Happy April Fools! No cringe-worthy jokes or Windows Vista reviews this year, just one of the greatest rock songs of all time (and I didn’t even sing it myself this time). Enjoy!
Update 2019: The video no longer exists. Though I’m sure one could find it again.
I’ve been an introvert for as long as I can remember. I have no problem hanging out with groups of people, provided I’m given a chance to mentally and physically recharge after.
As most introverts will attest, it’s hard. Even in the early 1990s, western primary schools changed their focus to support extroverted children with group work and desks facing each other. High school and university are about parties. Then your work life is taken up with talking to people, to then come home and do the same.
Our electronic devices bombard us with notifications, text messages, phone calls and email. We’re expected to be available every hour of the day by work, family, and friends. Despite the mental burden of each message, a lack of communication indicates an error state in extroverted societies; a veritable algorithmic exception to the program of life that must be caught and handled instead of embraced.
(Wow, that was a wanky sentence. At least I didn’t say disruptive paradigms).
It’s identical to sleep debt. Build up a healthy and regular amount of alone time/sleep, and you feel refreshed and happy. Skip alone time/sleep a few times, and you feel fatigued, tired, anxious, irritable and sad.
As Jonathan Rauch so famously wrote:
For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts us as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating".
That quote was from a smashing article by Jenn Granneman that suggests introverts even have different chemical reactions in their brains to extroverts. A lack of alone time can be the cause of headaches, trouble sleeping, colds, anxiety, feeling drained, and feeling trapped. I can personally attest to all of these.
Now if you’d excuse me, I’m off to do some Perl programming by myself. No, nothing to do with introversion, there just aren’t many of us any more!
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has proposed lowering federal taxes, and allowing the states to collect their own income tax for the first time since the 1940s. ABC News has the details.
Normally this wouldn’t be a topic for Rubenerd! But there are two quick reasons why I think this is a bad idea.
For a country with the population of Australia, states are useless. If we want to reduce the “blame game” between states, abolish them. I propose everyone repatriating back into New South Wales; though I’d be more than happy to rename this to Australia, and having Victoria’s Daniel Andrews take the reins.
It would disadvantage smaller states over the bigger ones. I studied in SA for a couple of years, and instinctively am skeptical of plans like this.
Multiple layers of tax will make life more complicated for accountants, sellers, buyers and the hapless IT workers who have to maintain databases. Among the hardest work I’ve done in my career is dealing with American state tax laws, we don’t need that here.
Tax is good. It pays for the services we all use and need in civil society. Can we stop demonising it please?
Ditch this idea, along with the GST, and implement a simple progressive tax that doesn’t unfairly discriminate against those least able to pay it. Done and done!
The above image was by the very talented scrii on DeviantArt. Anyone that can make our ugly flag look great and highlight the clearly superior winter Olympics is a winner in my book.
For such a dry post, I was originally going to go with this adorable picture of second-best girl from Kancolle, but in this case I really didn’t have a choice about the epicness of said images. She also wasn’t wearing a one piece, so there’s little point #shot.
Those who’ve read Rubenerd for a long time (my condolences) know about my Kyoani Doctrine. It states that no matter what series Kyoto Animation produces, I have to watch it. Period. It’s been in effect since The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and continued even through Free!, which I would have loved even if it also didn’t frustarte so many man-children whinging that Kyoani had “gone gay”.
Whoa, I just realised that means it’s been in effect for a decade. I watched Haruhi in 2006. That’s a mind fuck.
This year, Kyoto Animation began airing Myriad Colours Phantom World (無彩限のファントム・ワールド). The key visuals and title suggested it’d be a delightfully colourful series, eschewing (gesundheit) realism for bright, cheerful over-saturation one could only get away with in an animation. They’re owning this, and I love it.
Clara and I have watched the first few episodes, and it’s unmistakably Kyoani. There are heavy doses of moe, almost entirely as a result of Reina. The characters’ eyes have gone through another iteration, with the heavy mascara eyelashes first seen with Akiyama Mio being applied to everyone. The school campus (of course) looks believable, not like a Shaft production!
I adore that the lead male isn’t dishwasher dull. This hasn’t been a huge issue for Kyoani since Clannad, but even Chuunibyou didn’t feature the lead gentleman in their opening or closing credits. He’s also really cute.
That’s not to say there weren’t struggles. Pardon the double-negative, but saying “there were struggles” doesn’t convey the right tone.
As a philosophy and science nerd, the metaphysical arguments that underpin the entire series amount to Deepak Chopra levels of superficiality. I appreciate they were going for something deeper in this otherwise interesting world-building exercise, but matter doesn’t appear because we think of it, at least not at this level. The idea that optical illusions can therefore be exploited into generating alternate matter, right up to people, is a stretch.
Branches of philosophy like nihilism maintain we’re living in a world of our own making, but I’ve never found such arguments compelling. It strikes me as simplistic and arrogant; look at me, my imagination is so breathtaking I can dream up the world! Puh-lease.
Ruru is adorable, inexplicable, and pointless. At least so far, maybe she’ll turn dark and change the whole series. Wikipedia lists her as an anime original character, so I don’t hold out too much hope for this.
And then there’s the other kind of fan service. Kyoani have generally been a classier studio than others (no pantsu, for example), but it feels like they’re slowly heading in that direction. Hold on, I need to conjure a type of magic from my “heart”:
I’ve found Mai to be a surprisingly well fleshed out character who’s flawed like the rest of us, informed by her past, and easily has the most personality and range of expressions of any of the cast. So naturally the first we see of her are her breasts, and her physics-defying stunts under a limbo poll at the end of the first episode. FFS.
The good news is subsequent episodes seemed to have toned this aspect of the series down. It makes me think of so many others (Soul Eater, et al) that perhaps I should try again after ditching on the first episode for being superficial and cringe-worthy in this way. Maybe I’d be surprised.
I’m the worst kind of animation studio fan, because I’ll always watch what they make, regardless of merit. But let’s see where this series goes. And in the meantime, no prizes for guessing my favourite character so far.
No wait, darn. This may actually be harder to choose than I thought.
Podcast: Play in new window · Download
26:46 – My last day before turning thirty. Chatting about sides to issues, The Coffee Club in Singapore and Australia, angry zebra crossings, Easter Saturday, coffee shop vibes, Goldilocks weather, standing desks, finding my old swing set, ridding ourselves of junk, retail workers on public holidays, Shambes on turning thirty, birds, and flowers.
Recorded in Sydney, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.
Released March 2016 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.
Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.
I may (or may not) have been preoccupied with this for the last month, and even done a week of podcasts in the lead-up to it. But suddenly shit just got real.
I’ve removed “twenty-something” from about pages, and am prepared to mark the “30-39” dropdown item on registration forms and surveys. If anything else comes up, I figure I can just wing it. Fake it till you make it!
As always, this post is dedicated to my mum for whom I wouldn’t be here without a huge amount of pain on her part three decades ago, and who can’t be with us tomorrow to silly-brate.
When you go to Amazon.com from Australia, you’re asked what locale you want to access. What struck me wasn’t the availablity of ebooks and Kindles in my local juristicion, but the terrible state of the flags featured therein.
Let’s break these down. We’ll start with Australia:
The aspect ratio isn’t 1:2, or twice as long as it is high.
The Union Flag (because Australia!) belies the correct ratio, but doesn’t take up the top quarter canton. It finishes far too high.
The Federation Star isn’t centred in the lower left quarter.
The Southern Cross isn’t even close to being centered in the fly.
And the American flag:
The aspect ratio isn’t 10:19 (easy to remember, right?)
The state stars aren’t equally centered in the canton, which would be possible if the blue field in the canton was correctly sized.
I assume once I’ve pointed these out, Amazon would be all too happy to correct these mistakes.
This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.
This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.
Given I have an imouto iRL, the whole incest angle means I could never watch Oreimo (shudders)! I suppose if the lead guy ends up with Aragaki Ayase it’d be okay, if only because in the PSP game she seems to wear a sukumizu #shot.
What gets me about this game CG is the gap in the fence for her face. I’d rather there not be a fence at all, but I suppose if you’re going to have one…! What’s that called when glasses (etc) are partially hidden to show a character’s eyes?
