David

So, for the last five years, some High School friends and I have been attending A-Kon, an Anime Convention held in Dallas at the end of May.  An interesting fact, this convention is actually the oldest American anime convention; in fact, they are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year.  Included below is a snippet from the newsletter that they sent out recently:

OUR 20^TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION PARADE…& MORE

We have a lot planned for our show this year, lots of programming, fun things, including a PARADE through downtown Dallas! (paths are being laid out and approved now).  Follow these newsletters and the website to learn how to take part in the parade.  We will have many Celebrations that you’ll want to be part of, so watch this newsletter and our website (www.a-kon.com).  Tell your friends.



Yes, they are planning on having an Anime Convention Parade through downtown Dallas.  I honestly don't know what to make of it.  From the sounds of it, they'll be inviting attendees to walk in the parade, presumably in their costumes.  What else are they going to have, though?  Giant floats in the shape of anime characters?  Professionals dressed up as anime characters doing mock fights as they walk along?  It's like a mental train wreck, I can't stop thinking about it, but every image I picture is worse than the last.  Just imagine, if it's a slow news day, they might even have it aired live on the local news channels.

So yeah, if you're bored on the weekend of May 29-31 and in the area, you should consider driving up/down to Dallas to come watch the spectacle.  I promise, it'll be a once in a lifetime event.  Also, if you're actually interested in attending the convention and staying at the hotel, send me an IM/e-mail/phone call, my friends and I are about to make the final reservations and start making plans and stuff.

gamu-toys.info/sonota/sw/obama/obama.html

Honorable mention: Use the force, bro!

Soon...

I don't even remember how I came across this; I suppose it was from looking for information on the second season of Haruhi. This is so twisted and weird that I just felt compelled to share it.

I give you The Melancholy of Haruki Suzumiya: what it would be like if the characters from haruhi were all of the opposite gender.



more images (and descriptions of the altered characters) here. The 4Koma are especially amusing/disturbing.

first off, more proof that computers are better than humans, when humans make them so:



The guy apparently took a 360 controller and wired it to his computer, which had the tab file ripped from the game itself.


In other news, you want to be at the Diamond Ballroom on July 24.

For those who don't know, Kenpachi is a (bad-ass) character from Bleach.

I forget where I heard about this, but it sounds really awesome and I'm really interested in checking it out.  "Play!  a Video Game Symphony" is, as the name suggests, a symphony of video-game music, on world tour.  It features music from the Super Mario Bros. series, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy, Zelda series, Chrono Trigger/Cross, Elder Scrolls games, World of Warcraft, and several others.  There are several videos on youtube of their past performances (links provided below).

As you might be able to guess, the reason I'm making this post is because they will be dropping by soon.  Specifically, they will be performing in Ft. Worth, Texas, on Saturday, January 19, 2008.  Tickets are available, and range from $35-$65, depending on where you want to sit.  Based on their past schedule, I would say it is unlikely they will be back around these parts any time soon, so I really want to take the opportunity to see them.  What I don't want to do, however, is drive to Ft. Worth and see this by myself.

If you are interested in joining me, please let me know.  We can work out where we want to sit (personally I'd be willing to fork out the extra $30 for the nice seats, but that's me), when we'd leave, and whether we'd rent a hotel room or drive back that night.  The sooner a positive headcount and seating decision can be made, the better, especially if more than just a couple people decide to go, so I'd like to set the goal of purchasing tickets by Sunday, November 4th. 

For reference, January 19 is the Saturday after the first week of school in the spring semester.


As promised, links:
Official Website
Wikipedia article
Super Mario Bros. suite
Legend of Zelda suite
Stockholm performance (Chrono Trigger/Cross suite)

more videos are, of course, available on Youtube.

in older days, it was not uncommon to see the following scene at a concert:


in more modern times, for various reasons, people have taken to waving other objects:


And now I present the next step in the evolution of a concert tradition:

Other people have been posting their speedtest results, so I thought I'd share my odd little tale.  First, my speedtest results, as run from my computer this evening:



Not extremely terrible, I mean it's 300 KB/sec download, and over 100 KB/sec upload.  If I didn't know better, I'd probably be placated, if not really satisfied, by these numbers.  However, I know better.  Witness the speedtest results from my parents' computer, in the same network, behind the same router, on the same modem, on an ethernet cable that's in arguably worse condition:


over four times faster.  This, in fact, is the fat pipe my family is currently paying for, not that economy class 3mb down crap;  Unfortunately no one thought to give my computer the memo.  I honestly have no idea what is going on here, I don't have any torrents running, no programs in the background hogging the bandwidth (to my knowledge).  I guess the next step would be to try it on my laptop, see where it comes in at.

The tale starts simple enough. I remembered a webcomic strip that I followed a link to from somewhere at some point this semester, and wanted to find it again. It was a gamer-type comic, so there could only really be a handful of places I could have seen the link. Easy enough to backtrack, right?

Many minutes of scouring news archive later, and I'm no better off. I somehow find myself in the VGCats forums, in the webcomic sub-forum, browsing the "Favorite Strips" thread, ideally for the strip I'm looking for, or at least one from the same comic.

Several hours later, I've found a few funny strips, discovered that there are a lot of not funny strips (big surprise), but am no closer to finding my original goal. Finally, after going through 80 pages of the thread, I find a link to God Mode. The style looks right and the name sounds familiar. There's no archive, though, so I have to flip through about 50 comics, but eventually, finally, I find the stupid strip.

If only I could devote such effort to, I dunno, school work...

Here are a few strips I found that I felt were worth sharing:
Batman vs Alfred
Rejected Megaman Villains
Eight New Robot Masters
Athiests in Heaven
Solve for X

And the comic in question.

P.S.: Billy Joel in concert was awesome.

"In a practical situation, however, most mobile phone and voice-recognition users would agree that having to speak into your phone isn't always ideal or even possible."

full article

file: **********beta.exe (no need to flagrantly break the NDA)
size: 2.46 GB (2,642,644,992 bytes)

Started: 11/13/2006 4:50:33 PM
Finished: 11/13/2006 5:44:09 PM


Almost two and a half gigabytes of data in under an hour. Average speed of 821KB/sec. At the beginning, before I started doing other stuff, it was maintaining 893KB/sec. It seems Cox decided to arbitrarily buff our download pipe by 3Mb.

It all started simply enough. For reasons I've forgotten I was on Youtube watching someone playing "God Knows..." (from the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), noticed he also had a video of himself playing "Lost my Music" (also from Haruhi). I decided to check his profile, and find myself at his favorites; at the bottom is a link to the following:


after watching this two or three times, I proceeded to the Guitar Tapping video in the related tab. I listened to this twice as well, then saw a user's comment that "if you're into acoustic guitar, check out the videos on my profile." and of course went to his profile. It was there that I discovered the awesomeness that is Don Ross.


there are 8 videos total in rpoland's profile.

...And thus close to two hours is spent listening to incredible acoustic guitar solos. I expect I'll own at least one of Don's CDs before the week ends.

"...and as I stood there in the mob, fighting desperately to keep my head above my heels, I caught the gaze of a man I knew not. He was of a different culture than I, and was not one whom I would generally interact with, yet with the gaze came gleams in our eyes and grins on our faces, for we were united in our worship of the Gods of Shred."


Coincidentally, I got my Bose Triport headphones back from repair. I can once again listen to music in qualities unmatched by any other headphones I have ever used. I wonder what I'll listen to...

from Anime News Service:

The title for the new film series is “Evangelion Shin Gekijou Ban”, it will consist of 4 parts (First volume, Second part, Latter part and Final story) with the first part arriving in Japanese theaters in early summer, 2007. […] -The content is quite different though the time base of the story is the same as the original TV series. - It will be a remake, however, it is not a re-creation but a “new work”. - The approach will be different than what Tomino-san did with the Gundam Z New Translation films, there will apparantly be a large amount of new material. - Even if the TV series has not be seen, the viewer will be able to enjoy it. Though the content becomes easy, it is not redundant to those already familiar with the series. - The technique that purposely scatters difficult words and phrases will not be used any longer. - As an antithesis to current animation industry segments, it is an attitude on the production side to pull the act in the age that started from Eva.

This report brought to you because I hear you guys talk about Evangelion so much, and you have such strong feelings about the series.

I found this recently on teh intarweb during one of my "Boredom Browsings"© on 4chan Edit: I actually found the picture on deviantart; apparently the picture was used for Anime Expo 2005. I recall something similar to this coming up in one of those random discussions that occur in Triangle, so I felt obligated to pass it along.


For your viewing pleasure, Wake up with the King!

the deviantart page.

So odds are that if I know you and you've shown any decent level of interest in anime, you've heard about my trips to A-Kon, and possibly you were asked to join my band of merry men (and woman) on our trek to the latest A-Kon this previous June. Well, A-Kon 17 has come and gone, and that means it is high time plans were made for A-Kon 18!

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