The End of Utena.

Heheh, sorry, Evangelion reference. You know, the "End of Evangelion" movies?

Anyhow, we finished watching Utena just today. Very good, but still... I hate open endings. No matter how useful they are to fanfic authors. (Talking about open endings, there's Ranma... haven't seen so many variations on any particular story before!)

Won't spoil it to anyone, but it's just as confusing as Utena gets.

My two cents:
- Why in the world does Touga just HAVE to open his shirt to call for Akio's car? And eh... where did that wind come from in the piano room? Surely they didn't have an SFX guy doing it...
- What's the deal with all the I'm-so-amazingly-hot poses around Touga and Saionji? Not to mention Akio's moments of glory à la Cadillac on top of his car.
- Why did they put something so WEIRD as the show mascot? Chu-Chu, I mean.

And I thought the Clamp girls were open-minded about relationships... Utena shows that if there might be a way, there WILL be a way.

Oh and...

On a completely unrelated note: if you use MPlayer, here's a tip: use the flags -vo x11 to use X11 output and thus become able to use your usual Print Screen key to make screenshots. Really useful!

Heehee...

Watched 3 eps of Utena tonight. SO good! XDD

Especially this ep about a mystical Indian curry spice which switches personalities. Nanami, the local prankster and snob, apparently causes such a change upon the tomboyish Utena Tenjou and the innocent (I'd rather say masochistic) Anthy Himemiya.

To make up for it, they have to go to India to get some more of it and undo the change. "Divine justice"... so they say. For all her pranks and wrongdoings. In the form of.... elephant attacks. Yes, you heard it, elephants.

I think I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves. Oh, and there's an extra bonus after those, so keep an eye open!

Elephants can do anything!

• They can bash trucks:
  
  
  
• They can jump off cliffs:
  
  
  
  
  


• They can walk on tight ropes!
  
  


• They can surf!
  
  

Oh and... who said monkeys couldn't do kendo?


Yes, this is the Kendo Guy (Whose Name I Can't Remember), having been switched over with Chu Chu.

Screenshots!

Well, I think I FINALLY got pictures working. No thanks to that lousy junk, Hello. At least, if you're not going to work, tell me WHY, jeez.

Here's the first pic: it's the battle screen.


You can see there, from top to bottom, the options:

• Kougeki (normal and strong attacks)


• Special: depending on the character, you may have different special moves. Zakuro has an useful attack which damages all opponents (Zakuro Blade), Ichigo has her trademark attack, and Ringo has healing moves (a good thing, since she has lousy HP).


• Ryakku (Items): Need I say anything? Oh, btw: this is Shôjo World, so items are things like Cookies, Chocolate or Ribbons.


• Tokugi: these are individual abilities you toggle on or off. Ichigo has Yokeru ("Cheer"?), which speeds up Courage recovery.


• Koutai: switch party members at no cost. You actually walk around with all 6 characters at once, but you can only fight with 3 at a time. Kinda like Breath of Fire 4, only you switch individuals, not whole teams.


• Taiki: Do nothing. Recovers quite a bit of Courage.


• Nigeru: Run away.

You can look at the party members' HP at the top of the screen, along with their level and Courage bar. Most Special moves use 1 or 2 hearts and all strong Attacks use 1 heart.

Those jellyfish-like things are Paraparas (no, it's not the dance xDD). They corrupt animals' DNA and turn them into monsters, basically. Oh, and what's really weird is that you can actually see your opponent's HP!



This pic here is from the start of a boss fight with Kishu. As expected, he wasn't hard at all: this is just a game based on an anime, not a real RPG, so it's made to be real easy. Healing with Ringo and basically throwing everyone else at him was good enough. Special moves didn't seem to work with him, though.

Forgot to tell this game has something I've never seen before: when you're going to be attacked, you actually have the choice to Evade or Parry. Sometimes it depends: with Evade, you might not receive any damage at all, but if you do, you'll take full damage. Parry always halves the damage.

So, for those pesky weak monsters that appear when you're exploring somewhere you've been before, Evade's the option. Not for boss monsters... Kishu did about 25-28 damage to Ringo in one hit WITH Parry. Had he hit when I tried to Evade, he'd have knocked her out in one hit.

More pics:

• Slumber party (this IS a shôjo game after all):
  
  Purin: Wah, just as expected! Not a single slip, no! And I'd only brought these pajamas with me! (talking about Minto having a bunch of different ones)


• Talking with Zakuro (a la Tokimeki Memorial):
  In case you're curious, the options are: "What might be Kishu's objectives?", "I wonder what's for dessert today?" and "That pendant might be a Mew Aqua...".


• And last but not least: the WEIRD baddie!
  He's a guy, honest. He DEFINITELY sounds like one. No, don't look at the ribbon. Nah, the eyelashes and the purple lipstick are perfectly manly. Of course.
  
  Kishu: What do you want? I don't want people butting into my affairs, you know.

More TMM

Well, apart from studying for the exams, I've played a bit more TMM today. Just a wee 2 hours, don't have much more time than that. Does anyone have good statistical data I can use for my multivariate analysis practice? Jeez with my teacher: I always end up wasting time looking up things on the Net.

Anyhow, as expected, a new party member appeared (though it's not a Mew): Ringo (Apple). Doesn't seem to transform into any particular animal. She uses her pendant (from her late mother) and her Inner Power (Kokoro no Chikara, actually... it's not a literal translation) to transform into something similar to Ichigo's outfit. A new, and WEIRD baddie (other than Kashu), along with Ringo's brother have also appeared.

Finally, someone who can heal (50 HP), as a Special move.

Tokyo Myuumyuu or MewMew or whatever

Yep, that sort of name only works for shôjo series ("for girls"). Aaanyway, I'm playing the PSX game based on that series now. It doesn't seem to be part of the series itself, thankfully. Shows they're actually making an effort to design the game ground up and all that.

Well, to cut it short: as in any magical girl anime, a bunch of young girls (junior high school students) use something like henshin (transformaiton) wands to dress frilly suits which sometimes don't seem to protect much (viz Sailor Moon). It's pretty much the case, but this time, it's frilly suit+animal attributes (in an animeish, Digi-Charat sort of way).

From what I've been able to read and see in the game, there's:
Ichigo (Strawberry) - Pink Cat
Retasu (Lettuce... yes, you heard it) - White Mermaid
Minto (Mint) - Blue Peacock?
Zakuro (Grenade) - Grey Wolf
Purin (errrr... Pudding?!) - Golden Monkey (or something of the sort)

And it is quite a strange game. Oh, and there must be a 6th Mew, too. When they transform, they change their name to something like Mew Ichigo - which is quite stupid, considering it doesn't hide much of your name. At least those Sailor Moon names hid your real name properly. Well, I guess not many people walk around with cat ears and a tail.

Basically: they went to a country villa (of course, this is Shôjo World we're living in: everyone's got a villa!) that probably one of the guys has. Oh yes, there's Shirogane Ryo (the blond sporty kind of guy) and Keiichiro (the polite, French chocolate cake-making type). Not to relax: apparently to recollect some DNA data from a specific animal in the island. Which they don't know about. It's supposed to be similar to the sort of stuff they use for transformations.

Don't ask me in which cromosome they store the clothes. Really, don't.

Yeah, the story is pretty pink-colored and quite silly sometimes, but the game is actually rather entertaining, being based on a manga and all.

When animes die a screaming death

Well, that's over-exaggerating a bit. But see, there's animes you watch and think "Hey, this doesn't look bad". Then the story rolls along a bit and.... the anime literally turns into something else which isn't quite good.

That's the case of Bleach. Or so it seems. Maybe it's just a few bad eps in a good series, but it definitely seems to have turned into a "nuhh, huhh, my sword is BIGGER" sort of anime. There was a pretty good chance of teamwork (forced teamwork, probably) between Ichigo and his partner (I'm talking about episode 26), but it didn't happen.

And then, there's other two cases:
- It Became Good, but Then It Became Much Worse (ScryED). Ugggh. Don't watch that.
- It Keeps on Getting Worse (Weiss Kreuz). Worst series I've watched.

See, that's very, very different from great animes like Naruto or Inuyasha, for example. In those, the mangaka didn't just avoid doing that sort of stuff (which must be, obviously, harder to make).

Ack.

Darn Blogger. Should've told me the input was too long.

Anyhow, using that, you get an algorithm better than Warshall, but you have to use a trick Watanabe (a Japanese researcher) recently published an article on. And you might use several CPUs to calculate it (our teacher published an article on the subject, actually). Nice for those dual-core CPUs that will be coming out this year's last quarter, like the Pentium D or AMD Athlon X2.

I think I'll prolly apply for a place as his assistant next year, if I can. It'd be nice, and I might learn a few things xDD.

Well, mata aou, minasan.
~Antonio

Interesting stuff

Well, for me, anyway.

A few days ago, we had a really interesting Algorithm Design and Analysis (ADA for short from now on) class. It was mostly about calculating the reflexive and transitive closure of a graph.

Basically, a graph is a bunch of "dots" - vertices, connected by unidirectional or bidirectional arrows - edges. It's used for, say, representing labyrinths or steps of a particular process. Very useful stuff. Anyway, the reflexive/transitive closure of a graph basically lets you know if you can go from vertex X to vertex Y or not. It's as easy as that, really.

There seems to be a lot of different algorithms for this, and we discussed a few in that class. The most famous one (doesn't necessarily mean the best, of course) is the Warshall algorithm, which is actually a special case of the Floyd algorithm, which is a special case of the Kleene algorithm, who was ignored by most if not all textbooks on the matter. Poor fellow.

If you represent a graph with a Boolean (true/false) doubly-indexed table (sp?) where the (X,Y) entry is true if you can go to Y straight from X and false otherwise, the algorithm is as simple as a triple for-ish loop:

for (int k=0;k < n;++k)
 for (int i=0;i < n;++i)
   for (int j=0;j < n;++j)
    m[i][j] = m[i][j] || (m[i][k] && m[k][j]);

Anyhow, this takes a multiple of n^3 operations, which is not too shabby. Well, the discussion was on how to improve it.

We were discussing a different approach based on matrix exponentiation, which basically consisted on taking that matrix I talked about before, adding I (the unit matrix, y'know, the one with 1's on the diagonal) to it and then take it to the (n-1)th power.

Well, with yet another special algorithm (the quick exponentiation one), that took a multiple of n^3*log2(n), which sadly enough, it's worse than the previous algorithm.

Though, it can get better. There's an algorithm for matrix multiplication (geez xDD), the Strassen algorithm. Of course, it's only better when you get square nxn matrices where n>=120. It's not THAT uncommon in practice, especially if you do statistic calculations.

The old book in the HP 6 Adult Edition

If anyone can read whatever is written on the cover of that tattered, tantalising old book (oh yes, I love old books so: that musty smell, that mystery beyond your now and here) please let me know. Something to satisfy my curiosity until the book is out. Yes, I am REALLY looking forward to it.

p.s: I think I read - after zooming in with Photoshop - "Advanced Potion Making". Could it be that? Nothing that mysterious after all, is it?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

News on the next HP I am so looking forward to. I went to check my pre-order in Amazon, and found the following scraps of info:

J.K. Rowling has revealed three chapter titles from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to be:

* Chapter Two: "Spinners End"
* Chapter Six: "Draco's Detour"
* Chapter Fourteen: "Felix Felicis"

I might be speculating on this subject at greater length in another post. I need also to post the cover for the adult edition. I am buying the children's one, as that is the one I've been buying all the way back since 2000. Plus they are lovely illustrations, I can't still quite understand what's the need for an adult edition.
I should keep reminding myself about money moving the world around and so on. But I still can't understand!
I am not, however, that happy with this cover - nothing half as nice as the one for "The Order of the Phoenix". Doesn't Harry look a bit odd? What is it they are doing? Isn't it all a bit less detailed than the previous ones? I'm no pro arts critic, just saying what my eyes suggest me to say. My apologies to anyone thinking differently. Diplomatic, me?
I am so excited about it all - I can hardly wait to get my hands on the book! It is going to be my very own HP festival ;). Wait and see.

Going Postal: Mr Pump

Well, I just needed to leave this quote somewhere I could remember afterwards. As some of you know, I usually go through two works of fiction simultaneously, one, usually something for my PhD, in book format, and the other, an audiobook. Well, the audiobook I'm listening to now is Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal", book 33 (33, was it?) in the Discworld series, read by Stephen Briggs. Absolutely cracking, and the acting is great. This quote is a dialogue between the new postmaster, ex-thief Moist Von Lipwig (!!), and his parole officer, a golem called Mr Pump, who is read by Briggs in a thunderous voice which I will always from now onwards associate with golems. Great performance. So here we go:

‘‘I need some fresh air. What happened in there? Why is it so...creepy? What happened to the Post Office?’
‘I Couldn’t Say, Sir,’ said Mr Pump placidly.
‘You don’t know? But it’s your city,’ said Moist sarcastically. ‘Have you been stuck at the bottom of a hole in the ground for the last hundred years?’
‘No, Mr Lipvig,’ said the golem.
‘Well, why can’t—’ Moist began.
‘It Was Two Hundred And Forty Years, Mr Lipvig,’ said the golem.
‘What was?’
‘The Time I Spent At The Bottom Of The Hole In The Ground, Mr Lipvig.'
‘What are you talking about?’ said Moist.
‘Why, The Time I Spent At The Bottom Of The Hole In The Ground, Mr Lipvig. Pump Is Not My Name, Mr Lipvig. It Is My Description. Pump. Pump 19, To Be Precise. I Stood At The Bottom Of A Hole A Hundred Feet Deep And Pumped Water. For Two Hundred And Forty Years, Mr Lipvig. But Now I Am Ambulating In The Sunlight. This Is Better, Mr Lipvig. This Is Better!’

Now, isn't that such great fun? Ok, I must have been overambulating in the moonlight, I suppose. I still think it is a hilarious bit of writing.
I am certainly becoming a great Pratchett fan.

Gah.

Well, gee, thanks a lot. -_- I just happened to pick up a Ribbon from some monster in Culvert. Tried it on after much whining from my sister, and this is what happens. xDD

It's not that I like Swordies all that much - but I liked the idea, and Swordies usually make good starting characters for n00bs such as I. Better than starting with an Archer, I'm sure. Still have to check whether the Kafra Storage is shared among all characters in the same account. It'd make sense if it did.

Swordies do have a ton of HP - that's basically what they're for. You can imagine they're not exactly exciting to play sometimes. When you're in a party, your job is... getting whacked around while the Thief hacks, the Priest heals and the Wizard casts. So heroic.

Gourry Gabriev

That's a very compromising picture of my brother's RO alter ego. He wanted to go as Zelgadis, btw, but no way a mage can go around without a swordie to do the dirty work. Who needs two mages in a party? So he ended up as Gourry, who is, nevertheless, a bit of a personal hero for the two of us, in all his endearing ignorance of the ways of the world (and of any other ways in general, lol). In the words of the Great Gourry: "Errr?"
He never wanted to pose with the ribbon for this picture. That shows what a nice otouto he is :D. I suppose he did not suspect I was going to post it here. I already did, sorry!!
p.s: He also accepts favourable offers ingame. PM GourryGabriev, Sakray server.

Lina Inverse

Lovely mage Lina Inverse (who else?), my Ragnarok Online alter ego. PM ingame LinaInverse (Sakray server) - party and tank offers accepted!
p.s: No, I didn't choose the outfit. Comes with the job. I happen to be a Woman with Principles, mind you. Someone give me a cloak, please!

Shoukai (Introduction)

Hiho,

Just checking if I can actually post something. I'll be the one who'll be putting up computer-related things here (I'm a Computer Science student), along with mixed commentary on anime/manga series, Ragnarok, food, my Japanese language studies, that weird thing called 'my dog', and... my oh so wonderful uni. Maybe. And whatever comes up.

Do look forward to our The Great Wisdom of Tuxedo Kamen (-sama for the fans, if he's got actually any serious fans) section. I've got all the sounds/images extracted and prepared, I "just" have to make the Flash clip, along with its Actionscript code. Though Actionscript's quite easy to debug.

Let's see:
- Rose from the Sailor Moon arcade game (it's a Taito arcade system game)
- Tuxedo Kamen chibis from the Sailor Moon SuperS Fuwa Fuwa Panic Rom
- Sounds from the anime (obviously, the original Japanese seiyuu... you DON'T want to listen to the American voices... it's like Sailor Yogi Bear Moon!)
- And of course those gems of wisdom Naoko Takeuchi has to offer through Mamoru-kun.

Too bad I can't use LaTeX to make this site... yeah. xDD I'm addicted to it. Still discovering new things all the time. It's... big. There's no way to learn it in a sitting.

Brand New Blog

Here we go, my very own blog. The aforementioned is thus brought under daylight (or its virtual equivalent in any case) to be precisely that, my very own hodgepodge, or the result of my somewhat incongruous range of interests: literature (mainly British, mainly Victorian, and Fantasy as a sideline) and literary criticism, classical music (mainly vocal, mainly Baroque) and countertenors, anime (esp. R. Takahashi, CLAMP, Naruto, FMA, FB, etc.) and manga, videogaming (esp. Ragnarok Online these days), period drama, Victoriana, Harry Potter, fairies and what not. Indeed I think "What not" encompasses the whole mess just fine. You are warned!
Blog manifesto done with, let me add I am aware I shall not be updating as often as I would like. Days having 24 hours and we frail humans having to waste 8 (a few more on weekends) on sleep and that kind of thing, you know.
Keep an eye on us - the little brother (who will often feature as the co-author of the hodgepodge and will consequently add his own introduction) and I are preparing a most sublime homage to that paradigm of universal wisdom, Tuxedo Kamen, from the Sailor Moon series for those of you not versed in anime. He will soon be amongst us to answer all those existential doubts we have hidden somewhere, if only you give me five minutes to go to the storeroom and look for them ;).
A pleasure to meet you all, and do not hesitate to leave your comments!