Anime, year to date

Viewing has been fairly thin this year (only 3 series picked up from Q1, and nothing appealing from Q2 even with the after-action reports coming in, to investigate), and yet I've still been falling behind. So to cover what I've actually completed so far this year:

Inferno Cop

Studio Trigger -- saving anime one frame at a time!

This low animation (everything is a static sprite, with a few exceptions like Inferno Cop's flames) short episode one cour series from the larger bunch of ex-Gainax staffers actually started at the end of last year.

It's an affectionate parody of the 1980s OVA (e.g. Angel Cop) through video games and on to an ending right out of Evangelion. And unlike the last Gainax parody anime, it eschews carrying the series on cute Japanese girls cursing like troopers in English.

And it's officially up on YouTube if you have a spare half-hour - as also is

Little Witch Academy

More traditional animation from Studio Trigger, a cute little tale of the underdog winning at a sort of Hogwarts for Girls.

Available on the Studio Trigger channel.

Natsume Yuujincho seasons 3 and 4

The later cours move from being humorous or bittersweet tales of youkai, and move more to Natsume's teen angst, torn between the friends he's been able to make in both school and those in the spirit world. The introduction of a continuing villain in the Mataba clan, exorcists who view the youkai as a natural resource to harvest doesn't help either.

Still. the series reaches some closure -- even if the manga continues -- by effectively wrapping up the defining event of his life, as he revisits his childhood home for the last time.

Vividred Operation

Strike Witches in hotpants meets Nanoha meets Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons in this tale of magical Science! girls vs alien invaders.

In a typical shot, Captain Black Kuro supervises the Mysterons Alone

This has everything -- alien invaders, magical girls, mascot animal, Captain Black Kuro on the alien side, the power of friendship, power ups via gattai, Graf Eisen, you name it...

It's let down a little at the end when everyone stands around looking gormless for some minutes while the final boss starts to drink up all the Science! energy that would power the Vivids, and we never get the ultimate VividSpectrum gattai, but still harmless, if forgettable, fun.

Puella Magi Madoka★Magica

Madoka is surprised at the downsides of the magical girl gig

This one not finished, but rather put on indefinite hold if not outright dropped after 8 episodes of 12.

Yes, a landmark series from a couple of years ago that made it over the barrier of otaku anime and found popularity in the wider population in Japan; which I picked up when the Manga UK DVDs came out last autumn.

Alas, some series weather complete spoilers (i.e. from picking up after the fact from reading unfiltered popular reaction) better than others -- and this, unlike, say, Gurren Lagann, to name one that I watched with similar levels of knowing what was going to happen, is one that doesn't.

The story really relies entirely on dropping major genre-busting twists every couple of episodes -- and not on the cast of wooden and generally unsympathetic characters; so when you already know the twists, there's not a lot left to carry it. I certainly never saw how come the Japanese fandom came up with so much MadoHomu with what they had had to go on by that point -- their yuri goggles must have been turned up to a level that would have burned them out on Nanoha episode 4 alone!

I wasn't even able to get any real vicarious unspoiled viewing from my wife's reactions, as this one (unlike, say, the Vivids) seemed to leave her quite cold. That was not helped by the choice between the icky-cutesy voiced US dub (much like the one that did its best to ruin A Cat in Paris) and the poorly timed (often a syllable late, always very tight within the duration of the dialog) subtitles that really need a level of speed-reading.

The proper ED, after they dropped the pretense that this was a typical mahou shoujo, wasn't bad.

Saki Achiga-hen

Oh yeah, and the last few episodes of the mahjong mayhem that covered in 13 episodes (plus three of backstory) what the main series did in twice that, so the set-up of the opposing teams and all the mahou-jong powers weren't anywhere near as developed. Harmless fluff, but light in weight even compared with the original.

Recent reading

Time to do some catching up for the last few months...

Neal Asher's Polity (Agent Cormac, Spatterjay, and others)

As one of the few SF writers whose blog I can stand to follow, I thought last summer that it was about time that I went and read some more of his books -- having read The Engineer and Gridlinked back when they were new, well before I even started this blog. So since then I've been slowly pacing myself through everything that the local Waterstone's had on its shelves, trying not to mine out this rich seam too fast. But now, alas, that particular well has run dry for the moment.

Now, why had I left this much to accumulate? After I'd read Gridlinked, I'd felt that the book had gotten close to my squick level; and the description of his next oeuvre, The Skinner made it sound like it would be way over. But another decade on the internet seems to have desensitized me enough to handle the rest, though there have still been a few places where I've thought "I get the point" and skipped to the end of the scene -- you know you're getting off lightly, for example, when someone undergoing radical surgery for an invasive alien parasite is merely described as "looking like an explosion in an abattoir".

So, provided you are OK with the level of mud, blood, body horror and psychotic villainy, and are looking for good solid action adventure SF this is a setting of a messily human, yet generally optimistic far future, without the antiseptic niceness that too often seems a genre staple, where action spans from massive interstellar war-fleets to the poor bastards who have to get up close and personal with whichever menace out of time or space is behind the machinations of the current plot.

I still have no idea how my memories of Gridlinked (before rereading it recently) managed to get confused with what I think must have been Banks' Consider Phlebas which I must have read a decade earlier.

Next up, The Owner...

The Serene Invasion by Eric Brown

And now for something completely different...

Another "golden spaceship" novel in which the human race is enslaved by alien puppet-masters who stay offstage, much like his earlier Kethani. The difference in this one is that, rather than patching up and rewriting broken humans, the aliens rewrite reality directly to prevent the expression of actions that would injure self or others -- including animals (the matter of what happened to surgeons was quietly ignored, when even boxing was rendered impossible).

Consequently there are no riots over the last remaining stocks of bacon as the human race are socially engineered back to locavore subsistence farming under a network of alien-symp soviets. Resistance, such as it is, comes in the form of Morwell, a caricature Murdoch/Maxwell (the name might have given that one away) style media baron and ex-arms manufacturer, and a cartoon alien enemy who, while being able to rewrite reality nearly as well as the S'rene, apparently still find economic use in sending lower races down mines for materials (probably because they're right wingers and do that sort of thing, along with eating babies for breakfast, as naturally as breathing).

Normally I don't hold a writer's repugnant political views against them (I actually enjoy China Miéville's F/SF writing, ffs), but this sanctimonious piece of work comes straight out of -- or, rather, dives straight into and never again emerges from -- the low information leftist/watermelon reality tunnel.

It's the third strike, and you're out, I'm afraid, Mr. Brown.

Later: And the attention to detail is so great -- while humanity is being guided to hand-knit its own lentils, nothing is said about what you do with the billions of farm animals that you can no longer eat or even castrate. Or what you do when your horse breaks a leg, or your cat has a stroke and goes mad with terror.

None of that matters when you're getting off on fantasizing that your hate figures are sexual inadequates -- that's much more important to consider after the new Year Zero.

Milkweed (Bitter Seeds et seq.) by Ian Tregillis

Mad English warlocks vs twisted Nazi psychics? Yes please!

So runs Cory Doctorow's blurb on the back cover of the first volume of this Weird War II trilogy, summing it up most concisely.

This one caught my eye from the striking cover design of the series, the blurb piqued my interest, and the teaser synopsis did the rest.

Although there are a few lapses of nuance that betray the writer as American in this trilogy set in an alternate world where the Commonwealth -- and in particular, the most secret part of British Intelligence -- stands alone against the Nazis and then, later, the Soviets and their superhumans, the whole was a gripping read.

For once, a touch of flaming June

It seems like this is the first time in many years that we have had such a run of good weather, bright crisp rather than sticky, warm but not too hot -- certainly while I've been on holiday, it is.  It's been good to just kick back and enjoy after a fairly gruelling spring, in terms of both weather and work, potter a bit in the garden, start to do some real cooking for a change, and get out on the bike just for the sheer  enjoyment of it.  And without going on any endurance rides, averaged 15 miles each day so far, more than I would have done if it were a working week.

Too nice a day to be in the office...

Well, actually it has been all week, with mostly clear skies and temperatures in the high teens, moderated by a cool northerly breeze, those perfect days of early summer. So it's just as well I've not been in the office.

Just the sort of weather when a trip to the shops can be enlivened by a 10-15 mile detour on the way there, and finding places and ways ever so nearby that I've never been before despite having lived in the current place for over 25 years now, from little corner cuts to joining up places I'd never connected before.

Wet and Dry

Despite some wet weeks which cut down the cycle commuting, May made up with both Bank Holiday weekends being fine and dry. So at the end of the month I was at 6659.3 miles, or 294.1 miles in the month with long rides on the holiday weekends and 1066.4 for the year to date (1150 when counting the holiday in March), which compares with just over 600 this time last year; and 2840 miles in 12 months (ignoring hire bike miles).

The wet did give me a slot to get the bike overhauled and a new chain fitted after having been in heavy use for the last six months, so ready for summer, which seems to be arriving.

Bloomin' ridiculous

Forsythia should be long over by the time the cherry blossom is out

The garden has in the last few weeks leapt from winter torpor to that point of high spring where you just have to turn your back for weeds to be ankle-deep; so there have been a lot of delayed chores to catch up with -- and on the surprisingly good weather for the early bank holiday, the temptation to get out in the sunshine and fresh air on the bicycle.

So now the plants in the greenhouse are getting to the size to be planted out, or into grow-bags, the weather turns cold and very wet again.

A short month and a busy one

With spring catching up from being six weeks late, meaning plenty of catch-up in the garden, and work getting to that stage of a release cycle, amongst other distractions, I'm building up a backlog of things to post about. But this will just have to do for the time being.

An odo reading of 6365.2 means 253.5 miles cycled -- highest monthly total so far (excluding holiday miles) despite rain and events that kept me at home on some of the best fine days, and on the road for the cool, cloudy ones.

Spring may be here

In warm sunshine today, I mowed the lawn for the first time this year, and do a bit more hoeing and weeding. The cherry tree looks like it will burst its buds soon, ahead of the plums, which is unusual.

And that won't be the only bit of catching up needed in the garden. Hardy plants can start emerging from the greenhouse, and seeds get planted, in the coming days.

Hints of spring

Even though on Friday, when cycling home, there were still patches of snow in the more sheltered ditches, the weekend has started to feel warmer, at long last. I even managed to start pottering in the garden, removing moss and straw from some of the beds, pruning the dogwood, and planting out narcissi that had bloomed on the window-sill six weeks ago.

Q1 cycling

I'm up to 6111.7 on the odo, or 519 miles on my bike, plus 85 on the hire bike for last week's holiday, so 604 miles total in the quarter, compared with last year's 344 by this point.

The downside is that having cycled in snowy/slushy conditions, I clearly picked up a fair bit of salt from gritted roads, as there's a lot more surface rust on the various fixtures and fittings, and the dérailleurs -- let alone the chain -- have needed continual attention to keep from seizing up.

Sunny Suffolk Cycling

View 27-Mar-2013 in a larger map

When I stayed at the Westleton Crown last year, I wasn't aware that it was a bit declassé -- it just seemed like a nice country hotel, located conveniently to the coast, not too far from Southwold. Nice enough that as CycleBreaks offered it as a new single centre this year, I used up the remnants of last year's leave carried over to take a couple of nights there with the intention of enjoying the spring weather.

Now I hadn't been planning on the weather being like it was last year, but nor had I been expecting this

This is how an Ice Age begins

when I booked. And this wasn't the worst -- on the way there, taking a wrong left out of three near Stradbroke, the satnav helpfully corrected me down a single-track road where the drifted snow was still across the road in places, as rutted ice between small lakes (not that some of the bits on the route it had intended were much better -- approaching this bit

View Larger Map

was much the same, with drifted ice across the road before seeing this wonderful sign ahead). The sun was generally shining, though, and in the bits where I was sheltered from the relentless north-easterly, the glorious spring day that should have been managed to emerge in places.

At least having been accustomed to these sorts of temperatures on the commute to work, I had judged how much to wrap up so as not to overheat, and so I was warm enough, even wanting a little of the breeze through my fleece for air cooling. The other side-effect was that I didn't get anywhere as thirsty as I usually do on long summer rides, so getting to Halesworth around 11, it was just time for a cup of coffee for warmth, before taking the scenic route (past Bernard Matthews Bootiful Turkeys) to Southwold for lunch.

Wizard's Tower

Southwold was as near to deserted as I've ever seen it on this day in the school holidays running up to Easter, and while there were a few well wrapped up holidaymakers on the beach, nobody was trying the water.

Sunny Southwold

A substantial lunch was had at the Blue Lighthouse, and then I did the loop around the town and over the bridge to Walberswick, where, based on past experiences I declined to take the off-road bit to cut off the corner. The main road to Westleton being closed, I went into Dunwich, though didn't feel the inclination to stop for beer at the Ship. The bridlepath from Minsmere was actually quite passable -- drier than it has been last summer -- though there were some places on the last leg towards Eastbridge where I wheeled over snow/icy slush. And thence going off-piste back to the hotel, discovered some sights I wouldn't have by staying to the rustic routes.

Stainless Steel Sheriff

View 28-Mar-2013 in a larger map

Having been heartened by the good state of the offroad sections on Wednesday, Thursday I took the short-cut track past Minsmere, which only had a couple of bits of wheeling past wide puddles, and after a diversion to the coast at Sizewell

Sizewell Memorial

I headed along the off-road section (cautioned as for hybrids and mountain bikes in the itinerary) towards Thorpeness, finding that while there were a few sandy sections that called for pushing, it was nowhere near as bad as the Walberswick off-road, and far better signed than I'd been led to believe to boot.

Aldeburgh Beach

It was not yet half past ten after heading to the southern end of Albeburgh, so I headed through Snape to Orford via Iken, and was there by about 11:30 -- time for shopping at the smokehouse, too early, and a bit too far from base, for lunch, so I took the direct route back to Snape and took a light lunch at the Golden Key, just off the main drag, before ambling back.

There was a little bit of "twisty lanes all alike" where trees and thickening cloud put me off my dead reckoning when faced with a series of possible left turns at Eastbridge, but I was back to base by 3pm, time for a cup of coffee before beating the worst of the Bank Holiday rush home.

In total, about 85 miles, pretty much evenly distributed between the days; keeping up the cycle commuting, even at a reduced level, over the winter helped me avoid the usual long first day and collapsed second.

Just when you think it's safe...

Slight technical difficulty

...to put the winter gear away, along comes more!

The cold weather seems to have brought out foraging wildlife, as both days this weekend, I've seen a deer in the garden, one time quite close to the house. The cats are neglecting their duties here, so what if it's a bit bigger than a rabbit, the principle is the same.

It's hard to remember, with snow lying on the ground and temperatures barely above freezing, that a year ago, we were having pretty much the best we got of the summer weather for the year. I just hope the couple of spring days we got near the start of the month aren't it for this year.

I miss the '90s and early '00s, when you could still believe in global warming.

Playing some catch-up on the web, hitting gotchas on the bleeding edge

Ever since I got a first set of static web space on GeoPages back in '97, I've been playing around with designs, on and off. So I went through the phases of frame-sets, and then table based layouts and Java applets, before getting to the bleeding edge ten years ago and doing the whole semantic XHTML1.1, CSS, minimal JavaScript thing, applets in <object> tags, while still having to provide graceful degradation to Netscape 4 and passing conditional CSS with JavaScript fixups to IE6. (The current blog layout is really a spin-off from the sort of design I was playing around with at about the time I started blogging).

Then there was jQuery, and I did a little bit with that, like accordions to cut the space occupied by what had been growing heavily styled nested lists full of links. Oh, and scripting for the rounded corners too. And then <canvas> in some browsers, while having to feed SVG or VML to the rest either explicitly or through a wrapper library.

But that was all a while ago, and I felt it was time to start playing with the new things we can do that had been passing me by -- HTML5/CSS3, more semantic mark up, webfonts rather than image-substitution, with symbol fonts for icons, CSS3 effects (so we can do script free accordions like we used to do script-free drop-downs) -- and see what we can get away with these days, which changing the rather stale aesthetic of textured backgrounds and hard delineations.

So, getting to the point, I hit a CSS3 gotcha when trying to push the envelope. What I was after was to style a navigation list with a symbol font right-arrow in a circle at the start. So I tried this:

And I was disappointed to see Firefox render a little circle, then a placeholder glyph from the text font in use, then the list content -- whereas IE9 did exactly what I wanted, and Opera 11.6 drew a square around the arrow rather than a circle, even though all three browsers draw an arrow in a circle if I put the appropriate HTML escape in a span and style that. After some experimentation, it seems that Firefox will not put the glyph in the border, nor use the symbol font, for symbols in the private use area unicode range. And Opera 11.6 will use a square outline regardless.

So I can have a pure CSS solution with not quite the glyph I want, and in some browsers, not the outline; or I put the symbol I want in explicitly or by script. Or maybe some combination.

Still have to try it in a Webkit browser, mind you.

Later: experiments with other code points (abandoning the symbol font) shows that letter forms do get circled by this technique in Firefox, but symbol ranges e.g. Mathematical Arrows don't.

Even later: Chrome, as a representative webkit, doesn't show any glyph at all -- just the border! Looks like I might have to do this by script.

Even later yet: I ended up doing it with an image.

StyleCop and ILMerge don't mix

Just in case anyone else has the same sort of bright idea that had me flummoxed for a while today...

I had put together a little tool for some C# meta-programming that mixed some reflection with some source code parsing driven through the StyleCop parser, and it was working nicely, but actually deploying it was a nuisance, because it wanted the StyleCop assemblies as well as just the .exe -- so I thought to myself "Let's ILMerge it all together, that should be nice and convenient."

And that's when the test harness stopped working, with no parsers found.

Chasing through the decompiled sources, it appears that the parser assembly StyleCop.CSharp.dll gets loaded by looking through other co-located assemblies with the same strong-naming key and whose name ends in ".dll" -- assumptions which merging into a .exe for distribution had just blown away.

Apart from having to manage what is no longer a single unit, however, the end result of using StyleCop for examining source (and in particular comments and suchlike not compiled into the assembly being reflected upon) in conjunction with reflection worked very nicely.

February cycling

While I didn't cycle on the 1st, I managed to work in an extra day cycling to work, plus cycling into town to the dentist yesterday, ending the month of 5915.0 miles recorded -- 322 so far this year and 144 even in this shortest of months. And with the evenings opening out, though I didn't get to cycle today, from now on, it's cycling by default, so the totals should climb even further.

And the weather is looking properly springlike for the coming days...