The Continuing Saga of our Studio Amp Electrolytics

We previously covered building a great sounding Studio Amplifier from very affordable modules from eBay. We also covered the poor quality of the Electrolytic capacitors from China, despite what brand they may have on them.

Opening up the Amplifier again today shows that all of the Chinese supplied capacitors are failing, and the single good nichinon I replaced the worst one with last time is fine.

So we are ordering more nichinon  10,000uF 50V capacitors and will replaced the bulging ones when they come in from RS-Components.

Digital Manga and Comixology

Have known about Comixology comic app and store for a long time, but only installed and used it for the first time last week.  Have been a Kindle fan for novels many years now, but not being a hard core Comic fan meant it hadn't been relevant.

I needed it to check out Andy Clift's self published Captain Cosmic , and to get the 2017 Valerian Shougouzo inc . The show runner for Dark Matter recommended the Silver Age styled Captain Cosmic and had gotten Andy to do some comic Dark Matter illustrations for a possible Dark Matter comic book to follow on from the 3 TV seasons.  I now know Comixology does have stuff for me.

When I was in Japan in May 2018, it seems that half the young people riding on the train were reading Manga on their phones. Don't know what App or site they were using, but it seems to be everywhere. Saw the same manga on a phone in Sydney on the train last week.  The typical very small page size of a black and white manga translates to a small phone screen without much trouble. The text is not too small to see relative to the page size.   An American comic is more trouble with the larger page, and a European Album (like Valerian) is not actually readable on a phone. 

Maybe the manga format works better as it is also more about what the characters are feeling rather than what they are doing? Maybe.

I used Comixology on a 10" Samsung Tab3.  I prefer to use it in landscape mode and have the page expended to fit that width, so I can read the text.  Perfect Viewer for my own CBR files works ok that way too. 

But Comixology has an extra mode, where instead of showing the whole page, it will pan and zoom each panel to be full screen when you tap the screen to go to the next panel.

This makes reading much easier for me.  But I wonder how that impacts people that are really into traditional comics, where the panel relationships and relative sizes are significant?   All panels may as well be all the same size if this is they way they are being read, which would seem to impact the culture of the comic book. Except, it does animate the zooming of your eye on the page, so you don't loose the panels layout.  Interesting.

Both Captain Cosmic , and  Valerian Shougouzo inc  are complete standalone stories.  I have to say that Valerian is more to my taste and carries on what I think comics do very well.

Depending on what the art in a book is, having the paper version can be far better. But when space is a problem, the digital approach is a winner, very portable, and saves travelling to a store with limited lines anyway.

My own 3 Terraform Stories can be read for free online here.

A Movie Poster...

... in this case it is a Movie Poster for a Comic Series, our Terraform.

But how about this?

Or maybe this?

Always thought Poster and Album art was very cool.  But in the world of Streaming, that has had a great impact on these art forms.

A vinyl album was a large package where photos and art were to be seen and in all subsequent media the photos and art have gotten small and smaller.  There is much less to look at and probably isn't the influence on how you felt about an artist any more. You may follow their Twitter feed instead.

Well we are on twitter too: @megacurve

The "but he is famous" Factor

Miyazaki Hayao is known for hugely popular films from Studio Ghibli such as Totoro. A very talented artist and director.

What probably isn’t so widely known are his one man water color manga that were published as a few pages in the  monthly Japanese plastic model magazine Model Graphix. These were on his pet subjects focused on WW1 era plane, tank and ship technology and the characters accompanying these were usually pig people.
The right side of the above image is a 1920 Italian double tri-plane seaplane design in his hobby manga of "The Wind Rises" publised this way.

They have since been collected and published as 2 stand alone books.
I bought the first one with the tanks and what not over 20 years ago, and the other at a Studio Ghibli Exhibition at the Hyogo Prefecture Art Museum last week.

They are roughly drawn and hand lettered in pencil and usually have some educational aspect relaying technical details of the devices. Can have a fantasy element incorporated as well as the pig men.

I have done some similar cartoons over the years, but have mostly kept them to myself. I have a few videos on my YouTube Channel with some of this content that haven't received many views either.

I have a feeling that these other Miyazaki works were published because of his existing reputation and the overlap with the modellers subjects, and not on the merits of these works themselves.

"The Wind Rises" movie was his love letter to the Zero and its designer and is an expanded version of the hobby manga. It was still in a similar vein to the other Model Graphix manga....

I guess he has earned the right to do what he wants and have people let him do it.

Wouldn't it be great if everyone was given the same opportunities!

Living In Japan...

I lived in Japan for almost 15 years from 1987 till 2001.  I've now lived in Australia for 18 years, so quite some time has passed. It does put a different perspective on it all.

If you google "Living in Japan" you will mostly find articles from young single Americans who went there as an English teacher for a company like NOVA.  And that probably impacts how they are seen and expected to behave when there.

I went as an Electronics Engineer who had already done something quite famous, the Fairlight Instruments CMI II and Series III.  I also had a Japanese wife and a young son, that meant I didn't need to be looked after the same way by the company.  I also went to work for The Roland Corporation in Hamamatsu Japan, an electronic musical instrument company. The field I was already in.  Roland was also the company that's gear I personally bought and used and always considered them to have a great ability to come up with mostly the right thing at a great price. What I wanted to be involved with.

I also went when Japan was on a roll and doing great, a year or so before Australia fell into a economic hole, so I was in the right place and the right time.

Others will talk about discrimination, but you get both positive and negative treatment because of not being Japanese.   It isn't all bad at all.

Canadians and Australians probably have an easier time with Japanese culture than Americans, just due to their own cultural upbringing.   We all bring good and bad baggage to the gig.

I could go on at length with many anecdotes,   but I will keep this short.

There was an economic decline in Japan over the time I was there, that made some people in the company become less agreeable to the extent I decided I needed to leave the company.  I didn't actually want to leave Japan though.  Ended up that just being the easiest solution with a family to come back to Australia. Made my kids learn to speak English, and see another side of life.

Coming back to Australia after all those years makes you see where you are from in a completely different light too.  I mean was service of any kind always so poor?  Why don't stores actually carry anything I want?  Nobody turns up on time! You mean nobody here does any electronics and software development, or practically any other field, now?

We are now on the Australian NBN so our Internet now fails about once an hour for 5 minutes, as does the telephone.  And the complaints about the system are breaking records.  A pity that isn't fixing it though.  THAT wouldn't happen in Japan!

In Japan, in everything there was always an air of "I will do my best".  I really miss that, but it is also a source of pressure on everyone.

So working in a Japanese company isn't easy. People have died of over work, and there are new laws being introduced in 2018 in an attempt to reduce these deaths and wrecked families.  But it completely opened up my work life with the yearly overseas conference and other business trips I was involved with.  There was real career development for me.

General life in Japan is very good, it is the corporate side that makes it tough.

If I was someone that loved sailing or went to the beach and surfing, then Japan wouldn't be the place for me at all. I am not that person though.

If I didn't have to work other than do my own freelance illustration thing anymore would I live in Japan? Yes!  I was in Japan when I got my first freelance gig, and the Internet has just made all that even easier over the years.

Maybe more at some other time...