the over on this game is making a bundle today.

In a Bears-Vikings game? Huh?

Some updates on the new anime season:

• Toradora! is my hands-down favorite thus far. Plot-wise, it’s nothing new: shounen romantic comedy. Where it wins is the sensitive characterization and the gentle humor, hallmarks of talented director Tatsuyuki Nagai of Honey and Clover fame. Sweet, funny, and utterly charming; you can tell they’re going to hit it out of the park with this one.
• To Aru Majutsu no Index, on the other hand, has turned out to be a big disappointment. It has a high production value and is reasonably entertaining, but the storyboarding is poor—this is a big pet peeve of mine. They try to convey emotion through dialogue alone and don’t back it up with plot or atmosphere, making it very hard to care about the characters or understand why they’re getting so worked up. I had this same problem with last season’s Amatsuki and Nabari no Ou, which is why I eventually gave up on both. Also, a correction. I don’t know where I got this from, but none of the reviewers compared this with Kurenai in any way; they were actually talking about Toradora‘s hand-drawn animation.
• Nodame Cantabile: Paris is every bit as good as I expected. It keeps the winning formula of the first season, no small part of which are the two principal voice actors, who could have been born for these roles. They’re also, like last season, doing a great job of editing down the story from the manga.

I’m trying out a couple of new ones as well; most of the reviewers seem to really like Kuroshitsuji and Shikabane-hime Aka. More on those later.

You’ve probably noticed my infatuation with typography of late—an infatuation that I hope will develop into a deep and lasting relationship—and realized I’m in the midst of new-infatuation giddiness. You know, where everything new you learn fascinates you, and you seek out the object of your affections on the slightest excuse, and just being around it makes you happy. <dreamy sigh/>

Anyway. So what I’m trying to say is I get all excited when I learn something new about it, especially when it has to do with history. I learned today about the venerable history of Korean typefounding and the origins of Korea’s Hangul alphabet. Did you know that Koreans were using movable type more than 200 years before Gutenberg came on the scene?

And speaking of type history, make sure to read this history of type series from ilovetypography. Fascinating stuff!

Oh, and the cool typographical link of the day is to this neato Flickr collection of typewriter ribbon tins. Here’s my favorite. (via)

I just did some remodeling around here: I redid all the banner graphics, and changed the layout and styling to improve readability. Same basic idea, slightly better execution.

It’s time for a new season of anime to begin, and Anime News Network, as always, has a preview guide available. I haven’t actually watched any yet, but here are the titles I’m interested in, based on the reviews:

• Toradora!
• Nodame Cantabile: Paris Chapter – I loved the first season of this anime and am an avid reader of the manga, so of course I’m going to watch this one.
• To Aru Majutsu no Index – Some reviewers are saying this anime is this season’s Kurenai, which I loved, so I am definitely intrigued.

There appears to be no news on Skip Beat!, and no one seems to have begun subtitling it. I am very sad.

In other news, I have been watching Naruto on Hulu, which has the first season available subtitled (!). The humor is not great (it’s a bit juvenile, but that fits with the characters), but the action scenes are pretty good, it’s entertaining and I am awaiting the second season with bated breath. Of course, Viz may have only made the first season available so that people will have to rent or buy the second on DVD, but I’m hoping they release some of it for streaming.

Lots of good stuff at SimpleBits in the last week; just keep scrolling. Some things of note:

• The WebKit development team recently redesigned the web inspector with a ton of useful improvements. Do not miss this!
• Ork Posters – Typographic city neigborhood posters. Both Chicago and San Francisco are available. Super terrific!
• Scroll is a new magazine on web design—available in both print and electronic format—brought to you by Web Directions. I haven’t had a chance to dig deep into this yet, but I am expecting great things.
• The folks at SimpleBits have put together a custom Amazon store wherein they recommend books, music, etc. that they use to design. What a great resource!

Finally, A List Apart turns 10 this year; read Jeffrey Zeldman’s retrospective.

love this. You may recall me mentioning that my company is on an extended consulting assignment in Knoxville, TN. The way it works is that every three weeks or so, we fly out there for a full week—this was one such.

Problem is that there is no direct flight to Knoxville from San Francisco. Depending on the airline you take, you have to connect through its hub airport: Chicago for United, Dallas-Fort Worth for American, Atlanta for Delta, and like this week, Charlotte for US Airways. Now, let me make it known that there are no words vicious enough, evil enough, to capture the intensity of my bone-deep hatred for this airline, though the tale I am about to tell may go some way to explaining.

Charlotte, like all the hub airports I mentioned, suffers from the increasingly common malady of not being big enough to handle the level of traffic that comes through it. Flights are booked with very short connection times, and the slightest amount of delay wreaks havoc in a schedule not built for flexibility. On any given day, Charlotte is filled with disgruntled travelers who have missed their flights or had them canceled, etc., etc.

Problem with Charlotte is that it is built pretty much in a straight line, and inevitably the two gates I am arriving to and leaving from are at opposite ends of the airport. Combine this with a 50 minute layover and the likewise inevitable delay, and you’ll understand why most of my memories of CLT are blurry because I am always sprinting across the airport trying to make my connection.

Today, I had the same 50 minute layover, but my incoming flight from Knoxville was 40. Minutes. Late. There was no chance of making my original flight without divine intervention, so when we landed in Knoxville, the flight attendant announced that passengers going to San Francisco should see the gate agent.

When I got off the plane and found the gate agent, she informed me that I had been rebooked on a flight to SF leaving at 9:45, leaving from gate A14. As it was 5:50 at the time, I figured I had plenty of time to get dinner—the Charlotte airport is something of a culinary wasteland, but that’s another blog post—so I pocketed my new boarding pass and made my way to the food court.

It was about 6:30 when I finished dinner, so I started to make my way to the A concourse. I got to the beginning of it, but realized that there were—wait for it—only 12 gates. There was no such thing as gate A14. After wandering around a bit to ascertain that this was in fact the case, I went back to the monitors to look for flights to San Francisco, in hopes that my boarding pass had somehow been misprinted, and discovered none at all. There appeared to be no flights to San Francisco leaving for at least the next 5 hours, or whatever the upper limit is for the upcoming flights monitors.

Only then did it occur to me to take a closer look at the boarding pass, which was when I realized that the boarding pass I had was from Las Vegas to San Francisco, not Charlotte to San Francisco. Huh? What the hell was I supposed to do with a boarding pass from Vegas to SF when I was in Charlotte?

After taking a moment to think about it, I figured that I had been rebooked onto a flight with a layover in Las Vegas—which, can I just say, is just mean on a Friday night—but the gate agent had neglected to give me the boarding pass for the first leg. Pretty irritating, but not the end of the world. So back I went to the monitors, and there I found a flight leaving for Las Vegas at 7:41. I figured this was the flight I was intended to be on, so I went to its assigned gate, told the gate agent there what had happened and asked him to reprint my boarding pass for that flight.

He couldn’t find anyone by my name in the passenger manifest.

He did find, however, that the previous @#&*!$ agent had booked me on the earlier flight to Las Vegas, which had departed at 6:15. By this time it was 6:45, and I had, you guessed it, missed the flight. And the 7:41 flight was—shocker—oversold. This gate agent appeared to be as dumbfounded as me, but he directed me to the airline’s special services desk a few gates away to see if they could help me.

They were as astounded by my story as I was—lots of head-shaking going on—but managed to get me on the 7:41 flight, which would get into Vegas just a few minutes before the one leaving for SF.

Long story short, I ended up getting back to San Francisco after barely making the second leg of the flight—I literally got off one plane, ran to the second gate, then got on the other plane—a grand total of 3 hours late.

Again I ask: why does this stuff always happen to me? God.

Mostly meh. The town hall format is kinda dumb because most of the questions are of the “What have you done for me lately?” variety and are followed by shameless pandering.

The foreign policy stuff was more interesting, and I think McCain came off a bit more sensibly there, but the “I’m gonna get bin Laden, and I know how” sidestep was a big time waster.

Make sure to read both Stephen Green’s drunkblogging, and the Democracy in America liveblog.

by this statement that funding alternative energy now will stop Iran from attacking Israel by diminishing its oil revenues? Are you kidding me with this?