Entries by Ben

I was getting really pumped until the bit where they hit each other so that just the ass and bust of their clothes tear off. Still, might be pretty good.

And I have no idea how I feel about "I can haz Moe Cheezeburger."

Or what hamburgers have to do with any of this???

Funimation's page for the series is HERE.

I was not expecting to see this:




At least not on anything other than this:

Beaverton, Oregon will celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Mexico's Independence. Here is an interview by radio host Lars Larson with City Event Coordinator Erin Hickey. This interview is exasperating, but entertaining. No, Beaverton does not have a July 4th celebration. They also celebrate St. Patrick's Day (?) with a "Pooches on the Green" event (???).

ONE LAST UPDATE ** and one more. Laura and Toby are a hoot.





UPDATED AGAIN ** one more video





UPDATED *** HD versions of videos

Went back and captured the video using fraps at full size. My native resolution is 1680x1050; I resized to 1840x1080 which meets the top-end HD requirement and makes the frame size compatible with my h264 codec. Came out pretty good. Now I just need to find the embed tag that tells Youtube you're linking to a widescreen video rather than a 4:3.

Playing around with fraps and Virtualdub...finally uploaded some videos to my Youtube account. Either I'm doing the HD upload wrong, or I'm just doing too much to the video before giving it to Youtube. I get a pretty nice 784x480 video about 10Mb in size, which is pretty good. Youtube resizes it again and seems to cut about half of the picture information out. Can't see a difference between standard quality and 480p. I'll work on it. Here are the videos as they are; the quality is good enough.

My 12-year-old daughter recently shared similar opinions regarding Justin Bieber. I had a similar reaction.

Link is to Jay Naylor's Original Life.

UPDATED:

A few more HP series links and debates. I'm not necessarily agreeing with all of the content of all of these links, but all of them have interesting things to say.

R.U.I.N.S. Can't Stand Deathly Hallows thread. An ongoing forum discussion of Deathly Hallows and the other books from several angles. Small but thorough. The link takes you to the 7th topic, you can move back and forth from there.

Daniel Hemmens at Ferretbrain comments on Chapters 1 - 12 of Deathly Hallows. I don't agree with everything Hemmens says, but it's humorous.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Red Hen Publications essays on the Potterverse. Mostly very long treatises on what was left OUT of the books. Conjecture and implication, not fanfic. Hard site to navigate, check out the sidebar.

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I have been searching, ever since the last book came out, for other Harry Potter fans who disliked Book 7, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I've read the book through a few times, and it gets worse every time. It's garbage. This is not the kind of thing you say on even the most neutral HP fan site. You will get death threats. But surely I could not be the only HP fan on the planet who didn't like the final book and didn't think it was even written very well?

Finally, I found via the Confused Matthew forum a link to a Youtube review of Book 7. These guys pretty much nail my thoughts on Deathly Hallows, except for the section on scenes Rowling left out that they would have liked to see. I don't care about that, whether I agree or not. There's also a section in the second video with one of the reviewers upset that his fanshipping didn't turn out the way he wanted. But the rest of it is right on.

The sub-heading for MidniteTease is "Sequential Failure is a matter of perspective..." What I mean by that is that sequels and follow-ups of any nature are almost universally considered worse than the original or sub-par in some way. Some sequels are flat-out dismissed as being unworthy of their progenitors, cash-in attempts or failed experiments that should never be taken seriously.

I'm not saying that mentality is inherently wrong, mind you; I'm just saying that it's not always true. There are a lot of sequels that provide much more substance than they're usually given credit for, and I think some sequels deviate so far from the original material that they're rejected before anyone can take a serious look at them.

Anyway, this topic deserves much more attention than I've given it here; I mentioned all of that because of the following essay linked via Kaedrin praising the Halloween sequel Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Meyers. I heartily agree with argument put forth by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas; I've always enjoyed H4 just as much as 1 and 2. Unfortunately, I also like 5 and 6; which ruins my credibility a bit.

Via Brickmuppet: The Herding, by Baldilocks. Anchor link is messed up and will deposit you in the middle of the article. Don't miss the link to part two at the bottom of the article. Excellent essay for all of us racist white folks.

I mentioned a few posts back that I was reading a fanfic titled "Shinji and Warhammer 40K." This novel-length offering by Charles Bhepin takes the story of Neon Genesis Evangelion and tweaks one "minor" detail in Shinji Ikari's past. Bhepin's purpose appears to be to present the NGE story with a different Shinji, one who is truly a hero and mankind's savior rather than, well, what you get in the story.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT

As presented in the anime, Shinji Ikari was abandoned at a very young age by his father Gendo to an unnamed aunt and uncle after the "death" of Shinji's mother Yui Ikari. This leaves the boy with massive emotional and psychological damage. When the anime starts, Shinji, now eleven, is effectively a hollow shell. He feels unloved, unwanted, useless, and has practically no sense of self at all. From this point, the anime tells the story of man fighting desperately for it's own existence against invading space monsters called angels. In the end, after all of the backstory; the betrayals and secret plots, have been revealed, the future of the human race (maybe) is left in Shinji Ikari's hands (maybe) and he has to fall back on everything that happened to him during the course of the series to make some enormously crucial decisions (maybe). All of the "maybe's" are because the ending of the series (supplemented by rewrites and two movies, and a current retelling via movies) is an ambiguous mess. What I summed up above is one possible (and simple) interpretation of the ending. If you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about.

NGE is one of the more important and influential anime series ever produced. It's not necessarily the best liked; in fact Evangelion would make the top ten hate list of many anime fans. Lauding the merits of Evangelion (as well as taking the opposite tack) is one of the biggest hot-button issues in anime fandom. I personally love the show, while acknowledging that the story is full of holes, the production is a mess, and it's possible that you may wish to commit suicide after a viewing. The bottom line for me is that I can see greatness peaking out from behind many corners in NGE, and I can really glom on to the massive epic taking place behind what is actually shown

One of NGE's biggist faults, it's gaping plot holes, is also it's greatest asset. So much of the series is left unexplained, or is explained by characters who are shown repeatedly to have imperfect information or an agenda that prompts them to lie about the backstory; that the viewers can easily, if they wish, provide the details themselves. It is entirely possible to change almost anything in the given story without actually screwing with established canon. In fact, this appears to be the deus ex machina Charles Bhepin uses to re-tell the first half of the series. You could watch large portions of the series as reference material to Bhepin's work; the changes he has implemented all occur behind the scenes or at the level of subtext. This part of "Shinji and Warhammer 40K" I quite enjoy. In the second part Bhepin strikes off on his own on a quest to provide an entirely different ending to the series, and this part doesn't do very well. Instead of working within the boundaries established in the first part, the author intentionally devolves his epic into a pun-a-minute commentary on anime and fan-fiction tropes. As I said, Bhepin does this intentionally (according to his notes); unfortunately I feel he lost something great when he moved the series in that direction.

However, the first half of "Shinji and Warhammer 40K" provides not only a funny but fascinating "what if"; it actually tells the NGE story in a much more appealing way. All of this, initially, is accomplished simply by providing a Shinji Ikari who is not *the Shinji*.

I didn't really include many spoilers, I guess. Bhepin's work is incomplete, but he has apparently spent the last few years editing the earlier parts of the story. I do in fact want to know how he ends the series, as the current stopping point feels very much like the end of the second act in a three part epic. I definitely recommend a reading, especially if you want to dig a little deeper into the original story or if you would just like to see Shinji Ikari as a true, intentional hero.