aesmael

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Looked in on ABC3 a few nights ago, which I had not done in many months. They had some show on called Vampire Knight, and from the description I was thinking it would be similar to The Worst Witch so I decided to try watching an episode. Surprised to find it is actually a dubbed anime series as I hadn't thought that to be the sort of thing they air.

Seems to star a girl called Yuki who attends Cross Academy and works as a guardian protecting the Day Class (humans) from students in the Night Class (vampires). Even though the plot I think doesn't much resemble either it kept putting me in mind of a Harry Potter x Twilight situation. Mainly, I suppose, because we have a supernatural sort of school with a changing roster of mysterious teachers, and a girl as protagonist who is constantly being attacked and seems entirely incapable of protecting herself, needing an assortment of male characters to step in and save her.

I had a very hard time believing she is really supposed to protect other students at that school, since she seemed barely able to protect herself from a papercut, and my announce was compounded by other characters needing to explain to her what seem to be very basic aspects of the setting. Maybe my expectations were badly set, but I had been kind of hoping for some sort of active, clueful protagonist. Would be tempted to dismiss it as badly written, but perhaps it is a well-written example of something I don't like? From what little I've seen so far, the story feels claustrophobic and emotionally dangerous, in ways that make me think I might be better off avoiding it in future.

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday I watched a Care Bears movie (Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation), because it was on and I was curious how I would respond to it. I've never been familiar with the Care Bears franchise, wondered if it would evoke childhood nostalgia or not.

About half an hour in I decided the movie made a good metaphor for the cold war. At that point the Care Bears have just taken a couple of dispirited blond kids to their realm and given them a boost of caring and self esteem. Meanwhile Dark Heart has extorted control over their brunette friend with the promise of power.

So, proxy warfare by two competing interests to decide how third parties will live.

I do like the end credits song a lot. I was first shown that piece (Forever Young) by Elena and have enjoyed it very much since. Very straightforward song of friendship.

I was a bit taken back by race in the movie. All the humans I saw were very white, except one non-speaking background child who was black. That seemed very odd.

Speaking of which, I was disappointed to discover in starting a new game of Doom 3 that there are no character customisation options beyond choosing a name.

Current Mood: cheerful

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Some weeks ago the British series Misfits started airing here. It seems to be another in a line of attempts to show 'how superheroes would be in the real world', like the series No Heroics. The characters in this one are certainly convincing enough; I've been meeting people like them all my life. But, I don't like them and in the two episodes I watched there wasn't either any plot or drama that made me want to keep watching in spite of the characters.

For me, perhaps the problem is these interpretations starting with the idea 'realistic superheroes' and going from there to 'superheroes are petty, vain, selfish, and often bullies or bullied losers of some sort', and there's nothing left in it to hold my attention. Without the SF elements it would be a comedy or drama I wouldn't be interested in, and despite my interest being as biased toward SF as it is, nothing is done with those elements that might overcome my disinterest with the rest of the show. And the obsession with rape does not exactly help my interest (Timebomb on No Heroics, being gay and 'dark', sometimes threatens to rape people; one of the characters in Misfits has the uncontrolled power that sometimes skin contact with men compels them to try and rape her [no indication in the two episodes I saw if that works on women too]).

Hm. I was going to use My Hero as a comparative example where I like both the comedy and the superhero aspects, but I can't really imagine it without the superhero component, while I can imagine No Heroics without that, despite us seeing more direct heroing in the latter.

I don't think I opposed to the idea of 'dark' television treatments of superheroes, but I am annoyed that the concept of people being idealistic and heroic seems increasingly to get treated as an obstacle to putting superheroes on television.

Well, most of my annoyance is directed at No Heroics; Misfits I mainly don't like the characters and aren't interested to see more of them. It could be that I am reading them both wrong and they aren't superhero shows, but rather the former is a sitcom whose cast happens to be superheroes and the latter a youth drama featuring a cast who suddenly gained powers and has to deal with that. In which cases, I'm still not enjoying them enough to keep watching.

Current Music: The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

( Concerns Doctor Who through to Flesh and Stone )

In conversations with

lost_angelwings one of the topics she has talked about, especially in relation to Star Wars (and criticism of same), is conveying narrative through fight scenes and how this can be done well or poorly.

Last night I had this in mind as I was watching a movie presented as The Protector (or more properly, Tom-Yum-Goong according to Wikipedia), which features a man named Kham who is of a line of guards protecting the King of Thailand's war elephants and who pursues poachers to Sydney, Australia when the two he is closest with (Por Yai and the calf Kohm) are kidnapped, trying to rescue and return them home. Along the way he is troubled by corrupt white Australian cops who try to kill him and large numbers of people who arrange to be beaten up him, or occasionally to beat him up.

I was not paying especial attention to the plot since most of the movie is in Thai and subtitled and I was busier with my laptop for most of the time. One part which did catch my attention is very relevant to the first paragraph of this post. About halfway through the film Kham has tracked the the people responsible to a restaurant and I was amazed to see a single shot go on four about four minutes following Kham as he fights his way in a spiral up to the top floor. He bursts into the top floor of the restaurant and demands to know where his elephants are. A small group of people come out from the back and mock him about it, shots from around the restaurant and the service counter imply the elephants have been killed, cooked and are being eaten right now. We see his despair as he takes this in and as the lead of the group, wearing white, knocks him down decisively a couple of times while he is still too stunned to defend himself, taunting him with the elephant Kohm's bell. At this we see Kham recollect himself with anger and determination, wrap the bell around his hand and beat down his opponent and others, pushing his way to the back of the restaurant where he finds numerous smuggled animals ready to be killed and served (and the elephant calf Kohm who is alive).

That scene had me rapt all the way through.

There is another somewhat similar scene toward the end when Kham finally finds Por Yai's skeleton mounted on display. He is overcome by this and knocked around helplessly by his roomful of opponents for several seconds. When he recovers himself he takes out his anger by methodically breaking the bones of each of them in turn, leaving behind a floor covered in people groaning in pain.

These are I suppose simple things to communicate in fight scenes (although I did not do them justice, I think), but seeing them so well executed helped me to appreciate the power such sequences are capable of having. It has definitely inspired me to think about how I might apply such craft to my own work.

I said I was not paying much attention except to scenes which especially caught my attention so unless I was watching the US cut (which edited this out among many other changes, and which seems likely at this time) that probably explains why I did not realise until looking it up on Wikipedia that one of the film's main villains is a transsexual woman played by a transsexual woman.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Traveling Wilburys, The - Tweeter and the Monkey Man

Yesterday was the first full day for aimed-at-children network ABC3. I ended up watching a fair bit of it, since there were superhero cartoons I was curious about. Also Skyland, which as far as I can tell is Star Wars but intend to keep watching anyway in case maybe it actually isn't.

The other shows were all based on Marvel Comics franchises (and bear in mind almost my only exposure to comicbooks is from cartoons like these, live action films, television series and

lost_angelwings). First, okay, first was The Spectacular Spider-Man on a different channel which is fun, but I can never seem to tell where in the series we are.

Later was Wolverine and the X-Men, which I had already watched most of so this time around is more to fill in the gaps than anything else. I prefer to call it 'The Wolverine Show' and although it is not bad, have a lot more fun talking about with

lost_angelwings than watching alone. Like the time Shadowcat phases through ice into the ocean during a battle and isn't seen again for several episodes.

After that was The Super Hero Squad Show. I'd heard from

lost_angelwings that she dislikes the show. After watching an episode I also dislike it. The animation was unpleasant to watch and the show itself wasn't fun to me. Reminded me a bit of Muppet Babies although maybe that show had redeeming qualities (I don't remember if it was good or bad). Maybe part of the problem is I am not fond of or attached to most of the characters, although that hasn't been a problem for me with Justice League episodes and actually I think I recognised most of the characters - Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Storm, Ms Marvel, Wolverine, Silver Surfer... probably missed a few. Wikipedia says I missed many.

In the first episode they ended up fighting Mole Man (not the one from The Simpsons and a Japanese Kaiju movie. That sounds much more fun than it ended up being. Maybe the problem is the target audience is too young for me? I don't quite think so since it spent a lot of time being almost but not quite enjoyable, but I was a bad judge of what children would enjoy even when I was a child so maybe. There wasn't anything I saw on Wikipedia suggesting what age group it was targeted at though.

Iron Man is Batman, apparently. His mouth moves when he talks (as does Doctor Doom's) and that bugs me.

Hulk is Grimlock and that makes me sad.

That Silver Surfer was given a Californian Surfer accent confuses and angers me.

From what I heard I think I would enjoy seeing Ms Marvel in a different, fun context.

Last was the first four episodes of Iron Man: Armoured Adventures which I was surprised to find is my favourite of these so far. I was going to say while talking about The Super Hero Squad Show that just about anything describable with "... but as kids!" is almost bound to be bad (although they aren't actually younger in that show, the animation just makes that connection for me). Fortunately I did not, since this show stars a teenaged Tony Stark, Pepper Potts and James Rhodes.

In this version Tony's father Howard Stark was the founder of Stark Industries and killed by Obadiah Stane, who took over the company and now Tony has to attend high school.

In only vaguely related news, the final episode of Ergo Proxy played last week. It had I think a nice blend of resolution and openness at the end, and I was quite fond of a lot of the devices used during the latter part of the series. Tomorrow they begin broadcast of Death Note in the same timeslot, which is handy since as

infinitely_late may recall, I did not have access to ABC2 the last time it aired.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Delerium - Flowers Become Screens (Frequency Modulation Mix)

Was watching the Doctor Who special The Waters of Mars earlier. Since the rest of this post contains my thoughts about that, it goes behind a cut in case someone who wants to watch it unspoiled is reading this and hasn't done so.

( This is that cut )

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Vivaldi - Sinfonia in C - Allegro

Watching Bones and something is up such that I see the picture fine, music is heard, sound effects are heard, but not voice. So it seems voice is transmitted in a separate track to other components of the broadcast?

Some checking revealed voice was audible on a different version of the channel so it seemed more likely to be a transmission problem than a matter of settings on the television. Shortly after the credits voice returned to the channel in question accompanied by a puzzling flickering of the captions when they appear. My guess is someone at the station managed to fix the problem, perhaps by adding the voice track to the broadcast a second time - if the captions are carried on the same track as the voices being captioned that might explain the flickering since they are appearing on screen twice.

But, I don't know enough about television to be confident in this. In fact, I would be surprised if I learned I was correct in these conclusions, since why would the distributors deliver episodes to television networks in pieces to be assembled in broadcast? Although there is that tendency to overlay things like ads and voiceovers onto programs, but I don't think that is the same thing.

So, I've had some ideas but I don't know what is actually going on or why. Interesting error though.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Aram Khachaturian - Adagio

Only recently we got a television which can display closed captions. I don't normally need those to be able to understand what is on television but I often find them a great aid at times when my auditory processing is disrupted. Even otherwise they usually help me understand what is being said better.

Consequently now that I am able to access the state of closed captioning I am very disappointed in it. When I can understand what is being said the words on the screen are sometimes jumbled, overlapping, at the wrong times (such as showing after the preceding sentence(s)) or just wrong. Which is not the same as edits for ease of reading or clarity, and live captioned programs are not what I am talking about. Two of the newest television channels often seem not to have captions at all, which is especially infuriating, although I think my sisters appreciate it since they don't like when I have the captions on.

Maybe it is just this particular television acting up, or maybe I am seeing things wrong but if not, it is disappointing the state of captioning is not what it could be.

(I do tend to use subtitles where available in DVDs and games where available, and my impression of those is of being more accurate and comprehensible)

In the currently playing episode of Poirot he [Hercule Poirot] is complaining of a play he saw, that it is unfair because the resolution depended on information not available until the end.

Depending if he means 'was discovered at the end of the story' or 'was not revealed to the audience until the solution was expounded on to the audience', I think maybe he is being unfair. The latter case I would agree is cheating, but in the former, is it not how detective stories go that they are a process of uncovering the information which indicates the solution? And therefore that the story typically ends once we have all the facts in hand because those facts indicate the answer and thus our mystery is solved?

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: OSNews - OSNews Podcast #24: The Synergy Show

I always thought of Kill Bill as basically the Mirror Universe version of Charlie's Angels.

Edit: The part where she goes after O-Ren Ishii reminds me of the Hundred Man Battle from Berserk, with Gogo in the role of Adon's brother (same weapon and all, updated), although... hard to say who fared better. Guts seemed to manage the fighting easier, but The Bride can walk away under her own power at the end.

Edit2: I'll take that back. Accounting for the story styles those events are embedded in, I'd say they do about even.

Current Mood: busy

Watching the season premiere of Heroes and being frustrated because -

The character Claire has just started at college. Her room-mate was of the obnoxious over-achiever stereotype. At some point she (the room-mate) is found dead, having apparently jumped from the dormitory window, with a suicide note found later.

And the reason I am annoyed? Because Claire and her one friend keep insisting that this woman could not have killed herself because she was so happily pleased with herself, having an abundance of self-esteem, openly planning her life out for the next several years. As if the only people who might kill themselves are those who are noticeably mopey and sad, that no one who had the appearance of a happy, forward-looking life could do such a thing.

I am sure this character was murdered, because that's the shape of the story, but I think the way the characters are coming to this conclusion and expressing it is perpetuating untrue ideas.

Current Mood: aggravated

Wire in the Blood back on soon, which is good news because there haven't been any new decent episodes of Doctor Who for a while (this is relevant because I sometimes decide Tony Hill is The Doctor taking a sabbatical on Earth to work as a psychologist, especially since they both talk their enemies into defeat).

In related news, remembered the make of gun Megatron transforms into is apparently the same (kay, not really, but similar enough that I want to overlook) as is favoured by James Bond. Am sure someone can do or has done something with that.

Current Mood: happy

Just got to see Pat Cash and Mats Wilanders playing each other... something I was too young to do when they were playing professionally.

Also, a long while back

coniferous_you pointed me to a copy of Paradise Lost which I have been - extremely slowly - reading. I'm only just now at the beginning of Book 1, after taking my time with the introductory material linked above.

I am trying to do it properly though, follow the footnotes and look up the words I don't know. Which brings us to the second yay-thing. Was very amusing to look up 'tast', not find it in my usual sources and try Wiktionary only to find... the illustrative example they gave used the very line that had prompted me to search!

Wonderful!

Current Mood: happy

Just finished watching Dr. Strangelove for the first time. There is a terrible beauty to it.

Current Mood: anxious
Current Music: ABC Classic FM

This is a show I have been curious about for a while. When it was first broadcast here it was on at the same time as Criminal Minds so I did not give it a look until tonight.

After about a quarter hour my sister and I came to the conclusion that, like Bokugan, this program was generated by a machine which had been fed standard characters, scenarios and dialogue but had no understanding of what it was producing. We switched back to Bones.

Fun, but apparently not something I could take seriously. Maybe for riffing.

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: nomusic

Lately I have been watching videos we have around the place. Videos which were not much watched when they were new and especially videos which play documentary series and which were gifts from relatives.

I started with one which excited me when I saw the word Cosmos prominently on the front of the case. I was disappointed to discover the title is actually Mysteries of the Cosmos and it is not the famous series hosted by Carl Sagan, a series I have long wanted to see. I thought I'd mentioned that already on my journal but apparently not.

Tonight I am watching a series called Universe. In between, my sister and I watched Amadeus but it turns out that is not actually a documentary despite a) featuring people in costumes and b) playing a lot of classical music composed by someone not involved in the production. So, Universe. Am prompted to be posting now by thoughts inspired from the latter part of the first tape, concerning black holes.

They talked a lot about what happens to stuff which falls into a black hole, how it is inevitably drawn into the singularity and utterly destroyed. The thing is, that does not actually happen, at least from the perspective of an outside observer. The gravitational effect of a black hole is strongly attractive, yes, up close, but like all gravitational fields it also affects time. Watching from the outside we see time pass more slowly for an object as it approaches the event horizon until eventually it effectively stops, and we do not actually get to see it cross that point of no return. From the perspective of an object falling into a black hole it falls right in, but it also sees time speed up in the distance and all the stars go out first.

As far as I am aware this makes no practical difference; mass within a radius is still mass within a radius, but it does make me wish I were more mathematically proficient so I could explore.

Earlier parts of the video gave me an idea for a story too, so that's great. It has been done before and I find I do not actually care about that. Have the characters (been a while since they got a new tale), have the scene. If we get the details then we do the typing.

Time to put in the second tape.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: nomusic

Shore Leave... apparently this is the episode in which Kirk spends ten minutes hitting a guy.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: nomusic

As ever, I am reminded how much I wish The Hedge Knight had been made instead.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: A plot - Yuki Kajiura [Madlax Original Soundtrack 2]

Oh, Criminal Minds. Yes, even when you bring me tears.

I really want to get hold of these episodes to watch from the beginning properly.

Current Mood: tired

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aesmael

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Entries tagged with watching

Random report

When you think about it...

Real is not enough

Doctoring disappointment

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Cartoons and also animation

Has spoilers, but that's okay

Learning something new today

Closed captions frustrating me

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Heroes argh

Yay!

Double yay

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Fringe

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Watching Star Trek with my sister

A Knight's Tale is on

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May 2022

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