slipshod odd blog http://dumbluck.posterous.com where my random thoughts come to kick back and shoot the poop posterous.com Sun, 27 Jun 2010 23:31:00 -0700 Eating Time Along With Your Soul http://dumbluck.posterous.com/soul-eater-time-taker http://dumbluck.posterous.com/soul-eater-time-taker

So, awhile back I stumble upon a list of ten anime that didn't make it onto some prestigeous list of the decade and a few favourites of mine were on there (Full Metal Panic, Last Exile, Eureka 7, Samurai Champloo) so I decided to look into the ones that I hadn't seen yet. I immediately jumped at Sengoku Basara because it totally plays on my Dynasty Warriors heart string but the real hook was an anime called Soul Eater. At first I thought it was a chibi version of the other shinigami series Bleach but this anime puts a fresh spin on the death god genre.

Souleater
All of the characters are unique and fun to watch develop. In Soul Eater, the teams are comprised of meisters and weapons. It is the meister's job to help the weapon acquire 99 human souls and 1 witch's soul. I actually with the series played on this a bit more but other than that the pacing of this anime is superb - you never feel like it's going to fast or crawling. One noticable exception is the Excalibur episodes in which the plot pretty much hits a brick wall and you're treated to the antics of possibly the most annoying but oddly endearing anime character in any and all anime series.

Needless to say, this Soul Eater is an instant favourite. I mean, it's been two day and I'm already buffering the 42nd episode as we speak...

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/296605/images.jpeg http://posterous.com/users/37qKbYEgJSSt Martin Derige dumbluck Martin Derige
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:40:00 -0700 Handles & Monikers http://dumbluck.posterous.com/handles-and-monikers http://dumbluck.posterous.com/handles-and-monikers

For whatever reason, I think names are pretty important and I think there should always be at least a little story behind them. So, over the years I've had a ton that I thought were good at one point or another. Here's the list in no particular order.

  • zugzwang is a chess term meaning "compulsion to move" which describes a situation in which any legal move would result in an unfavourable position
  • haribon is the common name for the Philippines Eagle which comes from haring ibon meaning "King of Birds"
  • eurekaMachine stems a little bit from the Eureka7 series, machine was just for uniqueness
  • Hokuro Doukan is an unintentional typo on the Japanese words Dokuro and Houkan which mean skull and jester, respectively
  • fushigidane is the Japanese name for the very first pokemon, and my personal favourite, Bulbasaur
  • jester is the call sign of Casey Nolan - your wingman in MechWarrior 4 and your enemy in MechWarrior 4: Vengeance
  • ikigai is a Japanese term roughly translating to "the reason you get up in the morning" - no jokes
  • dumbLuck is a twist on my friends XBox live name dumbCrack
  • Fahrenheit this is in reference to the Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now" in which Freddie calls himself "Mister Fahrenheit"

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/296605/images.jpeg http://posterous.com/users/37qKbYEgJSSt Martin Derige dumbluck Martin Derige
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:38:00 -0700 Sympathy & Empathy http://dumbluck.posterous.com/sympathy-empathy http://dumbluck.posterous.com/sympathy-empathy I've spent the greater part of the last two days rewatching one of my all-time favourite animes, Last Exile. At one point a minor character says "I sympathize with your pain." Because of the context I understood that to sympathize was to understand how someone felt based on similar experiences. It also reminded me of how I always got sympathy and empathy mixed up but at this point I couldn't really remember what empathy was. Here it is so I, and maybe you single person who randomly comes across this blog in the interwebs, won't forget. As quickly...

Sympathy: 1 a : an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other b : mutual or parallel susceptibility or a condition brought about by it c : unity or harmony in action or effect

Empathy: 1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2 : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this

For any of those tldrers: to empathize is to be able to adopt another person's perspective in order to understand how they come to a particular conclusion or ended up feeling a certain way, while sympathizing involves empathizing and also coming to the same conclusions or feeling the same way.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/296605/images.jpeg http://posterous.com/users/37qKbYEgJSSt Martin Derige dumbluck Martin Derige