Complete Mess of Things
I'm not even sure where to begin right now, given how many stray thoughts keep wandering in and out of the dining carriage of my train of thought (dining area because I'm hungry, even though there's pizza taunting me in the other room, but bad acid reflux keeping me in this one). And before anyone complains, that was NOT a run-on sentence; it had proper punctuation and a parenthetical expression, so THERE! :P
Which brings me to the decline of grammar and the English language in general with people these days. I thought things were getting kind of bad when instant messages and chat rooms became popular, but now that people have started using text features on their cell phones, it's all over. Let's be reasonable, people - the Dvorak keyboard was replaced with the Qwerty one to slow people down because they were typing too fast for the poor, now-antiquated machines to keep up. Now, they're changing phones from a standard ten-digit format to having an entire Qwerty keypad on them - and a lot of them are still smaller than (or approximately the same size as) a cassette tape. On an unrelated note, all those who have ever actually recorded things onto a cassette tape to have your own music selection to play, raise your hands…. Back to my rant about the death of the English language (yes, it died between the beginning of the paragraph and now), how far are people going to let this go and still have it be considered "acceptable" before saying something is too much? I've already seen a number of (formerly) reputable online communities approve the use of "netspeak" (which translates to "laziness," or possible "never actually learned the correct way to type so s/he uses the fewest number of characters possible since s/he only types about 15 WPM).
I won't try to make the English language dead; it's necessary for a language to evolve, especially in the areas of medicine and technology because we're constantly discovering things that weren't even conceived a century ago, much less several dozen centuries! New words such as "[to] text" as a verb, "[to] Google" as a verb, etc. are fine. I do think it's pretty funny that the spell-check editor built into Firefox thinks that "google" requires a capital 'G' to be spelled properly - do the programmers think that the word was made up for the web and never previous used as a mathematical term for an extremely large number? I would just say that it was due to funding from advertising that made them encourage capitalizing the word, but "googleplex" isn't recognized at all. However, I resent and refuse to acknowledge changes that are made to the language through mass stupidity and/or ignorance. Just try to find the past-tense form of "sneak" as anything other than "sneaked" in a dictionary from the 1960s or before. I will continue my protest of the egregious transgression that is "snuck" as long as I live. I do, however, laud the programmers of the spell-check editor for NOT thinking that "snuck" is a word! Now, if we could only get Microsoft to realize that "Please advice." is not a correct sentence, we might be in good shape. I suspicion they disremembered the invite to the meeting to discuss proper grammar. Please note that anyone who does not find three things wrong with the prior statement needs to brush up on their own English! :P
And in the words of the great Monty Python, and now for something completely different: digital remastering of old video and audio and why it can be both a good thing and also a terrible thing. Please don't misunderstand me - I absolutely adore digital remastering, but only when it's done correctly. When something is considered to be so timeless, beloved, etc. that someone is willing to take the time to go through it frame by frame (for video) or millisecond by millisecond (for audio) and clean it up, the results are stunning. If you don't agree, take a look at the LD boxed set of "My Fair Lady" (or the DVD re-release, as it used the same footage), Disney's original LD boxed set remastering of "Sleeping Beauty" (or their initial DVD release, which used the same source material), or listen to the 24-bit digitally remastered version of Queen's "A Night at the Opera" album. Now that Blu-ray is the next great and wonderful format, all KINDS of things are coming out in "stunning" 1080p resolution for anywhere between $20 and $30. What's the downside, you ask? People aren't actually going through and restoring these films frame by frame; instead, they're running the entire film through a multi-million-dollar machine which requires minimal effort on the part of the human operator (generally some minor color correction). This results in "HD" footage which is a far cry from true HD. There are myriad discs which fall into this category - just take a look at any of the main Blu-ray discussion forums for people's gripes - but the biggest complaint I personally have would be a tie between a grainy image and flickers / blips in the picture. I just watched the original "Ghostbusters" movie a few nights ago, and some scenes looked spectacular! Others, however, seemed about on par with a commercial VHS release. Okay, I'll be fair - maybe an S-VHS release. There were places left in the film where there were short white spots (complete lack of color over one small portion of the picture for one to two frames), and the level of grain in some of the scenes was atrocious. I probably wouldn't have complained as much if the grain were consistent, but it would change from being barely noticeable to being blatantly obvious from scene to scene. Sadly, this seems to be the case with more and more films that are being released in "high definition" as the people who run said films through the expensive machines aren't really checking them anything close to as well as they should. However, playback devices which will "upscale" the quality of a standard definition DVD are SUBARASHII!!! :D
I would like to state for the record that the city of Atlanta could sink into the ocean and the only downside would be the number of fish and other sea life that had to move to other regions due to lowered property value in that general vicinity.
US-based anime companies seem to be picking up one incredibly old trend - no, staple from the Japanese releases of anime media. While the cost of anime releases in the US continue to fluctuate based on the unstable and saturated market, FUNimation has started inserting "first-pressing goods" with some of their releases! Also true to the Japanese standard, some of them are absolutely horrible in comparison with others (compare the little sticker that comes with "Soul Eater" set 1 to the postcard-sized cards that come with the new "Fullmetal Alchemist" set 1). They are also capitalizing on the principle that some people who purchase anime want all the bells and whistles, and some just want the episodes (and maybe not even the OP & ED credits!). The annoying part of this is that there will usually be an extremely limited run of either single-disc releases or "part 1" and "part 2" of a series which come with all kinds of bonus features (interviews with the Japanese staff, official music videos, PVs, textless songs, etc.) which are shortly followed by complete sets of the same show (often for the same price or less than just ONE of the previous releases) with nothing but the episodes (see "Aquarion," and "Kanon"). In all fairness, they do occasionally include the textless songs. This becomes even more obnoxious when companies decide to make the single-disc releases out-of-print and then put all-new extras on the complete collection ("Baccano!" and "Oh! My Goddess" (OAV) are a good example of this, but the latter at least was not only worth repurchasing, but also had a special trade-in offer where you could exchange your old discs for virtually nothing).
If anyone wants to place bets on what the "One Piece" is going to be in the manga and anime by the same title, I'm willing to stake quite a lot on my theory which follows the vein of shonen manga throughout history. There is probably either nothing (or virtually nothing, maybe a piece of parchment) and the "great treasure" is nothing more than the close friendship and bonds you formed with your shipmates (who should also be your "nakama"). The other question that arises here is this: how do people get back OUT of the Grand Line after they claim the One Piece? It's taken ten years to get (per the mangaka in a recent interview) approximately half-way through the Grand Line, and I don't think there's an "exit only" door at the end of it! Maybe a "Caution: Alarm Will Sound" door instead? Eh, who knows? Certainly not me, and probably not Eichiro Oda either, which is kind of bad since he's responsible for giving us the answers to these questions!
That's all for now. I plan to moander off to bed soon, but maybe not until I've played another round of that addictive diving game on the Square-Enix members page….
Which brings me to the decline of grammar and the English language in general with people these days. I thought things were getting kind of bad when instant messages and chat rooms became popular, but now that people have started using text features on their cell phones, it's all over. Let's be reasonable, people - the Dvorak keyboard was replaced with the Qwerty one to slow people down because they were typing too fast for the poor, now-antiquated machines to keep up. Now, they're changing phones from a standard ten-digit format to having an entire Qwerty keypad on them - and a lot of them are still smaller than (or approximately the same size as) a cassette tape. On an unrelated note, all those who have ever actually recorded things onto a cassette tape to have your own music selection to play, raise your hands…. Back to my rant about the death of the English language (yes, it died between the beginning of the paragraph and now), how far are people going to let this go and still have it be considered "acceptable" before saying something is too much? I've already seen a number of (formerly) reputable online communities approve the use of "netspeak" (which translates to "laziness," or possible "never actually learned the correct way to type so s/he uses the fewest number of characters possible since s/he only types about 15 WPM).
I won't try to make the English language dead; it's necessary for a language to evolve, especially in the areas of medicine and technology because we're constantly discovering things that weren't even conceived a century ago, much less several dozen centuries! New words such as "[to] text" as a verb, "[to] Google" as a verb, etc. are fine. I do think it's pretty funny that the spell-check editor built into Firefox thinks that "google" requires a capital 'G' to be spelled properly - do the programmers think that the word was made up for the web and never previous used as a mathematical term for an extremely large number? I would just say that it was due to funding from advertising that made them encourage capitalizing the word, but "googleplex" isn't recognized at all. However, I resent and refuse to acknowledge changes that are made to the language through mass stupidity and/or ignorance. Just try to find the past-tense form of "sneak" as anything other than "sneaked" in a dictionary from the 1960s or before. I will continue my protest of the egregious transgression that is "snuck" as long as I live. I do, however, laud the programmers of the spell-check editor for NOT thinking that "snuck" is a word! Now, if we could only get Microsoft to realize that "Please advice." is not a correct sentence, we might be in good shape. I suspicion they disremembered the invite to the meeting to discuss proper grammar. Please note that anyone who does not find three things wrong with the prior statement needs to brush up on their own English! :P
And in the words of the great Monty Python, and now for something completely different: digital remastering of old video and audio and why it can be both a good thing and also a terrible thing. Please don't misunderstand me - I absolutely adore digital remastering, but only when it's done correctly. When something is considered to be so timeless, beloved, etc. that someone is willing to take the time to go through it frame by frame (for video) or millisecond by millisecond (for audio) and clean it up, the results are stunning. If you don't agree, take a look at the LD boxed set of "My Fair Lady" (or the DVD re-release, as it used the same footage), Disney's original LD boxed set remastering of "Sleeping Beauty" (or their initial DVD release, which used the same source material), or listen to the 24-bit digitally remastered version of Queen's "A Night at the Opera" album. Now that Blu-ray is the next great and wonderful format, all KINDS of things are coming out in "stunning" 1080p resolution for anywhere between $20 and $30. What's the downside, you ask? People aren't actually going through and restoring these films frame by frame; instead, they're running the entire film through a multi-million-dollar machine which requires minimal effort on the part of the human operator (generally some minor color correction). This results in "HD" footage which is a far cry from true HD. There are myriad discs which fall into this category - just take a look at any of the main Blu-ray discussion forums for people's gripes - but the biggest complaint I personally have would be a tie between a grainy image and flickers / blips in the picture. I just watched the original "Ghostbusters" movie a few nights ago, and some scenes looked spectacular! Others, however, seemed about on par with a commercial VHS release. Okay, I'll be fair - maybe an S-VHS release. There were places left in the film where there were short white spots (complete lack of color over one small portion of the picture for one to two frames), and the level of grain in some of the scenes was atrocious. I probably wouldn't have complained as much if the grain were consistent, but it would change from being barely noticeable to being blatantly obvious from scene to scene. Sadly, this seems to be the case with more and more films that are being released in "high definition" as the people who run said films through the expensive machines aren't really checking them anything close to as well as they should. However, playback devices which will "upscale" the quality of a standard definition DVD are SUBARASHII!!! :D
I would like to state for the record that the city of Atlanta could sink into the ocean and the only downside would be the number of fish and other sea life that had to move to other regions due to lowered property value in that general vicinity.
US-based anime companies seem to be picking up one incredibly old trend - no, staple from the Japanese releases of anime media. While the cost of anime releases in the US continue to fluctuate based on the unstable and saturated market, FUNimation has started inserting "first-pressing goods" with some of their releases! Also true to the Japanese standard, some of them are absolutely horrible in comparison with others (compare the little sticker that comes with "Soul Eater" set 1 to the postcard-sized cards that come with the new "Fullmetal Alchemist" set 1). They are also capitalizing on the principle that some people who purchase anime want all the bells and whistles, and some just want the episodes (and maybe not even the OP & ED credits!). The annoying part of this is that there will usually be an extremely limited run of either single-disc releases or "part 1" and "part 2" of a series which come with all kinds of bonus features (interviews with the Japanese staff, official music videos, PVs, textless songs, etc.) which are shortly followed by complete sets of the same show (often for the same price or less than just ONE of the previous releases) with nothing but the episodes (see "Aquarion," and "Kanon"). In all fairness, they do occasionally include the textless songs. This becomes even more obnoxious when companies decide to make the single-disc releases out-of-print and then put all-new extras on the complete collection ("Baccano!" and "Oh! My Goddess" (OAV) are a good example of this, but the latter at least was not only worth repurchasing, but also had a special trade-in offer where you could exchange your old discs for virtually nothing).
If anyone wants to place bets on what the "One Piece" is going to be in the manga and anime by the same title, I'm willing to stake quite a lot on my theory which follows the vein of shonen manga throughout history. There is probably either nothing (or virtually nothing, maybe a piece of parchment) and the "great treasure" is nothing more than the close friendship and bonds you formed with your shipmates (who should also be your "nakama"). The other question that arises here is this: how do people get back OUT of the Grand Line after they claim the One Piece? It's taken ten years to get (per the mangaka in a recent interview) approximately half-way through the Grand Line, and I don't think there's an "exit only" door at the end of it! Maybe a "Caution: Alarm Will Sound" door instead? Eh, who knows? Certainly not me, and probably not Eichiro Oda either, which is kind of bad since he's responsible for giving us the answers to these questions!
That's all for now. I plan to moander off to bed soon, but maybe not until I've played another round of that addictive diving game on the Square-Enix members page….