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.

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.

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.

(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.

Now that I can talk about trademark stuff again, there’s a lot that I want to talk about– mostly because it seems like a ton of really awesome things happened while I restricted myself from mentioning them. So, while I know that in internet terms this news is mostly so old it’s ancient, dead and buried, there’re a few topics worth going over. This post is just a quick little list; some of it might be expanded on in the future (if I don’t go into ridiculous detail enough here).

1) The K-On! manga was licensed. I still need to see the anime. Or perhaps I should say I still need to see the animoe?
2) NIS America enters the NA anime market with Persona and Toradora!, online-only sales. I think it’s a pretty smart move, in point of fact. It certainly makes as much sense, if not moe, as K-On.
3) Halo 3: ODST didn’t suck. Well, okay, it’s just too short, but with Nathan Fillion as your commanding officer (and playable character in certain circumstances) it’s hard for the game to suck. Also, Halo: Reach continues to look interesting, though rumors are it’ll retcon some if not all of the Fall of Reach novel.
4) Video Games Live! Bonus Round wasn’t quite as good as the first time it landed in Pittsburgh– I think they were using a different choir last July, and unfortunately this one just seemed to be phoning in their performance. The rest of the orchestra was good for the material they were working with (they picked some weak selections, I think).
5) Watching the Olympics at my family’s house was fascinating. I made mention of how curling is such an interesting sport to begin with– and I reiterate that my interest is completely without irony– but hearing the genuine Canadian commentary on it was a real treat. Sometimes I miss living near the northern border.
6) I read through all of Miyuki Miyabe’s The Book of Heroes over that same trip; overall I thought it was a little weaker than Brave Story was, but still enjoyable. It has this weird metafiction-meets-Lovecraft-meets-juvie-lit thing going on, and I kinda think it should have been about a hundred pages longer. Might be worth grabbing from the library if you liked the other book.
7) Speaking of books, my late-Christmas gift arrived. I now own a Nook e-reader, and so far I really like it. I loaded The Baroque Cycle onto it first thing, and am going through that– it’s nowhere near as easy reading as anything Miyabe writes. Hell, it makes The Lord of the Rings look like The Cat in the Hat by comparison. Fortunately I’m not carting around three monstrous tomes to read all of Stephenson’s big show. It reads PDFs as well, with a minimal amount of fuss; this basically means that I have a new tool to bend to my will in interesting and unique ways.
8) Funimation announced that they’re re-releasing Trigun, with its original (Pioneer) dub. That’s good news for folks who don’t yet have it (I managed to swing a good deal on it at the beginning of ‘08). Now moe folks can watch Milly being her inimitable self!
(Call this “8A”: Come to think of it, there was another interesting Pioneer-related moment, but restricted to being just me: I managed to locate the El-Hazard OVA set for extra-cheap. The first VHS episode of El-Hazard was the very first anime tape I bought– $30 for a half-hour episode, dubbed, that was practically not even engaging enough to get me to get the rest of the series. Fortunately I got to see it marathonned at Tekkoshocon a year or so ago and loved it, and so when I found it in Erie, I only hesitated slightly.)
9) Once my sister figured out how to play completely broken card combos in Munchkin Cthulhu, she became uber. Once my mother figured out the scoring in Carcassonne, she became vicious.
(9A: The iPhone spell-checker recognizes “Cthulhu”, but Firefox does not.)
10) Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei was licensed by Media Blasters. At the time, there was no news whether or not a dub would be produced. Insert remark about uncertainty leaving many people in DESPAIR!!!, but honestly I think it’s still pretty damn good news no matter what (well, it would be better if there was a season set instead of old-style single-disc releases, but I’ll take my Pink Supervisor where I can get it).
11) I am totally not sorry about all the moe puns up top. In fact, there’s gonna be a whole lot moe. (No, there’s not. Yes, I know how it’s really pronounced with two syllables.)
12) Media Blasters also managed to rescue Record of Lodoss War from the defunct-company pile. I haven’t seen the OVA series, but do have CPM’s DVD set of the TV series– and have not seen the ending to that, either. If Media Blasters does a decent job repackaging the OVAs I may pick them up.
13) On a slightly related note, remember all that nonsense I wrote up about how the anime market in Japan worked? Turns out it’s really skewed towards DVD sales… and, in some somewhat unsurprising news, revenues from those sales, both domestic and foreign (read: Japan and not-Japan), are dropping sharply. Japanator estimates that a core market of only about 300K North Americans can be counted on for sales. Honestly? That’s more than I expected. At least NA localizers offer their series in reasonably-priced sets– the two-episodes-per-disc model still reigns supreme in Japan.
14) Working with the Nook a little bit more, I managed to find Calibre, which converts pretty much every document format into the open ePub format used by most portable readers. I’m gauging the interest for an e-book release of A Civics Lesson; keep your eyes on Linguankery to see if and when it’s available for purchase/download.
15) My rant on the 24th was directed at Wal-Mart. Trust me, folks, as soon as I move, I’ll be making a concerted effort to never shop there again. The problem lies in that it’s close to my house and I tend to value time pretty highly, so long trips out are “costly” to me. Gonna find a new apartment close to a grocery store, or at least a bus line to somewhere decent.
16) The reason I was in Wal-Mart, though, was to get passport photos. (Won’t make that mistake again.) I fudged my travel plans a bit– I’m planning a trip to Canada for a day or so in the immediate, but will probably wind up planning a trip further abroad later on– but odds are good that within a month or so I’ll be prepped to go fully mobile.
17) The 24th was rough. But it was all made up for by the Nintendo summit. In (extreme) brief, and in descending order of OMGs: Cave Story Wii has a date for March 22nd (three weeks from today– mark your calendars, there will be a test on it); Picross 3D lands on the DS on May 3rd; Super Mario Galaxy 2 hits May 23rd; the end of June sees the release of Metroid: Other M; and Monster Hunter Tri lands on NA shores on April 20 (free-to-play, Wii Speak integration (for the three people worldwide who own Wii Speak units), and a March 8 demo disc and a $5 Nintendo Points card for GameStop preorderers). I think I speak for everyone when I say “yay gaming”.
18) Oh, and on the 25th, Grandia became available on PSN for the PS3 and PSP. It’s a great game, easily one of the best of the PS1/Saturn-era RPGs, and unfortunately it didn’t age well… and its sequels got overlooked (II) or sucked (III). I reclaimed the first game in early ‘09 and have the second one, on Dreamcast, on order as I write this– more on that in a bit.
19) Just as I hit the 14K mark on Gamerscore, Pez decided he wasn’t gonna play 360 all during Lent. This makes him, officially, more Catholic than me, ’cause I’m not exactly sacrificing anything this season. I don’t know how that’s really making me feel, honestly. Also, there’s the question of, can he play if it’s on someone else’s profile (ie Rock Band nights which we have to get back to doing)?
20) For some silly reason, whenever I wanted to kill some time gaming, I spent a not-insignificant portion of time playing Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer. I’ve said before that I’m not a huge fan of multiplayer gaming, first-person shooters in particular; but for some strange reason, I just wanted to play this. Anyway, the solution was quite simple: I sold off the two CoD games yesterday towards my FF13 and Pokemon SoulSilver pre-orders (which was a good time to do it given the 50% bonus value promotion going on). I really only wanted Call of Duty for the single-player story; by the time I get the itch to play them again (read: near the end of the 360’s life span) they’ll be ludicrously cheap because the market will be flooded with copies.
21) Oh yeah, the Grandia II thing. See, I was out of town during the middle of February, and unfortunately that’s when an order of mine was sent out. The USPS says it landed on my door on the 19th; when I got in on the 21st, there was no package. I’d assumed it hadn’t arrived yet and waited until the 25th to talk to the sender… and that’s when I realized someone stole it. Long story short, it’s amazing what threatening to call the police and then feigning actually going through with it will do; the package spontaneously generated itself on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. Who knows, maybe I’ll run Grandia II as my next game before FF13!
22) But probably not, because yesterday I also managed to swing an incredible deal on Borderlands. The best phrase that can describe the game is “first-person gleeful redneckery”. It’s not immediately obvious that the game is going for the sci-fi-western thing that Trigun pulled off, at least not until you’re actually playing the game, but when they say “bazillions of guns” on the back of the case, you better believe it. You get guns for anything in this game. My only gripe right now is the excruciatingly dumb pickup system: when you pick up a new gun it’s automatically equipped, and whatever gun you were using gets put back in your very limited inventory space– or dropped, if your bag is full. I hit level 10 (it’s got RPG elements, but then again these days what doesn’t?) and I’ve had my bag full on more than one occasion, which cost me a really nice shotgun that was a quest reward (yeah, it takes its cues from MMOs). While some folks may not have cared for the single-player campaign, I think it’s pretty damn good, and I might give it a second run as a different character class once I’m through; nor would I terribly mind mixing it up in the online co-op mode.

That really about covers it… I know, far from “quick” or “little”. But honestly, that’s all, there ain’t no moe. (You knew I had to sneak one more in there.) From here on out, I should be up to “current” with my talking points, so let’s just get into March, folks.

So my grand experiment on not using this blog as a free billboard is coming to an end today. Did I learn anything from it? Oh yeah. Did I affect anything because of it? That’s a bit harder to gauge.

Let’s start with what I learned. Thing is, I cheated a little bit; I wound up having to drop the generic bit on my micro-blogging service because I realized I used that more as a direct communications tool than I initially thought. Most of my posts on that service had to be ‘branded up’ because they were recommendations to friends and so forth, and going generic would defeat the purpose of the message. I went as long as I could, and tried to keep things generic afterwards when they weren’t replies (such as the miniature painting progress), but that wound up being more or less a failure.

Although, I did realize that there’s a distinct difference between word-of-mouth support for a product or service, and false-grassroots “movements” in support of one. It’s probably unjustly cynical of me to presume malice or monetary impetus for anyone talking up something they like on the web or in real life, but sometimes it’s really hard to tell. In general, though, if someone makes a forum post about something cool they found, they’re not likely to be getting paid for it– particularly if it’s someone you know or trust. (We’ll set aside the issue of whether or not you can really “know” or “trust” someone you’ve only met online for now; I think everyone knows my stance on that, but as with everything it’s not a universal experience.)

Advertising in and of itself is not an evil thing; it’s just been so grossly misused and misapplied in modern society that it can get very overwhelming very quickly. To a certain extent I can sympathize with the views of folks like the Adbusters or their comrades in culture-jamming, even if I think they’re being just a tad bit too radical in their approach. It’s easy to say “f*** it all” and want to just withdraw from the commercial world altogether. Then again, that approach is dangerous as well.

Ads serve a twofold purpose. Their primary purpose in the world today is to garner sales for the product or service depicted in the ad (we’re assuming that the product or service actually is depicted in the ad– I’m looking at you, scuzzy pharmaceutical companies). However, their original purpose, and one which is more or less relegated to a side effect these days, is to inform the populace that a new product or service is available, and to tell the public about it. One can draw a distinction, then, between ads which serve primarily the first function– let’s call them “hypes” (as in Don’t Believe The)– and ads which primarily serve the second function– call those “dopes” (as in The Straight).

Hypes are everything negative associated with advertising. They’re glitzy, flashy, attention-grabbing or in some cases attention-arresting, and offer little to no substantive content. What content a hype may contain is either deceptive, misleading, or in some cases completely false. In computer terms, they’re viruses: they hijack a user’s computer for fairly small slices of time at a time to self-propagate and perform a detriment to the user.

Dopes are the more benign usage of advertising. They are detailed, specific, subtle or even understated, and tend to err on the side of the uncomfortable truth. A dope winds up being obviously an ad, but one that sometimes gets sought out by a consumer. In computer terms, they’re the documentation for some underused command-line arguments on a program: you don’t need it all the time, but when you do seek it out, it tries to present itself as the best solution to your problem, whether or not it actually is or you happen to have the problem it solves.

Modern ads can’t be so clearly and neatly divided into these two categories. How do you define, for example, a particularly pleasant earworm of a jingle? What about a dry, deadpan ad for a slimeball ambulance-chaser portraying himself as legit? Furthermore, the thought that pervasiveness equals success has caused most ads to shoot for viral status over being informative. Witness the titillating ads for a particular domain registrar that pop up every Super Bowl; how many average football watchers are going to give two rats’ asses what a web domain is? It gets worse in that hypes tend to be viral in a very literal sense, “infecting” consumers to the point that they themselves, either knowingly or unknowingly, start spewing hypes: commonly manifested as fanboyism.

I’ll freely admit to starting this month in anger and outrage, but the irritation was mostly with myself. It seems like I was constantly regurgitating the hype mill from some source or another without adding anything meaningful to the commentary. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my decision on what to talk about and what I didn’t want to talk about was itself a form of commentary, and that most of the time, when I made a post about something commercial, I felt the need to make at least some brief (ha ha) remarks on it. A lot of my irritation was being directed at the aftermath of a few product revelations, or in some cases lack of revelations, that had been going on at the end of January, and as a result I found myself defending a position that wasn’t even mine to begin with. It turns out, though, that taking this month to reflect on my online activity and what I was posting did me a world of good.

It’s probably obvious by now that I’m going to start talking about commercial interests again starting tomorrow; I’ve already got the next three days’ worth of posts lined up, and that also includes two Game Clear notices (I’m skipping doing Save and Quit for those games). The thing is, though, you can count on the fact that all of what I discuss here is my genuine opinion. I’ve only been paid to promote something online once in my life, and I’ve made it abundantly clear what that thing was (also, my obligation to do so is probably long since expired) and didn’t proverbially pee in the well; so, honestly, this blog is what I actually believe. Warts and all, perceived fanboyism and all, it’s my opinion. I’ll try not to jump to the defense of companies in comments on other blogs, of course– if I see some flagrant stupidity or fanboyism, I still feel obligated to point out logical fallacies and inconsistencies at the very least– but I’m not going to censor myself just because I’m not being paid to promote something I genuinely like.

As a final little coda to this, remember that buyout plan I left open in the initial post? Yeah, nobody bit. I didn’t expect anyone to, of course, but it was worth a shot.

A few years back, when I was in between jobs, I would spend my days literally camped out in front of the computer all day, getting up for soda and snacks, and when it became dark out (which was made longer by the fact that I was doing this in the summer), I would look up at the time, realize I’d lost an entire day, and curse myself for not accomplishing anything.

Today, I did stuff. Not a lot of stuff, but stuff nonetheless. Painted some models; brought one project to a pretty good pausing-point until an external event gets lined up; did some number-crunching in advance of some news that’s going to be on here next week; and, since I still have some time here before I want to go to bed, I’m probably going to try marathonning a disc of a TV series (likely a short-runner).

However, I still “feel unproductive” because I also spent about five hours playing an online game, when the stack of unplayed games is still ridiculously high. I suppose I can justify it by saying that I needed to relax, but in all honesty, I don’t even particularly care for the game I was playing… it just is scratching an itch I guess I never really knew I had. Ah well, hopefully tomorrow I can move on to something that gives me the “having done something” feeling I’m missing.

I’ll be able to talk about this more early next week, but let me just mention that some days, it really helps to get back some test results that make you flabbergasted to realize– not that you’ve been selling yourself short, because I know I’ve been doing that– but by just how much you’ve been self-effacing. It’s not really ego-stroking if you have paperwork to back it up, is it?

I hereby renounce anything good I ever had to say, and pre-emptively renounce anything positive I might say, about the US Postal Service.

I know many folks out there reading this here blog come from different walks of life. I’m sure some of you even work in retail. I’d like to believe that all of you are smart enough not to need reminded of this particular little training hint that I’m going to provide, but on the off-chance that it comes up, well, don’t say nobody ever warned you, OK? Here goes:

When a customer says to you, “You have made me look like an idiot three times today because your staff did not perform their jobs to anything remotely close to the standards you claim to have for their photography department,” the correct response to this is “I am deeply sorry, sir/madam, for your embarrassment and will process the refunds you requested right away.” It is most emphatically not “*scoff* I didn’t make you look like an idiot. I’ll talk to my manager but you ain’t getting a refund.”