The Organized Blog Post of Sunday, October 24/29th, 2010

Tagline: “Efficiency — a month of blogging in a single post!”

So Tim commented on this post from over a year ago, which sent me an email alert reminding me of the existence of my blog. From there I wandered into this post. Among all the other amazing posts from a year ago that stemmed from my illustrious genius (sarcasm).

I wish I could return to my prolific blogging habits from my sophomore year. It felt really good to bring out my thoughts, and at the end of the day, it gave me a feeling of having contributed to society — a feeling of general productivity, I suppose, which I can’t attain from games or anime or television.

As I return to this half-completed post, two days ago I got my computer infected with a virus (I knoww! ME, the total computer geek, with a virus?!), and life has generally been sucking. Well, that’s to be expected. Perspective, Ben, perspective. Your life rocks.

I have had no time for anime. And although this Fall 2010 season is a major exception, modern anime has been uninteresting for the most part. And of course the one interesting anime season would happen when I’m at the busiest point in my life. Tsk.

That was my short two-line spiel on anime. I won’t bother going into more detail (no time + no interest). However… anime music lately has been beyond awesome. Faylan’s last vision for last (if you remember, they did the remarkable OP for CANAAN a few seasons ago) is number one here. I was immediately obsessed with the TV-size version; however, upon hearing the full version it didn’t seem that great anymore. It is still a good song, nevertheless. My favorite part is when all the drums, guitars, etc all die out and leave just the piano and her singing. Maybe the animation that accompanied the song in Hyakka Ryouran was the reason for this.

Speaking of opening sequences, the opening of Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai / The World Only God Knows is the best this season. I usually hate english lyriced songs, but everything just fits together so perfectly in that intro sequence. I especially like the logo at the end, where the kanji “kami” (god) does that uhh weird thing (sry for dropping out of ap english o_O).

I also like irony by ClariS, from Ore no Imouto ga Konna Kawaii Wake ga Nai (the anime about Tim and Dorothy’s daily life). I can’t quite put my finger on what I like about the song. It’s cheerful, both in melody and in lyric, and somehow deep (even without trying to interpret the lyrics into native byte-code). I really love the name. It’s not very often that Japanese artists name their songs well (SERIOUSLY. UGH. one of my biggest gripes with asian music.) so it’s nice to see a short, sweet name for this just-as-sweet song. I feel like translating the lyrics for this song (but it’s probably already been done twice overby Words of Songs lol).

eufonius’s new song for Yosuga no Sora is nice, but it’s too similar to all of their previous works (Apocrypha, Mag Mell come to mind, along with the ef songs). They use the same instrumentation on all of their songs, and the same melodic phrases/chord progressions. The original conception was brilliant, but repeating the same formula over and over again wins them no points in my book.

New Fairy Tail songs are okay, but I’m saddened at the removal of Mikuni Shimokawa’s outro song. Sora no Otoshimono‘s opening isn’t as catchy as ring my bell, but I remember it was okay (can’t remember anything about the actual song).

I am very dissappointed in To Aru Majutsu no Index II ‘s music. I was looking forward to an outro song bu IKU more than I was looking forward to the actual anime. I’m saying that seriously. The OP by, whoever it’s by, was nothing special either. I guess I was impressed by the content of the actual anime, though. Since I read the novel, and know what will happen, I’m actually more excited after each cliffhanger/episode.

I know there are many brilliant animes this season, but I am already being crushed by what I have on my watchlist right now, so I will put most of this season off until last year. Yes, that includes Bakuman.

fml.

I’m thinking of moving the leafwood.net servers off of my home network. First of all, bandwidth and cpu/disk access from site visitors often hinders my normal computer usage. It’s annoying when suddenly the computer freezes up while I just had a good idea for my english paper, et cetera. Next, I would like to reduce the power consumption of my computer and increase its operating lifetime by not keeping it on overnight or while I am at school. Seriously, my computer is pretty new, and it already feels like it’s five years old. Things are breaking and crashing every other day. Finally, a dedicated server would provide faster access/ping times and high speed bandwidth, which would be nice to have in case we ever need to upload, say, large music files or video files (e.g. for songwriting or moviemaking).

I’m not quite sure how I’d pay for the server usage though. I would ideally want a package at less than ten dollars a year. I don’t need much bandwidth, and PHP and MySQL are pretty much the only server features I need. I wouldn’t even really need SSH access (although it would be nice). Any donation offers? :D

I can’t frick-ing (LOL Frick… sry inside joke) get enough of Touhou music. It started from a random post on an anime blog with a random link to a lame Touhou fan video (it was a parody stand-up comedy thing… very wtf weird). And then I heard the ending song at the end of the video, and it was all downhill from there~

One gripe is that not all Touhou music is equally good. In fact, most songs suck incredibly. But it’s very fun picking out the awesome ones and listening to them on repeat for five hours.

The Touhou characters and the setting of Gensokyo is also extremely compelling. I read one of the mangas, Silent Sinner in Blue in one night. Well, it was short. But I’m amazed at Touhou, and more amazed at Japan and its Touhou fans that have brought the game to such international fame.

I know this post was a bunch of meaningless crap. And I still posted it like four days late. Good thing all anime-containing posts are hidden from the front page o_O