Sundries

I started this blog by saying that I have way too many hobbies, in fact many of them I have yet to even mention in this blog. I thought I’d correct that by bringing up another hobby that I really never leave. That’s my love of “Anime”.

Anime, in it’s most simplistic meaning, is a word used to describe animated cartoons from Japan. In America, cartoons are mostly for children. There are exceptions such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, or King of the Hill but for the most part they are still viewed as being for children.

In Japan there are a large number of shows that are for kids but also many shows that are geared toward young adults such as High School and College age. There is even a very large section of shows called Hentia, which basically is the Japanese word for “perverted”. These shows are basically pornographic cartoons.

There are many quality shows intended for mature adults, I’m not talking about porn here, that deal with serious issues and have very high quality stories and art work. Just watch any movie from Hayao Miyazaki and you can be sure of seeing a masterpiece of anime storytelling.

I didn’t get into anime till very recently, about 2005 I think. In these last few years I have made up for lost time by almost completely giving up regular TV and watching only anime. Not so much because I wanted to make up for lost time but that overall, American TV sucks. I try to keep track of the anime shows I’ve seen using my account at Anime News Network which you can view here:

Seen every episode: 165 shows at this time

Seen some episodes: 35 shows at this time

I have about 10 or 15 anime DVD’s at home but most of the shows I watch are new anime shows that are “fan-subbed” and released over the Internet. Fan-subbing is where a group of people get a copy of a show, translate it, and add the English (or other language) subtitles to the episode. They then release it for free over the Internet.

Each episode of a series is about 170 – 250 megabytes in length and at this time I have about 2 – 2.5 terabytes of shows on my hard drives. Many I have yet to see as I just don’t have the time to watch them all as soon as I get them. So much anime and too little time.

**James

Some of my last updates were so long ago, my main character (Trillion) just hit Level 40 and got her first mount. Well, since then I have had a bit more progress on her. Unfortunately the images I saved when Trillion finally hit L60 were lost when my hard drive problem happened. At that time L60 was still the highest level you could reach so it was pretty important to me.

I hit L60 about a year before the Burning Crusade came out so I spent a long time fishing or working on my alt characters. I had some issues with the guild I was in (Spirit Warriors on Khaz’goroth) and they eventually split up and I didn’t bother looking for a new guild. Here are some images I saved around the time Burning Crusade was just about to come out:

Ready for B.C.	Nice drop in Zangarmarsh
Spam didn’t slow down.	Ironforge airport!!!
He’s so damn cute.	He’s also so damn cute!!!

Since the expansion came out I broke down and got my Swift Brown Steed which gives me a nice 100% speed increase over running. The previous mount I had was only a 60% increase so this is noticeably faster.

Now Trillion is L70 and has purchased her flying mount already. Unless you play out in Outlands it’s hard to understand how fast gold comes to you. After buying my new horse I only had about 300 gold left on me, by the time I leveled to L70 I had enough to spend the 900 gold for the flying mount and still have over 1,300 gold left on me.

I’m now working on my way to get the almost 5,000 gold needed to get the next flying mount that gives you a 280% speed increase over walking. I have a way to go but I do have over 3,500 gold now. The problem is that my main interest is in having something to work for in the game, I’m not really interested in grouping for instances.Now that I’m L70 and soon will have my elite flying mount I may have to put Trillion on hold and go back to working on my alts till the next expansion comes out.

**James.

I haven’t updated the site in a long time, over a year now I guess, so I figured I’d spend my time and update the look of the blog by adding in a new template. I’m not very happy with the current header but it’s about 2:30 AM now and I’m too tired to keep working in Photoshop now.

I’m pretty happy with this current theme though I didn’t really hate my previous one. I even took a screen shot before making the change:

I do have a number of updates to add and I’m hoping not to put blog on another year long hold again. Unfortunately I had a large number of screen captures from WOW since my previous update and I had my hard drive completely die on me. It wouldn’t even spin. I tried a large number of fixes but could never get it to work again and lost all those screen captures.

I have since starting taking more screen captures in WOW but I’ve lost so many memories that I can’t get back. I know it’s just a stupid video game (hehe) but it was important to me. I hope to add Warcraft updates very soon.

*James.