"I've started watching Attack on Titan again. Watching a giant bite the head off somebody, then pull them apart and eat them is so much less disturbing than watching that poor girl in Watamote humiliate herself. "
Full disclosure: Actual monsters in Attack on Titan are considerably less cute than this .gif implies.
In other news: We can now re-size .gifs in Minx. Wo0t!
This polysyllabically titled show airs on Crunchyroll a week late, so despite my judicious attempt at avoiding spoilers I'd heard considerable chatter about this episode being just wretched and 'worse than the last one'.
Given that the last episode was about our poorly socialized protagonist getting tunnel vision and missing the point of her hobby, I fully expected this episode to be a bit of a downer with Yura's Ahab complex causing issues.
Boy howdy.
One of the overriding themes of this show is sportsmanship. This episode also focuses on the importance of not becoming what one despises and how easy it is to fall into that trap, especially if one feels strongly that one's cause is noble.
The other major point of the show is that the raison d'etre' of a hobby is to enjoy oneself. This is not to say
that winning is not important, but the enjoyment is the goal. If lives are not at stake and what you are doing is unpleasant and wearying without an enjoyable payoff...then one needs to stop doing it or start collecting a paycheck for it.
As expected, Yura drives her team hard to the point of misery, at one point disregarding a fairly severe leg injury incurred by Kirishima. The kicker is that at the last minute Yura fires the winning shot....a split second after being hit.
By the rules this means Yuras winning shot was illegal but it's undetected by anyone except her opponent, the malevolent Haruna.....who smiles knowingly, informs Yura that she now respects her because she'll do anything to win and walks away.
The episode ends a tad ambiguously. Yura has the opportunity to make this right, but she's feeling a profound obligation to her teammates who she ran into the ground to get this victory....what does she do? Well we'll know for sure next week.
Of course most people reading this know that there is only one correct answer, but Yura doesn't. Her backstory is that she's never had friends. She hasn't learned about sportsmanship and she's carrying the shock of the earlier lesson about fighting to the end...for which she is seriously overcompensating.
I expect that the NEXT episode will be the nadir (emotionally...dramatically it might be quite compelling)
This is the antithesis of a shonen manga. Japanese society puts a VERY high value on giving your all and going all out whatever the cost. Shonen manga and sports manga tend to do the same with the former focusing on crushing the villain utterly.
This show, is about remembering to step back, breathe, and keep things in perspective...and how easy it is to fail to do that.
Yura is not an idiot, she's young and ignorant. She's learning, like we all do, as she goes and she's making mistakes. There is actual character development here. I'm still liking this show quite a bit though I think I may actually be the only one now.
So...for those of you who've been watching...any bets on whether or not she just flat out shaves her head this time?
Not Quite a Combo Breaker but.... It's Time for PAINTBALL!
Well after dwelling on dark matters for a bit I was damned happy to see Tuesday roll around because that means StellaWALLOFTEXTc3 is finally up on Crunchyroll.
In this episode we learn that the KGB club is even more co-ed than we thought.
This despite the fact that one of their members today has chosen to be strapping and not trapping.
One of the points that this episode touches on is the importance of having something to fall back on in the event of unlikely contingencies.
"We are SO going to kick Oorai's ass this year!"
"And those witches too!"
Oh...there was one other thing...
Oh my...
The series takes a surprisingly dark turn in the first 45 seconds.
Someone, quite likely a competitor, is playing for keeps. They're using an illegally overpressurised air-gun and start sniping at the girls.
Now Sonora is in the hospital with a concussion and Yura blames herself.
Although the other teamates decide to sit out the much anticipated 24 hour tournament, Yura somewhat rashly decides to sign them up, to honor Sonora with a win.
And the wallflower takes control...
As an aside, I think this is the first episode where Yura hasn't had a vision.
This show continues to completely surprise me.
In addition to a rather unexpected direction, this episode does develop on a couple of things we've seen previously.....
*Yura really is beginning to miss the plot...The point of paintball is to have fun, it is a leisure activity.
*Something BIG went down between Sonora and Haruna in the U.S.A. It's not at all clear WHAT but it seems to be developing into a major plot thread.
The series emphasis on sportsmanship is still very much in evidence. This particular episode touches slightly on the do's and don'ts of leadership as well.
I am really impressed. I have no idea where it is going but I'm increasingly confident I'm going to enjoy finding out.
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Yes regards Yura forgetting the point. That seems to be one of the themes to the show. In this case she also has the added guilt of doing it for a friend.
As for the other thing, most likely she slipped into paintball mode and forgot to take cars into account...ie: she forgot rule#2 'situational awareness'.
Todays lesson kids: General orders 1 and 2 are NOT suggestions.
This episode was not as...I don't know...engaging?... as some of the others but set up a LOT of stuff and it remained very interesting; to me anyway.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Aug 20 21:00:37 2013 (F7DdT)
RWBY is Now on Crunchyroll
There's not much to add except that having watched it again, Crunchyroll can handle the load in the exact same way that that RoosterTeeth's server's can't. (I tried to show it to a friend last night and it was all out of synch). It stays in sych at high rez too.
...but she would. She's in it. By the way, what DOES she see in that guy?
The latest installment of RWBY is only four minutes long. Well acted and nicely paced with even better music than previous episodes it...well it ends after four minutes which SUCKS cause I've gotta wait a whole WEEK to see what happens!
It's a cute show, plus it's always nice to see people who genuinely enjoy their work.
It Strikes Me
...that while this banner does make for admirable honesty on their part, such a high visibility release of this information is potentially counterproductive from a marketing standpoint.
Posted by: Mauser at Thu Aug 15 05:29:10 2013 (TJ7ih)
3
Shut-ins with psychiatric issues, either agoraphobia, social anxiety, schizophrenia, or some charming blend thereof. Probably also borderline personality disorder in a lot of cases. Hikikomori is a well-publicized aspect of Japan's ongoing social collapse, in public perception if not necessarily in fact, a large fragment of Japanese youth are going full-ama-no-Iwato, hiding in their family homes.
I haven't heard much about hikikomori recently, dunno if that means that the social panic about it has passed, or that people just got bored by reading about them. I guess they've passed on to worrying about foreign affairs and the new nationalism?
Posted by: Mitch H. at Thu Aug 15 08:36:16 2013 (jwKxK)
The stereotype now also includes them spending pretty much every waking minute online.
Himawari in Vividred Connection is initially presented as a fairly typical hikkikomori. (except that fact that she's a girl, and the stereotype is a young man.)
6
By the way, we should be grateful collectively to Japan's Hikkikomori, because a lot of the raws which get posted and eventually subbed for us come from them.
What I Learned this Evening on Crunchyroll
It's the school festival episode of Stella[REDACTED]Club C Cubed and I learned all sorts of stuff today.
The survival club is out of money. They're going to be hard pressed to pay the entry fee to get into a much anticipated '24 hour tournament'. They decide to go for broke and try to raise enough money at the festival.
I learned a new Japanese word.
In Japan a commercial shooting stall with electric target retriever is called a "massine'.
It may SOUND like they're saying 'machine' but it's a brand new and distinct word meaning 'shooting stall with electric target retriever'. I know this because the subtitle-ers spell it that way. Every. Single. Time.
See? They learned something too.
I have serious doubts that 'learning' that has made me any wiser but I learned some other things as well. For those that have seen the episode, here's what I learned... more...
In my defense I am distracted by my pondering of what Extreme Opera is. After seeing Dasichi's skillset, I keep having visions of them running through the forest weilding paintball guns with Daisichi portaying Brunhilde while Sigfried, portrayed by Aiara, shouts "Kill da Waaaabit!.
I am unable to unsee or unhear that.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Aug 13 14:18:37 2013 (F7DdT)
3
Maybe you can use the word "massine" in your next Japanese class to impress your instructor with your large vocabulary...
Posted by: Siergen at Tue Aug 13 17:05:30 2013 (Ao4Kw)
4
Somewhere on Youtube I saw a clip of what I guess is supposed to be a Japanese game show that involved spraying water on some women who were dressed--if you can call it that--only in toilet paper wrapped around their torsoes, so to be fair to Gainax, it's not as if they're making that up out of whole paper.
Posted by: RickC at Tue Aug 13 18:10:13 2013 (WQ6Vb)
I have a friend who does art. He used to be a professional animator and he's done a bit of small press work in comics. He's been doing art in various capacities for 30 odd years and has a wide range of interests.
I mean anything involving MMD or Poser will get under his skin and if applied for more than a few minutes will send him into a white hot rage rage. It's rather bizarre, its like his IQ drops 35 points and until the offending media is removed all he can say is "Duuhh..I hate dat stufff..." Now this is not a rational response and would seem to be a matter of personal preference and pig-headedness but he recently made an interesting argument when I pointed out that he'd seemed to like The Incredibles.
Well he does like Pixar films...mostly. His argument is that the MMD videos and such aren't actually art because unlike the big studio productions they're just using someone else's creativity. The person doing an MMD video on YouTube in his eyes isn't doing much more than posting a paint by numbers painting and calling it his. The programer has done all the art.
Now, as it happens, I'm tinkering with MMD right now, but I'm not making much progress because, I'm not artistically inclined and doing that on a Mac is clunky. With MMD one is manipulating these wire frame models and even at the most basic level choosing ones choreography. However the facial expressions in particular ARE all built into the program and were put there by the programers as are (I'm told) some basic movements). It's my understanding though, that MMD can be used to produce things like this....
I'm unsure of the provenance of these .gifs (which I nicked from 4-Chan) except that they seem to be from some Touhou fanfic. I understand that one can download Touhou "skins" for MMD wireframes now (fans made those available some years ago) However, even if the creators of this did use off the shelf " paper dolls" for their character designs there is the matter of the choreography and the subtitles which imply writing a script. Of course this is Touhou so it's fanfic anyway. However the potential seems to be there and is certainly present in the professional versions of Poser to apply ones own skins to the products frames. Such additions would require artistic ability (and being 3d would be akin to rendering a sculpture), but the objection of my friend is that those using this medium are using someone else's art.
My feeling is that this is akin to using Legos or perhaps a paintbrush. I'm of the opinion that even MMD can teach aspiring animators about computer animation, choreography and editing, which in the computer age are quite different skills from what they used to be. However, I don't do art, my figure drawing makes Randall Munro* look like Da Vinci so this is most definitely a layman's perspective. I'm really not sure how much ones brush needs to stray outside the numbers before ones effort becomes art.
I'm pretty sure that this piece done with Poser qualifies though
...but at what point on the spectrum between that piece of magic and simply having Lady Hatsune make a leek face it stops being analogous to stickers on ones Trapper Keeper...well I'm not qualified to answer that.
The person doing an MMD video on YouTube in his eyes isn't doing much more than posting a paint by numbers painting and calling it his. The programer has done all the art.
The same way Fender and Gibson did all the art and Mark Knopfler just played notes that were already there.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Fri Aug 9 06:51:17 2013 (PiXy!)
2
If you produce fine, handcrafted, heirloom-quality furniture, you probably have a low opinion of Ikea. But for a lot of people, Ikea is the difference between nothing and making do with milk cartons.
Or, if we're going to talk about paintbrushes... I use a Kolinsky sable brush from W&N, because it's a really good brush (quite a bit better than the painter, if I'm going to be honest), and the few extra bucks it costs isn't going to break my bank. It's nice having a brush that can hold a point that well. There are also artificial fiber paintbrushes made for the three-for-a-dollar crowd. There are people who get fantastic results with the former, to be sure - but there are also people who can take the three-for-a-dollar paintbrushes and do amazing things with them, because the tool isn't the talent, and it isn't the vision.
Sure, if you're a professional-level animator, you're not going to like tools that let people bodge together their own animation. Professional sound guys scoffed at software that let you do your own mixes on a home PC... and it turned out that a lot of people were pretty good at mixing without being a "professional" sound guy. Heck, for that matter, I'm sure that plenty of vocalists aren't too fond of Vocaloid.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Fri Aug 9 21:39:20 2013 (pWQz4)
3
At around 1:55 in the video, she appears to be firing the gun by cycling the charging lever on the bolt. Reminds me of a gunslinger firing a revolver by fanning the hammer, although I've never heard of a rifle fired via the bolt lever.
Posted by: RickC at Fri Aug 9 22:28:04 2013 (WQ6Vb)
4
@Avatar comment#2:
I think Vocaloid is a better argument for my friends point of view than MMD. The tone, pitch, and everything else is actually done by someone (or something) else. That being said, editing and songwriting are each definitely arts in their own right.
One thing that (I think) set my friend off is the ease of tracing with the computer. He was in awe of how much better some people were on the computer than on paper. I suspect that this generally has two causes.
1: the person is just much more comfortable in the computer medium (I'd wager that this is very common today given the amount of time people spend on it).
2: They're doing vectors.
This latter has turned out to be the case quite often in his recent experience.
As for MMD, given the sheer ammount of stuff pre-programmed into even the most basic version, I think my friends argument is not without some merit at the most basic levels of competency. I tend to think that his argument breaks down rapidly once one moves out of the orientation phase.
Of course some of this is just crumudgeonism on his part. but given the complexities of the tech, asking at what point a work becomes art and particularly ones own art strikes me as not entirely unreasonable. However, while I'm inclined toward your and Pixy's point of view on this, not being an artist at all makes me wonder. I mean look at the amount of clip art, embedded videos and such I use here.....though of course no one would call the blog "art".
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 10 00:17:21 2013 (F7DdT)
5
@ Rick C comment#3:
I'm unfamiliar with bolt actions in practice, however one can do something similar with a pump action weapon if one cycles it very hard and holds down the trigger. Note too that it has been mentioned in the series that she built the weapon herself so chambering a round and closing the bolt might automatically fire it.
Also:
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 10 00:25:40 2013 (F7DdT)
6
I've been curious about playing with MMD, but at the time, it seems like people had to patch it to get english or something. Of course, at one point I was going to dabble with Daz 3d (don't bother). And I used to futz around with POV-Ray, but nothing ever came close to some of the amazing images out there.
I just don't really have the commitment to achieve skill with these things, which kind of shoots down the idea that skill isn't required. (Although DAZ probably does, since it's basically a paper-doll system where more talented artists sell content for you to add to the program. It can't really create its own.)
Posted by: Mauser at Sat Aug 10 04:04:20 2013 (TJ7ih)
A Gripe
As I post this, it's a bit more than an hour before episode 5 of Stella-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch airs on Crunchyroll. I note this is almost a WEEK after most all the cool kids have seen it.
I've been judiciously avoiding spoilers, but here's not much point in blogging this one.
UPDATE: OK. For those of you who've already seen this.....
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I think the real issue is with Yura's motivations.
The rest of the team is out there to have fun. They enjoy the camaraderie and the challenge and have more or less come to terms with being, well, weirdos.
Yura hasn't. She's got some character movement, not very difficult since the start was at "scared rabbit in headlights", but what's motivating her isn't so much joy, it's fear. She likes being able to socialize with the others, something she's just not used to, but by contrast she's worried that they're going to reject her for screwing up.
(Incidentally, this is partly Sono's fault, for chewing her out over an etiquette breach when she hadn't bothered to explain the etiquette involved... especially when the other side had itself broken the etiquette by going for the humiliation-victory rather than playing the game. You don't get mad at rookies for doing rookie stuff! But Sono's own issues got in the way there...)
In the meantime, that's got Yura fixated on victory, in a way that the rest of them aren't; everyone else is out to have fun and looking to win as part of that fun, but Yura's out to win because losing would be terrible. It's not a healthy attitude for a sport, and the results could be... well, presumably Sonora's rival didn't get like that by eating too much cake in the light music club.
Yura could use, frankly speaking, getting the stuffing knocked out of her; she'd hate it, but realizing that the aftermath isn't getting turned out of the club would help her attitude a lot. Of course, all that is assuming that ep 4 was a weird aside and that the tone of the series remains normal-ish; if Yura's stepping onto actual battlefields, then taking a somewhat grimmer view of winning and losing may well be a survival trait...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Tue Aug 6 22:08:25 2013 (pWQz4)
While still not up to the level of its premiere, episode 3 of RWBY has recovered quite a bit from # 2, though slapstick visual 'cheats' don't work as well in this medium.
This is definitely a cliche' buffet and it has some technical issues, but it's amusing me. This episode was all dialog and the voice work held its own and remained pretty engaging.
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His blog brings all the boys to his yard.
Of course having put it in those terms...I'd best get off his lawn before he comes at me with a Chen-saw.
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