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Month: December 2023

Otaku no Video – anime culture of the 80’s

Otaku no Video – anime culture of the 80’s

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Otaku no Video is a cult classic that every classic anime fan should see. It was partially based in the personal life of the original creators of Gainax, who started their careers as otaku during the late seventies and the beginning of the eighties. Anime was in its infancy. Anime was a very niche and tiny subculture – largely unknown to most people and considered a very nerdy past time.

The 80’s and 90’s were definitely the wild west days. Just about anything went and there was everything from animation, manga, garage kit models, costumes, military enthusiasts, martial art fans, and just about any other activity and product you can think of. Anime houses developed tons of these kinds of materials and products to see what would become a hit, and which would fall flat. It was an exciting era of great highs and tragic lows.

This is where Otaku no Video shines. It captures the rag-tag glory of those days. It does this brilliantly through the main character – a regular guy named Ken Kubo who is socially active, plays tennis, practices martial arts, has a girlfriend, has good career prospects, and is an all around ‘normal’ guy. He runs into his former friend Tanaka who is into animation along with some other odd characters. Ken gets sucked in and becomes less and less ‘normal’ and more infatuated with becoming the ‘King of Otaku’. In his quest to become the king of otaku, we watch him develop his garage company into something bigger by producing all kinds of new characters and products – all of which were things anyone of that era would recognize. Through the narrative format of following his journey, you get to see the insiders view of the business environment and working with those passionate coworkers.

Otaku no Video references TONS of culture of the time. The people, themes, and references were almost directedly related to anime culture and developments of the time. For those who found anime in the 80’s and 90’s, it gave an industry insider view into these events. Everyone at the time would have known just about every event that happens.

Recently I learned a few new things. One of the themes I picked up on related to the character Ken Kubo creates with his company: Misty May. It turns out, that too was related to a trend of the time: the incredible spinoff madness of magical girl shows started by Minky Momo. These deals created huge franchises that resulted in albums, merchandising deals, spinoff series, manga, garage and model kits, video games, fan creations, and just about anything else you can image. They were cash cows, and every studio wanted to try their hand at them.

So, it’s no wonder Ken’s company tries to do the same with their character Misty May. In fact, Misty May (above) bears a striking resemblance to Magical Emi – one of the many actual Minky Momo spinoffs:

This video by Kenny Lauderdale (who has some amazing coverage of early anime in his videos) gives some great insight on the madness and money behind the magical girl franchises at the time, which can help you understand what it is comically plausible that they launch a theme park in Otaku no Video.

Definitely give Otaku no Video a try if you want to see what anime culture was like in the 80’s and early 90’s before it became mainstream. Also check out some other videos by Kenny Lauderdale to learn more about the era as well.

AI beat the old labyrinth marble game world record in just 6 hours

AI beat the old labyrinth marble game world record in just 6 hours

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I bet a lot of you played this marble game when you were younger. The labyrinth marble game was developed by BRIO in Sweden in 1946. It was introduced to the United States around 1950. While many take hours to get good at it, the world record (with video proof on the site) is held by Lars-Göran Danielsson at 15.95 seconds.

But an AI called Cyberrunner, which was connected to the marble labyrinth with a camera and servos, trained for just 6 hours and managed to finish with a new world record of 14.48 seconds – almost 10% faster than the current record. During it’s learning, it even discovered cheats to cut the maze (though the new record was set without using any of those illegal shortcuts).

Read more about Cyberrunner at their project site, read the technical paper, and the source/hardware are about to be open-sourced. Or you can watch it below:

Bill Evans – Blue in Green

Bill Evans – Blue in Green

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Bill Evans is considered one of the best jazz piano players that ever lived. He created a whole host of new jazz piano forms and methods, but Blue in Green has to be one of my favorites.

Written in 1959, he later performed it on the Mile’s Davis album Kind of Blue. Miles largely took credit for the song on Kind of Blue and wasn’t exactly cool about it, but it is largely understood that Bill was the genius behind the melody.

Evans had a troubled history with drug use, disease, and personal loss, yet created some of the most beautiful music in jazz. Give Blue in Green a listen.

A good example of a Portland activist

A good example of a Portland activist

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Want to know what ‘progressive’ activists are like in Portland? Here’s an interview with one: Adam Egelman.

Adam Egelman of Safe Street Rebel is referred to as leader of “a new breed of tactical urbanism that has sprung up across the U.S. and is transforming city streets without the permission of city governments.” “Direct action gets the goods,” reads the title of a panel Egelman participated in. The group participates in confrontation and illegally blocking and modifying roads without working with city transportation permission. One of the activities they were involved in was disabling self-driving cars in San Francisco with traffic cones.

Other quotes:

“Safe Street Rebel is explicitly anti-police.”

“We say ‘bullying works.’ “

“It can be tense with…people who favor car access, or, you know, [people that] oppose safe streets”

I have a serious problem with people like Egelman. They like to break the rules when it suits them, then go running to the cops when it doesn’t go their way. The behavior is designed to silence other voices, and…well…as he says: bully people. This works great when others follow the rules – but as we’re seeing right now in our country – it creates an environment in which ‘might makes right’ and rules and laws are just for chumps. His kind of thinking is how we descend into violent chaos.

Radicals like Egelman encourage others to see following laws and rules as pointless. If people see that you can do whatever you want, then they’ll start doing the same. His kind of thinking is common for extremist of both left and right groups such as the Proud Boys.

Bullying is an act of violence and behavior that unquestioningly harms individuals, harms communities, harms cities, and harms society. We don’t accept bullies at schools. Nobody likes working with bullies. Bullies destroy the best ideas coming out. Bullies don’t listen to others – they silence dissenting voices. We should stand up against bullies and for those oppressed by bullying.

It’s an incredibly arrogant stance to think your opinion is far more important than scientific evidence, community discussion. It’s a profoundly damaging thing for social structure as a whole. It teaches people to ‘do whatever you want’.

It’s the classic ego trap common with activists. Activists that often act more like cults than intelligent civic leaders.

Laurindo Almeida plays One Note Samba

Laurindo Almeida plays One Note Samba

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I think some of the best jazz of all time was created during the 50-60’s. Laurindo Almeida playing the One Note Samba with the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1964 is such an example along with greats like the Dave Brubeck quartet and Bill Evans.

Give it a listen.

Computational Lithography

Computational Lithography

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Optical lithography hit an interesting point in the 1990’s. Once circuit paths shrank to 180nm, we hit the physical limits of what the light wavelength and the optics in the lithography system could imprint on the silicon. You simply could not print silicon circuits any smaller. This was a huge problem for chip companies.

What some clever researchers did was come up with a way to bend these limits. Circuits are printed on silicon using a mask that creates shadows where circuit lines should be, and allows UV light to mark the areas that should be cut away. What they discovered is they would modify the circuit images by adding little ‘corrections’ to the circuit paths. These corrections would cause optical interference patterns that would actually generate the smaller features in the silicon. They started with simple ‘dog ears’ at the ends of circuits. As the features got smaller and smaller, the optical tricks they used got more and more complex.

This image below shows you an example. Each of these 5 lithography pictures generates the same circuit ‘plus sign’ on the left marked ‘no correction’. However, the ones to the right are able to do so at tremendously smaller circuit sizes. The image on the far right, ILT, can only be generated using complex mathematical models that work backwards from the desired final circuit image to the mask that must be put into the lithography machine to generate it. This, however, takes a lot of compute power.

Fast forward to today, and nVidia has released GPU optimized software to compute lithography patterns. Not only that, but they released the software called cuLitho. Using GPU’s, they claim it is 40x faster and uses 1/9 the power of traditional methods to calculate the computed lithography masks

Top 10 Airports in the US

Top 10 Airports in the US

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How do domestic airports rank? This year, my Midwest home of Indianapolis gets some love as the #2 airport in the US.

  1. Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport
  2. Indianapolis International Airport
  3. Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport
  4. Palm Beach International Airport
  5. Tampa International Airport
  6. Hartford Bradley International Airport 
  7. Minneapolis St. Paul
  8. Long Beach Airport
  9. Portland (Oregon) International Airport
  10. Detroit Metropolitan Airport

Sadly, Portland falls to #9 after having lead the list in years past, but things haven’t been very good at Portland airport in the last few years. We had protesters/counter-protesters assault each other a few times, and then of course a recent woman that fired a few shots at the airport.

360 VR experiences – black holes

360 VR experiences – black holes

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ScienceClic English created this 360 experience of approaching and falling into a black hole. You can move your camera around and see in all directions. This is interesting because it’s a different take on some of the older ideas of what would happen if you fall into a black hole.

If you want to know what you’re seeing, here’s an explanation of what’s going on in this video and what the different visual phenomenon are caused by.

Reading 50 year old rope core memory

Reading 50 year old rope core memory

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Mike Steward decided to recover the original Apollo guidance computer programs that landed man on the Moon in the 1960’s. Unfortunately some of them seem to have been lost to history.

It turns out, chunks of the original hardware still exist – such as the rope core memory which contained the programs. The next question is, how do you read these programs off 50 year old rope core memory hardware? This video below tells you how he did it!

He even wrote a web app that simulates how core memory works. We do a decent job recording history’s events, but I think it’s extremely cool that this kind of historical technical information is not being lost to the ages.

You can also check out the many other videos about the Apollo guidance computer in the other parts of his videos – or a previous article which has a super-awesome description of how Apollo computers work by Robert Wills.