Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

Tag: Otaku (Page 4 of 12)

The Interrogation Game of Reveal-Hikkikomori

Because I’m totally gonna look like a hopeless attic-bound hikkikomori when I fail to tag five people at the end of this post, my best efforts at excuses notwithstanding (Everyone I know were just already tagged I swear! I have friends, I do! I dooooo….. *echoes in the distance*)

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Anisong: Vidro Moyou

Here’s a nice little anisong post while I continue working towards my next editorial, on KnK 04 (finally!). I’m trying to get into a regular-ish posting schedule with the high-effort, high-time editorials punctuated by stuff like these. I know that similar attempts have spectacularly crashed and burned in the past, but hey, no harm in one more try :)

This is a pretty nice song, possibly my favorite in its season. Vidro Moyou felt like an essential component of the overall mood and style projected by NatsuMachi (Ano Natsu de Matteru), and its wistful, relaxed yet melancholic tune really contributed to the sunny, rainy, adolescent feel of the show. NatsuMachi tended to end its episodes on slight cliff-hangers, and Vidro Moyou, ever dreamy, ever contemplatory, was always a great tune over which one could lightly reflect on the going-ons of the show. Some EDs are great like that – they almost become an extension of the show itself, and contribute directly to its appreciation. The lyrics are pretty nice too. It’s a little difficult to translate, but I’m fairly happy with my version.

As usual, hit the jump for lyrics, translations, and a pic. Also, hit F8 to hear the song while it’s up. Enjoy :)

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Hana no Android Gakuen 10-12 English Translated!

And with this I catch up with all the published strips at the source site. Notably the last published strip there is dated May 15th, so no new strip has been published in sometime. Not sure what’s the scoop on that.

Anyway, enjoy three new chapters of translated Android High School Girl antics.

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the three new chapters. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

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Clannad, People, and a Philosophy of Doing

I am at this point very hopelessly behind on seasonal anime (So no brainmarks this season either, oh sorrow). However, I did recently complete a full rewatch of Clannad After Story (having splurged massively to obtain it in glorious 1080p), so perhaps it’s time I delved once more into that show of shows and talked about the things that stood out to me while being glued to the screen.

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Nepomuk and Anime, my new pet project

Some time ago I stumbled upon a cool little piece of code that Sebastian Trueg wrote, which sourced an online tv database (the TVDB) for meta information about video files of TV series you had on your disk, figuring out what the series, season and episode was from the filename, and storing that info in the Nepomuk semantic framework. That happened to coincide with some of the ideas I had on how a semantic desktop should work with regards to media consumption, and specifically for watching and dealing with Anime. Anyway I recently cleared myself some hobby-hacking time, rolled up my sleeve, set Trueg’s little program up on my box, and tinkered a little with the filename analyzer. Result of which is that the program now also recognizes common anime rip filename formats, and since the TVDB also contains a pretty comprehensive list of anime, we get the following:

Pretty sweet :) In fact, the way Trueg wrote it, you don’t even need to go through the context menu when you add a new file, Nepomuk/Strigi automatically attempts to fetch the metadata when it indexes your new file. So what is the point of this? Point number one of course is that it’s pretty cool! Point number two is that all these metadata are stored in Nepomuk, which in turn makes these data available to any other program running on the desktop that recognizes and queries it. What kind of programs would want to do so? In short, plenty. Some ideas off the top of my head would include a media player that knows what episode of what series it is playing, and can automatically offer to play the next episode, or list the other episodes of the series that you have. Or a series browser (plasmoid?) that let’s you browse your videos by series instead of by folder. Your imagination is the limit. I would myself like to try to make some of those happen, but that’ll be getting too far ahead for the time being.

This program in it’s current state has a glaring problem in the context of anime: the TVDB web api (through which the program searches for the series info) does not support aliases, and so you need to be searching for the precise name of the series as stored on TVDB or you’ll turn up blank. And with anime, series names can vary pretty wildly. For example, querying “Dantalian no Shoka” doesn’t work because the series is stored in TVDB as “The Mystic Archives of Dantalian”. It’s an annoyingly serious shortcoming – half of my files don’t work thanks to this.

So fixing this will be what I’ll work on next. TVDB says they’ll support aliases in their new site, but there’s no release date of that in sight. A simple solution would be to query a different site, like MAL, which appears to have a decent API. In fact, new web sources and APIs should be pluggable, so that’ll be task number one, separating the web-sourcing part into a plugin infrastructure.

I do have some vague plans on the future of this thing, but let’s not count our chickens too much. We’ll get there when we get there. In the meantime if you want to play, you can clone my git repo and grab the source code:

git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/nepomukoracle/code nepomukoracle-code

In order to build this you’ll also need Trueg’s libTVDb and Shared Desktop Ontologies 0.9.0 and onwards – look for that one in your repos.

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The Lazy Cosfest 2012 Post

Lazy because after having attended and covered this several times over, there really isn’t too much more to say about Cosfest. It’s the same old, same old cute and cozy cosplay event at the same out-the-way but pretty nice location at Downtown East. So we went down, and we photoogled, and I’m just gonna let my iffy photos do most of the talking here.

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Hana no Android Gakuen 07-09 English Translated!

And here’s some Android high school manga translations as I continue to, in between work, procrastinate on writing about the seasonal shows, and on Kara no Kyoukai 04. Ah well, post is better than no post right?

Actually it’s been some time since I did any of these anyway. The Japanese manga is up to like chapter 11 by now, so I needed to do some catchup anyway. As usual the quality isn’t the greatest, but I’m a one man team!

Look for translations of previous chapters in the category archives.

Hit the jump for the three new chapters. Like all Japanese manga, this should be read right to left, top to bottom.

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Lootz!

Holay I’m still alive? It turns out I am, and I got a tonne of things I wanna blog about but there are, well, things. The usual. I figured I desperately needed to get the ball rolling, and well… I always wanted to do one of these loot show-off posts, and this is the first time I’ve ever amassed anything close to a blog-post’s worth of stuff.

It turns out that I managed to make a pilgrimage to the holy soils of Akihabara, with the following spoils to show for it:

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Anime Fiesta KL, well, may NOT be a scam!

UPDATE2: Well, I guess a final update is in order re: “what really happened!?”. So the event did in fact happen (at their new venue), but as one might guess from the everything else written in this post and the last, it was as far as I could tell, a predictably, tragically dismal failure. Better luck next time Viva Version, if there is a next time. Ooh and here’s some extra word on a final fiasco that happened with AFKL. And here’s something I found which gave an idea of what it was like to attend AFKL (with photos!). It looks like the Darrel J. Guilbeau guest of honor guy ended up being a cool guy and saved the event somewhat. If only a little.

UPDATE: AFKL apparently changes their friggin venue like a couple days before the event. AreYouF**kingKiddingMe.jpg.

You’d think amending a previous declaration would be an uncomfortable and somewhat embarrassing thing to do, but damn, I tell you I’m actually relieved and a little happy. The truth is I’ve been actively lurking and keeping up on word on Anime Fiesta KL since writing that post. After all, a coalition of people remained that seemed to swear by the validity of the event, and I wanted to see if they could offer anything onto the table that could challenge the sizable condemnatory evidence (about AFKL being a scam).

So I lurked, and waited, and while most people spoke no sense in their fanatical loyalty, gradual lurk-analyses eventually revealed an actual possibility, consistent with all previous evidences, for Anime Fiesta KL to not be a scam. Nonetheless, I wanted to wait for an actual positive evidence before opening my mouth again, and today I found that evidence in the form of this post.

In short, the sum of all evidences I previously detailed can in fact either show that AFKL is a scam, as previously claimed, or simply that the organisers were inexperienced and generally exhibited bad form. For starters, there is no Hatsune Miku concert! This much is absolutely certain. There is some word claiming the organisers wanted to have the concert but it didn’t happen, and also some saying that it’ll happen later in the year instead. So that puts the Hatsune part to rest: there is no concert. No trace of that is in the events official web page, and the organisers are apparently themselves confirming this. Hyping a Hatsune Miku concert without confirmation is certainly bad form, but it’s at least not scamming.

A posted Malay-language interview of an organiser-representative also claimed that the organisers originally sought to work with JPAC, but failed, and so they’re winging it on their own. Basically this means, if true, that they probably have zero experience doing this. With this in mind, the atrociously bad, entirely plagiarized official website and the fact that it is hosted on a private streamyx connection shared with a mobile phone store becomes somewhat less suspicious – since it appears that the mobile phone store is in fact the organiser. It’s a little weird, but not quite impossible. The organisers and supporters are after all claiming that they are organising this out of interest and passion. Alright. Still again, claiming JPAC before confirming JPAC is, well, bad form.

The lack of the event on the list of scheduled events at the intended event location, KLCC, can be explained if the organisers actually announced the location before successfully reserving the site. I asked the organisers about this myself and they claimed to have been given a lot of trouble by the site admin, and had to make many floor-plan revisions. “Now we are rushing for the authorities’ approval”. Again, announcing before reserving and then scrambling to get the site is bad form, but it does let us explain the lack of the event on the scheduled event without labelling AFKL a scam.

Notably, the event is still not listed as of the writing of this post, and the organisers claimed to have requested it not be put up because, and I quote, “For reason that KLCC is wearing out all the enquiries.”. I didn’t understand that either. For now the best we have is the word of the guy at Typical Storm who claimed that a trusted person has contacted KLCC and confirmed the existence of the event.

There is still no official response from AFKL itself regarding all the allegations levelled at them, but if the above suppositions are true, well, it’s not at all far-fetched that the organisers are simply incapable of constructing a proper response. In fact it seems at this point to me that the organisers don’t actually have a spokesperson that is fluent in English, with most of the support and interviews appearing to come from the Malay-speakers.

In short, rather than a ginormous malicious scam, there is now a significant possibility that the organisers simply bit off far more than they could chew (and counted a hootload of their chickens before they hatched). The entire scam hoo-ha originated from the terrific ball of hot air the organisers created for themselves at the beginning of all this, throwing out names like JPAC and a Hatsune Miku concert and all manner of other superlatives, which people proceeded to investigate, dismantle, and call them out on. Now viewed in a more humbled light: as an ambitious convention planned by passionate first-time organisers, the whole thing becomes a lot more plausible.

And really, this is something that I could live with. Even a badly organised event with well-meaning but somewhat irresponsible organisers is a good effort that would hopefully become a learning experience for future efforts. It is definitely infinitely better than a scam. You probably won’t see me down at KLCC on the 31st of March, as RM50 is still well beyond what I’m willing to pay even for a premium con (sans concert), but I’ll be extremely gladdened nonetheless if there is a hall open down there, with people manning booths and cosplayers parading the aisles.

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Anime Fiesta KL is a Scam (Edit: Not?)

EDIT: This may not be a scam after all. See new post here!

Here’s a public service announcement of sorts. I don’t know how many of you who come by here are actually Malaysians or close thereofs, but if you are, consider what I’m about to say carefully. I came by a poster (above) today at a “Rock Corner” music store outlet advertising an anime con called Anime Fiesta Kuala Lumpur (web site here, as shown above), apparently to be held 31st March to 1st April at KLCC and even involving a Hatsune Miku live. The catch however is that this thing is, believe it or not, almost certainly a scam. After smelling something fishy while looking this up online, I did some reading around, and have a summary of evidences listed below:

  1. By multiple accounts (by people who claimed to have called up or visited the event venue, eg here) and by the schedule page of the location itself, nothing remotely related to anime is happening there at the announced con date. The halls that are supposed to house the event are also, apparently, already booked, by other parties. Various groups have also claimed that they were approached by the organisers selling their booths while acting extremely unprofessionally and making incredulous claims about the scale of the event.
  2. Someone apparently emailed Crypton Future Media Inc. inquiring about a Hatsune Miku concert in Malaysia and screenshot and posted the email conversation. The response was a negative. There are also many people voicing suspicions regarding the pricing of the Hatsune Miku concert tickets, who are apparently significantly more exorbitant than comparable concerts in the past.
  3. Some thorough, transparent (and Linux-assisted!) sleuthing, summarised in this post, revealed that not only is the event’s web page (and its many iterations!) suspiciously badly conceived and full of blatant plagiarisms, they are also self hosted under dyndns via a streamyx connection, and is in fact squatting together with the website of the claimed organizing company, which, as it turns out, is a mobile phone store in Ampang. Beyond suspicious for the webbie of an apparently highly ambitious project involving a Hatsune Miku live.
  4. There is no official response from the organizers regarding the avalanche of accusations levelled at them. Not even an appeal for time or a promise that everything will be cleared up. Take a look at (one of!) the event’s facebook page. Basically, they are simply ignoring the accusations (and, from bits and pieces here and there, apparently also deleting and banning them), only responding indifferently to price and time enquiries.

In short, taken collectively, I consider the evidence virtually incontrovertible. This is almost certainly a scam, do NOT fork out any money to these people! Unfortunately I was able to find little advice for people who might already have purchased something from these folks. This post recommends reporting the scam to the National Consumer Complaints Center/Pusat Khidmat Aduan Pengguna Nasional. There is also an “Official video response” of sorts apparently by the local community regarding the situation, in which victims are invited to “contact us immediately in the comment section below & it’ll further assist in the police investigation”.

I hope there aren’t many victims :( I was surprised at the terrible taste this left in my mouth, considering I had only had a passing interest in the possibility of going to the “event”. I can only imagine how it would feel to be brutally cheated of your money and your anticipation and excitement. Various parties claim to be taking action against these guys, I wish them the greatest success. If someone knows what else can be done about these conmen, please drop me a note at the comments.

Edit: links fixed. /palmface

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