Political topics are an area I try to avoid (this one will only be the third post over the 4+ year history of The Null Set) but I’ve had this thought rattling around my brain for the last couple of months and I just can’t seem to forget it. Every time I hear Mitt Romney speak about voting for him all I hear is Kyubey trying to convince another unsuspecting victim to have their fondest wish granted and get the chance to become a magic girl.

Needless to say, when I vote tomorrow in the primaries, it won’t be for Mitt Romney.

Filed under: anime, general anime interst, off-topic

Watching Gurren Lagann invariably leaves me in a contemplative mood; so, I wasn’t surprised when my recent rewatch of it ended with me reflecting on the quiet heroism that my grandfather (on my mother’s side) displayed throughout his life, which includes fighting in World War II. I decided to be a bit selfish and write something for this blog about him so others can read how incredible he was. I chose today to this so I could also remind people to thank a vet for the sacrifices that they have made.

My grandfather was a man of little words and he didn’t like talking  about his experiences in WWII or his earlier life so I’ve only heard parts of the story of his life from other family members over many different times and have had to put them together. It goes something like this.

Like so many other immigrants living in the Mahoning valley, my grandfather’s father worked in the steel mills and in those days it was a dangerous job. So, it wasn’t all that surprising that his father was killed while working in a steel mill nor that my grandfather’s mother decided to remarry. (That there was no welfare state like there is today probably contributed this decision.) Several years later, my grandfather’s step-dad contracted a bacterial disease while working in a steel mill and, since this was a couple of decades before the invention of antibiotics, he ended up passing away too. This left my grandfather’s family in a bind. By now there were several younger siblings that needed to be fed as well as my grandfather’s mom; so, even though my grandfather was still elementary age (once I was told he was in fourth grade and another time in sixth grade), he dropped out of school and got a job in a steel mill to support his family. Which he was able to do.

He continued to work in a steel mill until WWII and eventually joined the Army Corp of Engineers. I’m not sure if he was drafted or volunteered to go but he ended up going to the European theater and seemed to primarily work on building bridges. Like I said he didn’t talk often his war experience but I do remember hearing that he went to France soon after D-Day. (I think D-Day+3 but I’m not too sure.) One thing he did say about his time in Europe was that he disliked the French because they were a rude people.

After the war he returned to Youngstown to settle down and raise a family; he rarely left the area again. One of his war buddies offered to set him up to be an apple farmer in Washington state but he declined (thankfully, or else I wouldn’t be here ). He continued to work at a steel mill, tinkered with machines, and single-handedly built an addition onto his house when the family got to large. He literally did everything from digging out a full basement to laying the roofing shingles. The backdoor steps that he poured where so massively overkill that when a drunk driver tried to drive his full-size SUV at a high rate of speed through my grandparent’s house about ten years ago, those steps were able to stop the SUV before it could hurt anyone in the house or even cause major structural damage to the house.

I wish he’d have lived a little longer then he did because I was just starting to get old enough that his curmudgeon-like nature no longer scared me and I could appreciate him. Looking back I love how he’d show up for a family doing for about 30 minutes – just long enough to eat and engage in a small amount of socializing – before going back home. I have a couple mementos of him including his telescope and the wooden box he built to hold it and the various accessories.

In keeping with remembering Veteran’s Day, here our some pictures and postcards that have been digitalized that come from his time in WWII.

edit: I was looking through some of the other pictures I got and was wondering what exactly this contraption was:

Filed under: anime, off-topic, other wallpapers and pictures

The real reason I’m writing this post is so that I have an excuse to post a few pictures from the summer vacation I just got back from; but, I’m going to cover up the off-topic nature of this post by talking about a couple of thoughts I had about anime while on vacation and upon coming back.

Once again I spent my summer vacation relaxing in a beachfront home along the coast of Lake Erie. The location was so perfect, literally spitting distance from the shore, that we didn’t mind that the house lacked air-con.

Just about every house one can rent for vacation nowadays advertises that they have internet service but what they define as “internet service” is always an interesting surprise. This house had no landline phone or any sort of router that I could find but there was a wireless network my laptop found that I was able to connect too. I didn’t feel comfortable feeding this connection any of my various account names and passwords so I wasn’t able to blog or post comments but I did feel comfortable enough to fire Azureus up and continue grabbing anime that I wanted to watch. (I’m not sure what that says about me but I’m sure it means something.)

Very quickly I realized that it was going to be impossible keeping up with the 20 or so anime series I’m watching right now. There was important vacation related activities – like swimming at the beach, watching gorgeous sunsets, looking for beach glass, relaxing on the patio, marveling at all the stars that one can see outside of a city, etc – that limited the time that I was willing to sit down to watch anime. Also, the internet connection was junk; I felt that I time-traveled back to the dial-up days. It took forever for a single episode of anything to download.

This naturally forced me to decide which anime I’m watching right now was worth it and the ones I couldn’t live without was sometimes a surprise to me. The anime series continuing from spring that I had to keep up with were three: Steins;Gate, Nichijou, Tiger & Bunny. No surprises there – Steins;Gate is All-Time Top 10 bound if it doesn’t fumble the ending, Nichijou is the best comedy series by KyoAni ever, and Tiger & Bunny has finally gotten serious about showing it’s full potential and it’s been a nail-biting ride (I hope it continues). Hyouge Mono would probably be in this category but it’s been forever since a new episode has been subbed so I don’t know for sure. Of the continuing spring series there was two series that I found that I could wait till after coming back from vacation to watch – Ao no Exorcist and Hanasaku Iroha. I like both of these series a lot but if I’m being critical I know why neither anime got watched. The fight in episode 15 of Ao no Exorcist currently feels like the high point of the series with it treading water since then and I’m not sure if A-1 can make the ending top that episode. As an original work, there is no excuse for pacing issues but Hanasaku Iroha continues to stubbornly stick to being completely random even after 19 episodes and there’s really no compelling reason to why it needs to watched as soon as possible.

Of the new summer series only Natsume Yuujinchou Season 3, Mayo Chiki, and Dantalian no Shoka made the cut. No surprise with Natsume, it’s one of my favorite series of all-time and the location – near the lake with the sound of waves lapping the beach in the background – actually enhanced my viewing experience. Mayo Chiki continues to remain surprisingly engrossing and the best new comedy/fan service series this season. I’m starting to conclude that Dantalian no Shoka will not be among the best series this season but will continue to be an interesting anime to watch.

Two of the new summer series – Mawaru Penguindrum and Ikoku Meiro no Croisee – I dearly wanted to watch but the former didn’t air that week and my preferred subbers of the latter were slow (which was okay, I understand stuff happens but going through a Yune withdrawal is a painful experience). I initially didn’t think I’d miss either series as much as I did but I guess there’s truth in that saying about absence making the heart grow fonder.

This left a pile of new anime series that I didn’t watch that waited for my return home; including, R-15, Nekogami Yaoyorozu, Sacred Seven, Yuruyuri, Itsuka Tenma no Kuro Usagi, Kamisama no Memo-chou, Blood-C, and Kamisama Dolls. There’s some good stuff on this pile but not good enough to get me to drop all the important vacation stuff I was doing. Speaking of which, while watching an awesome sunset, I got into a discussion about the best type of sunset. I argued that a sunset under partly cloudy conditions was the best type of sunset and clearly superior to a cloudless sunset but I was in the presence of someone who held the opposite. Neither of us was particularly serious but I thought this would make a good poll question that I could ask an impartial audience such as those reading this blog to answer. To help make the decision easier, I’ll include pictures I took of both types of sunsets while on vacation this year and you can vote below.

Cloudless Sunset

Partly Cloudy Sunset(s)

View This Poll

Thanks for the vote. The rest of the vacation was pretty typical vacation stuff. On the clear nights I saw a fair amount of Perseid meteors leading up to the peak night but I got clouded out on the peak night itself. There were a couple of storms that blew through which made for interesting viewing on how the coastline can quickly change and I even got to see several lightning strikes out over Lake Erie at night and was mesmerized at how bright and crisp they looked. However, the most exciting thing that happened during the vacation was when a P-51D Mustang buzzed the house.  In the pictures below you can see how the house sits in relation to the lake. The P-51 flew past at the same level as the first story windows and only about 75-100 feet from shore. It was really bookin’ it; a blink and I would have missed it. Thankfully I was looking outside when I first heard the engine growling towards me, though I almost missed it because I was looking up for it. I never thought I’d actually see a P-51 in-flight. Growing up I went through a phase where I learned everything I could about WWII and, even today, the P-51 has remained my favorite plane of the era.

Vacations always end and before I knew it, I was back home and all the anime that I left alone was staring back at me wanting to get watched now. I was tempted to drop many of the lower quality series because I have a hard enough time psyching myself to watch the weekly R-15 or Sacred Seven but for a couple of these series I had two episodes to get too and for the others I knew another episode was just a few days away at best. All without my normal trick of layering together the better series with the poorer series because I’d watched all the really good ones. In the end, I trudged through telling myself that if I got through these series I would get to rate them as low as they deserve. And I was left with a bigger appreciation of how seeking balance is sometimes the right thing to do.

In closing, I’m back home with my high-speed DSL connection and the light pollution that washes out most stars at night and a clear anime backlog.

Filed under: anime, general anime interst, meta/office keeping, off-topic, other wallpapers and pictures

The good thing about my job and doing blogging using WordPress is that I can swap what I learn from doing one into the other, since we’re currently looking at using Wordpress MU (or creating a “blog network” in WP3) at work.  So I took this opportunity to both research some stuff for work, as well as look at some of the new features and how they might apply to this blog.

Menus

This looks like it will be a nice addition to Wordpress.  My main nav is currently also a mix of pages and categories – something which I pretty much had to do by ripping out the menu and creating my own using functions.php.  With the new menus functionality, I should be able to build the menu I want right in the WordPress interface.  My only question about it might be…what if I’m building a theme from scratch? Or I have two menus in two different places (above or at the top of my banner, and then below the banner?)  How would that, work exactly?  They at least did to think to make a sidebar plug in to allow you to  add one of the menu’s you made into the sidebar, so that won’t be a problem.  If you want to see a video of how some of the menu stuff works, you can check it out at Woothemes.

Custom Background and Headers

While I think this is something to do with the 2010 theme and isn’t necessarily going to be there for all themes, I think it’s still cool.  If i could find (or make) a theme where I could just plop in a new header in the WordPress interface, that’d be cool. Now they only need an option of having it randomly rotate or something.

Page/Post Types

This wasn’t as thrilling as I thought it was going to be.  It’ll help with organization, but one of the things I was hoping for was that, say, when I do a review, I could kind of break the segments up into blocks, which each had their own field, or something, which were then placed on certain places on the page, instead of having a giant blob in a single edit box.  It looks like that, if that is even possible i the first place, one would have to do it via the custom fields thing that already exists.  It’ll still be nice to, say, have a “Reviews” or “Anime Credits” button that I can just click on to do a post, but I’m not sure exactly what more it adds.  If this had allowed me to do that, I might have waited until WP3 came out to restart doing series reviews, but as it is I might go ahead and start posting them again now.

Other than that, there really isn’t much new to see (well, other than the merger of the core and MU, which doesn’t really apply to this blog).  They haven’t gotten around to updating the admin UI yet, so I can’t really comment on that.  In any case, a little non-anime (though still blog related) post to fill your day with.

Every time I try to save a revision to a published post, it just goes to a blank page under http://hontouni.com/souomou/wp-admin/post.php

The post gets truncated to plus/minus 350 words… T_T

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Okay gaiiz, who else is pumped? Right now the views of The Asian Invasion are 99,932 - THAT’S RIGHT, almost 100,000 100 000 as of 7.32pm EST 2nd June 2008 (and in which both the admins sadly printscreened) so this is the perfect opportunity to announce a few things including: 1. A COMPETITION (with prizes) 2. THE COMING [...]