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- Created By Desbreko
Believe in Me Who Believes in the Earthquake
What have I been doing the last few days? Typesetting Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2. And, um, more typesetting. And... that's nearly it. There's three chapters in the episode and the first one was a horrible pain to typeset. Unlike ep1, where there got to be more and more typesetting as the episode went on, ep2 starts out incredibly thick and gradually thins out.
This lovely little screen shows exactly how much of a pain it can be trying to find space for horizontally written English among vertically written Japanese. Or, rather, it shows how it can sometimes be flat out impossible. Have fun turning your head sideways and squinting at that schedule. I know I did.
I think this screen must take the cake for most subs on screen at once in the entire history of anime. The Japanese text in the background is moving in a spiral pattern around the kanji in the center, which is basically impossible to replicate with soft subs so we get a wall of text instead. On the plus side, they're soft subs so they can be turned off to see the original scene in all its spiral power glory if you really like.
Shots of newspapers, when they actually have real text on them, suck. They suck hard. Not only do they have tons of text, it tends to be crammed together with little or no space to fit in the English translations. And, in this case, it's at a funny angle and curved.
I don't like to do overlays and replace the Japanese text with the English typesetting but there was no other good, no decent, not even a bad place to put the list on the left. (But, again, that's the beauty of soft subs; you can always turn them off.) Getting the overlay to look decent also sucked, by the way. The lines between the text are actually a bunch of em dashes (—) in a row, using the box border setting to fill in all the space between them with black background, clipped to display only in the area of the original list and rotated to get the angle and spacing right. (And that's the simple way to go about it; if you want to use the ASS format's vector drawing features it can get even more complicated.) Then the text was placed in separate subtitles on top of that.
Thankfully most of the typesetting in the second chapter is very easy and there's relatively little in the third. I think there's only two or three scenes left that I'll end up raging at while working on them.
I've got a fever...
What I feared yesterday has come to pass. I woke up this morning with a sore throat that somehow manages to feel both dry and like there's gunk from my sinuses running down it at the same time. Joy. I'm not sure if I actually have a fever, but if I do it's at least not a bad one. I've been a slight bit dizzy at times but that could just be the sinus congestion throwing my balance off. My sense of taste is also a bit off.
Anyway, rhythm: I has it. I moved up to medium drums in Rock Band 2 yesterday after playing a few songs on easy and figuring out what the heck I was doing. Lots of five stars so far, with the occasional four creeping in. (WTF is with Tangled up in Blue by Bob Dylan? The actual beats in it are simple to play but there's not a steady pattern anywhere to be found in that song.) Sometimes it takes me a bit to pick up the beat, but once I figure it out I can usually stick to it consistently. Like, 600+ note streak on a song without having played it on drums before, consistently. I figure I'll finish out most of the tour on medium to refine the muscle memory and get better at fill transitions—I still accidentally hit the edges of the drums instead of the pads sometimes lol—then move up to hard. I may just end up enjoying drums more than guitar.
If anyone wants to take a look, I made a profile on rockband.com. Not much there yet but it's got a picture of my character. Yes, I made him look like Link. I was browsing through the various clothes and happened to notice this particular combo. I dunno if I'll keep him that way but for now I find it amusing. It's just too bad that there's no pointy hat to go with the rest of the outfit.
Jester is my brother's character. I have serious doubts about his taste in headgear.
My 21st birthday went well, better than I thought it would. I kind of expected to have to crash at my friend's place for a day or something to avoid my brothers trying to get me drunk. The two oldest returned home to the Bay Area before that, though, so nothing ended up happening. In fact, the whole thing was rather uneventful other than having some friends over Friday night to play RB2. But that's fine by me since I don't like making a huge deal out of my birthday.
Work on Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2 is slow but continuing. I'm currently waiting for more sign translations from Dagger so go poke her if you're impatient. :p
And speaking of anime, the new winter season shows have started. Shin put up another thread on OB for talking about them and I listed the ones I'm interested in. I haven't seen much of them yet but once I do I'll probably post more thoughts in there.
Jingle Bell Rock Band
Well, Christmas has come and gone once more. I had a lot of fun yesterday and none of it involved my PC or the internet—OMG, like, I know, right? My two oldest brothers are up from the Bay Area for Christmas so all four of us have been hanging out.
Anyway, I'm guessing people will skim the post looking for the list of loot before reading the rest of it (or is that just me? >_>;) so, without farther ado, here it is:
• Rock Band 2 Special Edition bundle for the Wii
• Component video cable for the Wii (for hooking it up to the huge HDTV out in the living room)
• Digital converter box (for the crappy old analog TV in my room)
• $50
• A bunch of candy
Not a huge list but I'm happy with it. RB2 was my one big present that most of my family went together to buy me since it cost a little over $200 after tax. But, considering how I got Guitar Hero II shortly after Christmas last year and was playing it off and on until a few days ago, I think RB2 will last me a long time to come.
Speaking of RB2, we had to go on a small adventure to find one of the bundles. See, Harmonix put out a press release saying that the bundle would ship out to retailers on Dec. 18 and that it wouldn't arrive for 5-7 days. That is, retailers wouldn't get it until a couple days before Christmas. So, me and my mom happening to be up bright and early on Dec. 23, we decided to go look for one. (Yes, I went with her to buy my own Christmas present. She knows by now to bring someone along who knows what they're talking about so that she doesn't accidentally buy the 360 version or RB1 for the Wii or something by mistake.) It turned out they had actually shipped earlier than announced and retailers had gotten them the previous week, with the result being that everywhere in town was already sold out. ... Thanks, Harmonix, you guys did a great job on not saying anything about that.
When we checked at one of the GameStop stores in town they said there was, however, a bundle available at a GameStop in a city about 40 miles away. After checking one more place in town and coming up empty, I was surprised when my mom said she'd drive all the way out there to get it. I hadn't said anything about it and had just resigned myself to waiting until a bit after Christmas to find a copy, but she said it was fine when I asked if she was sure she wanted to bother. So we had the girl at GameStop call the other store and hold the bundle for us and off we went. A couple hours later we were back home with a shiney new Rock Band 2 bundle in hand—which then promptly disappeared for two days until I unwrapped it yesterday. :p
I seriously was not expecting her to go through that much trouble, though, so it gave me that warm fuzzy feeling inside when she did. My parents can be pretty cool at times. ^_^
So, anyway, I haven't played it much yet but I'm already loving the drums in RB2. I have pretty good rhythm so I jumped in and immediately did excellent on easy. Medium was a bit more tricky 'cause I haven't developed any muscle memory whatsoever for drumming yet, but I can definitely see myself rocking out on expert eventually. Also, having the green notes swapped from the left to the right side of the note chart was screwing me up because I'd be wanting to hit the yellow pad for blue notes since I'm used to blue being farther to the right on the chart; I cannot see any reason for swapping green's position other than to screw people over and it annoys me.
The new guitar is going to take a bit of getting used to as well. I like that the fret buttons don't stick up and that they're a little closer together than on the GHII guitar so that I don't have to move my hand as far when sliding to reach green and orange notes. But I don't like that they feel squishy, without any click to them whatsoever; it's harder to tell when exactly the button gets pressed and it was screwing with my timing for hammer-ons/pull-offs. That will take some adjustment.
The strum bar is also a lot looser and kind of squishy feeling. So far I like it more for double strumming since it takes less strength to move it (and its shape is just easier to grip between the thumb and index finger), which translates to more accurate timing for longer periods of fast double strumming. But it seems a little harder to do fast single strumming with it since it doesn't spring back to center as fast after a strum as the GHII guitar. I think it should still be possible, it will just require some adjustment to the strumming motion to take into account the lack of springiness.
And now I am going to go pwn the game's solo guitar career on hard to unlock more tracks.
In Despair Once Again
I've been working on Goku Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei ep2 lately. Here I thought encoding the raw to use in the subbing would be easier this time, since I actually know what I'm doing now instead of learning on the fly. But, no, there were complications.
Simply getting a decent raw to encode from was a small learning experience. For ep1, Freelance-RAWs put a DVD image up on Tokyo Toshokan so I grabbed that and was able to encode directly from the DVD source. This time, they put up a 1280x720 upscale, leaving me going, "WTF mates? ^^" (For those that don't know, DVD resolution is 720x480 which then gets stretched out to 853x480 for 16:9 widescreen videos.) I messed around with it, downscaled it back to 848x480, and re-encoded. It ended up looking okay but not great.
After a couple days of still no DVD image showing up on Tokyo Toshokan, I decided to go hunting for one myself. Which involved learning how to use a couple Japanese peer-to-peer programs. I tried Perfect Dark first (no, no relation to the N64 game of the same name) and found two upscaled raws, one of which was the one Freelance-RAWs had uploaded. Apparently people upscale the DVDs for playback on the PS3, since it was labeled "PS3 upscale" or something like that, though I have no idea why. Then I tried Share and, lo and behold, I discovered a DVD image! This made the Des happy but I'm still wondering why the heck Freelance-RAWs uploaded the crappy upscale but not the DVD image this time.
So now I've now got my pretty new encode which kicks the crap out of the other one I did from the upscale, with the OP and title screen subs done.
Earlier I also did styling and scene timing for the ED subs, but I still need to do the karaoke timing for them. Which will have to wait until Dagger gives the ED a look (hint hint ^_^) since I just grabbed the romaji and an English translation off the net to have something to work with and am not sure if it's correct.
But enough ranting. I know what you all really want are some juicy screen shots.
Hopefully we'll be able to get it released some time next month.
And, since I probably won't get around to posting again until after Christmas...
I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Ear!
The Ballad of Miku: Verse 3
Yeah, it's been forever since I made a Miku post. I started with the intention of doing them fairly regularly, as long as I was finding new and good songs, but you can see how that turned out. Oh well, I guess I can just dump a huge list this time and go from there.
ファインダー (Finder) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
Last Night, Good Night [Nico Nico / YouTube]
These two are available on the album Re:package, by livetune feat. Hatsune Miku. The other songs on it are also decent.
Liberate ～赤い海の夜明け～ (Liberate ~Akai Umi no Yoake~) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
シンデレラ・ロマンス (Cinderella Romance) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
The full versions of these two are available on the album Tatsh Music Collection -I-.
１＞～イチダイナリ～ (1 > ~Ichidainari~) [Nico Nico]
あるお節介な言葉 (Aruo Sekkai na Kotoba) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
Enjoy the iDOLM@ASTER performance in the YouTube version. I know I did. :p
Celestial Symphony [Nico Nico / YouTube]
Everwhite [Nico Nico / YouTube]
琥珀の風 (Kohaku no Kaze) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
MP3s are available here.
Chocolate☆Magic [Nico Nico / YouTube]
Cuteness overload. MP3 is available here.
永遠のメロディー (Eien no Melody) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
果てなき蒼穹、果てる世界 (Hate Naki Soukyuu, Hateru Sekai) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
MP3 is available here.
モノリス (Monorisu) [Nico Nico / YouTube]
MP3 is available here (password: miku).
優しい空 (Yasashii Sora) [Nico Nico]
