Remake, Reimagining, Reject

Posted on October 1, 2006 by Ubu Roi

So it seems Steven Den Beste got his hands on Sol Bianca: the Legacy thanks to Geneon’s sale, and he couldn’t finish it. I’m not surprised. I never got past the first DVD.� My biggest problem is that it wasn’t the original, vintage 1990. While my memories of it are fuzzy, there were just so many ways that the original OVA’s rocked. It was a much cooler show. The roles of the characters made more sense compared to their personalities, for one thing. As pirates, the women were, well, pirates. Not scavengers of old technology; they actually assaulted ships and killed people to steal from them. Yet they weren’t total reprobates–they were capable of bravery and sacrifice; they fought among themselves, but they showed loyalty too. When chance dropped a seemingly-orphened kid in their lap, they protected him at great risk to themselves, which got some of them captured by a dictator (Emperor Badros; now that’s a name!) Ending up in the middle of a revolution, they caused a lot of mayhem; yet remained focused on their goals; their own freedom, loot, and getting the kid home to his parents. The one major distraction was when April got really, really mad at the dictator for slicing her cheek. When the opportunity came, she escaped and fought her way almost single-handedly through dozens of his elite guard force to reach him, while the revolution raged around the palace. April casually disarmed Badros, leaving him helpless and hysteric. Instead of killing him, she gave him a matching scar on his face — and then turned and just walked off.

That’s style. That’s storytelling. As I recall, Dr. Heinous said something to the effect that if he’d been Badros, he’d have called her back and made her empress on the spot. I think I responded that the obvious drawback was that then she would kill him, and succeed to the throne!
Imagination? How she escaped: one of the items they looted at the beginning of the show turned out to be a shipment of ultra-long-range laser sniper rifles. How long range� Feb (I think, it was the lush/captain, either way) clamps it to the Sol Bianca’s hull and kills April’s guards from orbit. (Evil dictator’s note #342: Never plan an open air execution when you haven’t found the enemy’s cloaked ship…) And there’s a greater story waiting to be told in the background. In the second OVA, it became obvious that the Sol Bianca was a mystery to everyone, even to her crew. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the captain wasn’t really in control. June was; the ship was somehow linked to her psychically — and not even all five of the women knew it. Only she, the loli (May?), and the captain (Feb?) did — though the others got a bit suspiscious when June ordered Gi (the AI) to come rescue them, despite having no visible means of communicating with it.

The second OVA ended on a cliffhanger, more were planned but never made. I later heard thirdhand something I can’t confirm; that supposedly one of the writers said that the real secret behind the show was that the ship was their mother. Based on some of the flashback scenes in the remake that SDB watched, I think they were still playing with this idea, but the execution of the remake was far poorer. The originals argued and fought� Well ok, we’ll have the copies do that too! Only the fighting is fake and put on, it’s not convincing. The Sol Bianca had a lot of special abilities? We’ll give it holographic attacks, like a huge woman shooting a bow! Never mind that it’s silly. But we can’t have the pirates engaging in, well, actual piracy; they’re more into scavenging. Character consistancy? Not even within the show itself, don’t mention against the original. All the roles were changed around; as I said above, the lush was the captain, not April, the blonde.

I admit I liked the art from the remake; the financing was apparently from a South American company, and a lot of the the ship’s menu and building designs were clearly influenced by the Hispanic culture. But those and a likeable OP just weren’t enough to carry the remake, even without comparison to the original. Steven couldn’t watch the last DVD… I never got past the first.

Sol Bianca: The Legacy was not a worthy legacy to Sol Bianca the original.

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The Dull Drudgery of Workaday Tidal Waves

Posted on September 30, 2006 by Ubu Roi

Well, the work on Mahou Meido continues, as I transfer the archives from Houblog. After some fumbling around, I found a fairly easy way to do it, as this time, the database structures are similar enough that I only have to add “,0,0,0” to the end of the string, and let PHPMyAdmin handle exporting and importing.� I have some hopes of being able to transfer the comments as well, although coordinating the change to the post numbers will be no fun.� And then I still have to work out the subdirectories for the pictures, then go through and alter each and every one of the links after I upload them.

One of the things that I worked on for some time last night was installing plug-ins to WordPress on this site.� The picture uploader was a key one — I figured version 2.0 would have better upload capabilities than 1.5.2, and I was right — but they fell short of the capabilities of 1.5.2 augmented by the plug-in I was using.� Apparently others agreed, because after an hour’s searching, I finally remembered that the link to the author’s site was in the plugin directory of Houblog (DUH!) and found the updated version for WP 2.0.� Only it didn’t work.� I found out (after following another dead end for a while) that it was necessary to install the original 1.5.2 version, then install the add-on for 2.0.� I’d only installed the add-on, so I was getting a misleading error message that had nothing to do with the real problem, causing me to waste time trying to “fix” my authorization levels.� Damn Shamus and his multi-level problems!

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Eh, What?

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Ubu Roi

Just got to work and looked at the site.  Very unexpected…. I set the header font family to fantasy; sans-serif; papayrus  (I think… might have deleted the family–it didn’t do anything).  That looked right on my home system, using Firefox.  But here, using IE, the font looks like a gothic serif.  WTF?  Is it the browser, or is it the fonts installed on my work PC? 

Great oogily moogilies!  That’s what I hate about dealing with non-standard fonts, but I’m sick of Arial….

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Whew!

Posted on September 28, 2006 by Ubu Roi

Ok, the header pic is pretty much done. Enough that I’m happy with it, though I’m not sure why the frame around it went AWOL. I’ll figure that out tomorrow night; it took me all evening to get the picture and font set, and I haven’t even eaten supper. And work was rough today. So of course, for some inane reason, my brother walks in while I’m deep in Paint Shop Pro, and hands me this ten page rant from some woman over in Channelview who thinks her husband’s out to kill her! (He got it off AOL.) I have no idea whether it’s a hoax or not, but I have better things to do than read short novels created by the febrile imagination of someone who didn’t take their medicine.

Who knows? Maybe it’s for real, and the husband didn’t take his. Either way, it’s a job for the police and divorce courts, not Ubu Roi, Ace Detective. No way in hell am I driving over there to check it out, so why waste fifteen minutes of my life reading about it? Come to think about it, haven’t I spent longer than that sitting here typing this rant out? It just goes to show, idiotic crap will suck all your time away if you let it.

I’m going to go eat.

Edit: Well, ok, I’m not happy with it, but it will do for now.  The title is still too hard to read.  I’ve tried a few different colors and nothing’s really worked well yet.

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Still Setting Up

Posted on September 27, 2006 by Ubu Roi

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’m still in setup mode (as should be obvious by the fact that the header pic is still Houblog’s). I have just finished transferring everyone’s registrations over to Mahou, so if you ever registered at Houblog, your same username and password should work here. I’m not going to guarantee that, since this is a different version of Word Press and it may handle the hash differently. If you can’t log in, use the lost password feature to retrieve/change it.

Hopefully, I didn’t screw up anyone’s email address, although I had to update one, and managed to dump 20 of them into the wrong field before I noticed the order of the VALUEs in the insert statements was wrong. That happened because the users’ table was changed, with different field names, arranged in a different order. It made editing the SQL dump from Houblog a pain in the ass. For the sake of my sanity, I edited most of the records down to the same ten fields. As a result, many registrants may find that some non-critical data is missing, such as their personal bios, real names, and website links.

My next task is going to be to do something about the header, and then I’m going to settle out how I want my screencaps directory to be structured. Then I can start moving posts from Houblog, and altering all the links to match the new directory structure. That should be enough to drive me crazy for about two weeks…

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Welcome to Mahou Medio Meganekko @ BridgeBunnies!

Posted on September 26, 2006 by Ubu Roi

Well, if you’re here anytime around September of 2006, then you probably know what’s going on, and what this is. For the sake of those who don’t, I’ll summarize. At the beginning of 2004, I, set out to create a site about politics and such. Originally, it was intended to focus somewhat on the national/internatinal scene, but mostly on local matters pertaining to my adopted home town of Houston, Texas. Thus I named it “Houblog.” Catchy, ain’t it? Whoopee.

I chose to write under a pseudonym, because my posts often were not friendly to the local government officials. At first I used the open-source PostNuke for my blogging, as a friend had introduced me to it. However, it was a piece of junk and hard to use; I kept waiting on the promised version 8.0 which would “fix” all the problems, but nothing was happening. (I finally found out that the primary developer had died in an accident.) It was sort of like being in my on world; I couldn’t do trackbacks or have a proper blogroll, so I wasn’t really a member of the net community. I was just….there. About a year ago, I stopped pretending that I was writing into the void, upgraded to WordPress, and started actually having a dialogue with other bloggers.
However, the more serious I got about blogging local affairs through this summer, the more I also began to blog about Japanese animation as a way to relax. It got to the point that my readership was 40% local politics and 60% animé, and the more complicated and stressful work and life got, the more I blogged about non-political matters. Since I had certain committments I felt I had to keep on the political side (I was, by this time, also a contributor on a group news/commentary blog), I started getting way overloaded and further stressed, which led to more and more animé blogging on what was supposed to be a political site. Which in turn stressed me more, because I felt like I was letting down readers who were there for the politics.

That just wasn’t going to do. If things kept on the way they were, I was going to end up doing a DenBeste and retire to full-time anime-blogging. Reaching my limits shortly after Labor Day, I sastisfied my committments by chunking all of them. In short, I took a hiatus from all my blogging in order to take care of some other issues, and relax a bit. I’ve now commence splitting the anime from Houblog into a separate site. This one, obviously. Eventually, I hope to delete all the anime posts from over there and move them here, although it’s going to be a cast-iron bitch to do it; I expect to lose all the comments and since I’m going to rationalize the screencap directories, not only will I have to move hundreds of .jpgs over here, I expect to have to rewrite every single img src tag in about 50 posts.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I am insane. This is simplifying my life? Color me anal retentive. Well, anyway, after a few adventures, I’ve got the bare minimums set up, and this is now the actual first post at the new site. But what is this site called? Well, therein lies a tale…
The following post first appeared on 9/25/06 over at Houblog.

Just keeping everyone posted on the state of affairs. I did not get as much done yet as I’d hoped, largely because of Magic the Gathering Addiction. This was the weekend of the Time Spiral Pre-release, so I spent Saturday and Sunday (after doing a few things around the house) shopping and playing. I only bought a few packs of cards because I’m pretty tight right now (more about that later). Most of the money went for entry fees into two tourneys. I was late both days and that’s all I could get into. I went 2-2-drop in the sixth flight (sealed deck) on the first day, and then eliminated in the first round of a booster draft on the second day. (For the uninitiated, the contest was to open packs of random cards and assemble winning decks from them.) This performanceis about what I expected–maybe better, since I’m just getting back in after being mostly out since just after Fallen Empires (about 6 years?).

Last weekend was “work on the car weekend” during which I took care of some deferred maintenance, so I haven’t made much progress in splitting the blogs yet. Originally, I planned to just put the anime blog in a subdomain named Omoikane, after the ship on Nadescio. Then, while debating blog names with Steven Den Beste (no, I didn’t take any of his oddball suggestions on Chizumatic!) and getting some help in Japanese, one name occurred to me that I was sure had to be taken. I checked just to be certain—thinking I’d discover a new anime blog, and maybe it would have some cheesecake.

Boy, was I wrong – to my surprise, no one had registered “bridgebunnies.com.” But….but! I know I saw it somewhere! What an oversight! Impossible! Sacré bleu! (Ugh, time to go wash my mouth out, I spoke French.) Anyway, I immediately fixed that terrible, terrible error. The internet must have bridge bunnies! While I was at it, I also grabbed “bridgebunnies.net” and “bridgebunnies.info,” for good measure, so copycats are going to have to settle for something else; “.tv” would be appropriate. (I finally remembered where I saw it: “Bridge Bunnies on My Mind” is one of the rotating titles on Jason Miao’s site.)

This left me in a quandary, because I kind of liked one of the titles I’d worked out with the invaluable assistance of Steven DenBeste and his friend HC. Before I go any further, I want to extend warm thanks to both of them for their help with the Japanese language and blog name suggestions. Thanks a bunch guys!

I was looking for something just a bit silly and over the top involving anime genres, but Magical Battle-Android Maid Girls just didn’t flow too well in English or Japanese: “Mahou Sentou you Andoroido Meido Shoujo” is a bit long and unwieldy. Trying to tack Meganekko onto that somewhere was just overkill. So at Steven’s suggestion, what I settled on is Mahou Medio Meganekko (Magical Maid ‘Glasses-Girl’) which will be appearing soon at bridgebunnies.com, .net, and info. I think Omoikane will survive as a subdirectory for screencaps or something. It’s going to be a bit of a complicated setup, because I’m going to try to strip all the anime posts from Houblog and move them over there. Fixing the screencap URL’s is going to be stone cold beyotch. I don’t see any way to easily do it (writing a script is beyond my pitiful PHP skills), and anyway, the database structure will be different, as I plan to start the new blog with WP 2.0.4. Unfortunately, this will probably cause me to lose most of the comments as well, since they’ll be as difficult to move as the posts. Still, it will finally split the politics from the anime/gaming/etc. It’s always been a touch bizarre as match-ups go–sort of like Fred Astaire and Anna Nicole Smith. It boggles the mind.

You know, I wonder…. Since I’m a government employee, can I get bridgebunnies.gov? I could claim to be the Emperor in an alternate dimension—how’s ICANN going to disprove it?

It could work….

Well, my first idea definately didn’t work…

UPDATE: Addon-domains don’t work like I thought they did. I thought it would appear to anyone from outside the site as a completely separate site; it would just use the same hosting account and resources as Houblog. Instead, it takes anyone typing in www.bridgebunnies.com and points them to the subdirectory and subdomain “bridgebunnies”; thus the viewer would see bridgebunnies.houblog.com. So I deleted it while I try to decide whether I’m going to spring for another account or not. Originally, that was my plan when I was going to go with omoikane.houblog.com, and I don’t suppose there’s any difference between that and bridgebunnies.houblog.com. And it would be much simpler if I didn’t have to move all the pictures from one site to another. But the reason I went with the domain name (outside of the fact that such a cool one was still available) was that Houblog and anime really don’t go together, and I wanted to separate the names, not just the blogs.

Sigh. Time to go look at hosting plans. Dammit, this hobby is starting to cost money. Correction: this hobby is also starting to cost money.

I went back to the drawing board, but along the way my browser tripped me up, so I managed to stick my pencil up my nose in the fall…

UPDATE 2:Ok, I am now totally confused. I purchased a new hosting plan to set up a second site, but when I log into the cpanel on it, the URL says bridgebunnies, but the cpanel says I’m in Houblog! All the databases, disk usage, stats, etc are from it. Jeez, that’s almost what I wanted in the first place…

Lesson #1, repetition 3,523 — when something weird is going on, just reboot.

UPDATE 3:Whatever the problem was, it’s fixed now. They’re seperated. Might have been an issue with my browser, or it might have been that they didn’t finish the setup until the invoice payment cleared. Weird. Edit: only now the placekeeper page has disappeared, and Fantastico won’t run; cpanel claims it can’t find it. And the move to a PHP 5+ server is still pending, but I can live with that; I don’t expect it to happen until tomorrow or later. I did want to get WP set up tonight though….

Enh, with the Fantastico auto-installer, it’s not like it took me a long time to do it the next day. I think my original set-up of Post Nuke took me something like 2 hours due to confusion and botches. WP was done in about 15 seconds. If that.

UPDATE 4: And they’ve got all three issues fixed by 11 am, when I only notified them of the last two just before 9 am. Hosting Matters just has great service, what can I say?

I love these guys! (er, actually, gals would be more appropriate, I think.)

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New Animé Terms and Concepts?

Posted on September 6, 2006 by Ubu Roi

Steven DenBeste discusses the arms race. The animé arms race that is, as he writes on the concept of simple plot or setting devices taken to their extreme. In honor of Gillette and Shick, he christens it “the five-bladed razor,” and then goes on to list what he feels are the “winners” (or perhaps, “worst offenders” would be a better term) in each of several catagories: Panty Shots, Harem, Maid, Combat Android Girls, catgirls, Girls With Guns, and so on. However he missed a category, for which he’s hardly at fault; I never realized it existed–and it may not have, prior to the series in which I found it.

I don’t watch a lot of robot shows, (Dual being only the 2nd one I’ve ever purchased, unless you count Nadesico), but the establisher and therefore hands-down winner in the category of Robot Fanservice has got to be Godannar. I mean, really, where else would you see something like this?

“Live, tonight, from Tokyo Bay, Robot Mud Wrestling!”
“Your diodes turn me on, baby!”

A “camel toe” on a giant robot? (These things are about 25 meters tall.) You know, after some thought, maybe it should be a five-bladed razor just for “Most Extreme and Ridiculous Fanservice.” It doesn’t even need a new category…

Edit 9/8: Well, I’m watching Dual, and the robots in it are also female in form and have high heels. However, none of them have obvious panties or tube tops. And they aren’t as…. uh, well-endowed.

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