I’ve been meaning to post something here for a while, but keep getting side tracked with other things. I really think I need to organise my time better. At some level I’m actively opposed to organisation of time, but it’s preferable to some of the alternatives.

Got back from Wellington early last week. Had a great time while I was there as usually seems to be the case. The annual Wellington Armageddon expo seems to be in downsize mode with less and less interesting content each time, but that’s not really why I go anyway. It was great to catch up with friends and family and enjoy the city. Every time I visit Auckland or Wellington I’m constantly left wondering how I’ve managed to live so long in what feels to me like parochial backwoods towns for the past 15 or so years. I’m not claiming Auckland or Wellington are the definitions of a metropolis by any means, but they seem to be as close as New Zealand gets (Yes, I have visited Christchurch and Dunedin). Hamilton has been home in recent years and isn’t exactly a small town these days, but it still still retains a small town mentality which I’ve never been able to adjust to. It’s really just not me, and I do wonder how long I’ll keep it up. Of course all of my immediate family is here these days which complicates things.

My presence in Wellington happened to coincidentally coincide with the Hamilton 400 V8 race back at home. In many regards it appears to have been a convenient turn of events. The road I live on is attached to the circuit a few hundred meters away from my house. I got back after driving for many hours to find the road still closed. It remained this way until Thursday afternoon. We’d been told by the council it would be open again by 6AM Monday so it was a surprise, but given how much of a damn daily disruption this race has been to me for the past month or more it really seemed par for the course. Maybe next year they’ll actually employ people who actually have something resembling brain tissue to arrange it?

It’s decidedly difficult to describe what the race preparation has been like without using words like “debacle”, “fiasco” or “snafu”. Oddly enough I’m saying this as a casual motorsport fan. I’m certainly more of a fan than the those making the usual “Oh I watch Bathurst.” comment. I may not have minded so much if it was a proper race with half decent cars rather than a lame duck Ford/Holden handicap race where all the viewers are supposed to pretend that the cars of each camp are somehow different in ways other than the body-kit. I’ll stop complaining as long as they start to move the damn concrete blocks and wire fencing allowing the streets to be less easy compared with Alcatraz or Birkenau.

For numerous reasons I’ve been planning to permanently drop buying Madman’s anime DVDs and today started putting this into action. On the whole I’ve been favouring high def titles in general over the past 6 months or so and anime had really represented the only remaining DVD purchases I’ve been making. Of course anime has only started trickling out on Blu-ray at this point, but until the pace picks up the remainder of the DVDs I buy will be region 1 US titles (thinkpak collections where possible). For many years I’ve supported the local industry at what I’d estimate to be a significant cost to myself, but at this point I’m seeing little worth supporting in the AUS/NZ DVD industry as a whole and certainly no reason why I should subsidise them. I’m especially sick of the shitty encodes Madman feels comfortable in foisting on us. I had been planning to finish off any series’ I had going, but as it turns out I recently have by-and-large. School Rumble is the only remaining Region 4 show I’m collecting with discs outstanding. That’ll be finished soon enough, and today I put in the first significant R1 orders I have in a quite a long time. So much better value for money.