Procrastination defeated? (plus less Wednesday annoyance)

I have this bad habit. Well truthfully I have several bad habits, but the one I'm thinking of is I tend to borrow anime and manga from my friend Dan, and then ignore it. This is a pretty silly thing to do, because I only borrow the things I'm interested in either watching or reading, yet I still do it. I don't believe it has anything specific to do with Dan, quite honestly I behaved in much the same way when I last had Netflix. My latest movie would arrive in the mail, and I wouldn't watch it. I think what happens is I start thinking of the borrowed item as something I need to watch (or read) and then return ASAP, so I subconsciously equate the borrowed media with a chore, and not as something fun I'd like to do. Procrastinating chores is as natural as breathing to me (perhaps a small bit of hyperbole there).

I bring this up because seemingly out of the blue the other day I started reading Monster again. When I first borrowed Monster from Dan (probably almost a year ago at this point) I read and really liked the first volume right away. Over the next month I very slowly read volumes two and three. Then I stalled out on four. Two nights ago, I picked volume four up again, and finished it off. Volumes five and six quickly followed, and last night I devoured seven. I have every intention of reading eight tonight, and keeping up with my pace of one or two volumes a day until I finish this off, and return it to Dan. It is among the best manga I've ever read, so beyond my little theory outlined above, I have no clue why I haven't finished this off months ago.

I have a few general observations about Monster. Finding redemption for past mistakes and/or wrongs seems to be a poor survival tactic in the universe of Monster. I'm quickly losing count of the number of characters who while trying to make up for their past sins are killed either by Johan or somebody connected to him. Only slightly less deadly would be choosing to either directly or indirectly help Tenma on his quest to stop Johan. Of course the absolutely most deadly job in the world of Monster is being Johan's foster parents, chances are quite high that any character introduced as being such, was already dead when introduced to the story.

As per my usual Wednesday ritual I watched the newest Kimi ni Todoke this morning before work. Since this was the end of a story-arc I did go to work much happier today then I did the last two Wednesdays. Granted I'm still impatient for more episodes, and I strongly suspect that future Wednesdays will leave me in much the same state as I described last week, for now I'm satisfied (well mostly, did I mention I'm impatiently waiting for more episodes).

One of the nice things about living in the cities as opposed to being back in Morris, is I'm once again able to watch anime with my friend Dan. This last weekend we finished off Ghost Hunt (third time through that series for me, first time for Dan). I've mentioned Ghost Hunt here in this very blog after I'd finished watching it the first time. I like it, I wouldn't have suggested Dan watch it if I didn't think it was quite fun. It is however not perfect. I have a few minor quibbles here and there, and one fairly large complaint with one story-arc right in the middle of the series. That arc features both a really bad case of plot induced stupidity (well technically I guess TV Tropes would call it Contrived Stupidity, but I've always liked the sound of the former better), and a troubling blow to ones suspension of disbelief (we are supposed to believe a body left basically in the open at a church remained unnoticed for 30 some odd years). That little two-episode arc aside, it remains an enjoyable series that is well worth watching.

Returning to an old blog tradition I return to the Monster theme and leave you with the following amusing picture.

Oh Patience, how you vex me

It's not that I'm incapable of restraint, I'm just not, in general, built for patience. I tend towards being impulsive. I prefer my gratification to be of the instant variety as opposed to the delayed kind. I admit this as a preface to the snapshot of my last two Wednesdays.

On both days I woke up earlier then usual, and checked the Internet to find that, huzzah, a fansub of the newest episode of Kimi ni Todoke had been released. I happily started the download, and went off to do my usual shower, and get dressed and ready for work routine, just like every other weekday morning. Upon completion I settled down and started watching the newest episode. And both times it was joyous, and both times I loved watching it, and both times when it was over I started swearing to myself because I now had to wait an entire week to watch the next episode. I have gone to work the last two Wednesdays very annoyed at that fact.

One would think that since I own the first two volumes of the manga, and already know what is going to happen next, I wouldn't be so impatient to watch the next episode. One would think that seems reasonable. Sadly one would be very much incorrect in that thought process. This is why I like watching anime that is already complete, and I have full access to; I can stop when I want to stop, not when I have to stop. So to reiterate, delayed gratification – not my strongest suite.

Of course now that I've admitted all that, I have to say I've shown what I think is pretty excellent restraint and patience on the Beatles front. I didn't go all crazy and buy all of the remastered CDs in one fell swoop. I have been steadily buying them in reasonable batches, and have only the Magical Mystery Tour, and Yellow Submarine left to get. I'm probably going to use this as an excuse to pick up Let It Be... Naked as well. Ultimately I opted to get the Wii version of The Beatles Rock Band, buying an Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing Rock Band proved to be a bit too excessive. Although as I stated last time, I'm now going to have to buy a Wii at some point in the future when my roommate and I stop being roommates. But since that is some undefined point in the distant future, I can live with that.

For the record, I'm really loving the new CDs, and yes I can hear the improvement in sound quality between the two versions.

Sadly Familiar Behavior

Before I delve into my latest tale of my sadly predictable behavior regarding sleep, let me set the stage a bit with some background information. The weekend of Easter (I forget if it was Saturday, Sunday, or Monday) I on Chipple crafted my final piece of the Shadow's Embrace set; which was the goal I’d been focusing all of Chipple’s attention on in WoW for more than one month. Last Tuesday patch 2.4 went live. When I got home from work, I logged onto WoW, got the patch, and like basically everybody else found almost all of my mods no longer worked. I sat in front of my computer thinking to myself, “I really don’t have anything I’m trying to do with Chipple right at this second, and I don’t want to play without my mods, and I really don’t want to spend the time to update them right now.” So I logged out of WoW, and started watching some anime.

I started off with a few episodes of Pretty Cure Max Heart, but eventually moved on to starting two new series: Rental Magica, and KimiKiss ~ Pure Rouge. Rental Magica is about the escapades of a company called Astral that rents out magicians and other magically inclined individuals to people who require some supernatural assistance. As you can probably guess from the name KimiKiss is a romance anime based on a dating simulation game. After work on Wednesday I didn’t log into WoW at all instead I continued watching mostly Rental Magica, and some KimiKiss. On Thursday I finally updated my mods, and spent some time playing around on WoW. I also finished off the final four episodes of Rental Magica. This brings us to Friday my last morning shift before having the weekend off.

A brief aside here. I’m sure I’ve said this before, or at least I’ve described my sleeping habits enough that this probably won’t surprise anybody, but I stay up later than I should when I work 6:30am - 3pm shifts. Since I get up around 5:15am I should really be going to bed at 9pm, but generally I’m up until midnight. I mention this mainly to illustrate why it isn’t terribly shocking that very nearly the first thing I did upon getting home Friday was fall asleep on my couch. I woke up somewhere in the neighborhood of 8pm, and logged onto WoW and played until a bit after Midnight. I then started watching KimiKiss. I watched four or five episodes and was through 13 of the 24 episodes. It was now somewhere around 3am I did this odd combination of going to bed, but also started burning files onto DVDs. Basically I’d start a DVD burning, and go lie down on my couch where I’d fall lightly asleep, but wake up when I heard my DVD burner open up. I’d then start another disk and repeat the process. I think I was on my third disk when I finally stayed asleep through the burner opening up.

I woke up at 10:28am. I remember this because I looked at my clock, and my first thought was, “well I guess I can’t get breakfast at McDonald's today.” I’m not really sure why that was my first thought, I’ve probably eaten breakfast at McDonald's five time in the last year, so it’s not like this is something I do on a regular basis. I goofed around on an alt on WoW until about noon, got myself some lunch, and burned a few more things onto DVDs.

At about 2:40pm I left to goto Matt’s for his BESM campaign. The actual gaming portion of the evening got started sometime after 6pm. It was a really good session (not that any of them have been bad sessions, I’ve enjoyed all of them, but this one was especially fun); Dan, Paul, and I each had one really awesome idea during the course of the evening. Another aside here this time to talk about the BESM campaign. In Matt’s chaos campaign we’ve dubbed the current world we’re running around in the anime world, and we’ve picked up a magical girl NPC (which is fitting since we got a cyber-enhanced troll NPC from the Shadowrun world, and a halfling cleric NPC from the D&D world). Matt has also tossed in a few references to my last BESM campaign. Namely Obo, and the bag of never ending homework.

Originally Obo was the main character of the comic The Path, which is the comic whose setting I used for my last BESM campaign (and promptly advanced the timeline 150 years, and altered the tone well beyond anything recognizable in the original comic). My Obo started out as a Buddha like figure, but evolved into a GM device for inserting comic relief, plot hooks, and useful bits of information. Every time the PCs encountered him he was in a different guise - the head of a monastery once, a cashier another time, etc.. He was also responsible for giving Matt’s character the bag of never ending homework. Matt’s character was a high school student, and it only seemed fitting that he should have to continue his studies while running around a fantasy world collecting magical artifacts. The name is a bit of a misnomer as the bag didn’t create an endless supply of homework, but was really just an inter-dimensional link between where ever Matt’s character was at, and his school back on “earth.” Obo arranged for his class work and homework to be delivered through it, and returned to the school once Matt’s character placed the completed work back in the bag. Matt must have liked the idea, as he inflicted it upon the magical girl NPC.

The basic details of the current plot in Matt’s campaign would be our group of inter-dimensional travelers had stumbled across something utterly ancient, and alien beyond human understating buried in Antarctica on the anime world (from Matt’s descriptions of it I keep picturing a huge robotic looking thing - 20 stories tall if I recall correctly, but the theme and tone he is clearly, and successfully, portraying is Lovecraftian in nature). We were trying to get it dug out of the ice, without waking it up, and moved to the nearby inter-dimensional portal leading to its realm.

It woke up. One truly epic battle ensued. We were succeeding in destroying it, but it became apparent to us that upon its destruction it would explode with the force of, as Matt phrased it, a few nuclear bombs. Dan’s wizard had the idea to create some Portal style portals between the about to explode alien monstrosity and the inter-dimensional portal leading to its realm. So we got it out of the anime world before it exploded, but we were unable to get the inter-dimensional portal closed before the explosion happened. Fortunately we have a sentient NPC ship capable of traveling between the dimensions (we call it Bob) we could hide in, unfortunately we knew from prior experience with these things, they can hurt Bob. This is where Paul’s great idea came in. One of the magical items we picked up in the D&D world was Lyre of Building. One of the neat uses of a Lyre of Building is protecting a structure from damaging effects including such powerful effects as disintegration. Paul’s character used the Lyre of Building to reinforce Bob before the massive explosion. So instead of being thrown through inter-dimensional space-time in a heavily damaged, and unconscious Bob, we got thrown through inter-dimensional space-time in basically unharmed Bob (his sensors were fried, but easily repaired). However we were still lost, and adrift somewhere in the multiuniverse. This is where my idea came in, as I realized our magical girl’s bag of never ending homework was linked to the world we had just been blown off of. With Bob’s sensors repaired it was an easy task to follow that link back to where we started. That is were we ended the session.

Now back to my tale.

We finished up with gaming around 11pm, and proceeded to play some Super Smash Bros. Brawl until after midnight. Paul and Matt continued on after that, I played around on the Internet. Paul and I left Matt’s well after 4am (somewhere around 4:20am I think). I arrived back at my house just a few minutes after 5am. I thought to myself hey since I was thinking about breakfast at McDonald's when I woke up, I’ll stay up until 7am and actually eat breakfast there today. So I start watching KimiKiss again. I didn't just stay up until 7am, I finish the series all 11 remaining episodes. It was now around 9:30am so I went to eat my breakfast at McDonald's. And I noticed that Across the Universe was available to rent at the Redbox there. I got home a bit after 10am, and I watched Across the Universe (really, really good by the way). Once that was over it was somewhere between 12:15pm and 12:30pm and I was still feeling like watching a movie, so I put in Hott Fuzz (if you haven’t watched that, you should really put it atop your “to do” list).

Now it was roughly 3pm Sunday, and I’d been awake since 10:28am Saturday. Did I go to sleep? Nope I started watching another new anime called Kekkaishi. This is a 52 episode shōnen action series with a supernatural theme. I continued to watch it until I fell asleep sometime after 6:30pm. I woke up at about 1am. Did I go back to bed? No that would be reasonable, and intelligent, I started watching Kekkaishi again. I did this until about 8:30am - 9am Monday morning (at some point in there I did pause to watch the movie Smokin' Aces which I found to be kinda meh) when I decide that since I needed to take the movie back to the Redbox at McDonald's I might as well eat breakfast there again. I came back from breakfast and again started in on Kekkaishi. I continued this until about 1pm when I needed to get ready for work. All in all I watched the first 35 episodes of Kekkaishi (basically 14.5 hours of anime).

That is my tale of foolish behavior. A few general notes on anime. In addition to those I’ve mentioned above, I’ve finished Oh! Edo Rocket, Clannad, and Spice and Wolf. I loved all three, and with any luck I’ll have some more to say about them soon. But now I’m going to see if I cannot finish off the final episode of Rosario + Vampire before I have to leave for work today.

I've got the sound, but do I have the fury?

I feel like there are about a hundred different things I'd like to talk about, and no way that I'm going to fit them all in. So let me mention a few things in passing with the (probably in vain) idea of addressing at least some of them in more detail in a later post (it could actually happen).

I finished off Sky Girls last week. I found it to be a solid, enjoyable mecha series. While nothing about it really grabbed me, made me want to run out, wrestle people to the ground, and shout "WATCH THIS" at them, I still have no problem encouraging people to give it a try. "Refreshingly straightforward" probably sums up my thoughts on Sky Girls more than anything else. There are no genre altering plot twists, no surprise villains, no secret organizations pulling the strings - just enjoyable mecha action. The fact these mecha were piloted by cute girls instead of angst-filed boys probably didn't hurt my opinion of it either.

I'm through the first story arc of Spice and Wolf. This series certainly started off slowly, but as the first arc progressed things did pick up nicely. Craft and Horo are very interesting characters in their own right, and watching their relationship develop has been quite enjoyable. My impression of Craft is he's a skilled merchant who is just a touch too cautious for his own good, but his dealings with Horo seem to be putting just the right amount of daring in him. As for Horo, she is a wonderful character. For a wolf spirit/harvest deity she is surprisingly human - very wise yes but also very fallible, confident and powerful but also emotionally vulnerable and even painfully lonely.

This is not your typical fantasy story, as stated Craft is not some stock fantasy archetype like a warrior, but rather a simple merchant; his big dream is to amass enough money to buy a shop in a city so he can settle down and stop being a traveling peddler. Outside of Horo's existence magic has been nowhere to be found, and even with Horo the flashiest bit of magic we've seen is her transformation into her wolf form - and that has only happened twice or perhaps more accurately once and a half since the first time we only got to see Craft's reaction to the transformation (it scared him witless). The main story arc revolves around economics with nobles, kingdoms, and rival merchant houses plotting and scheming to make money off a pending alteration to the purity of one kingdom's silver coins. For an anime the depiction of the economics gets pretty in depth maybe not quite "Moby-Dick's descriptions of 19th Century whaling" level in depth, but still I feel at times like I should be taking notes.

Oh what else: I've started in on Oh! Edo Rocket and it is ridiculously fun. When I try and think of a way to describe it I keep coming back to the fact it reminds me of Excel Saga, but only coherent with an actual plot. I'm not entirely happy with that comparison as I am at best ambivalent towards Excel Saga, while I am loving Oh! Edo Rocket. I would have to say that in every way that being silly is a good thing - Oh! Edo Rocket is just as silly as Excel Saga, and in every way that I found being silly a detriment to Excel Saga - Oh! Edo Rocket is actually logical and serious. The setting is Edo in 1842 (as the anime is quick to tell you Edo in 1842 was in the midst of numerous onerous restrictions on things deemed frivolous - like say fireworks), and the basic premise is a woman asks a fireworks maker to make some fireworks capable of reaching the moon for her. Anyone familiar with the anime will understand the magnitude of the understatement I’m about to engage in - there is more going on in this anime than I’ve just mentioned. I doubt I could do it justice were I to try and describe everything going on there, I think this is clearly a case of experiencing it for oneself as being the best policy.

I’m still watching Rosario+Vampire, I’m not sure I could even explain why. I know I haven’t made it through an episode yet where I haven’t thought, “now that is an excessive amount of fan service.” For some reason it actually makes me think of History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi. There are some similarities: Kenichi is the last anime I watched to feature a truly noteworthy amount of fan service (although nowhere near the level of Rosario+Vampire), many of the defeated foes in both go on to become staunch allies of the main characters, the female leads in both could kick the male leads’ collective asses, and while I wouldn’t really call Kenichi a harem anime the main character does pick up more than one female admirer over the course of the series. Where Kenichi differs from Rosario+Vampire (and most harem anime/manga I’m familiar with) is Kenichi (the character) actual grows and becomes more competent and mature (and since it is a martial arts comedy I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention stronger and more skilled). I doubt Tsukune is going to be much different at the end of Rosario+Vampire from how he was at the beginning.

Clannad and Shion no Ou both continue to be among my favorite anime I’m watching. I’ve been periodically pestering Dan to start watching Shion no Ou so I’d have somebody to talk about it with. Dan if you are reading this be warned I’m going to add Oh! Edo Rocket, and Spice and Wolf to the list of things I periodically pester you to start watching. I continue to make my way through Pretty Cure Max Heart, and I have only a few episodes left of Lucky Star. Sadly I haven’t gotten back to Dennou Coil yet. On that front I think it is actually an attempt by me to be responsible. I have a strong feeling that once I start watching it again I won’t stop until I’ve finished it, and because I’m only through 14 of the 26 episodes I’ve been hesitant to start watching it again since I haven’t had a window were I could comfortably devote the nearly five hours it will take to finish the series off.

I could continue on about anime for awhile yet, but time for a new topic instead. Despite what it must look like given the above paragraphs, my assessment last month that I’m making a transition away from WoW towards anime may have been premature. I’m starting to get the hang of being a level 70 character with Chipple. I’ve got my flying mount (sorry still no pictures), and I’m making slow, but measurable progress towards better gear. Assuming I keep up with the necessary farming of elemental motes, I should be making myself some Frozen Shadoweave Shoulders this weekend. I still need to get Chipple into some level 70 instances, and get her keyed for Karazhan (although given my current work schedule I just don’t see myself becoming a regular raider), but the tasks before me seem slightly less daunting.

I’ve also been spending some time working on a Tauren druid named Berenek on the server Zuluhed, because that is where my friend Erik plays (I’m sure I’m not spending nearly enough time there in Erik’s estimation). Speaking of Erik, I continue to wait patiently for move number three in our latest e-mail chess match.

Matt’s BESM campaign continues to go well. He’s seems quite happy to sit back and see where we (the players) take it, and speaking for myself I’m quite happy to see where we can get it to go. In my last post I mentioned that my character Cynthia had managed to retrieve a surprising amount of data from the memory banks/brain of our apparent main foe. It turns out this info is more memories and personality and less raw data, so Cynthia threw together a small robot to attach this personality to so we’d have something to interact with while obtaining what we’d like to know. Matt has portrayed the partial copy of our foe’s memories as being a bit morose, and more than a little bitter over the loss of its magical abilities. Its complaints on the latter topic lead Cynthia to retort something to the effect of (and I mention this mainly because Matt found it amusing), “I just grabbed the information we needed, it’s not my fault you don’t keep your magic in your brain.”

My character Kell continues to survive Ellery’s Eberron campaign, although after our last session, mostly by the grace of some amazing dice rolling. D&D has long had the idea of the “natural 20," meaning you roll a 20 on a 20 sided die, as being the best thing to hope for during combat. This has been true regardless of the version of D&D you happen to be playing (and outside of a few skill systems in the pre 3.x /d20 era rolling high on a d20 in any situation has generally been a good thing). I picked a very opportune time to get one during our recent combat with a mind flayer (technically a vampiric mind flayer but whose keeping score). Had I not rolled that 20 on my grapple check, my character was about 99% likely to have his brain eaten (just a little something mind flayers like to do). Near character death experiences notwithstanding I continue to have fun with Kell.

With that I think I've touched on most things I’ve been kicking around. So it is now time for me to go knock out a few dailies and farm some motes of water.

A Mysterious Package

There is a mysterious package waiting for me at home. I found it left on my doorstep by UPS as I was leaving for work today. I had enough time that I could have opened it up, but if it proved to be something cool I wouldn't have had enough time to properly play with it. So I simply took it inside where it waits for me to return home from work to see what it is, and who sent it to me.

 My behavior of late suggests I'm shifting out of MMORPG mode and into watching anime mode. Which isn't to say I'm in any danger of ceasing to play WoW, I just seem to be spending more time watching anime than I have been in recent months. I suspect it is a result of getting Chipple to 70. It's a nice milestone, and also a good place to rest a bit before getting serious about the grind of improving her gear. 

Misumi Nagisa

As I suspected I would, I've started watching Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart. Just like it's predecessor it is good light hearted, magical girl fun. I've noticed one amusing byproduct (amusing to me anyway) of the magical girl powers the main character's possess. Allow me to illustrate. Please note picture of Misumi Nagisa to the left. As an unrelated aside the cutesy teddy bear looking thing is Mepple, most magical girls have some sort of cute companion (often a talking animal) and he is Nagisa's.

Cure Black

Now compare this to the picture of Cure Black. If you can spot what I'm getting at right away, then good for you. However I'm guessing one example isn't probably enough.










So let me move on to example number two. Next please observe the picture of Yukishiro Honoka, and then the picture of Cure White. Again as an aside the cute companion is Mipple. Honestly the cutesy companion is one of my least favorite tropes of the magical girl genre. I probably wouldn't mind Mipple and Mepple that much if they just didn't end every sentence with "mipo" and "mepo" respectively.

Yukishiro Honoka

Cure White

Some of you may be spotting what I'm talking about, but the final example should
really bring it home. In Pretty Cure Max Heart a new heroine is introduced. So please take a look at the pictures of Kūjō Hikari (to the left), and her alter ego Shiny Luminous (on the right). I believe the amusing power should now be quite apparent. If you are guessing their transformation must include the application of magical hair mousse for increased volume, then we are on the same page. Extremely silly? Yes, but it is still what I think of basically every time I watch these characters transform.

Kūjō Hikari

Shiny Luminous

Aside from pondering the hair care regiment of magical girls, I've started in on a few other anime as well. I am just over halfway through Denno Coil (sometimes written as Dennou Coil). This one is extremely engaging - interesting characters and an interesting plot. I imagine I'll be finishing it up pretty soon. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it once I've finished it. For the curious the girl in the picture is Okonogi Yūko one of the main characters from Denno Coil. The strange looking pink things are called Satchii; they are basically antivirus software that patrol the Augmented Reality environment of the city Denno Coil takes place in.

 I've also started in on Rosario + Vampire (the first four episodes). This seems like a pretty fun series. Nothing really new here; it's a harem anime. The male protagonist is a normal first year high school student who gets mistakenly enrolled in a high school for monsters, and wacky shenanigans ensue. Naturally this includes the unintentional collection of a harem of beautiful supernatural female students (thus far a vampire, succubus, and witch). This anime has more fan service (of the panty shot and other sexual eye candy variety) than anything else I've watched in awhile. That fact isn't really anything either good or bad, but was a bit jarring at first.

1 - 2 and threatening to go 2 -3

My new video card arrived yesterday. I wasn’t expecting it until Tuesday so the early arrival was a nice surprise. Installation went much more smoothly as compared to my new DVD drive. I haven’t actually played around too much on either WoW or City of Heroes to see if I can detect a noticeable improvement in performance. I have experimented a bit with running WoW at a higher resolution, and was happy to note my new card handled that with ease (whereas my old card didn’t much care for me doing such things). Otherwise I’ve caught myself thinking things like, “I believe that images are much sharper now that I’ve installed my new video card.” However I wonder how much of that is real and how much is self delusion, but in any event I’m pretty happy with my new card. On the new optical drive front, I’ve ordered what I believe are the requisite SATA cables, so come Tuesday I should be ready for round two of its installation process. I hope to be able to post about my crushing victory later that day.

I finished off Pretty Cure last week. I don’t really have anything more to say about it beyond what I’ve already posted. I will reiterate that it is an enjoyable magical girl series, and well worth watching if you like that sort of thing. I’ll very likely be checking out the second series Futari wa Pretty Cure Max Heart.

Last night I watched the first two episodes of Spice and Wolf. I’m not sure what to make of this series yet, but I do think I’ll be watching episode three when it is available. The setting has a Western European, early Renaissance feel to it. The story seems to revolve around a traveling merchant named Craft Lawrence, and a Wolf Spirit/Harvest goddess named Horo who decides to travel with him because she feels the villagers whose fields she has been watching over have forsaken her. After two episodes not a whole lot has happened, but the premise remains interesting to me, so I’ll keep watching and see what develops.

Stupid things I do

I’m pretty sure I’ve touched on this theme before. This last Wednesday saw my latest example of enjoyable anime + disgusting lack of willpower equaling foolish behavior. Wednesday night I wrapped up my playing of WoW around 10:30pm. I needed to wake up around 7:45am – 8:00am the next day in order to leave for work by 8:30am so I could arrive by 9:00am. I didn’t really feel like going straight to bed so I decided to watch some anime. I have a pretty large backlog of series I’ve either been meaning to start or finish, and I decided I should check off one or two episodes from one of those. After a bit of deliberation I opted to watch some Suzuka (the linked review has some very valid points about the anime, although personally I found the characters to a bit more likeable than the reviewer so I’d grade Suzuka somewhere around 75%). I had watched the first episode of Suzuka last April and the second episode sometime last summer so I started off with episode three.

The next thing I know it’s a bit after midnight, and I’m thinking to myself, “Alright I’ve got to go to bed after this episode ends.” Then as I’m starting the next episode I’m rationalizing to myself, “Well once I’ve finished this episode it won’t even be 1am yet so I’ll still get seven hours of sleep.” A few episodes later I’m telling myself, “OK so I’m up too late, but I can watch one more and it will only be 2am, that’s still 6 hours of sleep.” A couple of episodes after that and I’m thinking, “What the hell am I doing up after 3am?” A stronger person than me would have gone to bed at that point; I kept right on watching. Sometime after 4am I went back to rationalization, “I can watch one more and it will be 5am and I’ll take a three hour nap before work, I’ve done that before, so I’ll be fine.” By the time 6am rolled around I was simply chastising myself, “This is stupid, I’m stupid, I’m weak, I should have gone to sleep hours ago, this is not the behavior of a responsible adult.” Naturally I kept right on watching more episodes. As it got closer to 7am I simply did the math, and decided, “Well I can finish the series and still have time to shower before I have to leave for work.” At about 7:50am the credits rolled on the final episode and the only question left to me was do I lie down and close my eyes for 10 minutes or do I shut off my alarm and go take a shower. I opted for the shower.

I doubt I’ll garner much surprise and even less sympathy when I say work on Thursday sucked – a lot. I think 10:30a – 11:00a was the worst; I had a very hard time not falling asleep, and concentrating on anything displayed on my computer’s monitor was somewhat tricky as my vision tended to get blurry. The sugar and caffeine from the ridiculous amounts of Mountain Dew I drank that morning started kicking in after that, and the rest of my shift passed without incident.

Surprisingly I didn’t go straight to sleep when I got home. I found I had a package waiting for me, the new DVD burner I had ordered as a replacement for the malfunctioning one that currently resides in my computer. I made a valiant effort at installing it, but was rudely stopped short when I learned I hadn’t done anywhere near enough research before I ordered this bit of hardware. My new DVD burner uses a Serial ATA connection; the old drive it is replacing uses Parallel ATA. Hopefully when my new video card arrives next week I won’t find I made a similar stupid oversight (I do at least know both my old and new cards use PCI Express).

Once I put my computer back together I decided to watch some more anime. This time I thought I’d play it safe and watch a movie (it was only about 7pm at this time but you can never be too careful). I watched Whisper of the Heart, a very excellent Studio Ghibli film (but aren’t they all). I had forgotten just how much I like that movie, and once I finished it I really couldn’t help but continue right on to its pseudo sequel The Cat Returns. Not too long after that I finally settled into bed for some much needed sleep.

Could this be tradition?

At the risk of starting a tradition, New Year's Day once again seems like a good time to reflect upon the state of the blog. I find that as I'm rapidly closing in on one and a half years of blogging I'm pretty happy with how this blog has turned out. I'm pleased to see that for my first full calender year of blogging I've hit my target average of four posts per month exactly (if I factor my five months of blogging from 2006 my average drops to 3.9 posts a month which is still pretty darn good). I had three very prolific months: January (7), February (10), and September (7). On the flip side I had four bad months as well: March (2), May (0), October (1), and November (2). I'm a little curious about just why I got so distracted by other things during October and November in both 2006 and 2007, but trying to break that trend gives me a little goal for the new year.

I'm glad to see the question of what direction I was going to take this blog has been more or less answered (perhaps it would be more accurate to say I've become more comfortable with the direction I have been taking basically since the beginning of this experiment). First and foremost I write this blog for my own amusement and edification, but of nearly equal importance I use this blog to communicate select details and interests of mine to the small group of my friends who regularly read it. I am quite happy with the result of the intersection of those two aims. Unlike last January I have no evolutionary dead ends to reflect upon - no commentary on celebrity deaths, nor pointless enumeration of the songs in my iTunes for me this year. I find I am, in general, quite satisfied with the topics I'm writing about. I still occasionally feel like I'm only mentioning some anime in passing, or end up feeling bad that too many of my comments about various anime I've watched can be summed up as "I watched this, and it was good/bad." I'm not sure that is necessarily a bad thing however, obviously I want to be saying more about my topic than just it was good/bad, but at no point have I ever set out to write a full blown review of anime (or anything for that matter) such as you would find on a website like Anime Academy. I do think it is a little odd that despite never having wanted to make this blog all about reviewing anime, I end up feeling bad about not writing actual reviews of the anime I feel like talking about.

As for going forward I'd like to see me write a few more posts about the books I'm reading, and the movies I'm watching. A few of my most recent posts have touched on those very topics, so that is a trend I hope to continue. I'd like to improve upon the reporting of what I've been up to. I'm pretty good about chronicling the basics of my role playing hobby, and I think I devote as much column inches as I care to regarding the time I spend on MMORPGs like WoW, but I made it down to the cities a number of times this last year for various different things and those trips saw little to no representation here. I'd also like to try and branch out every now and then and experiment a bit with the sort of posts I make. I've pondered a number of different things I might try: including a stream of consciousness post (I actually started writing one once, but ended up deleting it), posting the odd short story (that would actually require me to write a short story which is something I haven't done with any regularity since high school), and having a bad poetry day.

I think that meets my quota of introspection, time to talk a little anime.

Yesterday I finished watching Night Wizard. It is a thirteen episode action adventure anime based on a Japanese role playing game. The characters are interesting enough, I'd have preferred a few of them be just a little more fleshed out, but none of them were terribly two-dimensional. The plot is solid, nothing really cutting edge, your basic urban fantasy setting with demons attacking the Earth and a secret group of wizards charged with defending it. Add to that a quest to gather seven magic jewels, and a plot twist towards the end of the series that was adequately foreshadowed and follows the internal logic of the anime and I'd say it was worth my time watching.

There are a number of different ongoing anime series I've been following of late. Two of which have me extremely excited, but naturally I'm going to start off talking briefly about a third series I recently started. Taking advantage of the lapse of a North American license I started watching Futari wa Pretty Cure in December. I've made it through 32 of the 49 episodes. It is enjoyable magical girl fun. No real innovations going on, it is pretty much like watching Sailor Moon, but with much better animation, less annoying characters, and a better sense of continuity from episode to episode (although it is still pretty much a monster of the week show). If you like the magical girl genre, then you could do far worse than watch Pretty Cure. If you are interested in checking out some magical girl anime, then Pretty Cure would be an excellent start (although Card Captor Sakura would be better still).

Moving on to the two new series that really have me excited. The first of which is Shion no Ō. The series starts off introducing the eponymous character Yasuoka Shion an eleven year old girl on the cusp of becoming a professional shogi player. We quickly learn that when Shion was four she witnessed the brutal murder of her parents, the killer was never caught, and Shion hasn't spoken a word since that tragic night. The murder mystery is played against the backdrop of Shion's life as a professional shogi player, and I find the interplay between and the gradual revelation of connection between these two seemingly disparate things extremely fascinating. The characters are first rate - gloriously complex with numerous layers and facets. The episodes have been an interesting and enjoyable mix of unfolding mystery and suspense with each leaving me more anxious for the release of the next.

The other anime that has really caught my attention is Clannad. The anime is based on a visual novel developed by Key, and adapted for animation by Kyoto Animation (the studio also produced The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, so count me among their fans). Key and Kyoto Animation are also responsible for Kanon (Key the visual novel, and Kyoto Animation the anime) about which I had plenty of nice things to say back in April. The characters are the main draw for me here - I find them to be incredibly likable - the more I watch them, the more I want to learn about them. Thus far Clannad has be a bit lighter in tone than Kanon, a little less melodramatic, but the emotional impact of the developing plot has been every bit Kanon's equal. With few exceptions the episodes leave me feeling peaceful and content, juxtaposed with a growing desire to watch the next episode.

On a final note, much like last year, I started the new year off with a bit of browsing on Engrish.com. That I find this picture so amusing is proof that my time spent as a guild member of KotW on Dark Iron has corrupted me.

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:

Yes he can tear himself away from WoW

Poor Onegai Teacher, it was an enjoyable series, but it looks like I’m never going to get around to devoting a post to it. Oh sure I could actually write something up about it right now, but seeing as how I watched it back in March I’m afraid it just isn’t the freshest series in my mind. Ghost Hunt, My-Hime, and Mai-Otome all share the same woe; all are excellent series that I enjoyed a great deal, but I enjoyed them back in March (or April in the case of Ghost Hunt but the effect is the same) which makes it difficult to write about the specific details. Busō Renkin is in a similar, but slightly different boat since I was watching that weekly from the time it premiered in October until its end in March.

So in brief:

Onegai Teacher features your basic love story between a high school student and a beautiful space alien masquerading as a high school teacher. Watch enough anime and the above sentence won’t seem weird. The art, music, and story are all quite nice, and most of the characters are very interesting. Onegai Teacher is also only twelve episodes long so it moves along at a good pace. There is also a one episode OVA which is basically fun fluff, nothing of any consequence happens, and on some levels I think it exists as an excuse to say, “Hey remember all those couples we either showed or hinted at in the main series? (snicker) Well they are all having sex! (snicker)" Still it is another chance to spend some time with some very enjoyable characters.

Ghost Hunt is about the investigations of the Shibuya Psychic Research Center (SPR). It shares some similarities with, but isn’t as dark in tone as either Jigoku Shōjo, or Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. I also like that sometimes their investigations reveal no supernatural activity, and other times they are unable do anything (at least directly) about the supernatural entity in question. Again the art is very nice, and the characters are interesting.

My-Hime and Mai-Otome are worth talking about together. My-Hime is an interesting mix of magical girl, and mecha anime. It starts out with a fairly comedic tone, and takes a turn for the more serious about halfway through (coinciding with an interesting plot twist). The cast is pretty large, but they are handled well, and interesting characters abound.

Mai-Otome could be called a sequel, but it may be more accurate to call it a re-envisioning. The same character designs, and in most cases names and personalities are used to tell a completely new story (set thousands of years in the future). The main characters from My-Hime take on supporting roles, while many of the supporting characters become much more featured, and the main protagonists are original (well some more so than others). Much like its predecessor, Mai-Otome starts out fairly light-hearted and then through a number of plot developments becomes more serious in tone. You could watch Mai-Otome without first watching My-Hime, but I wouldn’t recommend it since the character development in Mai-Otome is mostly (but not completely) limited to the original characters, if you have already watched My-Hime this isn’t a problem because the other characters were already well developed there.

Busō Renkin at least got discussed here before so forgive me if I’m extremely brief with this one. If you like Bleach you’ll probably like Busō Renkin as they share some similar subject matter. If you like shōnen fighting anime you’ll probably like Busō Renkin. If you like the idea of shōnen fighting anime, but think they tend to drag on far too long (Dragon Ball Z I’m looking at you) you’ll probably love Busō Renkin because it’s only 26 episodes so the fights get resolved and the plot advances in a timely manner.

With any luck my next post will be about the anime I’m currently following. That would include Bleach and Naruto: Shippūden both of which I’ve mentioned before, and three new anime that started in April: El Cazador de la Bruja, Claymore, and Kaze no Stigma.

Kanon (2006)

I doubt I’ll have as much to say about Kanon, as I did with Kashimashi. I guess that is a little odd since I found Kanon to be one of the nicest and rewarding anime I’ve watched. It certainly isn’t perfect, and I’d never claim it’s for everybody, but I’m always going to rank it high among my favorites. I should point out I’m talking about the 2006 remake. I’ve never seen the 2002 version of Kanon, nor have I ever played any of the versions of the visual novel these anime were based on.

The story revolves around Aizawa Yūichi a second year high school student who moves in with his Aunt and Cousin (Minase Akiko and Minase Nayuki) whom he used to visit during the summers when he was younger (although he hasn’t done so for seven years). Yūichi quickly runs into several girls he used to know from his previous visits, but strangely he and in many cases they have trouble remember details of the events seven years prior.

The early episodes of Kanon are pleasant and leisurely paced. They do a nice job of introducing the main and supporting characters, but beyond some nice conversations, and the sowing of seeds for possible romance nothing much seems to be going on. Or at least it seems that way on the surface, nicely woven throughout are little hints and clues speaking to the fact that there is something more going on. Some are nicely used cues hinting at the areas and themes the anime is going to expand upon; others start out seeming like standard romantic anime fare, but quickly become apparent they have more importance than typical anime cliché. Then there are the more subtle clues that only become apparent when remembered after viewing later episodes. Finally, and these are my favorites, there are the revelations that induced double-takes or vocal interjections on my part while I was watching. The first one of those happened for me at the end of episode 4, where I was left wondering if the entire tone and them of the anime was about to undergo a radical change (happily it didn't, but it did leave me wanting more). A second, possibly even bigger “What!?” moment happened in episode 8. At that point it started to dawn on me, and as I continued through this anime it became more apparent (and delightfully so) that the world Yūichi lives in is every bit as fantastic as the worlds presented in say Kino’s Journey, or The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi (obviously in different ways, but fantastic never-the-less). My absolute favorite part of this anime was discovering just how much more was going on than I then I was expecting.

I should mention a few things in passing.

Forgive me for blogging about the weather, but I felt my local weather was pretty fitting for April Fools' Day. As one might expect from spring the last week has been pretty rainy, the previous two days in particular have been practically nonstop rain. Today however when I looked out my window I was greeted not to the sight of more rain, not to the sight of sunshine, or even just overcast skies. Nope I got to see snow; however it was warm enough that despite the fact the snow was coming down at a decent rate none of it was accumulating. So in a way it was like fake snow, I got the see the stuff fall from the sky, but I didn’t have to deal with it piling up on the ground. I felt it was a pretty appropriate April Fools' Day joke on the part of Mother Nature.

Baseball season has started. I am a very happy person.

I am really good at starting new anime (not as good at finishing them, because I’m easily distracted by more new anime). Last night I started a number of them. I have a feeling when I get home from work Ghost Hunt will occupy a large amount of my time before I go to bed (I watched the first 4 episodes of 25 last night). However Red Garden may give it a run for its money (I’ve watched 2 of its 22 episodes). I also took in the first episode of Code Geass, and the first two episodes of Negima!?.

Ghost Hunt’s title gives you a pretty good idea of what it’s about. The characters seem pretty interesting, and there are hints that the main female character has secrets to be revealed. I found watching Red Garden to be an interesting experience because I knew almost nothing about it when I started watching it (I usually at least know the genre of an anime before I start it). I knew it was by Gonzo, and that back in October John from Ask John had written in his Ask John column that he felt it might be overlooked by American fans (verses Pumpkin Scissors also by Gonzo which John thought would be a hit with American anime fans). I did have an amusing revelation when it dawned on me that Red Garden was set in New York City. If I had paid any attention to the opening credits the setting would have been obvious, but instead I got to sit through the first half of the episode wondering what was bothering me about it. The lack of school uniforms, the yellow school buses, and the characters with names like Rose, Claire, and Kate finally drove the point home for me about two minutes before the anime made mention of New Jersey. I don’t have much to say about Code Geass yet. It’s set in the future, it has mecha, and the main character seems rather intense (he has an interesting power, but I’m not sure I’m going to like him). The art style of Negima!? is very different from Mahou Sensei Negima! I’m a fan of the Negima manga, but less enamored with the original anime (I didn’t hate it, I just preferred the manga). I’m not sure yet what I’m going to think of Negima!? but at least it’s interesting to look at (not quite as stylized as Gankutsuou, but close).