It’s been a couple of weeks, and I’ve collected a link or two… So, let’s hit the jump and take a look at what’s Worth Reading!
Category: Life Of
Yamato 2199 Group Watch – One Week Pause
My deepest apologies, but I’m going to have to take a break this week.
Last night, one of our guinea pigs spent the night at the vet’s in intensive care… We adopted Miss Molly mostly fully grown in April of 2012, so she’s getting pretty close to seven years old. That’s pretty old for a piggie (80-85 in human terms?), and her health is increasingly frail. With the problems she’s already having, last night was pretty scary, I didn’t sleep well, and my head isn’t exactly in a place for creative work.
Hopefully she comes home today (watch my twitter for updates), but the future is increasingly cloudy. (Not helped by having another pig with inoperable cancer.)
Yeah, probably more than you wanted to know, sorry.
Anyhow, the short version is that it was one h*ll of an action packed episode… Scott’s review, linked below, covers all that pretty well. Hit the link and give it a read! There’s some stuff I want to talk about, but I’ll add it to next week’s post.
Yamato 2199 group watch:
Other Participants:
– Mechanical Anime Reviews: Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Episode 18 – Fortune favors the bold
About:
You can see the all the postings in this series by visiting the Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2199 Group Watch category page. If you want to participate, this post has all the information you need.
Seattle Photowalk – Pike Place Market
In which your humble correspondent takes part in a photo club outing to Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market.
Hit the jump and let’s get going!
Continue reading “Seattle Photowalk – Pike Place Market”
Empty but for memory
I hope you’ll forgive an occasional side-trip into something other than anime… Anyhow, an image from six years ago popped up in my Facebook memories this morning, and I was gripped by the need to re-edit it.
Below is my new version, the original version is after the jump.
To provide context: This was originally posted to Facebook a couple of days after I returned home from my dad’s funeral.
The original title and caption:
Empty but for memory
This is a the last of a long line of Dad’s chairs. This is not how I remember Dad’s chair. This is not how I want to think about Dad’s chair.
I remember him sitting there… Coffee or beer, newspaper, remote, and ashtray (back before he quit, much too late) near to hand. Kids, grandkids, and cousins on his knee. Watching benevolently as we scrambled beneath the Christmas tree and he struggled to wake up. Relaxing after work. Cooling off after chores or projects. Cursing politicians. Berating referees. Cheering when his team made a play, or howling when the opposing team made a better play.
Laughing. Crying. Living. Loving. That’s how I’ll remember this chair.
Goodbye Dad.
In Memoriam, H Dean Lyons 5/29/1939-1/6/2012
After the jump, the original image and some thoughts on the re-edit.
Happy New Year!
A quick post to wish everyone a happy New Year and to look forward over the next week or so…
- The normal weekly Wednesday post will be delayed until Saturday or Sunday for two reasons:
- I want to include the YuYu finale.
- If the weather holds, I’ll be out very late Tuesday night on a night photography shoot with the photo club. We’re planning on light painting a lighthouse up at the north end of the County.
This is an experimental light painting I did a few years back:
If you click through on the photograph there’s more about my process and tools.
- Depending on how things go, I should have a Winter 2018 anticipation post up Wednesday or Thursday
In closing a New Year’s Eve haiku I wrote a few years back:
final breath
witching hour tolls
new year
Happy New Years!
My anime music playlist…
For some months, I’ve been training an anime music channel on Pandora… (Link leads to the channel.) I’ve mostly tried to use seeds and thumbs up, though I had to thumb down the Pokémon Theme. Not only was it in heavy rotation – I positively loathe that song. And really, it was the heavy rotation that was the problem. Pandora’s selection of anime music is rather thin, and their song selection algorithms are… odd. They choose based on how much a song is “like” something you’ve already seeded the station with or given a thumbs up. Since the algorithm has only a limited understanding of “genre”, that tends to result in homogenization. Since they don’t seem to have a large selection of non-mainstream music, that also tends to result in pretty short playlists. (Though to be honest between their limited catalog and the algorithm’s over-eager pruning my more mainstream channels often suffer from the same problem.)
Anyhow, to make a long story short, I’ve had a Wake Up Girls playlist on iTunes for a couple of years now. A week or so ago, iblessall tweeted about buying the Girls Last Tour OST on iTunes-Japan, and I decided to see what, if any, anime music could be found on iTunes… (Though I limited myself to the American version because I didn’t want to go through the hoop jumping that shopping iTunes-Japan requires.)
I actually came up with a pretty nice selection of music. I could probably have found more, but my lovely wife gave me The Look and inquired as to just how much I intended to spend… I only really made one mistake, I didn’t pay attention when I bought START:DASH!!. I ended up buying the version performed by μ’s full lineup rather than the Honoka/Kotori/Umi version from ep 3 (which I prefer).
Anyhow, between Pandora and my iTunes playlist I have a nice selection of music to play when I’m working on my writing. When one gets old, I can swap to the other.
Do you have an anime playlist? What’s on it? Drop a comment and let me know!
Making Miso – Batch 1, getting started
If you’ve read my About page, or followed my twitter, you know I’m into food and cooking and have been exploring pickling and preserving… And you also know from here on the blog that my interests in Japanese culture extend beyond anime.
So, all that comes together in my latest project – making my own miso from scratch.
So, let’s hit the jump and take a look at the process!
Fall 2017 Week 5 – Sort of.
Well, it’s one of those weeks again… Busy with other stuff, life happenings, and writer’s block = three strikes to presenting a post this week. (Writer’s block comes up so often here at the Lounge that I swear I’m going to give it it’s own tag or category.)
I was going to use the image of two guys bowing I usually use for such posts, but I just couldn’t sit on this screenshot any longer… Konohana Kitan is slowly growing into such a good show. I could have done without the creepy doll, but the second segment and especially it’s finale was so well done.
With that, let’s hit the jump and dig into everything going on…
Awesome – Eclipse 2017
Just got back from watching the eclipse over where my wife works. (That way we only had to buy one viewing setup.) It was, frankly, an awesome experience. By that I mean the original meaning of the word – “extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear”. (Not the common meaning where it’s an all-purpose expression of praise and enthusiasm.)
At first, though it was cool to look at (through proper glasses), but it didn’t seem to be much… But as totality approached, even though it wasn’t full totality here, the light grew very noticeably dimmer and the air distinctly chilly. The light was also of a very odd quality, not the same at all as when the light grows dim at dawn or sunset. As a photographer, it was very noticeable… Even the friend who was watching with us noted how spooky it was. It was very easy to see how people of pre-scientific times would be deeply affected.. The world just doesn’t normally change so fast and then spring right back to its former shape as though nothing had happened.
And speaking of friends, this was different from most any other event in my life… It happened in slow motion (over the span of roughly two hours), and so there was time to share the experience over social media. It was… fascinating to read the reactions of friends and family scattered across the country in real-time. And that’s setting aside all the preparations of the last few days and weeks as people bought the required safety gear and set out to travel to see the event.
All in all, I can’t say I experienced some kind of epiphany… but I can’t say the experience left me untouched either. I just can’t clearly express how. Maybe it’s that part of my brain deep beneath the civilized and educated layers reacting. I just don’t know, but felt I had to share.
More mundanely, I caught a number of interesting images such as this one – where the gaps between leaves were acting as little pinholes and projecting an image of the eclipse on the pavement:
It’ll take some post processing work to see if I can make anything of them, but I still found it fascinating.
Anyhow, thanks for taking the time to read this and feel free to share your experiences and thoughts down in comments.
Now, back to the mundane rounds of daily life – errands, housework, and fighting with my now massively overdue Week 5/6 + Midseason Review post. (Three quarters done, having some writer’s block problems on a couple of shows.)
What I’m reading!
The current pile of books on my coffee table:
Hit the jump and I talk a bit about the books!
