nickchanger's blog - Archive: April 2010

... that really is not the question. You cry when you cry and that is it. If you feel like crying go for it for crying out loud! ... no pun intended - ok maybe a little.

I am not sure about when the last time I really cried were, but I believe it were quite a while ago. More precisely at the funeral of my grandmother (on my mothers side) around 12 years ago. Think it was the culmination of seeing several people around me suddenly in tears that tipped it over for me. Since then I have felt it to be close several times but never really done it. Most memorable is the funeral of my other grandmother (on my fathers side). It was a very moving event, with one of my cousins singing and all, but I was almost ten years older and apparently more prepared.

I have never cried from watching a film. One cause might be that I have not really seen that many really really sad films, so there have probably never been a reason to do so. Even though I have not seen that many I have seen some and although I have noticed a reaction, it has never been big enough to really bring forth the tears. Lately I have seen several anime series with quite sad and moving story lines and the latest have been the most brutal so far, Clannad After Story. It is the second season of the Clannad story. The first season were the first of this kind of theme I have seen and it were a bit supricing to me as it is marked as a "seinen" anime, which means it is targeted at men. The reason for this however is probably that Clannad were originally what is known as a visual novel - a computer game with lots of talk and often several cute manga/anime girls. The whole series is basically about one boy, a senior at high school, who gets to know several girls who all have a tragic problem of some kind which he helps them with. In the second season this style continues for the first episodes but it soon shifts to more or less only focus on this boys life as he struggles with several tragic events happening to and around him. Another anime I have seen which have the same kind of theme is Kanon (2006 edition). It is created by the same team who is behind Clannad, and is basically the same. Were also originally a visual novel. The main difference here however is that this time the boy have met all the girls before (when they were 7-10 years younger) but he have forgotten about it. While he starts remembering stuff some tragic events from the past are unfolded and at the same time happening in the present.

All series are actually quite good, but not exactly my kind of theme so even though I considered seeing Air, a third anime series created by the same team (and again originally a visual novel), I am not sure I really feel like it at the moment. I probably need a lot of comedy for a while :P . As mentioned Clannad After Story have been the most brutal I have seen so far, but it is only because of its length and thereby the amount of tragic events. There is no doubt in my mind that the absolute most emotional and sad film I have ever seen is still Grave of the Fireflies, yet another anime. It is weird to believe that it is by the same company who is behind My Neighbor Totoro! :o

One good thing about all this is that seeing these have proven to me that anime expands over so many different areas, from the very sad (mentioned above) over the more serious (e.g. Planetes to the mindless fun (e.g. Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu, Azumanga Daiou and School Rumble), and from the dark thriller (e.g. Death Note) over an ecchi magical world (e.g. Zero no Tsukaima) to some aimed at children and/or the whole family (e.g. Kiki's Delivery Service). So no reason not to watch anime! Btw, all animes mentioned are recommended :P .

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Tuesday the 6th of April I ordered five CD's from play.com. All of them had the status "in stock" and "shipped within 1-2 days". On the 8th (two days later) I received notifications that they had send two of the CD's. On the 9th they send the third. Then the weekend came and Monday and Tuesday the next week I got the notifications for the last two. That was pretty damn slow by play.com when they say they could do it all within two days.

Yesterday, the 20th I finally received the last CD by mail, two weeks after I first ordered it. I expected it to only take around half that time. To make it worse one of the CD covers had a scratch :/ . But I got them.

So what did I get? Only five of the best albums ever made!



For those who cannot tell which it is by the image is here a list (starting from the right, also chronologically):

• Blink-182 - Enema of the State
• Blink-182 - Take of Your Pants and Jacket
• Blink-182 - untitled or Blink-182
• Angels and Airwaves - We Don't Need To Whisper
• Angels and Airwaves - I-Empire

Sweeet!

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A couple of weeks ago we had big problems with the LoLBase.net database. We had to basically start it over which required us to "recreate" all of the data in a new database. There were over 400 MB of data in the old database that needed to be restructured and reduced. It takes a shitload of time to do so and we had to do it in small steps to make sure everything were done correctly (and to make sure the server would not get overloaded). This meant we (or more precisely me) needed to manually change some starting values and run a script once or twice a minute. With two half-hour dinner breaks and a two-hour major fixing, the whole process took around 18 hours straight - from early morning to late night.

I had Opera opened throughout the whole 18 hours, including during the major fixing where it where used heavily to dump and upload data. At the end it used almost half a gigabyte of memory and started to make some weird black graphic errors on the script starting page. So a good advice to anyone, is to close your browser completely once in a while ;) . Would be scary if I had used Internet Explorer or one of the earlier versions of Firefox which had memory leaks o.0 !

To avoid just sitting and waiting for the script to finish so I could start the next iteration I had to find something else to do. That is not easy, since I would get interrupted at least once a minute. That ruled out pretty much every game I have, except for Peggle! So I played a lot of Peggle that day... but 18 hours of Peggle would just be insane, so I needed to think of something else from time to time.

Usually I would start programming something, but that is damn hard when you cannot keep focus on the task at hand for more than a minute at the time.

A few days earlier I had finished seeing the second season of School Rumble for the second time, damn funny stuff! I were about to start on the third season when I remembered that they totally forked it up by only creating the last two episodes (25 and 26th). What were they thinking :( ! I then read some forum threads and they reminded me that School Rumble were originally made as a manga and apparently the anime followed it pretty closely. So I decided I wanted to find the manga and read that instead.

I quickly found a website that had plenty of mangas, including School Rumble. But I also found that there were no clear separation between the manga chapters that would tell me where season two of the anime would end and season three would start. So instead I started to read some other mangas, basically just picked some random ones. Got through more than two (with ~30 chapters each) on this day!

The site I found were called One Manga. I highly doubted it would be the only site out there and a simple Google image search on a popular manga revealed several others: mangareader.net, mangafox.com, manga.watchanimeon.com, manga.animea.net, mangavolume.com, mangachapters.info and ourmanga.com ... just to name a few. I have not analysed all of them so I have not uncovered all the differences and figured out which might be the best. They all have ads when you are reading the manga, and some are quite annoying - but of course these can be blocked by Opera. Most of them are updated at the same time with the exact same scanlation (as the scanning and translation of a manga is called) so none have better quality than others, and they use basically the same way to navigate through the manga pages. I think I will stick with One Manga though, as I like its simple design and navigation when reading.

When browsing the mangas I quickly found three mangas that were everywhere and usually also marked in some special way (one site even have them in the main menu!). These are Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. All of them I knew about from anime, but have, however, never seen any of it. Both as manga and as anime they are of the "never-ending" kind. Naruto have 490+ chapters, Bleach 390+, and One Piece have 580+! That is just way to much to follow at this point so I doubt I will ever read these three, despite their popularity. If you have any recommendations for a manga I should look at please let me know, as I am currently shooting randomly here :) .

Reading all of this manga have done two things to me: First, since Japanese manga is read from right to left, it have forked up my reading direction - I even tried reading an xkcd comic from right to left which is not as funny :P . Second, I have been greatly inspired to start drawing again - so hopefully I will release some drawings in the near future, and you cannot stop me!

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