Trivia that matter
I’ve watched Shingu twice now, and it was as good the second time as the first, even though I knew all the twists. But I’m as puzzled as ever by the great mystery of Shingu: why has the series never received the attention it deserves? There has to be a reason beyond the lame opening. (The following is mildly spoilerish.)
Grindelia.
When I first started fooling around with music on computers, one of my projects was to make my own primitive version of Switched-on Bach. I arranged Bach’s two- and three-part inventions and a few other things for software synths and sequencer. I recently unearthed the CD I recorded. It hasn’t aged well, but some of it doesn’t hurt my ears. I’ve uploaded some selections to my music site for the curious. (Click on the little speaker icons next to the download link to preview the tunes.)
When I made these recordings five years ago, I used as wide a variety of synthesizers as possible. After making the selections, I was surprised to realize that the majority of arrangements I found still listenable used only one synth, FMHeaven, an emulation of the Yamaha DX7.
When I first started fooling around with music on computers, one of my projects was to make my own primitive version of Switched-on Bach. I arranged Bach’s two- and three-part inventions and a few other things for software synths and sequencer. I recently unearthed the CD I recorded five years ago. Some of it didn’t hurt my ears. I’ve uploaded some selections to my music site for the curious. (Click on the little speaker icons next to the download link to preview the tunes.)
I’ve sampled a number of mahou shoujo series during the past year or so. Most are not particularly good, and the transformation sequences often are all that are worth watching. On my video weblog I’ve posted a half-dozen clips of mahou shoujo transformations that caught my eye for some reason or another.
Back inside the cathedral, again. It may not be terribly enterprising, but it’s a lot cooler than shooting outdoors.
Just because a picture is obvious doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking. Six exposures combined in Photomatix (still in demo mode).
Yep.
The weather this year has been crazy, even for Kansas, with winter following spring. This bradford pear is evidently still confused.
Another trip to SCA fighter practice, this time early enough to catch some action.
Did anyone win the Tour de France this year, or was every single rider disqualified?
This would ordinarily go on my other weblog, but the subject matter of “Zashiki Warashi,” the first arc of the current anime Mononoke ((Not to be confused with Mononoke Hime, or Princess Mononoke)), might make it of interest to some of my readers here. Set in Edo-period Japan, the story deals with a desperate, pregnant young woman seeking shelter at a crowded inn, and the the room she is eventually shown to by the inn’s owner. The inn was earlier a brothel, and the room has a grim history. The story involves masters taking advantage of servants, prostitution and abortion, and the spirits of unborn children figure prominently in it. Precisely what does happen in the second half is hard to tell — the storytelling and the art are highly sylized, both draw on Buddhist mythology, and much is shown symbolically rather than literally — but it is a horror story with considerable power nevertheless. (Detailed and spoiler-laden discussions of these two episodes can be found here and here.)
I’m not sure what this is — there was no label in the pot that I could find.
