Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:14 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Holographic display? Gimme!

I'd probably put it to better use, too:

Hey! Even Raine has one! No fair!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:58 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Leaving aside the pretentious name, it's a video player with a built-in file manager, BitTorrent client, and RSS thingy. What this means is that you can grab various RSS feeds and have it automatically download the files via BitTorrent as they become available. Just add a channel, copy and paste the RSS link, and off you go.

Remember that it is BitTorrent, so it will use your upstream bandwidth to share the videos while you have it open. It uses the standard BitTorrent ports too, and in the current version there seems to be no way to change that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:45 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Males have a lot of trouble not looking at
breasts. What is worse, males cannot look at breasts and think at
the same time. In fact, scientists now believe that the primary
biological function of breasts is to make males stupid. This was
proved in a famous 1978 laboratory experiment wherein a team of
leading male psychological researchers at Yale deliberately looked
at photographs of breasts every day for two years, at the end of
which they concluded that they had failed to take any notes. "We forgot," they said. "We'll have to do it again."

— Dave Barry

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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What I'm talking about is the inability to turn your brain off. An engineer is someone who comes out of The Matrix and says "That part about humans being used as batteries was really stupid. Humans are net consumers of energy. Now, if they'd said that human brains were being used as computation and memory units by the robots..."

(As an aside, there's a tendency to diagnose engineers, or rather engineers-to-be, as having high-function autism, or Asperger's Syndrome, or PDD-NOS, or whatever this weeks fashionable term is. To which I say, piss off you over-socialised wankers!)

Uh, where was I. Oh yeah. So, an engineer who happens to like, just to pick an example at random, silly little anime shows, will tend to over-analyse them, assuming (or hoping) that said silly little show will fully address the implications of the situations in which it has placed its characters.

Now, when you're dealing with something like The Matrix, or more contemporarily V for Vendetta, you know that this sort of analysis is almost certainly a waste of time. You're dealing with late 20th / early 21st century Hollywood, the place where dreams go to die.

But the Japanese are different. The less seriously they take themselves, the more likely they are to tackle complex ideas and deal with them well. (Maybe not so different as all that; one of the biggest problems Hollywood has these days is that it takes itself far too seriously.) We saw that with Popotan; a sillier, littler series you would be hard pressed to find, and yet the last few episodes are amazing.

And so we come to UFO Princess Valkyrie. The show has a gun that turns women into cat-girls, for crying out loud. And yet...

STEVEN, DO NOT CLICK HERE!!!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:33 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Kamichu is the story of Yurie, a middle-school girl who discovers one day that she is a god (kami-sama). The stories are very simple, focusing on various developments and difficulties in Yurie's adaptation to divinity while still trying to keep her family and school life somewhat normal.

One of the charming things about the series is that this is not a secret. Everyone knows that Yurie is a god, and treats it entirely matter-of-factly. But apart from the story itself, what makes the show special is the character design, artwork, and animation. It's not quite Miyazaki, but if you like his work, you'll love Kamichu.

The opening is already available in my torrent directory; I'll put the ending up as a separate file now. This particular clip was a cow to produce because it is encoded at a different frame rate to the rest of the video file. In fact, the encoders of the various Kamichu! fansubs seem to be rather erratic; I've yet to find a program that will play back all the files correctly. I just spent an hour fussing with VLC so that I could watch episode 6 in the proper (16:9) aspect ratio. BSPlayer crashes. WinAmp won't even open the file. VLC plays it, but screws up the subtitles. WMP gets the subtitles right, but squashes everything. Sigh.

By the way, I'd appreciate it if you'd give the torrents a try and let me know how they go. The current version of the software doesn't give me a lot of feedback, but it looks as though someone has been downloading the fils but very slowly. Either they have a dial-up connection, or something is wrong on my end.

Feel free to play with the comment editor as well. I think it needs a bit more hacking before it's ready for prime time, and your, um, comments, would be useful.

Ack. And because there's a bug in the layout of Broadcast Machine if you have 3n-1 files in a channel (for n>1), I've uploaded the closing credits for Ichigo 100% as well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:46 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Torrents here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:13 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I've upgraded from Blog Torrent, which worked (mostly) but was orphaned, to Broadcast Machine, which is nicer, works (mostly), and isn't orphaned.

It uses the same helper app for creating torrents, though, and it is evil.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And I got a download speed of two megabytes per second.

Azureus worked out that the seed was accessible on my wireless network, and went straight there rather than going out onto the internet.

Fortunately, I also have wireless internet, and that confirmed that the seed really was working.

So go for it!

By the way, if you have your own collection of clips that you would be willing to donate to be torrentified, drop me a comment. I'm kind of addicted to these things.

Of what's there now, my favourites:

The opening of Nanaka 6/17.
The closing of Popotan.
The opening and closing of Shinobuden.
The opening of Pretty Cure. The closing isn't bad either.
The opening of Tsukuyomi Moon Phase.
The opening and closing of Kamichu, the best anime of 2005.
And of course, the opening of Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar (aka Sugar, A Little Snow Fairy) which is a work of kawaii genius.

Oh yes, and the opening of Mama Is A 4th Grader. Steven Den Beste is wont to say that we are not nearly afraid enough of the Japanese (in reference to some particularly bizarre bit of their popular culture), but I think there's little to worry about with a culture that can produce something like this.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:16 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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