Yet another blog entry brought to you by my procrastination in writing my thesis. Thirty new shows, none of which I’ll get a chance to watch till late May or June. Which in one way is a good thing, I wouldnt watch them until they were finished anyway so having a good excuse to wait suits me fine. Some stuff looks decent here and one or two I really want to see. But there’s just something about this season that seems dull. In an odd change I’m looking forward to a ton of the OVA’s and most of the films (yay BERSERK!!). Continue reading…
Category: review/consume
My opinion on whatever products of the mass market which have had the joyous task of helping me waste my time. Anime, TV, Films, Games, Books, Music, Microwave Meals, Pot Noodles – You get the idea.
Thoughts on Windows and Desktop customisation
Well I finally broke and re-installed Windows (you would think it could handle having all the hardware in the machine bar the hard drives switched but apparently not). As I was making (something) of a fresh start I thought it might be time to update my OS and desktop customisation. For a year or two now I’ve been using a combination of RocketDock (with some plugins), RainMeter and StartKiller for desktop customisation. I’ve also added a few custom registry entries to expand the power of the almighty context menu. The results of all this can be seen in the screen shots below: Continue reading…
Best of 2011 – Manga
It’s currently September 29th, if past years are anything to go by that means that I should get this posted sometime mid-2012, possibly in June as an early birthday present to myself. Then again starting three months early may actually mean that this is one of my rare yearly round-ups that make it out at an appropriate time. Despite the tragic intervention of an MSc into my life of lazy media consumption I have already read what could fairly be described as too much this year. So much in fact that I’m rather apprehensive of adding up exactly how much. Went and added them up, 16543 chapters read since January. Not counting that a large number are monthly releases (i.e. generally twice as long) lets assume a weekly chapter size of 20 pages, that’s 330,860 pages. Around 135 individual titles. Seems a bit excessive if I do say so myself. On the other hand though its been an awesome year, lots of long-running series finally finished scanlation and I got around to reading a large number of the “classics” that I had avoided or missed (including the “Big Three” – Bleach, Naruto and One Piece). This means that paring this list down to ten was an even bigger pain in the arse than it usually is. Continue reading…
Best of 2011 – Games
I summed up video gaming in 2010 in one word, disappointment. For 2011 I’ll bump it up to two words, excellent and disappointing. There were a large number of releases I was looking forward to and thankfully the majority of them delivered, though not always as well as I was hoping. As always this list is a composite of things I’ve played in the year in question, not just what was released in the year, it probably doesn’t matter in the long run. As well as the Top 10 list itself I’ve also included an appendix of sorts where I give a line or two (and the first implementation of my new rating system, ooh the excitement) to all the game’s I’ve completed this year (and perhaps the ones I’ve played enough off to be comfortable making a judgement on). Also returning to education, in tandem with commuting, has eaten up a lot of prime game playing time, as such I’m a bit behind with the games I’ve played. I may get some of the backlog finished by the end of the month (currently December 6th). Continue reading…
(Planned) October Viewing – Anime edition
Even when I had nothing to do apart from some part time hours in Vodafone I never managed to get through the (admittedly unrealistic) thirty potential shows listed in these things. Now that I’m in college every day and in work all weekend I get the feeling I’ll be lucky to get one show watched a week, never mind the one a day thirty would demand. Of course I list thirty more because I find it a good line between “Watch only this” and “Watch whatever you want”, as such I’m going to stick with that number. I suppose I should write a bit about what I’ve watched in between the last one of these and the beginning of October. But I think that can wait for another time, something else that can wait for another time is switching out the AnimeNewsNetwork links used below for AniDB.net links. Continue reading…
Best of 2010 – Anime
Ok, so I totally fucking forgot about this, I’m posting it nearly a year late and even worse, I didnt even finish writing up my thoughts on each of the entrants. In the immortal words of Johnny Blaze, “What it is” Its odd. I feel like I’ve watched a lot more anime this year than I apparently have. I blame the summer months where a combination of depression and socialising savagely consumed time I could have spent keeping abreast of Japan’s animate cultural artifacts. I like to have a large selection to choose from for these kinds of article because it makes the obvious choices stand out more. When you have a smaller selection, the majority of which is fairly uniform in quality, it makes selection a pain in the arse. Read More
Very brief thoughts on the upcoming Fall anime season
Every day that goes by I regret more and more the unfortunate circumstances that have seen my return home. Reading about how awesome other peoples lives are going is not really helping. Really I should simply avoid social networking sites until my humour improves, as it would prevent me thinking terrible things that make me feel like a cunt. You’d think the free time would make up for it, but in reality I have rarely been so entirely unproductive. But while doing some file housekeeping (exciting!) I did a customary search to see what anime series I was waiting to watch have finished (no way I’m watching week to week like a peasant!). While doing so I came across a preview of the Fall season in the ever useful chart form. My thoughts on whats coming up can be seen below. Though likely it’ll be late Spring or early Summer before I get to watch any of these. Continue reading…
Let’s Read – 2000 AD – Prog 0002
Well moving house is continuing to eat my time in a totally unexpected way. I suppose deciding to re-decorate hasnt really helped speed things up. Especially as my tiles are sassing we with their supposed adhesive qualities. I read Prog’s 2-10 some time ago, which means I had to refresh myself a little when it came to writing this. Something I’ve run into is that its hard to read an entire issue, not because I dislike any particular story. But because its hard not to stick with the one strip and read ahead as opposed to reading a few pages and moving on to another story. To be honest, not sticking with the one strip until the end, especially as they’re all “complete”, is basically in direct opposition to how I’ve “trained” myself to consume all forms of media over the last few years. First world problems, eh? The other thing I didn’t realise about “Let’s Read” is that it really slows things down when you just want to read the thing in question. So I think I might just “guarantee” a Let’s Read of 10 Progs a week but read on at my own pace in the inbetween. Continue reading…
Schedules of the idle poor
I think that everyone who plays even a moderate amount of computer games has a backlog of games that they have yet to play or complete. Some of these will never be completed, they were rented for an evening or borrowed from a friend (or GOD FORBID, pirated) – they didn’t grab you and youre not going back. Other’s though are quality games that came out during a particular glut of such and didn’t get played or completed. Or perhaps you’re a fan of particular genre’s that tend to have massive playtimes (Strategy titles, RPG’s, etc.) and thus exacerbate the problem of an ever growing backlog. If you are reading this wondering what the fuck I’m talking about then you should a) rejoice in not being shouldered with a similar Sisyphean load and b) tip on (or read on, “whatevs” as the cool kids say). Continue reading…
Let’s Read – 2000 AD – Prog 0001
So here we go, thirty four years of comics, nearly two thousand issues. Since I first come across it 2000 AD has been responsible for introducing me to some of my favourite fictional characters of all time. Of course as a kid my disposable income was rather constrained, and by constrained I mean largely non-existent. So I only got to read 2000 AD sporadically, the highlights being the monthly specials (collecting entire story arc’s from various strips) and the annuals. During my teen’s the issues that I stumbled across seemed very different from my earlier experiences, a lot of them stuffed with the mindless violence that epitomised the dreary “Iron Age” of comics. Continue reading…