Things I've Learned from Anime

First, I guess I should start off with an apology. The last couple of posts have been kinda haphazard. I tried my hardest not to make them rants, and yet the main point was kinda to rant, so it all was in pieces. I'll try to get things a bit more coherent.

Anyways. If you don't know what Anime is, it's a broad classification of romance, comedy, action, horror, philosophical, visionary, melodramatic, stupid, ridiculous, and insane things. In short, it's Japanese cartoons. Several have made their way to the US, including stuff like Pokemon, Naruto, and Spirited Away, but who could forget the stupidity that is Dragon Ball Z. Suffice to say that if you think all Anime is like that, you're sorely mistaken. It would be like trying to collect all American movies and categorize them as "American". The style varies from studio to studio, and since it's animated the content is a varied and limitless as the animation. Everything from realistic drama to giant battling mobile suits with beam swords, Anime's got you covered.

The key thing about Anime is often its themes and/or style. It is extremely distinctive form the American style, although The Avatar on Nickelodeon has done a very good job at imitating it. Also, a common trademark in more comical ones is the expressions are distilled into very specific things, like a single sweat drop to illustrate nervousness. Also, a common feature in many Anime is large eyes, since the Japanese culture has a fascination with eyes and their ability to convey emotion and character.

Enough with the background.

So, some fun things I've learned form Anime.
1) The protagonist will always have a secret past. This isn't completely true, but it's something people like to use as a plot device. Something about the history of the person will define something about the current period of their life that we're watching. Whether this is a latent superpower or an explanation of whey they react the way they do to certain situations, the past makes a difference. Of course, to counter this, a common theme is also being able to break away from the past and destiny in general and to be yourself.

2) Your body can take it. For example, Bleach seems to think the human body has about 3+ Liters of blood that you can lose, and still get up and use your super powered move to finish off the bad guy. Or, how about several instances where people undergo intensive training and eventually become super powered over the period of about 1 year or less. Note they never break a bone or anything during all of this. Weird.

3) When the going gets tough, be sure to have friends. Now here's a theme I can get behind. The support of friends is awesome. Period. Mudd takes advantage of this by often times forcing to rely on your peers for homework and projects. And usually people do a good job of helping each other. Anime sometimes takes this to a whole new level. Basically, if you beat up the protagonist's friend, suddenly they get all pumped up to defend their buddies. So, if you're a bad guy, remember to kill the main character first, then gloat, then kill the friends. Hurting friends will mean the main character will suddenly get a power boost as if they ate a Mentos or something and then commence to beat you down.

4) Family is important. Sometimes people get confused when Anime makes such a big deal about family. This applies to not only relationships, but also to family history. Often they have to deal with something that their father or predecessor has done. However, to the Japanese, family is extremely important. There's often even a sense of debt to your parents for raising you and caring for you. The extreme case is the family is more important than the self, a theme that crosses with honor of the family name. Relationships, especially broken ones, are often a key and central theme in many series. Finding a family is also important, whether it be comrades or blood relatives, the idea of a family unit being together is important.

5) Only teenagers can pilot giant mech suits. OK, make that angsty teenagers that are maladjusted. See Evangelion. On second thought, don't. You might not be prepared for the insanity of the series. This is more of a LOL point. Most likely this theme appears in certain genres since they are geared towards middle school to high school aged kids. And let's face it, the time of change during High School is perfect emotional fodder in general.

and finally 6) Serialization is a bad idea. Trying to continue a series for to long usually ends in fail as the makers try to keep topping themselves with more outrageous characters or abilities and situations. First season they stop a nuke? Well, next season let's have them stop an entire insurrection. Then the national army. Then... ALIENS! You get the idea. The good ideas may still pop up every now and then, but usually they become so sparse it's not worth it anymore. I guess the same rule applies to this blog. Eventually, I'm gonna run out of good ideas to talk about. Then I'll have to try and write some random gibberish, or only talk about current events. Merp. That would be sad. I'd become a reporter. And it's not like I live an exciting life with robots and ninjas and cute girls everywhere... wait... I do live a life with robots and ninjas around. Now I just gotta get myself a cute girlfriend. A girlfriend with a mysterious past that will unlock my latent superpowers.

Heh, that would be hilarious.

Christian on Campus

Again, a disclaimer. I don't claim to speak for Christians nor any other sect of religious affiliation. This is a personal opinion.

So, I happen to classify myself as a Christian. The way I look at this is not that I attend a Christian church, or that I believe in the Bible, or any of that. I mean, the above statements are true, it's just I personally feel that doesn't make you a Christian. Being a Christian is a way of life, not filling your head with a bunch of facts or simply being at a certain place at a certain time, as great as those things may be. Nope. Being a Christian involves realizing your own shortcomings, how utterly lousy you are, and putting your faith in something greater than you who cares and is willing to help you. Of course, there's more to it than that, but I don't want to plunge into a giant rant about being a Christian and all that. This is just to let you know where I'm coming from.

In a prior post I talked a little about differing opinions and such. This is extremely applicable and so I suggest you read it if you get confused, because I'm going to assume you've at least skimmed it.

Now, to the main topic.

First, realize that there are differing definitions of being a Christian. I've presented one of them. Also, people tend to classify Christians in different ways. I use the word "people" to include Christians themselves in the prior sentence. I'm sure you know about Catholicism and Protestants and all that jazz, but even on a finer grain there's variety. Showing up for church is what some people think is a necessary pre-requisite for being a Christian. Perhaps being good enough or doing good deads. Others feel you have to believe the entire Bible literally, some think it's more of a guideline manual. There's huge variety, even down to people who claim to be Christian but don't believe in the divinity of Jesus nor the resurrection. Personally, those people kinda confuse me. I mean, you think someone stole the body or something? Bug me with your theory and I'm pretty sure I have a rebuttal, I won't list all the various crazy theories I've been presented here. Seriously, Jesus just went into a deep sleep? There was a spear stuck in his chest for crying out loud.

Moving on, there's plenty of different ways to express your faith on campus. We do have an Intervarsity (IV) group here on the Claremont Colleges, and they are awesome. I kinda wish I'm able to attend more often, but homework keeps kicking me in the face. Of course, there's also several churches locally, and people with cars who might be able to get you there. And of course there's everyday stuff. I mean, we don't have Bible burnings and being an awesome person in general is never frowned upon.

Conflict of course arises when the extremists start being, well, extreme. For example, going around being the stereotypical "you're all going to hell" kind of Christian is a Bad Idea. Not only are you being a jerk, you're also making people less likely to view Christians in a favorable light, and probably pissing off other Christians as a result. Also, there have been times that Christianity in general has butted head with other groups. The issues of abortion and homosexuality are the big current ones, evolution to a lesser degree. Maybe I'll do a random rant some other time on one of them and what both sides have been arguing so people will stop getting one-sided information. I hate that kind of stuff. Back to the point, while the general Christianity, or at least whoever the media report about, may set some kind of platform, even withing Mudd you'll find people who agree and disagree with the general platform. Kinda fun. Lovely little microcosm. Hey, there's another idea for another post.

This beings me to the final point. A weird thing occurs when you profess to be something. You are now an example of what that label might be. I profess to be a Christian, so I can be a representation of what a Christian is. Others claim to be jerks, and we all know the connotation of that based on people we know who are labeled or label themselves as jerks. Some people avoid labels because of the connotations and that their actions may reflect badly on that label. Sometimes I don't want to call myself a Christian since it would tarnish what other Christian I know have worked hard on to give it a good name. Then again, it's an accountability system. I need to live up to what I say I am. And, as I mentioned above, I know how lame and lousy of a Christian I am, which is probably a good thing. Being a self-righteous Christian is usually a bad idea.

I imagine that all of these things apply to other groups as well. Just wanted to share some stuff form my side.

041608: A Photo Blog

Sorry this is late. You'll understand why in a moment.

I had this insane idea to take pictures of my day, and randomly chose Wednesday since it's my most active and busy day. Little did I know it would be this insane.

8:45am - Time to wake up. After basic grooming and stuff, it's time to head out for my 9am class. Emotion: tired. Going to sleep at 2am last night doesn't help.


9:30am - Engaged.
Professor King is teaching Materials. Today we are learning about electric properties. You know, random stuff that happens when you apply a voltage to something. The best thing about King is his immense knowledge and passion for the material, but he can also help share that knowledge with you, the student. Also, when I say passionate I don't mean over the top off the walls, I mean he's engaged and so you're engaged. It's really kinda awesome. Plus he has a bunch of case studies that he shares with us, many from research or he's actually done.

10:01am - meh.
Return to my room. I have a small window of time to work on stuff before my next class. Once again the extraordinarily overpowered flash would make this look stupid, so I had to try and hold the camera steady for the 0.5s shutter time. It's a little messy right now due to the busy nature of the semester. Thank goodness for large desk space and the largest shelf ever: the floor. The floor's actually not that bad. Just 3 piles, one for work, one for storage, one for recent stuff like resumes.

11:15am - Engaged.
Music Theory at Pomona. Today we're continuing playing the pieces written by our classmates to a particular poem excerpt. The fun part was we had to use chordal notation, and then we got two guys to play them on the guitar. Lots of weird and crazy renditions, and Prof. Flaherty is quite crazy. He's the guy pointing on the right side of the pic. He loves music, and loves to talk about it and teach it and just knows so much history and theory it's incredible.

12:10am - Hungry
Lunch time. I typically shell out almost a whole hour to lunch. This is the East table. Well, one of them. Typically it's a giant table where Easties of all types gather and talk about random things. Games. Life. Classes. Memes. Politics. Linux vs Macs vs Windows. etc. I use it as a steady period of social interaction in case I don't have time to hang around the lounge, which has become increasingly more and more true recently.


1:20pm - Working.
This is a picture of the Engineering Computing Facility, or ECF. Recently outfitted with shiny new computers, it's where you go to run your software and modeling programs as an Engineer. Today, it's High-Speed PCB Design time. Figuring out modeling and then setting up our signaling and accounting for noise in the signal. Basically, making sure the digital signal gets form one place to the other OK.

4:20pm - Merp.
It's time for Seminar. Today it's Professor Little talking about Engineering being about politics. Not Democrat versus Republican, but codifying rules and ethics, ensuring what you make is used responsibly, etc. Pretty interesting overall. Seminar is usually used to bring in outside speakers who then give a talk about what they're doing in the real world or any other random topic. Last week was one on leadership and a look at a life in review.

5:40pm - A little hungry.
Today's High Speed class got moved to 5:30pm so that we could have a guest speaker, a Mr. Happy Holden from Mentor Graphics, and he gave a really cool talk about the history, current issues, and future considerations/ideas in printed circuit board (PCB) design. Stuff like optical signaling or 3D boards where you place the chip inside the board. Crazy awesome stuff, as well as practical stuff like material considerations as we have to remove lead from solder. Bloody pseudo science, it's been shown lead in solder is extremely inert and doesn't leech out. Oh well.

9:00pm - Working.
Right after the guest talk, it's to the VLSI lab. Actually, I haven't been back to my room since lunch time. Anyways, tonight we happened to get the Schematic team (of which I'm part of), the Microarchitecture Team, and several other teams all together. The key, though, was Microarchitecture and Schematic, because Micro built the tests, and Sch use them, but things break, so the Micro team can tell us what went wrong, then we can fix it. We churned though a lot of bugs from wiring to artifacts from recent changes that didn't get done properly. One giant work session. And Prof. Harris was around to help supervise and help out.
12:30am - Really Really Happy!
The schematics passes all of the tests. Professor D. Money treated us to ice cream at Jay's Place. W00t! I skipped Jazz Improv since we were smashing bugs left and right, and this is so worth it. Also, everyone helped out a lot, so major kudos to Braly (white shirt), Heather (purple), and Kyle (green) for helping me out the most on all these bugs. Although I can blame Braly for 3 out of the 4 major bugs. Bloody unstable ALU. Note how powerful the flash on the camera is. This is why I almost never use the flash. Professor Harris is sitting next to the non-functional pinball machine.

4:00am - Tired.
Went back to my room (finally) and started work on homework due tomorrow. Well, I guess now it's today. And now the homework's done. Busy day. I've got a 9:30am class tomorrow. Wish me luck.

Mudd Lore: Nunchuck Frosh

Sorry this is a bit late. Been very busy.

Also, there were a lot of prefrosh running around campus. Geez. Sorry I didn't get back in time to hang out and chill as much as I'd liked.

Anyways, I'm going to share with you a little bit of Mudd lore. Now, this is fairly accurate, and recent enough that there are in fact people who know the person in question still at Mudd. In fact, the crazy guy comes back to visit every now and then.

So, without further ado, here's the legend of the Nunchuck Frosh:

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So NunchuckFrosh makes himself nunchucks, is happy. Nunchuck frosh makes himself a duct tape sword, is happy. Nunchuck frosh takes him a Frosh Chem Test, is happy. Nunchuck frosh gets really tired at the end of the day.

Nunchuck frosh doesn't want to sleep in his dorm room.

Nunchuck frosh wanders out.

Nunchuck frosh thinks he's on Pitzer campus. Nunchuck frosh has slept on Pitzer campus before, and knows it is safe to sleep there. Nunchuck frosh is very tired. Nunchuck frosh sits against a wall and goes to sleep.

Nunchuck frosh is on Scripps campus. Big oops. Very big oops. Numerous orders of magnitude oops.

Scrippsies call Campsec. Campsec comes for Nunchuck frosh. Campsec says Campsec gets a call that a man is passed out on Scripps campus armed with weapons. Nunchuck frosh very confused, then veeeeeeery not happy.

Campsec tells Nunchuck frosh that NUNCHUCKS ARE ILLEGAL IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. Big oops.

Nunchuck frosh has his nunchucks confiscated. Nunchuck frosh has his duct tape katana confiscated for good measure. Nunchuck frosh wanders back to his own room.

Nunchuck frosh no longer sleeps anywhere near Scripps campus. Big time.
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The man in question has also made a full set of armor and several other weapons of varying degrees of awesome. If you come to ITR Games, he just might visit in full armor. He even has gauntlets.

Warning: Contents Under Pressure

Contents known to combust and react in unpredictable manners.

VLSI is about 1 week behind schedule. We just started the giant project for High-Speed PCB Design. Thank goodness I'm not in Clinic.

Anyways, I guess I've always considered myself an introvert. However, under certain conditions, I do some crazy things.

First, let's define introvert. I'm not talking about hermit. I can in fact give a good presentation to a large audience and scream and holler at a concert. It's just given a choice, I tend to do things by myself such as read a book or fiddle with something. The second choice usually ends up in the realm of games, map making, music, and video production. But, I'm not a cloistered nerd with a gut who gets a monitor tan. Here's a fun article about being an introvert.

The certain conditions that I come out of this a kinda weird. First, there's leadership. I've found I can lead efficiently and effectively. Think of me as a reluctant leader. I'd rather step down and let someone else run the show, but if no one steps up I can do a pretty good job. Must be my sense of pride in my work or something. There's actually been times where I took over leadership because of the prior leader's incompetence, and times when I've handed over leadership to someone who actually wants it. Also, I don't have a problem with making remarks or giving out criticism. On the same token, I'm almost never offended by criticism. Unless the person's being a jerk. Then I'll just explain my methodology and hope they stop.

Secondly, there's pressure. Being under pressure tends to make most people be a little weird. There's stories of people becoming insane due to pressure. There's people who've risen to the occasion and became legends due to pressure. There's also those who get squashed by the pressure. Or explode due to lack of pressure. Hehe, lame nerd humor about vacuums. Anyways, I tend to be a bit funky. I'll typically rise to the occasion. Sometimes I'll hide and nurse a few episodes of Anime or something. Other times I start being really daft. Daft like Jack. Pirates of the Caribbean reference in case you missed it. Crazy weird plots and double facing and hiding motives until I come out on top. Well, in a competitive setting at least.

Thirdly, there's crazy time. You know, just when you want to let loose and bug out for a little bit. Usually this occurs during or right after huge amounts of pressure. This is when you go celebrate with food and drink, go out and frag some people on the internet, climb a tree, get into a sparring match with cardboard tubes. Well, I guess in East we would use Shinai and PVC covered in pipe insulation swords. Oh, and Nerf guns. But, that's all a little tangential. It's when you just want to relieve the pent up energy and stress and stuff.

So, that's me. Kinda. Sorta. Again, it's hard to get a hold of a person without meeting them and messing around. Just talking usually doesn't cut it in my book. We gotta have an altercation or something.

Speaking of altercations, Video Link.

Short Post

GAH! TESTS! VLSI! SUMMER JOB! ONOSES!

By the way, if you have time, read the post archives. I tend to assume that you've read the prior stuff, and I try to refrain from repeating topics, thus if you start to get confused or think I should write about something, check the archives first.

Also, it would be lame if nobody read that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, I'm being kinda lame.

Go read stuff!

Also, if you don't get the Onos reference, check out This Mod