The Bucket O' Nothing

( Everybody's Fool, and why I don't always like 'tsundere' characters. )

To end on a less depressing note, though, here's a link to John Scalzi's recipe for Schadenfreude Pie. It is pie full of sugar, chocolate and cinnamon.

News from Kingdom Hearts II:

Auron is still awesome.

(That is all.)

This evening's task: trying to track down the purported track list for Elite Beat Agents, the English-language semi-sequel to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!.

So far, I have the following leads:

• N-Sider has an article about the game, with a one-page interview with the game designer. No mention of tracks other than the demo one; however, it appears trustworthy.


• A GameFAQs thread which has the apparent track list, but posters are casting doubt on whether it is genuine.


• A NeoGAF thread which was apparently the source for the GameFAQs post, and is linked to from there. Posters here also doubt the news is genuine.


• The latest headline at Bemanistyle.com, which claims that "in liu [sic] of the recent fall release list Nintendo sent out, they also made some details on Elite Beat Agents available". The phrase "in lieu of" means "in place of", so this implies that either Nintendo have sent out EBA details instead of a press release, or the person who wrote the post doesn't understand the phrase "in lieu of".

Searching on Nintendo's official website has so far revealed nothing.

I'll try to keep this up to date as I find out more.

!!!!!

XD XD

That is all.

(We now return you to your regular service, which does not involve me squeeing over Archer being cool. Nor does it involve me noticing where the anime has subtle remixes of the game tracks at important plot points.)

I present to you the best Final Fantasy VI cosplay ever.

In other trivial news, I've discovered that FFX is getting quite good indeed, and Sainsbury's apparently sells coffee bagels (which I picked up by accident on a search for something for dinner).

Searching on ff.net has unfortunately not yielded a story like the one I'm looking for (see here for the idea I'm searching for). However, I found a few that weren't too bad.

( More fanfic links, this time for Sailor Moon. All of these are set after the end of the Stars season, either before or after the foundation of Crystal Tokyo. )

I'd also like to know where the hell this idea of the Earth freezing over before the advent of Crystal Tokyo comes from. Maybe it was in the anime (though I don't remember anything about it from the first three seasons), because it certainly wasn't in the manga. Can anyone help with on this subject?

And with this post, I think I've done enough fanfiction reading for a good month or so. Now I'll be heading back to work on my Nanowrimo 2003 entry (which finally passed 50,000 words a few days ago), play Chrono Cross for the second time, and revise for exams.

Anime music videos.

I don't know how many people have heard of them, and of those how many people would willingly watch them. There seem to be enough that AnimeMusicVideos.org can thrive - there even seem to be enough willing to pay for storage space for their AMVs that there's already a system set up on the website.

Now, there are several ways to make anime music videos, basically depending on the software or hardware you have access to. Generally, the best way to produce something that people will watch is to use decent clips from stuff that's not got subtitles in (in fact, the rules of the site prohibit using fansubbed anime - it's DVD source or nothing, folks - but that doesn't stop the vast majority of the video makers, me included), and use a nice non-linear editor like Adobe Premiere. Premiere also has many special effects that can be used to spice up videos. In fact, there's even been a fairly well known video posted there called Euphoria (done to footage from RahXephon) which shows off how many effects can be added to a video to go with the music and still not overpower the whole thing.

According to an acquaintance in our university anime society, Euphoria also has a fairly rabid fanboy following, since whenever anything threatens to displace it from its "Best Video" slot on the website, the fanboys go and vote for it many many times to get it back to the top. This, to me, seems to be a pity. Not only is it stopping other good videos from being recognised, it's also sending completely the wrong message to AMV creators - "More is better".

This has resulted in many videos that I have downloaded, only to find out that the thick coating of Premiere filters on the footage has rendered them unwatchable. The video's entry on animemusicvideos.org is here, and is called Fade to Black. In fact, before this filter-mania started, the only place I'd seen this many ridiculous effects used was in a video that parodied the large amount of crappy Dragonball Z videos posted on the website, the All Purpose DBZ Music Video.

Of course, I am rather biased on this matter, as I don't have a copy of Premiere and the program I use to edit my AMVs is VirtualDub, which really isn't intended for that sort of use at all - everything has to be done linearly, the frame rates have to match up exactly, and there's no way to put (say) credits on the end, even a short screen with writing on. This is why the only video I've actually done enough on to post is still not properly finished, and thus there is no proper link to it, even from my profile page (yes, that's a blatant plug for publicity, I know).

Still, even without taking into account my opinions as someone who makes rather poor videos rather slowly with not-particularly-good software, I prefer to watch videos where the effects are only used to help the story, not to hide it behind layers of funky waveforms and page-turning transitions. So I'll leave you with a good (though full of spoilers for the end of the series) video for Angelic Layer, called Beyond the Angelic Dome.

(Oh, and I recommend all the videos I linked to here, other than Fade To Black. Even Euphoria has its good points.)

To be honest, the entry is mostly here to advertise a very fun Winamp skin I found, and a new icon I've made. You don't read these things for the thrilling news and content, now do you?

In a search for new Winamp skins last week, I came across this one: a quite snazzy Pokemon Center one. Okay, so it's not particularly elegant, and it's a little garish... but the details are done so well. Bitrate and sample frequency appear on computer screens behind the Nurse Joys (Nurses Joy?), the track title scrolls across on an overhead monitor, and the normal buttons for fast-forward, play, pause, and so on have people standing there instead, who turn around when you click them. It's the first Winamp skin I've seen that's so inventive - pretty much all the controls have some sort of theme to them.

The other thing I was going to show off was my first attempt at animated GIFs. Okay, it's not a particularly great achievement, since I managed to make the animation by taking frames from video and editing them down... Still, it is at least mildly hypnotic, and features a character from a favourite series of mine, Princess Tutu. This fellow is Drosselmeyer, a rather scary old man with odd taste in clothes, a passion for writing... oh, and he also happens to be dead. Doesn't stop him from interfering in the lives of the other characters, of course.

So, I present:



Dancing Drosselmeyer. Because everyone needs a scary spinning dead guy to lighten up their day. (The quotation on the icon is what he says at the end of each next-episode preview, while sitting in a rocking chair and cackling.)

In other news, I'm filling in an application form for a place as a Junior Library Assistant at the University Library. If I get accepted, I'll be working four and a quarter hours a week. Not much, I know, and it's only on Saturday morning so my tutor and DoS have agreed to let me do it. But it'll earn some money, which will always be helpful.

(EDIT: I've finally - about a year later - made a version that rotates at the right speed.)

In the middle of doing work for a supervision in about two hours. Just finished watching Card Captro Sakura episode 46 (the end of the second series) - after a few months of Sailor Moon, it's amazing how much... well, better, CCS is. The fact that it's newer, and thus the animation quality's better (and that I've got good copies of the episodes) could have something to do with that. Also the fact that it's by CLAMP. Go, CLAMP, go!

Watched the first twenty minutes or so of Kingdom Hearts today (James now has a PS2 memory card, and thus can play it). I now understand what thistle_chaser was saying about Riku. Mmmm. And yes, he reminds me of Touya Akira, but I'm an Akira fangirl. (Why is it they have to make some of these 14-15 year old characters so darn attractive? ;)

Anyway... I return to contemplating the Contraction Mapping Theorem. Ah, the things we do to try to understand maths...

Or, in something more closely resembling English, I've been doing quite a lot of work recently. Most of it to make up for not understanding last term's courses because I was either:

• On the river, rowing.


• Half asleep in lectures and supervisions, because I'd got up at 5am three days a week to go rowing, and went to bed at 11pm-2am like normal.


• Asleep in my bed when I should have been at lectures, because I'd got up at 5am etc. etc.

Thus, work is being done now. Also, I didn't get my computing project done during the summer because I didn't know it'd be in so soon... well, if I work hard, I can get everything done before it has to be handed in, and possibly even before I go back to college.

Rowing itself is out, for at least next term, and maybe for the rest of my time at university. Too tiring. Can't stand early mornings. I should've learnt from dev squad, where I regularly almost dozed off during our warmup in the boat. Oh, and (though this may be too much typing) my wrists regularly ache, as do random back, arm and leg muscles... enough whinging. I told the people on our anime club's IRC channel that I wasn't rowing next term, and one of them congratulated me. That fits with what most people I know think about rowers... they think they're insane. Couldn't agree more. :D

Went to see family in York, and to see the pantomime at the York Theatre Royal - much better than last year's, and David Leonard's little rant at the end ("I've been playing the villain for fifteen years, and every year I get killed off!") was wonderful. And I got a Wagon Wheel, too. They throw them into the audience before the curtain call, you see.

Anyway, in York I finally found a Claire's Accessories shop that sells Neopets merchandise, and I bought a Doglefox plushie (which, thanks to my dad's comment, is now called "Zaphod Doglephox") and two expensive notepads that had Rare Item Codes. Those are codes that, if you type them in in a certain area on the Neopets site, allow you to get rare items that can't be bought in the Neopets shops. I haven't opened them yet, as I'm not quite sure where they are... lost on my floor or shelves somewhere, I think.

And today, in the middle of writing out Methods notes, I finished the first Sailor Moon series. The whole thing about Tuxedo Kamen being brainwashed was quite a good plot line, I think, and the way they got him out of it was quite effective, too... I bet you never knew the light from a music box could be that powerful. :)

Still... they killed off /everyone/. Okay, Luna and Artemis were left alive (and I hope that we see some chemistry between them at some point, whether in R or in the S movie. Diana can't come from nowhere, can she? ;), and so were civilians like Usagi's family, but... they killed off all the Senshi. And Tuxedo Kamen. And then Usagi. And THEN... they all came back to life. Now that part wasn't very well explained - Luna described it as "things being as they were before", and since Naru doesn't seem confused by events happening again, or by meeting Mamoru for the first time once more, it looks like they really did set time back for a while. That, of course, makes me wonder... surely the Dark Kingdom would reemerge this time around, too? But that's a question best left unanswered, I suppose. Ah well, let's hope that my R episodes are watchable. I've seen Super already, and SuperS... that's apparently more done for laughs than for anything else. Stars, though, I want to see. More Haruka and Michiru! Yay!

Oh, and yesterday I discovered that many Hikaru no Go fangirls are scary. No, not all of them - I happen to be one, and I'm not all that scary - just the ones who write overly emotional, totally OOC fanfics with English so bad that I really do hope it's not their first language. Although there was one rather amusing fic - it called itself a "spamfic", which is a good sign that the author doesn't take themself seriously - that paired up Hikaru and Touya Akiko (Touya Akira's mother). Very amusing, although it'll take me a while to be able to watch HnG again.