The Honolulu Star-Bulletin had an article recently reviewing FLCL on Cartoon Network. It’s pretty cool to see a positive review of some of the anime on TV, especially something as off the wall as FLCL.

Only in California do you have people like Robert Anton Wilson running for Governor.

bOING bOING patron saint Robert Anton Wilson is running for California Governor! “After all, why should I remain the ONLY nutcase in California who ain’t running,” RAW says. [Boing Boing]

Edith Sitwell: “Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.” [Quotes of the Day]

It’s been a slow weekend for blogging, but it’s been a nice weekend so far otherwise. Yesterday I woke up early and drove out to kidnap Emilily to hang out for the day. We had breakfast at Rosebud and then took in a showing of Thirteen. The movie was pretty interesting and while wasn’t as outwardly shocking/disturbing as I expected, it is still pretty freaky to think that the movie was at least based on the real world. I did like the movie overall though. While I was waiting for it to start I was sure I was going to fall asleep almost as soon as the lights went down (I was exhausted and hadn’t slept well the night before) and it actually kept my attention and I didn’t close my eyes to sleep at all (though, I did for the piercing scene, I’m too much of a wimp).

After that we swung back by my place so Emily could get a demonstration of my Roomba and watch an episode of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” I’d been saving on my TiVo for her. Oh, and she got to create a character for Animal Crossing. Then we grabbed a late lunch, stopped by to see Lukas and Gen, and I zoomed her back home. Then I passed out for a long nap.

Last night. I finished Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on the X Box. Overall, it was a fun dungeon crawl, but it was actually kind of easy. Easier than I expected. The end Boss battle was almost too easy compared to some recent games I’ve played. I started up .hack//Mutation, but won’t start really playing that for a few days I think. More later after I’ve had some time to catch up on my blog reading.

Four Hours till Shaman King airs on Fox. I’ve already read a little bit about the name changes they’ve made in it. Manta is now Mortimer. Pretty lame. I can’t really figure out any good reason for it, except to annoy fans. Ryo is now Rio. And Tao Ren is Tao Len. Now, the last time could be considered a translation thing with L and R, but when the manga has already been running for around 8 or 9 months in the US with the name Tao Ren (and Manta and Ryu), you’d think they’d have them all match. Especially since the show is being hyped pretty heavily in Shonen Jump (where the manga runs). Oh well, we shall see.

Someone mentioned this quote on a MOO I hang out on and I had to share it:

Cruz Bustamante’s campaign for California governor boasts what is no doubt the most unwieldy URL in the short history of online politics: www.noonrecallyesonbustamante.com. [Slate]

Is this the first shot in the Blog wars? It appears that AOL (who has a new blog service online or coming online very soon) has blocked all links coming from Live Journal. Slashdot points to a thread on the LiveJournal development community about how first it was pictures and then any links.

Evan Martin writes “LiveJournal.com is an open-source weblog site with over a million users, some of whom use AOL. Last week, AOL began blocking all HTTP requests with “www.livejournal.com” Referer headers. This is a common practice by image hosting sites to prevent off-site linking of their images and ‘bandwidth theft’. However, in AOL’s case, they’re blocking everything, not just images, effectively breaking all links to any AOL member’s site–but only from LiveJournal. To be clear: nobody on LiveJournal can even make a link to any AOL member site without getting a ‘404 Not Found’ error. We’ve also heard reports of the same thing happening on AOL properties (Netscape, Compuserve). This concerns us because we have to deal with the support requests: it worked in the past for our users, and it continues to work for other sites, so our users think it’s our fault.” [Slashdot]

The post about them blocking more than images is about halfway down on the page. I personally hope that this is just some screw-up on AOL’s part and not a deliberate attempt to slow down some competition. People have pointed out that AOL can block whatever they want, it is their site. While that may be true, this isn’t people just linking to stories on AOL. This is AOL even blocking traffic from Live Journal to someone’s personal web space. Which seems like a big difference to me. I hope this is just some silly misunderstanding, as it’s pretty lame otherwise. Now the next question is, how long till AOL responds?

After wondering what game to play next for a bit the other day I decided on Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. I’d picked it up a month or two ago because I’d heard it was okay (but nothing special) and was on sale for like $11. I figured for a price like that even if I got 10 hours of play out of it, I’d have gotten my money’s worth. So far I’m really digging the game. It has that kinda Diablo feel, which I also think of as the Angband/Nethack feel. It’s even got something called Recall to teleport you back to the safety of town and to go back to where you were last in the dungeon. There’s a little bit of plot to hold things together, but in the end this feels a lot like your basic arcade style dungeon crawl. I’ve got to say I’ve been enjoying it quite a bit, more than expected.

Now, one of the new games I’m awaiting is Armed and Dangerous from the good people over at Lucas Arts. These guys can really put out amazing stuff when they are in the right mood. This game looks to be a bit of a first person shooter, but the storyline looks fun. And the trailer is really funny, the voice acting sounds amazing. Maybe that one will be a birthday precent to myself.

Oh yeah, and last but not least I’ve been playing The Golden Sun on my GBA. It’s quite fun and easy to just pick up for a few when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night. I can’t help it, I love console RPGs.

Oh, and next up after Baldur’s Gate, I take the plunge into Silent Hill 1

George Bernard Shaw: “Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.” [Quotes of the Day]

Thanks to my friend Ellen (who gets very annoyed with me if I don’t credit her) for pointing me at the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics site. It includes ratings of movies with the following rating system:

• GP = Good physics in general
• PGP = Pretty good physics (just enough flaws to be fun)
• PGP-13 = Children under 13 might be tricked into thinking the physics were pretty good; parental guidance is suggested
• RP = Retch
• XP =Obviously physics from an unknown universe
• NR =Unrated. When a movie is obviously a parody, fantasy, cartoon or is clearly based on a comic book it can’t be rated but may still have some interesting physics worth discussing.

The rest of the site covers common poor physics used in movies. It’s pretty interesting seeing just how many standard movie effects are so inaccurate.