“Tens of hundreds of years ago, the planet named Fashan, the fourth planet in the Extre-Harvest solar system, suffered a war so devastating that even now its wake is felt. In terms of destruction it ranks as one of the worse wars the universe has ever seen. Energy waves released in its name circled the planet unmercifully, nearly dooming its inhabitants, setting the evolutionary cycle back millions of years.
“And yet the war advanced the world as well. The evolutionary cycle held its own. Fashan had been reborn, shed of its peaceful cloak of culture and plenty. The war brought upon Fashan the Age of Savagery and Chaos, an age without gods to lead them. And through it all, the Terror, the spark to the great war, survived.”
— Spawn Of Fashan, Foreward (sic)Fruits Basket
(via)
It took me a while to decide whether to file this under Tools, Toys, Food, or Models…
Practice Safe Soldering
Turns out deleted tweets can still reproduce…
American Fairy Tales
Growing up in the Southwest, Red had learned how to handle Big Bad Wolves.
(via; SFW link, but this Tumblr is often NSFW)
Cloning Remo
In good news, CloneBD’s most recent update fixes the video problems I had copying the UK Bluray of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, so with the region-coding stripped, I can now watch it on my big TV without plugging in my laptop.
In dubious news, they’re making a new Destroyer movie, with the director promising to follow the novels more closely. Fans of the books mostly hated the movie, but the origin story in the novels is pretty awful. In fact, it took 10+ books for the formula to settle down and develop the relationship between Remo and Chiun, and you don’t have time for that in a movie. So if it’s going to reintroduce the character with an origin, it can’t be the origin from the books, and it can’t take a dozen adventures to build up a relationship between the leads.
The fact that the director involved is also doing remakes of Predator and Doc Savage doesn’t increase my confidence at all.
[Update: still doesn’t work on a Playstation 3, so I suspect the video has the PAL framerate; I’ll have to use one of the CloneBD options that reencodes the video if I want it to play on less-capable machines, but meanwhile, it works on my TV. Now to test the rip of Buckaroo Banzai…]
I like the future
Amazon Prime Now has expanded to the SF Bay Area. While I doubt I’ll ever order the ice cream and frozen pizzas, there’s some comfort in knowing that if you really need a 1080p home theater projector before midnight, they’ve got you covered.
Or if you find yourself running out of candy on Halloween…
I expect it to mostly benefit people like my sister, who often finds herself in business hotels, frantically working on events and presentations.
The tyranny of the 1%
Steven is justly concerned about the marginalization of normality by a very vocal minority that demands praise for every non-traditional lifestyle choice they make. Not tolerance, not acceptance, not legal recognition; praise. And in their childish tantrums, they lash out at anyone and anything that biology and society call “normal”.
The slang term “cis” (which simply means “on the near side”, false etymologies to the contrary) is a straightforward attempt to de-normalize “normal”, so that people who define themselves as “trans” don’t have to face up to the severe psychological problems that lead them to consider cutting off their genitals. (they have my pity, since they’re only harming themselves; the parents who decide that a child engaging in non-gender-stereotypical behavior is “trans” belong in prison)
I came across a good example recently, a comment on the usually-informative Boobs Don’t Work That Way tumblr, in response to a tutorial video:
"That video has some good drawing points but you should probably tag it at *least* as #casual cissexism"
“Casual cissexism” = “assumption that pretty much everybody is male or female” = “simple truth”.
But you can’t say that, because Speaking Truth To Activists is a hate crime.
I read it for the articles, backwards
There have been a lot of regional versions of Playboy magazine, with the nudity content varied to meet local standards. Most of them have gone under, and now that the flagship is abandoning nudity in favor of exploiting residual brand recognition, I doubt it’s long for this world. Honestly, any monthly magazine is a tough sell these days, and this latest change is likely to be about as effective as the time they put the magazine into the hands of a former Maxim exec.
But don’t worry, cheesecake fans, Japan’s got your back. Weekly Playboy (no relation) has a healthy business model built on healthy models, in and out of their clothing. Their photography lacks the high artistic and technical standards that once made Playboy stand out of the crowd, but nobody does it that way any more; the craft of creating a single memorable image has been replaced by happy accidents embedded in filler.
In the strictly-non-nude department, Bomb! reliably delivers decent cheesecake photoshoots that flatter their subjects (unlike the recent WP (NSFW) shoot of Erika Yazawa that just made me feel sorry for her). Their DVDs are nicely shot, as well.
There are a lot of other weekly and monthly magazines that add a slice of cheesecake (in many genres), but as always with Japanese magazines, it can be a little too fresh, so be sure to check the pull date before ogling too intently. The kanji 「歳」 preceded by a number should be considered a warning label.
