Bro borrowed the TMNT movie yesterday from a friend and we had a blast laughing at the plot, the design, the dialogues, and the overall lameness. OK, he didn't find it as lame as I did. I'm just spoiled by anime... Our experience of the TMNT consists of the 2nd NES game and bits and pieces of the cartoon, so the 3D movie was totally new to us.
The movie was all right and entertaining enough... That's all we could say about it. One thing that hit pretty close to home was when Donnie did the IT tech support. I used to ask those questions when I was at Staples. You'd be surprised by some people's replies. Bro just liked the big turtle head Mikey used.
While there's plenty of actions and fights, I couldn't help but compare and comment on how slow and clunky a lot of those looked. Bro thought it's because I've watched too much 2D anime, but he had to agree with me when I cited 3D games.
When Winters floated up and turned to light specks near the end, I commented to bro that it would be better if: Winters ages -> his hair turns white and his skins dry up and turn dark like that of a mummy's-> his skin and flesh flakes off and reveals the human skeleton (proof that he lived and died as a man) -> the skeleton turns to ash and get blown away starting from the left side (from the turtles' POV) -> the armour drops to the ground and breaks into pieces before turning to ash and getting blown away. The turning to light thing seemed too super hero to me and left no after-taste at all.
Never mind me. Like I said, I'm just too spoiled by anime...
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Friday, July 04, 2008
Just finished The Tower of Druaga ~the Aegis of URUK (ドルアーガの塔 ～the Aegis of URUK～) on the YouTube channel, and I must say it's unexpectedly turned out to be one of the better shows out of the spring batch.
My hope wasn't too high as the series appeared to be a parody and comedy at first, and I actually considered dropping it two or so episodes in if it wasn't for the heavy seiyuu cast and Gatou Shouji (he's the reason I had my suspicion of this being just a regular magic & sword dungeon crawler). I'm glad I stayed and look forward to the next season in 2009(!). Too bad Ishida-san's character didn't survive the season. Maybe I'll look for the NES game in the mean time. Apparently the ropers are actually quite tough in the game, despite their gag appearances in the anime. Absolutely love that roper dance, btw. XD
On the same note, I've been keeping up with Blassreiter on the YouTube Blassreiter channel as well. The latest episode (ep.12) was pretty dramatic. Of the original XAT Team 2, I didn't expect those two to be the surviving members... The 3D renderings still irritate me sometimes, but I'm kinda used to them by now. The show is pretty dark and the viewing number is way below that of The Tower of Druaga ~the Aegis of URUK~ on YouTube. To be frank, I might not have tried it if it wasn't for the cast... Most of them are out of the picture now, but there should be new characters showing up soon. We'll see how this turns out.
My hope wasn't too high as the series appeared to be a parody and comedy at first, and I actually considered dropping it two or so episodes in if it wasn't for the heavy seiyuu cast and Gatou Shouji (he's the reason I had my suspicion of this being just a regular magic & sword dungeon crawler). I'm glad I stayed and look forward to the next season in 2009(!). Too bad Ishida-san's character didn't survive the season. Maybe I'll look for the NES game in the mean time. Apparently the ropers are actually quite tough in the game, despite their gag appearances in the anime. Absolutely love that roper dance, btw. XD
On the same note, I've been keeping up with Blassreiter on the YouTube Blassreiter channel as well. The latest episode (ep.12) was pretty dramatic. Of the original XAT Team 2, I didn't expect those two to be the surviving members... The 3D renderings still irritate me sometimes, but I'm kinda used to them by now. The show is pretty dark and the viewing number is way below that of The Tower of Druaga ~the Aegis of URUK~ on YouTube. To be frank, I might not have tried it if it wasn't for the cast... Most of them are out of the picture now, but there should be new characters showing up soon. We'll see how this turns out.
Firefox 3 was released with a bang on June 17th, aka Download Day, and made world record for the most number of download for a software in 24 hours. I joined in the effort with two downloads, one for my PC (Coordinator) and one for the work laptop, but I wasn't able to really play with it until a couple days later, when I got my new glasses.
Glasses? Yeah, the frame of my 5-year-old glasses snapped in the middle the night before the Download Day and, being a heavily myopic person, I was half-blind for the days that followed. I managed to download Firefox 3 without problem and immediately gained a new appreciation for the improved zoom feature. I don't usually go beyond a single zoom level, but in my half-blind state, I had to zoom in at least 4-5 times, and boy was I glad to find things still smooth and readable after several Ctrl+. However, I probably needed 8-9 zooms to really be able to browse the websites somewhat so I pretty much gave up using the computer. The Windows magnifier was too bothersome and only covered a small area to be useful to me, btw.
The fact that I was pretty sick for the week didn't help much, but at least I had something to do away from the computer. Sleep! I slept almost 11 hours a day! The last time I did this was when I was quite sick a couple years ago...
Zooming back (pun intended) to after I receive the new pair of glasses. Finally, I got to play with my pet browser!
First off, all but one of my add-ons were updated. I'm still missing Converter as of now, but this one used to be Mozilla only so I can bear the wait. My brother wasn't so lucky and kept checking for updates everyday, and he finally either installed alpha versions or forced the version to go with Firefox 3. He couldn't live without all his add-ons, it seemed. We both use Personas so no issue with the themes.
The active tab wasn't distinguishable with Personas at first, but that was quickly rectified by the latest Personas version. The Japanese rock festival pack was also included in the update, which for some reason failed to install when I tried manually before. I've been sticking to Groovy Blue on Coordinator, but the one I used on the work laptop was nowhere to be found... It's changed to Foxkeh Kodomo no Hi at the moment.
One of the most discussed feature of Firefox 3 is probably the Awesome Bar, and I agree. It was also the first thing my brother complained to me about (I was half-blind at the time and just told him to figure it out himself). Now that I've used it, I have to say it's a bitter sweet experience thus far. On one hand, it does make going to some places easier which might have otherwise taken me a couple minutes, but it can be annoying if you usually just visit certain sites regularly. It also reveals a lot more about one's surfing history, which explains why my brother was extremely against me using his laptop to go online while waiting for Coordinator to finish some CPU hogging tasks. Totally understandable.
I'd say without any tweaking, the Awesome Bar is a great tool for someone who's jumping to places online and not so useful for someone who's staying within the boundaries of certain domains. On the basis that you're not sharing the computer with someone else, of course. Maybe this is solvable by just simply setting up different profiles? I'll never know...
One beef I have with Firefox 3 is that it doesn't warn me when I close the browser with multiple tabs if I enabled opening previous tabs at the browser start-up. While it's true that the tabs will still be there when I start the browser, it takes time to load all of them. Considering that I typically have 20 or so tabs opened, it can be irritating, especially if there's Nico Nico or YouTube in there. Hopefully it'll be fixed in 3.0.2 (3.0.1 should have frozen already and I don't think the fix is there).
Firefox 3 doesn't change that much for me, but it's the little things that make an impression, such as the better rendering of text and graphic and zoom, the search function within the add-ons manager, and download time shown on the task bar. The resume download thing is a hit and miss for me so far, but my brother has no problem at all. But then again, he doesn't usually download large files like video and game demos so he rarely have to pause it in order to load a streaming video. As for the other thing that people tend to talk about, the key hole interface, it doesn't really affect me. Yeh for Personas and small icons. XD
On a side note, I recently learned that the Taiwanese pronounces YouTube as you-to-be (as in the words "you to be" in English), and the Japanese pronounces it as yoh-tsu-bei. Interesting, eh?
Glasses? Yeah, the frame of my 5-year-old glasses snapped in the middle the night before the Download Day and, being a heavily myopic person, I was half-blind for the days that followed. I managed to download Firefox 3 without problem and immediately gained a new appreciation for the improved zoom feature. I don't usually go beyond a single zoom level, but in my half-blind state, I had to zoom in at least 4-5 times, and boy was I glad to find things still smooth and readable after several Ctrl+. However, I probably needed 8-9 zooms to really be able to browse the websites somewhat so I pretty much gave up using the computer. The Windows magnifier was too bothersome and only covered a small area to be useful to me, btw.
The fact that I was pretty sick for the week didn't help much, but at least I had something to do away from the computer. Sleep! I slept almost 11 hours a day! The last time I did this was when I was quite sick a couple years ago...
Zooming back (pun intended) to after I receive the new pair of glasses. Finally, I got to play with my pet browser!
First off, all but one of my add-ons were updated. I'm still missing Converter as of now, but this one used to be Mozilla only so I can bear the wait. My brother wasn't so lucky and kept checking for updates everyday, and he finally either installed alpha versions or forced the version to go with Firefox 3. He couldn't live without all his add-ons, it seemed. We both use Personas so no issue with the themes.
The active tab wasn't distinguishable with Personas at first, but that was quickly rectified by the latest Personas version. The Japanese rock festival pack was also included in the update, which for some reason failed to install when I tried manually before. I've been sticking to Groovy Blue on Coordinator, but the one I used on the work laptop was nowhere to be found... It's changed to Foxkeh Kodomo no Hi at the moment.
One of the most discussed feature of Firefox 3 is probably the Awesome Bar, and I agree. It was also the first thing my brother complained to me about (I was half-blind at the time and just told him to figure it out himself). Now that I've used it, I have to say it's a bitter sweet experience thus far. On one hand, it does make going to some places easier which might have otherwise taken me a couple minutes, but it can be annoying if you usually just visit certain sites regularly. It also reveals a lot more about one's surfing history, which explains why my brother was extremely against me using his laptop to go online while waiting for Coordinator to finish some CPU hogging tasks. Totally understandable.
I'd say without any tweaking, the Awesome Bar is a great tool for someone who's jumping to places online and not so useful for someone who's staying within the boundaries of certain domains. On the basis that you're not sharing the computer with someone else, of course. Maybe this is solvable by just simply setting up different profiles? I'll never know...
One beef I have with Firefox 3 is that it doesn't warn me when I close the browser with multiple tabs if I enabled opening previous tabs at the browser start-up. While it's true that the tabs will still be there when I start the browser, it takes time to load all of them. Considering that I typically have 20 or so tabs opened, it can be irritating, especially if there's Nico Nico or YouTube in there. Hopefully it'll be fixed in 3.0.2 (3.0.1 should have frozen already and I don't think the fix is there).
Firefox 3 doesn't change that much for me, but it's the little things that make an impression, such as the better rendering of text and graphic and zoom, the search function within the add-ons manager, and download time shown on the task bar. The resume download thing is a hit and miss for me so far, but my brother has no problem at all. But then again, he doesn't usually download large files like video and game demos so he rarely have to pause it in order to load a streaming video. As for the other thing that people tend to talk about, the key hole interface, it doesn't really affect me. Yeh for Personas and small icons. XD
On a side note, I recently learned that the Taiwanese pronounces YouTube as you-to-be (as in the words "you to be" in English), and the Japanese pronounces it as yoh-tsu-bei. Interesting, eh?
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Canada Day! A day for celebration for a wonderful country! (OK, so I missed it by a day...)
For a lot of British Columbians, though, Canada Day this year would probably be remembered as the day our gas price breaks the 150 mark, no thanks to the 2.4 cents gas tax starting July 1st. I paid $55 to top off the tank the day before, which will hopefully last me until the middle of next week. I don't want to think about how much my next gas receipt will show.
Just finished watching 図書館戦争 (Toshokan Sensou) and it's easily a top 10 contender. Originally, I was going to wait until I have all the episodes before watching 'cause I figured I wouldn't have much time for the new series this spring. I took a sneak peek one day and got instantly hooked, and I couldn't wait for the next episode to come out. It's like GunParade March all over again for me, in a good way. The story is good, the anime quality is great, and the characters are outstanding. I've watched every episode at least twice or thrice, in raw, Chinese subtitle, and English subtitle. Extremely recommended!
I was going to order the original novels for Toshokan Sensou, but they're still in hard covers so the girl suggested I wait for the paperbacks. I ordered the first eight books of 彩雲国物語 (Saiunkoku Monogatari) instead. Can't believe I forgot to ask about 十二国記 (Juuni Kokuki)... orz
Quote of the day
Bro *looking at the cat*: Are cats of the tiger family?
Me: .........Tigers are of the cat family. *thinking: You asked for it. I'm so going to post this.*
For a lot of British Columbians, though, Canada Day this year would probably be remembered as the day our gas price breaks the 150 mark, no thanks to the 2.4 cents gas tax starting July 1st. I paid $55 to top off the tank the day before, which will hopefully last me until the middle of next week. I don't want to think about how much my next gas receipt will show.
+ + + + + + +
Just finished watching 図書館戦争 (Toshokan Sensou) and it's easily a top 10 contender. Originally, I was going to wait until I have all the episodes before watching 'cause I figured I wouldn't have much time for the new series this spring. I took a sneak peek one day and got instantly hooked, and I couldn't wait for the next episode to come out. It's like GunParade March all over again for me, in a good way. The story is good, the anime quality is great, and the characters are outstanding. I've watched every episode at least twice or thrice, in raw, Chinese subtitle, and English subtitle. Extremely recommended!
I was going to order the original novels for Toshokan Sensou, but they're still in hard covers so the girl suggested I wait for the paperbacks. I ordered the first eight books of 彩雲国物語 (Saiunkoku Monogatari) instead. Can't believe I forgot to ask about 十二国記 (Juuni Kokuki)... orz
+ + + + + + +
Quote of the day
Bro *looking at the cat*: Are cats of the tiger family?
Me: .........Tigers are of the cat family. *thinking: You asked for it. I'm so going to post this.*
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