Rubenerd

We've made it into a week of Gurren Lagann episodes, and finally they're getting some assistance! Take on the world!

Plot: Up until this point, the Gunmen they've been fighting have been more like Gunboys. I thought I was rather clever with that renaming. In any case, we learn there are far larger ones, and they spawn others rather than just merging. Ouch.

Laws: These people are the sworn enemy of evil Gunman piloting blond guy. They've stolen one of his people's Gunmen machine device things. Yet despite this hatred so deep he wants to kill them and destroy every trace of their being, he can't fight people without clothes. In episode 6 our heroes had lost them in a faux hot spring Gunmen, you see.

Explanations: Previously I'd mentioned learning about just how many humans were scattered around the place, though I'd wondered why nobody else was taking up arms. More on that below, but suffice to say they did exist after all!

Technology: Despite being thrown to the ground, stretched and crushed with incalculable amounts of pressure and force, Gunmen can survive provided the fighting spirit of their operators is maintained. This we had already ascertained from previous episodes, though not to this extreme.

Setting: The super gigantic gathering point was itself a Gunmen, eerily reminiscent of a Japanese World War II battleship. Despite being able to manufacture these incredibly sophisticated devices that can regenerate and withstand incredible forces, their moving regional gathering point takes cues from 1940s design. Too late for the Strike Witches to fly out from somewhere and start battling too?

Strategy: Kamina's raw, surging passion (oh dear) meant he and Simon were able to take some pretty severe punishment, but it was Simon's strategising and Kamina's belief in him that ultimately won them the battle. Obviously Gainax are parodying the brain/brawn divide from countless super hero shows and series since time immemorial, but was still satisfying to see it executed so well :)

Swagger: Cool people don't look at explosions.

Inspiration: Sometimes, all people need is a powerful motivational force to get them off their behinds to join a cause. In this case, the legendary antics of Kamina (oh, and Simon) and Kamina and their Gurren Lagann who's reputation spreads around the world. We need some people like that here.

Design: One of the great things about shows that revolve around magic, or dreams, or alternative realities, is that designers can be really creative without restrictions on common sense or what's available to us here. I loved the yellow Gunman the best, he looks like a banana :).

Unanswered questions: Yoko is beautiful, Kamina is terribly masculine and rugged, and Simon is… Simon. They were all seemingly picked from random by chance encounters. So why are the others in their coalition of awesome so… overly, stereotypically Ruben-Schade-esque in attractiveness? Which is to say, not very attractive at all? Were the attractiveness genes confined to a specific area of the planet, or layer of crust?

Relationships: Yoko continues to warm up to Simon, going out of her way in what looked like a terribly awkward pose to give him words of encouragement. I'll admit it, I can finally see myself liking her now :)

Heart tugging: Kamina describing to Yoko why he's doing this: wanting to have children living under the sky without a worry in the world. cries :')

Conclusion: A real motivational episode. Human spirit and determination. United they stand, and they'll take on the world. A most relevent episode given what's going on in the world right now. We'll be watching o/

I haven't done a good ol' fashioned Jim Kloss inspired rant here for a very long time, and this evening's tutorial class gave me the motivation again to pen one!

location: sydney ---

*twitches*

So today in class we were performing a nice, generic discussion on information systems. The example our subject co-ordinator chose was the NBN, or the Australian National Broadband Network.

Our tutor had some choice words for it. He claimed it was far too expensive, and that it was unessisary in light of broadband connections that are good enough and do everything we want to right now. He cited wireless as a more cost effective and viable alternative, and that only major hubs like hospitals should be connected with fibre.

He (and his apparent idol Tony Abbott) was absolutely correct.

There is no point implementing a national power grid whatsoever. It would be far too expensive, and is unnessisary. We have existing gas lines, and gas powered stoves and lights, both of which would be the only things we'd ever use this newfangled electricity for anyway. You don't even need to have a gas pipe, you can get it "wirelessly" with canisters. Power cables should only be linked to major hubs like hospitals.

Hippie concepts like "future proofing" and "not knowing what we may use the infrastructure for in the future" are nothing more than petty money grabs. And WiMAX will solve everything, and in a cost effective way.

Tomorrow never comes

Can you imagine if we'd had people like that at the turn of the century when we were implementing our power grids? People back then had no idea we'd be using their connected electricity to power refrigerators, let alone computers that would be connecting us to the rest of the world. The point of fibre isn't to provide faster internet (though that would be nice), it's about giving us a framework for the future. A framework other countries have already had for decades. And even if WiMAX were a viable alternative, has he not heard the financial disaster stories about it?

This, from a tutor at one of Australia's premier technology universities. Thank heavens my other teachers have all had other views.

The cold hard truth is Australia is not at the same level as other developed economies today domestically and in our international connections, and we risk slipping even further if we don't get serious and think long term, rather than relying on these nonsensical band-aid wireless solutions which we can't even get working reliably today.

I'm used to living overseas and would be more than happy to go somewhere else if our telecommunications infrastructure continues to crumble at the hands of short sighted people, but others have an understandable attachment to their homeland and would rather not have it become irrelevent.

I guess my economics teacher was right. Countries, like companies, export products they're optimised for. For Australia, we dig stuff out of the ground and put it on barges, heaven forfend we try to do anything more.

Calming down now!

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Tiger & Bunny Wiki

They have wikis for everything thesedays!

(categories: anime tiger&bunny wiki)

Daring Fireball: Resigned

"Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself."

(categories: apple stevejobs news)

Otome – Mai HiME Merchandise you DO own?

An underappreciated series. I have a Mai figure :)

(categories: maihime myhime anime)

姬・HIME’ｓBack Garden – Panty & Stocking with Galterbelt – boy version …

Some pretty amazing cosplay! I want that wig :)

(categories: anime cosplay p&s)

Security Now! Transcript of Episode #314

Got to get me one of those ARM Cortex-M3 boards!

(categories: arm cortexm3 podcast twit)

25 Years of Mac: Product Timeline

Great timeline of Apple hardware and software from the beginning.

(categories: apple hardware mac history infographics)

Apple – Press Info – Letter from Steve Jobs

Peace out Steve. Good luck.

(categories: apple stevejobs press)

Steve Jobs and the sound of silence — Tech News and Analysis

Best post I've read about Steve Jobs resigning as CEO. Beautiful.

(categories: apple stevejobs business gigaom)

Android may overwhelmingly be the target for malware in the mobile space, but as usual the media have got the details wrong!

Kyubey has the Android logo’s eyes and ears!

McAfee's Threat Report for the second quarter of 2011 (PDF link) listed iOS as having no malware, and Android as having an order of magnitude more malware than any other platform. Understandably, the media have pounced on the latter… well, not as much as they would have if it were iOS, but still.

While I'm not an Android fan, the problem here isn't the OS but the OEMs that distribute it. It can be an unclear distinction for most consumers who just see "phones" (which is why the whole iOS versus Android debate is silly) but it's important.

While tech savvy folk would presumably prefer an unmodified copy of Android installed on their phones (the Microsoft Signature Experience, but for Google), their third party PlaysForSure hardware manufacturers have a vested interest in differentiating their products from the competition. This may come in the form of alternative user interfaces, additional applications, and/or modified defaults and branding… all of which would need to be thoroughly tested for compatibility with any Android updates.

They say Branding, she’s a fine girl…

Unlike vertically integrated manufacturers like Apple and RIM that can push updates to all compatible devices as soon as they're made available, official Android updates have to be made available by these manufacturers, some of which are better Android citizens than others.

This middle man approach unavoidably introduces a delay, which is why a startling percentage of Android devices are still running older versions of the OS. It's not Google's fault, or the fault of consumers.

This potentially may have been one of the reasons why Google bought Motorola: by being the manufacturer they could ensure the latest software updates are always made available for their devices, and in a quick and timely fashion. They have experience with pushing regular updates with Google Chrome, this would allow them to do this on mobile hardware as well.

Given the closed direction of Android they've started with Honeycomb, it could be another reason for OEMs to worry.

This episode of Gurren Lagann brought to you by the fine folks at Gainax, as a tribute to Hayao Miyazaki! Perhaps you've seen some of our other productions?

Plot: We follow our heroes trudging through the desert, though with a few additional crew members. They battle some more Gunmen — ho hum — however it quickly turns into something else after the team is prompted to follow an old man. In the desert. In fog. Makes sense.

Logic: Rather than destroy all Gunmen, why not leave some barely functional so in their process of limping back to home base they can lead our heroes to them? I'd thought this before, and finally someone makes the suggestion too.

Setting: We finally see a semblance of civilisation, even if ultimately it's fleeting! Not that there's anything wrong with caves or the noble tunnels our favourite character (or is he just my favourite character?) created back in his village, but this episode featured a building. An honest to goodness building!

Hayao Miyazaki Reference: Previous episodes have made subtle (and not so subtle!) jabs against some anime genres, but this time they make reference to locations. Was it just me, or did I see the bath house of the gods from Spirited Away? And the sneaky, watery Gunmen we meet later looks an awful like a sinister version of Howl's Moving Castle. If true, well played Gainax, well played :)

The Underdog: Just because you've lead a sheltered life under a man who's been lying to you the entire time doesn't mean you're incapable of detecting deception. In fact, our new travelling companion was the only one who noticed something was up from the beginning. I was disappointed in you Simon!

SFX: Cute winks by Yoko must always be accompanied by a loud, audible "ding" sound reminicent of a 1980s game show. Such "ding" noises must also always result in blushing on Simon's part.

Gainax Reference: My knowledge of Gainax productions aren't what they should be, but I'm sure I recognised the characters from Diebuster and the legendary Neon Genesis Evangelion amongst the eager workers of the bath house.

Rules: Given the episode was largely played out in a bath house, some sacred rules of anime had to be enforced, and given this is a Gainax production, they had to parody it to an extreme. If men and women are in a bath house, the women have to talk loudly enough to be heard through solid stone, and the men have to want to see what's happening on the other side.

Censorship: Pets make a good substitute for black rectangles in covering certain aspects of male anatomy, and bathing suits are good insurance for accidental disrobing, which we all knew would happen. This is still PG folks!

Explanations: While soaking in the hot springs specialised Gunmen, Simon and Kamina discuss their dream to reach the "moon", along with some pretty graphics. Technically a moon is any naturally occurring mass of sufficient size orbiting a planet of a star, but to specifically call it such suggests this is Earth, not a distant planet far, far away.

Relationships: For once, Yoko makes a nice comment about Simon behind his back, albeit disguised under another layer of criticism. For those keeping score at home, what are we up to in the nice/nasty ratio? Can my initial frosty opinion of Yoko improve?

Unanswered questions: Yoko is so ecstatic that they defeat the giant cauldron or Moving Castle or Gunmen or whatever it was, she jumps out of her top. While plausible… she wears similar garb all the time without this problem! Perhaps her regular bikini top has carbon fibre strings?

Conclusion: So we've come full circle from introductions, to something silly, to something more serious, to a fanservice-filled advertisement for other Gainax shows with a serious cliffhanger. Just when I think I've got a grip on this series…

For those of us who've been following Apple for a while, Steve's resignation as CEO was expected, but it was still a sudden surprise.

Twice at the helm of the company he co-created, Steve took on mediocrity, short sighted tech pundits and endless betas to create integrated products with elegant industrial design and software that just works. Customers rewarded his company for it with fierce brand loyalty, and his competitors employed their sincerest form of flattery. Love or hate his company, but you can't ignore it.

I wish him the best at his new position at Apple, and hope it allows him to focus more on his health and his family who love him, both of which are more important. Peace.

After yesterday's tribble-fest, today's episode of Gurren Lagann had the makings of a more sombre affair. Kinda.

Discoveries: We're rapidly realising there aren't just a few colonies of humans, we're everywhere, and we all have our own way of life. How prescient!

Limitations: As we saw in the first episode, while these enviably powerful machines can tap into the life spirit and energy of their operators, Gunmen have a limited passenger and storage capacity. Despite being above average, super bad arse incarnations of Gunmen, the components of Gurren Lagann aren't any better, forcing some to sit in less than comfortable positions.

Tricorders: Leeron has one reminiscent of a powder compact, and it can date rocks. I mean, it can estimate the age of a rock surface, not that the tricorder device thingy goes out with rocks. I'm also positive in the Gurren Lagann universe they're not called tricorders.

Booby traps: Have you ever dug a hole, covered it with mesh and leaves, then waited expectantly for a poor sap to walk into it and fall in? Allegedly that's how vast, deep entrances to underground labyrinth worlds are created some of the time as well, perfect for a stray Gunman to put pressure on and subsequently find itself in.

Colour: Everything looks more dark and sinister without colour, and stone only adds to sinisterness. Is that a word, sinisterness?

Religion: Is allegedly a comforting lie used by well meaning authority figures to shield people from truth that would be hard to accept, such as morality. Good thing that's only true in anime!

Behavior: Sure it's fine for Yoko to be walking around in a bikini top and hot pants given her colleagues of awesomeness walk around without shirts, but for a more conservative culture like the one they encountered today it seemed to be too much. Ironically they didn't question Kamina's lack of upper body clothing, but rather his behavior… I have no idea what they could have been talking about.

Explanations: After being compelled to dress accordingly for their culture, Yoko is forced to wear a flowing shawl which she hates because it "restricts her movement". I suppose that's the closest explanation we'll get for her attire? Wouldn't a regular shirt do the trick as well? Ah Gainax ;).

Unanswered questions: How would a Gunmen made of stone be repaired? How does one keep ceremonial white robes clean underground? Where does an underground civilisation like that get their food? Will a young man and two small children survive on the surface by themselves? Wouldn't they stand a better chance at survival if their whole village braved the surface together?

Laws: The Gurren Lagann Gunmen can't be merged unless stock, tongue in cheek transformation scenes are performed, and firearms cannot be operated unless one removes their shawl in an epic, twirling fashion.

Heart tugging: These kids who would presumably have been killed or starved on the surface were joined by the star of the episode on the surface, to brave this new unexplored world together. Aww :'). Also was it just me, or did they have a Hayao Miyazaki like look to them?

Conclusion: After the high-jinks of last episode, this was a more toned down affair, or at least as toned down as this series could hope to be with its giant mecha robot high octane fight scenes in caverns underground. And so their journey continues…

The UTS campus network started getting patchy around lunch time, and by early evening it was slow enough to be largely useless. My poor Cisco tutor instructed us in class to use "best effort" to access our online course material ;).

As of 22:00 AEST, it seems their network problems have spilled over to their internet facing site. I hope they can get it fixed soon.

In other news, the reason why their site looks crap on *nix is due to their use of Verdana in their CSS with no fallbacks, not even the standardised sans-serif identifier. Perhaps their web designer is a hipster, and knowing their target market did it ironically.

A power failure couldn't stop me from posting my Gurren Lagann episode summary yesterday, and sure as heck a university network failure won't either!

Plot: Compared to the previous episodes, the situation our heroes found themselves in (or on, given they're not underground anymore) bordered on the surreal with it's weird fuzziness; the design of the characters also seemed more exaggerated and cartoon-esque. I was informed (warned, if you will) about this by a friend, but I had to see it to believe it. Just wow.

Scenery: The first episode in the underground village, and Kamina and Simon's subsequent first view of the sky after breaking through showed some amazing art, but I think this episode topped it. The desert scenery was beautiful, if a little cliche. Dear Gainax, we want BluRay. Danke.

Safety: Proving a point regarding rugged manliness is worth sacrificing the safety of your brother, and baby dinner plate robots a fabulous hardware guru designed and built.

Enemies: Calling a spade a spade: they're Tribbles. As Star Trek did to lighten the mood after heavier or more involved episodes, this Gurren Lagann tale (of Alan A'Dale) was more lighthearted with a formidable enemy too fuzzy and cute to be scared by. I suppose they're the most dangerous though for that reason ;).

Explanations: Men are incapable of hunting for food when hungry, so naturally its up to their new (and obviously very attractive) acquaintances and Yoko to gather comestibles. Of course, their catch turned out to be sleeping sentient puffballs.

Technology: As we learned in previous episodes, these stunning Gunmen contraptions are effected by the mood and passion of their operators. We now learn more primal urges such as hunger have a direct effect as well, with their combined Gurren Lagann going as far as to point out low stomach contents on their displays. They also need increasingly lengthy, colourful and epic transformation scenes to pull off their combining.

Authority figures: Have stunningly brilliant hair, and wear more clothes without breaking a sweat.

Ruggedness: Merging Gunmen in a manly way is critical, and shaggy dog like creatures with thick white fur that would catch all sorts of dirt make for far more valiant desert steeds than horses.

Mini harem: Compared to most anime (so far), Gurren Lagann has a male dominated cast, but this was temporarily reversed in this episode, with comedic effect of course. The sisters from the so-called Black Siblings took quite a shine to timid little Simon… before they see the far more attractive and charismatic Kamina of course. Oh well!

Dysfunctional yet functional family: The assertive one, the shy one, the cutesy one, and the brother who can't go hunting when he's hungry. They roam the world on shaggy dogs. Wait, I already said that.

Pets: I'll be scolded for this, but Boota reminds me of Butan from Clannad. Puhi~Puhi.

Conclusion: After some more serious episodes, this was a more light hearted romp with silly villeins that still managed to deliver some character development and plot advancement. Because their dashing steeds were the part of the episode that made me laugh the hardest, we ride into the sunset in style: