Working on icons now. Safari doesn’t wanna cooperate with Winterboard for me though :(
Almost done (lol just hid all the icons that I haven’t done yet). Had to manually replace the SMS icon since I have no idea what name it goes by in Springboard (er, I’m being lazy so I’m using the easier old icon method from Springboard–Winterboard still recognizes it but apparently it’s not as proper, but fuck that). I was thinking about using the number badges for icons, but it just seemed weird to do that for anything but speed dial and the iPhone doesn’t really have that. 

Still have a few more icons to change (or maybe I’ll just be lazy and keep them on another page :D) and then I think I’ll move on to editing UI stuff (like the keyboard and sliders and other shit). I think it’s actually starting to look pretty good now.

I was bored this evening, so I decided to try screwing around with my iPhone to add custom system sounds to it. Haven’t done too much with it yet since I still have to figure out what sounds work best where (and exactly what some of the sound files are, I can’t remember where half of them are used and can’t seem to find a key anywhere online). I’m tempted to try screwing around with the UI some too. 

Anyway, here’s what it looks–er sounds like so far (I think the lock sound might be a little long, but I’m still messing with it):

It’s really a pretty simple mod once you’ve jailbroken your phone and figured out how to SSH into it. I just used the audio files from one of /a/’s Juiz clip-packs: Juiz.zip

[EDIT] Too lazy to take another video right now, but I added/changed some more sounds. 

Unlock: “This is Juiz.”
Lock: “Please continue to be a Messiah.”
SMS/E-mail Received + Voicemail: “Noblesse Oblige.” (probably should be one of the phone alert sounds, but they were getting boring so I changed it up)
E-mail sent: “Order received.” 
Dialing Error: “My apologies.”

I haven’t finished changing everything, but for the other stuff I altered, I just used different segments from the phone beeps/alert sounds from the clip-pack.

[EDIT II]

Here’s the lock screen and the background I just made (need to play with the icons so it doesn’t look like shit on the phone now…)

[EDIT III] Hoshi- apparently Winterboard supports video wallpapers! Time to animate the background I guess…

[EDIT IV] :< Got an animated background and lockscreen working, but it’s just too much for my 1st gen iPhone to handle ;_; (it runs but it’s laggy as fuck). I wonder if there’s some more optimization I can do to make it work better (it was still laggy when the background was like a 33k gif though…).

Originally, I hadn’t intended to bother with the second season of Haruhi when I heard about it. I watched the first episode, the art looked pretty shitty and even though it’s been a few years since it aired and got hyped to death I’m still sick and tired of it. 

But fuck if Itsuki isn’t extra FABULOUS now. /a/, this is all your fault. Now I have to watch Haruhi. :|

Mmm… Itsuki~

I’m really behind on Ristorante Paradiso, so given my shitty internet connection and minimal space available on my laptop I decided to give Crunchyroll a go. I should mention that I’ve been whining for years that anime companies need to be providing a faster turnaround for the international market if they ever want to dream about ending the piracy problem, or at the very least minimizing it. To be perfectly honest I think the concept of Crunchyroll is fantastic and that it’s a huge step in the right direction—but it’s got some rather glaring problems right now.

I’ve heard /a/ bitch about the quality of the video and whatnot, but I dunno it seems comprable to other streaming video services (Hulu, Netflix, etc) and really doesn’t bother me. I’m not a huge qualityfag for most things. Some shows definitely benefit from HD (SenBa for example), but for the most part it’s not a big issue and at best it’s more of a luxury than a necessity–i.e. Do I *need* to watch SenBa in HD to enjoy it? No. Is it even more awesome in HD? Hell yeah. Anyway, I think the free streaming quality is just fine. I haven’t looked at the quality of any of the other options. I’d have higher standards for something I’d be paying for, but for free this is perfectly acceptable. 

My main problem with CR is the atmosphere/interface. Take a look at CR in comparison to Hulu:

I dunno about you, but I’d take Hulu’s interface over CR’s any day. I think the main issue is that CR hasn’t changed it’s look a whole lot since it became legitimized—it still looks more-or-less like Youtube (or any other user-generated video upload site). The video is off center and the area immediately around it is quite cluttered with unnecessary shit and obnoxious moving ads (I’m sorry, I just find it intensely annoying to try to focus the video while there’s a WoW ad cycling over and over to the side). Admittedly the ads thing is likely a result of a different advertising scheme (namely, no commercials). But on Hulu, the video literally takes center stage on the screen, the area around it is much neater and professional looking.

Another major area of annoyance with CR is it’s idiotic userbase. Hulu has similiarly idiotic people, but the nice thing about Hulu is that it doesn’t shove obnoxious user comments in your face. I don’t think I’d use Hulu as much as I do if just below the video there were things like this:

[insert obnoxious, animated avatar]
xsmexygurll69x:
OMG!!!!! SILUS IS SOooOOooo HAWTT!!!!11111 <3

[insert avatar with 'witty' text]
sirsparklepants: 
lol guiz I just relized. david. slaid. golaieth. LIEK IN THE BIBLE!

Again, very Youtube. Not that it’s a bad thing for Youtube, but if you’re trying to present yourself as a professional site, with “official” content as opposed to user-generated stuff it just doesn’t seem to mesh very well. But maybe it’s just me. If I want to know what people are saying about an episode of something, I go on /a/ or I’ll go look at blogs or a forum. I don’t care what the idiots on CR think about an episode. 

tl;dr: CR, try to be more like Hulu and maybe people would be more interested in using your services than pirating your subs :P

So, I’ve been away for a while. I haven’t really been doing much of anything. For whatever reason, I tend to spend hardly any time online when I have an overabundance of free time and/or am home. 

I guess I ought to address 00 stuff first since that’s been my main content for the most part—to be perfectly honest, I got bored with it a few days after the last episode aired. I dunno. I lost interest without weekly episodes to look forward to and whatnot and was tired of all the drama, so my motivation to go hunting for stuff/do crappy translations went out the window. I’m sorry I never finished doing that last novel summary like I kept saying I would. My interest completely dissapeared partway through translating it and I have shitty work ethic when I’m bored with something. :| Reading some stuff about the latest drama cd kind of piqued my interest again, so maybe I’ll get back into it, I dunno. Now that I think about it, I had the same sort of reaction to the end of S1 until a couple weeks before S2 premiered (I didn’t keep up with it at all during the break aside from taking a look at the new Gundam designs and deciding they were ugly as fuck). 

tl;dr: My feelings re: 00 right now = meh.

In other news, I finished watching SenBa today, on my fabulous 42″ plasma screen TV :D The last fight was pretty fucking awesome. Not sure how I feel about S2. tbh I think I’d rather have a 1-episode-ova/movie of just wall-to-wall over-the-top fightan than a proper S2, but I’m not complaining. Also, is it just me or is Date significantly hotter with his helmet on?

I’m really behind on everything else but Eden right now. Not really sure how they’re going to resolve it in the last episode/how much they’re pushing off onto the movie, but I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I think I’m gonna try to catch up with Ristorante and Cake Girl whenever I get back up to G’ville and access to my desktop/non-shit internet speed (seriously, we’re paying for cable, but we’re barely getting fucking dialup speeds most of the time–fuck you Brighthouse, fuck you). Also, the first episode of the Maiden Rose OVA was pretty hot despite suffering from a bad case of invisidick. 

Er… what else… Oh yeah, my latest hobby: hating Twilight. Because hating stuff is fun! :D

So, I started getting impatient about CA releasing the rest of the second Gaiden series so I started watching what I thought were raws when I’d downloaded them a  couple months ago only to discover shitty HK subs! (Seriously, they’re worse than watching it without subs, don’t bother with them if you’re tempted.)

Anyway, this post is all about Reinhard’s FABULOUS duel outfit (I think I wanna make it…):

And MOE REINHARD:

Why are all the medium-long shots of Reinhard so QUALITY in this episode?

[EDIT] And his second duel outfit is FABULOUS too. Why does Kircheis get all the lame casua– well I guess it’s not really casual, but non-uniform wear?

I’m not sure if I even wrote about episode 11 but it was pretty lame so I don’t care.

Anyhow, with the final episode over with… I’m dissapointed. I guess it’d have been fine if I was going into it just expecting DRAMA rather than gratuitious homolust, but even in that area it’s a pretty weak show without the fanservice to justify it’s existence. As usual with this sort of thing basically the same handful of plots occured repeatedly with slightly different casts of characters (and not even that most of the time). It’s just over and over the same shit, which, I repeat, would be fine if it was a frame for some decent fanservice but there were like *maybe* two good scenes in the entire second season.

Another big problem is definately that this season was really heavily skewed toward the Junjou couple and Egoist and Terrorist kind of just got shafted (I guess Terrorist didn’t have many more chapters out anyhow, and I dunno about Egoist, I haven’t read much more of that story because I find it booring~ since at this stage it’s got the same problem as the Junjou couple with the redundancy and stupid).  So the repetitiveness of the Junjou couple got old even faster since it wasn’t broken up much or paced very well. Honestly, a lot of it felt like filler shit since ultimately it seems this season’s “plot” (if you could even call it that) was Misaki meeting and being accepted by Usami’s family (and Misaki finall confessing to Usami like 3 times, which was stupid) which probably could have been handled a lot better than: Misaki unexpectedly runs into Usami’s relative -> Relative tries to molest him -> Misaki runs away -> Usami gets pissy -> Misaki denys things -> Misaki confesses what happend -> Usami is pisssseeeddd -> CONFRONTATION WITH FAMILY -> Misaki confesses his feelings to Usami -> Misaki unexpectedly runs into Usami’s relative(s) -> Relative tries to molest him -> ETC

Conclusion: As I’ve been saying from the first week of this the only way for season 2 to redeem itself is PORN. ON. THE. DVD.

And now to catch up with Tytania and Kuroshitsuji…

I’m bored. The fuck is this shit?

So, I just finished Real Drive today. I really enjoyed it overall. Hm… Things:

- Holon ;_; That whole bit when Sota was going to confess to her but then she got reformatted mad me so sad. I’m glad it sort of worked out in the end though.

- I think they did a pretty good job with the antagonist characters and their turnaround in the end. It was overall pretty believable and I think they were characterized rather well overall. I hated Sota’s evil girlfriend for the longest time but when she stopped being a greedy bitch I came to like her more. For a while I was expecting that Kushima was going to be a mad scientist character. I guess he sort of was but not really. He was probably one of my favorites (though then again, I liked just about everyone in the show, picking a favorite is difficult–if I had to I’d probably end up saying Holon because I’m a sucker for androids). 

- I still don’t understand the title. Maybe I’m just dumb, I dunno.

- I liked the ending for the most part. Though I was kind of sad that Eliza had to go away (I’m sorry that reference/extrapolation was just too cool). Haru coming back as a young man was a little… weird but not really unacceptable. But I can’t say it didn’t seem slightly just so that Minamo and he could have a slightly less pedolicious relationship (I dunno, I kind of liked that they had a cute, loving relationship that wasn’t really a romantic one and just that aspect of the end, assuming my pissy jaded interpretation, just felt like a copout since all kinds of love have to turn into a romantic relationship in anime, right? Bah…). Is it weird that although I do agree that young Haru is more physically attractive, old man Haru is much cuter? I like him better as a quirky old man goddamnit!

- I meant to add something about this in my first post about RD but I forgot about it while I was writing: the music. I really like about half of the music in the series, and when I downloaded the soundtrack it became very clear why I only liked half of it–two composers. I’m really not impressed with the pieces Hirano Yoshihisa contributed to the OST. It’s all just rehashed Death Note and Ouran. For the most part, whenever one of his tracks came up in the show, I found it really distracting since they already had really strong connotations with those other series. On some level, it felt really half-assed. Taniuchi Hideki’s pieces on the other hand, I’m quite enamored with. Most of them are just really sort of mellow techno stuff that reminds me of videogame menu music. But I like it. It’s GOOD videogame menu music, the sort where you can really enjoy spending several hours reading the in-game encyclopedia to. It’s stuff like this that always makes me think that electronic devices should all have relaxing electronic music like this. 

Hmm… I’ll probably think of some other things to add later.

So, I’m about 10 episodes in now. I’m quite enjoying this series so far. A few thoughts:

- Why is it Real Drive and not Real Dive? I mean, Real Drive does sound better, but watching the show “dive” seems like it’d make more sense. I keep having to double check whenever I type it becaus I think I’m wrong. 

- I haven’t managed to bring myself to skip the OP yet. This is quite uncommon for me.

- As with most of Production I.G.’s SF stuff, Real Drive’s atmosphere is really thorough. They always seem to do a good job with presenting a world that feels real and complete. All the background artwork is really beautiful too. I’m quite fond of their color choices (it’s pretty similar to GitS, but more white-cyan bent than grey-purple), it’s very relaxing.

- However, somehow in a good third or more of the episodes I’ve watched so far, I feel like I’ve missed like a good 10 minutes of the story somehow (especially “Love Letter,” I mean, I *kinda* got what happened but not really). I only find this mildly bothersome though (I dunno, either I’m just too dumb to put the pieces together or this series just has a very “Japanese” bent–lol, yes anime that’s Japanese ,what a concept…). I think part of it is that the world setting feels so complete that some of the stuff (especially about the Metal and whatnot) that I feel lost about seems alright because… On some level it feels like it’s very, foreign, but native to the culture it’s about (er… that is to say, a lot of the stuff I feel like I’m missing re: the Metal/etc seems more like I’m not getting it because the story is being told ‘naturally’ for or by a member of the society the story takes place in, so certain things are glossed over and wouldn’t be missing for a member of that culture (which doesn’t actually exist), but since I’m not from that world I don’t get it, but I’m okay with it given that perspective–in other words: Hey writers of BSG, THIS is what “natural” SF is, not your lol-lets-gloss-over-technical-stuff-so-we-can-make-it-do-whatever-the-fuck-we-want-because-we-never-properly-establish-how-it-works bullshit. Your show is bad and you should feel bad–and yes I do take any and every opportunity to criticize BSG, it’s a terrible show and I hate everyone who thinks it’s good SF, because it’s an insult to the genre.) 

- I’m kinda so-so on the character designs. On one hand I think it’s nice to see a series that plays with a variety of bodytypes and looks for characters–but there are some noticable issues with some of the characters staying on model and I still have a hard time believing the girls are actually middleschoolers design-wise (they’re too… curvy, and it’s not just the boobs).

So, Misaki finally confessed his feelings to Usami. And by finally, of course I mean for like the THIRD FUCKING TIME, but who’s counting anyway? Obviously not whoever wrote it :D But somehow, I still D’AWWWW’d a bit. Would have been better if Misaki actually DID something once and a while rather than just sit there and let himself be molested while saying “nooo~ don’t touch me~” I know that’s his shtick and all, but seriously, it’s getting old. I mean, he could have at least given Usami a fucking hug or something after all that. 

Shower scene was interesting, but the fog was so blatantly and obnoxiously unnecessary it kind of ruined it (didn’t really help that the raw was a fucking piece of shit once again, channel bleed through and everything, stupid steam OVER FUCKING CLOTHING was not needed AT ALL). 

Despite all of Junjou Romantica’s shortcomings, I’d still say it’s probably been the best explicitly BL TV series to date (I’d say Antique Bakery but the homolust isn’t really the focus). Really, that’s not saying much since there haven’t exactly been very many (and no, shit like Gakuen Heaven hardly counts, there was not nearly enough homo in that piece of shit to justify it’s existence, and fucking ELBOW LICKING, what the fuck Japan? What. The. Fuck.) Anyhow, as the season’s drawing to a close, it saddens me to think that there will be no homo anime next season (aside from 00, lolololol). 

On another note, I really need to catch up on Casshern Sins. I never really meant to stop watching it, subs just got really sporadic really quickly and I was feeling lazy. I guess since the season’s nearly over waiting a few more weeks for a batch might be a good idea.