I recognize that the Transformers movie is essentially a shameless ploy to wring money out of my childhood nostalgia, but after seeing this new trailer, I do not care.
It is going to be awesome.
Also there is big, big news on the horizon, which I will be discussing soon. Look forward to it.
I suspect that this debate will rage for years—the debate over the “correct” viewing order for the fourteen episodes that comprise the first animated season of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It will be one of the Great Otaku Questions, up there with “What in blazes actually happens at the end of Evangelion?” and “What’s it like to go on a date?”
Sorry, cheap shot.
I watched the fansubs—a little late, I know; I should not have let Warren give me copies, but my greedy little nerd heart demanded more. I’m buying the special edition DVDs immediately, so all’s well that ends well, yes? But I digress. The episodes. The fansubs have them in broadcast order; the standard DVD release will be in chronological order.
Hunter, bless his heart, contends that the broadcast order was a cheap gimmick, and that there’s no reason to watch it out of chronological order.
I disagree, but for reasons I myself don’t fully understand. I do think that the Big Reveal needs to be at the end. By that time most viewers have more-or-less figured out what’s going on, but the solution to the Big Problem is more of a surprise, and I think it has more impact if it comes right at the end of the series.
I realize that I am speaking in vague generalities that could hit at anything from “lunch” to “apocalypse,” like some kind of nerd Nostradamus; for this I apologize, but it really is worth staying free of spoilers.
Anyway, Haruhi is really quite special, and no matter how loudly its praises have been sung, I can’t bring myself to call it “overrated.” It simply isn’t. My jaded literature student heart has been moved by this show, moved by the quality of its writing and characterization as much as the postmodern audacity it has to be both itself and a parody of itself.
It was with such admiration, and a new enthusiasm for the animated medium as a whole, that I queued up Genshiken.
I’m going to take a break from fannish raving now, perhaps discussing Genshiken another day, but let me leave with this: Between Planetes, Gunbuster 2, Haruhi, and Genshiken, I’ve seen more paradigm-shiftingly good anime in the last six months than I’d seen in the six years before that.
God help me, I think I’m being sucked back in.
For the tiny percentage of people out there willing to pay for a web browser, I should point out that OmniWeb is now on sale. I paid thirty bucks back in the 5.0 days (it’s 10 through November), which is worth it for the vertical thumbnailed tabs alone, to say nothing of workspaces and per-site preferences. Oh, also it doesn’t have that insufferable brushed-metal look that Safari uses.
See, it’s stuff like this that makes me feel like Ruby would be a neat language to use in a MUSH-like context. If only social/roleplay MU*ing weren’t a dying art…
#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w
# This tells me in no uncertain terms how many pages I need to
# get through in a given day in order to meet a deadline, and
# offers a Valentino Rossi-like GO!!!!!! by way of encouragement.
# Require the fancy-pants linguistics library
require 'rubygems'
require 'linguistics'
Linguistics::use( :en )
# Init constants
SecondsInWeek = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7
SecondsInDay = 60 * 60 * 24
Deadline = Time.gm(2006, "Dec", 15, 12, 00, 1)
Today = Time.now
TimeLeft = Deadline - Today
TimeLeftAdj = TimeLeft - SecondsInWeek
TotalPages = 403
unless ARGV[ 0 ]
puts 'What page are you on?'
current_page = gets.to_i
else
current_page = ARGV[ 0 ].to_i
end
pages_left = TotalPages - current_page
puts 'PAGES LEFT: ' + pages_left.en.numwords
# Could just print the results of evaluation, but
# that would be harder to write I mean read.
ppday = pages_left / (TimeLeft / SecondsInDay)
ppweek = pages_left / (TimeLeft / SecondsInWeek)
ppweekadj = pages_left / (TimeLeftAdj / SecondsInWeek)
puts 'AVERAGE PAGES PER DAY: at least ' + ppday.to_i.en.numwords
puts 'AVERAGE PAGES PER WEEK: at least ' + ppweek.to_i.en.numwords
puts 'ADJUSTED PAGES PER WEEK: ideally, ' + ppweekadj.to_i.en.numwords
puts '-------> G O ! ! ! ! ! ! ! <--------'
I’m painfully aware that this is incredibly trivial, but it’s a big deal for me, so you hacker types can keep your derision to yourselves.
This guy is out of his mind. Writing is harder than programming? Maybe that’s because you’re a better programmer than writer.
I’m an okay writer. If confronted with a situation in which I need to convey a complex or abstract idea using written language, I can (presupposing a working knowledge of the topic) explain it effectively—even, perhaps, with a modest amount of flair. With time to revise, I can do even better.
Programming? Forget about it. I am terrible programmer, and not just because I haven’t spent very much time at it. I remember taking CS 257 (Nonimperative Programming with Scheme) at UNM. I got a C in that class—the only C of my academic career. It was absurdly, unreasonably difficult for me. Even implementing the simple, easy stuff took me hours of interpreting and reinterpreting permutations of code, and frequently I arrived at the solution via trial and error rather than with insight.
I haven’t done much programming since then, but even my forays into Perl, PHP and Applescript (at various points for various reasons) have been characterized by similar bumbling. The code won’t work. I won’t understand why it won’t work. I’ll change an arbitrary detail. It works. I won’t understand why it now works. Or more likely, it never works and I simply give up.
Learning a bit of Ruby has started to change this very slightly, but even so, I will never be a even a moderately competent writer of scripts, to say nothing of being a “programmer.”
Programming is easier than writing? Maybe for you, pal, maybe for you.
EDIT: What concerns me is that if writing is harder than programming, and I am a terrible programmer, then what does that say about my writing?
Don’t answer that.
Ruby and I are running away together and there’s nothing you or Dad can do about it!
Been meaning to post about this for a while—about a year, actually.
I’m trying to think about how to introduce what is going to seem like a stupid piece of quotidia, but I cannot emphasize enough how important the following piece of software has been to my overall well-being.
No kidding. Mac & Windows. Use it. Love it. That’s all I have to say.
Yesterday I got some wireless multiplayer going on the DS, and experienced one of those oh-wow-technology moments. Something about the pick-up-and-go nature of gameplay added to the fact that one unit can act as a kind of server that supplies software to another via etheric translation (or something) was deeply impressive.
Sometimes I cannot believe the times in which I live.
I wasn’t cool enough to get one of the older ones with more space/memory, but yesterday I picked up a Linksys WRT54G router and flashed it with DD-WRT. The procedure was totally smooth and uneventful. Haven’t done anything fancy with it yet, but I’m at least going to do MAC filtering and some QoS stuff for BitTorrent Skype. Good geeky fun.
I threatened to perform the process naked so that I would have “flashed the router” in a different sense, but that proved impractical.