Who the hell do you think I am?
I just thought I'd give a quick update on my recent anime-watching and manga-reading, as it's not exactly often that I update what's on the about page. Possible spoilers follow, though I have tried to avoid any.
Anime
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Also known as just Gurren Lagann, it's your typical mecha anime: giant robots, impossible feats, epic fights, a magic-like energy source… except this one brings in manliness and fighting spirit, too. It's only 27 episodes long, and I watched it across two days. I quite enjoyed it, and would recommend it.
It also has some great quotes, like "Don't believe in yourself. Believe in me who believes in you!"
School Days
This one is a must-watch, it's follows Itō Makoto's life through a period of time (about a year, I think) of his school life, and how he changes in that time. It may not sound very good or interesting from that description, but believe me, it is incredible. At a mere 12 episodes, you can't really refuse on the grounds of it being a waste of time if you don't enjoy it.
School Days started out as a visual novel, which has about twenty possible endings, depending on the choices you make when going through. Obviously, the anime shows only one of these endings. If you enjoy the anime, I suggest you also acquire the visual novel, something which I intend to do soon.
Umineko no Naku Koro ni
Another visual novel adaptation, Umineko is another great story. I personally am enjoying this more than School Days, but that could be because half the fun of Umineko is trying to solve the mystery. The series is split into four story arcs, one for each arc of the visual novel. The arcs are independent of each other, and tell different stories though key features are the same.
Umineko no Naku Koro ni is the story of the Beatrice the Golden Witch, come to collect her payment for lending Ushiromiya Kinzo a mountain of gold to rebuild the Ushiromiya family after it was ruined by an earthquake. In the process, she kills all of the Ushiromiya family and their servants, apparently using magic. The aim of the game is to solve the mystery and figure out how it was all done without magic, and, more importantly, who did it!
I have a theory, which is currently falling apart as I play through episode two in the visual novel, but I'm working on it...
5 Centimeters per Second
This is a film, and follows the life of Takaki Tōno over a period of two decades. He and Shinohara Akari form a fast friendship at their elementary school and, when she moves away, he never quite gets over it. The story follows how this affects his relationships with others in his life, and is quite sad. This is another very good story.
Manga
I've just got in to manga, so this list is very short for now.
The Ring
An anime adaptation of Ringu, and is pretty much identical to the film. I have yet to read the actual novel, so I don't know how close it is to that. Being the first manga I have actually read fully, I definitely enjoyed it. I have tried to get into manga before by reading it online, but that never worked for me. Same failing as ebooks, really: it should be on paper, but isn't, so I can't enjoy it.
The Ring is (have you been living under a rock if I need to explain this?) a story about an evil girl, killed and who projects her evil into a cursed videotape and kills all who watch it, exactly seven days after they have watched it. Obviously, the manga isn't quite as scary as the film...
Half Term Week, and, one month of Spork Bomb
Well, one month tomorrow, but near enough.
School has ended for half term week—a whole 5 week days off, and what shall I do with this vast amount of free time on my hands? I have a couple of plans. Firstly, Erasmus. I'd like to hit version 0.1 and make a dent in 0.2 this week, as I have free time I can't really hit a snag and put off solving it indefinitely due to “schoolwork”.
Remaining 0.1 features:
- Working memory manager
- IDE driver
- ATA driver
The IDE and ATA drivers have sort of merged, which is ok, for now; I can separate them when I start on ATAPI. The memory manager is there, but doesn't work: I'm going to write one from scratch rather than just borrowing/editing code, as then I'll definitely know what's going on.
After Erasmus, fractalgen. I want to figure out how to create arbitrarily large images with gd; if I try to make one too big it complains about the size exceeding INT_MAX, or something like that. I refuse to believe gd has such a limitation that has no work-arounds when it comes to large images. I also want to start on my fviewer program, a GUI to display / zoom fractals. Smooth colour shading would be nice, but it's not really a high-priority feature currently.
Of course, there are always books. I've still got a heap of books from Christmas to read, and with 9 days before school again, I should be able to get through at least one, perhaps two. I make it sound like I try to read books as quickly as possible, which isn't entirely true: I just dislike having unread books lying around, when I re-read books, I do take my time and generally notice things I didn't the first time through.
Leading on to other forms of entertainment: anime. I have borrowed the first two seasons of Claymore which, hopefully, I'll enjoy. Claymore is about a world in which humans coexist with yoma, demons, where there exists a group of half-human half-yoma warriors, the Claymores, who protect the humans (for a fee).
Finally, after mpdspl was rewritten to be much better by sdelafond, I have been spurred into action to improve mpddp. A complete rewrite; a second version. It will be object-orientated and have much better code organisation (the current program is a mess: why I change it so very rarely), and I have a vague notion of wanting a “more powerful” config syntax. Currently each line of a config file acts as a boolean OR: including everything which matches this line, OR that line, OR another… I want to include more boolean operations, AND at the very least, perhaps NOT (that's currently worked-around by the “never” keyword) or XOR, too.
Of my plans, mpddp 2 is the one I'm most excited about implementing. I can barely remember how the current code works, so I'll most likely read through it to figure out which functions do what, and then just write version 2 from scratch.
