday. "Web" is still missing episode #3, which (aside from a shot of his legs in #2) is the first appearance of Col. Lethbridge-Stewart. "Enemy" is being VERY well received. What we couldn't tell from the audio was just how well directed this one was. Oh, and all the Pertwee episodes were made in color. For awhile, only b&w copies survived of some of them, but they've all had their color restored for the DVD releases.
Posted by: Will at Mon Oct 14 19:56:30 2013 (ISbVo)
2
Thanks!
I did not know that.
I always thought that several of the Pertwee eps were B&W to begin with. My VHSs lied to me!
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 14 20:14:44 2013 (DnAJl)
Their statement ends with the conclusion that the website will be operational again "once all self published eBooks have been removed and we are totally sure that there are no offending titles available.†When that will be, they did not say.
This is a gut-punch to the self published E-book industry and hurts a lot of authors. I certainly carry no brief for the subject matter and would not gripe if Amazon instituted a "no incest" policy, but this sweeping action is both lazy and hurtful. If it continues it will kill an emerging industry.
These are big companies, and they have a lot of employees. Some of those employees are going to look at this sort of thing and say "not at my business" and walk. Even people with no actual attachment to it... and you couldn't say they'd be wrong to do so. Would you be happy working for Valve if it turned out they had a Department of Baby Mulching?
And, even more importantly, they've got customers who think along the same lines. I can mentally compartmentalize and say "it's not a problem, buying manga and tchotchkes from a company which is also selling dinosaur porn," but not everyone is going to look at it like that... and, frankly, the amounts of money being spent by the easily-squicked are probably greater than the amounts of money being made by aficionados of dino porn, etc.
I can't even really blame Amazon etc. for what's going on. If you look down and see your pants are on fire, you don't carefully spritz the sections which are burning so you can keep the rest of them dry - you get out of the darn things and douse them thoroughly, even if it means showing your bum a little.
At the end of the day, big respectable companies can't really be all-comers markets with no eye towards what they're peddling.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Mon Oct 14 21:21:19 2013 (pWQz4)
That's a good point and as I said, it wouldn't bug me if they just said "NO! HELL NO!" to certain things.It's a private business. But the sweeping removal of all indie E-Books until they can be vetted strikes me as a bit worrisome.
As to what I'm gonna do? Lets see...probably go eat some chicken and then go play Fallout 3.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 14 21:37:35 2013 (DnAJl)
Episode 13 of RWBY is a very brief (5 and a half minute), almost perfunctory bridge to set up what will no doubt be the resolution of the Jeaune Arc arc cour next week.
There are inconveniences, affronts and indignities that some will endure as they strive to achieve their dreams. There are also lines that one encounters on the path of ones life that are not to be crossed, beyond which redemption is impossible or at the very best hollow.
The truest measure of a man is not how behaves when all eyes are upon him, but rather what choices he makes when he is alone, terrified and outmatched, where his doing the right thing will never be known and will result in the shattering of his dreams and public disgrace.
Jaune is a dork...but he's more of a man than most.
It was also nice to see Ruby make an appearance in her own show...
Sarah Hoyt posts on how Harlequinesque erotica has been showing up in the darnedest places lately. After some speculation as to why this is, she has some encouraging words for prospective authors by providing an example of....
Astronomers have discovered another exo-planet. However, PSO J318.5-22 is a bit different from most....this planet is not orbiting any star. It is an orphan gas giant that was either cast into space or somehow formed alone.
Very much. Sounds like a brown dwarf, a category of object which amounts to "failed star". They form the same way stars do but don't have enough mass to ignite. They radiate infrared, but it's all energy from the formation process.
3
Sounds like it's below the usual size limit for a brown dwarf - brown dwarf stars are large enough to fuse deuterium, but too small to run the main-sequence carbon cycle. The cutoff is about 13x the mass of Jupiter, and this is about 6x.
A recent discovery is that there seems to be rather a lot of rogue planets out there, anything from a trillion to perhaps many quadrillion wandering about the Milky Way.
And it may not be cold at all. Just guessing, but at 6x the mass of Jupiter and only 12 million years old, it's probably still several hundred degrees in your temperature scale of choice.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sat Oct 12 21:01:28 2013 (PiXy!)
4
A universe full of rogue planets might account for the "Missing mass". So much for "Dark Matter".
Posted by: Mauser at Sun Oct 13 02:31:17 2013 (TJ7ih)
5
Well, dark matter is just matter that happens to be dark. If it's rogue planets, though, there has to be a lot of them, and they have to be mostly very very cold; I'm not sure if that fits in with astronomical data.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sun Oct 13 06:38:23 2013 (PiXy!)
6
Andre Norton said that rogue planets and asteroids drifting in interstellar space are where the smugglers hang out.
Of course, it could just be that somebody's disintegration ray did a very thorough job on the star, or that the planet was the only thing flung out of a black hole that ate its original system, or....
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sun Oct 13 12:45:46 2013 (cvXSV)
7
If it ain't in orbit around a star, it ain't a planet. Sounds more like a "sub-stellar object". Speaking of which, apparently the Oort Cloud isn't considered to be part of the solar system anymore? Since Voyager isn't even part-way through the Cloud, which pretty much starts at the heliopause?
Posted by: Mitch H. at Mon Oct 14 13:13:01 2013 (jwKxK)
8
There is some discussion on the breaking point between a brown dwarf and a gas giant. The article indicates that this is well below that zone of fuzzieness.
RE: Voagyer leaving the solsar system was actually a discovey. It turns out that the heliopause is on this side of the Oort cloud. The characteristics of interstellar space were thought to be quite different from planetary space. Voyager discovered that was true thus confirming the associated theory and locating the heliopause...at least in the direction Votager is flying.
I guess the Oort cloud orbits the solar system. I suppose given it's origin and the fact that it's influenced the sun's gravity that its considered part of the SS but it is in interstellar space.
I'm guessing that there is much discussion of this in the NASA nomenclature situation room.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 14 14:09:19 2013 (DnAJl)
1
Does your car insurance not cover towing, or were you out of range of a free tow or something? I have moderately meh insurance from Progressive that I can't wait to swap out but I can get something like a 10-mile tow for free.
Posted by: RickC at Sat Oct 12 14:49:55 2013 (swpgw)
2
You show 4 girls, but only 2 axes of rotation...
Posted by: Siergen at Sat Oct 12 15:19:20 2013 (c2+vA)
3
I was on the wrong side of one of the areas bridge tunnels which complicates things. The shop with my tire was far from the closest one. I was not eager to find out how expensive a complication it would be.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Oct 12 16:41:47 2013 (DnAJl)
4
"Kenneth" can mean "handsome, comely", but it's Scottish Gaelic and not English. (Baby name books tend to lie and misinform, unless they're the onomastics type that only linguists buy!)
It's actually the Anglicized pronunciation of two similar-sounding Scottish names: Cinaed (the name of the famous king of Dal Riada), and Cainnech (which like "Caomhgen" (Kevin) is one of the many Gaelic names using the stem word "handsome," but which actually implies good manners and a non-messy appearance.)
Cinaed, OTOH, has two etymologies and you can pick which one. The first element is probably "ceann" (physical head or leader). The second element is probably "aed" (fire), but it's possible that it's "eidigh" (ugly or armored) like the Kennedy name. (You're probably familiar with all the Aidan fire names.)
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sun Oct 13 13:18:17 2013 (cvXSV)
5
Oh, and it's often the Anglicized version of a particular Irish saint's name: St. Cainnech of Aghaboe, also known as St. Kenny and St. Canice. He worked in Scotland and Wales, and October 11th is his feastday.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sun Oct 13 13:44:14 2013 (cvXSV)
6
Oh, and I looked the word up in eDIL (the online version of the serious Irish language citation dictionary), and it turns out that Cainnech can also mean "kindly, charitable" when used in a religious sense. Which was probably why the guy from Aghaboe had the name, as a lot of early Irish saints changed their name to something religious when they became monks.
Kenneth's a good name. Very layered.
Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sun Oct 13 13:57:19 2013 (cvXSV)
Episode 2 takes a very brief break from the manic energy of the first episode for about 4 minutes of useful exposition and a big plate of mealworms, before fully recapturing the supersonic pacing and squalid depravity that so appalled us last week.
As an added bonus the show provides the most unsettling and painful looking magical girl transformation sequence in the history of...ever.
Ouch... Ouch I say...
So...yes...this one's still firing on all cylinders.
A medical test being developed by
Kuwait will be used to 'detect' homosexuals and prevent them from
entering the country – or any of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC),
according to a Kuwaiti government official.
Given the glaring lack of any indigenous LGBTWMDs their defense priorities seem dubious as it is unlikely that their Advanced Gaydar Array will provide any early warning or defense capabilities against the mass casualty weapons being developed by the Iranians (who consider them all infidels).
But hey....with gaydar....the slash writes itself.
1
Meh. Odds are good they're just doing it to humiliate the "Gay Mafia", which has been flexing their muscles harassing harmless Pasta companies........
Posted by: Robert Mitchell Jr. at Mon Oct 7 18:44:11 2013 (MNAY3)
2
I don't think they care about the overreach or bullying by the gay left. In fact, I don't think their gaydar will even work.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 7 18:54:52 2013 (DnAJl)
3
I think I remember that there was a claim that the fiendish Israelis (or maybe it was the Americans) had created a gas weapon which converted heterosexual men to homosexuals. Wasn't there something like that?
J. Greely over at Dot Clue is reading the Miniskirt Pirates light novels examining the differences between them and the Bodacious Space Pirates anime as he goes.
The latest installment is the cute girls doing cute things genre is a gentle, methodically paced tale that follows a charming but haunted young lady who transfers into a new high-school where she knows no one. She struggles to fit in and find friendship by joining an after-school club populated with wacky misfits.
Please be advised that this is NOT a review of that show.
The show being reviewed here does involve a female transfer student which may have contributed to some confusion. However, if you're looking for a review of that show then you probably don't want to scroll any further. In fact you should probably move along because that show sounds boring and I'm not likely to review it this season.
Now that we've cleared that up...
Kill la Kill follows a young lady named Ryuko Matoi, who is seeking to avenge her fathers murder. Her one clue to his killers identity (and her primary weapon) is a is a scissor...
...singular.
Wandering through a rather run down city, she enrolls in the local high school as a transfer student and makes an inquiry about the student council.
...at which point things proceed to deteriorate with considerable alacrity.
The ad does not look anywhere as retro as this show actually is.
With Kill la Kill, the people that made Gurren Lagaan in homage to
giant robot shows have decided to accord the same respect to the genre
of hard boiled high school gangster tales...and women in prison
movies....and just generally shout out their adoration for Go Nagai.
This jarringly old-school retrogasm of a show is a completely over the top, tasteless exercise in gratuity. It navigates the utterly bizarre twits and turns of its story at a breakneck pace, all the while managing to be offensive, exploitative and refreshingly devoid of any redeeming societal values.
I laughed, I cheered, I winced, I deleted my browser history....
I don't know how long that they can maintain this level of truly high quality squalor but I aim to find out.
Update:
I probably should mentioned that the production staff includes the people who are doing Little Witch Acadameias....but that might give people an entirely wrong idea.
1
So, now we know what happened to Urabe Mikoto's scissors.
Posted by: Mauser at Sun Oct 6 21:27:57 2013 (TJ7ih)
2
Okay, I watched it. that was some amazingly over-the-top stuff, and yeah, retro-styled. Painted backgrounds!
I'm guessing it's going to be a succession of fights until she gets to the top.
Posted by: Mauser at Mon Oct 7 05:08:29 2013 (TJ7ih)
3
I was actually disappointed by the first episode. After watching Little Witch Acadamia, I expected a much different show. Guess the Studio Trigger people have a wide-variety of tastes and styles...
Posted by: Siergen at Mon Oct 7 11:13:02 2013 (c2+vA)
4
The same people also made Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt.
Posted by: Max at Mon Oct 7 11:38:38 2013 (9p6/L)
5
Oh dear... if you were were expecting Gurren Laggan then this show was still a shock.
If you saw "Trigger" and were thinking Little Witch Acadamias...you probably lost 1D6 san.
I rolled a 6 and now everything tastes purple and looks falsetto so I'm happy.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Oct 7 11:56:54 2013 (DnAJl)
6
Great! Time for you to re-read Leftism Revisited. Let me know when you are ready, I'll order a bottle of Elder Sign(tm) for you.
Posted by: Robert Mitchell Jr. at Mon Oct 7 17:31:13 2013 (MNAY3)
7
Great review here. Listen at your own risk, spoilers and coarse language.
I've been struggling for some time with a couple of half written posts. However, while there is grist aplenty for them, words are failing me...there is just so much to address.
The other day I got off early and had a few extra hours between work and class with no pressing assignments looming, so I decided to clean the car. Unfortunately, the gas station I chose has no working vacuum. Thus I simply cleaned things as best I could organized the textbooks and papers that had gotten under the seats and decided to clean the trunk.
The trunk was a complete mess. The toolkit and the various containers of stuff like brake fluid, power steering fluid and 5w30 were clustered in this big pile in the middle. TheWD-40 had discharged. Closer inspection revealed the bug out bag had sunk into the floor occupying the space where the spare tire should have been and the beaverboard floor-liner has curled up. at its edges and managed to pry open the first aid kit.
I started to clean everything out, beat the beaverborad flooring into some semblance of flatness, , got a box for the....
wait....
back up...
"space where the spare tire should have been". spare tire...
SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
What the HELL?
I'm guessing it got removed and forgotten about when I had the radio installed, or perhaps when the mechanics at another auto-shop fixed the drainage problem...or when a mechanic worked on the tail lights wiring...or perhaps during an inspection. Which means that I've been driving without a spare for at least 6 months...
I drove to DC and Luray with no spare tire...
"shudder".
Well, an inquiry of all the places I've had the car worked on over the last year or so naturally turned up naught, so Friday I ordered a junkyard tire which should arrive at the local mechanics on Monday. In the meantime I've invested in a new can of fix-a-flat and I'm sincerely hoping that my trips to Norfolk today and tomorrow are uneventful.
Instead this episode provided us with a bit of insight into the history of their world and a major (but not entirely surprising) revelation about one of our protagonists.
Jeaune has been something of an enigma. He's physically brave, but seems utterly out of his depth, both in combat skill and knowledge. He doesn't seem stupid (he can think on his feet ) but he is bonecrushingly ignorant. While his need to have even the most basic aspects of how magic and such works explained to him in small words has certainly helped to bring the audience up to speed on the show's fantasy physics, it rather beggared belief that this fellow actually got into an elite university that specializes in the very things he is most ignorant of.
Well...all that is explained by the fact that he got in via forged transcripts. It seems that (for whatever reason) he never made it into any of the fighting schools from which beacon selects its recruits.
It gets worse...
We find this out because he confess it to Pyrrha as she is explaining that she's got confidence in him because "anyone who made it into Beacon is worthy by definition".
This means that not only has he lied on his application (no doubt grounds for dismissal), he's also made Pyrrha party to his lie. Pyrrha has been assisting him with a saint-like helpfulness that frankly approaches co-dependancy...and now, well, given that she seems inclined to keep his secret (she offers to help him get up to speed) It follows that he's set her (and potentially his entire team) up for disgrace too.
But wait...there's more!
By the end of the episode, he's also being blackmailed.
I don't see how he gets to stay in the opening credits at this point.
"Yeah, I may have chosen...poorly. "
All in all there was much better writing and character development than the rather perfunctory resolution to the Weiss/Ruby issue in episode 10.
Of course since the episode was 7 minutes long, you probably spent more time reading the post than it would have taken to watch the show so I have serious doubts regards the utility of the review.
1
I suspect that
the leader of the school knows about his forged transripts, and let him Jeaune enroll because he sees his potential.
Posted by: Siergen at Sat Oct 5 15:49:49 2013 (c2+vA)
2
I think that's very possible. Of course at some point he's got to have the neuron fire that he can't do this on his own....and none of the other peole did either.
they, after all, had teachers.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Oct 5 16:00:48 2013 (F7DdT)
3
How do you
manage to admit you don't know how to fight monsters at all, yet insist you'll learn it yourself, when the entire point of going to a monster hunter training school is to learn?
Posted by: RickC at Sun Oct 6 16:12:36 2013 (swpgw)
4
Sleep deprivation...
He's cramming and sparing and doing additional training on his own (probably a good deal of which is at night in order to maintain his secret). He''s scared to ask questions, because, while there are no stupid questions, there are revelatory ones that give away the level of ones ignorance.
He's pushing himself to his limit as we saw in the sparing match with Cardin.
At this point he's exausted mentally and physically, is suffering from sleep deprivation and not thinking clearly. The only thing he can focus on is the depths of the hole he's in and the only thing keeping him from actually jumping off the building is his pig-headed determination. On top of this the two moments of competence he displayed in episode 8 resulted in his being a squad leader so he's got an additional level of stress.
He's in the third week of boot camp but ALL ALONE.
Now, as I said, the neuron really needs to fire...he needs some training he needs to accept any bit of help he can get and not blow up at the cute, competent, redheaded hoplite who inexplicably wants to help him....when the gods smile on your idiot self in such a profound way as that, don't screw it up.
He's very close to being a complete write-off as a character, but given that extracting himself from this predicament should require a good bit of actual character development I'm cautiously hopeful.
Posted by: Brickmuppet at Sun Oct 6 18:27:52 2013 (F7DdT)
Shifting attitudes toward information technologies can be followed in anime. In 1998′s Serial Experiments Lain, the "wired†is weird, scary and dangerous. In 2007′s Dennou Coil, evolved Google Glass is a lot of fun, though occasionally still dangerous. In Gatchaman Crowds, smart phones and conscious artificial intelligence are taken for granted and are generally benign.
I never saw Dennou Coil, but the difference between Lain and this is jarring. Of course, they are different types of show and Gatchaman Crowds really is unusually upbeat, but I think his trend-line holds up pretty well.
Ouch I say...
Jeaune has been something of an enigma. He's physically brave, but seems utterly out of his depth, both in combat skill and knowledge. He doesn't seem stupid (he can think on his feet ) but he is bonecrushingly ignorant. While his need to have even the most basic aspects of how magic and such works explained to him in small words has certainly helped to bring the audience up to speed on the show's fantasy physics, it rather beggared belief that this fellow actually got into an elite university that specializes in the very things he is most ignorant of. 
