Moe Computing Research Center (MCRC) - Tsundere Computer Development

If all of the science and engineering research assistants look as cute as Otome, then everyone would be doing research and we’d have military grade combat mecha by now (or we’d get no work done). Sigh. Such is the unfortunate state of being an engineering and science nerd.

Recently at work, my project has entered another stage of testing. What made this development version interesting was some of the new integration components. Testing of some of these new components requires cooperation with other software programs within the system. This is fine for most systems. But when dealing with the redundancy requirements for a military grade system, both the system and software engineers have to pay special attention to the various states of each computer component in the system. Knowing the possible conditions of the computer component and its connected counterparts makes diagnosing problems in the system easier.

My mind sorta stayed in that mindset in the past few weeks and when I read tjhan’s attempt at tsundere mathematical modeling. After looking at one of the best math graphs I’ve ever seen, one idea popped into my head: I can model the same thing using my short professional career as a systems engineer. Designing the tsundere computer system is what I will discuss today.

With a touch of class.. Sakura Sunday with the JASGP

5 cm per second got’s nothing on real life.

If you’re a regular to Anime Academy (And if so, many thanks for supporting us!), then you should know that we love to take ourselves outside the boundaries of anime. So when the annual Subaru Cherry Blossom Festival, organized by Japanese American Society of Greater Philadelphia (JASGP), with the highlight Sakura Sunday event rolling in last Sunday, my excitement was palpable (when I wasn’t bogged down with this, that, and the other thing for that matter anyway). Even if peanut (kame) and bro-ham choosing not to come down to check it out as well, I wasn’t going to let that rain on my festival (even if it was forecasted to, literally, rain on the festival). Anyway, I’m back, with pictures (mega thanks to my friend Greg for letting me borrow his camera), ready to talk about the culture behind the subculture. Let’s start!

On the Sakura Fatalism in Five Centimeters per Second

More reminders of work… data on the computer screen, books all over the desk and the good ol’ morning coffee. The one thing that stands out in this scene: The lucky boy has a window desk! I want a window desk. Stupid cubicle walls.

So I finally got a DVD copy of Five Centimeters per Second. I saw it in my local Best Buy coming home from work and I thought “What the heck, I’ll buy it now.” (I’ve been waiting until RightStuf finally restocks and ships my order which still hasn’t happened yet.) This past Wednesday night, I watched with sis while cleaning up the kitchen (in English dub because I can’t multitask very well while watching subtitles). Anyway, I had seen the first part on fansub and now I’ve finally saw the whole thing.

The speed of falling in love

I’ll start off by saying the same thing everyone else has said about the movie: “ZOMG THIS MOVIE IS SO BLEEPING BEAUTIFUL!” On a more serious note, the visuals are truly stunning. The backgrounds are just so lush with detail and some of the lighting effects are brilliant. There are times when there are no characters drawn on the screen where the scene is so detailed that it may easily be mistaken for a real life location. I’m actually quite happy that I waited until the R1 DVD came out (because watching in 56” rear projection awesomeness is worth the release wait). Five Centimeters certainly lives up the billing as one of anime’s visual masterpieces.

I have one small beef with the movie: In the end, I feel like I could not attach myself too much to Takaki. Yeah, I did feel bad for him and the movie as a whole does a solid job emphasizing moments of personal emotion. However, the movie could have done more to construct a foundation for this released emotion.

The Mystique of Kyonko

“All I wanna know is, sexy can I.
Sexy can I, hit it from the front,
then I hit it from the back.
know you like it like that…
…It’s a kodak moment, let me go and get my camera
All I wanna know is, sexy can I.”

Over at The Animanachronism, there was an interesting post on the theology of Haruhi Suzumiya. And even with the work being exhausting (something I’ll explain on another day), I still managed to get sucked into a long yet interesting discussion about nature of Haruhi’s deity. I’ve burned out all my thoughts on it so I’m not going to rehash too much here. If you are interested in that kind of stuff, I suggest taking a look at the comments from that post.

Among the various ideas that were thrown about, at least one conclusion sorta came out: Haruhi fandom has grown in to a fairly large idolatry. And in this case, while the fandom has pushed some random ideas to go down the pipe, I’m acually very interested in this recent fanfiction suggestion…

What started that theology post was sudden appearance of Haruhi Suzumiya fanfiction about an alternate universe with the entire cast as a different gender. This new fanfiction takes on many different shapes and forms as fans seem to find new ways of twisting the original material for this purpose. So much so that there has been a sudden rise in the popularity of this fan idea as seen by the constantly updated Animesuki thread. Initially, I commented on the Haruhi theology post without having seen any of the fanfiction. Now that I have a few pictures and read few plot threads on this new fanfiction, I must say to my surprise that Kyonko is actually… quite cute…

On Bandai Visual USA and the destruction of the anime middle class!?

They made my Koyori cry… How dare they…

On Bandai Visual USA

Last Monday, Bandai Visual USA made headlines on various anime news sites and blogs when their website included information about a region 1 DVD release of the animated television series, sola. Later, they confirmed the rumors making the pickup of the title official and they defined some details on the DVD releases. The first of five volumes will be available June 10th with each volume to be sold for $49.99 and containing 3 episodes each.

So when I first heard this story on Monday, I had to actually refrain from blogging about this initially because I was quite pissed off that they picked up another title I liked. That post would’ve contained alot of expletives deleted which would’ve gone against my mantra of posting relevant thought-provoking articles (allegedly). Now that a few days have passed and I’ve cooled off a bit, I can go back and attempt an objective well-defined blog post… maybe.