From the “Cute but Creepy” category comes Life-sized Anime Dolls, made by a company called Paper Moon (which I keep confusing with Type Moon, who makes the Melty Blood / Tsukihime games, among others). Thanks to An Unnamed Anime Blog for the link.

They seem to be life-sized, and relatively well articulated, and the licenses seem to span CLAMP, Gainax and Pioneer / Geneon’s holdings (the Hikari from Kono Minikuku mo Utsukushii Sekai and the Ifurita from El-Hazard are particularly striking, but Dave, you’ll want to pay attention to the Lain-in-her-bear-pajamas and Sakura Kinomoto dolls).

Anime Doll-o-rama!

It’s either a testament to the bland male character design in most anime or the sheer number of male otaku over female otaku that there is not a single non-female doll in this group. Which could be a good thing, really, because what would you do with a Shinji doll? Have it curled up in a fetal position with a minidisc playing a loop of “I mustn’t run away?”

Wow. Movable Type 3.0 is out, and it has a pricing scheme that essentially kills its use among its most devoted following. Mena of Movable Type has stated that they’re devoted to providing a free version of the product, which, on the surface, has reasonable limits: one author, three blogs.

On the other hand, most Movable Type adopters tend to fall into the “web design-geek / server script-monkey” mold (guilty), and these people like being able to set up multiple weblogs for, say, their friends. That was one of the reasons I adopted MT in the first place; many of my friends were scattering across Canada and the States, and I would have liked to see them post about their experiences as a way of keeping in touch (granted, this has not been as easy as some would like, and the hard drive failure from last winter has put quite a few blogs on hold — my apologies, Orion, Yomimono, and Andy).

I’m not such a total skinflint that I won’t pay for good software (I purchased the copy of Opera I use, as well as Trillian, EditPlus and numerous others), but if I wanted to spend $119.95 USD (that’s something like three million dollars Canadian, methinks) on a hobby, I’d rather go out and buy a new XBox, or put the cash aside for the Nintendo DS, or buy a better digital camera, or save some for a gashapon shopping spree for Japan. But with MT’s new pricing scheme, and no new features to boot? I think I’ll stick with MT 2.661. I’ll not be so foolish as to return to my old home-rolled content management system, but I’ll definately be looking into the alternatives (pMachine, WordPress, Drupal and others come to mind).

Ah, the exciting world of software licensing. Watching the trackbacks from Mena’s post has certainly been interesting; there’s a lot of negative feeling in the MT community, and a genuine sense of betrayal. While I wish Movable Type and their employees all the success in the world, they’re going to have to do a lot of hard work to earn back the goodwill they seem to have squandered.

My personal opinion? All told, $119.95 USD for 6 authors and 8 blogs (which is, I believe, what numenor.ca’s maximum load would be if it were functioning at full efficiency), is actually a rather reasonable price — if MT existed in a content management system vacuum. Compare this to what the average anime / video game hobbyist would pay for their personal vices ($20 – $40 USD per volume of a series, or around $40 USD per game, and that’s not including peripherals like new controllers or memory cards), and it’s actually quite cheap.

There are, however, other content management systems which cost users absolutely nothing out of pocket. And if a devoted Movable Type non-profit power user were to upgrade, I think that springing a $50 – $70 USD minimum price increase (previously $0 USD) on them is a bit much. This is what seems to have brought the community’s wrath down upon Six Apart: expectations simply weren’t managed, and they’re now paying for it. I’ll be very curious to see how this plays out; will this be a Netscape-ish end for Six Apart, with other CMS’ like WordPress stepping to the fore, or will they parlay this as a simple misstep for a growing company, and show some goodwill by changing the pricing scheme?

Hmm. I should really change this category from “Blogwork” to “Oh, god, he’s blabbering about website stuff again”.

So you want to sample the bounty that this great union of connected computing has to offer? Okay then, this is how this breaks down:

• Kazaa (or better, K++ / Kazaa Lite — which may now be missing, or assimilated by Sharman) is for Top 40 stuff
• WinMX is for more obscure music, like, say Tommy February6 or L’Arc-en-Ciel, or Deltron 3030.
• Bittorrent, baby, is for TV shows and anime. Yeah, you could try using it for warezing, but don’t forget that the protocol is transparent, and your IP gets broadcast all across the goddamn stream. If you’re using Azureus, use Safepeer, at least.
• DC++ is like the modern, evolved form of Hotline (ah, Hotline, before it got bought out and sucked). Huge barriers to entry, though; generally, minimum share size is in the 5 GB range, and the hub operators usually want to to limit the maximum number of connected hubs to less than 10.

I can’t speak about Overnet much (or its clients, like eDonkey), because the above four generally meet my needs in toto.

Just sayin’, is all. Remember kids, if you find an album with three or more songs you actually like, then go and buy the damn album (unless you’re one of the lucky bastards who can use the iTunes Music Store).

Roughly the same could be said for anime, though substitute “episodes” for “songs” and “series” for “album”.

If yer lookin’ to relive the glory days of the old frontier, when men were men and physics was wild and untamed, then you should do yerself a favour and check out The Legend of Jake Einstein, pardner.

thanks to The Fortean Bureau for the link.

….And I feel fine. Yes, it’s Lord of the Rings filk set to the tune of R.E.M’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know it”. Whaddaya know. It actually scans to the tune (which can be a damned fearsome thing, considering).

You don’t need a palantir to see that any public performance of this song will be a garbled mess, punctuated only by the relatively clear refrains of the chorus. Music of the Ainur indeed.

Looks like someone’s finally invented a self-cooling beverage can:

The can is double walled and the chamber surrounding the drink is filled with a water-containing gel which is separated from a vacuum in the can’s base by a breakable seal. A quick twist of the base breaks the seal, allowing the vacuum to lower the pressure and so evaporate the water from the gel. The heat needed to evaporate the water in the gel of the outer chamber is drawn from the drink itself, causing the fluid to drop to just above the freezing point of water in minutes.

This would be invaluable to me, as I am a fiendish consumer of canned caffeinated beverages, and am generally too lazy to remember to refrigerate said beverages.

Then again, there is always the age-old standard “putting ice in a glass with the beverage”. But that’s not anywhere nearly as cool. Heh.

Here’s a great GIF animation remake of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. By “remake”, I mean “very loosely modeled on”.

Yes, it’s in Japanese. You don’t need to read it to appreciate it (translations welcome, though).

For comparison, here’s one version of the original Little Match Girl story.

Following the horrifyingly addictive meme-life on the intar-web is bound to be dangerous, because, hey, they’re freakin’ memes and propagate by being read and absorbed. Despite Nietzschean warnings about fighting and becoming monsters (or in this case, passing along dangerously infection memes), I now present to you the following: the “Top 25-ish Most Played Songs on iTunes” (or in my case, my iPod). This is a sad commentary on my aural affiliations. Without further ado:

1. Megumi Hayashibara – Sakura Saku (3:14)
2. Daft Punk – Digital Love (4:58)
3. boa – DUVET (3:23)
4. Ah ha – Take on Me (3:20)
5. Deep Blue Something – Breakfast at Tiffany’s (4:16)
6. Buzy – Venus Say (2:13)
7. angela – Asu he no Brilliant Road (4:57)
8. Sae – Asu no Blue wing (4:28)
9. Cartoon Themes (1960-1990) – Voltes V Main Theme (3:03)
10. Kuribayashi Minami – Tsubasa wa Pleasure Line (1:30)
11. Elissa – Mamboleo (Extended English version) (4:41)
12. Swollen Members – Deep End (3:33)
13. Daft Punk – Aerodynamic (3:27)
14. Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Strong (3:44)
15. Daft Punk – Veridis Quo (5:44)
16. JAM Project featuring Masami Okui – Little Wing(TV size) (1:34)
17. Sae – Asu no Blue Wing – Daphne in the Brilliant Blue (OP TV size) (1:30)
18. The Delgados – The Light Before We Land (5:30)
19. Buffy The Vampire Slayer Cast – Standing In The Way (2:10)
20. The Calling – Wherever You Will Go (3:27)
21. Yuki Kajiura – Fake Wings (2:38)
22. Daft Punk – One More Time (5:20)
23. Daft Punk – Superheroes (3:57)
24. Daft Punk – High Life (3:21)
25. Daft Punk – Too Long (10:00)
26. The Pillows – Blues Drive Monster (3:25)

I make no excuses for any of this, dammit. The playlist is a bit skewed, as I recently scrubbed my iPod and Fixed All the Goddamn Tags. I should remember to try this again in three months and see how it changes.

Notes:

1. Sakura Saku is the main theme for Love Hina, and features the lovely and ubiquitous Megumi Hayshibara.
2. Duvet was the main theme for Serial Experiments Lain. Also sung by boa, which is a british band, in a classic case of Japanese Anglophilia. Still a damn good song, though.
3. Venus Say is the main theme for Twin Spica. Utterly infectious.
4. Asu he no Brilliant Road was Uchuu no Stellvia‘s main theme. Weird but deeply addictive chord progression.
5. Asu no Blue wing is the main theme for Daphne in the Brilliant Blue, which has the most fanservice per minute outside of, say, Najica Blitz Tactics.
6. Voltes V was a popular anime in the Philippines when I was a child
7. Tsubasa wa Pleasure Line is the main theme of Chrno Crusade, which continually fuels my “sexy nuns with guns” fascination. I blame renegade nuns on wheels, really.
8. Little Wing was the main theme for Scrapped Princess, and has lovely Celtic influences.
9. Fake Wings was Subaru‘s theme from .hack//SIGN, and was most often heard when wandering through the Venice-like city.
10. The Pillows are a freakishly awesome JRock band. They’re remembered to put the “roll” back in “rock & roll”. Plus, they provided the music for FLCL.
11. Daft Punk’s album “Discovery” continues to rawk the hizzouse. I keep getting techno-proletarian visions of a glitzy and glamorous Soviet state whenever I hear “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”.

So, it turns out that there’s this artist in Vancouver who makes high-end, small-scale replica medieval siege weapons. Following his recommendation, I see them as desktop toys for geekily-inclined management-types with a wry sense of humour, a good eye for fashionable design and a penchant for historicism. Plus, it’ll impress the hell out of your co-workers. Either that or scare them witless (these are functional replicas, after all).

With the right pieces, my desk could look like a small fort

Me? I’m partial to the mangonel and the ballista. Now all I need is that executive promotion, and I’m set.

I’m sure that the pic of the anime maid computer case has been making the rounds throughout the whole of blogdom (which is like Christendom, but with more electricity and an equivalent penchant for the blood of infidels) for a couple of days now. Let the Chobits jokes begin (“where’s the on button?”).

ERN005PC-Kana Maid Case

One wonders what would have happened if the designer (Katsura Matsumara) had decided to go with a mini-ATX or a mini-ITX board. Hand Maid May? Inappropriate locations for the USB ports? In any event, it turns out that the designer has also made a bunch of other similarly-themed figure cases, including a Tarutaru head and a Gundam.

It’s nice to see casemods reaching beyond the traditional “put more colored parts / heat sinks / refrigeration units onto a box”. Granted, space constraints may make these somewhat impractical for day-to-day use, but it helps if you think of them as conversation pieces and functional decorative statuary.

Of course, if you want to increase the functionality while maintaining decorative value, you can always embed a computer into a car. In this case, it’s a G4 built into a Russian Tatra (via Gizmodo).

West Coast Computing, Eastern Bloc Steel

It’s a pretty elegant job of it too, with the felt padding and the clear lexan / plexi window in the compartment housing the more condensation-sensitive components. It’s additionally boss because the designer also wrote custom software which integrates into the car sensors (ie, available fuel and fuel consumption). The built-in ethernet for hooking up laptops so that they can share the car’s airport hub is just icing on the cake, really.

I’ll also leave you with one of the more fun April Fool’s hoaxes: the Thinkgeek PC HabiCase:

Clear plastic tubes ahoy!