Is this productivity?

Omaha's been out of town since yesterday morning, when I sent her off on an Amtrak for Eugene Oregon and a game developer's conference. She's been in the dumps for a while about the progress her show is making, so hopefully contact with people who actually know about her show and listen to it will help.

I've been spending my free time sorting and filing. I had no idea how bad it had gotten. This morning I pulled through all of my files and began to organize stuff that's been molding in files for months. If you take a look at my del.icio.us folder, you'll see about twenty new entries, things that I've finally placed somewhere rather than have scattered about my filing cabinet. It's a weird collection: essays by Isaih Berlin and Ron Bailey, a reference article on rhetorical writing, 50 Tips for ADHD management, and how to tie-dye. In one way, this is just moving stuff from one cabinet to another, but it's at least accessible to me almost everywhere and not in a dusty corner of my household.

I'm a little worried about my desktop computer; after 202 days of uptime, it crashed twice in one day, hard, with nothing in the logs to indicate what went wrong, and the interval between reboot 1 and 2 was less than an hour. That indicates to me a power supply problem, but I just bought this power supply less than eight months ago. I dusted out the cabinet and it's been good for about five hours now. I'm trying to figure out how to install lm_sensors on it, but it's apparently an early AMD model with some twonky sensor settings. It would be nice to be able to monitor its behavior with the sensord server, even if it does crash again.

And I read with glee this morning an article by Kathy Sierra on Tom Kelly's analysis of the Devil's Advocate, and why such individuals are pure evil. As Sierra puts it, the Devil's Advocate is only trying to look helpful and thus can wear a winding sheet of innocent motives while in fact "ripping the throat from an idea one soul-stealing fear-based verbal attack." I think about a third of my projects have been killed by DAs. And I think DAs are most fatal in creative endeavors because creatives are, by definition, always teetering on the edge of depression anyway because they don't know that failure is possible. Introducing the concept of failure early in the blossoming of an idea kills it quicker than any other tactic.

The New TV Season!

Yesterday marked the opening of the Fall TV season in Japan, and already I've had a chance to watch a few of the new animes. Here's my opinion of three of them. Note that I watched these raw. My Japanese was good enough for conversational speech, but when the topic became highly technical I missed a lot, so my knowledge of what's going on may not be the best.

Cluster Edge

I so wanted to like this show. The previews looked wonderful and the technology and setting are something for which I'm a bit of a sucker, with the end of the airship era, the start of the modern. Throw in the fact that the storyline featured a cast of handsome young men pining for each other and I would be so there! This was the show I've been waiting all summer to preview.

( But... )

My Otome

My Otome is the successor (it's not a sequel) to Mai Hime, which I had really enjoyed. My Otome is set in a completely different universe, with a different (but somehow vaguely similar) plotline. The really brain-damaged aspect to this is that several of the characters are being completely recycled-- some voice, same look, but otherwise completely different roles. Poor Natsuki, who in the last series spent a lot of time avoiding being sexy spends this episode trying to be "official" dressed in a corset. I feel sorry for seiyuu^[?]Chiba Saeko-- does she really need the paycheck that badly, because it sounds like she's actually trying. The reserved and professional Shizuru is now a kick-ass magical girl, along with Akane, who now deploy from the car from Big O, now painted white and with special ejector seats for mahou shoujo. Mashiro, who was a calm and wise invalid in the first series is a wisecracking recalcitrant, and very active princess. Kaiji-sensei, the teacher with the role of greek chorus in the original, is now Kaiji-sousha, commander of a military force (and still doing the as-you-know speeches).

It hurts my brain. It's all wrong. It's just plain stupid.

( But wait, there's more! )

Aria

On the other side of the fence completely from all that absurdity comes this tiny little gem of a series that, frankly, I can't believe made it into production and I'm so happy it did. Our main character is Akari, a girl from Earth who's taken up residence on the terraformed water world of Aria and makes her living as an undine, the pilot of a gondola, for a little touristy corner of the world that looks a lot like a rebuilt Venice.

( Inexplicably, I like it. )