More manga, and miscellany
I’ve read all the Elfen Lied that has been scanlated so far. I gave up on Bleach during a particularly dull and pointless fight scene (of which, unfortunately, there are many). Now I am reading Death Note (sociopathic high school student finds magic notebook which can be used to kill people) and 20th Century Boys (some kind of near-future sci-fi mystery with a plot woven through several time periods in the lives of a group of friends).
I went up and down Table Mountain on Wednesday in bad shoes. Now parts of my legs don’t work, and I have four different unpleasant skin conditions (if you include mild sunburn). Hopefully I will soon feel better. Going up the mountain through India Venster was quite a lot of fun (actual rock climbing, minus vertigo — yay!); going down Platteklip Gorge — not so much.
My computer is having cooling problems. I had to replace the power supply fan. The only 80mm fan left in all of Canal Walk was one that is neon green and red and lights up with little UV LEDs. It does not, however, have colour-coded cables. Since the fan replacement involved splicing I had to do some swapping around, so now the bling-bling fan is the main case fan and I can see it through my tower case’s side window. The actual replacement was a bit exciting: what kind of idiot manufacturer makes a power supply you can open up, and then glues an important component to the fan — the component most likely to fail and also the only one a home user is likely to try to replace? Honestly. I had to pry it off with a screwdriver; nothing exploded, so I guess I didn’t damage it.
Today the machine hung again; I reversed the side fan to make air flow through the case better, and we shall see. I have room for at least two more fans.
I hope you are having a good miscellaneous holiday; mine has been pretty good so far. Representative selection of presents: nice shirt, blender, book vouchers and a pretty elf man on a horse.
Observations about the Elfen Lied manga
- It contains 300% more disturbing wrongness than the anime.
- It is a lot more coherent than the anime, and has more crunchy plot — which is good, because the crunchy plot is the best part.
- Yuka is a complete psycho.
- I now know why this manga will never officially be published in a Western, English-speaking country. They’d have to chop half of it out.
- The intermittent blatant fanservice is completely out of sync with the tone of the rest of the manga. It’s like seeing a Bollywood dance sequence in the middle of a documentary about cancer.
- Reading it in parallel to Bleach is a bizarre experience; they’re almost completely antithetical to each other.
- It’s really amusing imagining a poink sound effect every time someone’s head pops off (the fact that this happens often enough to be a noteworthy recurring theme should tell you something about the manga).
- People keep almost-but-not-quite dying. It’s ridiculous. I no longer bother feeling sad when long-time characters appear to peg it; unless there’s a body, and the head is separate from it and lying 20 metres away, they’re definitely not actually dead.
- It’s got a lot more interesting now that it’s moved beyond where the anime (abruptly) ended off.
Brief review of The Golden Compass
Went to see it last night with Hodgestar. My verdict: meh.
It seemed overly allegorical in patches (OK, here we have not the Catholic Church at all trying to suppress this mysterious tangible representation of “knowledge” and “free will”, which we’re not actually going to explain adequately in the movie…), the plot was very choppy, and the whole thing felt very thin. It didn’t help that they apparently moved the climax of the first book to the beginning of the second movie, or that they changed screenwriters three times (away from Tom Stoppard, and twice to the same guy).
I wouldn’t mind reading the book, if someone’s got it; from the summary it sounds a lot more coherent. I think it would be unfair of me to dismiss it on the basis of the movie’s average-ness.
Well, at least the armoured bears were cool. Mmm, ass-kicking armoured bears.
Also, Daniel Craig is cute and bearded and Eva Green is pretty. But Eva Green is barely in the movie.
Post-*Camp
*Camp was pretty cool. I didn’t get enough sleep. I learned the actual names of lots of people, thanks to the helpful nametags. My Scribus demo went reasonably well, given that we discovered a weird bug while I was doing it.
Things I forgot to say about Scribus:
- You can import HTML and it preserves the text formatting — it generates styles for the paragraphs / headers / etc. that it finds. There are other formats it imports from, too — I haven’t played with this very much.
- It preserves the transparency of PNGs with alpha channels.
My photographs, let me show you them.
*Camp!
It’s this weekend. It’s at AIMS. There will be talks, tutorials, techie people you can talk to, and free lunch. If you’re interested in coming, even if it’s only for one day, please sign up on the *Camp wiki page — and tell anyone you know who is a programmer (or belongs to an allied trade). C’mon, it’ll be awesome.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
