I didn’t mean to depress everyone who read my last entry. If you’re feeling down, why not check out:

• a cheerful rocketship
• Alex Trebek
• my brother
• Captain America
• Gamespot’s insightful coverage
• Jean Reno playing DDR
• Street Mahjong Trance 2
• cute zombie girls
• Ryu’s detective work
• rounding errors in the Matrix

I found a postcard on my desk at lunch today. It was from a teacher at the hospital school in Maebashi where I teach by telephone about once a month. The English message was brief and to the point. “Dear Andrew, Did you come back to your home this winter vacation? I think you had a good time. On January 17th, Chihiro died at Gunma Univ. Hospital. So please don’t ask about it on Feb. 4th TV class, because we never talk about it to the other students. Thank you very much for your kind lesson and the special gift to Chihiro. He was happy. Yours, Ayako Shiraishi.”

I never met Chihiro in person, but I saw him over the TV telephone every four to six weeks. He was a first-year middle schooler and astonishingly smart, cheerful, and outgoing. I know it’s tempting to think I’m heaping post-humous praise on him, but I swear to you, he was the best middle-schooler for English that I ever met. He had leukemia. I wrote letters to him from time to time – rarely, really, but I always returned his letters and he returned mine – and I learned a bit more about him over the past eight months.

He really likes videogames, so I told him about my writing. He asked me how many games I have, and I gave him an honest answer. He told me, “I envy you because you have 500 Video games. I have about 40. Can I borrow some of your games? I want to read your writings in Famitsu.” I asked him about his Game Boy, and he told me, “My GBA SP color is platinum silver. Do you know it? Do you want Achamo orange color, right?” That’s so funny; from my habits and hobby, he could figure out what color SP I wanted.

He told me that he had started to learn to spin a top. A later letter mentioned that he couldn’t spin a top anymore, because he had to stay in bed.

He told me how one day he had had two chocolates, milk and dark, and he liked the dark one better. (I told you he was smart!) I told him about the Ghiradelli chocolate factory in San Francisco, and he said he wanted like to try some. I suggested his family should check an international grocery store, but he told me, “I can’t get Ghiradelli chocolate. I am very disappointed. I want to go to the factory, too.” So I had my family bring some Ghiradelli dark chocolate when they visited in August, and the kyoto-sensei of the Kiryu hospital school delivered it to Maebashi during one of his visits.

Here’s the last letter he sent me, in December. The nameplate says “BESUTARU.” I never wrote him back.

I wasn’t aware of how sick he was, though I suppose any child in the hospital for almost a year can’t be completely well. I keep second guessing myself – not beating myself up, just thinking. I should have been more diligent about writing him back; I should have driven out to Maebashi and delivered his chocolate myself; I should have lent him some games; hell, bought him some games. I’m sure he would have played and enjoyed them more than I.

I’m not religious. I don’t believe in an afterlife, and I don’t believe that Chihiro is in a better place now. I believe that he’s dead and I believe it’s a damned shame. If I were religious, I suppose that I’d have some sort of a coping mechanism for things like this. But I’m not, and I don’t know what to do except tell you about him and hang his nameplate on my desk.

The first casting information for the long-delayed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie came out today. People who know me know how well I love the books (at one point, I had about half the series commited entirely to memory). So it was with great trepidation that I read about this project finally getting off the ground. However, the casting is so intensely awesome that I have nothing but good vibes for the project now. Announced so far are: Martin Freeman (Tim from The Office) as Arthur Dent, Mos Def (!) as Ford Prefect, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, and Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast. Interestingly, Marvin will be three feet tall and played by Warwick Davis. Both Marvin’s costume and the Vogons are being designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The only major character left to cast is Zaphod, and given how great the rest of the casting is, I’m not worried. Personally, I’m rooting for Eddie Izzard.

Say what you will about the tenets of swedish engineering – at least it’s an ethos. (Shamelessly stolen from Davon Alder.)

I should give some context to the photos I posted a week or so ago, before it becomes entirely too gauche.

I arrived in Orlando on the afternoon of December 30th. There wasn’t time to go to a theme park or anything, so Ginny and I looked around for something to do near the hotel. We found a quasi-permanent Titanic exhibition which was pretty interesting; it had a lot of original blueprints, placesettings, menus, etc. from the ship itself, as well as some full-scale reconstructions of rooms, hallways, and so forth. It was interesting and not as movie maudlin as might be expected – it was a bit, of course, but for the most part it let the exhibit pieces and historical information speak for itself. That evening, the two of us played a round of Pirate Minigolf. I was down by like 8 strokes at the nine, yet managed to come ahead to win by 1 by the end. It was awesome! (Though Ginny might disagree.) We had dinner at an all-you-can-eat seafood/lobster buffet, where I had Oysters Rockfeller, lobster tails, crab legs, crab cakes, and other assorted chickens of the sea. Some goobermeisters had taken the raw fish from the sushi platter while leaving the rice, which made me positively livid. I ranted at Ginny for five minutes, demanding to be told how we could live in a world where people were so goddamned stupid every single minute of every goddamned day. We had a coupon from the hotel front desk for a free drink; I made the mistake of ordering an American beer, having forgotten how they tasted after a year in Japan.

The next day, December 31st, we went to the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, a.k.a. EPCOT. We were planning to go to the park during the day and to Pleasure Island for New Year’s that evening. I mean, Pleasure Island is the place where every night is New Year’s, so New Year’s itself must be totally awesome, right? We’ll never know, unfortunately, as the price of admission was upped to $90 a head – just to get in, that’s before you start buying drinks or anything. Neither of us wanted to be the first to suggest a change of plans – but when we found out that EPCOT was open until 1 A.M., and that DJs, drinks, and party favors would be scattered throughout the world pavillion that evening, we both agreed that staying at EPCOT would make a lot more sense – after all, $90 could get us two or three extraordinarily nice meals, and we’ve turned into unadventurous homebodies in our old age.

Nich, who recently attended an event for Phantasy Star Online Episode III: Compressed Alternate Reality Data Revolution, shares my love of expanded acronyms. Which is why I spent all day annoying Ginny by telling her bald-faced lies prefaced with “In the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow…” For example, Ginny might say, “So what’re we doing for lunch?” and I’d say, “In the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, food is available only in pill form.” And if she asked me what time it was, I might tell her that “The Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow has advanced beyond such twenty-first century concepts as linear time.” Sometimes I would volunteer factoids independently, such as, “Did you know that each of the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow’s countries in the world pavillion is an autonomous embassy of its host government? That’s why so many foreigners come to Disney World over the holidays; they have twelve times as many places at which they can declare political asylum.”

She hit me a lot.

We didn’t ride any rides in EPCOT; December 31st is the busiest day of the year, and the wait for most of them was upwards of three hours. Instead, we spent the day bumming around the Imaginariums (“In the Experimental City of Tomorrow, Imaginators are treated like rock stars”), the aquariums, and especially the world pavillion. Going to the Japan pavillion was a strange experience; it’s fake and faux and hokey, yes, but at the same time somewhat authentic. It felt strange not because anything in the pavillion rang false, but simply because so much was left out. Rows of instant ramen and vacuum cleaners in the stores; Japanese signage with no English equivalents; drunk oyaji drinking disposable sake cups out of a brown paper bag. It was like walking through someone’s selective memories. The Japan pavillion had a nifty tin toy exhibit on loan from a Tokyo museum.

It was easy to differentiate the authentic Japanese tourists from the Japanese-Americans by the quality of Engrish on their t-shirts. Speaking of, someone in Norway saw my WIGU shirt and complimented me on my fine taste in webcomics. I thanked him, then noticed that he was wearing a Roast Beef “What We Need More of is Science” shirt from Achewood. So I was able to return his surprise, with a vengeance.

That evening, we ate dinner at the teppanyaki steakhouse – it was delicious, and I got to chat with our server in Japanese for a bit. I also had a Kirin, which confirmed my suspicions about the previous night’s Budweiser. Japanese beer is different, by which I mean potable. That evening’s fireworks show was great; in addition to the regular Illuminations show, they had a special twenty-minute New Year’s countdown for each country in the order they rang in 2004. Since America is dead last before the International Date Line, this made for a lot of extra music, fireworks, and celebrating.

You might not be aware that each country in the world pavillion is exclusively staffed by actual members of the country. Leaving the park after midnight, we walked through a number of pavillions and saw the staff of each celebrating the new year with traditional dances, songs, etc. This wasn’t some scripted part of the Disney Experience – it was just people thousands of miles from their homes suddenly and instinctively celebrating the new year in the ways they had their entire life. It was rather surreal.

New Year’s Day we got up bright and early to learn about the wonders of Orlando timeshare. It wouldn’t be gentlemanly to assign blame for this fiasco, so instead I’ll just say it wasn’t my fault, and let you deduce the rest. Though I might have done more to save us, admittedly. When the swarthy man in the hotel lobby asked it we wanted to save some money on park tickets by seeing a 90-minute presentation at a nearby hotel, I probably should have said something like, “FOR CHRISSAKES, GINNY, NO, NO, NO, DO NOT GIVE THIS MAN A DEPOSIT, DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT WITH HIM, RUN AWAY NOW, BUY YOUR TICKETS AT FULL PRICE, AND GIVE PRAISE TO THE HEAVENS FOR YOUR FREEDOM,” instead of, “I dunno … I don’t think this is a good idea … no really … I don’t think this is a good idea … *wink wink* … maybe we should go … come on … no, I don’t think so … *wink wink*” Ginny, see, had no idea what timeshare was or what we were getting involved in, which is why she so insisted we pursue this once-in-a-lifetime money-saving opportunity. I, well aware they were crooks, liars, swindlers, and thieves, tried and failed to communicate the severity of our situation via frantic and repeated eyebrow gestures.

We got lumped together with another couple who were fun and interesting to talk to – sharing our misery is the only way that we survived the interminable tour and schpiel. The girl, it turned out, had a job so boring that we used it as a punchline at gamers.com: she quite literally coded drivers for Lexmark. The guy was a machinist who built printer prototypes. They were from Kentucky and Tennessee and lovely people. In the end, we had to refuse purchasing a timeshare condo, purchasing part of a timeshare condo, leasing to own a timeshare condo, and then just putting a deposit down for a future vacation. A leathery manager come to our table at the end to try to “seal the deal” and all I could think of was Geoff Mulligan. The 90 minutes stretched into four hours, but goddammit, we escaped without buying anything and saved $60 on our Sea World tickets.

Ginny and I had to tell the timeshare corporation we cohabited in order to get our discount. For all I know, we’re now bound in a common-law marriage in the state of Florida.

Sea World was fun, but easily doable in six hours. We saw two live shows, some sharks and manatees, and I got to touch a manta ray. They’re super velvety smooth; I wouldn’t mind a pair of ray gloves. I learned that when killer whales are in captivity for too long, their fins start to sag. From depression, I guess.

That evening, I had the best meal of my entire life at a restaurant called Tu Tu Tango. It was a kitschy-yet-legitimately-cool, tapas restaurant. There were artists painting in the restaurant and fire dancers and belly dancers. The waitstaff wore street clothes in place of a uniform. The specialty drink menu – this was the coolest – was delivered on a ViewMaster 3D. There were four different kitchens in the restaurant depending on what kind of food you ordered. We had kimchi-glazed ribs, sweet-and-sour cheese quesadillas, cajun chicken eggrolls, some kind of mussel dish, a tuna sashimi salad, and the most, most luscious chocolate kahlua baileys milkshake for dessert. It was utterly decadent from start to finish; each dish was like the Platonic ideal of anything similar I might have eaten in my life before. I would put it up there with my Tsukiji fish market 7:00 A.M. sushi for “how can I ever hope to top this?”

January 2nd we woke up, rented a car, and drove the hour or so to the Kennedy Space Center. The center went through a $150 million renovation a few years back, so there was a ton to see and do that wasn’t there when I went as a child. There was a rocket garden with numerous spacecraft, some museums, moon and Mars rocks to touch, and an IMAX 3D feature filmed on the International Space Station. The bus tour took us past the spaceship construction building – a space so large that, unfiltered, it forms its own internal weather patterns – and towards a viewing area for the various launching pads. Finally, we arrived up at the new Apollo/Saturn V complex. This huge, warehouse-sized building has a great introductory film that ends with you filtering into the “firing room,” a theater with the original Apollo 8 equipment on display and a number of status indicator lights and video screens replicated throughout. It recreates the three minute countdown to Apollo 8’s launch in meticulous and harrowing detail, culminating with the windows rattling thunderously. As you watch the status indicators on the sideboard light up one-by-one, it’s hard not to feel a chill when the one reading “COMMIT” comes on. The Apollo/Saturn V building itself houses a fully assembled Saturn V rocket – over 363 feet long – as well as information, news clippings, and assorted bric-a-brac for each of the Apollo missions.

It’s kind of depressing how many of the exhibits were written in the future potential tense. “One day, man may return to the moon.” “In the future, man may visit Mars.” It’s a popular cliche that we’re living in the age of science-fiction, but I sometimes feel like that generational window has closed. Lucky me gets to live in the post-boom dystopia.

That evening, Ginny and I explored the Eastern Florida seaboard in its entirety, twice, as we searched for Cocoa Beach. Eventually, we found a small, unlit parking lot that claimed to border the beach. After much debate, we left the car, walked onto the beach, didn’t get mugged, stuck our feet in the water, noticed the beach is really cold at night, declared our outing a success, and drove back to Universal City Walk.

UCW is fun, if a bit cheesy and extraordinarily commerciall. It’s also where the entirety of Orlando youth culture goes to practice being delinquent. We ate dinner at a pan-South America fusion cuisine restaurant called Latin Quarter, where I had my third and best fajita platter of my stay in America. They knew what they were doing; the steak was an actual, thick-cut hunk of real steak, not the “strip steak” you’re usually saddled with. Yum. Desert was at Cinnabon; I ate half a Cinnabon, well satisying my icing quota for the next five years.

Animal Kingdom was the morning and early afternoon of January 3rd, our last day. You can see what I did in the photo album, so I’ll save my breath. One nice thing about the Animal Kingdom was how weathered and coherent each of the different areas felt – though it was built only five years or so ago, it feels like it’s been around for thirty or so. Disney’s obsessive-compulsive engineering never fails to impress. The other nice thing to note was that the cast members were – not to be lookist – generally less attractive than those at the other theme parks. Not unattractive, mind you, just less perky, clean-cut cute. The upshot was that they were extremely well informed. I got the vibe that, when it had come time to hire, adorability had been beaten out by knowledgeability. That afternoon, I flew back to Dallas. And slept.

I had a super fun weekend – just ask my wallet! Saturday afternoon, I went into Tokyo and met my friend Joe, who’s visiting from the States, in Akihabara. Good finds include a Shin Megami Tensei Nine LE box for 2000y – a savings of 10800y off the MSRP – and a new copy of Kunoichi for 2780y. Sega’s loss is my gain! I also picked up the Famicom DVD for a wallet-breaking 5000y, the new Cocco DVD/single for 3000y, and a ton of assorted budget software for friends in the states. The budget software represents the moral lesson of Akihabara, I think: low prices make for poor moral judgement.

The Cocco DVD, Heaven’s Hell, is a fundraiser for Operation: Gomi Zero, an Okinawa clean-beach initiative she started. Your 3000y gets you a two-track CD single, an 8-page comic and liner notes, a one-hour documentary DVD about the making of the song, and a video. It says something about my level of Cocco fanboyism that I was really, legitimately, totally unironically looking forward to watching Cocco talk about trash for an hour. It says something else entirely that, after watching the documentary, I thought: “that was so awesome!” Still, I learned two things of interest to foreign Cocco fans: Cocco’s spoken English is really quite good; better than one would expect from her sometimes wonky English lyrics. She gave a presentation to kids at an American school in Okinawa which tickled me all over. (“My name is Cocco. My hobby is picking up gomi! How about you?”) Second, the entire DVD has English subtitles throughout. It’s unclear what Cocco fans besides myself and Joe will benefit from these subs, but hey, I’m not complaining.

Sunday afternoon, I went to the Level-X Famicom exhibit at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. It was extraordinarily cool; moreover, it was packed, which surprised me – I guess the exhibit had some crossover appeal beyond “people who work in the gaming industry.” The bulk of the exhibit was every Famicom game’s package, ever, arranged in roughly chronological order in glass display cases around the edge of the room. Joe, Colin and I spent about 90 minutes making the rounds, trying to determine what games were what in English and having a natsukashii time. The exhibit also had some video interviews with game designers playing games they created displayed on a creative five-screen, d-pad style video installation. “Up” was the designer’s head, “center” was their hands and controller technique, and “down” was their feet. “Left” displayed the interviewer’s questions without sound, while “right” showed the gameplay footage. Very creative and cool. There were also some original design documents for famous Nintendo games, such as graph paper maps for Metal Gear, originally called Infiltrator, and storyboards designing the Pokemon “Get” animation. You could play Famicom games, one or two player, on a huge video wall, while another video wall showed footage of the last Famicom ever produced being assembled, packaged, and shipped. A hardware installation had everything from the SG-1000 to the Xbox mounted sequentially on a wall, while another wall had baseball games from the Famicom to the Xbox on playable display, giving an immediate and visceral representation of just how far technology has come in 20 years. They even had Virtual Boy baseball in the lineup – it and the Xbox version were the only two not being played. I had fun and picked up the book in the museum store; it contains pictures of every Famicom game ever, with bilingual descriptions for many.I’m thanked in the back, though it looks like they didn’t use the edited version of the Miyamoto interview I submitted, so I guess I’m thanked because I tried real hard-like and all.

Sunday night, I went to the best concert I’ve ever attended, fra-foa. If you haven’t heard fra-foa’s music, it’s hard to explain what makes them so powerfully good. The Engrish webpage tells us that the “group name “fra-foa” does not have a significant meaning. The vocalist CHISAKO invented this name by the pronunciation of this word which represents a kind of floating feeling or image. The characteristic of fra-foa’s music is energetic vocals like a flashing blue light out of the roaring sound of distortion guitars and drums. LIVE PERFORMANCE is very essential to fra-foa. The audience perceives the tremendous energy release as well as the catharsis from their performance.” Joe – on whose generous fanclub membership I attended – said it was like watching someone get on stage and slit their wrists for you. It’s not nearly as graphic or emotionally pornographic as that might sound, but it feels that intense, especially in a small, packed club of 300 people. “Catharsis” is the operable word; the band and audience both spent the entire hour and a half jumping up and down, shouting, getting carried away in the music. Chisako herself was overcome and dropped out from singing a few times. And I hope you don’t think less of me for admitting I was sobbing by the end of Kirameyuku Mono. Well, sobbing and smiling and jumping up and down and screaming and laughing. It was kind of a complicated reaction. When performed live, that song has a three-minute instrumental extro, and I’m fairly certain that they added it to give everyone a chance to compose themselves before continuing. I’ve always loved fra-foa, but seeing them live has given their music another dimension.

Really, this weekend was just about perfect, and if the hearing ever returns to my right ear, I can honestly say that I have no regrets! Huzzah.

It would be in extremely poor taste for me to mock my Omama students simply because they are, shall we say, not as academically oriented as the angels at Kiritaka. So I present the following transcripts of today’s quiz game with only the purest of intentions. Assume that most of these interchanges took place in Japanese.

Student A: What does “capitals” mean?
Andrew: Shuto.
Student A: Oh, like New York.
Andrew: Uh, New York’s not the capital of America.
Student B: Yeah, stupid, it’s Los Angeles!
Andrew: …

Student: Are there one hundred dollars in a yen?

Andrew: This category is “How Many.” For example, how many fingers do you have?
Student: Five!
Andrew gives the student a funny look.
Student: Oh, you mean both hands?

Andrew: What are the names of three presidents of the United States?
Student: Santa Claus …
Andrew presses the “incorrect” buzzer for a very long time.

Andrew: What were Cinderella’s shoes made of?
Student: Nike.

Student: What does “b-o-o-k” mean?

Andrew: Who wrote the “Lord of the Rings” books?
Student: Baggins!

Andrew: How many states are in America?
Student: Thirteen!
Andrew: Close. Two hundred twenty years ago, there were thirteen. But America got bigger, and today, there are more.
Student (shocked): They changed it?!

I’m falling behind on my New Year’s promise to keep you informed of my media influx, so:

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville: The hype going into this book was nearly insurmountable; while it didn’t change my life, it didn’t disappoint, either. It’s not clear if this book is fantasy or science fiction; the setting, the sprawling city of New Crobuzon in the world of Bas-Lag, is a grimy, overflowing melting pot of races, creatures, and medieval, Victorian, and modern scientific and magical worldviews. Despite the occasional “magical” elements, however, this book is seriously grounded in the real, day-to-day world of dirt and sin. I’ve read books before that treat their fantastic elements in a serious and ordinary fashion, but this is one step beyond it: this is fantasy as debased, not just ordinary but almost excruciatingly boring. The writing is dense, textured, and literary, but never precious. The characterizations are spot on. I was somewhat surprised that, after after two hundred pages as a fantastically detailed and interesting character- and world-building piece, the book takes a sharp turn towards gothic horror/thriller. Fortunately, as the novel progresses, these new, fantastic elements (even by the standards of the world, this crisis is highly unusual) find their place. The book’s greatest success is in the fidelity with which the imaginary city and cultures of New Crobuzon is realized; the impression the reader is left with is not of a few isolated locations and events, but of an interconnected, interwoven mesh of high and low, good and bad, fantastic and mundane. It is a city. Miéville’s next novel, The Scar, goes beyond the walls of New Crobuzon to explore more of the world of Bas-Lag; given the obvious strength of his world-building, I can hardly wait to see what’s next.

Strangehaven by Gary Spencer Millidge: The summaries at amazon.com do as good a job as I could of explaining this non-standard comic series. Basically, it’s beautifully-rendered, quaint small-town English paranoia – Twin Peaks meets the Prisoner, for your Hollywood high-concept pitch. The series strengths are in its insanely detailed, nearly photo-realistic black and white artwork, its slow, langorous pacing, and its laser-like focus on characters. Something is seriously wrong with the town of Strangehaven – you can’t leave it, for pete’s sake, there’s hardly any children, there’s a murderous quasi-Mason cult which seems to involve everyone in town, and there’s an unseen old man who keeps a young woman in a fishtank. Despite the obvious terrifying and probably supernatural forces at work in the town, however, Millidge focuses instead on the characters, devoting a page here to a discussion of English pickle brands, or several pages to Alex, the protagonist, sweating through a job interview. It’s slow – too slow, some might feel – but focusing on character relationships and stresses instead of overtly supernatural elements keeps the paranoia and tension high. Undoubtedly my favorite so far of the comics I picked up over break. (There are two trade paperbacks currently available, though amazon.com only carries the first.)

American Splendor: I didn’t take any great life messages from this character study of eccentric Harvey Pekar, beyond “follow your dream” or “the working man is people, too.” Still, this film’s integration of actors, real people, interviews, archival footage, live action, animation, and still comics is ridiculously good. It is a tour-de-force of production design and mixed media integration, and for that reason alone should be required viewing. It doesn’t hurt that it’s pretty darn funny, too.

The Big Lebowski: I’d never seen this movie, somehow, an oversight my brother saw fit to fix via focused Christmas giving. Thanks, Charles! It’s great, you’ve seen it, so hey. Perhaps the most surprising thing to me was how much it felt like a Coen Bros.’ movie – somewhere along the way, I had picked up the impression that this was a Hollywood sellout flick that lacked their usual charms of character and pacing. Uh … I was wrong! A sadistic black comedy riff on Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, it somehow manages to find a tone that perfectly matches L.A. intrigue with bowling slackers. Quite funny and eminently quotable. The Dude, quite honestly, is an archetype for the cinematic ages. Anyone who drinks that many Caucasians is okey in my book.

Early morning at Omama, and I have two free periods in a row. Nothing to do but propogate a LiveJournal meme! I normally pass on those, but this one is fun: take the IMDB Top 250 Movies and bold the ones you’ve seen. The IMDB ranking is far from a critical list – much as I enjoyed it, Return of the King is not the fourth best movie of all time – but it seems like a good enough place to start. After I’m done, I should be able to make a short-yet-embarassing list of “movies I really, really need to see ASAP.” For bonus embarassment, I will italicize movies I either own on DVD or have downloaded off the Interweb, but have yet to watch. For those of you with other things to do today, there will be a statistical breakdown and analysis at the end – feel free to skip straight there.

(Note: As this entry is rather long, I’ll move it to a separate HTML page once I get home this afternoon. But remote web updating means you get a big, fat infodump for now.)

IMDB top 250 movies (ones I’ve seen bolded)
001. The Godfather (1972)
002. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
003. The Godfather: Part II (1974)
004. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
005. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
006. Schindler’s List (1993)
007. Casablanca (1942)
008. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, (2001)
009. Seven Samurai (1954)
010. Star Wars (1977)
011. Citizen Kane (1941)
012. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
013. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
014. Rear Window (1954)
015. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
016. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
017. Memento (2000)
018. The Usual Suspects (1995)
019. Pulp Fiction (1994)
020. North by Northwest (1959)
021. Amelie (2001)
022. Psycho (1960)
023. 12 Angry Men (1957)
024. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
025. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966)
026. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
027. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
028. Goodfellas (1990)
029. American Beauty (1999)
030. Vertigo (1958)
031. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
032. The Matrix (1999)
033. Apocalypse Now (1979)
034. The Pianist (2002)
035. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
036. Some Like It Hot (1959)
037. Taxi Driver (1976)
038. Once Upon a Time in The West (1968)
039. The Third Man (1949)
040. Paths of Glory (1957)
041. Fight Club (1999)
042. Spirited Away (2001)
043. Das Boot (1981)
044. Double Indemnity (1944)
045. L.A. Confidential (1997)
046. Chinatown (1974)
047. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
048. Requiem for a Dream (2000)
049. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
050. M (1931)
051. All About Eve (1950)
052. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
053. Se7en (1995)
054. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
055. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
056. Raging Bull (1980)
057. City of God (2002)
058. Rashomon (1950)
059. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
060. The Sting (1973)
061. Alien (1979)
062. American History X (1998)
063. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
064. Leon: The Professional (1994)
065. Life is Beautiful (1997)
066. Touch of Evil (1958)
067. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
068. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
069. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
070. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
071. The Great Escape (1963)
072. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
073. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
074. Amadeus (1984)
075. Annie Hall (1977)
076. Jaws (1975)
077. Ran (1985)
078. On the Waterfront (1954)
079. Modern Times (1936)
080. Braveheart (1995)
081. High Noon (1952)
082. The Apartment (1960)
083. The Sixth Sense (1999)
084. Fargo (1996)
085. Aliens (1986)
086. The Shining (1980)
087. Strangers on a Train (1951)
088. Blade Runner (1982)
089. Metropolis (1927)
090. Duck Soup (1933)
091. Finding Nemo (2003)
092. Donnie Darko (2001)
093. The General (1927)
094. Toy Story 2 (1999)
095. The Princess Bride (1987)
096. City Lights (1931)
097. Run Lola Run (1998)
098. The Great Dictator (1940)
099. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
100. The Seventh Seal (1957)
101. Notorious (1946)
102. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
103. Cinema Paradiso (1989)
104. Rebecca (1940)
105. Princess Mononoke (1997)
106. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
107. The Big Sleep (1946)
108. The Graduate (1967)
109. Manhattan (1979)
110. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
111. It Happened One Night (1934)
112. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
113. Patton (1970)
114. The Searchers (1956)
115. The Deer Hunter (1978)
116. Glory (1989)
117. The Bicycle Thief (1948)
118. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
119. Yojimbo (1961)
120. The African Queen (1951)
121. Bringing Up Baby (1938)
122. Forrest Gump (1994)
123. Ben-Hur (1959)
124. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
125. The Green Mile (1999)
126. Shrek (2001)
127. Talk to Her (2002)
128. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
129. Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983)
130. Unforgiven (1992)
131. Stalag 17 (1953)
132. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
133. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
134. Gone with the Wind (1939)
135. The Night of the Hunter (1955)
136. The Wild Bunch (1969)
137. The Straight Story (1999)
138. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
139. A Christmas Story (1983)
140. The Elephant Man (1980)
141. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
142. The Hustler (1961)
143. Platoon (1986)
144. Young Frankenstein (1974)
145. Back to the Future (1985)
146. His Girl Friday (1940)
147. Die Hard (1988)
148. Grand Illusion (1937)
149. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
150. Amores Perros (2000)
151. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
152. Almost Famous (2000)
153. The Gold Rush (1925)
154. Spartacus (1960)
155. The Conversation (1974)
156. Charade (1963)
157. Life of Brian (1979)
158. Gladiator (2000)
159. The Celebration (1998)
160. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
161. Wild Strawberries (1957)
162. Being John Malkovich (1999)
163. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
164. Magnolia (1999)
165. Sling Blade (1996)
166. Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
167. Toy Story (1995)
168. The Insider (1999)
169. Roman Holiday (1953)
170. Mulholland Dr. (2001)
171. A Night at the Opera (1935)
172. Brazil (1985)
173. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
174. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
175. All the President’s Men (1976)
176. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
177. The Exorcist (1973)
178. The 400 Blows (1959)
179. To Be or Not to Be (1942)
180. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
181. The Killing (1956)
182. Lost in Translation (2003)
183. Mystic River (2003)
184. Ed Wood (1994)
185. The Terminator (1984)
186. Red (1994)
187. Adaptation (2002)
188. Nosferatu (1922)
189. Stand by Me (1986)
190. Twelve Monkeys (1995)
191. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
192. Harvey (1950)
193. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
194. The Right Stuff (1983)
195. Gandhi (1982)
196. Trainspotting (1996)
197. Network (1976)
198. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
199. The Lion in Winter (1968)
200. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
201. Minority Report (2002)
202. Hero (2002)
203. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
204. The Others (2001)
205. Rain Man (1988)
206. Laura (1944)
207. Groundhog Day (1993)
208. Stagecoach (1939)
209. 8 1/2 (1963)
210. Snatch (2000)
211. King Kong (1933)
212. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
213. The 39 Steps (1935)
214. Traffic (2000)
215. La Strada (1954)
216. The Untouchables (1987)
217. Rio Bravo (1959)
218. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
219. Henry V (1989)
220. Whale Rider (2002)
221. The Big Lebowski (1998)
222. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
223. All About My Mother (1999)
224. Joan of Arc (1928)
225. In the Heat of the Night (1967)
226. The Thin Man (1934)
227. The Killer (1989)
228. Planet of the Apes (1968)
229. Good Will Hunting (1997)
230. Fantasia (1940)
231. Being There (1979)
232. Red River (1948)
233. Clerks (1994)
234. A Beautiful Mind (2001)
235. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
236. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
237. M*A*S*H* (1970)
238. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
239. Road to Perdition (2002)
240. The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
241. The Quiet Man (1952)
242. Sleuth (1972)
243. X2: X-Men United (2003)
244. JFK (1991)
245. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
246. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
247. Heat (1995)
248. The Sweet Hereafter (1997)
249. The Birds (1963)
250. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Statistical breakdown: 10/10, 19/20, 36/50, 68/100, 123/250
Movies I own but have yet to watch: 11
Movies I feel I should really see: North by Northwest; Lawrence of Arabia; The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; The Maltese Falcon; American History X; The Manchurian Candidate; Planet of the Apes; Treasure of the Sierra Madre; The Elephant Man; Die Hard; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; everything by Hitchcock
Top five movies I would recommend you see if you haven’t: Singin’ in the Rain, Unforgiven, Donnie Darko, The Man Who Would Be King, A Clockwork Orange
Three least favorite movies I’ve seen: Life is Beautiful, Glory, Forrest Gump
Most conspicuous absence: Moulin Rouge
Movie I haven’t seen that most offends you by its omission: please leave a comment!

I’m too tired to write about my vacation up right now – that’ll come tomorrow. But I finally finished culling, thumbnailing, captioning, and HTMLing the photographs from my trip to Orlando. Check out the Titanic Exhibition and Pirate Minigolf, the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, Sea World and Tu Tu Tango, Kennedy Space Center, Cocoa Beach, and Universal City Walk, and the Animal Kingdom. And if there’s anything you particularly want me to comment on in my writeup, leave a comment!

I don’t want to encourage piracy, but I feel there’s should be some sort of moral exception made for TV shows generally available over the airwaves for free. There should be a further exception for quality programming on TV channels only carried by a small fraction of nationwide carriers. And when the program stars Yours Truly talking for pretty much every goddamned moment of its 22-minute running time, I have little choice but to don my eyepatch and give a hearty “Arr!” So fire up your BitTorrent client of choice, install any video/audio codecs you might be missing, and grab the Final Fantasy episode of G4’s Icons. I tried mirroring the torrent locally, but my server’s not equipped with the proper MIME-types, so. The file has about 60 seeds currently, but that’s going to drop as time passes. So grab it while the gettin’s good!

This nerd test has been making the Internet rounds lately. It’s a great deal more amusing, informative, comprehensive, and challenging than tests of this type usually are, so I recommend you to check it out. I got a score of 69%, which is either very impressive or very embarassing.

In other nerdy news, I feel that my new message board avatar is totally awe-inspiring.