American Doll Posse

I've listened to this album once and 2/3rds through so far. For me, Tori's music can be chopped into three sections: Early: LE, UTP, BFP; Transition: FTCH, TV&B, SLGs; and Modern/Epic: SW, Beekeeper, and now ADP. Although, "classic" Tori for me includes the first FOUR albums. Before I get going, let it be known that I prefer oldschool Tori, those first four albums. But I've found things to be liked in her later stuff, too - I just don't find nearly as much of it as moving as her earlier stuff.

Folks on Amazon.com said that if you liked The Beekeeper, which was pretty mellow, organ-inspired, that you'd maybe not like ADP. Good thing I really disliked The Beekeeper (I only listened to it once, sorta kinda). ADP is definitely still "Modern" Tori, as it were - her vocals still aren't as pretty or coherent as anything from her earlier stuff and still not near as angry as anything from BFP (which I think is her angriest as it seems the most true from her heart of all her albums for me). But this album definetly comes from an angry place. What's so different about it is that it's so heavily political. Odd that I FIND it odd, coming from Tori. R.E.M. or Indigo Girls, sure, but Tori? It *should* be expected of her, really, so I am unsure why I find it odd.

Whenever I listen to anything of hers (ever since "To Venus & Back") I try to pretend I've never heard anything from her before TV&B. It makes it easier. For "Modern" Tori, the album is pretty good, albeit very long at 23 songs. On first listen, if I am patient, there is something interesting and dynamic about nearly all of the songs so I do look forward to getting to know them better. I kind of wish she'd enunciate better - I mean, Tori has never been one to really enunciate lyrics but most fans kind of get the hang of her off-kilter pronunciations of things. But I think even the most talented Tori-translator will be put to the test with this album. Good thing it comes with lyrics in the liner notes. :D

Definitely an aggressive album - she's seriously using the whole band and it's fun to hear her do that, to let everybody really rock out. She's channeling the Beatles White Album and other '68 era artists in rolling style rock and she's not pulling punches in her political accusations while doing it, too. Oddly, some of my favorite bits from this album so far are the little "intermission" songs, the little 1-minute ditties. They're not the bubbly oddities of "Mr.Zebra" but they allow for little bursts of "we don't quite fit in like a normal song" that are delicious enough to make you wish they WERE longer, much like good ol' "Mr.Zebra". My favorite song off ADP so far is in fact one of these songs, "Devils and Gods", which is a mandolin piece - another oddity, Tori singing to a solo instrument that is not played with keys. A beautiful song with VERY poignant lyrics:

Devils and Gods, now that's an idea
But if we believe that it's They who decide
That's the ultimate detractor of crimes
'Cause devils and gods
They are you and I
Devils and gods,
They are you and I.
Devils and gods,
Safe and inside.

So I'll be giving this album a good, heavy listen and we'll see how it holds up later on.

The Practice of Happiness

I read this chapter about trust in a book called The Practice of Happiness by John Kehoe - the dude who wrote "Mind Power". I don't care what you think about positive thinking and books about it. All I know is that I've been good at negative thinking and it hasn't gotten me squat other than depressed. And I'm tired of it. So what do I have to lose from trying to think positively? Sounds funny when I say it that way.

This book has been pretty helpful in getting me through some rough patches this summer. It makes some good arguments for positive thinking - I mean, what do we have to lose by trying to be happy? Particularly when things seem like they can't get any worse?

"The Practice of Happiness" is a very short, quotable book - good for reading in chapter-by-chapter spurts. It's more of an inspirational read than a "how-to" read, like Kehoe's other book Mind Power in the 21st Century.

MySpace

Yet more reasons to hate MySpace:

1 • There's SPAM! Can you believe it? People can't really go around auto-spamming LJ. Far as I know it's too complex to really do that. Well, that and there's no LJ e-mail, but still. If I wanted SPAM I'd use a Yahoo email account.

2 • Regular users randomly message you with L337 hatemail! What the hell? I mean, it can be easy enough to be flamed here on LJ but it's MUCH easier to get such folks banned from LJ. Myspace doesn't give a shit about people's blog-well-being.

3 • interface? what interface?

4 • design? what design?

I could go on. Ugh, I HATE how every one or two click steps there are in LJ take 3 or 5 clicks in MS. Literally. I am not making this up. It's like Windows Vista asking you to apporove some inane action and then letting you know you did it okay. So:

1) click to initiate action (do the action)
2) click to approve the action (click)
3) Does this look good? (click)
4) action approved (click to get to an actual menu)

That's just to POST. In LJ you:
1) click create post (do the post)
2) click to post it. (click)
3) window rerouting you to chosen journal view (click to choose)

So one less but it somehow feels like 2 less clicks.

Then there's the general quality of blogging there. Which is next to nil. But then again, of the 7 people who have me friended on MS, only two of them actively seem to blog. No, correction, one of them doesn't blog, she only writes those Bulletin things, most of which are memes (ugh!) and the other mostly writes things I cannot read. So there really isn't ever anything for me to read. So in the end, this whole excercize is just one overblown, annoying e-mail wannabe program. I should stick to my guns and only use real email to contact people and LiveJournal to blog about personal things. Ugh.
~==~

In other MS news, I did find a CSS hack to force MS to look halfway decent. You have to be logged in and over 18 to see it - [I hated MySpace so much I deleted my account - couldn't stand it]

Also, if you have Firefox, you can install Greasemonkey, which then allows you to install user scripts that do nifty things. Like block all the ads in MS. Block the "cool new people", "cool new videos", New authors, books, comedy, etc. There is a script that, and this is the BEST, removes ALL customizations, forcing all profiles to appear like basic MS profiles. Does wonders for legibility, should you be forced to spend much time in MS. Haven't quite found a script that makes actual blog spaces legible, though.

But all that hassle... Does nothing but make me appreciate LJ that much more. :D

Pan's Labyrinth

We saw Pan's Labyrinth this weekend. In short, with no spoilers:
• DARK and very violent. Had to cover my eyes for many many parts.
• In Spanish (which enriches the film so much) so subtitle-haters beware
• Ofelia's fantasy plot may seem unconnected to the violent Spanish war setting but when the two are combined at the end create a much larger metaphor for innocence and war. Watch it and think about it.

In conclusion, though I hate violence and bugs, the textures and mood were very well done - I didn't know much of ANYTHING before going into this film so it was very exciting. Kind of a positive-sad movie in some ways. I really liked the fantasy side of it a LOT and the larger metaphor has really stuck with me. A very heavy film, I don't know if I'll rewatch it anytime soon but definetly worth a watch.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Today I bought Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for my DS. It is way cool.

I've only ever played "Symphony of Night" before so I don't know how Castlevania games are across the board. The graphics on this game are great - detailed, rich, and crisp, even on such small screens. The character movement is just like Alucard in "SoN", or at least very close to it. (Re-reading the above article, this probably due to the fact that they used a lot of sprites from "SoN", which explains a lot.)

Apparently with most Castlevania games you are one of the Belmonts and you only ever have one weapon throughout the entire game for the most part. "SoN" was a bit different because you were a Dracula descendant and you could choose between hundreds of types of weapons you got off dead enemies. You can do that, too, in DoS. Yay! So the equptment works the same.

One thing that is pretty neat is your ability to capture souls. Most, if not all, creatures in the game have souls that they "drop" every once in awhile that you automatically absorb, giving you a new ability. The more of each kind of soul you absorb (say, bat souls) the more powerful that ability becomes. This kind of replaces Alucard's four abilities in "SoN". There are four categories of souls and you can have one of each type of category equipped at a time. Familiars are back, too, but they are a type of soul you can equipt -- same with the various weapons of Castlevania fame (dagger, holy water, cross, axe, diamond...) - those are replaced by soul weapons. I haven't gone very far in the game and already I really like this new soul system - it's highly customizeable for different players. Say, by killing bats you can obtain the bat familiar. By killing Wargs you obtain a kind of warg fang bite thing that does a lot of damage. Using souls uses MP, which is the only thing you ever use MP on - well, that and special weapon attacks. You aren't casting spells like "Soul Steal" all the time like in "SoN".

Another interesting thing is that boss enemies can't just be killed - they have to be sealed. You must take them down to zero HP, which causes a Magic Seal thing to appear on your screen with the pattern of seal you must now 'cast'. You use the stylus on the touch screen to quickly draw the pattern you just saw in order to seal the boss permanently. Failure to draw the symbol correctly means the boss regains some HP and you have to take it back down to zero before you can attempt to seal the enemy again. You learn seals BEFORE hand and have the ability to practice them at any time you like. And they're pretty simple in the beginning so it's not that freaky. In comparison, the non-mandatory spells from "SoN" were WAY more difficult due to the directional pad not always doing what you thought it should of done. ;)

I also really like having the two screens on the DS. While you run about the castle, the map is constantly displayed on the upper screen. VERY handy. And apparently this is the largest castle of any Castlevania game made yet. I am so very excited.

Microsoft Word

Have I ever mentioned this? How much I detest Micro$oft Word? My dislike is not based on who makes the program, either. It's based soley on poor interface and poor document handling, etc. I seriously have no idea how the masses put up with Word — well, no, I take that back. The masses who all blindly suffer daily from using Microsoft software are obviously used to torturing themselves - no, they actually LIKE it.

Word is so cumbersome to navigate and get anything built properly. There was a time when I knew how to use Word but that was several years ago. I do recall knowing how to use it well enough to create fancy little newsletters for a class project in highschool. I can compare what I felt learning Word with what I felt learning, say, QuarkXPress – industry standard software for page layout. XPress (often called "Quark", though that's like calling Photoshop "Adobe") is to Word what graphing calculators are to simple, basic calculators, at least in terms of what the two programs can do and are used for.

But Learning Quark was WAY easier. Hmm. Shouldn't that say something? Shouldn't learning to ride a tricycle be more simple than learning to drive an 18-wheeler? Apparently this isn't how things go in the software world.

Anyway, my gripe with Word is that everyone USES this vile software to transport text around the globe. And it SUCKS. It REFUSES to give up its vile formatting when imported into a more dependable and versatile program. It drives me NUTS when I get text from a client that I have to lay out in Quark and I must first "de-Word" it, much like picking the ticks out of a newly adopted dog from the pound (or one would imagine). I go through the little song and dance of resaving the file as plain text so that when I put the text into Quark, I don't have to go through weeding out the bizarre residual glyphs from Word formatting. GAH! Sure the process takes only a minute to re-save but when working at a fast pace, minutes count. And the longer the document and the heavier the formatting, the longer the weeding.

Every flipping book, magazine, newspaper, and most newsletters you read were designed in something like Quark or InDesign. Not Microsoft fucking WORD. And yet Word refuses to be functionally helpful to those who are *actually* IN the business of dealing with WORDS. Does anyone else see the irony here?

Seriously, if i have to open Word again one more time today I am going to throw something heavy.

Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora

So, I got as far as 6 episodes into Kyoshiro to Towa no Sora:

The Good
• So far it is easier to follow than Kannazuki no Miko (KnM) was.
• We also got a solid explanation for the existence of the Absolute Angels (this series' Orrochi) which was also nice.
• The mecha are more interesting than KnM's. They look better and fight more interestingly.
• Evil Psycho Lesbian leader of the evil Absolute Angels.
• Kuon (Chikane) is in love with and not abusing Himiko (Himeko). What a first.
• Already some of the Angels have some depth, as of episode 2 (particularly the Chikane/Himeko clones - Kuon/Himiko)

The Bad
• Everyone else has very little depth
• Obnoxious stereo-hetero couple as the central romance.
• SO much fanservice. Nudity abounds with way more bathing and molestation than is neccessary in two episodes than would be tolerable for an entire series. Gawd.
• Music (opening/ending) SUCKS. At least KnM's themes were worth downloading, imho.
• There is mecha, which although has an explanation, the explanation is still a weak reason to have it. The series would work much better if the characters just had swords - same way KnM would of worked better.
• Evil Psycho Lesbian leader of the Absolute Angels. Can we be more stereotypical?

The parts that are ressurected from KnM:
• Chikane and Himeko - as bad guys (Angels)! *gasp*. At least they're in love and kiss.
• Oogami Souma - obnoxious dude is now also a bad guy (Angel).
• Catgirl chick is back though she's blended with some other manga/anime character.
• The scarred up meathead dude is also back. Yay.
• The Evil Psycho Lesbian leader of them all reminds me of the nun chick. Hmm.
• Kuu is a lot like Himeko - totally clueless about her surroundings and has super low self esteem.
• Kuu also has a dykey roomate like Himeko did. Only this one for sure is a dyke.
• Pointless mecha.
• Takes place in a town that symbolizes all the same stuff the town in KnM did.

The story was really horrendous til we got to Kuon/Himiko, then suddenly there was some depth, albeit minor. I think the creators are weighing heavily on KnM for backstory/back-character development for Kuon/Himiko. I was hoping for more continual development there but the segments on those two are so far and few between (and short) that the pain of the rest of the series just wasn't worth it. The main character, Kuu, is WAY more annoying and pathetic than the original Himeko, if you can imagine that. And her obsession with her 'prince' is just sad. Stereotypes abound with gender roles and sexualities. Love between girls is at first something to be disgusted by but upon reflection, something that is beautiful and thus should be exploited (although I must say, the kiss between Kuon and Himiko was very nice: loving, tender, and beautiful). Any hetero couples must be fantastically gorgeous: any long-lasting couple will include a male who is at least two feet taller than his female partner, be a total gentleman, and be tall dark and handsome, and the female should be super girly, blonde, self-concious, shy, and have no self-esteem.

Overall
This story was so shallow I couldn't bear to watch another episode. Even for Kuon/Himiko I could not bear to push on. It just wasn't worth it - and I tried HARD (you've SEEN some of the stuff I've made myself watch!) So by far one of the worst anime I have seen. Even Iczer One was better because it was at LEAST so ridiculous as to keep me watching out of sheer shock. And that's saying something.

2 out of 10