Bandai Visual

Bandai Visual Co., Ltd. (バンダイビジュアル株式会社, Bandai Bijuaru Kabushiki Gaisha), is a Japanese anime, film production and distribution enterprise, established by Bandai Company, Limited and a subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings, Inc., which is based in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Since the reorganisation of Bandai Namco Holdings in 2006, Bandai Visual now heads the group's Visual and Music Content Strategic Business Unit. Its subsidiaries include the Emotion Music Company, Limited, (whose logos also include the Moai from Easter Island), and Lantis Company, Limited music publishing labels.

Until 2012, it was involved in the production and distribution of several anime titles, including those it has directly produced itself and anime series produced by the anime studio Sunrise, a subsidiary of Bandai.

History

Bandai Visual is currently a fully owned subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings. Bandai Namco announced on November 8, 2007 that it would buy the voting shares it did not own between that date and December 10, 2007 and turn the company into a wholly owned subsidiary. On December 18, 2007, Bandai Namco announced that it owned 93.63% of Bandai Visual's shares since the end of November. The remaining shares were delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on February 15, 2008 after Bandai Namco acquired the remaining 10% of the shares.

Lolita (term)

Lolita was the nickname of one of the principal characters in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita. Lolita's actual name was Dolores, with whom the narrator, Humbert Humbert, develops a sexual obsession. In the book itself, "Lolita" is specifically Humbert's nickname for Dolores. Nevertheless, "Lolita" and "loli" has come to be used as a general reference to a seductive or sexually attractive young woman.

In the marketing of pornography, lolita is used to refer to a young girl, frequently one who has only recently reached the age of consent, or appears to be younger than the age of consent.

Etymology & Related Terms

Nymphet

A nymphet is a sexually attractive girl, or young woman. The first recorded use of the term "nymphet", defined by The Century Dictionary as "a little nymph", was by Drayton in Poly-Olbion I. xi. Argt. 171 (1612): "Of the nymphets sporting there In Wyrrall, and in Delamere."

In Lolita, "nymphet" was used to describe the 9- to 14-year-old girls to whom the protagonist is attracted, the archetypal nymphet being the character of Dolores Haze. Nabokov, in the voice of his narrator Humbert, first describes these nymphets in the following passage:

Lolita (play)

Lolita is a play adapted by Edward Albee from Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the same name. The troubled production opened on Broadway on March 19, 1981 after 31 previews and closed after only 12 performances.

Frank Rich in his New York Times review wondered why the play even opened after "weeks of delays" as it was "the kind of embarrassment that audiences do not quickly forget or forgive." Rich said the least of its sins were incompetence, being boring, and trashing a literary masterpiece. "What sets Lolita apart from ordinary failures is its abject mean-spiritedness," he wrote. "For all this play's babbling about love, it is rank with indiscriminate – and decidedly unearned – hate."

Ten years earlier, John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner's musical Lolita, My Love was a bomb, closing during tryouts in Boston. (Albee's Lolita also played in Boston before its Broadway launch.) Critics had scored the play, saying that the lack of Nabokov's authorial voice made the musical salacious. Albee put Nabokov on stage in his play, but it did not help.

Lolita (1997 film)

Lolita is a 1997 American-French drama film directed by Adrian Lyne and written by Stephen Schiff. It is the second screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel of the same name and stars Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert and Dominique Swain as Dolores "Lolita" Haze, with supporting roles by Melanie Griffith as Charlotte Haze, and Frank Langella as Clare Quilty.

The film had considerable difficulty finding an American distributor and premiered in Europe before being released in America, where it was met with much controversy. The film was picked up in the United States by Showtime, a cable network, before finally being released theatrically by The Samuel Goldwyn Company. The performances by Irons and Swain impressed audiences, but, although praised by some critics for its faithfulness to Nabokov's narrative, the film received a mixed critical reception in the United States.

Plot

In 1947, Humbert Humbert, a European professor of French literature, travels to the United States to take a teaching position in New Hampshire. He rents a room in the home of widow Charlotte Haze, largely because he sees her adolescent daughter Dolores, also called "Lo", while touring the house. Obsessed from boyhood with girls of this age (whom he calls "nymphets"), Humbert is immediately smitten with Lo and marries Charlotte just to be near her.

List of Superman enemies

This is a list of fictional characters from DC Comics who are or have been enemies of Superman. It is notable that several of Superman's enemies are or have been foes of the Justice League of America as well.

Central rogues gallery

In alphabetical order (with issue and date of first appearance):

Foes of lesser renown

In alphabetical order (with issue and date of first appearance):

Group villains

Allies in conflict

Some characters originally conceived as heroes have come into conflict with Superman.

Enemies created for other media

These are Superman villains created in other media, with no appearances in previous comics. Livewire, Mercy Graves, Non and Ursa subsequently made appearances in Superman comic books, and have been integrated into the mainstream continuity of the DC Universe.

Villains from comics in other media

A number of villains from the comic books have made an appearance, or appearances, in Superman related live-action media.

List of Soul characters

A comprehensive list of characters from the Soul series of fighting games produced by Namco.

Overall conception and development

The Soul series is a weapon-based fighting game franchise developed by Namco Bandai's Project Soul division and consists of eight games: Soul Edge, Soulcalibur, Soulcalibur II, Soulcalibur III, Soulcalibur Legends, Soulcalibur IV, Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny and Soulcalibur V. Set in the 16th century, the plot of the games revolve around Soul Edge, a cursed sword able to possess its wielder and devour souls. Its sprit is called Inferno, and his avatar/host is called Nightmare. Soul Calibur, a holy sword and Soul Edge's antithesis, also has a spirit called Elysium.

Characters

With each character, their weapon was decided upon before other aspects were. The design was then built to revolve around it, starting with gender, then physical measurements, and lastly background details. Once established, appearance and movement were fleshed out by the team's concept artist and rendered as a 3D model by a design team that worked solely on the character. The completed model was then animated by a motion capture artist working directly with the team. During this phase the team additionally worked with the story creators, refining the character's own role in the plot as needed throughout development. In the course of the series, two characters have been an exception to the process: Johan Druer, a berserker exclusive to the Soulcalibur Japanese player's guide, and Necrid, a character co-produced with Todd McFarlane that appears in Soulcalibur II.

Rock (processor)

Rock (or ROCK) was a multithreading, multicore, SPARC microprocessor under development at Sun Microsystems. Now canceled, it was a separate project from the SPARC T-Series (CoolThreads/Niagara) family of processors.

Rock aimed at higher per-thread performance, higher floating-point performance, and greater SMP scalability than the Niagara family. The Rock processor targeted traditional high-end data-facing workloads, such as back-end database servers, as well as floating-point intensive high-performance computing workloads, whereas the Niagara family targets network-facing workloads such as web servers.

Processor core

The Rock processor implements the 64-bit SPARC V9 instruction set and the VIS 3.0 SIMD multimedia instruction set extension. Each Rock processor has 16 cores, with each core capable of running two threads simultaneously, yielding 32 threads per chip. Servers built with Rock use FB-DIMMs to increase reliability, speed and density of memory systems. The Rock processor uses a 65 nm manufacturing process for a design frequency of 2.3 GHz. The maximum power consumption of the Rock processor chip is approximately 250 W.