Rubenerd

Going through my masses of unwatched anime, on a hunch from Robbie in our anime club I decided to see what Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai was be all about, given it has a second season out now. Suffice to say, it wasn’t entirely what I was expecting!

As the title suggests, this 2012 series revolves around socially awkward people who come together to make friends. Reading the plot descriptions, I was imagining the series very much like my experience with the anime club at UTS. I can’t begin to describe how much this club has helped me make friends and feel accepted, particularly in a new city.

Naturally, we have the usual Transfer Student who’s arrived at the school, and just like me he has blonde hair and menacing eyes. Well, mine are more panda than menacing, but there you have it. Through him, we meet the other horribly awkward social misfits the series will revolve around.

Immediately from this first episode I was drawn to the characters. Each serve as a larger-than-life representations of different stereotypically awkward people. Hasegawa Kodaka plays the roll of a legal alien among his peers who’s misunderstood and feels out of place owing to his Western features.

Mikazuki Yozora (above) is resolute and strong willed, but seemingly copes with social awkwardness through bullying and insults. Kashiwazaki Sena (below) is the stereotypical popular girl who’s social standing, attitudes and looks render it difficult for her to make real friends.

Superficially, I really liked the art. The scenery is colourful and detailed, and the characters themselves have lips! Perhaps not as groundbreaking as Mugi-chan’s eyebrows, but anime characters having lips in this day and age? Madness!

I’d said this series wasn’t what I was expecting, partly because it has more of a story than I thought it would. As I’ve come to expect from anime promotion, a large number of the posters and fanart for the series are rather suggestive. The series does contain some fanservice, particularly centered around Yozora’s legs and Sena’s… talent. Here’s hoping Kodaka has his shirtless moment during a beach or hot spring episode. If I’m going to be viewing the series vicariously through him, the least he can be is devilishly attractive himself.

Honestly, I’m very much interested to see how these personifications of social awkwardness overcome their fears and make friends. Assuming that’s what the series really does end up being about, and I’ve read conflicting reports. Should I be taking notes?

As an aside, I didn’t beat my last anime review record of seven minutes. This took a whopping nine minutes, partly because the latest build of mpv from Homebrew decided to stop supporting screencapping, and I was forced to break open VLC with its neverending font caching.

It is with a solemn heart but with loving memories that I bid farewell to an old friend of mine, my Samsung SyncMaster 2232GW 22″ display.

Images were taken yesterday, 2010 and early 2008 respectfully.

Purchased in Singapore’s Funan Centre during a sale in November 2007, she was manufactured in Malaysia during the same month. Clad in a glossy black plastic case with a elliptical base and generous vent, she matched my later 24″ SyncMaster 2433BW perfectly on my desk.

Equipped with both DVI and VGA ports, she displayed images at a 1680×1050 resolution, a generous horizontal upgrade from my previous 1280×1024 display without sacrificing vertical resolution. The biggest difference was her 2ms refresh rate, a vast improvement over the 12ms and subsequent ghosting of my previous display.

She displayed imagery from numerous computers, including my short lived Nintendo PC (so named because the case looked like a Wii), my venerable MacBook Pro, as a second monitor for my Mac Pro and as the primary display for my Antec A300 Sim Lim Square tower. In those capacities, she’s shown me Mac, KDE, Gnome, Xfce and Windows 2000 desktops.

This monitor was the first I ever owned with a glossy panel. To this day I probably still prefer matte displays, but I will admit she did render beautifully deep blacks provided I didn’t point her at a window.

Earlier this month, without provocation, the display started flickring upon being turned on. At first the flickering only lasted a few seconds, slowing down gradually until it returned to normal operation. Today, it takes many minutes, during which time I get a headache even having her in my periphery.

Goodbye old friend, you served me well.

I suspected my Fifth Estate post would generate some feedback, and it did!

@wonk_01: It’s a dangerous new step for them into the military-entertainment-complex, imho.

Agreed.

@TypeDom: Regardless of everything political or propagandistic about it, Benedict Cumberbatch looks creepy.

He was a devilishly attractive Sherlock, but being done up in a creepy fashion is in itself propaganda.

@babylove0306: you [sic] are ridiculous. Judging a movie before it’s even filmed?

That’s the great thing about scripts. I’m relieved I’m ridiculous though, my greatest fear in life is mediocrity. Well, that and funnel web spiders.

We’ve finally got some details about that “Fifth Estate” movie about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and unsurprisingly it’s a piece of propagandistic bullshit. Pardon the French, but this is such a cliché hit piece it’s embarrassing.

Assange was understandably angry:

“It is a lie upon lie. The movie is a massive propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the character of my staff,” the Australian Internet activist told the audience at the university’s Oxford Union debating club.

Reading from the script, he said the opening scene was set inside a military complex in Iran with documents containing nuclear symbols. [..] “How does this have anything to do with us?”

Regardless of your opinion of Assange, the fact the movie is misrepresenting honest people and advocating war should be unacceptable to all of us. I’m disgusted.

Produced by DreamWorks, the movie is being directed by Bill Condon, the genius behind the first two Twilight movies. I’m not making this crap up.

“We want to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age and, we hope, enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked,” he said.

I don’t know what’s scarier, that he’s being paid to say that, or whether he actually believes that’s what he’s doing. Ditto Benedict Cumberbatch.

Sorry for the serious tone, this stuff just makes me furious. This is important, not that fake Facebook Graph search scandal that merely made public what governments with and without due process have long had access to already. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

When I first started Rubenerd here, I did it mostly to express myself, have fun, and for remembering how to do things. A few years ago I put a simple buy me a coffee link in the sidebar, and have been overwhelmed with all your generosity.

A few weeks ago, I added a link to my Amazon wish list. As with the buy a coffee link, I didn’t really expect anyone to buy me anything from it. Still, it was a lot of fun to generate the list!

Well, yesterday morning I got a message in my inbox to say someone had bought me something from my wish list, a Good Smile Company Princess of the Crystal anime fig, from the Mawaru Penguindrum series! An email later, I learned my benefactor was Jeremy in Singapore. A delightfully self-deprecating, friendly person, all he wished for was to have his last name kept anonymous, and to thank me for all my “interesting fun blog posts about anime”. What a gentleman :)

I’m humbled beyond belief. Thank you Jeremy, she will be displayed proudly alongside the rest of the gang ^_^.

With my wonderful girlfriend out of the country and unable to watch the next Tamako Market with me, I’ve continued watching Vividred Operation instead. With that glowing endorsement, here’s episode two!

Having established the universe in the last episode, we get to see how the characters cope with their newly discovered mahou shoujoness. We also discover what they meant by the term “docking”, fortunately it was far less suggestive than we were lead to believe!

The universe they’ve created here is an odd one. As I said for the previous episode, this universe is centred around the manifestation of a SimCity like power plant, which seems to attract sinister aliens. Despite there being a few odd high tech pieces of equipment, they’re contrasted with contemporary fighter jets and large steel-hull battleships complete with bulkheads and rivets. The contrast is downright weird.

While we’re on the subject of weird contrast, there were certain things that were hard for me to buy. It’s easy to accept a mahou shoujo universe where the girls transform, are given limitless ammo and the ability to pick up planes in mid-flight with their bare hands, but apparently such powers also give them the ability to fly next to fighter jets and still be heard. LOUD MUCH!?

I’m also not entirely sure this is supposed to be mahou shoujo, or whether we’re dealing with a moe version of mecha. Rather than being bestowed special powers, their abilities are apparently provided through the use of specialised technology, in the convenient size of a key!

We also see the manifestation of Viviblue, a merging of our two protagonists after they’ve “docked”. This entails another transformation scene with lots of hugging and underwear. Of course. Viviblue emerges with Akane controlling her movement and voice, while Aoi merely providing thoughts and hair colouring.

I don’t care if she’s called Viviblue, I’m dubbing her Tuvix. Remember Tuvix, the merging of Tuvok and Neelix after that transporter accident on Star Trek Voyager? That’s right, I intend to make a Star Trek reference in each review of this show, boom!

And speaking of boom, while it was parodying magical girls, Aoi is even given the ultimate weapon of choice: a gigantic hammer which can summon 200% of its raw power output when she’s Viviblue. 1990s anime fans rejoice: HAMMERSPACE LIVES ON!

At this stage, I almost can’t tell whether this is a parody or not. The weapons they use are super comical and cliché, the transformation scenes utterly gratuitous (forget what I said before about their being no nudity now). If it’s not a parody, I’m watching it as such because it’s far more entertaining!

Eleven minutes to blog a review, from writing to scaling and uploading screenshots to submission. That’s MY special power!

Almost two years ago, I bemoaned the fact Yahoo were creating new things, but were still the only major mail provider to not offer SSL. On an unsecured wireless network, this is an open invitation for anyone to hijack your session.

Well, they finally listened!

Activating SSL adds an extra layer of security to your account. While using SSL protection is optional, we recommend it if you are on an unsecured internet connect, such as a wireless network at a cafe.

It’s a step in the right direction, but it desperately needs to be enabled by default. As a developer and sysadmin I know most people don’t change default settings, which means most of their users will still be unprotected.

It’s as inevitable as the WiFi failing at UTS: I go to an anime club screening or to one of my classes, and someone jeers at me for having a Mac laptop and/or an iPhone. When I ask why, they say I’m a tool of advertising, and that I should be using an Android device with three words in its name, or something.

I use Apple products

There are practical and personal reasons why I use Apple devices. Having tried the rest, Apple have the best after sales support and student discounts, absolutely no competition. The iOS platform runs the best of breed software for my needs. OmniFocus is the best GTD organiser, NetBot and TweetBot are the best ADN and Twitter clients, Sleep Cycle is the best health application. If I gamed, I’m pretty sure they’d be on iOS too.

Then there are reasons I don’t use the competition. Android’s anaemic and patchy font offerings don’t please a typography nerd like me, and the platform is made by an advertising company whom I’ve increasingly lost trust in. I don’t like the UI direction Windows Phone and Windows 8 are taking. Tizen could be appealing, but it’s not mature enough yet. Blackberry has nice hardware, but not the software I need. My beloved Palm has all but died.

Foam foam foam!

Reading Marco Arment’s Magazine article on the issue, I can relate to his experience. You shouldn’t ever read blog comments anyway, but if you unfortunately do by accident, the web is saturated with angry Android fans.

As I said in the intro, this isn’t just limited to the web, I get this iRL too. I have a hoodie with an Apple logo on it, and have even been accosted by Android users while waiting for a train, telling me with colourful language that I brainwash people and that their phones are better. The irony of their mob mentality was seemingly lost on them.

I’m not a sociologist, and am not aware what it is about the Android platform that breeds this vitriolic, knee jerk mindset in a larger subset of their users. I think it goes deeper than simple logical reasoning.

Whatever the case, it’s a sad state of affairs when people like @TypeDom have to specifically say they’re platform agnostic, then explain why. I should be able to just say I use Apple products without having to say I also run Linux and BSD to take some of the heat off. Having Tux on the lid of my MacBook Air seems to have helped a lot. Because yes, shock horror, I also use Linux. I must be pretty brainwashed by advertising.

Ultimately, people will use the devices that suit their needs and budget. For a large percentage of people, that’s an Apple device.

Enabled, but only for client software not applets.

From USA Today, even though it came out yesterday:

Instead of shoehorning the electric powerplant into a conventional GM compact-car platform, the next Volt will be purpose-built. That will allow the ability to better package the batteries and other specialized components, says Mark Reuss, president of GM North America.

Shows my ignorance, I thought it was purpose-built. The Honda Civic Hybrid isn’t purpose-built, and it doesn’t come with a premium price tag.

To me, this reads like a book coming out in hardcover for the people who really want it, then releasing the paperback for everyone else.

And now I’ve exhausted all my car knowledge, and have lost my train of thought.