| Yes Virginia, there are two |
[15 Dec 2005|04:32pm] |
Passed the oral prelim.
The one this fall was the written, where everyone in the class takes the 8-hour test on all of astronomy. The other half is the oral prelim, where I go into a room with four faculty members, present the research I've been doing for half an hour, then answer questions both about my talk, and about the general topics I covered. So, after two hours, and quite a few pretty tough questions, I managed to impress enough committee members to pass. Which means I've now qualified for a Master's degree, which I guess I get sometime next spring. Woo-hoo.
Anyway, in theory, now I should be getting a lot more science done. Heh, we'll see if that happens anytime soon...
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| All in |
[27 Nov 2005|06:08am] |
Every week, a bunch of grad students from LPL and Steward get together for a poker tournament. No-limit Texas Hold 'em, 15-20 people, 5 dollar buy-in. Then we go at it until there's one person left standing, and split the money up among the final three or four. I started playing back during spring, when my roommate Shane dragged me along to a tournament. Shane's quite the poker behemoth, having won the tournaments more than anyone else, and usually doing pretty well at various online matches. I, on the other hand, proved to be quite the mediocre player, making every rookie mistake in the book, even inventing a few of my own.
Well, anyway, it's taken me over a dozen tournaments to get here, but I'm finally holding my own. Last week, with about 17 players, and this week, with 10 players, I took first place. So I'm starting to dig myself out of the financial hole poker has been thus far. I think luck's a big factor here (I've hit a lot of straights the last two weeks), but I've also been making smarter bets (thanks to a little studying with "Harrington on Hold 'em"), and those two make for a nice combination.
As an added bonus, last week the last two players left standing were me and Shane (he was the one who lent me the book), so busting him out for the win was especially nice. He wasn't here this week, so it won't be until next week when we see if I can keep up the streak, or if Shane smacks me back down to my place.
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| Data taken, not reduced, no publication in progress |
[14 Nov 2005|04:45pm] |
I suppose at some point I should talk about the other traveling I did last month. And since there's a lot of work I should be doing at the moments, I'll talk about it now. Around the middle of October, I made the big hop from Tucson to Pasadena, for the Michelson Fellow Symposium. This is the first one of these, and I think it went pretty well. Two days of talks, as every one of us grad students and post-docs with a Michelson fellowship (there were only a couple dozen of us there) descended on the Caltech campus, and gave a talk on what we were working on. It was really a nice format, short enough to not break my spirit the way longer conferences can, and small enough to really get to know a lot of the people. My talk was pretty uneventful, though I tried to hide with a joke the fact that I didn't know the answer to one question which, in retrospect, I could have answered easily. It was also good for me, in that I got more of the nuts and bolts of various planet-finding techniques. Even the talks that were repeats of stuff I'd heard in France were useful, since I typically need to hear things a few times for them to sink in.
I also got to catch up with the family a little. My brother lives in San Diego, and my father came down to see the talk (and a good deal of the rest of the conference, surprisingly). It felt a little strange, since this was the first talk with a family member in the audience, but it didn't throw me off too much. After the conference I got to hang around San Diego and catch up with family a little for the weekend, before going to Hawaii on Sunday for Protostars and Planets V.
Going to PPV was a big deal for me, since with the better part of a decade between each PP conference, suspense really builds up. There were over 800 astronomers there, so it seemed a little intimidating. But it turns out I've been in the field long enough, and been to enough conferences to know a lot of the participants. The talks were interesting in that they were geared as reviews of the many subject areas, and most were in fields I didn't know much about. But five straight days of them, just coming off another conference, was a bit much. The poster I presented seemed to be well-received: I'd printed out a bunch of 8.5-by-11 copies, and left them under the poster itself; by the end of the conference, about 35 of these had been taken. Plus I got to talk with a lot of people in the field, which is one of the main points of going to conferences.
Hawaii itself was quite nice. The conference was in the Waikoloa Hilton, a massive resort on the western edge of the big island. It was a gaudy tourist trap, but the location was still pretty nice. Rather than stay in the hotel, and spend too much on food, three of us Steward grads rented a condominium for the week, and bought food at a supermarket to cook for ourselves. The condo was really nice, so I think it was a good decision. Partway through the week we went out to sea (a bit). There was this guy who provided kayaks, had us row out a little bit to an isolated cove, then gave us snorkeling gear to look at the fish around the coral reefs, which was very cool. In addition to all nifty tropical fish, we also saw a few sea turtles (a foot or so in diameter), which are pretty magnificent in the water. We also drove around the island a bit, going to a black sand peach, then to Volcano National Park, where we saw (from very far away) lava flowing down a mountain, and the smoke plume as it went into the ocean. We arrived just at sunset, which was when it was the most spectacular. Then, my last day there, I went with some of the other conference participants up to Mauna Kea, where we got to see Subaru (man, the Japanese build cool telescopes), Gemini north, and the sub-millimeter array. All very cool.
Anyway, hopefully I'll get around to developing my pictures (yes, I'm still analog) soon. But until then, look! Me with a dolphin!. (From Sea World San Diego, courtesy of my dad)
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| The pen is mightier than the telescope |
[08 Nov 2005|03:18pm] |
I came across a fun little paper on astro-ph today, that discusses some of the implications of using historical documents to study nearby supernova from the last few thousand years. Every one hundred years or so, in each galaxy, you get about one supernova. In our case, sadly, since we live in the dusty disk of our galaxy, it's expected that we can't actually see a lot of these, and the last observed galactic supernova was over four hundred years ago. There was a nice supernova in a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way in 1987 (creatively named SN 1987A), but other than that we have to look pretty far off to see these objects. Getting data on supernovae that take place closer to us is pretty interesting, and the best bet there seems to be to rely on what information past astronomers managed to write down.
In particular, the four-page paper considers the many historical accounts of a supernova that was observed around 1054, which was the exploding star that produced the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star about the mass of our sun but only about as large as your typical city, which rotates 30 times every second. I was kind of interested in the ways 1000-year-old data were combined with the latest observations to really get a full pictures of these objects, plus it's fun to reflect on the fact that there are some astronomical data reduction techniques that require a calibration for the internal politics of the Chinese court.
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| Ou est les planetes? |
[16 Oct 2005|03:06pm] |
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And back from France (though it took me almost a week to blog about it), with a brief respite before I go traveling again (later this week, to Pasadena, San Diego, and Hawaii). The conference went well, and the location was very beautiful. The theme of the conference was the science and techniques of directly imaging extrasolar planets, which, which I find that extremely interesting, is probably insanely boring to most people, so I'll spare you the details, ( unless you really want to know. )
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| Just like a kidney stone, only more painful |
[26 Sep 2005|01:20pm] |
I passed the prelim. A week after all us third-years took the two day, four-hours-a-day test on all of astronomy (well, most of astronomy..."stars" and "galaxies" were conspicuously absent on the test), we get a nondescript email telling us we'd all passed. I can't tell you how much of a relief that is.
Now all I have left is to take my oral prelim this december, where I present a paper I've written (ie, the AB Dor conference proceeding), talk about it for half an hour, then field general questions for a couple hours from a few faculty members about areas of astronomy covered by the paper. Sadly, said paper covers a lot of astronomy, so most of November will involve me hitting the books again.
As for now, I go to France at the end of the week, meaning I have to put together a presentation on some of the other work I've been doing the last couple of years. I think around Christmas, I'll be able to finally rest a little. Maybe.
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| Escape from the et al. jungle |
[14 Sep 2005|05:03pm] |
It's a couple years overdue, but at long last I've put out a first-author paper. I almost feel like a real astronomer. Sure, it's a conference proceeding, but it still counts as "Nielsen et al. 2005," which is good enough for me. Just minutes ago it appeared on the recent abstracts page of astro-ph, sitting there waiting for attention. Ah, 0509400, my new favorite number.
Other than that, I'm less than a week away from my written prelim, 8 hours of tests taken over two days, testing me on my knowledge of all of astronomy. I found out only recently that apparently "all of astronomy" covers a lot more than just "Knowing a thing or two about planets," so I'm in the expected panic mode trying to learn the rest. Still, once that's over, I should be able to relax a little more, and return to my normal, frequent posting schedule...you know, once a month or so. Maybe twice if I actually have something to say.
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| A post without images? Madness. |
[13 May 2005|12:21am] |
So, today's interstellar medium final was the last, meaning I've finished 12 of the 13 classes required for the astronomy Ph.D. It was really brutal, even for only two hours of test, but I felt I was pretty well-prepared for most of it, so hopefully I can walk away with a B in my classes, which is all I need. This means I can go into total research-mode, without all the classwork distracting me. That's a pretty nice feeling.
The rest of the year looks to be pretty hectic. This fall is the written prelim, a day-long test on everything I was supposed to have learned from the eight core classes I've taken. In other words, today's final, only multiplied by eight. Then sometime in December I do my oral prelim, where I present whatever research result I have from work I'll do this summer, and get grilled by a triumvirate of faculty for a couple hours. After that, it's smooth sailing until my thesis defense ('cause we all know researching and writing a thesis is such an easy thing). Add to that the conferences. I've already presented our results this year at the Aspen Winter Conference in Astrophysics (Aspen, CO). At the end of June I'll be giving a similar talk on AB Dor at the Ultra-low Mass Star Formation Workshop (Canary Islands). Then November is just plain crazy, when I go to the High Contrast Imaging Conference (Nice, France), the Michelson Fellow Symposium (Pasadena), and Protostars and Planets V (Hawaii).
Looking back, I got some more pictures developed. And since the last bunch were greeted with such fanfare, I figured I'd plug these, two. There are still more from our recent MMT runs, as well as a bunch from the afore-mentioned Aspen Conference.
Now, to catch up with my long-neglected anime collection...
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| May the Farce...etc |
[12 May 2005|09:31am] |
So my office is in the old telescope dome of Steward Observatory, the university's astronomy department. We have a long-running rivalry with the planetary science department, LPL. (See this pivotal review paper on the subject for more details)
At any rate, this is what greeted us as we came into work today (or in my case, in to take my ISM final).
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| I'll flatfield them later, I promise |
[07 May 2005|12:12am] |
Well, since we're starting to get good science results from the MMT, I figure it's only fair I start drawing attention to my badly-composed pictures of the place. Especially for those of you who prefer a couple pictures over many lines of verbosity.
That's me in front of the MMT enclosure; the whole building rotates around that circular platform as we track stars through the night. The shadow to my left is Laird taking the picture, and the mountain peak further to my left is Mt. Wrightson. The rest of the set mostly involve Laird giving a tour of the place to a new hire, and me tagging along with a camera. The first five were from a run last year, while numbers 6-29 were from our January run, where we didn't get a chance to do much beyond taking pictures. And to answer ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lonita's question, that purple thing hanging from the telescope in pictures 9,10, and 12 is the ARIES camera, a nifty infrared detector that has our SDI optics crammed into it. So run, don't walk (unless you're in a library, in which case you should walk carefully while keeping your voice down), over here to see the rest.
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| Average seeing |
[06 May 2005|02:45am] |
I've finally reached a lull just before finals. The professors for my three classes decided to cram an ungodly amount of work into the final two weeks of classes, but despite all that I managed to survive the five problem sets, as well as the 15-minute presentation and 21-page paper on the joys of finding planets with gravitational microlensing. And in the midst of all that, I had telescope runs at the MMT for each of the last two weekends. But the good news is my general relativity class is now finished, and I have two hours finals for both my cosmology and interstellar medium classes. After that, I only have one class and a seminar to finish off my required classes, and I can do those anytime in the next couple years. Well, that and the whole "prelim" thing, but that just involves months and months and months of studying.
I'm feeling pretty good now, in part because I know there's good research waiting for me once I"ve finished with finals. We've had a string of bad luck with MMT runs such that I'm convinced that Laird, Beth, and I should never go to Las Vegas. Of the eight nights we'd been given on the telescope to look for planets, combinations of bad weather and technical problems meant we didn't have a full dataset on a single target star, only some basic, non-science-quality data, and a poorly-corrected image of Titan. What really blew my mind was that we'd been given the same amount of time on both the MMT and the VLT, and while we had two papers with results from the VLT (and a couple more in the works), we've had nothing from the MMT. Even though they're similarly-sized telescopes, both with quality AO systems, and identical SDI optics.
But that all changed this saturday and sunday nights, when despite light cirrus overhead, the seeing was absolutely gorgeous. And thanks in large part to the hard work of the AO team (three people to keep the loop locked), the telescope operator, and Craig constantly updating and improving the software on the ARIES camera that our SDI optics are in, we managed to get datasets from a half-dozen stars. And of those, we've got some good results that can be written up in a paper over the next month or so (not "Woo-hoo! Found a planet!" good, though good nonetheless). But hey, Beth's playing with the data now, so I may have to retract that bit about not finding any planets quite shortly.
So, you hear that, planets around stars above the celestial equator? Your reprieve is over, you can run as close to your parent stars as you like, but we'll keep hammering at you until we find you, and then we'll post all your innermost details to ApJ, for all the world to see. That's right, your spectral type, your orbital parameters, and you better believe your near-infrared fluxes. We'll expose it all.
Or else we'll find nothing, and Laird will stop leaving me in charge of target selection.
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[28 Apr 2005|11:10am] |
So I work in a field where every time we find something marginally interesting, we rush off to write a press release. If we've found a planet, or think we've found a planet, or found something that one time out of a thousand turns out to be a planet, then you don't want to be between us and the papers. So given this biased perspective, I get surprised when other astronomers don't run off to the nearest reporter with all their pretty pictures. Like, say, this paper on astro-ph today, announcing the discovery of this really cool Einstein Ring:
Fig 1, Cabanac, Gabaud, Jaunsen, Lidman (the same Lidman on our AB Dor paper, by the way), Jerjen 2005. What you're seeing there (in the a image) is a massive elliptical galaxy at z=1 (the light we see left the galaxy 8 billion years ago, when the universe was only five and a half billion years old) in the center of the image. The ring around it is light from a galaxy at z=3.8 (just 1.5 billion years from the big bang). The b image shows a model fit, c shows the deconvolved-image of the lensed galaxy, and d is the prediction of how Hubble would see the galaxy.
As we all know, massive objects cause space-time to curve, so light traveling past that massive object bends. In special cases like this, where these two galaxies are sitting in almost a perfect line with us, this bending is so extreme that the roughly-circular source galaxy (the one at z=3.8) is stretched out along the Einstein ring (named after the obscure scientist who first predicted this phenomenon), and magnified a great deal (12 times or so).
I mean, maybe it's just because I'm in the midst of writing up a paper on finding planets by gravitational microlensing, but I would think this is an interesting enough result to warrant a big press release. Lensing seems like the sort of thing that's readily presentable to the public ("Gravity bends light. See? it's happening right there"), and there are only a handful of examples of strong lensing like this. Ah well, maybe I have an overly-inflated opinion of how the public views astronomy. Or else they're just waiting for the HST images before writing up press releases.
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| Things spall apart |
[24 Feb 2005|10:24pm] |
The three weeks of hell are finally over. A week of the Aspen conference, then a week mostly lost to jury duty, and this week spent catching up on problem sets and finishing my part of the massive proposal for Laird. To top it all off, today was my class presentation in our Interstellar Medium class, but now that it's finished, I'm finally in the clear...for the next few days, anyway.
It was a good presentation. I read the paper yesterday afternoon, put the presentation together well into the evening, finishing around midnight, then practiced the talk until 4am. Giving me four hours to sleep before heading off to class to give the presentation. It was a tawdry tale of romance, lust, loyalty, betrayal, and setting constraints on the discrepant measurements of ISM lithium abundances with values predicted from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. If you don't believe me, check out the thrilling blockbuster of a talk for yourself. Assured to knock your nucleons off.
The talk itself seemed to go alright, I did my standard prep work by giving the talk to a blank wall a half dozen times beforehand, then just sort of let the talk run on its own without me having to do much. There were six or seven questions, but most of them were pretty basic, so I figured I'd done pretty well. Both professors for the class told me I'd done a good job presenting the paper in question.
The weird thing is, it was pointed out to me afterward that I'd delivered the entire 15-minute talk (and most of the questions) to one of the other grad students who was sitting in the front row. I barely remember anything from the talk, but it sounds about right. It's disturbing, because he hits this problem a lot: he nods during lectures, so professors tend to direct most of their explanations right at him. So I fell into that trap, only to a much larger extent.
Well, hopefully my AB Dor talk as the Aspen conference was a little less creepy.
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| Deliberate choices |
[17 Feb 2005|05:06pm] |
Jury duty is over. Guilty, aggravated DUI (Driving while impaired by alcohol with a suspended license, driving with a blood alcohol content above 0.08 with a suspended license). The evidence was pretty clear, so it didn't take the eight of us long to get to the verdict. The trial started in the afternoon Tuesday (after I'd spent the morning in the jury assembly room waiting to be called), continued Wednesday, and wrapped up around 11am today. As a nice wrap-up, the judge and the two lawyers stopped by our deliberation room after the trial was finished to talk about the process, and to give us a few details we weren't allowed to know while we were impaneled jurors. All in all, it was a pretty interesting experience, and I think I understand a lot more about the judicial system, now.
I'm still swamped with problem sets, catching up from both jury duty and the Aspen conference. Turns out I did the relativity problem set utterly wrong, meaning I was horribly ill-prepared for the quiz today. And this isn't my usual "Oh, I don't know that subject matter very well" ill-prepared, this was "Killing Vector? I have no idea what the hell that is, what it represents, or how I'd go about deriving it" ill-prepared. Not great for the ego. Still, lowest scoring quiz is dropped, and homework/quizzes don't count for much in the class.
Anyway, I'm off to dinner with the colloquium speaker (someone who worked with Debra who I met a few times, doing some awesome science on correlations between planets and metallicity), to catch up on old times, the Aspen conference, and whatever else comes to mind in my half-awake state.
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| Uh...fourth, fifth, or sixth...yeah, definitely one of those... |
[15 Feb 2005|10:32am] |
At least Pima County (the one with Tucson in it) has some money. It means the Superior Court jury assembly room is kind of classy, and has nine computers with internet access so I can do important stuff like this. (The computers don't appear to have SSH clients, so this is also the limit of what I can do) I was initially called for jury duty the Thursday right before the Aspen conference, so I had them push it back to today.
It's a pretty interesting experience, and I'm trying to push aside my "So much work to do!" urge so that I can enjoy the fun civil responsibility aspect of it all. I mean, I vote in every election I'm eligible for, I pay my taxes, I'm registered for the draft, so this is the last bit I haven't taken part in, yet. Though, honestly, I'd be happy if I don't have to commit more than today to this whole thing.
The basic idea is that we all (about 150-200 people) sit here in this room, bored out of our minds, from 9-5 today. Then, clerks from various court rooms come in to call a group of 35 of us for a trial (the lucky few selected by random number generator), while the rest of us continue to amuse ourselves here. I've been here an hour and a half now, and they've already called three groups.
I had three problem sets due the week before I left for Aspen, and one the week I was there, all of which I did beforehand. I have three more this week, only one is done. Plus, Laird has stuff he really wants me to get to (after all, I was just slacking off in Aspen, right? No frantic preparations for a talk or anything). Man, grad school would be so much better without all these classes to waste my valuable research time.
As a side note, I should inform the court that their much touted "web filtering software" appears to be defective. Among the categories of content it claims to filter (adult content/gambling, racism, etc), is "Tasteless." Yet clearly I'm allowed to load up my blog with no problems. The county should demand a refund from whoever provides the filtering software.
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| A few less dynes per square centimeters |
[10 Feb 2005|02:44pm] |
And the talk is over. So much relief right now. I managed to get through the talk itself without any major hassles, just the expected "ums" and such. The question session went the full ten minutes, with seven or eight people asking questions at the end (mine was the 40th talk of the conference, and very few talks got that many questions). The main concerns were what Laird had prepared me for, namely attacks on the age and spectral type. I had a little back-and-forth with Kevin Luhman of Harvard, over our disagreement about the age of AB Dor A (I say 50 million years, he says a hundred), but neither of us had the killer argument to end all debate. Gibor Basri and Andrea Ghez also attacked our choice of effective temperature for AB Dor C, but that was to be expected. So for the most part I managed to field all the questions without looking like an idiot, and, more importantly, without people thinking we'd done bad science with the paper.
Afterward, a bunch of people came up to talk about various parts of the paper, and that's still going on during the conference. They've all told me "Very nice talk," but I can't tell if that doesn't just mean "I want to talk to you about something in your talk, but can't think of any other way to start the conversation."
I also heard some good things about the quality of the talk from my friends, Debra (my old Berkeley adviser), John and Jason (Berkeley grad students who work with Geoff), and Eugene (one of my professors at Berkeley) all gave me some pretty good reviews. I think it helped that I talked with Eugene about an hour before the talk, which calmed down the nerves a bit. Geoff missed the talk, but as a consolation I got to catch up with him during the dinner afterward.
The thing that surprised me the most is what they attack about the spectrum. Most of the criticism of the AB Dor result is in regard to our interpretation of the spectrum (we were wrong on our interpretation of the sodium line, they think our M8 standard is too old, they think a young M6 is more consistent, etc), and since it was me reducing that spectrum, it got me a tad depressed. Turns out everyone thinks the spectrum looks great given the circumstances (ie, I did a fine job reducing it), and it's just in the interpretation where there are questions.
As a final fun note, the thesis of my talk is "theories wrong, observers should be careful using them." Yet not a single theorist asked a question, it was all observers challenging me on various issues. I'm sure there's a lesson in that, but I'll think about it later. And don't worry, even with the talk over, I'm sure to have more things to whine about incessantly in the near future.
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| Drifts |
[08 Feb 2005|03:02pm] |
Halfway through day 2 of the Aspen conference. Yesterday was radial velocity planets and disk. Today's planet formation theory and transit observations. Then, tomorrow we hit disks as they relate to planet formation, and brown dwarfs. It's the later section where I give my talk, bright and early at...7:10pm. Last talk before the big banquet dinner.
What with us being in Aspen and all, the talks are divided into morning (9-12) and afternoon (4:30-7:30) sessions, to allow the participants to go skiing during the break. So assuming anyone's still awake and not collapsing from hunger pangs, it should be a good talk. I've gotten a few positive responses thus far, so I should have allies in the audience, which will be nice. I also talked with Debra and a couple of the Berkeley grad students, catching up and reliving good times, so it's all going well thus far.
So, check for posts wednesday evening/thursday morning to see if I survived the discussion section, if not...well, work out an equitable way among yourselves to divide up my anime.
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| Constructive interference |
[02 Feb 2005|04:18pm] |
I got a call today from the professor at Caltech in charge of the Michelson Fellowship: my application was approved. Woo-hoo! That's three years at NSF funding levels ($27,500 per year, a little more than a thousand dollars above what Steward pays grad students), plus up to 7000 dollars a year for work-related expenses (computer upgrade, journal publication costs, travel to conferences or telescopes, and so on). Definitely good news for Laird, as it free up a good chunk of cash each year that would normally be wasted on feeding my anime habit...but it's not like he was strapped for cash to begin with. Plus, it's a good feeling to be paying my own way (for the next three years, anyway).
So on that note, off I go to do some work for Laird while he's still the one paying me.
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| Shooting for the stars |
[27 Jan 2005|01:31pm] |
Anyway, I felt I should follow up on a post by lonita. Yes, astronomy does have us dodging bullets more than one might think. While Mt. Hopkins is useful primarily for the handful of telescopes at the summit, the fact that it has a road going up the mountain makes it an ideal destination for people who want to go to a mountain and shoot stuff. Welcome to Arizona. And after a few beers, apparently, one gets tired of shooting moving targets, and moves on to the road signs. Stop signs and speed limit signs are especially targeted. Some have a dozen bullets in 'em, and most of those have piles of empty beer cans sitting a few hundred feet away. We have a fence on the road for the last few miles, but how much respect will a fence get from people who willingly resort to firearms to take out stop signs? But don't think the astronomer's dance with danger ends there.
Astronomers get targeted even when they stand well clear of mountain road signs. A group of graduate students, with the lofty goal of getting drunk and hanging out, had to duck under tables at a Tucson restaurant/bar when shots were fired. There were about a half-dozen Steward grads there, including my roommate, Shane. No astronomers were hurt, but a few were rather traumatized (much of the crowd was made up by first-years, having only spent a couple weeks in Tucson).
And we're not the only ones who face the wrath of gun-crazed nuts, it seems not even telescopes can keep out of the line of fire.
So, the next time you see an astronomer, remember to salute his bravery, risking death by gunfire to bring you information about the universe. And if you have phone numbers of any cute, single girls, I'm sure passing those along would be appreciated, too.
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| Watashi no jijou wa dounano? |
[24 Jan 2005|12:16am] |
Tonight was the first anime night of the new year; it's been over a month since the last one, but hopefully now we can get back on the bi-weekly schedule. We finished off Kare Kano with a seven-episode marathon, and even got in a preview of Eva, watching the entire first episode before people went home. As expected, the fact that Kare Kano declines in the last third of the series (where Anno has pretty much abandoned the show) meant that people didn't enjoy the episodes quite as much as the earlier ones. The fact that there's no good ending, and that it seemed like they couldn't get the voice actor to a pivotal character for the last episode, didn't help matters either. Anyway, I figure it's better for people to see the whole thing, and let them enjoy the memories of the good episodes, rather than try to convince them "oh you don't want to see the rest, it gets bad from this point on."
The non-anime aspects of the evening were a little shaky (nicely matching the viewing material), but it all didn't turn out too badly. Last anime night was a potluck, and after that turned out so well (astronomy grad students are way better at cooking than you might expect), we tried another one tonight. It got tricky with three of us wanting to use the oven at the same time, and one person having to pull out at the last minute when a bunch of work piled up (leaving us dessert-less, and having to send a team to the grocery store to pick up an ice cream cake), but we managed to pull through and have a really excellent meal. The only caveat is that of the eight of us who are regular anime-night attendees, four are vegetarian, meaning there's no meat to be seen at these potlucks, which leaves my poor canines and incisors feeling left out. Still, it's a temporary sacrifice I'm more than willing to make for the greater (anime-related) good.
Two weeks from now (the day before I leave for Aspen to be crucified by angry theorists), we'll officially start up Evangelion, and this will be with the newly-remastered 5.1 audio DVDs (Renewal), nicely meshing with my roommate's new surround sound system. Man, if you haven't heard "Thesis of the Cruel Angel" (the opening theme) in proper surround sound, you haven't been living. Then, sometime around April or May we should have finished off Eva, and we'll be free to experience the perfection that is Gundam Seed. Some might say I have an addiction to that series, but that's so untrue: I can stop at any time! Like the way I'm stopped now, having to wait until MARCH 22 to see new episodes. The end of March! Oh, cruel, cruel fate.
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go |
| |
earlier |
] |
|
|
|
|
