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  • Anime Bread

    So I’ve seen anime with giant robots, anime about baseball, anime about playing Go, and anime about tennis (to name a few). But I never thought I’d see one about baking bread. Yakitate!! Japan is about Kazuma and his quest to make a national bread for Japan. He figures that since many other countries have types of bread they are known for, Japan needs one too. He’s also blessed with ‘Solar Hands’, which are abnormally warm and help make the bread rise faster after kneading.

    Yakitate-1

    This show is just too much fun. They’ve compensated for bread not being the most exciting topic by making it insanely over the top. The main character’s bread seems to be so good that it makes the people tasting it hallucinate. For instance, when tasting a bread he made with goats milk butter one character hallucinated flying through space to the constellation Capricorn. But mixed in with all the over the top antics are little bits of information about baking bread (I think most of it is fairly accurate).

    Now here’s a chance for anime to break a bit more into the mainstream. It could be on FoodTV. It was be a perfect match! And finally a show I can share with my mom (who used to teach a bread baking class).

  • World of Warcraft, First Impressions

    World of WarcraftSo I finally gave into the whole MMORPG craze. I’d played a bit of Asheron’s Call back when it was in Beta and enjoyed it. And even played a tiny bit when it was released, but it never really sucked me in that much. But I have a good number of friends playing World of Warcraft, and it’s one of the few games I can play on the Mac and still be able to play with them.

    First off. Big high-5 to Blizzard for releasing a game that runs on both Mac and PC beautifully. More companies need to do this. I have no idea how much extra effort it requires on their part but they really do a great job. Thank you for giving me something cool to play while all my friends are off playing CoH.

    So, about the game. It’s beautiful. I took some screenshots that are okay, but nothing as nice as some of the ones shown on the World of Warcraft site. The colors are vivid and for the first hour or so that I played the game i just kept looking all around me. I can’t wait to explore more and see what kinds of places I can find.

    World of Warcraft - screenshot 2
    Next, gameplay. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this game was easy to learn. I saw the manual that came with the the game and was a little nervous at first. It’s not huge, but it just looked like there was so much to learn. So, in proper geek form I just dove right into the game. After about 10 min I created my character and was on my first quest.

    So far, I love the game. As I play a bit more and get a little deeper into it I’ll report back with more details. The screenshots are hosted at Flickr, and there is one other up there.

  • Nintendo DS in Action

    A friend of mine sent me link to a demo of something for the Nintendo DS. It’s streaming and using windows media, so you’ll need that to watch. It starts out kinda slow, but around halfway through my jaw just dropped. Bonus points go out to anyone who recognizes what is played (I could name it in 4-5 notes). Even more points go to someone who can translate the japanese, since I can’t read it (or understand what they are saying).

  • Everyone Else

    Bunnysex

    Seen over on a friend’s LJ, a flash movie with a dancing and singing bunny.

  • Another Cool Flickr Thing

    Here’s another cool Flickr thing, a calendar showing when you’ve posted pictures in the last five weeks.:

    Flickr Calendar

    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.

  • For My Wish List

    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]

  • What I Hate About This Time Of Year

    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.

  • Not Getting 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.

  • Honey Flash!

    Cutey Honey
    (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.

  • Just What *IS* flickr Anyways?

    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.