Fortress Iserlohn

The Return of the Return of Fortress Iserlohn

2010-04-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

Well anyway I'm still alive and decided to start blogging again.

I plan to restart my LOGH ship collection, and in celebration some pictures. The Battle of Amlitzer is still a treasure trove even after I hit once.

Breaking News: A journalist shills for Obama and my thoughts at the moment

2008-11-26T19:56:00.000-08:00

Well its not that surprising is it. But anyway I couldn't helped to be somewhat irked while reading the latest breathless vapid Washington Diary post of Matt Frei's. While its not in the category of Chris Mathews declaration of love for our new presidential Messiah, its a piece that ignores anything outside of what the Frei wants to believe in.

Its uncritical of Obama's promise to generate 2.5 million jobs as if the President has a magical device that will do so, if there was, surely nobody ever told Bush about it. Then it goes on the usual tradition of comparing the Bush Administration as being incompetent and stupid and the two go hand and hand. Now incompetent I will give you, but stupid? Condi Rice is probably far more intelligent a person the anybody in the Obama probably including our erstwhile President-Elect himself.

Now his point was that McCain and Palin were trying to run a I guess an anti-intellectual campaign of which there are parts of people that think its a valid argument to make, but I would caution that just because one has a world class education and some governmental experience doesn't mean he can run a country well or not. Woodrow Wilson was a Professor for crying out loud and if Bush had tried half the stuff he did, Bush would've of been impeached. Lincoln was seen as a backwoods person who was self taught and had a somewhat folksy way of speaking, but he was a keen enough politician to keep the country together.

Then for competency on Obama's part, I would like to point out there isn't exactly an great deal of him getting thing accomplished outside of the fact that he can seeming win elections with the winds in his sail. But in terms of actual governance, I don't see anything from his time in Springfield or even in the Senate actually getting anything of importance done. By default I look towards how his fellow Illinois Democrats run things and see a poorly run state, so I'm not that enthused about the prospects.

Frei then starts to wax poetic about the missed opportunities of the Clinton administration blaming them on the "multiple distractions" which judging from context of the sentence (and I might be wrong but I doubt it) is code for mainly the events of 98-99. Which is a somewhat provocative thing to say as it seems to ignore the other 6 years of Clinton's administration which seemed to very active in domestic policy fights and I suppose one could argue that it might be due to the incompetence of his first years that cost him the House and the Senate and having to you know actually deal with the opposition as something other then devils to blame your ills on might be a distraction.

And then of course there is the usual blathering about how Obama has to fix the last eight years of Bush, which completely ignores the fact that Obama nor the Democrats actually attempted to do so during the last two years of holding Congress. Say what you want about Newt, he seemed to be a far better Speaker of the House in terms of setting the agenda then Nancy Pelosi has been.

Now for fairness sake after I vented my spleen, I will admit I have been pleasantly surprised by some of his actions and continual promise for nuclear energy. If wasting a bunch of money in putting a legion of bird killing machines in West Texas and such is part of the cost for some real improvements in our energy production infrastructure, so be it, its a small price to pay and besides it won't bother me.

So perhaps with the latest rounds of moderate/centrists actions and promises he will be a good president as Chris Buckley believes because of his great and towering intellect, or perhaps not. Obama is a great politician in the sense that he can slip out whatever he promises with little notice or attacks in the fact when he blatantly breaks a promise be it promising to use public finances, to bringing new faces to DC as opposed to the current retreat of veteran DC hands.

I have returned.

2008-11-20T10:29:00.001-08:00

Its been a while hasn't it blog. Anyway I have returned battered and bruised from being super busy.

Anyway, during my downtime, I'ved watched several anime series.

The last one Kishin Taisen Gigantic Formula I just finnished yesterday. Its a simple story really, giant god heads in the shape of the twelve Greek ones appear and basically conjule humanity to build them giant robot bodies and pilots so that they can fight each other. When humans first ignore this, the planet's envrioment gets screwd up by giant EM clouds. So the humans get together and basically say, ok the 12 major countries in the world get a head and there will be a battle royale and whoever wins gets to rule the planet.

Anyway the plot has two directions, the first of course is the one that deals with Japan's team of the pilot and the person who commincates the will of the god. Which is intresting sort of love story set in backdrop of this odd world war and conspiracy.

The secondary plot thread deals with the pilots of the other nations machines, and they get pretty decent backstory and characther development to make the viewer actually care about the fates of them. Which is pretty remarkable because you learn about their story while they are fighting in back and forth flashback.

Now of course the final boss of these fights is America robot which is powered by Zeus. Jupiter II. If the Jupiter II wasn't enough of an homage, it has the head of Optimus Prime. The ending is so so, its not completly out of left feild, but it does sort of contrast jarring with the rest of the show.

But by far the most enjoyable show I watched inbetween blog postings was Starship Girl Yammato Yokho. Its just plainly a good solid science fiction yarn with solid likelable characters and a plot that slowly unviels leading to a somewhat open but sastifying ending. Probably one of the more unique things about the show is the atmosphere it has, its a very dark show in terms of just pure lighting which I am not sure if it helps ors hinders.

Oh yeah

2008-04-20T08:20:00.001-07:00

I now serve two masters. Or aka, I been accepted by the UIC History's department as a grad student. Seriously, by the time I leave UIC, I'm just going to a little train of letters behind my name, which isn't a bad thing.

Lets play! Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 1

2008-04-10T11:14:00.002-07:00

Given that there is a new meme for games of playing a game and taking screen shots, I figured I would slowy work on the two Super Robot Wars games that have been translated into English by the fine company of Atlus.

Anyway Super Robot Wars originally was a Japanese crossover game of various mecha anime in a tactical RPG system. Its one of the better selling games over there, and its still going strong with recent production of an anime tv series and a OVA. The writers are quite good, and they in the various games managed to do a good job of tying all the plots together and often made original characters to help better tie things. Eventually they created so many original characters that they could make up their own universe and this what they did with the OG timeline. And the OG games are probably going to be the only ones released in the US due to various copyright issuses that Japanese don't quite have to deal with.

Anyway for this game it follows the current standard SRW tropes of having super deformed mechs. It confronts you straight up with the most important choice you can make of determine who your main character should be. The choices are Kyosuke of the ATX team, or Ryusei of the SRX team. Both picks have their plus and minuses (the main plot difference is that the ATX team is fighting in space against the UCC while the SRX team fights the DC on the Earth), and to be told the first game is more of the SRX team story then it is of the ATX team, as the second game is heavily ATX focused.

But I like Kyosuke better, so I'm going to play him.

Thus without further ado.

Space! The final frontier. Men have finnaly built a spaceship to propel them to the outer edge of the system.

That doesn't look good ;(

Captain Daitetsu, he's the platonic idea of a anime space captain. He's pretty cool and ends up captaining the Hagane, which of course awesome looking sort of retro spacebattleship.

Sean Webbly, his XO, he's an ladies man.

Gigansucdo is the other blue object on the screen. Its a Super Robot, Earth's first actually, designed to be an anti-battleship unit.

By mid-game the enemies on the screen would be chaff for your weaker pilots, so yes we make them pay.

Pay attection to that, its important plot expostion, and Bian Zoldark is arugably the most important NPC of the game

Anyway the first mission premission plot appears. I had some screenshots but things got messed up so lets just cut here to Kyosuke talking with his current boss, Lt Colonel Hans.... Viper. Yes he is a villian.

Kyosuke: A test pilot who has experince in crashlandings and the devil's own luck is understandable wary of piloting a machine that is infamous for crashing. Of course this makes Col Hans angry.

Its not quite clear why he does this. Or what he thinks he is going to get from trying to mess around with Mao Inc.

Irm. He's a quasi-miltary test pilot, son of a the main weapon designers at the very important resarch lab that makes the mecha, and sort of a Mao industries guy.

Haha, you're so predictably evil Hans
Here is a bit of a disjointed battle sequence due to the screen shot, but this shows the beginning menu. Notice the improbabilities of hitting? Attacking is simple, you fire your weapon and hope you don't get shot when they fire back at you. Defending is more complicated, you can counter attack, you can defend to mitigate damage that hits you, or you can attempt to dodge and lower the probability of getting hit.

Notice the tile map? Friendly units blue, and you can move around on it, various features give bonsus to hit rates, repair HP and energy.

Anyway when you do a high powered attack, often the pilot's face will appear followed by the attack.

An powerfu beam attack hits. Notice the bars up on the top? The top bar is HP, and bottom is energy. Energy is used for onboard energy weapon systems, flying, and shields. Important bosses often have shields, so you have to drain their energy before you can start hurting them.

After you defeat an enemy, you get money and XP. Pilot points are used to improve your pilot, money is used to buy upgrades or repairs to your units, and XP increases the pilot lvl automatically improving your pilot.

Here is the spirit command screen. As you gain in level you get to unlock more spirit commands, which help you. There SP bar is like MP, and probably the most oft used command is focus and flash. Focus decreases the enemy hit rate while increasing your own, and flash gives you an single perfect dodge on the next attack. You can only do spirit commands when its your turn to move the unit.

I used focused in this battle, and notice how the probabty of hitting is different then from before?

Battle Mastery's are important, basically they are bonus goals. If you achieve several of them you can unlock hidden units, items, as well as make the game more difficult.

Who didn't see this coming? The unstable robot plane crashing?!

Ring Mao is Irm's former girlfriend, and CEO of Mao. This is why Irm gets so pissed off.

And when you do a mission you are brought to this screen. Here you can upgrade the base unit, the weapons on the unit, change pilots of different units or upgrade them, save your game and then move on to the next level.

Whew. This was alot of work for a comparatively short mission, but admittedly the main holdup was not playing through, but the uploading of the pictures.

Anyway if anybody has suggestions of how to go, let me know. Also as a warning I'm not that good at this game, so I might give myself a bit of advantage if I get stuck.

Also....

2008-04-10T01:16:00.000-07:00

I beaten Super Robot Wars Alpha while I was on my spring break. Thankfully I have a power converter for the laptop so when I was in the car going across half the nation, when I was not writing papers, I was playing that game. I feel sort of good about it, because its the first SRW game I beat without having to use cheat codes.

Though the last level was for me very hard, in that the way you had to go about beating the boss went against the tactics that had been working for me since my main character got very good at her ability to dodge people.

Also while I am on the SRW front, I been showing my friend OP SRW anime, which I now seen both the OVA and TV series that came out recently. I may start commenting about robots from there that are cool.

As for LOGH, I haven't done much with it since I saw the finale, which was great but I feel sort of burnt out watching it, and decided to take a break.

And commentary on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Facism? Its good book. It forced me to rethink the paradigm of fascism, but germs of the idea are out there, even admitted as such by presumably non-right wing professors. Main problem is that he needed to stop repeating himself in certain parts, but other then that, its a good "popular" history book that gives a strong enough argument to at least re look at idealogical DNA of fascism and American populism.

A thought in the night.

2008-04-10T01:08:00.000-07:00

Its rather late, but something I was reading in a local Chicago magainzine struck me, and got me thinking about this line of thought, which I may expound on later. But every time I see intellectual or somebody that takes on intellectual airs talk about a complex situation that effects generally the less educated classes or lower socio-economic classes, I can't help but to think about Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor and the concept that its easy to be a good person when you are strong.

People are concerned about themselves first, then their kin, friends, whatever perceived community they are part off, and then finally the larger concept of the nation. When economic change hits people, say for instance off-shore manufacturing, its seen as economists as good as it helps generally the poorer country who gets the factory but America as well as by lowering prices, millions are Americans can now afford a product cheaper, and in the process spawns new jobs, but for the 30 year old factory worker, its a bitter fruit as they have to now do something else then what they spent their life presumably mastering.

Its easy for a College Professor in Econ to say this is good, but its harder say for a student of that Professor to tell his father who lost his job because of that the same thing. Being removed from situation makes the purely rational easier in some ways, but it also hurts in that removes the human equation as well, and since humans are social irrational creatures, this is important.

Anyway, its tired ramblings of a bored mind.

Robotech

2008-03-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

About sometime towards the end of Junior High, my family went on a trip to Door County, as had been the case of every time we went on a long trip, we often bought books for the ride, and on that occasion I had picked up for myself the first Omnibus trilogy of Robotech books.

Now this hadn't been my first exposure to Robotech, like many kids of the 80s I had seen it on TV, but I only seen bits of pieces of it, and outside of a single VHS that old movie store downtown, and a book from the middle part of the series that I had looked at on off, I wasn't well familiar with Robotech.

The books thus were my first real look at the world, and to this day remain some of my favorite. The Robotech novels took the story from the tv show and expanded on the universe in interesting ways (some of them are a bit odd like turning Protoculture from a power source to like the force but still it helped make some thematic sense and to serve as a reason for some of the deus ex machina moments) and were quite good.

When I got back, I became obssed about reading the rest of the series, and by that time next year or so, I had most of the the books, and later one I would read all of them, obtain two Robotech VHS, and later on a Robotech 2 Seintinels Comic Book. One of the first things I did on the internet was find some pictures of the SDF-3 at the local library. You could've called me a protoculture addict.

But I never watched the vast majority of the show. And in time, I saw Macross 2 (something I taped when it was played, which is still one of my favorite shows despite critics about it) and the Macross Do You Remember Love? movie, which was good, and then I saw the Shadow Chronicles when it came out and even had a argument with those who didn't like the retcon that brought about.

But I never watched the vast majority of the show, and so about after last Mother's Day, I bought the giant box set of Robotech, watched parts of episodes I already seen before to show my friend, the Robotech pilot episode for a sequel and then got busy watching other things. This spring however, I decided I was going to watch the show, and since I've been sick, that has been what I've been doing lately.

And so far, despite Macross saga's "quality" moments and English Minmei singing, I've enjoyed it. Its been utterly fascinating to me to watch how the directors and the American side staff turned three utterly different shows into a single coherent whole and they managed more or less to pull it off with some difficulty (the Robotech Masters sort of come out of nowhere, and script errors are very evident when they appear)

But so far, I've been enjoying myself, and that is good enough for me.

Anime flashback of 2007

2008-02-29T10:26:00.000-08:00

Some short reviews of the shows I watched during 2007 that I can remember

Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB6UQleD5DE
Its by the same people who brought us, Kannazuki no Miko, Steel Angel Kurumi and other things, and its shows and makes references to those shows in that it reuses some of the ideas and actual characters types and designs.

Its a show set in a future at a Academy about a high school girl name Kuu who feels empty inside and is writing to her dream prince, and her adventures in getting messed up in a conspiracy of the Ayanokōji family as each of the members use advance war technomagical war machines called Absolute Angels that look like pretty girls .

Its a pretty decent show, and if your a fan of the shows I mentioned earlier, you would probably enjoy it, though granted Kuu is pretty much the dumbest protaganist ever in anime, and that is saying alot. But it makes up for it by being at time so insanely silly and melodramatic and gives us one of the best reasons to be a villian ever, in that your brother steals your girlfriend.

3/5 average.

Heroic Age:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqFq_ChQVIc&watch_response

In the future Earth has been lost to Humanity called the Iron Tribe, against the combine might of the Silver and Bronze Tribe, their only hope in this war that is going against them is the single young Earth man named Age who had been child on a ship that was sent out to Gold Tribe's last known location when they sent a call to find them. The Gold Tribe had previously been the rulers of the Galaxy before they left and they had awesome powers, and controlled and imprisoned the remaining members of the stupidly powerful Heroic Tribe which were a race of gaint biomecha that had destructive effects on space and stars and had habit of blowing things up when they got angry and fighty which did they alot.

Age is a man who has teachings of the Gold Tribe, and as well as being the body that houses the most powerful member of the Heroic tribe (also called Nodoses with singular Nodos) Bellcross. By transforming into Bellcross he is the young Earth's Princess and her ship the Argonaught best hope to save humanity and the galaxy, but lying in his way are the space insects of the Bronze Tribe and their masters the generic pretty boy and pretty girl race of the Sliver Tribe who are just light years beyond the humans, and control the other 4 Nodoses.

Whew that was alot, but it was good set up. The show is combination of I think of a Super Robot War show meets Nadesico meets Legend of the Galactic Heroes, in that the there is a hero ship, heroic mech, and fleets that are thousands of ships strong line up against each other firing. Its a pretty gripping story, but after they retake Earth, things begin to get a bit sloopy and that is why I'm giving it only a 4/5 instead of a 5.

I'll stop here for now: Next update I'll be reviewing Tactical Roar, and Soukou no Strain, and Baccano!

On a side note, I've returned to playing through Super Robot Wars Alpha, and about half way through the game. Its fun and been pretty easy for me so far, though I have had some missions where everything went tits up, but that only happened twice, once against an EVA Angel, and another when the Macross transformed on me and blew up everything in front of it, which included half my units. But thankfully I had killed enough extra stuff to pay for the repairs.

Hello is this thing still on?

2008-02-28T00:26:00.000-08:00

Yes it is.
To myself and my pretend loyal readers, posting shall resume in the near future.

Topics to look out for!
Belated: Anime reviews of 2007
Commentary on Jonah's Goldberg's Liberal Facisim
More pictures from LOGH
And other random musing of my mind.

A Profile of a Galactic Hero: Admiral Bittenfield

2007-11-09T19:29:00.001-08:00

Admiral Bittenfield. Space Patton.

Bittenfield, what can I say about him? He's the wild boar of the LOGH universe, and he is a quite proud of it. He's loud, lacks social graces, but at the same time, he's honest and is one of the great positive characters of LOGH. Which is hard to see at first, since he is often the foil for Yang Wengli to trick taking advantage of his wanton charges.

But the thing about him, is that for the most part his shock warfare works in that keeps the enemy under heavy pressure, and he actually did in the last battle that Yang oversaw, do a great deal of damage to the Republican forces. He manages this feet by at some times through sheer force of will, just keeping his men going at it. He isn't a great strategic genius, but he is competent and this is seen towards the later part of the series in the battles of the civil war of the New Reich, and also during the last campaign of the Iserlohn Republicans in which if it wasn't for the actions of Julian when he was on board the Kaiser's ship would of saw Bittenfield just crush the remaining fleet that had been in battle against the Kaiser's fleet.

He is an interesting character in that he gets character development and becomes important, yet he is one of the few Admirals we don't see a personal side too.

Next time on the this focus of actual Heros, I shall focus on Alexander Bucock, probably the greatest FPA admiral outside of Yang Wengli or Dusty Attenborugh.

Ace Combat Six

2007-10-31T09:43:00.000-07:00

Well last night/early today, me and my friend played through most of Ace Combat Six a second time, and now that the initial feeling of being overwhelmed by the game is over I have some thoughts on it.

First on what I don't care for. The fact that you have to rush around babysitting operations till its done, such a style of game play isn't my natural one and it sometimes grinds on my nerves as I am doing all I can in area while another area is getting the crapped kicked out off.

Second, the music isn't as epic as the last three games. Ace Combat 4 had some pretty sweet latin choir or something sign in the final mission, ditto with Ace Combat 5, Ace Combat Zero had some of the best Spanish Guitar music I have ever heard (which is not saying alot)

Third, less of a selection of aircraft then previous games.

But what I did like:
The story and the characters in the story were pretty fleshed out for what you can do in like minute long cut scenes, but their placement within the game's plot makes logical sense and there are some powerful moments.

Allied Attacks, this allows you to sic on targets in front of you whatever operation forces you saved. Which can be awesome towards an end of a mission, when you have helos, fighters, tanks, artillery and sometimes even a guided missile cruiser firing at the same hapless target.

The Superweapons, ever Ace Combat game has about 2 or three superweapons. 4 had Stonehedge and Megalith (railguns and a giant missile launcher), 5 had the Arkbird (an laser armed SSTO) the SOLG (orbital railgun that shoots out nuclear armed MIRVS, and the Scinfaxi and its sister ship, which were giant subcarriers which fired devastating anti-air missiles. Ace Combat Zero has three: the giant laser tower, the giant aerial flying fortress, and Pixy's Morgan super fighter.

6 is like Zero, first you blow up a flying fortress with its own escorts of smaller (but still large flying battleships things), then you have to shot down a enemy ace in a superplan that has a wicked jammer, railguns, and fast missiles, and then you have to blow up a giant railgun firing large cruise missiles.

The first and the last superweapons mission are fun, the second one which takes place during liberation of the main city of your nation, is annoying and in sort of a bad way.

However, on the whole, the improved AI, the improved graphics and the excellent story makes Ace Combat 6 a worthy addiction to the Ace Combat series, and I give it 4/5 stars.

Eve Online and other stuff

2007-10-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

I am just killing some time, before my friend comes over with a copy of Ace Combat Six, and I figure what better use to fill in that void then with a post for a blog that nobody ever reads.

Things have been hectic for me lately, had two mid-terms this week, did pretty good on them. One of them is Old Church Slavonic, which is while not proto-Slav, is the first litearly langague of the Slavs. Its a pretty intresting learning this and comparining it to modern Russia to see what came from what.

However, I am not the greatest lingust in the world, and its tough learning.

In less serious pursuits I been playing Eve Online. Normal MMORPGS don't interest me that much because there is a serious lack of performance in response to what you do. For WoW which I hear is a great game, what you retain is just your character and its sort of a limited world.

Eve, is fun to me for a couple of reasons. First, its a wide persistent universe and second, players drive conflicts across hundreds of star systems that can be fought and controlled, and all share the same space. Or in other words, we are seeing a MMORPG that has in comparison to alot of MMORPGs, a persistent civil society and formations of micronations online that actually own and control their own space. This leads to interesting situations of fleets of hundreds of ships attacking each other, while giant super star destroyer ships lumber around.

Outside of space patrolled by the big NPC empires, is space controlled by the various players all fighting for power and control, and also their honor and grudges. It strikes me as a very feudal setup, in that corporations all rely on either personal contacts or promises of loot or protection to join, and these all build up on each other into a labyrinth of competing interests all fighting.

But its a fun game in which you can be anything from a captain of industry, to a miner, to a pirate to a full time merc, to just a dude whose ship keeps exploding looking for a hard isk.

Books to movies, Soviet Eastern Sci-Fi versions

2007-10-19T00:05:00.000-07:00

Since I had to read a Leo Tolstoi play earlier this week, I got to thinking about his nephew, who was also a writer, and the one work of his that I read, Aelita Queen of Mars, written by Alexei, who had the awesome nickname, the Red Count and then I thought about the movie version of it, and how ironic that in at least this case, not even the Soviet movie could escape the movie director's mass editing of the story.

The novel is a pretty interesting one in which details two early Soviets flying to Mars and finding a civlization that is just begging for a revolution and the majority of the faction is on Mars. The silent movie version that came out is sort of famous for its costumes of the Martians, but its a story that adds alot more of Earth to it then the Martian part. Now this wouldn't be a problem if it was interesting, however the like forty minutes spent on Earth is more of a diatribe against the policies of NEP then advancing a story about love and Mars.

Solaris, doesn't have that great of change from book to movie (we're talkin about the Russian masterpiece that is approximatly a million hours long, not the American remake which was not bad, but still was an inefior remake) and there the director once again added more Earth scenes at the begining and the end, and IIRC added ambiguty to the ending where there wasn't any. Here the scenes were well done and made the movie better, but it still changed it.

But what the director didn't change was one of the greatest lines of science fiction, and something that I as an aspiring writer of science fiction, have taken to heart when I sit down and attempt to write something about space and aliens and their interaction with humanity.

"To science? It's a fraud! No one will ever resolve this problem, neither genius, nor idiot! We have no ambition to conquer any cosmos. We just want to extend Earth up to the Cosmos's borders. We don't want any more worlds. Only a mirror to see our own in. We try so hard to make contact, but we're doomed to failure. We look ridiculous pursuing a goal we fear and that we really don't need. Man needs man!"

The book version is slighty different, but I left my book at home. And with that I end this post.

Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito

2007-10-15T17:26:00.000-07:00

This weekend in between bouts of studying and working for my mid-term and my own birthday party, I watched an interesting 13 episode show called, Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito, which is apparently based on a some visual novel h-game which its explains its semi-fanservicy nature at times.

However, the story is one that is rather intresting if confusing for the fact its not told in a clear linear narrative. The stops in between the stories which themselves are not in a 1:1 ratio with the episodes are done by the narrator, a strange cosplaying guy who only appears for a little bit each episode.

The story is ostenably a quest by the main character Hazuki who is looking for her adapted sister who she has a crush for. Her sister Hatsumi is a quiet strange girl with obviously magic healing powers as we find out as the story progresses, vanishes in a sparkle of green light on her 16th birthday, and soon after Hazuki runs into a talking bird who is searching for Hatsumi as well and ends forcing the bird to take her with him to search.

What she finds out is that the world is really collected in a book and its just one of the worlds that exists within a great library created by a very godlike being that is only referenced through the information that the fansubbers give the viewer from the H-game, and that her sister is Eve, a powerful being that used to be the Guardian and caretaker of this wierd quasi-realm library, who quit and decided it would be fun to travel the worlds, being born and then leaving at her 16th birthday.

She decides to travel the worlds to find her sister again, along with Eve's sister and current gaurden , Lilith who has her own reasons for traveling. And thus they go on a series of adventures interacting with various people of time frames and worlds in an effort to Eve. A side plot is begin early in the story that shows two other people, that Eve's life had touched in a world, though it focuses mainly on the crazy Gargantua who gets redeemed at the end. However, this dude is hilariously over the top and serves at times as the comedic relief.

The true beauty of the show is that its a post modern travel show, and it plays to its strengths of it being weird and quirky, nor does it take itself too seriously though there are serious moments to be had. The ending of the show is somewhat postive, and there are some questions that are never answered but all and all I would give it a solid 4/5 stars.

Gundam OO

Also much more recent is the new Gundam series. So far there has only been two episodes releashed, and I will probably go into this more when episode 3 comes out, but so far its looking promising. For once, the grunt suits look cool, and the possible char-like character, is an awesome American dude.

Musings about wastes of time.

2007-10-11T16:23:00.000-07:00

I recently gotten myself copies of Civ IV and its expansion pack Beyond the Sword. I played about three Civ IV games seriously, gave up on the first, the second one I muddle through on victory, and the third one, my French empire was going the way of the Western Roman empire as I was rich conquests but not rich enough to have garrisons everywhere.

Then I got BTS, and so far I been addicted to playing the Final Frontier space mod. Its a pretty interesting and good quality mod that also tells the story of how humanity got to this point. But what I find interesting is the concept that is always seems to be vogue in future history of a period of expansion and technological progress, quickly followed by rapid decline and collapse.

On the mechanics of Final Frontier, you actually feel like you're moving space ships around as oppose to army units in space. My one complaint is that the barbarian err, space pirates keep on ramping up in force till one turn today I was attacked by a space pirate first upgraded battleship. Which was a bit of a odd moment, but luckily my defenses held out.

The game takes a paper rock scissors approach which I think works, its a game where you really want to have balance forces. Already I see, there are mods seeking to build upon this mod to make more classic franchise games, and it shall be interesting to see how well they do that.

In other news despite rereading it several times, the Inspector-General is still hilarious play and it shows that Gogol knew what he was doing. Its a shame he went crazy and starved to death, but it appears that the line between genius creativity and madness is a very thin one indeed.

Also as a note.

2007-10-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

For those Anon. that wish to post on this blog, I am allowing Anonymous posting.

Anonymous does not forgive.

2007-10-10T21:28:00.001-07:00

What I am referring too is not 4chan's Anon which of course never forgives nor forget, but I the debacle that is the PostiveMorris 2's comment section of its only post. What began as a ill thought out diatribes against city government, merged into diatribes against rednecks over a certain incident that supposedly occurred at a McDonald's parking lot.

Though I am bit surprised, that there is that many people who care about Morris politics to post on a blog about it. I do have suspicions that several of the anons are really the same guy posting in response to himself as is something that happens every so often on the internet. The thing that I find interesting is that there is so much anger over the issues and belief that public official A has to be a dirty rotten scoundrel as oppose to being well merely wrong, apparently the old quote about citing malice where stupidity could be the culprit has no place on that comment section.

Now to say that there isn't serious issues affect fair Morris, there is. New capital construction of a City Hall is always going to be a big issue regarding financing of it, then you have District 54 which from what I understand, isn't in the greatest of finical shape, then you have this current rigamarole with the police chief, and not to mention projects like the annexation agreement. In short, sleepy Morris has a lot of issues in front of it, and seeing that we are also entering into a campaign season, tempers are going to flare.

Meanwhile just because I like the picture, here is a pic of my new desktop.

A return of sorts

2007-10-08T19:13:00.000-07:00

Well after a summer of constant real life events along with my discovery of the Super Robot Wars genre of games, I been considerably busy.

Now as the fall semster is about halfway, before I start writing yet another paper, I decided to announce that henceforth, if I can remember to do so, I shall be blogging again.

But as not to forgot one of the original reasons why I post this blog in the first place, here is a interesting picture that I haven't verified its accuracy yet.

Senate vote on immigration

2007-06-30T05:38:00.000-07:00

Well its been two days since the Senate voted to kill the immigration bill. The entire lead up to the bill was something very interesting to watch in that we had a bill that most American didn't want, leading to a revolt of I believe 2/3s of the Republicans in the Senate to vote against it with some Democrats against the Democrats and Bush.

Out of this political egg on the face for those pro-bill side, came up another issues of the role of talk radio and complaints by at least one Senator that there was racism involved in regards to all the people calling up the Senators and complaining about the votes. All sorts of reasons are given why the American people got so upset about the bill, and none of them dealt with the fact that American people are getting tired of dealing with illegal immigrants and all the baggage that they rightly or wrongly believe that they carry with them as they enter the border.

But the true show on Thursday was Robert Byrd and his speech talking about how great he and all the old senators where. Or the battle in the House committee between the Chicago democrat whose name I can never spell off the top of my head and the Dick's Cheney's budget. The Republican response was something like "its dumb to do this, and we'll stick it to you down the line" given in a muttering paused filled low tone from the ranking member of that committee.

Forget the network reality shows, C-Span is where the fun stuff is :) though its prone to make you lose your faith in democracy from time to time, but thankfully we don't have any charismatic military leaders to cut the ever present knot of American politics.

Ships of the Line: Amlizter

2007-06-17T18:27:00.000-07:00

Well this won't have all the screenshots I have, but I am going to start with some at a time taken from the Battle of Amlizter.

Now Amlizter in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is probably the moment that marked the death knell of the Free Planets Alliance. It was a battle that was basically the Alliance giving Reinhard a victory due to their sheer stupidity on their part.

Some background for those who are new to LOGH storyline. After dealing with like 150 years of non-stop Imperial invasion after invasion while bleeding themselves dry on Iserlohn Fortress, the FPA gets lucky and captures the fort and thus gains the strategic momentum. At this point there is a decision to be made, to try and sue for peace (which while the story makes the pro-peace party to be pretty much good people and the pro-war party but of a warmongering militarists concern for their only power, considering the fact that the Empire never officially recognized the FPA considered them rebels and such was about as friendly to the idea of a democratic republic as bugs are friendly to insecticide peace probably wasn't an option) or take the fight to the Empire itself.

They (the High Council) decided to take the fight on the idea that their massive fleet would be able to overwhelm the Empire and destroy it and thus securing their power in the next election cycle (which they were in danger of losing)

So they launch with like 200,000 ships in I believe 8 fleets and randomly take systems that the Imperials give up without fighting for. The problem which becomes quite apparent is that somehow the Imperials took all the food from the 200 systems that FPA "liberated" and the FPA was tied down in feeding the people, while at the same time their strategic planner was a dunce and their supply lines were open to attack.

After suffering from lack of supplies, the Empire launches an counter-offensive against all the weaken FPA fleets and they retreat. Now you think that the FPA which has a vested interest in not wanting to see its fleets get destroyed would have them go back to their GIANT INVINCIBLE DEATHSTAR of a fortress, but they instead meet up at Amlitzer Starzone. Where they proceeded to get crushed except for the fleets lead by Admiral Bucock (who is the awesome old admiral) and of course the 13th Fleet lead by Yang Wengli.

The sad thing was that all the Alliance Admirals could see the plan for what it was, and it was due to the orders from the High Council who were more concerned about winning the election then winning the war that screwed them over and devastated the FPA fleet. Only two fleets came back home leaving three fleets to guard the FPA in the meantime. A while later, that number is reduced by a fleet during the abortive military coup that is put down by Yang. And thus when the Imperials come a knocking the FPA just simply doesn't have the numbers to fight off like a hundred thousand ships coming all at them.

But enough about this. Lets get to the screen shots!

The Hyperion which is like the only non-standard color flagship of the FPA fleet that I can see or remember off. Its Yang Wengli's flagship that he receives when he takes command of the 13th fleet. However, due interesting situation it becomes the flagship of the exiled Imperial admiral Merkatz in the later part of the series. Its a pretty sweet looking ship with decent firepower for a battleship.

The Barbarossa, Siegfried's Kircheis's ship. Sieg is the childhood friend of Reinhard and a brilliant tactician and admiral in his own right. While Reinhard is called the blond hair brat by his own side, they call his ever present shadow of Sieg the red hair one for the obvious reason he has very red hair.

I'll talk more about Sieg and Reinhard later. But I think its appropriate that he gets a red color sleek battleship which sort of follows (thought you can't see it well in this picture) the same under engine thing that the Brunhilde has.

Konigs Tiger this is the flagship of the Black Lancers, which under the command of the aggressive Admiral Bittenfield serves as like calvary or shock troops. They excel at charging recklessly into the enemy line and sowing confusion. However, they don't do to well when confronted by Yang and his group, but in the scenes where they are not fighting Yang, they are fearsome enemies. Bittenfield's main fault and virtue is that he when he commits to something he does it all the way damn hell or high water, which made him not like him at first, but as time goes on he grew on me.

His flagship looks like like an overgrown cruiser in terms of shape then most of the Imperial flagships tend to look like. Which makes sense since he is leading a fast offensive unit.

These are the FPA space fighters launched for air defense and attack. They are probably some of the most "realistic" space fighters that Sci-fi has put out. For one they have turrets instead of fixed guns mounts and thus are capable of shooting at pretty much any angle and thus running up a ship's hull and firing means that they don't have to oriented at the ship, but parallel.

Fortress Iserlohn!

2007-06-13T15:57:00.000-07:00

Fortress Iserlohn firing its main cannon at some hapless Alliance fleet.

Fortress Iserlohn!
For those of you who have never seen Legend of the Galactic Heroes, this is the death star fortress that serves as a critical plot mcguffin to series as well as the inspiration for the name of my blog.

Some fun facts about this fort.
1. Its 60 kilometer sphere
2. Its has a liquid armor surface that weapons platforms can float on, and ships need to sink through to get into the interior of it
3. It has a city in it as well as a full fleet dock for at least 15,000 ships
4. It has tons of guns
5. It has a big cannon call "Thor's Hammer" which can wipe out a 1000 ships at time if it hits a fleet.
6. The interior part of it is decorate in Imperial Gaudy. The art style that afflicts the Empire, and at times seems more like a giant art museum gone wrong then an invincible space fortress.
7. It gets captured by Yang Wengli twice :p
8. It has a pretty nice park and civilian areas
9. Its located on the Iserlohn Corridor and serves as the choke point on that route, thus whoever controls the fort for the most part of the war was the power that launched offensives.
10. It was built as a symbol of imperial rule, yet ironically it becomes one of the most hallowed sites of the forces of democracy and republicanism for that universe as the series progresses.

Serious Anime/Hilarious Outtakes

2007-05-06T07:03:00.000-07:00

In the show Texhnolyze which took me about a year and half to gather most of the dvds (which I am still missing 3+5 off) I watched a show that got progressively darker and darker. I mean the show ends on really downer. When I watched the last three episodes my friend Omegapaladin over and he decided to actually watch it, though its not his type of show.

After the credits had ended, I decided to check out the extras and look at the trailers. I am a big fan of trailers, and sometimes the ones on the anime dvds are not horribly bad (generally these are the ones that just show the opening to the show they are trying to sell but I digress). An option calls outtakes catches my mind, and I clicked it on.

The like 8 minutes of outtakes had me and my friend in laughing like manics. After watching this show, listening some of the wacky things that were being said was awesome.

So I been re watching Berserk which I suppose is dark and grows darker (though while the show ends on a downer, you do know that the main character is countining to go out and kill bad guys) and then I notice that dvds have outtakes. Which again I look at and found to be hilarious.

I seen outtakes on other shows, but I think the best outtakes are really on those that are serious most of the time, for it just makes the statements even more funny since its completely out of left field. Though that may be love for absurdest humor speaking.

2007-05-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

Man things been busy with finals week. However in the meantime, between writing papers I been reading and watching some news shows and comics.

One of them GunXSword is a really spiffy show. Its show that was made in the spirit of Trigun as its a travel log story about a wandering warrior. However, this show is uniquely more dark and yet more insane and parodied filled then Trigun.

A classic example is the villains giving some speech about why they are doing everything for the benefit of mankind, and how they are going to end all suffering and what have you, and then the main character would retort, he doesn't understand he just wants to kill the man who killed his bride.

An intresting twist in that for the most part, the villians are motivated by "high" philosophical goals that in their twisted view will help mankind, and whereas the hero is motivated by one thing, revenge. I would go on but that would spoil the show and I don't have the time.

Ships of the Line!

2007-04-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

One of the things I wanted to just for myself was to create a listing of the various flagships from the series of The Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I intend to do this by re watching the series and taking screen shots and talking about the ships if I have anything to say.

First what I have to say is a bit history. LOGH is sci-fi universe set I dunno at least a thousand or so years in the future, in time frame after like big Republic that unified everybody falls into a Empire that for the quirks of its leader takes on a very German feel to it. People don't like this and they revolt and flee to another portion of the galaxy and form the Free Planets Alliance and after a while the sides meet and get involved in a 150 long never ending war. The war lasts so long because there is only two passages to connect to each other, and thus the defender always has the advantage unless they completely screw up.

The series's two main characters (well technically three but there be spoilers if I talked about it now) are the Free Planet's Alliance Yang Wengli a guy who joined the military for an education is like the Robert E Lee of the FPA in terms of fighting at a disadvantage all the time against the Galactic Empire who has its Alexander the Great figure of Reinhard Lohengrim, who overthrows the corrupt nobility and becomes the Kaiser. There is also like a cast of at least 50 characters who their own back stories, plots and its all very War and Peaceish. And is a long series several novels that were the original basis, and a 110 episode series, plus movies, plus side stories OVAs, plus manga. All very big and complex.

The name of Fortress Iserlohn comes from this series, and its the big superfort on the border between the nations that is fought for several times.

A thing about this universe, the spacebattles are rather large. A normal fleet is more then ten thousand ships of varying sizes. Thus the battles are more of a combination that reminds me of Napelonic Warfare in 3d and the line of battle concept take to the ultimate extreme. Thus there is a certain amount of mass produced ships, generally the cruisers that you see exploded in all sorts of way as the battles goes on. Though to show some coolness of ship designs, generally admirals have their own unique battleship that their flagship and this what I am going to be taking pictures off.

The Brunhilde. She is probably the most famous of the ships, and its Reinhard's flagship through the series. Its a pretty sweet looking ship, yet its really hard to see where the guns are on the damn thing. But like pretty much all Imperial ships is atmospheric capable of landing. She's probably the ultimate example of Imperial Star Fleet design of sleek ships. As a note Imperial ships take for the most part Germanic names.

This is a standard Free Planet's Alliance battleship/flagship. The thing looks menacing no?
The FPA has for its philosophy of big boxy ships that have nothing but guns for its bow. Generally to me they seem to be more boxier and slower, but heavily armed and armored then Imperial ships. But really its hard to tell.

Also as seen by the giant Six on the side, this is the flagship of the ill fated Alliance Six Fleet that along with the 4th fleet gets destroyed by Reinhard's fleet during in the opening two episodes of the series that takes place in the Iserhlohn corridor.

Also this ship has the first of the dying admiral/hero scenes on a burning bridge. Generally in this show, when somebody who has screen time gets killed on his battleship, the show him critically wounded, commenting either about philosophy, on the nature of war, talking about old friendships or loves, or regretting the fact he failed or what have you.

Again a standard FPA battleship. This is the flagship that Yang Wengli takes command of the survivors of the FPA fleet after the battle is joined with Reinhard's force. He pretty much forces a draw This ship is also interesting in that its the first ship to take the "Glancing blow of damage" which blows up only a portion of the bridge, and injures somebody. Generally in LOGH, when you get hit, you tend to explode, but battleships do have shields that show, and they can negate off centered shots a bit.

Snow in space? Fuzzy screen? No. Those are all ships that are range in length of at least by guess 200 meters long to over a kilometer with some flagships. When LOGH nations go to war, they don't really fool around. And this battle was about average, and this is only a tiny portion of the fleet that is visible.

Ouch!

2007-03-31T16:39:00.001-07:00

Hmm, I seem to accidentally deleted my longish post about Romance of the Three Kingdoms to get a couple of grammar errors. Talk about destroying a village to save it.

2007-03-31T08:08:00.000-07:00

Giant Michael Jackson bot to threaten the desert?

It sounds like something about one his music videos, but thanks to SB I came across this gem of a story. Normally its me who has something witty to say, but my friend, from Original Cin took the cake last night, I'll leave you with what he said. " I guess he figures nothing will improve your image after allegations of molesting children like a giant death robot in your image."

2007-03-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

End of a Era

Since I gotten my desktop all those years ago, I been running the ye olde version of Mozilla, just Mozilla not Mozilla Firefox. However, due to the fact that my old browser was unable to defeat the log in process of Blogger, I decided in interest of my sanity to update. And with this successfully done, I shall make a bookkeeping statement in that this will be the only blog I use now that I eliminated the problem.

My Home Town Discovers the Intertubes!

It started with Skeptical Morris, which spawned now three other Morris blogs, Positive Morris, Sledgehammer Morris, and now Hypocritical Morris. It is intresting looking at what I know of Morris through the cracked-out viewpoint of the internet in which everything becomes 100% more angry and anonymous (who proves that even if they are not on 4chan, they don't forgive)

2007-03-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

Well due to some strange mix up, I seem to have two blogs. So I therefor I shall make this one be the one about reviews of anime I have seen.

And let me start off by rambling.

Gundam Seed Destiny
I knew going into this it would be a trainwreck judging from the sheer amount of bad talk it got during its run over in Japan, and the fact that it still attracts negative attection on /m/ on 4chan on a daily basis.

However the true tragedy of the entire affair was that it started off really good. I liked the first eight or so episodes better then I liked the majority of Seed that I saw. The action scenes were done excellent, and there was good amount of plot movement and direction going with the hunt of the Girty Lue by the hero's ship Minerva.

Then it hit like around episode 12 or something with the first recap episode and things began to slow down and fall apart, and then picked up again with the introduction of a bit character who was while awesome fated to die, and then things slow down again. I have now seen about 3/5s of the show, and the last two dvds I had to will myself to watch pass the recaps and stupid characters doing stupid things.

A sad series, but one that I am giving a tenative 2 out of 5 at the moment.

Now for a quick take of other gundam outside of SEED I have seen.

Turn A Gundam: By far the best Tomino Gundam show, and its by far the most unique one. Unlike Tomnio's previous works most of the characters get a happy or at the very least an ending in that they live. Its also the most character driven show I have seen in a long time, and the ending does hurt a bit in a bittersweet movement.

Zeta Gundam: Which alot of people claim is the best of the UC gundam. It has some whackyness in it, but again seeing 3/5s of it so far its been good. The main character in that show does grow up a bit, and so does his main rival for the villians Jerrid (who has probably the best 80's hair ever) and the show has some pretty intense battles and cool designs. The Rick Dias which shows up here is by far my favorite UC mobile suit design.

There is also three movies that were releashed recently that had some new animation to it as well as drastic editing. The movies were cool but rushed, which can be expected from a 50 episode series turned into 3 2 hour movies.

0083 Stardust Memory: The first UC Gundam series I have bought. Its a OVA that deals with the events that occured between the first Gundam and Zeta Gundam. And it was made after the two. It deals with the remants of the villianous Zeon from the first series and their plan after they steal Gundam from the Earth Federation. Its a remarkable series in that the main characters are actually over 17 for once, and are military officers. Its also a fun show to see the cameos of future Gundam villians, such as Haman of Axis, and Bask Ohm of the Titans.

Char's Counter Attack: The movie that is the last Gundam to have the main characters from the first series of Amuro Ray and Char. Char after helping defeat the Titans has now become a genocidal leader of Neo-Zeon and plans to drop a giant asteroid on Earth to kill Earth and make space free. Amuro Ray his rival plans to stop him as part of a special Earth military force to deal with the space colonies. The movie good parts is that its really well done in terms of apperance and even has one of the first use of CG graphics. The bad part is that plot is pretty out there. At one point the Earth Federation sells Char the asteroid that has nuclear thrusters on it he is going to hit them with, after he already hit them with one rock at the begining of the movie, has stated intentions of not liking the Earth, in return for a promise to disarm Neo-Zeon and for a ton of gold to pay for their welfare policies. I am not joking.

Gundam Wing: Well what can be said about it. For many myself included it was the gateway into the world of Gundam. Though its more superrobots running rampage in a field of poor, poor mobile targets called Leos, then anything else, it still had this quirky awesomeness to it. Its notable for insane politics, super bishie boy pilots, and in my case villians more awesome then the heroes, it was 50 episode ride of super gundamness. The movie that came out to finish that universe was a good movie, and actually put closure on that crazy alternate universe.

Ahoy Mateys!

2006-12-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the good Fortress, where I ramble on about whatever interests me!

That is all.