Hey a new post and a new background to share with everyone. Full size is 1920 x 1080.
This came about with the right mixture of being bored, having recently installed Windows 7, and needing a new background. Several hours and several different brush styles later and there you have it: a Senjougahara wallpaper to pay homage to the 2009 summer hit Bakemonogatari.
Haruhi Season 2: Episode 4 - Endless Eight (again, once again)
Maybe I should just keep this episode summary to a minimum, and a rant to an all time high, as this episode four is nothing more than a repeat of episode 3. Now I don’t know if this is a very smart way of putting in Haruhi filler episodes or a very, very bad way of storytelling >_>. Let’s get on with the summary:
Summary of Episode 4:
It’s the same as episode 3! Just imagine varying degrees of dialogue, different scene angles, and people wearing different clothing. That’s it. Oh, and the iteration has increased. /end summary
Not much different from episode at all. I had some hopes that this particular story arc will end so it can get on with what this season is supposed to be, which is the Disappearance of Haruhi. This story arc is the prelude to it. As important as it is, I am not liking the idea of the arc spanning so far a minimum of 4 episodes. I’m hoping episode 5 delivers something more than just another repeat of episodes 2, 3, and 4 all over again.
Haruhi Episode 3 - Endless Eight (again)
Episode 2 was a preview to what was ahead for this particular episode. For this ep, Kyon starts out the day to the same episode as episode 2. You aren’t immediately clued in to what’s going on until he receives a phone call from Haruhi asking him to meet up and to bring his bike, where he seemingly finds out (for the first time) to go to the public pool.
To the audience, it’s clear at this point that either Kyon and company are repeating the same sequence of events or the viewer has lost their mind thinking they’re watching the wrong episode. To alleviate that confusion, the show replays the sequence of events with different angles, minor character positionings, and slight variations in dialogue.
The episode pretty much repeats itself for the most part. The minor variations are the camera angles and Kyon’s nagging thoughts of how everything looked familiar, as if he’s done these activities before recently. The largest variation is the night after the Bon Festival where Mikuru discovers that she has lost connection to the future. Kyon meets up with her, Itsuki and Yuki, where Itsuki explains how they are stuck in an infinite loop between August 17th to the 31st, and that all memories are reset when the loop rewinds itself. Well, all memories except for Yuki, who actually transcends space-time altogether, remembered every iteration. Kyon asks her how many times have gone on already, whereby she reveals that their current iteration of this repeating timeline is the 15,498th iteration already, an equivalent to roughly 600 years’ worth of days.
After this news, Kyon has no choice but to go through all the activities Haruhi had planned out for them for the rest of the summer. By the second to last day after their list of activities are all completed, Haruhi is ready to wrap up their summer. Kyon feels a heavy presence around him as if he needs to say something before Haruhi heads home, otherwise things will repeat itself. Unfortunately, he draws blanks as he watches Haruhi exiting the diner and his hopes of restoring the future. That next day, his willingness to continue his dialy routines is completely gone, giving in to the inevitability that he will find himself erased of all memory and starting off again on August 17th.
I was rather disappointed in this episode’s finale. It basically means that Kyon realizes that he is an infinite loop. However, his realization will be erased by the next episode and he has to “rediscover” it all again, which means the next episode is going to be another goddamn repeat of this one! Things better get resolved next episode.
Finally, a new episode after some 3 weeks since Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody. From what I hear, this episode is the start of the actual season, so there are consistent episodes per week starting from here on out.
Next to Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody, this episode also bears a significant amount of importance should this series cover the Disappearance arc. Anyway, after watching this episode, it would appear that this little story arc is a two-part series, although it was not mentioned at all either at the beginning or the end of the episode.
Episode Summary and Review:
Surprisingly, this episode actually starts out at Kyon’s house. That’s refreshing, considering 75% of the episodes started at the school, and the majority in the clubroom. But there’s a reason for this, since everyone’s on summer vacation. It also appears that the animation studio is going to shoot for a basic chronological series this time around, instead of mixing them up. It is good to note that the actual Melancholy story arc episodes were in chronologically aired. Just the random eps were randomized.
Okay, back to the episode. The title of the episode, Endless Eight (or Endless Eights) may not bear much meaning from this episode alone. If the next episode covers what happens next, then the title would make more sense. The premise of the episode here is that Haruhi is maximizing the remainder of her summer vacation with the SOS Brigade and doing a shopping list’s worth of activities.
The activities went from going to a Bon Festival, lighting fireworks, catching cicadas, karaoke, etc. I won’t go into details with the activities, so to sum things up, Haruhi, Kyon and company did a ton of things for the last two weeks of their vacation. One thing worth noting about these activities is that it explains where the frog suit came from. If you’ve watched the first season, the frog suit appears in the Day in the Rain episode.
The subplot of the episode, which is actually pretty important, is Kyon and his pending summer homework. He brings it up throughout the episode, and at the end, simply couldn’t finish it in time. Insignificant for this episode, but plays an important role for the second half of this Endless Eight(s) episode.
Not really an exciting episode by any stretch. I think the one thing to take away from this is they premiered the opening credits for the show. Unfortunately, it was rather forgettable. Still a lot of content to go, so it’s all good.
So an episode of Haruhi aired in late May 2009 and it would appear to be a teaser of sorts to bring the new season of Haruhi. It is definitely not a filler episode nor was it the strange pilot episode of the first season featuring the movie the SOS Brigade made.
From the opening scene, it was apparent that this episode was going to cover the Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody short story from the light novels as Haruhi is excited about celebrating Tanabata. It’s a good “return” episode for Haruhi as this story ties in with both the Melancholy series as well as the future story arcs. Not to mention, “Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody” is also the title of the episode.
In terms of the timeline of the light novels, this particular event is part of the collection of stories in the “Boredom of Suzumiya Haruhi”, and this event happens after they’ve made their movie, but before Mysterique Sign and Lone Island Syndrome. As the episode opens out, it follows the novel very strictly. It’s always a good idea to follow the author’s original direction.
As far as the episode itself goes, Haruhi is excited about Tanabata and wants the brigade crew to write down wishes for the gods to fulfill. The activity reveals a little more about the personality of each character based on what they write down on the cards. After this activity, Mikuru slips Kyon a note to stay in the room after the meeting, which he’s obviously ecstatic about. Yuki also slips him a note on her way out, without any explanation.
Mikuru requests for Kyon to go with her to 3 years back to the past. She knocks him out to prevent him from seeing how time travel worked. How convenient… Kyon wakes up in the past and meets up with the older Mikuru that he met before. She instructs him to go meet up with someone down the road at a school and help that person. That person being young Haruhi, of course.
Going back to the first season of Haruhi, it was mentioned that Haruhi was responsible for the infamous school grounds symbol drawing incident. Now we find out that Kyon is actually the one who drew the symbol while Haruhi directed him. This isn’t the only thing. His meeting with Haruhi sparks Haruhi’s interest in attending North High, I guess to meet up with more people like Kyon. Haruhi’s reaction to his obvious alias was great, by the way.
The episode concludes with the misfortune of Mikuru missing her time traveling technology, stranding them there for at least the next three years. Kyon then remembers the note Yuki gave him earlier. The two travel to Yuki’s apartment, where she syncs with her future self. Yuki offers Kyon and Mikuru a solution, asking them to sleep in the adjacent room. The light goes off, then back on as if Yuki forgot something. She didn’t though. They are already, ahem, back to the future. Pun intended.
Again, not a bad episode. This event is a very integral part of the series as the novels touch back to this single event on a number of occasions, so it had to air eventually. Also worked out really well for it to not have been in the first season. This is a perfect episode to act as a springboard to the rest of the Haruhi universe.
In terms of rumors of the upcoming season, many are saying that it’s just going to be a remake of sorts for the series, which confuses me. The first season was pretty solid in my opinion. My enthusiasm will go down the drain as quickly as it did when I found out FMA2 was a “redo”. Lost all interest. But I’m an invested fan of the Haruhi series, so I’ll see what they will do this time around. I’m still praying for the “Disappearance” story arc. If not, I’ll still settle for the movie making arc. Though both are too short to fill up an entire season on their own accord. I didn’t get anything from the ending credits as to what the upcoming season might hold, but the chalkboard image sure looks like a schedule. A movie-filming schedule perhaps? Who knows.
Finally got around to upgrading to Wordpress 2.7. Not too much of a noticeable difference except for the Admin section. Upgrading always feels risky, but everything turned out alright.
Besides that, took the opportunity to add a Blogroll to the sidebar. Done so many modifications to my sidebar I had to review some default pages to see how exactly to summon forth the blogroll for display. At least I know now.
This weekend took me to hell and back. On Thursday, my system encountered a “display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered” issue, followed shortly after with a screen lock and then finished off with a BSOD!
Needless to say, that came out of nowhere. No sign of issues beforehand or anything; practically a case of spontaneous combustion in a way. So after the BSOD, it tries to reboot, but starts showing signs of having trouble loading up Vista. I had to power off the system manually. This was when I went to work:
I yanked off the power cord, unplugged my monitors, opened up the computer, grabbed my compressed air can and blew out all the dust. I then pulled out the video card, sprayed off all the dust everywhere I could imagine and put everything back together. System rebooted fine and the problems went away for the night and I filed it away as an isolated incident. Little did I know that it was going to be much, much worse than I thought.
The next morning, fired up WoW, and I immediately get an error, the game locks up and my computer locks up. This was when I knew I had a problem. I didn’t have time to deal with as I was off to work, but when I got back, it was just constant “nvlddmkm” problems. Researching for solutions lead to dead ends as this problem has been around since 2007!!! What the fuck? 2007? Yes, 2007. At that point, I knew I was screwed.
Hours and hours into Friday night I go and no workable fix is available. So by now, it has moved on from an isolated incident to possibly a software issue. I wasn’t ready to call this a hardware failure, but I already made up my mind to be ready to go get a new video card just in case. Being 3:00AM in the morning, I called it quits until the next day.
Didn’t get much sleep at all. I was already up at 6:30 trying to find more solutions. The condition of the problems worsened by the hour. It wasn’t just affecting my gaming, it started affecting all aspects of my displays, even in idle mode, and all the way to when the system was just booting. I continued looking into nvlddmkm issues, but still no solutions. I kept looking, but nothing. So I decided it was time to try out a new video card. Along with this decision, I decided to quickly backup all my computer’s data. I had a feeling I was going to need a full computer format before all this is over.
I grabbed myself a new 9800GTX+ PCI-E. I quickly realized that I made a mistake. I didn’t look into the kind of powering I needed to run the new card. I plugged it in, but there was no way my current system could handle it. I was missing a 6-pin PCI-E power cord from my PSU. Not to mention, the card needed 450W to run, my PSU maxed out at 300W.
I repacked the video card and considered returning it. In the meantime, I went with my final option, which was to format my computer. If this was absolutely a software issue, a reformat will reset everything. Success on my side? Not at all. The issues affected the reinstall process, and crashed almost immediately when I started up WoW. I wasted the rest of my day reading about everyone else’s problems while noticing a steady, gradual decline of my video card. It was like watching someone’s health falter over time. It didn’t help at all that it was the onstart of Daylight Savings, effectively removing 1 hour of the precious weekend time.
Before I slept, I made the decision that I will try to get a new PSU with proper wiring and retry the new video card. Woke up early the next day, bought a new 500W PSU, got back, ripped out the old power supply, stuck in the new one and tested it out. Everything booted, so it was time for the new video card. Plugged everything in, boot fails. I remained calm and attempted a new Vista install. Success!
Everything was going smoothly at this point. Install was fine and no graphical glitches on the screen. Powered up WoW again, and it remained stable. I even went and got myself a pizza and let the game run. Everything fine when I got back. 2 minutes into me running around… and BAM.. screen fucks up and computer locks up. I was frustrated beyond comprehension. Did I diagnose the issue wrong? Was it my RAM that was causing the problems? My MOTHERBOARD?! Anything but the mobo, please.
Rebooted the machine, and decided to install the latest drivers. I didn’t get an nvlddmkm issue during the lock up, so I figured that it could possibly be a case of old drivers. Installed the new drivers and, to my surprise, that ultimately fixed the problem.
In conclusion, it was not a software issue. My RAM and Mobo were fine. It came down to hardware failure of my video card. And in true computer issue resolution, I threw money at the problem to make it go away. A new video card and a new power supply and now I am a happy camper once again. It even made me backup my files and format my computer. So everything is fresh and clean again. It only cost me some 2+ days of my life and close to $300, which I could’ve spent on a netbook =( . But I have my system back and that’s all that matters.
(And this my first post of the year. How distracted I have become due to WotLK.)
No matter how hard I try, the World of Warcraft somehow finds a way to pull me back in. Back in the beginning of October, I had this extremely plentiful amount of energy and free time, which I spent on working on a new site powered by Joomla, and it was going to be great and all. (For a sneak peek, and shameless plug, it’s located here: http://www.ninenines.net/portal)
And just when I thought things were well on its way to becominga full-fledged site of awesomeness, WoW came around and released the new Wrath of the Lich King content patch, which has sucked the life out of me for the past 2+ weeks. Why has it done so? I’ll tell you why. Here are some of the things:
1. New Talent specs
Did they nerf my rogue or beef him up? I need to know goddammit. Only way to know is to work out a new spec on a talent calculator and see what I’m doing against mobs in the real game. Conclusion? I feel buffer all of a sudden. With 10 more talent points to come, even more buff.
2. New life for my alts
With the new talents, my alts are buffer too, which gives me the motivation to blow the dust off their shoulder pieces and get back to leveling again. And from the expected server issues, I discovered how uberly OP my lowbie alt Paladin has become. Incredible.
3. Change in Game Dynamics
This has breathed life back into my guild. We were stuck on some hard-ass bosses, but with the new game dynamics mixed with new talents, steamrolling an instance had never felt better. 4 new bosses down in a single night? That’s unheard of.
4. Achievements for the ePeen
Of course, I couldn’t leave this little gem off the list. Whether I like them or not, or whether I have a choice or not, these little statistic tidbits are keeping everyone on the server just a little more busy than before. And for good reason. The reason being my next and final point:
5. Wrath of the Lich King expansion (in NOVEMBER!)
Ohmygod, you mean 2% of the WoW population will get a chance to get pwned in the face by Arthas himself? And 1% of them will pwn him back? I want in on some of that! But not just that. I want to try out the goddamn Death Knights!
With all the above points, Blizzard has successfully drawn me in along with millions of others to continue playing the game and for some, to return to the game. All in time for the expansion because Blizzard wants MILLIONS of people buying Wrath of the Lich King when it comes out, and they sure as hell want MILLIONS of dollars pouring into their already fat wallets. All the better too. Our economy is sucking right now. Maybe the surge in monetary movement between consumers and retailers will perhaps make everyone’s lives a little better by Thanksgiving and Xmas.
I’ve been spending the last 2 weeks putting together a new site using Joomla. It was a little overwhelming at first, but with the experience I’ve had using Wordpress, I didn’t have to worry too much about the system’s capabilities as I knew the program would have everything I was looking for so that allowed me to focus more on getting certain features and modules to work. Each day in this whole last week has been a small milestone in my goal of getting this new site ready. I predict another 2 weeks before it’s ready to take over the world. Hopefully.
So I finally got my hands on the official Melancholy of Haruhi DVDs so now I can remake my original AMV without subtitles in the way. Maybe it will open things up for maybe a whole new AMV somewhere down the line. For now though, I just wanted to experiment with the idea of overlaying the DVD quality video over the old fansubbed version.
Good ol’ Premiere took some time to figure all over again. This time around I was using Premiere CS3, which is rather different than 6.0 that I originally used for this AMV. For some reason, this new Premiere put in these two black bars on both sides of the video, which took another day just to get rid of. It didn’t help that I was working on this in hot weather, while under the weather or under attack by allergens, and with a headache for hours already.
So with a few extra added scenes, slightly better cuts, and multiple file conversions between raw uncompressed video to an acceptable MP4/FLV version, it’s finally complete. Unfortunately, there were some converting issues and it’s not exactly the best thing possible, but I just don’t have enough time to sit around to fix them, if I could even do such a thing.