Spring Cleaning/Anime Memories
Apr. 26th, 2003 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jcfialaWell, we've finally had a weekend where we have nothing scheduled and we are not worn out from doing too much, so we've been working on sprucing up the house a little. Got up late, mosied downstairs, and played a little .hack/infection this morning.
We'd lost our PS2 to the robbery back in February, but one of my coworkers wanted to sell his and five games for $175. I got it on Thursday, and after Weight Watchers we headed over to the Game Stop and traded in all the games we didn't want, keeping Ghost Recon. (They're all playing it at work, and it looks like fun.) We found a used copy of .hack/infection, which meant with their 'buy 2 used, get 1 used free' sale we were able to also pick up a used copy of Final Fantasy X and get ICO for free. ICO is this really marvelous puzzle-movement game, and Tammy's glad to have it back. We also lucked into a broadband adapter for the GameCube that was used, a used PS1 memory card and a second PS2 one. So, we're all tricked out for the PS2 now.
.hack is a great game. The idea is you're playing on your computer, accessing a MMORPG like Everquest that's called 'The World'. You join in and play a bit with a friend who had a 50th level character and doesn't mind babysitting you - but something goes wrong, and he drops into a coma in the real world. That's when it starts becoming apparent that not everything is kosher in The World - your post to a bboard asking for help with your friend is deleted, monsters show up infected with a strange virus that breaks the game, and a mysterious girl gives you the power to drain viruses out of monsters - at the cost of making the game more unstable. It looks like all the fun of playing a MMORPG, without the $10/month cost, and it comes with a little anime on a separate DVD too!
After playing .hack for a while, Tammy came home - she works until noon on Saturdays - and we started working on the house. I went through and washed a bunch of dishes, and thought longingly of the redesign of the kitchen we're working on. I am so looking forward to having a dishwasher! Once some dishes were clean, I started going through the videotapes.
Back in the old days, when anime fandom involved sitting in caves and staring at blurry 10th generation copies of a show, there was no 'commercially translated' anime. What you did was look for someone who had something you liked, dug up a pair of VCRs, and bought blank tapes, copying things over. Almost nothing was subtitled, so you'd download translated scripts or summaries of a show and read along with it. When I started the Carnegie Mellon Anime club, first titled Chaos Incorporated (and now titled Vermillion), there were several showings where I would sit at the rear of a room by a lamp and read the script in somewhat unison with the text on the screen - a process that apparently was jokingly called 'Fiala-vision'.
But I haven't watched any of these tapes for years! They just sit in the hallway and gather dust. Many of them I now have better copies, either on tape (NADIA, Bubble Gum Crisis), or on DVD (most of Miyazaki's work, Kimagure Orange Road). So Tammy emptied out a storage bin she didn't need, and I packed it to the brim with various generic video tapes with fading ink marking the spine.
While working on that I found the 'AnimeCon 91' music video. This is a 10-minute long video involving a score of different shows set to Dvorak's 'From the New World' symphony, 4th movement. It's a marvelous piece of work, and I sat down and watched it avidly.
It's a bit nostalgic, remembering back then - these days I can buy anime on DVD, subtitled and Dubbed, in any local mall. I can get up to six episodes at once, when I remember buying single episodes in the past. And fansubs? Instead of mailing my tapes to Canada for Actic Animation to send it back to me, I can start up kazaa or IRC and download them to my computer, and burn them to disk to watch on my TV.
You young whippersnappers don't know how easy you got it.
Once we were done with some cleaning, we headed out. On Friday I'd gone to California Pizza Kitchen for the first time, and I thought it would be fun to go a second time with Tammy and split a pizza. We got their Wild Mushroom pizza (4 kinds of mushroom) and added some chicken to it. We talked them into putting it on a thin crust, so it's almost the same as the Pizza hut Chicken Supreme pizza in ingredients - which is 4 points a slice. At three slices each, that's a non-extravagant 12 point dinner. We also treated ourselves to some Singapore Spring rolls, which is veggies, shrimp, and noodles wrapped up in rice paper. It's served cold, and is probably 1 or 2 points for half the appetizer, so that was good for us too.
After that, we walked around the Colorado Mills mall, which is a nice jaunt. We've joined their mall walkers club, and once we walk around 25 times we get some bonus stuff, but it's good exercize anyway. Tammy found a nice wind-chime, a horse bracelet, and some funky African music at one store, and then at the Radio Shack we picked up a 2-way A/V switch so we can have both the GameCube and the PS2 connected at the same time. We also found this neat leather top for Tammy at one of the many Leather clothing outfits there. It doesn't fit yet, but at $10 it was worth a gamble to buy it until it does.
And it's a good day. Tomorrow: Bowling. :)
We'd lost our PS2 to the robbery back in February, but one of my coworkers wanted to sell his and five games for $175. I got it on Thursday, and after Weight Watchers we headed over to the Game Stop and traded in all the games we didn't want, keeping Ghost Recon. (They're all playing it at work, and it looks like fun.) We found a used copy of .hack/infection, which meant with their 'buy 2 used, get 1 used free' sale we were able to also pick up a used copy of Final Fantasy X and get ICO for free. ICO is this really marvelous puzzle-movement game, and Tammy's glad to have it back. We also lucked into a broadband adapter for the GameCube that was used, a used PS1 memory card and a second PS2 one. So, we're all tricked out for the PS2 now.
.hack is a great game. The idea is you're playing on your computer, accessing a MMORPG like Everquest that's called 'The World'. You join in and play a bit with a friend who had a 50th level character and doesn't mind babysitting you - but something goes wrong, and he drops into a coma in the real world. That's when it starts becoming apparent that not everything is kosher in The World - your post to a bboard asking for help with your friend is deleted, monsters show up infected with a strange virus that breaks the game, and a mysterious girl gives you the power to drain viruses out of monsters - at the cost of making the game more unstable. It looks like all the fun of playing a MMORPG, without the $10/month cost, and it comes with a little anime on a separate DVD too!
After playing .hack for a while, Tammy came home - she works until noon on Saturdays - and we started working on the house. I went through and washed a bunch of dishes, and thought longingly of the redesign of the kitchen we're working on. I am so looking forward to having a dishwasher! Once some dishes were clean, I started going through the videotapes.
Back in the old days, when anime fandom involved sitting in caves and staring at blurry 10th generation copies of a show, there was no 'commercially translated' anime. What you did was look for someone who had something you liked, dug up a pair of VCRs, and bought blank tapes, copying things over. Almost nothing was subtitled, so you'd download translated scripts or summaries of a show and read along with it. When I started the Carnegie Mellon Anime club, first titled Chaos Incorporated (and now titled Vermillion), there were several showings where I would sit at the rear of a room by a lamp and read the script in somewhat unison with the text on the screen - a process that apparently was jokingly called 'Fiala-vision'.
But I haven't watched any of these tapes for years! They just sit in the hallway and gather dust. Many of them I now have better copies, either on tape (NADIA, Bubble Gum Crisis), or on DVD (most of Miyazaki's work, Kimagure Orange Road). So Tammy emptied out a storage bin she didn't need, and I packed it to the brim with various generic video tapes with fading ink marking the spine.
While working on that I found the 'AnimeCon 91' music video. This is a 10-minute long video involving a score of different shows set to Dvorak's 'From the New World' symphony, 4th movement. It's a marvelous piece of work, and I sat down and watched it avidly.
It's a bit nostalgic, remembering back then - these days I can buy anime on DVD, subtitled and Dubbed, in any local mall. I can get up to six episodes at once, when I remember buying single episodes in the past. And fansubs? Instead of mailing my tapes to Canada for Actic Animation to send it back to me, I can start up kazaa or IRC and download them to my computer, and burn them to disk to watch on my TV.
You young whippersnappers don't know how easy you got it.
Once we were done with some cleaning, we headed out. On Friday I'd gone to California Pizza Kitchen for the first time, and I thought it would be fun to go a second time with Tammy and split a pizza. We got their Wild Mushroom pizza (4 kinds of mushroom) and added some chicken to it. We talked them into putting it on a thin crust, so it's almost the same as the Pizza hut Chicken Supreme pizza in ingredients - which is 4 points a slice. At three slices each, that's a non-extravagant 12 point dinner. We also treated ourselves to some Singapore Spring rolls, which is veggies, shrimp, and noodles wrapped up in rice paper. It's served cold, and is probably 1 or 2 points for half the appetizer, so that was good for us too.
After that, we walked around the Colorado Mills mall, which is a nice jaunt. We've joined their mall walkers club, and once we walk around 25 times we get some bonus stuff, but it's good exercize anyway. Tammy found a nice wind-chime, a horse bracelet, and some funky African music at one store, and then at the Radio Shack we picked up a 2-way A/V switch so we can have both the GameCube and the PS2 connected at the same time. We also found this neat leather top for Tammy at one of the many Leather clothing outfits there. It doesn't fit yet, but at $10 it was worth a gamble to buy it until it does.
And it's a good day. Tomorrow: Bowling. :)
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anime nostalgia
Date: 2003-04-28 08:34 pm (UTC)So, lucky me, I didn't get introduced to anime until a couple years ago. *grins*