As some of you know, my mobile home was destroyed by an anarchist suicide tree back in November. Because I had moved nearly everything into the spare room because of some floor repairs, and because the spare room was destroyed quite efficiently. I lost most of my collection, including nearly all the DVDs and tapes I had. After I had paid for my tuition and books and was putting money aside I pondered replacing some of the Anime DVDs.
The purchase list was short. Rewatchability is a rare commodity.

Van Dread....yeah I picked up the thinpack. This show really ought to have been mediocre at best but it is one of the most satisfying shows of the last 10 years. I will certainly rewatch this.

Welcome to the NHK....the loss of the entire set gave me a chance to pick up the last disc (which was not available singly after Funnimation picked the show up midway through.

Lucky Star is apparently no longer in production...though I can probably get it on line.

Days of Midori which I mentioned briefly here is a spectacualrly good show with one of the worst premises of all time.

Full Metal Alchemist didn't get replaced as much as completed. I'd never picked up the third and final pack for reasons unrelated to the shows quality. Now I've watched the whole thing and it would have surely been on the list. I'll have a separate post on that later.

There was little else that I considered shelling out for, though I may pick up Black Lagoon at some point.

Zone of the Enders was on loan at the time...which is fortuitous as it is long out of print.

UPDATE: Inexplicably deleted the mention of Gurren Lagaan.

Also, Crest/Banner of The Stars was not destroyed.

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I....I'll just leave this here...

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1 I still can't decide what is more depressing outcome, that Cameron becomes our next PM, or that he won't be able to beat the current culsterf*ck. It sure sucks to follow UK politics at the moment

Posted by: Andy Janes at Tue Mar 9 18:20:03 2010 (Rf4g3)

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Via Ace comes this elegant response to question #9 on the census form.

[W]e should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — "Some other race" — and writing in "American." It's a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes.

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...another word about US voters feeling intimidated because they have to show ID or register by a deadline or some such nonsense.

The Iraqis just showed us how it is done.

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Whenever I ask "Oh good Lord...What ELSE can go wrong?", The Almighty answers my prayer with impressive alacrity.

Regrettably, I find this does not fill me with joy or reassurance.

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I've been down with Pneumonia last week which has put me waaay behind on schoolwork and I've been scrambling to catchup.


Here are a few things that caught my eye the last few days.

Vikings Versus Pirates !!
The Danes have boarded a buccaneered ship freed it from Somali pirates. The Russians assisted with mop up as well.
Interestingly, the Danish warship involved was HDNS Absalon a vessel which has been of considerable interest to many naval enthusiasts.  More on this incident here, here, here, and here.

The Obama administration is actually making some good moves with regard to nuclear power. However, Brian Wang reports that the US suffers from serious deficiencies in industrial capacity in that area.

Rand Simberg sees a lot to like in Obamas space policy. While I disagree with Simberg on his notion that there is no utility a heavy lift capability, I heartily agree that the emphasis on using commercial vehicles (like Falcon and Dragon), and focusing manned operations on techniques for orbital refueling and construction as well as asteroid missions is likely to be very beneficial in the long run. There is irony in this. The administration obviously believes in a top down big government model as the proper way to do most things. This space policy is so out of step with everything else they have proposed that it may actually be a gesture of contempt on their part. If alt-space is indeed contempt....then yay for contempt! More here.

Dr Zero has a long piece on Socialism and how to deal with it before we go the way of Europe and ultimately Argentina.

Good grief....even Keynes is spinning in his grave.

 I disagree with the premise behind this kerfuffle. PC is a blight upon the land. There are quite few other reasons that the WH chief of staff should resign. He's a thug. More importantly, he is an incompetent thug. Much of the visible failures of this administration have been the result of poor staff work. That would be the chief of staffs job.

On the other hand I liked what I heard of the speech.

Not that it matters 'cause.....Oh noes...GAME OVER MAAAN!1! ... GAME OOOVER!
    ^{UPDATE: HI Mom!}

A true jerk, brought to justice.


On the lighter side...

Colleen Doran has a new portfolio website up and her blog continues to be updated as well.

A lot of what people think they know about the internet is actually quite wrong. This enlightening video explains the structure of the system and points out the cause of potential capacity problems.

 
HT Meryl Yourish

In the current news environment where hype is never ending white noise, it is important for broadcasters to find ways of getting peoples attention when necessary....

HT Hot Air

DVDs I've recently finished: Full Metal Alchemist and Spice and Wolf. Reviews as soon as I get caught up.

Started His and Her Circumstances, Ikkitousen....progress...slow...brain hurts.

In the DVD que, Fate Stay Night, This Lovely Yet Beautiful World, Evangelion special edition.

^{Art by Juu Ayakura}

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Via Boing Boing comes this peek at the Olympic mascots...

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1 That picture certainly makes me want to run away.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sun Feb 7 12:14:55 2010 (+rSRq)

2

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sun Feb 7 17:29:23 2010 (+rSRq)

3

Crap. Try again:

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sun Feb 7 17:29:46 2010 (+rSRq)

4 I love this draws!

Posted by: pagares at Tue Feb 16 17:09:53 2010 (l3YAK)

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... consists mainly of a run-on sentence that expresses this bloggers approval of both the thesis and presentation of this incendiary blog post while crediting the blogger who directed him to the aforementioned online insight with a hyperlink contained within the word "via".  

^{This caption makes no mention of the Demotivator Generator but mentions the origin of the above picture which in this case is K-On!}

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 Al Gore must be in Virginia.

What would be a trivial a moderate example of snow in many northern cities has a disproportionate effect on areas that go years with no more than a dusting. Case in point: the cities of the Tidewater area of Virginia where it has been snowing for 18 hours.

Roadway pandemonium.

I'm currently semi-stranded at Worlds Best Comics looking at weather radar website that tells me  the snow has passed on....and out he window where my own  eyes are telling me that it is still coming down fairly hard. We've got perhaps 6-8 inches here in Newport News but there is a considerable amount of ice on the roads (over an inch) and the snow has alternated with sleet. On the Southside ( the other side of the 'Roads" ) where accumulations of more than an inch are unheard of, they got hit quite a bit harder. I'm watching cars drive sideways down Warwick Blvd. Given that the wind is howling, the bridge-tunnel is iced over and things are notably worse in Portsmouth, I'm just not gonna deal with that.

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Random, real time stream of consciousness thoughts on the State of the Union speech. Now mercifully hidden below the fold.


Other reactions here, here, here and Wonderduck has one of the healthiest and well grounded SOTUS night posts right here.



more...

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Via Instapundit comes this NYT piece that suggests that the recent earthquakes in Haiti are the first in a protracted cycle similar to one that occurred in colonial times. According to the articles map, Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola are right on the fault in question and PuertoRico is is in danger as well. The USGS page on Puerto Ricos earthquakes is here.  Note that tsunamis have historically figured in the area as well. 

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The Blue Bomber suffered a steering pump failure, a brake failure and an electrical failure all at the same time. It turns out that the steering pump was squirting power steering fluid into the electrical system....the brakes were unrelated. 

I can do homework...and..umm...stuff.

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As if there is not enough misery in Haiti....

It looks really bad ( BBC video here). It may be the largest earthquake on Hispaniola in recorded history. fRom the video, the presidential palace appears to be demolished. Most buildings in Haiti are not nearly so well built. Thousands are believed dead but there is very little info out of the country right now. Most of the pics seem to be via Twitter.

Los Angeles and South Florida rescue teams are already mobilizing.

The Anchoress has a round-up on charities that can help and recommends Food for the Poor, which not only focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean but has a better than 95% efficiency rating with their funds. I've heard good things about them as well.

More here, here, here, here and here.

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Saturday, I read Goldbergs piece on the new self deprecating Dominoes campaign. Being bored, (and REALLY tired of blackeyed peas) I decided to have one delivered to the comic shop and drove out there to split it with 'The Bob'. Going online to find the number of the Dominoes across the street from the shop I encountered their online ordering system and gave it a whirl.

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New season.....

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In the comments to an earlier post Steven Den Beste asks how the Christmas rush went at UPS last month.

Specific numbers are, of course, proprietary. However, volume was down a bit overall. It seemed that we had a little more volume going to the stores than last year. It also seemed that residential deliveries were down a bit from last year. Both of these observations are subjective and as I was completely uninvolved in any deliveries this year (for the first time in 16 years) I was in a poor position to gauge, but that was certainly the way things seemed to be rolling. I suppose this makes sense last year the retailers were a bit panicked by the crash and consumers hadn't groked the gravity of the situation, whereas this year consumers are looking at the job market with fear and retailers desperately need to clear inventory for tax purposes.

Even to the extent these observations are accurate they may not be typical. Southeastern Virginia got quite a kick in the teeth with the closing down of the meat packing plants, paper mill and sawmill in Isle of Wight County as well as several businesses (trucking companies for instance) dependent on their operations. This happened right before Thanksgiving.

It's also hard to get a good feel for the overall picture because volume was deperessed for several days due to weather delays.

Interestingly, despite the lower overall volume, we had what was, I believe, our heaviest day ever in our building. This was due to the backlog of stuff that had been delayed by the big snowstorm arriving all at once, on what would have already been the heaviest day of the year.

Cardboard tsunami.

All in all not terribly encouraging, but not quite the disaster some had feared. As an aside, the last two days have been exceedingly hectic, due again to dealing with the backlog of weather delays

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There are a  couple of issues to deal with yet but the blog seems to be running almost normally. The rest is just tweaking.

Now I'm off to work.

Thanks Pixy!

UPDATE: All seems fixed and back to normal now. To drive that fact home, the third comment after we got up and running was shoe sales spam.
YAY NORMALCY!

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^{Artist Unknown}

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I am working on the problem.
However, I think I just umm.....broke it more worser.
I'm beginning to strongly suspect  that the problem  involves a PEBKAC issue

UPDATE: Pixy's seems confident that the issues can be fixed, but I'm still missing the half the blog that is "below the fold" and none of the hyperlinks to the site work. I can post, but with limited functionality, and comments still don't work. I'll do another status post Saturday night (EST). Either everything will be resolved, things will be very close to being fixed or I'll have instructions for people to update their bookmarks.

In the meantime, Happy New Year! 

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The last of the presents are now on the brown trucks.

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The Anime/Manga franchise and merchandising juggernaut that is Sgt. Frog was commented upon by virtually everyone in 2005 when the anime started up. The show is still going strong in Japan and has been exceedingly successful. The oddball comedy has been surprisingly successful at appealing to audiences of all ages and has a lot of similarities to the long running Urusei Yatsura series from the 80s (which, indeed, was the stated intent of the Mangaka). The main difference is that the characters tend to be more likeable.

The show concerns several frog like aliens who are trapped on earth after their ill-conceived invasion attempt went awry. Their leader now lives in secret as the sort of housekeeper for a comic book creator and her children.  Other members of his squad are scattered around the neighborhood and similarly ensconced with various  humans...all of whom possess significant normalcy deficits. Every week he contacts his teammates and they join forces to conquer the planet Pekaponia (Earth)... hilarity ensues. As an aside, the show teaches younger viewers important life lessons as well...such as the fact that women are scary and dangerous and best avoided....even if they are wearing sweatervests.

Given its spectacular success and very broad demographic appeal in Japan it was natural that somebody would try to bring this show to the U.S.A. The theoretical potential of the show to be a genre crossing hit was immensely appealing at first blush. However, there were major hurdles, most daunting being the fact that the pop culture references that litter the show are overwhelmingly Japanese specific.

As the target audience would be Americans the references would make as much sense as an episode of Robot Chicken would to a North Korean. This would seem to be a show stopper, but one must remember that US television has long made good ratings on incomprehensible stupidity so this was not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle. Additionally there was the fact that the company that actually bought this marketing conundrum was ADVision...and the people at ADV were geeks who dearly loved the show and really wanted it to succeed.

ADV seemes to have really tried to get the show released on television, which despite its niche appeal in the US was not an insane notion but merely a far fetched one at the time these decisions were being made. Cartoon Network was showing a lot of Anime then and a number of the in-jokes (perhaps as much as a quarter ) referred to those shows. ADV had assembled over the years a very fine cadre of voice actors and they were certainly capable of doing comedy well. The problem remained the very culturally specific nature of many of the verbal gags,  The episodes required rather more extensive rewrites than usual though the basic plots and overall story arcs could be brought over with little trouble.

There was an even bigger problem that ADV did not foresee....ADV is no more.The show was one of those bought by Funimation and it is now being aggressively marketed by them....with a series of adds that don't quite do the show justice.

The show is one I found fairly enjoyable before this release and  it should be noted that the subtitle track is a pretty straight translation of the Japanese, which is what most readers here will watch anyway.

The dub fascinated me as I was very curious as to how they were going to play it given what to the target audience is the alien nature of much of the shows humor.

I don't know how many episodes ADV dubbed before they lost (or found out they didn't have) the rights in the Sojitz fiasco but the first 8 episodes are using most of the same voice actors that appeared in a preview ADV put on you tube some years ago. I am pretty sure that what we are seeing is very close to ADV's plan for the show, if so it is a worthy legacy because the dub is quite good. Funimation, which has a good reputation in its own right seems to have kept the bulk of the voice talent and there has been no jarring change in quality as of yet.

The dialog on the English track is fast paced,almost like a '40s screwball comedy. The acting is good and although the dialog has indeed been tweaked, the the Woolsyism's generally work quite well.  All in all I was very impressed. In my initial viewing I watched all but the first two dubbed and felt it did not suffer at all , in particular I...oh wait...you aren't reading this....

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^{Lucky Star girls are from...well... Lucky Star...(duh!)}

Banal Brickmuppet banality is below the fold. The above picture is unrelated.

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Behold....

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