The Shade

Hey everyone.

This is for Canadian customers of Rogers High Speed Internet.

Have any of you been noticing that your bittorent, itunes or podcast downloads been slow lately? Have you called Rogers support and they told you that it's your computer, modem, or router? It's not. It's Rogers. They have begun implementing what's being called packet shaping, whereby they are controlling or actually limiting the number of simultaneous connections you can make. Basically, anything over 3 upload connections and that's it. For those bt, itunes and podcast that are dependent on a large number of connections, this means that your downloads are slowed to a snails crawl, unless you are able to connect to someone with high bandwidth (in bittorent's case)

This new limit is different than the 60 GB bandwidth limit that was announced in March '05. Back then, there was an announcement and it was common knowledge. This new limit was unannounced, and no one knows exactly when it started(best guess is sometime around the end of October or early November).

Word of this is only slowly spreading across the net since everyone thinks their equipment is the cause. If you call Rogers, their tech support may not even be aware of the new limit and will blame your equipment/software. So far, Shaw and Eastlink customers don't seem to be affected, but for how long?

So, what are we to do? Switch over to Bell? Downgrade to dial up since we seem to have lost the very thing we needed high speed for?

Then theres a new mysterious DADA teacher who might be the 'big bad guy' in the book, which its not.

Defence Again the Dark Arts Teacher = DADA Teacher???

But when that instructor asked him what were his strength and his only answer was he can "fly fast" I was thinking WTF?

346469[/snapback]

Maybe he should open a flying delivery service?

I saw it Saturday night. There were almost no kids, woohoo!!!

First off, I liked it. After stumbling in the last one. they seem to have caught themselves.

Mechamaniac, I'm glad they cut out the whole Dooby subplot. Dooby is so annoying, he's a hair short of being Jar Jar annoying. As Gollum said it during the MTV movie awards: "Dooby's a fu#&ing f@*!"

Actually, I'm was surprised they were able to keep as much as what was in the book. Of course, cutting out the boring parts helped.

Bring on "Order of the Phoenix".

The guy in that Picture looks nothing like Morpheus, the King of Dreams or his son Daniel, who took his place. I hope the casting for Death, Despair, Delirium, Destruction, Desire and Destiny is WAY better than this. 

343681[/snapback]

This is one of those times I'm glad that Gaiman has a certain amount of creative control over most of the Sandman Franchise.

Getting back to the topic at hand (kind of), what's the deal with small hands anyways? I know it's an episode 3 reference, but that's about it.

Where's Agentone?  He's gotta have an opinion on remaking an Arnold film.  

I think he's been crying since the thread started.

340579[/snapback]

I can't believe he still hasn't posted. Maybe he found a girlfriend?

On a more serious note, the real reason the first 2 Alien films worked so well was that while you did see a lot of violence, much of it was hidden and was left up to the audiences imagination. IMO, that makes a sequence much more scary that simply seeing blood and guts flying all over the walls.

I wonder if the episode narrations ala Robotech will show up at all. Some people didn't like them, I found them interesting. Would be pretty useful too during the episodes with the post Rain of Death time gaps too.

339516[/snapback]

Oh dear God no! Please, for the love of God don't have any narration beyond what was already there in the Japanese version. A few year ago, when I was watching RT, that was one of the things that really irked me. At one point, I just wanted that narrator to shut up; it felt like he just wanted to hear himself talk.

I don't really trust ADV when it comes to english-dubbing.

Yep. Not since their Eva dub and most recently the terrible Azamanga Daoh dub. My Animeigo DVDs are backed up and intact (not counting the spare set). I'm good to go and don't need a dub of Macross this late in the game.

334947[/snapback]

Same here. The mere mention of ADV just sends shivers down my spine. And, I'm about to back up my Animeigo set. I've already changed the casings. The spindles are less hard on the DVDs.

I know that some members here will purchase the set, and I'm curious to see what the quality of the dub and video will be. And you have to wonder: will they go for another "5.1 surround soundtrack" like they did with that other show which shall remain nameless?

Not to pull this thread off topic, but are the Japanese forums experiencing similar negative feedback for the whole GSD ending, or is it a bit more civilised over there?

If Megs in Gun mode looks too realistic, it still won't get sold in the U.S. of A.

Production I.G. has no plans for a third season.

my source is from the ain'titcool.com anime weekly news, and it may be out of date. But it is the last I have heard.

327708[/snapback]

Everything I've read suggests that Production IG is not interested in a 3rd series.

I just finished watching it. Is it just me, or did the plot feel a little dragged out (about 4-5 eps too long) and did they seem to waste a lot of the ideas they seemed to be aiming for during the last 2 eps?

Also, I'm sensing a pattern here. So far, we haven't really had a GitS sequel that has really been totally satisfying (comic, movie, TV series). Is this some sort of curse?

The sets that always confused me were the mass TV show sets, for example, I saw the X Files, all 9 seasons on Ebay for about 100 bucks on the average with shipping. Its mass packed with 69-70 dvds in the set.

Nearly all the long running completed US shows have them on ebay now, Sex and the City, Buffy, etc.

Whats unclear to me is are these just direct rips from US dvds? Or these are made by some small bootleg group? Or is this bootlegging on a massive professional scale?

330292[/snapback]

To elaborate on what I was saying earlier, I will give additional info on the 2 anime series I borrowed from a friend (who thought they were legit btw). The 2 series were Trigun and Escaflowne. Both came in 3 DVD boxed sets. Both actually had the original R1 DVD menus, just modified to list more eps per disc (I know they're the actual menus since I've bought the legit versions of both these series). Both sets were printed by FX. The box artwork was first rate, the disc artwork also.

So, how to know if it's a legit release or not? I would say check out the website of the distributor/owner, whether it's Bandai, ADV, 20th Century Fox, etc. If they list the item you saw on Ebay, you're ok; if not, I would say you're looking at a bootleg.

I've noticed a trend lately on Ebay. The sellers are getting very vague about what they're selling. They don't always list the region code, just leave it blank.

Oh, and I've also seen bootlegs of some series that are direct rips of the region 1 DVDs. Often, the only way to tell legits from bootlegs is to look at the number of episodes per disc. A 26 episode series crammed into 3 dics is almost certainly a bootleg.

You can have absolutely fluid CG animation with plenty of inbetween frames, yet completely missing all these vital details. It happens a lot. Also, oftentimes you'll have CG animation that looks clumsy, as if the CG characters or robots were puppets on strings, the motion never looking quite right.

You can get around this, but it often takes as many animators as it would to do it in 2D, and since most people seem to use CG as a cost cutting tool, they're not willing to do that when most people will happily ignore the flaws and allow themselves to be wowed by the CG itself.

328632[/snapback]

The problem mostly with CG today is that it's too fluid

especially if you compare it to it's background (Mac Zero)

it simply doesn't blend in

in a 100% CG animation (FF Spirits Within, Reboot -come to mind) it's not an issue

but looking at mixed celshaded/CG images it's just horrible

329520[/snapback]

Ah, but most CG you see is really designed to be noticeable. The creators want you to know that you are looking at CG. CG is "hip" with today's "fans", and the more CG you can show, the better.

A few months ago, I had gotten really tired of the whole CG thing, and wanted to watch an anime movie with no CG at all. This lead me to watch Patlabor the Movie 1. A simple police story with animation designed to serve the story.

I don't think most of us qualify as anime fans. I would say that we are more quality entertainment fans. Sure we all like some anime, but we are always discussing any form of entertainment. I've found that the people's taste here are mostly like mine.

An example of an extreme anime fan I know: at my local comic shop, one of the clerks is always trying to get me to watch some crappy anime he's heard of or thinks that hentai is the best thing since sliced bread. Arrgghh!!

Whew! MW is back. I can finally stop shaking.

Another year of so-so movies, another year of hearing the MPAA complain that movie revenues are down again. sigh.

Seriously, are there any good movies coming out in August at all? Even July only looks so-so.

I was hoping for an explanation of the whole Yoda/Obi Wan disappearing trick when they died (it was probably one of the deleted scenes, grumble grumble).

My take on the emperor's face was that what you were seeing was only make-up and the lightning removed it and showed his true face, but this is just a fan boy's explanation.

Anaking killing those kids was in character. It showed how far he was already gone.

Anakin's scarring wasn't as dramatic as what I was expecting. I always thought that he had fallen in some lava, not helplessly burned at the side of a lava river. Oh well.

The Obi-Wan/Anakin lightsaber fight scene really was awesome. Fast paced, brutal, desperate.

On an artistic note, at the very end of the movie, Owen & Beru Lars holding Luke while the suns were rising was an interesting way to show the audience that there was indeed light at the end of the tunnel (we all knew it, but still a nice touch).

Waited in line for 6 hours in order to get a good seat (never again). Overall, a good movie, much better than the last 2. The scenes were kept short, nothing seemed to drag on. The dialogue was also much better, not as cornball as Ep 2.

Minor spoiler:

Being a John Williams fan, I loved the inclusion of the Leia theme and Luke theme at the end. It seemed to musically bridge the gag between the prequel trilogy and original trilogy.

Spare part??? I don't even want to know what part that is.

Whew! We're back. I was getting so desperate for my Macross fix, I had acturally visited RT.com. (shudders at the thought now).

It's like shaw cable wants to charge me for a faster connection, but they don't want me to use it.

Rogers has begun implememting a similar kind of "scare tactic". Their bandwith limit is set at 60Gb. While that would have been an enormous amount five years ago, today, that's nothing. It's like you say, they want you to pay extra for high speed, but only want you to websurf: yep, $45 a month, but it should only used it to make webpages load 5 seconds faster and not use it for anything else.

I've found that I've been reducing my bandwith usage since this new limit was set in place, but I think that has more to do with my fiancee paying the cable bill. I just don't want to risk her wrath.

Looks like that Clint Eastwood flick "Firefox".

I just checked mine. Discs 6,7 & 9 each have a crack, and mine aren't from the original 9 disc set, but from the 3 sets of boxed sets. I don't think this is a result of poor handling, but rather, as Opus stated, a result of second rate manufacturing. Eventually, it would seem all our sets are goint to crack in the center.