Rock. A sequel to Katamari Damacy is in the works.
Katamari Damacy sequel in development
Namco is working on a sequel to innovative, um, "roll-'em-up" Katamari Damacy and plans to release it in Japan on the PlayStation 2 during its 2005 financial year, according to a report on IGN. [via] [via Waxy.org Links]
Laurence J. Peter
"If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else." [via Quotes of the Day]
In case you ever wondered what To Kill a Mockingbird was about.
It's the true story of To Kill a Mockingbird. Complete with pirates, robots, slaves, lasers, flaming sharks, ninjas, the moon, and a pickle, done in Flash. [via jenett.radio] [via waxy]
Here's another cool Flickr thing, a calendar showing when you've posted pictures in the last five weeks.:
Each day is a link that brings you a page with pictures for that day. Nothing real fancy, but it does look pretty cool I think. You can also view calendars by month.
When the whole podcasting thing started to take off I found I was quite into it, but then RL got in the way a bit and it kind of fell off my radar. Interestingly enough, this happened when I stopped being good about using the treadmill three times a week. Today as I was getting ready to walk I realized I needed something to listen to and decided I needed to upgrade iPodderX and start listening again.
iPodderX looks like it is really progressing nicely, even if I'm going to end up having to shell out some $$ for it soon. It's got some really slick features, and I've already found one feature that I want in it. It lets you set the genre of what you download, which is cool, but I want to be able to access other tags also. iTunes has one called 'grouping' which I use for any extra data/keywords to describe the track. For instance, anime soundtracks are in genre soundtracks with anime in the grouping tag. So I'd love to be able to put 'podcast' into the grouping (as well as any other info).
Now I need to get off my ass and figure out where to set up my turntables so I can start doing a mix of the week podcast.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I've been a bit slow posting lately, so I'm just finally getting around to posting about my Turkeyday. It was a great holiday this year. My cousin and his family came to visit. Which was nice because I always like it when there is more family around. We ate lots of food and followed by passing out. They also brought their dog, which was great and reminded me how much I think we should get one.
And as for things I'm thankful for:
Oscar Wilde
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability." [via Quotes of the Day]
In the world of bizzare news:
Pickled cats thrown at police
Hamilton woman angry at police confiscation of pickled snakes so threw a jar of pickled kittens at them
It has been revealed a Hamilton woman was so angry about police taking her three preserved snakes that she stormed into the station and threw a jar of pickled kittens at the counter.
The jar shattered. [NZCity News]
I personally think the sentence "It has been revealed a Hamilton woman was so angry about police taking her three preserved snakes that she stormed into the station and threw a jar of pickled kittens at the counter." would make a great entry into the Bulwer-Lytton Contest.
I can't remember where I saw the link to this originally (or I'd give credit). Here's a subset of a bunch of disclaimer stickers for science textbooks. The first one is an actual disclaimer is taken from a sticker designed by the Cobb County School District in Georgia (see original).
William H. Mauldin
"I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages." [via Quotes of the Day]
I finally got around to fixing the Brownie Recipe I had posted a year or two ago. I kept meaning to do it and forgetting. But then my mom said that my sister had looked it up here and I suddenly paniced. Since if you followed the previous directions you'd have sugar and eggs left over, and I'm guessing that would taste pretty bad.
Okay, so I know there's no chance of me actually getting this, but damn what a cool collection.
Complete Criterion Collection gift set
241 movies for $5,000, about $20 each [via Waxy.org Links]
Henrik Tikkanen
"Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence." [via Quotes of the Day]
While not watching TV tonight I was scanning in some pictures as a favor for my mom and came across a bunch of them from when she was growing up. Here's one of a few from that bunch. This one is her at Christmas and is too cute.
One thing I've been finding lately is that I just don't watch quite as much TV. I blame it partly on the TiVo. I like being able to record something and watch it at a later time. The thing is, this is college basketball season. And since my parents, dad especially, is a UConn Women's Basketball fanatic that takes priority over anything else on TV. Including the one hour of prime time TV that I watch (Joan of Arcadia). I think what is most annoying is that I end up having to watch it in real time, suddenly having to run (er well, my version of run) to the third floor at the last minute. Oh well, at least whining always makes it not seem so bad.
And Joan was good this week. I hadn't gotten to watch last week's until this afternoon and it was a bit harsh to say the least. The show needed and episode that ended up an up note like this. This season has just had quite the dark cloud over it.
Roger Catlin of the Hartford Courant writes in today's Eye on TV section:
Japanimation Cute, But Strange; UConn Women Open Season
The super cutesy side of Japanese animation, already adapted in cartoons like "Hamtaro" and "Powerpuff Girls" (Cartoon Network, 8:30 and 11 p.m.) gets even closer to the source on the new "Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi" (Cartoon Network, 7:30 and 9 p.m.), with its rendering of a popular pop duo as a pair of adorable squibs.
Like a lot of Japanimation, there are some traits that are still tough to figure - chiefly how the mouths inexplicably become two dimensional slabs of baloney when open; and when open very large, routinely exceed the boundaries of the face. [CTnow.com (registration required)]
Um, just because the show is based on people from Japan does not make it Japanese Animation. Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi is a Cartoon Network original series. As is the Powerpuff Girls. They may be anime influenced, but that's it. Hamtaro is anime, but I still think Hamtaro should end up in a wood chipper one of these days.
Oh, and nobody uses the term 'Japanimation' anymore, that's so 80s.
Seen via Compendium, SBC's new RSS reader: Project D.U.. I guess D.U. stands for Digital Universe.
proj·ect · d. u.
(noun) 1. a reader populated with headlines pulled from across the web.
2. relater of news and rumors
3. hiding place for next month's topic of conversation.
4. the center of your Digital Universe. Synonyms: middleman, informant, eavesdropper.
First off, the site. It feels like it is trying way too hard to be 'Hip'. Almost all the buttons you can click are animated in some way. Luckily none of them burst into flames. Next, the Project D.U. Reader. I personally found it to be pretty lame in a bunch of ways.
And as I was about to close my browser window on the site, I noticed this on their about page:
One of the best features of this site, not unlike the advent of color television, is the Project D.U. Reader. It’s filled with headlines from some of the best blogs you’ve never heard of. In fact, we’ve spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours scouring the web, trying to find the most intriguing sites the world has to offer. To be fair, we pay the favored blogs a bit each month for the right to use their stuff. But we don’t edit what they say, that would be a very un-fun read.
Wait, they are paying the blogs they list money?? How can I get in on that racket.
I was whining this morning over on #joiito about being in a bit of a slump as far as blogging goes and Joi gave me a kick to get me back into gear, so here come a few posts.
Voltaire
"Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well." [via Quotes of the Day]
(Cutey Honey after blocking LOTS of bullets with her sword)
So I finally got a chance to see the Cutey Honey live action movie. It was one of the more fun movies I've seen recently. Cutey Honey first came out years and years ago as a TV series by Go Nagi (the individual responsible for many classic shows) and has had numerous other animated versions throughout the years. Finally, someone did enough drugs to decide that the next incarnation really needed to be a live action movie.
What makes this movie great is that instead of going and tweaking the story too much it sticks with the same over the top feel that the anime has. It almost feels like you are watching an animated movie with live actors subbed in. It's cheesy as all hell, but then again Cutey Honey is cheesy to begin with. My only complaint would be that the ending battle where she goes up against Sister Jill left me wanting more, but in the end it works out alright. Now I just think they should do a live action TV series. I mean, if they can do a Sailor Moon one this should be no problem! Oh yeah, and the theme song for the movie, performed by Koda Kumi, rocks.
Hubert H. Humphrey
"In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be." [via Quotes of the Day]
M. C. Escher
"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder." [via Quotes of the Day]
About 2 weeks ago I received a Nikon D70 Digital SLR camera in trade for some computer work I've been doing for a neighbor. I've long wanted an SLR of any type and this has helped energize the creative side of me a bit. It also means I've been putting pictures online more and making much more use of Flickr. Which has also led to many of my friends asking "so what's so great about this Flickr thing anyways?"
Flickr is a photo hosting/sharing service from ludicorp that's been in beta for a while now. I think I first started using it around 8 months ago, but didn't really get into it until the new camera. I'd fiddled around with running my own photo gallery software a few times, tried a few other services, but nothing really jumped out at me until Flickr. Flickr is all about finding ways to organize and ways to share your photos. Like most other photo hosting services you can upload pictures, create photosets (albums), etc. It also has a bit of social networking type stuff built in so that you can choose to only share photos with your friends or family.
But where Flickr has really hooked me is with some of the other features. The biggest of which are tags. Tags are keywords you can add to a photo to provide more data about it. For instance, in this photo that I uploaded there are a bunch of tags. I can then choose to look at only pictures of mine with the tag 'squirrel', or I could see all the public photos on Flickr that have the tag 'squirrel'. You can also put notes onto a picture that show up when you mouse over a certain area. Oh yes, and they also have it set up so that you can post your pictures to your blog or LiveJournal from within Flickr and they accept photocam posts too.
One thing the tagging system has done is that some tags have a following. People will take pictures that can be tagged with a certain keyword. One of my favorites is squaredcircle, where people post pictures of circular things in a squared image. This one has enough of a following that someone has created a group for pictures like this (groups are things you can join which have their own photo collections).
The other thing that made Flickr my choice for a photo hosting service was that someone wrote a plugin for iPhoto so that you can export your pictures straight from iPhoto (instead of saving them and uploading with the web site or one of their uploading tools). When it's this easy I can't help but want to post stuff all the time.
Flickr is currently free, also also has a Pro option. With a free account you can upload 10MB of pictures a month, have 3 photosets, and people can view the 100 most recent images you have uploaded. The Pro account offers quite a bit more, you can upload 1GB per month, there's unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth use, unlimited photosets, and permanent archiving of high-res images. In the future Ad-free browsing will be added to that. You can check out their FAQ for more info.
The last thing I have to say about Flickr is that it has really inspired me to really learn more about taking pictures and to actually get out there and take them. The other day someone invited me to a group called 'sky'. For the next few days I was on the road and everywhere I went I kept looking for good shots of the sky (and I finally got one I really liked). It really ends up being quite addicting after a bit.
Oh, and no, Flickr isn't paying me to rave on and on about how I like them. I just think it's one of the cooler sites out there and want more of my friends to use it.
A few friends of mine have been getting trackback spam for a while now and I still didn't quite believe it really existed. Until today. The spammers have finally discovered that I can be pinged. Luckily mt-blacklist seems to be catching at least a bit of it. It still annoys me though.
Horace Walpole
"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well." [via Quotes of the Day]
Thinking that students might be threatening the president by performing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War", the Secret Service paid a visit to a Boulder, CO high school this week.
School Talent Show Draws Secret Service
Colorado Band Singing Dylan Song Seen as Threatening President Bush
BOULDER, Colo., Nov. 12, 2004 — Parents and students say they are outraged and offended by a proposed band name and song scheduled for a high school talent show in Boulder this evening, but members of the band, named Coalition of the Willing, said the whole thing is being blown out of proportion.
The students told ABC News affiliate KMGH-TV in Denver they are performing Bob Dylan's song "Masters of War" during the Boulder High School Talent Exposé because they are Dylan fans. They said they want to express their views and show off their musical abilities.
But some students and adults who heard the band rehearse called a radio talk show Thursday morning, saying the song the band sang ended with a call for President Bush to die.
Threatening the president is a federal crime, so the Secret Service was called to the school to investigate. [abcnews.com]
For further reading, here's the lyrics to "Masters of War" (which was first released in 1963).
Robert Frost
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." [via Quotes of the Day]
From CNN.com:
TV stations canceling 'Ryan' telecast
Worried about FCC sactions; film must run uncut
NEW YORK (AP) -- More than 20 ABC affiliates around the country, including two in Ohio, have announced that they won't take part in the network's Veterans Day airing of "Saving Private Ryan," saying the acclaimed film's violence and language could draw sanctions from the Federal Communications Commission.
The decisions mark a twist in the conflict over the aggressive stand the FCC has taken against obscenity and profanity since Janet Jackson flashed the world during the last Super Bowl halftime show.
Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning movie aired on ABC with relatively little controversy in 2001 and 2002, but station owners -- including several in large markets -- are unnerved that airing it Thursday could bring federal punishment. The film includes a violent depiction of the D-Day invasion and profanity.
"It would clearly have been our preference to run the movie. We think it's a patriotic, artistic tribute to our fighting forces," Ray Cole, president of Citadel Communications, told AP Radio. The company owns three ABC affiliates in the Midwest.
...
Cole cited recent FCC actions and last week's re-election of President Bush as reasons for replacing "Saving Private Ryan" on Thursday with a music program and the TV movie "Return to Mayberry." [CNN.com]
I don't know about you, but I certainly find "Return to Mayberry" to be much more offensive than "Saving Private Ryan". I really hope this isn't some kind of sign of what TV will be like in the near future.
Since I saw the Shrek Twinkies at the store today, I just had to get some and take pictures of them. I was only able to stomach a few bites though. I'm just not a huge Twinkie fan.
There's a part of me that really wants to at least try this. Even if it would be scary.
Hello, Kitty!
Hello Kitty Online World! [via #!/usr/bin/girl]
I posted a bunch more pics to flickr tonight. My mom had asked me to pick up some apples so she could make some apple pies. I took the opportunity to play around with my new camera some more and try out some of the things I'd learned about it. I took a bunch of pictures of this one brook (complete with squirrel), and pictures of the first two houses I lived in.
Pepsi has a new version for the holidays: Holiday Spice Pepsi. You too can enjoy pepsi with the taste of cinnamon and ginger while you sip your holiday pepsi.
Excuse the ad, but I'm just doing my part to help promote Full Metal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Crisis start on Cartoon Network tonight. In general Cartoon Network has done a pretty crappy job with promoting anime, so I thought I'd help out a little. Yes, I'm a geek.
To folks that are just sitting around tonight doing nothing, I highly recommend checking these out, even though they come on a bit late. They are two of the better shows that Cartoon Network has picked up as far as anime goes. Also, don't be mislead by the beginning of Full Metal Alchemist, it gets pretty intense at times.
Here's some info on both Full Metal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
George Bernard Shaw
"You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"" [via Quotes of the Day]
In the rockin' future of Hello Kitty.
A picture of me that I don't completely hate. My friend Brian took this while playing with my new camera.
Oh my, I wonder if someone at CNN will lose their job over this. The lesson, be careful what you name your files (even if it is accurate).
I'd written IOGEAR around a month ago asking when the Bluetooth Mini Mouse that they announced during the summer would be out. I got a nice reply back a day or two later that explained it wouldn't be out until sometime first quarter of 2005. At the time I was kind of bummed because I really like their Mini Mouse line, but was holding out for bluetooth.
Today I just noticed on one of the blogs I read that it had been released! (I wish I could remember which blog so I could give them credit.) I plan on getting one of these as soon as I get paid next. It's a much more manageable size to carry around. Also, it comes with rechargeable batteries. A very nice touch. It's a little bit more than I was wanting to spend on a mouse, but I think I will get a lot of good use out of it.
I'll post a review if I end up getting it.
More hopeful news in the fight against IPF:
Anticancer Drug to Fight Fatal Lung Disease,...
Anticancer Drug to Fight Fatal Lung Disease, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis [via Blogdigger Search: Pulmonary Fibrosis]
I'm really glad to see more coverage of IPF online and in the news. IPF is one of those conditions that so many people have never heard of, and is a pretty hellish thing to have.
I just wanted to put out a big public thanks to some of my friends online. Thanks to MWF for succumbing to my blog begging for the Looney Tunes collection. To Ellen for the gift certificate, and to Izumi for the stuff soon to be received. Also, a big thanks to my parents for the Peanuts book.
Has it really been 36 years?
I am so full of sushi. Must nap.
Boston.com has an article on how parents feel that long term papers are too much work for high school students.
...But Laurie Mokriski, also a PTSO member, said she worries because the papers contribute significantly to students' already-heavy academic loads. Newton parents met earlier this month to discuss homework and agreed their children have too much, Mokriski said. They also need time for sports, theater, music, and academic teams, she said. ''They're trying to enjoy their high school years," she said.Denise Clark Pope, author of ''Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out Materialistic and Miseducated Students," argues that today's high school students are overworked. [boston.com]
Is it me or does this just seem like too much whining. I remember having term papers that were at least 10 pages long in High School. I thought everyone had to do that kind of thing. I like how because the kids have so many extra-curricular activities, we have to give them less academic work.
Linked to from over on the Cult of Mac, the iBitch.
Tired of the picture perfect virtual relationships? iBitch 2.0 puts the balance back into your virtual lovelife, giving you the "low end" to have a more fulfilling and realistic virtual relationship. After all, there can be no good, without the bad, right? iBitch 2.0 is the latest addition to the Virtual Girlfriend software family, compatible with Mac & Windows. [arkamfilms.com]
Oh yes, and this probably isn't worksafe.
