And so it begins. The path to the dark side is so seductive, so easy to take. One wonders how many steps Michael has taken. Or, is it a slippery slope and he's just accelerating his slide?
Thank you for giving me my daily dose of blind Microsoft-bahsing. Do you even know what you're talking about, or are you just karma-whoring?
We all know Microsoft makes a crappy OS. But IMO they also have some other really nice products (the mice and gamepads especially. Even the Logitech ones you're fond of, which I've used before, just aren't as good). So I buy the input devices, and don't buy the OS. What a revolutionary concept!
M$ is making money off this. Don't be tempted. Stay strong. Buy a Gamecube 3 days later.
Um. I'll buy my console based on what it can do, the software available for it, and if it's at the right price. By those standards, IMO the XBox is looking pretty good. And a lot of people think that Bungie has never put out a bad title (I'm one of them; I've played everything back to Pathways Into Darkness and loved them all), and if Bungie continues that with Halo then I'm gonna buy it. Yes, even if some of my money goes to Microsoft.
As a former resident of NH, I can tell you that Gregg doesn't have a clue about crypto policy or much else. It's staggering that he was ever elected in the first place, but I guess Americans love to vote for idiots.
As a current resident of NH, I can tell you that Gregg is actually a pretty smart guy, even if he does get get too much of his information from special interests (but then again, what politician doesn't?). A lot of people think mandatory backdoors for encryption is a Bad Thing, and I bet several of them have told Gregg how they feel about it. An editorial was also run in the Union Leader, the state's biggest newspaper, calling Gregg "disappointing." I'm sure there are other examples as well. Try having a little faith in your elected officials instead of blindly insulting them.
I'm currently a CS major at Georgia Tech, and I've taken exactly one Computer Science class in the past two semesters. The university system of Georgia seems content to waste my time with courses like health, industrial design, and psychology. These are going to be of nearly zero use to me in the future, so the only reason I'm paying a large amount of money to take them is because someone thinks it's important for CS majors to be well-rounded.
At the risk or tooting my own horn, I'm gonna claim that I'm an intelligent person who's able to hold my own in conversation on nearly any topic. I became well-rounded on my own; not through any formal schooling I've ever had. And I'm pretty sure that other people have had the same experience.
So why are people being forced to "become well-rounded" if they've already done so on their own? Why are universities (public ones, at least) allowed to soak their students for money they don't have when the classes it's spent on provide little to no benefit? I for one would much rather prefer the opportunity to take classes I'm interested in, or forego them entirely if they're not required by my major. When *I* find it necessary or desirable to expand my field of knowledge, I'll do it on my own (and spend way less money doing so).
...I *really* could have used one of these; every weekend my ex-roommate would download so much porn everyone else's connection speeds would be cut in half... but of course I hear about it three days after the term is over *SIGH*
...it's interesting and all, yay for small and cheap computing devices, but I really don't see it doing much good. They're trying to market these to a specific group of people, a sizeable percentage of whom don't have electricity or running water. I'd think their efforts (and that of similar aid-type groups) would better be spent towards something that can make their life easier in the immediate future. Plumbing, maybe.
we strongly advise that each new PC that will be running a Microsoft Operating System be pre-installed with an OEM version of the Operating System. The alternative would be to purchase retail product, at greater cost and inconvenience to your customers.
So, uh, what... I downloaded the two Mandrake 8.0 CDs for free in about an hour, spent nine minutes burning each CD, and ended up with an OS that sure as hell has not resulted in "greater inconvenience."
Would this be related in any way to the Fritz chess program Sergei Avdeev had when he was on Mir? (there was a./ story on it a while ago, but I couldn't find it; one of the pages it linked to was here.)
a multimedia GUI-based application in Squeak runs pixel-for-pixel IDENTICALLY across a vast array of platforms.
It most certainly does not. I've just spent a semester here at Georgia Tech taking a course on OO-design and -programming, with Squeak being the language of (instructor, definitely not student) choice. Our ongoing semester project was to build an MP3 player (seems cool, right?). However, nobody seemed to notice that people who ran Squeak under Windows (a majority of the class, I believe) had no MP3 support. Oops. They were delayed at least two weeks while someone scrambled to find (or write, I dunno) the appropriate library. Even then, the Windows users had to use a specially-modified Squeak binary.
God, someone just had to bring up Squeak. Ugh.
<rant>
Wow, someone who uses Squeak in the real world! I hope you're getting paid a very large sum of money to do so, since I can't imagine anyone doing it out of personal preference.
As stated above I'm currently in a OOP class using Squeak, and maybe 75% of the people I know in there would agree with me when I say Squeak has been the worst programming language I've ever had to deal with (out of the seven or eight I've learned).
The Squeak IDE is one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had to use. Slow, ugly as sin (both the original MVC and the newer Morphic GUI), and bloated as all hell. You must have superhuman patience to be able to create a game for your wife using it.
But good luck trying to turn it into a binary to distribute to your friends, because you can't! And don't ask them to try and learn the language either, because there's no documented API, and the purportedly self-commented code really isn't. Did I mention that that same code sometimes breaks on you, fresh from an install? Yep, believe it.
Also (and yes, I realize I'm reaching here), but the syntax is all backwards. It's not sufficiently like natural laugnage to be easy for beginners to use, and it just frustrates experienced programmers used to nearly every other language (i.e., based on C). It's going the way of Hypercard, Apple's old natural language-based multimedia programming environment.
It's *really* hard to believe that Squeak was supposed to become the language used on the Dynabook, If a bunch of college students can't get the hang of it, I don't see how elementary-school kids could either. </rant>
...on DVD for a while now; picked it up on eBay for around US$20. Region 1, English & Chinese subtitled, pretty cool packaging. There were loads of em being auctioned off, at least when I bid for mine; If you don't want to wait until October I'd suggest checking it out.
ehh, I don't know why everyone hates the original Evangelion ending so much... I thought it fit a lot better with the rest of the series than the movie-ending did (which I also liked, but I didn't think it worked as well). Just because everything didn't blow up, people don't like it... apologies in advance if I've lumped anyone into this category undeservedly, but I'm describing most of the people I've talked about it with.
I saw this a while ago, probably in the earlier Quickie people posted about, and I decided to reply to the guy. I took his (obviously highly scientific) diagram with Jesus, the Clintons, Socrates, and Einstein, and threw in Nomar Garciaparra, and "proved" that there really were five days in every "day." It was something really basic, since I just had to respond to the tripe he was spewing. The guy writes back (using my real name; kinda scary) and points me to more drivel he's written, mentioning also that he tried to speak at my university (Georgia Tech) but the "stupid uneducated anti-truth educators" refused to let him. He then writes back again, and asks me if I want to have a debate with him, since I was obviously interested in his wonderful theories. Crazy...
P.S.: would this Quickie subject have anything to do with some random troll posting big hunks of the timecube home page a couple of days ago? The timing is just kinda weird.
I dunno about Ultima, but I remember reading a couple of stories on/. about something similar (here and here). Lionhead Studios is making a game called Black and White in which you cast spells at bad guys and whatever, and the more accurately you draw the glyph for the spell with the mouse, the more effective the spell would be. I think it'd be pretty cool if those guys could somehow work this into their game.
...in no particular order of influence (just like the article was, or did I read something wrong?). Forgive me if this has already been done; I'm browsing at a +2 cause of the slow ol' modem in my folks' computer and I haven't checked every single post. 1. Rogue/Nethack/Moria/etc. 2. Zork/dungeon/etc. 3. Civilization 4. SimCity 5. Doom 6. Alone in the Dark 7. Ultima III 8. Command & Conquer 9. Marathon (really brought the FPS genre to the Mac, and was one of the first of its type with a detailed storyline) 10. Tomb Raider 11. Mechwarrior II 12. Falcon 3 13. Warcraft 14. Myst (didn't spawn too many memorable imitators, but was one of the first on CD, and also one of the first with high-color rendered graphics) and, of course, 15. Microsoft Solitaire Who knows, most of you will find my list just as unfair as the original article's in some way or another, but it seemed to me that the article focused mostly on games that (a)were made in the last ten years, and (b)were extremely popular, yes, but not necessarily influential. Oh well.
Wow, geez. What was the last anime you watched, Speed Racer?
I think my situation is the reverse of yours; I have been lucky enough to have watched some high-quality anime. Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain refute nearly all of the points you made above (I'll give you the one about uninspired backgrounds; I haven't seen too many nice ones).
While these two series are serious in nature, there are plenty of comedic ones that don't fit your view of anime. I like Slayers personally, but I've heard that a lot of people hate it so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.
As for Shakespeare, fine art, and all that, try reading up on Kabuki theatre. This style of Japanese dramatic theatre first started in the 1600's, but from what I understand it's kinda gone out of favor today, unfortunately.
"Manga" is a comic book or art book, and "anime" is an animated film/TV show/whatever. I believe "manga" is a word that originated in Japan, but "anime" was a word imported fron a foreign language (at least, on a postcard I received from Japan, the word "anime" was written in katakana, which is more or less a Japanese phonetic alphabet for foreign words).
I think that's all correct, but if it's not then please correct me. It's one thirty in the morning here; I might not be thinking straight.
On the other hand, anime (especially manga) has historically been no better than pornography[...]
Maybe most of the anime/manga you have heard about and seen is pornography. However, that's not representative of the genre as a whole. Hentai makes up a disproportionate amount of the anime and manga exported simply because sex sells. The distributors and exporters of manga are obviously going to ship titles that sell the most units, porn or no porn.
I agree that some anime and manga portray women as nothing more than sex objects, often in very disgusting ways. But there are also many others that feature female characters with normal breast sizes and roles in which, rather than being subservient to a male, they are the lead or otherwise main character. Find some Serial Experiments Lain, Nadesico (to a certain extent), or even older stuff like Bubblegum Crisis and you'll see what I mean.
Two points: First, "good" is extremely subjective. One man's trash, etc. etc. Personally, I don't believe much rock music made in the last, say, five years is worth listening to.
Second, just because your emigration-from-Socialist-countries scenario works for rock music doesn't mean that it works for every other genre of music as well. I listen to a lot more techno and trance than I do rock music, and guess where some of the big names are from: Fatboy Slim, and Sasha and Digweed? England. Paul van Dyk? Germany. Daft Punk? France. Countries with Socialist or Socialist-influenced governments. The point is, the rock stars (the ones motivated solely by money, anyways) come to America because they'll have a larger audience to make them more money, not because they want to get rich and famous and have parties.
Anyway, to drag this thing back on topic, I'm glad Bush and Gore are for artists' rights, even if they had no clue what to say and just told their speech writers to whip up some fluff for the article. But I don't think Napster will have as big of an effect on rock music (and music in general) as you claim. MP3s are nice and convenient, but for me at least there's no substitute for the liner notes and cover art from a real CD.
I had no idea that they're able to do this kind of thing already; I'd privately predicted another five years or so for the biotech field to catch up with the computing field and produce this kind of device. It seems that they're serious about getting some quick results from this project. I think the collaboration with Emory University (one of the leading medical universities in the South, for those who aren't aware) will help a lot. But it is kinda sad that even though I go to Georgia Tech I have to read about this from an external news site rather than the school paper, etc. Well, that's my $.02 anyway. I hope it'll make sense later today; I don't do my most coherent work at seven thirty in the morning.
[...]if someone's up there with no gravity for a year, and they come down, they aren't going to be able to walk. Back in September, a shuttle crew installed a treadmill to deal with this very problem (link to story on cnn.com). A super-fancy one too, lying in some sort of weird spring/harness thing so it doesn't affect the mocrigravity experiments going on up there.
As to your second point, I don't believe they're growing their own food. Virtually all the room on the space station is taken up by equipment, laboratories, etc. I read somewhere (also cnn.com, just don't have the exact page in front of me) that the previous three or four shuttle missions were basically supply runs, so I'd imagine they just hauled a whole bunch of dehydrated food up on one of the missions.
Scientists from Copenhagen University and Aarhus University in Denmark have established a new phylum -- or family -- for the tiny animal[...] If I remember my high school biology correctly, phylum != family. Does anyone know which taxonomal (sp?) category Micrognathozoa actually is?
I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this film (I'm way too lazy to go through all 800+ posts), but I recently watched Wings of Honneamise and thought it was pretty good. Set in an alternate universe, it's about a civilization that's about to send its first person into space. It turns into kind of a reflection on religion and human existence. I bought it because the guy who did Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, worked on this as well. As it turns out the two projects are completely different, but both are definitely well-done. The animation in WoH is just gorgeous, and the storyline is great too. One of the more intelligent animes I've seen, and one of the better ones.
[...]there is so much junk and cheesy non-sense out there.[...]
You're absolutely right, and it's because that is what appeals to the most people. There's an inverse relationship between the intelligence of a movie and the amount of money it's going to make. Movie studios want their films to make the most money; meaning, they have to reach the greatest amount of people possible; meaning, they have to fill it with explosions, gunfights, and sex scenes. Sadly, the lowest common denominator intelligence-wise is where all the money is. This whole situation is why I've stopped going to the movies, except for ones I see with my gf.
Slashdot Mirror
And so it begins. The path to the dark side is so seductive, so easy to take. One wonders how many steps Michael has taken. Or, is it a slippery slope and he's just accelerating his slide?
Thank you for giving me my daily dose of blind Microsoft-bahsing. Do you even know what you're talking about, or are you just karma-whoring?
We all know Microsoft makes a crappy OS. But IMO they also have some other really nice products (the mice and gamepads especially. Even the Logitech ones you're fond of, which I've used before, just aren't as good). So I buy the input devices, and don't buy the OS. What a revolutionary concept!
M$ is making money off this. Don't be tempted. Stay strong. Buy a Gamecube 3 days later.
Um. I'll buy my console based on what it can do, the software available for it, and if it's at the right price. By those standards, IMO the XBox is looking pretty good. And a lot of people think that Bungie has never put out a bad title (I'm one of them; I've played everything back to Pathways Into Darkness and loved them all), and if Bungie continues that with Halo then I'm gonna buy it. Yes, even if some of my money goes to Microsoft.
the linked page (and the site root) are both giving me 403 errors. Looks like a new record.
Anyone have a mirror?
As a current resident of NH, I can tell you that Gregg is actually a pretty smart guy, even if he does get get too much of his information from special interests (but then again, what politician doesn't?). A lot of people think mandatory backdoors for encryption is a Bad Thing, and I bet several of them have told Gregg how they feel about it. An editorial was also run in the Union Leader, the state's biggest newspaper, calling Gregg "disappointing." I'm sure there are other examples as well. Try having a little faith in your elected officials instead of blindly insulting them.
At the risk or tooting my own horn, I'm gonna claim that I'm an intelligent person who's able to hold my own in conversation on nearly any topic. I became well-rounded on my own; not through any formal schooling I've ever had. And I'm pretty sure that other people have had the same experience.
So why are people being forced to "become well-rounded" if they've already done so on their own? Why are universities (public ones, at least) allowed to soak their students for money they don't have when the classes it's spent on provide little to no benefit? I for one would much rather prefer the opportunity to take classes I'm interested in, or forego them entirely if they're not required by my major. When *I* find it necessary or desirable to expand my field of knowledge, I'll do it on my own (and spend way less money doing so).
It looks like it's meant for the splitting up of larger files, but it might work nicely for what you're talking about.
...I *really* could have used one of these; every weekend my ex-roommate would download so much porn everyone else's connection speeds would be cut in half... but of course I hear about it three days after the term is over *SIGH*
...it's interesting and all, yay for small and cheap computing devices, but I really don't see it doing much good. They're trying to market these to a specific group of people, a sizeable percentage of whom don't have electricity or running water. I'd think their efforts (and that of similar aid-type groups) would better be spent towards something that can make their life easier in the immediate future. Plumbing, maybe.
we strongly advise that each new PC that will be running a Microsoft Operating System be pre-installed with an OEM version of the Operating System. The alternative would be to purchase retail product, at greater cost and inconvenience to your customers.
So, uh, what... I downloaded the two Mandrake 8.0 CDs for free in about an hour, spent nine minutes burning each CD, and ended up with an OS that sure as hell has not resulted in "greater inconvenience."
Would this be related in any way to the Fritz chess program Sergei Avdeev had when he was on Mir? (there was a ./ story on it a while ago, but I couldn't find it; one of the pages it linked to was here.)
I was thinking Trigun myself...
It most certainly does not. I've just spent a semester here at Georgia Tech taking a course on OO-design and -programming, with Squeak being the language of (instructor, definitely not student) choice. Our ongoing semester project was to build an MP3 player (seems cool, right?). However, nobody seemed to notice that people who ran Squeak under Windows (a majority of the class, I believe) had no MP3 support. Oops. They were delayed at least two weeks while someone scrambled to find (or write, I dunno) the appropriate library. Even then, the Windows users had to use a specially-modified Squeak binary.
God, someone just had to bring up Squeak. Ugh.
<rant>
Wow, someone who uses Squeak in the real world! I hope you're getting paid a very large sum of money to do so, since I can't imagine anyone doing it out of personal preference.
As stated above I'm currently in a OOP class using Squeak, and maybe 75% of the people I know in there would agree with me when I say Squeak has been the worst programming language I've ever had to deal with (out of the seven or eight I've learned).
The Squeak IDE is one of the most frustrating pieces of software I've ever had to use. Slow, ugly as sin (both the original MVC and the newer Morphic GUI), and bloated as all hell. You must have superhuman patience to be able to create a game for your wife using it.
But good luck trying to turn it into a binary to distribute to your friends, because you can't! And don't ask them to try and learn the language either, because there's no documented API, and the purportedly self-commented code really isn't. Did I mention that that same code sometimes breaks on you, fresh from an install? Yep, believe it.
Also (and yes, I realize I'm reaching here), but the syntax is all backwards. It's not sufficiently like natural laugnage to be easy for beginners to use, and it just frustrates experienced programmers used to nearly every other language (i.e., based on C). It's going the way of Hypercard, Apple's old natural language-based multimedia programming environment.
It's *really* hard to believe that Squeak was supposed to become the language used on the Dynabook, If a bunch of college students can't get the hang of it, I don't see how elementary-school kids could either.
</rant>
...on DVD for a while now; picked it up on eBay for around US$20. Region 1, English & Chinese subtitled, pretty cool packaging. There were loads of em being auctioned off, at least when I bid for mine; If you don't want to wait until October I'd suggest checking it out.
ehh, I don't know why everyone hates the original Evangelion ending so much... I thought it fit a lot better with the rest of the series than the movie-ending did (which I also liked, but I didn't think it worked as well). Just because everything didn't blow up, people don't like it... apologies in advance if I've lumped anyone into this category undeservedly, but I'm describing most of the people I've talked about it with.
I saw this a while ago, probably in the earlier Quickie people posted about, and I decided to reply to the guy. I took his (obviously highly scientific) diagram with Jesus, the Clintons, Socrates, and Einstein, and threw in Nomar Garciaparra, and "proved" that there really were five days in every "day." It was something really basic, since I just had to respond to the tripe he was spewing. The guy writes back (using my real name; kinda scary) and points me to more drivel he's written, mentioning also that he tried to speak at my university (Georgia Tech) but the "stupid uneducated anti-truth educators" refused to let him. He then writes back again, and asks me if I want to have a debate with him, since I was obviously interested in his wonderful theories. Crazy...
P.S.: would this Quickie subject have anything to do with some random troll posting big hunks of the timecube home page a couple of days ago? The timing is just kinda weird.
I dunno about Ultima, but I remember reading a couple of stories on /. about something similar (here and here). Lionhead Studios is making a game called Black and White in which you cast spells at bad guys and whatever, and the more accurately you draw the glyph for the spell with the mouse, the more effective the spell would be. I think it'd be pretty cool if those guys could somehow work this into their game.
...in no particular order of influence (just like the article was, or did I read something wrong?). Forgive me if this has already been done; I'm browsing at a +2 cause of the slow ol' modem in my folks' computer and I haven't checked every single post.
1. Rogue/Nethack/Moria/etc.
2. Zork/dungeon/etc.
3. Civilization
4. SimCity
5. Doom
6. Alone in the Dark
7. Ultima III
8. Command & Conquer
9. Marathon (really brought the FPS genre to the Mac, and was one of the first of its type with a detailed storyline)
10. Tomb Raider
11. Mechwarrior II
12. Falcon 3
13. Warcraft
14. Myst (didn't spawn too many memorable imitators, but was one of the first on CD, and also one of the first with high-color rendered graphics)
and, of course,
15. Microsoft Solitaire
Who knows, most of you will find my list just as unfair as the original article's in some way or another, but it seemed to me that the article focused mostly on games that (a)were made in the last ten years, and (b)were extremely popular, yes, but not necessarily influential. Oh well.
Wow, geez. What was the last anime you watched, Speed Racer?
I think my situation is the reverse of yours; I have been lucky enough to have watched some high-quality anime. Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain refute nearly all of the points you made above (I'll give you the one about uninspired backgrounds; I haven't seen too many nice ones). While these two series are serious in nature, there are plenty of comedic ones that don't fit your view of anime. I like Slayers personally, but I've heard that a lot of people hate it so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.
As for Shakespeare, fine art, and all that, try reading up on Kabuki theatre. This style of Japanese dramatic theatre first started in the 1600's, but from what I understand it's kinda gone out of favor today, unfortunately.
"Manga" is a comic book or art book, and "anime" is an animated film/TV show/whatever. I believe "manga" is a word that originated in Japan, but "anime" was a word imported fron a foreign language (at least, on a postcard I received from Japan, the word "anime" was written in katakana, which is more or less a Japanese phonetic alphabet for foreign words).
I think that's all correct, but if it's not then please correct me. It's one thirty in the morning here; I might not be thinking straight.
On the other hand, anime (especially manga) has historically been no better than pornography[...]
Maybe most of the anime/manga you have heard about and seen is pornography. However, that's not representative of the genre as a whole. Hentai makes up a disproportionate amount of the anime and manga exported simply because sex sells. The distributors and exporters of manga are obviously going to ship titles that sell the most units, porn or no porn.
I agree that some anime and manga portray women as nothing more than sex objects, often in very disgusting ways. But there are also many others that feature female characters with normal breast sizes and roles in which, rather than being subservient to a male, they are the lead or otherwise main character. Find some Serial Experiments Lain, Nadesico (to a certain extent), or even older stuff like Bubblegum Crisis and you'll see what I mean.
First, "good" is extremely subjective. One man's trash, etc. etc. Personally, I don't believe much rock music made in the last, say, five years is worth listening to.
Second, just because your emigration-from-Socialist-countries scenario works for rock music doesn't mean that it works for every other genre of music as well. I listen to a lot more techno and trance than I do rock music, and guess where some of the big names are from: Fatboy Slim, and Sasha and Digweed? England. Paul van Dyk? Germany. Daft Punk? France. Countries with Socialist or Socialist-influenced governments. The point is, the rock stars (the ones motivated solely by money, anyways) come to America because they'll have a larger audience to make them more money, not because they want to get rich and famous and have parties.
Anyway, to drag this thing back on topic, I'm glad Bush and Gore are for artists' rights, even if they had no clue what to say and just told their speech writers to whip up some fluff for the article. But I don't think Napster will have as big of an effect on rock music (and music in general) as you claim. MP3s are nice and convenient, but for me at least there's no substitute for the liner notes and cover art from a real CD.
I had no idea that they're able to do this kind of thing already; I'd privately predicted another five years or so for the biotech field to catch up with the computing field and produce this kind of device. It seems that they're serious about getting some quick results from this project. I think the collaboration with Emory University (one of the leading medical universities in the South, for those who aren't aware) will help a lot.
But it is kinda sad that even though I go to Georgia Tech I have to read about this from an external news site rather than the school paper, etc.
Well, that's my $.02 anyway. I hope it'll make sense later today; I don't do my most coherent work at seven thirty in the morning.
Back in September, a shuttle crew installed a treadmill to deal with this very problem (link to story on cnn.com). A super-fancy one too, lying in some sort of weird spring/harness thing so it doesn't affect the mocrigravity experiments going on up there.
As to your second point, I don't believe they're growing their own food. Virtually all the room on the space station is taken up by equipment, laboratories, etc. I read somewhere (also cnn.com, just don't have the exact page in front of me) that the previous three or four shuttle missions were basically supply runs, so I'd imagine they just hauled a whole bunch of dehydrated food up on one of the missions.
Scientists from Copenhagen University and Aarhus University in Denmark have established a new phylum -- or family -- for the tiny animal[...]
If I remember my high school biology correctly, phylum != family. Does anyone know which taxonomal (sp?) category Micrognathozoa actually is?
I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this film (I'm way too lazy to go through all 800+ posts), but I recently watched Wings of Honneamise and thought it was pretty good. Set in an alternate universe, it's about a civilization that's about to send its first person into space. It turns into kind of a reflection on religion and human existence.
I bought it because the guy who did Evangelion, Hideaki Anno, worked on this as well. As it turns out the two projects are completely different, but both are definitely well-done. The animation in WoH is just gorgeous, and the storyline is great too. One of the more intelligent animes I've seen, and one of the better ones.
[...]there is so much junk and cheesy non-sense out there.[...]
You're absolutely right, and it's because that is what appeals to the most people. There's an inverse relationship between the intelligence of a movie and the amount of money it's going to make. Movie studios want their films to make the most money; meaning, they have to reach the greatest amount of people possible; meaning, they have to fill it with explosions, gunfights, and sex scenes. Sadly, the lowest common denominator intelligence-wise is where all the money is.
This whole situation is why I've stopped going to the movies, except for ones I see with my gf.