CAN I BE OF ASSISTANCE?
Shut it!
Thursday, April 13
The Real Number Of The Beast
Is 23.97602.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:29 AM
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I know. What were they thinking? Were they thinking? Or was this just the first kludge that worked, and we've been stuck through the need for backward compatibility ever since?
Posted by: HC at Thursday, April 13 2006 02:49 PM (qmTWt)
2
That's the actual frame rate per second for theater films, right?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, April 14 2006 02:20 AM (+rSRq)
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No, theaters went with the more logical 24 fps. NTSC was originally 30 fps, but when they added color in 1953, they fudged things to a misbegotten 29.97, using the saved bandwidth on color while retaining backward compatibility with the extant black and white sets.
In order to play back 24 fps material in a normal seeming fashion on 30 fps televisions, you have to repeat frames every so often - every fourth frame. The simplest solution in dealing with the problem for 29.97 fps sets was to keep the same ratio of 1:1.25 (24:30) - and that's how we ended up with dvds formatted in 23.97602 fps... and the consequent truly irritating problems in converting video from one format to another. To say nothing of the problems involved in synching the audio up again.
Posted by: HC at Friday, April 14 2006 04:52 PM (qmTWt)
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Wednesday, April 12
So, Pixy, Whatcha Up To?
Oh, nothing much.
(I've also started uploading some AMVs.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:11 AM
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Ah,
Hayashibara's Lips! Now THERE'S a classic!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, April 12 2006 11:27 AM (+rGmJ)
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I don't know if you've got it, but the Stratos 4 OP is a good one.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, April 12 2006 04:43 PM (+rSRq)
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Actually, if you've got it, the OP for the Stratos 4 OVA is even better. It's the same music but much better animation behind it.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, April 12 2006 11:10 PM (+rSRq)
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I don't think I have either. It hasn't been released in Australia, and I don't recall downloading any fansubs for it. (Back when I had money, this wasn't a problem. I imported American DVDs all the time. But for now I'm on a budget.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 12 2006 11:36 PM (LUBRF)
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So, Pixy, what did you think of "Otaku Anthem?"
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, April 13 2006 09:26 PM (+FLIL)
Posted by: TallDave at Thursday, April 13 2006 11:31 PM (H8Wgl)
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Wonderduck - I didn't think it was that great, but it did make me want to watch
World of Narue.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 15 2006 12:53 AM (nimvq)
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...which is the best compliment you can pay a video, if you ask me. I had the same reaction you did (except I like the AMV better than you, apparantly), in that it made me want to watch the show.
Fluff, but fluff is GOOD. Not every anime has to be
Evangelion. There's room for
G-On Riders or
World of Narue, too (not to say that those two are even remotely similar).
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, April 15 2006 02:40 AM (+FLIL)
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No Surprise
Which Haibane Renmei Character are you?
You are Nemu! Nemu is kind of a big-sister figure, always overseeing things and helping raise the children. She reads a lot, and is always sleepy, but that's because she's always doing more than her fair share of work.
Take this
" href="http://quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=17&url=http://www.quizilla.com/users/divadrummer/quizzes/Which+Haibane+Renmei+Character+are+you%3F">quiz!
;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=18&url=http://www.quizilla.com">Quizilla |
;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=21&url=http://www.quizilla.com/register">Join
|
;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=20&url=http://www.quizilla.com/makeaquiz.php">Make A Quiz | More Quizzes |
;" target="quizilla" href="http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=19&url=http://www.quizilla.com/codepastes/?quizid=133039">Grab Code
(via Haibane.info)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:26 AM
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Although when I went back to get the HTML, I changed one of the answers and got Hikari.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 12 2006 01:31 AM (LUBRF)
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I confess that I spent way too long on that quiz. I tried to manipulate it to get every possible character :)
Why do you say it's no surprise that you're Nemu? is it the sleep thing, or the library thing?
As I mentioned in my blog post I am pretty sure I answered the questionns a certain way to get my result. But Nemu definitely is the most similar to me in some ways. I'm pretty much nothing like Reki, though her character fascinates me the most.
Posted by: fledgling otaku at Wednesday, April 12 2006 01:16 PM (BLxXg)
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is it the sleep thing, or the library thing?Yes. :)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 12 2006 06:54 PM (oyvZL)
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I came back as Kuu. Having never seen the show, does that mean anything?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, April 12 2006 07:00 PM (+FLIL)
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"Having never seen the show, does that mean anything?"
Yes, it does, but we're not allowed to say.
Posted by: Will at Thursday, April 13 2006 05:53 PM (SOx9v)
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Tuesday, April 11
January?!
Can't you NASA guys
get anything right?
The mission is set to launch in October 2008, with a rocket that carries both the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and impactor. The orbiter will circle the moon for at least a year, mapping the surface, searching for water and scouting for potential future landing sites to send astronauts. The orbiter will pay particular attention to the south pole, which NASA considers a prime candidate for a future outpost.
The lunar spacecraft will target the south pole too, releasing its SUV-sized impactor probe in January 2009 on a suicide plunge at about 5,600 miles per hour toward a frozen crater believed to contain hidden ice.
No no no! If you're going to blow up the Moon, you have to do it on the
4th of July!
(via LGF)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:27 PM
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Bum!
V = (S+C) x (B+F)/T:
"Slender thighs and a hip-to-waist ratio of 0.7 will frame the perfect bum, well perfectly."
I really hope they have that backwards. And traditionally, the ratio is 3:2:3.
(Actually, the formula as presented makes no sense:
S is the overall shape or droopiness of the bottom, C represents how spherical the buttocks are, B measures muscular wobble or bounce, while F records the firmness.
V is the hip to waist ratio, or symmetry of the bottom, and T measures the skin texture and presence of cellulite.
Which states that hip-to-waist ratio is a function of cellulite. Eh?)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:54 PM
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But from the definitions S would equal 2C and I seem to recall from an undergraduate biology lecture that B and F were inversely proportional. T is an unrelated or lurking variable.
And all outcomes can be converted on a scale that starts at
DAMN!!!!
ends with
DAMN?!?!
and has plain Jane and greyhounds somewhere in between.
Posted by: BIg Mike at Friday, April 14 2006 09:03 AM (i6+Mn)
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Die, Pus Monkeys!
There are few things more thoroughly screwed up than video on Windows. The endless range of differing, pointless, and poorly designed containers and codecs, and the endless bugginess of the programs themselves, makes it agonising to do anything serious with video created by someone else. You find one program that works, and stick with it - and then you get a file from someone else created with
their program that works, and suddenly your program crashes mid-way or corrupts the video or the audio drifts out of sync or it just plain refuses to open the file.
All I was trying to accomplish today was to convert the opening credits of Hand Maid May into a good-quality AVI file. I have at least a dozen programs that purport to do this, but not one of them produced respectable results. Two of them crashed repeatedly, and one would not even recognise the straight-off-the-DVD MPEG-2 file.
To the rescue: VirtualDubMod. I use VirtualDub for all my AVI editing, because while it is not even slightly fancy, it actually does what you tell it to. But it only handles AVI files. VirtualDubMod is a modified version of VirtualDub (which makes sense) that can also cope with Ogg and Matroska and MPEG files. What is not immediately obvious (because it doesn't show up anywhere) is that it can just as easily read the VOB files you find on a DVD.
A little bit of tweaking of the DivX 6.11 codec (never needed to de-interlace the video before) and viola! There are still some compression artifacts, so I'm going to have one more shot at it and then upload whichever version looks best.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
08:35 AM
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AutoGordianKnot works great for me. It creates command line inputs to other progs based on some basic preferences. It uses VDub to 2-pass process VOB files with excellent quality/size properties.
http://www.autogk.me.uk/
Posted by: ct at Tuesday, April 11 2006 10:21 AM (iH6Wf)
2
Thanks, that sounds like just what I was looking for.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 11 2006 10:24 AM (oyvZL)
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Yeah Windows video is a mess. I find it hard to believe that it's merely coincidence that RealPlayer, the prinary competitor to Windows Media Player, is the only program, bar none, that will, on a regular basis, completely freeze my Windows session and force me to turn the power off and on again to restart it.
I got the Hand Maid May DVD a couple weeks and watched the first couple episodes. Annoyingly over the top in some scenes, but overall interesting and worth seeing (tx to SDB for rec).
Posted by: TallDave at Tuesday, April 11 2006 09:11 PM (H8Wgl)
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I'll just note that AutoGK is indeed the bee's knees. Makes it dead easy to produce high-quality DVD rips. The Hand Maid May and Dirty Pair clips I've posted were produced that way.
I plan to raid my DVD closet* next weekend and upload everything I can find.
* I still haven't gotten around to putting up shelves...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 11 2006 09:43 PM (LUBRF)
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Worst Bonus Episodes Ever?
Everyone seems to agree that the
Sugar Summer Special was extremely well done, and provided needed closure to the series. It's one of the best anime "extras" that I've seen.
But what's the worst? My nomination goes to Fushigi Yuugi Eikoden, which manages to negate every major plot point of the series. Wonderduck suggests the Elfen Lied special (which I haven't seen).
Anyone?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:02 AM
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I'm tempted to say, "Angelic Layer, because they didn't do one and I really wanted them to!" But that would be cheating.
I haven't actually seen all that many "extra" episodes; they're not all that common. The worst ones I've seen were the two for .Hack/Sign, but only because they were as mediocre as the rest of the series was.
Would you let me nominate the first "Key the Metal Idol" movie? It was 90 minutes which consisted of nothing except backstory exposition.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, April 11 2006 03:11 AM (+rSRq)
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OK, I looked it up and
Fushigi Yuugi Eikoden is a 4-episode OVA sequel. Now that I understand the rules of the game, I definitely have a nomination: the second
El Hazard OVA. The story was completely derivative, Princess Fatora was intolerable, and the appearance of the second Ifurita made no sense and ruined the ending of the first OVA, which is the only
El Hazard story that's actually worth watching. (What? Were the ancients turning out doomsday weapons on an assembly line or something?)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, April 11 2006 03:25 AM (+rSRq)
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Yes, that's a bad one. Right in line with
Eikoden, it smushes one of the most important points of the original story.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 11 2006 04:28 AM (oyvZL)
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The third Fushigi Yuugi is pretty hard to top. Heck, the only worthwhile thing about the Fushigi Yuugi OAVs was that series of shorts after each episode of the... second OAV, I think.
I suppose Evangelion: Death & Rebirth deserves a mention too... hmm. I'll have to think harder on this.
Posted by: HC at Tuesday, April 11 2006 09:27 AM (qmTWt)
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I nominate the entire Invid arc from Robotech.
(yes, I'm reaching here.. I'm a fledgling, remember?)
Posted by: fledgling otaku at Tuesday, April 11 2006 10:58 AM (BLxXg)
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I think I'd have to nominate the
Rahxephon movie on pure waste-of-money factor. Spend two hours rehashing the plot from the series without all that pesky extended cast and character development.
Posted by: Will at Tuesday, April 11 2006 12:50 PM (SOx9v)
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Some nominations:
Evangelion: Death. A movie, rather than a bonus episode... but it was a movie that consisted entirely of recaps. It was double-billed with Rebirth... but that itself was included in End of Evangelion. So basically, the whole Death/Rebirth movie was redundant.
Pilot Candiate/Candidate for Goddes - The whole series is told entirely in exposition. So's the movie.
The Onegai Twins OVA tends to mess up the ending of the series, so let's mention that as well. Hopefully, one of these qualifies.
Posted by: PyTom at Tuesday, April 11 2006 12:52 PM (vkkAp)
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At the risk of offending our host, I'd probably have to go with some of the Tenchi spin-offs / movies / etc. but I can't decide which ones. It's not that they're especially bad compared to some of the anime out there, just they're a significant drop from the original series. It's especially hard to explain given the jumps in continuity between the various series, and trying to determine which are bonus features and which deserve to be treated as seperate works.
The original OAV series is better than the first TV series. The first movie (Tenchi Muyo in love) is one of my all time favorites, but its a derivative of the first TV universe. Anything with Sammy / Pixy Misa is a guilty pleasure and yet another spin-off universe. The other subsequent TV series range from so-so to pretty lousy. The second movie is pretty bad, and the third is merely ok.
My personal favorite bonus episode is the 14th episode of Dual. Although it completely destroys the premises of the final episode of the regular series, it throws a very odd yet amusing spin on the whole affair.
Posted by: Civilis at Tuesday, April 11 2006 10:01 PM (NCCgb)
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The Tenchi spinoffs range from unncessary (Universe) to outright sucky (Tenchi in Tokyo).
Except for the Pretty Sammy TV series, which
rocks. Because it has Pixy Misa in it. (And because it's a good story, well told.) The Pretty Sammy OVAs aren't that great, though I like the second one, which is an unashamed assault on Microsoft for operating-system bloat.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 11 2006 11:35 PM (LUBRF)
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Monday, April 10
Wunch of Bankers
The current issue of
New Scientist has a cover story about water:
You Need It, But You Won't Believe Why: Water's Quantum Secret. It's mostly about the hydrogen bonds between water molecules, and how they make water act quite unlike otherwise similar compounds. It's not anything new, but interesting enough if you haven't run into the topic before.
And then the article suddenly careers off the cliff into the Great Homeopathic Swamp:
That there is something more to water than hydrogen and oxygen is something many researchers welcome. But Rustum Roy, a materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park goes further. He thinks it is time for a radical overhaul of the scientific view of water - one which, he believes, has been dominated by chemistry for too long. [Oy. — Ed.] "It's absurd to say that chemical composition dictates everything," he says. "Take carbon, for example - the same atoms can give you graphite or diamond."
Well,
duh, Mr Materials Scientist. That's due to the
chemical properties of carbon.
In a review paper published in Materials Research Innovations in December, Roy and a team of collaborators called for a re-examination of the case against the most controversial of all claims made for water: that it has a "memory".
And I call for a re-examination of your head, Mr Roy. I think you were dropped on it.
The physical nature of water is quite straightforward: It does not have a memory. This has been verified experimentally so often that only the very deeply stupid and outright frauds suggest otherwise.
The idea that water can retain some kind of imprint of compounds dissolved in it has long been cited as a possible mechanism for homeopathy
See my comment on the stupid and the fraudulent.
which claims to treat ailments using solutions of certain compounds.
But doesn't.
Some homeopathic remedies are so dilute they no longer contain a single molecule of the original compound -
Exactly so. And homeopaths, who knowingly sell their customers distilled water and sugar pills, claim that these are the most effective.
- prompting many scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary.
Bullshit, Mr New Scientist Editor.
What has prompted all competent and honest scientists to dismiss homeopathic effects as imaginary is that it doesn't do anything. It's been tested. It doesn't do anything. Yes, all physical, chemical and biological theory tells us that it won't do anything, but that pales beside the experimental evidence for it not doing anything.
Roy believes that by taking homeopathy seriously scientists may find out more about water's fundamental properties.
Pixy Misa believes that Roy was dropped on his head as a child.
The present editors of New Scientist, though, are merely an irresponsible bunch of scoundrels in it for the money.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
10:40 AM
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Regrettably, not everything from my alma mater is worth the time. At least this professor was not convicted of murder...before he became a professor!
It is depressing how the Mat Sci department has gone to the morons. We have or had a couple of fine professors from the UK in the department back in the day. Very good, very funny, very intelligent and sensible bunch.
C.T.
Posted by: C.T. at Monday, April 10 2006 05:14 PM (ehvnJ)
2
Hah! Good ol' Dr. Roy. He was the laughingstock of the
local paper in State College, PA throughout my college years, and most
of my good-for-nothing years as well. He was batshit in a fairly
tedious and long-winded manner. So he's selling homeopathy
now?
I seem to remember someone publishing a study claiming to actually get
some positive results on a homeopathic claim last year, but I fear to
google for it lest I fall into a truly septic mountain of moonbat guano
on the way...
Posted by: Mitch H. at Tuesday, April 11 2006 01:49 PM (iTVQj)
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There WAS a (sort of) vindication of homeopathy awhile back, but it wasn't for the reason the homeopathic advocates claim. What they found was that very dilute concentrations of things like radon and arsenic that are poison in higher concentrations actually do have beneficial effects. That is NOT, or course, the same as saying you can keep adding water to something ad infinitum and get the same effects.
And there WAS actually some recent hullabaloo about the fundamental properties of water, which inolve its shape.
Still, this article sounds wacky. I was considering a subscription to NS, but I guess I'll stick with SciAm and Science.
Posted by: TallDave at Tuesday, April 11 2006 10:20 PM (H8Wgl)
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There are almost infinitely many examples of substances that are deadly in large doses but can be beneficial in small doses and under the right circumstances. Salt is a good example. Water is another. Homeopathy still doesn't work, of course.
I used to buy New Scientist every week without fail, but it's been going steadily downhill for years. Sad, really.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 11 2006 11:30 PM (LUBRF)
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Come to think of it, oxygen would fit that criteria too (Okay, so it has to be pure oxygen under very high pressure. But you have to start labeling one of the most corrosive gas dangerous at SOME point.).
C.T.
Posted by: C.T. at Wednesday, April 12 2006 02:45 AM (8Arod)
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