spiritsnare's snareblog

Out of all of the things released at E3 thus far, Child of Eden, Q Entertainment’s latest attempt at digital synaesthesia (and spiritual successor to Rez), had me wowed. (In second place: Nintendo’s endless amounts of 3DS babes — wait, babes at a Nintendo conference?!)

I’m already formulating a checklist for when I eventually get my hands on the game. The checklist is as follows:

• Kinect setup
• booze
• pair of white gloves
• trance vibration setup (if applicable)
• must play it at night by myself in a dark room, as close to the above setup as possible

Once I think about it, if you take the Kinect setup away from the checklist, it sounds pretty suspect…

*Excluding Ninety-Nine Nights, of course. I hope I don’t have to say that about its sequel…

Two post-Fanime tidbits:

• For iPhone/iPad-equipped fans of Taiko no Tatsujin: Taiko no Tatsujin Plus has been released. It’s a free app that’s compatible with both iPhone and iPad, and instead of paying up front, you pay for song pack DLC (Y600 per pack) instead to append to the one free song that comes with the game. The problem: the first two (of three) song packs are rehashes of the first two iPhone releases! As a percieved apology, however, Namco released an update for the original Taiko no Tatsujin that adds the infamous boss song KAGEKIYO (pictured above) for players who have at least unlocked Oni difficulty (8500 Don Points).
• Fanime, although hectic, was pretty amazing. I’ve got a draft of a longer post sitting around waiting for me to add more to it, but I’m playing the aforementioned song instead. Oh, and my previous post in regards to Foursquare? It didn’t work as I thought it would, mostly because there were only a handful of people that played, and those that did were split between the convention center and the actual “Fanime Con” venue. Oh, well — there’s always next year!!

FanimeCon, Northern California’s biggest anime convention, is coming back to the San José Convention Center this Memorial Day weekend. I’m pretty much prepared — in fact, in about 45 minutes, I’ll be on my way down there to pick up my badge.

As far as social networking prep goes, I’ve opened up my Twitter to public view for the entirety of the event. (I’ll be closing it back up afterwards, of course.)

But what might even be more fun is the fact that there’s going to be over an estimated 15,000 in attendance (based off of 2009 figures), of which I figure a good chunk are tech-savvy.

That’s where Foursquare comes in. Richard Johnson, one of the e-Gaming heads (well, at least last I checked!), set up a couple of venues for Fanime’s main halls. (Then he claimed the mayorships for all of them, natch.)

Now, that badge at the top of this post? That’s the Super Swarm badge: 250 people checked into the same location.

Think we can do this?

I think we can.

I’m still alive! Seven days more to FanimeCon — I figure I should post. Let’s start by talking about anime.

What I’m following this season:

• Angel Beats!: How do I put this?…it’s so convoluted. There’s the random awesomeness, like, say, every Girls Dead Monster concert and TK (and crew’s) ability to pack up a mahjong set in five frames flat (that’s a sixth of a second!!); then there’s what I expect out of Jun Maeda (every flashback thus far; the Otonashi-hugging-Naoi-in-the-rain sequence; Tenshi missing out on her mabo tofu, et al.); then there are the unanswered questions about the world proper (see: everything about Tenshi). I think it’s precisely because it’s so convoluted that I enjoy it, even if in the end it has the potential to be the biggest troll Maeda’s come up with.
• Ookiku Furikabutte ~Natsu no Taikai-hen~: I liked the first series, so I figured I should follow it up with the sequel — it’s pretty hype. So hype, in fact, that I decided to take a look at how Funimation decided to localize the first season (and they did a pretty good job of it, I’d like to say — but I digress.) I see that (as of this post) ANN has it down as a 13-episode series, but AniDB, MyAnimeList, and Wikipedia all say it’s “ongoing” — here’s hoping to another 26 episodes!

What I tried this season:

• K-ON!!: Watched one episode. I don’t dig the new opening or ending. Supposedly it’s grown on people. Other than that, seems like more of the same, which isn’t a bad thing. On hold, because I’m too lazy.
• Working!!: Watched three-fourths of the first episode. I’m not sure what turned me off — the oddball cast, the loli jokes, my sympathy for Takanashi, picking on Popura, or what. Dropped for now, but reconsidering. (Also, as an aside, the first half-minute totally invokes the Sex Machineguns.)

Not too much is new, though. Finals are around the corner (I’m prepared for everything!!…except statistics); I recently held Doubletap, a wacky DJ Max Technika tournament (of which you can see videos on Drayne O’s YouTube account); I’ve got two cosplays ready for Fanime (thanks in no small part to Panda)…

What else is there? Oh — for kicks, I bought a bottle of Odor Blocker. It does, indeed, block odor for 16 hours, and maybe a bit more.

April 27 is a Tuesday.

On Tuesdays, I go to school just a bit earlier; the timing thereof also means rush hour.

April 27 is the release of Super Street Fighter IV.

I know correlation isn’t quite equal to causation, but I want what happened last time to happen again.

That’d be pretty great.

(click for fullview)

wait wait wait WHAT it was released on March 30th and nobody told me?!

I don’t care if it’s $35 that’s like half-off R2 price and it’s 5 episodes so it’s technically quarter-off!

brb telling Omo so that he has a working link instead of that dead link to the predecessor of this post two years ago and maybe Pete but Pete has R2s already soooo

This next week, I get to relax a bit from my academic duties and watch this thing called “Japanese animation” for longer than an episode of Hidamari Sketch x☆☆☆ at a time.

As a related tangent, even though it’s spring break, even though spring started just some eight days ago, it certainly doesn’t feel like it — flowers were blossoming around town a month early. Also, it’s hotter than I remember spring being.

El Niño sure is a funny thing.

Oh, yeah, something I totally forgot to note —

I passed.

Looking at my last post, I realize:

1. It’s been a month and a bit since my last update.
2. My last update was about a storm so crazy it turned 101 into a parking lot.
3. It’s only been a month and a bit since we’ve had weather this crazy, where “crazy” includes but isn’t limited to rain pouring so hard I swear the heavens are shooting Super Soakers at us earth-bound people; cherry and peach blossoms blooming waaay earlier than expected; and 75-degree high temperatures in the midst of winter’s grasp. Oh, and there was a lake in the middle of the frickin’ road as I was driving back home. Sorta like the aforementioned 101 incident, except it’s not 101, so it doesn’t matter as much.

I’m not sure what to think of the weather here in California anymore, except for the fact that somehow, it manages to surprise me every year. I’d say “every season”, but in retrospect, summer always comes just the way I thought it’d come, which is let’s break out six table fans and point them all at my body hot.

Oh, wait a minute — there was a time in the middle of July last year where the highs suddenly dropped into the 80s, huh?

Yeah, like I said, I’m not sure what to think of California weather anymore.

credit KGO-TV

There’s a bit of a storm outside; specifically, the third of four fronts hitting the San Francisco Bay Area this week. And despite the storm, business — and thus, the ever-so-popular commute by automobile — continues.

On Twitter and Facebook, the image of a flooded freeway (shown above) is being passed around, notably by people who didn’t go to work, aimed at people who did.

The most hilarious part of this image is the fact that this happens to be a depiction of Interstate 101 — perhaps the most notorious freeway used for commute. Normally, at this time of day (4 PM), 101 slows down to a crawl for most of its length. ABC-7, one of the local news stations around here, has footage of one lane, still submerged, open for commuters to wade through — a pretty painful sight to watch.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here? Why, yes. Yes indeed.