That excitement was dampened by the realization that I’d have to go through a bunch of school life stuff again. This was my least favourite part of Fate and remains my least favourite part of UBW and HF. The biggest problem I had with this was that there was about as much of it in UBW as Fate did. I’d hoped that with all of the setup that Fate had, we could get through this stuff quicker. Just like Fate, UBW gets good when we get past all of this stuff.

UBW was a very interesting experience for me because it made me realize that my assumptions of what Fate/stay night was about were off. Before playing it, I’d heard that the other routes weren’t about Saber. This was baffling to me, because I’d always thought that Fate/stay night was about Saber. Everything that I knew about F/sn indicated to me that Saber was a central character, if not the central character. After all, she’s essentially Shirou’s ticket into the Holy Grail War and the only way that he can do anything.

Now, I’ve only played a handful of visual novels, so Fate/stay night was yet another interesting take on how interesting the structure of the story for a visual novel can be. Unlike Ever17 or Umineko, where the characters’ motivations and personalities remain pretty constant, Fate/stay night takes more of an alternate universe approach, where enemies in one route become allies in another and background characters from one route are thrust into the limelight in another.

What’s really fascinating is that these alternate universes aren’t equivalent in their importance in the story. In Ever17, each route is different, but it doesn’t really matter which order you go traverse through them since they all serve the same purpose. In Fate/stay night, UBW expands on what we’ve learned from Fate, both in the mechanics of the world and the development of the characters.

UBW is the route that makes it clear that Fate/stay night is about Shirou. You could make the case that Fate was as much about Saber as it was about Shirou. I don’t think you can say the same about Rin and UBW. Yeah, she’s the main heroine of the arc, but unlike Saber, we don’t really get as much illumination or focus on Rin. Instead, it’s Archer that takes Saber’s place in smacking some sense into Shirou.

That’s not to say that Rin doesn’t do anything to help Shirou along. She does, but in a way which is much less noticeable than Archer’s head-on antagonizing Shirou for his ideals. Essentially, the role that Saber played in Fate is split between Rin and Archer. And of course, Archer’s role in Shirou’s development is much greater, given that he’s speaking, as is revealed in the game, from experience.

I can see why everyone loves this arc so much, especially compared with Fate. While Fate is fine as an introductory story with the promise of other routes to follow, I feel like UBW is just as interesting when it’s considered on its own. I hinted at it before, but for me, it was Archer who made the route, not Rin. To be honest, I don’t really like Rin all that much, at least not compared to Saber or Sakura. But I guess I’ll have to head off to HF and decide whether or not it’s better than UBW before I can say that conclusively.

So you may have noticed that there are a bunch of people in Vancouver who’ll be playing in the snow for the next two weeks. We just had a fancy ceremony to open the next two weeks and of course, the knee-jerk reaction is ‘herp derp China was better’. Which, I guess, is true. This ignores another fact that should be blatantly obvious.

Canada is not China.

I mean, it’s pretty clear. One of those countries has 1.2 billion Chinese people in it and the other has 33 million random immigrants. One stems from an ancient civilization going back thousands of years and the other is a relatively young constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. One is a burgeoning superpower and the other is a modest middle power. The opening ceremonies of an Olympics should reflect the culture of the host nation, so why are we expecting Canada’s to look like China’s?

China used their opening ceremonies to go through how awesome their history and culture is and to show to the world that it’s back. Canada is looking to present its culture, but not necessarily grandstand in it. And well, there is the fact that China has a much larger pool of cool things to draw from. This is why China had 2008 drummers in absolutely perfect coordination and Canada had punk tapdancers with shoes on fire.

Then there’s the cynical side of things. China is an authoritarian state and Canada is a parliamentary democracy. China has the authority and the will to trample over peoples’ rights and sink ridiculous amounts of money into showing the world how great they’ve become. Canada is beholden to the public and its actions are under constant scrutiny and there are always people displeased with what’s going on who have the right to make a fuss about it.

The intent of China’s show was much more clear as it was a show of force designed to awe the world. As a result, they did whatever it took, at any cost, to pull it off. And for the most part, they succeeded in making an amazing spectacle. Canada’s show is completely different in intent, which was more of a ‘hey guys, we’ve got some pretty neat stuff to show you’ sort of thing. This worked out because it meant that the scale and cost and execution didn’t need to be as grand. It was interesting and fun and pretty neat and that was all I was really asking for.

Now let’s see some frigging medals, Canada.

The thing that magnifies everything I hate about these groups is their policy of not allowing any of their scans on any online viewing sites. Normally, this would not be a problem. I happily grab stuff from ZSS whenever it shows up in my feedreader or whenever their bots get updated. But there’s really no reason to keep people from distributing the stuff. Well, there’s no good reason.

The justification tends to be that the group wants you to view it in the highest quality possible and there’s some sort of mythical compression that ruins their beautiful scans or something. This is retarded, because you’re trying to read a scan of a piece of paper. This isn’t something like digitally ripping a broadcast stream or Blu-ray. You’re scanning paper; it starts out with artifacts.

Of course, I suspect that there’s a lot more wankery and self-aggrandizing crap going on. I remember one group who forced people into their IRC channel to download their stuff so they’d have a huge number of people in the channel. Groups who whine about compression think that compression degrades their amazing work, since they ended up using fancy fonts that would have been unreadable in print and need to be viewed at 1080p.

But the part that is the worst about forcing people to go to their site is that their sites are often an awful Invisionfree board that’s been mangled and skinned for whatever stupid series they’re translating. They don’t have the decency to use Wordpress or Blogger or something that has an RSS feed so I don’t need to visit their labyrinthine forums every day to see if they’ve stopped whining long enough to release something.

Yeah, fansubbers are stupid, but most of them don’t actively try to stop you from watching whatever awful shows they decide to translate poorly. Fansubbers have nothing on scanlators in terms of irritating crap they pull.

I’d been fairly charitable throughout most of the anime’s run. I mean, there’s absolutely no way that any studio can adapt Umineko and have everyone be satisfied with the result. It just isn’t possible. So I was willing to give Deen a little slack. Okay, so it has bad animation, but Umineko isn’t known for great art. Okay, so some things aren’t paced well or got cut. I understand, it’s a challenge given the time constraints. Okay, so they remixed awesome tracks for the anime OST but never use them. Wait a second.

Episode 4 was terrible. Unlike the other arcs, there was not one scene throughout the entire Episode that was done well. Episode 1 had its tea party, Episode 2 had its tea party, and Episode 3 had Beatroll.

The weakest parts of every arc have been October 4 and 5, 1986. The problems with the pacing are because they decided to slow down only as much as necessary and to blaze through whatever could have been rushed. So all the mundane, important parts got the time that they needed, while the awesome parts got cut or rushed. And so, a lot of the emotional connection that Umineko has is lost.

The problem is magnified in EP4, where a lot of the story is introducing and fleshing out who Ange is. Ange’s parts of the story are comparable to the very first airport scenes. That is, they’re long, not very exciting, but pretty necessary. With that making up the bulk of the anime’s EP4 and the decision to do it mostly in one shot, the last part of the anime seemed worse than usual.

And what happens when you take all of the character and emotion out of Umineko? It’s just a bunch of tl;dr. It’s not even a coherent mystery that you can solve because there are quite a few things missing from the anime.

The final blow to the Umineko anime is that Deen just isn’t very good. Yeah, the animation is some improvement over Higurashi, but that’s not saying much. The music, even with the zts tracks that people were worried wouldn’t make it in, ended up being a travesty. And, as all Umineko fans are aware, the music of Umineko is a very integral part of the experience.

It’s really disappointing because I was really, really hoping that it’d at least be decent. At least now I know to preemptively be in despair whenever I see Chiaki Kon in the director’s seat (pretty sure Nodame Finale is going to be terribad).

I went to Urbana with the promise that I’d come away from it with a better understanding of what my role would be in God’s global mission. And I did. Did God give me a specific calling? Nope. Did I have a firm enough idea of what I’d be doing that I’d be able to make a commitment via decision card? Nope. What Urbana did do for me was that it reaffirmed a lot of the stuff that I’d been hearing about over the last few years and a lot of my own suspicions about what I think I should be doing and how things should be.

I’ll be honest. I was (pleasantly) surprised at the big topics that they focused on in the evening sessions. I was expecting a huge emphasis specifically on evangelism (focus on people groups or specific issues). What we got was migrants and displaced peoples, money, environment, and divisions between peoples. Beyond those particular sessions, I felt that instead of just focusing solely on evangelism, the big issue was social justice.

The theme was “He dwelled among us” and the focus was on John 1-4. Essentially, the incarnation of Christ is the model that we’re supposed to follow in missions. This is interesting, because it’s something that my pastor at my home church has talked about before. Why did it seem like our faith really grew and we could see God moving when we went away to university but nothing happened back at home? The answer is in being incarnational: living in the community you’re trying to serve and becoming a part of it.

Most of the seminars I went to were on advocacy: a lot of stuff on how to advocate on behalf of the poor, both urban and third-world, or the oppressed. Essentially, it was about how to use our incredibly privileged positions as well-educated citizens of a first-world democracy to change things around for those who can’t escape poverty or oppression. This is the kind of stuff that I’m looking for in an answer when I ask how I should put my degree in computer science and mathematics to use. I’ve always felt that the things we study and our occupations should and can be used to further God’s kingdom beyond the standard cop-out answer, that we’ve been placed in our workplaces so we can evangelize to our co-workers bla bla bla bla zzzzzzzzz.

I think this speaks to how much we don’t understand how blessed we are. We have so much influence and so much opportunity within our grasp and the only way we can advance the Kingdom is by sharing your faith with your coworkers? Really? We have exponentially more talents than the majority of the world, but so much of the time, we’re using less than or equal to those who have much, much less, using one or two here and there and burying the rest into the ground.

We’re very familiar with the concept that sharing the Gospel isn’t just shouting the book of John at a random guy. We’ve come up with clever and creative ways to present it and we know that different aspects appeal to different people. This is exactly the same with combating poverty and oppression. You don’t need to go and hand food to the poor to help them. Like I said before, where we’ve been placed in society gives us unique ways to do stuff like advocate for the poor and the oppressed.

Something that stuck with me about missions was from my short term missions trip a long time ago. Essentially, our purpose is not missions, but worship. Why is this? Missions is temporary. There will come a point in time when Christ returns and missions will no longer be necessary. In the same way that Christ told us to go and make disciples of all nations, he told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and to visit those in prison. Like missions, all of these things are temporary, because, well, there aren’t really going to be any oppressed after Christ returns, are there?

And I think that something that’s been keeping us from thinking bigger and about the world is our inability to use our gifts in a way that isn’t obvious. One of the things that really made me think about what’s going on in other parts of the world are the accounts and stories of the church in other parts of the world. They’re facing incredible challenges that we can’t even imagine and they’re still able to do what we can barely do here, in our comfort and wealth. And those are just those who are oppressed and know Christ. Imagine living in slavery or poverty and not knowing Christ!

Something that Urbana does very well is remind us that there is a world beyond our immediate vision. Being forced to worship in a different style and language is a very easy way to get across the point that God and his church is much, much bigger than we often realize. And once we notice that there’s an entire world out there and we’re overwhelmed with the enormity of this realization, Urbana is ready with resources to guide us towards taking creative and daring, but realistic and manageable steps to impact not just the people around us, but the world.

So where does that leave me? Well, I have a much greater awareness and understanding of the kinds of things I want and need to be doing. At this point though, I’m still unsure what it is exactly what I’ll be doing. If you know me, then you’ll know that I love theory but hate application. I guess that’ll be the struggle I’ll be facing in the next couple of months while I continue to digest the things I brought back with me from Urbana.

It goes without saying that the production is still spot on and beautiful. Even better is the fact that Seventh Heaven is essentially the vocal version of the main motif that you hear when Shiki goes into fight mode.

This chapter was a really fitting end for the entire series. We finally get our answers to just what happened four years ago. Araya really is the central villain of the series, throwing in one more roadblock for Shiki and Kokutou to overcome before they’re allowed to be happy. And Shiki and Kokutou are finally forced to confront Shiki’s murderous nature and their relationship.

It’s definitely not as epic or action packed as Paradox Spiral. This movie is much more personal than that one. Paradox Spiral was all about taking down the last boss. Murder Speculation Part 2 is about tying up all the loose ends.

One of the revelations that we’re treated to is that we’ve been following Shiki’s adventures under the assumption that she’s a murderer, when it turns out she hasn’t actually killed anyone. Her kills that we see include a bunch of ghosts, zombies, and Araya. And so, it’s really interesting to see that after all of Kokutou’s pleas for her not to kill and in the face of her own reluctance to kill, the series ends with Shiki being driven to murder someone.

Summer Wars was on my list of things to look out for. The first promo pictures were intriguing, with Natsuki standing in front of her family. And then the first trailers came out and that shot my anticipation up by about 2000%. In hit theatres in August and sadly, there still hasn’t been any news of a DVD/BRD release. Luckily enough, a terrible Korean-hardsubbed raw showed up on the Internets. I debated for a while whether or not to wait it out, but impatience and people going crazy over this movie won me over.

Let’s start out with the first and coolest thing we’re introduced to: OZ. OZ is essentially a much, much cooler Second Life that is actually useful beyond flying around. Every possible thing that you could think of is tied to OZ: GPS systems, utilities, emergency services, commerce, entertainment, everything. As someone who understands software design, this super-centralized system is frightening.

Now, Natsuki mentions that she’s born in 1992 and she’s 18, which sets Summer Wars in next year. I guess that’s why we’re seeing Windows 7 and DSes connect to OZ. Again, I find it frightening that someone imagined that every aspect of our lives would be intricately tied to Second Life by next year. The movie’s main plot thread starts when OZ’s security (which is apparently a 2056 digit number) is broken and an AI starts taking over. Obviously, because everything is tied to OZ, the real world is essentially thrown into chaos.

So who do we have to save the day? Mild-mannered math nerd Koiso Kenji. How does he get roped into saving the world? By getting conned by his crush, Shinohara Natsuki. Basically, she wants him to pretend to be her fiancee at her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, where her entire extended family will be gathered.

Being the unconfident guy that he is, Kenji doesn’t really do much saving at first. Much of that glory falls to Grandma, who might be the most awesome character in the movie. She demonstrates her power and her sense of responsibility, using her vast connections in the midst of the OZ crisis and by not taking any crap from one of her kids. At the same time, she’s not crazy like the head of the Sonozaki family. Her priority is her family and she’s the central figure to that family.

That family is pleasantly diverse. Unlike your standard powerful anime families, this family has members everywhere. They’re civil servants or rescue workers or businessmen or fishermen. They’ve got housewives, kids, and young adults. And what’s great about the movie is that the interactions between the family and with Kenji feel very real. Yeah, those are those annoying aunts and those cousins that you meet up with every year.

Now, honestly, Kenji doesn’t really do that much saving. I mean, he’s good at math, but the only useful thing that seems to come out of that is only factoring 2056 digit numbers on paper. He really doesn’t even do much in OZ. What he is able to do indirectly is move the rest of the family into action. He starts off very unconfident of himself, but grows through his time with this rambunctious family to the point where he’s able to take a stand for fighting this thing and by the end, does end up saving the day through math.

There’s a ton of good stuff that’s explored here. We’ve got the whole technology angle with OZ. We’ve got all of the family stuff going on. We’ve got a bunch of characters that are unsure of themselves who grow throughout the movie. And of course, there’s a budding romance that needs some growing.

One of the things that I really liked from this movie was the fact that it had so much stuff that happened in it. Usually, I prefer TV series because I find they have more time to develop their characters and carry out more elaborate plots. Summer Wars was able to have a lot of discrete events and still have it paced really naturally. I’m surprisingly satisfied with how much the movie covered.

And the visuals! Madhouse is a pretty amazing studio. Most of the movie looks like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time stuff, which is to be expected. And those parts look great. But the real eye candy is in the OZ scenes. That stuff is worth watching in Blu-ray. OZ is ridiculously detailed. There are a ridiculous number of objects in OZ and they all look great.

I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of stuff I missed out while throwing this post together, but basically, tl;dr: Summer Wars is probably the best animated work of this year.

So obviously, with so many people talking about Fs/n and so many opinions about it, it was hard to get into this thing and give it a fair shake. We’ve got the whole Fate/stay in the kitchen thing, CG dragons and mana transfer, and the impression that Fate is the worst route and is terrible and is an abortion. I mean, I’d intentionally avoided the anime because I’d heard Bad Things, and so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to suffer through Fate before getting to the really good stuff.

To my surprise, Fate was actually fairly interesting. I’m actually sort of baffled by the GRAAAAGH WORST ROUTE stuff I’d heard. I mean, I guess it’s vacuously true in that it is the least good of the three routes, but I’m not sure why it inspires the sort of impassioned fury and disgust that I’ve seen. Maybe the anime really was that bad?

I’d heard beforehand that Saber was actually King Arthur and I’d expected this to be a random, thoughtless twist on something that we were familiar with. And it turns out that this twist is the thing that we spend pretty much the entire route exploring. The complications that would arise if it turned out our hero was secretly a girl, if you thought about it hard enough, are actually really interesting. And I’m really glad that the implications that arise from this premise are a pretty big part of Saber’s character.

Here, we have a heroic figure who, through her amazing powers, saved her country at the cost of her own life, both metaphorically and literally. And then we have Shirou, who wants nothing more than to have and do everything that Saber had and did. And when he finally has her power at his disposal what does he do with it? Well, nothing, because she’s a girl.

It turns out the two of them are exactly like each other. Both of them desire to save everyone at any cost, even their own lives. Shirou tells Saber to stop doing that because she’s a girl. Saber tells Shirou to stop doing that because he’s a scrub who can’t do anything. Both of them refuse because it’s the only thing they could do. Saber felt indebted to her country after she pulled the sword out of the stone. Shirou felt indebted to everyone after he alone was saved by Kiritsugu. It took the two of them watching each other act in a blaze of self-destructive glory to realize that they were actually the person they were watching.

So, Fate/stay night started off pretty well for me. Well, by the end of the first route at least. Much like Umineko, I found the introductory stuff really tedious to get through. But again, much to my pleasant surprise, when things got rolling, the payoff in the interesting parts was worth it. But I have to wonder just how bad the anime is to cause such loathing for this arc. I can’t really imagine Fs/n without it.

Basically, the entire thing is an excuse to watch monstrous blobs do weird things and fight each other. Not that that’s not entertaining. It’s pretty awesome seeing Cenco turn into various things like a car or a giant staple gun and have him just stare at the characters for a bit. The reason that that’s all the movie boiled down to was because it was just too short.

I mean, there’s tons of stuff that was really interesting that could have been expanded upon. The whole antenna-ahoge controlling the monsters and the mechanics of the monsters, some more about the characters, and tons of other stuff that weren’t explained are all fertile ground for more stuff we could have seen.

Since it’s only thirty minutes, it’s worth taking the time to see. Again, it’s pretty neat and I’d be surprised if someone who didn’t know about it would be disappointed by it. The worst thing about it really is that there isn’t any more.

So we know that Count von Count (colloquially known as The Count) loves counting. According to Wikipedia, he will count anything and everything, regardless of size, amount, or annoyance he causes everyone else. The logical question would be, what happens when we present The Count with an uncountable set like the set of real numbers, ℝ (unless you are a crazy person)? Can he count it?

The answer is of course he can, he’s the goddamn Count.

What are the implications? Basically, The Count can enumerate any set, whether it’s uncountable or not. This means that to The Count, every set is recursively enumerable. This means that for every set S, S and its complement S’ are recursively enumerable. But this means that every set S is recursive.

So, now we consider the halting set H = { (P, w) : program P halts on input w ∈ Σ* }. From above, we have that H is recursive (since H’ is recursively enumerable). But this means that H is decidable. This means that The Count can decide the Halting Problem, and thus, can decide any undecidable problem.

What we conclude is that The Count’s power isn’t to count, but is, in fact, to break logic.

I remember looking at the season chart for GA and going MORE LIKE HIDAMARI SKETCH HURR and didn’t look at it for a few weeks. After all, I had a ton of other stuff to watch. I did give it a shot after a fairly positive reception from PA forumers.

The thing about GA is that its pace, direction, and style is a lot like Hidamari: quick, really SD and cute, and tons of SHAFT-like cuts and backgrounds. There weren’t any weird photos or text, though, which was a nice change. On the other hand, the content of the gags was more like Moyashimon in that they were grounded in the topic.

Both of Hidamari and GA are about a bunch of high school girls in a specialized art school. Where they differ is that Hidamari is about school life and the relationships between the main characters, while GA is entirely about art. We’ve got art history, art techniques, art tools, art design philosophy, and more. And since I’m interested in design, it was pretty neat seeing jokes about composition and colour theory.

The flipside to this is that I can’t remember the names of most of the characters. There are a lot of them and the time that they do spend time on characters is spent on exploring that particular character’s quirk. So there’s emotionless girl who likes black, hyper active girl, hyper cutesy girl, shy girl who likes cat, and the most normal out of the five girl.

I wouldn’t say that this is what would immediately come to mind if someone asks for a recommendation for this genre. That’s not to say this is anywhere near bad. It’s really good and fun and enjoyable. This can definitely get another season, and maybe next time they will talk about typography, please. ◔ ◡ ◔

Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

So if it wasn’t clear enough from EP2, EP3 will definitely convince you that Umineko is a completely different beast from Higurashi. We begin with a look into the past with the revelation of the existence of Kuwadorian and someone who’s actually named Beatrice as well as Rosa’s confirmation of this fact. We also take a look inside Eva’s ambitions and how this plays a part in 1986 Rokkenjima.

The exciting parts of this episode during the actual twilights were decent. Both Beato vs. Virgilia and Rudolf/Kyrie vs. Stakes were a bit short. All of the important good parts were kept, of course, but the extra stuff that really sealed the deal was absent. The depiction of Evatrice’s carrying out of the second twilight was one of the more disappointing parts of EP3. The visual novel was able to render it much more nightmarish than in the anime. The anime’s offering was also a lot weaker than what we all imagined. When they said sea of jelly and mountain of cake, I think that was what we were expecting to see.

But the most important part of the Episode was the ending. How well did it do on that front?

I felt like the ambiguity of who died and who survived shouldn’t have been there (yes, Eva was the only who survived). The buildup from the beginning of the episode was fairly well done. From the looks of my feed reader, Beatrice did her job and masterfully trolled everyone. Ange’s introduction was pretty good, although it could have been foreshadowed better (like mentioned once in a while over the last three Episodes rather than have a flashback the episode before). I’m not sure about the choice of forgoing more EP3 Tea Party stuff for going straight into EP4 material. I suspect that they wanted to clear up who died and who the mysterious girl was, but from the discussions I’ve read, it seemed to make little difference.

The main problem with the adaptation is that it hasn’t managed to convey the depth and richness of the visual novel’s storytelling. This is for two reasons. The first is that there simply isn’t enough time. At the moment, I think that they’re doing the best that they can, leaving in all of the important stuff. That’s good, but it’s all of the small details that get paved over that really makes Umineko fantastic and I think that another twelve or thirteen episodes would have given enough time for the studio to include even small, incidental stuff. I’m not saying that it needs to be one-to-one, but the selection of material to adapt can definitely improve.

The other thing is that I just don’t think DEEN is good enough to render an adaptation that matches up to what we see in our heads when we read the VN. All of the awesome parts of the visual novel so far have been good in spite of the adaptation. However, for every single one of these moments, there’s always something lacking in the execution.

Act I: Analysis

I’d already mentioned before that Complex Analysis was a crazy roadblock that put me on to the road to proposed and much easier plan requirements. This was clearly because I was insufficiently prepared for the material. Even though the lecture material made sense as we went through it and the textbook was pretty much the same thing, it was determined that I didn’t have the adequate foundational knowledge in analysis and the intuition that comes with solving those sorts of problems.

So, this was for the best, it seemed. After all, dropping one course wouldn’t be too bad.

Act II: First-Order Logic

Now this, this is failure. This is where we learn that the Rudy 08 strategy does not work when applied to coursework. After not having gotten a passing mark on any assignment, I decided to seek the advice of the TA before the midterm. It boiled down to understanding the solutions to the problems, which I felt like I had a pretty good handle on, especially after relearning everything.

As it turns out, it wasn’t good enough and I failed the midterm. I decided that the chances of my passing were very slim at this point and decided to abandon ship.

This course was a very interesting experience for me. Unlike Complex Analysis, where I was insufficiently prepared, this course should have been cake. I did well in my first logic course and I enjoyed computability theory in the CS context. It turns out that that would be my downfall, because it seems that that was some sort of mental block that made it impossible for me to solve the problems in such a way that it would satisfy the subject in a pure mathematical context.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a course baffle me like that before. I’d go do an assignment, feeling confident that I’d solved the problems fairly competently and find that I was doing it wrong. I’d look at the solutions and try and see what went wrong, internalized the mistakes, and took a stab at the next assignment and, again, felt confident. The cycle would repeat all the way to the midterm.

Epilogue

I walked away from this entire debacle understanding just where my interests in mathematics lie. The things that attracted me to pure math wasn’t exactly the purity and the theory. It was exactly the things in math that I found cool (algebra and number theory) and pure math was the only way I could study those things. And as much as I might want to think otherwise, I’m still much more of a computer scientist than any other kind of mathematician.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In anticipation for the second season (and because of boredom commuting to work) I decided to go through the light novels that Baka-Tsuki had translated. As it turned out, this was just volumes three and four. As per my expectation, volume three was animated and we got to see Amati get pwnt in his smug face. Not as planned was the absense of volume four in favour of some other volume that I’m not familiar with.

I’m not sure why everyone’s so disappointed over the new OP. Personally, I think it’s great and it goes particularly well with the scenes in the OP. I can understand everyone’s discontent with the loss of SEVEN APPLES ON THE WITCHES TREE, but it’s like losing Dango Daikazoku – unfortunate, but they probably didn’t have a choice.

I can see why Brains Base decided to go with not volume four as the second arc. If we consider the entire season, it seems like the entire thing was focused on developing Lawrence and Horo’s relationship. Volume four was more about finding Horo’s hometown and more about her origins. That is, it was more focused on the journey than on their relationship.

It was interesting seeing their interactions in the second arc after the material from volume three. Volume three was about Lawrence’s and Horo’s trust in each other. The second arc shows us a Lawrence and Horo who aren’t quite jabbing at each other in the same way as at the start of the first arc. And in the second arc, we see them putting their trust to work in selling Horo to make the deal work.

Unlike the first season, where we saw them ride on a cart off into more adventures, the second season has much more closure. Well, Lawrence’s and Horo’s journey continues and we have no idea where they’ll be next, so it’s still open in that sense. However, their relationship is a lot less vague. Their relationship has been developed to a fairly concrete point by the end of the season.

And so we come to the end of a very solid season. At this point, there’s almost no uncertainty that we’ll be seeing a third season some time. And I’ll be waiting there again for more long, entertaining conversations and saving the day with the power of commerce.

So in about five minutes, I’ve managed to think up a better cover design. The problem beyond the cover being terrible is how they plan to make covers for future volumes have the same look and feel. My ideal cover would be some sort of sketch or watercolour of the place they’re visiting, say a field of wheat for volume one or Rubenhaigen for volume two, and Lawrence’s cart somewhere on the cover. There, we have a classy cover scheme that conveys the atmosphere of Spice and Wolf, fits the target audience (light, fantasy, not trash), and can be extended for future volumes.

It’s baffling because their Haruhi cover redesigns were actually pretty good. The silhouette of Haruhi is recognizably Haruhi and the use of a bright solid colour makes it easy to distinguish volumes apart while keeping them visually consistent.

It’s unfortunate, because I was looking forward to buying Spice and Wolf much more than Haruhi. I guess that won’t be happening now.