John Zeitler

In reverse order, no less. I’m an hour into Final Fantasy XIII– not even through the first chapter. So far I like what I’ve played.

And last night, I tried making up a home version of the kind of breadbowl-pasta meal you could get for far cheaper at a pizza place. I’ll just say it was a valiant effort and move on for the time being.

More tomorrow, folks.

For anyone interested, there’re photos of the Warhammer 40K event I participated in over here. Surprisingly all three of my matches are documented there, early on, at any rate. You can tell they’re early on because I still have pieces on the board…

So I spent this night in anticipation of the “lucky” Final Fantasy… by watching the “unlucky” one, The Spirits Within. I still maintain it wasn’t a bad movie, just one that (like, well, most movies) over-promised and under-delivered. The project was ambitious and unfortunately ten years ago the tech just wasn’t there. It is now, which is why we have stuff like the gorgeous (yet, in terms of story concepts, absolutely wretched) Avatar.

That’s part of why I can’t bring myself to hate TSW or Avatar nearly as much as I “should”. To me, those films represent technological leaps that might be a bit over-reaching, but at least they’re trying something different. Would I prefer that a good (or, hell, let’s split the difference and say “not awful”) story go along with them? Of course. But the thing is, if you can only put your money in the writing or the visuals, while writing might get you Oscars, the visuals are going to get you butts in seats.

Let me say this, though. I don’t hate James Cameron. I can’t. The guy directed Aliens. I mean, that alone should be good for at least two or three stinkers. Then he did The Abyss and Terminator 2. The guy’s earned his right to write obnoxious furry wish-fulfillment, if you ask me.

The concept of a Warhammer tournament is a little different from what’s usually thought of by the word. Unlike, say, a poker tournament or a basketball tournament, every participant in these events plays the full complement of games (usually three). Matches are made at each stage of the tournament, usually by rankings, so that everyone stays competitive at any point– a player who gets blown away in his first match could get decisive victories in the next two and come away with an overall win.

Furthermore, since each player has a distinctly different set of figures, and mission objectives change with each stage, there’s almost no predicting what you’ll face. For example, in my Round 2, I wound up taking the attacker’s role against a set of Chaos Space Marines… who were defending by not defending. My opponent chose to keep all of his forces in reserve, let me blunder in and wonder what happened– which also negated the orbital bombardment that I was entitled to at the beginning of the match, because there was nothing there to hit– and subsequently wiped the floor with me.

Overall, though, the $5 or so you pay as an entry fee is really more of a token gesture to the shop hosting the event. That five bucks guarantees you about six to eight hours of wargaming in a competitive and friendly environment. Some shops or clubs will even provide pizza or drinks. Really, it’s best not to go in thinking you’ll win, because unless you’ve got a decent amount of experience behind you, you probably won’t. Instead, focus on the game itself and enjoying the play, rather than obsessing over the results.

Oh, and incidentally: I learned the importance of vehicles. I’d been thinking they were just big targets, but they might just be worth having a couple around… which is why my Imperial Guard army is going to be fitted up with four tanks and four assault carriers.

As mentioned, I’m not terribly fond of the Space Marine faction to begin with, but this trailer does show da Orkz in fine form. Odd, then, that the SMs are my first full army…

So today I had a better Pittsburgh Transit Experience than I did on Thursday.

Let me set the stage for you. Wednesday night I got it in my head that I wanted to take the bus to work from here on out, as it was (in theory) possible. I had schedules and a fairly strong sense of where I needed to be, and at what times, in order to safely convey myself to and from work. Turns out that getting to work wasn’t a problem at all– I got downtown fairly early, was able to get a hot chocolate from a coffee shop, and was at the door to work before 7:30a. Beautiful. Getting home, however, was a four-hour-long exercise in pain. First, I waited for half an hour at the stop I’d been dropped off at for the bus to take me back downtown, only to discover that it doesn’t stop there on the way back. I instead took a different line downtown, which then became an exercise in finding out where the Port Authority moved my stop for the one line that directly connects downtown to the area near my house. It would have been very helpful for them to put up a sign saying “this stop is closed, please go X blocks that way to catch your line”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. By the time I realized where I needed to be, I had already passed the deadline for the last run of that line anyway. So I caught another line which was supposed to take me directly there, but which instead dumped me off in Wilkinsburg (about halfway between downtown and my house). This was around 6:25p; bear in mind, I left work at 4:30p. I had to wait half an hour for a connecting bus to take me to the Monroeville Mall, which actually overshot where I needed to go but (naturally) didn’t take a route that went anywhere near my house. That line then landed immediately before the connector back to my house arrived… of course, that connector took the long and ridiculously windy path, overshooting my house twice more. By this point the dramamine I’d taken at 5:30a was starting to wear off, and I was starting to get very carsick. Conveniently this negated the ravenous hunger I’d been enduring since, oh, 4:35p.

That was Thursday. Today I managed to find all the correct stops and get there on time every time. I had enough time in transit to finish a game (almost– there was one last puzzle for me to solve), no less. I left work at 4:25p and arrived at the plaza near home at 5:30p, whereupon I had dinner at the Chinese buffet. Simple.

Despite the aggravation and tension involved in catching a bus constantly, I’m probably going to continue taking mass transit to work for three reasons. The first is that it forces me to get some amount of exercise in each day; specifically, the stop near work is about a quarter of a mile down a mild hill from the office, and the interval between the stops downtown is anywhere from three to six blocks. This averages out to about half an hour on foot each day, give or take. The second is because being on a strict timetable helps me with impulse control: I work near the hobby shop that hosts GASP, and if I had my car available every day, I would pretty much be going directly from work to the shop to dump money into Warhammer figures. Same goes for games and anime; removing the easy daily access to the store reduces the temptation to spend money there.

The third reason is that 99% of the hassle involved could be alleviated if I didn’t live out in the middle of East Nowhere, and as a result my next big task is to find someplace within reasonable access of a real bus line.

At 6:37p, I completed “The Elysian Box”, the final puzzle of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box on the DS. This is the sixth game cleared in 2010. Forty-four games remain to be cleared for the 50/2010 challenge.

By the time you read this, I’ll likely be a good distance of the way to work… on a bus.

(Okay, the title’s a lie. This started out “quick” and spiraled out of control. I’d say I’m sorry, but really I’m not.)

On Sunday, Japanese telecom giant NTT announced plans to expand their e-manga business into North America. Initially, this sounds like a great idea, but when you get to the details, there’re a few flaws. I’ll just cover the most obvious ones as they pertain to the Barnes & Noble nook reader, as that’s the one I have– you’ll quickly see that the issues are more or less universal.

The biggest issue is the size difference. The standard, traditionally-accepted size for manga volumes in North America is 5 inches wide by 7.5 inches tall, giving a surface area of 37.5 square inches. The nook’s main screen is 3.5 inches wide by 4.75 inches tall, giving a surface area of 16.625 inches– only 44.33% of the paperback’s space; margins notwithstanding. This also doesn’t get into the issues of resolution, though in reality the resolution of the nook’s e-ink screen is far more than sufficient for manga. The size becomes a deal-breaker because the two most prominent e-book readers– the nook and Amazon’s Kindle line– don’t offer any kind of zoom functionality.

The size issue poses another problem; even if the images were to be resized so that it could be clearly readable in the adjusted speech bubbles, the image would still be distorted. The standard paper-bound manga has an aspect ratio of 2:3, while the nook’s screen has a ratio of 14:19– just slightly too short. Increasing the vertical size of the e-ink screen to 5.25 inches would solve this; if that were to happen, the device would need to be lengthened, or the color touchscreen (the nook’s defining feature) would have to be downsized or eliminated. In my opinion, neither option is feasible.

A slightly odd issue is the fact that manga is read right-to-left; most e-readers use a right-facing arrow to advance the page, and start with the left-most page. It’d be a tricky thing to program, I think, but it’s hardly a deal-breaker– just a matter of retraining, as it was when right-to-left manga was introduced to begin with.

Finally, there comes the issue of the logical size of a manga volume. My sample “standard” manga is volume 13 of Hayate the Combat Butler, which has 187 pages of actual content (about another 5 pages or so at the end– the leftmost end– are used for advertising and promotions). Even in monochrome, a high-resolution scan of one of those pages, uncompressed at 400 DPI, is 1.83 kilobytes. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? The full book is therefore 342 kilobytes. Slightly larger than an average text e-book of that length (I picked Coraline as my exemplar, at 323 kilobytes). Assume that the metadata and formatting for the e-book is negligible compared to the space needed for the content. Let’s now assume that the e-book is in 16-bit greyscale, and each page can be compressed by about 33%. Doing this changes the size of each image to 19.34 kilobytes, bumping the size of the full volume to a whopping 3.53 megabytes! In contrast, Quicksilver, a text e-book that is 927 pages in its print form (its very small-print print form it should be noted), is only 1.29 megabytes. Granted, these days that still doesn’t sound like a lot– unless you’re the one footing the bill for the data transmission charges on the 3G cellular networks that feed these devices. (Consumers don’t, it should be noted, or at least don’t directly pay the costs; they’re usually lumped into the cost of the e-book.)

It’s a sad thing to say, but I think e-manga is more or less dead in the water right now until the devices can support it better and data charges are brought down out of the ludicrously high levels that they are now. A firmware patch for the devices could solve that issue (at least giving zoom and RTL reading functionality a green light), and it’s a given that data will become as cheap as– well, let’s say basic bottled water– at some point. I’d probably estimate about three years for the tech to be ready (as a stupidly out-there outside guess)… but the market’s here now, I think. I wish NTT best of luck, but it’s gonna be a while ’till this really catches fire.

In 2002, I started what would eventually become the capitalized “The Collection” from some pretty humble beginnings: I had a single “CD tower” of Playstation 1 and 2 games, probably about four feet tall and barely a foot wide. I also had a handful of boxed up retro systems, and maybe a dozen or so anime DVDs (with a modest amount of VHS tapes as well). Obviously, I expanded; as most of you all know, I also had to sell off roughly 95% of my games and anime during a downturn between jobs. Today, the Collection is the largest it’s ever been, and it’s in no danger of having to be sold off anytime soon.

I don’t like to brag– particularly not about stuff that I own– so that’s not the purpose of this post. Most folks don’t see their piles of video games and movies and suchlike as collections– they see them, primarily, as just “stuff”. If they want to get fancy, they may refer to it as a “library”. Really, though, these are cop-outs: if one is really serious about becoming a collector, then there can never be a point where you just have a pile of discs. You have to start early, so that it doesn’t get away from you. I’ve been throwing around terms like the Reclamation List and all that for years now without really explaining the thought process behind it all; I figure, now that the majority of the work is behind me, it would be a good time to take a look at how I built up even this modest collection and how I go about expanding it.

I should note, though, that it’s perfectly okay if you don’t want to be a collector of DVDs, games, whatever. That’s fine. It’s not something that everyone can do or has an interest in doing. The thing is, of course, that some folks out there do want to be collectors, and there’s some stuff that I wish I knew when I was setting out. That’s the purpose of this post (actually, by the time I’m done, it’ll probably feel more like a lecture).

So, without further delay, let’s start with ( The Ten Commandments Of Collecting… » )

In the end, taking up media collecting as a serious hobby can be rewarding and fun, but it can also be really nerve-wracking if you’re not prepared for it. Obviously, I’m not setting myself up as an authority or anything, but these are all just stuff I’ve found out since starting the Reclamation project. It all comes down to what you get out of it; if you want it just to have it, or if you want it to watch/read/play it all at some point.