Haibane.info

Author: fledgling otaku

  • A brief visual taste of Makoto Shinkai

    via Nick, who has been blogging about Shinkai and Byousoko 5 cm for a year now. The subtitles are, ahem. not officially sanctioned. The hype surrounding Shinkai as the next Miyazaki has definitely whetted my interest. I have also learned that you can’t go wrong with a Nick obsession 🙂

    UPDATE: Nick has a massive post with numerous shorts by Shinkai, and a link to an english fan site.

  • Hero machine

    A cool toy at UGO lets you build your own superhero. I gave it a whirl:

    megan neko

    I can’t wait to see what Steven comes up with. Otaku dream girl, anyone?

  • hepped up on goofballs

    I find this sort of thing fascinating.

    With candy sales banned on school campuses, sugar pushers are the latest trend at local schools. Backpacks are filled with Snickers and Twinkees for all sweet tooths willing to pay the price.

    “It’s created a little underground economy, with businessmen selling everything from a pack of skittles to an energy drink,” said Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville.

    This has become a lucrative business, Nason said, and those kids are walking around campus with upwards of $40 in their pockets and disrupting class to make a sale.

    the candy black market thrives!

    via Freakonomics blog, naturally.

  • Closing thoughts on Dennou Coil

    I think Nick says it best:

    Sometimes, I wonder how the Japanese are able to show what are considered “children’s anime” which can deal with very serious topics. How do they allow shows that put their viewers through such an emotional roller coaster that are said to be aimed at elementary school students? And why don’t I see or hear about this in many modern American animations, unlike the American classics (recall something like Bambi, for example)? I don’t hear of anything that runs like Full Moon wo Sagashite in America today, but I have found another example of an emotionally tiring series in Denno Coil.

    Emotionally tiring, precisely because it’s a serious children’s anime. There is a lack of pretense and a willingness to treat children seriously that is the hallmark of the kind of anime I am drawn to. There are few to none of examples of this in American animation, though I think Pixar makes an effort. However, the closest analouge in our media would be children’s books, like Bridge to Terabithia or Holes (both of which have since made the transition to movie form; I’ve read both but only seen the former).

    Dennou Coil is definitely targeted at children, but it seemed a blend of a lot of more adult-level anime. The Haibane Renmei parallel is obvious, with a Reki-Rakka empath/loner pair joined by an emotional bond. There’s also the Serial Experiments Lain parallel, toying with the nature of reality and the implications of granting too much “reality” to cyberspace (I would argue in fact that Dennou Coil did a superior job of this than Lain). The magical girl concept is neatly transposed to the technological here, you could even argue for a hint of Someday’s Dreamers in there. But the point about Dennou Coil is that it manages to straddle all these genres of anime and yet establish it’s own unique identity on its own terms.

    I have to agree, this is one of the best anime I have ever seen. I have to rank it slightly more highly than Shingu, since it was equally enjoyable to watch but simply had greater heft, its backstory formly grounded in the rich human experience instead of needing to import aliens wholesale.

    I don’t have much to say about the ending, spoilerwise or otherwise. Some random screen shots below the fold… (more…)

  • Windows XP SP3

    The official release of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP inches closer. The latest release candidate (RC2) now includes support for HD audio, which was lacking in SP3 RC1 (and thus made my life miserable for a week trying to install Windows on my EEE). I think I will do a wipe of my EEE and reinstall SP3 when the final version is released.

  • dreaming of an EEE Tablet

    It seems that the next generation EEE, which will have a 9-inch screen and Windows XP preinstalled, will also feature a resistive touchscreen LCD. The unit may also include GPS though this has not been confirmed.

    This is pretty intriguing news, though not in itself enough to make me lust for one. The inclusion of GPS is a great idea, it’s a fairly cheap chipset and will add tremendous functionality. But the touchscreen LCD is more promising because it suggests that a tablet EEE is not too far in the future. Tablets tend to be expensive and midsized, which are both disincentives to pulling them out in public and using them in tablet mode. But an inexpensive EEE tablet would be revolutionary. Imagine a tablet that you could truly hold in one hand, with a touch screen, and sporting GPS to boot. Coupled with WiMax you’d basically have the ultimate device. That’s something worth waiting for, as long as they keep it in the $500 range.

  • wavatars updated

    Shamus announces an update to his wavatars plugin. However, as noted earlier, the pending release of WordPress 2.5 will likely break most avatar plugins due to its built-in avatar support. It think it makes more sense to wait for the post-upgrade version of wavatars for the time being; I still would like to see a way to define avatar libraries so that instead of two plugins, I could just select from a drop down of avatar styles (wavatars, monsters, etc).

  • Byousoku 5 centimeters

    I came across this fascinating anime movie via a banner ad of all things. It’s subtitled, “a chain of short stories about their distance” and is aboutfriends who grow apart over time, rather than closer. Here’s the summary from Anime News Network:

    A tale of two people, Tono Takaki and Shinohara Akari, who were close friends but gradually grow farther and farther apart as time moves on. They become separated because of their families yet continue to exchange contact in the form of letters. Yet as time continues to trudge on, their contact with one another begins to cease. Years pass and the rift between them grows ever larger. However, Takaki remembers the times they have shared together, but as life continues to unfold for him, he wonders if he would be given the chance to meet Akari again as the tale embarks on Takaki’s realization of the world and people around him.

    There’s also a trailer on YouTube:

    I like the style, and also the sentiment of the plot. I think I will add this to my netflix queue if I can find it there.

  • Yume returns

    yumeNew Someday’s Dreamers series to begin this summer!

    According to Moonphase, a new Someday’s Dreamers, (a.k.a. Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto), series has been greenlit for production and is set to begin later this summer season…

    The new series is entitled, “Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto ~Natsu no Sora~.” A formal announcement, according to this 2ch thread, will be made in the latest issue of Shounen Ace magazine — on sale March 26.

    (via Nick and AnimeNfo)

  • declaration of email independence

    Michael Arrington laments the state of his inbox, and calls for someone to solve the problem of email gone wild. The problem with email is that it doesn’t scale. The solution of creating complex rules, filters, and forwards only serves to move email around but doesn’t solve the problem that it will always take a finite amount of time to process a piece of email, even just to click delete. Ultimately, what is needed is to reduce the volume of mail, not attempt to sort it.

    There is a solution, but it isn’t for the faint of heart. The answer to email tyranny is email independence. Consider the types of email we get:

    – personal email from friends and family
    – email related to work
    – email from strangers
    – spam

    The key is to eliminate mail from each category. Ultimately, you want to receive less mail overall, so that the “signal to noise ratio” of your inbox is improved. Let’s consider each of these in reverse order.

    Spam is actually the easiest to handle, as built-in mail filters do a decent job. However, a great technique to improve the performance even further is to forward your mail from one account to another. For example, you might have a public yahoo email address, which forwards to your private gmail account. Email must survive the spam checks on both accounts in order to reach you.

    Email from strangers is usually a matter of convenience – for the stranger. Do you really need a public email so that people can contact you? The easiest way to cull mail from those people you do not know (outside of a work context, of course) is to employ a whitelist, a list of contacts who alone are permitted to email you. Email from anyone not on the whitelist gets an auto-response indicating that you don’t know who they are and if they really need to contact you, they can do so via an alternate method, such as a voicemail box (preferably one custom reserved for this purpose). Whitelists are not a standard feature of most free webmail services but there are various ways to achieve it, Google is the best resource.

    Email related to work is simple in theory – just use your work email, and do not use that email for anything other than work. Arrange things so that your work email is inaccessible outside of work. Or at worst, read only. Time spent clearing the work inbox is time spent doing work by definition, assuming you’ve strictly limited your use of that acct to work matters alone.

    The other strategy for work email avoidance is to heavily embrace other intra-office communication methods. Embrace tools like LinkedIn, become an Outlook Calendar power user, or Notes depending on your environment. Think about setting up a wiki for intraoffice documentation rather than the endless parade of word documents. And of course, use the phone for quick questions or other instant communication needs. The typical office is brimming with technologies and software that can be used to circumvent email for routine communication.

    Finally, the hardest nut to crack – your friends and family. For the most part, the best solution here is to realize that because these people are already in your life, they probably will never rely on email for something truly important. Thus, you can safely let most of this email go into your Family folder unread. If something important comes up you can always use the search function of your email service/client to retrieve it. But on the whole, train your friends and family to realize that you rarely read their emails, by simply repeating the phrase, “oh, I must have missed that email…” a lot. They will adapt accordingly.

    Analogously to the office scenario, though, you do want to retain the ability to engage in routine communication with your friends and family. Using tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, and heavily adopting RSS and proselytizing it heavily, will emable you to do most of that social communication through a feedreader and web browser rather than a cluttered inbox. The Facebook news feed is orders of magnitude more efficient than email in keeping up to date on birthdays, events, and other miscellany. Likewise with “subscribing” to your friends and family on Flickr or delicious instead of emailing links and photos back and forth. Its possible to offload most of this content onto the social network scene.

    There are probably a lot of other ways to transition away from email. But all of this requires a serious commitment. After all, email will always enjoy an ease of use advantage over the various services and whatnot you might employ as surrogates. With discipline though, it can be done. I am not there myself yet, but ot’s something to work towards 🙂