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Showing posts from 2017

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Your Name...

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Over the past weekend, I stopped by my local Walmart and much to my surprise, guess what came home with me... Your Name ... From director Makoto Shinkai, the innovative mind behind Voices of a Distant Star and 5 Centimeters Per Second, comes a beautiful masterpiece about time, the thread of fate, and the hearts of two young souls. The day the stars fell, two lives changed forever. High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch paces. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki's body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other. Yet, somehow, it works. They build a connection and communicate by leaving notes, messages, and more importantly, an imprint. When a dazzling comet lights up the night's sky, something shifts, and they seek each other out wanting something more-a chance to finally meet. But try as they might, something more daunting than

Otaku Fall Cleanup 2017...

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A to O P to Z Currently, I have over 4600 DVDs. The live-action titles were originally arranged with A though L on a small bank of shelves and M through Z on a larger bank of shelves with TV shows separated from movies on the larger bank of shelves. Recently, I began to run out of space for live-action titles. In an effort to combat issues with the mainstream live-action titles, I decided to consolidate the anime to one bank of shelves. It meant that there wouldn't be much extra space for new titles, but, everything would fit on eleven shelves with a handful of the larger box sets relegated to the topmost shelf. With space recovered from anime, it meant that there was more room to consolidate the animated TV shows and movies. I reorganized them with the mainstream animated movies and Disney animation sorted alphabetically and having pride of place in the front row and animated TV series being placed on the back row. And, all of the animation fit on one bank of shelves.

Contempo In A Two-Column Format...

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Blogger  launched new templates a few months ago and, although the  new templates have some nice features, there is still room for improvement. The Contempo template presents posts as a series of snippets and originally, the snippets were presented one per row. I wanted a way to display more snippets in less space, so, I explored different mechanisms for achieving the desired result. At one point, I had managed to do most of the heavy lifting using a complicated style sheet, but, ultimately, the CSS proved to be a bit flaky and occasionally, a post snippet would either disappear or would be misaligned in some horribly noticeable way. Eventually, I created the following gadget: <script type="text/javascript"> function DoGridView() { var d=document; var divs; var articles; var mainposts; divs=d.getElementsByTagName('div'); for (var i=0;i<divs.length;i++){ if (divs[i].className=='blog-posts hfeed container'){ mainposts=divs[i]; articles=mainposts.ge

Solty Rei...

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I wasn't entirely sure what to make of Solty Rei , but, the series seemed like something I might enjoy, so, years before the series was available as a box set, I picked up all six individual volumes of the series... Volume 1 Roy Revant is living the hard life of a bounty hunter in a broken city, a city where thousands have died in a mysterious event called the Blast Fall. Those who survived share the sting of loss. Countless Resembles walk the streets, people whose mangled bodies have been rebuilt with high-tech prosthetic devices. Yet there are those that even science cannot mend. Roy needs a miracle to escape his rut… and one night she falls from the sky. Like countless others Solty is a Resemble, but one unlike the world has ever known. A young girl without a past, soon she will have a family. But in this world, pain and alienation are never too far away. Volume 2 As dark fades to light and light becomes pitch black in an instant, all a man can do is put his head down and

Wizard World Comic Con - 2017...

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Last month, I went to the Wizard World Comic Con in Philadelphia . Highlights of this year's Comic Con in Philadelphia include: Chuck Norris, WALKER TEXAS RANGER, Gene Simmons, KISS, Nichelle Nichols, STAR TREK, Famke Janssen, X-MEN There were, of course, many, many other people of note in attendance and a whole list of panels and other events included in the cost of admission and a great many paid events that we could go to if that was the sort of thing we wanted to do. Last year, parking was an issue, so, this time around, Mom offered her services for transportation to and from the venue. This year, I would be going with Tony, Amanda and Anthony. We arrived in Center City around 10:30am. There was a longer line of people waiting to get in this year, due to increased security measures in the wake of recent violence at other public events elsewhere. Although, slightly inconvenient, the extra security was welcome just the same. Like last year, a small area had been set a

Wonder Woman...

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Over the weekend, I saw the theatrical release of Wonder Woman ... An Amazon princess (Gal Gadot) finds her idyllic life on an island occupied only by female warriors interrupted when a pilot (Chris Pine) crash-lands nearby. After rescuing him, she learns that World War I is engulfing the planet, and vows to use her superpowers to restore peace. Wonder Woman  follows Diana's growth from a young girl to adulthood and her fateful meeting with Steve. Trapped on Diana's island home, Steve wants to return to his people to complete his mission and Diana wants to venture out into the world beyond her island home, to go to the front lines of a conflict that has embroiled the entire world and threatens humanity itself. So, Steve and Diana head out into the battlefields of World War I on an epic quest to save humanity. There is some violence, but, the feature is not particularly gory. Overall, Wonder Woman was very entertaining. Even Mom, who doesn't usually get excited about mo

Popular Posts in a Compact Format for Contempo...

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A few months ago, Blogger rolled out new templates. The popular posts gadget is a new feature of the Contempo template which displays a handful of snippets for the most popular posts. For the popular posts, I didn't necessarily want full blown snippets, but, rather just a handful of links. So, I adapted a custom  Related Posts  gadget to create the following compact popular post gadget: <script type="text/javascript"> var d=document; var divs; var articles; var popularposts; var popularpostsDivs; var popular_posts_content=''; divs=d.getElementsByTagName('div'); for (var i=0;i<divs.length;i++){ if (divs[i].className=='widget PopularPosts'){ popularposts=divs[i]; articles=popularposts.getElementsByTagName('article'); for (var j=0;j<articles.length;j++){ var pageURL=new String(articles[j].getElementsByTagName('a')[0].getAttribute('href')); var imgURL=new String(articles[j].getElementsByTagName('img')[0]

Skull Man...

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I wasn't sure what to make of Skull Man when it appeared on store shelves a few years ago, but, I picked it up anyway... Otomo City: where freedom and justice have atrophied to the bone; where conspiracy rules the day and death stalks the night... Death in the form of the Skull Man, a literal Grim Reaper whose skeletal grin presages grisly mayhem and murder, even to the monstrous mutants that haunt the city's underworlds! To investigate a bizarre slaying, journalist Minagami Hayato and photographer Kiriko Mamiya must stalk this ultimate predator, through a festering cadaver of a city where the corruption flows in rivers as deep and foul as the sins of the reigning elite, and unearth a secret so shocking that an entire city has been turned into a tomb to contain! In a nightmarish necropolis where nothing is as it seems, vengeance comes in the form of a living Death's-Head! Recently, I took the opportunity to see Skull Man . The series centers around a mysterious vigila

Severing Crime Edge...

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Severing Crime Edge  involves a group of people who wield cursed objects and their efforts to kill the Hair Queen... Kiri Haimura loves cutting hair. Actually, he doesn't just love cutting hair, he obsesses over it and even has a special set of scissors he delights in using. But when his mane obsession for a bit of trim draws him to Iwai Mushanokoji, whose long hair has never been cut, he finds himself entangled in a situation no shears can hack him out of. You see, Iwai is heir to a strange curse that makes her hair impossible to cut. Or at least, it was until Kiri's clippers take off a lock, thereby revealing that his scissors are cursed as well! But now that she's shorn free, Iwai has a slew of murderers after her, each armed with their own cursed implements and eager for the chance to kill the Hair Queen. And if that's not enough to make Kiri wig out, it seems that many of them actually attend his own school! Will this evil crew cut in on Kiri's Hair Queen,

Where To Buy Anime In Philadelphia...

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Brick and Mortar Retailers... This is a brief primer for those of us who still enjoy anime on archival media and who happen to be in the Philadelphia area. With the demise of the major retail outlets (i.e.: FYE, Suncoast and Tower Records) in Center City, Philadelphia, it's become much harder to find anime in Philadelphia and I felt it was time to mention the subject. The last vestiges of some of the major retail outlets (most notably FYE) still exist in the suburban malls such as Franklin Mills Mall -- which, for some reason that defies description, now wants to be called Philadelphia Mills Mall even though the mall itself sits on the border with Bucks County and is a whopping fifteen miles from Center City. Unfortunately, without the higher volume of foot traffic that would be available in Center City, anime isn't as much of a priority in the suburbs as it was in Center City. So, with this in mind, although there is still a decent selection of anime to choose from, on

We Without Wings...

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A few years ago, I reached a milestone when We Without Wings came home with me -- it was the 4000th DVD in my archive. Based on the description on the back of the box, We Without Wings seemed like something I might enjoy, so, I picked it up... Timid Takashi wants to escape to an alternate world where he is a heralded knight, but is held back by thoughts of his younger sister and his girlfriend. Part-timer and all-around upbeat guy Shuusuke has a disastrous first encounter with a woman who turns out to be his new co-worker. Handyman Hayato is a hard-boiled loner who has random encounters with two gangs and a girl with a uniform fetish. Throw in plenty of fan-service, random humor, an alternate medieval world, and your narrator DJ Condor, and you get We Without Wings - Under the Innocent Sky. According to Carlos Santos on Anime New Network ... Imagine a parallel universe where We, Without Wings is actually a good anime. Imagine that the story, with its surprise twists and intens

Bringing Newer Posts Links to Contempo on Blogger...

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The new themes from Blogger , brought some new features, but, also changed some existing features. The new themes allow one to navigate to older post snippets and to the home page, but, once you've moved past the first few pages of post snippets, there is no way to get back to a previous set of post snippets, except by returning to the home page and navigating through the older post snippets again. After poking around on the Blogger Help Forum , the official advice seems to be, if you want the newer and older navigation links, then you should use a theme that provides that functionality rather than the newly released themes. Well, I really like the new themes and I wasn't willing to go back to my previous theme just for the navigation, so, after a bit of experimentation with the HTML, I came up with a solution. To enable the newer post links in Contempo , you'll need to edit the theme HTML. As it happens, there are placeholders for both the newer post links and the prev

Pretty Dates for Contempo on Blogger...

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After the dust settled following the release of the New Blogger Templates , I took the opportunity to consider making some improvements to my site. I had seen some pretty dates on other sites and I thought that I might want to look into this for my own site. With Blogger, you have some control over the general format of the dates on your site, but, in the end the dates are just plain, boring text. I wanted something a bit nicer for the front page of the site, so, after poking around in the inner workings of my site and reviewing a number of pretty date schemes and advice from other sites, I came away with two thoughts. One, there wasn't really a convenient way to reformat the existing date text using only CSS. And, two, after reviewing a number of suggestions from other sites on how to make pretty dates, a common theme among the advice for making dates look pretty, is that the dates need to be broken up into their component parts (i.e.: Day, Month and Year) and the the date parts

Adventures At The Gates Of Hell...

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This is a bit off-topic, but, as a fan of the video game  Doom , I felt compelled to share. After my previous experiences getting the classic DOS-era first-person shooter, Doom to run on a Windows 10 PC using DOSBox and installing Doomsday to experience classic Doom with a technological makeover, I decided to try my hand at installing GZDoom 3.1.0 - Windows 64-bit . According to the ZDoom web site: ZDoom is a family of enhanced port of the Doom engine to modern operating systems. It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and adds new features not found in the games as originally published by id Software. Older ZDoom ports may be used and distributed free of charge. No profit may be made from the sale of it. GZDoom and its descendants from version 3.0.0 on are licensed GPL and are subject to the terms and restrictions of the new license. ZDoom was originally created by Randi Heit using id Software's and various others' sources. Its successor ports GZDoom and QZDoom

Random Posts in a Compact Format for Contempo...

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A few months ago,  Blogger  rolled out new templates. The popular posts gadget is a new feature of the Contempo template which displays a handful of snippets for the most popular posts. For the popular posts, I didn't necessarily want full blown snippets, but, rather just a handful of links. So, I adapted a custom  Related Posts  gadget to create a Compact Popular Post gadget. Then, I came across code for random posts on the Blogger Help forum and adapted the code for my own purposes into the following gadget to display random posts in a compact format: <script type="text/javascript"> var randomposts_number = 3; var randomposts_current = []; var total_randomposts = 0; var randomposts_current = new Array(randomposts_number); function randomposts(json) { total_randomposts = json.feed.openSearch$totalResults.$t } document.write('<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"/feeds/posts/default?alt=json-in-script&max-results=0&callback=rando

Murder Princess...

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Sometime ago, when video stores still stalked the streets of Philadelphia, I picked up Murder Princess ... In the kingdom of Forland - the stronghold of an ancient and powerful magic - a bloody coup led by Dr. Akamashi and his supernatural cyborg minions pushes the royal family to the brink of extinction. Forced to flee in the hopes of preserving her noble bloodline, Princess Alita crosses paths with the infamous bounty hunter Falis - a collision of souls that will alter the course of their lives forever. Recently, I took the opportunity to watch Murder Princess ... It should be noted that the series, at six episodes, is fairly short. After Alita and Falis bump into each other and fall off a cliff together, they manage to survive, but, are changed. After the change, the two main characters strike a bargain and at Alita's request, Falis intervenes on behalf of the kingdom. After some initial challenges with the evil doctor, Alita's brother shows up to save the day. Then, thin

Kyousougiga...

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I wanted something a bit out of the ordinary, so, I picked up Kyousougiga ... In Kyoto, nothing changes. No, not *that* Kyoto, but rather the "Mirror Capital" Kyoto, the world inside of a painting! Colorful, beautiful, but static, the people of this world live an idyllic, if boring life. That is, until Koto appears, like a wrecking ball slamming into still waters. Koto's never met her mother, and in search of clues about her missing parent, she winds up in the very place she's supposed to be, yet least expected. What unfolds is a tale of a crazy, mixed-up family, where the father has mysterious powers, the mother is a goddess, and the siblings have an intense rivalry that will finally see its conclusion... even if that conclusion brings about the attention of the Shrine, an organization dedicated to protecting the multiverse. Kyousougiga  centers on a blended family of demons, humans and half-demons who have taken refuge from a disapproving human world in a magic