my blog post is coming together!

"What it do", blogfans

Today I'm going to post about things and you will read those things and that's about it.

Got an iPod

This is the biggest news for me recently, I bought a friend of mine's old 80GB iPod and Rockbox'd it and now I'm generally 350% happier. Awhile ago I made a post about getting my new cellphone and how great it was to have music wherever I was again but really the ability to have like a decent library of music on me is what I've always wanted. I haven't had a chance to fill it up yet but so far I have these artists:

13 & God
24 Effects
A Silver Mt. Zion
A$AP Rocky
A-Trak
American Football
Animal Collective
Aphex Twin
Arcade Fire
Avey Tare
Avishai Cohen Trio
BADBADNOTGOOD
Beck
Beethoven
Big Baby Gandhi
Big Boi
Binary Star
Boards of Canada
Burial
cLOUDDEAD
Cunninlynguists
Das Racist
Death from Above 1979
Dr. Dre
Eminem
Faure
Faust
Flying Lotus
Four Tet
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Grandaddy
Heems
Hidamari Sketch Original Soundtrack
Hymie's Basement
IOSYS
Islands
Jaylib
Joanna Newsom
Juicy J
Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble
Killer Mike
KKK Visions
Kool A.D.
Lakutis
LCD Sounsystem
Lifesavas
Lil B
LMFAO
LSD and the Search for God
Madvillain
Major Lazer
Matryoshka
MF DOOM
misc internet
mum
Music from Saharan Cellphones
NieR
Number Girl
Outkast
Panda Bear
Pimp C
POLICEMAN
Quakers
Radiohead
Rameses III
Reaching Quiet
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Rival Consoles
Robert Wyatt
Shabazz Palaces
Sigur Rós
Sufjan Stevens
Talking Heads
The Airplane Boys
The Avalanches
The Beach Boys
The Beatles
The Go! Team
The Unicorns
Thom Yorke
Tim Heidecker
TV on the Radio
Venetian Snares
Viktor Vaughn
Waka Flocka Flame
Why
World's End Girlfriend
Wu-Tang Clan

Wow that was an easy way to fill up some space in a content-looking way. Thanks, script!

But yeah Rockbox is great, iPod is great, I don't know what more I can say.

Anime stuff

Saki
So I finished Saki, really enjoyed it. REALLY HOPE EVENTUALLY I WILL GET TO SEE THE NATIONALS. I sorta burned through the last bunch of episodes pretty quickly and I lost track of where I was and when I got to the last one I just thought the "next file" button on MPC was broken. Sad, sad. I guess I'll have to read the manga. And oh yeah watch the spinoff, of course, I watched the first episode of that and I was really impressed. I've always loved the sort of spinoff that can recast the former protagonists as antagonists. Great way to get a fresh look at the characters and it handles the problem of them being overpowered in a really elegant way too. The downside is that now I'm either gonna not like the new group of MCs as much or I'm gonna end up cheering against Saki et al, and I don't really know which I'd prefer, and that raises an interesting question about like, abandoning characters or something, I dunno. Also I finally actually learned how to play Mahjong and now I feel almost like rewatching the series with that added perspective. Granted, I'm not very good at Mahjong yet or anything, I'll often trap myself in a hand that has no Yaku, for example, which is really amateur hour, but maybe watching the show will help me improve?? Either way Mahjong is really fun, really addictive. Hits a great sweetspot of casualness and intensity, of easiness and complicatedness. Lots of strategy that eventually just becomes intuitive so you can play it well without it being very "thinky". Basically everything I like about euchre except with more random exciting crap that can happen. If there was one thing delaying this blog post, aside from not having anything to say in it, which has never stopped me before, it's that I kept playing mahjong.

Rinne no Lagrange

I've watched up until episode 17 of this. Hmm.... I dunno. The last season had a great mix of plot stuff and SoL hijinks, I never really got bored of either. But now in retrospect it was more that I just wanted to see SoL hijinks and never really cared much about the plot. The visual effects of the fight scenes and such were well done but really the most interesting aspects of those scenes is when they subverted the like, Evangelion line of tropes, Madoka being an inverse Shinji etc. Now they're playing a lot of them straight? And the interactions between the girls are more stilted when there's so much exposition and such to deal with. Still pretty fun, though, still really technically sound. The scene of Madoka's test is uh, well, hmm. It seems my guess about some trend now of things being suddenly way more explicit re: Kokoro Connect applies here too. Her line about becoming a mother someday is rightly controversial for all the really thin walls it tears down in conventional moe-theory, especially for all the yuri-moe fans of this series (myself included). I'd uh address this but at the moment I'm ignoring it. So I guess we'll see what happens but hopefully eventually we'll just get some more wacky Kamogawa slice of life stuff.

Kokoro Connect

I've watched up to episode 6 on this. I didn't expect the body-swapping thing to just be one arc and now they're on to some other thing. I'm okay with that though. That's a good way to solve the pacing problems that I worried about earlier. Now they're going from learning about other people to learning about themselves! That's deep. Except not really. The sorta pseudodeepness is basically the only thing I dislike about the show, everything else is really quite well done, it's funny and suspenseful and dramatic and even pretty moving at times. Everyone complains about forced drama but yeah that's like, the premise of the show: an omnipotent being subjects likable characters to dramatics and we watch. That's really not a bad premise.

Tari Tari

I've seen up to episode 6 on this too. Enjoying it quite a bit, seems like I'll like it even more now that Wakana's "arc" is over and she's happy and ready to sing etc. Or maybe a bit less? I was getting a bit tired of that whole plot but when it ended I found myself surprisingly touched. The other characters really need a chance to shine, though. They've been doing a good job of keeping us "in touch" with them and interested in whatever they have going on, but it's hardly satisfying. But if we do start focusing on the problems of the other characters, what's gonna happen to Wakana? She'll just be fine and largely ignored for the rest of the show? Or probably near the end she'll finish her mother's song, that'd be fine, that'd be good. Also interesting is that they've reintroduced male characters into the Slice of Life genre without including any romance, this is a trend I think I support, generally.

YuruYuri

Comiket episode was great, being Ayano is suffering, all that good stuff, I dunno, not much to say. Next episode is all about sisters, though! Does that mean... Akane!? Finally!??!?


Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer

Started reading this finally. I'm about halfway through. Really enjoying it, but I figured I would 'cause I literally have never heard a bad word about it. The premise is pretty strange, sure, it took a while to get used to. And some of the action scenes are... awkward? But they really like, ought to be, I guess, given the characters and such. Anyways everything else is great though. I guess though my fear is that the ending will be "MC has learned to love the world so much that he no longer wishes it destroyed". This could be done really well, of course, and it seems so obviously "right" that I can't blame them if they do it. But they've spent so much time reinforcing how crazy this premise is, how crazy the MC is, that it seems like so much of the series will be retroactively invalidated if they got rid of it. We'll see though, I guess. My favorite characters are prolly the princess, the MC and the crow knight. I really like all the characters, though.


Music stuff

Lately I've been listening to uh...
-Captain Murphy - "Mighty Morphin' Foreskin"
Who is this guy? I am less sure that it's Tyler. He's pretty amazing, though, crazy flows all over this track.
-Captain Murphy - "The Ritual"
This one I like slightly less, just isn't quite as smooth.
-Animal Collective - "Today's Supernatural"
Of course.
-PSY - "Gangnam Style"
Not since LMFAO have I been so utterly in (post-pseudoironic) love with every aspect of a song.
-Other Lives - "Tamer Animals (Atoms for Peace remix)"
-Atoms for Peace - "Other Side (Stuck Together remix)"
Thom Yorke has really come into his own with a very distinct electronic sound, and it keeps maturing and improving. Can't wait for his album with DOOM! And I mean I can't wait because you can't wait for something that will never happen.

I guess that's it for now

Next post... Saimoe comes off break! C82!! I start school/work soon and won't have time to update the blog!!!