*Image Overload* Even though 3 isn't really an overload.

So I've been browsing around my Pandora Profile, altering a few past decisions for station refinement, bookmarking a few more songs/artists for the hell of it. The flaws of the system are pretty evident from the straight facts at the top though. My most thumbed up artists: Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx are total runaways; but the next 3, Venus Hum, Andy Bell, and The Postal Service probably have at most 4-6 songs voted high each. And in The Postal Service's case, most of that is remixes. Which goes to say that creating a station from an artist is hardly any guarantee you'll get much of that artist, all seems to be at least a bit of sinister luck.

As for the thumbed down:

BT -- Give Pandora an inch and it'll take a mile. BT has a pair of really good songs, and the rest of his works are complete garbage. But apparently they still fit the genome profile so they keep showing up. And because I've upped something by him, he'll keep recurring beyond two downed songs.

Stereo Total -- Really a hit or miss artist for me. Foriegn language singing can be a plus but their songs oscillate between bizzare and nigh-painful at times. Same problem about elimination as BT.

Erasure -- I like Andy Bell, who works with Erasure, but most of their stuff is too almost-but-not-quite Chill. It's not really relaxing so much as boring and tepid, but some of the stuff Andy Bell did with them shows through on some songs, and those are keeping them in the mix.

The last two on the list aren't noteworthy, I think they just got 2 marks down as opposed to the vast array of singularly downed artists.

I'm still experimenting with station creation and evolution. The original station: Foundations(Daft Punk), is based solely on Daft Punk, using 107 upped songs and 371 downed to explore the variety of Pandora and set the basis for Masterpiece.

Masterpiece (Andy Bell, Basement Jaxx, Daft Punk, Daniel Bedingfield, The Mountaineers, United State of Electronica, Venus Hum) is my long playing station, having 155 upped songs and 957 downed songs to shape the flow of music. I've found that some of the upped songs are really slow to come back around, either because they're so fringe or because I've trimmed the genome around them.

I've got a pair of experimental stations I fall back to when Masterpiece is having a particularly sour run. Neither one has much expose yet, perhaps 25 songs total between up and down each at most. Panic! Shiny Fallout Service (exactly who it sounds like) attempts to isolate that new genre and it's work wonderfuly so far. Actually boasting more upped than downed songs for the time being. The other station Femmes Fatale (Sarina Paris, Tsunami Bomb, Venus Hum, Ian Van Dahl, Tori Amos, Girls Aloud, Ayumi Hamasaki) is attempting to see if I can teach Pandora along a gender-singular genome, brutally pruned within my purposes (ie: the denial of Madonna, Britney Spears, Lesbians on Ecstasy, and Chicks on Speed).

While it has been long enough for another post on Webcomics (especially with my recent re-acquisitions and drops), I'm hoping to at least get Eureka out of the way, if not more anime than that with today's post - much as the warm of the store and late nights playing in Alcatraz may try and deter that - but I did want to say that Megatokyo is doing well to win back my good graces (not to imply that I have any significance amongst his countless legion of readers).

When you enjoy a series, you like it to run long. I know I'd kill (metaphorically) for more of Suzumiya Haruhi or Sousei no Aquarion (perhaps not the ideal pick since it is getting an OVA, but the idea stands). Eureka kinda wonks that facet, simply because you don't need everything they decided to enclose to love the show. I don't know what Eureka's target really was, like who they were aiming for. Sure it's got Mechas and Explosions, but the LFOs are pretty basic and the explosions are pink and colorful. It's got Skyboarding, but they don't use it for any real tricks. There's not a ton of cute animals (Gulliver, Skyfish), but they are present. The tiniest bit of sex, some slice of life, epic struggle... it's kinda all over the place.









Alot of the show could've been about the dichotomy. Eureka/Anemone, Corelian messenger against her artifically created doppleganger. Renton/Dominic, which is actually more of the same person just caught on different sides. Holland and Dewey, Holland and Charles, Talho and Ray, Talho and Renton's sister. The show has a wider cast than that though, so it never fully falls down to those levels, even if it doesn't really need to give everyone a story. They live their lives: Matthieu and Hilda are married, Doggy gets his piloting spotlight even if he gets abused for half the show (I still laugh when Holland kicks the stool into his leg), Giget gets to educate Eureka about being a girl. All the minor characters have roles and parts and combine to make up something greater, Gekko State as a concept and a family, however dysfunctional.

For me the show really won when it was cheesy, musical, and raw. I couldn't stand the episodes where Renton meets people while wandering and learns to appreciate something better, or a life lesson. Nor did I deal well with Eureka learning about makeup, or the whole misunderstanding episode where everyone thought Renton was trying to make Eureka have sex with him (though, it was amusing how they all reacted to it, especially the guys smuggling him magazines). The children probably deserve their own rant, they barely redeem them from total loathing (omniloathe!) at the end, but the whole Eden stretch when they find true-Earth is pretty god-awful. What won was Ray and Charles, all the fights -- especially the one where Renton finally realizes he's killing people -- and, of course, the one couple I really did like.


While I wouldn't reccomend it, just watching the last 3 episodes of Eureka 7 would probably suffice to capture the core of the story. You'd miss out on alot of the story (which I'd certainly hope would be true given that there were 47 other episodes), alot of it good arcs: Ray and Charles, searching for a replacement for Anemone, Project Orange, etc.

I probably could choose something a bit before that, perhaps any point where Dominic is learning the truth about Anemone, or Anemone realizing the truth of Dewey's nature, but 48 is the solidifying episode of it all. Anemone's monologue in Ballet Mechanique is powerful, and the reaction from theEnd (Shame Nirvash wasn't some reversal of that name, for mirror purposes) really enchances the effect.

49 really demonstrates how planned Dewey was, and whether Great Hero Thurston's information was that good or not is unknown, but the fact that the necklaces are in place not only at the first episode, but also in the flashbacks predating that, is significant if odd (did they never think to take that off when she left the army?). The Compac Drive was probably part of Adrock writings, though I'm uncertain how he obtained it, given what Norbu had to go through to get his.

Episode 50 is just cheese. Though with casual Amenone they could've had Dewey's kids in a firefight with Maurice and I wouldn't have really minded.

Overall it's a really great series, if you can just make it past the kids and the attempts at what is essentially slice-of-life for the socially inept (at least N.H.K. had the concept as focal based on the intent of the episode). The music rocks, the characters are cool, and everybody loves rainbow explosions.


Closing note: I saw the box for the PS2 game the other day, it was scary. At least I guess I recoignized Holland, the rest seem just game-original generics. Dunno how many of the rest of the cast show up in the course of the game.