anime update

I don't know what I've already said about things and I'm too lazy to go back through previous posts to find out. There may be repetition of previous statements contained herein, and some things I said previously might be said again.

So, the remaining episodes of Haruhi (The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya) reminded me that I'd already read the novel containing it, so I know how everything happens. It's still very nice to have animated, and to my recollection they're sticking fairly close to the novel. If you remember The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru Episode 00 and Live Alive, well, The Sigh slots in chronologically just before those two episodes. If they stick to the original announcement of the rerun containing 28 episodes, then the next one will be the last new episode.

After blazing through the exposition and several important arcs, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood has slowed down to a sane pace and taken a completely different direction from the first season. Shit's going down right now. Scar and homunculi abound. I still think Winry is hotter in this season.

Now I definitely know who the main antagonist is in Basquash, but his motive is unclear. Another of my suspicions was indeed correct, showing that I've learned way too much about story structure and how to spoil oneself without trying. I'm being vague because pretty much everything happening now is related to one or another spoiler.

In CAINE's showings we're watching Cowboy Bebop, Nodame Cantabile, and Kuroshitsuji. Only after the first showing did I notice that I hadn't added Cowboy Bebop or its movie to my list on MAL. I fixed that and then flooded it out of my sig image for the lulz. We're watching it dubbed because apparently we couldn't get the showing room dvd player to turn the subs on and it was a choice between the dub and watching it raw. But the dub isn't all that bad, so... yeah. I still get a weird feeling watching anime with english audio, even when I do it voluntarily. My eyes keep scanning the bottom of the screen for subtitles.

I get this weird deja vu feeling about Nodame Cantabile, like I've seen it before or something. Regardless, it's hilarious, and while I never played in an orchestra (band FTW) I can still draw on old musical knowledge to understand stuff.

Kuroshitsuji is fairly over the top. At a glance you just see the "rich child who inherited his parents' company" character and the accompanying "loyal butler" and assorted comic relief maid and other mansion staff. But the butler is actually a demon and the rich kid has a contract with him. Inevitably something happens to the kid and the butler has to cap a few bitches. I might have paraphrased that a bit.

Since my rate of finding stuff on /w/ that I like isn't slowing down at all and my unsorted directory is currently massive, look for a wallpaper update very soon. There's some editing to be done of course, but it shouldn't take too long. I may actually split this into multiple small updates because I just looked and I have 34 wallpapers sitting there to sort through and edit as needed. If only Picasa made it easier to do these updates.

Seriously, this is how a wallpaper update progresses:

1. Open up picasaweb
2. Navigate to one of the albums I have new wallpapers for (or create a new one and adjust the date so it appears in the proper spot, I do this to force them to be sorted alphabetically by album title)
3. Upload wallpapers 5 at a time
4. Once I'm done uploading the new stuff for that album:
1. look through to see what exact tags I've been using since it doesn't have any form of a smart tagging system that would autocomplete tags for you
2. Tag each image as appropriate
3. Go through and copypasta the link code (sans table) to the post editor on blogger
4. Add target="_blank" to the link and the appropriate title attribute with resolution, aspect ratio, and short note if needed to the image tag
5. Remember to put a space between them so they'll autowrap on blogger
6. Sort the album by filename (lol arbitrary)
5. Repeat from step 2 for the rest of the albums
6. Write bullshit about the update and hit publish post
7. Go force Facebook to import the post and then laugh at the single column of images because Facebook thinks it knows all and as such doesn't respect the imported post's formatting completely
8. Wonder why the hell I still have Facebook import my posts
9. Log out of Facebook so it can't track my movements across the internet (disabling beacons on Facebook's side doesn't mean that they don't receive the data, and I don't trust them to discard it)

Maybe I can solve portions of that with Greasemonkey. I don't know if I can hack in an autocomplete feature (and it would mean learning AJAX, eww), but I could certainly mess with the link it generates to make the copying/pasting process go faster.

Or I could just stop trying to use Picasa for something it's not meant for.