Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
Clever. A whole bunch of anime-related LiveJournal icons set to, in my opinion, a god-awful song. I’ll give it points for the icon bit, though.
Tekkoshocon today. I’ll likely be doing a photo-dump tonight.
I would love to have this entry be a witty little commentary on the state of the Earth right now and how people are basically just looking for excuses to tear the world apart. It’s not. It’s basically me saying that I really really like the song lists from Pop’n Music 11 and 12. That’s all.
Tonight, I’ll be picking up my badge from Tekkoshocon, which means that, as you might have guessed, the entry schedule is going to be teh wacky for the next few days. I expect I’ll have Bailout for you tomorrow, and then incoherent notes for the next three days while I prepare the inevitable 2007 Tekkoshocon Report. I’m going to say right now that while there will at least be four entries between now and Monday, they may not exactly appear on the site until after the fact. I hope you’ll all forgive the minor lapse and fudging of the timestamps. I’m going to be running in con- mode for the next few days, so sleep is a premium.
Which would be more relaxing and actually kind of normal for me if I didn’t have something ridiculously important on Monday.
Fair warning: this is going to get a little sappy and overly sentimental. Anyone with severe allergies to saccharine or Type II Diabetes might want to skip this entry… or, alternately, you can go read the interview I did with Backbone Entertainment, who are making the US-centric remake of Tokimeki Memorial. Actually, if you are interested in that please go read that and come back. Hooray for mixed messages!
About a week ago I came across a relatively new webcomic. “New” of course has to be prefaced by “relatively” because while the strip was started in 2003, it hadn’t come to my attention until Friday or so. Anyway. Titled Count Your Sheep, by Adrian “Adis” Ramos. Nominally, the strip revolves around the young Katie and her imaginary sheep friend Ship; the title comes from the first gag of the strip, and the oft-recurring one where Ship can lull anyone to sleep just by himself. Of course, the only people who can see Ship are Katie, her mother Laurie (who had Ship as an imaginary friend during her own childhood), and Katie’s father Marty (who is deceased and never appears in the strip proper, but is referenced many times).
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s basically Calvin and Hobbes taken a couple steps further. Whereas C&H widened the world a little bit, however, Count Your Sheep focuses almost exclusively on the three primary characters. Other people are never seen and seldom named. The strip plays with time quite a bit; switches from Katie’s childhood to Laurie’s happen frequently and abruptly at times. On occasion, strips extend into short storylines, and there are plenty of recurring gags that come up now and again (such as Katie’s love of soccer vs. Laurie’s football fanaticism). The one-shot strips are especially good.
It’s actually very hard for me to define what makes the strip so very compelling. As I’d said, the whole tone of the comic is very sweet and almost cloying at times. Despite this, however, there’s a sincerity in Ramos’ writng and art that makes even the most obsequieous moral completely transparent. It’s unabashedly heart-tugging, and for my part that makes it worth reading. That’s not to say every strip drips with sugary nausea; the touching moments come more frequently than in other webcomics, but the vast majority of the strips have hilarious and off-kilter punchlines that are so very worth it. It tries to emulate Calvin and Hobbes to a great extent, and more miraculously, it actually succeeds in its efforts.
While I certainly would encourage folks to read over the entire archive from the beginning (shouldn’t take you more than an hour or two if you skip the non-CYS strips early on), a few moments stand out as being worth highlighting, in no particular order: The flame of Olympus, gratitude, the best policy, waterbed liquidation sale, the defense rests, in the land of the blind…, (can’t say without spoiling it), enjoy the silence, they both start with ‘d’ (one of my personal favorites, by the by), the only prescription, condensed, and it’s what’s for breakfast. ….so I went a little overboard. Actuially I left out quite a few that kept me giggling for hours, so consider these just a starting point.
Catch you folks tomorrow.
I really doubt I’ll be able to finish another game today. So, yeah, no three days in a row of “GAME CLEARED!”. Actually, I’m a little nervous about something else that’s going on, something I’ll keep to myself until it becomes clearer.
Oh yeah, check back tomorrow for something kind of nice.
At 6:24p, I defeated the final boss of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales on the DS. This is the seventh game cleared in 2007. The next game that is closest to completion is Trauma Center: Second Opinion (Wii), followed by Super Robot Taisen (GBA) and Final Fantasy III (DS).
Not much to offer right now, folks. I’ve cleaned up the blog categories a little bit; you’ll notice that they’re actually more readable, and that each one should have a detailed description.
One thing that might be of limited interest, is that Seasons 4 and 5 of Babylon 5 were released in the iTunes Store over the weekend. That would, of course, be great if Season 3 was available. It isn’t. For some unknown reason Season 3 is absent from the store at this time. I personally think it’s just a little hiccup in the encoding process, but to be honest I don’t mind waiting a little bit longer. That’s not to say I didn’t get Season 4 already, and am waiting until I have positive cash flow again to get Season 5. But S3 is the last thing standing between me and a complete set of the series.
ANYWAY. Not much else going on at the moment. I hope to finish up Chocobo Tales today, so you should see that; I also have to go do some grocery shopping later. I did have some plans for the afternoon, but actually, those dried up. So, yeah.
Oh, the title? Just a little Blizzard humor, noting the fact that Friday afternoon I sprinted across The Barrens for the first time, chased by large, burly Taurens who wished to do unpleasant things to me. Sadly, since there’s currently no path directly from Ratchet to Astranaar, I have to do it all over again to get back. Fun fun. Later, folks.
So, Easter. It’s been a quiet day for me, mostly; I went out to eat, came back, and finished the game you see below. (Incidentally, that ‘moratorium’ thing ceased fooling me, and as a result I ditched it. It served its purpose, actually– I resisted buying certain games which would have been mere impulse buys, and as a result I managed to keep a better grip on managing my open game list… which is still huge, but now I don’t feel as guilty.)
Right, Easter, and I’ve promised you Bailout for a while now but been unable to deliver. So:
Mom, two things about this video: Happy Birthday and I love you, and keep it in mind when you let them get stale this year. They don’t sit around idle, you know…
Finally, the voicecast thing is in progress. I got a response from LiveJournal’s staff and apparently, I was the only one complaining. Expect it to get fixed within a few weeks, and then I’ll be back on the air, folks.
Enjoy the rest of the night, and I’ll catch you all later.
At 3:37p, I defeated the final boss of Star Fox 64 on the Wii’s Virtual Console. This is the sixth game cleared in 2007. The next game that is closest to completion is Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales (DS), followed by Trauma Center: Second Opinion (Wii) and Super Robot Taisen (GBA).
Still no update on the voicecast situation. Still not much else going on. Wish I had more for you folks, but this is all I can do for right now. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have something a bit more engaging than static text… but don’t count on it.
I am currently in intense, hardcore, and chainsaw-related negotiations with LiveJournal to see if I can’t get the LJ feed to act as a normal podcast-compliant feed again. I am not the only person with this problem, but I am the only person who’s been complaining about it. So hopefully I’ll get an answer soon enough.
In the meantime, folks, have a good Easter weekend. We’ll probably just be doing some basic Bailout for the next couple days.
