Good SF-novella by Nancy Kress: “Dancing On Air” (and no, you don’t have to be interested in ballet to like the story…)
Author Archives: [maven]
Sucker for Wings
Kudos to bakaMX, who are now fansubbing Haibane-Renmei aka “Charcoal Feather Federation”; and it is just soooo good. clean art, nice music and tons of cute fluffy wings. created by Yoshitoshi ABe (lain, niea_7) and Tokoro Tomokazu (niea_7). I don’t have a clue where it’s going, but it doesn’t seem too happy (rather “subdued happy”): I really, really like it!
Watched quite a bit of anime over the weekend
Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai (up to ep11) is another GAINAX show which transports a boy + girl (just friends ;)) to alternate realities making parodies of just about anything (SF, Jurassic Park, Film Noir, Romance Games / High School Anime, Kung-Fu Films, …). After #6, I was quite sick of it, but just then they story returned to its core and dealt w/ the construction of the “Magical Shopping District”, which was an excellent move. I hope it manages to continue like that…
Mahoromatic (up to ep3, but 2nd half of ep1 was broken 🙁 ) OTOH I really, really like. GAINAX style, cute maid, some nice action / humor, tons of fan-service (nudity)… I just checked, Pioneer will start releasing that in January 2003, and knowing Pioneer it’ll most likely be on 4 discs.
Now and Then, Here and There (up to ep2) is done by Akitaroh Daichi, and heally, really hard to watch (because it’s so mean / brutal to basically nice people). Basically, boy transported into different world / universe / dimension and dropped inbetween two faction at war. Thinking hard about the box-set (which is $70).
RahXephon (up to ep13) still doesn’t grab me and seems even more Evangelion-like than it did after episode 3, i.e. Mecha controlled by boy who doesn’t / didn’t want to fight, female supervisor, odd / nearly emotionless comrade, … it’s all there.
Witch Hunter Robin (up to ep5) has a really nice, semi-Victorian darkish, angular style, very nice character design. Organisation (STN-J) hunting out so called witches with magical powers. Little humor, no fan-service (which is fine ;)), lots of ambience and interesting CG-backgrounds. Don’t know whether it’ll be interesting in the long run, but so far it’s been good.
Current (from this list, except #1 ;)) favourites:
- Seishu Heiki Kanojo (Saikano).
- Mahoromatic.
- Now and Then, Here and There.
- Witch Hunter Robin.
It’s not complicated
Managed to recompile the kernel (knowing about mkinitrd helps… thanks, mandrake-manual… not!) w/ ACPI and w/o framebuffer-support (as that supposedly breaks the nvidia X-driver). i still can’t switch to a full-screen terminal from X, though (and neither exit…). grmbl!
Not quite there
installed linux (mandrake 9). works fine. had a bit of trouble getting the audigy digital-out to work. also nvidia drivers make me loose the console (w/ blank screen) after exiting X / switching to consoles… (problem w/ smp & missing APM maybe?)
Another Opportunity to spend Money
JList will sell the Japanese Saikano DVDs (which supposedly have English subtitles) as special order…. ^_^
Quite busy
Got over the initial bout of lectures… Seems I’ll be busy.
