25.2.09

Resumes vs CVs

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1138

THIS IS RELEVANT BECAUSE TODAY I WENT FOR CAREER ADVISING AND THEY BASICALLY TOLD ME THE SAME THING

Strike Witches

I finished this series a while ago and didn't make a write up on it, though I think I should give a few opinions on it. It has moe, after all.

First and foremost, I stand firmly in my belief that Sky Girls is overall better than Strike Witches. Sky Girls came first; I checked the dates on Wikipedia, so I'm absolutely sure about it. The OVA was the first to come out for Sky girls, which then the novels for Strike witches came out. I think then the TV series for Sky Girls came out followed by the Strike Witches OVA + series... regardless, Sky Girls came out first, Sky Girls was more moe, and Sky Girls had better characters/plot/etc.

That being said, Strike Witches was still moe, therefore I still must give it credit for being pretty good imo.

The weak point in Strike Witches, imo, was the overall plot of this whole Neuroi thing. The mere concept of aliens and magical girls in a scenario before WWII is just totally like, "wtf?" :V. About as WTF as a soda can turning into a girl, but lets not go there yet since I haven't watched that anime. Well it doesn't matter, the mass approves of moeness of all types, and I am part of the masses. Indeed, the character designs are very nice and appealing, which always makes the fanservice more *cough* tolerable (because we all know if we don't like the character or its designs, the fanservice can just exacerbate the visual pains...). Character personality as well has been fine-tuned to match moeness of each character, albeit some of the characters' personalities seem faulty at times.
The setting and theme is weak, like the plotline, so that it's not really worth watching if one wants any substance. It's visually appealing and can provide for some good sense of cuddly warmth without the icky emoness that's usually associated with romance-type series. And, according to my mecha-based friend, it has decent enough battle scenes that can even keep the mecha fan entertained, as so long as he can tolerate having a pantsu shot every 3 seconds in the battle. With that all in mind, its no wonder its quite a popular series: 60% moe, 40% action, and 0% plot! What can be better.
Music wise its mediocre. I realize a lot of music has been rather mediocre lately; perhaps the better songs are just somewhere else in the anime world? Well Gundam SEED and SEED Destiny had good music (and that's about the ONLY good thing about the series) so I guess they're there, somewhere.

CHARACTERS I LIKE:
1. LYNNE-CHAN (As if you couldn't tell from my previous Strike Witches post)
2. That night-watch girl that's always sleepy and wears black knee socks. O:
3. Amazingly, that one silent tsundere girl who has a younger sister in the hospital. At first I didn't think she was my type but when she became more "open" I thought she was pretty funny for her military-ness. :V It was quite cute, especially the part when her sister wakes up. "CHAAARRRRRGGEEEEEEEE" *points towards her destination*
4. I guess the white knee socks girl that's the friend of the sleepy black knee socks girl. She's kind of cute, but I think her personality and her voice are a bit... "fake" so to speak. Or maybe just the voice. Although her char design is kind of nice.

Anyway I made this post since it was recently announced that Strike Witches is getting a second season. Good going, especially since Sky Girls already had 24 episodes. More moe is always welcome. Still, you'd have to do some serious amping in plot and character development/personality to match Sky Girls. :( Maybe I'm being too stringent as a Sky Girls fanboy...

23.2.09

Mokke

Ever since I slowed down on playing Disgaea I've been finishing random anime series here and there, but mostly been too lazy to write anything about them. However, since I really liked Mokke and it's not really known, I thought I should make a post or something about it. The aspects of Mokke remind me somewhat of Aria, although Mokke definately has more of a supernatural feeling, rather than a tranquil feeling which Aria provides. Instead of providing an ideal utopia setting that any audience would desire to live in, Mokke puts various everyday life troubles in a supernatural setting, using (I'm assuming) actual references to traditional japanese folklore. Even when a watcher may know next to nothing about japanese folklore, though, the whole mystical setting is attractive.
Admittedly, one of the main reasons that I started watching the series and I continue to watch it was because I thought one of the characters was quite cute in appearance and in personality. It was when I played the Da Capo visual novel that I realized I was probably attracted to the character (that character being the older sister that can see things) because the character reminded me so much of Kotori, not just in appearance and personality but also in (in some sense) her "special power". The little sister was not as "appealing", so to speak, but a well-developed character regardless. I liked the grandfather character a lot, though; his whole understandable knowledge on all the spiritual facts combined with his appearing-cold-and-strict-but-quite-caring personality was pretty cool.
None of the series had any real connection with each other, which is good in some sense so that one would not need to watch the series in order. However I was a bit sad (though its understandable) because I was hoping for some reappearance of some characters or spirits, like the one spirit that tried to encourage a classmate of the older sister to hit on her. :V Haha that one was funny, it even had fanservice :V

ANYWAY IN OTHER NEWS I watched Coraline, which was pretty good, visually. I thought the plot could have been more developed and was speedy at times (I felt it in the American voices, it felt like there were gaps sometimes where there shoudl have been more explanation). This is too bad because the movie wasn't that long in the first place, but maybe because of all the 3D effects they didn't want to make the movie too long or something.

But Mokke is better. Watch Mokke. :D

19.2.09

Internal Conflict Error (Warning: Low Sanity Level, Read With Caution)

T: THIS HAS GOT TO STOP how is it that you can say your internship is teaching you anything when you're sitting there reading comics all day?!? It was already bad enough before you stepped on that landmine and now look you can't even concentrate on work you're supposed to be doing--
G: Look, the work we've been doing so far has been pleasantly received, so is it really any big deal to them what you're doing as long as the work you've been doing so far is being completed in a reasonable amount of time? And it's not like you can spend 6 hours just staring at code and feel preoccupied, especially if you're not finding anything wrong with the code and the program seems to be working--
T: But you can spend 6 hours watching/reading anime related material? The code can ALWAYS be improved. Even right now you can still look at the code and take effort to understand it better. Look into that class-loading application you've been trying to make. Figure out better improvements, anything to show you're doing something helpful--
G: You can't say that if we aren't even getting paid to do this. Why must we be so devoted to helping them out? We're already helping them out a bunch already. Why should we bother making this program so great? Look at the programmers previously working on this. They did a terrible job and left confusing code here and breakpoints there, and they WERE getting paid. We're all just working so hard just to make a good image of ourselves, right? Just so we look "great" and "awesome", huh? Why should we care so much how we look to people?
T: Not to look awesome, but at least to look mature. How can we give an image of maturity if we're looking at comics all day? Try to understand, image can be important. We don't want to look like a hero that can do anything, but at the least respected well enough so that they'd want us like a friend as well as a coworker, and when recommendations come along people will be happy to write what a great intern you were, not that you were reading comics all day--
G: A great image, you say. Image has always been a weakness of yours. You always want to stay neutral and not risk any harm or risk. Limited aggressiveness, unwilling to pursue new things--
T: WHAT DO YOU THINK WE ARE TRYING TO DO RIGHT NOW?!? AND ARE YOU HELPING IT AT ALL WITH ALL THIS ANIME CRAP?!? We have SO MUCH to do-- fixing resume, by CHANCE finding a job even if we can only stay for a year, starting all these damn applications...!
G: --it's because we've been so concerned with all these academic and occupational things that we never have a chance to express other hobbies, such as writing. Everything is always being neglected in pursuit of academics or other things that seem more "important", but do they seem more enjoyable?
T: Academics has had its share of neglectance, thanks to anime related material...
G: Anime has ALWAYS been placed on the backseat, ALWAYS been a "wait till we're all done with this classwork" hobby!! We strive hard to keep it from getting out of control, so to speak, and that's good. But what's wrong with indulging just a little?
T: A little?!? Whenever we get the chance we go all out!! We could spend MONTHS just watching anime, at the rate we download and with all the series we have backlogged!! We can finish a 50 episode series in 2-3 days, and we usually do! At the very least we could try WORKING while we have something to do...
G: It's better than staying home all day with nothing to do and bum around like a loser. We ARE making progress, although you might think its not acceptable. Not only are we volunteering to do work to learn skills in programming and communication, even at home we're trying to practice other things we need to do. Notice how now that there's no more academic material it feels like we have a lot of free time to do whatever we want. But we're trying to keep that under control. Search for Universities. Study for GREs. Work on resumes. We're doing all of that--
T: Yea, for like 10 minutes a day.
G: --which is better than nothing. In any case, we're trying. Sometimes, the human body betrays us and we're feeling less energized and wanting to do anything. Even watching anime, we have that "do we really want to watch it" feeling before we begin to go right into it.
T: It would have been better if that "do you really want to do that" feeling had been kept with reading megatokyo. Now what.
G: Megatokyo is still finite. Eventually we'll finish and then everything will be back to steady pace. It's incredibly unlikely we'll go off and start downloading manga onto a computer that's not ours. Although if Megatokyo wasn't so emoish and suspenseful in every comic it would probably not be as much of a problem.
T: I can agree with that. But we can't put the blame on it.
G: Yea, well. Might as well finish up this blog post--
T: Which was again used to distract us from the work we have to do.
G: Well its not watching anime, either.
T: But that's probably what you're doing afterwards anyway.
G: We finished our work for the day!
T: YOU SPENT A GOOD AMOUNT OF THE DAY READING MEGATOKYO--
G: This is not going to end if we don't stop now.

16.2.09

Mamotte Shugogetten

Yes well, recently I finished Gundam SEED, watched two movies (PUSH and Shopaholic), but of course, Mamotte Shugogetten is most important. And probably the best although I'm sure people will assassinate me for saying that.

I actually started watching Mamotte Shugogetten a looooong time ago (like, when I first got into watching anime), but I never got the chance to finish it until now, finally. Having finally finished it now, my opinion is... I think that Mamotte Shugogetten wasn't some remarkably great anime. :V In fact, for the most part it was very... simple and straightforward. So straightforward, in fact, that there were episodes where I swore there had to be something fishy behind some characters, but in the end all the characters were pure hearted and etc. and I was like "O:". With that being said, at some points it was remarkably boring. However! MOST IMPORTANTLY... it was a great study in the history of Moe. When the anime was released 10 years ago, there wasn't as much of the moe culture as there is now (the only other possible moe icons I can think of is probably Ah My Goddess). I thought it was really interesting how considerably conservative Mamotte Shugogetten was (comparing to "modern" moe anime, although Shugogetten DID have its ecchi moments).
The first season, I think, showed the general concept of moe in the 90s. The OVAs, I believe, showed much more dramatic change in just the episodes themselves. I feel like the series starts drifting from its conservativeness and heads towards the more fetishy type moe that's predominant in today's culture, imo. The style of the art as well seems to become more towards modern moe standards (and imo more cuter, but that may just be because I feel that modern moe is more appealing). The stories also get more emoish in the OVAs, probably another sign of the difference in interests in these romance/harem type anime. While the first season seemed primarily (cheesy) comedy, the OVAs seemed much more serious. This can be seen in the characters too; the characters in the OVA seem a lot more... entertaining, in a way, while the characters in the original series never seemed that serious. Also, there was better pairing in the OVA compared to the original series, where everyone just went after the main hero and heroine.
On a side note, I read a little bit of the manga today and (as expected) the manga seems more in depth and entertaining. In fact the same is true with ToLOVERu manga, which I'm finding quite entertaining. I don't know why I keep watching these anime that's pretty crappy compared to the mangas, especially since I hate the Love Hina anime most especially since its so crappy compared to the manga... :V
Mamotte Shugogetten: A history of Moe and Harem anime. Don't watch it. :D

More Lessons of Moe

Physics.
http://en.akibablog.net/archives/2009/02/50803679.html

Zoology.
http://en.akibablog.net/archives/2009/02/50805747.html

BEWARE, WORLD!! THE OTAKU ARE GETTING SMARTER.

Maybe.

6.2.09

Strike Witches (Unfinished)

LYNNE-CHANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

SOOOOOOOOOOOO CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTEEEEE


(possibly because she takes after a certain orange sukumizu char in another very very very very similar show)

LYNNE-CHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN~~~!!!!!

5.2.09

Nogizaka Haruka S2

http://www.moetron.com/2009/02/05/nogizaka-haruka-no-himitsu-season-2-announced/


YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

1.2.09

Verbal is the Bane of my Existence

I have two things to talk about and they have nothing to do with the title. Or with each other.

Recently I watched and finished ToLOVERu. Again, not exactly one of those awesomely great anime to watch but the preference at the time of deciding what anime to start watching was that of a slapstick comedy that had some cuteness in it. Well, I was starting Hidamari Sketch x365 but it was getting a bit slow for me, albeit it's still a fun show to watch. But ToLOVERu seemed like the one to marathon for the weekend.
Obviously with its 90% ecchi references its not a show that should be taken seriously. Plotwise, there wasn't much to expect, but at some points it was disappointing how an episode would end and the situation in the episode wasn't completely resolved (before they start a new episode about something completely different). It would be nice if they at least resolved issues in the episode itself, or showed how the entire group overcame a giant volcano explosion... oh well what can you expect.
Character cuteness got a high ranking for ToLOVERU. The character designs are the cliche anime moe type, which is understandable since it probably comes from a visual novel with the cliche CG moe type. Not that I mind at all. :V The main character Lala is rather immature at times, so although she looks cute I don't think she's quite the appropriate personality; the main (normal) girl Haruna is much cuter. However the cutest girl in the series has to go to the one that's not even a girl half the time... the concept itself is quite funny already but they top it off by making the girl form of Ran so cute~!! Although in my logical reasoning I have my qualms but then, how can I make any logical reasonings with a character that changes sex when it sneezes. I think it was just some Ranma logic lurking in me. Speaking of other anime it's quite glaringly obvious that one of the characters in the anime is COMPLETELY RIPPED OFF OF SOME PARTICULAR SHONEN ANIME/MANGA WHOSE NAME REPRESENTS AN ANIMAL ASSOCIATED WITH BAD LUCK AND HALLOWEEN. Not just "hey she looks like this char" or "hey they ripped off the char design from this char"; its "lets take this entire character from a different anime and place her ad verbatim into this one. Might as well call this a generous cameo for that character. (Not that I minded much; even though I never finished Black Cat, that character was my favorite in the anime, although in ToLOVERu I thought the char was a bit unrealistic to be cute).
The music is futsuuuuuuuuuuuuu. Not terrible, not awesomely great either. Just catchy enough to be worth downloading whenever I get the time.

The second topic involves a program I made at work internship ( :( ): an XML user interface generator. You can read the incredibly short document with big pictures associated with the file. Since anyone that would possibly read this blog probably doesn't have any XML file at hand, I'm fairly confident that the program will work with HTML too since HTML is almost considered an XML document itself; however, you might get some funky results since it wasn't suited for HTML use. (I could probably change it so any XML document can work, but I'm lazy and this was all my group needed to work efficiently.
Analogies should make sense and be reasonable, dammit.
Stupid blog website that doesn't let you upload small files! >:O Or maybe it does and I'm too stupid/lazy to figure it out. >.> <.<