30DoA.17: Best Background Music: .hack//SIGN

Day 17 - Best Background Music: .hack//SIGN

I never got past the second disc of .hack, but I still own both of the soundtracks, because they have pretty, pretty music. My favorite aspect is the way vocals are used in some of the songs. While the lyrics are nice, they are all in English, so I'd imagine they'd be less distracting to a Japanese-language audience, who could then focus on the way human voices blend with the instruments to make a pleasing whole.

You know, sort of like the overuse of Ominous Latin Chanting gets used for everything.

( Here, have some Youtube videos of the music. )

Icon Totally Relevant... Sadly

Today has been a bit of a night. I ate too much or the wrong thing, so I felt kind of queasy til about 6. I've got a talk tomorrow that I was supposed to write, so I'm setting down to do that. I got some improvements on the data I was using -- mostly just reduction on the error bars -- but this is apparently radically changing my conclusions. That and one of the programs I tried to run was pretty borked*.

Then my evening got a bit more interesting. My upstairs neighbor let his sink overflow. I didn't notice until I heard a sort of dripping, cracking sound, which was water coming through my entryway light to hit the carpet. Until I went upstairs to check, I was worried it was a pipe or something that would require me to do more than put a bucket under it. Well, or call someone out here on a Sunday night to fix it -- the apartment complex keeps people on hand to handle such things, but calling one out would be a hassle.

But, thankfully, it was just my upstairs neighbor and his sink, so it stopped around the time I went up to ask if something was going on up there, and before I called someone.

Now, I should just sit down and write this talk, and then do damage control with my adviser after it for next week's conference. Granted, I'm pretty sure I can make a joke about this, since I've been to conferences where the presenter is like 'yeah, my conclusions have totally reversed themselves since I sent in my abstract'**. Not that good when I'm such an untried scientist, though. And I might have to retract my paper and resubmit it after re-writing the sucker.

I even have my potato. (It's a model for a moon -- talking about rotating coordinate frames is hard without a model.)

* I think I know why, now that I think about it. I just picked a bad way to turn a 3-D data set into a 2-D one. Which means I have a week to figure out a good way to represent a 3-D data set in a way that gives a physically meaningful answer.

** In one case, it was literally the night before.

30DoS.17: A pairing you thought would never work out, but did? Zuko/Mai

Day 17 - A pairing you thought would never work out, but did? Zuko/Mai

Or, rather, a pairing I thought could be badly executed so many ways during the show, but for which I was mostly satisfied with how it worked out.

Besides maybe Aang, Zuko went through the most character development throughout the series*. Hence my skepticism about romance, since it can be tricky enough to balance Zuko's changes within himself as well as extend this out to his this changes his relationships with other people.

( Zuko is pretty much designated as the Ambiguous Antagonist from... well, at least as soon as we get his backstory from Iroh.  )