By popular demand, here’s a post that’s not about animu. Let’s see what delights my 3B term is bringing me.

CS 462: Formal Languages and Parsing (He)

This was one of the courses I was most looking forward to. And then I found out the prof I that I thought was teaching the course (who is a really awesome prof) was going on sabbatical. щ(ﾟДﾟщ)

The actual prof isn’t that great in lecture. His speaking isn’t very good and neither are his board notes. He’s pretty good when emailed though, so I just read the textbook and imagine it’s the author (who was the prof I wanted to get) lecturing instead and I just take notes.

The course itself is pretty cool. It seems to be more CS 360 stuff and in the same order too, going from finite automata and regular languages to context free languages and then to Turing machines. Thank God for Jeffrey Shallit’s book, A Second Course in Formal Languages and Automata Theory. I think I’m going to keep it.

CS 466: Algorithm Design and Analysis (Biedl)

This is another really cool course. In terms of content, it seems like it’s just more CS 341: here’s a problem, now let’s try to solve it and refine the solution. Now, we have a few more techniques that didn’t make it into CS 341.

I really liked the prof for this course when I took CS 360, enough to change my plans and push STAT 231 even later. But, having Timothy Chan guest lecture one class sort of convinced me I probably would’ve been okay if I’d decided to hold off on it until spring. Still, really good prof with really good board notes, although I find her equations and formulas really, really verbose. This preference for verbosity over notation seems to be a thing that’s really common among CS profs, actually.

PMATH 352: Complex Analysis (Spronk)

This was probably the class I was most worried about, since the last time I had anything to do with calculus was in 2A, which was two years ago. And it turns out my fears were completely realized. The class itself seemed pretty interesting, but it became clear that I had no idea what was going on when the time came to do assignments.

The prof was really helpful when I talked with him about it. This eventually lead to me dropping the course on his suggestion and altering my program plan to a more achievable one. He’s also really good in lecture and is one of those profs that proves and notes every detail. He writes really fast though.

PMATH 432: First Order Logic and Computability (Csima)

So I learned too late that I probably should have chosen PMATH 434 (Computational Number Theory) over this one. The course content for this was essentially a more intense version of CS 245 combined with what I believe will end up being the solvability parts from CS 360 and CS 341. Well, the stuff on solvability might make it worth taking this course, so we’ll see. This course is also kind of annoying because there’s always something that I’m missing in a proof that causes me to hemorrhage marks.

The prof is alright and has pretty good board notes, although she does get mixed up a bit sometimes. I don’t blame her, when you’re going on about models of stuff and interpretations of stuff, it’s not easy to keep track of it.

PMATH 442: Fields and Galois Theory (Liu)

Best course of 3B. Remember when I said rings and fields were awesome and groups were kind of meh? Well, Galois theory tells us that groups can be alright. It just takes something interesting like fields to make groups cool, that’s all. So yeah, field theory (and by extension, ring theory) is pretty awesome.

The prof for this course is great. Her accent needs about one class to get used to and then you’re good. Best board notes of the term. The thing that sets her apart, though, is that she cares about the students. She’s always asking us for our opinions on things about the class and tries to make sure that we understand everything and reminds us that if we’re having trouble, we can always ask her for help and stuff.

Just ended my terrible string of being busy. Now I have time to squander away. The question now is how best to do so.

5. The Sacred Blacksmith

Everything about this is completely underwhelming. Quite honestly, I expected it to be this way, but I’ve been avoiding these fantasy/RPG types of shows for a while because this is exactly what I expect when I think of those. So far, I haven’t dropped it simply because it’s only twelve episodes, but it’s not soon after the start of the episode that I get the urge to.

4. A Certain Scientific Railgun

I didn’t get very far in Index. That said, while the premise of this is still kind of stupid, the first few episodes have kind of been amusing enough that I don’t mind. Yeah, people are complaining about how it’s boring school life and Kuroko is annoying and all. Oh well, I think it’s doing alright for a show about a girl who is a railgun.

3. Kobato

There are some shows that I wonder why I’m watching them and it turns out the answer is that it’s because they are nice. Clannad was once of these the first time I watched it (although now, I watch that sort of stuff without a second thought). I don’t find Kobato’s retard moe to be annoying like I did with Yui, but that may just be that there’s no Mio to compare her to here. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Her ignorance of how the world works does make me cringe sometimes.

So far it seems like a pretty nice going to help people out sort of show, kind of like Natsume Yuujinchou. Of course, people who are more familiar with CLAMP seem convinced that weird crap is going to eventually happen. Oh well, what could go wrong?

2. Darker than BLACK: Gemini of the Meteor

It’s still too early to piece together what happened in between the first and second season (and I guess there will be that OVA to help with that). At twelve actual episodes (not “twelve” two-episode arcs), I’m not sure how far they can bring the story and I’m pretty sure that we’ll be seeing another season. And even though they dropped the episodic format, they still seem to be introducing cool contractors and then offing them by the end of the episode. Everything’s still as well produced as I remember, so this’ll be pretty good.

1. Kimi ni Todoke

This is the show of the season. If you don’t like this, you are a bad person. Well, I guess if you don’t like shoujo, then you probably wouldn’t like this, but that’s okay. Kimi ni Todoke is one of my favourite shoujo manga, probably second only to Kare Kano. Of course, that’s based on the tiny number of chapters that are released and scanned. There’s a very good chance that it can top it.

I really like the anime. I wasn’t too thrilled with Noto Mamiko’s voice in the first episode, but I guess I got acclimatized to her voice so the second and third episodes weren’t as bad. So far, the anime is pretty much following the manga in lockstep. I’ve noticed a few people who were pretty unhappy with the direction, but I really haven’t noticed anything bad. And the production values on this thing are great, as expected from Production IG.

Fall? More like fail

This is a pretty bad season, a fact which is magnified by the fact that summer was one of the best seasons in a while. With FMA and Umineko, that makes seven shows, two of which are middling and would be dropped as soon as I don’t have enough time. I guess there’s always those extra episodes of Hidamari Sketch and Bakemonogatari to look forward to.

To be honest, the only reason I watched this was because I’d heard that Kinoku Nasu wrote it. I wasn’t really expecting something like Kara no Kyoukai or Fate/stay night, but I’d expected some kind of similarity. Well, I guess the only similarity was the fact that the plot is pretty incomprehensible.

The incomprehensible story that is CANAAN features a cast that I can’t really bring myself to like. There’s SUGOI, there’s her generic bumbling guy co-worker, mysterious assassin lady who happens to be friends with SUGOI, her mysterious evil counterpart mastermind, crazy girl who has the hots for her oneesama, masochist in love with crazy lesbian, hot lady with tragic past, ex-agent who caused lady’s tragic past but is in love with her, Yun Yun, and taxi driver.

The thing with the story is that I’m not sure what it was supposed to be about. It seemed like a bunch of random things happened in sequence. Oh look, there are a bunch of people infected with a virus and then terrorism happens at an anti-terror summit. I can’t see colours but suddenly I can again! Let’s go investigate this virus, also we’re both CANAAN. Also I’ll just shoot my arm off, TIME PASSES, stuff happens, THE END.

What.

I guess the gunfights were pretty cool.

I wasn’t going to give this one a shot, mostly because I’m not a huge fan of baseball. Yeah, I know, I’m reading Cross Game and I wasn’t really anticipating that one either. Also, with the avalanche of girls doing stuff (rock band, mahjong, kendo, baseball, art etc.) shows, I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to watch another one. That changed when someone noticed that the start of the first episode was a two-minute musical of the main character singing about how great Taisho era Tokyo is. I guess I’m attracted to shows with musical inserts (Kure-nai!).

As expected, the show was about a group of girls trying to play baseball and eventually challenge the boys. What’s nice about this show is that none of the characters are terrible moe archetypes that we’ve come to expect with our K-ON!s and Sakis. None of them really have a trait or meme that can be used to perpetuate their popularity throughout the imageboards and across the Internet.

They’re also doing funny things as opposed to cute things. Instead of sitting around eating cake or doing repetitive things, they’re actually actively doing hilarious things like becoming roving street baseball gangs. The gags aren’t dohohoho, aren’t they retarded and moe, but rather dohohoho they are pretty awesome and this is hilarious.

I really liked Saburo and Koume because they are so d’awwww ( ◕‿‿◕ ). Anyhow, I hear there is more material in the light novels to be adapted, so maybe we’ll see more? That would be nice.

I was first lured into Saki with the promise of mahjong. Of course it was a fairly transparent trap. High school girls playing mahjong? Really? I didn’t really expect much going into it. Hell, the first few episodes bored me to tears and I eventually dropped it right before the tournament started.

A few months later, after the PA anime thread devolved into people having their lives ruined after watching School Days, people started talking about Saki. Then I saw this and decided that I needed to see what the hell was going on in that show.

I like to describe the show as Code Geass with mahjong. You’ve got the same kind of ridiculous stuff going on in Saki. I mean, when you’re Geassing the mahjong table or going in and out of stealth mode, it’s not too far a stretch to start expecting someone to turn into a rocket, right?

The side characters really made the show for me. I mean, the Kiyosumi crew is just Saki, Nodoka, whipped dude, Tacos, glasses girl, and Hinagiku. Basically, everyone was just being awesome while Tacos had ADD and the guy was around being irrelevant. Most of the other major side characters had motivations and backstories that were far more interesting than any of the main characters. Not only that, but they pulled off some ridiculous crap.

Like Geass, Saki was a really fun show to watch, with each week bringing moments that would be discussed with incredulity. Unlike Geass, there’s not much more to it. Serious mahjong this is not. Of course, now I don’t know if I’ll be on board for a second season now that all of my favourite characters are out of the picture. I can’t envision Saki without Stealth Momo anymore-su.