A Pictorial Recording of Listening Habits from September and October

Subtitle: I never post to this blog but this seemed like a decent attempt to pretend it is still alive

September

October

Listening to: His Hero is Gone - The End Result Of 11 Days In The Mental Hospital (Fifteen Counts of Arson, 1996)

Nichijou Episode 6

Well its been about 8 weeks since I've watched this show. For six weeks this was due to being busy, and for the other two it was due to no longer being busy and hence being extremely lazy. So lazy that watching movies, playing games and even installing media player classic home cinema on my computer were not worth the effort. Easier to just lay in bed / on the couch and listen to whatever I find in itunes / watch whatever I find on TV first.

But anyway, I'm now no longer that lazy (although still too lazy to care about grammar and hence avoid starting sentences with but or placing long chains of clauses in brackets) and so Nichijou is on again. Episode 13 is subbed already by coal girls as I am writing this which probably means Japan is actually up to either ep14 or 15 - I haven't been bothered to check, mainly because I only have 10 episodes and am running low on downloads atm especially considering my entire family (including myself) is on holidays this week.

So anyway, Episode 6. I quite enjoyed this episode, although I think my enjoyment was aided by the fact that I haven't watched the show for a while. At the risk of sounding negative, I have to declare that this episode seemed a little more-of-the-same-ish in terms of humour, but I think every SoL/Comedy is like that really, even the greats like Azumanga daioh (cough I still haven't watched the last few eps of this even though I own the DVD. Or read the manga which I own. Actually what am I doing writing this blog now when there is Azu to be enjoyed?).

To be more specific, I think this is the episode where (bearing in mind that this is a 26 episode season) the effect of the show's unique quirks and characters has started to wear off. The show will still be good if it just maintains the status-quo, but if it wishes to be great, new ideas will be needed every few episodes. That isn't to say that patches of same-ish-ness aren't acceptable - I can't think of a television show (Anime or RL) with more than 3 or 4 episodes that remained as good as its premier throughout its air time.

I won't really go through each scene, because there were two I really liked much more than anything else, and the fact that uploads contribute towards my download limit notwithstanding, I'd like to spam the hell out of screencaps for these scenes.


The star of this episode was the principal. His character has popped in and out of various episodes, but it wasn't until now that he got his moment in the spotlight. What a moment it was too.

Double Creep

If you look closely, he's actually spewing blood. That's pretty damn hardcore violence for Nichijou.

Plan B

Determination, Resolve, Hope for third time lucky... If you're wondering, Plan B ended in much the same way as Plan A.

OMG KOUCHOU JUST GERMAN SUPLEXED A DEER. No I don't know anything about wrestling, I had to spend ages on wikipedia and google image search just to find out what this move was called. Who knew there were SO MANY TYPES OF SUPLEX

RL equivalent. Except that you have to imagine the dude in red is a deer. And that the dude in blue is a school principal.

Scene 2, now with 30% more redundant screenshots. Camping is never fun and I'm glad that Nichijou agrees :p So basically they cook, they spill, and no matter how hard they try to make the camping trip seem worthwhile, they only manage to make things worse :p The construction of this scene was nothing novel, the sequencing was predictable, and the reactions were standard Nichijou, and yet it was just so adorably hilarious.

BEST.

COVER UP/PANIC/TROLL WALK/SCUTTLE/FUMBLE/OSHI~/CRAB IMITATION

EVER.

Seriously though Yukko, where were you going to go with this one `_^ ?

Tokoroten. Yeah I didn't know what it was either...

Looks pretty sensational though, what are they complaining about.

Mai to the rescue, surely there'll be no trolling. Mai to the rescue, surely there'll be no trolling. Mai to the rescue, surely there'll be no tro~... oh the conclusion; it's so gloriously inevitable.

Release, aka Liftoff.

You can really see the speed when you realise that the fish hasn't moved in the last 3 shots :p

If I could win at camping as well as Mai, i.e. pro fishing skills + a fresh quater pounder meal, I might enjoy it too

Nichijou. Reaching new levels of violence, kawaiity and repulsiveness with every epsiode.

First it was my border softness, but now you take my colour depth as well?

Nichijou. Bringing you domestic revolutions for better living, three Japanese sentences at a time.

Listening To: Nahvalr - There Isn't Anything (Nahvalr, 2008)

New Beginnings

Even for a blog that no-one ever is supposed to read, this is a post that, really, no-one should ever read.

Well exams are over, during which period my computer was slowly dying on me. I had had the one installation of windows XP ever since I bought the computer a little over 5 years ago. Over that time I have used it almost every day, shut it down almost every night, filled it with a ridiculous amount of crap, caused it to fall ill (and helped it to recover from) two serious viruses, accumulated around 550 programs and customised the hell out of everything. Eventually it took twenty minutes to start up, which in recent weeks became a longer period of time than the average time it would run for before crashing.

Long story short, it was time to upgrade. But me being me, I couldn't just buy a new computer. Far to clever (read poor, stingy, stubborn etc.) for that. Instead I simply spent $100 on a new 1TB hard drive, which took me a whole day to install, mainly because my motherboard has 3 bays for 3.5inch drives, but only two of them have rails (which are required to lock the drives in place - and I already have 2 drives). So I found a great little computer store which sold me a metal encasing to covnert one of my 5.25inch bays into a 3.5inch bay, but finding this store, driving there, and installing the drive + bay took a while. Plus after I was done it took me three boots + opening of the case to figure out I hadn't connected the power to the drive. Silly me.

Anyway I decided to install windows 7 on this drive, and it took me a further day and a half to get it, essentially, to behave like my old XP. By that I mean, I wanted it to feel comfortable again, like I hadn't lost five years worth of computing habits. This involved re-installing the most crucial programs out of the 550, and ensuring many others which I'm still running from the old drive were operable (to avoid turning the new drive into the same disaster in one/fifth the time). Most importantly though, it also involved the physical appearance and behaviour of the OS.

I used to have an entirely lucky star theme when I was running XP, found somewhere on the internets, made by some kind anon (or perhaps a non-anon). Anyway my favourite part of it was the chocolate cornet start button, so I replaced this first of all - which involved actually creating a start orb - a fun and educational process requiring an understanding of alpha channels. I also managed to find the same cursor set that the LS theme used, which was not a lucky star set (although they do exist), but a sleek-yet-soft bank called 'comic blue' (which is quite popular among deviantards). I find actual character based sets, while ridiculously kawaii, kind of impractical :p. Windows 7 does its own paper cycling now, so I didn't have to install an app for that, but I switched from my LS wallpaper folder to my K-On! folder. In turn, chrome, which used to have a K-On! theme, now has an awesome nichijou theme that the guy at randomnessthing.com made. I also installed a few customization things from Stardock including 'fences' which allows you to organise your desktop icons, 'desktopX' which can create and apply whole themes (I couldn't find a decent one and I cbf making one myself, so I just set some colours and dealt with aero - aero is ok because its kind of inoffensive and doesn't reek of that institutionalised microsoft feeling, which was the original reason I started customising because it started to make me needlessly morose), 'objectdock' which adds a cool apple-like quick access menu to the bottom of your pc (it chugs through cpu resources but only while mousing over it - I don't think its optimized to make use of your graphics software in quite the same way that windows GUI elements are, but hey, I'm guessing microsoft have a few more resources at their disposal than startdock, and plus 'objectdock' is completely free) and 'cursorFX' which I used to change the cursors.

EDIT:
The last thing I changed was the sounds. Previously I had the Japanese windows 7 sound pack featuring Nanami Madobe, and Lucky Star bgm for shurtdown/startup/long on/off, but I thought it might be time for something different. Startup and Shutdown feature The introduction to Silky Heart and Vanilla Salt, respectively, while the log on/off themes are the introduction and ending to nano desu, respectively. The 'error/alert' tones like asterisk etc. are all taken from the little 'uguu~' soundbites on the Kanon visual memories CD. To break with the Hocchan trend, the min/max/restore up/down sounds are all taken from voice demos from the acting in the magnificent OVA Tamayura (soon to be a series, ogod please air when I have no work to do). Finally, device connect and device disconnect are taken from the very first and very last few seconds of an album by Hazel Nuts Chocolate. They are totally out of context, but ridiculously ridiculous.

Now that all is said and done, the results are shown below:

the desktop. All the backgrounds are this good, ie. /w/, watashi wa anata o aishite, ie. weeabo as way of saying I <3 u in as formal and stilted language as possible because its directly from google translate since you know the words but not the grammars but then you romanise it, effective trampling all over the formality, because you can't handle runes.

chromes, my favourite program. Also, nippaaaaaaaah!

XP, doin it the old way

Moe. Not Even Once. This....may have been...at....well not at home.... :p That's where they say people are using these days anyway @_O. EDIT: new and improved censored image for less v& & b&

Listening to: Converge - Lonewolves (No Heroes)
EDIT: Listening to: Converge - Hell to Pay (Jane Doe), and my new sound theme :D

Comparisons

So I've had this folder in my computer for a while called 'comparisons' with about 15 images. Today, the idea behind it ran wild in me and it has expanded to 50, allowing me to waste lots of time in the best possible way on the internet. So what is this folder? Well its about winning, but not Charlie Sheen style. Essentially, once you have seen the light, you realise that there are two ways of doing things - the right way, and the terribly wrong way. Unfortunately, only certain people are gifted enough to do things the right way, but even those who can't and have come to know this painful fact nevertheless try. This is a gallery of failures, both on the part of the blissfully ignorant and the sorrowfully learned, followed by the victors showing how it is done. (the images come in a series of loser/winner pairs)

A brief disclaimer before we commence; apart from the fact that no-one ever reads this blog and even if they did the likelihood of coincidence is incredibly minor, should one see an image in their likeness here, know that this post is merely in jest and that I acknowledge winning is not everything - one can still have fun by trying ;)

Ok so a few miscellaneous ones to warm up:

Doin it rong

Doin it rite

Trying to beat them at their own game = doin it rong

doin i~ ..... eh.

here you think they might be doin it rite...

...but then you see that they weren't

Now we're into trying to win part one:

valiant but failed effort to do it rite

masterclass in doin it rite

ok you're trying to do it rong here i swear

riter, but not the ritest i've ever seen

keeping it simple can still mean doin it rong

"i got this".

doin it rong, celebrity megane version

fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Segue into nekos:

doin it rong, but perhaps for the sentimental lolz

neko koneko does it rite

 Sports:

you probably aren't even aware of rite and rong, so I can't blame you for this one...

...but learn by example, this is how to do it rite

 Technology:

anon does it rong...

...whereas this guy never posts, but does it rite

this exemplifies rong

hello kitty goes in every field = full marks

 Transport - for all the non-believers, this is a really good example free from any arguments about selecting unrepresentative individuals to make a point about a group.

doin it, ..., somehow rong

ok this is actually a train hijack by ikea for advertising their furniture , but the idea is so cool that its doin it rite

i dont even know wat they're doin here...

...but it wasn't anything to do with this

doin it grungy

so little difference in reality, so much difference on the rite scale

this guy seems to think that someone has done it rite...

...but these folk know better

meanwhile in Penrith...

...sometimes we have to wonder, how do they do it so rite

welcome to cityrong

done rite for the kodomos

 Foods:

doin it dull, but if subway is your other option...

...or you could learn to do it rite (good luck)

doin it with the army (they always get it rong)...

...NERV get it rong sometimes too i suppose, but this isn't an example

 Trying to win, part two:

so rong its rite

but then you see this, and you feel for the subjects above, you really do

left of photo (from our perspective) actually came close...

ohsorite

it appears that this person was winning at other types of games, why they had to try their hand at this one, i do not know...

...maybe they hadn't seen what they had to compete with

So now to finish I'm comparing two very different things, but I see a strong resemblance in the concept. The rong version (scene) came much later in fact, and I doubt it knows anything about its rite counterpart (ganguro), but nevertheless its time to criticise anyway

wat can you say, really?

oh dat fone. (this is pure art)

this isn't even quite rite for scene kids

same pose, different rite.

guys can do it rong too

but some are immune <3<3<3<3 (this is my fav picture of the whole lot)