I hope everyone's 4th of July weekend was filled with lots of booze, explosives and marginally legal fun :P. I feel a strong urge to post something well, can't really think of much to post about. In lieu of the holiday, we called off the weekend raids and other than a couple of rounds of WipEout HD I didn't really do a whole lot of gaming. I did though, play with the server quite a bit so uuh, if anyone noticed, it kind of went down for about 5 minutes then rolled back to a restore point earlier that morning. Whoops. Oh, there is also a footer at the bottom of this site now if anyone cares...

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood finished up its 64th and final episode this weekend. I don't know if it is because I am fairly oblivious or if it is because I haven't been actively into anime fandom in uuh years, but I didn't notice a whole lot of buzz going around for Brotherhood, given how many people are watching it. I guess everyone got it all out during the first television series?

Anyway, FMA:B follows the manga's story line. It thankfully rushes past the overlap and splits off at around episode 16 or so. Past that point, it is a very different show than its predecessor. The early parts of FMA:B are still kind of heavy on the dumb short jokes but not to a grating degree. The manga's storyline is well paced and plotted out as expected. It is probably one of the best new anime series that i have seen in a while for whatever that is worth.

The animation, particularly the combat scenes retains its quality throughout the entire series which is notable given its length. In fact, the pacing and the story quality in general were right on track for all 64 episodes. It never at any point diverged off into a filler story or degenerate into a clip show. It's still worth seeing the first series. I think FMA:B assumes that you have seen the original show based on the amount of content that was cut from the first part of the series in order to cut down on the repetition. Awesome show, definitely recommended.

Does anyone have any good suggestions as to what we should watch next? Other than a half-assed viewing of Durarara I really haven't picked up any new anime series in several seasons. It's about that time of the year where the new summer season series start to come out anyways so I might just do the, "download the first and second episode of anything interesting" bit again and see how that goes.

Anime Expo was this weekend. You know, for as long as I have lived in Southern California I have never bothered attending that convention. I would say maybe next year, but we are tentatively planning on attending PAX next year (I formally announced it on the internet so it will happen right?) so I don't know how my vacation and the con schedule will be.

To the two people who signed up for Linode via my referral code: You both rock.