On my front porch.
Excuse me, I’m going to go listen to The Smiths
If you haven’t finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet, don’t click here. (Language, etc., advisory.)
(While I’m on the topic of Pötterdämerung, let me point out that there is a Potter-related poll in the sidebar. There is a similar poll, worded differently, on my other weblog.)
Update: J.K. Rowling tells all (spoilers, spoilers, spoilers),
*****
You might have wondered where this site was this morning, and several other mornings recently. I wondered, too. Apparently, whenever there is emergency maintenance to be done at the hosting service, or an outage or a kernel panic, the server where my site is currently stored is always affected. I guess if you go with a cheap hosting plan you get cheap service. Still, none of the other inexpensive web hosts I’ve used were as unreliable, not even my original free GeoCities site years ago.
*****
I knew Steven has a powerful mind, but I never realized just how mighty he is. According the the “recent comments” widget in Avatar’s sidebar, “… Steven Den Beste ‘… has a temper and can toss building-shattering attack spells around.'” For your own safety, do not nitpick.
*****
While browsing around the Anime Tropes Wiki, I came across this:
When A Modest Proposal was written a lot of people thought it was actually talking about eating babies.
Some years back, a friend wanted to write a satirical letter-to-the-editor. I suggested that he read Swift’s dispassionate discussion to see how it’s done. My friend mentioned it to his literature professor. The professor said, “What do you want to read that for? It’s about eating babies!” He was the head of the honors program at Wichita State.
*****
It may be a while until Guchuko plushies are available. Until then, there’s this.
Anime for grown-ups
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.)
Ignorance was bliss
107/365
Grindelia.
Complicated noises
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.
Two or three voices
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.)
Henshin x 6
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.
106/365
Back inside the cathedral, again. It may not be terribly enterprising, but it’s a lot cooler than shooting outdoors.
105/365
Just because a picture is obvious doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking. Six exposures combined in Photomatix (still in demo mode).
La Theatricule Stoique
Yep.
104/365
March?
The weather this year has been crazy, even for Kansas, with winter following spring. This bradford pear is evidently still confused.
103/365
Another trip to SCA fighter practice, this time early enough to catch some action.
Just wondering
Did anyone win the Tour de France this year, or was every single rider disqualified?
Find the regret
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.)
Length, width, height …
102/365
I’m not sure what this is — there was no label in the pot that I could find.
101/365
Wichita rocket. This was originally the ascending portion of a playground slide, but for liability reasons the city fathers dismantled it and closed it up.
Haibane Coil …
… or Denno Renmei?
(It occurs to me that there are significant parallels between the two Yukos, and Rakka and Reki.)