Metablog

Anders loves Maria is my new favorite comic next to Sinfest and Gunnerkrigg Court. Check it out. Awesome webcomic. The art style near the beginning isn’t too hot, but the artist really hits her stride later on. Check out this little interlude done in a slightly more artsy style. In fact, medium changes like this appear to happen frequently, as the artist gets tired of vector graphics, or her scanner breaks preventing hand-inking. But the underlying style is the same regardless. Human expressions are conveyed expertly, in a slightly exaggerated way that’s a bit offputting at first, but you later grow to love. The author, a Swede, is not prudish in the way many Americans are, which is refreshing. (It’s a webcomic, god dammit! I’m an adult! A little nudity won’t reduce me to a small puddle of mush! (Though nudity and sex aren’t the only ways this is exhibited in the comic.)) Updates are fairly consistent, though frequency has been all over the place. Currently it’s at 3/week.

The story explores the evolving relationship between its two main characters, Anders and Maria. We follow them through her impregnation, Anders’ affair and their breakup, and then the ways in which they eventually reconcile. We take trips into the past to explore the history of each character to see how it shapes their current character. Everything stays quite realistic, only asking you to suspend disbelief that Anders is the inheritor of a large fortune and a celebrity in Sweden. (Maria, on the other hand, hails from the working class.)

Oh, and I’ve linked to them before, but Gunnerkrigg Court is still awesome.

I got an Ipod nano last Christmas. I didn’t use it. Well, I finally got around to fixing some problems with my dynamic compressor so I can my classical music on there the way I like it, and extracting the contents of my old linux hard drive (which has been in my machine for a long time, but with its contents inaccessible) with lots of my mp3s on it, and getting a large backup drive to store everything on, and I think I’m almost ready to start using the damn thing. What a lot of work it is!

So I plug it in, and it doesn’t come on. No big surprise—the battery’s dead. I wait two hours. Nope, still dead. I look up how to reset the thing, try it, no results. I’m not seeing anything at all on the LCD screen. Not even the “recharging the graphic” battery you’re supposed to see. Well that’s just great.

So, two days pass. I take a look at the Ipod. Oh, look, it’s on. Interesting. Battery still dead, but at least showing a menu. Not connecting to ITunes, but it’s on.

Oh, look. Now it’s not.

Hmm. This is going to take some work.

Lack of posting due to depression, stress, and working on projects (Lojban translation, Isabelle theorem prover, dynamic compressor) rather than posting. The dynamic compressor’s about ready to release, once I get around to it. I have it as a standalone tool now that does batch processing and is much faster and more memory-efficient (well, except for the fixed overhead of .NET) than the old one.