the second eyelids

SCANDAL-On! – SCANDAL does ‘Don’t say “lazy”‘

ilifin — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:21:31 GMT

I like SCANDAL. Something about four girls in one band speaks to me; one bass, two guitars and a drummer is better than having one keyboard too. I also like Houkago Teatime, although five girls and add in keyboard from a girl with peanuts for eyebrows. So does someone over in Japan, and mixed it together. Can we get a Fuwa Fuwa Time cover too?

Starts with a presentation of the band and promo of their current best seller "Shoujo S"; the K-On! fun begins at approximately 00:40.

Blogging from an iPhone

ilifin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:55:42 GMT

I already have Tweetie running on my iPhone to sort out Twitter when on the run. I can go in MSN and AIM from the phone. Hell, I can even get on IRC either through an SSH app or just through Colloquy. Now I can blog from it without using Safari with its random lag.

The Wordpress app feels and operates like any good iPhone app, although a misconfiguration in my LigHTTPd made the app simply bug out. I fear that half of the world's self-hosted blogs will have the same problem if they use pretty permalinks. The trick was to make sure xml-rpc.php has its own redirect line so that HTTP GET values get passed on properly.

Did anyone else try the app out?

Recent project: Desucon

ilifin — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:02:22 GMT

I recently finished a website project for my buddies in DirtyWorker now that their yearly con is getting close. Desucon's Art team had a meet-up that I attended since they wanted a backseat moderator who knew the limitations of time, form and composition of a website using Wordpress. At the end of this meeting, I was already in charge of making the new website happen, and spent just over a week putting it together. Below is a peak at the finished project, click it to see the site in action. If you are Norwegian and reading this, please leave your comments in this entry!

Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier

ilifin — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:09:30 GMT

Long time, no post, see Twitter.

I've been playing Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier the past few weeks and it has fired up the JRPG-gamer in me again. I've completed Fallout 3, I've cleared Fable 2. I've yet to do any of the DLC for neither, since Endless Frontier's occupying me.

This game has so much breasts, so much gratitious intense amounts of random bouncing from any character without a flat chest - even a character with AAs has the frontal set bouncing like mad from simply lifting her arm to cast a spell. Add in that the game itself is very self-aware of this and is thus filled with horrible jokes about breasts all over. Take for example a scene where the crew lacks a keycard, and our friendly hyperactive big-titted robot with a love for sarcastic remarks delivers this line:

She also has golden moments such as

But to the gameplay itself; this game has overdrives making you get an animated scene on top of the battlefied. As KOS-MOS here demonstrates.

The main thing you do to increase damage in Endless Frontier is to keep an enemy in air, chaining together all kinds of attacks by commands on the D-Pad or with a simple press of the A-button. You need to time it right, and you can cancel attacks to increase the "Frontier Gauge", which lets you see bouncing breasts when it fills to 100%. In fighting games, you call this juggling. I would argue that for Endless Frontier, this should be jiggling, and this game is full of shits and jiggles. Did I mention that the first pair of bouncing meat belongs to Yukana, and the cat ear robot is Suzuki Mariko? The voice acting in this game is awesome.

Minute reviews of what I’ve been watching lately

ilifin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:35:09 GMT

My good time is being spent on movies, TV-shows and not so much anime these days. I prefer to have company to watch stuff together with and thus there's either one of my housemates or someone else upstairs with me watching something. That, or I'd be outside watching a movie or just hanging out. With this recent obsession over spending time NOT watching things alone, I've discovered various rather amusing things. So here's some reviews.

Watchmen (movie)
I'll start with saying I haven't read the comics, but I like Rorschach somehow because of an artist that did awesome artwork for Quake 2 mods back in the day, who signed everything as 'Rorschach'. My attraction to this movie was then based on knowing there was a guy in a coat with a hat walking around being awesome with his white mask with inkblots from the Rorschach test on it, and my expectations next to none.

I'll be brief, as there wasn't much to say. I felt like I was tossed into episode 4 of an ongoing TV-show with Watchmen. Something was missing, and the characters were really badly introduced and I had no real grasp on who any of them were except the Comedian and Rorschach at the end. The effects were... cool. Some will watch this for the effects, I wasn't too amused. There were however some moments where I was being all 'ooh shiny' and then Dr Manhattan comes with his blue penis to ruin it. The moments I enjoyed most of this movie were with the Comedian and Rorschach. I laughed at Night Owl and Silk Spectre II's scene in Arkimedes with the godawful misplaced song and the flamethrower. I did not laugh at anything Involving Ozymandias. Rorschach (again) should just have had his own movie where he narrated his own random investigations like a journal - I really didn't enjoy any other parts of this movie. I rate it 4/10 for Rorschach, and if they ever decide to keep using the Joker in the Batman movies, please make Rorschach's actor the new one.

The Mentalist (TV show)
It was C.C. that told me I should watch this show, while warning me the main character is a big jerk. I don'' get it - I love the guy. I love this show. It's a extremely intelligent and very socially smart guy walking about helping crime investigations while his mental condition is a mystery and all you really know is that he will slaughter his wife's murderer in stead of prosecuting him. And yet you just sit there and enjoy the ride.

Having Patrick Jane troll and zing every person he can come over and always flaunt his superior intelligence and knowledge, always putting his beliefs and what he believes is justice and right in front of him and making it the norm for anyone he encounters. He is just so amusing with how he always gets his way - and nobody really tries to get back at him for doing it. The rest of the cast supplement him really well too, although I feel the boss is a bit poorly written. I absolutely love Cho ('it's time for CHO BUSINESS') and how his extremely straight and unshaken character keeps the stone face, even when someone drunk and hurt is sitting next to him near a bed - crying her eyes out - in stead he just zinged her in stride.

I'm all out of episodes now and I can't wait for more. For me The Mentalist is like watching Code GEASS or Death Note without the superpowers and the will to dominate the world. It's a relief from the oh-so-evil-boo-hoo mentality that Lelouch and Light have their characters based around. In stead, the superior intelligence is used for a greater good, although with an ulterior motive to get himself some peace of mind - at least not by dominating the world.

I just saw these at MegaHobby 2009 and holy shit

ilifin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:36:16 GMT

Some of my absolutely most favorite shows out there is the Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha triology, and of these, I like StrikerS the best. With that, I had my eyes pruned opened for the past half year, waiting for Alter to announce their incarnation of Nanoha and Fate in their StrikerS form. I have *every* single other Alter Nanoha figure, with Nakajima Subaru on pre-order now, and I picked up Teana Lanster from the postoffice yesterday. So why am I posting this? Actually, did you even read this before you noticed the below images?

Yes, I have more images. They are courtesy of Akibahobby and Hobbystock.

Bonus Fatina picture:

Japanese games not being kept Japanese

ilifin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:24:36 GMT

Milling around lately on the great Internet is the news of the new Star Ocean 4 game, coming out this month, having de-animefied the game and changed the menus and whatnot. Also, there's no original dub track from the Japanese release and thus only an awful excuse for an English dub will be available instead. I assisted my housemate in wrapping up his copy of Infinite Undiscovery and returning it to the gamestore. We screamed as the voiceactors in Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 opened their mouths. I really, really don't like dubs. And I can't play the non-dubs unless I import Japanese consoles.

For games like Tales of the Abyss, where I have use for the terminology the translators there used, I have soft-modded my PS2 with a networking adapter and a huge IDE harddrive in it. Works like a charm with HDLoader and I play an UNDUB of Tales of the Abyss. I didn't have the need for this with one of my favorite games, Eternal Sonata, where the game itself came with a Japanese language option. My XBOX 360 is European, which means all the games are usually in English since region codes prevent me from getting Japanese games. And because of this, I had hopes for Namco Bandai, who started out so well on the 360 with Eternal Sonata. Come Tales of Vesperia, and the North American release doesn't have a Japanese language option. I hold my hopes high as I wait for the Asian English release to possibly have it - no luck there either. And this game doesn't even have a European release slated yet! With both Tales of Vesperia and Star Ocean 4 probably only having shitty dubs - and both games I would really like to play - chances are I won't even play them. Until I get my hands on a Japanese 360, as these dubs are just plain awful and hurt my ears, and thus also ruin my experience with the game.

So I'm asking whoever's reading this - are there any good current generation games like Eternal Sonata out there - without awful English dubs, that keep the Japanese dialogue? I think Lost Oddysey has kept it, but if there's two games in the pool of many, I'm sad that we're not even being offered the ability to get the original audio as downloadable content at least. I'd pay full price for the game and half the original price on top of that just to get the original audio. Please, Namco Bandai, pretty please!

HTPC woes

ilifin — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:12:57 GMT

Some might have caught on that I have recently spent time building a HTPC and set it up to replace the old machine I had which couldn't run 720p with more than one line of text at once. Gundam 00 karaoke was fabulous and Marina's song was ten times as annoying since the whole episode started lagging. But no more! I can now run 1080p with 20-30% CPU usage while crunching through a billion torrents. Although... I've had to file a ticket with the motherboard creator, since I can't get sound through HDMI no matter what I do. I've tried about everything I can think of now, and the latest event was me getting a reply from a technician at XFX, handing me a beta BIOS. Still not working, so we've had to run 2-channel sound through analog outputs instead. Sure, there's sound, but I'd rather have it running digitally over HDMI.

I'm now furiously trying to figure it out together with the XFX technician. I've cross-checked with other TV sets and confirmed the audio working over the cables and to the inputs on my TV using my XBOX 360. So what gives? Any ideas?

Nijuu-Mensou no FFFFFFFFF

ilifin — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:58:14 GMT

I was forced to watch yet another episode of the story of Hirano Aya still not being able to voiceact properly in an anime about a boring girl. Episode 21 felt like an ending to the show, FINALLY, yet there's an episode 22. I don't even... this show has again and again frustrated me with how it was damned cool with a really cool concept from the first few, is it five episodes? And then they just killed the cool crew Chiko hang out with. And the whole concept of a gang of thieves doing ridiculous thefts like in say - Ocean's Eleven - just vanished, and Chiko met up with all kinds of fucked up characters and especially that goddamned annoying maid and COITUS SHUNKA. Akechi was cool though. But I hated that fake detective with my every being and you were supposed to feel for this guy and sister complex.

And then it just went down the drain, really. Characters modifying their bodies, a mecha woman lusting for OJISAN, some other weirdo that looked just like the mecha woman lusting for OJISAN and those fucking kids and then the doc has molded himself into OJISAN? Topple all that with that song Hirano Aya so wonderfully fails at singing and then they're making Ion Cannns and I don't know anymore. I can't wait for episode 22 so I can finally say I managed to watch through this show and that I can rate it so low that I will forget it existed and announce how it managed to be worse than Evangelion. And from my point of few, that is a seriously major feat - and Evangelion doesn't even have Hirano Aya!

My XBox 360 is fixed; a new challenger appears

ilifin — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:59:47 GMT

I got my 360 back yesterday. I also confirmed the imminent death of my PC the same day, as if though the 360 decided that it now wants attention instead. I am now saving up funds to get a new one since I can't be arsed to get a new PSU for the old hog. The 360 did work just fine though, since I finally was able to play through the Mirror's Edge demo, which was the initial cause of the crashing before Fallout 3 did the death strike.

Question now is whether I play or whether I do something else.

I still don’t like Hirano Aya

ilifin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:50:26 GMT

My housemate saw Yes Man this weekend, and confronted me on my thoughts on the acting history and hilariousness of Jim Carey. I presented my point of view where I laugh well at his roles where he is allowed to do his batshit thing where he just goes all the way out with his faces and weird remarks and whatnot, especially in cases like Ace Ventura and The Mask. However in cases like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, what were they thinking? Putting a leash on Jim Carey isn't how you do it, you rather take a different actor. By returning him to his glory in the Yes Man, my housemate was as happy for this as I would have been if I got to see Hirano Aya do her thing again.

So I think this is the case with my misgivings with Hirano Aya too. I'm so pleased with her roles as Haruhi and Konata, that hearing her earlier roles and more recent roles just seems so wrong. I can understand the seiyuu market in Japan where you have to take <some role> every season to make a living, yet while being a seiyuu doesn't really pay your bills - and at the same time I can see that there aren't enough explosive types of characters out there to use her on - she's getting roles she's not really fit for. I'm not really one to say here, but I don't think she's really liking these roles, is she? With her success using her explosive voice she can't be all to pleased with getting shit roles like Minato in Akasaka, Ayumi in Hyakko or goddamned Polka in Eternal Sonata. Can't you just let her do her side-jobs instead, Japan? Please don't ruin more characters by not letting Hirano Aya do her thing. Other seiyuus can do better, and riding on her popularity will just last you that long.

Christmas loot

ilifin — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:04:25 GMT

My parents are awesome and completely endorse my hobbies, and thus have given me a hugeass two meter tall glass display for figures. Pictures later.

qqkthx

ilifin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:53:53 GMT

Just a quick note for those who didn't see it yet, qq's got a website going now. Scripts and torrents are to be found there, while we still maintain the notes on my blog. Some guy has been asking for the scripts forever now, so joy to the people now that they're available.

Getting cultural enlightenment from translation

ilifin — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:19:01 GMT

In my endeavors in translation of colloquial Japanese in common-day situations, I always end up stumbling over references made to literature, god deities, TV shows, and all kinds of� imaginable commonplace things that your everyday Japanese person would know of if they are actually watching anime. For me, who's living over in cold Norway, I haven't had the chance to get indulged in these cultural tidbits around me while growing up and thus having a parental unit to ask about what the hell is going on and why it is funny. Instead, I have to do research with the mighty force of Google in Japanese behind me, reading up and trying to figure why it is funny or why something makes sense to say, and sometimes I end up wasting quite a lot time on it too. Not only is it on references, but on things that guys would never know of unless especially interested or if they got kids, and I have to say some of the things I have learned from translation is rather funny.

Take for instance Toradora. If there's anyone in the show that uses these cultural reference, it is Minori, and lately the other characters have shown to bring them up in situations I had expect something completely different. Take for instance the latest episode that I've been working on, episode 10, where Minori suddenly explains how she's using a "Manjuu Kowai" method. I was convinced beyond that that couldn't for the love of me be what she was saying, until I started reading NicoNico comments for the episode. Google to the rescue, and I find out this is a Rakugo, a comedy script told by one person sitting dead serious in a seiza, and that it is rather funny as well. I end up reading the whole thing, and it struck me as one of the best trolls in comedy history, and probably one of the oldest too. There's a good translation of it here. But how common are these Rakugo for the Japanese?

I have already experienced that the author of Toradora is very well versed in Japanese culture and loves to stick in her favorite parts of stories as a retelling in Toradora. I can't catch all of them, but when I do, I probably have had to read up on it beforehand. In episode 6, Ami is getting trolled good by Taiga, and is made to do imitations. I had no idea who half of these people were, and I only learned of their names again from reading it somewhere, and then I had to make sense out of what the hell they might be doing. I watched some YouTube clips with Uganda in it, I read about Matsumoto Seichou and Akechi Mitsuhide and figured who they were. After having done all of this in this particular episode, I knew way more about Japanese history, and I knew more about some of their known authors. Again in episode 3, I had no idea what kinrou kaiki file was. Figuring out this took a while and I ended up reading about other old shows too, expecting them to show up later.

Cultural stuff aside, I now know how swimsuits work, and I learned how to make beans spun in fried eggs and other bean-heavy recipies. I know what isoflavone and docosahexaenoic acid is. I'm also getting good at making english rhymes and puns out of their Japanese originals, if somewhat having to call upon the power of scone-munching faggots. Excuse me while I read some more Rakugo, this shit is hilarious.