Fullmetal Alchemist
I think it’s actually better than I remembered. Some things like bringing back the armour was a bit of eye-rolling fan service and I’m not super happy with what they did with Wrath, but it’s fun, it looks great and I thought that the politics are handled shockingly well. There are plenty of historical inaccuracies but y’know what? Maybe Dietrich Eckart should have transitioned.
The foremost problem is obviously that the movie looks like shit. There is an underlying decision to try and make it look like the cartoon in a way that just does not work at all. The sets are sterile, sparse and over-lit, the CGI is charmless, the costumes honestly mostly work but everyone’s hair is awful. Roy Mustage looks like he just aged out of a second-rate boyband. Maes Hughes is just about the only character that works.
So why would I ever rewatch this? Because I watched it in Japanese years ago and recently learnt about the awful nostalgia-bait English dub where they brought back the original English voice actors for Edward, Alphonse and Winry and no one else and I wanted to both experience this and subject some friends to it. It’s an extra layer of trainwreck on top of the rest of it and is kind of fascinating to watch. Because they did get the original English actors back, not Brotherhood, and Aaron Dismuke as Alphonse is very, very noticeably not eleven years old any more, but you won’t be hearing that much of his voice anyway because Alphonse’s horribly-out-of-place-in-live-action armour is too expensive to have on screen so he gets immensely sidelined.
Meanwhile Vic Mignogna’s lines sound like he recorded them over the phone, which makes them feel even more out of place besides the much more subdued performances of the rest of the cast who aren’t reprising old roles. The English performances also feel constantly at odds with the body language of the on-screen actors, who are contributing to the attempted animesque style with some extremely hammy acting. On top of this is the fact that they have dubbed this more like an anime than like a live action film; trying to carefully sync lip movements to lines in a way that only calls attention to how what is being heard absolutely does not match what the on-screen actors are saying at all.
But gawking at a trainwreck is only fun for so long and, while the script does an admirable job at condensing so much of the story down to just two and a quarter hours, it’s two and a quarter hours of an incredibly poor rendition of a fantastic comic and show and the humour of poking fun of it wears thin before the movie is even half-way done.
he’s called Maes Hughes but actually he’s normal sized
They give titles to the homunculi in Fullmetal Alchemist that mostly rhyme: Greed the Avaricious, Lust the Lascivious, Envy the Jealous, Gluttony the Voracious, Wrath the Furious but then the last two are Pride the Arrogant and Sloth the Indolent when they could have gone for Pride the Vainglorious and Sloth the Languorous.
What if instead of keeping the names of the homunculi in English when translating Fullmetal Alchemist they replaced them with the ecclesiastical Latin to keep it foreign? Avaritia, Luxuria, Invidia, Gula, Ira, Superbia, Acedia.
It’s really interesting to compare this to Brotherhood. They look so similar and have in large part the same core cast but a different musical identity and of course wildly diverging plots. Many of the same scenes play out but in a different order, in a different context, leading down a different path.
I find looking at different interpretations of the same story and characters interesting and it’s especially fascinating here with so much of the same cast. Vic Mignogna nails Edward from the start, while Travis Willingham as Roy definitely takes more time to get his role down. There’s a noticeable improvement between Mustang at the start of 2003 and the start of Brotherhood. Colleen Clinkenbeard gives a pretty different performance as Hawkeye while Laura Bailey’s Lust is voiced in the same way but ends up having to play a wildly diverging character. Alphonse you could almost be convinced is the same actor in both but characters like Scar and Hohenheim just feel wrong.
And it’s fucken good! It’s no Brotherhood: It’s weirder, it’s edgier, it’s messier, it’s much more casual about logistics and coincidences but it’s good. And I forgot how much I liked Wrath in this.
Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII
I have been rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 and talking about it with friends a lot so here is my favourite of all the intros from it or Brotherhood (it’s just the first intro from Brotherhood).
Also just a small rant: I hate how the top results on Youtube for this kind of stuff is always horrible interpolated to 60FPS upscaled crap that ruins the animation.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have conflicting urges to want to write more and do more but also I know I need to rest more. Don’t expect me to be Blaugusting. I am actually trying to get as much off my plate as possible and not commit to things, including pruning my RSS feeds quite a bit so I feel less obliged to keep up with so much. Everything is difficult 👍🏻
But I have still been reading and have things to share. No particular order or categories to things this time.
On how a compelling narratives not just get people to buy into ideas, but obscure otherwise very obvious flaws, and how the use of narratives in this way is actually taught and enforced in university education.
No, the real point is that the claims from this study are ridiculous and intelligent people that have been studying for years can’t pick up on it. The real point is that I am actually really confused as to how Piff got his results, but at least I’m not tricking myself into thinking I know what’s going on. Did he fudge the numbers? Was the experiment poorly set up? Just pure bad luck in sampling? Hell, is the result true? I don’t know, but I will say that you don’t know either.
Why is the 11th of each month (other than September) consistently underrepresented in the Google Books database as shown in this XKCD comic? The answer is typographical.
When I began this study, I was hoping to find a hidden taboo of holding events on the 11th or typographical bias against the shorthand ordinal. Alas, the reason is far is far more mundane: a numeral
1looks a lot like a capitalIor a lowercaselor a lowercaseiin most of the fonts used for printing books. An11also looks like ann, apparently. Google’s algorithms made mistakes when reading the11thfrom a page, interpreting the ordinal as some other word.
This really resonated with me. The most frustrating projects I have coded for are the ones where people have not thought through the meaning of what they are asking for, where they ask “make this work” with no clear definition of what working looks like outside of the most idealised possible scenario without consideration of real world use, let alone edge cases or failure states. I feel “a programmer is paid to refine semantics” to my bones.
Programming is the act of making a computer enact a semantic task. The computer’s silicon internals, its RAM and hard disk and even its pixels, are the syntax here. It has no intrinsic meaning, just a set of ones and zeros and a very complex set of rules for transforming them. The semantics are the human interpretation of what it’s doing and why, the understanding of those numbers and pixels as a map to the nearest ramen joint or a simulation of a puppygirl begging for treats.
I still get far too emotional thinking about Cohost.
the reality of social media is that unless you have an Audience, you are probably better served among friends.
I really love A Game of Thrones and I used to read a lot of fan analysis stuff and listened to a couple of podcasts just about the series. Turtle-paced is the one person in that sphere that I still follow and I still really enjoy reading her deep dive chapter analyses when she posts them. She does, as the name of her blog implies, post them at the rate of a testudine and it is a nice occasional treat for me.
This is just how it is, per Tyrion. His response is not to address the unfairness but to show gratitude for the benefits he enjoys. The idea that everyone should have those privileges does not cross his mind. It’s a way in which he’s like Cersei. Though again, and as usual for the Lannister siblings, this is also a product of an abusive home. Tyrion’s only protection against the various injustices he faces in life due to his disability come from being a Lannister. The idea that everyone should have Lannister-level privileges is a threat to him - which in turn is a belief born of despair that of course everyone will hate him for his disability, and this can never change.
Putting native Gamecube controller in a new PC game, cool! Seen via Misty.
okay so, something that’s been bugging me for 15+ years but i never realized how to put it into words until recently: regular game controllers have different layouts depending on if you’re in gameplay or in menus.
Another multimedia CD.
Writing about early CD-ROMs means coming across a lot of early examples of things that became famous later. Sometimes that means finding new and exciting angles on something familiar… and sometimes it means something that’s only notable for being early. Today’s disc is one of those.
My clone also shared some interesting links, including an article about the decline of bin stores, a type of business I didn’t even know existed and beautiful photos of industrial waste dumps in Russia.
Ancient trade is cool! The past was international!
Titianus himself was a Macedonian, as well as a Roman citizen, and reflects just how complex and multifaceted these exchanges truly are. We talk of “Rome” and “China” as unitary civilizations, exchanging speech and goods like two singular individuals, but of course both were mere representations of vast conglomerations of peoples, cultures, and nations, all of which were constantly in flux. At Shatial, in the Karakoram Mountains of the Punjab, more than 1,000 inscriptions and 700 petroglyphs were carved into the rock near a key pass, recording names, dates, and prayers from travelers. They appear mostly in Sogdian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Aramaic, Brahmi, and Kharosthi. Nine are written in the extinct Bactrian language, one uses Chinese characters, and one is in Hebrew.
A short lament about erasing someone’s past from an old device.
Have you ever bought a pre-owned game cartridge or MP3 player or something, and the previous owner’s data is still on it — and for a brief moment, you feel a sense of connection with that stranger through their lingering data, and a twinge of sadness at the idea of deleting it to use the device for yourself?
Hell, I have felt sad in the past about clearing out my own childhood savedata from a cartridge. A few years ago I was able to boot my old copy of Soleil and was greeted with save files under my deadname as well as my brother and sister’s names.
Seen via Mike Egan’s link roundup.
If you could wave a magic wand and wish a new fantasy console into the world…what would it be like? What constraints would it have to force developers to get creative? If it came with hardware, like the Playdate, what would the console physically be like?
This is something I have actually thought about before. One of the myriad little ideas filed away that I will certainly never have time for (and would have to learn many, many new skills to ever do myself) and if I ever do get time for it the moment for it will probably have passed. But the idea of a Pico-8 style fantasy console with its own integrated development environment but 3D with an eye to creating PSX-style visuals in the way that been in vogue, especially with horror games with a Crocotile-style friendly editor for mapping and modelling has been fermenting in my mind for years.
And very importantly it would also be paired with a secondary, 2D, low-spec fantasy console similar to Pico-8 (some musings of this involved it being a Pico-8 clone that could run Pico-8 carts itself, but maybe that would be stepping on Zep’s toes too much) that could play its own separate games as well as link to main console to act as a simple secondary screen like a VMU, either running it in a separate window on the same desktop or else running on your phone linked via wifi connection. Have extra HUD info on the second screen, control a game entirely through your phone with a unique interface, pass it to a friend and allow extra asymmetrical co-op control, download a chao to your phone! I am aware that second-screen peripherals have been done a load of times and it has basically always bombed but I don’t care I love control and interface gimmicks and am eternally enamoured with stuff like the Dreamcast port of Silent Scope allowing you to use the VMU screen as an incredibly low fidelity scope and Zombi U’s gimmick of making you look away to the Wii U gamepad so much to divide your situational awareness in stressful situations.
Medical misogyny is nothing surprising to me but this lays it out very strongly.
There was no medical reason to keep it. You don’t need your uterus to survive, it’s only function is to be a womb. If you keep your ovaries you won’t even go into early menopause. Yet they made it clear that saving my womb was more important than my life.
But at a certain point, you have got to stop accepting the argument that an amateur Daz 3D porn game is worth an international uproar, no matter how transgressive and offensive it’s trying to be.
I think this raises an interesting question of why anyone is bothered to take a game like No Mercy seriously at all. I do think there is an interesting idea in how games so very opaque to a lot of people that they don’t necessarily intuit the obvious difference between a shovelware porn game and something with the the actual cultural impact of, say, Call of Duty in the way that they obviously can between a Holywood movie and some random porn film but I do feel like it is something more culturally based than games just been too long and too much of an investment to experience.
would transition have saved Barry the Chopper?
I have pretty bad impulse control around eating. If there is food in front of me I struggle not to keep picking at it even if I’m already uncomfortably full and even if I don’t like it that much. I generally don’t keep sweets or alcohol in my house because I tend to binge through it if it’s there. Moderation is not something I am good at.
One thing Ellie used to do sometimes is hide chocolate bars around my house and then, when I was in need of a treat, tell me where to find one or pull them out herself. She was incredibly sweet. I found a Galaxy caramel bar in the back of the kitchen press this morning. One last birthday present from her.
And now I guess I just want to share stories about her. We watched a lot of TV together. Just cuddling on the sofa or in bed and watching television had honestly become of my favourite things. I came over to her place once when she was watching Evil, enjoyed it and then she rewatched it with me from the start and we carried through all the way to the end together. She talked about watching a video essay (I do not recall who by) about Miraculous Ladybug and how it matures and grows more complex each season and I basically downloaded it and made her watch the first few episodes as a joke and then just sort of fell into continuing it because I cannot resist sticking to a bit well beyond what is warranted. It was a bit of mindless fun to put on and cuddle and chat. We were most of the way through the third series.
Just feeling the warmth of her body against mine is one of the things that I miss most of all. I got her a rose gold Zippo lighter for her last birthday. She liked fire and burning little things. She could be a real little very tall gremlin. She had left the lighter in my house a few days before she died. I had it with me to give back to her when we found her body. Sometimes I light it for a while and then just feel the warmth of it in my hand. Somehow that feels like the closest thing to having her here again.
We were also rewatching shows we liked as teenagers together. She was showing me Wolf’s Rain, I was showing her Outlaw Star and we were revisiting The Big O together. She loved R. Dorothy. We had also started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist together and had gotten as far as The Alchemy Exam back in September and then it took eight months till she was finally in the mood where she was happy to sit through Night of the Chimera’s Cry again just a few days before she died. Seeing as this has turned into the anime paragraph I will also say that we had both enjoyed Dungeon Meshi but had watched it separately as I was watching the dub and she was watching with subs. She loved Falin, too. She related a lot to robot girls and monster girls.
She was a big, lovely, autistic, dork and I cannot describe how wonderful it was watching her unmask and being earnest and silly about things she was self-concious about. I understand deeply the shame of trying to be normal, of burying stuff you are enthusiastic about, and I loved seeing her dig it all up. One time while we were hanging out at home I turned a corner to see her standing stimming in the middle of the living room, shaking her hands back and forth and bouncing a little. When she saw me she withdrew a little bit. She was a bashful about it but it was adorable. I wanted to encourage her. I asked her to keep doing it and when she demurred I cupped her head in my hands and begged her “Ellie, I need you to be more autistic!” She cringed into herself shyly from that but smiled and giggled and said, mock-ominously “You know not what you ask!” and I just kept saying it until she said she would. From then on “I need you be more autistic” became something I would implore when she was being self-conscious about herself.
She really liked making characters and just fucking around in games. I’d watch her play WWE 2K24 and she would often play a random match and not even particularly try to win. Just have fun and being playful with the narrative of a wrestling match, showboating, playing a referee and being as obviously biased as possible to the worse wrestler. She talked to me about some of her RPG characters. She had restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times but had never actually gotten to the end. Her current character was named Drizz and she had a whole backstory thought out for him that she spent an evening explaining to me (with a lot of interruptions to explain details about the world because I do not know much about Dungeons & Dragons).
Drizz was a drow trans man, raised to be an assassin in a cult dedicated to Lolth, who was shunned for not wanting to be a woman, betrayed by his mentor and ended up living rough for a long time. There was a lot more detail but I confess my memory is very poor and I don’t know that she ever wrote any of this down. She played Drizz as angry, brash and socially inept, deliberately making obviously risky or poor choices with him that would piss people in the game off. She saw a bunch of scenes she hadn’t before with previous characters as a result. Also it’s definitely Drizz and not Drizzt. He gets mad if you call him Drizzt. He did not name himself after Drizzt and is annoyed at people who assume he did.
I am not good at conclusions. She was wonderful. She’s gone, but she was wonderful.
the law of e-Caoimhe-lent exchange
