I have discovered a few new loves in this past month.

The first is They Might Be Giants.  It is an excellent band that has been around longer than I have been, and I am just now realizing they exist.  They’re awesome.  Check them out.  Now.

The second is Questionable Content.  It is a webcomic of epic indie-romantic proportions.  96% win, 12% love.  Hard recipe to beat.  Read.  Soon.

In fact, the only thing I can think of that beats it is Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.  Over 9000% pure win.  Seriously.  I’m pretty sure it’s the greatest thing that’s yet to have happened (”…imagine knowing me,” get the reference?).  Anyway, it’s the brainchild of Joss Whedon and stars Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day.  Watch it.  Repeatedly.

Yep, so vacation was cool.  It consisted of family, boating, tubing, Frisbee, bags, euchre, and sleep.  Umm … not too much else going on that I can think of.  I’m having fun playing with 1080p footage.  That’s about it?

This past week I’ve been trying to play catch-up on my work and failing due to computer issues.  I had to play catch-up in the first place due to other computer issues … and also Cole being home from Germany for a week.  Yeah.  So the week before last was … hectic to say the least.  We basically managed to condense an entire summer’s worth of fun into seven days.  I averaged four hours of sleep and two energy drinks a day.  We went into the city, wrote a song, took a road trip, played video games, watched movies, went to bonfires, played Frisbee, shared music, shared pictures, had jam sessions, ate far too much, slept far too little, and went partially insane.  It was the best week of my summer so far, and I’m sure it will remain so through the end.

Other than work and the week of Cole, my summer is pretty low-key and hardly worth mentioning.  I’m hanging out with friends, but it’s just pretty standard.  Nothing to write home about.  I enjoy it though.  I’m in the middle of the eighth season of Stargate SG-1, so only about two days worth of footage left until I’ve finished the series.  -_-”  I still haven’t even finished the first half of Gurren Lagaan though.  I guess in some way what makes Stargate great is that I can watch it without realizing I’m watching it.  Most shows, even the greatest, I’m still aware of time passing, my responsibilities, and the fact that I’m just watching some show.  That’s especially true of most animes.  They’re great, but I can only watch so much before I have to go do something productive.  With Stargate, I can basically put it on and forget about everything.  I need that sometimes.

Other than listening to Streetlight, I’ve been up to some relatively boring stuff. I’ve watched quite a bit of Stargate SG-1. It’s keeping me from my work, really. And from Gurren Lagann. I figured out that the runtime of the entire series is 9900 minutes, or 6.785 days. Yes. It is almost a week long. I’m not even halfway done with it.

As for my work, GSoC is coming along nicely. I scrapped most of the work I did the first week in favor of a new plan that my mentor suggested, and the past couple days I’ve really made some progress on it. I’m coding mainly from my new Gentoo installation on my laptop, which is quite nice now that it’s actually set up and mostly functioning.

As for my anime releases … Cowboy Bebop is moving along … slowly. Typesetting takes a lot more time than I had thought. Just the first pass at it is taking about half an hour per episode, and I’m not doing any real editing of the subtitles. Once I get everything relatively typeset, I have to go back and check for errors, edit things to make more sense as I see fit, fix errant timings, etc. It’s going to take a while. I’m going to give DN Angel the same treatment, but beyond that I think I may drop character-specific styling. We’ll see.

I picked up Death Cab For Cutie’s new album, Narrow Stairs, when it came out last Tuesday. It’s the first time in years I’ve gone to a store to get an album on release date. I must say it was entirely worth it. It’s an absolutely excellent buy.

This past weekend was ACEN. I was rather excited to be going again after missing it last year for prom (bad decision on my part - so much drama could have been avoided had I just let my inner geek speak out). I was also apprehensive as to whether it would live up to my expectations. The first year I went, I got to see The Pillows perform live. Thus, the following year I was quite disappointed when my experience wasn’t up to par. This year I went into it with rather low expectations and was rather pleasantly surprised. I got to meet Jeff Nimoy, Quinton Flynn, and Vic Mignogna (among others) and get autographs from them all. For those of you who don’t know, Jeff Nimoy wrote and directed the English dub for the first, second, and fifth seasons of Digimon, in addition to voicing Tentomon and other characters, as well as Nicholas Wolfwood from Trigun. He’s also an incredibly down-to-Earth guy. Same with Quinton Flynn. The two of them do a great panel called Adventures in Anime. If you get the chance, look up their so-called “Yaoi Song.” It’s quite entertaining. The other highlight of the convention, at least for me, was finding the FLCL Ultimate Edition boxset for under $60. Usually it sells online for a few hundred dollars. Given that FLCL is one of my all-time favorite series, I couldn’t help but snatch it up. In fact three of my other friends bought it as well - we cleaned the booth out of FLCL boxsets.

This week I’ve really begun research on my GSOC project. It’s a bit hard to motivate myself because it’s really open-ended and right now I’m not actually doing work, just research. It’s kind of like studying without any assigned homework. I’m just not good at it. The program officially starts on Monday, so by then I’ll be really working.

I’m finally getting to work on real anime releases. I’ve done a lot of ripping for myself in the past, and this year I got involved doing encoding for Ryuu-Rogue, and now I’m gearing up for my launch as a real releaser. It’d be kind of deceptive to call myself a release group since it’s just me, so a releaser I am. The first thing I plan to release is Cowboy Bebop. I’m taking the video from the Japanese HD-Remastered set of DVDs and the audio and subs from the English Remix DVDs. See, there are groups who are doing good work with subtitled-only releases, niizk in particular, but no one has done a decent dual-audio release since Zhentarim’s way back when. I’m going to fix that. I’m actually getting into typesetting for once and planning on using character-specific styling. After Cowboy Bebop I think my next release will be DN Angel, followed by Trigun most likely. Neither of those series have good dual-audio releases available either. I believe I’m going to buy Gravitation and Hellsing this summer, and hopefully Serial Experiments Lain, so they’ll get the treatment as well, then hopefully Samurai Champloo, Paranoia Agent, Peacemaker, Gilgamesh, and Samurai 7 later on. I’m going to be busy for a while, and I’m going to enjoy it.

Anyway, the year is almost over. I had my last day of classes yesterday. I have my first final, physics, tomorrow morning, then nothing until the middle of next week. I have my DiffEQ final Wednesday afternoon, then both my ECE classes back to back Thursday morning and afternoon. I really need to do well on all my finals, especially DiffEQ and physics. That means I’m actually going to be studying over the next week. Fancy that. Me. Studying. Anyway, I should really be doing that now, but I figured I’d take a while to unwind this morning/early afternoon and get some things taken care of. Blogging just happened to be one of them somehow.

Now, in the less than two weeks since i was introduced to How I Met Your Mother, I watched the entirety of the series thus far (the first two seasons have 22 episodes and the third has 17 so far) and have begun re-watching. Actually to be more accurate I should say I’m almost done re-watching. I only have about 12 episodes until I’ll be done seeing the entire series twice. In less than two weeks. Yeah, it definitely takes the number two spot for comedies in my book.

So last weekend was pretty damn busy, what with my family coming to town, Emily’s musical, my birthday and all. It was pretty enjoyable though. Urinetown is a really, really great musical, and I highly recommend seeing it if you ever get a chance. Also, my parents got me a Wii for my birthday, along with Brawl. So that’s cool. On to Sunday night and the Kimya concert.

It was at this really small venue off in the middle of Urbana. There was a tiny stage that was only a foot or two off the ground. Angelo Spencer and l’Orchidee d’Hawai opened for her. Angelo Spencer is a crazy French man who lives here now (and according to last.fm is married to Kimya?). He is also a one-man band, and a damn good one at that. l’Orchidee d’Hawai is also a French band that Angelo Spencer used to be a part of or something like that and so they’re just here in America for a show or two…? I was confused by the situation. Anyway, the venue was really pretty sweet, as it was the Urbana Independent Media Center, which means it had all sorts of quirky and artistic stuff all over the place. Kimya and crew were really happy to play there because they had just played a show at Notre Dame where there were uniformed servers and camera crews on both sides of the stage to show them on big-screen monitors right over the stage. So they really liked being in a small quirky laid-back venue again. I liked it too.

They were all incredible, especially Kimya. She’s just so positive. Her music, even the darker songs that deal with heavy issues, all remains quirkily optimistic. Also, I think this post probably has the highest concentration of instances of the word quirky and its derivatives this side of nowhere. So props to me for that. But yeah. It was an amazing show.

The beginning of this week wasn’t so amazing after that. I had a good birthday and birthday dinner, but after that I studied for my ECE 290 exam. The exam was Tuesday night, during the Ben Folds concert at Foellinger that I had to miss. So that pissed me off. Then I spent about three and a half hours debugging my code. I didn’t finish. I started debugging again Wednesday at 2:30 in the afternoon. I gave up at 9:45 and turned it in before the 10:00 deadline. I don’t know what the problem was. It passed all but one of the tests I threw at it, but I couldn’t isolate the issue to save my life. So yeah. There’s that.

Last night I was finally introduced to How I Met Your Mother. It’s a pretty excellent comedic show. I still hold The Office as my favorite, but HIMYM is actually a contender for tying with Scrubs for second I think. I don’t know where Grey’s Anatomy fits in on my scale of favorites anymore, but since it’s a drama I’ll say it’s in another category so I don’t have to deal with it. :)

Cursive is definitely a band one can describe as intense. Their recorded repertoire is intense. Their live show is about five times that. This is due in part to the fact that everything is louder live, but really it’s more of an effect of everything being so much more raw and unbalanced. While on the albums everything has its place, everything is thrown at you at once on-stage.

The elevated volume was, I thought, the biggest issue with the concert overall. Cursive’s albums display detailed intricacies in their varied soundscapes - a.k.a. I get off on how wonderfully musical it all is. It’s not your average indie/emo stuff. They’re incredible musicians. Seeing their guitar live further convinced me of that fact. All those intricacies are lost when the music is too loud though. The subtle balances are destroyed.

That said, I still managed to enjoy it quite a bit. My two favorite songs, “Some Red Handed Sleight Of Hand” and “Dorothy At Forty,” were the songs that suffered the most in the live performance. They were still amazing. “Some Red Handed Sleight Of Hand” was the closer, and managed to generate a small mosh and a bit of crowd-surfing. That’s a lot for Canopy, as it’s a really laid-back venue. “Sink To the Beat” on the other hand only benefited from the live aspect. It’s greatness comes from it’s intensity rather than subtle balance, so seeing it live was just downright amazing. It was as pure power in audible form.

They also played about six or seven songs from their upcoming album. They seemed to be much more subdued than their past recorded material, but in a good way. It will be interesting to hear the finished product at the beginning of next year.

Besides being mellower, the other main thing to note, especially concerning the band name, is that the “Disco” element is gone. The heavy techno influence in their debut album is entirely gone. It seems that Pretty. Odd. is Panic!’s attempt at indie. It certainly isn’t straight-up indie in that it has a lot of different musical influences. I rather like it that way, and it’s off course unique to Panic!. That’s what really drew me to A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. It was that it mixed very different musical styles and managed not to butcher any of them. It produced a signature sound. Pretty. Odd. does this as well, defining a new signature sound for Panic!. It mixes an indie-folk core highlighting banjo and harmonica with guitar licks reminiscent of 60’s rock, as well as Panic!’s unconventional use of vaudevillian piano and brass.

The lyrics have changed in form and attitude as well. A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out focused on youthful themes of love, lust, angst, and a few others. It took a very jaded, coming-of-age approach to these subjects. Pretty. Odd. seems, at least to me, to be the result of this coming-of-age. The lyrics still touch on the same subjects at times, but handle them much differently. More often though, the subject is somehow more ethereal.

That pretty much describes the whole transition. Time for a sex metaphor! A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out takes the purely physical approach. It’s all about raw, carnal pleasure. Pretty. Odd. takes the romantic approach. It’s about love and intimacy. Yes, the metaphor is a bit stretched, but it’s how it plays out in my mind. I think it’s a good move for Panic! personally. Then again I tend to be more a fan of indie than anything else (besides Streetlight) these days, so I may be biased. On the other hand, there’s just no replacing the energy and pure audible love that is A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out. So long as I can have both when I want them, I’ll be satisfied.

As for my opinions on a couple songs … I really, really like “Do You Know What I’m Seeing?” It’s one of the songs that really still shows the old Panic! influence in my opinion. It sounds nothing like it on the surface, but underneath it there are some of the same elements and it has the same feel in a way. “She’s a Handsome Woman” reminds me intimately of The Shins. I don’t know what it is about it, but I can’t help but make the connection in my head as I listen. I’m also quite the fan of “Pas de Cheval.” It’s just fun.

Not too many really exciting things have happened since the last time. Those that did fall under a certain category and the reason they’re not posted here is that I started a new blog, called Steal Your Carbon, for all my technology-related blogging entries. So I spent a while getting that up and running.

I’ve been pretty busy as well. I should really probably be working on some homework or other right now, to be honest. I spent a lot of my spring break writing up proposals for Google Summer of Code. Read more about them over at SYC. Really though I’ve just been really busy this past week with homework. I’m just finishing up a big programming project after having a physics test during the week. I’ve got another two tests, Monday and Wednesday respectively. Oh, and I had to get my ass in gear for the recent batch release over at Ryuu-Rogue.

I’ve also had the worst luck of my life with computers the past week or so. Before spring break my HTPC died. When I got back and was trying to fix it the NIC in my main desktop died. So I’ve been working from my laptop all week. I finally fixed my main desktop last night. So yeah. That’s only added to the time commitments.

Now, for the happy side of things. I really enjoyed spring break. While I was doing some work, I had a lot of free time. I got to spend a lot of it with friends. Like a lot, a lot. I was out pretty late several nights, and played Risk a few times and Diplomacy once. The Diplomacy game didn’t end and saw me getting home at about 5:30AM. o_O I also got to watch a lot of anime. In the week or two before spring break I watched about two thirds of Death Note and over break I finished it and watched all of Last Exile. While Death Note didn’t live up to the manga (and how could it?), it was really good. I’ve been meaning to watch Last Exile for, what, four years now? So I was really happy to finally watch it. Plus, it was really quite good.

So that’s at least a little of what I’ve been up to. I really like this trend of me watching more and more anime though. I think it’s going to continue. Also, I just registered for ACEN 2008 last night. After missing last year’s I discovered I really want to go again. Woot!

Since then I’ve been doing homework. No joke. I’ve had some big assignments, most notably a programming project. We had to implement a transposition cipher in assembly language. If we were programming it in a higher level language, like C, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. The issue is it’s assembly so it’s a pain in the ass. LC3 assembly, no less. So that sucked. I actually just finished it about twenty minutes ago. I spent six hours tonight debugging after having spent probably ten hours programming the decryption segment of the program. The encryption segment took probably four hours of programming and another four debugging last week. So all in all it was, what, about 24 hours? Probably more. That’s a lot for one project, especially when it only ends up being ~420 lines of code. That’s the nightmare that is assembly. There’s no visual codeflow. You (or at least I) can’t just look at it and tell how it’s organized. Every time I look at a chunk of assembly I have to read the whole thing. With C or PHP I can read loops and logical constructs straight out within seconds. In any case, I’m glad that our next assignment is, in fact, in C.

Oddly enough, I’m doing phenomenally well in that class (ECE 190, by the way). Coincidentally there are 190 students in the class. Coincidentally, we had an exam the same day my … ex-friend … decided to email me. About three hours after the incident. Oddly enough, I scored a 95 on the test, which was the top score in the class, with four scores of 91 coming in tied for second. I think I should get another two points back on a re-grade, making it a 97. Woot! I guess being mad doesn’t make me mess up my academics. Perhaps I just need to get angry more often?

I’ve decided that I really like Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin. Like I new before that I liked Something Corporate, but I mean I really like them. It’s great music. I guess I’m becoming more and more of a sucker for piano rock, eh? I’m really starting to dig the old Ben Folds Five stuff too. And by really starting to like it I mean that I hadn’t really heard the old Ben Folds Five stuff before recently so yeah. Anyway.

Ryuu-Rogue has released my first encode for Digimon Adventure 01. So after years of encoding hundreds and hundreds of videos, one of them has finally made it to the Interwebs. I’m thinking that I might start releasing some of my other encodes on my own. In particular, I’m looking at releasing Cowboy Bebop, DN Angel, the Samurai X collection, some Ghibli films, and a number of live action movies. Just thinking about it still, don’t view this as a promise.

Also, what’s odd is that within a week of officially losing one close friend, I seem to have gained another back, at least on some level. If you remember, I’ve talked about cutting ties to one other close friend in the past. It wasn’t really of my choice, but of hers. I tried to patch up the relationship in the fall and she tried to cut it off for good. In any case, she decided to start talking to me again. So far things have been going pretty well, so I’m optimistic. I’m not expecting to become best friends again, but so long as communication is open and I can know she’s happy and doing well, I’ll be content. Hell, even when she wasn’t talking to me I was still doing my damnedest to check in on her from time to time to make sure she was doing well. I’ll still do the same for my other friend that I’ve (at the present) lost. Don’t get me wrong when I say I’m optimistic, I’m not expecting her to come back too. I’d actually be really, really surprised if she did. The optimism doesn’t apply to her. Just the one who did come back. Oh the confusion induced by not using names…