About 2 weeks ago my old (really old) machine fell apart and I had to order a new one. Without the net access I had so much time on my hands. It's magic. Heh.
Finally I got around playing some games and watch some DVDs. God of War (PS2) and Zelda:TP (Wii) were lots of fun. A less well known, but very entertaining title was Odin Sphere 『オーディンスフィア』 (PS2). It's somewhat of a successor to (the even less known) Princess Crown 『プリンセスクラウン』 (Saturn/PSP). Genre wise I would call it a 2D fantasy action RPG where the action is delivered in some side scrolling beat'em up fashion.
Odin Sphere features hours of excellent voice acting (I'm not sure about the english VOs tho), and a very distinctive art style. It's really something different. The animations are partially done via some 2D bone system for example. There are vibrant colors all over the place. It looks beautiful and surreal at the same time. Highly recommended, but be warned - it's a long game. It takes at least 80 hours to finish it.
On the DVD side of things I watched some random crap such as Casshern 『キャシャーン』 (weird visuals, partially very nice with a bla bla story on top), and of course also some anime. Oh yea, speaking of Casshern... the version I got featured the worst menu ever. It was so bad it almost deserves some award. Rotating text? It's not like someone actually wants to read those menu labels, right? But that's not all - they decided against any indicators for the selected options! So, all you had to do is wait for the rotating text to show into your direction and memorize your selections. It's amazing that they managed to cripple usability to that degree. It's not rocket science ffs.
Wonderful Days 『원더풀 데이즈』 was a tad better (well, the menu certainly was). It's a Korean CG-heavy sort-of anime. I also can't really recommend that one, but the animation was very good, and the bold mix of hand drawn and CGed stuff is, well, pretty unusual. The version I got lacked the original audio track. Boo. Hiss. Why are they doing that kind of thing anyways? It's not like pressing the DVDs would take any longer if there are a few more pits.
Ah well, now I got a semi decent dual core machine and about a quarter of the tools/programs, I'm regularly using are already installed. I also can start working on Inkscape extensions again. I couldn't for about 3 months thanks to bug #1767881. Now that issue is dodged - not fixed. If you're wondering how I did that randomize color effect then... well, color effects extend some color effect base class, which does all the DOM interaction. The effect itself only gets RGB values and returns new ones. That's the reason why you can write/test 0.46 (lxml) compatible color effects with 0.45 (libxml). However, doing other new effects/importers/exporters or bug fixing wasn't possible at all.
With some luck I'll be able to finish the XHTML slideshow exporter. :)
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