Anime Winter 2015

by on April 2, 2015 at 9:38 pm
Posted In: Anime

So the latest season of Anime has just wrapped up. I’ve been doing a fair amount of watching over the last three months, but most of it wasn’t new.

When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace — I hadn’t quite seen the end of this last time. It stayed on target through the end: a fairly light humor series, even if you see parts of something bigger with secondary characters. It’s not a great series overall, but it kept making me laugh, and it had one of the best cases of rules-lawyering to a solution ever near the end.

Yowapeda —Finally, it’s over! It started out as a good cross between geekery and sports, and then slid into stupid shonen tricks, with some episodes just being worthless. It’s pretty obvious that when the series did well, it got more episodes, and just didn’t have any story to put in them. This really needed to be a season or two shorter. That said, the last episode was great, and the perfect note to go out on.

Log Horizon II — And sadly, it looks like we’ve hit the end of this one too. (Hopefully, there’ll be a third season down the road. Or a second season of Maoyu… I know, not darn likely, but I can dream.) Things continue to get more complex… and some of the politics is leaving me behind. Still, it’s a great world, and some interesting ideas (such as the gold farmer bot that is now an adventurer in this world…).

Yona of the Dawn — (Or: Yona: The Girl Standing in the Blush of Dawn) This one started last season, but Smudge didn’t introduce me to it until after this season started, making it the only new thing I watched this time. And now it’s over too. It’s a good fantasy series with a Korean feel (at least in all the names), that starts with the assassination of a good king… who may not have been what the country needed. After two seasons, we’ve had a couple major plotlines, and finally gathered the main cast (that was a Quest). It’s been good, but the overall story is just getting started, and we’re at the end.

Railgun/Index — With the dearth of everything else, I finally got to see the second half of both these series (and the movie). They’re good, but I like the plotlines in A Certain Magical Index better, and the secondary cast in A Certain Scientific Railgun better. Also: both (and especially Railgun) really need a lot less sexual harassment masquerading as humor.

Fairy Tail — And, still watching this. I’ve seen, oh probably another six seasons (going by the quarter-year seasons, where the opening and ending credits change) worth of Fairy Tail now; two major plotlines (Oración Seis and most of Edolas) worth. The first one dragged out a bit, I think it needed to be at least two episodes shorter to tighten up the pacing. There were several one-shot episodes in between the two major arcs that did a lot to restore my faith in the series after that. Edolas has suffered some from Screaming Villain Syndrome, but has otherwise been good throughout.

Mushishi — And the group of us finally got to watching the bulk of the second series of this for Sunday Night Anime. It lived up to the first series quite well. Nice, quiet, stories of the intersection of humans and the otherworldly.

Natsume’s Book of Friends — And now we’re going through this on Sundays. We’ve only really just begun the series. I saw a little of it when it was first on, and wanted to see more, so I’m very happy to get to see the rest.

And right now, I don’t know of anything new I’m going to be watching next season.

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Can’t Win for Winning

by on March 29, 2015 at 10:35 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Finally had the gang over today for some gaming. A lot of the initial responses were along the lines of ‘I think I can make it’, and ‘that should be a good day…’, so I suggested Dominant Species which can easily take any number of people we might have show up. (As long as Jason, the owner of the game, made it….)

Once everyone did show up, we did our usual draw for animals. I got the Insects (I seem to get them a lot), Dave got the Arachnids, Mark got the Amphibians, Patch got the Reptiles, and Jason got the Mammals. Jason got off to large lead early, with the rest of us in a tight cluster for the first two turns.

3-Turn-1

I did okay at first, but quickly ran into a problem that dogged me the entire game: I adapted to take water as well as the native grass, but Mark’s Amphibians ended up adapting to take three grass as well as his native three water, so that any place that I could get dominance, Mark could do it much better. I eventually diversified into meat, but just couldn’t leverage anything. Dave broke from the rest of the pack during turn 3, and eventually overtook Jason. Patch followed around turn 4, and caught up to Jason, who was well behind Dave by that point. Mark and I were still wallowing well behind the others.

3-Turn-5

Mark (partially due to a rules goof on the first turn) had held the Survival card for the first few turns, but only had species on two tundra tiles, which kept his points low. Patch ended up taking Survival over for the last few turns, which helped power him into the running again.

I had been going the whole game without being able to come up with any real strategy. For the last two turns, I speciated to hit my token max at the very end (though I ended up forgetting to take my final free action), and then doing a late (four item) migration followed up by three competition actions in the hope that I could clear some tiles and claim some dominances by default. However, I just couldn’t do enough, and only got a couple of tiles. Also, I tried to take over Survival, but miscalculated and ended up tied with Patch (I could have prevented that, but I would have only been on two tundra tiles).

Dave ended up in a fairly good position, and had some high-scoring actions over the last two turns, putting him at 110 VP for the end of the game. And then it turned out that Patch ended up at 110 VP, and being higher on the food chain, the game went to him. Jason ended at 97, Mark was at 75, and I was at 52.

3-End

This is by far the worst performance I’ve had in this game. I could never get anywhere, or come up with a real idea of what I wanted to do. Interestingly, wanderlust all went off in one direction, filling out one corner, and barely budging anything else. Dave had thought he’d won for a minute (which he hasn’t come close to since our first game), but the tie/win from Patch was a real surprise.

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Alexander to Actium

by on March 21, 2015 at 6:48 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve long been interested in the ancient world. The Roman Empire, especially, gets a lot of my historical interest. In my reading, it’s very easy to find books on Rome (Empire and Republic), and on Alexander. The period right after Alexander is a bit more difficult. So I’ve been searching for a good book on the diadochoi and the successor states in general for quite some time.

Peter Green’s Alexander to Actium is that book. Green is a professor of Classics who needed a textbook on the Hellenistic world for a set of lectures, and found that no appropriate work existed (which explains my troubles). It is a history of the entire Hellenistic world from the death of Alexander to (to spoil his alliteration) the death of Cleopatra. He wrote it with both the specialists and more general audience in mind, “The main text throughout remains free (I hope) of all arcane allusions, historiographical jargon, specialist shorthand, and quotations—familiar commonplaces apart—in foreign languages.” He is much more successful with the earlier parts of the list than the later parts. There is a fair amount of academic French scattered throughout the book that is opaque to me.

The book itself is broken into five parts, roughly delineating different periods of Hellenistic history, and for the most part chapters of ‘straight’ history are alternated with examinations of particular subjects such as art, architecture, medicine, science (or the lack thereof), and philosophy. Philosophy in particular gets two chapters in part five, and proved hard for me to get through, as opposed to the rest of the book, which was (a few phrases apart) a very interesting read.

I should mention that it is a very long read as well. Nearly three hundred years of an area stretching from Greece to India (at its greatest extent) is a lot of territory, and this is not a beginning summary, but a full, detailed overview of the entire subject. Despite the size of the book, and the amount of detail that is in the book, it does not hold your hand. It starts with Alexander dead, and plunges directly into Macedonian/Greek power politics with no real guide to who these people are. This holds true, though to much lesser extent in other places as well. Thankfully, this wasn’t a major problem for me, but I sure could have used a dramatis personae going in.

In all, this really is the book I’ve been looking for for over a decade. History, culture, thought, of a period I wanted to know more about, all well told in a single package, and a great place to go back to for reference, and to tie any greater detail I find back into the whole. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the period.

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F&E Vassal 2.0 Test 5

by on March 6, 2015 at 9:55 pm
Posted In: F&E

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

I’ve actually been working on the 2.0 version of the F&E Vassal module again for the last month or two. Right now, there’s going to be three main phases for the project:

* Test – While I add the bulk of the content and try to get general items working
* Alpha – Cleanup and making sure all the features are up and working
* Beta – Final proofing and scenario file creation

I’ve just mailed out Test 5 to a few people. It’s already been invaluable, as I’ve been trying to add a new feature, and on the big map, it’s having trouble.

Several scenarios use ‘sectors’ to break them down into small mini-scenarios. The big scenario in ISC War used a new system of ‘cordons’ to do much the same thing. Rather than have the confusion of two sets of extra lines on the borders on the map at the same time, I came up with a system where you can turn big, transparent pieces off and on as needed.

But a big map with two big transparent layers is defeating most people’s systems. I think it’s just overrunning the default memory allocation in Vassal, but I’m still trying to get test data on that.

But here’s a look at how it’s starting to shape up:

And the latest new feature:

You can now flag ships with optional EW modes to signal their current settings, and the counter will report the appropriate stats (it still reports max Attack and EW if nothing is selected), and bases can be set to a particular EW level and report the correct AF. I envision this as a good reminder during PBeM games, but I hope to get better reporting of the battle line in this module, and it will help with that.

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Rob Roy

by on February 28, 2015 at 9:20 am
Posted In: Books

Well, this was a little different. There’s a set of introductions to the book that, between them, take up well over 50 pages. The main one (by the author) gives a short history of clan MacGregor, and explains the long-term problems they have had with the law. This then turns into a history of the actual person, Rob Roy. This would have been fine, but was over-long, not that well written, and of course, I wanted to get to the actual story.

The other introduction is from the publisher (of the 1893 edition) describing the writing of the novel. It is much shorter, and has some interesting points. An important one is that Rob Roy is not about Rob Roy. Sir Walter Scott in fact resisted the title for that very reason, but he was a popular enough figure that as soon as he was in the story, it was what everyone wanted to know about.

My copy of the book is a cheap (I got it for free) Kindle ebook from Waxkeep publishing. Unlike some other cheap ebooks, this one was in pretty good shape. All the footnotes merely appeared at the end of the paragraph they occurred in, and there’s a few ‘L’s instead of ‘£’s, but is mostly free of problems.

The book itself was a disappointment. It was by no means bad, but I found it nowhere near as engaging as Ivanhoe. The main character is Francis Osbaldingstone, a young man enamored of France, and poetry and creative endeavors. His father is a colorless businessman in London, estranged from the rest of his large Scottish family, and wants his son to take over the business. When his son refuses, Francis is exiled to his relatives with instructions to pick one out as the heir to the business.

Things get complicated from there, with fellow travelers on the road north, his uncle and cousins, a romantic interest… and then things go a bit sideways with trouble with his father’s business, sending him into Scotland and a new cast of characters. This new cast of course prominently features Rob Roy himself, but also the Scottish countryside.

The structure of the plot is sound; everything in the novel rests on other elements, even when it seems like a digression. In fact, the least essential thing in the book could well be the main character. His presence kicks off much of the action, but the vast bulk of the book is him being acted upon instead of acting. Add to this the fact that there’s a fair amount of dialog in various Scots accents, and the book is a slow read. (I found the heavier accents easier going for some reason.)

So, I can’t really recommend Rob Roy, even though I did generally enjoy it. If you do generally like 19th Century writing, I do recommend it.

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