1
More like Thermopylae as comic book, since it's a GN adaptation. But I'm amused by the way they dealt with the fact that ancient Greek warriors didn't wear pants.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Saturday, January 16 2016 04:42 AM (Bkf8Y)
1
...except the trolls advice was completely *ignored* by her parents, and they did the exact opposite. Elsa's parents get the Idiot Ball for that one.
Posted by: cadrys at Thursday, January 14 2016 02:03 AM (iirnQ)
2
Agreed. It usually starts with Disneyfied princess(es) whose parents are dead or absent.
Posted by: Ken in NH at Thursday, January 14 2016 04:56 AM (MqjGP)
3
Troll dude, brain-wiping Anna: I recommend we remove all magic, even memories of magic, in order to be safe.
(To Elsa) Your power will only grow. There is beauty in it, but also great danger. You must learn to control it. Fear will be your enemy.
You can blame lazy writing, but as written, it's on the trolls.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 14 2016 09:12 AM (PiXy!)
4
I do blame lazy writing. Bad advice, dead parent syndrome, unearned villain. It's not a good movie.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 14 2016 09:23 AM (PiXy!)
5
How It Should Have Ended did a wonderful send-up of the troll advice scene.
Posted by: Mauser at Friday, January 15 2016 10:42 AM (5Ktpu)
6
That's pretty good. I also take comfort in the number of scathing reviews on IMDB.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 15 2016 01:30 PM (PiXy!)
1
You don't need to watch the second series to understand the movie. I haven't watched it, and it's been since the original release that I watched the first series, but I had no trouble with the movie when it came out.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, January 09 2016 01:10 AM (+rSRq)
2
If you really remember the first season well you don't need to watch the second season to understand the movie. But the second season can still help.
The Tanabata episode (a.k.a. "The Only Good Episode") is really the key to the whole series. There are some references to it in the first season but it's helpful to watch the real thing.
If you can force yourself to sit through "Endless Eight" you will really be able to appreciate what motivates Yuki.
Posted by: Jonathan Tappan at Saturday, January 09 2016 08:01 AM (Bkf8Y)
3
I'm half-way through Endless Eight. I quite like it for what it is, but my God that must have been annoying to watch week-to-week. The way they reshuffled season one for broadcast was a stroke of genius, but this would have been a bit much even for me.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 09 2016 10:21 AM (PiXy!)
4I loved Endless 8 as it was airing, and I still like it now. I'm still annoyed at people who trash it without having actually WATCHED the episodes, but whatev'.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, January 09 2016 03:10 PM (zAcee)
5
Having seen it all now, I think the Endless Eight sequence was handled very well, but between that and the five-episode making-of sequence, it meant that there wasn't much story in season two.
If they'd compressed Endless Eight to four episodes (it can't really be done in less time than that) and making-of to three, plus the Tanabata episode, that would have left six episodes for the Disappearance arc. That would have been a really strong season two, with a nice mix of new story and back story. But of course then we wouldn't have gotten the movie that we did in our timeline.
And Jonathan, you're right, you really need to watch Endless Eight (I think all of season two) to get the full impact of the movie. Everyone else has had eight months of Haruhi;
Yuki has had
nearly 600 years.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2016 10:45 AM (PiXy!)
6
Wonderduck, I agree with you about the way KyoAni handled the Endless Eight arc. Every chance they had to be lazy and re-use animation from the previous loop they avoided.
And I only noticed now that one of your commenters signed his message as John Smith.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2016 09:57 PM (PiXy!)
I have a new server, Sakura, to handle backups for the mununiverse. It has 32TB of disk, arranged as two independent 8TB RAID-1 volumes. The previous backup server (also named Sakura) had 6TB RAID-5, so 16TB RAID-1 is quite an upgrade. And the new server is slightly cheaper.
Only downside is the new Sakura has shingles. That is, it uses shingled disk drives, where the tracks actually overlap. This works because drive read heads are smaller than write heads, and can accurately read the half-sized tracks. But it means that you can't overwrite a single sector; you have to read a whole group of tracks, change the bits you want, and write the whole lot back.
Sequential performance is just fine - 160MB/sec on both reads and writes. Random access is fine, even great, up to a point. The drives have a 20GB buffer area for random writes, which works extremely well - several times faster than a normal disk drive.
But I can't recommend doing an OS update while a RAID rebuild is running. That seems to be pushing things a bit too far.
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Thursday, January 07
K-On! Movie Pre-Review
Hirasawa Yui is my spirit animal.
Update: The big problem with watching any K-On! is that their songs are terrible earworms. I now have Rice is a Side Dish stuck in my head.
(Couldn't find a clip of them actually performing this song, though they do it once in the TV series and again in the movie. This is the movie version, where Yui does an unscheduled One more time! and the other girls go Whut? but manage to jump back in.)
My favourite has to be Listen, the season 2 first-half ending, featuring cake-fairy Mio:
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, January 07 2016 07:08 AM (+rSRq)
2
Took me a while to watch, because it comes between episodes 22 and 23 in season 2, and I couldn't remember how far I'd got in season 2.
So I started from the beginning...
Having seen almost all of it now, I'll say what I said before: If you like Yui in episode 1, K-On! is for you. If you don't like Yui in episode 1, it's probably not.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 07 2016 02:59 PM (PiXy!)
3If you like Yui in episode 1, K-On! is for you. If you don't like Yui in episode 1, it's probably not.
I've read a scanslated version of the K-On! manga at one of those "free" online manga sites*, and I thought Yui was tolerable in moderate doses--a bit like Tomo from Azumanga Daioh in that regard. Is her latent annoyance factor higher or lower in the anime? (For comparison purposes, my favourite member of Afternoon Tea Time is Mio, but my favourite character of the entire manga is Nodoka, who in turn is similar to Yomi from AzuDai.)
*As an aside...yes, I do feel like a dirty pirate, and I have half a mind of making what Steven den Beste would call a guilt buy. How good is the Yen Press translation of the K-On! manga?
Posted by: Peter the Not-so-Great at Friday, January 08 2016 12:42 PM (XC8ds)
4
The characters are pretty much identical in the anime; they didn't fiddle around with that. But KyoAni really hit it out of the part with the production quality of K-On! Everything about the show is exactly right, and it makes the story so much better.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 08 2016 02:44 PM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, January 09 2016 05:01 AM (XOPVE)
6How good is the Yen Press translation of the K-On! manga?
Very. Better than any scanalation of the series I've seen.
...my favourite character of the entire manga is Nodoka...
I have her figma... along with Mio, Ritsu and Azu-nyan. Don't believe what it says, the guitars don't come with straps. Easy to make one out of the vinyl off a three-ring binder, though.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, January 09 2016 03:23 PM (zAcee)
7
Nodoka is great. She's the backup "only sane man" once you realise that all the girls in the band are crazy in their own way. (Mio is the sensible one... Oh. Mugi is the sensible one... Oh. Azu-nyan is... Oh. Sawa-chan... Oh.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, January 11 2016 10:53 AM (PiXy!)
I have nothing bad to say about this film. Four stars.
I was going to suggest that perhaps Lucille's accent wanders a bit, but I checked, and she's played by Vanessa Paradis, who is French, from Paris, and plays the role in both the English and French versions, the only major cast member who did so.
1
I found that movie by way of your linking the "La Seine and I" video, and found it delightful, mainly in the rather small scale of it, because I am getting a bit tired of everyone always wanting to save the entire universe lately. (Yes, I know that's a bit of an exaggeration.)
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 06 2016 02:25 PM (FvJAK)
2
Yes, that's definitely part of it. I expecting something larger scale, and was absolutely charmed by the way it played out.
I stumbled over that video just clicking around on Youtube after watching that Moses Supposes animation Wonderduck found a few weeks back. I'd never heard of the film before; I don't think it got a theatrical release here in Australia.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2016 03:33 PM (PiXy!)
I'm toying with the idea of Tintin as an anti-hero, like Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, so completely obsessed with getting the story (no matter how trivial) that he is entirely unaware of the disaster he leaves in his wake.
This film did not grab me. There is one part that is very, very, very good, but that's a few minutes of honey in almost two hours of cold porridge.
1
Are you a Tintin fan, out of curiosity? Or did you go into the film cold?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, January 05 2016 12:33 PM (zAcee)
2
I've read a bit, years ago, but it's not something I grew up with like Asterix and Obelix.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 05 2016 01:04 PM (PiXy!)
3
Gotcha. I learned to read with Tintin, but I've only read a couple of Asterix books. I'm the only person I know IRL who routinely uses the word 'menhir', though.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Tuesday, January 05 2016 04:38 PM (zAcee)
A menhir is a standing stone (as in Stonehenge), typically used to comically squish Roman legionaries. In the Asterix series, Asterix's best friend Obelix is a menhir-maker.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2016 10:48 AM (PiXy!)
6
Or did he just deliver menhirs? Can't remember; it's been a while.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 06 2016 11:57 AM (PiXy!)
7
Delivery man. Who makes the menhirs he delivers is a mystery I don't remember.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, January 06 2016 01:43 PM (zAcee)
In which Pixar takes Dennett's "Cartesian Theater" perhaps a little too literally.
Cute film, and yet a stronger story than Brave. The model of mental processes is almost the diametric opposite of reality, but I'm willing to let that slide.
1
I remember, very vaguely, a cartoon, probably Warner Brothers, where there are two individuals in people's heads driving them around. At one point the emotional, impulsive one gets the woman to pig out on sweets and all the graphs of her body and figure virtually explode. I absolutely do not know the title of it, so I have never been able to find it.
Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, January 05 2016 12:42 PM (5Ktpu)
2
That sounds like something Bob McKimson would have done.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, January 05 2016 01:01 PM (+rSRq)
