Nutshell

So you may have noticed, I haven't had much to say here in the last few years.  So the brief overview of my geeky life:  I've stopped playing WoW, I've resumed playing City of Heroes, I've obtained a Wii (but I don't use it very much), I still enjoy tabletop RPGs, I plan on running a new BESM campaign soon, I got a new computer, I changed the OS on my old computer to a Linux distro (Linux Mint, plus dual-booting my main computer to Kubuntu alongside the Windows 7 it came with), I'm still watching anime (but not as much as I used to), I've rediscovered my love of Doctor Who, and I'm currently engaged in a game of chess over Facebook.   For any who care less about my geeky hobbies, but may be curious about my personal life in rough chronological order:  I left Onvoy, I moved from Morris to the Twin Cities, my father died (October 19, 2008), I floundered around a bit working some jobs that weren't very good fits for me,  my roommate moved to Vermont, I paid off my car, I became unemployed, I remained unemployed for far too long, and most recently (as in this week) I started a new job that I am extremely excited about.

So that's been my last three years or so in a nutshell.

Now to keep me honest, the breakdown of the Facebook chess match with my friend Joel:

             Me                   Joel
             White               Black

 1.         e4                    e5
 2.         Nf3                  Nc6
 3.         Bb5                 Bc5        (Ruy Lopez, countered by the classical (Cordel) defense)
 4.         c3                   Nf6
 5.         d4                   exd4
 6.         e5                   Ne4
 7.         O-O                dxc3
 8.         bxc3               d5
 9.         Nd4                O-O
10.        Nxc6               bxc6
11.        Bxc6               ba6
12.        Qxd5              . . .

I leave you with an amusing video found on CollegeHumor (the ending veers into NSFW territory YMMV):

It's the best day ever tomorrow!

I don't imagine it is that terribly hard to find amusing videos on YouTube. I just don't generally have the patience to go look for them myself. Fortunately for me I have several friends who are very good at finding them.

A fair warning, the following is probably NSFW do to language reasons (I guess you all know your respective work environments best, but just so you can't say I didn't warn you).  In any event this was originally uploaded to YouTube by bishopvids.  Enjoy.

My gift to you.

I felt like sharing some positive feedback. So here you go.  To anybody that has done something good:

 And to anybody that I like:

 

 You may now return to your regular Internets. . .

I can't really add much to this

I ran across this little YouTube gem on the PAA forums. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.

Well BOO! the embedding on that clip has been turned off. You can still see the cats on a tread mill by going directly to YouTube, but no fancy embedding for us. I guess I could replace the video with some other video of cat(s) on a tread mill, but I've opted for a different species playing on multiple tread mills instead. (Not that I think there are many people left on the Internet who haven't already seen this, but it is still one of my personal favorites.)

A few topics with nothing to do with each other

I'm going to start this post out with an accusation (and a wild accusation at that, which really is the best kind). I'm currently ill, and I completely blame my friend Paul for this fact. Allow me to present my reasoning: Saturday I felt fine, Saturday night I talked to Paul, Paul complained about having the flu, and Sunday morning I woke up sick. The kicker here is I spoke to Paul via WoW. That's right my fiendishly clever "friend" used his obviously demonically granted knowledge of the intricate series of tubes that comprise the Internet to find a way to use it to transmit a biological virus to me.

Well played Paul, well played. The next time I'm GM my retribution will be fierce, but not immediate. After all we all know that old Klingon proverb about revenge.

All joking aside, I actually do have a cold, although it's origin is almost certainly my place of employment (and serves as pretty compelling proof that I'm not washing my hands enough while I'm there). However the truth is nowhere near as amusing as my little hypothetical explanation of my illness. Ponder for a moment the havoc that would be caused if biological viruses and bacteria could actually be spread over the Internet. I find the idea both fascinating, and terrifying. Ready for it to be worse? Add to your consideration this common (and more often true than many would like to admit) little statement, "the Internet is for porn." If you care to dispute that, I direct your arguments to Avenue Q.

Rapidly shifting gears this last Friday I and my whole office received a depressing bit of news. I've talked about my work situation with friends and family, but I've never posted anything here, but back in November my company was purchased by another company. Aside from getting a new insurance provider, and a new 401(k) manager things didn't really change too drastically for my call center. I understand the buyout process was significantly more stressful for the people working at our corporate office in Minneapolis, and a number of people there did end up loosing their jobs, but my office was spared most of the stress and all of the layoffs. That was until this last Friday. A coworker of mine, a very nice lady, got the news that her position was being terminated. She took it pretty hard, and really we all did here. It's not like she was being fired for cause, she just had the bad luck of working a position that after the buyout, merger, and ultimate restructuring of my company was no longer needed.

To finish things off of a completely different (and happy) note. Episodes 4 and 5 of The Guild have been out for a while now. If you haven't already seen them, for shame, and enjoy.

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:

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.

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.

Some things are too cool by far

I'm not really sure what it is about steampunk that tickles my fancy so, but regardless of the reason it certainly does.

While this isn't precisely steampunk, it is a very interesting site.

I'm especially enamored with the steam powered R2 unit.



And again:



I'm still planning on saying a few things about Onegai Teacher, and a number of other anime I've recently finished, but that will have to wait for another day.

Well he is a Sith Lord. . .

The weather this last weekend was most uncooperative so I ran my BESM campaign remotely. All-in-all it went just fine I couldn't get my firewall to allow my computer to act as a server for any of the various programs we made use of, but other people were able to handle that so it was only a minor annoyance. We did have one "major" technological outage, but I cannot really complain about it as it luckily happened just when I was ready to call a short break so I could fix myself some food, and was resolved a minute or two before I was finished eating the food I had just made myself.

I received an e-mail from an old friend of mine today. It consisted of a link to an amusing video on YouTube. I give you Dark Vader being a jerk:

Way too much Haruhi

Tomorrow, weather permitting (and if not technology permitting), I'll be running my BESM campaign. Tomorrow I will also be making the official decision about what to run for my next campaign. That particular decision is approximately 99% made at this point so baring a last minute strenuous objection by one of my players (or some late night epiphany) I'll be running a sci-fi campaign featuring independent mecha pilots in a Firefly/Serenity inspired setting. The second place idea was The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya inspired campaign. In honor of the campaign that might have been (and I guess clings to a 1% chance of still being) I give you this post which happened when happy chance lead me to YouTube, YouTube -like it usually does- lead me to more YouTube, and that inspired me to see how many of these Haruhi Suzumiya videos I could embed in this post.

I'll start with the original video I ran across. It's your basic anime music video featuring the end credits of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and a song from the Namco game Mojipittan. I found it delightfully amusing and immediately began looking for more.


Next I'll move on to the clean versions of the opening and end credits (see here for song titles and artist info).


With the original versions out of the way I give you the all dance version of the end credits.


I was very happy to find this edited together version of Haruhi's surprising rock concert at her school's cultural festival. Kyon's face when he realizes Haruhi is on stage just kills me.


Sticking with the rock theme I move on to this AMV featuring The White Stripes song "Fell In Love with a Girl."


There is a veritable cornucopia of Haruhi Suzumiya themed AMVs to be found on YouTube (and doubtless even more on the Internet in general). To represent those countless numbers I chose this one because it featured Nagato Yuki who may just be my favorite character in the anime.


Finally I leave you with the Gundam version. The fact that a Gundam version exists is proof that people with far too much time on their hands make wacky things and post them to the Internet, and other people with far to much time on their hands (like me) find those things and blog about them.

A little light reading

No earth shattering updates in my life this last week to report which overall is probably a good thing. The Eberron campaign on Monday was fun, and we'll be meeting again tomorrow. We should probably wrap up the current adventure (or so our DM has estimated). The process of remote gaming is proving surprisingly workable, even if the occasional technological issues are still somewhat annoying. All-in-all I'm quite happy with the experience thus far, and I am really enjoying being a player again. My own BESM campaign should meet again this coming Saturday an event I eagerly anticipate. I estimate my current BESM campaign will be concluded in another three to five sessions, and while I’m more then a little sad to see it end, I’m also filled with a fair amount of satisfaction over how it’s developed.

I’ve spent the majority of my free time this last week rereading many of David Weber’s Honor Harrington books. I also ran across LibriVox.org and its collection of public domain audio books, and promptly making use of its services I’ve enjoyed having Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars read to me these last two days. I should start in on the The Gods of Mars in the next few days.

I also found time to watch some anime. I’m still keeping current with Bleach (episodes 114 and 115) and Busou Renkin (episodes 18 and 19). My research into the picture I used to end my post on 2/9 peaked my interest a bit so I’ve since watched the first six episodes of Blood+ (I’ll probably get around to watching a little of Fate/stay Night as well). Since I’ve only watched a few episodes I don’t have much to say about it yet, but I did find those six episodes to be pretty interesting. Over the last two weeks or so I’ve watched the first four episodes of Sumomomo Momomo mainly because I wanted to do a little investigation into martial arts comedy anime with an eye towards some future BESM campaign (I’ll probably get around to checking out Shijou Saikyou no Deshi Kenichi at some point for the same reason). I’ve found it to be enjoyable enough that I imagine I’ll continue watching it. Last night I watched the first episode of Tokimeki Memorial Only Love and I find myself at a loss for what to say about it. I enjoyed it to be sure, but I don’t think I could describe it other then to say I have no idea what to expect from episode two (I will say that assuming the remaining episodes follow in the footsteps of the first episode I could be in for quite an enjoyable parody of high school romance anime).

Finally I watched the debut episode of Naruto Shippūden. I was surprised how easy it was for me to follow the action and guess what had transpired from where I left off watching Naruto and where Naruto had ended prior to the new series. The short (and somewhat unfair) description of those events would be not much. For the record I watched 82 episodes of Naruto prior to stopping leaving 138 episodes before the events of Naruto Shippūden, of course the last episode of Naruto based on the manga was 135 (and remember episode 101 is an omake and episodes 102-106 comprise the first of the anime only filler arcs) so I’ve watched a bit shy of two-thirds of the anime based on the manga, but still I think I should have had a few more questions about what was going on when I watched the new Naruto series. All that said I really did like Naruto Shippūden and look forward to watching some more of it.

It did not escape my notice that pitchers and catchers reported to spring training this week. Obviously there is still awhile to go until the season opens, but never-the-less the phrase spring training always makes me happy.

I leave you with the following video I ran across on YouTube:

New month, new post

I don’t imagine it will surprise anyone to learn that I found BloodRayne to be a truly awful movie. It was painfully bad. While I cannot say I’ll never watch another Uwe Boll film, it is going to be a very long time before I do, and even then I’ll have to be in a really odd mood before I’d willingly submit to that particular activity.

The last two weeks have been pretty good. No one event really defines just what was so good about them, but all in all I’ve had a good two weeks. I’ve slowed down a little in my anime watching. I did watch another seven episodes of Hunter × Hunter. The series continues to be really entertaining, but with so much of it left I still don’t have too much more to say about it. I also watched another four episodes of The Twelve Kingdoms. The current story arc was rapped up resulting in Yōko taking her thrown as the Queen of Kei, and Sugimoto being returned home to Japan. I’ve also been keeping current more or less with Bleach (through episode 113) and Busou Renkin (through episode 17).

I’ve done a fair amount of role-playing during the last two weeks. I’ve joined a D&D Eberron campaign being played entirely over the Internet. For those who care about such things I’m playing a changeling named Kell (he’s currently a 2nd level character Rogue 1/Fighter 1). It has been really nice being a player again (I only rarely get to be one). Playing over the Internet is interesting. For our first session we used Skype to provide a voice chat client. It worked alright, but we had periodic problems with voice quality, and we needed to restart our conference call several times over the course of the evening. For our second session we tried out Ventrilo. Ventrilo wasn’t as user friendly to set up as Skype, but we had far fewer problems with voice quality. We’ve also tried two different mapping programs. For our first session we used Gametable; a very solid program that I have no problem recommending to people for use in remote gaming. For our second session we tried out MapTool. Using MapTool isn’t anywhere as intuitive as Gametable, but it has a lot more features. I don’t really have any problem recommending MapTool for use in remote gaming either (just read the manual).

Also I got to run my BESM campaign this weekend. As an added treat Dan joined us in person for this session instead of remotely (usually via iChat) as he usually does. Once again we started the evening off with some Wii action (Excite Truck, and Rayman Raving Rabbids mainly). I continue to find this BESM campaign to be highly satisfactory. What started out as a short little 2 maybe 3 month campaign where the players were supposed to track down four pieces of a magic item, and then use that to defeat the bad guy has taken on a life of its own. The characters have developed in interesting ways, and a number of very entertaining side stories have developed. The next session should be on 2/24.



In related BESM news I got both my PDF, and dead-tree version of BESM 3rd Edition during the last two weeks. It looks really good. I haven’t had a chance to really tear into it yet, but from what I have looked at I’m pretty happy. It is definitely changed from the 2nd edition. The basic resolution mechanic has changed from rolling a stat score or less on 2d6, to rolling a target number or higher on 2d6 (in both cases often modified by skills). The cost of everything has been rebalanced, and characters are now built on a lot more character points. For example under BESM 2nd Edition 25-45 points was a pretty common range for starting characters (and those characters would be pretty powerful), under 3rd Edition basic normal humans are built on 100 character points (I imagine I’ll likely be starting characters in the 250 – 350 point range).

As a little side note one of my players in the BESM campaign (and also a fellow gamer in the Eberron campaign) has started a blog.

I leave you with another picture that amuses me. This particular screen capture comes from The Twelve Kingdoms. I laughed really hard when I watched this scene, and I laughed even harder when I made this screen capture. Yes Rakushun is naked in this picture, but nothing sexual is going on. I swear to you, The Twelve Kingdoms isn't hentai.