Random News

Damn! A key component of my plan to marry a rich supermodel and become a highly educated trophy husband has been revealed: Apparently marriages where the women are hotter than the men end up happier because the men try harder and the women feel more secure.

Also, what could be a better present than Ikaruga for XBLA being released on my birthday?

1) If someone gave me an Xbox 360. :)
2) If Anime Expo announced the return of Maaya Sakamoto to AX for 2008, given that I missed her in 2005 because I WAS IN JAPAN!

Satyagraha

According to TSA Bob, the x-ray of my macbook air is "sensitive security information".

Well, this is my big chance to leak "sensitive security information"; here you go: 

note: I actually took this using photo booth's x-ray effect.

my new favorite marine inveterbrate

Sorry, Mr. Octopus, all your learning skill and flexibility just isn't as cool as the fact that the Mantis Shrimp can see circularly polarized light, live longer, have fricking awesome eyes, and oh yeah, they generate cavitation bubbles when they strike with their claws at >10,000g.

白鷺

Well, hopefully the UTF-8 encoding will work and you should see the title as characters and not squares. I guess it doesn't help a whole lot unless you know enough Chinese/Japanese to actually read them, but hey, you should be able to guess at the meaning of the second character from the main radical, and if you don't know the first character, there's not much hope for you.

In the tradition of naming my gadgets and things after mecha, I was searching for a fitting name for my newly acquired Macbook Air. I had decided to leave my previous laptop named Scherazade (no, not that Scheherazade) even though my reborn desktop from 2005 retained Escaflowne as moniker. That left open the possibility of some names from more recent mecha anime that I enjoyed. Unfortunately, the names in those were not nearly as interesting. (Sure, Fafner's not bad, but it does derive its name from a dwarf-turned-evil-dragon.) Ikaruga is certainly nice, but somehow does not quite capture the obscurity and coolness I desire. Luckily, I was able to flip through my Yasushi Suzuki artbook to find that the ship preceding Ikaruga, is, Shirasagi.

白鷺 literally refers to a white heron, so it does give the connotation of a bright, sleek, bird. And to go along with the name, I grabbed a nice photo of Himeji-jou off of Flickr, since, as the wikipedia entry points out, "It is occasionally known as Hakurojou or Shirasagijou because of its brilliant white exterior."

And then I went and named the Windows partition Ikaruga. (you know, because of the whole dark-light duality metaphor?)

Anyway, I installed a bunch of 3rd-party software and hacks to make everything the way I wanted, even though OS X is pretty nice already.

1. hacked the menu bar to not be translucent (Apple later made this an option in 10.5.2, but the look is slightly different.)

2. hacked Mail.app to display three panes in a horizontal format, rather than having the message body and list of messages in a vertically arranged column.

3. installed SIMBL and other hacks in order to get the colors in Terminal so that the blue on black would be readable.

4. installed quicksilver and visor

5. grabbed a copy of Papers

6. Adium, of course

7. growl, even though Leopard isn't properly supported yet

8. wait patiently for MailStamps to be updated for Leopard so that I don't have to deal with Mail.app's stupid buttons.

Color

Partially inspired by this post, seen on Boing Boing, I pondered the naming of colors.

Specifically, if we have navy blue and army green, shouldn't there also be an air force red?  It only seems logical.

Well let it be known that I hereby claim the rights to the color known as "Airforce Red".  Crayola, have your lawyers give me a call, whenever you decide to expand to 256 colors.

damn anime companies!

When are you going to get some voice actors who can pronounce words correctly. Japanese pronunciation ... not that hard. What was really bad was how they completely screwed up the names in Noir. Seriously, a film-noir-ish anime about French femme fatales, and Mireille becomes "Miriel" (think "Muriel" with an initial "Mi" instead of "Mu")?

Anyway, I figured it might be interesting to see how Funimation decided to pitch Aquarion, given that you can stream the first episode from IGN. The intro was somewhat amusing for its military-esque description of Deava, which is more or less accurate, but made it seem a little too sci-fi-ish when I think Aquarion belongs in the middle of the fantasy genre. The hilarious part was at the end of the introduction voice-over, when it suddenly got hints of American Idol: "which of these youngsters are going to be chosen as the final pilots of Aquarion?"

Well, what can you do? It takes a lot of money to get into anime publishing these days, and the Japanese studios are pretty wary of modern distribution systems.

this made my day.

link

Finally, Maaya and YK collaborate again. I think a lot of people were sad when they went different ways in 2005, but it's not like her work has gotten worse (though that is the opinion of some people). It does have a slightly different feel now, but I still enjoy it.

Anyway, the probably biggest draw for this on the anime side is that this the return of an anime produced by Shoji Kawamori, scored by Yoko Kanno, with an opening sung by Maaya. Last time this happened, we got Escaflowne. Previous Shoji Kawamori and Yoko Kanno works (without the presence of Maaya) have ranged from the somewhat cult-ish and strange (Arjuna) to the rather episodic, but fairly fun to watch (Aquarion). Oh yeah, and this is for Macross Frontier, the new series for Macross's 25th anniversary (which is probably why the new fighter is the YF-25). So, hopefully we can get some more fans from the Macross-watching pool.