In a better world we could all follow our obsessions this way

science fiction, video
Published on Leave a comment on In a better world we could all follow our obsessions this way

Everybody has played Tetris right? I remember when my little brother got the original Gameboy for his birthday and that was one of the games he also got for it: everybody in our family played it. Simple but addictive, something you play for five minutes or an hour and you can put down again.

But of course there are always people who get obsessed even by this. Ever since it first came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System, people have been trying to beat it. But what does that even mean? That’s what this video tries to explain by diving into the history of people trying to beat Tetris:

This is not normally the sort of thing I’m interested in, but I got it through a Twitter recommendation or maybe it showed up in the Youtube algorithm and I ended up watching it when it struck me that this was the future we had always been promised. This is basically the sort of shit the people in the Culture fill their days with. Beating Tetris really doesn’t matter, it’s neither useful nor will advance your career but it is something that people rather than AI excel in: stting yourself arbitrary challenges as part of play. Throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties the assumption always was that automation meant we would need to work less and would have more leisure time to fill, but instead we got shittier jobs for worse pay. In a better world everybody could be a Blue Scuti and follow their obsessions like he did.

You’ll never work on something as cool as this

Science
Published on Leave a comment on You’ll never work on something as cool as this

Voyager 1 stopped sending engineering data back to Earth last November, so NASA developers had to figure out a way to reprogram fifty year old software which also is literally located outside the actual Solar System:

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

If this doesn’t make you jealous as a software developer…

Don’t get too nostalgic for fansubs

Anime
Published on Leave a comment on Don’t get too nostalgic for fansubs

Every time an official translator does something remotely interesting, some anti-localisation chud shows up and laments how fansubs have disappeared, because these people knew how to translate properly, giving you exactly what the funny cartoone characters were saying, without using their misguided creatifity to improve things. Oh for the days of fansubs like this:

In the end into a community that seems very strange I joined, says this school girl character from Tesagure Bukatsumono episode 2.

Goddamn that was rough. The first episode of Tesagure! Bukatsumono — a 2013 part improv slice of moe comedy show — had not prepared me for how bad the subtitles would be in the second episode. Not that official subtitles can’t be bad, but when they’re this bad people notice. Clearly this is somebody who just took what was said in Japanese and dumped it into English, without activily understanding what was said or how it should work in English. For context, she’s talking about joining a strange school club and that’s how it should have read: “in the end I joined a strange club” or I ended up joining a strange club”, depending on taste. Not this monstrosity, with its sentence structure taken literally from the Japanese. I kept watching to see if it got better and sampled some later episodes, but unfortunately, it didn’t.

A shame, because that first episode was funny. But with this being the only fansubs available and neither Crunchyroll nor seemingly any other legal (English language) streamer having it available, I doubt I will ever watch more of it.

No overdrive, just undercooked — Highspeed Etoile — First Impressions

Anime
Published on Leave a comment on No overdrive, just undercooked — Highspeed Etoile — First Impressions

It’s a bold strategy to start off your first episode emulating the most boring bits about Formula One. Let’s see if it pays off.

Some racing cars trying to overtake each other

Spoilers: it didn’t.

It didn’t because the people involved with Highspeed Etoile seem neither to know nor care about how to make a race look interesting. This is no Initial D. There’s no sense of speed, no tactics or strategy at play here. There’s just the King and Queen, who, the commentators tell us, have been number one and two whole season with nobody else getting a look in, and they’re just faster and that’s it. The only real tactic on display during the two races in episode one and two is that the Queen has a team mate who cuts off anybody who tries to overtake him in third place, so that she can fight her battle with the King in peace. That does not for interesting racing make, having all the competition stuck behind you having to ride the Dick train.

Richard is keeping all the other cars in a single file behind him.

It’s not inherently a bad idea to introduce your cast and setting through a race: gets the adrenaline pumping, gives you some idea of who these people are through how they race, uses the commentators to inclue you on the strategies used and background of the race. Initial D did it all the time even with terrible nineties animation and CGI. But here it just feels like toy cars running on a toy track with no sense of personality for either the driver or the car. There’s no weight to it. I thought that maybe things would’ve improved with the second episode when I sat down to watch it this morning, as that finally introduced the actual protagonist, but most of the episode consisted of similar dull racing as the first. Worse, said protagonist turned out to be such a rookie that she didn’t realise she was lapped by the race leaders! I understand making her the underdog outsider, but this was just embarassing.

Yankee with a heart of gold — Wind Breaker — First Impressions

Anime
Published on Leave a comment on Yankee with a heart of gold — Wind Breaker — First Impressions

No better protagonist for a yankee anime than a guy who has no problem beating up half a dozen thugs only to get blushy and tsundere when their victims thanks him:

It's not like I saved you or anything!

Yankees are what Japan calls a certain kind of teenage criminal: violent, engaged in petty crime, but usually with some code of honour guiding them, thought his of course is more usual in fiction than real life. Managa and anime have always had a soft spot for these people, so aggressively doing their own thing in a society that values conformity above almnost anything else. Sakura is the perfect protagonist for this sort of series. Slightly dumb, overtly focused on violence as a solution to all his problems. Not sadistic, just obsessed with proving he is the strongest as the only way he can get any respect. Having always been judged a criminal, up to no good because of the way he looks, he felt he had no choice but to fight to earn his place int he world.

A crowd of shadowy figures is looking at the camera calling the protagonist gross

All of which is revealed or implied in the very effective first minute and a half of the episode, where Sakura is walking a metaphorical tightrope as he recalls the disgust and anger of his class mates, teachers and family. No wonder he wanted to transfer to the worst school in Japan, a school with a reputation as yankee heaven, where he can fight as much as he pleases to become the strongest. Reality turns out to be slightly different however, because somebody already had gone through this story two years ago and they reformed the school to the point where the juvenile deliquents now guard the peace in the city. As the women he rescues tells him, this means that he will never reach the top, as he’s alone. But alone is what he has always been, so he doesn’t understand what she’s trying to say at all.

Sakura is carrying around enough psychological baggage to make for a satisfying protagonist and that other necessary element for a yankee series, the extreme but stylish violence is also tackled. The fights here operate on the kung fu movie principle, where mobs of adversaries politely wait their turn to be beaten one by one by the hero. There is however some element of realism in these fights: when a sneak attack gets Sakura cut on the ankle, the wound does debilitate him enough that he momentarily cannot defend himself.

I really liked this first episode; I always love a good yankee series and this looks to be an excellent one.