krpalmer: (anime)
2025-03-01 08:45 pm
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At the Movies: Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning-

Advance reports of a new Gundam series did get my attention. It hadn’t been all that long since The Witch From Mercury; for all of the complaints from other fans feeding into my self-pitying thoughts that “mecha series don’t get a fair shake these days,” perhaps the temptation was to now think the franchise was actually doing all right. (In reflecting on the years between that series and Iron-Blooded Orphans, though, I did wind up reminding myself the “Build Divers” shows had appeared in between them.) The peculiar subtitle of the upcoming series “GQuuuuuuX” at least got my attention too, for all that I felt very tempted to anticipate knocking out the “u”s in private record-keeping of episodes watched. (While it’s not the exact same thing, I’ll admit to forever being tempted to think of “The 08th MS Team” as “Gundam MST08,” even if this didn’t extend to trying to cast that OVA’s characters in yet another “non-standard MSTing...”)
ExpandAt the very least, hints at a surprise given away )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
2025-02-26 06:20 pm
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Working Things Out Backwards

After reading a book about calculators and then a weblog post about a brief slice of their history when pocket electronic machines became available in the early 1970s, I happened on an emulator program for some of the first Hewlett-Packard pocket devices. That got me thinking about their particular method of data entry, and whether I’d brushed by “Reverse Polish Notation” just because of the unfortunate potential for inappropriate smirks. I did get to the point of looking up the manual for the HP-35 calculator, the original “electronic slide rule,” and then I started searching in my phone’s “App Store.” One free application offered the layouts of the HP-35 and two of its immediate successors, the enhanced HP-45 and the cost-reduced HP-21. It did offer “haptic feedback” when you pushed on-screen buttons, but when I realised it didn’t quite offer the multiple memory registers of the HP-45 I started looking at calculator programs you had to pay for. One person offering quite a few programs had a “free sample” ready in the form of the HP-70, a simplified financial calculator, and that was enough of a preview for me to buy an HP-35 program for my phone and a HP-45 program for my iPad.

Once I’d become used to it I could see how “RPN” entry worked with complicated calculations; the question was just how many of those complicated calculations I actually do. I also got to the point of thinking I ought to see if I could still multiply and divide by hand on paper, and found myself prone to errors while multiplying at length. My only hope is that practice would help there.
krpalmer: (anime)
2025-02-14 06:26 pm
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Manga Thoughts: Destroy All Humans. They Can't Be Regenerated 1-2

Dropping in to the area bookstore not that long ago, I had definite thoughts of looking for a single new volume of manga by an artist I’d read some works from before. The consciousness I haven’t been grabbed by all that many new titles of late, bringing me pretty close to confronting those stacked-up volumes “waiting until I’ve seen their anime adaptation first,” did get me at least passing by a display table. One title I’d been aware of caught my eye again, and this time I picked up a first volume of Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated, then looked around a little more and saw the second volume in the series was also available. The small wrinkle that this was a manga about Magic: The Gathering, which I’ve never played, was still in effect. Now, though, I was at least wondering if this might be a marshmallow-light example of “even if a story isn’t ‘meant for you,’ you still might come to understand another small part of humanity a little better from it.”
ExpandIt’s in the cards )
krpalmer: (anime)
2025-02-03 05:55 pm
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Legitimately Remembered Love at last

Advance reports the latest release over in Japan of “the Macross movie” Do You Remember Love? would have English subtitles got my attention. That particular piece of the Macross franchise hadn’t been included in the recent rollout to streaming services outside Japan I don’t have a subscription to. While I am quite aware a good number of other fans assign all the blame for that continued absence to Harmony Gold, I have to admit to being willing to wonder if there might be something to the occasional counterarguments the number of entities involved in the production of the movie four decades ago could have something to do with particular problems with its overseas rights. (I also understand that when the English dub of uncertain provenance was released on videotape years and years ago, Harmony Gold didn’t appear to have been involved...) In any case, I did start contemplating taking a rare step indeed for me.
ExpandExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence )
krpalmer: (apple)
2025-02-01 04:36 pm
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Straight Back to Mariani

In the final stages of preparing a post about some new-to-me Apple II emulators, I went back to the GitHub page for the “Mariani” emulator to retrieve its URL. While there, I happened to notice the number of “branches” to the code, and was curious enough to take a look at them. Spotting something called “delete-key-mapping” was sufficient to get me thinking I might keep delving into Mariani after my post was up.
ExpandTo correct your mistakes )
krpalmer: (apple)
2025-01-30 05:50 pm
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Fresh Emulation Options

One recent upgrade to the long-established emulator Virtual ][ promised improvements to its rendering of Apple II graphics. That got my attention. While Virtual ][ includes many useful features and I bought a license for it some time ago (long enough ago that I have to admit I’ve used the license code to get the program running on more than one computer), in an age where some emulators make efforts to simulate the blurred-together look of cathode-ray tube monitors it had got to looking a bit old-fashioned. However, those modest improvements didn’t seem enough to make a post about.
ExpandHeading for Mariani Avenue )
krpalmer: Imagination sold and serviced here: Infocom (infocom)
2025-01-24 05:49 pm
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Return to Fractalus

Keeping up with a sort of digest of “Color Computer news” (it was where I’d learned about the regional antique computer exposition I went to last year), I saw a pointer to a video promising a detailed look at a game ported to computers including the “CoCo 3,” Rescue on Fractalus. The game (an early work from Lucasfilm Games, later LucasArts) was a sort of science fiction flight simulator where you flew down valleys and over mountains generated via what was just becoming a buzzword, “fractals,” shooting alien gun turrets off the ridges and landing to rescue crashed pilots. While my recollections have my family only buying the game during the final closeout sales at Radio Shack on Color Computer software, by which the state of the art for people who’d bought more expensive computers had become Wing Commander, I’d played Rescue on Fractalus enough to take some interest in the video.
ExpandReturning to the rescue )
krpalmer: (anime)
2025-01-18 01:43 pm
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Manga Thoughts: Witch Hat Atelier 13

Seeing a release date for the thirteenth volume of Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier manga had at once been as welcome as ever and given me the peculiar feeling it had shown up earlier than I might have expected. Willing to hope, I put in an order anyway a little in advance of the date. As it turned out, I was then able to pick up the volume a little sooner than I’d expected to. This time, I didn’t “save the best for last.”
ExpandCatching a breath and speeding up again )
krpalmer: (kill la d'oh)
2025-01-13 07:31 pm
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Manga Thoughts: Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow 1

When I set about watching through “sample episodes” from six decades of anime two years ago, I had only one series starting in 1970 available with subtitles. Unlike a few other early cases of that, I was uncertain about sampling it. My post about Tomorrow’s Joe began by lamenting how, for all that I knew the original manga had been a very big deal, the accumulating injuries of boxing unsettle me. I do wonder, though, if I’d protested too much; I can at least understand how the “repelled” versus “compelling” balance has varied over time and for different people even if some of the results of being punched repeatedly start to hint at “body horror,” something in general I really don’t do well with at all. (For that matter, clothing getting ripped in “staged fights” doesn’t appeal to me either. By the time this leads to admitting that bits of an outfit being lost over the course of a story might not appeal as well, maybe I’ve given enough away to be psychoanalysed.) All of that does lead into how, when I learned the original manga was being translated and released over here, I wound up buying a copy even if a “three-in-one hardcover” was awfully expensive, especially given the paper didn’t seem that different from the stuff that yellows over time in ordinary manga.
ExpandA bone-white ring under the red-hot sun )
krpalmer: (europa)
2025-01-10 06:26 pm
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Radio Surprise

Trying to turn off the alarm of my clock-radio for the weekend, quite by accident I snapped the radio on instead. While I was able to turn it off again after a few moments, I had an impression the few notes from the area classical music station I keep the radio turned to sounded familiar. I turned the radio on again, and found it playing the closing of “Parade of the Ewoks” from the Return of the Jedi soundtrack. Maybe it’s unfortunate I wouldn’t be able to recognise many pieces of older and therefore presumably more outright “classical” pieces, but it made for a nice surprise.
krpalmer: (kill la d'oh)
2025-01-06 06:47 pm
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From the Bookshelf: My First Love's Kiss

It wasn’t until I’d acquired the second volume of My First Love’s Kiss in rapid succession after the first that I realised the cover was on “the wrong side.” I hadn’t started buying another “girls’ love” manga, but a “light novel” series. With the way I now try to track down what manga is becoming available for purchase, I suppose my confusion was explainable. Having read a girls’ love manga with the art provided by the illustrator Fly (who I first became aware of through the Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki novels) played its own role too.
ExpandBeyond the back-cover blurb )
krpalmer: (anime)
2025-01-03 08:07 pm
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New Year, New Purchasing Option

While I took the path of least resistance and have been buying anime Blu-Rays from the “Crunchyroll Store” for a bit over a year now, I’ve at least dabbled in alternatives, ordering Sentai discs from that company’s own store and AnimEigo discs from the “MediaOCD Store.” Becoming aware the cardboard spacers Right Stuf used to put inside its boxes are no longer in use has a bit to do with that for all that whatever desire I once had to get expensive deluxe sets and “quasi-imports” burned out some time ago.
ExpandAs for another company... )
krpalmer: (anime)
2024-12-31 07:01 pm

2024: My Fourth Quarter in Anime

At the beginning of October I’d worked out an anime viewing schedule fitted to what I was still thinking of as increased constraints on my time. It would mix some antique series seen via “fansubs,” some not quite as old shows on Blu-Ray discs, and just a few brand-new streaming titles. I’d only seen one episode apiece of the “Blu-Ray shows,” though, before winding up in the hospital with a broken hip. While I have to acknowledge the personal good fortune of having family who could head to where I live and take care of things for the first weeks of recovery, the additional people in my place did make watching Blu-Rays on my big TV feel a little awkward. I dropped back to what I could watch on my iPad, which amounted to the fansubs and streaming titles. The “Blu-Ray shows” were replaced with a few more newly streaming titles that had at least got my attention before but for which I’d tried to come up with reasons why they had to fall by the wayside. It wasn’t until I’d recovered to the point of going back to work and faced turning in earlier again that I happened to wonder if I could have worked back up to “two episodes a day every day” in my time off and raced through an extra catalog title or two. Still, in that time I had read through a manga series I’d already finished, perhaps even rarer for me than returning to an anime series, and got a good way through an old multi-part documentary. Even that small variety might well been more satisfying than uninterrupted anime.
ExpandBack from the past: Anne of Green Gables )
ExpandScheduled streaming: Blue Box, Mecha-Ude, and Love Live Superstar )
ExpandStreaming additions: Sengoku Youko and DAN DA DAN )
ExpandBlu-Rays eventually: Riding Bean and Otaku no Video )
ExpandBack to one future: Space Battleship Yamato )
krpalmer: (anime)
2024-12-18 06:33 pm

Dressed Up Again, Eventually

Although I keep bringing it up, “only reading manga after I’ve seen the anime adapted from it” isn’t quite a hard-and-fast rule for me. I might even have started to wonder a little if that rule formed about two decades ago, even if I can then wonder if daring to bring up “to me, anime from the ‘early digital production era’ now looks a bit less impressive in general than recent anime” would bring up complaints from those ready to find faults in something approaching all recent anime and assign blame to big companies.
ExpandDressed up, eventually )
krpalmer: (kill la d'oh)
2024-12-13 07:41 pm
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Manga Thoughts: The Call of Cthulhu

Not all that long, or so it seemed, after I‘d read Gou Tanabe‘s manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Dark Horse announced another adaptation was going to be translated and released over here. This time it would be “The Call of Cthulhu,” significant enough for providing the name for the whole “Mythos.” I got around to buying and reading a copy.
ExpandConceivably a survival )
krpalmer: (anime)
2024-12-01 07:43 pm
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More Remembered (Streaming) Love

Just as I’d happened to do during the first months of this year, I came upon on certain notices there’d be another altogether unofficial streaming of Do You Remember Love? This time, the promise was of the original Japanese language dialogue with subtitles. That would be more familiar to me than the perhaps-infamous English dub streamed earlier, but I still thought I could make a late evening of the movie.
ExpandFound in translation )
krpalmer: (europa)
2024-11-30 05:43 pm
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Six-Day Saga

While the waning months of autumn have been my habitual time to indulge in watching through my Blu-Rays of the Star Wars movies, my parents staying over during my recovery from a broken hip made me a little self-conscious about what I had on TV. (It did happen, anyway, that I spent some weeks of recovery at our family home so that my parents could head to appointments of their own, and there I did happen to see bits of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on TV, which my parents had tuned into first...) At last, though, I was by myself again during a last week before my planned return to work, and that made me decide to head through the saga in six days instead of six weekends. (There have been a few times where I managed to watch six movies in the space of a regular weekend, but in more recent years that’s come to feel a bit too time-consuming.)
ExpandPicking an order )
krpalmer: Charlie Brown and Patty in the rain; Charlie Brown wears a fedora and trench coat (charlie brown)
2024-11-26 02:38 pm
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Manga Thoughts: Manga Biographies: Charles M. Schulz

Happening to see notices a “manga biography” of Charles M. Schulz would be translated into English (and my impression is that I keep up with “Peanuts news” enough I saw it there rather than as “anime and manga news”) did get my attention. Knowing about the popularity of Peanuts in Japan kept the juxtaposition from feeling altogether odd to me, but a certain sense of two personal interests bumping together in an unexpected way still could have managed in the end to make me get a copy of the translated manga.
ExpandA life in drawing(s) )
krpalmer: (Default)
2024-11-19 07:40 pm
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End of One Road Elsewhere

After eking along my Tumblr side project of posting computer magazine covers for years, today the cover of the last issue of MacLife in my old subscription emerged from the now altogether depleted queue. I had been wondering for a while whether to just let that account sit, use it for occasional “reblogs” of the posts of others, or go back to a certain number of computer magazines I hadn’t quite managed to include in the lineup the first time around. One extra thought that came to me was that, in covering thirty-five years of computer magazines in less than that time, I’d more or less reached the fiftieth anniversary of the first issue of Creative Computing (even if that can leave me wondering how that magazine might have covered even the second half of the 1980s had it survived its corporate overlord a bit longer). Making “fifty years ago” reblogs would mean a lot of time in between them, though.
krpalmer: (anime)
2024-11-11 04:17 pm
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Unrealized Cross-Media Fortunes

To be brief, I’ve pared time spent with a web browser open well back. To fill that gap, I decided to return to some manga and read it again. Picking up The Promised Neverland, I pushed through twenty volumes and a special follow-up of one-shots also from author Kaiu Shirai and artist Posuka Demizu in four days. This was a considerable acceleration from my usual pace of courteous chapter-sized nibbles.
ExpandThe reason for my choice )