Tag: english

Schedule

May 21, 2007
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My plans now, once again (and i think not the last time). Books: finish The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco; Confessions by Saint Augustine, the third and fourth piece of the Narnia series, the three Theban plays of Sophocles, Eclogae by Vergilius and Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut. Also, i want to buy Harry Potter 7 (The Deathly Hallows) as soon as it’s out, which is due sometime this summer, 21st July, to be exact. Can’t wait. Others: learn german and programming in Pascal by autumn, become pro in literature, history, philosophy and japanese by next spring, get a driving licence this summer, learn PHP to its very last bit, so that i can get some jobs related to it. I also want to rewrite the blog engine from the very bottom (yeah, once again), but i promise you won’t see a single bit of that until it’s totally and fully complete. It’ll be a lot better than the current one, which means it’ll be faster, better coded and more secure. Not to mention, finished.

There are some other things, more recent and of a bit higher importance in my life now, for example, learning the literature of the middle ages and doing my maths homework. Yeah, i’d appreciate if someone said “be happy until you don’t have any more serious problems”.

(Just as a side note, i tell everyone this is the first scheduled post in the blog (finished at 18:56. I hope it’ll work out as expected.)

StarCraft II

May 19, 2007
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Finally, the news i’ve been waiting for many years now… StarCraft II is officially announced. This one’s shocking. Naturally Blizzard has not announced an official debut date yet, but some sites (unofficially) claim that the game will come out on the 20th of November.

I’ve seen the images, i’ve seen the trailer movie, and all i can say is that just as WarCraft III, or rather say, just as all Blizzard strategies as of yet reformed the RTS genre, StarCraft II will also follow that path and become a game everyone knows about, in the matter of seconds after it’s debut.

On the game’s IGN page, one can find 30 high quality pictures and a three minute long (!) video of the game, and a report from the scene. How to say, it’s… well, to quote Monty Python, “it’s…” Or if you want me to continue the sentence so badly: it’s perfect. A new, 3D graphics engine displays the game. Everyone knows, that i’m not very sensitive about the graphics of a game, but this one really rocks. I couldn’t say anything bad about it. The explosions, the battles, the units, the nukes, everything is designed in the quality expected from Blizzard.

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Banzai!

May 19, 2007
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Don’t worry, this one won’t be in japanese. I decided to write only limited amount of japanese and german posts, for two reasons: one, i’m not good enough in these languages to write full-blown, long posts, and two, i hate to use those online translator applications, which i have to use if i want to write more than i can.

Anyway. If anyone remembers what i wrote about my plans on how to spend an eve, then i can provide “good” news: everything seems to be tending towards that outcome, though nothing is sure yet.

Also, as it’s usual nowadays, i spent my almost whole afternoon in the library with my fellow japanese-loving friends (the remaining part i spent with my best friends hanging out here and there), so, as it’s usual nowadays, i arrived home around half past six, and as it’s usual nowadays, i sat down here to write something interesting. It’s failing, i already see.

I decided not to work a single bit today, rather only watch anime and listen to music. If i feel like, i will also read… most probably the you-know-what or the Bible. I want to read the latter in whole once. The anime in my plans include the latest episodes of Bleach (last) and Naruto (first), and Samurai Champloo (between). The word in braces mean the order i’ll watch them in.

Oh, and wait for tomorrow. Great news shall arise. Also, today one more post will be done, according to my plans…

Stravinsky

May 17, 2007
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Before anyone ask, i don’t want to write about Stravinsky, i simply found it a bit annoying, that one of my contacts signed on with the name Igor Fjodorovič Stravinski (sic). No, the problem is not that he borrowed the name of that genius russian composer, the problem is, that this way i don’t have the slightest idea who he was. I mean, that contact, not Stravinsky. I indeed have a bit more contacts than i should have, simply because in “ancient times”, once or twice, i was invited into huge “convo” chats, which means there was a lot of people, and i added too many of them. Haven’t talked to the most ever since. Anyway, luckily Trillian allows me to rename my contacts, so as soon as i figure out who that Stravinski was, i’ll give him a name that i recognise.

Anyway, i haven’t worked on the blog today, even though i should’ve. I instead worked on a kinda more important project, that i should’ve finished for half a year now – and to be honest, now i really think i’m close to opening it.

Gosh. I just realised i still have loads to learn… For example, the whole history of ancient greek literature. Fun. I think i won’t sleep much this night…

Hellsing

May 13, 2007
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Today, before doing my homework (which comes after writing this post), i watched the first and second OVA of Hellsing. It was dead good (both of them) – they continue the manga storyline, which the anime left un-ended (almost un-dead). I would indeed write a long summary about both of them, but… well, then, should i do it? Don’t forget: i’m not careful with spoilers now, so you should be, if you still haven’t seen these OVA. If you’re not interested in my babbling, i’ll cut it short just for you: both are must-watch category, high quality anime products. I can’t wait to see the third subbed.

One important difference compared to the TV series is that the OVAs feature some kind of humour, that’s – to suit the horror scenery – often morbid, but still very amusing. One such gag is when Jan Valentine, while shooting down his enemy in a corridor “crossroads”, shouts the (said to be) well-known “Konami Code”, which is a cheat code in Konami games that gives the player everything needed to win the game. After that, just to top it all, he also states “I’m cheating and I’m invincible” – naturally by the end of the episode, one of these statements prove false (one can guess, which).

Also, there is a couple of literature and moving picture culture references: for example, in the very beginning of the second OVA, Alucard dreams (!) about a man “killing him” – in a very similar fashion like Dr Van Helsing and his companions killed Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel; to be exact, in the very same fashion. Also, according to the manga (which i sadly have not read), he is indeed Vlad Ţepeş, also known Count Dracula. In the end of the second OVA, when reporting information regarding Millenium to Integra, Walter mentions Han Solo and his superb ship Millenium Falcon briefly. There are also more, but i forgot them…

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Huang Shan

May 11, 2007
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Title: Huang Shan Mountains
Creator: `foureyes

Bleach 125

May 10, 2007
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This is the first time since the rebirth when i write about anime. Soo…

The new opening of Bleach, which is not so new, since it’s been on for a couple of episodes now, but i couldn’t write about it yet; so the new opening sounds quite good. Now i wrote this, i realised that virtually all music of Bleach sounds and sounded dead good – it’s enough to mention Yui’s Rolling Star or D-tecnoLife by UVERworld. Both are played in my Winamp at least once daily. This time too, not only the opening, but naturally the ending is very catchy, though it takes some time, i listen to them whenever i can.

Now about the episode itself. Well, i have earlier read this part (and all oncoming) of the manga, so i kinda knew what to expect, but how to say, a moving picture battle is very far from a still one, like it’s squared or so. It’s also hard to write about this in a way not spoiling anyone, and still doing a nice summary… Thus i stop now, and continue in the longer version of the post. Check it if you want it.

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What a nice lava lamp!

May 10, 2007
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If anyone played with the second piece of the Broken Sword series, this title must have awakened funny memories of Nicole standing in the room of the El General trying to talk about something with that dead dumb man. I ROFL at that scene.

Anyway. I messed around the regexps used on each longer text (like posts, comments), so now all double quotes (“) should be replaced to quote tags. I think it’s somewhat better… But it was dead long to do it. I know, i suck at regexps. Also, there are more and more quotes (mostly japanese or self-made 俳句 (haiku)) added to the databese to be displayed on the left, in the Better panel. Hope you like them. If not, don’t read.

Edit 19:54

Oh, and from now on, the respect links are displayed in a random order on the sidebar. I felt bad, because that order looked like they were ordered, though they were not. So it’s now random.

SakuraCon

May 7, 2007
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This weekend the spring anime con took place in Budapest. And i wasn’t there… Why, anyone may ask. First of all, if i would’ve gone there, then i would’ve gone on saturday, because the most interesting events were scheduled for that day. On the other hand, another, for me obligatory event took place then: the graduation ceremony in my school (no, i ain’t graduating yet, i will next year), which i had to attend, and consumed most of my morning. Not to mention i forgot that SakuraCon was then (i’m ashamed), naturally by the time i realised it, which was at about 2 PM, it was already too late to get there, so this year i missed this great event… Doesn’t matter, if everything goes well, in the autumn i’ll attend the Autumn AnimeCon, which will be at least as good as this one – at least i hope so. One may ask why i haven’t gone there on sunday: the answer is quite simple. I didn’t want to spend much money (at least it’s much for me) on an event i may not enjoy. And to top it all… well, that should be the topic of the next post.

Comments

May 7, 2007
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Finally, after about two hours of painful debugging, the commenting works. Dare not find any bugs, or i’ll remove the whole commenting thing for sure until the next blog version (just joking: report all bugs as soon as possible).

I had fun with the following: anti-spam protection, which first produces some twisted “first gate”, that should be able to sort out spam-bots, and then a second line, which checks the strings for spam-words; and then the remembering of non-registered users’ data, which gave me about an hour’s undisturbed entertainment: first, it wouldn’t recognize the input fields, then it wouldn’t add the comment to the database, then it wouldn’t make the cookie to store the data, and finally it rejected to detect that cookie that the very same script set, not to mention being unable to decode the self-encoded string. Funny. But at least it works. Don’t ask me to ever touch it.