Manwhores, Art, and Japanese Practice: Summer Time and the Spring Anime Season

The ladies by the pool and beach are an excellent indication of what season it is…

Ah… Three weeks removed from my 6th semester of college, I’m finally ready to put some things down on this site once again. There are some reviews (Spice and Wolf, Shigofumi, Hatenkou Yugi, True Tears, Clannad) still left on the draft table, and between the three of us, we’ll have to discuss whether or not any of those will be worth presenting at this point. But the winter season is so 7 weeks ago, right? So let’s put that aside and start talking about Spring 2008.

Random Thoughts - a crunchy roll, a virtual girlfriend, a virtual oscar, etc…

“I’m back… muhahahahahahaha…”

Hello everyone. I apologize for my rather lengthy disappearance from blogging. I once again blame this mostly on work (right now we’re understaffed on engineers so they basically tossed the entry-level engineer into the deep end and said “swim”). I’m actually quite happy that there was some content on this site while I was away especially since I’m not the only one pressed for time. UPenn is closing on their finals so bro (chigaimasu) is pretty swamped for the next few weeks. As for sis (kame-chan), I’ll explain her situation a bit later.

Instead of the usual multi-page long theses I tend to write here, I’m just going to blurt out the random thoughts in my head today. It’s not because I have nothing to say (there’s about 15+ drafts between all the writers sitting on the dashboard). I just don’t have the time this week to really analyze stuff like I normally do. So here’s the random bits of stuff floating about in my head today.

A quick reflection on life and anime

Being a psuedo-student of Catholic theology back in college (I say psuedo-student because perusing a minor undergraduate concentration doesn’t make you a full student), one of courses I decided to take senior year was a course on “Death and Dying”. The course was taught by the theology department chair and he certainly expected plenty from us in the course. What I liked about the class was the comprehensive nature of the course content. We covered things like the psychology of the death and the study of death in a comparative religion aspect. And while we did end up covering death in a Christian context, it was the comprehensive nature of the course that kept me interested. It was one of the few courses outside my major where I still remember most of the concepts off the top of my head. Unfortunately, it was also during that semester where I learned the most about death outside of class.

Narutards going too far.

Who would’ve thought that this was one deadly weapon?

As I was trying to waste time over the weekend, I happened to pass across a news clip on youtube. It was about a 10 year old dying from being buried in a sandbox. My first thought that came to mind was, “How did this happen?” Well, I watched the clip and I was stunned. The friends of the 10 year old ended up burying him because they were pretending to be Gaara from Naruto. The friends didn’t know the child was suffocating until they finally dug him out. The child was hospitalized for 2 days but ended up dying on Monday March 10, 2008. Here’s the news clip if you want to watch it.

Quick Thoughts: A big boom with lots of stardust…

That has overcompensation written all over it…

A few days ago, the United States Navy was able to shoot down a disabled satellite using a missile fired from naval destroyer off the coast of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. USS Lake Erie fired one re-programmed Standard Missile 3 normally used for ballistic missile defense towards the disabled satellite. The main target, the satellite’s near-full fuel tank of hydrazine, was assumed to be able to re-enter the earth in one piece and was deemed a health hazard if it landed in a populated area. The SM-3 made contact with the satellite and the resulting explosion is assumed to have destroyed most of the satellite including its fuel and tank. The resulting debris is expected to burn up upon re-entry to earth’s atmosphere and fall relatively harmlessly into the ocean.

So why am I talking about this? Well, part of it is because I’m an engineer along with my dad and bro so this kind of nerdy stuff really interests me. But a good most of it is because I work in this field and along with the satisfaction of being at least somewhat involved with a successful test of the system, I can appreciate the technical work involved into executing such a complex mission. However, I kinda wish that they didn’t have to shoot it down in the first place since almost all of it comes from the taxpayers’ dollars (including mine). Still, the office buzzing about more than normal last week was quite a nice change of pace.