What would it take for an architect not to name his new creation after the old building's original purpose? Are we going to see The Abbatoir in coming years? The Brothel, perhaps?

* Apartment building.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Look, you imbeciles, it's you. It's you. People have taken a look at the modern Democrat Party and realised that for all Bush's faults, they can at least trust him to run the country, to do what needs to be done, most of the time.

They look at the seething, whining, feces-flinging monkeys that represent the Democrats and realise that handing power to these people would be the biggest mistake they could make. Better, far better the occasional corporate scandal (as if those never happened under Clinton...) than to hand America over to this feckless bunch of nogoodniks.

And until you can understand this, until you stop trying to pin every Democrat electoral disaster on voter ignorance and smarten up, you will only sink deeper into this swamp of your own creation. The voters know exactly what they are doing, and that's why 60% - sixty percent - of voters in California (California!) voted Republican.

Stop it. Cast the hapless loonies of the far left adrift; let them be eaten by sharks if need be. But face up to your own damn failings for a change or you will end up exiled to the political wilderness forever.

I keep running into something called Jane's Law, which says The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane. I don't recall it ever being more true than today, but then, until this year I got my news from, well, newspapers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:56 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And, unavoidably, each of them runs into his or her past and has to deal with it.

I don't agree with him entirely; I think that Faye in particular was doing better with coming to terms with what she was than he gives her credit for. But then, he's seen the series much more recently than I have, and as a more coherent whole, since I was watching it two episodes at a time as it was first released with subtitles. I mean to watch it again; number 8 out of 25 may not sound very special, but that 25 is itself selected from over 200 anime series that I have seen. And that's ignoring the 500 or so that I read about and decided not to waste my time on. So, number 8 out of 700, really.

Warning: His review gives a lot of spoilers, so go watch the series first, and then read it. Pixy Misa says so.

Update: Steven Den Beste (!) writes in the comments:

Thank you for the kind words. I'm curious to know what you think of my second explanation.

This rings true to me.

Now, I haven't sat down and analysed the motivations of the characters in Bebop the way SDB has; nor have I studied Japanese history in any great depth, but I have been exposed to at least the popular version of the Bushido code and the life of the ronin (as in, masterless Samurai, not youths studying for their college entrance exams).

But when I watched Bebop, I had a visceral understanding of Spike and Jet (and Faye and Ed too, but they are less relevant to this discussion). With Jet, this is not difficult, because his actions are not that far from what a certain Western archetype in the same position might do. Watching Spike, though, the only answer to some of the questions of why would he do that? is that he is following a code of honour, that there are certain things he must do to redeem this honour, and that the consequences - even his death, if need be - are less important than that these things are done.

Is it truly Bushido? I don't know; I'm no expert on Bushido, and except for the movie, it has been years since I watched Cowboy Bebop. But nothing in this interpretation strikes a wrong note to my ears.

Update: Untold Millions write in the comments that Bebop is not a classical tragedy, lacking the necessary elements of hubris and nemesis (hubris plus nemesis gives exegesis, if I recall correctly). They (the Millions) also suggest that Spike's code of honour is not Bushido at all. Anyway, since U.S.S. Clueless (quite understandably) lacks comments, feel free to debate the point here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:46 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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"Why", I hear you ask, "did you need to reconfigure the firewall, if this application is, as you say, web based?"

Because the web-based application is being run over Citrix.

Yes. Really.

For the non-technical reader, this is like... Um, help me out here, my analogy-generator seems to be broken... Like you need to get from New York to L.A., so you buy your airline ticket and then drive to L.A. airport, where you then rent a car.

Or something. Anyway, it's really, really dumb.

Update: Here's another try at an analogy:

You want to go get some lunch at the drive-through, so you go out and buy a truck, and then you put your car on the back of the truck, and when you get to the drive-through you unload the car and buy your lunch, and then you load the car back onto the truck and drive back to wherever you were.

Whereupon you find that they left out the fries which are the best part of the meal dammit!

In other words, it's totally pointless and stupid and makes everything harder for all involved, wasting huge amounts of time and money in the process and delivering a product which is greatly inferior to what you would have had if you'd just done the obvious thing in the first place.

In a word: Dumb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:42 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:25 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:34 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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* Looks like another outage at Hosting Matters.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:22 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:45 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Ash discovers a hitherto unknown Pokemon.

Chiyo and Kagura from Azumanga Daioh. The management, etc, etc.

Pengi-san fall down!

I am not Rei from Sailor Moon. I am not Inu-yasha. Do you see any doggy-ears? Well, I had ears yesterday, but...

Ruri Hoshino from Nadesico. Baka.

Sakura from Naruto.

Um, some chick from Final Fantasy singing a song. Nice costume, tho'.

Lain, Navi, and Man in Black from Serial Experiments Lain. There was another Lain, also in teddy-bear pyjamas; unfortunately my photos of the teddy-bear battle-to-the-death didn't come out.

Girl-type Ranma, just for Daniel.

Posh Spice... Uh, that is, Umi from Magic Knight Rayearth.

Left to right: Seras Victoria from Hellsing - accessories sold separately (in the series, she carries a 30mm cannon as a sidearm); Vash from Trigun; no flaming idea; Yuna's mother from Final Fantasy.

I don't know who this is, but it's still a cute girl in a yukata with a parasol.

Great Director Nabeshin from Excel Saga takes over the stage.

Sakura from... Naruto? Funny, we had no Sakuras from Card Captor Sakura this year.

No Face from Spirited Away.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:16 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The problem is that Google ranks pages on the number of links it finds to them, and blogs are highly linked. Moreover, Google isn't bright enough to exclude trackback pages, which contain only capsule - very capsule - summaries of the posts themselves, and are generally useless to anyone not interested in the mechanics of trackbacks themselves. They are quite easily filtered... It's just that Google doesn't.

Of course, Orlowski sees

concerted attacks to undermine [Google's] integrity from link farms and webloggers

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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