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.)

Understanding Bakemonogatari

Here is something that I did not see and understand until the last (aired) episode of Bakemonogatari smacked me in the nose with it: Bakemonogatari is really a love story. A romance, like Toradora.

And like Toradora, I think that it is a good one. It does not have a love triangle, because that's not the kind of story it is telling; it is more telling the story of how two peculiar people come to fit together and to more or less understand each other.

I don't want to say that the supernatural elements of Bakemonogatari are just trappings, because they're a lot more than that, but ultimately they're the means to an end and not an end to themselves. Right from the beginning, the important things that wind up happening are all about the characters, not about the monsters.

Sidebar: on Bakemonogatari's art style

Bakemonogatari has a somewhat peculiar and often minimalistic animation style ('cheap' is the uncharitable label). While I didn't mind it, I can understand why other people dislike it and feel that the studio was being lazy. However, it strikes me that an advantage of the art style is that it leaves you without distractions for the dialog, which is important as Bakemonogatari often has very dense dialog that you really want to pay attention to.

Quick things about Kampfer 07

(Warning: mild spoilers.)

From Author:

Why did Kaede (Sakura) lose consciousness?

I concur that we don't have enough information. However, there seems to be a striking pattern that Kaede drops out of the action just when her nose would otherwise be rubbed in the existence of Kampfers, and I doubt that this is a coincidence.

I continue to think that Akane was not shooting seriously for whatever reason. Otherwise, she is an embarrassingly bad shot; has she hit anything meaningful?

(Since Kampfer seems to be mostly a comedy anime, we could be overthinking all of this. Convenience coincidences and comically bad shots are a stock in trade of ordinary comedy.)

From another Author entry and what it points to:

Natsuru has not yet taken showers/baths as a girl. And this is supposed to be a real full-blooded hetero adolescent?? What gives??

He wasn't able to keep the transformation or transform at will previously, so showering was out of question.

Natsuru seems to have gotten much better at transformations as of the start of episode 7; it looks like he can transform at will and hold the transformation at will, but he actually needs to be able to muster the will (which was his problem at night).

My take on his lack of showering et al is two-fold. Minorly, it's likely to be hard on his will. Majorly, it's not as if Natsuru is on his own, and we know that his entrails animal likes both making sarcastic comments and cheering Natsuru's development on, and imagine the potential for either or both if Natsuru deliberately goes off to shower as a girl on his own, no matter what actually happens or doesn't happen. There is much less utter embarrassment in avoiding the whole situation.

(We, and Natsuru, have no idea if entrails animals are aware of it when their person transforms.)

(On a side note, I'm (still) working on getting my followup to Author's reaction to my last entry on Kampfer to say what I want it to say. This writing clearly stuff is harder than it looks. I'm aware that this is somewhat against the spirit of quick reactions and rapidly jotted notes.)

The (lack of) fighting in Kampfer (as of episode 4)

In the Author style of brief notes on things that I ran into elsewhere (via Author, of course): I actually find the current lack of fighting in Kampfer to be pretty realistic.

All of the Kampfers are theoretically ordinary highschool kids who basically got drafted against their will. It feels entirely right that they are generally unenthusiastic about actually beating each other up, or even theoretically killing each other, regardless of what the Moderators may want them to do, and that they would much rather hang out and talk with each other (and, in the case of Shizuku, yank everyone's chains). If anything, they now have more in common with each other than with their classmates.

(This makes me unconvinced that Akane actually is as terrible a shot as she seems to be. It doesn't even have to be deliberate and conscious on her part. Really, humans are startlingly kind when you get down to it; outside of cliched shounen action series, you usually have to work quite hard to get them to hurt and kill each other.)

As for Akane: I think she's just manic (okay, very enthusiastic). Shizuku is just an excuse to let off some energy, as Natsuru was at the start of the show.

(I believe that Akane even more or less admitted that the reason she stopped fighting Natsuru wasn't that they were on the same side but that she didn't have the heart for it after he saved her.)

Mahjong in Saki

One of the things that strikes me about Saki is how unimportant the actual mahjong games are. While it matters who wins (and sometimes how powerful their win was), the show pays almost no attention to the actual process of playing and winning. This is especially striking in the past two episodes (6 and 7), where the show has been focusing on a tournament.

(Sometimes we get a little bit of dialog about strategy issues.)

This is rather unusual for a nominal sports anime, but does mean that you can follow pretty much all of Saki without knowing more than a tiny bit about mahjong. You won't miss much in being unable to follow the games, because there's usually nothing there to follow in the first place.

(While episode 7 does show some gameplay, my impression is that it is just illustrative; it's there to show Nodoka's dominance, not for anything important about the play itself.)

One reason I like Nodame Cantabile's Chiaki

One of reasons that I like Chiaki is that he is that rarity in anime, a competent protagonist who understands his own competence. The usual pattern is that the protagonist is either unskilled (and learns through the course of the anime) or is basically an idiot savant, ferociously skilled but without understanding.

(Nodame herself is an example of the latter category, and one of the themes throughout Nodame Cantabile is people trying to get her to harness and direct that ferocious skill, to think about and understand what she is doing.)

One particularly blunt way to put the attraction of this is that it means that Chiaki has clues. He comes to realizations; he sees problems; he fixes things. In short, he gets to act intelligently, not blindly. He gets to be smart in his field, which is refreshing to see.

(This is unfortunately kind of a rarity in anime protagonists; being smart this way is usually reserved for the secondary characters.)