Nuns to the Rescue!!

Among my school friends, I've been often viewed as an anime guru. This is probably because in my first two years of college at Case Western Reserve University, I took advantage of the world’s most powerful learning environment by downloading anime episodes from the Internet and the school network, and regularly going to the CWRU Anime Society, where members view anime episodes on a projector screen in a lecture room. Compared to most friends on IRC, my anime knowledge is very limited. Still, I plan to write about a few series I watched, in an attempt to rescue my blog from death. The first one I shall feature is Chrno Crusade.

There are light, vague spoilers below. After rereading, I don't think my post will ruin it for anyone who hasn’t watched or finished watching this show.

Background

Sister Rosette, prepared to fire a Gospel. from AniPlanet

Many people describe Chrno Crusade playfully as a show with nuns with guns, giving you a little idea of the series’s background: in the U.S., 1920, heroine Sister Rosette, one of the professional exorcists of Magdala Monastery, and her partner Chrno investigate events related to demon worship and fight the culprit (summarized from AnimeNfo’s description).

Development and Themes

The beginning episodes are light, humorous, thrilling at times (exorcism scenes), and as the story and characters develop, the episodes becomes more emotional and heavier, but still with enough comic relief. The themes of religion and heresy grow stronger as the show progresses. I feel they are merely a setting for the anime, not intended to be taken seriously, but there are a few episodes with heavy religious references that I find difficult to associate with the rest of the anime. Still, for a casual pagan viewer like me, these themes provided an interesting setting, and some spooky and impressive scenes and music :) Many episodes are action packed, where Rosette and friends rescue, pursue, confront, or survive from ambush. One scene in a later episode especially fits the aforementioned popular description, with a large troop of nuns shooting at demons with machine guns loaded with holy bullets :)

Music

I find music in most of the anime series I've watched appealing; actually, anime OSTs constitute 70% of the music I listen to. Some anime soundtracks adapt to the show very well, but are too boring, weird, etc. to be enjoyed alone. But I was impressed with Chrno Crusade’s background music and theme songs when I watched it, and I still enjoy the soundtrack regularly two years later now. The music is mostly classical, played by orchestra, piano, and/or voice.

Overall Evaluation

I enjoyed Chrno Crusade greatly for its unique setting, emotional story and exciting action. The ending was a part of the show I didn’t like, but a few commentors seem to favor it. I think this anime will also be welcomed by most anime watchers with a diverse interest.

So there is my first anime review ^_^ I’m looking forward to feedbacks from you!

Revision

By requests in the comments, I added a short evaluation paragraph above.

Tags: anime , Chrno Crusade

Another One of the Lame Posts

Greetings. I haven't posted in a long time, not to mention a post of interest. This one is still going to be uninteresting, but I think I can promise you to write something to rescue my blog from death soon :)

Today I did heavy-duty tweaking, as it should be obvious. If you're familiar with Blogger, you'd know there are a few great-looking templates for you to apply to your blog. I was getting very bored with my old template, Rounders 3—or maybe it's just my blog hasn't been changing its look for a long time due to the lack of new posts—so I switched from my old template Rounders 3 to Rounders 4. Looks fresh, doesn’t it. And this provided me with something to write about. The Rounders templates are very similar, so the process is easier than changing to one of the more different templates. But it still wasn’t a one–click process, since I had to recover multiple customizations I made to the template, and adjust them to fit the new look. But having this experience, my blog’s next face-change will be a little easier. :)

Another excuse for me to write this post is my commenting service, HaloScan's down time. Its forum has been under maintenance for at least a day now, and while I was tweaking the template I noticed the comment links are gone. I’m a little worried—I hope this service won’t go down forever. But it has been up for three years, so I think this is only one of the technical difficulties that will get fixed soon. When the comment links are up, please don’t ridicule me for abandoning Blogger comments for an outside service that has downtimes like this—as I showed you in previous posts, HaloScan has brought you and me many advantages. So long!

Update

The comment links appeared soon after I posted yesterday, but new comments seem to be disappearing. HaloScan maintainers are aware of the issue, and said the new comments are safe and will be restored soon.

New update

The new comments are lost, and cannot be restored now :( I know Fizza posted one, and I could put it back easily like I copied the old Blogger comments when I switched to HaloScan. But I hope there were no other comments...if you posted one and it's not listing here now, could you try again please? Thanks. Now I'm going back to cry....

Tags: template , HaloScan , downtime

Warning: Content is Hot!

Yesterday, as I was entering McDonald's for work, I was greeted by a huge poster on the glass door with a Sony PSP on it. I didn't have time to check if I was hallucinating or read the text, but luckily the rest of the restaurant was also full of postings regarding the new PSP giveaway. Basically, you get chance to win a PSP or other prizes for buying a Big Mac or a large fry. Some details can be found here. The official site of the program is PlayAtMcD.com, but I found the site distracting and unhelpful. It's still worth checking out for a laugh ;) and you need to go there to enter your "MAC Code" for the giveaway. Would working at McDonald's increase my chances of getting a free PSP?—Let me fantasize about the possibilities again—No, because McDonald's employers are not eligible to enter. :( I suppose I could still save money—quit job—buy Big Macs, but I probably don't have the luck anyway.

Still, I'm proud of my employer's display of great taste. This seems to be a step in their campaign to attract young, tech-savvy customers. I also learned recently that McDonald's is a sponsor of Bleach, an anime series I'm following. This has raised my level of respect for McDonald’s a lot, and I might actually enjoy my work better because of it :)

Tomorrow (I mean when the sun comes up next time, which is soon) is a day off from work for me. Hopefully I'll be able to use it to post something interesting. My friend Justin, who started blogging two weeks later than I, has much more interesting content on his blog, and is now a contributor on BlogCritics.org, so he can write reviews on his blog and they will show up on the site. That will probably bring him many more readers! I'm a little jealous, and I plan to apply too, as soon as I'm sure I can find things to review on, and be able to review often :) I know most of my readers are also bloggers, so I suggest you try it too, as Justin also recommended.

Tags: McDonald's , PSP

Psst, look aside!

Apology to my readers who are more interested in personal stuff, but this post will again be technology-oriented. But it's very cool, and nothing hard to understand :)

First, please finish reading this paragraph, and then follow its instructions. Look at the side bar. Scroll down, as you see stuff like "About Me", "Previous Posts", "Archives". And keep going...

(Now I give you a few seconds to do it)

Didn't you see something cool?? Hopefully with your name in it! This is a list of latest comments to my blog. When you move your mouse on the commentor's name, a tooltip shows you the first few words of the comment. You can click on it to see the page with the comments. This is made possible by LastHalo, an addon for HaloScan, my new comment service.

You may already see something missing: you can't tell what post the comment is for. Unfortunately, even after you click the commentor's name and open the page with comments, you have no way to get back to the original post. I read about this problem in HaloScan's forums; it seems Blogger makes it very hard to get back to the original post. There seems to be a partial solution, and I'll look into it soon.

So, why not leave a comment and be on the cool list? ;)

Tags: LastHalo , HaloScan

On Comments and...“an ‘Arse Feed’ You Say?”

Warning: this post is technicality-heavy. But I think you might find the information helpful...leave a comment after you finish reading whatever you felt like reading, anyway :)

As Gravi-T noticed and pointed out, I changed the commenting page. My comments are now hosted on HaloScan. You can find its logo on the "Powered By" section of this site's side bar.

What does this change for you? When you click on the "comments (n)" link, a popup window will open, listing the comments for this post, and on the bottom you can type your own comments. If you're a Blogger user, the new window won't automatically fill in your name and profile any more...you'll have to type them in, but your browser will probably remember them the next time. Otherwise, I don't see the change bringing anything bad for my dear readers :) You can still use bold, italics formatting and links in your comments, and a bonus is "clickable smileys". They are easily accessible when you click the "?" besides "Comment:" on the popup.

The switch wasn't painless. I had to copy/paste all the comments you left on Blogger, and edit their time and commenter's name, and homepage. It took about 3 hours! So why the switch? It's mainly for my benefit :) As I post more, it can get hard to keep track of comments. It's not so bad with the newer posts, since I see how many comments there are in the main page, and I could tell if there were new posts by remembering how many comments there were before. But if I wanted to find a comment on an old post, maybe because I just remembered I could write something about it, it'll take very long to dig it out. HaloScan can display all my comments in one page, where I can edit, delete, and search them.

HaloScan also provides an "RSS feed" of the comments—this term might sound mystical to you, but it works very much like email, and in fact you can use Thunderbird to read a feed. So the comments won't spam my email inbox, and I can look at them in an organized, familiar interface. By the way, the blog itself also uses "RSS" technology, meaning you can read my postings in Thunderbird. There are many more programs you can use to read RSS feeds, but so far my favorite is NewsGator Web edition. You don't need to download and launch a program, because this works on a website. I've subscribed to some of my "Friends with Blogs'" blogs very easily, allowing me to see if they have new posts at a glance. I encourage you to try it out, and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Tags: HaloScan , comments , RSS