Finally finished watching Michiko E Hatchin last night and I must say I love it when shows like this come along.

Michiko E Hatchin does a great job as something of the stylistic successor to Cowboy Bebop. It takes all the great music, the heat of the dessert, the humidity of the jungle, the serenity of the seaside villages and the frenetic pacing of the cities; wraps it all in vibrant South American colors and culture then tells an at times hilarious, painful and heart-warming story.

It certainly has me itching to visit Brazil.

I should remember to look out for more shows like this that break the typical Japanese anime mold… oh, and get down to Brazil as soon as possible.

After 25 years, G.I. Joe is back… and I’m not talking about that shitty Summer movie.

G.I. Joe: Resolute represents an update of the cartoon to match the years that its audience and the world has developed. Major characters die. There’s a sense that the stakes really are high. And Cobra Commander has grown a pair.

I should remember to keep watching the free episodes to see how this whole experiment works out.

I could barely care less about the Oscars last night. In fact, I had forgotten that they were even on until some friends over reminded us.

So, we fired up the rabbit ears and checked out Hugh Jackman’s opening number, which was fun (especially the part about not seeing The Reader). Then the awards got under way and I realized that there was only one award that mattered to me: whether they would award a movie with almost no speaking as the animated film of the year. The woman and I had a brief debate about this category being the “animated film of the year” not the “kid’s film of the year”. Then, thankfully, the Academy awarded the Oscar to Wall-E.

I should remember that there are still some places where people are brave enough to get behind unconventional projects.

Just walked back up the street from checking out the marathon. It’s really convenient that the runners pass within half a block of my apartment. One of these days maybe I’ll have enough courage to try out myself.

Although I tried my best to get some good photos, I only managed a couple decent ones. Oh well, I guess there’s always next year.

In the meantime, I should remember to keep checking the NYC 2006 Marathon Group on Flickr to see what other people caught.

Yesterday, I picked up my woman from work at Rockefeler Center and thought to take a photo of Anish Kapoor’s “Mirror” installation.

Of course, due to my loathing of plowing through the tourists to get a great shot, all I managed was the one you see here taken from her office.

I’ll have to remember to swing back around there and take one from the Sak’s side of the street.

You know, I’ve always gravitated towards cartoons and the cast of characters that inhabit them. Sure, at the beginning it was lots of Looney Tunes, Scooby Doo, Tom and Jerry, and the like. But then one morning while flipping channels waiting for Pole Position to come on, I came across Robotech on spanish TV and I was hooked on anime.

Anyway, despite the years of spending more time with foriegn animation, occasionally something comes along to remind me of the time I spent lying on my stomach on the floor inches from the tv watching Looney Tunes. Earlier this year, artist Michael Paulus did a series of 22 illustrations imagining what the skeletal structure of cartoons would really look like and now Hyungkoo Lee has gone even further by creating actual cartoon character skeletons out of resin, aluminum sticks, stainless steel wires, springs, and oil paint. Not only is it truly amazing, it also displays the odd underlying freakishness of children and things they gravitate towards.

I should try to remember that cartoon characters can be real!

Via Veer, NOTCOT.ORG, ResonTence, Talk About Design, BagelTurf, Observations of Life on Mars, and just about everyone else.

Wow! I have to remember to figure out how to buy one of these! Being a fan of the Ghost in the Shell movies and Stand Alone Complex series (not so much the mangas), I’ve wanted a Tachikoma of my own for a long time. This one seems like a prototype, but I really hope they go into production. I would definitely be in line to pick on up.

Here’s some video of it in action and the Tachikoma robot product page. Via Engadget.

OK, I’m not really into TV nowadays, but there is one show that almost forces me to watch through sheer coolness. That show is Lost. I admit: I love it. Although I missed the first season completely and didn’t start watching until the second, a quick review of what I had missed had me hooked.

I mean what’s the deal with the black smoke and why haven’t we seen it in a while? Also, who are these “Others” and why are they on the island? What’s the deal with the island anyways? Is it purgatory like so many people like to hypothesize?

I dunno, but I’m going to find out. I hope this upcoming season is as cool as this promotion poster they’ve just released for it (click for a larger version) because I’ll definitely remember to catch it when it returns to ABC October 4, 2006 at 9pm!

I can’t remember (surprise) exactly how it came up, but yesterday while waiting for a meeting with some other people, I found myself saying: “Hey, remember that cartoon in the 80′s where that kid could transform into a red corvette?” Of course, someone starting singing “Little Red Corvette” while another person said: “You mean Transformers?” Surprisingly, though, someone else blurted out “Oh yeah! Turbo Teen!” Yeah, Turbo Teen!

It started to come back to me. So, this morning I did a quick Googling only to find that a lot of people with better memories than me were still talking about this rediculous 80′ cartoon that only ran for one year. I distinctly remember that my older brother hated it and would do his best to get me to change the channel, but really there was nothing else on… just Turbo Teen.

The premise goes like this:

Brett Matthews was just an ordinary teenager with a hot sports car until one stormy night, an accident caused him to crash into a laboratory where scientists were testing a fusion ray. Brett and his car were hit by a beam and as a result, the two merged into one. Though Brett still appeared normal, whenever he was exposed to heat, he would change into car form as he has now become the revved-up Turbo Teen.

Don’t forget the opening to Turbo Teen.

Back on February 28th, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Intel powered Mac mini at a small event. At the time, the announcement garnered both positive and negative reviews of the machine. Regardless of the reviews, this was the perfect machine I had been waiting for Apple to come out with.

Everywhere the old mini fell short (power, longevity, etc.) this new mini excelled. The one drawback was the integrated video chip which meant that it would never be a great gaming machine… but that wasn’t what I wanted it for.

I bought the thing that very day, and just a couple days later it arrived with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Once I got it home, it took all of a couple seconds to plug the thing into my Samsung LCD TV using a DVI to HDMI cable (not included, BTW) and there it was: OS X on my TV without having to juggle laptops.

Previously, I had been plugging my 15″ Aluminum Powerbook into the TV to watch movies and downloaded content. This was a terrible setup for a number of reasons. One, I had to plug it in each time and unplug when done. Also, I had to store all my media on the laptop which was quickly running out of space. On top of that, the Powerbook didn’t have an optical audio out port, which meant that the sound had to go through the headphone jack which picked up an awful lot of the Powerbook’s internal noise (harddrive spinning, etc). This made the audio quality pretty bad.

The Mac mini solved all those problems with the addition of a 500 Gig external harddrive while adding Apple’s decent Front Row application and remote. Placing DVD’s on the external harddrive even allowed instant access to my entire library from the remote just like iTunes had already done for my CD collection.

Yeah, some things didn’t perform flawlessly. Front Row, for instance, feels very young. There’s lots that it just doesn’t do well, although a fairly recent update shows that it’d being improved by Apple and could grow into a very nice piece of software.

In the end, though, I highly recommend this configuration and should you have cable TV (which I don’t) you can easily extend it using the great EyeTV products.