Monday, October 31, 2011

Ravy 2011 Pg. 44.

Click Here.

Taking a look back  at an old story form another character's perspective.

I believe that is the first time I ever let the word bitch through. I figured that if the FCC let's Bob and Tom say it, then it is alright with me. I've tried to maintain some semblance  of decorum, (for this comic), but once in a while to help get that feeling I want a character to show, you have to cross that line.

I just did a comic and in the punchline I used (bleep.) Shit would be a much better word to use and funnier. However there are some lines in the comic I am not willing to cross just yet.

Identical twin sisters kissing, no prob.

On an unrelated note:

What was Cyberteam in Akihabara? It's a hybrid magic girl/sentai/robot fighter/playing card/tiny monster show. I think it's main purpose was to collate all that together and tell a semi-comprehensible story at the same time. It's a bit slow and it really could have been done in 14 episodes instead of 26. Sometimes we get to know things that just are not important, like how many siblings Suzume has. Only one ever shows up and only once. Other problems are that you have to deal with the interminable little girl crap, inconstant characterizations, nudity, and a rather aged look to the series. Not as bad as Toei though. I remember watching this back in 2000 and thinking how old it looked. Even watching side by side with Ghostsweepers.

The best part is that all the pertinent characters get fully developed. They are not one dimensional. You get to see all the motivations, desires, triumphs, and tragedies. Nice that there is a short version of the transformation sequences. The tendency to play around with the end theme and credits lends some freshness.

I have had the rather dubious distinction of having watched three different dubs: AXN, ADV, and the original Japanese. Of which AXN is the best for people who don't like to read their cartoon shows. AXN was far from perfect, but they chose the right voices and even got the pronunciations of the names correct. The Japanese dub surprised me at how low pitched Hibari's voice was. I also recommend listening to the voice actor commentary on the ADV version. They really went in and researched this series and found all the references to anime and real history. Though you do have to put up with what the weather is like in Texas during fall/winter.

The one thing that has me the most perplexed at how many Cyberteam theme CDs there are. I have four. There were dozens more I saw on the shelf. Even more oddly is no merch. Just a couple of keychains on Amazon.

Overall it's not a bad series, buts it's not an outstanding one either. Something to fill in the time between releases of really good series.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

New Schedule.

I'm changing the update schedule for the website.

It will change from
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday
to
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

I have already been doing a double update in Thursday anyway. Mostly because I like not having to worry about doing anything on Friday. So I might as well set it in stone now, or more precisely: HTML.

There is a secondary change to the unannounced schedule. I would try and get the site updated by noon Eastern Standard Time. Reality demands a change. I am going to move it later in the day, somewhere around ten PM Eastern. I'm not going to bore with any more details.

I do this out of respect for the guy that stops in once in awhile. I've said before one of the things that annoys me is when people make these kinds of changes and don't tell anybody.

These changes will take effect on the 31st of October and will probably last until about April of 2012.

Or until I arbitrarily change it sooner, or later.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Ravy 2011 Pg. 43.

Click Here.

Ghosts of Vista.

My biggest complaint about C 64 was having to type in that command every time and wait forever for the game to load. Imagine my pleasure with Win 98 at having to just double click on an icon and just go.

Had some difficulty moving from 98 to XP, but most of that was resolved by downloading updated versions of my software. This week I got reminded why I went form XP to 7.

Ubuntu 11: Onerous Ocelot. The great thing about earlier versions of Ubuntu is that even though you had to do some deep digging to get some stuff to work, it was still pretty straight forward. The commands were there in the menus. You might have had to look up what they were, But hell, I could figure it out.

So why do programmers that are way smarter than me do dumb stuff like remove the easily clickable restricted drivers option and the Synaptic Package Manager? Now we have Ubuntu Software Center which was no help what so ever in getting the wireless on my laptop to work. It's always worked before. After about five hours of reading one tutorial and forum post after another I accomplished screwing up the install and having to start form scratch. Then I found some obscure site that I forgot to book mark that had the real instructions. It wasn't Canonical by the way.

Look, I love Linux. It has saved my bacon many times over the years. Mostly due to my own errors. But this was frustrating as hell. If that was pissing me off, think of everybody else that just wants to turn thier computer on and go. Why in the hell should anybody have to type in some long and easily misspelled command line in Terminal, or XTerm, or is it UXTerm?

My dream job would be a tester with hire/fire authority. The only thing I would tell some dumbass programmer that removed the two pixel wide option is fix it. If I get any sass, then your ass is going out the nearest exit. Especially if it's a window that's not exactly on the first floor.

You'd think people learn from Vista.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Said enough on Monday.

Title says it all. Of course, this post will be trapped between two Mondays. Could cause a lot of confusion.

Or as I call it: S.O.P.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Ravy 2011 Pg. 42.

Click Here.

Recently discovered that the upgraded web editor I use has decided to scrunch all the code on a page down to about a couple of lines. Fortunately there is a right click option to "Reformat HTML." Not going to fix everything. Pointless. Too much work to retinker with something that isn't really broken.

But hell.

Why was it necessary to jam all the code together from what had been working fine for the past seven years anyway? Thank a lot Micro$oft.

In other news: Currently working on comic 1800. After about two weeks of messing with stage size and test uploads to YouTube I finally got the third scene done. I was stuck trying to get a five second bit with a carrot topped bikini wearing paranoidal Deutschlandic magic girl to work. I could get it to work fine in its own FLA. But when I copy/pasted the frames over to the actual movie, everything screwed up. Eventually I discovered quite by accident (usually the way) that I needed to click don't replace existing items in the library. (Note: I didn't put that in quotes. I don't want to fact check it because there's the possibility of a crash that would ruin everything I typed out so far. Thanks a lot Adoobie.)

The next part may be a scene from a show about a pill popping doctor that is very similar to a sci-fi movie from the 60's about the future that has long since come to pass, and is best enjoyed while popping pills.