Monday Morning Rambling for January 28th

Well, another week is starting, and it's a beautiful sun-filled day. Which is especially joyful as most of last week was distinctly lacking in the sun. Fortunately, I work in a big room with lots of artificial sun (read that as florescent bulbs) so I'm not suffering from a lack of light. Of course, things could be worse, I could have to be reviewing Glass Fleet.

Anyways, I have another geek moment involving my kids. This one involves the elder son, and Star Trek of all things. We had just finished watching an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender and what was coming on next was Edgar and Ellen. Now, there are a lot of cartoons that I'll watch, and a lot of those I'll even enjoy. Edgar and Ellen falls into neither of those categories. Yet that's a topic for another day. So, there I was, having pushed the "guide" button on the remote, and scrolling through the various offerings on the boob tube, and throughout this activity, my son, who knows that the channel is getting changed has been saying how much he wanted to watch the cartoons. No surprises there, the boy loves cartoons as much as I do--much to the chagrin of my beloved wife.

As one may have guessed by now, I switched over to Star Trek, and like the good geek that my boy is, he instantly stopped asking for the cartoons and started asking for the SF show. I'm so proud.

In movie-land, there's not a movie that I really, really want to see (well, Juno looks good) until the Valentine's day release of Jumper and The Spiderwick Chronicles. That said, this weekend saw the release of the movies Rambo and Meet the Spartans. Guess which one is #1 at the box offices. Here's a hint--it's the one that's not a revival of a nearly thirty year old franchise. Just one of those things that I find amusing. Of course, there are some interesting images from Will Smith's upcoming superhero flick, Hancock (images courtesy of Rope of Silicon):
Switching hats to book land, I'm in the process of vetting the Darth Bane sequel's review, writing Hal Spacejock: Second Course's review, and have just finished Scalzi's Android Dream. Which reminds me of something that I find odd. I'm of distinct mixed emotions whenever a book store closes. On the one hand, I have less places to peruse and purchase books, while on the other, I can get books cheap during the "we're closing" sales. Sadly, the bookstore closest to my workplace, a Waldenbooks in the Metrocenter Mall is now gone. I'll miss it, even though I knew it only a short time.

Now that I've given my wife enough material to mock me for the rest of the week at least, let's move on to anime. First off, let's talk a bit about other anime blogs out there. While this doesn't have a distinct directive on anime, it is a big part of what I talk about, infused as it is with that whole geek culture thing. Anyways, Jeff Lawson, over at Hop, Step, Jump has an interesting article discussing the differences between episodic and editorial blogging of animes, and where he himself falls into those paradigms. Personally, I've long been of the editorial mode myself, waiting for an entire season to play out and then writing my thoughts up on the whole series. That said, I've long noticed that most of the blogs out there dealing with anime were of the episodic variety. Long, have I wondered if I should switch to writing reviews on a per episode basis. In fact even now, it leaves me leaning back in my chair, stroking my cleanly shaved chin, and saying, "hmm." Well, my chin isn't that cleanly shaved at the moment, I was in a bit of a rush this morning.

Frankly, I'm not certain if I have the time to do such episodic reviews. After all, I've barely have free time as it is, what with all my various geek pursuits. Yet, the thought of episodic blogging does appeal to me, even if it means that I need to figure out how to take screen shots. Which is either as easy as pressing CTRL+i or a varied, multi-step procedure involving arcane settings and the "print screen" button.

Oh well, I've got True Tears 4 and Spice & Wolf 3 waiting on my PC for my viewing pleasure this evening. Let's see how easy it is to do this with these two animes. If I'm enjoying it, I'll try expanding out to the rest of the animes I'm watching one by one. Of course that begs the question, does anyone really care?