From the people who claim 300 is a true story, comes the tale of a nations birth (well actually it comes from Adult Swim) - 1776

Cheesy? Maybe. Accurate? Hell no. But funny non the less!

And as a comparison the real 300 trailer:

Yesterday I’ve watched Toki o Kakeru Shōjo, Tokikake for short, or as the english call it - The Girl who leapt through Time. While the title may suggest a flick for girls only, I thoroughly enjoyed the move as a man in his 20ies too.

After getting the special edition DVDs recommended by amazon while browsing for animes, the customer reviews got me hooked. Reading that the movie wasn’t even mainstream in Nippon but still won all kinds of movie festival prices helped made my decision to buy the piece clear.

So the story goes: Makoto, a 17 year old girl is about to die in a freakish train accident when she suddenly finds out that she can leap through time into the past and redo things there. At first she only uses her new-found ability to make things right for her, get good test grades and make less of a fool of herself in various situations (although they then turn out pretty funny with her knowing stuff all the others don’t). She has two male friends in the school with which she playes baseball and hangs out all day. But as more as she jumps through time to have fun all day long she realizes that maybe, if only good things happen to her, more bad things will come to others.

The movie is a rather unique time-travelling movie, with more focus on the moral and philosophy of ones doings, and with the central phrase the charakters learn in english class, “Time waits for no one.”

Besides a few scenes the movie is relatively action-free (i.e. there are no big explosions, but still action happens between and to the characters, just not on a action-film level), but it had everything else a movie need to succed: Loveable characters all with their little quirks, a really interesting story, very funny moments, sad moments, moments of romance and, while not an ending with everything one could wish for, and ending with everything one could hope for.

It is really a feel-good movie, with the ultimate motto of “seize the day” and “do things as your heart tells you to”. The last time I have seen such a heartwarming movie was probably Tim Burton’s Big Fish.

I can only recommend this masterpiece to everyone interesting in anime, or good storytelling and interesting characters. And although the Wikipedia entry only mentions the Japanese and German DVD releases (amazon.com only lists the region 3 DVDs, but with english subtitles still so that is an option), the film was shown on canadian and american film festivals so it is bound to be released in the US too.

And on a last side-note: The anime is based on a story by Yasutaka Tsutsui, whos other film adaptation was Paprika which was also a very philosophical flick about dreams in the real world, only bound by imagination.

All it takes is a good or just innovative video, to get the fans going in making their own interpretation of it. And sometimes the mockup of the video is even better or at least more funny than the original, as with this example:

Step 1: Take a rock video

Step 2: ???

Step 3a: Make a similar song and video referencing oversold and former popstars instead of living-on-the-edge rockstars, and use image samples instead of real video footage to make is look poorly done, but focus on the lyrics:

Step 3b: Use the exact same video, but add characters from a game to it, and write a song about the game:

Sometimes people get on your nerves. That is perfectly fine, not everyone will always have a real good time with everyone else. But when your roommates and coworkers become a major source of your frustration, sometimes you just have to vent. And the blog Passive Aggressive Notes is a witness of such actions. The guys over there hunt all the notes that stressted out people write for their neighbords, roommates or coworkers when they are fed up with their action. Such nice notes include:

Oh, how passivly aggressive!

The website Dumb Little Man posted 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches recently.
While most of the at least I have known long enough, they may be new to some not as well-versed with google or boolean operations in general. Anyhow, I still learned a few new tricks to get better results there, like using the tilde (~) for similar words or using double-dots (..) as a num-range indicator.

Since the advent of Hollywood action blockbusters we’ve been pretty accustomed to characters dying on screen in various gruesome ways; sometimes crushed, sometimes slashed, sometimes shot, but always fatally injured. There aren’t many movies, especially those targeted for the mass market where the main character of the story dies. But so-called sidekicks (which, by the way are often the real character actors opposite the big and muscular action hero) pretty regularly bite the virtual dust. And more often than not they die in order to save the hero/heroine of the story.

And if the sidekick happens to be male and saves a heroine from the brink of death (or vice versa) they usually breath with their last words something akin to “I love you”, which according to Hollywood laws the hero/heroine has to respond to with “I will always love you” or something kitschy like that.
While this surely is a nice gesture for the dying person, it is all too often used in movies, and fiction in general. When grave danger awaits the protagonist, someone has to step up and sacrifice him- or herself for the greater good. Yada yada. Obi Wan did it in Star Wars to get Luke and the others an escape route, Bruce Willis did it in Armageddon for his daughter and her fiance, Boromir did it for Merry and Pip in the Lord of the Rings, and countless others did it too.
So, apparently, the story-act of a character sacrificing him- or herself for a more relevant character is often employed and people are kinda used to it. But here I have to add that especially in Hollywood movies the sacrifice normally happens all of a sudden when the to-be-saved character wouldn’t expect it; i.e. the sacrificee jumps around the corner to catch a bullet for the protagonist or some such thing. Getting shot, stabbed, etc. - things movies and stories often employ. Getting beaten to a bloody pulp is not often seen, because it is much more gruesome. And exactly that (and much more cruel things) happen to the sacrificial character I want to write about in this post:

This is Judeo from the manga Berserk, after getting his hand chewed, his back whipped and his chest stabbed by demons, while trying to save the love of the main protagonist (Guts), Casca. And although one as a reader could have picked up that Judeo himself was interested in more than just friendship and camaraderie with Casca, he did never say such a thing.
Why there are demons attacking and devouring them doesn’t matter to make my point, and it would spoil the story too much too (knowing that Judeo will die is a big enough spoiler already). It are the two very last pages of his life that matter only:
As I said before, at least I am pretty used to see characters die as a sacrifice to save others, and I have seen a lot of horror and splatter movies, mangas and animes where people die gruesome deaths. But never before has the death of a character touched me more, emotionally, than Judeo’s. That is because it is the most personal death I have ever seen. How much more personal can it get, than to watch something through the characters eyes?

“Are those my last words?”, “I’m glad to see - you cry”“; Just reading and writing these very two lines makes me shiver again. It is so very honest, personal, human. The last thoughts of a dying man, as seen through his own eyes. To me, this death scene is more gruesome and touching at the same time, than every on-screen death I have ever seen. Sure, the medic in Saving Private Ryan died a tragic death as did lots of others, but never before could you see the last moments through a dying ones eyes.


And the saddest thing is perhaps that she would never know that he was in love with her. Because only in Hollywood have the dying a chance to say “I love you” as their last words before they close their eyes. Life (and mangas) are another matter:

Those two pages I have to say are the most touching (to me) thing I have ever seen or read in fiction. Can’t get anymore personal than that scene.


Phew, what a long post, but at least I got time again to post my thoughts here… and I hope that I got you interested in Berserk, if so, you should try out The Hawks and Evil Genius if you can’t get your hands on the manga (because, as in germany, older volumes may not be available anymore, and newer volumes take their time to come out).

Lifehack.org wrote about 15 cool Firefox tricks. While half of them, like keyboard shortcuts and making the icons smaller via the view-menu are rather obvious, and at least by my definition, not especially cool, other like speeding up the fox via HTTP-pipelining and limiting Firefox’s RAM usage are really helpful in configuring the browser. In the same vain is the tip for writing Firefox to the harddrive when minimized so it does not use any more RAM at all - that one really is neat!

I am pretty much swamped with work right now, programming the interface and protocoll for our new machine, doing the system administration stuff (as there is always something wrong when Windows systems are involved) so I’ll keep the posts short and witty for a while. But the long stuff will come back too, I promise.

So here’s for now, a name generator that translates your name into japanese kanji, arabic, hindi, hieroglyphs and even Tengwar (elfen script from J.R.R. Tolkien).

Found on the Thinking Blog.

“When goblins blow themselves up, it’s called stupidity.
When humans do it, it’s called heroism.”

Shock Troops [Magic: the Gathering Card] flavor text

P.S. All work and no play make me go… something… something…

Sometimes you just have to wonder in what order newsstations and newsmags put their respective news. Not that there aren’t enough newsworthy stories happening all around the globe every day, with people (still) getting killed in Iraq, Dafur, etc. and all the political stuff that happens around the clock.

But somehow CNN probably thought it would interest much more people to hear about “Sheryl Crows toilet paper square”, “Heather Mills tumbling out of a dance show” or that a suspect bolted out of a local court room “hollering for mom”.

I never really thought of CNN as one of the best news around, there are lots of better informed ones, and especially more objective ones. But this frontpage just screams “boulevard tabloid” to me:

Found on the Applegeeks Blog

One day I will order a meal at our local McDonald’s like this:

We all knew the Master Chief from Halo was badass. As was Samus Aran from Metroid long, long, before him. Now the time has finally come for the two to battle it out in a big city brawl. And to make things worse the hive is also swarming there.
So much for the “story” of this brilliant machinima. What really made my jaw drop here is the animation which is top-notch. Never before have I seen such fluid and perfectly choreographed fighting in a fan-made game video. There are a few scenes reminiscent of the Matrix action, but other than that it looks very original. As if the fight between Master Chief and Samus wasn’t enough of brilliantly choreographed styling, when the two have to team up against the hive they let hell loose upon them, double-team style.

I just wish that you would actually be able to do all these crazy moves in the video games!

Sorry for not updating in a while but I’m really stressed completely at work since a new project started last week, and we got meetings and stuff all over the place… gotta drive 2 hours to another one tomorrow 6 o’clock in the morning… *sigh*

Anyway, I saw the movie 300 a few days ago, and while I really wanted to like it, the best thing about it I can say is that the action was very cool. Story- and character-wise I would have anticipated more from the creator of Sin City.

But nontheless, this edition of VG Cats is genius, mixing Mario and the probably most-shown-scene from 300:

Found on the great webcomic “Ctrl+Alt+Del”:

And it’s true, Windows Vista does that kind of things to you!