efaardvark

Just finished Sacred Blacksmith.. https://anilist.co/anime/5940/SeikennoBlacksmith Kind of meh. Not bad but... Now I'm working on Chobits.. https://anilist.co/anime/59/Chobits I'd started it long ago but never finished it. Recently had a chance to borrow a DVD so why not? It's interesting to see it again after all these years.

I loved the original Xenoblade on the Wii. One of these days I'm going to have to get Dolphin running on my linux box just so I can play this game again. Now this tune is going to be stuck in my head again for the whole weekend.

I don't see how Netflix could ever establish a dynamic that would produce good anime at the volume necessary to also be good for a significant amount of profit for a company the size of Netflix. As a publicly-traded, US company they HAVE to put shareholder value (i.e. profits) first. A much smaller, anime-only company might be able to focus on producing good anime - especially if it were non-US or privately held and the owners were actually interested in doing it. But I just can't see a company like Netflix pulling it off.

(Kinda meh on the anime, but it does have some good tracks.)

I was born in Santa Monica, California (so west coast USA). After moving several times - once as far as Huntsville, Alabama - I've now settled down in ... sunny southern California once again. Now I'm in the foothills north of Los Angeles about 30 miles from where I was born. Some nice hiking around here, at least when the hills aren't on fire... (more pics from my fb page)

It is highly variable for me. I'm a binge-watcher so usually wait and watch a whole series at once, or at least over a couple days. (I prefer the 12- or 24-episode format, so usually 1 anime = an afternoon's entertainment.) In between it depends on other priorities. Sometimes I'll go for weeks without watching any anime at all. Sometimes I'll spend a whole weekend doing nothing but watching anime, eating, and sleeping. This is me too. I'm a big reader, play games, and have my own computer programming or electronics projects to distract me as well.

If we're restricting ourselves to the 3 realms in the anime (SAO/Aincrad, ALO/Alfheim, or GGO) then I think I prefer Aincrad. Providing they re-enable the "log out" menu item of course. Gun Gale was too much like PvP/arena combat & I've never really liked that sort of thing. Aincrad was a long-term campaign, which I like. It was also "real" in the sense that people were playing a single-life player (no respawns, reincarnation, or re-rolling), which is kind of appealing as well. The spell system in Alfheim was interesting, as was the flight aspect, but the whole thing was just a fake front. (Which was extremely annoying to my gamer instincts btw.) Maybe if they did it over and made the Oberon quest real I'd be more inclined to like it, but even then I think I'd still like Aincrad better. To me it just felt like Aincrad would have had more depth of play for groups/guilds of players to cooperate. The whole thing of successively unlocking, exploring, and ultimately beating all 100 levels with your guildmates is very appealing to me. Alfheim, OTOH, seemed more "gimmicky", lacked depth, and was more geared towards the PvP side of things, none of which I'm a fan of.

Happy birthday.

Sora no Manimani An older one but kind of silly/fun.

Yes, I code. I know C, a bit of C++, Perl, and enough java, python, and lisp to be dangerous. Back in the dim, dark, early days of my career I also learned 8080 and 6502 assembly for systems-level programming, but I think those brain cells have mostly died or moved on to other things by now. They made me take Fortran in college, but I never really used it outside of class. I also know BASIC from my Apple days. Haven't used that in mumbedecadesmumble either. I know enough HTML to code up a page in a text editor, and enough CGI and SQL to do interesting stuff with a database on the back-end, as long as we're not talking 1000s of transactions per second. PHP I've played with, and if performance were an issue I'd probably use that, but mostly I stick with perl for CGI stuff since I already have a lot of experience with that. I've also dabbled in Lua and C#, though I can't say I know either one very well. Likewise I've looked into Objective-C and Swift, but haven't done anything much beyond "hello world" with either one. Honestly, I've always been the engineer/tech guy who like to mess around under the hood. At this point I'd be ok with tackling pretty much any language. My main go-to languages are C and Perl though. If I'm coding something from scratch I'll usually prototype it in Perl, then move to C if I need performance. I did use 6502 assembly to make a couple game-ish things on an Apple ][ once upon a time. One was a kind of side-scroller with a missile-launching helicopter and not a lot of backstory or plot. Eventually I took out the scrolling, added a "star" to the center, started calling the choppers "spaceships", and turned it into a sort of Spacewar clone or physics simulation. The other was a flight/space simulator of sorts. Using a 3d library and a RA/declination/distance table from a star almanac I input the locations of a couple hundred (real) stars and let you fly around in them using a joystick. I was in jr high/middle school at the time so no commercial intentions in either case, but I had fun. I'm into electronics and currently I use arduinos a lot, so mainly C there. I'm also not above getting in and modifying other people's code for the software I use and most of that's in C as well. (Open-source rules!) My favorite game at the moment is Kerbal Space Program, which uses the unity engine, so that's my (limited) C# experience. At work I use mainly perl, but sometimes C or C++ there too. I also manage a mySQL database for production (and metrics for the boss of course) so I'm somewhat proficient in SQL. I'm in realtime operations though, not software dev, so a lot of times I don't have the luxury of a full design/coding/debug cycle. I need something that works, quickly, and it doesn't have to look nice. As long as the patch holds things together until the real software devs can get a fix in the next software release I'm happy. (Though that said, I'm still maintaining software that I wrote 10 or 15 years ago too. Some of it is even being shown to the public! Fortunately nobody but me sees the code or I'd probably have to consider seppuku.) A lot of my day-to-day work is system monitor and control stuff. Status or metrics from a cron job pushed to a database, with a program for the human controllers pulling the data out and putting it on a GUI, flashing red or yellow as necessary. That kind of thing. Perl (and CPAN modules) is good for all that.. CGI, SQL with the DBI stuff, reports, logging (& parsing logs), GUI stuff with Perl::Tk, XML with one of the XML modules, etc. I also spend a lot of time in c-shell and bash on unix/linux and perl is a good fit for that environment as well.

Not sure but it could be Mekakucity Actors. I haven't watched that anime all the way through but the fragment in the video you posted seems to have a similar style and I think I recognize the characters. Really hard to tell from just that bit though.

I like Crunchy. If you're into dubs you're probably still better going with funimation though. Crunchy has some dubs, but they're still the minority. Or maybe vrv? I don't know anyone who has tried vrv yet, but it apparently gives you access to both crunchy and funi, as well as some others. (I think you still need to be in the US tho.)

Naruto is pretty long. Over 200 episodes if I recall. You might want to take a break every so often and watch another one. There's quite a number of good, 1-season animes that only have about a dozen episodes that you can binge in an afternoon.

I had the same reaction. I enjoyed the anime, but... weird. I must have muttered variations of, "this is nuts" at least a couple times per episode. I loved the, ah, reimagining of the various nationalities, and the reenactment(?) of the various historic battles. Somebody did some homework, then .. went off on a tangent. Genius or madness? Hard to say. I think my favorite bit was the little white flags, and the little "pop" noise they made.

Would things like Gosick or Rozen Maiden be acceptable?

I think the first real Japanese anime I can for-sure remember seeing at least parts of was Tranzor Z, which was the Americanized version of Mazinger Z. Might have been others before that, but I can't remember details or names. (I was maybe 10yo at the time.) I didn't see all of Tranzor though. I only found it because it was on at around the same time as Space Angel, another (non-Japanese) animated show I was interested in at the time. The first anime I remember watching all the way through with any real interest was Star Blazers. (Americanized Uchū Senkan Yamato, or Space Battleship Yamato.)

I think that's more an artifact of the consumer electronics industry than anything else. I actually do like a lot of old/retro stuff.. old furniture, architecture, artwork, etc. Thing is, it has to be still useful somehow, and it helps a lot if the quality is there. I have a garage full of old things - toys, books, tools - that I've kept around because they are still usable. Especially the tools. I bought them because they were well-designed, I kept them clean and well-maintained, and I didn't replace them with new ones because the old ones were still perfectly good and the new ones in stores really didn't improve on the old designs. Electronics though.. things change so quickly in the industry, and because of that electronic gadgets are not designed well. Certainly they're not designed to last long or be easily maintained. Even the better-made stuff just doesn't feel like it was designed to last. People don't buy a cellphone for example with the thought that maybe they'll pass it down to their kids when they grow up. People often do that with other types of objects like tools or furniture. If I buy something with the intent to keep it for a few decades then I tend to care more about it from the outset. Electronics is not (yet?) one of those industries where you can really do that. People know that better kit will be out in 6 months and plan to (re)purchase a new version of whatever widget in a year or three. Can you imagine still using one of the original iPhones that came out in 2007 today? (Even assuming Apple still provided support for it.) Can you imagine buying a Samsung S9+ or an iPhone X today and still using it a decade from now in 2028? Blame it on advancing technology, consumerism, and planned obsolescence.

Apart from boring things like groceries, or gas/petrol for the car, or lunch (sesame chicken salad - yum!) at the cafeteria today... I think the last thing I bought was a new cover for my Mom's iPad. I might have bought my new slippers at the same time. I actually haven't been buying a lot lately. I'm trying to save money atm because I'm planning on doing a major overhaul of my desktop PC later this year. It is probably going to cost a bit so I'd like to get a little ahead on the money side before I dig into the project.

Tastes may change, but anime is such a broad subject that I don't think you're ever too old for it. That would be like saying you're to old for books. I'm 53 and still into it (both anime and books). True, I don't watch/read the kinds of stuff that I did when I was in my 20s or 30s, but I'm still finding interesting new stuff.

Mostly anime is entertainment for me so I don't get too heavily invested in any of it. (Hmm.. should I be saying that on an anime site? Ò,ó ) That said, I did kind of identify with the living-with-crazy-geniuses thread(s) in Pet Girl of Sakurasou. I've had the good fortune of working with groups of crazy-talented people in my own career. It is hard, often daunting work just dealing with the personalities sometimes. It is tough to avoid screwing yourself up mentally by trying to measure up to their examples. It takes a lot of effort just to keep up with a group like that, never mind feel like you're making a useful contribution of your own to the project. A lot of times it looks like things can't possibly work out, and you have to somehow not give up. Sometimes things don't work out, and you have to get yourself through those times. But at the end of the day, when it all comes together in an amazing way it is extremely rewarding too. I think Sakurasou caught some of that pretty well, especially the first season and the Nyanboron thing at the school festival.

Not very likely at all. Somebody might do it for the nostalgia factor, but even in its day 8-track had issues. Vinyl records are still a thing for anyone into analog and/or retro at decent quality. Anyone else has already moved on to digital media. I'd certainly never go back to anything analog at this point. Even if someone just HAD to have tape for some bizarre reason they'd be better going with the later audio cassette format, or maybe something like VHS or Beta.

I'm interested, though I wasn't planning on getting any hardware until next year when the popular 3D engines get multi-threading and threadripper gets some real-world exposure. I might do something experimental on my current system before that however. I've got an rx480 gpu and an 8-core/4gz CPU in there now so that isn't a total pipe dream, but the MB is an older one running ddr3 and I'm not sure if that'll be an issue. It probably wouldn't take much to convince me to advance my test/upgrade schedule if you have something specific in mind though.