O Freunde, nicht diese Tone!
Warning: Long Post Ahead. (Like really long) Time how long it takes you to read (or scroll) past it and post to see who has the best time!
So, I haven't updated this with a real post in, oh....six months or thereabouts. No excuse beyond just falling out of the (admittedly infrequent) habit of it and having too much to catch up on. During the summer I started a real, tangible journal for a bit, but stopped writing in that a while back, too. Maybe it's just because LJ has lost some of the appeal it once had, with a fair number of friends on it I once had either discontinuing their own jourals, stopping reading others', or just growing distant enough I can't really relate to what they post. Everyone has moved onto Facebook now (even my mother), but I dunno, it never really clicked with me. And these days I mostly just use my LJ friends list for various feeds and community postings. Ah well, enough reminiscing, I have 6 months to cover and I don't wanna make this unreadably long.
Okay, where to start? Last post was in early August, where I was working at the Toco Hills library, watching Initial D, G Gundam, Lucky Star, and Gurren Lagann, and getting ready for Lee Peiffer's wedding. The wedding was alright, but suits and I just don't really get along, and I doubt we ever will.
The one or two times I tried to update this sooner was when I had just seen a new episode of Gurren Lagann and just wanted to rant and rave and geek out to someone about how cool it was, only to come to grips with the fact that I don't know anybody who's watched the show straight through. Anyway, it's good. Really good. So good that by the last handful of episodes I was waiting by the computer as it aired in Japan, f5-ing until the raw showed up on Nicovideo. Didn't matter if it was in Japanese, I think I'm finally getting to the point where I can kinda half comprehend it if it's not too incredibly wordy. Anyway, if you're of the persuasion where it is the sort of thing you might watch, you should watch it.
My laptop started acting up towards the end of the summer. It all started after I worked at installing Japanese language support so I could play Fate Stay/Night (which was awesome, by the way. Eagerly looking forward to the impending English patch for the UBW path.) After the install, the system just started acting weird. The mouse would kind of lag a bit, everything would run slow, and the sound would stutter all to hell. At the beginning of it acting up there, it gave me some trouble when I tried rebooting, too. Windows didn't wanna start up. It kinda stabilized after a bit till it was just the mouse lagging and sound stuttering, though. Nothing catastrophic, just irritating. Little did I realize, though, that the saga of my laptop was just beginning. (To be continued...)
Dragoncon happened. It was pretty good, though maybe not quite as good as its been in the past. Not quite as many panels I was eagerly looking forward to, the costume contest was a little underwhelming, despite being hosted by the Mythbuster build team, the crowds had gotten really bad, and construction had forced them to put the dealer's rooms two hotels away from everything else in the convention, which made it kind of inconvenient to kill time there between events.
Wow, I'm just realizing there was a whole semester of school that I skipped here. Onto my classes, then, I guess.
I was shooting for minors in East Asian Studies and Cinema studies, but I found out at the end of the semester that I was a little short for both. I had a bad grade in an East Asian studies course, and you can only get a minor by taking a language all the way to the end, or a certain number of non-language courses. With the crappy grades from a couple courses last year, I came up a little short on the non-language stuff and couldn't continue the language through to the end, even if I wanted to. (which I think I wouldn't, with the way the department's gotten) So even though I took a total of about seven courses in the department, half of them wouldn't count with the other half, and neither half alone was enough for a minor. Alas. One final FUCK YOU from them. Cinema studies turned out similarly. I woulda had a minor if they let one class that fulfills two requirements for a minor actually fulfill both requirements, and if the version of a course that all Film & TV majors are required to take counted the same in their system as the identical version of the course they give to cinema studies students.
But I digress, and I shouldn't. I've got lots to cover.
I took Theories of Imperialism and Colonialism from the East Asian Studies department. It was mildly interesting, I guess. The talk kinda got out of the range that my brain can follow first thing in the morning sometimes, and I fell behind on the readings. I won't lie, the course was basically an entire semester on why capitalism is the worst thing in the world, workers of the world unite, yadda yadda yadda. We read Marx and talked about neoliberalism, I'll leave it at that. I guess I know my socialist revolutionary theory, though, since I got a good grade even though I almost never did the reading or posted biweekly on the message board that they required us to.
I took two Animation courses. The first one, Film Genres: Animation was through the cinema studies department and was a pretty thorough basic grounding on the history of animation, about why Disney ruins everything, with way too close readings on some really simple and honest children's TV. Towards the end of the semester I gave a five minute presentation on A Charlie Brown Christmas and how it was a revolutionary and intellectually fascinating piece of animation that was unique in the field at the time of its creation. Except it isn't, really. I'm proud of that presentation. I think it was the crowning achievement of bullshit of my entire sixteen year academic career. An ultimately dull course, though. The professor told a lot of jokes that he thought were funny, and you could kind of see how he might think that, but ultimately they were not.
The other animation course was deceptively called History of Animation. I enjoyed it a fair bit more than the other class, though it was really strange. I walked out each day feeling like I'd learned something, but that that something was in no way related one bit to Animation, much less its history. It was taught by a professor named John Culhane, quite a character. I believed I described him as being kind of like Mr. Streeter, with a love for disney cartoons instead of a love for trains, with Streeter's kind of resentful grumpiness replaced with a kind of Santa-like jollyness, and with the same kind of level of connections and anecdotes as Professor Slughorn from Harry Potter. I don't really know how he became a teacher - I gather his career was as a writer for Newsweek. Anyway, he was rather...unique. The first day we took more than an hour to call roll, as he would ask each student in a class of like 40-50 where he or she was from, and then go off on a tangent based on their hometown, no matter where it was. Kinda summed up the whole experience. His unified goal for the course, if there was one, was completely nonsensical and mostly ignored. The classes were pretty much a series of tangents backed up through a massive VHS library of Disney, Warner Bros, and foreign children's cartoons. Whereas my other class would talk about the themes of socialism (hi ho, hi ho) and misogyny (oh look this stranger's house is filthy, let's clean it) in Snow White, in this one the Professor would speak at length about the purity, grace, and terror of the film, the raw, innocent emotions that it conveyed. I'm not kidding about the Slughorn-ness of this guy, either. He showed documentaries with him interviewing a bunch of really famous animators at Disney and he'd met pretty much everyone in the biz personally, even Miyazaki. Some of the assignments basically came down to picking a favorite animated work and talking about why you liked it. Those who did something from Pixar and did a good job had what they wrote emailed to Brad Bird. He claimed one of the villains (I forget the name) in The Rescuers was modelled after him. Anyway, as interesting as the course was, I really can't say for sure that I learned much from it. Ah, well. It was fun.
I also took a course on WWII. I knew that I would love it the second I walked in the door, saw the elderly professor wearing the most stereotypical "history teacher" tweed jacket I'd ever seen, and was handed a half-inch packet of maps. It was, pretty much hands down, my favorite class that I've ever taken. I realized like halfway through the semester that I was honestly disappointed when I overslept and missed it, not because I was worried I'd get in trouble or wouldn't know what I needed to know, but because I honestly wanted to go, that I really enjoyed the lectures. I didn't even realize for most of the course that he didn't even take attendance and there was nothing preventing me from skipping. The work was fairly heavy, we had a lot of war memoirs to read and write on, and a 14-page paper at the end of it, a length I haven't written to since Ms. Cassell's class in Britlit. (I had difficulty finding a topic. At the last minute, I wound up writing a fairly spectacular, if I do say so myself, paper on the change in Stalin's propaganda rhetoric from communist to nationalist, how that affected his relations with the Orthodox church, and its ties to the Napoleonic wars. A topic suggested by Dad when I prodded him to be serious.) Prof. Rose had a whole collection of almost every WWII (and some WWI) movie ever made, and let people borrow them every day. Seriously. This class was the highlight of my day.
Continuing the saga of my laptop, fairly early in the semester I took it out in one of my animation courses, and after not two or three minutes there was a popping sound, the cooling fan went from zero to max, and smoke began to waft out of the vent. I panicked, closed it to make it stand by, and then kind of looked at it cautiously thereafter. Upon further use, it kind of exascerbated the problems it was having before, slowing the whole system down and be almost unusable. I was too nervous about it melting in my lap for me to use it for anything other than trying to get data off the hard drive, anyway. I knew that I would have to call Dell and talk to them about fixing or replacing it, but having heard horror stories about Dell's customer service I procrastinated it to the max. The saga continues in part three, around the time of winter break...
My depression flared up a little again partway through last semester, but it wasn't quite as bad as in past occurences. I managed to avoid troubling Mom and Dad or crawling back to counseling, and it passed in time.
Thanksgiving was hectic, as usual. Had the whole clan over, as well as the Potts, since they're British and if they tried to do Thanksgiving they might serve blood pudding or kidneys or some other foul item the British think is food. My ear started acting weird around that time, like it was clogged up. I figured it was maybe earwax-related, and did something stupid and played with some Q-tips, which only made the problem worse. It cleared up a few days later though. Near as I can play web doctor and tell, I had a buildup of earwax and gave myself an "earwax compaction" when I tried to fix it. My doctor mentioned it looked kinda extra waxy when I had a checkup over the winter, so I guess that was probably it. Anyway, dinner and such was good.
Watched a lotta other stuff. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, which is one of the few instances I would really consider an anime to honestly and unequivocably be art. Code Geass, which was a fucking amazing show made terrible when I discovered that they ended it abruptly on a cliffhanger that was somewhat less of a cliffhanger than if they had left the entire cast hanging off a cliff. Then went off to go do another show or two before they do season two. Bastards. At least what they're doing instead is Gundam 00, which I'm watching and, while the jury is still technically out, is proving fairly enjoyable. It's kinda...like Gundam Wing only done right. (though they have lately started to feel a little too yaoi fangirly for my tastes) Also by far the most realistic gundam series, which is kind of odd. Finally watched the rest of Elfen Lied, which was...kind of unpleasant. An okay show overall, but one that made me too uncomfortable to want to ever watch again. The ending was far happier than I really expected for it, though.
Went to the first annual NY Anime Fest, from the guys who started the New York Comic Con that's been so successful. This one was...not quite as good. One of the big draws of the NYCC was all the huge comic names that were there (NYC being their home turf), something you didn't get from the anime industry. The dealer's room was alright, but a bit too corporate and a bit too small to drive the fierce competition that gets you low prices in bigger conventions like AWA or Otakon. Video rooms are usually a good part of any anime con, in my opinion, giving you previews of stuff you haven't seen, since the panels there are usually crap. Unfortunately, while the NYAF had a fair number of video rooms with some showings that looked pretty interesting, the more corporately funded nature of the con meant that each and every thing shown was some craptacular dub that I couldn't stand. I saw literally two things all convention that were subbed. They'd been hyping their maid cafe for reasons I can't really comprehend (don't make the US fan base any creepier than it already is guys), but it was kind of amusingly pathetic. They weren't actually allowed to sell their own food or drink due to convention center rules, so it basically consisted of three or four girls doing the whole bow-and-"irashaimase" thing at the entrance to a roped off seating area with some of the standard Javits center food carts. You were actually served by the same surly looking minority workers that worked all the carts in the convention. All this stuff kinda summed up the quality of the convention, it didn't seem to take off nearly as well as the NYCC. The first day was really bizarre. It was the only time I've ever gone to a convention and had it honestly not be crowded. Kinda empty, even. It did pick up the next day, though, and you could properly smell that nerd funk. I passed on the last day, just didn't have anything to draw me back all the way uptown. Most notable thing of the convention was probably me breaking down and shelling out the big bucks for the box set of Gunbuster and the incredibly overpriced DVDs of Diebuster. I know that they're ludicrously priced and scarce because they just made them to prevent Japanese fans from importing the cheaper R1 DVDs, but I just love GB/DB too much not to get the official release.
Oh, and next door they had a twelve foot Serra Angel statue out front of the Magic: The Gathering world championship. Now THAT was something.
I fell back into playing WoW briefly, mostly working on alts and grinding dailies to get first my epic flyer, and then my gyrocopter and dragon mounts. I raided a little bit, but didn't really do all that much past Karazhan. I did a couple SSC raids to kill everything through Vashj, who was kind of a neat fight, but didn't really go to them too regularly. They killed Kael while I was playing, and I did all of TK up to him, but they couldn't down him on either of the nights I was there. I kinda stopped playing again come Christmastime, and now GSA has moved on to full clearing Hyjal and working through Black Temple, not doing Kael anymore at all. Ah well, looks like I'm stuck waiting for Blizz to eliminate the Hyjal attunement requirement. I've been meaning to get back into playing since getting back, but things have been kind of busy, as I will explain further down.
As the semester came to a close and I was buried in my WWII paper, I realized that I would be cut off from my G5 and relying on my laptop over winter break, and so we come to the end of our saga. I call Dell, expecting to be on the line for three hours minimum and to have to say "what?" no fewer than three times in a row to the Indian guy on the other end. Despite my expectations, though, I got an accentless guy (who could still be in India) who, within 15 minutes or so, arranged to send me a replacement laptop and a box that I could send my current one back in, for no charge. Aren't I glad that I got the "customers are special delicate flowers" special XPS warranty instead of the alternative?
Anyway, so not two days after I get home, my laptop shows up. Only I open it up and...it's not my laptop. It's a different model. Confused, I turn it on and the Windows Vista logo comes up. I freak out for a bit and eventually do some research. It seems that at some point Dell had discontinued the model of laptop I had (there's a chance that I actually caused the mess by waiting so long to call) and this was the next model in the high-performance ultraportable line that they produced. It's basically, hands down, an upgrade in every area. 3.5gigs ram, an actual decent video card, a big ol' hard drive, a DVD burner, Vista (okay, maybe not an upgrade in EVERY area). It did cause some serious freaking out for a bit due to the switch to Vista, though. I'm okay with going to a new OS usually, but if you don't see it coming its kind of a shock. It's turned out to not be quite as bad as I'd heard Vista's been, though. There's an occaisional Vista-specific problem here and there, but they're even fewer and farther between than the occaisional problems I have with still using OS X 10.3.9 instead of one of the newer versions. And it's fixed almost all the quirks my old laptop used to have. I can play Half Life 2 on it now!
Speaking of which, The time since Christmas has been crazy as far as gaming goes. I used some Xmas cash to go on steam and buy The Orange Box, which is a whole lot of gaming right there. You could see they tried to make HL2 ep 1 kind of interesting and innovative, but it was kind of dull tbqh. Ep 2 was pretty neat and fun, though. Portal is, hands down, the best game made in years and years. Maybe ever. Believe the hype. (Tangentally, I find it kind of weird how Valve spent so much focus on the gameplay, on the puzzles, and on making sure the player always knew exactly what to do, but what really gets people crazy for the game is the hints of story, the characters, and the ending, all of which Valve seemed to care about far, far, far less. There's an article somewhere that calls the game a feminist masterpiece, which I'm positive is not what they intended, but works anyway.)
I've put way, way, way too much time into Team Fortress 2 already, and I don't expect to stop coming back to it now and then. (If you play, gimme your Steam ID so we can play together sometime.) I've been playing engy more than most anything else, though my logged hours on demoman and heavy, to a lesser extent, are beginning to get up there because they're just so damned useful. I didn't use sniper or spy at all for a long while (because I am a bad shot and a terribly obvious spy), but I've really warmed up to the sniper on certain maps lately, and have even started to give the spy a shot every once in a while. Dustbowl is probably my favorite map, followed by Hydro, interspersed with the occaisional 2fort. Granary, Well, and Gravel Pit have gotten kinda tiresome.
I spent a time really big into Dwarf Fortress on my new laptop. For those who don't know, it's a freeware game made by one really really OCD geology/computer science major. Uses complex controls and ASCII graphics, but is really fun. Basically, you take some dwarves and some supplies, randomly generate a world, and have a sandbox environment to make a dwarvish settlement, like Moria, the Lonely Mountain, Ironforge, you know. Lava waterfalls, axes, blocky architecture, so on and so forth. Challenges start at feeding your dwarves and digging a cavern without it falling on your head, and eventually you move up to stuff like repelling armies of goblins or delving too deep and awakening foul things in the dark. It's fun. In my latest fort I just finished digging an extensive lava moat around the entrance to my underground lair, which channels down into a passage that feeds nearly a half dozen lava-based furnaces, forges, and kilns.
My big huge major present for Christmas was a 360, which I've been making use of. Got and beat Halo 3, which was really quite good. Fixed some of the problems I had with Halo 2. They said the campaign was too short, but it seemed alright to me. I haven't done any of the online crap since I seem to be the only one out there who likes the 1 player and co-op modes more than their shitty capture the flag deathmatch games online with 12 year olds that can swear amateurishly at you. I also got Gundam Musou, which is fairly mediocre as a game but has occaisional really enjoyable moments. Also Bioshock, which is pretty good, but maybe not quite as good as some of the hype I've heard. I got Gears of War but have yet to touch it, same with the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance game that came with the system. I still wanna get Ace Combat 6, Dead Rising, and the new Katamari game, just to start.
Inspired by some of the excellent LP threads on the series, I picked up a collection of the games by Paradox Entertainment: Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis II, Victoria: Revolutions, and Hearts of Iron II: Apocalypse. Basically, they're like Risk on crack. You take control of a country and guide it through history, with each game providing a set of rules and a different system for the differnt ages they cover. Like in CK you mostly spend time managing your dynasty, making sure that you have a proper heir and having your vassals rebel against you and defect to the fucking French. Or in Victoria, which I've mostly been playing, your focus is largely on Industrialization, Colonization, and cultural movements like romanticism. I've only played through about two games of Victoria so far, one as Brazil (generally regarded as a good starting country, being big and far away from nasty Europe) where I managed to get it up to great power status with France, the US, the UK, and the rest. My current one is as Sweden, where I'm aiming to unify myself with Denmark to form Scandinavia. Or I was, until I ticked off Prussia and they steamrolled me before I could mobilize my reserves. Also of interest: the Confederacy managed to fight the civil war to a draw and continue on. And at one point Mexico managed to somehow get at war with USA, Spain, France and England all at the same time. I don't know how the hell they survived.
I bought Advance Wars: Days of Ruin the other day. Good strategy game. Simple, yet moderately deep. Again, I haven't started playing it online at all. I should get on that sometime.
I've been on something of a Super Robot Wars trip lately. I think that if anything will drive me to work towards fluency in Japanese, it'll be wanting to play SRW alpha 3. As it is, for the moment I've sated myself with a ton of youtube videos, ordering OG1 and OG2 for the GBA since they're actually in English, and reading a couple walkthroughs that aren't quite translations, but good enough. I'm thinking after I get familiar with the menu system and some of the original characters from the OG games, I'll try my had at the alpha series. As near as I can tell from my experiments, I can follow the story if I have a walkthrough giving me the basic gist, if I take it slow, and if I'm already familiar with the component series. Which means I'll have to do some further research into some of the more obscure and hard to find old robot shows, like Mazinger, Getter Robo, Raideen, Kotetsujin Jeeg, and Macross 7, but I think it'll be worth it. Hell, just seeing them put a happy ending on Eva for alpha 3 would be worth slogging through.
But enough blathering about vidya games. I've started a new semester, and my last, the end of sixteen years of classrooms and teachers. I've got a fairly easy courseload this semeseter. Just three real classes.
First up I have a one credit pass/fail course, Senior Colloquium: Exit Strategies. It's basically life 101, focusing on resumes, interviews, and how to find a job in film. Reallly informative, glad they offer it. I'm also taking a class in Hong Kong Cinema. It's actually with a teacher I've had before, for the recitation of my Language of Film course, my first semester, freshman year. Never have I met a teacher who can better take an interesting subject and make it dull, but she's taking Martial Arts cinema of the 1960's and 70's and giving it her best shot. At least with it in the evening there's little chance of falling asleep, but the class is so goddamn long and goes until so late on a night with good TV that I have to resist the urge to duck out during the screening. Finally, I have a bright-and-early 9 AM course on Japanese cinema the next day. Could be interesting, but is kind of hampered by being so early, for so long, in a conference room with chairs that you are not meant to be sitting in, watching a movie for four hours. The teacher is kind of demanding of complex thought for that early, too. The film list is odd, I've seen basically none of the stuff, haven't even heard of most of it, and only one film by Kurosawa. We'll see. My first essay, a deep, deep reading into Godzilla, is due on Thursday.
I started an internship this semester, too. This past week was my first. I'm working at Optomen Productions, the US division of Optomen Television, a big UK comapny. They're currently working on a miniseries on evolution for the history channel, and an ongoing series on weekend getaways for the Travel Channel. The work so far has been very diverse, but for the biggest part I've been running around picking up and returning equipment to various rental houses across the city, as well as fetching tapes from the transcription house and going on miscellaneous errands around town, the most exotic of which so far have been to go buy a pair of size 37 womens boots for someone who was about to go to Costa Rica that night, and going up to Barnes and Noble to buy "Babe" and Season 2 of "Mad About You" for god knows what reason. When I'm not running around town doing stuff, I've worked at the office. So far I've done research on various touristy things in London, done a spreadsheet for organizing our evolution tapes, worked reception and answered phones for a couple hours when the receptionist had a doctor's appointment, and passed out memos. The work is pretty strenuous and tiring, and the hours are long, basically full time three days a week (10-6), but it has its perks. I'm getting a lot of exercise running around so much, for one. I get to see a lot of the city, which I enjoy doing, but need an excuse to do since I'll usually be a lazy ass if left to my own devices. And it's kinda sorta pays! Not really, though. Technically we get a $20 stipend a day to pay for lunch and our commute expenses, but since I can just take the subway, which is covered by my new unlimited use monthly metrocard, and I'm still running on 1-2 meals a day, provided by the complimentary bagels in the office kitchen and the meal plan at NYU, my profit from the stipend is 100%, so while it's not much, without bills to pay beyond my monthly metrocard, and with my food mostly done through the meal plan, just $60 a week takes care of an awful lot of my expenses. Huzzah! I'm working! The real question is if I can get that $2800 tax credit they're giving everyone for the recession? I doubt it.
Man oh man, the primary has been heating up this week. It's really weird, I remember caring about the 04 primary about as much as I usually do the superbowl, despite being all over the general, but this time it's like the nervous anticipation and excitement of election night stretched over months and months. I even stayed up late on Tuesday watching the results come in.
I dunno if I mentioned this back in the summer, but I have kind of gotten really solidly behind Obama. I just honestly feel that he is in every way exactly what the country needs right now, solidly liberal yet graceful. Someone who will win yet not draw the ire of the right any more than needs to be done, not rub their faces in it and force a swing in the other direction. Despite being substantially more liberal than Hillary, he's gaining significant support among the right, and his post-partisan message is, to an extent, working. (and those republicans who aren't wooed are largely scared. I've heard of him being referred to as a potential Reagan for the left if he wins more than once.) McCain's staff have said anonymously that they're nervous about attacking him, even though it might be reasonable at this stage, because if you go for him (and if you first avoid tipping off the media's overly sensitive racial remark sensors) with anything other than civility, his message of reaching across the aisle and lessening the dirty side of politics will only ring truer. Limbaugh has said that he's going to try and raise money for Hillary because he feels that her getting the nomination is the only way the republicans can win this year.
Personally, the way I've seen it, after eight years of Bush the chances for a Republican victory have always been slim, and all the democratic candidates have been more than acceptable. However, there are a number of ways I can see things ballsing up in the way they do for the dems. One of them was McCain getting the nomination. That's all but certain now, but I didn't expect the conservatives to split over him so much. That's good. And even if he did get the nomination, I figured it wasn't the end, he was still beatable. But the other big thing is if Hillary gets it. A Hillary/McCain matchup is just bad news. If it turns out like that, it would still perhaps be winnable for the dems, but I would no longer be at all sure. I would sweat right up to election day. Policy-wise, they're both really centrist and would aim to court the middle, but Hillary's proven to be incredibly divisive, which would give McCain an edge in that regard. Not to mention that more than just being divisive, she drives the right fucking nuts, taking away the edge we currently have of the far right not liking McCain because he's a sane human being.
I've heard it said that the real difference is that people used to expect Presidents to not only have good policy and a strong will, but they expected them to be intelligent, great orators, true philosopher-poets, and generally good people. JFK was the last real example of that sort of president, since from Nixon onwards, people kind of became jaded. There were no more nice guys in politics, politicians were all just windbags and sleazeballs, beholden to interests, and the best you could hope for is for a politician beholden to the right interests and focusing on the same issues as you. Obama is offering a return to nice guy politics. What's more, while I could be wrong, I'm pretty sure that McCain would be up for it. He's been the victim of Rovian smears and underhanded tactics before, and despite being a republican and therefore wrong on a great many positions, he has seemed to me to be, at heart, a decent, sane, and rational human being, unlike much of the rest of his party. An Obama/McCain matchup could prove to be one of the cleanest and most pleasant elections in decades.
While I admit that my political awareness has been fairly brief, just since the last election, pretty much, I can't recall really being specifically excited for a candidate before, just appalled at the other guy. Not like with Obama. I've now got an Obama sign in my window, a shirt in the mail, and I've made a donation to his campaign using some of my Xmas cash, since the next couple bunches of states are so critical to woo the superdelegates and triumph in the smoke filled room. I've been to a rally and seen him speak. I'm probably going to give again on the 12th, where they're trying to see how many individual donors they can get to give $5.01 on a single day (the 12th is Lincoln's birthday, see, and he's on the $5 and the penny). I've considered it, and while there's no way I won't vote for the democratic candidate come November, if it's Hillary, then I will be so, so, so sad and disappointed when doing so.
But really, the best argument I've seen against Hillary was the photo someone took of a sign someone put on a telephone pole, that just said, in plain, big letters, "She voted for the war." Personally, I might add "and won't even say 'I'm sorry'" at the bottom, but it still stands as basically all that needs to be said.
So, I haven't updated this with a real post in, oh....six months or thereabouts. No excuse beyond just falling out of the (admittedly infrequent) habit of it and having too much to catch up on. During the summer I started a real, tangible journal for a bit, but stopped writing in that a while back, too. Maybe it's just because LJ has lost some of the appeal it once had, with a fair number of friends on it I once had either discontinuing their own jourals, stopping reading others', or just growing distant enough I can't really relate to what they post. Everyone has moved onto Facebook now (even my mother), but I dunno, it never really clicked with me. And these days I mostly just use my LJ friends list for various feeds and community postings. Ah well, enough reminiscing, I have 6 months to cover and I don't wanna make this unreadably long.
Okay, where to start? Last post was in early August, where I was working at the Toco Hills library, watching Initial D, G Gundam, Lucky Star, and Gurren Lagann, and getting ready for Lee Peiffer's wedding. The wedding was alright, but suits and I just don't really get along, and I doubt we ever will.
The one or two times I tried to update this sooner was when I had just seen a new episode of Gurren Lagann and just wanted to rant and rave and geek out to someone about how cool it was, only to come to grips with the fact that I don't know anybody who's watched the show straight through. Anyway, it's good. Really good. So good that by the last handful of episodes I was waiting by the computer as it aired in Japan, f5-ing until the raw showed up on Nicovideo. Didn't matter if it was in Japanese, I think I'm finally getting to the point where I can kinda half comprehend it if it's not too incredibly wordy. Anyway, if you're of the persuasion where it is the sort of thing you might watch, you should watch it.
My laptop started acting up towards the end of the summer. It all started after I worked at installing Japanese language support so I could play Fate Stay/Night (which was awesome, by the way. Eagerly looking forward to the impending English patch for the UBW path.) After the install, the system just started acting weird. The mouse would kind of lag a bit, everything would run slow, and the sound would stutter all to hell. At the beginning of it acting up there, it gave me some trouble when I tried rebooting, too. Windows didn't wanna start up. It kinda stabilized after a bit till it was just the mouse lagging and sound stuttering, though. Nothing catastrophic, just irritating. Little did I realize, though, that the saga of my laptop was just beginning. (To be continued...)
Dragoncon happened. It was pretty good, though maybe not quite as good as its been in the past. Not quite as many panels I was eagerly looking forward to, the costume contest was a little underwhelming, despite being hosted by the Mythbuster build team, the crowds had gotten really bad, and construction had forced them to put the dealer's rooms two hotels away from everything else in the convention, which made it kind of inconvenient to kill time there between events.
Wow, I'm just realizing there was a whole semester of school that I skipped here. Onto my classes, then, I guess.
I was shooting for minors in East Asian Studies and Cinema studies, but I found out at the end of the semester that I was a little short for both. I had a bad grade in an East Asian studies course, and you can only get a minor by taking a language all the way to the end, or a certain number of non-language courses. With the crappy grades from a couple courses last year, I came up a little short on the non-language stuff and couldn't continue the language through to the end, even if I wanted to. (which I think I wouldn't, with the way the department's gotten) So even though I took a total of about seven courses in the department, half of them wouldn't count with the other half, and neither half alone was enough for a minor. Alas. One final FUCK YOU from them. Cinema studies turned out similarly. I woulda had a minor if they let one class that fulfills two requirements for a minor actually fulfill both requirements, and if the version of a course that all Film & TV majors are required to take counted the same in their system as the identical version of the course they give to cinema studies students.
But I digress, and I shouldn't. I've got lots to cover.
I took Theories of Imperialism and Colonialism from the East Asian Studies department. It was mildly interesting, I guess. The talk kinda got out of the range that my brain can follow first thing in the morning sometimes, and I fell behind on the readings. I won't lie, the course was basically an entire semester on why capitalism is the worst thing in the world, workers of the world unite, yadda yadda yadda. We read Marx and talked about neoliberalism, I'll leave it at that. I guess I know my socialist revolutionary theory, though, since I got a good grade even though I almost never did the reading or posted biweekly on the message board that they required us to.
I took two Animation courses. The first one, Film Genres: Animation was through the cinema studies department and was a pretty thorough basic grounding on the history of animation, about why Disney ruins everything, with way too close readings on some really simple and honest children's TV. Towards the end of the semester I gave a five minute presentation on A Charlie Brown Christmas and how it was a revolutionary and intellectually fascinating piece of animation that was unique in the field at the time of its creation. Except it isn't, really. I'm proud of that presentation. I think it was the crowning achievement of bullshit of my entire sixteen year academic career. An ultimately dull course, though. The professor told a lot of jokes that he thought were funny, and you could kind of see how he might think that, but ultimately they were not.
The other animation course was deceptively called History of Animation. I enjoyed it a fair bit more than the other class, though it was really strange. I walked out each day feeling like I'd learned something, but that that something was in no way related one bit to Animation, much less its history. It was taught by a professor named John Culhane, quite a character. I believed I described him as being kind of like Mr. Streeter, with a love for disney cartoons instead of a love for trains, with Streeter's kind of resentful grumpiness replaced with a kind of Santa-like jollyness, and with the same kind of level of connections and anecdotes as Professor Slughorn from Harry Potter. I don't really know how he became a teacher - I gather his career was as a writer for Newsweek. Anyway, he was rather...unique. The first day we took more than an hour to call roll, as he would ask each student in a class of like 40-50 where he or she was from, and then go off on a tangent based on their hometown, no matter where it was. Kinda summed up the whole experience. His unified goal for the course, if there was one, was completely nonsensical and mostly ignored. The classes were pretty much a series of tangents backed up through a massive VHS library of Disney, Warner Bros, and foreign children's cartoons. Whereas my other class would talk about the themes of socialism (hi ho, hi ho) and misogyny (oh look this stranger's house is filthy, let's clean it) in Snow White, in this one the Professor would speak at length about the purity, grace, and terror of the film, the raw, innocent emotions that it conveyed. I'm not kidding about the Slughorn-ness of this guy, either. He showed documentaries with him interviewing a bunch of really famous animators at Disney and he'd met pretty much everyone in the biz personally, even Miyazaki. Some of the assignments basically came down to picking a favorite animated work and talking about why you liked it. Those who did something from Pixar and did a good job had what they wrote emailed to Brad Bird. He claimed one of the villains (I forget the name) in The Rescuers was modelled after him. Anyway, as interesting as the course was, I really can't say for sure that I learned much from it. Ah, well. It was fun.
I also took a course on WWII. I knew that I would love it the second I walked in the door, saw the elderly professor wearing the most stereotypical "history teacher" tweed jacket I'd ever seen, and was handed a half-inch packet of maps. It was, pretty much hands down, my favorite class that I've ever taken. I realized like halfway through the semester that I was honestly disappointed when I overslept and missed it, not because I was worried I'd get in trouble or wouldn't know what I needed to know, but because I honestly wanted to go, that I really enjoyed the lectures. I didn't even realize for most of the course that he didn't even take attendance and there was nothing preventing me from skipping. The work was fairly heavy, we had a lot of war memoirs to read and write on, and a 14-page paper at the end of it, a length I haven't written to since Ms. Cassell's class in Britlit. (I had difficulty finding a topic. At the last minute, I wound up writing a fairly spectacular, if I do say so myself, paper on the change in Stalin's propaganda rhetoric from communist to nationalist, how that affected his relations with the Orthodox church, and its ties to the Napoleonic wars. A topic suggested by Dad when I prodded him to be serious.) Prof. Rose had a whole collection of almost every WWII (and some WWI) movie ever made, and let people borrow them every day. Seriously. This class was the highlight of my day.
Continuing the saga of my laptop, fairly early in the semester I took it out in one of my animation courses, and after not two or three minutes there was a popping sound, the cooling fan went from zero to max, and smoke began to waft out of the vent. I panicked, closed it to make it stand by, and then kind of looked at it cautiously thereafter. Upon further use, it kind of exascerbated the problems it was having before, slowing the whole system down and be almost unusable. I was too nervous about it melting in my lap for me to use it for anything other than trying to get data off the hard drive, anyway. I knew that I would have to call Dell and talk to them about fixing or replacing it, but having heard horror stories about Dell's customer service I procrastinated it to the max. The saga continues in part three, around the time of winter break...
My depression flared up a little again partway through last semester, but it wasn't quite as bad as in past occurences. I managed to avoid troubling Mom and Dad or crawling back to counseling, and it passed in time.
Thanksgiving was hectic, as usual. Had the whole clan over, as well as the Potts, since they're British and if they tried to do Thanksgiving they might serve blood pudding or kidneys or some other foul item the British think is food. My ear started acting weird around that time, like it was clogged up. I figured it was maybe earwax-related, and did something stupid and played with some Q-tips, which only made the problem worse. It cleared up a few days later though. Near as I can play web doctor and tell, I had a buildup of earwax and gave myself an "earwax compaction" when I tried to fix it. My doctor mentioned it looked kinda extra waxy when I had a checkup over the winter, so I guess that was probably it. Anyway, dinner and such was good.
Watched a lotta other stuff. Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, which is one of the few instances I would really consider an anime to honestly and unequivocably be art. Code Geass, which was a fucking amazing show made terrible when I discovered that they ended it abruptly on a cliffhanger that was somewhat less of a cliffhanger than if they had left the entire cast hanging off a cliff. Then went off to go do another show or two before they do season two. Bastards. At least what they're doing instead is Gundam 00, which I'm watching and, while the jury is still technically out, is proving fairly enjoyable. It's kinda...like Gundam Wing only done right. (though they have lately started to feel a little too yaoi fangirly for my tastes) Also by far the most realistic gundam series, which is kind of odd. Finally watched the rest of Elfen Lied, which was...kind of unpleasant. An okay show overall, but one that made me too uncomfortable to want to ever watch again. The ending was far happier than I really expected for it, though.
Went to the first annual NY Anime Fest, from the guys who started the New York Comic Con that's been so successful. This one was...not quite as good. One of the big draws of the NYCC was all the huge comic names that were there (NYC being their home turf), something you didn't get from the anime industry. The dealer's room was alright, but a bit too corporate and a bit too small to drive the fierce competition that gets you low prices in bigger conventions like AWA or Otakon. Video rooms are usually a good part of any anime con, in my opinion, giving you previews of stuff you haven't seen, since the panels there are usually crap. Unfortunately, while the NYAF had a fair number of video rooms with some showings that looked pretty interesting, the more corporately funded nature of the con meant that each and every thing shown was some craptacular dub that I couldn't stand. I saw literally two things all convention that were subbed. They'd been hyping their maid cafe for reasons I can't really comprehend (don't make the US fan base any creepier than it already is guys), but it was kind of amusingly pathetic. They weren't actually allowed to sell their own food or drink due to convention center rules, so it basically consisted of three or four girls doing the whole bow-and-"irashaimase" thing at the entrance to a roped off seating area with some of the standard Javits center food carts. You were actually served by the same surly looking minority workers that worked all the carts in the convention. All this stuff kinda summed up the quality of the convention, it didn't seem to take off nearly as well as the NYCC. The first day was really bizarre. It was the only time I've ever gone to a convention and had it honestly not be crowded. Kinda empty, even. It did pick up the next day, though, and you could properly smell that nerd funk. I passed on the last day, just didn't have anything to draw me back all the way uptown. Most notable thing of the convention was probably me breaking down and shelling out the big bucks for the box set of Gunbuster and the incredibly overpriced DVDs of Diebuster. I know that they're ludicrously priced and scarce because they just made them to prevent Japanese fans from importing the cheaper R1 DVDs, but I just love GB/DB too much not to get the official release.
Oh, and next door they had a twelve foot Serra Angel statue out front of the Magic: The Gathering world championship. Now THAT was something.
I fell back into playing WoW briefly, mostly working on alts and grinding dailies to get first my epic flyer, and then my gyrocopter and dragon mounts. I raided a little bit, but didn't really do all that much past Karazhan. I did a couple SSC raids to kill everything through Vashj, who was kind of a neat fight, but didn't really go to them too regularly. They killed Kael while I was playing, and I did all of TK up to him, but they couldn't down him on either of the nights I was there. I kinda stopped playing again come Christmastime, and now GSA has moved on to full clearing Hyjal and working through Black Temple, not doing Kael anymore at all. Ah well, looks like I'm stuck waiting for Blizz to eliminate the Hyjal attunement requirement. I've been meaning to get back into playing since getting back, but things have been kind of busy, as I will explain further down.
As the semester came to a close and I was buried in my WWII paper, I realized that I would be cut off from my G5 and relying on my laptop over winter break, and so we come to the end of our saga. I call Dell, expecting to be on the line for three hours minimum and to have to say "what?" no fewer than three times in a row to the Indian guy on the other end. Despite my expectations, though, I got an accentless guy (who could still be in India) who, within 15 minutes or so, arranged to send me a replacement laptop and a box that I could send my current one back in, for no charge. Aren't I glad that I got the "customers are special delicate flowers" special XPS warranty instead of the alternative?
Anyway, so not two days after I get home, my laptop shows up. Only I open it up and...it's not my laptop. It's a different model. Confused, I turn it on and the Windows Vista logo comes up. I freak out for a bit and eventually do some research. It seems that at some point Dell had discontinued the model of laptop I had (there's a chance that I actually caused the mess by waiting so long to call) and this was the next model in the high-performance ultraportable line that they produced. It's basically, hands down, an upgrade in every area. 3.5gigs ram, an actual decent video card, a big ol' hard drive, a DVD burner, Vista (okay, maybe not an upgrade in EVERY area). It did cause some serious freaking out for a bit due to the switch to Vista, though. I'm okay with going to a new OS usually, but if you don't see it coming its kind of a shock. It's turned out to not be quite as bad as I'd heard Vista's been, though. There's an occaisional Vista-specific problem here and there, but they're even fewer and farther between than the occaisional problems I have with still using OS X 10.3.9 instead of one of the newer versions. And it's fixed almost all the quirks my old laptop used to have. I can play Half Life 2 on it now!
Speaking of which, The time since Christmas has been crazy as far as gaming goes. I used some Xmas cash to go on steam and buy The Orange Box, which is a whole lot of gaming right there. You could see they tried to make HL2 ep 1 kind of interesting and innovative, but it was kind of dull tbqh. Ep 2 was pretty neat and fun, though. Portal is, hands down, the best game made in years and years. Maybe ever. Believe the hype. (Tangentally, I find it kind of weird how Valve spent so much focus on the gameplay, on the puzzles, and on making sure the player always knew exactly what to do, but what really gets people crazy for the game is the hints of story, the characters, and the ending, all of which Valve seemed to care about far, far, far less. There's an article somewhere that calls the game a feminist masterpiece, which I'm positive is not what they intended, but works anyway.)
I've put way, way, way too much time into Team Fortress 2 already, and I don't expect to stop coming back to it now and then. (If you play, gimme your Steam ID so we can play together sometime.) I've been playing engy more than most anything else, though my logged hours on demoman and heavy, to a lesser extent, are beginning to get up there because they're just so damned useful. I didn't use sniper or spy at all for a long while (because I am a bad shot and a terribly obvious spy), but I've really warmed up to the sniper on certain maps lately, and have even started to give the spy a shot every once in a while. Dustbowl is probably my favorite map, followed by Hydro, interspersed with the occaisional 2fort. Granary, Well, and Gravel Pit have gotten kinda tiresome.
I spent a time really big into Dwarf Fortress on my new laptop. For those who don't know, it's a freeware game made by one really really OCD geology/computer science major. Uses complex controls and ASCII graphics, but is really fun. Basically, you take some dwarves and some supplies, randomly generate a world, and have a sandbox environment to make a dwarvish settlement, like Moria, the Lonely Mountain, Ironforge, you know. Lava waterfalls, axes, blocky architecture, so on and so forth. Challenges start at feeding your dwarves and digging a cavern without it falling on your head, and eventually you move up to stuff like repelling armies of goblins or delving too deep and awakening foul things in the dark. It's fun. In my latest fort I just finished digging an extensive lava moat around the entrance to my underground lair, which channels down into a passage that feeds nearly a half dozen lava-based furnaces, forges, and kilns.
My big huge major present for Christmas was a 360, which I've been making use of. Got and beat Halo 3, which was really quite good. Fixed some of the problems I had with Halo 2. They said the campaign was too short, but it seemed alright to me. I haven't done any of the online crap since I seem to be the only one out there who likes the 1 player and co-op modes more than their shitty capture the flag deathmatch games online with 12 year olds that can swear amateurishly at you. I also got Gundam Musou, which is fairly mediocre as a game but has occaisional really enjoyable moments. Also Bioshock, which is pretty good, but maybe not quite as good as some of the hype I've heard. I got Gears of War but have yet to touch it, same with the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance game that came with the system. I still wanna get Ace Combat 6, Dead Rising, and the new Katamari game, just to start.
Inspired by some of the excellent LP threads on the series, I picked up a collection of the games by Paradox Entertainment: Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis II, Victoria: Revolutions, and Hearts of Iron II: Apocalypse. Basically, they're like Risk on crack. You take control of a country and guide it through history, with each game providing a set of rules and a different system for the differnt ages they cover. Like in CK you mostly spend time managing your dynasty, making sure that you have a proper heir and having your vassals rebel against you and defect to the fucking French. Or in Victoria, which I've mostly been playing, your focus is largely on Industrialization, Colonization, and cultural movements like romanticism. I've only played through about two games of Victoria so far, one as Brazil (generally regarded as a good starting country, being big and far away from nasty Europe) where I managed to get it up to great power status with France, the US, the UK, and the rest. My current one is as Sweden, where I'm aiming to unify myself with Denmark to form Scandinavia. Or I was, until I ticked off Prussia and they steamrolled me before I could mobilize my reserves. Also of interest: the Confederacy managed to fight the civil war to a draw and continue on. And at one point Mexico managed to somehow get at war with USA, Spain, France and England all at the same time. I don't know how the hell they survived.
I bought Advance Wars: Days of Ruin the other day. Good strategy game. Simple, yet moderately deep. Again, I haven't started playing it online at all. I should get on that sometime.
I've been on something of a Super Robot Wars trip lately. I think that if anything will drive me to work towards fluency in Japanese, it'll be wanting to play SRW alpha 3. As it is, for the moment I've sated myself with a ton of youtube videos, ordering OG1 and OG2 for the GBA since they're actually in English, and reading a couple walkthroughs that aren't quite translations, but good enough. I'm thinking after I get familiar with the menu system and some of the original characters from the OG games, I'll try my had at the alpha series. As near as I can tell from my experiments, I can follow the story if I have a walkthrough giving me the basic gist, if I take it slow, and if I'm already familiar with the component series. Which means I'll have to do some further research into some of the more obscure and hard to find old robot shows, like Mazinger, Getter Robo, Raideen, Kotetsujin Jeeg, and Macross 7, but I think it'll be worth it. Hell, just seeing them put a happy ending on Eva for alpha 3 would be worth slogging through.
But enough blathering about vidya games. I've started a new semester, and my last, the end of sixteen years of classrooms and teachers. I've got a fairly easy courseload this semeseter. Just three real classes.
First up I have a one credit pass/fail course, Senior Colloquium: Exit Strategies. It's basically life 101, focusing on resumes, interviews, and how to find a job in film. Reallly informative, glad they offer it. I'm also taking a class in Hong Kong Cinema. It's actually with a teacher I've had before, for the recitation of my Language of Film course, my first semester, freshman year. Never have I met a teacher who can better take an interesting subject and make it dull, but she's taking Martial Arts cinema of the 1960's and 70's and giving it her best shot. At least with it in the evening there's little chance of falling asleep, but the class is so goddamn long and goes until so late on a night with good TV that I have to resist the urge to duck out during the screening. Finally, I have a bright-and-early 9 AM course on Japanese cinema the next day. Could be interesting, but is kind of hampered by being so early, for so long, in a conference room with chairs that you are not meant to be sitting in, watching a movie for four hours. The teacher is kind of demanding of complex thought for that early, too. The film list is odd, I've seen basically none of the stuff, haven't even heard of most of it, and only one film by Kurosawa. We'll see. My first essay, a deep, deep reading into Godzilla, is due on Thursday.
I started an internship this semester, too. This past week was my first. I'm working at Optomen Productions, the US division of Optomen Television, a big UK comapny. They're currently working on a miniseries on evolution for the history channel, and an ongoing series on weekend getaways for the Travel Channel. The work so far has been very diverse, but for the biggest part I've been running around picking up and returning equipment to various rental houses across the city, as well as fetching tapes from the transcription house and going on miscellaneous errands around town, the most exotic of which so far have been to go buy a pair of size 37 womens boots for someone who was about to go to Costa Rica that night, and going up to Barnes and Noble to buy "Babe" and Season 2 of "Mad About You" for god knows what reason. When I'm not running around town doing stuff, I've worked at the office. So far I've done research on various touristy things in London, done a spreadsheet for organizing our evolution tapes, worked reception and answered phones for a couple hours when the receptionist had a doctor's appointment, and passed out memos. The work is pretty strenuous and tiring, and the hours are long, basically full time three days a week (10-6), but it has its perks. I'm getting a lot of exercise running around so much, for one. I get to see a lot of the city, which I enjoy doing, but need an excuse to do since I'll usually be a lazy ass if left to my own devices. And it's kinda sorta pays! Not really, though. Technically we get a $20 stipend a day to pay for lunch and our commute expenses, but since I can just take the subway, which is covered by my new unlimited use monthly metrocard, and I'm still running on 1-2 meals a day, provided by the complimentary bagels in the office kitchen and the meal plan at NYU, my profit from the stipend is 100%, so while it's not much, without bills to pay beyond my monthly metrocard, and with my food mostly done through the meal plan, just $60 a week takes care of an awful lot of my expenses. Huzzah! I'm working! The real question is if I can get that $2800 tax credit they're giving everyone for the recession? I doubt it.
Man oh man, the primary has been heating up this week. It's really weird, I remember caring about the 04 primary about as much as I usually do the superbowl, despite being all over the general, but this time it's like the nervous anticipation and excitement of election night stretched over months and months. I even stayed up late on Tuesday watching the results come in.
I dunno if I mentioned this back in the summer, but I have kind of gotten really solidly behind Obama. I just honestly feel that he is in every way exactly what the country needs right now, solidly liberal yet graceful. Someone who will win yet not draw the ire of the right any more than needs to be done, not rub their faces in it and force a swing in the other direction. Despite being substantially more liberal than Hillary, he's gaining significant support among the right, and his post-partisan message is, to an extent, working. (and those republicans who aren't wooed are largely scared. I've heard of him being referred to as a potential Reagan for the left if he wins more than once.) McCain's staff have said anonymously that they're nervous about attacking him, even though it might be reasonable at this stage, because if you go for him (and if you first avoid tipping off the media's overly sensitive racial remark sensors) with anything other than civility, his message of reaching across the aisle and lessening the dirty side of politics will only ring truer. Limbaugh has said that he's going to try and raise money for Hillary because he feels that her getting the nomination is the only way the republicans can win this year.
Personally, the way I've seen it, after eight years of Bush the chances for a Republican victory have always been slim, and all the democratic candidates have been more than acceptable. However, there are a number of ways I can see things ballsing up in the way they do for the dems. One of them was McCain getting the nomination. That's all but certain now, but I didn't expect the conservatives to split over him so much. That's good. And even if he did get the nomination, I figured it wasn't the end, he was still beatable. But the other big thing is if Hillary gets it. A Hillary/McCain matchup is just bad news. If it turns out like that, it would still perhaps be winnable for the dems, but I would no longer be at all sure. I would sweat right up to election day. Policy-wise, they're both really centrist and would aim to court the middle, but Hillary's proven to be incredibly divisive, which would give McCain an edge in that regard. Not to mention that more than just being divisive, she drives the right fucking nuts, taking away the edge we currently have of the far right not liking McCain because he's a sane human being.
I've heard it said that the real difference is that people used to expect Presidents to not only have good policy and a strong will, but they expected them to be intelligent, great orators, true philosopher-poets, and generally good people. JFK was the last real example of that sort of president, since from Nixon onwards, people kind of became jaded. There were no more nice guys in politics, politicians were all just windbags and sleazeballs, beholden to interests, and the best you could hope for is for a politician beholden to the right interests and focusing on the same issues as you. Obama is offering a return to nice guy politics. What's more, while I could be wrong, I'm pretty sure that McCain would be up for it. He's been the victim of Rovian smears and underhanded tactics before, and despite being a republican and therefore wrong on a great many positions, he has seemed to me to be, at heart, a decent, sane, and rational human being, unlike much of the rest of his party. An Obama/McCain matchup could prove to be one of the cleanest and most pleasant elections in decades.
While I admit that my political awareness has been fairly brief, just since the last election, pretty much, I can't recall really being specifically excited for a candidate before, just appalled at the other guy. Not like with Obama. I've now got an Obama sign in my window, a shirt in the mail, and I've made a donation to his campaign using some of my Xmas cash, since the next couple bunches of states are so critical to woo the superdelegates and triumph in the smoke filled room. I've been to a rally and seen him speak. I'm probably going to give again on the 12th, where they're trying to see how many individual donors they can get to give $5.01 on a single day (the 12th is Lincoln's birthday, see, and he's on the $5 and the penny). I've considered it, and while there's no way I won't vote for the democratic candidate come November, if it's Hillary, then I will be so, so, so sad and disappointed when doing so.
But really, the best argument I've seen against Hillary was the photo someone took of a sign someone put on a telephone pole, that just said, in plain, big letters, "She voted for the war." Personally, I might add "and won't even say 'I'm sorry'" at the bottom, but it still stands as basically all that needs to be said.