First: I’ve picked up my Pixonomy project again, and while I’ve JUST put it on hold again, I’ve progressed the library with a refactoring and I just need to do some cross-platform hacking (to get it to compile nicely on OS X as a universal binary), and implement a couple of search functions to actually get it to a state where I can actually start programming client software in GTK+ or wxWidgets (I haven’t decided which) to demo the library.

Second: I’m currently taking a break from Pixonomy to work on a nifty font for OpenTTD.  Since I noted that they finally implemented TrueType support and Unicode support in 0.5.0 (which I’d tried to implement before, but never really got around to), I figured I’d try my hand at something fun.  After I get all the lower case characters done preliminarily, I’ll start adjusting the bounds and kerning by testing in game…

Third: Been watching some of the subs for this season, and I think Allison & Lillia does seem to have some promise, but we’ll see where it goes.  Zettai Karen Children, though, is not so much up my alley.  We’ll see where the other series I want to check out go (namely, Library War)…  There’s a few others that might be good, too.

This course is an introduction to some of the major genres of Japanese animation: sci-fi/cyberpunk/mecha, apocalypse, gothic/noir, romantic comedy, and epic. We will discuss anime’s distinctive paradigms and its narrative and visual styles with attention to anime’s development and circulation in postwar Japanese culture and to its contemporary commercial and cultural globalization. Students will be required to view all the films before we discuss them in class (generally a 2-hour feature a week) and to watch one entire TV series on their own over the course of the semester. The reading load for this class is heavy and some of the readings are difficult. If you are not interested in film theory, you will not like this class. Because anime is a new field of film studies, relatively speaking, some readings are in early film theory, from a time when critics and theorists were trying to articulate what was significant about film as a new medium for art and experience. Though we are not seeing photographs animated for the first time, the advent of anime is something like a new medium and a new aesthetic. Other readings are critical analyses of particular works. We read these both for the writer’s particular insights into the film and for ideas about what it might be important to notice about anime in general or specific genres of anime or about animation. We may also read about the history of producing animation in general to help us understand the production of anime in particular. There are short writing assignments about the films during the semester and a final exam that covers the films and the readings.

400 yen a piece.

Namely, who is this girl?

She’s not in the anime OR (so far as I can tell) the novels!

EDIT: Someone said it was the “girlfriend” of the Computer Society president. You can forget a lot in three months… o.o

Haruhi is scheduled for Thursdays… Yay!

And lastly, first two classes (Intermediate Mechanics and Data Mining) seem good. Will report on OpSys and JPNIII tomorrow.