Post Revision & Anime

Post fix 1: I have finished editing (probably not for the last time) my recent piece about sophistication according to base complexity and definition. I apologize for what was originally a confusing log of the evolution of my thought process and encourage you to read the revision.

Post fix 2: I was scrolling through the list of my posts, feeling nostalgic for the time I would casually blog whatever I was thinking about from a recent experience, when I found this. I immediately realized it needs some followup, for I have seen two animes. Here's the update.

S.C. was one day watching something on YouTube which he told me was the first episode of a space-western anime. After hearing how a friend had told him about it and another one in a conversation most simply put as "stuff like Firefly," and having had a glimpse of the exposition, I decided to use my spare time to check it out.

My curiosity could not have prepared me for the experience. Trigun was fascinating enough to make me set aside my repulsion from the general style and put up with the outrageous moments of anime as I knew it; and as I watched each episode, these feelings dissolved into an appreciation for the art and an acceptance of the silliness as a quality of the characters I grew to love. This may not have happened if the show wasn't tame compared to my previous exposures to anime (the stereotypical ridiculousness was never in the form of bad drama/action), and it was certainly aided by the simple philosophical intrigue offered by the wandering protagonist.

You are introduced to a cornball but highly skilled marksman with an unknown past, hunted and feared by all for something that apparently warrants a sixty billion dollar (double dollar, technically) reward for his capture. The first episode sets the stage for a season of exploits that tease and slowly reveal who this man is, as well as where and when the show is set. Vash the Stampede is known to show up at a random town and obliterate the entire place; but in this trail of destruction people forget the absurd fact that nobody ever dies. Following him around, you quickly see that he is not the monster everyone thinks he is. He foils the wicked, escapes the impossible, and helps everybody to a childlike extreme without his name passing as more than a rumor.

But what starts off simple and lighthearted becomes deep and mysterious as Vash's past hunts him down better than any bounty hunter. Through most of the season, revelations are given in the form of things to question, and everything is woven together by the end with extremely well-written flashbacks of things you had and hadn't seen before. The philosophical (and even theological!) spikes in an enormous sci-fi tale told from the crux backwards as Vash moves forwards. I was amazed.

And I eagerly turned to Cowboy Bebop, the counterpart among fans, which is more like Firefly than Trigun. I no longer had to take anime quirks in stride because this show steered clear of them. The art outdid itself, and the content was all over the place and awesome all the way.

Spike Spiegel and company are bounty hunters ("cowboys") trying to snag a living in outer space, shooting to bring in the wanted but usually ending up involved in much more than they intended. Typically they set things straight and honest where they would not have considered it their business and come up shorthanded where they insist it matters; they're like a small gang of Han Solos.

The show at large follows the various misadventures of this bunch; but while there is little of a unifying plot, the world is pleasantly knitted together. The writers achieve a delicate presentation that gives pieces of a whole without overtly assembling them. One scenario will provide information that another references for different reasons, and both treat it like common knowledge. The characters know the whole so you can take it for granted, and this works wonderfully.

Such coherence makes way for the complex crossing of paths between the characters as each makes a personal journey reconciling their past with their future. The true beauty of Cowboy Bebop is this collective dynamic, this band of friends traveling different roads through an evolving fellowship with each other. It masterfully portrays the joint individuality and universality of human life while exploring countless topics and situations.

(The show's one failing is how explicit the content can be at times. On top of the language and rather bloody shootouts, it very bluntly portrays a decadent culture that could be implied without showing some guy's collection of erotica plastered on the wall, bursting in on a pair of gays when trying to track down their crime boss, etc. This kind of thing varies from the odd camera angle to what is essentially a brief topless shot for plot purposes. View with discretion; if you can see Firefly, you can watch this.)

So, as always, the stereotypical conceals unique excellence. I am not specifically an anime fan, but two of the best TV shows I have seen are anime. Somebody told me these came from the golden age of anime and most programs these days are garbage; considering the decline I have witnessed in American kids' shows and cartoons, I believe it.

A new year's notice--

Well, now that I'm finally back on my blog, I have a lot to say, most of which I've forgotten, unfortunately. But I do have some good and important news: I finally managed to transfer this blog to the e-mail address I desire. It was a very weird process; nothing happened the way it should have. Since the author invitation approach didn't work, I exported the blog and imported it on my other account, and found that both accounts were listed as authors, despite the fact that it was registered as a different blog. In fact, the account I'd been using suddenly was the author of two blogs. Anyway, despite all of the anxiety and precautions throughout the ordeal, it proved to be a simple and harmless task to delete the first account and blog entirely, leaving these in their places. No posts were lost in the process, and all of the settings were carried over. The only items that had to be reconstructed were the Tome of Randomness, the poll, and the pictures, which I hopefully restored to their original states (except for the poll, which I threw out since it had no voting history). Oh, and my profile has only 8 views...

Now, the greatest importance of this:

This blog's address is now ahspensieve.blogspot.com -- The old address could not be reused.

So, Happy New Year, and I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate). I'm off to bed.

Spiff Hack Update

Being the end of the week, I've had time to continue (resume?) working on my hack of Solar Jetman. I figured I'd announce where I am and where I'm going at this point.

Changing the graphics of the pod is proving to be a slow and difficult process. The pod turns 360 degrees while corkscrewing so that you see the top when it faces up and you see the bottom when it faces down. This makes everything in between hard to draw and smoothly connect, especially since Spiff's ship is a saucer and I have to work with a solid red unless I decide to take extra liberties.

Since graphics work was tiring, I decided to look for a utility for overall level editing; I found none. In order to change the level layouts, types and positions of enemies and items, what makes you go where, and so forth, I need an editor. These kinds of things are rocket science to change via raw coding, and if one knows enough to do so, they might as well create a utility to make it easier. Rather than devote my entire computer life to such a thing, I'm going to wait, and possibly ask, for such a program to be made by a ROM hacking veteran. Unfortunately, this could place restraints on what I do until such ability comes into my hands, as I won't be able to fit planet names with planet environments and such all at once. In fact, if I finish this hack in every other way, it may remain a visual hack only, depending on my interest to come back and rework the level designs once I possess the requirements to do so.

So what can I change right now besides graphics? Text. Text hacking is a category unto itself due to how it is stored in a ROM. There are graphical tiles for each letter and number, and the game uses strings of hex numbers in which one number translates to one tile. This makes the hacking a matter of locating the hex strings that represent text. But how is this done, and how do you know what number corresponds to which letter? I viewed this as a complicated problem in the past; in fact, this is the first time I've done it. I once again (I had tried once before) read a tutorial on the procedure, and since I could not get the recommended DOS hex editor (Hexposure) to work properly on the computer, attempted it with the editor I have, differently though it works.

A table file, containing the key for hex and text, is needed to locate and change the right data. Since none existed for Solar Jetman, I had to make my own (I believe this is where I said "forget it" in the past, since Hexposure wasn't cooperating and I didn't know how to use the Zelda table I found with my favored editor). Opening the ROM in a debug emulator, I called up the tile viewer, found the text tiles, and wrote down their hex values in Notepad. After saving the key as a ".tbl" file, I opened it in my hex editor along with the ROM. All the hex numbers in the ROM were displayed on one side and, thanks to the table, the corresponding numbers and letters (where applicable) on the other.

A given hex number may appear several times in the data, and an editor will show it as a text graphic wherever it crops up, regardless of whether it is text or not. Finding the actual text was the easy part, though. I just had to scroll through the data until I found actual words from the game. Then all that had to be done was change the hex numbers so they made the text I wanted.

However, Solar Jetman had a catch. Each planet's name was missing the last letter in the editor, with one untranslated hex number in its place before the text for the next planet. I had to tinker with this on my own in order to figure out how to deal with it. Experimenting with planet 2, I first tried replacing the untranslated number with the hex for "D;" but when I opened the game I found that "2 MEXOMORF" (the F was missing in the editor) had become "2 MEXOMORD3 OMEBRU." The text had been squished together with planet 3's. I could draw two conclusions from this: the unrecognized hex contained the missing letter, and it also served as a sort of break or finisher, ending the line of text. I made certain of this by replacing the number in between planets 1 and 2 with the one in between planets 2 and 3. Sure enough, this made "1 PRELUDON" say "1 PRELUDOF." At this point I began to jot down the values for these "letters and breaks" in my table file, and suddenly noticed that if I filled in the rest of the letters of the alphabet that the game's planets didn't use, I would have sequential hex for every letter followed by one of those breaks. The last question, then, was whether or not I could use the resulting table to end a planet's name with a letter that the game never did. I tried it, and it worked!

I am very pleased with this accomplishment; maybe I'll be a great ROM hacker yet.

Problems Already!?

As soon as I get my blog up and running, I start having problems. Oh, everything's all right, but it is incredibly frustrating to try to transfer a newly created blog to my other account address, only to find that something is just not working. So either my other address will get the invite eventually, or I will just have an inactive second author on my settings list for eternity.

The Blogging Has Begun!

All right, I've finally joined The Harangued Internet Negotiations Group (T.H.I.N.G.), otherwise known as the blogosphere. I hereby somewhat dedicate this blog to my thoughts on videogames, Calvin and Hobbes, and the fact that I have so many other ideas that swirl through my conciousness that I either need a legilimens or a blog to get them out to other people and avoid the problem of forgetting what I wanted to tell someone when they come home from college. So, here's to all the unknown geniuses who live life trying to remain in God's grace, and just wing everything else as it comes ... like me. Cheers, good luck, and make sure you have enough experience to defeat that final boss!