By now you’re probably asking yourself where I’m going with this?  Travel Channel used to show programming that actually was about travel; they’d send Samantha Brown to various interesting locations and she would tell us interesting things about them.  The kind of interesting things that you might expect to get from a travel channel…a brief glimpse of the local scenery and culture, just enough to make you want to…say…travel to some of these places.

Then there is the Travel Channel of now, which would be more accurate to call it the We Send Someone Somewhere to Overeat Channel.  Anthony Bourdain has the closest thing to a good show on that network, and he recently assailed Paula Dean for her horrible cooking style that makes people fat.  Around the same time his remarks were printed and were gaining traction, Travel Channel was airing a special about the best places to get fried foods, such as fried twinkies, fried ice cream, fried candy bars, and other such bastions of healthy eating.  Their other shows include such things as Best Places to Pig Out, Man V Food (which is the host going from city to city taking on how much can you eat challenges), Best Truck Stop Foods, etc.

When you look at the shows on Travel Channel, the one thing they have in common is someone going somewhere to see how much they can eat, and the one thing that they all lack is any travel.  I’m not sure how the rest of the world is, but I don’t really plan my vacations around where I can get a hamburger with 17 beef patties, so I don’t really consider that a travel show.  Seeing some guy try to eat a six pound burrito doesn’t draw me to Santa Fe, or really make me want to go there at all.

All that being said, isn’t it time for Travel Channel to change its name to The Gluttony Channel? To help them along their way, I’ve even come up with a couple of shows they could add to their line-up (assuming they can fit them in around their haunted this or that shows.)

• Best Places to Have Heart Surgery
• Top Places to Pig Out While Ignoring Scenery
• Bacon Sculpting
• Ghost Hunting At The Buffet
• Cellulite Masters
• Scariest Places (featuring Weight Watchers and Gyms)
• Deep Fried Vegetarian Foods
• Travel Tips for People Who Can’t Fit Into Normal Seats
• Making Surface Tension Work for You At the Soda Fountain

As you are aware, the role of a childhood friend is a very important one in society.  As your neighbor has no parents / one parent who is working out of the country it is very important that you fulfill your duties.  It has come to our attention that your performance in one of these key areas has begun to deteriorate.  Please seek to take proactive measures to ameliorate this situation before the next review period.  Find below a list of area(s) where improvement has been deemed necessary:

___ Waking up in the morning; it is your sole responsibility to wake bearer of this document up every morning in time for school / work.
___  Breakfast making duties
___  Lunch making duties
___  Dinner making duties
___  Not changing with the blinds open for an “accidental” glimpse
___  Cold duties: you are required to prepare rice porridge, get cold towels for the forehead, and lecture about how important it is to take care of a cold.
___  Having a lot of cute friends that could easily fall in love with your childhood friend

Thanks In Advance For Your Cooperation

1. main character sounds like Kyon from Haruhi
2. main character has a little sister
3. main character has no parents
4. main character has a childhood friend who cooks for him
5. the school has an ojousama in it
6. the school uses bloomers
7. main character trips and his hand lands on someone’s breast/butt
8. someone lands such that their crotch is in the main character’s face
9. main character gets a nosebleed
10. episode is a beach trip
11. episode is a summer festival
12. episode is an onsen visit
13. episode involves bathing suits for no apparent reason
14. little sister has a crush on her brother
15. breasts have that official *squish squish* sound when they’re groped
16. someone does the “oh ho ho” laugh with their hand in front of their mouth
17. someone says “this isn’t a house…it’s a mansion!”
18. episode has a Ruri-type (aka expressionless loli)
19. episode has a hyper energetic girl
20. the magical can of coffee is used to solve a problem in the episode
21. main character has a stash of porn mags discovered
22. someone finishes everything on the table despite the food being awful
23. main character is indecisive and annoying in general yet has a harem (this is pretty much a freebie)
24. main character walks in on someone in the bathroom
25. main character walks in on someone changing
26. You are pretty much aware of what color underwear all of the female characters are wearing

• No parents: you can choose yourself whether you want to have them already dead, working in another country, or dying in episode 1.  Regardless it’s important that there are no adults in the house.
• Childhood friend: “the distance between childhood friend and lover is very thin” is a statement oft regurgitated in every show, so make sure that your Generime has one.  95% of childhood friends are female and are in charge of taking care of the protagonist of the show because…there are no parents.
• That seat in class: your character HAS to sit about halfway back in the class, next to the window.  This is not an option.
• Big boobs = that voice: there is only one seiyuu who can do the voice for your large breasted character.  She says “ararara” a lot and is usually the older sister of the childhood friend and pretty dense.
• Gravity distortion: remember that Japan has a different gravity field for breasts, so be sure to include significant movement with the slightest action.  This is the same phenomenon that causes the male characters to fall, landing with their hands/face on a breast/butt.  It also frequently causes female characters to fall off ladders/chairs and land with their crotch on the main character’s face.
• Tsundere cuisine: if your main female character is tsundere, she can’t cook.  Don’t argue, that’s just the way it is.
• Panty shots: put them in every shot
• That guy: every show has that guy who keeps a database of every girl’s measurements in the school.  It’s up to you if you want him to be mildly attractive but forever alone because he’s so perverted, or he could be dorky, or fat.
• A-set underwear: every girl, every day wears matching underwear; you can only deviate from this in the case of striped panties (shimapan.)

I hope this is good enough to get you started on your Generime.  Remember that if you don’t think you can manage any sort of story, throw as much Moe into it as possible.

Home Shows:

• This is a great space!
• There’s enough room in here for all my/your shoes
• His and her closets? More like hers and hers closets. Hahaha
• Wow, stainless steel appliances
• This would be great for entertaining
• I really want a man cave
• I’m not so sure about the paint color

Car shows:

• Let’s grab this bull by the horns (talking about Lamborghinis)

• Try to spell several words wrong on your resume just so you can see how good the hiring manager is at catching mistakes.
• List every job you have EVER had; it is just an unfounded rumor that most companies only care about the last three or so.  They need to know how proficient you were at flipping hamburgers in your teen years and will likely attempt to contact this employer, regardless of how long ago it was.
• Try to keep your resume as long as possible; most employers print them out before going through them and imagine how impressed they will be with the thickness of yours compared to the others.
• You never know what skill an employer might be looking for, so put down absolutely everything that you can do.  This can range from proficiency with office software to being able to drink a fifth of Vodka at one sitting.
• Rate yourself on your skills so they don’t have to bother asking you about them.  Give yourself so-so ratings on most things so that they will think you are honest.
• Try to schedule interviews for Fridays so that you can get in on their Casual Friday action by just wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
• Always keep your options open, so make sure to feverishly search for other jobs in the middle of your interview.
• Keep friends and loved ones up to date on how you think the interview is going by texting them and updating Facebook / Twitter in the midst of the interview; it’s perfectly acceptable to ask the interviewer to hang on for a second while you do this.
• If they ask you what the worst thing is about yourself, say that you like to masturbate into the water cooler, then laugh uproariously while explaining that was just a joke (whether it was or not.)
• If they ask you what the best thing is about yourself, say that you don’t masturbate into the water cooler (follow-up jokes go a long way.)
• Most companies like to get a feel for how you handle high pressure situations, so when they ask you how you’d respond to a massive outage of some sort say “I’d start looting.”  This shows initiative.
• Salary negotiations can be tricky, so try to give yourself some bargaining leverage by saying that you have a huge meth habit and gambling addiction.

Hopefully this guide will prove very useful to you and by following it you’re bound to find the perfect job in no time!  Good luck!

Before leaving I gathered up some things that I might want with me, videos, manga, some documents for school to study and set about putting them on the iPad.

• Video was no problem since I already had a lot of it for the iPhone; I didn’t bother reripping it to a higher resolution and the video scaled for the iPhone looked fine.
• Manga was downloaded and this is where things started getting fun.  I had a directory of Yotsuba (which I have read but you can never read enough) and Skip Beat (which I have never read.)  The Yotsuba directory, after several minutes, was converted to iPad specs by iTunes (you can’t just dump the image directory straight onto the iPad) and transferred to the device.  The Skip Beat directory, being larger, was not as happy.  The first message iTunes gave me was that there wasn’t enough free space for the images.  600mb directory with 6GB free and not enough free space?  I broke the images into two different directories thinking iTunes was just stupid about handling so many images and was proven correct as it managed to convert and then put both directories onto the iPad (this took nearly 30 minutes.)  Great, let’s see how it looks.  I opened up photos on the iPad and…the images aren’t in the correct order.  Time was ticking away before my flight while doing all of this, so I didn’t have time to look into it thoroughly, but upon further investigation the iPad sorts images by date modified.  There is no way to change this.  Looking around people say you could either right click each image and choose ‘save as’ to change the modified date (thousands of images, no way) or make a new album in iPhoto and change the sort there, then sync it through iTunes, then the iPad will display the images in the correct order.  Either solution is pretty silly when you should just be able to change the sort order on the iPad.
• Office documents so I could study for school….well, after fighting with the image thing for longer than I had hoped, my time was nearly at an end.  I download the Apple apps to view .docs and .xls and … umm… how do I view these?  They’re saved to my harddrive but how do I get them on the iPad?  The only way to get them onto the iPad is by selecting them in iTunes and then syncing it, then opening the app on the iPad and importing it.  How convenient.  Sadly as I was out of time I wasn’t able to sync my documents to the iPad, so this was another loss.

Fine, so I have movies and out of order managa and no school work on my iPad on the plane, which was fine as it was fun for watching Doctor Who.  I figure I can mess with it more when I get to the hotel, only to find out the internet at the hotel in Vegas is wired only, there’s no wireless nearby to borow and the iPad doesn’t have 3G.  I guess I could use it for taking photos off my camera, but you need to have a dongle for that.  I could force my in-laws to watch Birdemic on the one of the widescreen TVs but you need to have a different dongle for that.  I can’t download anything through iTunes to put on it, because my Mac laptop was back home and my netbook can’t sync with it.  So I can pretty much watch just watch videos on it, or play the same apps I have for my iphone.

The iPad is a pretty neat piece of hardware, but having to funnel everything through iTunes is very cumbersome and I don’t really see the point.  Why not just let it mount as flash storage and have Movies, Documents, and Pictures like my home directory on OS X that you can browse to using Finder or some other file tool?  The iPad is very good for some things, very annoying for some things, and convenient as I didn’t have to take it from my backpack either time going through airport security.  But is it a complete replacement for the laptop like Apple is saying? No, because you have to keep going back to your laptop/desktop to put things on the iPad and if you plan on taking a vacation with one, make sure you have the 3G model.

Moverload

Being that this is the internet, there are always a lot of really pointless arguments going on about really pointless things; one of the discussions that seems to pop up a lot recently is whether Moe and every anime that has it is garbage.  The answer is no, but there is a disturbing trend where Moe is involved.  The way I see it, Moe is to anime as computer animation is to big-budget Hollywood movies.  You have movies like Lord of the Rings where the animation really helps the movie and many of the key scenes could not have been accomplished as well without it.  Then you have movies like Transformers 2 where they obviously spent more time rendering the special effects than they ever spent working on the script or finding stars who could act.  Computer animation is merely a tool and the way it’s used can leave you with either a clever, brilliant piece of work, or Jar-Jar Binks.

By now you’re thinking that’s nice, but what does it have to do with anime?  The recent trend with anime has been to take a very thin story with substandard animation and characters, slather a thick layer of Moe on top and serve it up to hordes of squealing otaku.  If it’s Moe enough, everyone will talk about how Moe this and that is and never once mention that the show doesn’t have a story at all, or that the characters are fresh pressed from the Moe-Mold.  Yet, here is where a lot of the people arguing this are getting it wrong…it really doesn’t matter.  There’s still plenty of really good anime with awesome stories and characters (Hatsukoi Limited for exmaple) being made and the Moepocalypse hasn’t affected this at all.

The other portion of this Moe argument is people complaining about what others are watching; it really doesn’t affect you at all and you aren’t being forced to watch it at gunpoint, so shut up about it.  On that same note, it would be nice if the people who watched those shows didn’t have to mention the word Moe every five minutes and talk about how Moe everything is in the show ad nauseum.

All in all, they make different kinds of cars and different kinds of music because not everyone likes the same things.  One person’s K-ON is another person’s Gundam and you the amount of negative input you should have on what someone else is watching is zero.

1. Come up with a good, simple idea for people to get /stay in touch with each other
2. Get a lot of users because people like this good, simple idea
3. Notice that you have a lot of users on your site and start tossing tons of ads and additional features at them to try to gain / keep even more users and make a ton of money in the process
4. Pollute your good, simple site with so much crap that everyone starts moving onto the next good, simple site.
5. Close your site down as you lose all of your users

So as you watch Facebook constantly redesign their site to make it harder to use and Twitter add more and more features that no one ever asked for, start thinking about the next good idea for a social media site as yours could be the next big thing.

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

The easier things get, the easier it is to screw them all up – me

The definition of an idiot is someone who doesn’t learn from their mistakes – me

The tallest tree catches the most wind – Japanese Proverb

If you head towards the light, the shadows will fall behind you – Unknown

Specks of dust piled up become a mountain – Japanese Proverb

When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better – Mae West

If you spend all of your time complaining of things about yourself that you don’t like, eventually you’ll convince everyone else that you’re right – me

People can be like magnets, those who are positive tend to attract far more than those who are negative – me

If you don’t find anything about yourself attracrtive, no one else will, either – me