Future Diary

For some reason I’d been skimping on my manga lately. I haven’t read Air Gear in a while, Noritaka keeps falling off my radar, Gantz was never really able to hold my attention, and I haven’t even been keeping up with Otogi no Machi no Rena’s slow release schedule. The other day while trolling through 4chan’s /a/ board, though, I stumbled upon Mirai Nikki, a suspense / action title with an interesting concept and what looks like rather sporadic fan translations.

Mirai Nikki means “future diary” and is about a socially-inept high school student named Yukiteru Amano, who obsessively records everything he sees into a diary-like log on his cellphone. When one of his imaginary friends (for he has no real friends) decides to play a new game with him, things get interesting. His diary starts writing itself, and shows him the future. This is all well and good until this phone tells him that a serial killer is going to murder him.

Happily, Mirai Nikki doesn’t fall into the age-old Sci-fi trap of time paradoxes and such, allowing our protagonist to influence his own future. After escaping near-certain doom, Yuki discovers that eleven other people were given the ability to see into the future as well, and over the next ninety days or so they are to hunt each other down. The last person standing will inherit the title of Yuki’s imaginary friend, who just happens to be the god of space and time.

The main character falls squarely in the downtrodden-everyman category that has become so hackneyed in Japanese fiction, but five chapters into this story I’m really quite excited to see where all of this is heading. Due to the clearly limited scope of the premise (twelve competitors, three months), I’m optimistic that the plot won’t spin itself completely out of control like so many other manga I’ve had to give up over the years.

Jealousy and Revenge

With the casting changes of Episode 8 and 9 behind us, Tengen Toppa Gurren-Laggan is back out of its transitional phase with episode 11. Time for us to settle in and watch the young man face up to his destiny.

With the discarded princess Nia now the focus of attention amongst the Dai Gurren Dan, and apparently amongst slathering fanboys across the blogosphere and *chans, the original core trio of Simon, Kamina, and Yoko (with Simon looking in with envy at the other two’s budding romance) is now Simon, Nia, and Yoko.

Poor Yoko. Hard on the heels of a great personal loss, she kept a stiff upper lip in front of her peers and provided no help to Simon in his hour of need. Now a pretty young princess fallen from the ranks of the enemy has taken her place. Episode 12, “Miss Yoko, I Have Something to Ask of You,” finally has given Yoko a chance to work out her issues a bit, something I figured Gainax wouldn’t bother doing. The first half of the episode focuses on a one-sided rivalry with Nia, with Yoko losing at every turn. After the obligatory fight between giant robots starts up, Yoko gets a chance to take the reins and show the bad guys, her comrades, and the viewing audience what she’s really made of.

Aside from the obvious fanservice draw, episode 12 brings one of my favorite characters back into the foreground where she belongs, and not just as a couple of boobs and thighhigh stockings.

Another Game Wrapped Up

Over a year ago, I started up my most recent game-mastering endeavor in the Iron Kingdoms, an adventure pitting a Morrowan monk, a priest, and an Ordic nobleman against a series of Orgoth tombs, all seeking out a personal relic of Morrow Himself. The specifics of the relic were unknown to the adventurers. The details of a monastery raid were long lost to time, as the Orgoth had rather thoroughly defaced their records and monuments at the end of their occupation four hundred years ago. Of the original party members, only Lord Farad Zacharo, retired Capitan of the Ordic Army, the eldest son of a minor Castellan family loyal to Baird Cathor II, survived to see this task completed.
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Comment Spam Milestone

Congratulations, Cherokee Indian Village nonsense-poster from 86.71.107.239, you’re my 50,000th comment spammer since I switched over to WordPress last year!

cherokee indian village

This page contains some info about cherokee indian village

I know that a lot of spam supposedly comes in from China and Russia, but I personally see a lot hailing from France. I have no idea why, perhaps their computer security habits are closely related to their bathing habits or treatment of their immigrants.

Candidates vs. English

I didn’t have the chance to watch last night’s Republican presidential debate on CNN, as I have a job, but was able to catch up with it today. Two quotes caught my attention. One of them, courtesy of Mitt Romney, was seized upon by Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart: “Well, the question is kind of a non sequitur, if you will. And what I mean by that — or a null set — and that is that if you’re saying…” Well, Mr. Romney, that isn’t what a non sequitur is. Maybe he misspoke, but no, he mis-uses the phrase again when challenged for dodging the question: “Well, I answered the question by saying it’s a non sequitur.”

For those of you keeping score at home, “non sequitur” literally means “does not follow.”

Speaking of the literal meanings of things, another quote caught my ear, this time from Mike Huckabee: “And the fact is, they know that if they have excessive taxation and a tax system that literally steps on their head…” Oh my. Our tax system literally steps on our heads? Literally? I was unaware that the tax system had feet, or was capable of stepping on anything.

Clearly the No Child Left Behind program was too late to save these unfortunate souls. People shouldn’t be permitted to throw around high-falutin’ words when they don’t know what they mean. Not without being called on it.

Transcript | Non Sequitur | Literal

FUD vs. Trust

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt have an advantage over reason in the short term. It is natural to treat change as dangerous. When encountering a new person, business, or technology that is seeking your trust, it is normal to withhold or deny that trust at first, looking for some indication that it is merited first. The above slickly-produced infomercial is an excellent example of this.

The purpose of trusted computing is to insulate computer hardware and software vendors from liability when end-user information is compromised in some way. Toward this end, the TCPA encourages certain practices regarding interaction between processes within a system or between systems. By implementing these practices it is theoretically easier to make tools that share information responsibly.

FUD dictates that should be viewed as a power grab by greedy corporations that want to sneak into your house and steal your Cheez-its. Clearly by implementing a chip on your computer that uses 2048-bit encryption, some diabolical cabal will be hijacking your World of Warcraft guild chat and putting your company’s trade secrets up on eBay.

The Against TCPA group may be well-intentioned but their claims are unsupported and their arguments are largely an appeal to anti-corporatism. Due to the nearly invisible way that Internet traffic is already routed past various parties, through unknown hardware to practically-unknown destinations, all based upon paper-thin chains of trust with ominous names like DNS and BGP, it seems to me that this is much ado about very little indeed. If you’re concerned about shadowy figures reading your email and poking through your top-secret communications, you would be well-advised to encrypt it yourself, establish VPN tunnels through various foreign connections, and wear a tinfoil yarmulke under your hat.

Love the mascot, though.

Foil, Epee, and Saber

Transitional episodes have an odd effect on me. Most shows don’t have the courtesy to provide them, as it’s necessary to keep the story and character development moving forward, but I think Gainax was able to pull it off with the introduction of a new character, a dramatic (if temporary) shift in presentation style, and a little reshuffling of the deck.
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Stick Remover

The other night I was exposed to a lovely little web game called Stick Remover. The instructions are in Japanese, but the controls are super easy. Use your mouse to remove support beams from a structure that suspends a star above the red line. Every time you remove a structure, you risk dropping the star too low. When you’re satisfied that you’d removed as many support beams as you can, click “next” on the upper right.

Five levels of fun. I scored 131, how ’bout you?

Manly Tears

This weekend’s episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has been action-packed, and full of the valor, burning passion, and forthright struggle we have come to expect through eight episodes largely comprised of excellence. This week, the series passes a major milestone, a waypoint that anybody could have seen coming, but one that feels like it came all too soon. The pacing and craftsmanship of Gainax shows through in this episode, as it wrenches the faithful viewer though emotional peaks and valleys, wrapping up with a poignant, appropriate ending.

I’m not in the habit of posting spoilers, but I’ll be flying my Gurren Dan flag at half mast this week.

Starcraft II

Blizzard Entertainment has finally caved in to the inevitable, and in a bid to preempt military action by a rabid South Korean fanbase have announce that Starcraft II is far enough into development for a web launch.

Back in the stone age when the original Starcraft came out, my coworkers and I would stay late after work for multiplayer games, eschewing Battlenet and its uber-teenagers. I never cared for the Protoss and their rather impressive end-game abilities, preferring to get the fight started relatively early on. Sometimes this resulted in accusations of “Zerg Rush” cheapness, but really it’s just part of the game; I could never mount a credible defense against a well-built carrier force.

I look forward to seeing what they’re doing with the Terran and Zerg units. Blizzard apparently wants to trickle new information out on a per-faction basis, starting with my least favorite. I can wait, though.

Burrowowl

Infrequently-updated geek ramblings