See, this is why I probably shouldn’t have a blog. I’m inherently boring. I just don’t do enough that is interesting.

And I haven’t done enough on Star Revolution to warrant an update.

So, here’s some random stuff based on what I’ve done in the last week or so.

* I watched My Neighbors the Yamadas. Charming, funny stuff, though very Japanese. If you try it, don’t be surprised if you don’t get everything. The movie is based on a Japanese daily comic strip – imagine a Japanese version of Peanuts that includes the parents as well as the children. Most of the movie feels like very short skits that are basically animated versions of daily comics, but there are longer set pieces in there as well. My favorite part is near the beginning, when Takashi and Matsuko (the father and mother) get married.

I initially tried to watch it subtitled, but I kept missing things because the pretty animation kept distracting me from the text at the bottom, so I switched to the dubbed track. The dub was suprisingly good. When I’d heard Jim Belushi was going to voice Takashi, I was worried, but he actually does a very good job. Molly Shannon also does very well as Matsuko (she makes Matsuko’s voice sound appropriately robust). The only voice I didn’t like was…

Okay, let me make something clear here – I love Tress MacNeille. I’ve been a fan of hers for a long, long time. But I just didn’t like her as the grandmother, Shige, because she used the same “old lady” voice that she’s been using for years for characters like Agnes on the Simpsons or Mom on Futurama. If I hadn’t heard the same voice used in so many other contexts, it probably would have been fine.

* I also watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Loved it. An absolutely fantastic visualization of the classic children’s book…and I’ll be honest, I can’t understand why people freaked out over the Christian allegory in it; that was actually de-emphasized in the movie. I was expecting us to get some really decent fantasy movies in the wake of Lord of the Rings’ success, and I’m glad this was one of them. Now we need a great movie version of The Hobbit!

* In the wake of watching My Neighbors the Yamadas, I googled “life in Japan” and came up with this site. This is the site of Dan Laurson, who very luckily got to go to Japan on a collegiate foreign exchange program. Fortunately for us, he brought his digital camera and is good at website design.

* I mentioned briefly in a previous post that I was basing my new GUI design for Star Revolution on the concept of an immediate-mode GUI. Here’s the video presentation I watched that convinced me to give this idea a chance. So far it’s working out well! I’ll be honest, I wish that there were more podcasts and vidcasts about game development. And I don’t mean “Oooh, let’s talk about what EA did this week!”, I mean nuts & bolts, “Here’s how I implemented this effect in HLSL” kind of stuff.

And that’s it for now, I think.