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.

Picture of my Grandpa and Grandma at Mill Creek Park

Picture my Grandma sent over for my Grandpa while in Europe

I believe this picture was taken while he was still in training.

The next three are pictures that my Grandpa wrote notes on the back of.

I don't know if this is one of the bridges he helped build or just one that interested him.

They look cool in this picture

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

I love how my Grandpa writes "of" as just an extra loopy "f".

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

Of all the holidays that inspire anime bloggers to post off-topic about, Halloween wouldn’t be my personal choice as the biggest but I just realized that I haven’t missed a Halloween yet. So for the fourth year running, I hope everyone out there had a great Halloween.

I’ve been trying to work through a bit of writer’s block lately but with the Fall season starting to really hit it’s stride I hope the inspiration will get me writing more often. Anyways, the next picture is of the pumpkins that carved this year, mine is the one second from the right.

Good anime Halloween pics seemed thin is year:

And let’s close with a couple other pictures from around my house for this Halloween season. I’m just glad there’s not snow on the ground at this point .

I was disappointed that a grand total of 3 kids came Trick-or-treating this year; the normal is around 25 to 35 a year. I gave these intrepid kids (it was sprinkling a little bit) double the normal amount of candy .

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.

Not the most relaxing way to spend time on vacation but it was a very memorable episode.

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.

It definitely was worth the wait though.

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.

Picture of the house I stayed at, taken from the beach

The view from the second story balcony

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.

I’m sometimes amazed how disrupting a vacation can be to one’s life but that’s not the reason for this post (though it does help explain where I’ve been for the last 3 weeks) nor is it an excuse to post pictures from my vacation (though I will post some)  but because I had a thought about slice-of-life anime while I was on vacation and I took the above pic to remind myself of this thought so I could share later.

Since the summer vacation of 2008 where I tried out vacationing without a purpose except to relax and the small fall vacation from Fall 2008, I’ve really gotten into the whole renting a house for a week+ somewhere and doing nothing type vacations (see 2009 and now this year). So there I was sitting on the beach, listening to the lapping waves of water, watching the sun set and eating mint chocolate chip ice cream – immensely enjoying myself, far beyond what I should be allowed to feel and it hits me; I’m practically doing a live action slice-of-life anime by myself. Practically because I don’t happen to be a high school girl in a band who likes tea or a high school boy that can see ghosts  and has a fortune cat as a sidekick or a gondolier on a terraformed Mars but it’s still close enough to make me realize that the reason I like slice-of-life anime so much is because I love those small normal goings-on that are the center of these shows. Going to the beach? Awesome, I love the beach. Picking tomatoes, creating a feast and inviting all your friends over? Sweet, wish I doing that right now. Going to a coffee shop run by a android that drinks more coffee then she sells? Bring on the apocalypse, that’s my idea of the perfect day trip. I just wish it was easier to make these shows sound interesting to other people.

Sorry if that wasn’t such a deep philosophical point but it is slice-of-life anime we’re talking about.  Now here’s some other pictures from my vacation and the other reason why I’ve been slow with the posting is that I’m teaching my one younger sister how to drive (this’ll be the fourth sister I’ve taught to drive) and we’re trying to do it in only a month and a half which means I’m going out everyday  for at least an hour and it’s really sapping my strength.  And it’s not like she’s a bad driver but I’m exhausted nonetheless. This would be episodes 8-9 of my life as a slice-of-life anime but sadly, not many Japanese learn to drive (using anime as a judge) and thus this would feel out-of-place in an anime. The only example I could think of was Sunohara from Clannad.

Same sunset as the first picture

Same sunset as the first picture

Same sunset as the first picture

The beach house we rented had a lovely lookout.

The owners overstated their beach access but I wanted to get a picture of this cliff from the beach below and after a climb down the near vertical ravine and across the rickety 2 ft. wide bridge without anything to hold onto to keep balance on, I got this picture.

Time-lapse pic of the nearby road from the 2nd story deck, the stars were pretty as well from here but we only got a couple nights clear enough to go star-gazing.

This butterfly let me run into the house, grab a camera, and come back outside without moving so I could get this picture.

Another sunset pic but from another night

Filed under: anime, meta/office keeping, other wallpapers and pictures

With my defeat in the quarter-finals (which I totally expected and helped along by voting for Kurogane) as well as the end result of this year’s aniblog tournament in sight, I feel this is a good time to reflect on the Aniblog Tournament and post a couple of suggestions for next year’s aniblog tournament (assuming the organizers will run this tournament again).

I’d first like to thank everyone that voted for me throughout the tournament; I appreciate the support. Even in my loss to Kurogane, I couldn’t believe the number of votes I received. I know some of the votes were made in attempt to get the weaker blog to advance but even discounting those, I received far more votes than I thought was possible.

It felt very surreal to make the final 8 and it left me with conflicting feelings. I have no illusions that I’m one of the top eight blogs in the anime blogosphere but to say it was a fluke would belittle my opponents from the first four rounds which would be wrong. I wasn’t very familiar with my second round opponent, Bokutachi no Blog, third round opponent, Unmei Kaihen, or fourth round opponent, Anime Diet, before the start of this tournament but I now know that they (and bad luck party too) are quality blogs and beating them definitely meant something. However, the ease that Kurogane beat me means that I’m still no where near being one of the titans in the anime blogosphere so I won’t let my performance this time go to my head.

General Thoughts About the Aniblog Tournament

The Aniblog Tournament was a complete surprise to the vast majority of the anime blogosphere when it started and I was very curious to see how the bloggers and readers would take it. There were so many different ways it could have turned out; it could have been ignored or it could have generated tons of animosity and bitterness between blogs or it could have turned into a big joke after being swamped by fake voting. Instead, the result was very close to the best case scenario and I think that says something good about everybody involved (from the voters to the organizers).

I wasn’t expecting much from my involvement since this tournament was “just a popularity contest” so I felt blindsided when I realized that my participation would yield great unsolicited feedback about what I was doing right and what I needed to improve upon. Some of the suggestions for improvement where things I was privately thinking that I should do but it took someone else pointing it out and the desire to fix these deficiencies before the next round match up to actually get me to fix them.

I also wasn’t expecting to discover new blogs that I should follow but that happened as well. Upon becoming an anime blogger, my intake of anime increased drastically and as a result I radically cut back my anime blog reading. I had less time to read other blogs and my need to read episodic blogs disappeared because I was now watching all the anime that interested me in the slightest. I also stopped checking out new blogs as they started because I liked the mix of anime blogs I followed and didn’t see the pressing need to find more. The product of this mindset was there was a depressing amount of blogs I was not familiar with and before I voted I wanted to make sure I was voting for the “right” blog. (Never call me an uninformed voter in anything.) This lead to discovering blogs like ghostlightning’s where I had previously read a few posts from but never connected these posts together in my mind to tell me that I needed to follow this blog and established blogs like Behind the Nihon Review that I can’t understand how I missed in the past and newer blogs like Scamp’s that I found having an interesting author/style of writing behind it.

For “just a popularity contest”, I think the Aniblog Tournament did a great deal of good.

Suggestions for the Next Aniblog Tournament

I was very happy with how this tournament was set-up but I thought of a couple tweaks that I think could improve next year’s aniblog tournament (assuming and hoping there is one).

I like the general format of the tournament, how it has 96 spots for blogs and gives a first round bye to the stronger blogs, but using a set number will always mean some blogs are left out or there’ll be not enough blogs to fill the required spots. The best solution, I think, is to have a round zero where all the blogs not getting first round byes are put into different pools  – I was thinking 8 – and the top 8 vote getters in a poll of that pool would be used to seed the first round match-ups.

Another needed change is to publish the tournament bracket early, giving the voters time before the start to review blogs they’re unfamiliar with and to allow bloggers time to prepare their blogs to look and read their best.  (And allow any blogs to opt out if they so desire.) Assuming the my first suggestion is implemented the added time could be used for feedback to ensure no anime blog gets left out. For example, next year around mid-February, the initial bracket with the blogs getting first round byes could be published along with the proposed list of participants in the various pools. People could then mention anime blogs that were not included that they feel should by included and a revised listing of the pools would be published about 7-10 days before the start of March. Then on March 1st, the polling would commence on the pools and by the middle of March the winners would be known and placed into the tournament bracket. From there, people would have a couple of weeks to read and/or prepare for the start of the tournament on April first.

I also thought trimming the matches from 7 days to 5 days was a good idea and wonder if it could be shortened to 4 days.

I have seen the suggestion somewhere else that editorial and episodic blogs be segregated more in their pairing next time. I think the idea is tempting but ultimately not a sound one. Yes, they are completely different types of blogs but one can still measure how much value reading a certain blog gives to oneself independently of the content of the blog. And looking over all the match-ups, I don’t see the editorial blogs doing that badly anyways.

Completely Off the Subject

Though I don't like how the game makers elected to hide Germany's true flag for the game.

The lack of anything new on The Null Set recently can be attributed to my decision to pick up a game called Hearts of Iron 3 and the insane difficulty it’s taking to learn how to play. I didn’t expect this game to be this difficult to get after playing so many games of the same genre but it is and trying to figure it out has been taking up a lot of space in my brain. I’m at the point now that the game is starting to make sense and becoming fun to play. If you’re wondering, it’s a strategy game set between the years 1936 – 1948 and the player can pick any country to play out WW2 or an alternative WW2. In my game, I’m playing one of Chinese political factions and so far I’ve been able to reunite China, push Japan off the Asian continent then invaded and conquered Japan turning myself into the Asian superpower. And in Europe, Germany started the war like normal but then invaded Spain and England. And America finally joins the war in mid-1942 (no Pearl Harbor to bring it in sooner) and invades/frees Norway from Germany. At the present moment, England is trying to convince the Chinese Empire to become an Allied power but I’m being tempted by the largely undefended Allied holdings in Asia (India, Indonesia, etc.) not to join, though, the idea of a European invasion by the Chinese Empire to save England, France, etc. is almost too absurd to pass up.

Completely Off the Subject 2

My younger sister graduated high school this year and for her party, last week, she wanted to rent a farmhouse in Amish country and spend her time shopping and relaxing. At night I marveled, once again, about how awesome the stars look outside of the city and decided to see if I could take a picture of them. A tripod would have been extremely helpful but I did get a couple nice pictures.

If you look at the full size pic you can see it's the Big Dipper

Filed under: meta/office keeping, other wallpapers and pictures

I’ve been rather slow getting to all the various items of this, the spring 2010 season and My Garden was definitely something I’ve been looking forward to since the end of the fall season. Last year’s Garden was a big success and I was hoping to see even more improvement. So without further ado, here’s my impression post about My Garden.

Rating for first couple weeks of gardening – 12/12  Perfect
Anticipation Level: 5/5  Very High

The Story

March and April saw some heat and it made me almost jump the gun and start planting but it’s a good thing I waited. A chilly May saw lows routinely dip below 40 degrees F and forced any thought of planting to the last week of May. Last year’s experiment of trying to grow pumpkins and corn in the same bed together was not repeated this year; instead, the focus will be on growing corn and getting corn shocks to use for Halloween decorating. Peppers made a comeback this year, proving no plant is dropped forever. Also making a surprise return appearance is Dusty Miller. Other than that many of the flowers are well-known returnees, being grown from seeds collected at the end of last year.

The Fine Print

So far everything looks good. The wild animals have behaved themselves. So far there’s been no sign of the groundhog living under my neighbor’s back porch or the rabbits living in the brush a couple of lots over or the deer that wander over from the park or the squirrels that like to dig holes and uproot plants.

The germination rate has been outstanding so far. The home-grown seeds once again prove their superiority to store-bought seeds. Though the store-bought seeds have been doing good themselves. So, it’s a very impressive start to My Garden and it deserves a perfect score. Pictures follow:

One day this'll be a tall stalk of corn.

And this'll be pretty cosmos in a couple of months.

And these tomato plants are already making tomatoes

Top 3 Reasons You Should Be Gardening

1.   Gives You Interesting Tidbits To Talk About Anime

And here’s proof, by gardening I know that cosmos flowers show up a lot in anime.

2.   I Have a Cute Nephew

3.   You Can Get Your Own Pesticide-free Lycopene Cheaply

-

So I ended winning my second round match-up against Bokutachi no Blog and advance to the third round and face Unmei Kaihen. Since I won, I will honor my promise to review any one randomly picked show from people that voted for me but so far I don’t have any candidates (I’m not sure if zzeroparticle was serious). Therefore, if you have a show, no matter how bad, that you want me to review and you voted for me then please leave a comment on which show you want.

And if this post seems like an odd one, it was inspired by this post.

As you might have guessed by the title, yesterday marked the start of my match in the second round of the Aniblog Tournament. You may have also guessed that this post is the type of post that at some point, maybe after trying a bit of bribery or trash-talking or arguing for my superior worth, I’ll ask people to please go here to vote for The null set. And you’d be right on both accounts, but I’ll try to keep this interesting for you nonetheless.

Three Reasons Why You Should Vote For The Null Set

1.   I Have a Cute Nephew

And I have the pictures to prove it:

If that’s not a good enough reason to vote for me, I don’t know what is.

2.   I’m From Youngstown and I Know People

Sure some cities have nice sounding nicknames like ‘The City of Brotherly Love’ or ‘The Big Apple’ but my hometown has cooler sounding nicknames:  ‘Mob Town, USA’ and more recently ‘Murder Town, USA’. And don’t think these nicknames are misnomers, in the 90’s, for instance, Youngstown had the highest per capita homicide rate in America for many of the individual years of the 1990’s and we were either #2 or #3 all the other years.

3.   I’m Part Elven

If J.R.R. Tolkien is right about how elves develop a yearning for the sea the first time they get near it then it’s conceivable that I’m part elven because I seem drawn to it. Look how often it’s come up on my blog, here and here and here. In two months I’m going on a week long vacation at a beach house and that’s in addition to the beach trip I just went on (found a bunch of nice sea glass) and another trip sometime in June. Here’s some new pictures I took on the most recent visit.

Isn’t my blog the most awesome, so go here and vote for The null set now.

-

Okay, so this list wasn’t a serious one, though, everything said about me true. I do have a cute nephew and I’m proud of being from Youngstown and I do enjoy going to the beach. I included being from Youngstown because it is an important part of who I am. If you look past the nicknames and the murder rate and the inability to park your car on the street because sooner-or-later someone will break the windows in – I still think of it as a great place to live, it’s got the second largest urban park in America behind Central Park in New York City; the people are by and large good, hard-working people; and I’m optimistic the worst of it has past and the future will be a better one for Youngstown.

Now for the serious list as to why I think people should vote for The null set.

Three Reasons Why You Should Vote For The Null Set

1.   Unique Philosophy to The Null Set

I wanted The null set to be a successful anime blog and not wither away after a few short months. To do this, I needed to find something that would separate this blog from other blogs and I needed to believe that whatever this blog did, it had some importance to my potential readers.

What I eventually came up with as The null set’s mission is to get people to watch good anime, even if that means trying something they normally wouldn’t and to steer people away from wasting their time with bad anime. This influences everything I do, even if it’s not apparent. I normally write my anime posts as if the audience reading them has not seen the anime in question which means including as few spoilers as possible, among other things. The types of anime posts I write mainly – impression posts of new anime, series reviews, season previews, and seasonal/yearly anime awards – are designed with this mission in mind. I’d rather have people spending time watching good anime then spending time reading what I have to say about good and bad anime.

2.   Wider Variety of Content

I have only the highest respect for episodic blogs and their ability to cover the same shows week in and week out; I’d probably burn out quickly if I tried. I think the format, however, is very constricting and it would limit the quality of my blog since many of my most read posts and the posts I’m most proud about wouldn’t fit into that format.

For example, there was my rebuttal to Mr. Sherman, president of Bang Zoom, about the impending death of anime in America and from a couple of years ago, my two-part (1, 2) rebuttal to the “documentary” that Otaking put out. There’s also this post where I used the licensing patterns of the anime from 2008 to show that instead of blaming fansubs, maybe studio execs should be looking at the shows they license; the post still holds up well though there’s been some more licensing of 2008 anime shows since I wrote it back in November.

From time-to-time I like to pit two series or two characters against each other to see who would win. The most read one remains the Haruhi vs. Gurren Lagann one I did back in 2008 but the one I had the most fun putting together was the Haruka Minami vs. Ibuki Ikaruga battle because I was surprised by the winner.

I also enjoy dabbling with Photoshop because it exercises my creative side a different way then writing does. The result is often posting wallpapers that I’ve made. The Soul Eater ones (1, 2, 3) have been the most popular; my Toradora ones actually got linked to by a Japanese anime blog which I thought was great. My favorite wallpaper was one I did for Bakemonogatari that splices Araragi and Mayoi onto a picture I took while on vacation at Washington D.C.. I also once tried out vector tracing using Muraski from Kure-nai. And I also sometimes take the time to stitch together those pan-up shots the animators do of a really awesome outfit/character. The latest was one I did the other day after watching episode 5 of Katanagatari and I might as well share it with you know as thanks for reading this far down.

There’s also those posts that are hard to categorize except to say that something about the anime I was watching or manga I was reading at that time interested me and I wanted to share. There was a recent post about fixing a joke I read in the Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei manga, there’s this post where I mention anime songs that make me cry, the post about how animators seem fascinated with the night sky, a post about how anime needs more mature characters, and the post where I talk about When an Anime Becomes a Keeper.

3.   Winning Would Do The Most Good For The Anime Blogosphere

I struggled with how to word this one without sounding presumptuous and I still don’t think I quite got it right. I’m not saying that my anime blog is super important or even more important than my opponent, Bokutachi no Blog, but the feedback I received during the first round and pressure to make my blog competitive for the second round pushed me to improve The null set and winning in this round will push me even harder to improve the quality of The null set to make it competitive for the next round. I have several ideas that I think would make very interesting posts which have been kicking around in my brain for a while now, waiting for a good time to get written, and trying to win in the third round would be a very good reason to get them written. I’m even thinking about bring back my weekly anime review.

-

So, hopefully, something I said has convinced you to go here and vote for The null set in the Aniblog Tournament; I’m currently behind by a little bit but with your help, I might just win.

Yes We Can! With your help The null set can win.

I wasn’t going to try the bribery route but I just had an idea that attempts to bribe while still keeping within the parameters of running The null set like normal. If I win my second round match-up, I’ll watch and write a series review of any one randomly selected anime (up to say 40 episodes in length) picked from a list generated of people leaving a comment at this post saying that they voted for me and the name of the anime they’d like me to review. Of course, I can’t verify if the winning person did, in fact, vote for me but I’m willing to trust in my readers. And  no matter the legitimacy of the comment, I’ll still be reviewing a show I haven’t done yet and I’ll only do it when I win so it’s a win-win for everyone involved.

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

There’s just something “wonderful” about a snowstorm that all forecasts say will only drop 3 – 6 inches (~7.6 – 15 cm) of snow in your area and you wake up to find that 19 inches (~48 cm) of snow has fallen. So on the day I was planning to write a few posts up for The Null Set – maybe get to a few winter impression posts or mention how much I’ve been liking Kobato lately or get to my top 2009 picks or figure out what else I should do with the 400 screen shots I took from the latest Gurren Lagann movie – instead I was out shoveling snow. I can’t really complain, though, I saw video from the mudslides in California and I have to say that I’d prefer snow removal over mud removal any day.

While I was out today, I took a few pictures and figured I’d share since it’s not everyday that a person gets so much snow dumped on them.

Click on any picture to enlarge, if you so desire.

Bird tracks in the snow

I'd've love to have seen that squirrel as he made his way through the snow.

Even on a day like today, the birds are cautious.

Two of the really big crows that live in our area.

The amazing thing is about 20 minutes after I took this shot, the street department actually plowed our street. It normally takes several days for them to bother.

Filed under: other wallpapers and pictures

Today it hit a balmy 40 degrees F (4.4 deg C) so my family decided to take the 1.5 hour drive up to see how the beach looks in winter time. Turns out, it’s really cool both figuratively and literally. In the picture above I’m standing about 20 feet from shore over Lake Erie itself – the mixture of ice/snow/sand felt solid but it still was a bit unsettling to know that I was walking on the lake itself. Below is more shots that I took including one of the snowman that two of my sisters made.