aesmael

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.

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.

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?

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

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

lost_angelwings has complained to me a few times about the awfulness of a morning cartoon called "Bakugan," on one occasion directing me to a clip of the show hosted on Youtube to demonstrate. From the evidence presented I can only concluded this show has no author. Rather, it appears to be generated by some machine similar to those from which entertainment was produced in Nineteen Eighty-Four, standardised tropes, themes, characters and dialogue assembled into the shape of a story; nothing human went into this program.

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.

    I feel pleased about my sisters. We were watching television when one of those programs about the actions of border control/immigration officials in pursuing and capturing scary foreigners came on, and my oldest sister turned it off, saying it is racist. Which I agree with.

    Writing, well. Yesterday I wrote only 29 words of Discourteous Joe. Today I have written more and am not done yet. I also, when storm concerns prompted as total a disconnect from electricity as we could manage, added two new columns to my spreadsheet. One shows me the average number of words I have written daily for the month so far, the other tells me the average I must maintain to reach my target. No longer will I need to calculate these manually. Not that I ever calculated the former.

    I hope I can write the dragon story tonight. If it lets me. Other things to do first.

178 / 9,300 (1.0%)

Just one hundred more days at this rate.

Average so far: 89 words/day
Average to meet target: 314.55 words/day

    Found something interesting today playing around with Google Trends:

    I asked it to compare searches for catgirl, bunnygirl, foxgirl and, because I realised my list was focussing on girlcandy but not boycandy, catboy. Most of them did not show up. The blue line is catgirl. The green one is catboy. I wonder why the sudden surge in searches  over the past few months?
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