Via SlashDot comes a story about a company in the UK called StreamBurst that is experimenting with DRMless video distribution. I’ve often thought about the way that an “advisory” DRM alternative could work, but the simplicity and beauty of the StreamBurst system strikes me as incredible.

StreamBurst currently doesn’t have any anime available (not surprising, they haven’t been around very long at all), but this system, or something like it, strikes me as THE way to go for video distribution, and I’ll be surprised if it isn’t used for anime sooner or later. I’ve done a bit (just a bit) of reading about Steganography, and I’m quite aware of its limitations (most techniques for watermarking images can be trivially defeated); nonetheless, no other system that I’m aware of so clearly indicated “ownership” of a file, both in terms of copyright and the person that purchases a copy, without fundamentally altering what can be done with the file. This is, quite simply, great.

Just saw this ad on ANN as I was searching for something. Wow…

Oh my, what is this anime rated again? O_O

(May contain mild spoilers if you haven’t watched the previous volumes)

It’s been a while since I watched Elemental Gelade 3, and I’m glad there’s a summary of “what just happened” at the beginning. As we see

Ren on the train and Cou running, there’s some nice dramatic music in the background. This episode has the Edel Hunter from earlier in it,

who we learn is a combination of abusive husband, neo-nazi, and world’s worst boss. Oh, and he’s a jerk, but he learns an important lesson. My prediction: he’ll be back before the end (duh).

In the second episode, Ren arrives at a town where every single building has a single point of failure that will cause it to collapse. The name of the episode is “The Village With the Large Windmill” but I personally think “Bad Engineeringstan” would have been a better name for both episode and location. The village also has a single point of failure, in that someone made the villiage build a giant wall in
front of a windmill, and now everyone upset because they don’t have any water any more, which the windmill used to pump out of the ground.

There’s some nice music here to, and the poetry is a nice touch too. Also, the characters are now driving around in an RV. I can’t say I remember any other anime where the characters travel by RV, but it actually makes sense if you think about it.

The next episode is on a cruise ship that looks incredibly ugly. Cou’s infected with a toxin that controls his mind, or something. There’s
some mind games and mystery, but the situation is actually pretty straightforward.

The last episode on the disk introduces a new character. I’ve noticed a very subtle but symbolic change in the opening – see if you can catch it too when your watching this one. The extras say that this is actually the third version of the opening, so I’m curious what difference between the second and the first is. Cou meets a fan who asks for his autograph on a wanted poster (he is sky pirate, after all). There’s a huge surprise at the end of this episode. There was a bit of a spell where Elemental Gelade was
starting to strike me as somewhat puerile, but the the final episode has convinced me once again of the series’ artistic value. DO NOT WATCH the next episode preview at the end of this disc. It seems to contain a terrible spoiler.

I got a copy of Negima 101 from the library, and, if you ever need an unusual “stock character” that also just happens to be a teen girl, for, say, an RPG session, you should look no further, as ghosts, vampires, robots, martial artists, and other oddballs abound in Negima.

Before I started watching this, I was told that it was “unwatchable.” I’m forced to admit that it’s probably an acquired taste that won’t appeal to all anime fans, and probably won’t appeal to anime non-fans at all. Teen girls in echhi situations with a pre-teen boy will probably raise a few eyebrows; a quick glance online shows that this aspect of the work is controversial, to say the least.

Well, the show is silly, and maybe even a bit questionable, but I like it. It’s just too weird not to like. The premise is that a young wizard from Wales comes to an all-girls school in Japan to teach English.

Also, I can’t believe:

• Greg Ayers is really the voice of Negi. No, really, he sounds absolutely nothing like himself in this.
• I’d ever see another anime that has someone riding a horse through a school without the other characters batting an eye after Cromartie, but, yep, Negima has that too.

Recently, the economist David D. Friedman asked about fiction with an economic theme in his blog. The lack of any significant plot points about economics and the simple flat-price shop system in Final Fantasy XII would make it a really poor choice to nominate as an “economic game” there. However, I can’t help but think that someone inside Squenix had the idea of the perils of central control of the economy in mind when they came up with the concept for the city of Bjhurba.

First of all, a little background. I’m about 20 hours into the game, which is only a small fraction of the way through the plot, and just arrived at the Garrif village. Bhujerba is a floating city – it’s literally on flying rock in the sky. While most of its neighbors have fallen under the control of the Arcadian Empire, Bhujerba maintains a fairly strong independent government in the form of Marquis Ondore. The Marquis is related to the royal house of Rabanastre, which the party is trying to restore. Since it’s on flying rock, there is no significant agriculture in Rabinastre; food and other supplies are mostly imported.

Except for the fact that Bhujerba defies gravity, nothing that I’ve mentioned above is based on fantasy so much that you couldn’t have a city like that in real life. City rule based on nepotism? Not at all unimaginable. A unified political area with limited land and natural resources? Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all fit this description. Massive military and economic empires with rivalries? That’s the history of the previous century in a nutshell.

So, if you were the Marquis of Bhujerba, how would you organize its economy? A modern, enlightened ruler would recognize that the marketplace organizes itself through price signals given a reasonable legal framework, but Marquis Ondore is old-school central planning. Out of necessity, of course, things in Bhujerba are mostly imported from elsewhere. What’s entirely unnecessary is the way in which these imports are paid for. While a market economy would be inclined to naturally diversify its exports, the exports of Bhujerba consists of magicite mined from the land.

As one NPC points out, the magicite is what keeps Bhujerba airborne. As the ruler of a flying island, I would look harder for a way to make money without bringing my little fiefdom to the ground. Flying islands of the size of Bhujerba not being all that common in Ivalice, the world of Final Fantasy XII, it wouldn’t be very difficult to find something else to contribute to the GDP of the Bhujerban city-state: it’s a thriving tourist location, with a historic palace, scenic viewing area, and the rough equivalent of a major airport. It apparently has enough tourists that Marquis Ondore pays for a free guide on every street corner (some of these are actually spies, but no matter). Most of the businesses in Bhujerba operate “under royal charter,” but a handful do not. There seems to be no signicant difference between the classes of shops.

This arrangement is unsurprising not very robust. When Marquis Ondore leaves Bhujerba in order to stir up support for a anti-imperial resistance, the mines are dormant. The miners want to mine, but they can’t because the mines are filled with monsters. There are bodyguards for the miners that can get rid of the monsters, but they aren’t working because… Ondore isn’t there! So, the unbalanced economy of Bhujerba has basically come to a halt without its leader.

A friend, Scott, says that I’m wrong both to claim that Bhujerba has a communistic government, and to claim that Bhujerba has a centrally planned governments. In particular, he says that Bhujerba is more akin to the company towns of ages past, and less like, say, the Soviet Union, because the ideology of Bhujerba is to benefit Ondore himself rather than The People. Except, of course, that the (real) tour guides are clearly not present for Ondore’s personal benefit. Nor are the mining guards (he could tell the miners to fight the monsters themselves, after all). The people in Bhujerba seem like to like Ondore. Additionally, while the central planning of Bhujerba is not complete and absolute, its clear that Ondore has an extreme level of influence on all aspect of the island’s economy.