Thoughts on Quantum of Solace

As mentioned in my last post, I went to see the latest James Bond yesterday. I haven’t pay attention to any reviews prior to the movie. It’s a Bond movie so naturally I’ll go see it like all the rest of them that I’ve seen. I still haven’t read up on any critiques but for me, it was somewhat disappointing despite being a decent movie overall.

*Warning: Possible spoilers*

My disappointment is mostly from the lack of exciting action, gadgets and nice cars. In terms of action, there are plenty of fight scenes, a car chase plus a boat pursuit. But those were nothing new or special. Nothing jumped out from them that made me think “Wow, that was cool.” Leaping large gaps. Running on roofs. Fighting sequences. Shooting guns. Can’t they do more with these scenes? Maybe because so many of these action scenes are dependent on the actors physically that there’re not a lot of variation. And this also brings me to my next point – the lack of gadget. There were essentially no gadgets for Bond except his phone and the guns (does this even count?). I did like the computer system they were using at the headquarters (or wherever that office place is). It was very interactive and visually appealing. If only I had one haha. As a technology enthusiast, I was hoping to see at least some innovative inventions regardless of how unreal they would seem. Lastly, what happened to the car(s)?! There was an Alpha Romeo that was racked in the chase scene in the very beginning of the movie. After wards, you see some tiny compact car, a run-down old model Beetle, some Land (Range?) Rovers, and a Ford SUV. Seriously, Ford?! What is up with that. One of my friends pointed out that the Ford is an electric car or hybrid. If they want to promote environmental awareness, I would love to see the Tesla Roadster instead. hehe. Speaking of environmental, there was a hotel in the movie that runs fully on hydrogen fuel cell. But the whole building went up in flames after a car crashed in the underground parking. Not so safe, is it?

Compared to Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace did not provide the same level of enjoyment. That’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable. I just liked Casino Royale a lot more. One of the reason for that might be I prefer Eva Green over Olga Kurylenko. And maybe because my hearing is deteriorating or I am too used to watching things with subtitles, I had trouble hearing some of the dialogues, especially the ones with accents. I would rate this latest Bond at 6.5/10. Just for comparison sake, Casino Royale was an 8/10.

Posted in Entertainment
Tagged as James Bond, movie, Quantum of Solace

Transforming Wall-E

I went to watch Quantum of Solace at the mall today. It happens to be the release day of the Wall-E DVD. There was a sale on Wall-E toys at Toys ‘R Us and I couldn’t resist getting the Transforming Wall-E.

Still in the box.

Various transformation shown on the side and back of the box.

Out of the box but still stuck in the inner packaging.

After 5minutes of painful untwisting.

Wall-E!

Transforms into a box.

Compacted wheels.

Peeking.

With the Wall-E and Eve my sister bought at the Disney Store.

Wall-E with Kallen.

Wall-E with Eve.

Wall-E with NGE girls.

Posted in Entertainment
Tagged as Asuka, Eve, figure, Kallen, Rei, wall-e

New Toys

One piece ‘Yume no Kazokusen’ (Dream Pirate Ship). Set of 5 that can be put together to form the ‘Thousand Sunny’, second pirate ship for the Strawhat pirates.

Each set have extra components to create a setting by itself for those buying individual ones.

There’s a button at the front that shoots a canon / missile out of the mouth when pressed.

<3 bupo for these.

Posted in Entertainment
Tagged as figure, One Piece, Thousand Sunny

Threadless

I ordered a couple of tees from Threadless.com a couple of weeks ago and they arrived today.

Posted in Real Life
Tagged as tees, threadless

Fansub Experience

Last week I took on a somewhat unexpected project – fansubbing the anime One Outs. Fansub is basically a term used to describe subtitles of video create by fans. It’s very common with animes. Having said that, there wasn’t any One Outs fansub release since it aired in the beginning of the month. (There is now and that group is a bit bitter about us releasing.) This anime is created by the more or less same team (mangaka excluded) that made Akagi and Kaiji which both my friend, backlash, and I enjoyed. He was particularly enthusiastic about the series and really want to watch it. Unfortunately the only subs we found was Chinese ones, which he couldn’t read. Therefore, I decided to translate it. He joked about releasing the subs at first but we ended up actually distributing it.

Being a long time support of anime fansubs, I knew it was hard work to make subs but I didn’t realize it was really THIS time consuming. Translating the 20minute episode takes from 4-6hrs. Maybe my Chinese nor English just isn’t that great. I had a tough time finding the correct adjectives to describe the words in the Chinese subs. Also, this anime is somewhat about baseball so I had to figure out what the Chinese baseball terms were saying. And even had to consult Kyph on “Americanizing” commentary in a game. Then there’s also the subs that didn’t make sense. I had to download a different Chinese sub and compare. There’ll be lines that are translated completely different between the two Chinese subs. This is when our Japan correspondence, Missa, come into play. I record the audio of the sentences and she’ll ask her Japanese colleagues. Also, at some parts, notes have to be added to explain some terms in the video although, I’m kind of against them because it covers up more area of the screen. I think we’ll be keeping them to a minimal.

After the initial translation, it was timing, which means to time the translated line to the correct period in the video. Thank god there is software that simplify that process. We used Aegisub which has an audio analyzer. This makes selecting the time period of a particular sentence much easier. Then comes the endless editing. Changing some words to make the sentences smoother. Picking out typos or grammar errors. The timing and editing job is shared between backlash and I. Bupo helped out in editing a bit too. During the editing, we also added in the typesetting, which is to translate any Japanese settings in the video and place them inline.

For episode 1, backlash tried to encode the video into a smaller size than the raw file we obtained. That failed. Therefore we only muxed the subtitles, chapters into a mkv container and ended up with a 400MB file. Typical HD files is around 350MB but what can we do? Before releasing, I quickly threw together a website for our group on my own hosting so we can post about our subs. Then backlash made the torrent and uploaded it onto NyaaTorrents, which is the tracker we were using. Almost immediately, someone posted it on Tokyo Toshokan, which is a torrent library for Japanese media. Distro (distributing) was a big problem for us since both backlash and I have terrible upload speeds. It took a very long time to get the first copy of the file out. I had to get another friend, Luffy, to help out with the torrent seeding. We were quite overwhelmed with the response at first. A lot of people started downloading it. There were over 2500 downloads in the first 24 hours.

Since then, we’ve received a lot of thanks and offers to help out. We got ourselves an encoder and a typsetter now. Someone put a xdcc bot in our IRC channel and an admin from an anime distribution site, Anime Me offer to host direct downloads of our episodes on his site. We’ve released episode 2 now as well as a version 2 of episode 1, based on feedbacks from those who have watched it. The plan for now is to finish the series. Some have asked us to sub other series. I can only shrug and say that’s not really possible time wise.

So far, on torrents, there had been around 4000 downloads of episode 1 and about 500 downloads of version 2. As for episode 2, it’s sitting at 3000 downloads now. It seems our first fansubbing efforts is a success.

Posted in Entertainment
Tagged as anime, fansub, one outs

4GB Nano Spotted at Futureshop

The 4th Generation Nano was announced earlier this month, with a 8GB and 16GB version. But soon a 4GB version popped up at a Dutch online store and later at the Canadian Bestbuy site. Yesterday, I was at Futureshop wasting time and spotted the 4GB nano. It was only available in green.

Posted in Tech
Tagged as Futureshop, iPod Nano

Wall-E Case Mod

Last week, I went to see the latest Pixar animated feature Wall-E. It was an awesome film. I really enjoyed the story and is overwhelmed by the power of sound effects. I recommend everyone to go watch it. Now! Today, I saw in one of my feed news a Wall-E Case Mod for the Gamecube.

So cuteeeee. Too bad I don’t have a Gamecube. The Wii is a little thin for a Wall-E mod. Maybe a EVE mod would do. Since it’s all white already.

Source and more images at Resurrect Your Gamecube With the WALL-E Case Mod.

Posted in Entertainment
Tagged as Gamecube, mod, wall-e