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…the current Bleach filler arc was “nevertheless interesting?” Yeah, totally changed my mind. They had the last episode of that today, and it could not have come soon enough.

And now that it’s so close, of course, I cannot wait for the regular story to come back, which it should next Tuesday. I suppose what this means is that I should take up the manga so that I can be up to the minute on it. Come on, Tuesday!

Yes, and an otaku, too. Just thought I’d get that out of the way first so you don’t have to say it.

I really get a charge out of TV show fan-service where they make references to pop culture or, better yet, other TV shows. It’s one of the reasons I love Psych, or the final Michael J. Fox episode of Spin City where, after he left city hall, his character went to work for a young senator named Alex P. Keaton. Ha!

Imagine how excited I get about stuff like that, and then imagine it going on for 25 solid minutes, as it did in the first half of the Gintama/Sket Dance collaboration that’s airing this week. The casting of these two shows is so incestuous that there was endless fodder for jokes; for example, the voice actor who plays Gintoki in Gintama is the same one who plays Switch in Sket Dance. I was beside myself with delight. So much fun!

He’s somewhat famous in our circle for liking nearly every movie he’s ever seen. Seriously. In the 10-odd years I’ve known him, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’s said he didn’t like a movie.

The reason I bring that up is to give you context when I say I like every kind of music: I am about music the way my friend is about movies. I can find something to like in just about every piece of music, and rarely meet a piece I don’t like. Nevertheless, though it’s shorter than most, I too have a musical shitlist.

It is exceedingly rare for me to take a song or composition in instant and total dislike, but when it happens…well. Edwyn Collins’ A Girl Like You is one, and one I heard today, Demi Lovato’s Skyscraper, is another.

This song, while a “heartfelt” acknowledgement of her struggle with a myriad of mental and physical issues—and good for her, seriously, for getting past them—is a caricature. It’s overwrought, heavy-handed, and Lovato’s delivery of the word “skyscraper” sets my teeth on edge.

I hate this song. It makes me want to stick my fingers in my ears—kinda dangerous when you’re driving, like I was when I first heard this song. Like I said, kudos to Demi Lovato for coming out the better from a very tough time in her life, but the song still sucks.

I am reminded, forcibly, why I hate to program in PHP. It’s made doubly worse because I’ve spent the last few months steeped in Ruby and Python, which are so much better it’s almost—almost—laughable.

So you may have noticed the new template. What you may not know is that the changes are more than skin-deep: I’ve rewritten the template from the ground up to take advantage of all the latest CSS3/HTML5 bells and whistles, including my new favorite thing, Compass.

The site is now responsive: you should be able to look at it on everything from an iPhone to a desktop and the layout should gracefully change to accommodate the screen size (if you notice any wrinkles, please do let me know).

Finally, the site design makes use of a series of best practices that my colleagues and I have been compiling over the years, which has culminated in an open source project we call our CSS3 Foundation.

Take a look and let me know what you think!