Somehow I missed the recent (9/21/07 isn't exactly recent) release of AMV Hell 4. I can see my cable modem is going to be busy tonight (*ahem* after work of course).

If it's half as funny as the AMV H3, I'm gonna have a hard time breathing.

Posted in Anime by: Will at 01:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 60 words, total size 1 kb.

I commited a second cardinal sin. Unbeknownst to me, one of our group is that person who flips to the last page when starting a book. I made the mistake of supplying Miss Last-Page with links to the various Wikipedia pages for the shows in the hopper. I was very clear up front that the links were for after viewing.

I hit Haibane's wiki page to assess the potential damage and discovered that it is at least somewhat thin on plot details. Tragedy not quite averted, but it wasn't a complete loss.

Alright, so we're starting into the hot and heavy of Haibane Renmei at this point: episodes 8-13. People are disappearing, others are getting sick, and back stories are filling in.

I did help out a little with pointing out times during the show that deserve special attention to detail.

During Rakka's dream sequence in the well, I told everyone to pay very close atttention to what they're both seeing and hearing.

At the end of the show, at least one person had come to the prevailing conclusion about what Glie could represent.  I did what I could to fill in the gaps with observations based on my multiple viewings of the show and left them all to stew on the show.

I'll find out what they really all thought about it this next week.

Oh, and to pad out the schedule at the end, we watched the first two episodes of Tenchi Muyo OVA 1. It makes for easy fluff to kill time before everyone is present, or afterward if some people have to leave early.

Next week we start into some solid sci-fi / space opera with Crest of the Stars.

Posted in Anime by: Will at 07:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 272 words, total size 2 kb.

So a couple friends expressed an interest in getting back to an old (thought rather sporadic) tradition of getting to gether to watch anime. We managed it a handful of time back in college, but it was always a hassle to get everybody in one place at one time so no one fell behind.

College days are long gone, and a measure of stability has settled in.

So now we're back on something resembling a schedule. Tuesday nights, I put a hojillion miles on my truck and we watch anime.

I get to be the pusher. I have the stash so to speak. I make suggestions, recommend genres, and generally try to guide them toward shows in an ordet that makes sense.

So what do they decide they have to watch the first week (9/25) out of the gate? Haibane Renmei.

It was my fault really. I shouldn't have even taken it along. When the semi-angelic girl on the cover caught their eyes, I refused to say anything about the plot, other than that it is very good, and very very different. That sold them apparently. I tried rather weakly to guide them in another direction until they'd seen a few other things. But they insisted that they wanted to see it, so I obliged.

Week one, we got through the first 7 episodes with only a few raised eyebrows and glazed eyes. Confusion was running rampant, but I kept insisting that, while not everything would be explained before the end, it would start making sense about five hours after the last episode.

The general concensus was a tentative thumbs up, unless of course the ending royally pissed them off.

Posted in Anime by: Will at 07:04 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 288 words, total size 2 kb.

Foul language welcome.

I'm trying to stick to the natural colors you see in the banner images.

And while I'm on the subject, I haven't been able to get the custom color pop-ups working right. I'd really rather the posting area were more tan/brown than it currently is. It's dangerously close to pink for my taste.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 01:37 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

This was what I had to say about Haibane Renmei back in May of '05. Much of it is dated, but that has a lot to do with living conditions at the time, and there are a few things I'll need to append when I have a second.

Thank you sir for pointing this one out to me. I finished up volume 4 last night and have been letting things percolate since then.

Haibane Renmei is one of those shows that will leave you all warm and fuzzy, unless it doesn't. That sentence makes more sense once you've seen the whole show. If you're the kind of person who's a perpetual optimist, you'll no doubt be brimming with tears of joy at the beauty of salvation and redemption. If you're a cynic who tends to assume the worst, the open ending and loads of unanswered questions will likely leave you a little cold, but still with the sense that you've seen something special. Me, I'm switching back and forth between the two because I've got some sort of weird bi-polar pessimist disorder. Either way, it's a wonderful experience.

Below be spoilers where I will wax rhapsodic and bloviate on various things that come to mind. Read at your own risk.





No seriously... If you haven't seen it, stop here and find something else to read. There's a whole Intraweb of info out there just waiting for you. Come back when you've seen the show in its entirety.





So apparently Glie is a place where the souls of children who commit suicide (or die near infancy in the case of the Young Feathers) are sent to redeem themselves and earn a second chance. They are all there to solve whatever flaw it was in their character that drove them to end their life. The steps required to do this are mostly unknown, but it seems that in at least some cases they must first receive forgiveness/salvation from another to break them out of their Circle of Sin. Sounds simple enough except for the fact that this isn't made known to the Haibane, and we as the audience only know this because Rakka stumbles across her own source of forgiveness. It's also convenient that she is far enough on the Communicator's good side that he slacks off on the rules with her quite frequently. He fills in enough of the gaps that Rakka can eventually puzzle out what happened, and it's through her experience that we learn that the aid of someone else is required for a Haibane to be redeemed and reach their Day of Flight. Whether all Haibane are trapped in some form of sin isn't clear. It may be that only those who fall back into the pattern that got them there in the first place require this special form of redemption.

So what were their flaws and resulting deaths?

The revelation of what happened to Reki in her previous life is pretty devastating. Suicide by train seems like a particularly horrible way to die. She's the kind of person who easily felt slighted, became jealous of the people around her, and decided that the way to exact revenge was to make them miss her. All her talk of "vanish"[ing] and being forgotten is what lead me to this conclusion. Many suicides happen because people feel unappreciated and decide they need to make themselves stand out in a spectacular fashion. I've seen it posited that rather than commiting suicide, the Old Feathers are simply children that died before their time. However, that doesn't explain the need for salvation and redemption in order to leave Glie. If a child were to simply die in a horrible accident, there shouldn't be the need for all the soul searching and character building that comes with being a Haibane.

Rakka had a similar problem to Reki's, but where Reki felt driven to harm those around her with her death, Rakka simply lost the will to live out of loneliness. There was no intent to harm on her part. She actually seemed to think she wouldn't be noticed when she was gone. However, she did end up hurting someone. That someone took the form of a raven, and was eventually able to forgive Rakka after enough of her memory returned. As to how she died, most seem to think she jumped from a great height. The strange thing is, Rakka has this water motif surrounding her in both the intro and credits. The very first scene in the very first episode, the raven splashes through the surface of water in pursuit of Rakka. The first thing we see in the intro is what looks like the view looking up through the waters surface, then comes the fall to Old Home. As we see her form floating through the feathers, she has the ripple effect of light refracted by water playing off of her. The ending credits I believe are pretty self-explanatory. I'm guessing that, if she did jump to her death, it wasn't onto a solid surface, but into a body of water where she drowned. Rather than "falling," she may have been sinking.

I wish we knew more about Kuu. I'm curious who her source of salvation was. We meet her so close to her Day of Flight, that she's already all but finished her redemption process. From her name, I'm guessing she's the one who really jumped to her death, but we don't know enough to begin puzzling out why.

Nemu is in a similar situation. The Communicator hints that she's ready to go, she need only stop waiting on Reki to Fly first. There are any number of explanations for how she killed herself and lead to her "sleep" name. The method that immediately jumped to mind is staying in a confined space with a running vehicle. You suffocate, but before that happens, you fall into a deep sleep from which you never wake.

Hikari is difficult to pin down on both regards. She plays an extremely minor role. "Light" is a little puzzling in conjunction with a suicide. Sure there are a lot of ways the two could combine, but most are extremely violent. Explosions, electrocution, and immolation come immediately to mind, but I think they intended for Reki to be the person with the most violent death. That's just my gut feeling.

Kana also suffers from a lack of information. Her name meaning "river fish" or some such might indicate she also drowned. Her tomboy personality seems meant to serve as a foil to Hikari, but the "why" of how she came to be in Glie is left fairly open.

Ok, now I've seen a few message boards where people are getting way too mechanically detailed in what is essentially a supernatural place. Trying to come up with scientific explanations for why the halos glow seems a fools errand. Halos glow because that's what halos do. They're forged from some strange glowing leaves that grow in the wall. How do the plants glow? It doesn't really matter. The whole town is bathed in mysticism.

The humans in Glie are another puzzle. It would seem easy to conclude that they are in Glie for reasons similar to those of the Haibane, but towards the end of the show, in the last few episodes, I began to get the impression that they might just be another part of the system meant to redeem the Haibane.

The Young Feathers are probably S.I.D.S victims or the like. We all have that point before which we can't remember anything. Without memory, we have no individuality. That's why the older Haibane's names are derived from their one-and-only memory upon entering Glie and the younger are given names based on their first dream/desire. The Young Feathers are probably the souls of those too young to have developed much of an individual personality, and as such they aren't forced to face the same trials (that we know of) as the Old Feathers.

What the Haibane are allowed to remember seems rather arbitrary. They recognized a train and railroad tracks without there being such a thing in Glie, but it seems to me that the ability to recall an object like a train has as much to do with location as it does the train itself. When I think of trains, I think of the line that runs parallel to the road leading to my uncles house. I think of the tracks that cross the road not far from here and occasionally make me late for class. Having no first hand experience with any amnesia victims, I have no frame of reference outside my own head to understand how to remember what something is without also linking it in with a location. I guess we'll just have to chalk this one up to the powers of Kami-sama.

I'm sure there are more things I'll think of and figure out as time goes by. I'll plop them down here once they coalesce into something coherent.

[UPDATE 6/29/05]: Ok, I may have been a bit off in my analysis of Reki's situation. As much as she wished to vanish, it was really more a result of her belief that everyone had abandoned her. Then she abandoned herself. The anger and jealousy are no less real, but now I see that her suicide wasn't really about vengeance. I think my initial reaction was colored by her quite angry reaction to the recovery of her cocoon dream and the way she seemed to take it out on Rakka.

Posted in Anime by: Will at 06:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 252 words, total size 9 kb.

A great many moons ago (I can't even find the post now) Kim du Toit described himself as an "Angry Man." He didn't mean he just flew off the rails at any little thing. He was talking about a deep-seated anger and frustration at what he saw going on around him. (again, I'm paraphrasing from memory here, but if anybody can find the original essay/post, you'll receive a free web-cookie).

What angered him was the slow and seemingly unstoppable assault on and decay of Western Civilization from forces both foreign and domestic. Individual rights and rational thought giving way to collectivism and emotional thinking. While Bill Whittle represents the Western Optimist, Kim can come across as the Western Pessimist. They're both right in some ways, and both points of view are valuable additions to on-going public debate.

Zetsubou Sensei is a caricature of a home-grown Japanese "Angry Man." His over-the-top rants on the decay of society around him are always followed up by, "I'm in Despair!" and a melodramatic suicide attempt. He's an old fashioned man in a world changing so rapidly that nothing ever gets a foothold into the culture long enough to become anything like permanent.

It's hard not to wonder what message the manga author was trying to send with this character. Does he agree philosophically with Zetsubou? Minus the despair and suicidal tendencies of course. Or is he satirizing those in Japan who may think like Zetsubou?

The rest of the characters could be looked at as critiques on other developments/aspects in Japanese society: hikikomori, xenophobia, etc. There's meat here for a lot of heavy analysis, but the show's mission to deliver laughs means playing up the stereotypes and amping up the ridulousness.

It's an intriguing show, whether it's meant to be taken seriously or not.

Posted in Anime by: Will at 09:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 306 words, total size 2 kb.

I first read about it here.

Dragonmount hosted a blog for Jordan, but the traffic spike appears to have knocked them offline.

I wasn't much of a recreational reader until a friend handed me The Eye of the World in college. Ever since then, I've probably read more books in the last six years than all the years previous.

It's sad to hear that he's passed. From what I understand, he'd had the ending of the Wheel of Time series planned out long before ever typing a word. He's supposedly been dictating much of the plot and outline to people, so it sounds like the last book in the series may yet happen. He also spoke of some potential short stories to be sprinkled throughout the chronology later, but those are not going to happen now.

I wonder if he felt regret at not finishing it himself? His books touched a great many people, more than any author could really hope to. I'm certain that that's what he'll be taking with him, not any regret over a few untyped words. Sometimes the best endings are those left to the imagination.

Posted in Books by: Will at 10:17 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 195 words, total size 1 kb.

I've been in my current job for 5 1/2 years. Well, I can't exactly say that.

I started at this place in Jan. 2002 while I was still in school. At that time, I was only the part-time "intern." They liked to sound big by calling me that, but really I was just a part-timer. I held that position for three years while I chipped away at my engineering degree.

A little over a month before graduation in Dec. 05, in the middle of trying to finish up my senior design project, both of my bosses left the company. ( I was passed back and forth between two departments as need arose.) One was fired just a week after the other put in his two weeks. I was very quickly thrust into doing the work of three people at the worst possible time.

The replacement for the fired boss had been lined up and arrived the day after the firing, but it took a couple months before he was anything like up to speed. I was still checking his work 4 months later.

The other boss that quit caught the company completely off guard, and they had to scramble to find a replacement. Their first attempt at replacing him was a complete failure. The new guy would nip out for "smoke breaks" to the van he basically lived in after moving from Oklahoma, and he would come back smelling quite strongly of alcohol. It doesn't help that he royally screwed up a big project, and I had to step in and do it all over again from scratch. He didn't last a month.

That position was technically empty for the next 5 months while I held it provisionally. In about April of 06, the head-guy at our plant asked me if I wanted the job. I didn't really. I had applied for JET before graduating, and I was pretty confident I would be accepted. But the news came back negative in late February, and I had made the horrible mistake of not having a backup plan in place. Also, in all the chaos after the first two guys left, there was a months-long process of all the other experienced people I'd grown up working with leaving as well. I was basically drifting at the time I was asked, so I accepted the job.

Ever since then, it's been one miserable day after another. I spent most of 2006 helping new people get trained rather than doing my job, and the turnover has been abysmal.

Things seemed to calm down in early 2007, but in the last month, three more people were let go. Two I can't say I'm sad to see go, but they at least seemed to be able to do their jobs. The third was just ridiculous.

I'm done being ignored when I point out problems. I'm done being ignored when the answers I give aren't what they want to hear. And I'm done dealing with ownership dedicated to un-fettered growth by squeezing blood from stones.

I've been recruited by a better outfit, and I'm gone.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 08:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 525 words, total size 3 kb.

When I comment in Minx from work, the ip hash always comes back as "sox9v", and from home it was always "ols40". Now my home ip is generating a different hash. I can't think of anything that would cause/require my home ip to change. From what I understood, the ip on a cable connection should be static.

It's not any big deal, just unexpected.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 09:07 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 69 words, total size 1 kb.

At least it sucks when you're shopping in a real estate market that's suffering the aftershocks of hyper inflation.

Four years ago you could have got yourself into a nearly-new suburban track-home for under 200k. Then the market went on a bat-shit crazy binge for a couple years.

At the height of the boom, you'd be in a bidding war for that same house for all of 15 minutes before it sold to some jackass investor out of LA for 310k. They all expected to sit on the property for a month or two, maybe a year, and flip it for another 50k or more. The bubble burst and now there's a couple dozen foreclosures a week because people bought up property they couldn't afford long-term.

All these newly bank-owned properties are flooding the market, but the banks being what they are, refuse to loose money on these deals. Houses that should rightfully be below 200k are still being held up by stubborn banks for what's still owed on them. (In one case in particular, I saw a bank list a pretty rundown house on the MLS at price of 210k, but finally dropped it to 180k.They rejected three offers for that lower price, then promptly jacked the price back up $12,000.) In the mean time, interest rates took off in May and June and haven't really relaxed.

When I decided it was time to get myself into a house back in March, things didn't look so bad. Interest rates were ok, but the prices hadn't yet dropped into my wheel-house. It may just be my perception, but prices seem to have flattened right about the time the interest rates bumped.

In the mean time, I allowed the lease on my apartment to expire and convert to month-to-month. I didn't plan on this taking so damned long. So I'm paying pretty close to what a cheap mortgage would be as it is.

Speculating investors and realtors have fucking destroyed the AZ real estate market, screwing those of us who actually want to live and work here.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 10:25 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 350 words, total size 2 kb.

Really good shoes.

The best way to make a trip to Vegas almost miserable?

Spend the weekend following your group of friends from place to place to place, not really doing anything.

Just walking. 

A lot.

In utility boots.

At least the hotel was nice.

Don't adjust your screen. We weren't actually on Mars. The camera in my very expensive cellphone just sucks that much. Between the poor resolution and the retarded automatic color correction, I hardly bother with using the camera function anymore.

And the amount of City Center construction going on along the Strip is absolutely ridiculous. If you were to turn 90º to the right from the picture above, you would see a massive hole in the earth from which burst a rectangular beast of steel, concrete, and wiring. We had the misfortune of being placed in rooms that faced the new iron monstrosity, and the construction had all of us up far too early on Saturday morning.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 06:15 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 167 words, total size 1 kb.

So, there's a Vegas trip coming up in my distant future. I hit Google Maps to figure out how to get to the hotel when what did I see in the satellite view but this odd looking set of buildings. From closer to the ground you get an entirely different view (and a hefty price tag).

It's called Turnberry Place, and whoever assembled the overhead shot for Google's database managed to turn four fairly normal highrises into a Dali-esqe image of leaning towers and nonsensical shadows. Though, it would be more fun to live in that way.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 02:47 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 100 words, total size 1 kb.

Xenoglossia is turning out to be far better than it has any right to be. The betrayal staged in episodes 17 and 18 was particularly well constructed, and it made me both angry and not a little bit amazed at the character's ability to stay so inconspicuous (and dedicated as well).

There's still so much left unexplained that it's hard to guess where the plot is going, but I don't get the feeling they're going to pull any Eva style metaphysical nonsense, so it's at least got that going for it.

Posted in Anime by: Will at 09:08 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 95 words, total size 1 kb.

You hear me? The last straw!

It's time to join Ducks Unlimited!

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 08:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.

I can't imagine how you would even practice a landing at this airport.

Whatever they're paying that guy, it doesn't seem enough.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 12:44 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 31 words, total size 1 kb.

And he's not above bludgeoning you over the head with that for an entire novel either.

Or words to that effect.

A friend loaned me the first 8 books of the Sword of Truth, and while I was having some serious Robert Jordan deja vu for the first two books, once he set his teeth into the conflict with the Order, I began to finally feel like I was in new territory.

Then he decides he's gonna turn modern-day George Orwell for a novel. And while I agree with the sentiment, it's the ham-fisted execution that had me groaning every couple pages.

Hopefully he got it out of his system. Pillars of Creation has started out pretty slow, but it's interesting to see that he brought back Chekov's Siblings.

Posted in Books by: Will at 06:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 142 words, total size 1 kb.

If you're a retool of a spin-off of Tenchi fan, that is. Funimation has licensed the Sasami: Mahou Shoujo Club series for a 2008 release. A couple fansub outfits only managed to get the first episode released (even after all this time). Now we get to see how this new (and likely inferior) Misao turns out.

Posted in Anime by: Will at 11:04 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 58 words, total size 1 kb.

Two local TV stations (3 & 15) just had their helicopters crash into one another during a slow-speed chase.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 01:31 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 21 words, total size 1 kb.

It's been one of those days where I just keep getting things stuck in my head.

There's no sense in not sharing.

Little language warning in the second one.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 04:19 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 31 words, total size 1 kb.

The CBC has made a sitcom called "Little Mosque on the Prairie."

Read the full plot outline.

Posted in Random Debris by: Will at 08:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 21 words, total size 1 kb.