Recently in Personal Category

Today is the one year anniversary of me starting this blog! One year I ago, I posted “Let’s Posting Love,” and since they I’ve posted 139 more entries about anime and video games. Two weeks previous, I moved into my new house, and my wedding anniversary is just a month later. It’s like I timed all this! Here’s to another year and even more posts!

This week, one of my all time favorite shows finally hit DVD: The State. Well, technically it hits in two weeks, on Bastille Day. Which, if I understand correctly, is a day to celebrate bastilles.

Anyway, I preordered it, so I got it early, along with a snazzy grey t-shirt that I intend to wear as soon as possible. It’s a 5 disc set with all four seasons, an unaired pilot, as well as some filmed and later cut sketches. Included in the box is a note from the cast of the show, advising we the viewer of something that we’re going to have to deal with regularly as MTV releases some of its older shows on DVD.

We’ll call July 14th “The Day The Music Went Away.” Due to the extreme cost of licensing, the music that was freely available for MTV to use in their shows while they were airing is no longer available for DVD release without additional licensing costs.

Sometimes it works out fine, but some sketches are inextricably linked, either thematically or through direct references, to the music playing. The best example is Barry and Levon (aww yeah) talking about the Marvin Gaye song playing in the background. The producers have done their best to match the music as closely as possible but sometimes it just doesn’t work. I’d rather have the DVD sans music than not have it at all, but I’m more worried about Daria, for which the DVD has a preview.

Daria, even more than The State, was a show where the music’s role was integral to many scenes. It established the tone and emotion for the characters and the story, and removing that music is really going to hit the show hard.

I don’t hold these problems against the creators of the show or against MTV itself, but rather against the labels that are asking exorbitant amounts of money to use even a segment of their song. “Hey guys, here’s six hours of advertisement for your songs, and millions of people will purchase it!” “Okay, pay us a billion dollars!” Now, instead of getting some free advertising, they’re forcing the producers to change the music completely. Both of those shows had tons of great music from the time and the shows both got me buying CDs. I’ve gone and bought single mp3s because of the shows as well.

So MTV, thank you for bringing us your best shows. We’re happy to have them.

Record labels, why you jackin’ us and messing up our shows?

I’ve added a new page along the left-hand side. “My Collected Works” will be a running list of all the writing I do away from this site, mostly through Anime AMN and Kombo.com. Of course you can always just use the search function further down the sidebar, but as long as I can keep the collected works page updated it ought to be a quicker way to keep track of what I’m spending my time with.

I just want to say, for those looking at my gamercard on the left there and wondering what’s wrong with my head, I had a party this weekend! And everyone played Guitar Hero and Rock Band, while I went outside.

Try as I might, I’m totally done with those games. GH: Metallica only holds my interest by being, well, jam packed with Metallica songs. I’ve been known to write fairly lengthy posts about Rock Band, but unless they go and release Guitar Hero: Thee Michelle Gun Elephant (which would ROCK by the way.) or, I don’t know, Jazz Band featuring tracks by Miles Davis and John Coltrane (Hey, who wants to put their lips on the plastic trumpet next?!), I don’t think I’ll be picking up Guitar Hero Galactic Tour or Guitar Hero Van Halen. If Rock Band Beatles ends up in my house, it won’t be via my wallet.

Now, I want to be clear here. I’m not saying you can’t like music games! I’m just saying I’m all played out on music games that don’t appeal VERY specifically to me.

Okay, I would totally buy Rock Band: Calexico.

The first resolution I will make for the New Year is this: For each game I play, I will make at least one post.  As I try to look back at the last year of games, I'm finding myself at a loss regarding what all I played.  It's easy to remember this fall's insane glut of games, but that aside it's difficult to look back at what I've played and be sure I'm not leaving anything worthy out.

We'll see how long I last with this resolution....

It sounds hot, but it's a pretty good read: Photography and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking.

Anyone who does anything - anything - creative, and struggles with it should read this.

I've discovered a new form of crack that is highly addictive to nerds and people with an obsessive compulsive streak.  This drug, this horrible drug, is called MediaMan.

MediaMan is a media library cataloging application.  Meaning, you use it to track all your movies, books, cds, games, etc.  You can import your media through a number of methods. One title at a time, through a CSV file, or you can scan barcodes with your webcam or a barcode scanner.  I haven't been lucky enough to try the last two, but the first two have been pretty good for the most part.  The app searches Amazon for its info - you can even have it search Amazon Japan, though my success with that has been rather spotty.

Some other neat features:

• You can tag your library items with as many tags as you can come with
• You can import your own cover art
• You can export to PNG or to a very fancy HTML format - check my library out.
• You can do live searches within your collection (meaning, it searches your database as you type)

It's not without it's flaws.  It would be nice if I could display one tag set minus another tag set; say, all my anime DVDs that are only tagged as "anime" but not with a genre or any other info.  The piechart display could be more robust.  I wish Amazon searches would show more than 5 selections from each category.  With all that though, I will still say I've been discovering new features daily and I'm really liking it.  I'm definitely going to be plunking $40 on it this month.

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