A thought (well, a speculation) on Oh! Edo Rocket's quality

I watched Oh! Edo Rocket several years ago (before I started writing Roving Thoughts) and enjoyed it quite a lot; ever since then I've felt that it was an underappreciated gem, and I am glad to see people like Author discover it.

(Yes, yes, technically Author 'discovered' it ages ago, back when it originally aired, and merely watched it recently. You all know what I mean. Ironically I think one of Author's old side comments about a bit in the first episode that helped push me towards watching it, although my Google-foo isn't sufficient to find it now.)

One of the interesting things about OER is that it not an original anime work; it is an adaptation. I find this interesting because anime adaptations have a terrible track record; most of them have ranged between bland and bad, even when the source material is pretty good. Good anime is rare, but my impression is that good anime that started in another media is even rarer than that. But the really interesting thing for me is that OER was originally a successful stage play, not a manga, a book, or a game (the usual three sources for anime series), and for a while I've wondered if this is one of the reasons that OER is so good.

Here's why I say that:

The way you tell stories in manga, written text, or games is very different from how you have to do it in anime; this means that adapting any one of them for anime may require fairly significant changes in how the story is told and even call for changes in the story. However, it seems intuitively sensible that a stage play would wind up using techniques similar to what anime uses, which means that adapting a stage play for anime would require much less changes and thus has a higher chance of preserving what made the original material so successful.

(Stage plays and anime are not quite the same, in the same way that stage plays and films are not the same (as early cinema discovered).)

Note that I may well be talking through my hat. If you want an expert opinion, find someone who understands how stage plays and film (and ideally animation) tell stories and how they differ, and see if they fall over laughing at this idea.

PS: this entry absolutely is prompted by Author's roll call of the sleeping and the dead, although the thought has been rattling around in the back of my mind for a while.

An aside on the timing of my previous entry

It is mostly a coincidence that I wrote my previous entry on Panty & Stocking right after Author posted his roll call of the sleeping and dead. I watched the episode last night (after reading Aroduc's summary, which pushed it up the 'I want to see this for myself' list) and immediately wound up thinking about how to write up my reaction to it, since it's one of the few anime lately that I have had a distinct reaction to.

However, I can't deny that his entry made me get off my rear to put my thoughts into action and actually write something for once. Really, I should do this more often.

(At a minimum I want to write something about my overall view of Ookami, since I wrote about the first episode. But that would need me to actually watch the final episode.)

My reaction to Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt #1

It is not often that the first episode of an anime series leaves me boggled as my major reaction.

The best way I can think of to describe P&S is that it feels like Gainax decided that they wanted to make a modern American cartoon and then turn the age limit up (without turning up the maturity level, which appears to be set firmly at the Ren & Stimpy or Beavis & Butthead level). The result is extremely unlike almost all of the other anime I've seen, including Gainax's other work.

(In a very bad way, Gurren Lagann is the closest other anime that I can think of, in that it started out as a deliberately over the top take on Japanese giant robot anime. You could perhaps say that P&S is an even more over the top take on modern American cartoons, given a Japanese twist and a much increased age limit.)

Aroduc's summary of the first episode will give you a more detailed rundown if you want it. Do not worry about reading spoilers; P&S is not the sort of experience that can really be spoiled.

I don't know if I like it, because the question feels inapplicable. This is not a show that you like, this is a show that you watch in horrified fascination because you can't turn away. (Or that you flee from with all due speed. It is possible that this is the most sensible reaction to P&S.)

I fall into the 'boggled and unable to look away' camp, so I will be watching the next episode. Of course I have no idea what it will be like; P&S is already so bizarre that it would not surprise me in the least if Gainax changed things majorly every episode (or every few episodes or whatever), depending on how thoroughly they want to run the current joke into the ground.

My quick reaction to Ookami-san to Shichinin no Nakamatachi episode 1

Rather than just just email my comments to Author in response to his entry, I'll be Author-like and post something here for once.

The first fansub of Ookami+7's first episode has come out, and I've watched it now (partly because of Author's entry). Unlike some, I actually like the narration; without its injection of snarky commentary and the show's gleefully casual exploitation of Western fairy tales for our amusement, this would be a pretty ordinary romantic comedy anime with a vaguely unusual hook. As it is the show's atmosphere is deliberately over the top, making me interested enough to watch at least an episode or two more.

(How over the top? Well, the main part of the first episode is an extended Cinderella parody, complete with a bicycle-drawn pumpkin carriage. Said carriage is nowhere near the most amusing and absurd part of the parody.)

If you want your romantic comedies without sly asides to the audience, this is not your show and Aroduc's criticisms are completely on target. Otherwise and assuming that you don't want something too deep, the start is promising but as always first episodes can be terribly misleading and we don't know if the show can keep this up for more than a few episodes without the formula getting stale; parodying a fairy tale an episode this way could get repetitive really fast.

My current photo processing workflow (as of June 2010)

In Thom Hogan's June 14th update (now here), he wrote:

Tonight's homework: document your workflow. Really. Write it down. Include everything that happens from pressing the shutter release to looking at the final image (wherever it may have ended up, e.g. on a wall, on Facebook, etc.).

I have some spare time today for once, since I already wrote today's techblog entry, so I feel like tackling this one just because.

To start with, a note. My workflow is strongly influenced by two things. First, I'm a Linux user, which means a limited choices for software and tools (and a bunch of scripting, because I'm comfortable with that). Second, it's strongly oriented around my Project 365 work, with an inevitable time-based focus on how I organize and approach things.

So:

• the camera puts the picture in the default Nikon directory structure on my 4GB SD card. I have my camera set to the defaults, where it just numbers images sequentially and only resets the numbering when it rolls over every 10,000 images.

  A bit of negative workflow: I've learned the hard way that I can't tell a good picture from a bad one from just looking at the camera LCD (and it goes both ways; good pictures have looked bad on the LCD, and bad pictures have looked great). So I almost never delete pictures in the camera and generally it has to be completely and obviously a bad picture before I will.

  (The common causes are accidentally taken pictures or pictures where it is clear that the exposure is nowhere near where I want it.)

• when I want to pull things off the camera, I use a script to rsync the entire card to my current master directory. This happens every day, generally only once.

  (Note that when I say 'the entire card', I really mean it; the master directory is an exact image of the card's directory layout.)

  I don't reformat the card when I do this. Instead, pictures stay on the card until the nominal remaining capacity drops below somewhere in the 90 to 50 images range (I typically take around 50 pictures a day, so this gives me at least a day's margin on card space). At that point I move the current master directory to my archival area, start a new one, and immediately reformat the card. Master directories are numbered sequentially as d90-pool-NN; I'm going to have to go three digits soon.

  (This is why I have to use rsync; I need something that will not re-copy already copied images.)

  My iron rule on card reformatting is that I must have run the card sync script a second time immediately before I reformat, and it must have reported nothing synced. This is designed to avoid accidentally reformatting a card with un-transferred photos.

  Yes, this does mean that I have every photograph I've ever taken (and not immediately deleted in the camera). Disk space is cheap at the low-ish rate that I photograph.

  (I am not claiming that I have a useful archive of every photo I've taken, because it's not. But if I really want to find something, at least it hasn't been deleted so it's possible.)

• at the end of each day I use an exiftool-based script to copy all of the day's photographs to a temporary staging directory. Usually this happens at the same time as I'm pulling them off the camera.

  (This is also the point where I pop the camera battery out and drop it in the battery charger. Also, I clear the staging directory of the previous day's pictures before running the script. This is not scripted, because I don't script things that delete pictures.)

• I use Bibble 5 on the staging directory in a multi-pass approach to decide on my selects and completely process them (all in the staging directory). At the end of this I have Bibble 5 write the 'developed' JPEGs to a subdirectory and I go through them with xli to make sure that I'm happy with them; if not, I process them some more until I am.

  The actual details of how I work in Bibble 5 are far too long (and variable) to go into this entry, which is already long enough.

• I use a script to copy all of the bits of the final selects from the staging area to my Flickr archive area (which lives inside my general photo archive area). This is broadly organized by day (and by month and year once each is finished and I archive it). By 'all of the bits' I mean the original raw file from the camera, the Bibble data file about the edits I did, and the final generated JPEG.

  (The script picks out what to copy based on what pictures have generated JPEGs.)

  If I had to use chromatic aberration correction, I use the GIMP to trim off the last few pixels on the sides of the picture if they need it, because the current version of Bibble 5 corrupts the very edge of the picture in this case. (If I have cropped an edge in it doesn't need this, so I don't just hit every CA-processed image with an ImageMagick script or the like.)

  (In theory I could crop the image by those few pixels in Bibble 5. In practice, Bibble 5 on Linux is currently unusably slow when cropping in magnified view. So I get to use the GIMP.)

• I upload the JPEGs to my Flickr using Flickr's basic uploader page in Firefox. After this finishes, I blank out the default filename-based titles that Flickr has given the pictures and add tags for appropriate things if they're missing.

  (Then I agonize over what to chose as my Project 365 photo, except on days when the choice is completely obvious or I only had one thing that was worth uploading to start with.)

On some days, I'm selecting images for more than just my Flickr uploads; the most common case is that I am also selecting for TBN's website. In these cases I generally repeat the last three stages for each separate reason, sometimes entirely independently and sometimes interleaved (where as I look at each image, I decide both if it's good for Flickr and if it's good for TBN).

(Note that I have two completely separate photo archive areas, one for the master directories, and one general photo archive area for all of the pictures that I've selected for various things. The second area has subdirectories for the thing, like flickr and tbn and family, and then generally date-based within each reason. If I had a higher volume of pictures, I would probably want to be more organized and consistent about my directory structures.)

As a Linux user, my strong impression is that Bibble 5 is about my only good choice for processing anything more than a few photographs in raw format. There are some free programs that will process individual raw format pictures, generally not really very well or fast, but I haven't found one that does a decent and acceptably fast job at browsing through them so I can make my selects.

(At this point I am nowhere near willing to either give up Linux or to get a second computer just to do photo processing.)

I could simplify a bunch of this workflow if I could bring myself to trust Bibble 5's 'catalog' asset management features. I would probably use multiple catalogs, with one for my master archive and then one for each reason I pick out photographs (a Flickr one, a TBN one, etc), and switch to formatting the card every time I copied the pictures off it (even though this makes me nervous; leaving the pictures on the card is vaguely reassuring just in case something disastrous happens on the computer). However, this would mean giving up the principle that nothing except my own scripts gets to go anywhere near the master archives.

(I'm a sysadmin. No, I don't trust your program.)

With a more complicated copying scheme I could change my master archives over to a date-based directory structure while still not reformatting cards immediately. I would have to rsync to a staging area, then hard-link the files into their final destinations (chosen based on their EXIF dates); anything that was already hardlinked wouldn't need to be looked at a second time, which would make it reasonably efficient.

Sidebar: looking back at the history of this

A lot of the dance around my master directories is because when I started out, I was planning to burn each master directory to DVD when it was 'done' as a backup archive; this is also why I got a 4GB SD card, because it went well with wanting roughly DVD-sized chunks of work. I never actually implemented this plan; my backups are instead just rsync'd to an external USB drive every so often.

(Don't panic, my machine has mirrored drives to start with.)

It's interesting and a bit depressing to see how pervasively this never implemented backup plan has shaped the rest of my workflow.

Back when I was using Bibble 4, my theoretical workflow was to use the staging area only to make my selects, then have Bibble 4 copy the selects to the per-day P365 archive area, re-point Bibble 4 to it, and process them there. This never entirely worked; every so often I would have to do most of the processing before deciding whether something was a select or not, and every so often I would get pulled into processing an image before pausing to copy it.

When the Bibble 5 beta came out, it forced my hand by not supporting directory based file copying (it could only copy files around inside its asset-management catalogs). If I was copying the files outside of Bibble 5 anyways, it was much easier to do all of the processing in one directory instead of theoretically splitting it across two separate ones.

In praise of Sora no Woto

Sora no Woto is the most interesting show I'm watching this season. Despite having a cast that mostly consists of cute girls and telling fundamentally heart-warming stories, it's going in a more complex, deep, and serious direction than it initially appeared, and it keeps surprising me.

(I'm also pleased that one character's incompetence at her job was not kept as a plot point for very long.)

One of the interesting things for me is the intriguing and carefully mysterious setting, which Sora no Woto has been progressively revealing more and more about. However, I'm not sure if the show is ever going to actively explore it and answer our questions, or just keep using it as background material for the character stories. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter, since so far Sora no Woto has been more character oriented than plot driven.

(I'm not sure that other people will enjoy Sora no Woto, though, because it mixes light-hearted entertainment with a more serious background, and not everyone considers these to be tastes that go well together.)

Sidebar: an attempt at a summary description

So what's Sora no Woto about, beyond the bare summary? It's about a girl joining a small group of other girls (of assorted personalities) and fitting in, character driven stories, and through the stories we explore the mysteries of the setting around the characters. It has an intriguing setting with lots of things hinted at and a bunch of well realized secondary characters to go with the lead ones. The stories are heart-warming, and things are somewhat stereotypical but not to the degree that they annoy me. Music plays less of a role than the bare summaries make it sound.

gg's interview with Sam P, an anime translator

I happened to stumble over an interview or two that gg (a fansub group) conducted with a translator called Sam P, who works with Crunchyroll among other places. So here's three links: the background, the answers from Sam P, and then an additional chat later. Reading the whole thing has been interesting and has certainly given me things to think about.

(This is somewhat belated, as I seem to be much better at writing down little notes about entries that I want to write than I am at actually, you know, writing them.)

About Darker Than Black - Gemini of the Meteor

I quite enjoyed the original Darker Than Black, ending and all, but I'm still not sure what I think about the second DTB series because I still haven't made up my mind about the ending. I'm pretty sure that the creators intend for the ending to be considered a good one, but I can't decide whether it's a good ending or actually a disturbing and creepy one.

Apart from that, I liked it and it's a good series. It's more straightforward and less wandering than the first one, but that's because the first one was longer and was taking an indirect way to introduce us to all of the characters and their world. The second series just threw us into the main plot right away.

(I have avoided looking silly about several things in Gemini through the simple means of not writing them down here at the time, unlike what I did with Kampfer. Possibly this spoils the fun.)

The Nikon DSLR trick with Auto ISO and Manual mode

Nikon DSLRs have a reasonably smart automatic ISO mode, where you set your minimum shutter speed and maximum ISO and when the camera has hit the minimum shutter speed it starts raising the ISO. They are also famous (or infamous in some quarters) for not turning off Auto ISO if you go into Manual mode, contrary to what you might expect.

(What happens in this semi-Manual mode is that the camera works out its idea of the correct exposure and then attempts to get there purely by changing the ISO.)

I actually sort of like this, because it enables a trick: it essentially turns Manual mode into a combined Aperture+Shutter priority mode, and in turn what this does is give you a convenient way to vary auto ISO's minimum shutter speed as conditions change:

• if I am shooting braced or with better support than expected, I can switch to M and drop the shutter speed down to lower the ISO.
• if I switch from one end of a zoom to the other I can either drop or raise the shutter speed as necessary (depending on how I set my minimum shutter speed).
• if I am suddenly taking pictures of action or something else where I want a fast shutter speed, I can increase the shutter speed without moving from my preferred (or necessary) aperture.

(Life would be somewhat simpler if Auto ISO also let us pick a minimum aperture; even though I can shoot a 50mm f/1.8 wide open, I often don't want to and I'd rather raise the ISO a bit and be at, say, f/2.8.)

Using Manual mode this way means that you really want to be able to control exposure compensation, and in turn this probably makes this trick unusable on bodies with only a single control wheel (where you lose access to exposure compensation in M mode).

The one thing that I really have to remember when doing this is to pay attention to the ISO and to the exposure meter, because the camera can overexpose if you push it. Generally if I'm doing this I want the ISO to always be above base ISO; the ISO going to base ISO when I'm at a comfortable shutter speed is a sign that I should switch to another exposure mode, because M mode probably isn't getting me anything useful.

The novelty of frozen brakes

A disconcerting novelty happened to me a few weeks ago: my front brakes froze solid. As far as I can tell, I mean that literally; not just that they seized up, but that they seized up because they were frozen. As you might imagine, it was more than a bit disconcerting to squeeze the front brake lever and have it have no give at all, especially since the front brakes are the more powerful ones where you do most of your braking.

(This is not always the case for me, but that's another entry. Someday.)

My best theory on what happened is that in previous days some water had worked its way onto the brake cable and into the front cable housing (perhaps from spray thrown up by passing cars) and had not drained away. When I took the bike out in sub-zero temperatures with significant windchill, the water froze and locked the cable and the ferrule together. Exposing things to warmth and working the front brakes improved the situation by melting things a bit and breaking the binding action, although they were not entirely better.

Ah well, winter biking can be interesting. (If it was easy and painless, everyone would do it.)