Overall, I’d say it’s worth a watch, but it’s also definitely not for the squeamish (especially the second half of it, there’s some pretty gory images involving a killing floor that are not for the faint of heart).

On the anime front, I watched Coyote Ragtime Show today. It’s a nice short 12 episode series. Interesting storyline, and it’s a good balance of nearly-constant action and short but well-used quiet times. Sort of a non-episodic, non-depressed, non-insane and non-episodic rendition of Cowboy Bebop.

GG did a very good job subbing it, inasmuch as I have no particular complaints about the job they did and I thought their treatment of the credits typesetting was entertaining and well-crafted. AnY also subbed it apparently, and they tend to do good work. ADV also apparently owns the rights to it, but I’m too lazy to check if the dvds are out yet :p.

OK. Firefox 2.0 is the best thing ever. I’ve been using it since rc2, and the integrated spellchecker is a forum/blog user’s best friend EVAR. I have been itching for a word-style spellcheck for blogging and whatnot for ages, so much so that I considered making a Sharepoint-blog at one point, or setting up a mailbox and blogging via Outlook. Which is awful, ’cause I am not a big fan of Sharepoint, and really don’t like Outlook all that much either.

Not to say that it’s the answer to all of the things I’ve always wanted at my fingertips when I’m writing things. But it’s a nice improvement nevertheless.

IE7′s also interesting. It’s a good UI improvement over IE6, I think. But you could say the same thing about just about anything, since the ie6 experience kinda blew (what with ActiveX controls and no adblock … and so many vulns it wasn’t even funny). I still prefer Firefox, especially in the 2.0 implementation, and I’d still even prefer opera as a rule, but I can definitely see the improvements nevertheless, and they deserve some sort of acknowledgment.

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was surprisingly good. I didn’t expect it to be quite as well-executed as it was. At times I sort of felt he was a bit self-serving in his presentation of his own life and research, but ultimately it somehow served to help see things from his perspective.

Jackass 2 was incredibly stupid. I am not normally a fan of Jackass, wouldn’t normally consume it, but … well … it was so stupid that it was funny. Like … “what the fuck is wrong with you, seriously??” funny.

New anime series “Pumpkin Scissors” is interesting looking so far. Lots of … umm … tank-killing. It’s set in a sort of alt-reality in which tanks are still the most powerful weapons of war. So … after WWI, before WWII sort of tech. It’s got an interesting cast and storyline that I’m not going to elaborate on for fear of spoilage, but … if you’re looking for a series to follow and you like crazed tank-killing soldiers, it’s definitely one to look at.

Speaking of new anime, Black Blood Brothers is also somewhat interesting. It’s in the “neoclassical vampire” genre (as opposed to classical vampire like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or modern pseudovampire in the vein of Blood+). Sort of along the lines of an Interview or even Hellsing (not quite as flipping-the-fuck-out as Hellsing though). Also shaping up to be an interesting story.

And Claws… Kemonozume is crazy. Awesome. Stylish. It’s Romeo and Juliet with flesh-eaters and flesh-eater-hunter samurai. Crazy stuff. Another “definitely worth watching” series, as of the 4 HD-eps I’ve watched so far anyway. By the way, 720p H264 releases are definitely the win.

Frustrations. I always find it frustrating spending an hour and a half trying to get something to work that you KNOW should be working, only to find out it’s a very stupid random mistake that’s preventing it. Last week was a mod_rewrite issue (mod_rewrite was loaded, but rewrite rules weren’t working from .htaccess … turns out I just needed to add some stuff to AllowOverride in the vhost config, but … well, spent an hour fighting with it before I realized what was going on. Then today, I was making myself a little html+css start page, and was trying some CSS that I knew _should_ be working, but the box model stuff wasn’t working no matter what I threw at it. And then I realized, “Oh yeah, it’s float: left;, not . A ‘:’ away from correctness was all it took … totally threw me off for 45 minutes.

I guess one of the reasons I didn’t notice that for that long is that I’ve come to rely on vim syntax highlighting, which is … simplistic. It just looks for words that are the normal form, it doesn’t actually parse or understand the files, it just knows how to apply color codes to keywords and constructs. Which really serves as a pointed lesson for me: don’t rely on tools to cover your own shortage of understanding. I guess I’ve sort of been treating Active Directory that way, too … thinking of it as a good way to do kerberized ldap, rather than pursuing actual understanding of kerberos and ldap myself. When I think about it that way, I’m sort of displeased with myself for that. The worst part is, if I had been using Dreamweaver’s editor to edit the css, I would have never even had the problem, because … well, it would never have come up, autocompletion would have magically inserted the appropriate character, or the built-in parser would have detected the problem and brought it to my attention already.

I guess, the tools are specifically built to prevent you from having to get under the hood even so far as changing the oil. Like, it’s become acceptable to not understand how ldap works because Active Directory hides it from you, or it’s become acceptable to have a shaky halfassed understanding of CSS because Dreamweaver will prevent you from having to learn it. Or eclipse (or jbuilder or visual j++ back in the days) would prevent you from having to really get intimate with the syntax of the language to use it. Maybe this is just an argument to use a simpler editor though … vim without syntax highlighting, or whatnot. The frustration I went through underscored and drove a real understanding of what I was doing, and what I was doing wrong, which I think definitely had real value.

But then the question is, how much do I want to get under the hood? I mean, really, I sort of half-want to know CSS, but the other half doesn’t and has better things to do. Similarly, I don’t know if I’d think of it as cheating if I configured OpenLDAP with LUMA or FDS, or samba with SWAT, or mysql with phpmyadmin. But I know it enriched my understanding of samba to manually build the config, and my understanding of mysql to learn enough SQL and database concepts to work with the CLI alone as efficiently as a web interface (if not moreso).

Maybe in a world of limited time and energy, I’m better served by NOT pursuing every avenue to understanding? I guess I’ve just got to chew on that one more though… what’s worth pursuing and what isn’t?

Speaking of pursuits of knowledge… exams. Had an exam in Theory of Computation. Got a 75. Grades ranged from 63 to 88, with the mean being a 74 (or so I seem to remember Chris whispering to me, I missed the first 5 minutes that day). With the peers in that class, I’d say hitting the average is pretty dang good, and I’m happy with it. Third psych exam is in 23 and a half hours, I’ve done minimal studying so far. I think I’m going to go to sleep after I’m done writing, wake up with 8 hours of sleep and spend 3 hours or so digging into the study-mode stuff before the exam like I did with the last one. I’m not as confident going into this one, since I don’t really get memory, movement and feeding like I “got” the senses.

I was going to try to be an inconsiderate, belligerent jerk to my roommate as a sort of passive-aggressive retaliation for his being a thoughtless, reclusive tool. But I can’t do it, it’s just not in my character. I can be a jovial jerk, a cynical jerk, but I just can’t do the belligerent thing I guess. *shrug* maybe it’s for the best.

It’s not bad, as far as the genre goes … rather than being total harem bs like Hina and Mahoroba and a couple others, or being the “one devoted couple” sort of thing, like KareKano and AYA, this is a healthy mix … one central “couple” … except that the title character rejects the guy from the start, and one of the other girls in the series finds someone else to be with (while not quite getting over Suzuka, which leads to complications down the line). And then, of course, the title character only wanting what she can’t have, so getting jilted by the guy she jilted, and trying to play it cool. It’s at 17 eps right now, and things have particularly gotten complicated…

Anyway, here’s what I’ve noticed: all of these high-school stories only really care about the students who are at the very top of the class, of the school, of the prefecture, whatever.

For example: KareKano is about a guy and a girl who are both at the top of their class, and compete for the best grade constantly. Maburaho is about a guy who comes across as a loser and a failure, but has a unique bloodline and incredibly powerful magic (granted, in a magic-user’s school). Ai Yori Aoshi? Girl who’s the daughter of an extremely rich family. Guy who’s the disenfranchised son of an extremely rich famiy. Guy’s also top of the class, goes to grad school (or just college, I dunno, seems like sort of both) in Enishi, and is top of the class there too. Suzuka’s title character is a champion athlete, and the male lead, while he comes off as a loser, is also a top-tier athlete.

It’s an interesting cultural observation: all of these stories end up revolving around the fates of the elite … of the “best” people in something. The main character is virtually NEVER an ordinary guy (with the exception of Love Hina, where Keitaro is just the best punching bag, apparently). All of these things, it seems to me, serve to reinforce the constant pressure to succeed — the idea that if you’re not the best at something, you’re not worthy of having the “dream relationship” or whatever.

I like Suzuka so far because it hasn’t been the sort of trouble-free romance that Kare Kano was, nor has it been quite the obsessive stalkery crap that Hina pioneered and so many other series imitated. But I get the feeling it’s going to end the way the title and the first ep setup makes us expect: he’ll end up hurting the feelings of the girl he’s with, breaking up with her, and getting Suzuka instead — where his heart really is in the first place. Which is a sort of trite, predictable thing, but what can you do?

Yeah, it was pretty freaking great. I don’t know what to say, other than that it really was amazing.

I grabbed this on a whim, wanting something to balance out the crazy foreign film lineup it’d come with, and I wasn’t disappointed.

American History X is about a skinhead kid whose brother was a leadership personality in a newly formed local skinhead gang, up until some ballers from the hood try to steal his car. He opens fire and ends up brutally killing two of them, and is tried on murder charges. Convicted, he spends 3 years in prison, while his younger brother begins following the path of hate that he walked.

The story tackles the tough issue of inborn racism, and the cycle of hate, in an incredibly graphic and brutal way. All in all, it’s just an amazing, beautiful, and at the same time horrifying movie, filmed in an incredibly compelling way. If nothing else, wonderful perspective and great cinematography. But it’s more than just that … it’s great drama as well.

Definitely worth checking out.

He generally does goofy things, hits on attractive ladies, and is overall comical … but for some reason people try to kill him, and end up in piles of corpses on the floor instead.

“A real man is one who lives his life under the sun, with nothing to hide.” A common theme among this sort of movie, but really exemplified by Zatoichi’s lifestyle.

I loved this movie. From the somewhat cheesy but still awesome fight scenes to the awesome but horribly jumpy plot, it pretty much fits the traditional “Japanese Samurai Movie” bill to a T.