Earlier tonight, I finished Shivering Isles. I had picked it up a few weeks ago when gogamer was selling it for cheap. Since I had just finished playing through Resident Evil 5 (see below), I decided to give it a play. I still had my "Ruler of the World" character that I had used when I played through the main game about a year ago, so I used that to play the expansion. All in all, I think it was pretty well put together. I was especially entertained by the solid writing and voice acting that they put behind the central character of the expansion, Sheogorath. It is important for madgods to have good characterization and they managed to pull it off quite well. Otherwise, it reminded me of any of the other major sidequests in Oblivion.

Immediately before SI, I had been playing Resident Evil 5. The game itself plays similarly to Resident Evil 4 (no suprise there), but this time involves one of the original protagonists: Chris Redfield. Chris has been around since the original Resident Evil, but has only showed up in three of the 7 "main story" games: RE, RE5, and Code Veronica. Coincidentally, these are also the only ones in which Wesker appears. Overall, I enjoyed the game. I ended up playing through the game 3 complete times (twice on Normal, once on Veteran) in order to unlock various items in the game as well as to get various Trophies. I did eventually try to play it on the hardest difficulty, but, finding that normal enemies could one shot me, gave up on that idea.

Next up, I intend to finally finish The Last Remnant. I am also playing through Max Payne again now that I have managed to get the sound working in Vista.

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My old Lain bag was never particularly good at being a bag and my old backpack has begun to degrade in a bizarre fashion. As such, I decided to look into getting a new bag and about two weeks ago ordered a bag from Timbuk2. I bag initially arrived last week, but was not the one that I ordered. Luckily, the customer service people were very reasonable and cross-shipped me my replacement bag which arrived today:



I ordered mine custom. The panel configuration (though it is difficult to tell from the lighting) is teal, pink, purple with a citron (yellow) logo. I chose these colors for two reasons. Firstly, they look decent together. Secondly, they are completely unmistakable from even across a room. I haven't yet tested the bag to see how well it will serve me, but just adjusting the straps and such I've been pretty impressed with how well put together it is. I may have more updates later.

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Earlier today, I put the first hole in my wall since I've lived in my apartment. I did this using a nail so that I could put up my newly framed painting.

The lighting in my apartment makes it hard to get a shot straight on without there being glare, so I present two shots:




Because of the placement of studs in the wall, I had to slightly rearrange the wall's layout. I normally use 3M Picture Hanging Strips to hang pictures rather than driving nails into walls, but the painting framed weighs at least 7 pounds which is pushing the upper limit of what the strips are designed to hold. Regardless, I present the new wall's layout below:



Obviously, there is some overlap in the images here. Starting on the left and just barely in the shot is pledge paddle. The first frames on that side are my Theta Xi certificate above my Upsilon Pi Epsilon certificate. Next over is my diploma. Then the picture of my graduating class at RHIT above my Pi Mu Epsilon certificate (apparently I lost my Sigma Pi Sigma certificate during college at some point...). Then we have "Dressed for Success" and finally a Gurren Lagann wallscroll. In theory, this is just an open wallscroll slot that could be switched out, but I don't have any plans to switch it out soon.

Rearranging all this, and putting up the couple of pieces of Haruhi fanart that I bought at Anime Expo, has made me realize that I like having interesting things on my walls. I suspect that this means that I may spend more time in the artist's alley at Anime Expo next year. I also wish that I had a good shot of the 004 cast that I could put up on my wall, but I'm pretty certain that we never made such a thing during the original run and it will only get harder to make one going forward.

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So, it is already the ides of July and I should probably start figuring out if I'm coming back to Indiana for Homecoming. Obviously, I'd like to do a 004 show, but I'm wondering who would even be available at this point. It seems like Andrew, Imani and Greg have gone to the four (three?) winds. I have no idea what happened to Phil (clearly the remaining wind). Last I heard, Tom was somewhere close enough that he could make it back to RHIT for things like summer kegger. Taken together, this sounds like maybe two live people in the booth which seems insufficient. Of course, I could be wrong.

So the question is thus: who is going to be around Terre Haute during 25-27 September? Can we make quorum? Does anyone other than me care?

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(Note: this post was written on Thursday night, but apparently I didn't post it then...)

I recently added two additional search engines to those available through the link. The first one I added was to Wikipedia's SSL site. The second one is for Anime Suki.

Adding WikipediaS option led me to discover an error in my database schema for additional hidden variables given to search engines. Apparently, rather than using a foreign key constraint against the search engine id, I had simply made the column that was (supposed) to be the foreign key constraint a primary key. This had worked fine as none of the engines that I've been using had required more than one additional parameter, but since the secure Wikipedia page also requires a parameter specifying that I want to carry out a search, I discovered it. This specific bug would have been introduced during the link rebuild that I did back in the end of 2006 for my databases course...

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In unrelated new, my father has left (or more accurately, is leaving tomorrow). He had been around since sometime during Anime Expo and we went out to several dinners during the week. He also has encouraged me to look into buying a house more seriously. I've thus started filling out paperwork to go through a loan pre-approval process. We'll see how that goes. I suspect that having basically no serious liabilities is a major benefit.

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I finished watching Kannagi a little while ago. The series is somewhat interesting, but seems to end unsatisfyingly. Since it is directed by one of the Haruhi directors and one of the Lucky Star directors, I expected a little more, but I mainly got some fun shout outs to those series instead. I would call the series...middling.


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Shortest day yet: I was in at noon and out before 3. I bought a painting that I'd been considering getting. I had originally though of getting a different one (a Disgaea 2 group shot similar to the box cover art), but ended up buying "Dressed for Success" instead. The pic below is a crappy photo of it while still in its protective wrapping.



I intend to get it properly framed, but it is hard to find a custom framer who is open on the fifth of July, much less a Sunday.

I only went to one panel of consequence today: Production I.G.'s industry panel. The panel itself had a few interesting things in it, most notably that there is going to be an Eden of the East movie. They also talked about a fully 3D movie, Oblivion Island, that is currently in production and which seemed somewhat interesting.

I spent some more time in the dealer's Room and saw another person from CAS. I ended up buying a Shadow Skill boxed set. I had originally watched the first few episodes some time when I was in high school, but had never been able to find any of the rest. I saw the box set on sale for about $30, so decided to pick it to see if it had aged well. I also bought a few Haruhi fan posters in the artists' alley. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with them, but since they are relatively standard sizes (12x18), I'll probably just buy a couple of frames and put them up somewhere in my apartment.



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I got up even later for AX today and so got into the convention center around noon. My first target was the FUNimation panel. They announced various things: Gunslinger Girl Il, Dragon Ball (they now own the first 13 episodes which they hadn't previously), and various other things that I can't remember. Overall, nothing that really made a mark on me.

I wandered the Dealers' Room some more afterwards. I saw a couple people that I know from out here: one is in my D and D group and was with his kids, the other was someone who occasionally comes to CAS (Steve Racer). I still have yet to find the first box set of Utena and am beginning to give up hope. One person was selling individuals of the first two (of four) discs of the set, but wanted $30 each for them. Another was willing to sell the first 10 discs for $150. Neither of these seemed like a fair shake. I was extremely tempted by some Nippon Ichi artwork that they were selling at their booth. I've been tempted by it each day of the con and, after looking at what custom framing will run for it and my current supply of disposable income, will probably end up picking it up tomorrow. I may force myself to do a coin toss to make the final decision, however.

I grabbed some substandard, convention center sushi for lunch and then went to the "Anime Debate: Final Round" to kill some time. I didn't actually stick around for the debate itself because the pre-show entertainment things that the host does were better than the debates themselves previously. One of them today involved a girl winning a contest by yelling "TITS!" as the answer to a question to which it was not the appropriate answer. She later was...attacked?...in another contest by another female forcing a kiss on her during another contest. It was unexpected and caused that particular contest to end without resolution as far as I can tell. I skipped out after that because the debate couldn't be nearly as interesting as the pre-show (though the debate topic was "Hentai is for perverts" which could have proven interesting, I had my doubts).

Then, I lined up for the Anime Music Video contest rebroadcast/awards. They had done the initial showings the night before and allowed the viewers to vote. Votes were tabulated last night, and after showing each category winners were announced. It was pretty enjoyable and was prefaced with showings of Dead Fantasy. It seemed that the winners in most of the categories seem to have been chosen mostly by song choice, but I suppose this is not entirely suprising. I was a bit annoyed that the winner of the "Drama" category seemed to be more of a "Comedy" video as it was Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" set to Death Note. Athough both the song itself and the series in question are generally serious, it was constructed so as to be mainly humerous with cuts designed to provoke laughter.

That was the end of my day at the convention. There wasn't anything else on the schedule that interested me and so I was back at my apartment by 7pm. Apparently, my start and stop times are narrowing each day. I don't consider this a bad thing, necessarily, but I wish they'd not front-loaded so much of what interested me into Thursday and Friday.

Tomorrow will probably be mainly a shopping day since the con closes at 5 and there is maybe one event that I'm interested in going to see.

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Today, I arrived at AX later than yesterday because I there wasn't much that I was interested in going to see until around noon.

I started the day by checking the Exhibition Hall again looking for Utena season one. In that, I was unsuccessful. I did however manage to not buy anything else either, so that might be considered a victory of restraint.

Afterwards, I went to the Aniplex industry panel. They mainly showed off trailers of things that I'd already seen, but the main thing that suprised me was finding out that Guin Saga had been licensed. They didn't come out and say who had licensed it or even announce that it had been licensed, but they did show an English-language dub of scenes from the first episode which makes it seem almost certain that the show has been licensed given the incredible cost of dubbing.

At that point, I had about 1.5 hours to kill until the Morning Musume concert and there were no panels that even seemed remotely interesting. Instead, I went to a screening room where they were playing the first 4 episodes (00 and 1 through 3) of Haruhi. When I had originally watched Haruhi, I found it interesting and fun and enjoyable but didn't quite get it. I didn't really see why it was as popular as it was. However, rewatching episode 00 and 01 made me realize how brilliant the whole thing is. The 00 episode doesn't make a damn bit of sense the first time through, but seeing it now, it seems brilliant given the understanding of what is actually going on. Maybe it is the sort of thing that requires two passes...

Then came the Morning Musume concert. It was fine. I had a good seat (last row of the left-center-front section). However, I'd say that their style sort of brushes up against the edge of what I generally like. I found them nice enough to listen to, but tended to sort of wander off mentally while they were performing. I suppose not everyone can be The Pillows.

I grabbed some food and then went to the preimere of the Evangelion movie. It was...Evangelion. It was also dubbed, which I wasn't expecting, though the dub was competent. The main thing the movie seemed to have up on the series was an extreme lack of still-frame silence time. All of the angst is still there, compressed into the two-hour format of a movie, of course. The film itself didn't cover the entire series and is probably closer to maybe 6-8 episodes worth (at least if the fact of them making four movies is important). They've updated all of the Evas themselves with conspicuous CG. It isn't clear to me that this is an improvement. Also the movie did not introduce Asuka, which seems strange given her relative importance to the series. They referred to her offhandedly a few times as the "third child" being "trained in Germany", but she got no screen time.

Ultimately, Evangelion is Evangelion and if you liked it before you'll probably enjoy the movies since they've basically cut big swaths of filler. Also, the movie looked like it did a fair bit of animation recycling, but it's hard for me to say definitively since it has been something like 5 years since I last watched Eva (in contrast to the Gurren Lagann movie where I'd seen it like 4 months ago).

Once Eva was over, I decided to call it a day because there was nothing else on the schedule that I cared about.

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Today was the first day of Anime Expo and, since I have a pass for all four days, I attended. I had some difficulty finding both the exit from the interstate to the Staples Center and then once off the Center itself, but I still managed to arrive by about 9:30. Waiting in line for my badge was relatively straightfoward, though they forced us to queue up outside in the July sun.

After looking over my options for the day, I realized that there was nothing that I was really interested in going to until the 5pm panel from Right Stuf/Nozomi. I initially tried the tabletop gaming room because I've been doing a fair amount of board gaming recently, but it was devoted entirely to people playing the Yu-gi-oh! boardgame. Also, the Exhibition Hall (a.k.a., the Dealers' Room) didn't open until noon, so I spent the next several hours waiting in line (outside again) to get a ticket for tomorrow's Morning Musume concert. I'm hoping that I didn't get a sunburn from the waits. In line, I saw a really good c(r)osplayer of Wander. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture because the cosplayer was taking off her parka at the time and she was like 2/3 of the line away around a bend.

After that, I went to the Exhibition hall. I mostly restrained my spending: I only purchased two things there. Those two things were box sets two and three of Utena which are basically impossible to find as far as I'd been able to tell. They cost me $65 and $50 respectively which seems like a hell of a deal when compared against Amazon used prices or buying the discs individually. I was also severely temped by a print of a painting rendition of the Disgaia 2 cover. It was listed at $325, however, and that seems a bit too much for a game that I've neither finished nor am entirely sure that I like. I'll hunt more for the first Utena box set tomorrow if I make my way to the Exhibit hall again.

In the afternoon, I went to an "Anime Debate" panel because my feet were begining to be tired of walking all day. It was mildly interesting, but two of the three debate options which came up were severely one sided (Is the Anime Industry dying?; Xbox 360 vs. Wii) due to the demographics of congoers. If I'd been on the first one, at least I could have made good arguments about the death of the smaller US licensors and the pain caused by easy access to fansubs. The panel there instead made arguments about nostalgia for the "better" old series like Macross. It went poorly for them.

By that time, it was almost the Right Stuf panel's start time so I headed over to it to get a seat. On my way, I got flagged down by Andrea which was a strange thing to be sure. Seeing her there was entirely unexpected, but seemed eminently reasonable given that she works in Arizona. I hadn't seen her in over two years, but I guess my trademark ponytail + labcoat is recognizable even from behind. We chatted briefly before heading to our seperate locations.

The Right Stuf panel was mildly interesting, they announced that they are licensing Aria, Rental Magica, the fourth season of a shoujo-ai show, and a pair of shounen-ai shows. I managed to snag a copy of the first DVD of Aria by asking a question.

After that was a panel by Mega 64 which was rather entertaining, but tapered off near the end. I personally would have prefered Loading, Ready, Run, but I don't think they make decisions that way.

The last thing I saw today before heading home about an hour ago was the US Official subtitled premiere of the Gurren Lagann Movie. It was about 100 minutes long of which the majority of the first 60-70 minutes were recycled directly from the series. However, the final half hour or so consisted primarily of new, awesome work which includes [spoiler]Simon climbing an enemy mech by stabbing it with drills[end spoiler] in addition to other brilliant moments. According to the person who spoke briefly before the showing, there is currently a second movie running in Japanese theaters, so we can expect to see it in the near future as well.

And then I came home and wrote this post, and then it was now, and then I don't know what happens.

Tomorrow, my main priorities are going to the Morning Musume concert and seeing the screening of the Evangelion movie. I'd also like to try to BESM 3E tournament, but it conflicts with the Eva movie, so it seems unlikely.

Saturday, I'm only really interested in the FUNimation panel and seeing the AMV contest replay (I don't want to go to the first showing because I'd have to stand in line at it to get tickets for an indeterminate amount of time).

Sunday, I'll probably just go to see what deals are in the Exhibit hall. One of the days, I'll also try to do a Collateral Damage "learn to play" session as it is a game made by the same people who did Whack a Catgirl which Nate used to praise quite highly. I'll also probably look into getting a new bag of some sort. My Lain bag is really a poorly designed courier bag and my old backpack is begining to degrade in some bizarre way that involves the fabric shedding some sort of plasticy stuff that (I hope) is the waterproofing.

All in all, decent start.

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I believe it is no longer possible to buy a new laptop with a 4:3 aspect ratio through any major manufacturer. I believe this is especially the case if one wants a UXGA (1600x1200) screen.

I am annoyed by this.

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I originally tried Bawls Guarana at a LAN party that I went to while I was in high school. I enjoyed it and, in college, began to keep a supply on hand. I consumed the last of my stockpile before moving out to California and, not knowing where a distributer might be found, gave up on it for a while. After settling in, however, I discovered that Target had begun to stock it in can form and so picked up an approximately 2 can per week habit again. While picking up various things at Target over the weekend, I found that they seem to have stopped stocking it or perhaps had reorganized it to some hidden corner of the store (away from the rest of their energy drink supply).

As such, I began looking for an alternate supply route. This led me to the Bawls website where I found that Amazon now stocks Bawls in 24 packs. They were somewhat more expensive than what I'd been paying at Target, but looking closely showed me two things:

1. I could have Amazon set up an automated shipment of 1 case per month to my apartment. This is slightly higher than the rate at which I generally consume it, but has the benefit of being highly unlikely to run out.

2. Amazon discounts items in automated shipments like this quite heavily. The base price for a 24 pack at Amazon runs $55. They take 15% off of that when doing automated shipments and give free shipping (though it would qualify for super-saver anyway).

Doing the math puts the Amazon supply at $1.9475 / can and the Target supply at $1.7975 / can. This gives a 15 cent per can price increase, but a much lower liklihood of running out. Also, Amazon's "subscription" program seems less onerous than most: they provide a web-based console where you can skip a month's shipment, request the shipment now, or even cancel the subscription entirely with minimal fuss.

So, we'll see how this works out for now. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't offer Bawls in the classic bottles that were so awesome...

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I spent most of today doing two things: playing board games with people at least a decade older than me and watching anime with people either a decade older or several years younger than me. Gaming went rather well, I managed to win the first two games we played: Dominion and Kingsburg. I then lost at Puerto Rico and won a single game out of the three games of Shadow Hunters we played.

Dominion is a card game in which you are trying to build a deck out of a set of communal cards. Each turn, you draw a new hand, and using the action card and money cards available you try to either build a better deck or to buy cards that provide victory points. It is made more interesting by having 25 types of cards available to purchase, of which, only 10 are actually used in any given game. It even provides a special random choice deck for deciding which ones are availble.

Kingsburg was also rather interesting. It is fundamentally about kingdom building and resource management with an element of die rolling to provide some random generation. It is further made tricky by having explicit catch-up mechanisms (you get bonus actions and dice when you're behind on building) as well as having periodic events which upset your standing (attacks from enemy hordes).

We then played Puerto Rico which is (essentially) another kingdom building game, only the kingdom is the plantation kind in South America. It may have too many moving parts for my taste and it is very easy to get very far behind. Add that to its long play time and I'm a bit unimpressed with it.

The last game that we played was Shadow Hunters. The premise of the game is that each player is either a "Shadow" (some sort of nasty World of Darkness type thing), a "Hunter" (the kind that kills Shadows), or a Neutral. At the beginning of the game, players are assigned types randomly and those types are kept hidden. When they're assigned a type, they are also given an objective: Shadows and Hunters want to wipe out the other side; Neutral have their own unique objectives like wanting to be the first to die or collect a pile of artifacts. Players move around a board by rolling two dice (1d6+1d4) and get cards black and white cards tend to give items, weapons or instantaneous effects. Green card, however, contain questions which help to reveal the nature of the people around you on the board. The drawing player reads the card, which forces actions on certain types of characters, and then gives them to another character who then must carry out the action. Of course, all of this is done without revealing anything to any other players, including even what card was given. I think this was my favorite game of the day.

After I got home, I ended up ordering Dominion and Shadow Hunters to have at work for our board game lunches. The former will make a good addition to our set of games that can be played with three because we have very few that fall into that category. The last will make a good alternative for large groups (5+) since the game's probably only interesting with at least 5 people (I think 4 is technically playable).

As for anime, we screened a whole bunch of single episodes of things. Nothing we watched really jumped out at me as necessary, except perhaps Project Blue Earth SOS which is retro-futurism set in the far off future of the year 2000 (I'd note that the original run of the series was in 2006). It is sort of what Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow would be if done in anime form in the FUTURE! rather than the past. Of course, we'd already watched the first episode previously, so it hardly seems fair to list it tonight, but I feel compelled nonetheless.

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A few days ago, I finished inFAMOUS. The game itself is premised on the question "what if a normal person gets super powers?" It answers by providing an open world and a plot which forces you to make choices with a moral overtones. The gameplay itself is solid and well constructed with plenty of interesting powers. What I was most impressed with, however, were the game's "karma moments". These are, as perhaps can be gleamed from the name, the times when you are presented with said choices. What impressed me was not their existence, but the fact that the choices tend to be excessively reasonable even for the "evil" side. For example, the game is takes place in a city which is under quarantine. The first choice in the game involves your character and a government food drop. The good choice is to take only what you require for now. The evil choice is to take a few swings the nearby pedestrians who are attempting to take their own (you needn't kill or even disable them) so that you can have enough food to surive longer term with your sidekick and girlfriend. The second choice is clearly selfish (which the game tends to classify as evil), but doesn't involve the usual burning down of orphanages which "evil" choices tend to.

Overall, I'd recommend the game. It was good enough that, with the thin justification of getting the platinum trophy, I took a second pass through the game. Anymore, such a decision is a rare one.

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On my way home from work, I got a traffic citation for running two stop signs on my bicycle. It happened while I was on lab, so I get to call some security person at JPL tomorrow to see what the citation means. Nevertheless, if I'd done it in a car, I'd lose my ability to park at lab. Personally, I hope that they tell me that I'm not allowed to park my bike on lab for some period of time and force me to drive (or bike to the edge of lab property and walk from there). I think the irony of such a turnabout would be great. I wonder if "parking" my bike in my office would count...

Apparently, some high ranking person on lab got tired of all the cyclists running stop signs, so lab security has cracked down. They're also forcing people without helmets to walk their bikes while on lab. I find the whole thing bizarre and a huge waste of security resources when there is a whole lab that's supposed to be being protected.

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Mere moments ago, I finished watching Code Geass R2. I had previously watched the first half/season a few weeks ago, and--getting tired of waiting for R2 to come out on DVD--obtained the second half this past week. Although several people that I talked to about the series seemed to believe that it wasn't very good, or went downhill in the second season, I quite enjoyed it.

Basically, the premise of the entire series is that the main character is a strategic genius who then additionally gain the ability to, by making direct eye contact, force people to follow his commands. The series then follows his attempt to defeat (through various means) the Brittanian Empire.

The series does do a few things that make is rather unique. First, despite the main character being a strategic genius, he is shown to actually have very little skill in combat or physical prowess. Thus, rather than having the leader run in at the head of every battle (as is common in "real robot" anime), we see a leader who actively avoids getting himself in combat the vast majority of the time.

Secondly, [spoilers start here] in R2 after about episode 20 presents a very strong characterization of a properly operating "evil overlord". This even goes so far as to involve the main character actively turning people into suicidally loyal slaves which he throws at his foes Zap Brannigan style to keep them busy. Frankly, I'd almost prefer that the show stopped at the commercial break in the last episode so that we end with a view of the main character having accomplished all of his proported goals. [spoilers end here]

I would probably recommend the series to more strongly if they hadn't spent two full seasons (50 episodes) getting to the last five or so where (I think) the series truly shines. It is certainly a decent show and probably one of the better entries that I've watched in the "real robots" genre.

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