About quarter past ten last night, it was a clear sky with hard bright stars, and a coppery fat waning half moon just rising. Going to bed, Penny the Burmese cat snuggled down under the covers between us, curled up, and purred very loudly.
Sunlight on branches
Morning dawned with a very hard frost, but very bright and clear.
Once sitting, now walking.
The ponds at work were frozen over too, except where the fountains had been churning the water.
[Now playing - Planet Rock]
Yesterday it was sunny, if breezy, comfortable enough to walk around town with T-shirt and sandals, amongst all the odd folk dressing by the calendar.
Saw the 37 hour old moon, a thin paring of light in the twilight sky, conjunct with Venus, at 5pm (new moon JAN. 19 4h01 UTC)
I mowed the lawn for the first time this year; the strong winds having dried the grass that their mildness has been encouraging to grow.
Admittedly, I would have done it a couple of weeks back, if it hadn't been so wet; but this is just crazy.
The weeds think it's spring already, too.
Everyone's talking about the new phone thing from Apple — whatever it ends up being called after Cisco's trademark suit.
What nobody has yet mused on that I've seen is whether the UK launch will see it co-branded with Orange.
Driving to work this morning, the sun was rising behind me and the moon, full hours before, setting in the pale light ahead of me.
And a double-decker school bus was stuck behind a horse for quite a while, with me a few cars behind that.
Another anime by Abe, also responsible for Serial Experiments Lain
After a dream of falling, a girl wakes from a cocoon, amongst a community of children and young women with wings and halos; which she soon acquires.
The Haibane, the winged folk, are outsiders in a community that is a small town, in a walled hinterland. Effectively, no-one leaves; except that Haibane depart as mysteriously as they arrive.
A slowly told tale of redemption. But not of the person you first expect.
Not a life-changing anime, but one I'm glad to have seen.
Darker than the first season, with depraved goth-loli assassins, chainsaw wielding cleaners, and conflicted loyalties in a return visit to Japan. And thus bloodier too.
None of these people are nice, and we are shown it.
Still a rocking good series.
This was billed as a real weepie, and good with it. So I even ordered it from the States (only to find an R2 release was in the works). And I was prepared to forgive the sketchy animation style.
Alas, this series fails and fails hard. In trying to be tragic, it falls heavily into melodrama, and ham overacting. The subtlety of emotion is akin to that of a flung house brick, so after a few episodes I was sitting there, numbly waiting for something really heart-rending.
Alas, while my eyes might have moistened a bit during the first few episodes, by the time we came to the tragic death of a close friend towards the end, I was thinking "Just get on with it.", and it continued to over-egg the pudding all the way to the very end.
Nowhere near as good as the buzz suggested.
Slice of life at a Catholic girl's high-school, centred on the doings of the student council, with the highest drama being about matters of etiquette, in the main — the girl who seems to be dating too many different men (who turn out to be her brothers); or the one who is found to have a set of Buddhist prayer beads, rather than a rosary (like fibbing to get into a church school here). No magic, no martial arts, no fan-service, save the occasional shoulder or ankle, or sisterly hug.
In contrast with the hyper-kinetic action of other titles, this is quite calm, and about the people, and, in the second series, the matters of succession, as the third-years graduate, and everyone else moves up one place in the council hierarchy.
This is definitely a series that deserves its high reputation. It's also one that on the face of it doesn't sound like my sort of thing at all, but just sort of clicked.
Finally mopped this one up, after having d/ld it a while back. Having chosen the more active Miyuki fansub, I did have to suffer appalling literal romanization, like "Ririsu" and "Jiru" for Lilith and Jill.
Generally a harmless piece of ecchi, if a little incoherent given the world-book hopping background, but what the hey, it has some bad-ass sword fighting, too. And knowing the dud ending in advance helps it from being too much of a let-down.
Perfectly fine for whiling away a wet winter evening.
One of the autumn's titles that didn't get much attention, perhaps because of the unusual animation style, with a lot of rotoscoping for backgrounds, and an almost European feel to the character design, except in occasional bursts of nigh standard anime look in the intro vignettes to most episodes.
The basic premise is that there are man-eating monsters who usually live concealed in human form; and there is a clandestine society of hunters who act to keep society at large free from predation. The heir to the society falls for a girl — but you guessed it, she's a Flesh Eater. Cue, one would think, Romeo and Juliet with martial arts mayhem. But no.
If there is anything that this builds on, it is Nietzsche's line about being wary of fighting monsters, lest one becomes one as well. Factions splinter, divisions blur, and things start falling apart as the intermittently happy couple try to stay ahead of pursuit. And by falling apart, I mean descending into serious madness, of one of the most messed up and depraved villains gets close to succeeding in dragging the whole world down with him.
Definitely 18-rating stuff, but definitely one of the more original titles of 2006. It's not every day your hero fights to freedom while bound naked (but for handy censoring blur) to a chair.
Much like n molesworth, I've been doing a lot of "did 0" and "mucked about". A chance to rest has been good, especially after starting the holidays with a filthy drive in fog to go to pay for the newly installed carpet in my den, and continued discomfort from the tooth that's been playing up these last couple of months. At least that has settled down a bit now, even if it doesn't yet feel ready for prime-time when it comes to chewing.
I now have a nicely fitted out and de-cluttered den, sufficiently de-cluttered that Karen can come in in her wheelchair and watch stuff with me; and we've even managed to clear and sort the spare room enough that that's accessible and the bed could be used. Admittedly there's still stuff to sort, and a lot of jumble waiting a chance to offload, but there is progress.
And all the usual seasonal things happened, the dinner with college friends on Sunday, and this year, none of the trauma we had last year.
Hard frost, and lots of it today. Hard work scraping the wind-screen to get a peep-hole, while running the engine; and the edge of the passenger side had only just about defrosted by the time I got to work. This will have put a stop to the still busily flowering fuschias in the font garden.
Plenty of wild-life crossing the road on the way home; a hare on the bridge over the new dualling of the A428, and a muntjac on the descent into Bourne.
The last six weeks have gone roughly : toothache, fever, toothache, cold, tooth with abcess, root canal work part 1 of 3. Not fun. Not much enthusiasm to blog either. Just retardedness on ephemeral chat boards.
[Now playing - Planet Rock]
Posts
All Comments
Previous instalments at Life before Blogging.
Forum Administrator : EvaGeeks.org — An Evangelion Fan Community
Copyright © Steve Gilham, 2003-2013
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Code snippets released under the WTFPL
