Author: duh magnet

There’s a reason they call it Badlands

STEALTH APPROACH

The price of collateral damage

For a 12 year wait, that was certainly very underwhelming.

I don’t wish to spoil anything (but that’s probably more because of apathy than a real desire not to ruin a film for others), but the entire feel of the film felt like it was a short arc transposed from the first half of the TV run. Which, to put it delicately, isn’t really the part of Trigun the majority of fans love the most. As a homage film it only did its job semi-adequately, as a genuine addition to the Trigun franchise, my honest opinion is that it failed. The film ghosted in and out of pre-production for a while, so I’m disappointed that after all this time, Nishimura Satoshi didn’t close out the franchise with a serious bang. Now, I also understand the movie is caught in the same quagmire that the Conqueror of Shamballa film from FMA (which coincidentally, was dire) found itself in, since Trigun Maximum doesn’t really play well with its anime counterparts, but you still have to set your expectations pretty low for this film not to give you a mixed feeling at best.

Tired of saying “I Told You So?”

As expected Greenwald makes the salient response to Wired’s bleating self-defence.

Since Pvt Manning has a high chance of spending a good portion of the rest of his life in solitary confinement, Poulsen and Hansen’s prevarications are especially distasteful. Although Wired has never been a paragon of investigative or even objective reporting, with the blunt claiming it’s a tech-whore magazine relic of the dot com era, the carefully worded non-denial denial of the Wired staff clearly indicates a tip-over to the dark side of political speak, with truth taking a convenient dump once the tech media (usually more lambasted for the relatively harmless terrible/dishonest reviews of consumer/IT products) found itself confronted with handling the first serious mainstream issue of the day.

When we consider that the Fourth Estate in the US is now suffering from a near terminal case of cognitive capture (with broadcast media long since gone over the tipping point into cadaverhood, save for PBS and the occasional Charlie Rose interview), this is just the latest in a long sequence of bad jokes about how utterly broken the socio-political climate in the avowed defender of the free world has become. That the world of the tech journalist, long been the haunting grounds of self-proclaimed geeks that claim to value objectivity and truth over the hypocrisy and venality of Everyone Else(tm), bears no protection from the entrenched fault lines of the wider social strata is darkly humorous.

Jarring progress (with a swab of Vaseline)

D2D/Directwrite will become more of an issue the closer we get to FF4’s release date. It will not be a good idea to subject new users to something as basic as font readability…that’s too much of a comfort zone shock for new converts. Disabling D2D/DirectWrite by default off the bat (corrected with a point release down the road) is a saner approach, because I think Mozilla is underestimating the user pushback once the non beta testers (who generally have more conservative machine setups) are involved.

I guess there is some solace (depending on how you look at it) in that IE9 will probably beat FF4 in coming out first. That should increase significantly the chances Microsoft will fix the DirectWrite issues in the near future.

Another day, another spilled database

This has been making the rounds these few days. I don’t think I have a AMO account, that is, I don’t REMEMBER having one. Hard to sort ’em out these days, with a million and one sites requiring seperate (and generally badly hashed) logins…

That being said, this leak isn’t the scale of others that involve financial transactions (sometimes of an embarrassing nature.) And accounts of this kind are littered with dummy personal particulars, since as a rule of thumb the users are technologically savvy. There’s also the consideration that anything dealing with money and/or security clearances always require a heavier burden of security. If your throwaway blog poster account is compromised, the site only (nine out of 10) gets a spam infestation with possible malware links. If your favorite e-commerce account is 0wn3d by Mordor the Russian Mafia, you might be considerably out of pocket. Still, the stunning number of sites still using MD5 hashes (and Mozilla only switched in 2009) should put a chilling fear into any paranoid netizen’s heart and mind.

For whom the bell tolls

I’m no fan of FB, but this probably is a good, strong mark in the Yahoo! is DOOMED! ledger. Every step towards a diminished user base pushes Yahoo that much closer to the criticial mass threshold, but it’s a return trip this time round.

Once one of the undisputed giants of the tech industry, it’s now tottering around with many wounds, most of them self-inflicted. It’s name is synonymous with the screwing up of promising tech startups that were bought but left to rot through terminal mismanagement or just plain neglect. It will join the list of failed search engine companies that expanded for a time, caught “Management Syndrome” and died a slow lingering death. Within a few years Microsoft will pick up the choiciest bones and move on, and this time round no cajoling will be needed.

Heroic Age Episode 01

Come Mar and Apr and it’s the typical moment where we’re being INNUDATED with new anime, and the ever popular (and often deliciously crappy) mecha genre is going into factory overtime mode. We already have the somewhat impressive Reideen (considering its progenitor material), and quite a few barrel-bottom scrappers (like the hilarious Voltron knockoff Dancougar Nova that doesn’t even go for the magic number 5 for the useless gestalt parts), but that’s not the focus for this little piece…

Heroic Age sounds suitably pulpy as a title, and from all indications it seems to be exactly that. In recent years we’ve had some resurgence with both the grand space opera and the realism sub-genres in the area of sci-fi, what with efforts like Gunbuster II and the Crest/Banner of the Stars (coming on the heels of the genre classics like Legend of the Galactic Heroes) for the former and Planetes and Starship Operators for the latter. Heroic Age is a somewhat schizophrenic combination of both these areas, as we’ll soon see.

"We put in the Au in Auwe"

Our story begins in apocryphal fashion, with one of the series’ characters giving us the customary infodump narrative on the grand scope of things. In vague fashion we get the spiel on an advanced alien race called the Golden Tribe (given the way Marvel-esque cosmic entities are tagged, this isn’t as howlsworthy as it seems) that issues a clarion call to the younger races in the primeval past, and 3 “younger” races answer in suitably stirring fashion in the race to the stars and dominion over all things material. After weighing up the situation our glowing plot devices decide to move on (another plane? universe? college party with brewskis?), but a wee fact snares their attention: pesky homo sapiens has joined the party late (presumably getting the memo from the local planning department on Alpha Centauri in time).

"We come bringing you gifts of gold, frankincense....oh, wrong setting."

Some confusing conflation of time and circumstance happen, and our resident superfriends are seen mucking around in a ruined human craft that has landed on an unidentified world, and would you know it, there’s a human babe in your typical swaddling clothes there for the picking. Our Golden Tribus members, in a stunningly obvious reverse spoof of Superman, whisks him away…..

Cue the present…

Clippy, eat your metal heart out.

The human vessel Argonaut (suitably named once the nature of its mission is clear) is out on a long trip through the cosmos, and they’re on short supplies. Aboard is our main female character, the princess Deianeira, and she has certain psychic gifts that she uses to scan nearby space for the mysterious object of their laborious quest, while following the usual cryptic clues and a related distress beacon signal. 2 facts become salient, that Deianeira is ruling over her crew/nation in matriarchial fashion and she and the crew are desperately searching for salvation in a lopsided war (no, there are no Vipers around. At least, not in this ep.) In a turn of events very convenient to the viewer, they’ve discovered the planet they’ve been looking for, and an armed scouting party are sent down with the princess.

You were expecting a sandworm?

Worst Name EVAR.

Twins...but no 'cest, thankfully.

In the ruins of a ship (dum dum dum DUUUUUM) they discover a wild-haired child alone that whimsically refers to the malfunctioning ship AI as Mother (either through being left alone too long or outright adorable insanity), but no real clues as to who he is or why the ship is there, beyond the yet-to-be analyzed ship log. We also get a glimpse of our hopefully non-Odious Comic Relief pairing, the psychic twins Malyl and Talyl and aides to the Princess (one of them being voiced by the familar kender voice of Rie Kugimiya) as well as the token male sidekick, the Junos Knight Iolaus. Before the search party can question the wildling, the plot moves onto the gatecrashers….

….who are the delightfully named Bronze Tribe, who seems to be at least a component of the war effort that’s acting against the humans. Taking a page from the Borg Rulebook for Geometric Starship Construction, they take to the cosmos in monolithic planetoids, and the Argonaut, caught in orbit when one such ship bears down on them whilst the party is still earthbound, retaliates in typical space opera-ish fashion: saturation fire. It doesn’t work on the planetoid, and enough grunt units slip through the point defence blanket to enter the planet’s atmosphere.

Who ordered rock grubs?

You wouldn't happen to have some floss handy, dear chap?

The look of the terminally FUBARED.

POIGNANT+1

The search party are soon surrounded by the aliens, who look to have escaped from a Starcraft or Starship Trooper movie set. Things look grim, but it’s only the first episode! Predictably enough, the wilding turns Hulk and invokes/summons/becomes possibly the wankiest giant walking bag of bolts in anime since Ideon and the Gunbusters. Running amok, the metal beast soon clears the ring in a matter of speaking, and Deianeira confirms our big, lethal Iron Giant is what they’ve been looking for, whilst leaving quite a few questions unanswered.

QUICK VERDICT: There’s nothing outstandingly original about what is on show in this dish, but it does blend together space opera-ish elements (thematic, visual and plot-wise) from Star Wars, BSG, Gunbuster, Banner of the Stars and even Lensman with mixed success. The action certainly moves along in a brisk fashion (usually the case given it’s the first episode for a non-franchise series), and there’s a refreshing lack of anything remotely emo-ish, but that may change once the series develops. The series does have major pluses in that the plot and certain elements of the mecha are intriguing enough to draw in viewers and it’s evident that the storyboarders don’t take the characters too seriously, which always helps in a pulp setting that has indeterminate quality.