Officially Minnesotan - with "i" dotted, and "t" crossed

My years of flagrant disregard for Minnesota state vehicle laws has come to an end. Today I purchased my official Minnesota License Plates, and they nicely match my offical Minnesota Driver's License I got back in December. Huzzah! I can now be pulled over without fear of accruing additional fines for driving a car with South Dakota plates despite having been a resident of Minnesota for the last decade or so.

Tangential Thinking

I watched the 26th, and likely final, episode of Claymore today. It was good, and the entire series was highly enjoyable. It did get me thinking about the inherent problem with watching anime based on an ongoing manga series: it is really hard to provide resolution when they story the anime is being adapted from isn’t complete yet. Assuming Wikipedia can be believed the anime’s plot stayed pretty true to the manga through episode 20 before diverging, presumably to set up an actual ending. The ending we got is by no means bad; it just leaves a lot of unanswered questions. So here’s hoping Claymore was popular enough to warrant a second season. Also I really should look into getting the manga.

I spent some time thinking about the various options the creators of anime adapted from an ongoing manga series can take. There is the Claymore/Fruits Basket option: stay basically true to the manga until the final few episodes and then try to set up a satisfactory ending. Fruits Basket’s ending worked for me, I’m still mulling over Claymore’s (but it didn’t make me want to throw anything so that’s a good sign). This is a pretty standard choice for when there is more manga than anime. There are also varying degrees of divergence: Fruits Basket doesn’t diverge all that much from the manga, and no major plot points are resolved in the anime’s ending (at least none that also exist in the manga). Whereas X comes to a complete and unequivocal ending (something the X/1999 manga hasn’t and may never do) which means at a certain point its creators just started making stuff up. InuYasha, on the other hand, just plain stopped with a little bit of voice over detailing the character’s desire to keep on hunting Naraku (they did have the decency to finish up the story arc they were on).

At the other end of the spectrum you can have more anime than manga. This happens mostly with long running anime. Bleach and Naruto are two popular examples of anime that caught up to their manga. In both their cases the anime continued with episodes not based on the manga, until enough additional chapters of the manga had been published to make returning to anime adapted from it a viable option. Interestingly the Hunter × Hunter anime just stopped when it ran out of manga, only to return with OVAs as more manga was published.

These ponderings lead me to consider Real Bout High School; partially because it represents a manga that has next to nothing to do with the anime “based” on it (much like how the movie The Lawnmower Man has nothing to do with the Stephen King short story of the same name). The manga (I’ve read five of the six volumes) is alright, nothing earth-shatteringly good or bad about it. The anime that was “adapted” from it, however, is really bad (or at least the first 4 episodes were - I couldn’t make myself continue on after that). The quality of the manga, or the anime's lack-there-of isn’t what really captured my fancy today, instead I mostly reflected on how I came to purchase it (the manga, thankfully the anime was a rental), mainly because I'm fairly sure Real Bout High School is the first manga I ever bought(I know it is certainly the first I ever purchased in a store and not online).

A few years back my company moved their corporate headquarters to a new building (from Plymouth, MN to a building that has a Minneapolis address even if it is still technically in a suburb). They, as businesses are wont to do, had an open house to celebrate the event (actually they had several, but one I’m concerned with was for employees and their families). My corporate office opted to hold a raffle for anyone from my little satellite office who was interested in attending, the prize for which was them covering the cost of the hotel room. Other people from our office were of course free to come, they just had to pay for their own hotel rooms. I was one of the winners. Obviously this has nothing to do with manga, but the day after I, and several of my coworkers, found ourselves in the Twin Cities with some time to spare. So we went to a mall, either the Ridgedale Shopping Center in Minnetonka or the Southdale Shopping Center in Edina not that it really matters. I eventually ending up in a store with actual anime for sale (I picked up Vampire Hunter D for sure, and maybe Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust as well). Then I noticed the manga, and I thought, "why not take the plunge?" I first looked at Oh My Goddess!, but decided against it because I couldn’t find the first volume. I kept picking up Love Hina, but in the end I grabbed the first two volumes of Real Bout High School. Not because I’d heard anything about it, but solely because the Love Hina covers were a bit heavy on the eye candy, and I was too embarrassed to be seen by my coworkers reading them on the drive home. A silly reaction to be sure, and one that didn’t persist; within a few months I had no problem bringing Love Hina manga to work with me.

Alright, enough of my meandering train of thought. W00t for post 60! And to celebrate I leave you with a host of amusing videos (host being defined here as four). To start things off, one my friend Todd just today sent me in an e-mail with the subject: WATCH THIS NOW! (his emphasis).


And now I venture into the realm of the Penny Arcade Alliance forums and to the land of the <Burley Men> who took time out from their usual activities to point these three videos out:

"You even grill geeky" - Matt

This last Saturday I gathered with my gaming buddies for more role playing geekery. We added a bit to the usual mix this time around. Paul acquired a portable grill. In his e-mail informing us of the purchase he mentioned it had about the same grilling area as a hibachi, which I mistakenly took to mean he’d be bringing something similar to an actual hibachi. In retrospect I should have known better.

While I was expecting something like this:
Instead we ended up with the Grilliput (this is picture is taken from ThinkGeek and sadly isn't an actual action shot of us using the grill):
The Grilliput consists of two parts. The actual grill (assembled on the left, and in its storage mode on the right):And the optional fire bowl (fully open on the left, and again in storage mode on the right):
We cooked hamburgers, brats, and corn on the cob. It was all very delicious.

With food out of the way we settled down for a rousing game of Super Munchkin.
We also couldn't pass up the opportunity to play some four person Mario Strikers Charged. As a general note, I really ought to get a Wii.

Amazingly after all that we still found time to actually role play. Matt wrapped up the Shadowrun portion of his BESM campaign. I found it pretty amusing how quickly our dimension hopping characters started thinking like stereotypical shadowrunners. We may be on a mission to save the universe, but when we found ourselves in need of money we pretty quickly hatched a plan to rob a few of Seattle's local mafiosi to obtain it (we had some fun with Jedi mind tricks).

Matt ended the session by depositing us in a classic D&D style world where we quickly got to save a halfling cleric from some owlbears. I'm not sure how many campaigns out there have featured vans trying to run down owlbears, however I cannot help but notice I've taken part in a few campaigns now where vehicles have been used as weapons.

All-in-all, a very fun weekend.

This one is for all the geeks in the house

So while browsing the "My WTF video of the day" thread on the Penny Arcade Alliance forums I came across this beauty. Enjoy.



To the best of my knowledge I have five people who read this blog with any regularity (hi guys). So for the two people in my known audience who aren’t big anime fans the soundtrack the above hacked ROM is set to is the ending theme to the thoroughly delightful anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Two Topics. Unrelated, but of Equal Importance.

If you like webcomics, but still value your free time then Tangents is a dangerous website. I have found out about far, far too many interesting comics there. Most recently it pointed me in the direction of No Rest For The Wicked. All I can say is if you aren't looking for another webcomic to read then stay away, because it is damn good.

I almost let the day go by without mentioning it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day! So allow me to go out with a nice choice quote from Treasure Island, "There! That's what I think of ye. Before an hour's out, I'll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour's out, ye'll laugh upon the other side. Them that die'll be the lucky ones."

Because I’ve apparently mistaken my blog for Twitter

As I sit here and admire my (and my coworkers’) handiwork I have to reflect that nothing says “competent professional” quite like a computer held together with packing tape (and just to be safe a fair amount of black electrical tape). If I ever figure out how to move pictures from my cell phone to a computer I’ll be sure to show you. . .

Playground Fun Now Coming to an Office Near You

I had planned on posting about something today. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to talk about but it was probably going to be either WoW (because both Chipple and Cominius are over 40 and I have pictures of them on their mounts), or BESM (because we gamed again on Labor Day). Instead you are getting a rare post about work.

This morning I took a call that has to rank in my top ten most ridiculous calls I’ve ever handled. I’ve mentioned before (last September in fact) that one of the things my company does is provide an after hours repair service for various telephone and cable companies. In general these companies are all pretty small (as compared to a Qwest or AT&T) and generally have a pretty limited number of exchanges that they serve. Now with the advent of local number portability things aren’t completely as cut and dry as all that, but for the most part if a caller’s exchange isn’t on the list provided to me by the phone company s/he is trying to call it is a pretty safe bet s/he is calling the wrong phone company.

So this morning I got a call from John Customer calling Fake Name Telephone Company (henceforth I’ll be calling it FNT). He told me he had no dial tone, and gave me the phone number and as soon as I heard it I knew two things, the city and state he was calling from (and FNT does indeed have customers there), and that he probably didn’t get telephone service from FNT (because his exchange was XYY instead of XYZ). Still with number portability it is possible he was a FNT customer (he would be the first one I’ve ever had for that company in that city with that exchange, but that doesn’t guarantee he was wrong), so I asked the all important “cover-my-company’s-butt” question, “and you get this phone service through FNT?” He answered yes, so I moved on. After gathering up all the relevant information and ending the call, I called up the on call technician for FNT and told him what I had. The tech responded with, “Yeah, he’s not our customer, but give me the information and I’ll check it out to be sure.”

About 30 minutes later I get second call from John Customer. He told me that he’d reported no dial tone a little bit earlier, and a tech had called him back, but the tech told him he wasn’t a customer of FNT, and John Customer knows he is a customer of FNT. That’s right John Customer didn’t believe the tech, and despite not being found by the tech on the FNT customer rolls, he knows he’s a customer. I did a quick run down in my head of my options at this point. I could try and convince the caller that no he probably isn’t a customer of FNT, I could call the tech back as say guess what that caller is back and he says he is too a customer of FNT, or I could try and slam by head through my computer’s monitor. I opted to call the tech back. I offer up the fact a reached his answering machine as proof of a benevolent God.

I, of course, made it sound as professional as I could, but the message I left on the tech’s machine still boiled down to, “am too!” John Customer called back a third time, no doubt to say, “am too plus infinity*,” but blessedly he was interrupted by the tech calling him back. Either the tech had discovered he was in fact wrong, or he was able to convince John Customer that he really wasn’t a customer of FNT, but in any event that ended the whole ridiculous exchange.

I cannot resist making this analogy, even though there is only one known reader of this blog who will fully understand and appreciate it, so Dan this is for you. This call was like Staghmar and Carthris having one of their “No U!” fights, but with private messages instead of in /gchat and naturally one of them would have to use me as an intermediary. So basically it would start with Stag sending Chipple a PM saying tell Carthris, “NO U!” I would send Carthris a PM saying, “Stag says no u.” Carthris would reply to Stag with a hardy, “NO U!” Staghmar would come back to Chipple. . . I think you get the picture. And sadly in the exchange this morning there was no Zilpah around to fop or /gkick the involved parties.

*He might also have been calling back to say, “am too, I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off of me, and sticks to you!” In actuality he was probably calling back to say, “Hey the tech hasn’t called me back, and I want my phone fixed!” However I think my first two guesses are much more fun.

I leave you with this completely unrelated video that shows German women can be a little weird (but really I don't think weirdness knows either gender or international boundaries). There is nothing inherent to this video identifying the performers as German, but for further information about Lynne & Tessa try here, or here.