when Ritsuko times out

Okay, so the clock isn’t really that useful – about the only way this would look good would be in Linux, on an already sparse Fluxbox/IceWM setup. But hey, go Miyako! I was rooting for her from the start, good to see that she pwns Kei this time around.

Frankly, episode 8 was just disturbing, especially for a Miyako fan like me.

But let’s move on. I like the direction this series is taking. Sure, the Chihiro/Renji arc took 3 episodes until it started becoming interesting, but the Miyako/Kei/Hirono arc more than made up for it. Plus, I like that movie maker guy. He reminds me very much of Manaka Junpei from Ichigo 100%, and while he is a far cry from that womanizer, he sure brings back the good old memories I had reading that manga, which adds points.

Goddammit, Renji, suck it down like a man already.

The ef clock on my desktop is just great. Too bad it disappears whenever i press Win+D. It would have been a great desktop widget otherwise, but the minimalist in me is just screaming for its abolition. The Miyako fan in me is wondering what in the world she is saying when the clock strikes the hour, and begs me for more time to translate it. Perhaps she’s telling me to go to sleep, it’s 3am already.

Pure genius scenes in ef so far: Miyako calling Hirono a hundred times before throwing her phone into the water, the screen filling with text each time she makes a phone call, and sneaky Kei erasing her calls on Hirono’s phone; Miyako and Hirono on the beach – the entire sequence – lovely; Kei running in episode 9’s epilogue (made more touching and beautiful because she had sworn to eradicate Miyako and her leg was injured); and Chihiro losing all her memories and waking up.

I’m starting to love this show.

EDIT: I got the 1080p Bluray rip of AIR and watched the hell out of it. My Core Duo T2050 at 1.6GHz managed to decode the H.264 1080p video smoothly (with LPCM encoded to FLAC for 6 channel audio? Holy FUCK!) with 70% CPU usage across both cores with CoreAVC. Yes, I know there were a lot of cores in that sentence.

Conclusion: AIR doesn’t deserve this kind of bitrate. I deleted it to make space in general, and also for a HD version of Planetes and GITS Solid State Society. But damn, I’d like to have that rip just for the novelty of it. 1080p H.264, with FLAC? That’d be a great burn-in test for the old PCs at the coop room! (hohoho, just slowly torture a Pentium 2 to death while it struggles to decode just the audio) but seriously, AIR doesn’t deserve the HD treatment. Give me some GITS. Haruhi. Even Code Geass. Not Evangelion, I already watched that a thousand times already. Kanon, yes, that might just deserve the HD treatment. Higurashi. Cowboy Bebop needs a Bluray release all right – with audio in LPCM format. Oh yes, uncompressed Cowboy Bebop audio. I’ll stop my greedy rantings right here.