There’s a new season coming soon of Slayers, my favorite anime created by Hajime Kanzaka. Slayers has thus far spanned three awesome seasons and has several side stories compiled as standalone episodes. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in anime or looking to try something different. As to when it’ll be available in outside of Japan (or as fansubs)? Sore wa himitsu desu!
The greatest TV show I’ve ever seen, Babylon 5, is now starting to be made available for free online through Warner Brother’s new Hulu.com service. Time for everyone to catch up on all my obscure quotes :-D
The best new TV show of the 2007/8 season, Chuck, will be back for two more episodes in late January. While the show was given the go-ahead to make the remaining episodes to fill out the full 22-episode season, due to the writers strike its actual future is unknown. Interestingly the last aired episode, “Chuck vs The Crown Vic”, felt like it could have been left as the end of the series due to how it returned the show to the status-quo from earlier in the series, but I’m definitely glad to see more coming. Yay!
(Originally started in December 2006)
My wife and I don’t watch much TV, primarily because we cancelled our TV cable subscription several years ago. While we are both fans of science fiction shows there simple was too much junk on aside from two or three shows to spend upwards of $60 each month, and we also wanted to move towards more constructive ways of spending our time. However, there are still those one or two shows we really enjoy and wish to keep up with, without having to wait a year or more for the episodes to be released on DVD. Enter what is currently IMHO the best alternative solution to our predicament - iTunes!
In 2005 (IIRC) Microsoft released a media initiative called Plays For Sure along with a number of both device manufacturers and online music stores. The idea was that you would be able to buy any number of devices from different companies, then buy music from different stores and be sure the music would work with the player. Well, it seems Microsoft has had enough of this idealistic “partnership” or “play nice for the consumers” thing and is going back to their old practice of locking everyone out: their new Zune players are incompatible with music bought for the old stores and the old players will not be compatible with music from the new Zune store. Yeah, that’s why people still buy Microsoft products / services, they like having to re-buy everything every two years. Good on you, MSFT!
Now, lets compare that to Apple’s iPod and iTunes Store: every single iPod sold since the beginning is still able to play music from the store today, and every new iPod is still able to play music bought from the store on day 1. Yes, it is vendor lock-in, but at least they tend not to give their customers the shaft quite as often. And they have BSG ;-)
Over the past several weeks Jen and I have been playing a came called Luxor after being introduced to it by Jen’s sister. Its a really fun puzzle game where you have to match up spheres before they reach your temple.. blah blah. It starts off pretty slow and an average computer user (someone who’s pretty good with the mouse) could get fairly far with it with a little patience. Some of the later levels, however, are a real pain, some of them I had to re-do six or eight times, but in the end I manage to finish it, with Jen’s help. Oddly enough I kinda found the very last level easier than one or two of the others, but between good luck, good timing and Jen calling “green, left” at appropriate times, I was able to get through it on my third try. Yeehaw!