This has been such a long week.

A brief summary:

Monday: Work.
Tuesday: Work in the morning, lame ass orientation in the afternoon. Discover that lo, there is a department orientation on Wed that they never told me about.
Wednesday: Apologise profusely to boss for skipping out on work, but go to department orientation. Useful things accomplished: parking sticker and ID acquired. Spoke to adviser and can now register for classes. Come home to find AT&T is having a mental breakdown and cable is down. Eventually it comes back up. Register.
Thursday: Go in to work 2 hours early to try and make up for missing last 1.5 days. But must leave at 11 to take Japanese placement test. Spend time stuck in inexplicable traffic jam and looking for parking space. Take test. Manage to get into second year class even though suck at interviews. Go back to work. Stay late trying to make up for missing 1.5 days and being gone so long at lunch.
Friday: too tired to think about it.

I, too, noticed that nausicaa.net was down. Luckily(?) I happen to know the sysadmin’s livejournal address. But there was no good news to find there. The entire site is down until next week because the machine died.

Ok, I’m finally cleaning out my tapes, like I was going to do a year ago.

Because there are people who might be interested, here is a list of the anime tapes that I’m going to get rid of. Anyone who would like to rescue them from the trash, email me at kate AT flaminggeeks DOT com to claim them. There’s only one copy of most, so it’s first come first served. (If there’s more than one, it’s listed twice.) The tapes are free. I want to get rid of them. You will have to pay for shipping.

SACD. I had never heard about it until today (I am not an audio person. Yes, that’s right folks, I don’t have surround sound in my home because I don’t like it. A living room is too small. It just gives me a headache. I don’t care if I’m missing the “full experience”.) But it sounds interesting. Does it mean we have to buy all our CDs over again, though? I can’t even afford to replace all the VHS with DVD. :P

Back in May I made a webring, then got distracted and never did anything more with it. The homepage is still in nascent form; it’s uneven and lacking substance. But it’s better than the big nothing that was there for the past 3 months. Book h0s of the world unite.

Decided I already have too many books to read to purchase another one immediately, so will hold off on Possession for a few weeks.

Today I finally returned the 2-disc vesion of FotR in exchange for store credit at B&N (which I promptly spent). I was fairly irritated when I found that version didn’t have any deleted scenes, but rather 2 lame tv specials which, if I’d any interest whatsoever in seeing them, I would have watched when they were on TV. So I will wait until November and get the big version.

Shadow Puppets is out! Yay! I must confess — I know Kenpi is a big fan of Bean, but I really have never found him that interesting. I do, however, quite like Petra (sooo much more interesting than the insipid Valentine). And I am also becoming more and more of a Peter Wiggin fangirl.

When I first read Ender’s Game, about 5 years ago now, I hated Peter. He reminded me of, among other characters, Suboshi from Fushigi Yuugi, whom I absolutely loathe. But then I read the rest of the original Ender quartet — Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and Children of the Mind. And by the end of books 2 and 3, I was completely disgusted by Ender. It’s not that he was no longer the “hero”. It’s not even that he had grown up. I just didn’t like him. He was constantly manipulated by events and other people; it was like he had lost any will to try and influence the world on his own. He was passive. And so I was pleased when he died in book 4. newPeter was a big part of book 4, much more a part than the disintigrating Ender; he was interesting and dynamic, and recaptured much of what Ender had lost. Plus, he was spending all his time with the only other interesting female in the entire quartet — Si Wang-mu.

Now that we have the newer group of books, focussing on Bean somewhat, but also chronicling originalPeter’s rise to power, I am much more satisfied. The action is more political (which is what saved Children of the Mind from the metaphysical bog that Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide were sucked into) and the plot more immediately engaging. As Peter gets older, he loses the whole Suboshi aspect of his personality; it appears to mainly have been childish outbursts — someone with the knowledge and the power to do things, but without the emotional capacity to handle it. He’s still a manipulative bastard, but he’s just the kind of manipulative bastard that I like. (See: Fuuma, Seishirou, Lex Luthor (Smallville version), Q, half of my own characters…)

Possession: It was a good movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit. It has inspired me to get the book, which I’ll probably pick up next week. While the movie was good, and enough of the plot was included that it didn’t feel like we were missing huge things, I did feel like there was more to the story which we didn’t see. More character development, for one, and more back story, for another. There was obviously more back story. Also, I am confused, and this is a problem that also showed up in of all places, Star Trek. Gwyneth Paltrow’s character was named Maud Bailey. Her great grandmother was supposedly named May Bailey. Whaaaat? If May Bailey got married in the 1800’s and had children, their last name would NOT be Bailey. Hopefully the book does not contain such a glaring error, or at least explains it. So I’ll pick it up on Monday when I finally return those things to B&N that have been sitting around.

The blog is 1 today.

So now that the new Spirited Away site is finally up, I went to go check and see if any date info was available for Boston yet. The first place I hit was Kendall Square’s website, and lo and behold, they do have it listed (but they are a chain — it could very well be coming to some of their theatres and not the one in Cambridge). Except their listing has the wrong link to the official website. So I emailed them.

I was agreeably surprised to get an answer back within an hour from their web department (person?).

I went back and checked later and they’ve fixed it. But !!!

Last night I stopped at the farm stand on the way home and bought some corn and some tomatoes. I had one of the tomatoes last night for dinner, and it was soooo good. Not perfectly ripe, but still good. Mmmm.

Hahaha. I don’t always agree with reason magazine, but a lot of the time I do. This was particularly amusing.

*fangirlish squeals*

Rumor now has it that the Ghibli production of _Howl’s Moving Castle_ is *not* cancelled, it is instead going to be directed by The Man Himself.

And in other strangeness, does anyone else find it a wee bit odd that Disney, who is a big user of whatever kind of copy protection they can get their hands on, is releasing this? My question: Can you even watch their DVDs in it? Toy Story would not display at all when I ran it through the VCR from the PS2, even if there wasn’t a tape in the VCR.