Warning: Improbability field (and jiggle) detected

Avram Grant disapproves of this pic, casinos, lucky women and even maybe Alan Pardew
This is the only selling point the creative staff could think up I’m afraid

I can’t believe the first new show of the season I watched is Rainbow Gate, which bodes extremely ill for the rest of the stuff coming down the pipeline.

There is precious little to talk about, and seasoned anime watchers already know what the series is aiming just by looking at the promotion pic. So yes, it’s an ecchi show and no, everything else is terrible, like a hobo’s version of Saki. I won’t even say the ecchi is decent either, considering the scenarios are so uninspired it’s clear the entire production team just phoned it in with the camera angles that are Aika-esque, but not quite. The sheer absurdity of a casino hiring an odd-jobs variant of a croupier with an aura of luck can be left as an exercise for the the watcher. I got a little bit of solace though in that her role didn’t require Marina Inoue to use her tsuntsun voice, which would be pretty tiring sans any good writing, which is manifestly not present here.

I once mentioned in a conversation that R:RG would be a good tourist board advertisement for a certain banana island republic that just happens to have two casinos. Given the origins of the titular character as a pachinko mascot girl I’m sure that giving the impression that the casino is a HAPPYFUN place (and not a Kaiji-ish nightmare pit where hopes go to die) was the general idea. Granted, did it have to be so silly it involves a little pipsqueak wandering around on the casino (and outdoors!) without supervision and a horrible episodic plot revolving around a damn teddy bear?

It’s going to be a long hard winter.

(Evryone would actually give this show a thumbs up if it featured Nicholas Cage as a permanent side character every ep, and he’s faithful to his portrayal in THOSE ads. Just sayin’.)

Did someone dial 1800-M-Z-R-O-B-O-T?

Death Caprice is not an exotic pizza

The best tourist guides bring the attraction TO you

Tired of your Gundam lead moaning his head off? Then this should be therapeutic.

Mazinkaiser returns, just seemingly shorn of the previous continuity in this OVA. What little plot there is involves a colony of Amazons in skimpy garb (predictably useless like most others from the Land of Nagai(tm)) and handwaving about a gravity curtain and somesuch threatening world devastation, but I’m sure the fans aren’t too bothered about all that. With a giant robot that’s a walking Equilibrium advertisement, dramatic rising from a flaming chasm and a suitably battle-crazed leading duo going by the squad name of Death Caprice, you know you’re in for a madcap ride. Other amusing notables include the greatest use and commentary on rocket punches EVER, and Satoshi Hino and Shintaro Asanuma being the 2 male leads, last seen in such roles as Tsuchida from Hanamaru Kindergarten and Junpei from Nyan Koi! respectively. People suffering from withdrawal syndrome post Shin Mazinger Z should be ecstatic about this new offering.

(Is it some some kind of seiyuu joke that Shiraishi Ryoko (everyone’s favorite butler with the poor face) is cast as the Hurricane character?)

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.