The Holidays Are Over

And I'm regaining time. Well, at least that is the theory.

Of course, with the new anime season starting up, a new video game, and as always more and more books (much to my Beloved Wife's dismay), that theory does not always hold up well under the light of day.

On the book front, I have recently finished American Gods and was thoroughly happy with it, and I've managed to purchase Tobias Buckell's Ragamuffins. Sadly for me, this is the second book in a series, which of course means I must now go and see about acquiring his Crystal Rain novel. Amusingly enough, much like Doctorow's and Scalzi's works, I discovered his writing via a blog.

On the video game thing, I finally broke down and purchased Sins of a Solar Empire. I've been watching this game for a while now, and have never bought it mainly because I did not think that the enjoyment I would find in the game was worth the $50 (then $40 and then $30) price tag. Luckily, they brought said price tag down to $20 and the little economist in my head decided that yeah, $20 for that game is a worthwhile purchase and one should get $20 worth of enjoyment out of it. And I have, and I'm nowhere near finished playing with it.

Finally, over in the anime department, I've been bad. I know I said I was going to try to do episodic blogging last season, and I did watch 11Eyes, but I didn't ever really blog on it. Likewise, I'm wanting to build a nice review of t he series, but there is that whole "lack of time" thing going on.

Anyways, it's now firmly within the winter season, and I have tentatively made up my mind on which shows I'm going to watch this season:

• Durarara!! (for what appears to be an awesome anime)
• Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu (for the amusement)
• Okami Kakushi (for the sick horror of watching car wrecks)

Alas, let us see if I manage to make it through the entire season watching all of them this time.

In manga/comic news, I feel the need to talk about something here that I usually reserve for my programming blog. As indicated by the fact that I have a programming blog, I am, by training and trade, a software engineer. As such, I practice on things. I build software for the sake of building it, much the same way that I write things for the sake of writing them.

One of those things that I have built, is called eComic. It's purpose is to display CBR/CBZ files. For those of you who are unaware, CBR is a file format which is basically a RAR or a ZIP file of a folder of a bunch of images. eComic (and other tools like it) basically display the images within said file in a sequential format.

Basically, it's a digital comic book. It is software that is both free and open-source, therefore have fun with it. My primary reason for building it is to learn new techniques therefore, I release both the compiled version for people to use, as well as the source so others can see what I'm doing within it.

Now, despite all those things I have been doing, I have seen a few movies recently, among them 9 and Astroboy. And as one might expect from previous proclivities that I have espoused upon this blog, I did find both enjoyable (actually Astroboy more so than 9 in a somewhat surprising upset of my expectations).

Oh well, they were both fun movies, now I just have to get the time to go watch Avatar, Holmes and The Book of Eli. Maybe this weekend which happens to be my 10^th wedding anniversary.

Yes, intrepid reader, you read that correctly! A mere 10 years ago, this Friday, I was suckering a beautiful blond into being my wife getting married, and have been happily within that particular state for all those years now.

I am a lucky, lucky man.