Samurai Champloo just came out in Japan last week and, in fact, today is when episode two should be showing. Samurai Champloo is the latest series from Shinichiro Watanabe. Why should you care? Well he is also the writer/director of the Cowboy Bebop series, which if you haven’t seen yet, you should definitely check it out (try Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim).

Anyway, two of the fansub groups I keep up with are currently subbing the series. Animeforever was the first one that actually came out, followed shortly by Anime-Kraze. These two subs are actually quite different–Animeforever’s sub seems more refined and definitely contains less cursing while Anime-Kraze’s sub seems more gritty and probably closer to what the characters are actually saying (lots of cursing). When it comes down to it, I prefer the sub from Animeforever, but I encourage everyone with lots of bandwidth to download both and decide for yourself.

About the actual show–it’s good! This will surprise you if you watch the intro which is horrible. The english opening song is pseudo-rap and pretty bad, so don’t judge the show based on the opening. The animation style is darker and murkier than what I generally watch, but some people will argue this is the true anime style. The show sort of reminds me of Cowboy Bebop in the animation department but the flow is fun and crazy like FLCL, although this ends up making a lot more sense than FLCL ever did. ;)

The bittorent tracker page for Animeforever can be found here and the one for Anime-Kraze can be found here, also both sites have channels on irc.rizon.net (alt. server: irc.rizon.org) with really fast xdcc bots. I can download an episode in under ten minutes from irc and it’s only that long because that is the max of my cable modem speed (this becomes untrue when new episodes are released and the bots are swamped, just a warning). If you don’t know how to use irc to download stuff, there are a couple of good guides available: guide one and guide two.

Edit: Updated Animeforever’s links to point to the new site at Animeforever.org.

Just a quick update for those of you watching Chrno Crusade. Episode 22 is out from Animeforever either in torrent form or from their irc channel, #Animeforever@irc.rizon.net. The bad news is that episode 23 will not be out until June 2, that and this episode is extremely sad. Go and get it and remember to leave your bittorrent windows open for as long as possible so you are not an evil leech. :)

For those of you sticking with the Inuyasha saga (anything over 150 episodes deserves to be called a saga), there are currently three places to find new episodes.

1. Anime-Kraze is still subbing it but they are pretty far behind. They just released the special episode 147-148. They also have torrents for older episodes if you need to catch up. Hit their bittorrent tracker page for the torrents or visit their irc channel at #Anime-Kraze@irc.rizon.net.
2. The next place is SaiyaMan’s bittorent page. The most recent episode they have subbed is episode 146, but they also have torrents for episodes back to 128.
3. A place I just found this week, InuYasha4Ever. They are supposed to have an irc channel as well as the bittorrents, but I didn’t see it when I looked. Anyway, this group is the furthest ahead because they just released episode 150. EDIT: Don’t believe the tracker when it says zero seeds and zero peers, it’s wrong.

I prefer Anime-Kraze’s subs but the other two are not too bad, especially if you want the newest episodes right now.

SPOILER WARNING (don’t read if you don’t want to know): For those of you happy that Kikyo fell off a cliff into molten lava, watch out, you’re not going to like where episode 150 is going…

Edit 2: Updated Animeforever’s links to point to the new site at Animeforever.org.

Today has seemed like a week in itself, which may be why I keep thinking it’s Friday. I’m not sure why, I’ve just been really bored and restless today. Even now that I’ve decided to update, I don’t feel like writing anything. Maybe it’s because of my interview yesterday. It was quite an ordeal. The actual interviews were fine, but due to miscommunication, I was left sitting in the lobby for about an hour. The person who set up the interview was gone to a dentist appointment and the interviewer did not know they were supposed to come to the lobby to get me.

So, after the receptionist called the head of the entire department and had her call the individual managers and I called Dustin to see if he could find anything out, we finally found which room I was supposed to be in, but not the interviewer. Finally, a little over an hour after I arrived, my first interview started, but it was cut to a half hour because we started so late. The second interview was still an hour, but I would’ve liked to talk to the first person for an hour as well. Thirty minutes is not a good length of time to really get a feel for the candidate. Oh well. I did get a couple interesting logic/creative thinking questions that I’ll share with you:

1. You have three jars of jellybeans, one entirely grape, one entirely peanut butter, and one a mix of the two. You can’t see inside the jars. The jars are all mislabeled. How many jellybeans do you have to pull out to determine which jar is which?
2. If a crazy guy approaches you on the street and says he’ll give you a million dollars to determine the height of the UT Tower using this barometer, how many different ways can you think of to find out the height?

From a different interview, a variation of the buckets of water question:

1. You have a container of water and two ladles. One ladle is 18 ounces and the other is 8 ounces. Using only the two ladles, no additional containers allowed, how do you get exactly 4 ounces of water?

Since I haven’t posted anything in a while, this will be a big conglomeration of all the things I’ve been meaning to post but haven’t.

First up–job hunting. After the phone interview from Hades, I was invited to an onsite interview. The three hour interview actually turned out to be SIX technical interviews with six different people. Any of you who have experienced technical interviews know how much this sucked. Anyway, I thought I did pretty well and the interviewers seemed interested. However, about a week later I got the “you’re so talented, you’re going to have a great career–just not with us” email. Then NI called and wanted to have me in for another interview since they are hiring again. Today is my interview, from 3 to 5, so I’m just wasting time now so I don’t start to get nervous. Which is why my blog is miraculously getting updated today. :)

Second–the new Zelda. Nintendo showed some video from the new Zelda game for the GameCube at E3 and it looked AWESOME! I liked the cartoony look of Windwaker, especially since the face and eyes were so expressive, but the new game has a more realistic feel. Not to mention, Link looks hot in the new game. ;) (see what I mean) If you haven’t already, check the screenshots and the video from Nintendo’s site. I don’t think a release date has been set yet, but it should be out sometime next year.

Third–Fullmetal Alchemist has been licensed by FUNimation. This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that all the fansub sites have stopped subbing the show and taken down the torrents. The latest episode I have seen subbed is 31. You can still find alternative torrents by doing a search at DownloadAnime. The other bad news is that when it is finally realeased here in the US, it will be too expensive for me to buy. However, the good news is that FUNimation is planning to air the show on Cartoon Network starting in October. For those of you that don’t know what Fullmetal Alchemist is, a trailer is available at the official FUNimation site, FullmetalAlchemist.com. This is one of my favorite anime shows and well worth checking out.

Fourth and finally–I have tomatoes! Both of my plants are starting to grow tomatoes. Mr. Stripey is another story… I’m not sure why tomatoes are already growing seeing how the plant is still about six inches tall, but oh well, the sooner the better. The tomatoes are still very small, the biggest is the size of a large marble, but it’s progress and at least the plants are not dead.

Dustin was nice enough to invite me to Gmail a while back and now I can invite up to three people. Since most of the people I know already have accounts, I’m extending the offer to you all, so send me an email and tell me why you think you are worthy of an invitation. :) You can either send me an email at my gmail account, jessief at g m a i l dot c o m (take that spam bots!) or jessie at jessieferguson dot com.