When does "Inspired by" become Plagiarism?
Here's a good example of how I hope to use "Random Debris" from now on.
There are only so may ways to arrange notes. Repetition is inevitable. So when I first played through the third episode of the Xenosaga franchise, one track in particular tickled that portion of my brain I mentioned previously that gives me (annoyingly selective) Rainman-like ability to remember a bit of music.
You can only take "inspired by" so far. Hans Zimmer caught flak for his heavy-handed use of Holst's Planets when composing tracks for the Gladiator soundtrack (I've heard them both, and I'm much more on the side of the Holst foundation than the article's author). I like Yuki's music, but this sounds a bit suspicious.
The less I remember about the Big O, the better. I caught a couple of episodes on Toonami back in the day (which is why I've never seen the factory-installed OP/ED, until just now). It was enough to convince me I did not want to see anymore Batman with mecha.
Posted by: Will at April 29, 2008 11:39 AM (WnBa/)
Which version of the Big O's theme? There was also one lifted from the old UFO series.
Have to actually finish the Xenosaga trilogy. It's my favorite, which is why I have been spending too much time building up my characters rather than advancing the plot.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 13, 2008 04:57 PM (zM0D5)
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Well this is the one I found immediately (and it does have that Queen sound).
Xenosaga is my favorite RPG series, with Xenogears taking top honors in the stand-alone category. It's a shame they had to truncate the plot of XS. There's plenty of room for a continuation. Unfortunately, Monolithsoft is now owned by Nintendo while the XS series is firmly in Namco-Bandai's grip.
I've been thinking of going back to work on my own translation of Perfect Works (I did a few pages for class projects back in in college). It is not light reading material and is a mother to translate.
Wow, you want to translate Perfect Works? And you got a copy to do that from? Wow. I mean, just wow. There were some other people doing it, back when the Zenosaga website was still up, but that effort seemed to have disappeared.
Last time I checked, though, Namco-Bandai was not platform specific (After all, they gave the world Idolm@ster for the XBox 360.). And given Nintendo's history of letting subsidary development studios get bought out by other parties (Cough-Rare-Cough)...Well, we did get Xenosaga on the DS. Since Xenosaga is my favorite video game series (Never played Xenogears though.), I still hold hope that we shall see something come from it again one day.
Funy thing you mentioned it, since over at AOD, there was a conversation on whether Yoko Kanno had done the same thing, or was simply a case where certain taste and styles produces similar results.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 13, 2008 09:32 PM (zM0D5)
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I've had my copy of Perfect Works since about 1999/2000. Even at that point it was hard to get. What was supposed to be a 2-4 week ship turned into 3-6 months. I have a few of the translated PDF pages "int" put up on zenosaga.com. I'd like to do something similar, but I'd have to wreck my only copy to do it (and they're getting $200 for copies on amazon). It was a damned shame when he decided to shut the site down (of course I'd been through the same thing a few years prior when Dark Warlord shutdown xenogears.org.). There's a fairly complete history of things here.
Nintendo bought up Monolith specifically to make them RPGs (Batten Kaitos was one of the few on the Cube), but given the poor sales of the XS series, I don't see them making the effort to work out a deal with "Bamco" to re-ignite the series. Tetsuya Takahashi has now tried twice to tell this story, and both times he's run up a huge tab and taken too much time getting product on the shelf. He needs to just write a novel or three and get it over with. I just don't think he has what it takes to develop video games. And given the way Soraya Saga was treated by all parties involved, she certainly won't be getting involved again.
Shrug...Well, given the dearth of games available for the Wii, you would think something might be worked out. In any case, that is water under the bridge now, and I have been waiting for both Gust and Tri-Ace to release their latest titles. Tri-Ace, especially, since Star Ocean (The only reason why I would touch a PS3) and Valkyrie Profile have titles under development. As an aside I thought it was Tri-Crescendo who developed Baten Kaitos?
Anyway, I would not be eager to rip apart the copies of the Japanese books I have either, given the scarcity value of some of them. I think I might had read seen some of the translation you had for Zenosaga if I remember right. Never really could understand them, even after they were translated, probably because I never did get into Xenogears. Thanks.
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 14, 2008 07:50 AM (zM0D5)
Wikipedia says both were involved, but I don't know how the work was split between them. Monolith's name has been the one I've always heard linked with the BK series.
I never submitted any of my translations to Zenosaga. Those PDFs were all done by them. I haven't looked at them in a while, but as I recall, they were only slightly better than Babelfish quality in places. It looked like they fed the text to a machine then cleaned up the output with mixed results. The book is also full of technical jargon that is really hard to translate. It took me a half-hour working with my Japanese instructor (who had little to no science background) to work out the differences between the three words (elevation, absolute altitude, and AGL) the Nelson dictionary translates simply as "altitude."
If you can find Xenogears for anything less than a small mint, get it. There is so much going on in XS that hearkens back to XG that I've always thought people without the extra background weren't getting the full experience.
Ah, that clears it up then. I never did see more than a handful of scans on Zenosaga so I probably was not missing much.
Oddly enough, I have seen Xenogears, back when Gamestop/EB still carried PS1 games, at pretty good prices (~$20). I was tempted to buy it the last time I saw a copy, but I was quite happy with Xenosaga by itself than trying to read too much into a backstory that even Monolith Soft commented had spiritual connections with the Xenosaga series. (Just to complete things - I have no opinion on Soraya Saga/Xenosaga situation. Almost all the stuff I read seemed to be a lot of hysterics and not a lot of facts.)
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 14, 2008 06:43 PM (zM0D5)
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As few as he had done, they were easier in the eyes than raw text. But int quickly locked them away from the general public, limiting access to only those people who put in ridiculous amounts of time in the Z forums and whatnot. Can't say I liked the guy that much.
Oh, so that was it. I always suspected something like that, but my interest in Xenosaga at the time was not that devoted. Now it is much higher (As a quick assessment of the Xenosaga merchandise I own will report.), but that attitude always irked me a bit.
Just as well I was more into naval matters on newsgroups back then. Either everyone could find out about a piece of information, the information was made-up and therefore non-relevant, or you would not be able to say anything about the information you knew because it was classified...
C.T.
Posted by: cxt217 at May 15, 2008 09:28 PM (zM0D5)
I decided I'm going to make up a new category for the random crap I come across while surfing and leave the "Random Debris" category to more serious subjects (Hah!). Basically I'll just link-dump stuff I find either humorous, cool, bizarre, or some combination of the three.
Today is a monk theme.
Monks chanting the Lotus Sutra (long, with a strange but cool acoustic shift about 7 minutes in, shamelessly stolen from the Hostages).
Which reminded me of another bizarre monk vid I saw at some point (@ Hop Step Jump I think). I think it's a piece of software (like a midi tracker) that allows you to have these "monks" sing various parts and turn it into a song.
The original song is a classic Yuki Kajiura piece. After that, it looks like somebody threw together a choir of anime character impersonators to sing the track.
Less weirdness and more music (video-heavy) beyond the jump.
Over the years, I've observed something about myself. When it comes to females in anime, I'm a sucker for the sensible ones. The women who have their act together, and in the absence of plot contrivance, are perfectly functional people. If there's Shipping to be done (which, oddly, doesn't seem possible with most of my choices) , I'm usually Shipping in their direction
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Well, there is a shocker - Will prefers sensible women. Whatever happened to opposites attract? I was sure that you would love a good "fixer-upper" walking disaster type of gal
Posted by: TheRightWife at April 26, 2008 10:19 PM (uS+aN)
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Heh, and people laugh at me when I say my favorite Sakura Taisen girl is Kanna...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 27, 2008 11:43 PM (LMDdY)
Kerith, I've tripped over two-such so far, and I don't care to deal with it any more. Women who aren't completely psychotic are hard to find.
As to Sakura Taisen... It's a show I have given serious thought to starting up times, but considering how much the continuity is split up into videogames/anime of varying age and availability, the cost overhead has always driven me off.
Posted by: Will at April 28, 2008 12:18 PM (WnBa/)
I had some thoughts on the show that didn't really fit with the comments in the other post. Most are holes in the "realism" of the premise that I think are interesting.
For a show touted as "realistic," it seems to be full of highly dysfunctional people in positions where dysfunctions are normally filtered out in the application process. Psych evaluations are a big part of going into space right now. That would have been an interesting direction for the show to explore. The world is full of people who have no business going into space for various reasons, but if we commercialize space to the extent shown in Planetes (and dreamed of by guys like Glenn Reynolds), how do you handle the competing needs of access and safety for fellow travelers?
I know the Japanese are still in love with tobacco, but what company would spend the time and money building something as hair-brained as a "smoking room" into a moon base? Some people maybe be disappointed (angry even), but I fully expect space to be a default No-Smoking Zone, no exceptions.
How the hell do they feed all these people in space? I wasn't looking very closely, but I didn't see anything resembling dome-agriculture on the Moon. If I ever go back to watch it again, I'm going to keep an eye out for exactly what they eat and where they might get it from.
I'll keep adding to the list as I think of things.
This is an old draft (4/9/08) that's been sitting in the list waiting for me to finish it up. The problem is that I still feel exactly like I did when I wrote it, and I don't have any interest in going back to give the show a second chance.
It must be the novelty of "hard" sci-fi. That's the only explanation that makes sense for the praise this show receives. (Or the socialist prosthelytizing going on constantly throughout the second half.)
The management of the Debris Section are a couple of screw-ups that would never be let within sight of a functional rocket in the real world.
The ending felt tepid. Maybe all the glowing reviews inflated my expectations. Maybe moving in the middle of working through the show colored my experience. Maybe the show's the greatest thing since sliced bread, when viewed in the right place, time, and frame of mind. None of that does me any good right now, because I have no interest in re-watching the show at all right now.
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The setting is at least mildly interesting for me on its own, but it would be far more compelling with a cast that weren't a bunch of losers and a story that lived up to the hype.
Posted by: Will at April 22, 2008 08:30 AM (WnBa/)
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In the end there is no substitute for interesting characters and a compelling story.
That's why I'll be curious to see your take on Lucky Star. If I had to break it down...
Setting: 5 - High school slice of life. We've been here before. We'll be here again.
Characters: 8.5 - The series' strong point. They all occupy the far reaches of their particular archetype/stereotype. The show's really about having fun bouncing these moe-modes off one-another.
Story: 3 - Not that it's bad, just that it's non-existent. No villains, no struggle, little character growth. Almost entirely static.
Posted by: Will at April 22, 2008 11:47 AM (WnBa/)
I'll admit my bias up front. I liked the show. I liked it a lot, in fact. I'll be the first to admit that the biggest draw is probably what Steven calls the "gadget fetish." Hard SF is very rare in anime, and I'd bet the success of Planetes is part of what's behind the recent rash of what might be best described as "space-pr0n." Rocket Girls,Freedom and Moonlight Mile, especially (caveat: I haven't seen any of those, but I've read the reviews at The Space Review and other places, and seen plenty of screencaps). Basically, Planetes is to these shows what the original Gundam is to the "real" subgenre of mecha shows.
The Leftism is something I've basically resigned myself to in anime these days. At least it wasn't as egregiously anti-US as the manga was. But what gets me is the notion that there was no story development, that the characters were static, and that the characters are losers (management aside; my God those two twits were annoying. I'll put up with the Leftism of the manga to avoid Lavie and the boss). Hachi grows up and starts to work toward his goal instead of just sitting there and talking about it. The company manager he had been friends with has the same story, but in reverse. She had it all, career-wise, and basically throws it all away after losing a rigged contest - as opposed to sticking with the company and changing it from the inside. For grins, the writers doubled up on both of them in one character with Chen-Shin, the pilot who manages to recognize the trouble he's getting into and bootstraps himself back out of it. Fee was already a pretty level character, underused in the show maybe (agian the manga is different), but she didn't need much growth. She's the show's 'perfect spacer,' the measuring stick for the rest of the cast. Even the space-cop who'd been Hachi's mentor is simply Fee to the Nth. Yuri came to terms with his loss that started the show in the first place - and gains a mission in life, helping to prevent it from happening again. And Ai? She ends the story where she belongs, back on Earth and hopefully never going back up to space (except maybe as a tourist) ever again. She's the human who can operate in space, but probably shouldn't, and loves it anyway. Like Hachi's mom, she lives space through her loved ones.
Posted by: Rich at April 22, 2008 07:29 PM (kfccJ)
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Most of that probably should have been inside a spoiler tag.
Rich, don't confuse my comments on Lucky Star above with my thoughts on Planetes. Some characters do change in Planetes, the problem is they just couldn't seem to make me care.
For example, when Clarie and Ai were stranded on the Lunar surface, there was never any doubt in my mind that Ai would do the right thing. All that supposed tension and dread felt completely hollow to me. She was too much the "pure" character to leave Claire for dead. Sure she's been disabused of the romance in space travel, but she's still the idealist she was at the beginning.
Hachimaki is the one character who really underwent serious changes. The problem is he went from a listless self-centered jerk to an ambitious self-centered jerk, only to finally become something resembling a sociable human being in the last couple episodes. I hated his character for 24 episodes, so I'm quite dubious about how genuine and permanent his transformation will turn out. Was I supposed to empathize with this guy?
Those ninja-cosplaying clowns on the moon drove me nuts as well. I was supposed to feel sad when they died in the engine expolsion, but I help feeling happy I'd never have to see them again.
That's not a failure on my part to "get it." That's a failure of the writers to give me a cast I give a damn about. I didn't like the principals. The secondaries were mostly stereotypes, and there are better ways to lighten the mood than filling your tertiary cast with Excel Saga rejects. It completely destroyed the mood of the show.
Posted by: Will at April 23, 2008 09:29 AM (WnBa/)
Ahh, I see your meaning, Will. I did confuse your comments on Lucky-Star with what you meant about Planetes, mixing your comments 2 and 4 with Steven's #3 into an extended multi-blog group whine about the story not being what you guys would have made it. Which is still no excuse for my own whining thereafter. Your opinons are your own, and this is your blog. Regardless of guest opinions, those of the host are the correct ones in his own home, and I'm sorry for forgetting that.
(Aside: we're in complete agreement on the tertiary cast in any case; I so completely blocked the "clowns" out that I forgot they were ever there. Those scenes were downright painful to watch.)
About spoiler tags, I don't see a button for those on the control panel at the top...is it some form of 'special character,' or something else? I'll tag the rant appropriately if I can edit.
Posted by: Rich at April 23, 2008 09:07 PM (kfccJ)
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I'm certainly not one to turn into a despot over differing opinions. There's no sense getting wound up with somebody over fiction. Non-fiction is a whole 'nother story.
And that spoiler tag format Steven mentions works at any mee.nu blog (mu.nu I'm not so sure of).
Posted by: Will at April 23, 2008 10:20 PM (ZhN+Z)
That's basically the choice in this show. How much do you dare to know about what's really going on?
It's a show full of characters. Sure there are some eccentricities (I guess all aliens are fun-loving goofballs), but it looks like everyone's up to pulling their own weight when the chips are down.
On the other hand, you can tell the show doesn't take itself too seriously. Fourth wall breaks appear in just about every episode (mostly by Hajime in the narration, but occasionally someone else will ham it up and talk to the camera).
I'm not sure exactly which episode I left off at last night. The Cultural Festival has yet to arrive, but it looks to be just over the horizon. It's hard to tell at this point if Hajime is going to turn out to be some untapped super-powered bad-ass or just a mundane with fate/serendipity on his side. It seems everyone's powers are specialized. I guess Hajime's "Ganbare" power could come in handy from time to time.
Oh, yeah, you can probably guess I found my Shingu DVDs.
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Yep. I assiduously avoided reading any of your spoilers when you were gushing over the show last summer. The discs (still in the wrapper) disappeared in my move two months ago, and I finally found where they'd been secreted away.
Posted by: Will at April 18, 2008 02:22 PM (WnBa/)
One of the songs I most enjoyed playing during my short time in the junior high jazz band was Birdland (named after the jazz club Birdland, which was itself named after a jazz musician nicknamed "Bird"). It was one of the first songs we played that gave us a chance to improv solos, and when we finally had it down, it was probably one of the fastest tunes I've ever played.
(Somewhere just north of 180 bpm when we were really pushing it. We never performed at that tempo. We just did it to see if we could. It was ridiculous amounts of fun at that speed. The director would have to break in to cut-time so he didn't look like he was trying to take off.)
It's a song I haven't heard in a while, and being jazz, there are about N+1 arrangements and variations out there. This is the cleanest recording I found so far.
The other song that was always a lot of fun was Malaguena. It's also another song with N+1 arrangements and variations (because in addition to being a jazz band favorite, it's also really big with marching bands)
Here's an indoor performance of the song from Blast! (a show everyone owes it to themselves to see)
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Well, only three Buddy Rich recordings came up in a quick youtube search. I can't say the audio quality in any of them is particularly good. This is the best sounding of the three. It is a lot closer to the version we played, but it was only junior high, so we were playing a simplified arrangement.
Posted by: Will at April 18, 2008 09:39 PM (ZhN+Z)
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Obviously you guys weren't going to be playing at his level.
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I have a HQ avi of "Battery Battle" from Blast here at Pond Central; the Phantom Regiment is from Duckford, and has their Tryout Camp at Duck U., so I've gotta be a drum & bugle corps fan.
There's something about walking out of the Duck U. Bookstore and having the Regiment's drumline slamming away ten feet from your car that puts a zip in your step after a long day at work...
Posted by: Wonderduck at April 18, 2008 10:01 PM (AW3EJ)
Little late to respond on this one, but I just remembered something. On the soccer fields adjacent to where we play our city-league softball games, occasionally a local drum corp rehearses in the afternoons. I think it's The Academy, but a buddy's girlfriend was rehearsing with their color guard, and I'm pretty sure she's older than the DCI limit of 22. I can't think of who else it would be.
Posted by: Will at April 23, 2008 05:05 PM (WnBa/)
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That video is the pinnacle of marching band nerdom.
No offense or anything, but really, it's hilarious for that very reason.
Nevertheless that was a really tight song. And then there's birdland being another one of "those" songs we all have to hear. But anyway it's good to find another eclectic blogger who's into anime and jazz.
Posted by: lelangir at May 10, 2008 07:04 PM (iZmZ/)
Ras-a-frassin' @$%#&"! *grumble*
I should have taken the Photoshop class back when I had the chance. This "learn-by-doing" isn't going as well as it did with AutoCAD.
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Oh, come on. You think that's bad, try "learning while doing" Flash! (Someday I got to go back and wade through the tutorials. I'm sure I'll learn all kinds of useful things.)
Oh, I've read your epic struggles attempting to wrangle some functionality out of Flash. It allows me to marvel at people who can put together stuff like this.
I wish I'd been blogging back when I was teaching myself how to use the editor for the Unreal franchise of games. It would have made for an interesting case-study of a decent into madness.
Posted by: Will at April 08, 2008 01:50 PM (WnBa/)
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I have a lot of the same problems with Photoshop. I can use it to do most of what I need to do, no sweat; that's because most of what I need to do is "paste a layer over another layer and line them up".
But some things are just impenetrable in the interface. Today, for example - I was working on Lucky Star, a caption where Akira's holding a sign upside-down humorously. Naturally, the client has requested that this sign be subtitled upside-down, which is fine as that's how I was doing it anyway... But for whatever reason, I -cannot- find the function that says "take the selection and flip it upside down". I ended up just rotating the entire canvas instead and dragging the sign to where I wanted it...
I get the feeling that if I knew enough to write some basic scripts in Photoshop, I could save myself a significant amount of carpal wear (that volume of Lucky Star meant, literally, hundreds of subtitles copy/pasted over each other). But I have no idea where to start...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 08, 2008 07:45 PM (LMDdY)
I use MS Paint and MS Digital Editor 2006 for most basic things... most of my screenshots are resized, cropped, and color-fiddled using Digital Editor, Paint is used if I have to scribble on the pic.
I use them because I know how to use them. P'Shop is a great program, very useful for a lot of things, but there are times where having your head run over by a main battle tank would hurt less.
But if you really want to learn the meaning of 'pain', try to teach yourself how to use Adobe AfterEffects. I've been trying to do just that for the past six months or so, and I've barely gotten to the point where I can get the main editing screen set up the way I like it.
That might be one reason why I haven't gotten much done, editing-wise recently.
Posted by: Wonderduck at April 09, 2008 07:05 PM (ccSyJ)
Posted by: J Greely at April 11, 2008 02:30 PM (2XtN5)
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No, I knew Paint had that capability. But the reason I'm using Photoshop is that the files have to be maintained to a very certain image specification or they won't work on the DVDs; part of that is "absolutely no alpha layer". Photoshop won't put one in there if it doesn't start with one; practically everything else will... ;_;
J, I'll give that a whirl when I get home, see how it works.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at April 14, 2008 09:23 AM (d2LNE)
Life, the Universe, etc. ~ Part Deux ~ Now with More FAIL
Boy, almost a month without anything new here. I didn't have a resolution to keep or anything, but I had planned on every few days getting at least something up.
Settling in is settling in.
The box containing a number of my anime DVDs (including my still-wrapped Shingu boxset) appears to be lost/missing/stolen. The first run of bills are rolling in with all the pain of various "setup" fees attached. As much as I would love to run out and spend the money on the various big-ticket items that would really get me up to speed living in the place, small nickel-and-dime items are what has me running to Wal-mart every other day it seems.
The softball team had a mediocre regular season. We finished 8-4, with those 4 losses came in a row during the middle of the season. We're seeded 4th in the Tournament that starts this week.
In a couple weeks comes what amounts to a "softball team" camping trip. I've been looking forward to a little "cold weather" camping, but it's always been difficult getting more than a couple people interested. I'm curious to see how it goes. I need to get a good 0º bag because nothing I've got right now is going to cut it at 7000'.
Shortly therafter comes a wedding to attend. I've got to figure out where my nicer clothes are in this mess. A polo and jeans is not appropriate wedding attire.
Lemme see... lemme see...
Oh, got notice of my ten-year high school reunion in the mail, only to discover they're charging $89 for a ticket. Thanks, but maybe I'll organize a counter-reunion for people not of a mind to waste perfectly good money just to meet people who are rapidly becoming strangers all over again.
Wow. That was bitter. I'm going to blame stress and lack of fresh anime. The winter season has tapered off. I won't even bother with any spring shows until a couple weeks in and some of the chaff has been shaken out.