Anime — Blue Drop ～天使達の戯曲～

Blue Drop -- The Angel's Play

One of my top 5 titles of 2007, good for reasons I can't really explain. On the surface, it's really just Mari-mite with spaceships…

Wakatake Mari is an amnesiac orphan, sent to a girls' bording school after her elderly aunt (grandma?) can no longer look after her and home-school her. She is roomed together with the class president, Senkouji Hagino, whose presence triggers memories of the disaster that killed her parents.

But Hagino is really Commander Ekaril of the 5th investigative ship BLUE, and a renegade from an alien scouting fleet which is undertaking preparatory reconnaissance for an alien invasion.

This is a story of school life… Will Mari reconcile with Hagino? Will dormitory head Funatsumaru Hiroko manage to KEEP WEIGHT? Can Michi finish writing the script in time for her play to be performed at the school festival? Or will the curtain be brought down prematurely by the Arume invasion?

All done in a very engaging style of animation, and with an impressive soundtrack, with both OP and ED (below) being spot on for atmosphere.

Bottom right of the top image is, of course BLUE Drop -- in the style of an Adama Drop, that is.

Copied and pasted, regarding FLoser episode 9:
Haali media splitter doesn't split this mp4 container version correctly so you will get only video. So in mplayer classic press O (options) -> internal filters -> source filters ( tick mp4 ) -> ok and it plays it back perfectly, OR use VLC

Anime — Sky Girls

Girls in aerial frames blowing stuff up -- what's not to like?

After devastating global conflict against autonomous machines called WORMs, reconstruction has begun, with the 20-40 age group decimated after the conflict, leaving teenage girls in the front line when the WORMs return, in this title which builds upon (and modifies the continuity of) the 2006 OVA.

A little bit slice of life meets monster of the week, with a blink and you miss it somewhat confused environmental moral. Not an enduring classic, but a bit of good harmless fun with girls blowing stuff up, and one of the better titles from 2H07.

Book — Being Digital — by Nicholas Negroponte

The new guy (a new graduate) on my team loaned me his copy as about the only book in his library that I hadn't already read, after I had pointed him in the direction of a lot of SF and said "read that" to his counter-suggestions.

Nothing dates so quickly as the future…

From the viewpoint of 14 years after, it's easy to see that his vision completely missed out blogging (and user generated content in general) -- the tacit assumption throughout is that the MSM would still be the main source of content; and the mobile phone (and wireless in general) -- like the pre-wired house of the future (when I laid cabling at home about 10 years ago, that was bleeding edge; in '06 when I ripped it out, it was an embarrassing anachronism), or the home system that would detect that you were out and answer the phone without waiting to ring-out (rather than the call being expected to go to you at your mobile rather than the fixed location, your house). And he only vaguely got something in the neighbourhood of search engines.

Overall, an interesting read from a perspective of history, but that is all that remains.

Links for 18-Jan

The Majesty of the Mythical Man-month

Immutability in C# -- a review

StopwatchWriter -- a neat use of the using(IDisposable) idiom, which really is the C# equivalent of a destructor

Links for 16-Jan

Powershell and inner exceptions -- hooking into WinDbg

Collection.Each -- Ruby-like idiom for C# 3.0

System.AddIn scenarios -- why you will want to use this new feature

Software Transactional Memory for F#

F# Fast Guide -- documentation links

Links for 15-Jan

Building your own literals in Java -- a neat trick, that could probably be made to work in C#

The Myth of Creativity -- Thinking about thinking about problem solving

Is Programming Like Music or Engineering, and Must it Be Unintuitive

Nerdosity

NerdTests.com says I'm a Cool Nerd King. What are you? Click here!

Links for 11-Jan

Use collection<T> rather than List<T> in APIs

Test SMTP delivery without needing a mail server

.Net 3 offers windows automation APIs

.Net 3.5 System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement simplifies credential and group membership checks

System.AddIn pipeline builder

Anime — Moyashimon : Tales of Agriculture

It starts off with an offbeat premise -- a boy who can see microbes, and whose family has associations with the brewing trade, going up to agricultural college; such plot as there is generally involves weird and wonderful fermented foodstuffs from around the world (like kiviak, illustrated on the right); and the intricacies of sake production.

It's only 11 episodes, and could have been fluffy and slightly educational with it; and after 6 episodes, I was willing to rate it as "unexpectedly good". But then the next two episodes got subbed...

Alas

-- after the half-way point, the gross fermented foodstuffs give way to frat-boy antics, sophomoric ecchi humour, and bolt-on by-the-numbers fan-service (trap? check. lipstick lesbians? check.) -- which literally loses the plot. It wasn't about the people, it was about fun with fermentation, and related bio-industrial or similar processes.

Verdict: Disappointing.

Links for 9-Jan

A first look at Parallel FX -- a .Net concurrency management framework (interesting ideas to try and use it in an Erlang-like idiom here)

Python vs C# 3.0: Tuples vs. Anonymous Types (Redux)

Some New IIS7 Resources

The 51 Core Abilities of Successful Software -- and we wonder why Business Software is Messy and Ugly

Configuration Section Designer plug-in for Visual Studio

JRuby 1.1 hits RC and Ruby 1.9 (experimental) release

Links for 7-Jan

Start of a holiday round-up:

What I admire about professions like Engineering and Medicine -- Software Engineering still has a long way to go

You can't measure what you've never seen before -- usability and novel interfaces

Design by contract in .Net 3.5 -- a series of articles

Why designing Surface apps is different -- another series

Watin -- ASP.Net unit test framework

Design Patterns -- the controversy continues

Functional -- A functional programming library for JavaScript

Anime — 2007 in review

A little premature perhaps, since there are some titles that finish airing this quarter that haven't been completely subbed, or have been, but I've not watched yet (Sky Girls, Moyashimon, Blue Drop, but all of which seem aimed at the "Unexpectedly good" category), or carry over into Q1 next year (Ghost Hound); but this year is the first I've been deep enough into the scene for a round-up to be better than superficial. So, from the top…

The best: Dennou Coil, Mononoke, and Seirei no Moribito — each very different from the others, so no possible ranking

Unexpectedly good: Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Rocket Girls, Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight

Sequels that didn't quite live up to their predecessors: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, and Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS

In the category of "also watched" Claymore, the Marimite OVA series (more of the usual) and, leaking over from last year, Le Chevalier d'Eon. I would add Moonlight Mile, but nobody picked up the second season because it had been licensed for the US (unlike the complete subbing done for Gurren Lagann, Seirei no Moribito or Chevalier in similar circumstances).

Now the lemons, the series I dropped. Apart from the mess made of Bokurano, I also tried a few episodes and gave up on a number of titles:

• El Cazador de la Bruja, after 3 or 4 episodes, another girls and guns from the creators of Noir, that just didn't seem to have the charm (or musical hook) of the first.
• Saint October, for lack of subs after 3 episodes, but I might have given up this somewhat weak magical girl series anyway
• Les Miserables, for lack of subs after 6 episodes, though it was shaping up to be rather slow paced
• Lucky Star of which I watched 4 episodes, though I may come back to this harmless piece of fluff, it was just the anime equivalent of candy floss
• Kaiji from the same mangaka as Akagi, but following a character completely opposite in temperament. Akagi grabbed me in the first few minutes; this was just boring. Watched 4, called it suspended, watched another recently, still no better.
• Shugo Chara! a magical girl series for girls, didn't really grab after one episode

Non-starters: Hidamari Sketch, Potemayo and Sketchbook full color's, for which I couldn't manage a full episode (Kawaii! JeNny also fits here, but that would only ever have been for the lulz).

Worst of the year (of titles I watched) : Baccano! which gained raves about awesome and loveable characters, who turn out to be respectively psychopaths and morons, no-one likeable or sympathetic. I watched two and a bit episodes and stopped, because it was shaping up to just being a downright nasty splatterfest. It left a very nasty taste in my mouth.

Manga — Narutaru (Shadow Star)

At last, I have been able to read it all in English, rather than just look at the pretty(?) pictures, since the last third was never translated, and the last half could no longer be had for love nor money. Admittedly vol. 12 is still only there in the form of separate script and raw, but that's one of the perks of having leapt at the chance of proofing the scripts for volumes 10-12 — the edited version probably won't be released until the end of January.

So we find that the anime had subtle spoilers for parts of the manga that hadn't yet been translated, and exactly what is going on in the bleak concluding volumes, in a way that existing synopses had failed to achieve.

At times a bit shaky, darting off in directions that never quite come to anything except to in passing reveal a fragment of what is going on; but in the last three, previously untranslated, volumes, picking up momentum to the final resolution.

The End of Narutaru.

Anime — Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai (ひぐらしのなく頃に解)

Sequel/(re)solution/revelation series to the original Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (ひぐらしのなく頃に).

While the original was all about things falling apart and “WTF is going on??”, this explains what has been going on through all the previous reboots, and spins it out over a recap episode and three arcs spread over 23 episodes. This does give it pacing problems : the second arc is somewhat repetitious in the episodes of “Save Satoko.” protest, and the third and last stretches the back-story over an episode too many.

I stalled for a very long time over episode 16, the third of the final arc, which had a lot of covering the ground of things we had already inferred happening from the back-story revealed in previous arcs, but then marathoned the last half of that episode and the rest today. It did take a bit of getting started, but by the time it got to be obvious that we were past the “Oh, not that again!!” bit, it picked up momentum, and got to be more like what the series had been in the past (only with a happy end).

 

For the lulz -- in the style of the NaruTaru OP, with just the same level of spoilers…

Happy holidays

Another working year over, though not quite the usual ritual, as this time Karen has come down with one of the bugs that's going around, and has been feeling quite wretched, while I try and stave similar off.

So it was by myself to the much reduced traditional banquet last night, and then today, I was spared the drive down to the in-laws in the pouring rain, did a bit of coding, and watched a lot of anime.

Including rewatching some Simoun. Knowing the outcomes for the characters makes it, if anything, even look even better crafted. Mamiina ;_;