Category Archives: Triumphs

Masako is a more likable character than Ringo (and day 5)

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I want to say sardonically, "Simpsons did it" but the irony is that it wasn't nearly this funny or absurd when they did; it was actually one of the most heartfelt and serious episodes in the series.

I like stalker characters quite a bit and really enjoyed all of Ringo’s episodes pursuing Tabuki. I also enjoyed learning about Momoka and watching her strained relationship with Shouma develop in the wake of the actions of the Takakura parents. It’s all very fun and the idea of being stalked by a high school girl never really loses it’s appeal, but I’ve decided that Masako is, nonetheless, a more endearing character. Her charm is how mysterious she is. The viewer is scared of what she’s capable of and, until episode 16, knows very little about her, which lets the viewer’s imagination run wild.

As for the table, it would get unreasonably long if I kept including all previous days. I don’t know how long I’m going to keep this experiment up, but, at the very least, I shouldn’t give up until I’ve recorded at least 10 days. At the end of 10 days I suppose I’ll make a table of all the results.

Abstract here
 

Day #Offences for male students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for male students (inclusive)
5 4 4
Day #Offences for female students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for female students (inclusive)
5 4 7
Day #Total offences(Male + Female) %Offenders [%Offenders(adjusted)]
5 11 22% [36.667%]

Day 4

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These slouches are getting worse by the day.

I keep forgetting halfway through class to keep counting. I had to trash the results from several days since they were incomplete.

I do want to make clear though that I don't exactly object to the idea of slacking off in class on any ethical grounds; what I object to is the blatant scorn for the teacher and minority of students who are actively trying to enjoy the class that slacking off in so blatant a fashion as using a PSP, DS, or mobile phone reveals. It's like regifting. We all regift, but we don't tell the recipient when we do it.

Having said that, I, of course, am not one of those people actively trying to enjoy the lesson. I let my mind wander from academic matters all the time in class. But in any given class there’s bound to be at least one person who enrolled, not because he or she thought it would require a minimum of effort (the primary criterion by which I determine which classes to join), but because he or she actually thought it seemed interesting. Those are the people I feel bad for. Not myself.

Nonetheless, I slack off just as much as the next guy. What makes me better and more ethical than the rest of you louses, however, is that you can’t tell when I’m slacking off. I play mental games during class like counting backwards from 1000 by threes, counting how many people are using mobile phones, doing rough estimates of how much SP I’d need to fully farm a pure STR glaive character with maximum grasswalk, fire imbue, and heuksal skills, imagining Christina Hendricks as a catgirl chambermaid with glasses, smirking while thinking about the fact that I have a symmetrical 35Mbps connection, picking at my cuticles, trying to write kanji I’m on the verge of forgetting over and over using my finger on the desk, cracking my neck, thinking about rDNS, trying to mentally paint pictures of various national flags, trying to remember all the U.S. presidents, trying to name all 50 U.S. states, trying to name every province of China and its capital, trying to hide my bleeding cuticles, naming every Japanese prefecture from north to south, trying to name every country in a continent of my choosing, drawing a mental map of the trade winds or tectonic plates, thinking about what’s on TV tonight, and looking at my digital watch, Benoit Garibaldi, exactly when the minute changes and then attempting to count precisely 60 seconds before looking at him again. I can do all of these things relatively discretely. You cannot play with a mobile phone without it being visible. The key to slacking off while still appearing like an earnest sort of person is to enjoy yourself primarily by using the vivid imagination you’ve developed by playing Magic: The Gathering, Angband, and reading R.L. Stine books when you were a kid.

Abstract here.
 

Day #Offences for male students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for male students (inclusive)
1 0 0
2 2 2
3 0 2
4 3 3
Day #Offences for female students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for female students (inclusive)
1 5 8
2 9 11
3 6 11
4 9 12
Day #Total offences(Male + Female) %Offenders [%Offenders(adjusted)]
1 8 16% [26.667%]
2 13 26% [43.333%]
3 13 26% [43.333%]
4 15 30%[50%]

Day 3

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Abstract here.
 

Day #Offences for male students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for male students (inclusive)
1 0 0
2 2 2
3 0 2
Day #Offences for female students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for female students (inclusive)
1 5 8
2 9 11
3 6 11
Day #Total offences(Male + Female) %Offenders [%Offenders(adjusted)]
1 8 16% [26.667%]
2 13 26% [43.333%]
3 13 26% [43.333%]

Let’s do a science!

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I’m conducting a sociological experiment. On days when I remember, I’m going to count how many students in my class use mobile phones, portable game consoles, multimedia players, and other handheld gadgets during class. I’ll do it in only one class per day and not necessarily the same one. I’ll try as much as possible to do it in the same class each day but if I forget to do it one class I’ll do it in the next instead. My hypothesis is that, though young people today are, in general, uncouth, barely literate brutes unfit for middle school, let alone higher education, female students are more disruptive during class, at least, than male students.

The experiment will not, admittedly, be very scientific because I will, of course, be paying attention to the content of the class as well as looking out for slackoff behaviours. This means it’s almost inevitable that some students will whip out an iPod or PSP or something and it’ll slip under my radar. I expect this to happen. Whatever my results are, the reader should realise that the actual figures are probably much worse. It’s also not always possible for me to see everyone in the room from the seat I’m in. I try to sit near the back in the centre of my classes so that I can see everyone but there will surely be times when I won’t have a good view and will fail to spot offenders because of it. There’s also the fact that I don’t want to look like an insane person, so I’m not going to go nuts looking around the room like a psychoneurotic squirrel.

I speculate that if there were simply a sign at the entrance to the school that asked people to turn off cell phones and other electronic devices before entering most people would comply. It works for the most part in movie theatres.

I’m not counting kids with laptops or netbooks as offenders because it’s possible to use those things to type notes even though this is actually not allowed at my school for some backwards reason. I’m giving them more than the benefit of the doubt here since most students I see with laptops are playing computer games or otherwise goofing off.

The classes are all an equal length — 75 minutes — and are both supposed to be the same size. I’m not going to try to count how many students are actually present in the class though. The only calculation I’ll attempt to make is the percentage of students who used one of these devices at least once during class. To calculate this I’ll just assume nobody is absent and all 50 students are in the class. The fact is, however, that there are actually something like 20 students absent almost every single day. There are only about 30 chairs in the classrooms and there are usually one or two empty seats left over, so the reader should, by all means, assume that the percentages are much higher. I’ll also do an “adjusted” percentage of students present who are offenders based on the assumption that there are 30 students present every day. Obviously, this is not always going to be accurate.

I read somewhere that the students in my school are about 60% female and 40% male, which I suppose is its legacy as a former all-women normal school. This means there will be a tendency no matter what towards female students having a greater number of offences. I predict, however, that the unequal distribution of offences between the sexes will outweigh the bias introduced from the unequal distribution of sexes among the student population.

Because so many students begin using these devices as soon as class begins, I will be noting how many students who do use electronic devices begin their usage within the first five minutes of class as measured by my trusty wristwatch sidekick, Benoit Garibaldi. Since some students use these gadgets for nearly the entire duration of the class, whereas others only use them intermittently, it would be nice if I were able to measure the duration of usage for electronic devices, but I don’t think I could divert from the content of the classes the amount of attention required to record that information. Then I’d be just as guilty as the boors I’m observing. Yes, I’m not a particularly objective observer.

Days 1 and 2:

 

Day #Offences for male students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for male students (inclusive)
1 0 0
2 2 2
Day #Offences for female students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for female students (inclusive)
1 5 8
2 9 11
Day #Total offences(Male + Female) %Offenders [%Offenders(adjusted)]
1 8 16% [26.667%]
2 13 26% [43.333%]

I love Hanasaku Iroha

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Sixteen years old: still a bud...nonetheless the four main characters in this show have mastered the use of meaningful stares off into the distance. A girl's adolescence isn't easy da mon!

Good to be back home in New York. Our tap water really is the best. I got back on Monday actually. I didn’t realise Penguin Drum wasn’t airing today. Next episode airs on 08/18. Why they air anime so late at night is still a mystery to me. I shouldn’t complain, since it’s early afternoon here when it’s late night anime time there.

Moving right along though, Hanasaku Iroha is great. I take back everything I may have said about not caring for the premise. After seeing the first episode or two there were a couple of things that put me off, constituting big hurdles to enjoyment of the show, but once the show overcame them, its brilliance became clear to me. I couldn’t get past what I saw to be a half-hearted setup where Ohana ends up at Kissui Inn because of her irresponsible mother running away from her debts. That seemed unrealistic to me. The first episode confession event and Ohana’s subsequent minimal reluctance to leave Ko behind were also a hard pill to swallow. I also hated her grandmother so much that I didn’t think I could stomach watching more of the show. All of these roadblocks to enjoyment of the show were intentionally set up, almost as straw men, although I don’t like to use a term with such a negative connotation, just so that the show could proceed to obliterate them in its characteristc growing pains style and claim the mushy remnants of the viewer’s heart as its well-earned battle trophy.

You're mine now!

Nonetheless, I did continue watching it. It’s rare that characters are developed so subtly and skillfully that I can hate someone at first as much as I hated Okami-san and, by now, grow to love her just as much as I loved Yuina from the start.

Say what you will about Ano Hana — it was fantastic and made me weep some high value tears — but I may have to revise my previous assertion that it was the best of last season. Hanasaku Iroha has more episodes to work with and not only can afford to take a more subtle pace, but it benefits from it by allowing the intricate, analytical explorations of each character that are its great strength. All of the characters are so likeable and earnest, even Takako. Ohana though is, of course, impossible to hate, even more so as a little girl.

Her isshokenmei work ethic and spunkiness are, perhaps at times, overwhelming, but that’s all right, since not overdoing things is, itself, just one of the many lessons she is learning on her journey. That said, Ohana isn’t even my favourite character. She’s nice in a slightly typified take-on-all-comers genki na shoujo type of a way and there’s nothing wrong with that. To me though, she’s a lot less interesting than Minko and Yuina. Despite not getting most of her accents, it’s that quirk of hers and her ambivalence about her future that make Yuina the most likeable character for me, I think. I loved the episode in which the class had a filed trip to the ryokan in which her would-be-boyfriend Yosuke works and, in the end, she helps him clean the bath, proving herself to be capable of working only to later reveal to him that, though she doesn’t know precisely what she wants to do in the future, it should be something she enjoys, rather than working in the ryokan. Ah~ they’re growing up!

I really want her massage chair. It looks really nice. Too bad The Sharper Image went out of business. Whenever I used to go to South Street Seaport I would stop by The Sharper Image shop there and try out the massage chairs.


Minko, meanwhile, is probably the most interesting. If Tooru were the protagonist we’d call her a tsundere and character development would stop there. But that’s not the focus of the story, so her personality is allowed to be unraveled in a way that’s not constrained by the typical character archetypes of harem shows with male protagonists. She has a number of really nice facial expressions. Of course, the fact that she’s played by Chiaki Omigawa doens’t hurt either.

My only remaining complaint is that I still get Jiromaru and Enishi confused. One of them should have purple hair or something so the viewer can tell them apart.

Finally, Nako might be my least favourite character. This isn’t because there’s anything particularly disagreeable about her; it’s merely that I find her the least interesting. I still enjoyed the episode about her wanting to change her outward personality to more closely resemble her inner self that she displays at home, but I still think she’s somewhat more limited in the depth of development we’ve seen with her. She’s a pretty standard character type: the shy, nurturing (she cares for her siblings), large chested, introverted, poor with men, self-conscious, soft-spoken beauty. There’s nothing really wrong with hers being a conventional character type; it’s a staple precisely because it makes for a likable character with good potential for popularity. Saying that she’s the last on my list of characters isn’t really a bad thing since I love all four of them; it’s just that I think I’m least enthralled by her story. I think that, if not Ohana, either Yuina or Minko are captivating enough to be the protagonist, whereas with Nako, I don’t think she would be enough to keep me watching if she were the protagonist. She’s extremely likable as the supportive friend though.

Other than the simply excellent storytelling and character development in this show, something in particular that I think stands out are the dreamy sequences. For example, in episode 10, the scenes in which Ohana was sick in bed with fever and kept having all sorts of crazy delusions were far out. It reminded me a bit of El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer, my favourite episode of The Simpsons, except her visions actually made some sense, pertaining to work, Ko, and Jiromaru’s story.

The metaphor used in episode 18 of the sea and land was cute but very effective and unmistakably Nakoppoi, with the sea representing Nako’s home life and inner face, while the land represeents her outer face that she displays in society and at work. The sequences where she was a mermaid and all the other characters were friendly little sea creatures (even Mame-jii!) except for Okami-san who was somehow still smoking, despite the serious impediment of being underwater were quite fun, yet still meaningful.

Ohana’s imaginings are really interesting and dreamlike too, such as in episode 19 when, in preparation for the cultural festival, she pictures Ko in waitress garb.

There’s just the right amount of comedy in this show to prevent me from falling into despair, as I’m prone to do at the slightest provocation. Tomoe is a source of much of the lightheartedness that this show props itself up on, as are Jiromaru and his literary creations, but I think the funniest moments come from Takako.

Her silliness is enough to lighten the mood when it’s necessary, but never crosses into the territory of slapstick or anything that will completely distract the viewer from the heavier themes of a given episode.

I think you could call this show “heartful” and not sound like an idiot.

I really regret being quick to judge this show when it started airing. On the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t listen to myself back then and drop the show. I would have missed out on, though it sounds ridiculously clichéd to say this, a moving story of the adolescence of four young girls and their, uhm, trials and tribulations as they learn to live and love. Ah, well, I suppose that’s why I always dodge the question when people ask me why I like things; I spout nonsense like that which makes it sound like the work in question is trash. Be that as it may, it’s a show overflowing with love and warmth and valuable lessons about growing up and the valuable moments in life.

Bwahhh~ I feel myself growing alongside them!

It’s one of those shows that I really feel like I should buy on Blu Ray to appease that guy in my head shouting about my abysmal internal morality imbalance I’ve racked up over the years from watching fansubs. I doubt he’ll win though. I’d spring for R1 BDs at R1 prices, not R2 though unless I could get ’em at R1 prices, which is unlikely. Or should I even use DVD region shorthand when talking about BDs? the price discrepancy still exists so I guess they’re still useful designations, despite USA and Japan both being region A.

I’ve done some speed tests using Optimum Online

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I’m on vacation with my family today and the place where we’re staying has Optimum Online service. I’ve never used this service, but I remember there were rumours several years ago about shit service and crazy policies about P2P throttling.

These are the same people who have a TV commercial that claims they are the only ISP in United States to offer 100MB/s service. Yes, they actually explicitly write “100 MB/s” in the commercial. There is no ambiguity in those units; they denote megabytes per second, not megabits per second. This is a blatant lie. OOL does offer 100Mbps (read megabits per second) in some service areas, but not 100 MB/s. They’re just doing that because they think that most people will respond to the capital letters and the exclamation point in the commercial, rather than the actual measurement, which is incorrect. That and the fact that they assume (probably correctly) that even the people who do realise that the usage of the capital letters makes their commercial a lie either don’t care enough to hold it against Cablevision or are in a position where Cablevision is the only non-ADSL ISP available.

But because of the rumours about insane throttling on all service tiers to low speeds as well as the false advertisements, I’ve always had a mild dislike for Cablevision in general and OOL specifically. I also think it’s stupid that the Internet service is called “Optimum Online” while the television service is called “iO”. Time Warner has a separate name for their Internet service and call it “Road Runner”, but at least they’re consistent about it; they call all three of their services “Road Runner”. Verizon also calls all three of their FTTH services — TV, Internet, and phone — “FiOS”. I don’t think Verizon even has a catchy name for their ADSL service; I’m pretty sure it’s just “Verizon ADSL” or “Verizon High-speed Internet”.

My point is that having two names is acceptable, but having three separate names is asking too much of the consumer. Most people can’t even answer the question “who is your ISP?” so asking a person to remember three names for the same company as well as which specific service each name refers to will just cause confusion. Plus “iO” is a stupid name anyway. It’s almost as bad as “XFINITY”.

But I did some speed tests here and they’re consistently good. I was tempted to test some bittorrent downloads and I did for about 10 minutes but I soon started to feel guilty, seeing as it’s not my connection or anything. It was just a linux ISO though so there’s really nothing to feel bad about at all. It looks like these people have the 15Mbps/2Mbps plan. I was able to download at 1.4MB/s on the linux ISO but the speed soon dropped to about 200KB/s and remained stable. I’m sure that’s not throttling though; it’s just a bad configuration on my side, I think. I was curious to see how long the speeds would be sustained, but I really felt too self conscious running a torrent client on a stranger’s connection so I closed it.

On the other hand, I was able to download consistently from my FTP server at home at about 1.7MB/s, even while it was busy seeding ~1000 torrents. This is why FiOS is so great. While they don’t explicitly allow you to run any type of server from a residential connection, there’s nothing stopping me from running an FTP server. I ran it on port 2121 just to be safe, but on dslreports I read that they don’t block it even if you do run it on port 21. My IP address at home barely ever changes either. It’s a bit like the Earthlink connection I used to have, where running any sort of server was formally forbidden but, in practice, even port 80 was open and I could host a tiny website for years, without having to change the DNS information more than once or twice a year since the IP address always stayed the same.

Verizon don't seem to care that I use my full bandwidth 24/7. Who needs to pay for hosting when FiOS residential service is this fast?


My conclusion from today is that I wouldn’t mind terribly if I had to live somewhere in which Cablevision was the only ISP. The channel guide menu on the STB is a bit slow to respond, but I bet this is because it’s an old SD STB they have here. This is the first time I’ve ever used OOL or seen iO TV, so I wouldn’t know if the Scientific Atlanta 4200 is still being given out on new installs or not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if newer boxes have a firmware update or something with a nicer-looking guide. This guide is faster to respond than the guide on the HD STBs from Time Warner Cable that I had, but slower to respond than the Verizon FiOS STBs I currently have. The selected line on the guide moves less than one second after you press the up or down arrow with this iO TV STB, whereas with the TWC boxes I had it was at least one second or even slightly more between the time the user would press a button and the time the selection bar on the screen would actually move.