Holizz versus the Web

I just managed to watch Steamboy. Managed because I’ve had it for a few months and I’ve only just gotten to making it work. I might not have bothered to get mplayer set-up right if it wasn’t for xine suddenly forgetting how to use its codecs.

First I turned fullscreen on (it was drawing a normal window and hoping ratpoison would respect its requests to resize it - ha!), which kept the aspect ratio from breaking. Next I set up the subtitles to use a nice font (I chose Mona; a nice font with Japanese characters) at a nice size with antialiasing and gausian blur (a pleasure after xine’s default unaliased miniature text). The audio was a little tricky, and it’s not completely fixed (unless the film was encoded poorly). I set the output to SDL, with an autosync of 30 (whatever that does) and it seemed to fix the skipping.

The film itself was rather good. It’s steampunk which is one of my favourite genres. It’s also by the director of Akira. Best of all, it featured lots of steam-powered machines including walkers and power armour. The film’s set in England (London mostly) and the subs were not only in British English, but also featured appropriately archaic language.

• The May Day Carnival was fun. It wasn’t super-fantastic fun like nethack, but it was enjoyable.
• I loved the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica so much (2×10) and I’m eagerly anticipating the next two episodes.
• Japanese is still going well.
• Archery still isn’t.
• Jujutsu is going.
• I’ve been watching Buffy season four lately. Of the few homosexual relationships I’ve seen on TV, Willow and Tara’s is probably my favourite. I’m loving re-watching it. I love Tara; she’s so shy.
• And I disabled comments. Far too much spam.
• Good night.