Roving Thoughts archives

A review of the Filzer dZ4L bike computer

This may be a good bike computer for someone, but it certainly isn't one for me. My experiences with two units have been negative.

My first dZ4L lasted only a few weeks after I bought it; it failed to survive a relatively modest Toronto autumn rain. As far as I can see, this is intrinsic in the design of the computer; the transparent plastic top seems to be simply pressed very firmly on the main unit, not sealed. This is basically tailor made for capillary action around the edges, so once you've got enough water exposure the water starts being drawn up the sides and into the main display area where it mists up the screen and then gets into the electronics. Result: dead unit.

After a year of more or less reliable operation out of the rain, my second dZ4L is now frequently failing to register wheel motion, resulting in either much too low speed readings or a total glitch. This appears to be due to the plastic mount warping (and expanding in the summer heat; hotter weather makes it worse and cooler weather makes it more reliable) so that it no longer firmly holds the computer against the mount contacts. It can simply stop working on its own, plus even small bumps seem quite prone to jarring it just loose enough. Rapping or pressing the computer into the mount can temporarily make it register again, but it's far from reliable and rather frustrating. Trying to use a map case or anything that rests near the mount on the handlebars is troublesome, because it seems very easy for a velcro strap or whatnot to put just enough pressure on the computer or the mount to let things come lose; even a very light touch can be enough.

I find this really unfortunate. The dZ4L's four line display is by far the best information display of any bike computer that I've seen, but a bike computer that periodically glitches out and drastically under-reports speed when I go over even a minor road bump is not a bike computer, it's an unattractive handlebar ornament.

(I may some day put this on the MEC website, where I bought my dZ4L.)

A realization about Dantalian no Shoka

In his usual curmudgeon way, Aroduc has been grumpy about how the protagonists of Dantalian have just stood around for the past two episodes and watched while things happened around them. This has led me to a realization about Dantalian's genre.

Put simply, Dantalian is horror, not action. As horror, Huey and Dalian are our viewpoint to witness things and explain them, but they may or may not have to take any action to resolve the situation and return it to normality. In fact the running theme of the first four episodes is people who do something terribly wrong and are then destroyed by it (often through their hubris).

The first two episodes obscured this by having Huey act, but look back at when he had to act and what he had to do. In each case, Huey only had to act to dissipate the surface manifestation of the destruction (the out of control monsters); the actual responsible person had already been punished by the situation.

This may have already been obvious to other people, especially in light of Dantalian's ending sequence.

(Obvious disclaimer: Dantalian may yet change its genre. The opening has some suggestive bits.)

A brief aside on Blood-C episode 3

(This is the kind of thing that I would put on Twitter if I had a Twitter account. Maybe I should get one. PS: spoiler, sort of.)

Boy, Saya was surprisingly cold-blooded in episode 3 when she just stood by and let the nice innocent baker walk into the monster to get unpleasantly killed. Especially since the show went out of its way to show that the baker hadn't already been mentally consumed by the monster (he was just under its control or something) and probably could have actually been saved.

(And this does not seem to have been red-eyed killer Saya, either. Her eyes were normal in the scene.)

I sure hope this means something important, because Saya is several times less likable and sympathetic now.

On Gosick's ending

The last two episodes of Gosick (which I just recently got around to watching) are so much of a change that I got whiplash, and are among the fastest I've seen an anime series descend into more or less incoherence. It's as if the writer and director woke up after episode 22 and realized that they still had two thirds of the story to cover and only two episodes left.

(There are spoilers here.)

As you'd expect the result was less a story than an extended summary of a story. There were abrupt and unexplained lurches in what was going on (at the end of episode 22 Kazuya was being held by the Ministry to get Victorique's cooperation; at the start of episode 23 he is in military training in Japan). Major story events casually took place offscreen (eg Cordelia freeing Victorique from captivity). What we did see was often drastically out of tune with how Gosick was before. Characters did abrupt changes in characterization that made it hard to care about them. Completely inexplicable yet very convenient things kind of happened. And amid all of this the show spent times on scenes that seemed to do nothing (eg Kazuya's hallucinations, if they were hallucinations).

(I also feel disturbed by what the last two episodes seem to imply about the show's world; they casually present a situation where it seems that Germany may have won that world's version of World War II. Japan has a nice real-world habit of considering WW II to be this not a big deal that other people make too much of a fuss about as it is, so seeing anime downplay it makes me twitch.)

Apart from the last two episodes, Gosick was a decent show. Unfortunately episode 22 doesn't end on a good stopping point so you can't really pretend that the last two episodes never happened.

My early impressions of the Summer 2011 anime season

Another season brings another installment of what is now my regular habit of taking a snapshot of my views of the early episodes that I've seen (just like last time).

Shows I've seen, more or less in the order seen:

• Sacred Seven: it's a Sunrise action series. It's acceptable. I'm sure there's going to be a midseason surprise twist, because that's Sunrise's pattern.

  So far this has my favorite opening of the season, partly because it's so goofy it's impossible to take it seriously. (For some reason I find the hero's little pseudo-motorcycle absolutely hysterical.)

• Kamisama Dolls: the start is interesting and I mostly like the characters. The action helps, although I could do without yet another incarnation of the 'young female character is cutely incompetent' trope.

• Mawaru Penguindrum: the portions of the first episode that were supposed to make sense were well done. I need to see at least one more episode before I actually understand it, though.

  (The second episode is more setup, so I can't say I understand it yet.)

• Kami-sama no Memochou: I like the characters so far, and that's really what a show like this is about; the nominal mysteries are likely to be secondary.

• Blood-C: the first episode was a disappointingly boring introductory episode, and they lose style points for lame exposition. The second episode doesn't add all that much, and the fights seem oddly pointless. Still, I hang on optimistically.

  (Saya exposits by explaining things to her schoolmates, but there's no reason for what she explains to have only come up now, especially since this seems to be a small town where everyone would know all of this background anyways.)

• Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi: there's an interesting story in here somewhere, but I can't help but feel that the actual execution in the first episode is a bit lacking. In many ways this suffers by comparison with Kore wa Zombie desu ka, which covered much the same ground but better and aired only six months ago. The second episode makes me somewhat happier, but not hugely.

  (Also, this sets new lows for casual fanservice, with radioactively censored casual fanservice for bonus fun.)

• Natsume Yuujinchou San: just what I was expecting and hoping for. If you've enjoyed previous seasons (and even if not), this is more of the same.

• Nekogami Yaoyorozu: it's pleasant but the first episode feels a little lightweight. I suspect it may not sustain my interest for long.

• Mayo Chiki: much more amusing than I expected it to be, even if Subaru is about as convincing as a boy as Charles (from Infinite Stratos).

• Dantalion no Shoka: Bearing in mind that I really like this sort of thing in general, I found this nice without being stunning. I expect to enjoy it a lot, although they could always fumble future episodes.

Have not watched due to the description being not to my tastes in various ways (this list is incomplete):

• Ikoku Meiro no Croisee: plain and simply not my genre. I have no opinions on its merits.
• Idolm@ster: also not my genre from descriptions so far, although Author may yet get me to watch an episode.

• Usagi Drop: like Aroduc, I am kind of allergic to melodrama

• Ro Kyu Bu!: you jest.

• Blade: Madhouse's Marvel adaptations have if anything apparently gone downhill since I found Iron Man not interesting enough to watch more of. And Blade was always a second-stringer Marvel character anyways, movies not withstanding.

(I don't really have anything to say about the other shows I've not seen. I may yet watch an episode of some of them in optimistic hopes.)

On Natsume's Book of Friends

Extracted from Aroduc's 2011 Summer Anime preview:

A series that seems to inspire one of two things in people, an intense love [...], or the compelling urge to take a nap.

However fond I am of Natsume Yuujinchou, I have to more or less agree with Aroduc here. NY is pretty much a bunch of heartwarming slice of life stories that just happens to be about the supernatural (or mostly about the supernatural). Given my usual tastes, I have no idea why I like it so much, and I certainly can't recommend it except very selectively; it would bore or annoy a great many people.

(But if quiet, heartwarming stories about the supernatural sound like your kind of thing, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. Consider this a strong plug. You could probably start anywhere without losing much, but starting at the beginning of the first series isn't going to hurt.)

The military in Infinite Stratos

Author:

If IS' military use is prohibited, what is that destroyer doing in the academy's harbor?

If I take IS's background seriously I have to conclude that the whole 'IS military use is prohibited' thing is propaganda, and not very convincing propaganda at that. IS are armed, IS pilots are taught weapons and combat operation, competitions between IS pilots are combat duels instead of any number of other plausible tests of IS pilot skill, IS piloting seems heavily militarized, and so on. I can't think of a single non-combat use of IS we see in the entire series.

If I try hard, I can make the background covered on the Wikipedia page (see also) make some sort of sense. Clearly 'IS will never be used in combat' is a highly unstable balance of power that no one expects to actually last once things get serious, so everyone is frantically trying to get powerful ISs and stockpiling trained pilots (and keeping a careful eye on each other).

(When I was watching the series, I just assumed that there was some secret menace lurking in the background that some of the adults knew about and that all of the IS pilots were being prepared to fight, perhaps alien invaders or something. The IS anime ended right about where I'd expect the big reveal about this to happen in a longer series and I have no idea what happens in the light novels.)

PS: I try not to think too hard about the background in Infinite Stratos. The claimed lack of military use is just one of the issues that are probably best not examined too closely.

Some reactions to commentary on Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars

Now that I've actually watched Shingu I've been going back and reading commentary on it that I skipped over before in order to avoid spoilers, and of course I have some reactions to various bits of it. There are spoilers here, along with possibly too many words.

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On one of Shingu's mysteries

Note: contents contain spoilers for Shingu.

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Linux DVD players for anime

For my future reference if nothing else, based purely on watching Shingu on DVD:

Xine on Fedora 8 has much better handling of DVDs than even a bleeding edge mplayer, but mplayer has better deinterlacing and keyboard controls for pausing and so on so I used mplayer. Mplayer did turn the subtitles to mush in a few places so I went back and re-read them with xine. More modern versions of Xine may have better deinterlacing, which would probably make it almost completely superior.

Different players have somewhat different renditions of subtitles. My Xine shows them as solid yellow text; mplayer shows them as semi-transparent white text. Most of the time I prefer mplayer's style, at least when it's not garbling the subtitles.

(The Fedora 8 xine also has the irritating habit of leveling the left and right audio channels when it starts. I deliberately have mine slightly off balance because that's what it takes to sound right in my setup.)

Mplayer usage: gmplayer -nocache -vf yadif dvd://N, where N is the episode/title on disk; at least for Shingu, yadif was the best option for deinterlacing out of the ones that my old computer could do in real time. Occasionally I needed '-aid ID' as well to make mplayer use the Japanese audio track (by default I believe mplayer picks the first audio track; on most of the Shingu DVDs this was Japanese, but on one it was English). You want to stop and start gmplayer to change between titles or otherwise change parameters; when I did it from the gmplayer menus, the very bottom bit of the picture got this shifting green cast. I could not get mplayer's DVD menu support to work at all well, so I did not attempt to use it.

(I suspect that live action may call for quite different deinterlacing options than anime.)

I admit that it was periodically tempting to give in and download a fansub for Shingu, despite having the DVDs. I suspect I would have had somewhat better visual quality (since someone who knew what they were doing would have deinterlaced it well) and a better rendition of the subtitles.

(As I mentioned in my reactions, modern softsubs are clearly better than DVD subtitles. This should be unsurprising; among other things, modern subtitles are higher resolution.)

PS: the sign that one's anime DVD needs deinterlacing is that things moving sideways get this comb effect at the edges, as half the pixel lines are displaced relative to the other half. It's very visible.

PPS: if people have opinions on the best Linux DVD player for anime and the best settings for this, I'd love to hear them. I can't say I've done extensive experiments here.