Not dirt.
The final subbed episodes of Spice and Wolf and Shigofumi being released overnight reminded me that it’s about time for another anime-related post. And that is what’s coming up next season. And it’s a biggun!
Update: I’ve dug up a few of the PV’s on Youtube and added them to the post.
Continue reading ‘Spring ‘08 Anime’
So I’ve been waiting for this little game on the Wii called Super Smash Bros. Brawl. You may have heard of it. And being an Australian, I’m left with the choice of waiting six months while everyone else tells me how awesome it is, or I could go the filthy, filthy pirate method. I opted for the latter.
Now this is the first dual layer game for the Wii. And as a result, many people are having trouble even reading the original disc. The Wii is even more particular about burnable discs, so I tried to find a decent brand to burn my copy. For some reason, I had this idea that Imation were a fairly reliable brand, so I picked up a pack of 10 for $30 from Officeworks. Not a great price, but I’ve seen worse.
After patching the game to run as well as possible on a PAL machine thanks to a few people over at GBAtemp, I burnt it and waited the forty-five minutes it takes for a dual layer disc. Popped it straight in the Wii, and, oh noes. “Unable to read disc”. For what it’s worth, this is the same error many people have been getting with the pressed retail discs, so it wasn’t necessarially my modchip or even the discs.
Continue reading ‘Wii, Brawl and filthy, filthy lasers’
So my 360 arrived this morning, and I’m still nowhere near finishing Kingdom Hearts 2. I blame the goddamn Demyx battle and goddamn Timeless River. Quick time events get me in the angry dome.
Anyway, I’ve gone ahead and created myself one of these newfangled gamer tags, which you can see over to the right. Feel free to go ahead and add PantsOfPie. PiePants was taken.
I’ll most likely be buried deep in Forza Motorsport 2 for the next few days.
I think I’ll set myself a goal for this weekend. I need to try and finish Kingdom Hearts 2 before Super Smash Bros Brawl comes out (9th March), and before my Xbox 360 arrives (probably 5th or 6th March, depending on how generous Australia Post are feeling).
I have a feeling that could be a little tricky considering how I’m only at Mulan’s world as it is.
…sort of.
Actually, Jaymz finally got his forums going. So go check it out if you’re a fellow AusAnime refugee. :yarr:
Or “Adventures in Wii Modding”
So I finally purchased a Wii last November, and had been wanting to get it chipped ever since, for several reasons.
The biggest reason? Despite the fact that the DS and Wii are actually rather popular in the PAL regions (Europe and Australia), we just keep getting screwed over with the release dates. Look no further than Super Smash Bros Brawl for a great example: It came out at the end of January in Japan, and it’s got a release date of the 9th of March in the US. Anyone want to guess when it comes out in Australia? Well, your guess is as good as mine, because we still don’t have a date.
Back in November, I wrote about how a lot of people were hotlinking to the site. And now I have some data to compare with.
Isn’t it funny how a simple URL rewrite turns 3.72Gb of bandwidth into this:
Funny that. I estimated it to be around 20%, but it was actually 65% of usage being wasted to hotlinks. Wow.
And awstats’ HTTP status codes log tells the rest of the story:
Edit: I should clarify that the Bandai I refer to in this post is Bandai Visual USA Inc., whose American division basically produces subtitled-only R1 DVDs. There’s also Bandai Entertainment Inc., owned by the same group, but they usually do a full English dub as well, and occasionally license shows from studios other than Bandai Visual Co., Ltd. Talk about confusing.
Bandai were one of the few US anime licensees that I actually respected. Their DVDs have always been pretty good quality, so I wasn’t too dissapointed when I heard that Shigofumi had been licenced by Bandai. Then I read into it a little more. The first R1 disc comes out in May, subtitled only. I was thinking to myself, finally a US licensee has gotten the point.
Then I saw the price. 45 Australian dollars per disc with two episodes per disc, with the seventh disc at 33 Australian dollars for one episode. At this point something else went through my head. Something more along the lines of:
I don’t know who they expect will pay three fucking hundred Australian dollars for a twelve episode series. I love the series, sure, but I couldn’t justify that bullshit. And that’s only me. I know the reception for the show elsewhere has only been lukewarm.
And these fucking companies wonder why people continue to download the fansubs. Take a goddamn hint already, most of us aren’t made of money.
There’s some series I knew would suck this season. As I’ve already said, H2O was pretty much horrible in every aspect, and so I’ve dropped that already. Rosario + Vampire, well I reluctantly got through the first episode of that. I didn’t even get halfway through the second episode though before I decided I’d rather roll around on hot coals than watch that garbage any longer. It’s now joining H2O.
On to the stuff that doesn’t suck now. And I’m actually happy to say that two series in particular are well and truly making up for the shortcomings of H2O and Rosario.
Continue reading ‘Letters from the Dead’
So I got around to backing up the boot drive in my server and proceeded to format it so I could play with Ubuntu Server 7.10. I’d been thoroughly impressed by the experience I had under the desktop version, so I expected much the same from the server version too. In the end, it didn’t go quite as smooth as I expected, but to be fair none of the problems were really Ubuntu’s fault. Following is a bit of a long-winded description of what not to do if you plan on running a system with either software RAID, or bridged network cards.
Continue reading ‘First impressions of Ubuntu Server’