i promised you some pics so here´s one of them. i tried to do a 180 panorama, but since i don´t have a support for my camera it´s far from perfect. the image alignement isn´t too good and also there are some mistakes in the photo (but i think they can be corrected with photoshop)
it’s been some time since i did an anime review so here goes: haibane renmei.
first of all this as a great anime. it’s no eva or lain, but for me at least it’s right there in the top with those two. haibane renmei started out as a doujinshi written and illustrated by yoshitoshi abe (character design for lain, texhnolyze) so this alone is reason enough to watch it!
the anime starts with two strange images: a girl falling through the sky with a crow flying beside her trying to stop her fall but to no avail; then we are presented with the image of an old dusty corridor where a girl carrying some boxes accidentally stumbles upon a large cocoon growing out of the ground…
during the 13 episodes you’ll follow a young girl joining the haibane (winged creatures with haloes above their heads) while she retains no memory of her previous life – not even her name – and the joys and hardships she endures while becoming a haibane. in the first three episodes you’ll be introduced to some scenes form the lives of the haibane who live along with regular humans in the town of glie, a town surrounded by a wall that nobody is allowed to cross. after these first few episodes you’ll have so many questions that you’ll just want to continue watching all of the 13 episodes (some of your questions will be answered, some will not). i’ve found a several-page-long essay on haibane renmei discussing the nature of the unknown, the unknowable and faith (but i won’t link it here since it contains spoilers). yes, it’s one of those anime that require you to think.
the animation is exceptional, somewhat different from traditional anime (instead of vivid screaming colors you get a lot of shades and worn-out colors) which makes the setting feel more real. the music is also great and it supplements nicely the majestic landscapes of glie. the characters are well-drawn and very lifelike (much like
bottom line: if you want a very beautiful, emotionally compelling anime that will also make your brain cells jump a little then go watch haibane renmei. if you want a deeply philosophical, psychedelic experience then go watch eva and lain (though these are not recommended for everybody)
it was one week ago that my plane landed in
one striking feature here is the landscape. due to the lack of tall buildings and the relative flatness of the terrain (at least in my side of town) you can always see the horizon far, far away; and somehow the clouds are so low you have the impression of being closer to the sky. it’s really nice here when the sky is clear (and even when it’s cloudy it still seems majestic). and the buildings and trees seem to be scattered in a random fashion, unlike in
the day before yesterday i saw a bird flying upside down. i’ve always believed this to be impossible. there were actually two of them, crows or ravens as much as i can tell. and one was chasing (courting?) the other. when it would get above the other this latter one would always do a corkscrew maneuver, several times in a row. stupid drunken icelandic birds.
the only animals i’ve seen apart from birds are cats. i was told there are quite a few stray cats in
i’ve also started to learn to use latex (got myself some documentation too from the prof). i think it’s just like linux: easy to use, difficult to master. i only wish i had taken advantage of pete and sanyi and learn some tricks from them while i had the chance.
i’ll post some nice pics of reykjavic soon…tomorrow maybe.
i had quite an adventure yesterday. well, how should i put it...i got robbed! I AM ALL RIGHT AND NOTHING HAPPENED TO ME!! I AM STILL HEALTHY physically and mentyally (almost :p) too. it's simple, i was walking down the street with moni (a coleague of mine)in broad daylight and i was wearing my bag on my left shoulder and my laptop case on my right one, and suddenly i heard the engine of a motorcycle and i felt that somebody bumped into me; the first fraction of a second i believed it was an accident, but the guy grabbed my computer case (needless to say that the plastic harness snapped like a twig), and drove off, i tried to follow them (there were two on the bike) for about 20-30 meters, but to no avail. (i swear i've only seen this thing in the movies up till now - and i always took pride in the fact that nobody ever stole anything from me). anyway, besides my laptop i had my passport, my bus ticket back to romania, my health insurance, 10000 huf, and some other papers. i'm most depressed about the laptop, more over the physical thing and a bit less about the data on the hdd (some research data that is backed-up here in the lab, but on several pcs, and all the photos i've taken since i've arrived and all the articles and bibliography i've downloaded) of all these things, the passport is the most problematic (i'll be able to buy a new laptop if i get a ph.d. grant here, my health insurance is also registered at the company, as is my bus ticket). but i have to go through A LOT of paperwork to get a new passport and a new 'carte de sejour' for the remaining two months of my stage. i also might have to travel to strasburg or to paris to the ambassy. anyway i got over the thing (mostly), i just went home, ate some cold food, drank a beer with tequila and went to sleep. (sorry for the sloppy formating, but i'm not using my lappy with my familiar word on it)
i would also like to take this opportunity to thank the secretary here at the institute for everything she has done for me. she did help me a lot in the past, but yesterday she was just brilliant. besides alerting the campus police and the bank she took the time to drive down to the police station with my file in case i needed help. (as i had no id whatsoever and my french is rather bad). today, in the morning, by the time i arrived at the lab, she has already contacted the ambassy and also had a paper signed for me by the head of the institute that he backs me up and aknowledgees me as a student doing research at the institute. so, jessie is the greatest!! not to mention all the moral support she has given me, simply amazing. if all the secretaries would be like her, this world would be a better place!
THANK YOU JESSIE !!
from the bottom of my heart !
*bows deeply*
here’s what i’ve been thinking of while going home after doing the groceries (you’ll soon understand why): if you could choose any spell up to level 5 to cast at will as a free action as a level 20 caster in your everyday life, what spell would that be? i can almost hear you: fireball, lightning, create minor undead (yes seri, we know you’re a necromancer), dispel magic, gaseous form…screw all of them. the only spell i would ever need would be tenser’s floating disk. this one just beats them all. it wins hands down. you know why?
because when you live two kilometers away from the nearest shop, and you have to buy food for 3 days (given that on sunday everything is closed and on monday it’s some national holiday and everything is closed again) and, not owning a car, you have to carry all that stuff back to your place. i once tried to carry 16 liters of orange juice and two full bags plus a small backpack and my lappy. i didn’t manage, so i’ve come up with an alternative. i’ve kidnapped a cart (or whatever they are called) like the one shown in the photo and pushed it till i reached the student dorm, then i abandoned it. (this is no easy job either as the cart doesn’t roll too well on grass and tilted surfaces and you also have to be on a lookout for the cops). also the downside is that once you reach your destination you have to find another similar cart in order to retrieve your coin (if you can’t…well you’ve just lost one euro!). of course buying a car would solve all my problems, but wouldn’t casting tenser’s floating disk be a more elegant solution. and it’s also handy when you have to move your fridge (oh boy) and a car won’t be of much help to you unless you can make it climb the stairs to the 10th floor. (if someone would fix the elevator i would be thankful).
so, bottom line, you can keep all your fancy spells, i’ll just stick to tenser’s floating disk; this is the greatest spell ever devised, not counting evard’s black tentacles (this evard guy must have seen a lot of hentai to come up with this one).
batou’s tip of the day (totally unrelated): the only way to defeat in melee a pkf cyborg with a modular body and with his pain receptors turned off is to deal massive trauma to the brain unit!
tibi’s note: or you could just use your positron rifle, like pete did with the forvalaka (massive overkill !!!!). thanks god (the dm that is) it didn’t misfire!
another anime review. this piece is a strait-forward action movie without any depth to it. if you have another anime you want to watch, go for it and forget about rod, but it’s great fun if you want to relax a bit after watching some heavy stuff – if you don’t have ‘ninja scroll’ or some hentai around (yes szilard, i know you always have home hentai around :p). i watched it after ‘now and then, here and there’ and ‘kakurenbo’ and i found it very pleasant.
it’s basically an old-school spy movie, where a small taskforce of ‘special’ agents takes on some supervillain with outrageous powers and a plan to take over the world, while the entire army proves useless. it slightly reminds me of the avengers movie (the one with sean connery; i haven’t seen the old series); even the boss is an english gentleman who, while saving the world, still has time to enjoy his 5 o’clock tea. the music also bears resemblance to the soundtrack of old spy movies.
my favorite character is miss deep, not because of her large boobs, but because her face, hairstyle and attitude remind me of faye valentine, while her movements and clothing resemble those of makoto kusanagi. at some point she is even sent to a hospital suffering from amnesia (like faye valentine!) and she is shown sitting on a bench trying, but not succeeding, to fold paper animals (like kusanagi in the sac2 flashbacks!). of course she also reminds me of kitty pride, and while she is far from being my favorite x-men, she still has a special place in my heart as the first ever x-men story i’ve read was the one with kitty traveling to japan to find her father – it was featured in some spiderman issues (prof charles taught all the x-men telepathically to speak fluent japanese, why can’t this happen to me? ;p )
i love the part when the american president freaks out, wets himself and has to be restrained by his bodyguards not to launch the nuclear attack.
the anime is bloodless and there is very little violence, so it might be suited for younger viewers. it also has a lot of comic relief moments. if you like your action anime more gory and serious, but still enjoy the supernatural, then you should stick to ‘ninja scroll’ or ‘blood the last vampire’ (jubei: “all right, it hurts! we’re even now. stop! if we keep this up one of us will get killed!” tesai: “yes, one of us…” :)) )
kakurenbo is an animated short from yamatoworks. it won the 2005
it tells the tale of a group of children playing hide and seek in an abandoned town, where allegedly children have previously disappeared while playing at night. the movie features many elements of japanese mythology and folklore both in terms of plot - the story is based on a folktale which warns that children who play outside at night or in the fog will be kidnapped by oni (=demons, in case you didn’t know)- imagery, and music (at some points you can hear daiko drums). i’ll have to improve my knowledge of japanese folklore as there is a lot of symbolism in the movie that i still don’t understand (what do the kitsune masks stand for? what’s with the nocturnal butterfly? what do the names of the oni mean?)
the characters are very well drawn and each with a personality if its own, although it’s rather difficult to fully develop the characters in a 30-minute film. the backgrounds are beautiful and radiate mystery. the oni are simply marvelous and the next time we role-play and i’m the dm, you can expect to go against these things :p.
anyway, i advise you to watch this even if you’re not an anime fan. the director mentioned in a recent interview that kakurenbo was just a project to test the team (it’s the first anime from yamatoworks) and after it’s completion he intends to work on full-length features. i wish him best of luck and i hope they’ll stick to folklore and mythological themes, although i’m convinced that they could do an equally gorgeous phildickian cyberpunk or a steampunk setting. (if you don’t know what ‘phildickian’ means, look it up on wiki!)
btw, oni is both the singular and the plural of the noun, just like anime and ninja, not NINJAS! (baka gaijin, you lose one point of honor, roll 2d6)
i was going to write today about a comic book, but last night i watched "now and then, here and there" (ima soko ni iru boku) and i just had to review it. my bro sent me two dvds full of good stuff (lain included!) so for the next week my blog will probably resemble szilard's, meaning that i'll be having a lot of anime reviews.
i started watching "now and then" with rather great expectations. what shocked me in particular, after only 10 seconds of viewing it, was the animation, as it seemed quite childish. i was told by viki that this anime is about war and pain, and i just doubted that these could by conveyed through such childish animation (i was expecting something like gits). it took only till the second episode (till the scene when sara and shu were suffering in captivity) to realize how very wrong i was. in a nutshell this anime is about the horrors of war and about the evil that men do, and about this very passionate boy, shu (trust me on this, he has ten dots in willpower and must have taken the merit 'unbreakable resolve' at least three times - not that it would stack). while it is no eva or lain, this one is well worth watching! i both liked and hated the ending - i will refrain from commenting it as i don't want to spoil anything for those of you who might want to watch it (szilard, you must see this one).
have to go and work now, can't wait to get home and watch kakurenbo.
everybody knows that green is a shitty color, for several reasons, but since i don’t have neither the time nor the space here to explain en detail, i’ll just list a few of them.
first, green doesn’t have conterspell in it (this alone is reason enough for a color to be unworthy, but green has many other shortcomings). it also lacks swords to plowshares, hypnotic specter and fireball.
second, green’s main asset is large, fat creatures at a low mana-cost. but who would use creatures to beat an opponent when you can do an elegant isochron scepter-metamorphosis lock.
third, green is full of useless creatures with useless abilities (birds of paradise, troll ascetic, wild mongrel and blastoderm are just some of them). not to mention that the iconic green creature is the elf (bleh desu!) – slender, pointy-eared and gay (“not that there would be anything wrong with it” -seinfeld)
fourth, green has a lot of artifact hate in it. but artifacts never ever hurt anybody, so why hate them so much?! most artifacts –sensei’s divining top, skullclamp, umezawa’s jitte- are useless anyway!
fifth, green creatures can’t fly and we all know from porco rosso that “a pig that doesn’t fly is just a pig!”
i was having a walk in a park near the campus last weekend (can you picture me walking in the park...anyway, nothing is open here on sunday). so there i was walking in the park and i saw, in the middle of a small clearing, a large metallic semi-sphere, around 5-8m in diameter. some kids were trying to climb it, while others were kicking it as hard as they could (did i mention i hated kids). so i approached it to see what it was and next to it i spotted a wooden stand with a piece of paper on it. it said 'the sun' and listed some facts about our beloved star. then i got it! it was a model of our solar system!! it didn't take me long to spot mercury (a small sphere on a pole) around 50m away. lovely, as i walked down the path between the trees i would pass each planet one by one. neat idea. and every planet had a small fact sheet next to it with astronomical data (tilt of the axis, rotation and revolution periods, moons, etc.), a short history of the planet's discovery and a few words about the roman/greek gods after whom they were named. lucky for me the relative distances were not the real ones, or i was bound to walk some 20km to get to pluto and even farther to reach the oort cloud (yes, even the oort cloud was there).
in the picture you can see me hugging jupiter (the great red spot is clearly visible) although my favorite has always been sailor mars (omfg, i can't believe i wrote that!) -anyhow, i've grown up now and i only watch deeply philosophical anime, like ninja scroll.
did you know that jupiter has a very large and turbulent magnetosphere. it was discovered that streams of high-energy atomic particles are ejected from the jovian magnetosphere and travel as far as the orbit of the earth. also electric currents were detected flowing between jupiter and some of its moons, particularly io (guess you can call that the largest lightning in the solar system - though they probably aren't as spectacular as portrayed in 'hoshi no koe')
today’s post is dedicated to a very good friend of mine who is celebrating his birthday tomorrow – but i’m posting today because i don’t usually write on saturdays (not cause it’s shabbat, but because i don’t have access to the net). i’ll try to describe this dude to those of you who don’t know him (he’s so going to hate me :p – haha, all his dark secrets will now be revealed *diabolic grin*). well, by trade he is a physicist, he’s doing his first year of master studies in solid state physics and he’s interested in particular in carbon nanotubes (he’s a ‘csoves’ like many others). he was gifted with a healthy dose of sense of humor, always a fun guy to have around. very dependable. lousy guide “come with me, i know a shortcut” (that was one hell of a shortcut, the romans must have had a more pleasant time climbing the serpents path to massada under enemy fire). an average cook. a mac guyver kind of guy – he can’t build an airplane out of paperclips and chocolate wrapper, but he can manage a submarine (although just a tiny one) out of a few plastic bottles. likes eating ice-cream in winter when it’s freezing outside and everybody is giving him weird looks (just like me). has read the guide. likes rpgs (role playing games, not rocket propelled grenades). loves idiotic humor magazines like ‘kreten’ (mee too). listens to rock music, but not the heavy stuff i like, though he enjoys some iron maiden and manowar songs. he plays magic (the card game). he has seen shin seiki evangelion (but not la blue girl). he almost finished dungeon crawl (omfg, he got the orb of zod!!). on the sci-fi/fantasy personality test he turned out to be g’kar (from b5). the had a t-shirt with candle jack on it. the (almost) speaks basic klingon. he likes lake of tears…and there would be a lot more to tell about him. he was my roommate for 3 years (i miss those days). i still have to beat him at quake or ut.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY PETE !!
