Anime blogging!

Mai Otome continues to be somewhere between annoying and attractive. As of episode two, Arika is shown to be such an obnoxious, fixated brat that she's only outshown by Mashiro-hime's brattiness. In fact, the whole show is full of brats: the third girl in this triangle of rivalry, Nina, is a wealthy brat whose apparently willing to step on anyone and anything in her way to get to the top.

Shizuru (yay!) is still the same, still attracted to cute girls and still wowing them with her elegance and prowess, only now she's a butt-kicking, sky-spanning ninja-like warrior. So far the only character I'm actually interested in is the very minor Major Wang, Nina's foster-father. He seems to have some interesting history.

Sousei no Aquarion continues to be, as one acquaintance put, "crack-fueled". Each episode mocks some issue or aspect of either anime or life. Episode 16 mocked goth-loli anime; episode 17 mocked dieting; episode 18 mocked cosplayers. The animation and writing, though, are solid, and somehow the writers came up with a good combination of characters that can continue to be played off one another in entertaining variations. Sustaining a high-pitch for the full episode, episode after episode, is pretty hard, but so far Aquarion has managed it.

Aria, the anime, is still delightful, a good wind-down to the end of the week. It's my must-see of the season.

Now, that's an impressive build-time.

The keyboard is tolerable, although it looks like it might be two weeks before I can buy a replacement. I called around to all the used places in Seattle and nobody had one. I checked Ebay and bought one for $39 from a reseller; here's hoping it's what I want. Unfortunately, the purchase has dropped my PayPal account below six bucks. Ah, well.

I continue to be impressed with some parts of Microsoft. The MS Shell looks to be a kick-ass application. Although Raymond's cadre will pooh-pooh the use of non-ASCII streams through the pipelines I think it's one hell of a good idea, and not one that could be too difficult to port to Unix. The only headache here is that it does require a consistent object model-- not something you're likely to see coming out of the Gnome project anytime soon. I also like C#; the "get" and "set" attribute handlers absolutely rock and ensure contract consistency within a given object and between objects. It's incredibly easy to write object relationships and application databases where the object's persistent representation is in a at-least-2nd-normal-formed database somewhere. C# and Ruby seem to be heading into the common space of modern languages, making some strong assumptions about how much horsepower and memory you've got and doing the correct thing with respect to the programmer. And the C# compiler for Linux works really well.

Now if only Microsoft didn't act like it had to rule the world, and if only it's C and C++ divisions actually learned how to do proper product development and not this cowboy crap they've been doing for the past fifteen years.

Hard as it is for me to believe, my laptop is still running an install I started 15 hours ago. It's not stuck, and I can see it performing useful work. Apparently it really takes over 16 hours for Gentoo to install OpenOffice on my little machine. Poor little workstation. Right now it's building the help files.

Consolation prize or desperate measure?

I stopped by QFC and bought some ice cream. They were having a two-for-one sale on Dryer's brand, but only if one of the two was the seasonally available pumpkin-flavored. I can't figure out if that's a consolation ("You bought the pumpkin? Here, to make up for it, we'll give you something else free.") or a desperate maneuver to get the cooler cleared ("You bought some Dryers? Please, take one of the pumpkins! Just get it out of our store!").

Actually, it's not even that bad. Kouryou-chan likes it, but Yamaraashi-chan just wanted the vanilla. The pumpkin ice-cream tastes a lot like pumpkin pie, complete with natural spices, which are listed on the side: cinammon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger.

Lifehack of the week: use one grocery store and learn everybody's name who works there. Being able to shout, "Hey, Joe, I need a checker on aisle 3!" can really make a difference in your getting in and getting out without getting lost.

Dearest gods, but I have a twisted imagination...

Well, the spacebar is reliable enough that in the course of the last hour I've written over 800 words without having a problem with it. The scary thing is, I'm not writing in any of my usual stories. No, this is something so sick and perverse I can't even begin to imagine it. To give you an idea of where I'm going (see if you can pick up the idea) the working titles I have are: Orgy In August, Sodomy in September, Nymphs in November, and I haven't worked out what the Christmas special should be, but I have some ideas already.

I hope I can just ignore this one and go back to writing the Journal Entries. But I bet it'll haunt me for the next couple of days.

( Sample )

If you do guess, please don't name the series here. This isn't something that should show up in a search engine!