Anime — The Book of Bantorra : Armed Librarians

A belated review, by some months, belated enough that it's fallen off the Crunchryroll roster.

I tried the first episode late last year, and wasn't impressed, but went back after a lot of talk about how the series was getting awesome later on; and fortunately the awful CGI from the first episode seemed to be a one-off.

In a climate where cute girls doing cute things and high-school romance seemed to have driven almost everything else off the table, Bantorra was a welcome return to an adult cast (with well endowed women) and OTT violence. However shoehorning a series of ten light novels with more plot twists than you could shake a stick at into a 26 + 1 recap episode series didn't quite work out so well in the end.

The setting was interesting and unusual in many ways -- a sort of alternate 1940s, where magic also exists, and people have made up European-style names that look and sound more like keyboard mashing (Olivia Litlets, Parney Pealrmanta, Enrique Bis'hile...); in a world where at death, a memory snapshot fossilizes as a "book" that can be "read" by touching it.

So the big struggle starts off between the Armed Librarians under Acting Director Hamyuts Meseta of the Bantorra Library, and the Church of Drowning in God's Grace, whose noble thoughts about the value of humans is belied by their separating their flock into True Men (at the top), Mock Men (mid-range operatives) and Meats (the masses). And then things get more and more complicated, with -- except in the occasional digressive arc for a bit of back-story -- the villains of the piece changing again and again, and major characters being killed all over the show.

Perhaps had it been a 40-episode series it might not have seemed quite so erratic and all over the place; or maybe it would have still seemed like it was trying to fit in everything and the kitchen sink. Overall a decent enough piece of entertainment and one that at least did all it could to be different from the current pack.

Javascript Airport weather decoder

While weatherpixie remains on extended hiatus, I have finally put together a simple in-browser replacement. It uses James Padolsey's cross-domain Ajax plug-in for jQuery (indirecting via YQL), a simple parsing script from Manuel Heras, here separated into a stand-alone script, and an iframe-based page to do the work.

The final piece of heavy lifting is to get the appropriate METAR report for the local airfield, and that's just a few lines of javascript --

Here, EGSC is the ICAO code for Cambridge Airport. And that's a lot closer to home than the Met. Office who give out current conditions at Bedford on the Cambridge forecast!

This made me laugh

Though by rights, it shouldn't -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8048844/Brits-sense-of-humour-fails-at-the-age-of-52-study-finds.html

Road rage

Some weeks ago, I was working late, and so cycling home after the usually flurry of commuter traffic.

Coasting one of the downhill parts, doing in the 15-20mph range, I suddenly heard this strange whirring sound behind me -- and then, suddenly, a whole flotilla of sport cyclists.

Now, when they travel solo, going along in their spray-on advertising, nose on the tarmac, arse in conjunction with the planet Jupiter, they are just subjects of merry jest. When they travel in packs, it's different.

Six to eight pairs of them streamed past me, peddling like the clappers, leaving little to no clearance, doing only the absolute minimum to move out of their straight line and pass, nearly forcing me into the verge -- much more threatening and aggressive road use than any of the buses or farm vehicles I usually have to contend with.

Between their silly outfits and bad behaviour, the sort of thing that gives cyclists a bad name, and discourages cycling as a more relaxed form of transport.

A season in the saddle

Three months ago, I finally got around to getting a cheap and cheerful trip computer for my bike. Three months later I have done 767.4 miles at an average of 11 mph, as well as measuring that the final part of my journey to work that I couldn't measure with the car odo, starting with an off-road part, comes to just over 1.6 miles each way.

This also measures up to my order of magnitude guesswork that I average closer to 2000 miles in the saddle each year than 1000.

Computing per-service SIDs without sc.exe

How it's done is well known:

When configured to have a per-service SID (i.e. type of SID either "Unrestricted" or "Restricted"), the service SID is computed as S-1-5-80-{SHA-1(service name in uppercase)}

Here's a quick script to do it, that can be the basis for including the computation programmatically into e.g. installer generation.

So running it we get:

>& 'C:\Program Files\FSharp-2.0.0.0\bin\fsi.exe' .\ssid.fsx MyService
S-1-5-80-517257762-1253276234-605902578-3995580692-1133959824
>

which compares nicely with:

>sc showsid MyService

NAME: MyService
SERVICE SID: S-1-5-80-517257762-1253276234-605902578-3995580692-1133959824
>

where each of the 5 trailing facets is just the decimal representation of 4 bytes of the SHA-1 hash taken as a little-endian unsigned integer.

Film — True Legend (Su Qi-Er)

Woo-Ping Yuen's latest chop-socky film about Beggar Su, the master of Dunken Fist wu-shu had its UK première here this evening.

It was almost solid martial arts mayhem, with just a few pauses for breath; however the structure of the film was a bit of a mess -- the intrusive 'now put on your 3D glasses/OK take them off again' around the training arc and what looked like it was going to be the Boss Fight didn't help (nor did the 3D itself where the actors often seemed to be floating detached from the rather washed-out scene around them.

The story itself seems to be a fairly direct one about Su and his adopted brother Yuan who spurns the generosity of his adopted family, and cue two-way revenge tragedy -- then just when you think it's all over, a long coda culminating in the real Boss Fight out of nowhere.

Clearly it must be following the high points of a well known tale -- but it ends up feeling unresolved because of the broken narrative rhythm, whereas stopping at the tragedy of the 3/4 mark would have given closure (if you don't ask too deeply why a martial artist of Su's calibre would dig a box out of sandy ground with his bare hands, rather than using some one-inch-punch technique to break open the lid in situ).

In all, not entirely satisfying popcorn fare.

Film — Henri Quatre (Henry of Navarre)

Added to the Film Festival programme after the program went to print, a competently done edited-highlights costume drama (German production, dialogue in French with some Italian and Latin) of the life and turbulent times of the eponymous French King.

Not something I would have gone out of my way to see, had I not already earmarked this week for the festival, but equally not something where I felt I'd wasted the afternoon.

Anime — Kemono no souja Erin

Where 2007's Seirei no Moribito adapted the first of a series of ten novels by Nahoko Uehashi over 26 episodes, this 2009 series adapted the first two of a separate quartet of hers over 50 episodes; and while they are, in broad, fantasy, there is none of even the limited magic from the Moribito series.

We follow Erin -- crabapple -- for a decade or so from her childhood, where her mother, Soyon, tends some of the ferocious war lizards -- touda -- that the Grand Duke of the land employs as the ultimate weapon against potential invaders, and Erin herself is a keen observer of her mother's craft and of the natural world around her. As an outsider, from a despised people, who had only married into the touda raising village, Soyon is the obvious scapegoat when the whole colony fall to some mysterious sickness.

Literally cast adrift after her mother's death, Erin is eventually fostered by a kindly bee-keeper, under whose care she discovers more about the natural world -- and encounters for the first time the ohju, the wolf/roc lord beasts with their iridescent plumage. Being fascinated by these creatures, and nature as a whole, she finally manages to be inducted into the prestigious school-cum-ohju care centre near the capital, in the peaceful lands of the True Queen, whom the Grand Duke protects.

And as Erin takes to her craft, and violates all manner of traditions of ohju-care in doing so, politics and dissension amongst the successors of both the throne and the dukedom brew up and engulf her, against all her desires, until a final resolution that changes the status quo forever.

Being spread over so many episodes, the pacing is glacial during the first arc, until Erin is cast into exile (part of the reason why this review is somewhat belated); but once that is past, and the story starts to move, albeit at a leisurely pace, it becomes gently compelling, in the same quiet way that Aria is.

It is clearly an anime aimed at younger children -- not only are there some comic relief characters whose function is purely that; but the last episode concluded with an announcement that there would be a 10 episode summary then broadcast on an education channel. As such, where there is violence involving touda or ohju, the art moves from realistic to an effective highly stylized mode; and the person-to-person combats are almost bloodless; this being Japan, though, there are several themes, including Erin's preference for suicide to being used as a tool by any of the competing factions, that are probably not sanitizable for sensitive Western tastes.

Overall, good, but not great. Being on Crunchyroll, it's viewable without fansub guilt -- but equally it's unlikely to make it to DVD.

Caught in the Act -- Again!

This evening, after I'd made sure that the cat-flap was set to inbound-only, I heard the door swinging, and thought to myself "but all the cats who know how to use it are in, unless this is a visitor" -- but there was no sound of challenge from the cats who had just a little while before been at their feeding station nearby.

So, I wander into the lobby, just in time to see the hindquarters of a cat exiting through the 'In' door, clearly having hooked it open by the rubber rim and stuck a nose under.

Some cats are too clever for their own good!

Film — The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec

For someone who announced his retirement a few years ago, Luc Besson remains remarkably active...

The 30th Cambridge Film Festival opened with his latest film, an adaptation of a 1970s bande dessinée about the eponymous Adèle, who is an Edwardian Lara Croft, with a touch of Tintin, in a turn of the century Paris, populated mainly by bumbling gentlemen with florid moustaches and ghastly haircuts. And, for reasons that become apparent as the film progresses, a rapacious pterodactyl which serves as the maguffin.

For a comedy adventure, the humour is uneven, sometimes leaden, some gags are over used (the rule of three is callously disregarded at times), sometimes a little too knowing (in the form of a certain quip about a change in the Parisian landscape that post-dates the original publication), but in the main, works.

Two strikes against the film -- an anachronistic attitude to tobacco (fixable by tweaking one line of dialog), and two uses of bullet time.

Oh -- and you do have to stay through the credits for this one.

Film — L'Illusioniste

A new feature directed by Sylvain Chaumet (Triplettes de Belleville) to a 1956 screenplay by Jacques Tati. This 100+ minute animation is very clearly a Tati film -- it's almost done in mime, an absolute mimimum of dialogue -- with a strong air of melancholy under the veneer of humour (an example of the mood being the scene where the girl, who has attached herself to the middle-aged, slightly past-it stage magician of the title, serves up rabbit stew to him, and some of the other stage acts who share their digs, while he is surreptitiously looking for where the obnoxious creature which he pulls out of hats has gone). Although the CGI leaps out at you in a slightly obnoxious fashion in a couple of shots, for the most part it could be line and watercolour after the style of Oliver Postgate.

Its evocation of Britain (some London, a lot of Scotland) c1960 rings very true, both in the looks -- I'm sure there were photographic references underlying the scenery -- but also the cultural references, as the old music hall acts are elbowed out by the new rock'n'rollers exemplified by Billy Boy and the Britoons. And there are some more knowing, more contemporary, jokes embedded in some of the signage (it's very worth reading all the text, like the menu at the chippie, and the pawnbroker's hoardings).

And look out for the actual Tati to make a brief appearance, as well as the namesake central character.

Likely to be the best film I see all year.

Caught in the act!

For a while now, I've had my suspicions as to who was responsible for the level of food in an open tin going down. Now I have the suspect red-handed --

"Call me Arthur"

At least that's not as bad as bringing a pigeon in through the cat-flap, which is what I came home to today -- a flurry of feathers and a bemused looking half-plucked bird standing in the middle of the living room floor, and needing shooing out,

Cambridge Film Festival

An even more dreary and schlocky or right-on selection in the program (though the list on the printed program differs slightly from what are listed on the web-site) this year; down to only 2 that caught my eye

• The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec -- which is Besson not retiring again
• True Legend (Su Qi-Er) -- 3D chop-socky

Let us hope that neither is a disappointment, since the generally tawdry, often cheap and nasty looking, selection of films definitely is. (Clearly no money or enthusiasm available for anything like Miyazaki's Arietty.)

Cycling Holiday

View August 2010 in a larger map

Equipped with the new car and, more importantly, a bike-rack, I strapped my trusty old mount on the back, programmed the satnav, and set off for a couple of mights' stay in one of the country inns that I've stayed in as part of a Cycle Breaks holiday -- this time going to the King's Head in Great Bircham, thereby cutting out a couple of days messing around near Swaffham (and, equally important, the drive home down the A11).

After an easy run through showery weather, I got to my destination in good time to unship the bike and head off to the Gin Trap Inn at Ringstead for lunch. Alas, the after lunch amble down the lanes was interrupted by unexpected rain, first a cautionary sprinkle, then, a mile or so from base, the heavens opened.

Tuesday I trusted the forecast when it said light showers, late afternoon, so set out on a long loop, expecting to pick up some provisions in Fakenham, then head up to the coast. Not finding any obvious place to buy big cartons of juice in Fakenham, I just loaded up with some Lucozade Sport, then started following the cycle route to the coast.

Evidence of previous rain was there in the need to get off and wheel the bike around some big puddles on a short stretch of green lane; but by the time I got to Gt Walsingham, the sun was shining, and I could shed the brushed cotton shirt that had been providing warmth. And then I noticed the wall of weather heading my way. With not enough time and land to avoid it, I skipped the off-road path through Holkham Hall grounds, did as best as possible to skirt Wells, and got to the main road as the sun shone through again, and revealed another squall line following.

I got to the Jockey in Burnham Market just ahead of the weather and then waited for it to pass, before heading back slightly damp and in strong cold wind to the hotel.

On the last day, I looped west, through good weather that started to develop a high haze, discovering a convenient superette in Heacham -- even though I didn't need anything; a useful stretch of cyclepath along the main road between Heacham and Hunstanton, and eventually back to the Gin Trap for lunch, before heading back through distinctly overcast weather. This time I beat the rain on the route to the hotel -- but it arrived earlier than forecast during the drive home.