Kids on the Slope

I bought my first jazz album sometime in 2003 or '04. It was almost immediately after reading the Tokyo chapter of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, which name-checked a number of performers and records. After Yoko Kanno's soundtrack for Cowboy Bebop, I'd been wondering where to start with "real" jazz, and the novel had given me a list of albums to check out.

I was trying to find Undercurrent by Bill Evans and Jim Hall, but the Belfast HMV didn't have a particularly large jazz section at the time and I ended up buying Waltz For Debby by the Bill Evans Trio* - the only Bill Evans they had.

Jazz and anime seem to have overlapped quite a lot in my interests, until I left Belfast for Dundee in 2007. I'd all but burned out on anime and the move to Scotland meant that my enthusiasm for running my anime website (which had basically supplied me with free titles for a few years) completely died.

With jazz, I'd been content for a long time to just stick with the three or four albums I had, especially with CDs costing up to £16 a pop and an aversion to buying digital music (I don't pirate it either; I buy the CD and rip it) that still persists. I still listened to jazz, but wasn't especially eager to buy more.

For the last few months - basically since being exposed to Puella Magi Madoka Magica - I'd been wondering what other stuff I've missed. I asked on Twitter for recommendations of recent titles, and someone mentioned - almost in passing - Kids on the Slope.

I'd never heard of it before. I didn't reading anything about it before watching. And the first episode kicked my ass in a way that nothing has for a long, long time.

This is the moment, in the first episode, that I fell entirely in love with the series.

Everything about Kids on the Slope was different from what I thought I'd find when I came back to anime; the art and the animation, the way the characters act and the way the music sounds. There are no supernatural forces at work, there are no heroes or villains, there are only people who don't really know who they are or who they want to be, and who've ended up figuring it out together.

It's difficult to express how much - and even harder to explain why - this show stuck a chord with me, but I was so excited by every episode. Not just waiting to see where the story went, which I was, but waiting for the music - to see what pieces they picked and to watch them play it.

If you'll forgive this temporary digression into internet vernacular: OH MAN, THE FEELS.

I wish I could say that everybody would get such a brilliant experience out of the show, but I have a feeling that if you don't like jazz (and some people don't; nobody's perfect) then you won't understand Kaoru's, for want of a better word, "awakening" the first time he hears Sentaro play.

The show has really reignited my interest in jazz, though. I've already bought two new albums off the back of this series (Portrait in Jazz - because you can never have enough Bill Evans - and Moanin'), and I'm already looking into where I should start with Charles Mingus.

The video embedded above was the moment that I knew Kids on the Slope was going to be something special, when I knew it was going to be something that stuck with me. But my favourite sequence in the show (arguably surpassed by the very last performance in the final episode), is when they perform this medley. Music seems like a fitting way to stop myself talking about the show, because now that I've started it's getting very difficult to stop.

One final word, that might convince otherwise hesitant anime fans to give it a shot: the show was directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, and the music's produced by Yoko Kanno. How far wrong could that pedigree lead you?

*I wish I had a specific memory of the first time I heard those opening notes. I wonder if it was a big deal? I know it was a positive experience, just judging by my CD collection, but was it transformative?

Maybe that's why was such a powerful, exciting moment for me, to see Kaoru's face when Sentaro finishes that first drum solo - hearing that music somehow makes it feel like it's okay to just wing it until you find a rhythm where everything clicks into place.

New Years Resolution

I only have one real resolution for 2013. There's the whole "get better with money and go to the gym more" thing, but that's an ongoing process rather than a specific-to-2013 goal.

I aim to buy no videogames for myself this year:. The idea popped up on The Society of using the PlayStation Plus subscription as your sole source of new games, and the rest of the year would be spent clearing your backlog or on more worthwhile pursuits.

I don't have the kind of backlog that some people do; there are maybe a dozen titles on Steam that I've never given a fair shake, but not too long ago we went through and cleared out a load of old stuff, and in the last few years my purchases have been pretty low anyway.

I figured it couldn't hurt to have a definite limit though, so the 11p-per-day* gaming challenge seems like a good way to prevent any spur-of-the-moment temptations.

This does, of course, largely rely on the PlayStation Plus subscription's "Instant Game Collection" keeping the quality up - and on my ageing PS3 staying afloat. I've had a few hard lockups recently playing Arkham City which have made me very aware of its age (it's a 60GB launch model, which I bought second-hand) and I've got the feeling it's going to be dead before the year is out - especially with the increased workload this "no games" year is likely to present. I've also got to contend with an almost-full hard drive, but spending £80 on a larger disk seems foolish for a machine that could be on its last legs - better to save the cash for now in case I need to replace the whole machine for a larger-capacity model in a few months anyway.

I almost cracked and bought FTL on the 1st when it popped up on the Steam sale, but managed to restrain myself before this - frankly, not especially difficult - resolution failed less than 24 hours into its life.

There are some caveats built into the resolution; the participants in this challenge on The Society have given themselves slightly different rules, from a limited number of wildcards to mentioning specific titles they won't be able to resist.

In my case, I'm going to let myself buy The Last of Us. I'm also not going to count games bought for me by others (although Catherine isn't going to be suddenly picking up my slack), or those I buy with Microsoft Points or PlayStation Network credit I already have, or that's bought for me. Only stuff bought with my own money counts.

I just hope I don't end up spending all the money this is supposed to save on movies or jazz albums instead.

* This is the cost of a PlayStation Plus subscription (£39.99) divided by 365, which works out as just under 11p per day.

Ubuntu mobile

Canonical, the group that maintains the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, have announced a touch-centred phone UI for Ubuntu. The plan, apparently, is that the phone will be able to connect to a keyboard, mouse and external monitor - which should, in theory, convert it into a full desktop PC.

There are a couple of hurdles in the way, though. Firstly, the early videos and previews I've seen have been less than glowing. They all realise it's a pre-alpha, first-release version of the OS, but the lag and reliance on gestures have caused concern. The gestures in particular don't seem quite right to me; they might be more useful once the lag's worked out, but I get the impression that the swipe-down gestures in particular were thought up for use by a mouse - the target icons are minute, which has the potential to make finger navigation a right pain.

The second, in my opinion much more dangerous, problem they face is the timeline. Ubuntu Phone devices aren't going to be available until early 2014 - over a year away. That's assuming, of course, that there aren't any unexpected delays or manufacturing problems - which would be unheard of outside Apple's processes.

A long lead in, giving developers time to get used to and create software for the OS, isn't necessarily a death knell for Ubuntu on phones, but they've basically given everyone else in the smartphone market a list of features that they can start copying now to undermine all of Ubuntu Phone's USPs by the time it launches.

Palm, and later HP, made similar premature announcements about webOS that meant once the devices hit the market their features were either old news or had been effectively incorporated into Android, iOS or both.

Obviously the phone-as-full-PC feature is going to be difficult for Apple or Google to rip off, without a big-screen version of iOS or Android currently on the cards, but I'd expect the majority of smartphone users aren't looking for that as a primary use for their next device. The gesture stuff, which is in a stronger position to change how people use their phone day to day, is much easier for someone else to nab in the next twelve months.

Back on the anime bandwagon

Despite running a website about the stuff from 2003 to 2007, I've been out of the loop on anime for years - basically since I moved to Dundee (or, more exactly, since I stopped running the website and was no longer sent new stuff for free).

Recently, the newest stuff I'd seen - other than the Rebuild of Evangelion movies - were Dennou Coil (2007), Eden of the East (2009) and Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011). I've been keen to get back into the habit though, so the arrival of the Crunchyroll app on Xbox 360 seemed like as good a reason as any to sign up for the service (I hadn't realised until that point that it was even available in the UK) and see what's out there nowadays.

Even the free offerings on Crunchyroll are decent, although a fiver a month gets you HD video and iOS/Android/Xbox streaming, as well as removing all the ads. Trying out the first couple of episodes of a show to figure out if you like it isn't a problem, and it means there's a lot less time (or money) investment to try something out - it starts playing instantly. The downside - such that there is one - is that they have a lot of stuff, going back to the start of 2009, and it's a bit overwhelming to know where to start when you've not been following any of this stuff for a couple of years.

So far I've watched all of Kids on the Slope (my new favourite show) and Sword Art Online (decent first half ruined by the second), and have seen most of GIRLS und PANZER (surprisingly awesome), BTOOOM! (really stupid but irritatingly moreish) and Shin Sekai Yori (f--king weird, in a mostly-offputting way).

As part of this 365 posts thing I'm planning to write a full post about each show as I finish it, as well as (probably shorter) posts about the stuff I give up on partway through. I've got drafts written for a few shows already, but I'm praying that inspiration strikes about something else soon and I don't end up writing about Japanese cartoons all the time.

2013

Right: I'm going to give this blogging thing another shot. My plan is to do some kind of 365-in-365 thing with a post a day.

The hope is that they'll be at least interesting, but consider this post a warning about the likely content.

I ran an anime news/reviews/blog website from 2004 to 2008 called aNIme (now offline, but still embarrassing me on the Wayback Machine). I've been pretty much entirely out of the loop on anime since moving to Dundee, but just before Christmas I signed up for the free trial for Crunchyroll in an effort to catch up. I've watched some really great shows already (as well as some pretty terrible stuff), and will be talking about those in greater detail than I should be comfortable with.

My new year's resolution for 2013 is to not buy any videogames*, but with enough on my Steam backlog, a few games I'm hoping to replay and the PlayStation Plus Instant Game Collection I should have enough to keep me going. I expect I'll bring those up, months behind everyone else.

I'm guessing TV and movies will also show up, and possibly some random ramblings about web development if I can't think of anything more interesting.

I used to be ridiculously prolific with long, reasonably-researched news/politics rants on LiveJournal (years ago), but I'm in a less mind-numbing job now and won't have time to read up and fact-check myself, so those will be few and far between. Not sure if that's a bad thing.

I'm also going to be really lazy and count this as my first entry.

*An exception is to be made for The Last of Us, although that was before I remembered BioShock Infinite and a second season of The Walking Dead; I guess I'll have to hope they're gifts at some point.

The Last of Us

May 7th is still very, very far away.

As excited as I am by this trailer - and I am very excited - my enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat by the mention, on the PlayStation blog, of multiplayer. I should have known, of course, that you can't release a big-budget retail game these days without some kind of online component, but given how badly the multiplayer aspect of Uncharted 3 affected the single-player level design, I'm worried.

Hopefully this time through, +Naughty Dog will have more separation between the multiplayer and campaign design teams so The Last of Us won't suffer from Uncharted 3's single-player-levels-that-look-feel-and-play-like-multiplayer-maps issue.

But this trailer does a lot to assuage my fears. The story and cast look promising at this stage, Naughty Dog still do the best cinematics in the business, and there seems to be a much wider variety of locations than I'd expected based on material released before.

I'm wondering, though, how much my experiences with The Walking Dead, and its (superficially, at least) similar plot will affect how I approach situations in The Last of Us. I can't imagine dialogue is going to be much of an option in this one, though.

Returning to Facebook: A thought experiment

This tweet got me thinking.

Haven't actively used Facebook in about 3 months now. Huh. /cc @aniki21
— Robbie (@robbiethng) August 9, 2012

I've kind of been missing Facebook. Not the service itself, but some of the people on it who I didn't keep in touch with any other way. I miss the social bit, not the network (although this post by maciej makes a strong case that social networks are neither).

I'd quite like to keep up with some of those people again, but don't have any real desire to open up my life to Facebook's increasingly terrifying database of People And Everything That They Do. So I've been trying to figure out how I would rejoin Facebook, if the temptation does eventually reach a point where I cave in.

I don't want to just re-activate my old account (I assume it still exists, even though I told Facebook to delete it a year ago) primarily so they can't link up any old data about me. I want them to have as little (useful) information about me as I can provide, so a new account entirely is required.

(I realise this post is going to go a bit Richard Stallman in places, for which I can only apologise.)

Firstly, there's the signup process.

I don't want Facebook to have my real email address (and I'd used it for my previous Facebook account anyway), so I'd have to set up a new one. Not difficult; there are dozens (if not hundreds) of free email providers, and I'm kind of interested in trying out Microsoft's new(ish) Outlook mailbox anyway.

A slightly trickier section is the phone number - Facebook now requires you to provide a mobile phone number when you sign up for an account. I assume this has to be unique, so I can't just re-use the number I had on my original account, or the number I used on my work Facebook account (I need this for testing, and since it uses my work email address I don't want to try and use it for personal stuff). In this instance, picking up a cheap Pay&Go SIM won't be prohibitively expensive - and while I'm not pleased with the idea of having to pay anything to use Facebook, it's probably worth it for keeping my real details away from their servers.

The other major way Facebook can track your information is by watching what other sites you visit - even if you're not logged into Facebook. The easiest solution to this, that I can see, is to only use Facebook in a different browser than everything else, or to use Private Browsing. Chrome has an "Incognito mode" that you can open which uses a different cache from your main browsing session, and which is disposed of when you close the window. This means you've got to re-login to every site if you're Incognito, but it also means anything you do Incognito can't escape to your main browser history. I already do this with my work Facebook account, so adopting this strategy for a personal one wouldn't be a new habit to learn.

Avoiding linking up my Facebook account to other services seems like a no-brainer, and although I'll happily use my Twitter account as an authenticator for blog comments and the like, there's something about the way Facebook collects, stores and uses the data its users provide that makes me much more wary about giving them that data in the first place.

Even with those precautions, I'll have to give this a lot more thought. There are bound to be things I've over looked or haven't thought of, but as an initial to-do list for opening a Facebook account I think this should protect me pretty well if I cave in and re-join Zuckerberg's Monolith.

Why I can't support Penny Arcade Sells Out

I think that generally, Kickstarter is a brilliant service that provides a much-needed funding source for projects that wouldn't have any startup finances at all. The problem is the recent spate of high-profile projects that have been breaking records, which have brought the Kicktsarter process to the attention of people who just want their ongoing costs to be covered rather than bringing something new to the table.

I think that's the main problem I have with Penny Arcade Sells Out. They're not starting anything with this project, and they're not going to do anything new with the money. They're just replacing a revenue stream, which seems to miss the point of Kickstarting something. The admission that they'll have to do this yearly just underlines how far away from the real point of Kickstarter this is.

And how much money will this take away from other Kickstarter projects? How many people will be spending $15 or $25 to Penny Arcade that they would have otherwise spent on projects that are actually creating something new? Gabe in particular has been emphasising on Twitter that nothing's actually going to change in terms of the content of Penny Arcade, so this is literally a $1 million ad blocker. You can get those for free, by the way.

There's been some implication that by replacing the ad revenue with crowdfunding, Penny Arcade will have more time for other projects, but I don't see how. I wouldn't have imagined that Gabe and Tycho are spending a lot of time moderating and approving advertising content; if they are, then what do they have business management people for?

I'd also like to know what their current advertising income is, and how it compares to the Kickstarter goal. Are they ripping people off, charging two or three or several times what they currently make on ads, or is $1m a bargain? Considering how many of the ads they run are seemingly for Penny Arcade's own side projects, what percentage of their advertising rotation is actually external business?

I don't remember the last time I took particular notice of an advert on any webpage, unless it started playing sound at me, or expanded to fill my screen when I rolled a mouse over it - which none of Penny Arcade's ads have ever done, to the best of my memory. They're mostly unintrusive and usually relevant to my (or at least PA's core audience's) interests. They only have two ad locations on the entire site, and one of those isn't even on the page with the comic strip.

If they wanted to do a Kickstarter for the Automata project, or the Lookouts project, or any of the other stretch goal bonus content, that'd be fine (although they'd probably need to do more than six pages each, and it would require a print run, if they wanted to justify the kind of money they'd undoubtedly ask for).

I can't help but see the Penny Arcade staff watching the total climbing and asking each other, "can you believe people are falling for this?"

On Hitman

I don't often feel like Tycho has completely missed the point, but last Friday's newspost definitely seems to suggest that he's skipped right over the cause of the outrage following the Hitman: Absolution trailer.

Of course the entire industry isn't about fetish-nun assassins and the brutal, fetishised murder thereof, but that doesn't mean we can just dismiss this kind of bullshit.

The attitude that led to the creation of that trailer is a very real and very pervasive part of the (largely male-oriented and male-dominated) games industry, and unless consumers and creators challenge this kind of wannabe-snuff misogynist wet-dream, it will continue to inform and encourage the kind of trashy, offensive (and by all accounts not-even-relevant-to-the-game-being-promoted) marketing that doesn't do anything but undermine the artistic efforts being made by game creators who are trying to do more than fulfill the base fantasies of straight white teenagers.

For excellent (and spot-on) reactions to the trailer in question, and the ensuing fallout, I recommend Keza MacDonald's article at IGN and Rob Fahey's at GI.biz.

From Kuramathi

Bought a couple hours' internet access from the hotel, catching up on Twitter, G and forums. Doesn't seem like we've missed much news. :P

Honeymoon is going great; coping with the heat better than we expected and no hangovers or sunburn yet (although tans are developing slowly so far too).
Currently posting from the tablet, which only has this one photo on it, but the views are spectacular. Difficult to believe that places like this actually exist outside of films and holiday brochures.

Highlights so far include the seaplane to the island, the phenomenal steak I had the first night, walking on the sand bank on the north of the island, and snorkeling with sharks this morning. The food (and drink) has been outstanding, the staff are really friendly and helpful, and the neighbours have at least been tolerable (the Russians on the left had noisy kids, and the Germans on the right have questionable musical taste, but they've been sensible about the hours they keep).

Fallout: Dundee

The Fallout look is actually something of an improvement for the Dundee council building.

Graffiti under the Bell St car park

You Can (Not) Redo

After stumbling across this trailer, I realised I'm looking forward to the last two Rebuild of Evangelion movies more than the first two; as the story is diverging more from the TV series, there seems to be more of a point to the whole exercise.

I've still not gotten around to watching 1.11 and 2.22 back-to-back, so I'll have to rewatch them before sitting down with 3.0.

I have to admit, though, as cool as Asuka looks with an eyepatch, there's something about it that reminds me of Nadine from Twin Peaks.

Netflix

After months of speculation and even longer desperate hope, American on-demand video provider Netflix has finally launched its services in the UK. It faces an uphill struggle to gain a foothold on this side of the pond, facing off against the Amazon-owned LoveFilm (which also provides physical DVD, Blu-ray and game rentals), as well as on-demand TV and film services provided by Sky, BT and Virgin Media. And those are just the legal alternatives.

They've made a brave stab at it - apps have launched for Android and Apple devices, as well as all three current home games consoles. Their catalogue, guaranteed to grow quickly in these first few months, is already significantly better-stocked than LoveFilm's offering, which consists mostly of independent and older films.

A larger, high-quality selection of content is a strong opening gambit, although the service at-launch is not without its flaws. The interface on the Netflix website and the Xbox 360 app are both extremely poor, and although slightly better on the PS3 it's still very difficult to find content. You can search for something if you know you want to watch it, but there's no guarantee it'll be in their library yet anyway. Finding something new is almost impossible, as there's no way to drill down into categories, and although there's a "similar items" when you start watching something, you have to start watching something before that option pops up.

The PS3 at least lets you flip through the episodes in a series without having to start the first one, while the web and 360 interfaces only show that option once the show starts.

I'm not sure what they were thinking with the 360 app, though - it's a confusing vertical list of horizontal lists, presenting you with just cover images (which awkwardly expand into a screenshot when you hover the cursor over them for a second). It vaguely uses the same idea as the new "Metro" interface, but it's not consistent enough. The biggest problem is the inability to sort titles, and I'm not entirely sure what governs the order they're presented in. Presumably the date they were added to the service, but wouldn't name or the original release date make more sense?

And would a favourites/want-to-see list be out of the question? Something like LoveFilm's (or Netflix US' DVD rental) queue, that lets you add stuff you're interested in that can then be used to give you more recommendations, or just provide quick access to things you'd like to watch.

The lack of options within the apps is another stumbling block; initially, your video quality is set to stream the lowest bitrate version of the film, but there's no indication where to change this option or even that you can. You've got to go onto the website and update the streaming quality from there (along with any parental controls or language preferences); while it's good that all the account management stuff is in one place, does it really have to be in only one place?

Once I'd bumped up the streaming quality and found something to watch (The Usual Suspects), it actually worked really well. The film started playing in as-near-as-I-could-tell HD within a few seconds and stayed in HD the entire way through, with no skips or lag - a near-miracle on our internet connection, which sometimes struggles to buffer an entire YouTube video. I also watched the start of Battle Royale to check out something with subtitles, and was surprised to see they were using soft subs rather than the hard subs my original DVD version had. A couple of titles (Battle Royale and Avatar: The Last Airbender) started off streaming in quite poor, low-quality video, but after a minute or so they bumped up to at least standard definition and stayed there for the rest of the time I was watching them.

Overall it's a promising start, but I hope they take some time to make the experience of finding films easier. Right now, it's too hard to stumble across something new, but too much effort to search for something specific that might not be there anyway.

At this point I don't think I'll keep the service beyond the first free month, but I'm going to try and get my theoretical money out of it. Maybe it will change the way we watch films and TV, although since most of the stuff we watch is as-it-airs US TV, maybe not.

The Last Of Us

Honestly, I'd be more interested in a post-apocalyptic game that doesn't rely on monsters. The Road was so depressingly effective (and so effectively depressing) because it was just about society falling apart, without needing a zombie infestation to cause it.

It would make a better game too, in my opinion, to leave the zombies behind; the use of (mostly) inhuman monsters as enemies in this seems like a cheap way to get around the "lead character as murderous psychopath" problem that the Uncharted series has started to run into, and doesn't actually leave the unnecessarily combat-heavy gameplay behind.

If they're really serious about driving storytelling forward, Naughty Dog need to commit to pushing their themes through gameplay, not just cutscenes. The problem with the story in Uncharted 3 is how most of the stuff you play seems non-canon for Drake's character; all the murdering is just something you do to keep you entertained as you move from point A to B.

There's such a disconnect between the flawed-but-fundamentally-good guy you see in the cutscenes and the remorseless gunslinger you actually play as. If that dichotomy isn't resolved effectively in The Last Of Us then I don't think the story is going to have the resonance Naughty Dog are hoping for.