if anything it means obsessive fan and was used by a lot of anime fans at the time instead of using the word for "you".The actual meaing of otaku is "house".
being "otaku" of any type is not considered good. There are car otaku, sports otaku,basicaly otaku for anything.
The reason it is considered bad is that(according to my japanese professor) there was a guy who killed a number of people in japan and he was "otaku" and was really in to anime and had a ton of tapes. As a result a bad meaning got attached to the word.
Hence I find it funny when people refer to themselves proudly as otaku without really unterstanding the meaning. I wouldn't go to japan and refer to yourself as one(I saw people who did while I was at school there, it was funny).
The following two schows are aimed at teenage girls but are pretty good too:
Vision of Escaflowne(not the version shown on Fox) its got great animation, excellent music, very good story, great characters(its even got sir issac newton in it!), sword fights and some mecha battles. Its got romance and action etc. The only annoying thing is that the girl can't decide which guy she likes. 26 episodes from bandai. Oh, btw the mecha are designed by the sameguy as macross.
Fushigi Yuugi, great story, got comedy, action etc. Again aimed for teenage girls, but AWESOME STORY. 52 episodes.
I'd watch macross plus to as an intro, good story, characters and music.
Nausica is good too.
If you want to see funny stuff, watch the Lupan movies. As my old roomate put it "He is like a crazy inspector gadget that scores."
If you like cars, Initial D is definatly the one to watch. With each season the animation(both cg and cell) get better and better. Its a fighting anime with car battles, no NOS here, just down hill action.
Yeah but back then MTV did have a wider variety of programming. Check out their schedule and see how many hours a day videos are played and when they are played. They play 15 hours of videos today (6.5 of which are before 8am)6 between 8:30-2:30 when most people are working at school.
MTV has too much non musical programming on because at some point they became "entertainment televison" instead of music televison. What does the real world or road rules have to do with music? Its the same with VH1. The vast majority of the weekend is taken up with "behind the music" because it probably gets better ratings than videos. If you want to watch videos(and a variety of them) you have to have digital cable for MTV2, MTVX VH1 classic etc
Now adays when they show videos they are cut for time to hear more from carson daily or whatever VJ, have too much stuff overlayed on the screen, or have screaming little girls saying how great the artist is.
Sounds like the same problems the beastie boys had with capitol records(the beasties own the grand royale label i believe).
Likewise, the beasites play under the psuedonym "Quazar" in smaller clubs too since their shows are always sold out.
On a side note, for those of you who don't like the beastie boys, read/listen to their lyrics(i don't know of another band who prank calls Carvel stores(an icecream/pastry chain in the northeast) wanting to talk to cookie puss(a pastry), sings about Yoo-Hoo soft drinks, or extol the virtrues of white castle(a burger chain near NYC)) Also their music is very diverse, listen to the insturmental tracks on the albums. Each album has covered a different genre(punk, techno, hip hop or combos of each). The beastie boys totally don't take themselves seriously at all(go watch the sabotage dvd or the criterion dvd). They also did the whole rap/rock thing way before Limp Bizkit. Lastly they were very innovative back in the 80's in their use of sampling(go listen to Paul's Boutique).
i have a copy of it, but havent read it in 12 years or so, i just only recently reread the trilogy. Thats one of the next books on my list to read on the train!
Hence why I said the author should have brought his friend along who had brought the card.
Or you can find a theater that allows you to preorder and pick up your tickets at a machine in which you stick your credit card in to verify the purchase before the tickets are printed. As a result you bypass any ticket sales people or any assoicated problems.
"Such notions about Hobbits can be found in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," but the Hobbits themselves have been pushed off center stage. If the books are about brave little creatures who enlist powerful men and wizards to help them in a dangerous crusade, the movie is about powerful men and wizards who embark on a dangerous crusade, and take along the Hobbits."
Thats actually my whole take on the book itself. The hobbits are along for the ride mostly. If anything they are there because supposedly(as others have brought up), more resistant to the rings powers. The hobbits can't take care of themseleves physically in a fight due to their size (with the exeception of Sam fighting the big spider who underestamates him) and lack of fighting skills. The rest of the fellowship is made up of warriors and a sorcerer. The 4 hobbits are more or less farmers, it is only in the Scouring of the Shire that they put the soldiering skills they learn to use.
Having recently re-read the stories themselves, I don't believe as stories themseleves they are that great.
Tolkien provides excellent descriptions of the events and scenerey throughout the books. His command of the english language is outstanding. The background of the world that he creates, his middle earth, is also exceptionlly fleshed out, even more so through his other books like the similarion. The poems follow the same, and provide plently of background info and enrich his created world much like the little intros at the begining of each chapter in Dune.
Now for the bad parts. Throughout the 1500 or so pages, depending on who published the book, of the lord of the rings, how much character development really occurs? Not much at all! The characters don't grow at all and are nearly the same as when they left to go on the voyage. We read plenty of how hard the journey is for frodo and the weight of his burden, but he is really no different in the end of the book except for the loss of his finger. Another example is Sauron. He is presented as a very bad guy who wants to take over the world and reclaim the ring. When he actually does appear(all 3-5 pages of it), he dies and we learn nothing about his motivations as to why he wants to take over the world.
If there is any character development at all in the book it is regarding Golumn himself, who as the characters discuss back and forth may have or have not had a change for the better and saved everyone.
The rest of the characters are kinda generic: Aragorn/Strider the hero etc.
I'm hoping that this release of the movie shows more character development for each of the characters. It certainly looks like it takes care of the rest. I'm curious how much of the movie is action oriented as the book certianly isn't, most of the battle scenes are covered in just a few pages.
Nothing personal, but you would think after the first time that you would have just brought your friend who owned the credit card along with the card.
I don't believe that ticket sellers have a very high paid/and or rewarding career and therefor probably don't care about your situation very much(how ever frustrating it might be!) You had the right idea by making a stink about it and at least got something for your time.
I would have made them call the manager then and there for clarification.
Limp Bizkit's first CD is pretty raw, definatly NOT mainstream and I doubt a single track could really get any airplay on a major station (the song "Bitch" comes to mind). When they softened up a bit on signifigant other then they sold well.
I personaly like the sound of their first album and think the rest is pop crap.
Its hard to get exposed to new music at all. With a large number of radio stations all owned by the same 2-3 companies, the playlists are astonishingly similar. You hear the same sets of music by the same "artists" every 2 hours or so.
The only real opportunity one has is to find a local college station or independent station to hear a wider variety of music and musical genre's. MTV used to be a way to get exposed to new music (now they hardly play videos anymore or if they do they are the same 10 in TRL everyday which have little girls screaming about how great the artists are with the their voices louder than the songs. It doesnt even help that the videos are cut short anyways.) I do have to admit that MTVX does play a wide variety of new and old rock as well as the other MTV2 networks.
The best way to find new music is still from friends, especially musician friends since music is their passion.
No wonder sales are down when stations won't take the risk to explore new artists and musical genre's. When you are hearing "Get yo freak on" on 3 stations at once, why would you want to buy that cd since its on all the time, and secondly, how are you going to buy the single from anyone else since you can't hear anyone else!
When I was in college (RPI) there was a big to do in the CS department because the school had recieved a number of machines from Intel/Microsoft and the school was instituting a laptop program with MS stuff installed. The problem was that the school wanted everyone to use the Microsoft C++ compiler,but the CS department wanted people to use various Unix ones since thats what the "real world" used at the time.
I never really cared much because I'm an electrical engineer and most of the stuff we used in upper level classes were old VAX machines, but it was a big deal on campus at the time (circa 1998-1999).
I personally liked xenogears far more than the FF efforts on the psx(too much sitting back to watch FMV which you cant skip which gets annoying the second time through). While the second cd was rather rushed and the format of the game switched to more of a "misson" format, the fighting system for both the robot mode and human mode was excellent!
The story was great too(and at some points rather disturbing and not for children), also the runtime to play the game took 60-80 hours or so. Pretty good for a game that had more of the snes effort of chrono trigger. The sprite based animation was pretty good too.
I'd like to find a copy somewhere, ebay i guess.
I would like to see a sequel or game in a similar format by square. I never did play Chrono Cross.
Final Fantasy Tatics was an awesome game. Yet another square psuedo 2d game that in many ways played better than the 3d for the sake of 3d Final Fantasy efforts on the PSX. The job system in that game was a lot of fun, especially how you could customize the characters virtually any way you wanted. It also presented multiple ways to play through the game by that virtue. I would like to see a sequel.
The dreamcast failed primarily because fanboys like you were all in awe of the specs and marketing hype that Sony had put out. Eventually some good games have come out, but it is a shame that so many people put off buying a dreamcast for a system that at least intially did not have much of anything other than dvd playback to offer.
As you might remember the only "good" inital game was SSX for PS2. Granted at time of release the DC was on its second generation of software.
There are only 2 games I like for it now, parappa 2(import) and MGS2.
I havent read the books myself, but after seening the movie, I'm not sure what the hype is about. While friends of mine said it followed the book very well, the story jumped around quite a bit, the was very little sense of time passing(im not talking about the cg where the seasons change,but the evens during each season).
The secnd hour of the movie seemed almost unnecesscary, the broomstick game sequence seemed pointless as harry has already established that he is good at catching fast moving objects.
I didnt think most of the CG was that impressive either.
I didnt like this movie that much, but everyone I met who has read it has. Now based upon the movie I probably wont read the book.
Another funny thing is that when I was a kid fantazing about doing great things it was never the 11 year old me slaying dragons or flying planes but a version of myself in my 20's. Maybe thats why I couldnt relate to the characters.
If you have Digital Cable, those logos are redundant since every time you flip the channel, the current program is displayed as well as the channel name.
That being said, digital cable subscribers are ovbiously in the minority.
MD sound quality still is better than MP3. I love my MD and it is a great replacement for tape. I use it all the time at the gym or while riding my motorcycle.
When I lived in japan, you could go to any cd rental store(yes you can rent cds there, for as little as one hour to a week, gee I wonder why)and you would find at te checkout counter, blank discs and blank mds. Renting a cd for 200 yen isnt that bad considering most japanese releases were 2500-3200 yen(22-28 bucks or so). Prices are higher there for cds too because you have multiple middlemen, hence a single costs about 10 bucks believe it or not.
Chairman Kaga isn't dubbed in the US release. I thought that was one of his conditions in airing it in the US. I always find it amusing during the judging poriton where he speaks Japanese and everyone else replies in english.
WMBC TV(channel 63), a korean station in new jersey, or channel 24(Which had some of US Nippon's programs like Abarenbou Shogun) used to show Iron Chef undubbed. I don't think they do anymore though.
You are technically correct. Anime=animation in japanese.
As a medium, anime and cartoons are no different.
The major difference is the content. Most cartoons(at least now adays) are mindless comedic fun for little kids.I feel sorry for little kids now a days, no big action shows(a-team, knight rider, airwolf) or cartoons G.I. Joe, Transformers like in the 80's.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an engineer. Its a geek job and I get the day off.
Not everyone is in IT or a programmer though it seems like everyone is on slashdot.
sort of
if anything it means obsessive fan and was used by a lot of anime fans at the time instead of using the word for "you".The actual meaing of otaku is "house".
being "otaku" of any type is not considered good. There are car otaku, sports otaku,basicaly otaku for anything.
The reason it is considered bad is that(according to my japanese professor) there was a guy who killed a number of people in japan and he was "otaku" and was really in to anime and had a ton of tapes. As a result a bad meaning got attached to the word.
Hence I find it funny when people refer to themselves proudly as otaku without really unterstanding the meaning. I wouldn't go to japan and refer to yourself as one(I saw people who did while I was at school there, it was funny).
The following two schows are aimed at teenage girls but are pretty good too:
Vision of Escaflowne(not the version shown on Fox) its got great animation, excellent music, very good story, great characters(its even got sir issac newton in it!), sword fights and some mecha battles. Its got romance and action etc. The only annoying thing is that the girl can't decide which guy she likes. 26 episodes from bandai. Oh, btw the mecha are designed by the sameguy as macross.
Fushigi Yuugi, great story, got comedy, action etc. Again aimed for teenage girls, but AWESOME STORY. 52 episodes.
I'd watch macross plus to as an intro, good story, characters and music.
Nausica is good too.
If you want to see funny stuff, watch the Lupan movies. As my old roomate put it "He is like a crazy inspector gadget that scores."
If you like cars, Initial D is definatly the one to watch. With each season the animation(both cg and cell) get better and better. Its a fighting anime with car battles, no NOS here, just down hill action.
Yeah but back then MTV did have a wider variety of programming. Check out their schedule and see how many hours a day videos are played and when they are played. They play 15 hours of videos today (6.5 of which are before 8am)6 between 8:30-2:30 when most people are working at school.
MTV has too much non musical programming on because at some point they became "entertainment televison" instead of music televison. What does the real world or road rules have to do with music? Its the same with VH1. The vast majority of the weekend is taken up with "behind the music" because it probably gets better ratings than videos. If you want to watch videos(and a variety of them) you have to have digital cable for MTV2, MTVX VH1 classic etc
Now adays when they show videos they are cut for time to hear more from carson daily or whatever VJ, have too much stuff overlayed on the screen, or have screaming little girls saying how great the artist is.
Sounds like the same problems the beastie boys had with capitol records(the beasties own the grand royale label i believe).
Likewise, the beasites play under the psuedonym "Quazar" in smaller clubs too since their shows are always sold out.
On a side note, for those of you who don't like the beastie boys, read/listen to their lyrics(i don't know of another band who prank calls Carvel stores(an icecream/pastry chain in the northeast) wanting to talk to cookie puss(a pastry), sings about Yoo-Hoo soft drinks, or extol the virtrues of white castle(a burger chain near NYC)) Also their music is very diverse, listen to the insturmental tracks on the albums. Each album has covered a different genre(punk, techno, hip hop or combos of each). The beastie boys totally don't take themselves seriously at all(go watch the sabotage dvd or the criterion dvd). They also did the whole rap/rock thing way before Limp Bizkit. Lastly they were very innovative back in the 80's in their use of sampling(go listen to Paul's Boutique).
Watch the behind the music episode on them. You really don't "see" them play their own insturments(network wouldnt allow it).
Also, they had a big fight on releasing their own original material(which flopped if i remember).
BTW anyone actually ever see their Movie "Head"?
I haven't but it looks quite wierd.
yeah butithought the human kings who recieved them and becamethe ringwraiths were naughty anyways.
Didnt seem to do much to the elves with the elven rings.
My point is why did the parent post get modded down? Probably because its an unpopular viewpoint.
i have a copy of it, but havent read it in 12 years or so, i just only recently reread the trilogy. Thats one of the next books on my list to read on the train!
Right on. Great use of language and excellent descriptions (the book is about the lands and history, not about the plot)
no character development
see my other post
Hence why I said the author should have brought his friend along who had brought the card.
Or you can find a theater that allows you to preorder and pick up your tickets at a machine in which you stick your credit card in to verify the purchase before the tickets are printed. As a result you bypass any ticket sales people or any assoicated problems.
"Such notions about Hobbits can be found in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," but the Hobbits themselves have been pushed off center stage. If the books are about brave little creatures who enlist powerful men and wizards to help them in a dangerous crusade, the movie is about powerful men and wizards who embark on a dangerous crusade, and take along the Hobbits."
Thats actually my whole take on the book itself. The hobbits are along for the ride mostly. If anything they are there because supposedly(as others have brought up), more resistant to the rings powers. The hobbits can't take care of themseleves physically in a fight due to their size (with the exeception of Sam fighting the big spider who underestamates him) and lack of fighting skills. The rest of the fellowship is made up of warriors and a sorcerer. The 4 hobbits are more or less farmers, it is only in the Scouring of the Shire that they put the soldiering skills they learn to use.
Having recently re-read the stories themselves, I don't believe as stories themseleves they are that great.
Tolkien provides excellent descriptions of the events and scenerey throughout the books. His command of the english language is outstanding. The background of the world that he creates, his middle earth, is also exceptionlly fleshed out, even more so through his other books like the similarion. The poems follow the same, and provide plently of background info and enrich his created world much like the little intros at the begining of each chapter in Dune.
Now for the bad parts. Throughout the 1500 or so pages, depending on who published the book, of the lord of the rings, how much character development really occurs? Not much at all! The characters don't grow at all and are nearly the same as when they left to go on the voyage. We read plenty of how hard the journey is for frodo and the weight of his burden, but he is really no different in the end of the book except for the loss of his finger. Another example is Sauron. He is presented as a very bad guy who wants to take over the world and reclaim the ring. When he actually does appear(all 3-5 pages of it), he dies and we learn nothing about his motivations as to why he wants to take over the world.
If there is any character development at all in the book it is regarding Golumn himself, who as the characters discuss back and forth may have or have not had a change for the better and saved everyone.
The rest of the characters are kinda generic: Aragorn/Strider the hero etc.
I'm hoping that this release of the movie shows more character development for each of the characters. It certainly looks like it takes care of the rest. I'm curious how much of the movie is action oriented as the book certianly isn't, most of the battle scenes are covered in just a few pages.
Nothing personal, but you would think after the first time that you would have just brought your friend who owned the credit card along with the card.
I don't believe that ticket sellers have a very high paid/and or rewarding career and therefor probably don't care about your situation very much(how ever frustrating it might be!) You had the right idea by making a stink about it and at least got something for your time.
I would have made them call the manager then and there for clarification.
Limp Bizkit's first CD is pretty raw, definatly NOT mainstream and I doubt a single track could really get any airplay on a major station (the song "Bitch" comes to mind). When they softened up a bit on signifigant other then they sold well.
I personaly like the sound of their first album and think the rest is pop crap.
Its hard to get exposed to new music at all. With a large number of radio stations all owned by the same 2-3 companies, the playlists are astonishingly similar. You hear the same sets of music by the same "artists" every 2 hours or so.
The only real opportunity one has is to find a local college station or independent station to hear a wider variety of music and musical genre's. MTV used to be a way to get exposed to new music (now they hardly play videos anymore or if they do they are the same 10 in TRL everyday which have little girls screaming about how great the artists are with the their voices louder than the songs. It doesnt even help that the videos are cut short anyways.) I do have to admit that MTVX does play a wide variety of new and old rock as well as the other MTV2 networks.
The best way to find new music is still from friends, especially musician friends since music is their passion.
No wonder sales are down when stations won't take the risk to explore new artists and musical genre's. When you are hearing "Get yo freak on" on 3 stations at once, why would you want to buy that cd since its on all the time, and secondly, how are you going to buy the single from anyone else since you can't hear anyone else!
When I was in college (RPI) there was a big to do in the CS department because the school had recieved a number of machines from Intel/Microsoft and the school was instituting a laptop program with MS stuff installed. The problem was that the school wanted everyone to use the Microsoft C++ compiler,but the CS department wanted people to use various Unix ones since thats what the "real world" used at the time.
I never really cared much because I'm an electrical engineer and most of the stuff we used in upper level classes were old VAX machines, but it was a big deal on campus at the time (circa 1998-1999).
I personally liked xenogears far more than the FF efforts on the psx(too much sitting back to watch FMV which you cant skip which gets annoying the second time through). While the second cd was rather rushed and the format of the game switched to more of a "misson" format, the fighting system for both the robot mode and human mode was excellent!
The story was great too(and at some points rather disturbing and not for children), also the runtime to play the game took 60-80 hours or so. Pretty good for a game that had more of the snes effort of chrono trigger. The sprite based animation was pretty good too.
I'd like to find a copy somewhere, ebay i guess.
I would like to see a sequel or game in a similar format by square. I never did play Chrono Cross.
Final Fantasy Tatics was an awesome game. Yet another square psuedo 2d game that in many ways played better than the 3d for the sake of 3d Final Fantasy efforts on the PSX. The job system in that game was a lot of fun, especially how you could customize the characters virtually any way you wanted. It also presented multiple ways to play through the game by that virtue. I would like to see a sequel.
What about the jaguar? 2600? lynx? 5200, colecovison(not sure about that one)?
The dreamcast failed primarily because fanboys like you were all in awe of the specs and marketing hype that Sony had put out. Eventually some good games have come out, but it is a shame that so many people put off buying a dreamcast for a system that at least intially did not have much of anything other than dvd playback to offer.
As you might remember the only "good" inital game was SSX for PS2. Granted at time of release the DC was on its second generation of software.
There are only 2 games I like for it now, parappa 2(import) and MGS2.
I havent read the books myself, but after seening the movie, I'm not sure what the hype is about. While friends of mine said it followed the book very well, the story jumped around quite a bit, the was very little sense of time passing(im not talking about the cg where the seasons change,but the evens during each season).
The secnd hour of the movie seemed almost unnecesscary, the broomstick game sequence seemed pointless as harry has already established that he is good at catching fast moving objects.
I didnt think most of the CG was that impressive either.
I didnt like this movie that much, but everyone I met who has read it has. Now based upon the movie I probably wont read the book.
Another funny thing is that when I was a kid fantazing about doing great things it was never the 11 year old me slaying dragons or flying planes but a version of myself in my 20's. Maybe thats why I couldnt relate to the characters.
If you have Digital Cable, those logos are redundant since every time you flip the channel, the current program is displayed as well as the channel name.
That being said, digital cable subscribers are ovbiously in the minority.
MD sound quality still is better than MP3. I love my MD and it is a great replacement for tape. I use it all the time at the gym or while riding my motorcycle.
When I lived in japan, you could go to any cd rental store(yes you can rent cds there, for as little as one hour to a week, gee I wonder why)and you would find at te checkout counter, blank discs and blank mds. Renting a cd for 200 yen isnt that bad considering most japanese releases were 2500-3200 yen(22-28 bucks or so). Prices are higher there for cds too because you have multiple middlemen, hence a single costs about 10 bucks believe it or not.
Chairman Kaga isn't dubbed in the US release. I thought that was one of his conditions in airing it in the US. I always find it amusing during the judging poriton where he speaks Japanese and everyone else replies in english.
WMBC TV(channel 63), a korean station in new jersey, or channel 24(Which had some of US Nippon's programs like Abarenbou Shogun) used to show Iron Chef undubbed. I don't think they do anymore though.
I wonder if the X-box will be region locked?
You are technically correct. Anime=animation in japanese.
As a medium, anime and cartoons are no different.
The major difference is the content. Most cartoons(at least now adays) are mindless comedic fun for little kids.I feel sorry for little kids now a days, no big action shows(a-team, knight rider, airwolf) or cartoons G.I. Joe, Transformers like in the 80's.