Author Archive for Jamie Spong

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Loose Ends, or How My Summer Ended With A Whimper (Rather Than A Bang)

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Stuff.

Summer is over. It has been for some time, it seems.

I did not have the best summer ever. It was pretty good, though.

I stopped posting updates because I was lazy. By the time I got around to it, I had done a bunch of stuff that I couldn’t remember, or wasn’t interesting, or was too much for one post or something like that. So I didn’t.

I gave up on my goal of a different ice cream every week. In fact, I have gone back to a diet consisting primarily of instant noodles, still the cheapest foodstuff on the market despite the price going up by 12.5% due to the Recession.1

I went to Scarborough. I forgot my sunglasses. I played Outrun 2 SP. I ate fish and chips.

I watched Macross Plus. It was good. It made me want to watch the rest of Macross.

I purchased an Xbox 360. It was a good thing that I purchased it at that time because the price rose shortly afterwards. It came with Burnout Paradise, Trivial Pursuit, Sega Superstars Tennis and Hasbro Family Game Night. Burnout Paradise is my favourite. My gamertag is spongbros.

I went to Ayacon. It was brilliant. I took photographs. I started tagging and labelling them, but then I got bored and stopped. Feel free to browse, but you’ll have to figure out what’s going on in them for yourselves. You could make a game out of it.

I watched Robotech: The Macross Saga. It was good.

I am back at college. I have a lot of work to do.

I’ve been looking through my photographs and have received much nostalgia. (Many of my Flickr uploads were set to private until I tagged them; I never did, so I never made them public. Maybe one day. They won’t mean much to you, anyway.)

I continue to like girls. They continue to feel indifferent towards me and/or not exist. It’s better this way.

My favourite song is We Built This City by Starship. I am listening to it right now on Spotify premium. You should too.

I hate analytical writing.

I ordered the 2006 re-translation of Macross. Somehow, I get the feeling that it will be good.

  1. Was 8p, now 9p. [↩]
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Best Summer Ever 2009: Week Blue

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Random Thoughts.

Every so often, I go on a holiday.

A few days, often a week, usually with my family.

We stay at quaint seaside holiday cottages and second-least-expensive hotels. Nice places. The weather usually shines on us.

We rarely travel abroad. The one major difference that I’ve noticed between British hotels and foreign hotels is that British hotels will always, no matter where you stay, provide one with a kettle, a couple of mugs and a small selection of teabags and instant coffees at no extra charge.

Douglas Adams must’ve known just how hard it was to get a good cuppa abroad when he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which generic Englishman Arthur Dent travels to the end of the universe (which, apparently, has a five-star restaurant) but cannot, for the life of him, find a decent cup of tea anywhere other than his home planet (which is destroyed within the first few minutes of episode one). But I digress.

Anyway, because Wi-Fi still isn’t as commonplace as indoor plumbing, going on holiday leaves me without Internet access for a while.

For someone who uses the Internet on an almost constant basis, there is inevitably a period of acclimatisation. For the first day or two, my mind’ll still probably be focus’d on whichever “hilarious” YouTube video I’ve decided to like lately.1

When I discovered Twitter, I thought that it was a brilliant way to circumnavigate the exuberant charges charged by the mobile telecoms by sending one text message and having it pop-up on several people’s phones at once. Then Twitter switched off text notifications for UK users. Fine, I thought. I never talk to people anyway. I’ll just use it as a blog that I can update with my phone. Then Twitter moved their UK number to Ireland, meaning that not only were status update texts not covered by Orange’s bonus top-up promotion, they were twice as expensive. Naughty. This summer, I found myself with a new problem: No signal. I had completely lost the ability to tweet.

To say that I was isolated from the technological world would be a lie; an exaggeration at best. With the gradual phasing-out of analogue television, Freeview is now the norm — the bare minimum, really — and just about every household is now at that stage, even the quaint seaside holiday cottages; where there was once a charming CRT tuned to Tyne Tees in the corner, there now sits the cheapest flat-screen on the planet, connected to an error-prone digibox and a DVD player that I haven’t dared to touch. Also, I now have my iPod touch, which, while not entertaining the mobile Internet capabilities of its far more prolific, far more expensive iPhone bretherin (which I wouldn’t've been able to use anyway due to the lack of signal), plays music and video just fine (in anticipation, I loaded a bunch of Pani Poni Dash theme songs and a couple of YouTube videos on there before I left2) and, with the latest barely-worth-the-asking-price updates, lets me write blog posts on a sofa by the fire3 in a cottage on the coast of Northumberland. And, as is to be expected in this day and age, I will eventually be offered Internet access in some form, whether it’s a terminal in the hotel lobby with flies buzzing around it, a creaky AOL dial-up account on a dear old relative’s laptop computer with Accessability settings enabled and stern instructions to not “break” it or a pay-by-the-half-hour service at the local book depository.4

But this summer, I didn’t.

Earlier this year, when I went to Italy, I used the hotel’s lone Internet access point once. And that one usage just served to aggrivate me. You see, humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. So, when taken away from the Internet and given oh, say, three days to adjust, one becomes used to this arrangement.

And one feels at peace.

One has been freed from the burdens of checking one’s email, flipping through one’s unread items in Google Reader, being annoyed by the people on Twitter one still unaccountably follows, worrying over how many hits one’s blog gets, searching for the latest deals from RightStuf and so on. All those YouTube videos and games of Minesweeper were tearing whatever was left of my attention span to shreds. Just a few quiet days of reading, walks on the beach and eating Auchtermuchty-type sandwiches5 and I’m a new man.

And one makes a vow.

That when one goes back home, things’ll be different.

No longer will one be a slave to technology. Feeds will be unsubscribed from. Friends will be unfollowed. Games will be uninstalled. And, remarkably, computers will be shut down once in a while.

Because, as it turns out, the Internet just makes one’s life worse.

And then you get home and Google Reader tells you that you have 1000+ Unread Items and you start to blast through them and the seasons rotate and history repeats itself and life goes on. ㋼

  1. You can check my latest favourites in the sidebar over there. But you knew that already. [↩]
  2. Some transformation sequences and two versions of Keyboard Cat. [↩]
  3. It was a particularly wet day. [↩]
  4. Incidentally, I can highly recommend Barter Books in Alnwick if you ever find yourself in Northern England. Tea, biscuits, Internet access and over a quarter of a million second-hand books. I got a nearly-new copy of The Salmon of Doubt for £2.20 (which’ll be why I spent an earlier paragraph discussing THGTTG), and it even came with a free bookmark. [↩]
  5. Haggis and bacon. A new candidate for Best Thing I’ve Ever Eaten. [↩]
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Best Summer Ever: Weeks 3 & 4 (and 5)

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Ice Cream and Slice of Life.

In the first episode of the flash-in-the-pan Lucky☆Star anime, the girls discuss, among other foodstuffs, soft serve ice cream, noting in particular that one is always left with an amount of creamless cone to munch upon at the end. They reach the consensus that the disproportionate ratio of the frozen treat to the wafer cone diminishes one’s ice cream experience.

Konata demonstrates a workaround. “While I eat, I do a push-and-shove thing.”

Konata demonstrates a workaround. “While I eat, I do a push-and-shove thing.”

The main thing that I learned from this episode is that the ice cream technology that us Yorkshire folk have enjoyed for years is far more advanced than that of Japan. And it’s thoughts like this that make me feel really good about living here.

As an example, observe this standard-issue regular rolled cone. (This weeks flavour was Strawberry, by the way.)

As an example, observe this standard-issue regular rolled cone. (This week's flavour was Strawberry, by the way.)

As you can see, unlike other brands, even when youve cleared the top…

As you can see, unlike other brands, even when you've cleared the top…

…the ice cream just keeps going…

…the ice cream just keeps going…

…and going…

…and going…

…and going…

…and going…

…and going…

…and going…

…all the way down to the very last bite. No push-and-shove things required.

…all the way down to the very last bite. No push-and-shove things required.

As Brother neatly put it, “what you see above the cone is only the tip of the ice cream berg”. No, I do not work for Ripley Ice Cream, nor do they sponsor me.

I had a dream about Lucky☆Star a night or two ago. I was back at college, and I’d just discovered that all this time I’d had accommodation available to me as part of my package and I hadn’t been using it at all (or even aware of it). It was a shared room with Konata, Tsukasa and Kagami also living in it. So I checked it out. Kagami (who appeared to me in this form) was the only one there. We had a discussion. That’s all that I remember.

And I don’t even like Kagami.

In further anime news, it seems that I’m not the only one out there determined to have the best summer ever. Haruhi Suzumiya, whose on-again-off-again anishow recently restarted with repeats interspersed with a seemingly random splattering of new episodes every so often, has been doing her bit by enlisting the assistance of her ever-so-loyal SOS Brigade in their latest episode, Endless Eight. Much like my mental to-do list (the completion of which these Best Summer Ever posts seek to log), Haruhi brainstorms a series of events and activities (such as hitting baseballs with baseball bats, going fishing and appreciating fireworks) to do within the final two weeks of their holiday together.

If any of this seems familiar to you, it’s because Haruhi’s latest arc invokes what TV Tropes calls the Groundhog Day Loop. Due to my rudimentary knowledge of the Endless Eight storyline, I put up a brief episode review with the intent of repeating the episode review in next week’s post in order to confuse the masses. However, next week’s post never happened. For one reason and another, I couldn’t be bothered to finish this update in time last week. And so the blog went over two weeks without an update. If I could go back and do it all over again, like in Haruhi (incidentally, there have been four episodes of Endless Eight so far, in which almost exactly the same events take place — Brother expressed concern that eight episodes of Endless Eight would be produced), nothing’d change. This is what I do in the summer. I put things off in favour of other things. And although I have done a wide range of blog-worthy activities over the past two weeks, I barely remember any of them. So this post’s going to seem a little uneven as I try and recall all the major events over the past fortnight. Okay. Here goes.

Better get the week before last out of the way first, as I remember it the least. It didn’t get off to a very good start. Monday (which started out with fog÷mist) was focused on writing the previous week’s Best Summer Ever update and filling in my student loan application. And waiting for the post to arrive. (It didn’t.) I don’t remember exactly what I was waiting for, though.

After biding my time, I finally selected the best day to leave the house and go to Harewood House using that membership card that I purchased way back when to encourage me to leave the house more often. Unfortunately, the best day also happened to be one of the hottest days of the year so far. Normally I’d go to Harewood’s on-site planetarium (which I’d really like to do a post about in the future) to get out of the heat but, as it is still term-time for many of the good boys and girls of the world, it was booked out for a school visit. So I had a walk around. The Harewood grounds weren’t as big as the map implied — I felt slightly ripped off, in fact — and I completed a circuit without too much trouble despite the torrential sun. I really should’ve made the most of it (or come back on a slightly less temperate day); not only has the average temperature dipped now, but my bus pass has run out. A day’s bus fare, incidentally, is over £6.

As I may not have already mentioned, I am a subscriber to Popular Video Rental Service. I first signed up after being impressed with the selection of anime titles on offer, and have continued to work my way through several decades’ worth of cinema history. My most recent rentals from the past couple of weeks include The Castle of Cagliostro (which hadn’t aged well, particularly in the soundtrack department. If the Japanese soundtrack of Laputa was anything like that, I’m not surprised that they fixed it for the American release), Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis (a fantastic retro-futuristic spectacle that I highly recommend), The Big Sleep (the original version, apparently famous for not making sense. It made about as much sense to me as anything else I watch) and The Karate Kid (which left me quoting many of its lines. “Show me sand-o floor” indeed).

Overrated developer Telltale Games released the first of a series of all-new Monkey Island games. After initial disappointment at the control system (hint: use WASD), I really got into the game — and then I got stuck. Then I got unstuck, and I continued playing until Brother booted me off his computer so that he could have a go.

After much waiting around, Gurren Lagann (the first nine episodes, at least) is being released in the UK. Four episodes in, and it’s really little more than a standard shōnen anime (albeit with faster pacing and robots). Still, time will tell.

I went to a music concert. The band that played was The Orchestra (previously known as ELO Part II), a band based on the Electric Light Orchestra. Most of the songs that they played were ELO songs.

I only managed to fit in one round of Ripley Ice Cream this fortnight, and that was mainly so that I could take those photos at the top. I’ve been inactive a lot of the time, and am now obsessing over my weight and overall health, so I expect to eat less junk food in the coming weeks. Incidentally, Japan’s annual Soft Cream Day (which commemorates the introduction of the frozen delight to Japanese audiences inspired by Independence Day-celebrating North American people occupying the nation at the time) was held the day before I purchased my latest ice cream. According to Wikipedia.

I played Wii Sports again for the first time in several months. My arm has hurt ever since. I think that I have damaged it somehow.

Me and Brother went to York in order for him to pick up a top hat. Apparently, Brother now cares about what he wears. Personally, I see clothes as a necessary evil, and don’t spend much time worrying about them. We had lunch at Little Bettys, which cost £24.35. Normally, I wouldn’t spend more than one tenth of that amount on lunch, but it’s Bettys. You’re paying for quality.

Over the past couple of weeks, I ate fish and chips a combined total of two times.

And that’s pretty much all that I can remember. I tried looking at my recent photographs (which are on Flickr; I’ll think of names for them later), but they didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. Most of this week, the fifth week, was spent working on or thinking about working on this very post, and preparing for the summer holiday. Really, just me in bed browsing the Internet, getting up only to eat, use the lavatory and watch Top Gear. I’d normally say something like “don’t expect any updates for the next week”, but seeing as it’s taken me nearly three weeks to finish this post, you wouldn’t be expecting one anyway. Yes, like everything else in my life, these posts have become a chore. I no longer wish to continue these “weekly” updates, and will instead switch to a “just update whenever the heck I can be bothered to” régime. I dunno. Maybe I just need a week away from the Internet to truly relax. There’s still a chance to save this summer. The rain is over (for now) and with a week in Northumberland, hopefully I’ll be able to turn this around.

Wish me luck.

Oh yeah, and I got my results from college. I won. ㋼

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Best Summer Ever: Week 2

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Ice Cream and Slice of Life.

It seems that I’m not the only one out there determined to have the best summer ever. Haruhi Suzumiya, whose on-again-off-again anishow recently restarted with repeats interspersed with a seemingly random splattering of new episodes every so often,1 has been doing her bit by enlisting the assistance of her ever-so-loyal SOS Brigade in their latest episode, Endless Eight. Much like my mental to-do list (the completion of which these Best Summer Ever posts seek to log), Haruhi brainstorms a series of events and activities (such as hitting baseballs with baseball bats, going fishing and appreciating fireworks) to do within the final two weeks of their holiday together.

I'm sure that this is a reference to something, but I'm not sure what.

I'm sure that this is a reference to something, but I'm not sure what.

This week’s adventure proved to be one of Haruhi’s less supernatural endeavours, providing a refreshingly down-to-earth episode with nothing out-of-the-ordinary to be found. No idea why they called it Endless Eight, though.

Watching Haruhi and her merry friends get up to all kinds of vaguely summer-related antics (in the space of only two weeks!) has made me realise that I haven’t been making the most of my time. This week did NOT live up to last week and I didn’t manage to do everything that I’d planned. Also, I forgot to bring my camera, so don’t expect any further images for the time being.

I became curious as to whether the flavour of the week at the Ripley Ice Cream parlour at the Valley Gardens in Harrogate was the same as the flavour of the week at the Ripley Ice Cream parlour at Ripley. So I walked down to the one at the Valley Gardens. This week’s flavour: Lemon. Hmm. So I walked on until I found a bus stop and a bus on its way to Ripley. I found them both, and after a short journey on a busy bus, I arrived just outside Ripley’s flagship “world-famous” ice creamery. I thought that I’d just pop in and pop out again, as the bus back’d only be a couple of minutes away. This week’s flavour: CHEESECAKE. Cheesecake flavoured ice cream!!! I had stumbled upon The Greatest Known To Man. Without thinking, I immediately ordered a handmade rolled cone with a fudge stick and a hot chocolate dip. (I’ll go into the ice cream extras in a later post.) They wouldn’t let me on the bus with the ice cream (yes, I tried), but it was worth it. Or so I had thought. Maybe they pulled the wrong handle, maybe it was just a poor flavour. Either way, I couldn’t distinguish it from vanilla. Probably serves me right for something. I’d better stick to mixtures of the two flavours in future to be on the safe side.

Then I went to Knaresborough. I saw some wonderful things. I forgot to take my camera. Maybe I’ll go back with my camera and take photographs of wonderful things.

Every so often, I eat fast food to remind myself why I don’t eat fast food. It was for this reason that I stopped off at the only KFC in the area on the way back and treated myself to what they call the “Fully Loaded Meal“: one piece of fried chicken, one fried chicken burger, one side dish (I chose corn), chips and one drink (I chose Diet Pepsi). I’m used to having my chicken roasted, so the fried chicken surprised me with the tenderness of the bones. I was able to chew and swallow them with almost no problems. The corn was incredibly hot, the chips were distressingly plain and the burger had too much mayonnaise. Whatever my opinion about the meal itself, I’ve had cravings for fast food ever since. Next time I’m in Leeds, fast food’ll be on the agenda. Oh dearie me.

The only other times I left the house this week were to pay in a cheque and to visit Newby Hall with Father. These times, I did remember to bring my camera. But I didn’t take that many photographs. They’re on Flickr, but they’re in the wrong order because Flickr Uploader is rubbish.

I finally got around to playing those Wallace & Gromit games I got ages ago. I was disappointed that a British license was being developed by an American developer — Telltale Games, famous for the Strong Bad point-an’-click-em’-ups and the recent Sam & Max serieses — and, sure enough, Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures Episode 1: Fright of the Bumblebees {gasps for breath} paints what is unmistakably a foreigner’s view of England. It didn’t help that, with my experiences with their games, Telltale is notorious for releasing bug-riddled glitchfests. In this case, I managed to unwittingly trigger a game-breaking bug in the very final scene, meaning that I had to go back to my last save point and sit through several minutes of unskippable cut-scenes. Employ better testers, Telltale. Hopefully you’ll’ve learned your lesson before the release of Tales of Monkey Island.

I started watching Kiddy Grade again. Now that they’ve got all of the character introductions out of the way, the plot is the focus the focus is on the plot. And, for the sake of said plot, the series has taken the radical direction of firing Lumière and Eh! Claire from their GOTT jobs. I’m not sure what the economic climate is like within their expanded universe, but it’ll be interesting to see whether or not they find employment. Missing the point aside, I’ve really been been really enjoying this series. I’d do a full post on it, but there’s nothing I can really say about it that’s much more substantial than “standard science-fiction (but that’s okay)”.

I now have copies of the only four volumes of the Corrector Yui anime ever released in English. I may never watch them.

I flicked through the first few lines of Ever17 again. That racoon-dog haunts me. Never played it? Fix that. It’s less than £20.

Brother made a new blog post. Read it.

Uh… That’ll do. The upcoming weather forecast looks good enough. Maybe some rain. I welcome it. ㋼

  1. The original Japanese broadcast of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was out-of-order. This new episode order sorts them out chronologically, meaning that any new episodes that take place in between the older episodes have to fill in the gaps. [↩]
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Best Summer Ever: Week 1

Posted on June 22, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Ice Cream and Slice of Life.

First update. I don’t know exactly what form these posts are going to take, so I’m just going to start typing and see what happens.

A couple of years ago, the ice cream parlour at Ripley (just a few minutes away by bus) went through an extensive rebranding process, giving itself an overhaul — calling itself “World Famous Ripley Ice Cream” — and opened up a parlour right here in the Valley Gardens of Harrogate (just a few minutes away by foot).

Unlike other ice cream parlours and their simply staggering selection of flavours, Ripley Ice Cream keeps things relatively simple. There are three options: Vanilla, the Flavour of the Week or a mixture of the two. I almost always go for the mixture. This week’s flavour was a new one to me: Turkish delight, of all things. An overly sweet flavour that’d've been a challenge for me to eat on its own (without the counterpoint of vanilla).1

We went to see a suitably epic two-part theatrical production of His Dark Materials in Leeds. It was far superior to the big-budget film adaptation (which didn’t even make it to the end of the first book). I really liked the production techniques; in particular, the dæmons, realised through the magic of puppets operated by actors in inconspicuous clothing — echoing the Japanese tradition of bunraku. Isn’t it great how I’m able to tie anything and everything into my interests?

Just days before my summer began, I had been working hard to finish my assignments. This put me under an amount of stress, and my health suffered for it. This week, I was still feeling the effects; I had a headache and an upset stomach nearly all week, and found myself falling asleep at hilariously inappropriate moments. Although I got better over the weekend, this made it hard for me to get into the summer spirit. I do not intend to do any further work for the remainder of the summer months.

I have a new personal goal: get a new MacBook Pro. However, this takes money, and I need to work to earn money, and I do not intend to do any further work for the remainder of the summer months. So I have set my sights significantly lower: I intend to go back to the aforementioned ice cream parlour every week and try out each flavour that they have on offer. Kinda like Super Size Me, only not really anything like it at all. Fun! This is a manageable goal for me and will give me something to talk about week after week.

Wednesday was wet, so I took the liberty of watching a few of those anime series that I hadn’t watched yet. Just an episode here or there. I started off with Air, which was sad. Then there was Str.A.In (which was underwhelming), Abenobashi (which was awkward), The Big O (which was cool), Kiddy Grade (which was awesome) and My-Otome Zwei (which was better than TV Tropes said that it was). I should probably do a better job of paying attention next time. I can’t really forgive myself for using “cool” and “awesome” as adequate descriptions. I mustn’t let my mind go numb. I’ve watched one Michael Bay film too many this week.

On Friday, me and Brother went on a pilgrimage to the National Media Museum at Bradford to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen in glorious, £8-per-ticket IMAX format. It was big and loud. Even with earplugs in place, the noise system produced a bass so deep that it made my whole skeleton vibrate. Luckily, we’d seen the original The Transformers: The Movie the day beforehand in preparation, so we were able to pick up on some of the film’s mythology shout-outs. It didn’t leave much of an impact on me, however. (Physically or otherwise.) If you’re in the area, though, I heartily recommend a visit to the museum itself.

The weekend was spent catching up with Scrubs season 8. I was greatly surprised by the high quality of the episodes after all these years, despite the constant re-use of running jokes.

I purchased a Crabble because Dr Ashen didn’t hate it.

Brother says that he’s going to work on a blog post “soon”.

And I think that that’s just about everything that happened to me last week.

This week’s weather forecast: Sunny spells. Top temp: 21℃.

See you soon. ㋼

  1. On a side note, eating a chocolate-covered Turkish delight bar is an excellent (and delicious) way to stay awake and alert through lectures and seminars that would otherwise send one to sleep. As they’re so small, I recommend carrying a bar or two should one require a pick-me-up. [↩]
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Best Summer Ever 2009: Week 0

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Slice of Life.

“Work is over / If you want it”

I’m done.

After all these months, I finally have all of my assignments handed in.

And I don’t feel particularly good about it.

But now I have two-and-a-half months free. And, as with every summer, I’m going to attempt to make this one the Best Summer Ever. In order to gauge my progress this year, I’ll be making weekly updates on this blog in order to encourage myself. “What have I done this past week in order to make this the best summer ever?” or something like that.

I’ve already got tons of stuff planned. For instance: As anyone who has read the About page will know, I like anime. Over the past few months, I have amassed several stacks worth of anime that I haven’t watched much of due to all of that work that I eventually did. I’ll have to watch no less than one episode a day if I’m going to get through even half of it. Instead of making just one blog post for each thing, I’ll be collecting everything together into the weekly roundup. It’ll give me greater freedom than Twitter whilst not overwhelming myself.

So that’ll do. I’ll figure out the specifics later. Just know that I intend to have the Best Summer Ever and let you people know about it with weekly updates starting this weekend. There’s got to be someone out there who cares enough to read. ㋼

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Miku Hatsune — Broken Neck

Posted on June 1, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Pictures and Stuff I've Bought.

Oh dear.

Miku had a bit of an accident this morning, as you can see.

Anyone know how to fix her? Anyone know someone who’ll do it for me?

Great to see that she’s still in high spirits.

Musicians are always doing crazy things in the name of publicity. This accident may give her career a boost.

I call this one “Making The Best Of A Bad Situation”.

I’m going to close this post with some inspirational words about how we all have problems in our lives that seem like a major inconvenience but are actually a blessing in disguise. If life gives you cream, make yourself some cream soda. No, wait. More like, if life gives you… Gah. Motivational lecturing is one thing. Putting it into practise, well… Concentrating on short-term stuff takes about as long as the long term stuff and produces fewer gains. Advice for life, right here and exclusive. ㋼

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K-onic Sans MS

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of New and Upcoming Anime.

“If music be the food of love, K-On.”

K-onic_Sans

Last Thursday’s film class involved watching some stock footage compilation called something like Poyahniskwazzi. It was depressingly boring. If this is pure cinema, I’d rather wallow in the mud of the latest Hollywood action flick.

Thankfully, this bout of anti-tainment was followed by a visit to my local anime society, whose antics are usually enough to keep me amused for the rest of the week. Our weekly showings go something like this: Attendees are allowed to bring in anime episodes. The congregation then votes on what they would like to watch, and the four or five shows with the most votes get shown – barring any (annoyingly common) technical difficulties. Hardware aside, one particular flaw in this system was demonstrated to me during the most recent showing: There’s no quality control. People are free to bring any anime in any format, regardless of whether it’s a 5-year-old fansub1 or a poorly-mastered DVD Video (although DVDs are generally discouraged at the society due to the aforementioned technical issues). Last week, when the first episode of the frighteningly popular anime series K-ON! was voted in, us anime society denizens were treated to this:

"Just not to join any club will turn into a home dweller?"

That's "Just not to join any club will turn into a home dweller?" for those of you with images switched off.

Yep. Awkwardly phrased English, low video quality, annoying subtitle typesetting – they didn’t even include the title theme or ending credits!2

Comic Sans MS is the much-loathed font used in this fansub. Much media attention has surrounded the Ban Comic Sans movement in recent weeks; the abundance of the typeface and its usage in unsuitable situations are the points of contention that they seek to put a stop to. What would you think if you went to an up-class restaurant and discovered that the menu was written in the very same cartoon font used on banner ads and office circulars? Thought so.

Comic Sans may be a discredited font, but that’s not the worst of this particular fansub’s problems. See for yourself in these undoctored screencaps:

"Stop the nonsense!"

"Stop the nonsense!" "Once we've become professional, the ticket profit share will 3/7 split, OK?"

"We have to keep her stay by all means!"

"We have to keep her stay by all means!"

o(`ω'*)o

o(`ω'*)o

There will always be bad translations. And, if a series is popular enough and some other bright young translators make the effort, there’ll be good translations out there as well. It’s up to you, the consumer, now: DO THE RESEARCH. Don’t just grab the first file you see on Tokyo Toshokan. Download only from accredited fansub sites like AnimeSuki. Make use of fansub comparison websites. Download and compare several different versions yourself if you have to. Just, please, don’t subject us to any more of these failsubs. Yes, that’s right. I said failsubs. ㋼

  1. A fansub is a film or TV show subtitled into a different language by fans of the series. The quality tends to be a lot more hit-or-miss than professional translations, and there are different translation and presentation styles that can cause one series to be fansubbed by different parties. [↩]
  2. The opening theme (OP) and ending theme (ED) are more prominent in anime than their equivalents in foreign TV shows. They usually run for at least a minute and feature a catchy, mass-marketable song that may or may not be directly related to the show itself. In the case of K-ON!, the OP and ED music CD singles went straight to the top of the Japanese charts – quite a rarity for an animated TV series. [↩]
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Free Comic Book Day 2009 – An Outsider Peeking In

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Printed Matter.

Obsessive folk out there who follow my every tweet will know that I’m not much of a reader. In fact, until recently, I outright refused to read any form of printed fiction. (Personal reasons.) As I see this year as a period of renaissance for myself, where I reject my stagnated self and rediscover things like nature, culture and having a shower more than once a week, I’ve been trying to get back into the lost art of reading for fun. However, years of reading nothing but road signs and flicking through RSS feeds have left me significantly out of practice. I don’t know what makes a book good. What am I supposed to like about them? My family members gave me several recommendations, and I had a few that I, myself, wanted to read.

The problem is that I have not particularly enjoyed any of the books that I have read this year so far. Watchmen had a couple of great moments but I didn’t like the story. The Notenki Memoirs was annoying, self-praising rubbish. Douglas Adams‘ Dirk Gently series would’ve made no sense to me had I not already listened to the radio adaptations. I didn’t find Skellig interesting. The City And The Stars remains unfinished. All of these recommended to me and/or critically acclaimed, and I didn’t like any of them. I still see reading as a chore rather than a joy. So much for getting me interested, guys.

It is surely for people like me, then, that Free Comic Book Day exists. Once a year, usually around the time that a new comics1 adaptation is released in cinemas (the new X-Men film in this case), comics publishers unite to produce a range of comics samplers freely available at comics shops for one day only. It’s a publicity stunt designed to get people into comics stores, and it works.

By the time I reached the local comics house, a great deal had already been claimed by those who woke up earlier than myself. Not knowing which ones I should go for, I grabbed a few from the piles with the most copies left (so as not to disappoint anyone who might turn up later looking for one of the ones with only a couple of copies left).

Whoa. I realised when I got them home that I’d managed to pick up a stack of them. This is going to be a pretty long article if I’m going to read and talk about all of these.

How fitting that the first comic that I grabbed isn’t actually a comic. It’s a collection of articles from a bunch of US-centric comics-related magazines. In keeping with the film tie-in nature of the Free Comic Book Day event, it starts off with a list of the 50 “greatest” comics-based motion pictures. Can you say “flamebait“? Other features include a horrible Death Note “A-to-Z” that misses out six letters of the alphabet and a little Transformers strip consisting of annotated photographs of toys. Right. Moving on.

This next one was double-sided selection of titles from Dark Horse Comics. Side One consisted entirely of a battle sequence from the Star Wars expanded universe. Side Two had a large, eclectic range of titles: Usagi Yojimbo (which translates from Japanese (despite not being a Japanese comic) to “Rabbit Bodyguard”. I suppose that they couldn’t call it “Bunnyguard” because of the The Angry Beavers episode of the same name) about a rabbit who is also a samurai, Emily the Strange (which made absolutely no sense to me), something called Beanworld (same) and a fun Indiana Jones vignette. So far, so meh. I began to notice that the mere touch of my finger on the page left horrible fingerprint marks.

Ah, this looks interesting: The Avengers, featuring a whole host of instantly recognisable Marvel-type characters with a film adaptation in the planning stages. This tale is told from the POV of our favourite web-slinger (that’s Spider-Man for those of you who… eh, never mind) and serves as an introduction to the continuity of this particular series (or a refresher for former readers who haven’t been keeping up). Were I to use Seung Park of insani’s meal metaphor, this would be the main course. It’s not something that’d interest me beyond the festivities of the day, though.

Transformers on one side, G.I. Joe on the other. Two toyetic series whose animated shows maintain large fanbases of children (who watch them) and adults (who remember watching them). I belong to none of the aforementioned groups. Transformers was easy enough, but I didn’t quite get the G.I. Joe strips. I’d probably need some prior introduction to the series to know precisely who is who. Wait, wasn’t that the whole point of the day?

Finally, a series that I’m familiar with. I used to read the Titan-published Simpsons Comics until the price became ridiculous. The Beano could be purchased for less than 70p (I started reading when it was 28p and it got slightly more expensive every few months), whilst each Simpsons Comics issue was several times that amount. Having not read many other comics than those two, I couldn’t quite pick up on the Simpsons Comics’ numerous references to other popular comics series and books, which, to some extent and partially due to the fact that Father would often point them out to me, I can now look back on and smile to myself. This year’s Free Comic Book Day issue takes the opportunity to satirise the very concept of free comics themselves, featuring Comic Book Guy’s annoyance at Bart and Milhouse getting the last copies of Krusty’s (awful) promotional comic. A Futurama short and a spin-off of #FABF15 “Simple Simpson” featuring Homer and Bart as Pie-Man and The Cupcake Kid respectively round off my favourite of the stack.

Great. The one manga title I picked up and it’s Shonen {sic} Jump. This particular imprint targets the 12-17-year-old market with titles like Bleach, One Piece, Naruto et al. For those of you who haven’t heard of them, they’re all rubbish. This particular issue, however, is notable for premiering a new title—Ultimo—based on a concept by comics author and media whore Stan Lee. It’s about a pair of boys who are also robots and they make explosions happen and they go on these adventures and they sparkle and they throw things and there are two of them. There is at least one problem with this: BOYS DON’T SPARKLE.

Fun fact: In Japan, the song Jump by Van Halen (as popularised by a recent episode of The News Quiz) is used to market Jump in Japan, once again proving that the Japanese televisual media just doesn’t (don’t? Curse these plural forms) care about copyright law. Humming the song to oneself makes reading their numerous titles a much more bearable experience.

Resurrection seems to be a post-apocalyptic tale with ambiguous aliens. I continued to hum that iconic synth line from Jump in my head. Despite the distraction, I found it to be a very engaging title. On the B-side (this was a one-sided comics book), we have something apparently executively produced by North American comedian Stephen Colbert, who I am not familiar with. It was pretty funny. All in all, a very good grab.

With its retro-style cover, “Savage Dragon” looked to be another superhero-grade comics, only with less graphical polish than that The Avengers one I’d read earlier (not that this is a bad thing). By this point, I was thoroughly distracted. I still couldn’t get Van Halen out of my head. I just sped through the reading of this one, but I thought that it was pretty well done. It summarised the storyline, and the fact that it ended on a cliffhanger gives one an incentive to read the rest of it. Or not.

And that’s that. Free comicses for one and for all. I’m not any more inclined to start reading comics any time soon, but at least I’ve got a stack of books that, some day, will be worth something. Investing is fun.

There’s probably an ideal comics out there for me somewhere, just as there’s probably an ideal girl. I just can’t be bothered to look for her.

In conclusion: Free Comic Book Day turned out better than Free Cone Day did. But that’s not saying much. ㋼

My thanks go out to the good folk at Destination Venus who didn’t seem to mind me running off with eight of their comics.

  1. According to Wikipedia, the word “comics” should always be used in its plural form to refer to the medium. Pretentious much? [↩]
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Changing The Calendar

Posted on May 6, 2009 by Jamie Spong in the field of Pictures and Slice of Life.

These are going to be a good couple of months.

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