• Sunday, November 30th, 2008
This is the first Sunday I’ve been able to spend entirely at home it in the last two months or so and it makes a nice change. Managed to tie up a few loose ends with various things I’ve been doing in a relaxed fashion. I’m so looking forward to my Christmas holidays and actually having the chance to make some proper progress on the various projects I have going as well as catching up with some well needed rest.
Anime-wise I had been slipping a bit behind with the admittedly excessive amount of shows I’d been watching recently. Managed to catch back up on Akane-Iro ni Somaru Saka and Toradora in the last few days. The more I see of the latter the more the internet hate for the show seems unjustified. Also started watching Astro Fighter Sunred which amuses me in many of the same ways the reecently finished Detroit Metal City did. Hoping to catch back up with Ga-Rei Zero tonight.
Not had any time for gaming in the last few days although Eternal Poison for the PS2 has arrived along with what I have to say is the best artbook I’ve yet seen included with a game. The Christmas game release lists have been especially poor this year. The only release I care about in the next month is Persona 4 and I don’t intend to start that until after finishing Persona 3 FES properly. In other Shin Megami Tensei related gaming news I applied to beta test for the upcoming Shin Megami Tensei MMORPG a while back. Hope I get accepted in. No word yet on an english port of Devil Summoner: Raid? Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon (another Shin Megami Tensei spin-off) yet either. I have no idea how well the first game did, but I thoroughly enjoyed it personally.
Also had the latest Sunn 0))) live album, Domkirke, arrive a few days back. It’s an album that I suspect won’t appeal to many but may prove of interest to the adventurous. The genre of Sunn 0)))’s music is typically referred to as “drone doom” or “drone metal”. Heavy with plenty of guiter, but little in the way of traditional beat or rhythm.
With Domkirke Sunn 0))) were invited to perform in the 12-th century Norwegian Domkirke cathedral and added the cathedral’s pipe organ into their sound. I’d describe it, but it’s easier to quote the cathedral curator Nicholas Mollerhaug.
Our idea behind this concert was to commission a piece of music from Sunn O))) referring to the gothic Gregorian hymns of the late Middle Ages. Hymns that flourished at Bergen Cathedral in its earliest years: the age of the Great Famine and the Black Plague. The Gregorian hymns of this time reflected the despair, the terrors and darkness of the world. Musically the hymns consisted of long slow lines of unison melodies. The unisonity, the dark mood and the slow melodic development are also elements that can be traced back to Sunn O)))’s musical universe.
The album was only released on 180 gram vinyl across two LPs so needless to say my turntable has been getting a workout lately. These are the heaviest and most well made LPs I’ve yet seen. The same can be said of the cardboard sleeve.
Oh, and Malcolm. I don’t know if you read my blog or not, but you need to write that Oblivion review on your blog that you keep talking about.
Current Music: Amaral - Kamikaze - Gato Negro Dragon Rojo
• Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
I mentioned car problems in my last post and these have thankfully been resolved. My car while not entirely on it’s last legs is at the point it’s going to start costing money more regularly. Due to this I’m actively planning to replace it early next year. I’d do it now, but the thought of adding car shopping into the inevitably hectic December schedule really isn’t appealing. At least in January I’ll have some time off to dedicate to the task.
No idea what kind of car I’ll end up with yet. I’m not someone who dislikes cars per-se. You might even say I’m somewhat enthusiastic about them, and there’s certainly many exotic and expensive ones I’ve love to drive. That said the running and maintenance costs extinguish my enthusiasm for anything outside of the square in ways akin to putting out a lit match with a high pressure water blaster. So I’ll probably end up with something boring that will ideally be good at the banal a-to-b malarkey while remaining reasonably cheap to maintain.
Valkyria Chronicles for PS3 arrived a week or so back now and any time I’ve had spare for gaming has been spend in that direction. I’m really impressed by what they’ve done with this game. When I first saw video of the game running in trailers many months ago I thought it looked promising (especially artistically), but there was little sign of any gameplay and I was skeptical. It also was being put out by SEGA and even the most die-hard SEGA fans would have to admit the company has put out little worth playing since they killed the Dreamcast.
No, each time I saw more about Valkyria Chronicles the more I could see it was something I wanted to play…no HAD to play. At that point buying it was not an option, it was a necessity. This contrasts with my experience of Mirror’s Edge where each new bit of information served to put me progessively more off the game, but I digress.Valkyria Chronicles is not without it’s flaws, but those that are there pale compared to the rest of the experience. I think I’d go as far as saying it’s the best 2008 game I’ve played so far. Still a few weeks for something to edge it out though. *is optimistic*
As a final note I have to take an obligatory swipe at the Linux Clustering and Global File System suites. You wouldn’t think when you’re spending tens of thousands on severs and SANs full of more hard drives than you’d feasibly count on your fingers that you’d have any trouble sharing a few files between cluster nodes. Why is the documentaton for these tools so bad and why is the diagnostic output so archaic? We’re not talking your garden-variety open source here where they could accuse people of not being willing to pay. RedHat want to charge thousands of dollars for the priveledge of even enabling these features. Not impressed.
Current Music: Get Wild -DX Remix- - Nami Tamaki - Get Wild (single)
• Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
The last few days haven’t been especially great for me. To some degree it’s just too much to do but so little time. I also have had some unexpected costs rear their head (car, etc) which have clawed back all of the cash I mentioned was happily accumulating in my last post. I can’t complain too much, but my financial sixth-sense is telling me to minimize costs now lest the Christmas season require significant money micro-management.
Gaming-wise I’m mostly killing time until my copy of Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3 shows up. I didn’t want to miss out on the download-able content and it was substantially cheaper so I ordered from overseas, but the downside of course is that this leaves me waiting now. I’m still playing Persona 3 FES. I could have finished it ages back, but I’ve been trying to play it in the right way to max all the social links. Not far to go at this point, and it’s a special game to hold my interest for so long. After that I’ve still got Persona 3 FES’ bonus “The Answer” arc to play. Fallout 3 can sit on the shelf until it has a patch or two under it’s belt. I’ve also got the enhanced edition patches for the Witcher now so should finish that sometime. This should all work out well as there’s no games on the November or December release lists that interest me.
I’ve been watching a lot of anime lately. A lot from the current season in Japan. There are some shows I’m still undecided on, but overall I think I’ve enjoyed what’s come out this year (in terms of the Japanese and US markets) more than I have the last few years. I’m not about to claim it’s all A-grade stuff or that 2008 has been the best year for anime, but it’s certainly had more shows that resonate with my personal tastes…or perhaps even just shows that have been the right thing at the right time for whatever mood I was in at the time.
My enjoyment of this year’s shows has probably been reflected in me having purchased more Japanese Region 2 DVDs this year than in previous years. These DVDs have no English audio track or subtitles of course, but I find some shows the Japanese audio track alone is fine and in others I’m re-burning them myself to insert subtitle tracks. Thanks to my new ability to play/rip Blu-ray discs from any region too I’m going to do some tests to see how easy it’ll be to re-burn a Code Geass R2 Blu-ray with English subtitles. Personal use only of course, I’m not about to start dabbling in the black market selling BD-Rs out of a car boot. I’d hope that subbing on Blu-rays will prove a less painful process than doing so on DVD can be at times.
Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Sunday Afternoon - Rachael Yamagata - Elephants...Teeth Sinking Into Heart
• Thursday, November 13th, 2008
I know it’s been ages since I posted something here. Partly because I wanted to upgrade my Wordpress install first which I hadn’t been looking forward to. It actually went much smoother than I was expecting though so I can’t complain. I had actually started a few drafts posts over the last 2-3 months, but never got around to finishing them off. In summary, I was sick a lot in August, had eye problems in September (resulting in anti-histamines/new glasses/contacts) and was hit hard with pre-orders/exchange rate drops in October. Been doing all the usual stuff in between like gaming, movies, music, anime and heading to the Armageddon expo. This month to date has mostly been very busy and my free time has tended to go on gaming with a bit of video encoding on the side. Nice to see the bank account numbers going up again this month as I had little on pre-order for November.
I mentioned back in June about a computer upgrade I was looking at and how I was holding out for the release of Intel’s LGA 1366 platform. Funnily enough these parts started showing up on local stores lists in the last few days. I’m a little disappointed with the early Core i7 benchmarks. It’s faster than the Core 2 line sure, but in many cases it’s not enough so that it’s worth caring about. This appears to be because they cut back on cache memory with the design which is IMHO always a dumb idea.
Looking at what I actually use Windows/Linux PCs for though (games and video encoding) it still appears to be worth the jump. The benchmarks for x264 video encoding especially (something I’m using more and more) are much faster on the Core i7 CPUs and given they are all quad cores it will be a huge speed boost from my current dual core Opteron.
I picked up the first part of my new PC late last week anyway. A LG Blu-ray burner. It’s not really that I want to burn Blu-ray media just yet, but the drivers are fairly cheap now and it seemed pointless to buy a Blu-ray reader combo drive only to pay money on a burner later a few months down the track. I’m going to go with the Intel Core i7 920 CPU (The others just aren’t worth the money for so little speed gain) and a nice quiet Zalman ZM850 power supply. I’m still undecided on the case, motherboard and RAM although for the case I’m leaning towards one of the more basic Lian li designs mainly because everything else is either huge, ugly or overpriced. With the Core i7 RAM works best in triple channel configuration but looking at the benchmarks higher clocked DDR3 RAM provides little gain so I’ll probably just go with something basic and reliable. Other parts will just be taken from my current PC.
I know it’s a kind of dull post for my first in ages, but I think I’ll just leave it here for now. I don’t want to ramble on too much and it gives me an excuse to write more posts later anyway.
Current Music: Trailer 5 - Mono & World\'s End Girlfriend - Palmless Prayer/Mass Murder Refrain
