Finally, Ars Technica has updated their famous system guides. I plan to use this as a framework for my planned compy next year that I will purchase the parts for and assemble for when I (hopefully) leave for university.

Naturally, I’m using the guide for the Budget Box. Since my local stop for computer parts and supplies, Canada Computers doesn’t have everything in the world (sadly), I’ve substituted a few things. In the past, I’ve always mixed the budget and hot rod guides together, but this time, I’ve seen no need. The Budget Box fits my needs perfectly, and comes just a bit over my budget. Let’s see what we have now:

Yes indeed. MicroATX cube. Since the budget box was made to be microATX, I thought ‘why not?’ Also note the absence of floppy. And yes, I am getting an LCD monitor no matter what. I may look for cheaper RAM as a way to get under $1300 though.

A while ago, Adwin sent me a link to a flash video. Now then, since the flash thing didn’t show up properly for me, I had no idea what is was because it was missing text. After seeing the same thin posted a few times, like at CAA and Slashdot, I decided to take a look. Turns out it’s the entire ending to FFVI with the characters replaced with consoles. Watching the half hour spectacle that is Final Fantasy VI’s ending again brought warm feelings to my heart. In addition to being an amazingly cool concept, it just reminded me how much FFVI owns all the other Final Fantasies. FFVII’s ending is what? Ten minutes at most? FFVI was half an hour. FFVI’s ending is a masterpiece and it manages to be a better ending than the new fangled 3D FFs without the 3D FMVs that they so rely on. This goes to show that substance pulverises style anyday.

I don’t like North American dubbed anime. I think it’s horrible. I stick with my fansubs that I have over the Internet. The problem with bringing anime to North America is the impression that it’s for children. That misconception is the reason why some horrible changes are made to perfectly fine anime.

Let’s start with some minor things. These are things like translation and voices. Voices are a minor thing because realistically, you can’t get the same guy to do both Japanese and English voices when you prepare to dub it for North American release. However, I am slightly annoyed by the change of voices, since I get so used to their Japanese counterparts. Also, some translations are horrible, since they feel the need to English-ize everything that they say even stuff that really should remain Japanese for context and the like. Along with translation, companies seem to have a thing for changing names to their western counterparts. This practice has been declining since people are starting to realize that anything that’s Japanese is cool.

The major problems relate to the kiddy view of anime. Recently, it’s been announced that Naruto is licensed. Since the corporations view the target audience of anime as children and youth, they tend to strip out qualities that older viewers may appreciate like music and replace it with less than acceptable pop substitutions. Then there’s the whole censorship thing. What? Did you think that an anime about ninjas or samurai was supposed to be blood-less? Did you expect that an anime about war would be without people committing atrocities? Often times, the North American anime has a dumbed down plot so the kids can understand. The problem is that the target audience in Japan wasn’t ‘kids’.

I say keep on downloading anime, movies, and music. If we’re lucky, we’ll run these corporations down to the ground and we’ll finally get some marketing-free entertainment.

Recently, I gave in and had a look at what Technorati is all about. Basically, it’s a search engine that goes through all of the blogs on the Internet that are visible. For example, if your blog is on Blogger’s site and is not hidden, it’s searchable on Technorati. So, I used it to have a look at how many people are talking about TJCAC. Then I thought that maybe people had photos from TC2005 and searched for that. The result was that I stumbled upon quite a few peoples’ blogs, like the TC Worship Team, Wesley’s, Cat’s, etc, etc.

I did find what I was looking for though, which was high quality TC pics which weren’t really team pics (although I would like Melchizedek pics) but were TC pics. I found them at Silas’ blog. Silas was the guy on the A/V Team with the iBook. Anymoo, he has some pretty nice pictures here. I’m still waiting for Mike Mak to put up more of his, since I assume he has a crapload.