Rubénerd!

The interwebs are reporting the K-On! Movie has been announced for the 3rd of December. I predict it will be about eating cake, performance anxiety and eating cake. Can't wait :D

As for those rolling their eyes, haters gonna hate.

After a couple of months in mothballs, starting today MacTheKnife has been recommissioned for full service! I know, exciting right!?

Wait, don't answer that

Since iMugi the Mac Pro entered the picture to take care of the heavy lifting and Senjoughara the ThinkPad X40 was used for mobile work, MacTheKnife the 2006 MacBook Pro was relegated to secondary duties. This wasn't helped by the fact his battery was completely shot, and when Ruben's sister stole his power supply after she damaged hers, he couldn't even be turned on!

Yesterday though MacTheKnife got some new stuff, and as we speak he's with Ruben in a coffee shop typing this infuriatingly written third person blog post! He received a brand new battery and 85W MagSave power supply from the Apple Store on George Street in Sydney which means Ruben won't be able to eat for a month, but now he can use his Mac laptop again!

Ugh I just realised that lineup doesn't include my homebrew file server. Oh well, its not well designed like these anyway :P.

Blastie from the pastie. Mmm, pastie

Ruben bought his venerable, first generation MacBook Pro in March 2006, as denoted by a blog post discussing the then-new Intel/PPC Universal Binary situation (Universal Binaries for Mozilla Software). He ran Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger at the time, what a blast from the past!

Speaking of blast passing (wait, what?) Ruben was living in Malaysia at the time so the movie and concert tickets, CD covers and random coffee shop paraphernalia wedged between the lid and the clear perspex cover are like a time capsule into his life in 2006-07! Ruben thinks that while that's cool in a way, ideally MacTheKnife should receive a bit of an upgrade. For one thing, there needs to be a seriously large Ho-Kago Tea Time cover alongside the Blues Brothers and SOS-Dan ones (too much epicness?), and the ticket from when Ruben saw Bebel Gilberto, at the very least!

MacTheKnife has had a thorough screen cleaning, a new key chair for the S keycap installed so it doesn't wiggle in that irritating way, a thorough polishing of his discrete-construction aluminium enclosure, and a compete reinstallation of OS X Snow Leopard from scratch, just to be nice and clean and fresh and new and lovely :).

Ruben also has some BIG plans! Now that MacTheKnife isn't Ruben's primary production machine now and is more of a portable workstation thingy, he doesn't need a massive internal drive any more and can probably swap it out for an SSD. He's also going to try finding a replacement keyboard cover, and removing the SuperDrive completely. He never uses it, and it just makes the unit heavier. Finally, he'd love if he could replace the hulking ugly closed Telstra NextG Sierra Wireless dongle with an internal ExpressCard/34 to make things neater, but he's not holding his breath.

Finally, Ruben thinks this post has gone on long enough, so he will cease!

It's that Yuletide season thingy, so I'm doing what any self respecting, atheistic, masculine, terribly intelligent 24 year old would do, setting my desktop backgrounds to super cute pictures and all that. 56k warning, run for the 56k hills! Slowly!

iMugi the Mac Pro

K-On! Used it JUST for Mugi's nose and antlers XD. Snow Leopard, 1920x1200

MacTheKnife the MacBook Pro

Suzumiya Haruhi and Co. I like Yuki's hat :). Leopard, 1920x1080

Senjoughara the ThinkPad X40

Toradora. Taiga doesn't look too impressed!. Fedora 14, 1024x768

mikurubeam the Homebrew C2D

Photo from our 2009 winter trip. Germany is so amazing. FreeBSD, 1280x1024

Ami the Libretto

Lucky Star, in honour of their rumoured new season. Warm and happy :). OS/2, 640x480

Ritsu: Know why we're awesome?
Mio: We know Yui and Mugi?
Ritsu: BINGO!

Aside from being entirely pointless, this post serves to test if automagically posting certain entries from WordPress to Tumblr works. We'll see ;).

From the Bureau of Ruben Has Been Blogging Too Much About K-On we have this poll by the Otaku no Podcast folks over who people's favourite characters are.

The results are encouraging, it seems I'm the only one who has voted for Mugi-chan, which means she's mine by default :3! Of course I'm also dismayed at the same time, as this implies she didn't receive any votes before I came along, when the others did! Fight Mugi, fight!

I'll give Brad Rice of Japanator a Steve Jobs answer: yup. Honestly, for its intended purpose/audience its an awesome series. It's like the Seinfeld of anime. And wait for it, the best part is: you don't have to watch it if you don't like it!.

Oh and Yui, it's three, not two ;).

UPDATE: It seems someone on that story already commented about Seinfeld and K-On being about nothing. And here I was thinking I was being so original. Obviously just had a Yui moment! Hah I kid Yui, you're awesome ^_____^;

From Pixiv. She's probably not making teh tarik, but I thought it was fun to post anyway! I could go for some right now, might head off to Mr Prata this evening ^^.

I so thoroughly enjoyed reviewing the previous episode of K-On! without really talking much about at all, I thought I'd repeat this winning recipe. Recipe, dang I could use some of their tea and cake, I wish there had been a music club like theirs when I was still in high school!

While I'm obviously way behind given the second season has started, I've seen enough of the rheims of fanart (doesn't Rheem make water heaters?) that I knew what to expect from this one. You know where I'm going with this, so much so I'm phrasing this sentence as a statement and not a question.

Yes, this episode was all about the girls from the light music club dressing in very formal attire which, I admit, was quite a gamble seeing as the otaku community haven't really been exposed to such an idea before and haven't seemed to be very receptive to it. Apparently there are even cafes in Japan and Singapore where people dress up in such clothing, though obviously nerdy guys are forced to attend them because they wouldn't want to otherwise.

Kyoani and the original manga writers and artists really went out on a limb here, which I assume would be quite painful given I banged one of my shins on a table this morning and I yelped. Isn't that a phone company? This whole paragraph with its intentional misunderstandings was terrible even by my own standards which is scary. My anime review writing standards are the stuff of Halloween legends, at least that's what I've been told, by me.

The trackpad on my laptop just stopped working for some reason, and the lights at the cafe I'm typing this at just flickered as a lightling bolt hit outside. I think the Gods are telling me to stop going so flagrantly off point and get back to reviewing. Either that or my tracking finger has stopped working. That really didn't sound right.

Okay, so what was I talking about? Oh yeah, eyebrows. I'd never really paid any attention to them before until I realised just how few characters in animated programmes had them, or if they did they were just pencil lines. Some people in the real world even get by with just pencil line eyebrows, what a lot of work.

Eh I give up, at some point in a review about an episode I should talk about... the episode. Right? So in this episode Yui's sister graduates and joins the other girls. The Light Music club tried their best to recruit other members by putting on a kick arse concert that's packed to the rafters... sorry, that bad Aussie comedy ruined that expression for me. Packed... yeah, it was packed.

See this is where my cognitave dissonance starts coming in. The obsessive senpai who dresses the girls in ridiculous outfits and the fact the Hirasawa siblings have never seemed to have had an argument I can deal with, but how could you put on a show like that and get nobody? I suppose Japanese society is even more conservative than I thought :P

I... well, that is to say... um, that is... I was thinking... um... Mugi!!! Wait, sorry I got distracted again. What I will say though is even though everyone else no doubt was more interested in seeing Azusa (the only person interested in joining!) I appreciated the fact Mugi was in it more. Everyone thinks Mio is the best, and for a period of time I agreed with them, but we all know Mugi is now, right?

And they wonder why they can't get anyone to join their club when this is what they get as a welcome! Well that first part was okay, but being crushed... though I can imagine some people would go for that... Mio and Azusa are the only ones pulling reasonable expressions! Wait, that's not what I meant. I think I'll sleep now.

John Farnham once sang that Everything Is Out of Season (great piece of Australiana in that video by the way). No mate, just this blog post is!

With the second season of K-On!! starting (hence the double exclamation mark thingy, how linguistically clever!) I figured it was about time to finish watching the first dang season so I could pick it up. And I've been instructed by two girls and a guy, so I have very little choice in the matter. Yes, I talk to girls... shocking, I know!

The Reason sounds like a John Grisham novel

I've been telling people the reason I stalled in watching and blogging about K-On was because I was busy, but the truth is I've been kinda scared to. I know, it sounds ridiculous and silly, a moeblob anime about fun loving people that doesn't take itself seriously, how could I possibly be afraid of that?

I know it sounds childish, but because my mum died around Christmas a few years ago, the feelings around that season are still a little raw. Perhaps its the stereotype of families being together in a happy environment celebrating togetherness and all that, but I really can't deal with it, and the thought of watching an entire anime episode where happy folks celebrate it seemed way too much. It was like a roadblock.

Aww, wow! Hello! ^^;;; I mean, sorry, I um, gulp, *cough* *cough* got distracted for a second. In hindsight I should have done one of two things instead of eschewing the entire series indefinitely:

• skip it if it was going to make me worry and be upset
• watch it anyway because it turned out to be just as adorable, sweet and hilarious as I've come to expect and would make me feel better as it always does

Anyway I finally grew a pair today and watched it. And it was awesome! They had Secret Santas. Their Christmas party was friends and food (and sensei!) at Yui's house, followed by a visit to the shrine to wish for good luck for the new year. I couldn't have thought of a better way to do it ^^. I know so, because save for the shrine part, before my mum got sick and my sister and I were still little, we used to do the exact same thing as a family. Here's hoping one day I'll be able to do it again. Good times.

As far as K-On episodes go, the art in this one was beautiful too, did anyone else notice that? I get the feeling more people were interested in seeing Mio look scared :P.

Uh oh, the anti-moe brigade marches

There's been some serious backlash against moeblob anime being shallow, silly and a detriment to the artform, something which I'll be addressing in a separate post now that I'm "back in the game" as it were. In summary here though: I don't care, and as with any artform, for some people if something is popular it means it can't be good. It's the reason why people dismiss Rubénerd.com, because it's too wildly popular. Yeah, that must be it (>^_^ )>.

My only criticism of this episode was it didn't have enough Muginess. I know the fans all want Mio, but we all know Tsumugi with her eyebrows and keyboard and voice contains far more awesomeness. This is undisputed fact.

I love that this review was a dozen paragraphs long and yet contained no details on the episode whatsoever! I should get a job reviewing products for Gizmodo. Nah, I'd have to steal something first though.

Usually I'm okay with flights, but the combined jetlag from a turbulent redeye and a late morning connection rendered me utterly incapable of doing anything productive. I try to blog at least once a day though, so I decided to comment on this K-On image now circulating.

I ask you, how can you possibly have Shine without Mugi?! She's the best character! Perhaps she's holding the camera. Can you get handheld piano cameras? I suppose that'd be an accordion camcorder, or an accamcorder. Hey, I like that, accamcorder. I should write an accamcorder iPhone app.