Good evening, internetland, computerland, and possibly cell phone land. How are you? What's up? Empty polite greeting, etc.

I will now reveal to you a plan of mine, a mine of plan: The Knights of Mars. Sounds cool, no? (If you say no, I will hurt you! HURT YOU!!!) Maybe a little explanation is in order. The Knights of Mars is an idea of mine, a sort of faternal (although it would include women) society that would spread wherever I or my friends or their friends would go providing a welcoming place to go to everyone in it wherever they may go in life. I'd like to elaborate, but I need to go.

So goodnight, good evening, empty polite goodbye, etc.

Anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart, and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks! (just a cautionary goodbye, I'll probably be back with a real session later today.)

Memorial Day

I'm planning to try to get a session about Memorial Day done before the day is over, but I don't want to do it if I can't get it right, so if I don't do it, well, to all the veterans out there and to all those who have died in service of their country, thank you.

Hero for a day

Good, well, actually morning folks, here's a rarity I'm actually starting a session before noon-time, so soak up the goodness, soak it up, SOAK IT UP!!! Any who, I first heard the Metallica song which is the title of this session in an Otakon video which meshed it with scenes from some sort of special edition Dragonball thing. Why am I sharing that? No particular reason, so let's move on. While I probably would have picked this title name no matter what the circumstance for this topic (I probably should tell you what the topic is, it is the show "Heroes") seeing as it has the word 'hero' in it, the phrase "Hero for a day" seems particularly appropriate due to how lavishly praised Heroes has been and how much it's recent season finale has been massively slammed. But the point of the matter is that I'm doing a review of Heroes.

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm looking at you Bob, and you too Smithee, Heroes has random people gaining superpowers and dealing with the changes it inflicts upon their life and the world, a secret organization and a coming disaster (at least the first season was about the coming disaster), good stuff, no? Actually I wasn't that intrigued with the concept at first because I thought it would be done in a really crappy way, but it's done well, so I'm good with that. It's part of the wave of dramas that have been coming out lately and being one of the most successful it is often compared to one of the other most successful of the major dramas, Lost. It shares with Lost the supernatural sci-fi-fantasy drama label, but in many ways it is, as the respected TV columnist Alan Sepinwall calls it, "the anti-Lost."

How, may you ask, well Sepinwall would point to the fact that Lost has long complex, twisting, conveluted mysteries that never really seem to get resolved and even when they do get part resolved the writers throw in some more craziness to crazy it up a whole lot more. With Heroes, yes there are conspiracies and surprises but they tend to resolve mysteries relatively quickly, adding new mysteries but in a way that moves the plot forward instead of just tangling it up and such. But I think there is more to that comparision, something that goes to the tendencies of the mediums the creators of these series had previously majored in. Lost was created by J. J. Abrams, a long time tv guy, and Heroes was created by Jeph Loeb a long time comic guy, get where I going with this. Basically the thing is that while Lost concentrates on character (I mean half of every episode is usually in a character's head giving glimpses to deepen up the characters), the usual measure of tv shows, Heroes concentrates on plot, the usual measure of comic books. The result is this, Lost has deep, many, many dimensional chacacters, but a nonsensical plot, and Heroes has a complex but sensical nicely moving plot, it's chacacters often lack full depth (there are exceptions, most notably the awesome, awesome Hiro and Horn-Rimmed Glasses Man (Noah Bennet)), often they are simply archetypes, which while nice at times are not used to their fullest and are sometimes tiresome.

The comic book heritage also may factor into the final episode of Heroes. Comic book fans are notoriously detail oriented, memorizing every tiny, tiny detail and then ranting and raving insanely when one of those details are contradicted by another detail. The final episode was criticized for many factors but for most notably the last scene when one of the main character who is exploding do his powers becoming uncontrollable needs to be flown out by his brother (at the expense of his brother's life) despite the fact that the main character had flying powers. Now the reasoning that came me is that his powers had become uncontrollabe and so, well he couldn't control his powers. To back it up a fan noted (on Sepinwall's website) that in a flash-foward to this, the main character says he's frozen. That's the sort of detail that would come easy for comic book fans or which comic book fans wouldn't mind searching for, but it doesn't nearly as well for tv. Why? Because with tv, especially at an intense climax scene, you're put in the moment, and going back and thinking about how this makes sense needs some level of detachment that the tv view should not need to have. So while I understand what the Heroes writers were getting at, I still have to be critical of it.

Still, I love the show and I'm going to be watching every episode next season. It's got a lot of cool moments, a couple really cool characters (although not as deep as Lost's per se), and a really interesting plot line. It also, as comic books tend to, has created a huge, complex and fascinating universe (Lost also does this so here there's less of the anti-Lost comparison), and so I got to say I still think despite all it's flaws it's awesome. But I can't help but think, well, what if it didn't have those flaws, what if those things were fixed, then it could be great, heck it could be legendary, it could be a 10 out of 10 but it doesn't reach that. Now it's always hard to judge a tv show while it's still on the air and especially given the possibilities for the next season, but as things sit now the best I can give it is a 7 out of 10.

So that's my Heroes review. Since the series is still coming out maybe next season I might actually throw some reviews of individual episodes...or maybe not, depends what I feel like, because I the Rand, I the Rand indeed. So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

And when does the soothing breeze become the hurricane

I'm doing well, but I can't help but ask myself, how long can this last? Mentally and emotionally I'm as strong as I've been in a long time, but I've done well before only to see it collapse, will that come for me again? But it is best not to obsess on this, rather to use this time well and enjoy it. Times are good, so why not be happy about it?

A little Azumanga Diaoh note

I just wanted to share that YouTube has the whole episodes of Azumanga Diaoh (my last session was a review of that show), although they are sliced up into thirds, WATCH IT!!!!

The temptation of wheat or Azumanga Diaoh review

First of all, the theme song makes no sense, no sense, this link has its lyrics, but it includes the above line the temptation of wheat, and stuff like Cake for you, Tea for you, etc., very, very weird, further proof that Japanese people are crazy (of course my assessment of that is wildly innaccurate since I'm basing this largely on my own tastes for crazy anime). Still song crazy, so it gives you a little clue about the show itself.

Actually in some ways the show isn't as crazy as the intro song and sequence would imply, but in other ways it's just as crazy if not more so. It has a few moments like Kodocha where random things pop up but that's mostly just in the dream episodes. Mostly it's just high school life and not even really eventful high school life, overall nothing much happens to these kids except the school life and the breaks and such. There aren't even the crazy romances of normal high school life (except for with one girl and her obsession with another girl and a teacher's obsession with the first girl (don't worry none of this actually amounts to anything but a lot of laughs). There are rarely long plots even within an episode even since each episode is actual 5 5-minute shorts pieced together (the manga was sort of like a comic strip (I think) and the show first aired as 5 minute shorts each weekday and then the week's episodes were combined on Saturdays (I think, I wasn't there to see all that stuff during the first time around, A. it was a some time ago, and B. it was in Japan)). So with no plot and ordinary high school life how can it be as crazy as temptation of wheat? In the end it is because the characters are just crazy, zany, and absolutely hilarious.

This is one of the shows which makes me feel like an absolute girl, it is a girl's show, there is only one male character and he is just a side character playing the pervert teacher with a heart of gold stereotype (mostly the pervert part) (of course this is never really developed much as it would be if he was the star, but there are plenty of other shows for that (including plenty of animes like that)), but that's part of the charm. It allows the characters to just talk easy as friends and let all their quirks and crazies come out. In some ways this strikes me as more accurate than most romance-centered high school shows, because while the romances of high school tend to come and go, the friendships last and talking to your friends, just shooting the breeze (damn breeze, time to die!!!!) that's what high schoolers really spend most of their time doing. So this show is about that. The quirks and crazies of high school girls and their teachers, and about friendship. It could be very dull, it could be, but instead it's absolutely hilarious because those quirks and crazies, while so ordinary, are played up to maximum effect but without taking away from the love you feel for the characters.

The characters are a mix of archetypes and somewhat novel characters (who are found plenty in real life but are rarely explored). For the archetypes (there's a subtle difference between archetypes and stereotypes, while both are basised on the classic notions of the character types, the archetypes have their depths probed, while the stereotypes are pure superficial) You have Tomo, the crazy mega-enthusiastic goof-ball, you have Osaka, the ditzy, out of it goof-ball, and you have Yomi, the all-together, little-snobby, ultra-dieting, and mature girl, and Karoin, the obsessed-with-her-crush girl (although with a twist the love is another main character, aka, another girl), on the less-heard-of-side you have the grade-skipping-ultra-young, Chiyo, and the looks-very-mature, looks-very-cool and very aloof and looks kind of scary but really is very nice and loves cuteness girl, Sakaki and one which might fall on either side given my lacking knowledge of teen shows, Kagura, who's the ultra-athlete. With the teachers you got the standard boke and tsukkomi, that is the ultra-goof-off and serious person who puts her in her place, and then you have as a side character, the perverted male teacher, who turns out to have a heart of gold but is still very, very, very perverted. All these quirks are perhaps not groundbreaking but they are played out in very normal circumstances to the absolute breaking point but without passing the point of making the characters unsympathetic (although to some I've heard the male teacher passes that point, but I think he's cool (that's what is wife says)). Overall it's a good mix, although I wouldn't mind seeing at least one well-rounded guy, but I suppose that might distract from the girl's show atmosphere, which does add a certain lightness and charm to the show (after all the atmosphere girls carry with them is quite charming (although I'm actually probably too old to be saying that when the show is about high school students (and one student who's the age of elementry school kids)) and it might distract from the ultra-cutsyness of the show. Some will be turned off by this, but me, having the tastes of a ten-year-old girl, find it awesome. At times the show does draw on a bit, and you do kind of wish to have more in-depth adventures that might explore some more facets of these characters, overall I kind of had a sense that I wanted to know them a lot better than I got a chance to, but still you know them enough to love them, and enough to laugh like a madman at them. Overall I'd give this a 9 out of 10.

So that's my Azumanga Diaoh review. I think it went pretty well, although perhaps I could pull out a little more analysis if I wanted too. Oh well, the point is, awesome show, watch it, WATCH IT!!! You go now.

So anyways, take it to your head, take it to your heart and remember Rand rocks. Goodnight Folks!

Transformers the Movie: Is it Transfomerrific?

I am a very big Transformers fan. So when I heard about the movie I was very very happy, now... a little less so. I've seen the previews and as my older brother pointed out the movie seems more human centered than the properly robot centered tv show. Moreover it has Shy Lebuff (I have no idea how to spell his name), the kid from Even Stevens which makes this seem like it might just end up being a highly cutesy movie, which would be highly annoying. One of the most important things about Transformers is that it took itself seriously, if this movie can't do that...well, no matter what I'll probably see it, I'm too big of a fan not to unless it's a complete and utter travesty (like the Aeon Flux movie).