He's a Magritte of our times, telling us "this is not a tangerine" while making tangerine cakes shaped exactly like a tangerine. His nights are cursed with the recurring dream of coming up with a type of banana that looks like banana bread.
Currently watching Mobile Suit Victory Gundam for @hardworkandguts and this might be the only thing that won't leave me fuming for wasting so much time watching it.
Because it's been 25 years almost to the day of one of the first memes I can recall and I have zero respect for my time, I decided to translate the infamous Zero Wing intro back into Japanese, but also breaking it even further. More details under the cut
It's just a video of the intro I recorded with Retroarch, then because kdenlive isn't great with text, created the subtitles on Gimp using the BestTen font from FlopDesign and did some masking to simulate the character by character effect. It's way too fast, but it's also a situation I'd need it to be better with text for me put more effort in.
The script, in case you want to translate it back:
Because it's me, I added some dumb jokes of my own:
"Main screen turn on" now is "arouse the main screen"
"It's you!" is "Anata da!", which is the same, but since it's kanji, the Captain is saying "It's darling!". Folks, I've given Zero Wing a Yaoi backstory.
CATS is "Nekotachi". The plural of cat. Also the dictionary tells me "neko" is a bottom, because the stars truly aligned.
"ha ha ha ha" is now "grass grass grass grass", because it reads the same. Dunno if it's that's why "LOL" in japanese is "草", or grass, because that's what happens if you put many 葉 (blades of grass) together.
"Take off every Zig" is now "Undress every Zig". Idk, something for ship fetishists as well. Or Tenchi Muyo.
The reason I meant to do this was this dumb joke: "For Great Justice" has become "To the Taisho Era": it was the period of "great righteousness", which can use the same kanji. へ indicates direction (should be "tameni"), so now Zero Wing in a Yaoi story where someone goes back in time to early 20th century Japan.
Photos of guys being really sad collecting an individual MVP award but missing out on the championship title. No forced smiles, just deep down everyone knowing you did better than everyone else and it still wasn't enough.
By now, you probably have realised I think giving these awards to players on the losing side is a bad idea because nobody is having a good time after losing a final and that award is the last thing on their mind.
Well, while I still can't figure out the last three kanji, here's the full HD remake of the fist episode of the Gunbuster Science Lessons I've mentioned before, which started out as "maybe I should redraw the characters to make better gifs" and got me thinking "wait, from here to extracting the sound and remaking the whole episode is a small step", so here it is. If you want to know more about it, well...
I mostly did it because I wanted to get more acquainted with the tools after many years without doing anything, and since I'm running Fedora and I wish a very "please disappear" to Adobe, decided I'd use open source tools.
The process was simple, first identified each frame of animation each character had (39 total, I think), screencapped and vector-traced them using Krita, then used two different brushes for the outlines, one for all of the outlines and other bigger just on the thicker ones, and decided on a rougher pencil/ink look because I thought they would play better with this style of animation, then did the colouring using separate layers, before merging them all and exporting as if they were actual animation cells. Because I'm sure these were quick doodles that took the original artist far less time to draw than to me to redraw, ended up doing some cleanup because in HD some parts looked too "jumpy" or things like their hands going from 5 fingers to yakuza hands. Initially I was going to do some color texturing to give it a more hand-drawn look, but decided against it because 1) I needed a tablet because that sort of work with a mouse that isn't great is just pain 2) didn't want to sell something to buy one. Also thought of adding a noise layer or some film grain in place of that on post, but was not happy with the results.
Second part was creating the backgrounds and slides - The background is pretty basic, just a slight gradient, and I know they're copying a HyperCard program, so I searched a bit if I could find where one of those icons came out, but nothing matched so drew something close to the original. As for the cards, I know a few basics of japanese so (even if Krita does not like the kana/kanji input method I use) and while the bigger text was easy to figure out, a few of the smaller ones, even from cleaner transfers, were from educated guesswork and might be wrong and from searching for fansites for terms that could. Trying to figure out kanji for technical terms and pretend science isn't easy, you know. Decided to leave the "PPCIFIC" in there, it's easy for me to fix it if I want to later although I messed up that card and had to remake it (aaah etto bleh). Biggest deliberate change was deciding to give a chalkboard look to the last card because I feel that's what they were going for and it looks cute, don't @ me.
As I was moving along and doing each "cell" and card, I started sequencing the frames, a bit like a cell animator would with a camera: in Kdenlive (initially Shotcut, although I use it mostly to edit gifs), added a track for each character, the background and two for cards, sometimes using a draft just so I could feel progress in the work, and started to matching each character (they are named 00-00-00 depending on the "cell" of the character: kazumi-coach-noriko") to the same frame in the original, which I believe is completely accurate. During this process I noticed a few tiny mistakes and imperfections I fixed by deleting that area, and repeating the drawing process on a small rectangular "patch" to save time, an advantage of seamlessly being able to fix, save over the same file and just hit refresh on the file in Kdenlive). The card transitions, who have a different aspect ratio, are accurate in the way they start moving and slide out of frame at the same time, but it's just a position animation. The last thing to compose do was figuring out the fade out animation, a combination of two effects in Kdenlive that I've felt matched the original. Subtitles were really the last bit, added on Kdenlive and they're hardcoded here, but if I ever upload a dual-audio version or to a place that allows subtitle files, I can easily export a "clean" version, in higher quality too, although at 50-something% to fit under 100mb it looks pretty good already since it's very basic with little animation.
So, from here: Episode two reuses many of the "cells" and they're fully done, every card has placeholders I'm working on and the image sequencing is all done, but with a lot more tiny text on the cards and details I can't make out that is pissing me off. Three has them on kimonos requiring a redraw of every "cell", and a few more challenging cards with animation, but I won't start working on it until 2 is at least 85% done, and four should be also pretty quick to do with just some additional "cells" and screencapping the OVA for space alien drawings.
While I'm still stuck figuring out the text for the first (and second) episode of Gunbuster Science Lessons which I'm remaking in HD, noticed I haven't tried doing vector animation, and since I'm not interested in returning to After Effects and I'm sticking with open source software (although some of the stuff, like text, really tests my resolve), decided to give OpenToonz a go, and picked the boot animation sequence from Patabor the Movie (it was on my mind since I did a gif of it) and after two days of casually learning how the program works, ended up with something that is far from perfect, but allowed me to learn just enough in some time I might actually do a much closer version, frame accurate version of it rather than just vibe based.
As for the Gunbuster Science Lesson those will be as accurate as possible, and the individual character animation (it was just vector tracing the original frames on Krita, clean up some stuff that looked a bit too distracting and painted each individually) for the first two episodes is all done and composed in Kdenlive and the only thing missing are three kanji from episode 1 and finishing the slides on 2 (that really has a lot of text), and until then, here's two frames from Noriko and Kazumi, plus a Jung Freud I drew just for fun in the same style.
Photos of guys being really sad collecting an individual MVP award but missing out on the championship title. No forced smiles, just deep down everyone knowing you did better than everyone else and it still wasn't enough.
By now, you probably have realised I think giving these awards to players on the losing side is a bad idea because nobody is having a good time after losing a final and that award is the last thing on their mind.
Photos of guys being really sad collecting an individual MVP award but missing out on the championship title. No forced smiles, just deep down everyone knowing you did better than everyone else and it still wasn't enough.
I was rewatching the anime OVA of Video Girl Ai for a new thing I'm doing, and this time noticed I really liked some of the music and searched for the soundtracks. The ones who caught my ear were the ones by Nav Katze, particularly Frozen Flower, a very nice piece of 90s indie/dream pop:
Going on a bit of a search for more info, I ended coming across contemporaries Soft Ballet, a synthpop/EBM band that apparently obtained a bit of a cult status in the post YMO Japanese synthpop scene, and going for a night walk (the perfect mood for EBM that doesn't involve being dressed in leather), I started thinking, this guy has a very similar voice to Dave Gahan:
The voice is around the same register, but the cadence and inflection are just eerily similar. Doesn't help that early DM was incredibly influential in darker synthpop and EBM is an understatement, but this is... Something else, I guess. So is After Images with it's English chorus.
(Aaaah I love those sort of small guitar riffs so much)
As I'm learning Japanese, I understand half the words that pass by and can generally make out the lyrics reading them - then it got me thinking again - I've been speaking English over 30 years now (haha *turns to dust*) and I was pretty much at native level for a good part of it, but what if I could compare the feel of it by hearing Dave Gahan sing Depeche Mode in a language I couldn't understand? Ah, well, since they never did a single Avril Lavigne style, maybe burn the world a bit more and see if one LLM thing could translate one song into mandarin or something. And then I remembered this:
Yeah, I'm convinced.
Anyway, go listen to Soft Ballet and Nav Katze. Lovely stuff. You really never know where you'll find something new to listen to.
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