Elf:

Half-Elf:

If you can’t be an adventurer, be an adventure supporter! Won’t you think of the puppies?

(src)

What do you you get when you buy a supporting membership to Worldcon so you can be one of the ridiculously small group of fans that votes on the Hugos? A backpack full of loot:

(src)

[this message brought to you by Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, which is better than many of this year’s Hugo nominees. Which says more about how broken the Hugos are than it does about random harem anime.]

That humans-as-batteries moment in the first movie? Please apologize for inspiring the villain’s evil plot in the second volume of the new Ms. Marvel comic. Because bullshit that thick always leaves mental scarring.

On a whim, I picked up a set of translated light novels a while back, the first five of the 130-volume Guin Saga, a popular fantasy series in Japan that I’d never heard of, notable primarily for its length and the fact that it was written by a very talented and prolific woman, Kaoru Kurimoto (who apparently had a hand in creating the yaoi genre in addition to her other accomplishments).

They’re a light, quick read, which is fortunate, because they follow a pretty basic formula, one that’s been done many times before and since. It’s noteworthy that the 2009 anime adaptation ripped through all five of these books in only 10 episodes without losing much that mattered. Although they did feel it necessary to make the one-on-one fights rather overpowered, and replace relatively realistic mass combat with plate-wearing soldiers jumping around like ninjas on crack.

I haven’t finished watching it yet, largely because it gets tiring to hear every character in the story constantly repeat Guin’s name while pausing the story for a closeup. Also, the closeups are pretty much the only decent art, the animation is tolerable-to-bad, and the music is intrusive and repetitive. I’d have given up already if I didn’t like the performances by the voice actors for Guin, Istavan, and Rinda (who was naggingly familiar until I had to look her up, at which point I wasn’t surprised to discover she played Maia in Daphne in the Brilliant Blue).

Not recommended, but if you’ve run out of other things to watch, it’s on Crunchyroll.

After years of filling in as Acting Network Guy (now ending, thankfully), I have decided that there’s really only one thing I’m certain of: IPSec problems are always at the other end.

This was demonstrated yet again this morning when we were trying to change our end of a tunnel that had been up for several years from a /32 to a /24, so that additional machines could route through the tunnel. On my end (OpenBSD), this was a one-line change in ipsec.conf and a one-line change in pf.conf. On their end, which involved Real Networking Hardware, it was days of fumbling that left the old /32 tunnel up while they insisted they’d switched their config.

It took a 45-minute conference call this morning to get it straightened out, which I basically spent watching anime with the sound off while their tech guy cleaned cruft out of his configs and rebuilt their end from scratch.

[unrelated, my co-lo had a power outage, and my ancient beta WebEngine never auto-boots completely; you have to hit the big red button on the front. Sadly, the folks at the co-lo had no success with the big red button, so I had to scrounge around the house for the custom console adapter this thing uses, and stop by on my way to work today to watch it fsck the disks. They’ve had several outages this year, and I think it’s time to move the server to one of the statics on my Comcast Business line and then upgrade it to something more powerful than a 500MHz Pentium 3 with 256MB of RAM.]

Episodes 1-3 covered book 1, 4-6 book 2, and 7-8 book 3. Episode 9 is starting book 4. Book 7 was released just over a month ago, and book 8 comes out in a few weeks, so it’s a race between the animators and the author.

If it’s a single-cour series, they’ll finish book 5 at the current pace, and won’t have enough material to adapt again until at least the Fall season. If they try for 26 episodes now, they’ll have to pull in the spinoff series about Aiz and company, which has 5 books as of last week.Or go with original stories, in which case it was a mistake to rush through the books; 2 episodes for a light novel leaves out a lot of material. Three episodes was already pretty tight, and risks turning an anime into a highlight reel (like DaiMaou), but it’s been working pretty well so far.

I see special editions of book 8 on Amazon, which suggests the anime is helping sales, and the pre-order for the first disc is at #68 in anime Blurays, so my guess is that they’ll do a second series in the Fall or Winter season.

It continues to be entertaining, but I’m hoping that Bell’s new skill doesn’t turn into an all-purpose “I Win” button, which is unfortunately implied in Hestia’s description of it.

SF/F writer Tanith Lee died last week. Bummer.

This Chinese SF novel is being praised as good old-fashioned hard science fiction, filled with powerful and fantastic ultra-science and a gripping plot that uncovers a secret war against humanity that opens Earth up to alien conquest.

Yeah, not so much. The only two on-camera technologies that exceed present-day capabilities are:

1. The bad guys remotely project a countdown timer into Our Hero's field of vision. At the end of the book, they use this technology again to project a short insult to the eyes of a small group of people.
2. The good guys use Our Hero's experimental nanomaterial to construct monomolecular garrotes that slice an oil tanker into ribbons as it passes through the Panama Canal.

You have a well-funded secret society that sincerely believes in an upcoming alien invasion, but despite the complete lack of hard evidence, a room full of generals (and one suspicious old cop) are convinced that they desperately need to destroy that tanker in a way that kills everyone on board before they can delete their files (which are believed to contain additional messages from the aliens). Why a tanker? Because it was in fact a sea-faring radio telescope, used to carry out decades of two-way communication with the invaders.

But let’s assume for the moment that all of the third-hand evidence collected from the conspirators and the tanker is true, and aliens really are on their way to conquer Earth. What is their powerful and fantastic ultra-science weapon (singular, despite the blurbs)?

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