So I’ve been marathoning older Kamen Rider shows to help me fall asleep. (Not that they’re boring, but I’ll talk more about that another time.) And as I watched episode 33 of Ryuki, I was on the verge of dozing off until I got to the end of the episode.

Without ruining it for anyone who’s never seen the show, the end of this episode has a deliciously over-dramatic slow motion sequence backed by an amazing instrumental song. Folding laundry has never been so hype. But I also knew I’d heard that song somewhere before, so I was suddenly wide awake and searching the web to figure out what it was.

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As you may have noticed, I like talking to myself about TV shows. I like using my blog as an outlet for that sort of thing, because my friends, social networks, and IRC aren’t all interested in all the same things I am. (I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who shares all the same interests as me.) Also, I hate spoilers, and I don’t want to risk spoiling things for other people without the ability to warn first. And I rarely watch anything within 24 hours of its airing, so it’s odd to try striking up conversations about things that aired days, weeks, or even months ago.

But anyway. My TV rambles have always been more talking than writing, so I’ve been wanting to try doing it in audio form for a while. But I couldn’t really use my microphone until recently. And on a whim I decided to try it out in late February, rather than waiting until summer. So rather than typing up unordered lists for each episode, I recorded myself saying sentences. It’s still just as disjointed, but with brief silence instead of bullet points for separation. And I ended up doing stuff for January, February, and March episodes, so I’m not gonna bother listing every show before the cut. Also, there are no text spoilers, but there are tons of them in the audio files.

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Over the past year or so, I’ve seen lots of comments about translation practices, mostly in regard to Japanese to English. Some people favor heavy localization, while others prefer to be so literal that they leave many words untranslated. In essence, I think both viewpoints get too extreme. Too much localization can result in loss, while being too literal can make things confusing. It’s all made me do a lot of thinking about my own translation practices, too. I think there’s a healthy middle ground, and that’s something I aim to show. (Whether or not I’ll succeed, who knows.)

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Before I get to the actual subject, let me just say that I’m not trying to sell you on anything or change your mind. I’m only trying to explain my own reasons and maybe clear up some misinformation. In other words, this is meant to be informative rather than persuasive. And I feel the need to give this little warning up front because the subject in question is one of the most polarizing forms of entertainment in existence. So much so that non-fans probably would have stopped reading by now, which would be unfortunate considering that’s my target audience in writing this.

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Last night, I was watching an old South Park episode while trying to fall asleep, and a few particular lines stuck out to me. Richard Dawkins started talking to Mrs. Garrison about flying spaghetti monsters. And I thought to myself, “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t Futurama have an actual flying spaghetti monster in their episode about the evolution debate? I remember it saying something like, ‘I am a flying spaghetti monster. Do you mean to say that I evolved from some kind of manicotti?'” I thought it was too much of a coincidence that two shows with episodes about the evolution debate would feature something as particular as flying spaghetti monsters, so I started thinking that Futurama (the newer episode) had ripped off South Park.

I love both of those shows, so this was a startling realization for me. I started writing this big comparison between the two episodes in my head, until I then switched to the idea of making a YouTube video out of it. I’ve never uploaded a YouTube video before, so I was getting excited thinking about how I’d make it. I would use low quality screenshots and audio instead of full clips, to make it as fair use as possible, and I’d record some narration for it. Thinking about all of this greatly reduced my tiredness, so I decided I’d at least take some screenshots and make some notes while I was up and it was on my mind.

First I searched around the web to make notes about the two episodes, and to see if anyone else had already pointed this out. And in the process, I discovered that “flying spaghetti monster” wasn’t just a throwaway term from South Park. It was around well before that episode, and is a pretty widespread argument in the evolution debate. In fact, while reading about it, I realized I had heard about all this before, but I guess it slipped my mind at some point.

So, obviously, Futurama didn’t steal the concept from South Park. I would have felt pretty stupid if I’d made a whole big comparison project out of it and (re-)learned all this later. Crisis averted, I guess. But I am kind of disappointed that I no longer have an idea for my first YouTube video, and I won’t get to talk to myself on a microphone. Maybe some other day I’ll have my chance to be on YouTube.

It’s no secret that I adore the Dragon Ball manga. It’s one of my most prized possessions. I love it so much that I summarized each chapter on my site years ago, as my way of sharing its contents with the world. Curtis Hoffmann’s summaries were what inspired me to buy the manga in the first place, so I was sort of hoping to do the same for others. And I still love it enough that I’m gradually trying to clean up those summaries, along with a few other things that give me an excuse to re-read the series.

Over the years, I’ve also complained many times about the additions and alterations in its anime adaptations. Back in the day, people would get outright offended when I told them something was “filler” during in-universe arguments. But I still enjoy watching the anime, or at least most of it. Even if it isn’t my ideal version of the story, it still has wonderful acting and music, along with lots of pretty colors. And the crappy anime-original material still had its charm, even if it’s just ironic enjoyment in some cases. (Like seeing a lengthy flashback of Piccolo’s life story as Gokuu and Freeza duke it out on an exploding planet. That’s just amazing.)

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In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I was attempting to consistently work on a project throughout the month of November. Not a novel (maybe next year), but some things for the site. And I was pretty consistent about it, but not at the quantity I desired. Anyway, since I intended to focus my free time almost entirely on this project, it wouldn’t leave much room for other activities, like watching television. But I came up with a great idea to counter that: November sweeps. I could justify watching TV by “covering” the November sweeps episodes of all the shows I keep up with by making more of my disjointed rambles about them. So I watched shows while I worked on my project, and made notes that I later turned into complete sentences (though some things are still only in note form, as of this writing).

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Back in 2004, I was looking for sources to reference and cite for some articles I was writing. And I had trouble finding results that weren’t from Wikipedia, or a site that blatantly steals from Wikipedia. Wikis in general have polluted search engine results over the years, and it’s gotten difficult to find anything else.

I have sometimes complained about my hatred for all these wiki projects on IRC. So I thought perhaps I should articulate those thoughts on the web. It probably won’t stop me from complaining about it on IRC, though.

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Story time. I moved across the US a couple years ago, and I couldn’t bring my car with me, so I sold it a few months before I moved. The local comic store was 35 minutes away by car, and since gas prices were pretty bad at the time, it was not easy to convince someone else to take me there. Thus, I started ordering my comics online at Things From Another World until I moved. But after I moved, the comic store here turned out to be 25 minutes away (which isn’t much better), and rarely has what I’m looking for in stock, so I decided to just keep ordering comics from TFAW.

Fast forward to the present. They shipped my copy of Buffy #34 in early April, and come the middle of May, it never got here. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally… the blog has come back to Rachel’s Page. That is, it’s on my own server now, so yay. And with purely my own layout that is (or will be, in most cases) used on the rest of the site. The parts of the site that do have this layout don’t have the new banner yet, though. It’s actually an update of an old “Use this to link here” banner I’d made partially as a joke back in 2001, which is why Chris Jericho has so much hair, and why it’s so tacky. But the picture of me is recent (the previous one was from 1998), and had major lighting issues that I couldn’t fix, which is why it’s grayscale’d. That, and I guess it helps keep me stealthy compared to the rest.

Anyway, blog, new/old location. I think I still have a few kinks to work out, but for the most part, I guess it’s finally ready for a public debut. I had a nice little run on Blogspot, but I’m a control freak, so it just wasn’t sufficient for me. But on that note, if you’re using the custom RSS feed I mentioned last month, you shouldn’t have any problems with the transition. If not, then I guess this might be the last post you ever see, unless you take note of this and go to the new URL.

I haven’t been able to do much thought spewing lately, partially because I was busy setting up all this, but I definitely do have plenty to spew. For one, I still have that Lunar Navy thing, as well as things to say about TaXatioN, Hulk vs Mindfreak, Esmeraude, and the 13th Warrior/Monk/Thief/Red Mage/White Mage/Black Mage. At least one of which you might see within the next few minutes, because I didn’t want to come empty-handed.