Tuesday 25 February 2003

Pic of the day: Picture from the intro sequence of the anime Naruto.

Naruto day

I've been watching an anime (Japanese cartoon) called Naruto. That's the name of the main character, an adolescent boy from a village of ninjas. The "village" is actually fairly urban and it's all contemporary or near future, not historic. The ninjas are more like magic superheroes than historical ninjas, too. This is not a bad thing in my opinion, I like adolescent superheroes. Naruto is a bit like Impulse, for those of you who read DC comics. He tends to act before he thinks, he likes girls (one in particular) and cannot understand why the feeling is not mutual. He has a good heart, though.

The first long story arc was very interesting, except that about a third of each episode was devoted to summary and flashback. This probably makes sense if you see only one episode per week, but when you watch them in succession it is kinda irritating that intro, exit and flashbacks eat up about half the episode! Anyway, the story arc was concluded in episode 19, which was absolutely wonderful. Despite some savagery and bloody death, it carried a very positive message and was very moving. I shed a few tears myself, and I don't weep enough to wet a handkerchief over the course of a year. (Not sure if this is because I am a cold and callous person, or because of lack of potassium in the food, or because I live all alone so it makes no sense to laugh or cry.) Anyway, highly recommended.

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I bought a new box of minidisks in order to record the intro song to Naruto, which I love too. I have recorded a few songs from some of my favorite anime: The theme song from Figure 17 (which I still haven't seen through to the end, so I guess favorite may be too strong a word), and the intro and exit song from the original Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu. I still want to record the intro to Naruto and to Magical Nyan Nyan Taruto (the catgirl princess), and preferably gather them on a separate disk. The five minidisks I bought along with my first minidisk player are pretty much filled up. Then again, it is 4-5 years, I'm not quite sure. MD never really made it big, despite being far superior to cassettes. I guess it was just its bad luck that MP3 arrived too soon and killed it as medium of the future. And with the large number of baby boomers living in the past, the cassette seems certain to age gracefully too.

While on the topic of spending money, I also bought the European version of Shrouded Isles, the expansion pack for Dark Age of Camelot. I play a bit on the European servers too, although less than on the American. This is a good time to play a necromancer on the European servers ... the first version after Shrouded Isles had them a bit more powerful than they became later. Anyway, I did not get it to work, because (unlike their American cousins) the European servers asked for a separate registration username and password that is different from the login username. Of course I did not have this anywhere, so now I either have to abandon the account or the expansion pack or both, if I cannot cajole them into sending me the password. Oh well. It is not a big deal. Just a hobby. ^_^*

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Back to Naruto: I also looked at some Naruto fan fiction over at FanFiction.net. "Unleash your imagination and free your soul" is their slogan. But it easily happens that the flesh is freed (or unleashed) instead, I think. More about that in an upcoming entry, I hope.

Sorry for the delay, I originally overreached myself and wrote about things that were too difficult for me without much more time.