A few thoughts on Redline

We should consider ourselves lucky to have a film like Redline.  The entire production took seven years to make, every frame of animation is hand drawn, and it deliberately eschews the cliches of modern anime in order to be a deliberate throwback to the exciting, well built sci-fi blockbusters of yore.

In other words, it has no chance to succeed financially, and the likelihood that we'll ever see something of this nature ever again is slim to none.  With that in mind, we should cherish Redline, because it makes good on all the promises made by every glowing review.

What more can I say that hasn't been already said? The animation is gorgeous, the soundtrack is effective, and the story is constantly engaging.  As other critics have tried to make clear, Redline isn't the deepest or most powerful animated film ever made.  It is simply one of the most entertaining animated films to come out in the last fifteen years.  

There's a lot to be said for that, I think.  This is a film that you'll want to come back to again and again.  In my experience, that's rare.  I can count on two hands the number of movies I am willing to watch more than once, and I'd say Redline is the newest member of the list.  I think it is beside the point to try to say that this film is "mindless fun" or "all style and no substance".  Aside from being arguably inaccurate, Redline is able to combine sights, sounds and motion to create an entertainment experience that could never be replicated with live action. If that isn't the point of animation, then I'm not sure what is.

I'll admit that while the story is effective, it does introduce certain plot elements without establishing them.  In that way, it very much reminds me of older anime films which try to cram a bit too much into the length of a feature film.  But at no point is any element of the film confusing.  You might not get any backstory on what you're seeing, but you know what it is and why it is there.  That alone puts Redline in a better class than many of its fore bearers.

Again, I'll echo the pro-Redline critics in saying this - you don't have to find Redline appealing, but you can't argue with the fact that it accomplishes what it sets out to do.And you should wish that someone would take the time to apply this level of craftsmanship to the things you do like.  Redline is the kind of film we won't forget come twenty years from now, and for a certain sector of anime fandom - those who found the medium fifteen to twenty years ago - this is pure gold.  

New Year's

When my family first moved to Pennsylvania, our only neighbors were a single young family with an eccentric head of household.  The father was the kind of man who vehemently disliked certain aspect of modern society (I didn't get to know him well enough to determine whether he disliked them all), and his response was to simply do as he pleased, in a region where there weren't that many people who would bother him about it.  He loved wood working, and would create a multitude of large, obnoxious wood cutouts to display on his lawn.  He used a recreational telescope, despite the fact that in the Poconos, the clear skies are blocked by tree cover in every direction (I know this because I got my own cheap telescope for my birthday and struggled to with it for a single winter). He also burned his trash so he didn't have to deal with waste management companies, which seems like an innocent, personal decision until you find out the hardway that he threw bones and other meat by products onto the side of the road, where your dog will find and eat them before you have a clue what he's going nuts after.  Ultimately, he moved his family away before I left myself, and I can't help but think that he was driven out by the addition of more and more houses on the street, combined with his refusal to accomodate other people being around him.  On the other hand, the same could be said about my own family's refusal to keep our dog in check long after we should have, so maybe it was just us that pissed him off.

In any case, today I was reminded of one of my old neighbor's most memorable quirks - he refused to celebrate New Years Eve.  As he told my mom, "there's nothing different about January 1st.  It's just another day, so I'm going to go to bed early and get up as usual."  An army of hipsters are nodding their head in agreement, and I admit that technically, he's got a point.  Yet I can't ever shake the feeling that New Year's Eve is special, and more than that, I don't think I want to either.

Part of my opinion is due to the fact that, for some people, New Year's time isn't just another day.  If you work in certain professions, then it is true that the Christmas/New Year's season is hardly different than any other (retail fits this mold, and as it so happens, my neighbor sold fish at Grand Union).  On the other hand, if you are a student, or a certain kind of office worker, the end of the year is when everything shuts down for two weeks.  When jobs give time off for the two holidays, many workers simply take off all the time in between to give themselves a break before life spins back into full gear in January.  It may be an  arbitrary machination of society, but like it or not lots people take a break at the end of December, and that makes it the perfect time to reflect on the year that was.

Another arbitrary machination is the New Year's Resolution, and while I think specific resolutions are a tricky topic, I don't at all disagree with seeing the New Year as an opportunity to start fresh.  Some goals truly do take years to accomplish, and the start of a new one is a good time to assess whether you are making good progress.  We can take the pessimistic route and scoff at all the people who so quickly forget their resolution to lose weight or quit smoking, but if you get pessimistic enough about it, then you take this failure as being a certainty.  If only one person is truly inspired and motivated to change themselves for the better after the New Year, then that certainty no longer exists, and the pessimist has one less leg to stand on.

Here is my personal experience.  I get into a rut whenever I get into a daily routine.  I stop seeing what is ahead of me on the road of life, and I only focus on what is in front of me during any given day.  This causes me to lose perspective.  I forget just how close future dates are, or how little time I have to finish something.  It is a huge problem, and I'm only ever shaken out of this stupor when I'm broken out of my routines.  That is exactly what happens during my year end time off. Already I'm working harder than ever on preparing for my wedding, and I can once again see all the plans I have for 2012.  Even better, I have more motivation than ever to make those plans a reality.  I know that in just a few months some of this optimism will fade.  Hell, maybe all of it will come April.  But there is a slim chance that the fire and optimism will stick with me, and those are better odds than if I just went to sleep tonight and saw January 1st as any other day.

Android phone rooting

Yesterday I rooted my phone (an OG Droid) and put Cyanogen mod on it.  After a couple of recommended settings tweaks, it's running much better than it was on the stock ROM, and the battery life looks to be much improved.  All told, I'm happy with the results, but not so much with the process of getting there.  The steps I needed the take - that is, the ones which were necessary to root the phone and load the ROM - were not bad.  The number of steps I actually took, however, was far greater, and the overall process chewed up a significant amount of my Sunday afternoon. 

"Back in the day", when rooting and custom ROMs were a new thing, the processes were not well documented, and there was always some risk that you would brick your phone.  Nowadays, however, writers all over the 'net, on legitimate sites no less, proclaim how much easier it is to soup up your Android phone.   When I read such claims, I assumed it meant that the Android community was akin to the modern day Linux community, which has made it easier than ever before for new users to install both the OS and new software.

Not so.  There are lots of places instructing you on how to root your phone or load a ROM, but no one is on the same page.  Everyone has a different approach, and at first glance it isn't easy to understand why (or which one you should adopt for your own purposes).  Look a little closer at the dates when all these instructions were posted, however, and you'll begin to understand the problem.  Most of them are old, and are likely made obsolete by newer, better methods.  Unfortunately, if you're dealing with an old phone, you're not going to find any very recent guides, so you have to weed through archived forum posts and figure out which ones are "current".

The other problem I noticed is a lack of explanation.  On one hand, you have guides which try to be user friendly by eliminating any sort of explanation of what is going on.  They simply tell you do run some tools and poof! - your phone is ready.  This is dangerous and potentially costly, and I wonder if these friendly guides harm more than they help.

On the other hand, however, the more technically minded authors are reminiscent of the Linux community from years ago, which would scream "RTFM" to people who didn't know where the manual even was (and there was a good chance that it wasn't easy to find).  Many forum based guides scold any would be rooters who fail to understand the process, or the purpose of all the software they need to use. I can understand that you want the reader to have this knowledge in hand, but why not give it to them then?  If you tell them to go google it instead, they're likely to go find another, better guide in the process.  Imagine if you were a teacher who gave instruction but, never assigned any work to complete, and never specified any texts to read.  Then you decided to fail a students who didn't find the materials on their own, and so was unprepared for the day's lecture.  That's what it felt like when I read some of these posts.  If you tell someone to use the Android SDK, would it be hard to actually say "this is part of the Android SDK, and here's why you need it." And if you aren't good at writing, surely someone else in the community is!

Lastly, I have an issue with how some Android fan sites use people's interest in rooting for their own gain.  Many of the forum based guides are unuseable without registering for the site.  Links are blocked, downloads are disallowed, etc. I don't like having to register for a site that I only plan on visiting once, and it's even more insulting when the site in question has a "rooting" sub section which is linked to on the front page.  Way to rope 'em in.

When all is said and done, I understand that this section of the Android community is built on volunteer work, and I am very thankful for their efforts.  It's just frustrating, as a nerd, to see worst nerd tendencies manifest themselves again and again.  It doesn't have to be this way.

And if you're wondering why I don't go and volunteer my own time and knowledge, consider this - on the XDA developers forum, one of the subforums has a "no newbies allowed" warning, and as far as I can tell, there's no alternative newbie zone to start out in. Behold the power of open source gone wrong - everyone is free to participate, unless you aren't bright enough to figure everything out on your own, or lack the effort to wade through problems which were already solved. 

Zeta Gundam Volume 10

Here we are.  The final five episodes of Zeta.  To answer my question from last time, I think this volume makes up for some of the damage caused by the last batch of episodes, but it can't fully erase their stink. 

Here's the long and the short of it - each faction in the war hatches some sort of plan to turn the tide in their favor.  Scirocco tries to take out the Titans' leadership, Axis Zeon tries to play everyone against each other, and the AEUG take control of the giant colony laser (without much thought as to any hypocrisy this might entail).  Each side succeeds in their plan, but that doesn't mean everyone's a winner.  The Titans are wiped out, the AEUG win the battle, and Zeon sets itself up to dominate the rest of the war.  Yes, the good guys don't really win at the end of Zeta Gundam.  The best you can say is that they eliminate the "Gryps" part of the "Gryps conflict" by eliminating the Titans, but in relation to the war at large, Zeta's ending is merely a turning point that sets the stage for its successor ZZ Gundam.  On its own merits, I don't think this is a disappointing way to end the show, but I do feel disappointed, knowing that ZZ will never see the light of day in the U.S.  I won't hold that against Zeta, but damn Bandai, why did you have to leave us hanging like that?

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that Volume 10 kills off a significant number of cast members in astonishingly little time.  Considering that this is a Tomino show, I wasn't shocked at the fact of these deaths.  What bothered me is that they have very little weight behind them.  Because the second half of the show wasted so much time, none of the pilot rivalries are given any time to grow, meaning none of the showdowns within these episodes carry any sort of weight.  Furthermore, the uneven pacing of the plot meant that characters would often vanish for several episodes at a time, only to return out of the blue, as if the writers felt like they quite literally had to cram in an appearance to justify their existence.  It leads to a lot of wasted potential to say the least.  The best example of this is Yazan, who manages to kill more main AEUG pilots than anyone, despite not being an newtype.  The idea of this normal pilot winning through sheer skill is intriguing, but he shows up in this volume after a long period of absence, for no other reason other than to have one very successful sortie.  Yazan got some solid character development earlier in the show, but the way in which he returns to cut a path through the AEUG makes his success (and the deaths of his targets) feel cheap.

Ultimately, Zeta Gundam's biggest problem is that it was never meant to wrap up the story it began.  Emotionally and narratively, it doesn't wrap up cleanly because it really can't.  That being said, there was a way to say farewell to most of its cast with a little more respect, and it'd have been nice if the final battle between Kamille and Scirocco actually meant something.  I understand the idea of a sci-fi show that treats death and destruction realistically, but to be honest, Gundam isn't that show.  Main characters are spared in grim situations, and ace pilots are usually given all the time they need for their rivalry to simmer.  Zeta switches up the rules in an unexpected and inconsistent manner. The result is a show that lacks any of the punch it should have, which makes it all the more frustrating when it chooses to waste more and more time with inconsequential topics.

Zeta Gundam is a stunningly well animated show, and it does much to expand the world of the Universal Century in ways which its predecessor never could.  I understand how it became so influential, but for anyone simply looking for good storytelling (with giant robots), I don't think I can recommend it as essential viewing.  And that's a damn shame in my eyes.

Zeta Gundam Volume 9

At this point in the show, there are only ten episodes left.  That isn't much time to wrap up the now-three way conflict, to say nothing of the numerous rivalries and plot threads still lingering.  I thought that perhaps Zeta Gundam's status as a an all time classic was in part due to the way in which it handled all this narrative content.

I couldn't be further from the truth.  Most of the episodes in Volume 9 are a complete waste of time.  So bad is this batch that it retroactively damaged my opinion of the previous forty episodes.  It's also the reason why it took me so long to polish off the rest of the show.

I'm not going to beat around the bush - the show wastes three, maybe four episodes dealing with Rosamia, most of which occurs in this volume.  The fact that the Titans literally brainwash her to have the mind of a child is creepy in principal, and worse in execution.  It isn't enough that she's annoying; the writers then have to cram her antics down our throat in overly lengthy, incredibly awkward scenes. Her presence also gives them an excuse to write Shinta and Qum into more storylines, and at no point is that ever a good thing.

All in all, Rosammia is almost a proto-Moeblob.  While she has the physical traits of a grown woman, her mind is that of a (potentially slow) child.  The scene in which she runs around topless is beyond uncomfortable considering the circumstances.

I know it sounds dramatic, but I honestly believe that the focus on Rosammia/Shinta/Qum/whatever do irreparable damage to the entirety of the show.  There's so much to do still, and it all gets put by the wayside in favor of this?  Sorry folks, but true classics don't tend to cave into demographic based pandering quite this earnestly.  There's no hope of this show ending the way I want it to, but maybe it will manage to redeem some of my esteem before the end credits.

Where's it at?

This morning I encountered an annoying, inexplicable computer issue. I wanted to configure our new printer to work with our netbook, which my fiance typically uses for computing tasks.  It runs Linux, and I had no idea if any printer makers beyond HP had any semblance of Linux driver support.   So I went to the Lexmark website (on the netbook) and saw that they had some Linux support. But I found no drivers whatsoever.  The only choices available to me were firmware updates for the printer itself, and the only OS choices were Fedora Core and Open SuSE.

Rather than giving up or getting angry, I instead got distracted by something on my main computer.  And when I decided to go back to figuring out what to do about the printer, I googled up Lexmark Linux print driver support, without realizing that I had switched PCs.  I came across a list which included my printer, so I went back to the drivers page, and tried again.  This time, I got a much larger list of Linux distros to choose from, and when I picked the appropriate one, I got an actual print driver.  I copied it over to the netbook, and the configuration went smoothly.

My question, then, is why did I get different choices on the driver download page based on which PC I was using?  It's possible that the page uses the web browser's user agent information, but that doesn't make sense, since it lets you choose an OS anyway. It's silly that on the Linux box, I got no good options for Linux, but on another OS I got a list of over twelve unique distros.  

Ultimately, I'm just glad I can print from multiple places.  But if I didn't mistakenly use the "wrong" computer to check, I might not have gotten that far.  I can only wonder how many other unsuccessful driver searches of mine were the result of a similar problem.

Ugh

Today's HP Touchpad fire sale, and the whole "out of the consumer biz" HP move put me in a sour mood.  The sale because it was a huge tease.  Us mere mortals know that such discounts are out of our reach, yet we cling on to this miniscule hope that maybe we'll luck out.  It never actually happens.  The stores were simply not on the same page, and some of them might have been playing games.  I heard of at least two people go to Walmart and be told that the tablets weren't being sold for the $99 sale price.  Three hours later, when they called back, the store was sold out.  Playing favorites?  Anything is possible with this shit.

As for the business move, it just shows you f-ed up the business world is.  HP's computers were profitable, but not profitable enough.  So now they're probably going to be gone.  We all know the deal - businesses aren't charity cases, they have to make profits.  But the amount of profit desired, and the steps shareholders are willing to take to get them, are getting absurd.  When you have people who are willing to burn something to the ground in order to line their pockets, maybe this whole "publicly owned company" thing is a bad idea.  Not that it is a bad idea in general, just when you have a society that can't be trusted to handle such decisions.  Libertarians often think that the free market will fix anything, but I think a lot of the business decisions you see today show that companies will leave money on the table if it means going after a bigger table with a bigger pile.  If that means that you and I can't find a decent PC (or an operational Postal Service), "tough noogies" is the answer we get.

Gahhh, I need a drink.  And a cheap Touchpad.