...it might go a little something like this.

As some of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed, I recently crafted a small bit for inclusion in the write in portion of Anime News Network's Hey, Answerman! column. Unfortunately, I was snubbed there and didn't have my writings brought to a larger than usual mass, but as I was planning on ranting about that topic on my blog anyways, I shall put it here regardless. (Damn you, Answerman!!!)

The question put forth was thus:

How open are you about your anime love with friends, family, and colleagues? Do you wear anime cloting, or read manga on your break? Be honest, damn it!

His incorrect spelling of "dammit" notwithstanding, here was my response:

When it comes to sharing my feelings of the various Japanese related media that I ingest on a day-to-day basis, I'm really very open. After all, why is it that just because a person likes media from a different country, they should be ashamed? For that matter, why are they persecuted? People who really enjoy sports or cars or anything "normal" don't have to face this problem, but they're doing the exact same thing we "otaku" do; follow, enjoy and obsess over their particular subject of interest. I suppose it's the "die hards" that taint the perception of the anime crowd, but aren't we all annoyed by that one person who won't shut up about his obsession (whatever it may be)? But, now I'm delving into another topic all together.

I enjoy my anime, my manga, and Japanese culture in general and I'm not afraid to share that enjoyment with those I'm with. But, at the same time, I try to keep in mind that they may not enjoy the subject as much as I do and adjust my level of enthusiasm accordingly.

One thing I did not mention, but was actually a driving force for me writing something in the first place, is a nerd's treatment of another type of nerd. To rant about somebody else's fanboyish obsessions while you yourself are guilty of the same crime, though it may be in a different field, should be punishable by damnation. Granted, I myself am guilty of this, but there it is.

/rant

So, after my epic battles with Premiere and then three times uploading to YouTube, I've finally finished the video that completes my series of reviews. If you can excuse the rather poor writing and me tripping up over my words, you may find enjoyment in it. Either way, it's been fun writing these reviews and I look forward to the good stuff to come in 2010!

Due to many codec and such type issues, progress on the third and final installment has not progressed as quickly or smoothly as I hoped, so I'll give you a quick sneak peak at what's coming down the turnpike.

Here we are at part 2 of the Matt's Grand Anime Review. Today I focus mainly on shounen/action genres.

Dragon Ball Z

Without Dragon Ball Z the American anime market may very well not exist (certainly not the way it does today). DBZ is certainly an entertaining show, what with all the rediculous battles and "power up" sequences, but it's not without its faults. Cheesy and reptitive animation dampen the action sequences and there really isn't a whole lot of character development. In fact, I consider DBZ to be almost like a "bro show". And, toss on the fact that no character can ever really die and a lot of the suspense has just been killed. But, at that, it does make for some excellent entertainment if you're willing to overlook the formulaic plots and the aforementioned other problems. 6/10

As a kind of quick Merry Christmas to anybody reading this blog, I bring to you some of my latest art pieces. I'm thinking perhaps that an art section on the gallery page might be a good idea, but in the mean time you can enjoy it right here or on my deviantArt page. But, I digress.

I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas and will have an awesome New Year!

Here begins three articles of anime reviews. Yes, I know I said two in the previous post, but after creating the list I realized it would be more prudent to split this into three. This also allows me to kind of categorize things and I'll kick the list off with cute and romantic comedies. Another thing to note is that my criteria have changed. The movies and video games were all things released in 2008-2009. These are all things I watched in those years. So, without further ado, here is part one of my anime reviews.

Midori Days

Midori Days falls into the latter of the aforementioned categories. The premise is absolutely rediculous opening with protagonist Sawamura Seiji waking up one day to find that a tiny girl, Kasugano Midori, has replaced his right hand. Oddly enough, even though the show indulges in more fan service than any other I've watched, there was never a raunchy moment, something I thought odd considering the premise. The overall story follows these two as Midori tries to win over Seiji who is otherwise distracted by just about every other woman within eyesight... except the ones that actually like him. The show is full of plenty of laughs and feel good moments and I'd certainly recommend watching it if you are interested in the genre. 7/10

It is time now for the second wave of '08/'09 reviews with today's column covering video games.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (2008, Xbox 360)

There was quite a bit of hype surrounding this game when it came out. It was supposed to be a Star Wars IP that the world hadn't seen since Shadows of the Empire. Did it live up to the hype? Depends on who you ask. I didn't buy it until recently, but I definitely had fun playing it. That said, there were also many points where I was frustrated out of my mind to the point of controller throwing (something I've not done in years). Some of this was due to faulty game mechanics, but mostly my own incompetence. Sadly, the game is fairly repetitive in terms of combat and I found myself relying on Force lightning to handily finish off every enemy I came across. There are plenty of options for combat such as push and choke and, of course, your lightsaber, but none of these were as handy or wholly satisfying as lightning. Oh, and for all the hype about Euphoria, never once did I see a stormtrooper grab another in mid air. 7/10

The year is beginning to wind down and Christmas is just around the corner. I've consumed quite a lot of media this year, from my newfound addiction to anime and the usual domestic shows and video games. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to review what I considered to be the best of the best in each genre. Today, I'll start off with movies. I'm going to fudge a little bit and include movies released last year as well, otherwise this would be a really short list.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

Honestly, I just watched this movie for the first time tonight. I will preface by saying that I really didn't have any issues with the 2003 film and saw the reboot of a reboot so close together a little ridiculous. However, that aside, the new film was enjoyable. I didn't love this film, nor did I hate it. It's pretty much the basic tale of how Bruce Banner became the Hulk and how he attempted to cope with it. There's plenty of action to go along with the story and everything flows well. One thing I will pick on, however, was how bad the CGI in this film was. At times I felt like I was watching something that had been rendered with the UT3 engine and there was even a scene where the green screen keying failed to suspend my disbelief. 7/10

To say my October was an interesting one would be like saying that the sun is hot or that I'm sick and tired of hearing about Twilight. There were numerous things that made it interesting, from my going to the Tulsa State Fair to sitting teaching myself HTML 5. However, the highlight of that month was my trip to San Francisco to interview with Digg.

The code running this website is well over a year old now and, as I've gone back to upgrade/fix things, I've noticed that it is clunky and highly inflexible. The implementation I've used is actually very, very similar to what I used in YPNgine back in 2003; a switch statement calling functions from an included script based upon variables passed in the query string. Granted, there's going to be some degree of that in any implementation, but through some tinkering with the music page and interviewing with some of the developer's at Digg has led me to a new paradigm: a set RESTful API calls independent of all front end management.

Now, aside from the nice code separation and simplification of feature adds and maintainability this provides, it also opens up a new world to Ajax. Since all the data is accessible via query string, almost all the usual functionality that would normally call for separate pages can be added in without ever having to leave the landing page. In fact, I've implemented this functionality on the test server. As interesting as this may sound, it raises some interesting issues concerning usability and the user experience.

The largest concern is that of site navigation or, more specifically, navigation history. In a normal site, every page you visit will be added to the site history, appending itself to the not only pages visited, but the forward and back buttons as needed. With Ajax, you have none of this. Were you to click a link to a story and have it loaded via Ajax, your browser history does not change. Pressing the back button will take you to the previous entered URL and not the previous page because, technically, you're still on the same page. The new page won't be placed in browsing history which could make finding back a particular story particularly difficult. And, finally, because the page never changes, neither does the URL in the address bar which could lead to confusion.

Say you entered my site on the gallery page using the url http://dxprog.com/gallery and eventually found your way to to the June 2006 blog archives, specifically to a story about my life without a laptop. Because the page never actually changes, the address bar will continue to read http://dxprog.com/gallery even though that content is no longer there. This would have made my retrieval of the URL for that story more difficult and, had the title not been permalinked, I wouldn't have been able to retrieve it at all.

Another thing to take into consideration is search engines. When Google crawls your site it doesn't have JavaScript enabled. So, unless you write duplicate functionality to generate the page before sending to the browser, none of your content will get indexed. I face this problem with the current gallery implementation; even though there is a way for me to access individual items via the query string, there are no hard links on the gallery page itself to point to them. Even if there was, all of the content is loaded on the client side so search engine spiders are just going to get a blank page devoid of content. Not a very smart idea if you want that content indexed.

In conclusion, when it comes to Ajax and dynamically loading content, you really have to consider carefully what should and shouldn't be dynamically loaded. Portal pages - any page with links into sub pages of the site such - are probably best left to the traditional method of loading a new page for each item. Smaller things such as paginating an entry's comments probably wouldn't hurt as much since it is an aside to the main material. Though, even then there may be something interesting you'd want picked up on a search engine. It's really is a balancing act between slick functionality and overall usability.

ID3Lib [ Download ]

As one may have derived from previous posts, I have a project the uses MP3s quite heavily. As such, retrieving tag data from these is quite an important thing. Having recently migrated my personal server to Windows, I needed a non-Linux variant of my previous tag read. I thought that while I was at it I could add an additional feature, namely saving embedded album art. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any clear directions on how to do so using TagLib, so I created my own library. Three different times. In three different languages. A C++ version, a .NET version and, finally, a PHP version.

Recently, while making some additions to the Music Page, I came across the need to get the location of a YouTube FLV. Unfortunately, most of my googling turned up outdated results that no longer work. Fortunately, unlike a certain other site, it's not impossible. Below is a quick explanation of what I got to work. I'll be assuming that you know how to get your hands on the video ID (the "v" parameter in the query string).

In the downtime during my ever continuing quest for employment, I've taken up a few extra hobbies to keep from going completely bored. Some are more relevent to my future line of work, while others are simply for my enjoyment.

One thing that I've attempted to take up again is drawing. My skills currently sit somewhere between mediocre and decent, a stat I'd certainly like to level up. So, my brother Chris and I have periodically enjoyed an evening of drawing while watching the nerdy sitcom, Big Bang Theory. Unfortunately, we've finished the first two seasons and now are forced to wait a week for new episodes, as the third season just began. For the off days, BBT has been summarily replaced with Pinky and the Brain.

In keeping with my new found - and probably unhealthy - fascination with the land of the rising sun, I've been taking cues from the manga/anime style (much of which is fan art). So, for those who enjoy that sort of thing, here's a gallery of some of the artwork I've created over the lest month and a half.

So, there it is. You probably noticed that there's a bit of a common theme to the above pictures (beyond the manga/anime thing). If you didn't, you lose five points and get no cookie.