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How Gundam’s Amuro Ray Changed What It Means to Be an Anime Hero

Amuro is a curious character as heros go, or more accurately perhaps, I’ve rarely considered him the hero of the story: so much as caught in it. Which in of itself could be considered a Gundam-trope by now, 40 years later.

Given a different circumstance to the war: I’d rather invision Amuro Ray in protest to military conflict at all, and that it’s a kind of bloodied, twisted irony that he ended up one of the most notable heroes of the One Year War. And as such would still be active much later during the Londo Bell era.

A large part of Gundam’s first set of story arcs centers around the fact that he’s pretty much got a simple choice. He can pilot the Gundam into battle, or he can kiss his arse goodbye before the shooting even starts. That’s the card they’ve been dealt. Really, he’s kind of a dick during the earlier parts. But over the course of the series he evolves much better as a character.

I think the article’s parting bit puts it more accurately than the tile. Less that the character changed what it means to be an anime hero, and more that he’s a different type of protagonist to fill the role. ‘Cuz let’s face it, the Saturday morning go punch the villain slot isn’t dead yet and it’s been decades, lol.

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One positive side of my iOS change over has been the battery life.

The iPad Pro 11 works out to about a nightly charge after heavy use, and I can basically irk out two days at light use  or a medium plus light day worth of I keep an eye.

By contrast, every Android tablet I’ve had pretty much needs a nightly charge if it’s Google all the things.

The exception is my old Thor model Kindle Fire, which runs on a more “What week did I last change this thing?” pattern of life.

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Part of me thinks the genetics and upbringing assured that I’d be capable of eating like a proverbial horse. Part of me thinks of I wanna live to die an old fart, I should probably exercise more and eat less.

Willow on the other hand wishes she could swipe my tuna.

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In a more perfect world: there would be a personal coffee droid hovering a few meters from my head, like a mobile keurig that dispenses coffee, and shoots cookies like a pez dispenser.

Ahh, an idiot can dream.

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https://youtu.be/ZiJJZyNrsPI

The negative points are pretty much why I haven’t used paper notebooks very much since my teens. Having a pile of stuff to sort, revise, and remove the cruft from: is a problem that doesn’t scale. Or as I like to remember: after about three binders, I’m pretty much done and hate dealing with heaps of folders.

Most of the advantages I sought came from having a digital file system. Typewriters never really did it for me the way text edited and word processors do. But as a consequence of funneling everything down the word hole: you lose the freedom of the page.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about having tablets is the ability to have my tablet alongside as I work. Lean over, and swipe words into my textual notes, and then shift back to my work. Evernote also works pretty well in that it optimizes for the more word processor like nature of many of my work notes, yet makes it easy to merge disparate bits of information from external resources. Including handwriting, images, documents, scripts, etc.

Tablets open up greater ease to get off the beaten path of the word processor: while retaining the ability to keep it as simple as WordStar. Especially when you have both a stylus and a keyboard available to aide your note taking.

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Side effects of a seven year old computer:

Encoding with My Anime HEVC/AAC profile, which favors quality over size, runs at about 9 fps on my Core i5-3570K. This works out to roughly an hour per ~24 minute episode. Or roughly an entire day worth of taking over my processor when there’s a lot of episodes for HandBrake to crunch through.

On the flipside, I was about to get one of my favorite anime off eBay for less than half the going price on sources like Amazon.

Which coincidentally, runs around ten hours of video content. Thus it’ll probably be tomorrow night when my desktop stops melting from the encoding, lol.