Friday, August 13, 2004

So how do they get the little M's on M&M candies, again?
Well, yesterday we were off in San Diego (again), this time with a big moving truck, and we moved a ton of our grandmother's stuff out of her now spider-infested house. Before this everybody's been putting it off, but the time has finally come to make a move.

Earlier in the day I helped my dad with most of the heavy lifting and box-making. I swear, you can get so much entertainment out of those cardboard boxes.. My brother hid himself in a corner in three boxes that looked like they were just stacked there, and freaked all of us out. It was pretty funny to see my sleep-deprived aunt's reaction, heh.

Other things my brother did with the boxes:

- Sneak around in it and pop out ala Solid Snake

- Fell asleep in one with a blanket and a radio with country music playing

- Put things we were taking home in them, sealed them closed with tape, picked them up, put them in the truck and arranged them to optimize the amount of space used (Creative, huh?)

Our two-week-old cousin was sleeping in the living room for a good amount of time while we were packing, and my brother wasted a lot of time watching him. Little guy made lots of strange faces in his sleep when I was watching- he was a lot more "baby-cute" than when we saw him last week (At that time, he was still "ugly-and-pink-and-smushed-but-still-a-baby" cute).

My dad woke me up at eight for unpacking the truck, because he had to return it and go to work by 2, but I really didn't get up until 11-something.

And now that it's all unloaded, this house it totally packed with stuff. We moved our tried-and-true cream-colored leather couches out into the backyard temporarily to make room for the new couch which is only comfortable when you put tons of pillows on it. We have two end tables sitting next to each other in the middle of the room, next to a new one-person couch, which has absolutely no place to be in that room. Oh, and there's the new TV cabinet sitting between the dinnertable and the old TV cabinet. It doesn't have room for game consoles or too many DVDs, so a wonderful new solution has become apparent to us:

The computer cabinet of my grandmother shall now be used as a TV cabinet that shall be placed in this, the room with the computer, and one of the televisions will be in here as well.

So all I need in here is a toilet and I could spend all day in here. The Gamecube and PS2 will be in here, along with our good-as-new-but-still-lame computer and a TV. Isn't that just great?

But until everything's sorted out, this room is also a huge clutter of junk. Three boxes of stuff, a chair, an end table covered in bills and a disturbing Erte painting are nearly covering the entire entryway, so it's very hard to get in and out.

--

The other day when the computer had just stopped working I decided to go watch End of Evangelion for the first time since February. This action was motivated by the all-night Evathon over at my friend's house a week ago, and after watching the earlier half of the series over there (Which pales in comparison to the other half) made me want to watch the "better" parts of Eva.

So I decided to go with the movie. I had only seen it a couple times, after all.

End of Evangelion is a very, very good movie. I may have a rather limited number of theatrical anime releases under my belt, but EoE is not only my favorite in the animated category, but it's probably in my top ten movies of all time. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to rant about why it owns Spirited Away, Grave of the Fireflies and Ghost in the Shell combined .

I would first like to address the issue of the animation quality. The 26-episode series of Evangelion had extremely high quality fight scenes and production values (for its time), and animation should never be the first or only reason to go see a feature-length animated film, but End of Evangelion had some amazing visuals and it deserves some recognition.

To me, the most important aspect of animation is not fluidity or color but character designs. If a character's features are far off from the original designs in a scene, I stop enjoying a scene as much. It kills the mood. In End of Evangelion, however, everything is on-model in every frame, even when the ever-complicated Eva 02 is jumping around slicing off the heads of nine other complicated Evas.

The framerate during action sequences is flawless as well- The entire SEELE invasion was all so fluid. It's really impressive, when you consider how many people are onscreen at a time and how long it must have taken to get it all right. Asuka's last stand is another memorable scene that's so freakin' impressive. It's not my favorite scene ever (Rei II death for-evah, baby), but it's definitely noteworthy.

Next is the story itself. I found EoE to be a good mix between the two portions of Eva- the psychological one and the action-oriented one. A lot of people were really turned off by the last two episodes of TV-Eva, mostly because it was left so open-ended and with a ton of questions, not to mention that god-awful congratulations scene. Personally, I enjoyed them, but End of Evangelion was a better mix, with a better ending.

"But Sen, TV episodes 25 and 26 were open-ended and you're ignorant for not liking them more!"

Yes, TV eps 25 and 26 (Let's call them ending A) and EoE (Ending B) were both left rather open, but there are two kinds of open endings: The first one is a good open ending in which some things happen and you're left wondering about how things will pan out. It is a good ending. The other, however, is an ending where a bunch of random stuff happens and there's no possible way to have a decent idea of what had happened, which makes it rather hard to imagine what will happen next. Ending B was good-open, and Ending A was bad-open. Both left your head scratching, but Ending A left you scratching until you penetrated your skull and started tearing up delicate brain tissues. In a bad way.

Of course, they were both good, but this is all my amateur opinion. I just felt like ranting for a while.

Oh, and for the record, I had to turn off EoE in the middle of Giant Rei's encircling of Earth during Third Impact so I'm probably missing some sort of important information in here somewhere. Forgive me.
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