The Daily Show...

Now I watch this show every day it's on but for those who don't, I recommend last night's show for the casual fan. The interview John Oliver has with the Kenyan ambassador is HILARIOUS. Historical note: Kenya, like us, use to be a colony of the British Empire.

Filler Arcs...

Most anime are created after a successful run (both long and short) in the manga world, that is, Japanese comics. Most run for a season or two (13-26 episodes), then end, typically well before the manga which is usually on going and can run for years. Some series however buck this trend and run for what seems like forever. A famous example of this was Dragon Ball Z which has premiated the mainstream enough over in the west that at least some people out there know what I'm talking about.

The only problem with this is, manga chapters are released at a rate of 1 chapter a week with breaks usually only for things like Golden Week or the main writer taking a quick vacay. Anime, released at a rate of 1 episode a week, covers more than a single chapter typically. Eventually the anime starts to catch up with the manga, or to put it another way, the show starts running out of story. To combat this, most long running anime, do what is known as a filler arc, or an alternate storyline that exists outside the timeline of the manga but doesn't adversely affect it. The thing is, filler arcs universally suck.

They have to keep making episodes of anime but they can't have any real plot because they can't do something that will affect the actual story taking place in the manga, which is considered the official universe if you will. Well two of my long running animes have recently started their filler arcs and after an episode or two, the trend continues. They officially suck. Oh well. Luckily I have a large backlog of movies to go through. Next up: Slumdog Millionaire. Let's hope it's not all hype.

Quote of the Day...

People are just morons in the movie, and they don't die, which isn't fair.

- Win, talking about the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Best Blogs of 2008

The 2008 Weblog Award Winners. Nice to see a few of the blogs I frequent, some on a daily basis, made the cut.

Edit: If the best travel blog doesn't make you want to quit your job, travel the world and indulge in the cuisine and culture of other countries, something is wrong with you.

Bringing Order to Chaos...

I've never been the biggest fan of iTunes. It just doesn't seem to work very smoothly on PCs. I hear that this isn't the case on Macs but I remain skeptical. Maybe it's just a bad port, who knows. But the hard truth is my mp3 collection has reached a point of critical mass that makes it almost unmanageable. I've tried sorting them by genre, alphabetically and more recently just by year, but using directories and XP's file system has never been the most efficient solution. So yesterday Tom was showing me some of iTunes filter options and afterwards, I decided to undertake a project to import a large portion of my mp3 library into iTunes to see if it would actually make things better.


But the task is both tedious and time-consuming. It is a three step process of renaming the files, retagging them, then importing them into iTunes hoping that iTunes' database can find the album in order to properly display the artwork in coverflow. There are quite a few areas that can cause snags along the way. I went ahead and processed 8 gigs of my more recent mp3s and already I can see the advantage of using iTunes with its Genius feature in order to automatically generate random playlists. Plus by using my iPhone's Remote app, I would be able to control my entire mp3 library from my phone.

So far so good, but I just moved over the majority of my Alternative/Rock mp3s to my new dedicated mp3 hard drive, nearly 40 gigs worth of music. This is by far the largest genre of music I have, and by that token the biggest hurdle I have to overcome in order to finish this project. I've already decided to give up on trying to organize my gigs of classical music or the gigs of singles I have from the late 90s and early 2000s. The design of iTunes facilitates the albumization (I just made that word up) of music, which is odd considering buying songs individually on iTunes was one of its early strengths. Hopefully when I'm done, listening to music will be an even more enjoyable experience.

The End of Print Media?

At least one newspaper of note, isn't going down without a fight.

... something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution. Each day, peculiar wings and gills poke up on the Times’ website—video, audio, “drillable” graphics. Beneath Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed column, there’s a link to his blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube videos. Coverage of Gaza features a time line linking to earlier reporting, video coverage, and an encyclopedic entry on Hamas. Throughout the election, glittering interactive maps let readers plumb voting results. There were 360-degree panoramas of the Democratic convention; audio “back story” with reporters like Adam Nagourney; searchable video of the debates. It was a radical reinvention of the Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.

Audience Atomization Overcome...

Recently I've been watching a lot of future technology shows on the Science Channel centered around either eco-technology or human enhancement technology. It's scary and exciting to think how our world and even ourselves will change in the next ten or twenty years. As someone who was around for the birth of things like the answering machine, the ATM, the web, the cellphone, and the laptop, things that are so prevalent in our lives today they have become indispensable and and at the same time invisible, I know that technology is expanding at an exponential rate. Its ability to affect our lives and our society is almost immeasurable. Given that, it's easy to forget that it is affecting other things besides adding more convenience to our lives.

Technology has been for quite some time, also changing how we connect and relate to each other. Most people are familiar with social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, and even Blogger, the site driving this website. But it also shaking the foundation of other more unconscious relationships such as the one between us (the audience) and mass media. Jay Rosen over at PressThink explains it in detail. An interesting read for those who are interested in such things (like me).

Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.

Silver Screen...

So Win told me about a new movie that just came out called Defiance, about a band of Jews who resisted wholesale extermination by the Germans and fled into the woods of Poland. The trailer is below:



It's a story I never heard of before but the trailer grabbed my attention. I checked online, found the release date had already passed, and searched for the nearest theater. Sadly, it's only showing in LA. Damn I hate limited releases. Fortunately a DVD screener had already been released online. I watch the majority of my movies this way but for movies with promise, I prefer to go into the theater. The last movie I saw in the theater was the Dark Knight. Definitely needs to be viewed on the big screen.

Anyway, a few hours later I have to say, not a bad movie. Probably the best World War II movie I've seen in a while and I believe currently the 3rd one in theaters, albeit it is only marginally so. Definitely worth the time to watch it though like all trailers, it misleads you in the overall plot quite a bit. But maybe that's a good thing. There's little worse than giving away the entire story in a 30 second ad.

Overall, I give Defiance a 7 out of 10. But then again I'm partial to WWII, one of favorite periods of history. Check it out if you get the chance.

Perspective...

A friend sent me this link of 48 amazing examples of photo manipulation. Check it out, it'll be worth the effort. Here's a sample.

Silver Screen...

My brother just sent me this trailer. It's a new movie by Tim Burton but I've never heard of it. The trailer looks amazing and there are definitely some heavy weights in the cast. Check it out below.

Not Your Childhood Cartoons...

Just finished watching Ergo Proxy and it was definitely one of the best thinking animes I've ever seen. Any anime that requires lengthy paragraphs at the end episode explaining all the historical, philosophical, and religious references isn't your standard fare anime which got me thinking about something else.

Last week, at a coworker's Christmas party, my friend asked me why I still watch anime. His question is one I've actually heard quite a few times over the years, and demonstrates a common misunderstanding of exactly what anime is.

When non-anime people think of the medium, I believe the common perception is that of cartoons, and all the childish connotations that go along with them. But they would be drastically wrong, not that some don't fall into that category.

The truth is that anime is as diverse as any modern mass media format. It would be like seeing a reality TV show on FOX and thinking that it is representative of all American programming. Like actual TV shows, some anime of course caters to a younger audience, while others are geared for a much more mature and higher educated group often delving into areas left unexplored by American television such as the metaphysical (Ghost in the Shell), political intrigue (Patlabor) and the psychological (Ergo Proxy). To tackle these ideas in the States, you usually have to shell out $10 to see a multimillion dollar movie.

Honestly, in a time that regular TV is dumbing down their plots in order to cope with the ever shorter attention spans of Americans, most of the anime I watch is smarter and more complex than the majority of prime time programming. With that said, some of anime is decidedly childish but then again, so are many of the modern plots on television today. And it would suck to be serious all the time anyway.