I've been studying my arse off today, so I thought I'd take a break and launch a new blog post series in the same spirit of Fun Facts, only this time they're Anime Fun Facts! Imaginative name, right?
To start us off we have this terrible one inspired from a Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu magazine image.
Amamiya Shiina is mortally afraid of luggage.
Thank you.
It's probably a combination of reverse psychology and the need to stick it to the man, but I wonder how many more emails have been needlessly printed since people started following the advice of sites like ThinkBeforePrinting.org and started appending "Please consider the environment before printing this email?".
I'm a greenie, I vote for the Aussie Greens political party, I buy stuff from Oxfam, I don't have or use a car, I take public transport and I vary rarely print anything, but I can't help but think… what if their well intentioned efforts are backfiring?
Perhaps I'm just biased because I really dislike rich messages with HTML and have the feature disabled in Thunderbird, or in the case of my Alpine install such a feature doesn't even exist :).
A person from university asked me today why I like watching anime because he "[didn't] get it". Funny thing is I can't quite explain it myself, but in this next series of posts I'm going to try.
One of the reasons why I find anime, manga and the surrounding culture engrossing and fascinating is the same reason why I loved Magic The Gathering when I was in primary school: I adore the art. There are some extraordinarily creative and artistic people out there who generate some amazing works.
As the design of the site would attest to, my graphics design abilities are woeful, so I'm naturally in awe of such people. Suffice to say I'll be submitting material to SourceForge, Github or Google Code before I ever do to DeviantArt! Unless bad photography I nevertheless have fun with counts :).
While we're talking about this specific aspect of anime and manga, it would be as gross an exaggeration to claim they have a generic style than to say "European" is a language. There have been entire books published on specific artistic styles in anime and manga, and each series, publishing house and studio have their own signature styles. In anime for example we have Navel who are famous for their endearing, cute characters, Kyoto Animation does moe almost too well (which ends up inspiring works like this!), and Shaft is simply congruent to awesomeness.
With each passing year graphics also change, so when I watch all those classic episodes of Sailor Moon I grew up with they look quaint with a nostalgic quality. And you know how I'm a sucker for nostalgia!
And then of course there's all the fan art which the internet has helped make so easy to distribute, and decreasing costs have made the barriers to entry even lower. The amount of detail in some of their works is simply amazing, and makes me even more ashamed of my crappy site logo I've been using since 2005-ish.
Anyway that's one of the reasons, presented in no particular order. If studying doesn't take up too much of my time over the next two weeks, hopefully we'll be able to discuss this topic further good sir/madam.
Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to put up a bunch of Bleach and Haruhi Suzumiya posters. Sure the second season of the latter sucked compared to the first, but the art is still cool :).
Speaking of voting, do you think the new Kenyan Constitution should allow the public to remove ineffective MPs? So far the the Kenyan Standard newspaper poll in the left sidebar has garnered 4497 votes with 94% saying yes to the idea. Seems like a smart, logical thing to enact… so it probably won't be.
Ever since I was a little kid my mum and I had plans to go to Africa together. I'll go one day.
It's that time of year again for people to cast their votes in the New Humanist magazine's Bad Faith award. Last year's winner was Sarah Palin, who'll win this time around?
Ladies and gentleman, the time has come. For months now, nominations have been pouring in for those most deserving of our prestigious Bad Faith Award, presented each year to the person deemed to have made the most outstanding contribution to the cause of unreason.
They have a whole page of deserving candidates, and to be truthful I almost voted for Tony Blair for his recent outburst against secular people, agnostics, atheists, humanists and all us other people who are responsible for all the ills in the world… of course!
Tony Blair: […] What’s probably earned Tony his nomination this year is a speech he made in October, in which he suggested that the major world religions should work together in the face of “an aggressive secular attack from without”.
Similar sentiment against atheists in particular also made Cormac Murphy O'Connor a close call:
Cormac Murphy O’Connor: As he prepared to make way for Vincent Nichols as Archbishop of Westminster, the former head of the Catholic Church in England bid us all farewell by branding atheists as “not fully human”.
I'm not fully human? What am I then sir, a grilled cheese sandwich toaster? ;).
For the time being these two people's words can just be dismissed as childish name-calling that only makes them look silly and is in itself fairly harmless, so instead I placed my vote firmly for Pope Benedict XVI who's attitudes and words continue to kill innocent people.
Pope Benedict XVI: […] Having stated in March that AIDS “is a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, and that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems”, could 2009 finally be his year?
My idol Richard Dawkins called him a boring choice on a RichardDawkins.net talk page on the poll, but I agree with AlanW who posted a comment on the same page.
[The pope is the] obvious choice for many people because of the sheer scale of the horror he causes. If he doesn’t get the award what does that say about our humanitarian concerns versus petty political points?
I'll be calling my grandfather this afternoon after my next exam for a chat to hear who he picked and why. I'll be meeting up with him in hell after we're both gone ^_^. Who do you think should get it?
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
Hot on the heels of my comment on someone's tweet about Facebook (wow, wasn't that an internet sentence) one of my friend CalgaryGuru's tweets got me thinking about FriendFeed.
Just pulled Facebook out of my FriendFeed… Stuff I post on FB doesn’t always make sense as a twitter tweet. Besides, FF is depricated.
(emphasis added)
It seems like only yesterday all the social network big wigs, head honchos and other cranially related titles (cranially related titles?) were using FriendFeed and hailing it as the aggregation answer to all their disparate service problems. Then overnight Facebook bought them out, and now they're about as relevant as Google Knol or the Rubenerd Blog.
I'd anticipated the sale to Facebook would scare some people off, but I had no idea it would be this quick and to the sheer extent it did. As far as I know Leo Laporte's TWiT network uses it for shows, but other than that when I go to FriendFeed it feels like a ghost town. I'm not the only one saying this.
My dad and I still have our FriendFeed accounts, but neither of us can remember when we used them. Do you still use yours?
The funny thing is, I still get emails every now and then telling me someone new is following my FriendFeed profile. Huh.
Kent: Big game fever is reaching a fevered pitch as the fevered rivalry between Springfield U and Springfield A&M spreads like wild fever and… this is writing?
Niece backstage: I’m sorry Uncle Kent, I lost my thesaurus…
Kent: Thesaurus? You’ll lose more than… In preparation for the big game Springfield Stadium has caught additional seating capacity fever and… argh!
I've used a lot of terminal emulators over the years trying to find the best one for my needs. Lately I became lazy and just started using the default Gnome and Xfce terminals but as of today I've started using LilyTerm and am kicking myself that I didn't switch sooner.
LilyTerm is a lightweight, fast terminal emulator with an attractive and very usable GTK user interface that blends in well with Gnome and Xfce, and if you your window manager supports composting LilyTerm supports true transparency. It's a really polished app.
Instead of a menu bar that takes up screen real estate or narly xterm or rxvt .Xdefaults text files, you configure LilyTerm through a simple right click menu that shows you the results of your changes as you make them, and allows you to save them for future sessions.
To show why LilyTerm is Win, I constructed an entirely subjective comparison table showing the other terminal emulators I've used in a productive capacity over the last few years. The difference in performance between xterm and rxvt is noticable on older hardware, but not on my current ThinkPad.
| xterm | rxvt | mrxvt | urxvt | aterm | LilyTerm | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast, light | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Unicode | – | – | future | yes | yes | yes |
| Tabs | – | – | yes | – | materm | yes |
| Transparency | – | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Composting | – | – | – | – | – | yes |
| Pretty | – | – | – | – | yes | yes |
Build it and give it a try :).
@jowyang commenting on #smba:
Many attendees say they don’t trust Facebook. Concerned about how their data is used, permissions, and connecting personal with work
It seems this attitude is spreading. Having spent some time at my uni's computer barns recently, I've overheard conversations even by non-techie people about how Facebook is starting to worry them. Some naturally talk about how their significant others, bosses and the like accidentally saw something they weren't supposed to, but others talked about the issues Owyang is hearing too. This is a fundamental shift in attitudes.
The vast majority of Facebook users probably don't know or care, but all it takes is for enough people to become worried for a shift to start happening. The Facebook guys should be taking this gradual erosion of their reputation very seriously because unlike their constant remodelling that angers people but then gets ignored, this could be enough to scare people away from their service.
The problem is, with MySpace and Friendster back in the day there was a viable alternative in the form of Facebook to move over to when things starting getting icky. What is there for disaffected Facebook users? Twitter is a different type of service, and Orkut doesn't seem to be getting anywhere outside South America.
I suppose we've got a while yet before things really change.
