If NASA ever needs us, we are on standby.

A while ago I did a complete playthrough of Mass Effect. Here it is, in all of its failure glory.

I have covered Desert Bus in previous years to a more ongoing extent, but since someone always gave me crap about all my Desert Bus posts I decided to only make one post, and this is it. This year, the folks as LLR raised $380,445 (as of dec 29th). Extremely late post on my part, but I was pretty busy this semester, so it can’t be helped. As always, the event was quite entertaining, even if I didn’t manage to catch all of it. One event, six days, and they raised more then a quarter of a million dollars for charity. Lets hope they continue breaking their record year by year when then do this again!

Yep. That’s the end of the internet.

Too lazy to make a really long post, so here is a video with me talking about stuff for 14 minutes.

I also played Portal and uploaded those videos a while back. Its about an hour and a half and can be viewed here. It was way simpler to do Portal because I already had a good editor, and a decent upload at the time. I remembered most of the game from when i played it back when the orange box came out so I went through it fairly fast. I got stuck maybe once or twice on puzzles I forgot about, but it wasn’t too bad.

Other than that, I also have a few random vidoes, like some audiosurf stuff to music by Mic-B, some minecraft videos, and a pointless APB video. Since i completed my Bad Company videos, I have a very small about of content planned for my gaming channel. I have some more minecraft stuff that i failed to record properly and that is about it. Looking for a game to be my next Lets Play, and I was eying Crystalis because I played it back in the day and it has some sweet 8-bit music.

Anyways, enjoy the videos guys! Be sure to check out my gaming channel if you would like to see more!

Does it surprise anyone that I went into the third movie with the same attitude? It was what I expected again: more of the same. I went looking for big screen CG Transformer action and it was delivered. I am not a big critic, I generally like most movies because I go to them to be mindlessly entertained for a few hours. If I wanted deep story I’d read a book. That being said, the story was shit. No depth, I could basically guess what was going to happen as the movie was trudging along between the action scenes. They could have done way more with it, either in the personal level of Sams relationship troubles or the backstory of the main plot point (or Cybertron in general). Instead of fleshing out one route, it decided to do a little of both and it succeeded in doing a poor job in both respects. It feels like the took the base story and just ran around randomly adding needless stuff. The scenes with Sam’s parents don’t have any impact and were basically a way to waste like 20 minutes of our time.

You know what I would like to see next? A prequel. That sounds like a horrible idea, as prequels tend to suck ass, but in this case it would be sweet. The start of the Autobot/Decepticon war could be fleshed out into a full length movie, with an interesting story, instead of just straight action. Either that, or they could do a sequel with just the Autobots as the main focus and develop their personalities and interactions. I have no idea for an actual plot, but i’m sure someone could come up with something that they could use. However the main focus in either case is the Autobots and their personalities, history, friendship, or hell, even some technology. Basically, what I’m saying is flesh out the Transformers universe beyond Sam and his personal/love life. I think Shia does a good job but his character is getting old and doing the same shit as the first two movies.

Anyways, ranting about story aside, if you go into this movie for CG action scenes, you won’t be disappointed. If you go into it for deep and compelling story, you would be wasting money, so go and rent something good instead. As for me, I don’t regret seeing it but I expected literally nothing of this movie other than CGI. And that’s all it really delivered.

Wow… Ghost in the Shell. This series is great in so many ways, from the action and character development down to its view of future technology. I just finished rewatching it yesterday and it has easily earned second place on my list of anime, right after Cowboy Bebop.

I guess we’ll start with the basics: Graphics/Animation & Sound. The graphics are superb, and the animation is smooth and flows nicely. The combination of the 2d characters with the 3d Tachikoma tanks is interesting to say the least, and works extremely well. This was the first anime I was aware of that used 3d models for some things as opposed to everything being 2d or hand drawn. It portrays the futuristic setting and technology in a believable way, for an anime at least. Even though GITS was produced in 2006, five years later and it still looks awesome. As for sound, the effects are good and fit really well. Ghost in the Shell probably has one of the best dubs in anime history (like Cowboy Bebop) and is worth a listen. GITS also has one of the best opening and ending songs out of any anime.

The Laughing Man Logo

Moving on to the story and characters, I have to say that the overarching story is an interesting and complex. It never reveals the whole story to the viewers, leaving them guessing along with the characters, and it doesn’t feel stretched out or shrunk down to fit within the 26 episode season. The series has two episode types: Complex episodes and stand alone episodes. Complex episodes are about the main mystery, trying to figure out who the “Laughing Man“is and what happened during the “Laughing Man Incident” 6 years prior to when our story starts. As for the stand alone episodes, they don’t factor into the big mystery of the series, but instead dive into certain characters individually and flesh them out a lot more. While most of the time i watched these episodes, I definitely wanted to skip them and get back to the main story, but i never did because that would mess up the pacing and I feel these episodes are still essential if one it to grasp the whole feel of the characters and their actions. Overall, I love the stories in this series. It was written very well. The ending feels very satisfying, and leaves tones of room for more (Like the 2nd GIG).

As for the characters, I was a little sad that four of them were more fleshed out than the others. Major Kusanagi, Batou, Togusa, and Chief Aramaki had way more depth than Saito, Ishikawa, Pazu, and Borma. I do realize that in only 26 episodes there was no way to flesh out all the characters and still deliver a complete story, so lets hope they get some more development in the 2nd GIG. I have to say, my favorite character has to be The Major. It’s sad to say, but it i still kind of rare to see a strong female lead in this type of anime. She is a great hacker, strong fighter, and extremely intelligent. Her English VA portrays her extremely well.

My other favorite character is Togusa, because he seems a lot more like an average guy then the rest of Section 9. He has not cyborg parts, other then his Cyberbrain. If he gets shot, he bleeds and it may be fatal, where as the Major and Batou are full cyborgs and can switch to new bodies. He is pretty easy to relate to, coming from being a police detective where as all of the rest of Section 9 has a military background.  Batou is interesting, if not partly predictable. He has some anger issues, and loves to jump the gun it seems, but he is a nice guy who has good values in the end. After him, The Chief is an awesome character. I wish Ishikawa had more air time and depth, he seems awesome.

The last thing I suppose I can talk about is the technology portrayed in GITS. Considering I am also a huge technology geek, this show had even more appeal because of the awesome way it envisions technology. In this universe, the line between robot and human are extremely blurry. Some humans has complete cyborg bodies, and there are advanced AIs that learn and be curious. Everything is electronic and connected to the net; eyes, ears, your brain. People have holes in their neck where one can jack into their brain, everything can be connected either wirelessly or through plugging into it. In one episode, The Major goes into a chat room. Its virtual reality style, which is cool as hell. It seems now days people don’t strive so much towards virtual reality, which is sad, because it is an awesome concept that I hope I will see someday. All of this interconnectivity does breed a problem, and it is addressed in the story: tampering and information control. The main antagonist, The Laughing Man, is an awesome hacker and uses his abilities in real time. He can hack into on lookers eyes and make them see his logo over his face, so they cant identify him later. He also hacked others eyes and completely erased his presence, making him seemingly invisible. Information control. Its already happening today. More and more things are becoming digital, and easily tampered with. We keep trying to restrict the internet, but that isn’t a good idea at all. I do however enjoy the GITS technological vision. I mean, how awesome would it be to be able to plug into a computer and dive into the net? To browse the internet in your head wirelessly? Have video communications and a heads up display built into your eyes, or have telescopic vision with those eyes? It would be grand.

Ghost in the Shell is an insane digital world, and I love it. I’ll be sure to make a post on the 2nd series.
See you guys next time!

Honestly, I have never really seen the point of categories AND tags, especially when there is a search as well. Too much categorization for my tastes… so i’ll probably add things to the menu that aren’t categories, or maybe make a few categories… we’ll see.

The only reason I made this post, in all honesty, is because Mic-B accepted my challenge, and now we have some sort of update war going on. As of this post, I am winning!
Bwahaha!

Spice and Wolf is a series I have recently been engrossed in, even though I have known of it since sometime in 2008. I have just recently finished the first season of the anime (in english, the dub is pretty good) and became an instant fan. I guess I’m a sucker for a good story, haha.
For a quick summary, here is the series description from Yen Press:

The life of a traveling merchant is a lonely one, a fact with which Kraft Lawrence is well acquainted. Wandering from town to town with just his horse, cart, and whatever wares have come his way, the peddler has pretty well settled into his routine—that is, until the night Lawrence finds a wolf goddess asleep in his cart. Taking the form of a fetching girl with wolf ears and a tail, Holo has wearied of tending to harvests in the countryside and strikes up a bargain with the merchant to lend him the cunning of “Holo the Wisewolf” to increase his profits in exchange for taking her along on his travels. What kind of businessman could turn down such an offer? Lawrence soon learns, though, that having an ancient goddess as a traveling companion can be a bit of a mixed blessing. Will this wolf girl turn out to be too wild to tame?

You know, reading that totally makes it seem like such an unmanly thing to like… but whatever, don’t judge me – I love this series.

Spice and Wolf originally started out as a light novel (its like a short book with some illustrations), and then moved into other forms such as a manga and an anime adaption. I first found out about the series though its anime back when it started airing in Japan, sometime in 2008. I watched some of it and then lost interest because the subs were horrible (i probably just had some bad luck picking a group…). It was still on my ‘watch sometime later’ list until I found it on Netflix a few weeks ago, and then I spent all Sunday afternoon watching it (season 1 is a short 13 episodes, only took me 5 or 6 hours). Since the 2nd season isn’t out in English until August this year, I decided to pick up some of the translated books so I could advance through the story, though the first 2 books are the same as the first anime season. The third book is supposedly the same as episodes 1 – 6 of season 2, but I haven’t read any of them yet.

I have been refusing to watch Spice and Wolf season 2 subbed because I want to watch it dubbed. I have this strange affinity with dubs, especially when I watch the majority of a title with them. Since i saw all of season 1 dubbed, i must watch season 2 dubbed for consistency. It doesn’t bother me though, because the Spice and Wolf dub is pretty good. Until the 2nd season comes out however, i will read the books. The 4th book comes out later this month (June 24 i believe), and that will probably cover season 2 episodes 7 – 12 (Well, the anime covers the books, not the other way around. The books are the original media).

The only thing about the English novels is that the translator and publisher, Yen Press, decided to Americanize the covers (As seen above, the first book has a different cover style) to reach a wider audience. They released the first book this way, but after fan outcry, released the next 2 novels with the original cover and just included a dust jacket with an American cover (seen below). However the only way to get the original cover for the first book is through a semi-rare dust jacket that I hope I can find, because I actually like that cover a lot more.

I know I have wide range of topics for posts, from programming, vehicles, internet shenanigans, music, and video games; but this is another topic in which I will be talking about as well, Anime, Manga, and Japanese related stuff in general. This all incorporates into who I am, so if you don’t like this stuff, feel free to skip to one of my other articles that you would find more interesting.

I will voice my thoughts on each book individually after I have read them… maybe not as a review, but just my general thoughts about them. It might be awhile until then, but we’ll see. The books are generally short, the first being 230 pages, second being 280, third being 246. I could probably read them all in three days, but there is no fun in just blowing through them all. As I said, I will post my thoughts on the books as I read through them!