Ambient Irony

They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.

Saturday, November 19

Erased

Also known as Boku dake ga Inai Machi.

There have been quite a few anime series playing with different forms of time travel this year. MariWaka, which is full of stable time loops, Re:Zero, with its rather unfortunate reset mechanism; Orange, I think (haven't watched it yet), and this one.

It starts out as a kind of anime version of Tru Calling, but quickly flips to something different and larger.

Our hero, Satoru, a 29-year-old failed manga author, has the ability sometimes to skip a few minutes backwards in time and avert an accident. When one such "revival" just leads to further tragedy, he finds himself skipping back years and having to rewrite his own life to prevent the circumstances that led up to this in the first place.

Solid so far. And it has a terrific opening credit sequence, which for me is 90% of what makes anime great.

Watching it on AnimeLab, the Australian streaming service run by MadMan Entertainment, which is so much better at this than Netflix. One click and I have instant perfect 1080p video. Netflix has to think about it for quite a while before it upshifts from third-generation VHS.

Update: Finished, and recommended. Not perfect - the pacing is a bit off here and there - but very good. Apparently they cut a few episodes worth of material out of the manga, including much of what happens in the present day, but it works very well as it is. And the actors who voice the main character both do a great job.

It also has the least misleading opening credits I've seen for years. The entire story is in there, but you can't see it until you've watched the whole thing.

There's also a live action version. Don't know if I want to watch it; the story is intense enough when the characters are animated. Also, the trailer is loaded with spoilers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:43 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Friday, November 18

Classic Apple Form Over Function

If you can't use your mouse because the battery is flat, you need to plug it in via the Lightning port - which is on the bottom, so you still can't use your mouse.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:04 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Re: Re: Zero

Now I see what all the fuss was about.

But Betty is clearly best girl.

I want to see where this goes, but the 25 episodes that just ran covered all the published material (and some that wasn't yet published when it aired; the author was directly involved in the anime production). Since it started in 2014, it will be at least 2018 before they can do another run, unless they slow the pacing down significantly, or add filler, neither of which I want to see.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Saturday, November 12

Winners And Losers

What we've learned from 2016, as far as politics goes

Advertising doesn't work
Polls don't work
Newspaper endorsements don't work
Celebrity endorsements don't work
Telling your opponent's voters they are bigoted fools really, really doesn't work
Complaining about your opponents living in an impenetrable bubble when you write for the New York Fucking Times just makes you look silly
No-one really knows what's going on, especially Paul Krugman, except that
Liberals are consistently poor losers

Winners

Populism, generally
The alt-right, unfortunately
Twitter, surprisingly
Reddit
Rule of law

Losers

The mainstream media and their perennial sense of entitlement
Academia generally, and the screaming campus garbage babies in particular (which is why they're rioting in such hotbeds of conservatism as Oakland, Berkeley, and Portland)
The globalist agenda
Facebook
Political dynasties
Snark as a substitute for adult discourse
Polling organisations. Guys, you got everything wrong this year. Everything.
The breathless pearl-clutching incredibly sincere liberals infesting my technology and pop-culture podcast feeds
SJWs and their entire blighted worthless movement
Huge secretive trade agreements like TPP and TTIP

I'm buoyed up at the moment on a tsunami of schadenfreude, because I loathe those losers (as may be apparent). But I'm far from complacent about Donald Trump being leader of the free world, which he IS, or rather, will be in two short months.

But politics is suddenly interesting again, social trends that needed a resounding slap upside the head have been so slapped, and the most corrupt presidential candidate in living memory got soundly thumped.

If we're all dead in four years time I'll regret it then, but not today. Not today.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:10 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Yup, the pendulum is swinging back, hard.

BTW, over at Brickmuppet, I'm seeing the comments on that long post of pictures overlap the comment entry box.

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, November 12 2016 01:07 PM (5Ktpu)

2 The boil has been lanced. It is oozing pus and still infected. It will take months of treatment, but it will be healed if we keep draining it and applying disinfectant.

Posted by: Ken in NH at Saturday, November 12 2016 03:34 PM (HKDTd)

3 I don't agree about Twitter and Facebook. If anything, Zuck's refusal to eject Thiel from the board raised his esteem, while Dorcy's SJW agenda damaged his company. And in any case Facebook is just better, as a social platform.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sunday, November 13 2016 01:20 PM (XOPVE)

4 No argument on that last point.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 13 2016 09:54 PM (PiXy!)

5 Demographics are destiny: in two ways. 1. Even if the US slams the outside door totally shut on 21 January 2017, the US school system - public & private - is on it's 3rd generation of Marxist snowflakes. 2. Culturally, the US shall continue on the arc of 'identity politics,' a polite way of saying Balkanization, among our existing population.
All that aside: the fact that HRC was running and not in jail proves that the rule of Law is dead; Trump's election, while awesome, is just the twitch of the giant's corpse.
I've one (well, two, but that's beyond the scope of this comment) hope: the right fights to take back the culture. Politics is downstream from Culture; learn or die.
#Gab #machciv #culture

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Thursday, November 17 2016 12:55 PM (ug1Mc)

6 Right. In itself, this is no more than a reprieve. But a Clinton win would have been a disaster.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 17 2016 02:53 PM (PiXy!)

7 But the fact that we got this reprieve is a sign that there are still a lot of people willing to fight. We have sixty million allies, and that's no small thing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 17 2016 09:00 PM (PiXy!)

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Wednesday, November 09

Four Flaming Skulls

Trump is still Trump, but for now it's time to celebrate.

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Monday, November 07

Dammit, Scientists!

I always wondered why certain trans-Neptunian objects were classified as "cubewanos". Where did that name come from? There are plutinos (makes sense, planetoids similar to Pluto), classic and resonant Scattered Disk Objects (SDOs), Kuiper Belt Objects, and so on, which are mostly self-explanatory. But cubewanos?

Turns out the first example found was classified as (15760) 1992 QB1. Other similar objects were named QB1-os - as in spaghettios. And that ended up being spelled cubewanos.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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