Summary of Seattle Trip

Shimul: Are you limping?
danced for ~12 hours this weekend at camp jitterbug (+ brunch with shimul after!). it was eye-opening. although after staggering through the airport just now, I'm starting to wish airport hallways weren't so freaking long, uggh.

bug

I know I say that work is generally a lot less stressful for me than Berkeley usually was, today I swear I almost hyper-ventilated over a freaking bug.

Granted, this is the hardest bug-fix I've had to work on since I started working, and I've learned a lot that I never thought I'd learn about... well, routers in general because of it, but seriously, it's been two weeks and I feel like I've made no actual progress. I can't even reproduce this issue consistently. It's like this bug is taunting me. STOP TAUNTING ME ALREADY.

Ironically, the more I learn/spend time actually doing work, the more I like my job? Guess my academic masochism translated to work pretty well.

Series

I don't remember the last time I put a list on here. I think Evernote's been satisfying my list-making cravings for a while now.

But anyway, a list of series I've been getting into in the past year. Because I like obsessing over different series, particularly if it has a wiki associated with it (my other source of obsession. >_>). As of late:

1. A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series that spawned the Game of Thrones TV show, which I also like)
The books tend towards being too verbose and long, with lots of pages where it feels like nothing's actually happening, but the clever dialogue and all the moments where stuff actually happens kinda make up for it. This actually got me back into reading book series again. I'd forgotten what it was like to get all giddy and excited to read the next book in a series, or at least since Harry Potter ended... 4 years ago now? I guess technically, I read Dune and Ender's Game not too long ago either, but those novels ended on a note where they didn't necessarily need a sequel and could easily stand alone on their own right. With A Game of Thrones on the other hand, it was kinda harder to ignore how it was pretty much setting up for the rest of the books.

2. MS Paint Adventures - specifically, Problem Sleuth and Homestuck
I'm a sucker for anything that remotely resembles a text adventure game (aka interactive fiction), and these web comics are just that. Problem Sleuth had a noir-ish kind of setting and Homestuck had references to data structures... and then they both kind of exploded into something else. According to wiki they're estimated to be the longest comic on the internet, and probably with good reason.

3. Batman comics
Trying to read most of the important stuff in chronological order (which is a lot harder to do for American comics because they like to retcon stuff all the time - it took me a while to understand the release cycle). Started with Year One, currently on Knightfall, although I've been holding off on it for a while cause Knightfall is a lot bigger than any of the past trade paperbacks I've read.

4. Outer-space based sci-fi (Mass Effect, Battlestar Galactica, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien)
I'm lumping all of this in one category, but lately I've been realizing that I'm a bit of a sucker for anything based in outer space. Although I never could really get into the Star Wars universe for some reason. I think the whole idea of the Force was a little too mystical for me for a space-themed setting.

5. Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra
I never got into it too much originally because seemed too much like a western imitation of anime, but after recently marathoning through everything in order this past week, I am now beyond obsessed. Great animation, great characters, great setting. I feel like this show is the realization of all the elemental power stuff I used to like daydreaming about, the stuff that didn't make it into X-Men or whichever.

and now currently:
Baldur's Gate
So like Planescape: Torment previously, I've been meaning to get to this RPG series since high school but never really got around to it. Ironically, talking about Diablo 3 as it was released earlier this week made me really want to play Baldur's Gate, so I started. It took some getting used to the user interface and the nature of gameplay, though - this game was clearly made for patient people. Will see how it turns out.

The Earthsea Trilogy
Just started the first book, but I like the writing style so far. It's only around 160 pages, but compared to the ~1000 page books of the Game of Thrones series, it feels like a breath of fresh air. My perception of it is slightly eschewed by the fact that there's a Studio Ghibli Earthsea movie, so I keep picturing some of kind of mystical pseudo-Miyazaki fantasy world when I'm reading it.

Tech Challenge

Volunteered at the Tech Challenge today, representing Cisco (woo presenting sponsor!), although I kinda wish in retrospect that I'd signed up for judging cause a lot of the projects that the kids brought in were pretty interesting.

The challenge was to develop a device to rescue a stranded civilian (aka toy) from an unstable bridge that had just broken apart due to an earthquake and bring it back to safety. Remote robotic cars, or a bulldozer in one case, seemed to be a popular trend (some controlled by laptop!), with some teams going for a trap-like mechanism to pull the survivor into the vehicle and others opting for a mini-remote vehicle that would push the toy into the bigger vehicle. In one case the latter vehicle was unwieldy enough to almost fall over into the "ocean" a couple of times.

A few groups opted for something like a wheel that would traverse the top of the bridge (in one case operated by a complex pulley system... really cool) and drop a line to hook the toy, like an air rescue. One went for an actual remote-control helicopter in that fashion.

And then the others I didn't quite get: a crane remotely operated via a string that fell over every time the string was actually pulled; a hook thrown across the bridge like a lasso that kept missing and getting entangled in the bridge itself; a slingshot that won "most spectacular failure" in the middle school group; and a laser guided crossbow? And I only got to see a handful of all the groups that went up anyway due to my volunteer duties in the other room; it would've been interesting to see what the high schoolers came up with.

Instead, I managed the handing out of t-shirts in a ~90 degree room thanks to the sun roof (perfect day to make the volunteer shirts black!...) and the entrance that got turned into an exit midway into the competition... which wasn't helped by the fact that the sign indicating that it was an exit was crafted from the side of a cardboard box and written over in permanent marker like a homeless person's sign. nor by the fact that other volunteers flaunting their "all access" passes/parents looking for lost children or phones or cameras or the other exit/people complaining about the wait at the actual entrance would just force their way through anyway. Sigh.

Anyway, the whole setup with the bridge seemed like a pretty straightforward challenge for grade-schoolers to address, which makes next year's challenge seem really out there in comparison. Apparently the kids'll have to come up with a device to glean information from a neighboring comet. I have no idea how they're going to test that. O_o

Home

*Dad makes insinuation that Mom can't count*
Dad: What high school did you graduate from?
Mom: The same one as you, so I guess that makes us both dummies.

Dad: What's the difference between a snowman and a snowwoman?
Me: There's a difference?
Dad: Snowballs.

Brother's friend: My dad is a special ed attorney. His job is to sue the school districts.

Cousin: Hey Ryan, doesn't [my baby's] leg look like a drumstick?
*minutes later*
Cousin: Aww, she looks like a drumstick!

A/M

Kinda went on a nostalgic binge watching anime openings on youtube today. And in the process, I started wondering if early exposure to anime predisposed me towards liking it more in the first place? I mean, I actually don't really like anime stereotypes and find them to be a turn off if I see them in a show, but I can still tolerate watching series that use them more than most people I know probably would. and I started wondering why I like anime/manga in the first place?

Well, looking back on things:

first anime: Pokemon technically, although most people have seen Pokemon at some point so I don't feel like this counts so much.

first anime that led me to downloading anime on the Internet: Sailor Moon in 4th grade, when it was playing on Cartoon Network's Toonami. mancard revocation aside (kinda embarrassed to admit, the last episode of first season made 9-year-old me cry) I was impatient because they weren't showing the rest of the second season on Toonami and wound up downloading all 200 episodes in Japanese with fansubs within a year. I probably should mention that dad got us our first desktop when I was in first grade, and the internet soon followed... which probably was a huge factor there.

The hard drive I had those episodes on crashed because of a virus soon after, and I haven't really watched an episode since... although apparently my memory is still good enough to recognize the audio of a clip from the fifth season playing on Johny's computer. He called me disgusting because of it. :P

Those first sites on the internet combined with whatever happened to be playing on TV at the time led to a bunch of other discoveries:

Elementary School:
Toonami: Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z, Ronin Warriors, Tenchi Muyo. and Reboot, which isn't an anime, but everyone I talk to has no idea what Reboot is so I am mentioning it here anyway because it deserves more attention.
Saturday morning cartoons: Digimon, Yu-gi-oh
Sailor Moon led to Card Captor Sakura via a group that was subbing both online.

Middle School:
getting impatient for Digimon 02 =>
Detective Conan anime on a site that had clips of both =>
the Detective Conan manga because I got impatient waiting for people to sub the anime =>
waiting for new Conan issues in the Shonen Sunday magazine =>
English Shonen Jump magazine =>
Naruto, Bleach, One Piece mangas

High School:
impatience waiting for the previous mangas in English =>
looking up these series online =>
Hunter x Hunter, Rurouni Kenshin, Monster, 20th Century Boys, and Berserk mangas online
and, the rest is history.

and on a tangential note, the Phoenix Wright game series got me into Haruhi Suzumiya, Higurashi, AND visual novels, but that's another story.

Considering how long I've been into anime/manga, I actually haven't watched/read that much, or at least compared to other people I know and some of the users I've seen online that got into it relatively recently. But I've gotten into enough for people to call me a Japanophile... and even read a number of visual novels, so I probably shouldn't be arguing back anyway.

I have to say, it gets interesting once you're able to recognize common tropes and themes between series and the extent to which some series will make references to and parody each other. Sort of like what intertextuality is to books and movies. Gintama is probably the best anime example of this. So it ends up being: the more I see/read, the more I want to see/read. Like a neverending cycle... although I could say this for just about anything I obsess over too - books, games, tv shows, movies. Anime and manga is just another outlet for me, I guess.

It seems like the driving factor that got me into both is impatience, though. Funny how that works.

sigh.

*goes grocery shopping for ingredients for dinner at Trader Joe's*
*drops groceries off at car and eats dinner at the Sweet Tomatoes next door because too tired and hungry to cook*

I also walked into work the other day carrying a tennis racket without realizing it, because the racket was sitting next to my backpack in the trunk and I wasn't really paying attention. I don't know where my mind is nowadays.