I’ve got my hands full at work at the moment, so blogging will continue to be light for the next week or so. Here’s a menagerie of… stuff…

I rewatched Gunparade March for the third time recently. I have to thank Omo for turning me on to the show way back when; it’s one of the few series I’ve bought on DVD sight unseen. Despite being riddled with a lot of annoying little imperfections, it’s a perfectly enjoyable show with a strong cast of characters. It’s also structured in such a way as to be fun to watch in large doses. That combined with its relatively short length makes it an easy rewatch.

One thing that I noticed this time around that I hadn’t noticed in the past was that Kenji Kawai was responsible for the show’s score. Now I know why I always loved the background music.

On the gaming front, I see that Gust and NIS are bringing Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis across the Pacific at the end of March. Since the game looks to be the successor to Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm - which I enjoyed quite a bit - I’ll be sure to buy it.

You may remember that I was working my way through Persona 3 not too long ago. The reality is, I haven’t touched the game since before Christmas, and my desire to continue is pretty much non-existent at this point. To be honest, I don’t have time for marathon gaming sessions, and while the mission based nature of Atelier Iris was such that I could play for an hour or two on occasion and actually accomplish something, the same amount of time in Persona 3 often feels like a complete waste of effort. Persona 3 is a good game, and I’d like to finish it, but it’ll have to wait.

Changing topics, my recent foray into live action Japanese dramas has resulted in an interesting discovery. The computer I use for fansub playback is older than dirt and thus isn’t all that useful for watching h264 or 720p encodes. I’ve been putting off replacing it for some time now, as it handles standard encodes marvelously, but with h264 really catching on with fansub groups, I figure it’ll be only a year or so before I simply have to do something, whether I like it or not.

Anyway, on occasions when I’ve watched h264 or 720p encodes, I’ve found that lag issues don’t really kick until about twenty minutes into an episode. Since the average anime episode only runs a few minutes longer than that, I’ve been able to make do, but with live action drama episodes running twice as long, it becomes an issue. It was during an episode of Hotaru no Hikari, however, that it dawned on me: if the processor simply wasn’t up to the task, why would it always wait twenty minutes before giving up the ghost? Clearly, whatever the problem was, it was a function of time.

Turns out, it was a temperature issue. Monitoring the temperature of the processor while watching an episode, I found the lag would always kick in once it reached a certain level. And it would usually take about twenty minutes to reach that level. My suspicion is that the processor intentionally throttles back at that point to prevent damage. Hence, the lag. Thankfully, I found that simply pausing playback for ten minutes once per episode in order to let things cool down made all the difference in the world. I’m glad I figured that out; now I can explore potentially cheaper cooling options without throwing a bunch of money at a new computer.

Although, I’d probably be better off just replacing the computer and being done with it. After all, I can get a nice little Core 2 Duo machine for under $500.

Finally, as thanks for reading this far, here’s Nanoha getting her ass kicked.

That’s all I’ve got.