Tag: melative

WorldCat: This is Possibly Awesome

Posted by Ryan A - October 4, 08

WorldCat

I came back to WorldCat earlier this evening as I was browsing wikipedia’s info on the A Certain Magical Index light novels, which haven’t had a translation project yet. I peeped the premier and am hoping the adaptation will stimulate a translation project somewhere.

I’ve seen WC before but it still intrigues me. The organization began in 2001 I’m guessing so it is decently matured, but glancing around it is quite clean. I love it. The simple notion of synchronizing the world’s libraries so one may find almost any sort of information locally is quite stunning. If only I could find direction as such to aim melative.

Some of the interesting features include custom lists, reviews, and tagging. Sure it isn’t feature dense, but its clean, and more importantly they have indexed over 1 billion items. I’m going to think of a nice way to integrate WorldCat into melative, perhaps with the list feature. I’m not sure about reviews, but most definitely WorldCat.org will become a standard resource* for all media, just as wikipedia.org is.

The problem with hard reviews would be that WorldCat’s titles represent physical objects. Where melative, like wikipedia, represents the metaphysical residue of a title; a single title is not split into DVD volumes (ie).

Anyway, I hope the site may come of use to others in the blogosphere.

note: A “standard resource” is simple a site which indexed much of the same media form (eg MAL, AniDB, ANN, Manga Updates etc) These are used on melative as a placeholder to more complete information on a title.

Daily Amends

Posted by Ryan A - August 15, 08

I develop melative, it’s going alright. For a “general use” media catalog (not really the purpose), similar to AniDB and MAL, but for everything, it works quite nicely. Here is a recent shot.

More…

Weekend Rolling

Posted by Ryan A - August 8, 08

This is one of the “general” update posts, but not Mizunashi.

First on the agenda has to be the season. I dropped off in Spring (freeking birthdays!), but randomly wound up in Summer. The short list:

Eve no Jikan
Sweet animation, reflection here.
Xam’d
Awesome BONES ordeal, saw Extrange posting on this one, and went okay. [reflections]
Yakushiji Ryoko no Kaiki Jikenbo
Can’t resit the character design and mixture of eccentricity. [reflections]
Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu
Uber sweet, basically makes we want to hurl, but I’ll go for masochism. [reflections]
Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto: Natsu no Sora
[not yet dipped]
Koihime†Musō
[not yet dipped]

So that’s the anime slice.

Other rambling

Right, well, melative continues to progress through it’s unknown tao, and I’ve posted a couple updates on the blog, which may be interesting or useful to gage what/where it is going. The *wish* feature works well, btw, and I thoroughly tested it with the FF extension API front-end, placing some 300+ wishes in a matter of minutes (looks like this in the end). It really just serves as a more intricate way to interact with media titles, that’s all (melative doesn’t care about how many episodes a series has, but the experience); basically it is a small way to compete with AniDB, which has that file-logging functionality.

Also on the site, I wound up pushing a few light novels into the database. I’m looking at the lists of 4000 anime+manga, but don’t know if I want to push it all in. Then there’s music and movies, bleh. So much media….

Anyway, it’s sports time. Olymipics 2008 are amped!

Ryan A

Micro-Blogging Revisited

Posted by Ryan A - June 2, 08

I took the time and signed up for Twitter, after learning about it sometime in Autumn 2006. I’ll just say, MAL “microblogging” is not, even melative “reflections” are not (though pushing towards the lightweight implementation and availability). These lack the interfacing and simplicity, and that thing of time-saving. Truthfully, “Notepadding” is closer to microblogging, but it isn’t social.

Here is a presentation by Jyri Engestrom, and I ask where do anime blogs stand in this social currency market, because blogs are quite the slow and time-consuming bag. Mind you, this is not new stuff, but Jyri makes a good point about “value” and while the steam of the otakusphere is “the current, the hot, the seasonal”, a couple months later it just doesn’t matter (editorials rule the time! glad to see more of these in recent months!!).

So what we have are blogs that just don’t stand, are continually “hot” and updated, but it’s being done in a very tedious way. It’s gotta be the mobile ease, and probably my stimulation here is my lack of leisure computer-time in the past few weeks to realize that the mobile connection works even being away from “home” half the time (adventure always calls, usually nature).

Efficiency and effectiveness will find a way :) and I’ve found sitting on a computer looking at the RSS feeds just isn’t that effective, because eventually time explodes and I just won’t be on the computer very often.

Ryan A

btw: relevant film reflection, Cafe Lumiere, see it. [reflection]

In light of melative, Rating

Posted by Ryan A - May 7, 08

I was lead into a post over at Meaty Anime Blog recently, initially by the basis (Ouran and Towards the Terra), but something was stated:

…it’s the twelfth top rated show on MyAnimeList. Not that the last point means anything,…

This may or may not be out of context, since I cannot attest the same reasoning for the statement, but it has implications… ratings are flawed. And no, this isn’t a MyAnimeList-only problem (see how many 10s are given to popular movies on IMDB, ie Rush Hour 3).

What we have is an arbitrary rating system with a limited-number scale. In other words, I can arbitrarily rate multiple items 10/10 as much as I want…. but does this mean they are equivalent? Definitely not. Perhaps we should increase the arbitrary scale, as AniDB does with enhancement scripts (test that thing for steroids!), from 10 to 1000, does that make it better? Probably, but it also increases the level of “pain-in-the-ass”. Do I sound tempered?

This does not irritate me, because I don’t have to use it if I choose, though I would like to see accurate ratings, and so I come to the point, melative. (I know, I’m a broken record, shoot me for being my own fanboy… jkwut or just jk?)

The general idea: Relativity

melative.com has an embedded RRS (Relative Rating System), a premise which has held with me for a few years now (apparently there is a book that has a similar notion called slicing, I don’t know that the book is titled though). The idea is extremely simple, but it can work on the large scale, via recursion. Let’s do an example:

I have 2 media, A and B, let them be on the same “tier” or “level”. In this state they are equivalent, I feel they are equally great. If I feel A is greater than B, I place it on the next level up, or if I feel B is less impressive than A, I place B a level down. Effectively, I have rated A and B relative to each other, clean, concise, simple.

Rinse and Repeat

When dealing with a large list of titles, this may seem like hell, but it always uses the base… A=B, A>B, or A<B; there are only 3 options. On the large scale, it is easier to know a fuzzy location of a title, perhaps in the top 10%, great melative knows how to do that too, but that isn’t the point. Just because the ratings model is a recursive base case, does that really yield accurate averages for a title?

I ask too many questions, for more information, here is an overview/instructions on this RRS, but the money is in the Theory section. Douzo meshiagare!

Ryan A

note: further discussion, questions, or ideas can be directed to me via e-mail or on irc (#animeblogger or #melative).

melative reflects the thoughts

Posted by Ryan A - April 24, 08

Today I didn’t do a weekly adventure post, though I plan on doing one for code Friday. Rather, while reading some of the blog list this week, I noticed a couple bloggers mention the use of MyAnimeList for twittering “micro-blogging.” It isn’t difficult to see why I am putting this post out there, but I think melative reflections need some light.

Credentials

One of the first mentions of melative here on AloeDream, was this post, but the concept of “reflections” came somewhere about month after Maestro gave me this blog, and I asked myself, “Is there a better way?” I got into blogging wanting to bring my cluttered notebook of small ramblings to the world web, but this *stares at WP* was just overkill for what I wanted.

I had been planning a web-app at the time, but I grew this unrelated idea of “short notes” in the mix of things. A previous 2004 application I coded did a small version of tracking my anime experience and notes as I went along (all in AJAX), but I gave that up when I went S.A Hikari-mode with school. Funny thing… melative reflections weren’t stimulated by that project, they were stimulated by episodic blogging.

When I started to blog, I did the episode to episode thing, but it was tiring. The snapshots were tiring, the summary was tiring, layout was tiring, and the only enjoyable part was writing what I felt about it ( the reflection ). It is a different time. If the short list on the right doesn’t do justice, here is an example of extremely undemanding reflecting…

rss

I want to repeat that extremely undemanding part. I’ll say it, I’m lazy, I can’t spend 2 hours on a post about ONE episode, or ONE volume of a manga. Still, why reflections? why melative? Even though the site is in rubble (SRSLY ごめんなさい), some things work, reflections I made sure of since I use them. *smacks himself for dancing around the questions*

Answers and Rambling

melative reflections are “directed at specific pieces of media“. So what’s the difference between MAL’s ‘related’ posts, or better yet, Last.fm’s journal connections (I respect that thing). Well, the words have different meanings (directed, connected, related). This isn’t so say a reflection is unable to connect or relate, because that is already built into melative with bbcode links (ie. [anime]Kanokon[/anime] or [creator]Katsumi Nishino[/creator] or [actor]Miyū Takeuchi[/actor] … don’ ask me why I used Kanokon references, because I entireli don’t know :P).

Why not Twitter or Pownce?

It’s feasible, but these sites are more about “events” in the life of a person. How many users post about the experience. melative aims to display the experience. I could Twitter, “I just watched episode 12 of True Tears, the chicken should have died” or I could reflect … “the chicken should have died” (directly at True Tears, on an episode, no.12). Very similar approaches, but it’s about organization of thought vs a stream of events, the latter being Twitter.

Lastly, one of the greater purposes of melative is the fact that MAL and Last.fm are different sites, but still toying with media. melative encompasses all media (or 13-14 areas planned). So a reflection doesn’t have to relate to another anime or manga, it can just as well be connected to an album, game, poem whatever. And just as important, reflections and melative do not eliminate the need for a blog; it is a tool, the informaiton is meant to be portable and accessible (code code and more code).

Anyway, the melative story doesn’t end with reflective micro-blogging, which it is a very small, almost unintended piece of the pie. It is a personal tool which fits precisely into the scheme of this animeblogging. Hence, the reason I use it.

Ryan A

wp-melative :: part II, the badder

Posted by Ryan A - March 26, 08

Raki Pudding

This post is technical, I’ve been told

Well, the wp-melative reflection thing works decent for now. Though, there will be comment support etc in the future, I think a good start is to be able to import reflections into a blog. For myself and Aloe Dream, I am using the source at rss.melative.com/user/aloe/reflections/anime.

In any case, I am using a small RSS retriever since URL file access is disabled, as well as XSL transform, which are very quick in php5+libxsl+libxml2 (not that that means anything). Let’s get to it, here are the files, all two of them:

File 1, the php
File 2, the xsl

The php does pose some problems, DOMDocument::load is not catchable in php. I believe this is due to it being a module function (libxml2 or so). But, since the RSS is the result of an XSL transform on the melative.com server, it should parse properly.

The great part about this is that the php only has two configurations, $cacheTime and $rssFile. After setting those, it is only a matter of changing the XSL to get full customizability. The shorthand, there is no programming needed to modify the output of wp-melative.

For customization, I personally recommend XSL output with specific id and class names, then it is only a matter of adjusting CSS styles and/or javascript interactivity. The result has good modularity; I like it.

That’s my post.

Ryan A