Rotation

Besides being an awesome tune from Herb Alpert’s amazing Rise album, it is also a word that means going around in circles.

In this case, I am writing about the reviews of series I cycle around. With too many in rotation, it is time to finish out two to streamline things a little. So for the near future, Squid Girl season one and Bleach season one will be fast tracked since they are almost completed. Then the rest will resume their normal places.

The movie reviews will get loose rotation too. Marx Brothers films will be joined by Godzilla movies and Studio Ghibli animes, with other movies slotted in between. A couple of relatively unknown foreign films will be prioritized before I fully start rolling on that rotation.

But before any of that gets posted, I have to put up the 1979 video of the title tune. While Rise is a great tune and made the album a huge hit, this is by far my favorite track from it:

Pure music, late ‘70s style.

Enjoy.

Fractale Episode 4: Departure

Clain reunites with Phryne, but the light hearted adventure is gone when the price paid for the carnage ending the last episode begins to hit home for the Granite clan. While there are comic moments to be found, the series is darkening quickly as the Temple responds to the terrorist attack. Fractale: Reiterated continues with HD screen captures & revised text.

After the shock, if not whiplash, induced by the change in tone at the end of the third episode I had wondered where Fractale was headed.  Departure shows that the change is no fluke and integral to the storyline. More than that, it depicts that there are consequences for what you do in this fictional world. Harsh consequences…

Renovations to the Blog

This summer, I decided to do a little remodeling to the blog. Rather than change the visuals, I decided to change the accessibility of older posts. It has been a work in progress and I will continue to refine the layout as time goes on. One of these days I may even replace the old photo of me with something more recent, which will not be easy since I avoid having my ugly mug photographed.

The latest change involves using Blogger’s pages feature which was introduced last autumn. In keeping with the KISS model, there are now simple indexes to reviews with a new bar near the top allowing easy access. Eventually there may be new pages, but for the moment the categories of Home, Movie Reviews, Anime Series Reviews, and Television Series Reviews will be it in the tabs.

Hopefully, this will help people searching for more content they are interested in, since tags have turned out to be a little messier than I expected. With people clicking in from countries all over the world and from many different languages, simplicity is a must. Enough people have been using the tags for me to realize there might be a better way to go about things. It means a little more work for me, but it it should be worth it.

Comments are not allowed on the index pages in order to keep them neat, but any feedback is appreciated on individual posts, of course.

I never expected to have many hits on this blog, but I passed the 20,000 page view mark a month ago to my amazement. While it started out as a journal of sorts, it has become something more experimental than that. Being in on the Web relatively early, I find myself missing the random surfing of web rings and the excitement of finding something unusual. The Web may be more useful now, but it was a lot more fun back then.

So From the Sidelines is not going to be the usual blog that is purely personal, political, or other niche oriented. It is going to be an  oddball mix of some of my many interests with no apologies for any of it. Much like my DVD/Blu-ray collection has anime sitting next to highly acclaimed films next to cult classics next to box office hits without segregation, the posts here will be the same.

If I have managed to inform, entertain, or intrigue just one person having trouble sleeping or simply surfing the Net, then I am satisfied that I have returned a little of what I got to experience back in the 1990s when the World Wide Web was new.

So I thank all who have visited thereby keeping me intrigued and entertained from showing up in my stats and comments. It adds something to my life here on the sidelines.

Blogger Referral Spam and Twitter

After digging into my monthly stats on Blogger, a pattern emerged of links to apparently legitimate sites that really were not genuine. Instead, they used Twitter’s URL shortening service, T.co, to disguise the page. It turns out that some hits that I thought were real from stumbleupon.com were actually the exact same kind of spam as I previously wrote about here and here. Another falsified website referral using t.co I found was for cultek.com which is a biomedical company.

I have never liked link abbreviating services due to the amount of malicious code, pages, and photos they have been used for. Twitter has launched lawsuits and claim to be filtering how t.co handles links, but so far I am not impressed. It seems like services are always falling behind the black hats in cyberspace, so the moral of the story is for people to be very careful about what they click. Examine the entire link and be reluctant to click on a shortened one.

UPDATE:

Oh the irony. From the time I started writing this post to actually publishing it, another site with referral spam hit me, but not using t.co. This one is ultrafiles . net and is again out of Russia. The title of their website is Linkbucks . com and is another make money off of links site.

UPDATE: A day later, another fake link using devscripts.net and t.co, so the beat goes on.

UPDATE: July 31st brought a new falsified link using the same method, this time posing as myhealthscore.com.

UPDATE: Another one supposedly from filmhill.com that links to a video of how to get “lucky” using a fish. The absurdity is amazing and I am glad I have a little used browser in a sandbox to check these things.

The Dark Knight (2008) Review

After successfully rebooting Batman with a serious origin in Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan had high expectations to meet with both critics and movie goers. Determined to go “bigger” in every way often  and by unleashing an unforgettable version of the Joker, Nolan created a masterpiece. Brilliant, beautiful, thrilling, and contemplative, The Dark Knight is film making at its best. It is also a twisted bromance for the ages.

A sequel to a popular film is a very tricky thing to make for recapturing lightning in a bottle is rare. When successful, it can result in a superior film under the right hands. The Dark Knight is not that. Instead it transcends its predecessor to become a work of art that stands on its own. What is even more amazing is that it became a box office record breaker, which is unusual for such an intellectual film which also turned out to be surprising commentary on the War on Terror.

Let us dig into the film and see how he did it.

Health 7-26-2012

The bout with Lyme Disease took more out of me than I thought and it has been hard to get going this week. Allergies are flaring, so they share at least a little of the blame. What has surprised me is how physically weak I have gotten and it looks like it will be awhile before I get my strength back. My always shaky hands are now erratic at times and I have been accidently knocking things due to the large tremors. Irritating.

On a positive note, I have been hiking up the driveway in hot and humid weather to get the mail with no ill effects. It is strange the stamina is recovering faster than the strength. Headaches are subsiding too, which is good since those combined with allergies is true misery. Still it is not the summer I was hoping for.

Life or Something Approximating It

The past week was busy by my standards and this week looks to begin that way. Saturday and Sunday combined to make for a marathon run of events, so I am not feeling terribly good today. Two D&D sessions in a row contributed mightily to that, but at least we had one TPW (Total Party Wipeout). I did try to get the party killed in the first session, but the level five party managed to survive a mummy lord thanks to me and defeat a young adult green dragon that I attacked. He did have it coming after torturing my character, I must say.

I was rather surprised to be given the Diablo III Book of Cain hardcover by my friends hosting the second session. While I cannot yet afford the game, I always enjoyed the lore and storyline contained in the series which this book covers. It looks like it will be a fun read.