Miyazaki does it again: Tales from Earthsea

Somehow, the Miyazaki (of Studio Ghibli) movie Tales from Earthsea slipped through the cracks and I wasn’t aware of this Miyazaki film until just last week when Netflix suggested it to me. My friend, Nnedi is usually the one who keeps me up on his latest movies. This one was actually one of the best of the more recent films by his studio. Certainly not as good as my all time favorites: Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and Princess Mononoke, but definitely up there and more memorable.

It is much darker than his others, so I wouldn’t recommend it for children under 11. However, the atmosphere, the artwork (of course), and the creativity of the story is classic Miyazaki. The story takes place in a fantastic, medieval setting and is about the journey of the son of a King, who in a fit of unexplained rage kills his father and steals his magic sword

. At the time, the great balance in the world is shifting and the whole movie has a very powerful forbidding sense of dark evil subversively strangling the characters in the movie. The movie is definitely much more atmosphere than story but in this regard it is one of his better movies. I watched it in the original audio track (Japanese) with subtitled, so I don’t know about the quality of the dub but it probably is of excellent quality like the others given that it is Disney Studios production. If you are like me and have small children, older children (11 and upwards), and love a good animated feature with something in it for fantasy lovers (which I am), I would suggest grabbing this movie.

ReleaseForge

ReleaseForge

We just put out a 4Suite release and one of my tasks was to update SourceForge. If you've ever maintained a project on SF, you'll know that making a release through the Web forms is a very tedious experience. ReleaseForge is a Python/QT GUI that makes the process easier. Much easier. Normally SF release for 4Suite takes me a half hour or so. With ReleaseForge it was a matter of five minutes.

In installed the ReleaseForge RPM, but it didn't seem to have useful dependency info (a common problem with Python RPMs). I'm on Fedora Core 3, and got it working fine by doing:

apt-get install PyQt sip

After launching ReleaseForge and giving it your SF login info, you start with some basic info for the release.

ReleaseForge Screenshot 1

Then you select all the files to release and use simple controls to set the file types. This is the part that used to really get my goat. Now it's a snap.

ReleaseForge Screenshot 2

At this point ReleaseForge takes over and does all the talking with SF.

ReleaseForge Screenshot 3

ReleaseForge offers an option to post project news as well.

ReleaseForge Screenshot 4

But this seems to use different rules from the SourceForge Web forms. When I posted simple text with line breaks, ReleaseForge humped it all onto one line, as you can see. Posting the same text into the SF Web form had the expected result. But posting news on SF was already easy, so no real complaints about this little quirk.

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia