For a long time now I have been primarily watching anime in Japanese with subtitles. The belief being that Japan has the best trained voice actors in the world… and the majority of American voice actors who do anime are aging nerds with no other job skills. But there is a problem I ran into last night while watching “The girl who Leapt Though Time” english dub. Not only was not… not bad. But I enjoyed it more and understood it with less effort. Reading subtitles adds more work when I’m already listening to the music, looking for visual clues, and hearing the actors. So now I’m at a crossroads. I’m sure most of the anime watching I’m going to do will be in Subtitles (fansubs, FTW) but I’m going to be at least testing out the English dubs more often. There can only be positives. I can watch anime while doing something else that doesn’t consume a lot of my attention (like reorganizing my file system, downloading files for class or formating documents for homework I haven’t started yet. And I’ll get a lot more anime watched because I don’t have to keep 100% of my attention glued onto the TV.

This is also a little conflicted with most of my values and belief about anime as a medium and an art form… but values are easily thrown out the window.

I baked cookies today! I don’t know why I just had the urge to bake. I’m going to try it a few more times. It was enjoyable to start with a munch of ingredients and wind up with a tasty finished project at the end.

I’m also debating if I should just buy Season 4 and the next few after that. I’m consuming them extremely fast and having a great time doing it. But Netflix can be slow… and I’ll probably end up buying them anyway. They really aren’t that expensive. A whole season costs $23 on Amazon. That is about what a movie costs, and an entire Simpsons season provides more than 5X the amount of entertainment.

I really need to get into the habit of writing ideas down when they come to me. Sometime in the past few days, I can’t even remember when god I’m an old man, I came up with a wonderful idea for a novel. One of those ideas where once you have the first image in your head the entire finished project comes instantly into light. But now I cannot remember it. I could have been anything! I’m begining to think that I just dreamed the feeling of having a great novel idea, but I really didn’t have anything. Ugh, well I’ll continue thinking.

I’ve recovered a bit from my funk. Still don’t feel like doing much work. My 18th Century British Lit. Professor allowed us to keep our papers for an extra day but I only mangaged to find two or three small things I wanted to change. I probably should have just handed it on and forgotten about it. I’m catching up in Logic, after falling way behind due to Italian taking up so much time. Tomorrow I’m just going to send the last few homeworks (one required, one optional) and hope my midterm grades come out all right. The second half I should have much more time to focus on that class… and I only took it because I figured four classes were too few! I really overestimated my motivation this semester.

A Tweet from John Hodgman lead to me finding this gem:

Brings tears to my eyes.

Abbey Road on Beatles Rock Band tomorrow. Looking forward to it!

Something seems to have sucked all the creativity out of me in the last few days. I’m lethargic, I have trouble writing (especially for poetry class), and in general just feel like I’m going though the motions everyday. I don’t like it and I hope it passes soon. The cause is probably the two large papers I just wrote. That shouldn’t be just a big hit on my system but those big papers have always taken a lot of me. Soul sucking, I call it. After I wrote my final papers for both Shakespeare and English 301 last semester I couldn’t do anything for weeks. When I came out of it I revived Time Travel is Awesome and worked to build it up all summer. So I know this brief spell will pass… but more are to come. I’m only half way though the year.

I’m fairly confident that if I kept taking my language I would have lost my mind this week. With exams, those two papers, and the general homework I get it would have torn me apart. I would be doing nothing but schoolwork. Even the idealized version of myself floating above the clouds controlling things with his mind wouldn’t be able to do it. Ok, that’s not realistic… of course he would. Hyperbole is my weakest trope. But seriously, the extra time I get in the mornings has helped a lot. Giving me some extra time to work and just some time to mentally prepare for the day. I’m not the type of person who can keep going from place to place and task to task without a break in between and that’s how my Mondays and Tuesdays were and it drove me to the very edge of sanity.

It’s going to be a busy and exciting weekend. Windows 7 and the new Beatles Rock Band DLC (Abbey Road) comes out on Thursday. I can’t wait to play with the final version of Windows 7. It’s the first time I’ve been excited to use a Microsoft product! I’ve been running the Release Candidate for the past few months and I’ve had no issues. But I want to see how polished the final version comes out. Hopefully some minor issues, like a memory leak in the Sidebar, will be patched up. I’m also hoping for some performance improvements but I doubt that I’d notice even a tiny beat of fine tuning at this point. Can’t wait!

I have a terrible habit when I have papers due. I have the idea that I’m going to write the paper early and get it out of the way. But then I end up finding some way to procrastinate for hours and wind up awake at two in the morning still working. I know that if I just sat and worked the whole time the paper would be done in an hour or less, but I end up sitting and wasting time surfing the Internet or singing along to music, or wondering into the Kitchen to watch baseball instead of getting words onto the page. Maybe it’s the fact that I need to really think out formal essays before writing them. With most of the writing that I do I just hit my keyboard until I have enough words on the screen and then I fiddle with it until it makes sense. Or, in the case of these blog posts, skip step 2. Even with articles I have written recently (not many, unfortunately) for Time Travel is Awesome I’m able to slam out something fairly quickly and then agonize over it for hours until it’s perfect (or reasonably legible). But with formal essays the process is never that simple. I need to create an argument and back it up with facts. Ugh, what a hassle. So I wind up wasting all my agonizing time as I’m writing the paper.

What I really need to do is use my essay writing stratagem to work on my blog posts or fiction. I mange to turn off all forms of Internet or other communication with the outside world and just work for hours. Some of those hours might be spend just staring at a black screen… but at least I’m in mode that lowers the opportunity for procrastination. Unfortunately I don’t normally go into this mode until hour four.

I hate to admit this but for the first time a fansub has failed me. At least… I hope it was a fansub and not the DVD rip. My Tenchi GXP files, which I have had for years but never watched, went from being very good to awful in a single episode. The person who compiled the torrent must have pulled them from two, or more, different groups. After episode 9 the subs go from comprehensible to something that looks like it was translated by a computer. It seemed like a literal translation from the Japanese into English and because of that it lacked even basic sentence construction. Some examples:

These weren’t hard to find either. These errors made the series unwatchable. The next step was to go over to netflix and get the series there. But they only had half the DVDs. Ultimately I decided to buy the DVDs in order to finish watching the series. Which isn’t too much of a tragedy. I just don’t like buying an entire series when I don’t know if it’s any good. The show has been getting a lot better over the last few episodes and hopefully it’ll continue to improve in quality. But without knowing how it ends this might turn into a huge mistake at any moment.

This probably will never be on DVD

Just thinking about this idioticy makes me shake with rage. I put the first season of the Drew Carey show onto my Netflix queue a while back and now that it has made it to the top I decided to add a few more seasons just to be prepared. Well… they don’t exist. Apparently Warner Brothers decided after releasing the first season in 2007 that it wasn’t profitable to release the rest of the series. So as of right now the Drew Carey Show is not available legally in any form for any amount of money.

Warner is telling its customers to pirate. There are so many methods of getting this content out to the public for little or no cost to the content provider other than formating it correctly. They could put it on Hulu and gain ad money on the customers who watch it with little or no cost to Warner. They could put it on iTunes at a minimal cost. Hell, they could just sign a deal with YouTube and put the content up for streaming to the biggest audience on the Internet. But they haven’t done any of thing. They released one DVD set and decided to give up on maintaining the legacy of a classic show. It’s backwards. It’s abhorrent.

What’s worse is that if I will never want to buy the Season 1 DVD, which is still in print, because I Warner has told me that there is nothing else coming. What is the point to hanging onto one season of a show that ran for nine years?!

Things are getting stressful. I think I need to withdraw from Italian and just rethink my plan for getting my Language requirement completed. If I don’t I fear I may have a complete breakdown. Without Italian my day will be much shorter and my work will be less to stress about. I’m not completely swamped right now but I’m completely stressed for some unknown reason and just looking at a page in a foreign language is nearly enough to cause me to panic. Ugh. I feel so defeated but if I continue at this pace I’ll feel like I’m not being true to myself. And we all know what Polonius said.

Sure this revelation comes about five years too late. But Tenchi Muyo GXP, while it has some of it’s own decent qualities, looks as if it was designed to fail. The animation is substandard for the time it was produced, the music is terrible, the main character looks exactly like Tenchi, and there is a space Pirate named Ryoko. They had a chance to really explore and develop the areas of the Tenchi universe that are only background details in the three OVAs, and they still might. I’ve only watched four episodes out of the 26th episode series.

I don’t know they thought this show could attempt to stand on its own while relaying on visual and dialog reminds the viewer of the original. I want to see if they are able to capture some of the qualities of Tenchi, the humor; the well developed characters; or the awesome villains. These four episodes seemed to only have established the premise and set everything up. So hopefully now that they are entering into the actual meat of the story some of those characteristics will start to bleed though.

I can’t help but think there might be a flaw in exploring the greater universe of Tenchi. Leaving the actions of the background and focusing on the actions of these very important and powerful characters in this rural Earth setting is what made the show fantastic. The great space operatic events were set in the background, except when the threat breached the peace of the Misaki household. Which is strange considering that normally the viewer demands to see those epic moments. The viewer demands to know details about this interesting Universe that he is only given a small taste.

It makes me want to go back and watch the OVA and really look at the narrative style in depth. Meanwhile I’ll be making my way though Tenchi Muyo GXP, hopefully under my own will.

I have a serious problem with organization and getting work done this semester. I somehow manage to get everything done in the classes that I care about, English classes, but I find myself slacking in Italian (which is a nightmare) and Logic. Could I have developed seniroitis (fun fact: Seniroitis does have a Wikipedia article! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senioritis That means it’s a read thing!) or is this just a lack of motivation in those specific classes. I just want to be done with school. I feel that I’ve completely transformed myself after High School. I went from almost not graduating from High School to an honors student at a State level University. This took two years of Community College and maintaining a job (full time during summer, part time during school) in order to achieve. Now I feel like I’m just going though the motions. Working towards walking out of the institution with a piece of paper that says I’m good enough to enter the work force. But I’m tired of the structure and requirements of an academic world. I want to start improving myself and move on to building a career afterwards. Those areas I think I really need to work on in order to make myself a complete person, like Health and mastering the English language, are being hindered by University requirements.

I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t enjoy College. I like my Literature classes and the environment of being in the English department of a University that is focused on the Major. I’m a first rate citizen! Small class room size, nice Professors, and a common room that looks out above the rest of the campus all make the experience worth it. I just don’t want to build a skill in a Foreign Language that I’m never going to use. I don’t want to spend the better part of my formative years just trying to get by in a subject in which I have no practical need.

Oh well, I soldier on.

More importantly:

My use of Wave has really taken off with the discovery of the public section. It isn’t built into the current version but you can create public waves by adding the public contact. Then you can search though the public waves, by tags, by specifying ”in:public.” So now I’m a member of several anime Waves, a whole network of PlayStation themed waves and a writers wave. I’m not quite sure yet if Wave is going to replace public forums. In order for that to happen there needs to be a more effective grouping method. If you can group a series of waves together then yes, this is the next generation of the web forum. Now that I’ve used it for a few hours today I can say that Wave is going to be my primary direct communication tool when it goes public.

I’ve had detailed conversations with multiple people, while one person was responding to one part of the conversation I was replying to another. It was very exciting. I’ve created image galleries. Yet I’ve only just scratched the surface of the potential of the tool. Hell, just watching someone type in their message has changed the way text messages work. Now I can start writing my reply before their finished their comment. That idea alone makes my head hurt. I’ll take some screen shots in the next couple of days to show exactly what I’m doing with Wave.

I didn’t plan on only talking about Wave in this post… or for the next couple of days. But with my college stress coming down on me and homework unfinished… it really is the only positive thing I can think to write about. I’m going to write about a concept for a novel that’’s been sitting inside my head for a few weeks now about a complete technological reset of the world. Using Wave bought this idea up again. What if we can just say to everyone , “Stop what you’re doing… this is better!” And do that for transportation, getting information, receiving news, the method for getting television, ect. Well, I’ll go over it in more detail later. I need time to iron out the wrinkles in the concept before I can put it down in any sort of logical or concise way. I realize the brief description of the concept is an incoherent ramble.

I got my Wave invite!  I’m going to be playing with it over the next few days . The bad part about only allowing in a small number of users is that those users can’t take full advantage of the service. But I already know some AniBloggers from twitter who have it. So I will be abusing them in order to learn exactly what the service can offer.

I finished Snow Crash this morning. It was a very odd novel. Neal Stevenson has such a unique view of the way the world works. He creates a satire  it by building a world around the concept he is satirizing. It is an odd thing to explain. In Snow Crash the idea he was satirizing was the attempt to control information. The model he used in order to show the danger of information control were franchises. No matter where the protagonist went the world was exactly the same. There were always the familiar Uncle Enzo’s Pizza and the Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong. Always governed by the unbreakable law of a three ring binder. Did I mention that the concept was hard to describe?

It was a fantastic read. Crazy. Enjoyable. Full of action and plenty of intellectual thinking and problem solving. The only problem is that the end is left a little too vague. I normally like ambiguous endings. But some of the threads of the novel were left half finished. You could probably guess the resolution. But it wasn’t explicit i n the text. Much of it is simply assumed.

New episode of You Look Nice Today is out and, as usual, it is fantastic. I have already listened to it several times. Go check it out!