I told Ian when I walked in the door:
“My love affair with Spike Jonze continues.”

Which about sums up this film.

If my brief comments about the film ring of defense, it’s because they were cast after reading Robert Butler’s (of the KC Star) review, in which his only main complaint about the film was that the characters were ‘whiny’. While I can see how someone might take that away from this film, I really have to disagree with that being the overall final judgment of the work.

My main thesis, and what I tell everyone about ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, is that the film is about children, but not necessarily for them. That is to say, while the subject matter is kids, it’s not a kids movie. I think maybe people don’t like the film as much because the narrative is too wandering, or perhaps even absent at some parts. There is no clear purpose to a good deal of what happens on the island where Max finds the Wild Things. While this is somewhat true, I think it’s also the point of the work.

In the almost gut-wrenching opening of the movie, we see Max and his interactions with his mother and sister, as well as other children. He’s not a bad kid, just one that gets into a fair bit of trouble. Through a few select events, we learn a good deal about how alone Max feels, with his angst-ridden sister and her typically jerky friends, as well as with his mother who’s juggling work, her family, and trying to date Mark Ruffalo. With his orbit about these people being only every so loosely bound, it takes only a small push to send Max running from them as fast as he can, literally.

The remainder of the film takes place on the island of the creatures, and here is where it seems to ‘wander’. It feels this way because it seems to be the product of a type of thought experiment: What happens when Max is faced with beings as childish as himself? They act just like he does, responding to disagreement with tears, jealousy, and even rage. For the Wild Things though, all of these emotions are magnified, not just by the huge expressions on their enormous faces, but also by their outbursts which are so violent at times as to be almost terrifying.

On the island, Max is crowned king of the Wild Things after he bluffs them into believing he possesses terrible powers which they should fear. His reign consists of a small list of games and projects, none of which are seen through to fruition, and few of which do not end in an argument, tears, or a fist fight between the huge creatures. There seems to be mutiny stirring beneath the surface of Max’s happy-go-lucky little kingdom, and the more he tries to pull these creatures together, the harder they seem to push each other away.

In the end, after the goat outs Max for not being king, and instead “just a normal little guy,” Max comes to terms with the fact that these animals are really best left to their own devices, and the time’s come for him to go back to where he belongs. He speeds home on his boat, leaving Carol on the shore in tears, but understanding. I felt like that, more or less, at the end. The movie is really very sad: little is immediately resolved or fixed in the course of the film, leaving you feeling a little anxious and depressed about the whole thing, but you understand, and that helps. Everyone has felt like that at one point or another, and we all make it through.

With that in mind, I earnestly encourage anyone who doesn’t mind having their emotions knocked around a little bit in order to catch a glimpse of the human experience in the eyes of a Wild Thing to check this film out. It’s worth the time.

Additionally: ‘All Is Love is the song that’s played over the credits, and it’s really growing on me.

[ mp3 ♫ ]

Where The Wild Things Are – Karen O and the Kids

I made the mistake of mentioning at one point to Conor (in the REU program) how badly I miss playing Halo. He said he and his friends were actually going to play that evening, and I was welcome to join them! Terribly excited was I, for it has been a sad, lonely month since Master Chief, the Arbiter, and myself laid down some hurt on a whole manner of evil.

What I didn’t realize is there is a delicate balance between being good at the campaign mode (Ethan and I are currently somewhere in the Legendary campaign) and online play. In even the worst campaign battles, through clever use of teamwork, you can beat the system, and your enemies. I was thinking online play would be kinda fun; I remember when Hank had the old XBox Live, for the old XBox and the old Halo, and how we’d get on and I’d work the controls, just running around like a lunatic, and Hank would talk smack to evoke entertaining responses from all the 14-year-olds that inhabited the online-Halo-scape.

It’s a whole different ballgame now, folks.
These people are crazy.

Now, I know I accuse insanity in a lot of different subsets of human culture… and I suppose this really isn’t any different… I was just amazed/appalled how intense online Halo is. Maybe I feel like I need to make excuses (EG: these guys are too intense and have no life!) to compensate for my own gross shortcomings in online Halo play (EG: getting routinely wiped across the floor by people with ‘leet’ screen names). In fact, I know that’s what it is. Nonetheless, the intensity of those players surprised me. I think I might have to drop some coinage on a few months of Xbox Live just to hone my skills; I don’t like sucking that bad. A man would like to be able to hold his head up high when he gallivants around a digital landscape, assuming the guise of a fictitious super-soldier.

I’m bemoaning my lack of XBox during the summer months in which I have large amounts of unassigned time, but the XBox would certainly spell doom for my reading list, so in the end it’s probably a good thing.

Sadly, this review isn’t nearly as much fun as my Gundam Wing review… Gundam X is a much better program, and so it’s harder to mock. In the chronology of the Gundam Universe, this series aired directly following Wing, and somehow despite a noticable improvement in quality, suffered poor ratings, ultimately clocking in ten episodes short of the intended 49, totaling 39. Thus, I began my ‘halfway’ review at around episode 20.

(NOTE: I do intend to do a wrap-up review of Wing, but I still need to find the time to watch Endless Waltz on YouTube, which is a bit of a pain in the neck… But I haven’t forgotten!)

Backstory
The story of After War: Gundam X is not terribly complex, but it’s solid. It is an “alternate universe” in the more typical definition of the word; that is, you can actually trace the point at which the AW timeline of X diverges from that of the UC. In this world, the rebelling space-fairing forces actually managed to stage a world-wide colony drop, ravaging the face of the planet, and reducing the planet’s population to something like less than a percent, if I remember correctly. That event occurred 15 years prior to the opening of the series.

In this strange new world, by and large devoid of humans, the survivors cling to the surface, struggling to rebuild their world. Confusion reigns, and people are more or less self-sufficient, with no sense of any collective, global conscience, for the moment at least. The main characters are a class of adventurers called “Vultures.” I’m not sure if that word has such a negative connotation in the Japanese language as it does in English, but nonetheless, the protagonists all seem to be happy with the label. They scour the Earth, looking for left over and abandoned equipment from the war, selling it off for money to maintain repairs on their ship and to their weapons, as well as to feed their crews.

Jamil is captain of the Frieden (Germ: Joy), a Vulture craft. The first story arc focuses on how the headstrong young mobile suit pilot Garrod, and the Newtype Tiffa, come to join his crew. With them comes the GX-9900 Gundam, the ultimate weapon of the old federation which unleashed the attack that in turn triggered the colony drop. Jamil, guilt-ridden for his contribution to the war 15 years ago, now makes his living as a Vulture, all the while seeking out Newtypes in order to protect them.

Garrod Ran

Characters Garrod is the main focus of the series, but given that he eventually joins the crew of the Frieden, that becomes much less apparent later on, when the entire crew gets roughly equal screentime. Garrod is a 15 year old punk, hasty and too bold at times, but also quite resourceful. One of my favorite things about Garrod is he’s a pretty believable character. We know little about his past (or it escapes me/has not been revealed), but it’s easy enough to understand him: he’s a hot-shot out to prove that just because he’s a kid doesn’t mean he can be ignored.

Constantly rushing in without looking at what’s ahead, Garrod finds himself in countless tight spots. More often than not, Roybea and Witz, the “hired guns” on Jamil’s ship, arrive in their respective Gundams to back him up. These two guys are pretty interesting characters, because while it would be easy to write them as either “faux-twins” (basically the same person with different animations) or polar opposites, neither is actually the case. One entire episode is devoted to telling their respective backstories, and you slowly come to see the reasons why each fights. Most of the time, they get along like old buddies, kidding around, watching out for each other, and so on. However, the current arc I’m midway through actually sees them at odds with one another, which has been fun to watch. One of the most impressive points about X so far is that they’ve received development at all.

That supporting characters get this treatment is fantastic, and the principles are no exception. Both Tiffa and Garrod are noticeably changed by the events that transpire on board their ship. They both begin to understand what it means living with the rest of the crew, and it comes to define their interactions with the rest of their shipmates. Contrast this with the static and mysterious Capt. Jamil, the former Federation Soldier, and his first mate, Sarah. They don’t seem to change much, but they’re already, for the most part, responsible, empathetic characters that lend most of the support the rest of the crew needs from time to time. Even more minor characters, such as Kid, the ‘boy wonder’ chief mechanic, and the Doctor that takes care of the crew, step up to the plate and prove interesting and complex, in spite of their limited screentime.

Tiffa, most of all, I like. Her character, the strange shy girl with tremendous power (characteristic of a Newtype), is so easy to screw up from a writing standpoint. In order to maintain the “mystery” aspect, they usually would just mute this character (I’ve seen it done… Neon Genesis Evangelion, that was directed at you, in spite of our love affair). That way, if she never says anything, you never know what she’s thinking. I was very worried that Tiffa would be like this, and she was, a bit at first. But then she starts speaking, because the crew starts listening. Her feelings about many things (like helping Jamil, caring for the Frieden, etc.) are easily enough discerned from her actions. However, she’s still reserved (never is seen joking around or playing with her shipmates), and much to his chagrin, seems ambivalent to Garrod’s shy and timid romantic advances.

Once more, I can’t emphasize enough that the real joy of watching Gundam X has been seeing how these characters progress and develop. All of this only from the first half of the series! Contrast this with Wing, in which what pass for ‘characters’ in that program are more or less scripted archetype-automatons that respond the same way in the first episode as they do in the last (Quatre and Trowa being the exceptions, perhaps, and Duo getting points for not being half as irritating as the remaining cast). Remember Heero’s “I Fight Because There Is Fighting!” speech? None of that trash here; not even close.

Mecha Not to continue contrasting this to Wing, but I feel like I can do that because they were aired back-to-back, and I watched them in the corresponding order. Here is one spot where Gundam Wing proves the better. Gundam X is a really well-written show, but there are really only one or two interesting suits. Whatever model of the GX Garrod pilots is fantastic to watch. Witz’s Airmaster is cool too, transforming many times in a single battle from humanoid form to an airplane mode. Roybea’s Leopard is essentially an artillery platform, spending most of the battles shooting endless supplies of missiles into the fray. But that’s it. The enemy suits encountered are very generic, (even the OZ mobile dolls had a bit of character to them, or at the very least you knew their model types!) and given that their average screenlife is about 2 seconds, and then they explode, it’s hard to really give a damn about them. The two antagonists that recur have confusing and odd suits, cited by the crew as “Freaky Gundams” in the translation I’m watching. That about sums it up. They’re goofy looking, and have extendo-arms, and show up long enough to make a mess of things, and then they run away. So complex is their makeup though that it’s almost impossible to identify one from the other, and even then, understanding what you’re looking at is a bit of a chore with those guys. So yeah, only the two or maybe three really cool suits, but that’s OK. They’re cycled and upgraded often enough that you never really get bored of watching them get the crap beat from them every other episode. Plus the satellite cannon is a pretty sweet (and actually technologically feasible!) weapon.

The GX-9900-DV, Piloted by Garrod

Overall/General Comments
The best thing I can say about X is that it’s a well crafted story. It’s composed of about 8-9 arcs, each lasting about a handful of episodes, with it’s own set of new characters that join the regulars for that arc. The structure is almost reminiscent of a serial or comic book, as within the arc every episode ends on an air of tension. Unlike Wing, with the mega-generic recap that occurs at the start of each episode that contains ZERO useful information in it the 2nd-15th time seeing it, X updates you on exactly how the last episode ended.

The best part here is that this recap normally goes about 20-30 seconds PAST what you’ve already seen. You can’t ignore it, because there is a tiny scrap of new material, even in the recap, which is, in 4-out-of-5 instances, masterfully timed to recapture the suspense you felt at the conclusion of the previous episode, and then they throw you into the intro sequence! Once or twice this was done so well I even got goosebumps! Then, at the close of an arc, they lay off. That leg is over, and they’re not going to drag you along to the next one if you don’t fancy it. Thus, with nothing suspenseful to recap, the following arc-opening episode usually begins with a small prologue, giving you helpful information to understand what is about to unfold.

I don’t know how else to put it: it’s respectful, intelligent, professional story telling. The episodes seemed to be crafted with a purpose in mind, as opposed to a 30-episode story stretched to its limits to fill 50 episodes, and then haphazardly diced up indiscriminately where it was convenient (YES, GUNDAM WING, I AM GLARING AT YOU). It’s masterful, and I’ve enjoyed it greatly.

Not available in America, I’m getting pretty close to buying a crap-copy of this program, so enamored am I with it thus far! I’ll let you know how it winds down, but let’s just say I’ve got high hopes.

ADDENDUM: Sorry, I just thought of this; the episode titles! They’re always quotes from the show, which I thought was neat. At the very least, it’s a step up from Wing:

…so maybe that wasn’t quite as scathing of a commentary as I meant to level, but Wing’s titles are just plain terrible. Seriously, can you guess what happens in episode 18: Tallgeese Destroyed? THE TALLGEESE GETS DESTROYED. Come on. Maybe X’s sound a little fluffy, but at least they’re not spoilers. Actually done now.

[LIES! Final comment, is to take a look at this fantastic review of Gundam X. I was looking around for some images to stick in the post, and I came across this review. He says what I say far more concisely, I do admit, but it's more or less the exact sentiment I was getting at with my survey of the show! ]

Only just recently, I dropped a post about impressions concerning Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0, You Can (NOT) Advance. There’s a lot to speculate on, and I’ve been poking around the internet for some decent reviews with mixed results:

A spoiler-less review that is a tad cursory, but gives you a good idea what to expect left me wanting a little more. A far more detailed review gives a lot deeper analysis of the characters, new and old, how they’ve changed, and the difference in tone between Rebuild and the original source material. I actually had to stop reading that one though, because I don’t want the story ruined for me.

…It does, however, put me in pain for wanting to see the original, despite the fact that they’re still in Kirksville! Damn. I never quite forget how much I like Eva, but sometimes I do get a reminder that proves to be annoyingly painful. So anyways, that’s all I’ve really got to report about 2.0. The real meat today concerns 1.0, which you might have thought was old news!

Au contaire! I went looking for the above Evangelion news (mainly, reviews of 2.0 which was released in late June) and some how stumbled upon this trailer:

[NOTE: I actually found it at the Apple Trailer Site for Evangelion 1.0, where it is available in high quality]

Imagine my surprise! I had not heard so much as a peep about a North American release, and I was beginning to give up on one. Turns out that I found this on July 3rd, and the official press release was only published on the second. Go me for keeping up with the times, for once. Anyways, Funimation was just releasing the English Language cast and director, and noted at the bottom that it would be in theaters this summer.

It looks like the English language cast from the series has come back, for the principles at least. I’m really excited that we’re going to get the film, and that it’ll be here as soon as this summer. The DVD can’t be far off, which is the real goal, for me at least. I heard that they just released the film in Japan again, but this time as a BluRay. It’s funny that I could care less about regular films in that high of quality, but I’m pretty curious to see what Eva in super-monster HD looks like.

There are no additional points of speculation, as I’ve already talked 1.0 to death, but the last thing I’ll encourage you to check out Funimation’s Events Page to see if Evangelion is playing near you. By some fluke of time, space, and luck, Evangelion 1.0 is showing in Boston on August 14, the day before I get on a plane to leave! I’m very, very excited, and already have my ticket, because I wouldn’t miss this for the world. Granted, I’ve already seen it once, but that was a grainy torrent back in the Summer of 2007, and I can barely remember even watching it, so this is well in order.

Anyways, I’ll report back after I see it in August, and give you the full run-down of my thoughts on what will undoubtedly be a fantastic film experience!

With a spare second at the lab the other day, I was poking around the internet on one of the computers in the lab. Hitting up Google News, as I am accustomed to doing, I noticed under the “Science and Technology” heading that just the day previous (which would have been June 30th) Firefox 3.5 had been released! Yay! I do love a good release of my favorite browser from Mozilla, and 3.5 has been in the pipes for quite some time.

The release promised to be a speed boost for a browser that has historically been… well, not slow, perhaps ‘thorough’ is a better word. Firefox always takes forever to boot, a problem I’ve since resigned myself to by never shutting the damn thing down, unless in the event of a complete reboot of my computer. As far as browsing, I never noticed any problems, and I have no good way of knowing whether it’s my connection or the browser. In any case, I’m not leaving the ‘Fox any time soon, so the point is a little moot. I am glad it’s faster, though.

In that article though, there was a ton of other information that I had been entirely ignorant of, particularly all the crazy stuff going on at Mozilla Labs. I’m fairly familiar with the stuff that Google Labs puts out, because they always trumpet it from their homepage, which is my homepage, coincidentally (and has been since… god, I can’t even remember when!). I like that Mozilla has taken the cue, and set up their own “Labs” environment. I’m sure this was probably done with a fair amount of eye-rolling on the part of the developing community.

The nature of open source software means that Mozilla has been doing “labs”-type operations since they emerged from the ashes of the Netscape group in 1998-1999. The source code has always been available as nightly builds, and if you felt like it, I assume you could compile it yourself, and execute whatever was posted online. I’ve never done this, but that’s my understanding of how it functions, roughly, at least. Past that, you could say that the Mozilla people even further pioneered this idea with the addition of extensions within Firefox.

This fantastic move put a lot more control over the browser in the hands of third party developers, as well as the users themselves. The extensions [NOTE: They've since been re-named to Add-Ons, which has always irritated me, and I haven't been able to break the habit of calling them extensions] are modular, in that you can have as many as you want, and they all play nice with each other in virtually any configuration. The downside is that there is no central development, and so sometimes extensions will just kindof die, even if they’re useful tools. Odds are though, that if they’re popular, they’ll continue to develop.

So, how funny, that in spite of these two huge developments, Mozilla, to compete with Google, has to spell out the ‘labs’ idea. As nearly as I can tell, Labs seems to be for things that are bigger than any mere extension (despite being installed the same way) but not big enough, important enough, or complete enough to merit integration within the mothership of a milestone Firefox release.

So what’s up at the labs, you might ask? Lets see! There are a lot of things to play around with, and what distinguishes this from Google Labs is that these are actually in-progress works. I’ve never used a Google Labs tool that broke or was ugly; Mozilla Labs has liberated me from such an unfortunate state. If it breaks, you know someday it’ll be better, which is frustrating and encouraging all in the same moment.

Weave
A synchronization tool, this allows you to get access to your Firefox ‘profile’ across machines. The coolest thing I saw was that you get access to your web history in the form of the smart-bar transferring with Weave, and you also get your tabs! So when I have a tab-collection open on one computer, I could get a public machine with Weave installed to essentially “take me home” as far as tabs goes. Neat! It also brings your bookmarks along for the ride…

Strangely, I don’t care. I haven’t used bookmarks in years, and vis a vis have probably given Google an extra thousand searches when in actuality I was just too lazy to try and remember the URL. On the other hand, I manually type “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THING” when I want to know something about a THING, so. Whatever that means…

I haven’t actually started using Weave, because for the summer I’m confined to my laptop. I’ve never used the MacTop so intensively before, but she’s holding up quite well. I’ve also made some real pioneering leaps in terms of RSS feeds and e-mail portability, but I’ll get to that later. But yeah, I don’t want to build a Weave profile on my auxilary machine, and then push it to my primary, so that’ll have to wait.

Jetpack
This makes it even easier to program little mini-extensions for Firefox using web standards that more people are familiar with. I don’t fully understand it, but the tutorial makes it look pretty easy. Maybe they’ve finally dumbed it down enough that I could finally fulfill a lifelong ambition and contribute to the Mozilla community! I’ll probably play with it next week, and I’ll get back to you.

Ubiquity
Cool as hell, but probably a little to futuristic for me at this point. Glad someone’s got the stones to take on such a project though.

Personas
I almost dismissed this as just a corollary to the Themes system set up by Firefox right now. I played with Themes when I first got the browser, many moons ago, but ultimately nothing’s quite as clean and seamless as the default. Plus I have it use the little buttons so I can get more screen space, and they’re so small I just want something that’s no-nonsense, form-over function, you know?

Boy am I glad I didn’t pass this one over! On a whim, I installed it, just to give it a go. Imagine my surprise when, as I was browsing the gallery, I slid my mouse over one of the previews, and instantly my browser responded by skinning with the theme, preceded by virtually no lag at all! This makes it so easy to try out anything, or everything, and just click when you find one you like!

Hopefully, as the community designing these ‘Personas’ grows, there’ll be even more designs to choose from.

Snowl
-Preface-
Finally we arrive at the feature I was most excited for. I’ve really come to love Thunderbird, the red-headed stepchild of the Mozilla foundation. It doesn’t have the userbase, or the glamor of its older brother, but it tries hard. A lot of people at Truman are just kinda lazy, and use the crappy web-mail circa 1995 for all their e-mail needs. It’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s just clunky as hell. Couple that with my collective hard-on for all things Open Source, and you see why I’ve been using Thunderbird loyally since the summer of 2006.

Recently, Truman transitioned its e-mail service over to GMail. Despite my initial resistance, I’ve grown to like it. Part of why the transition period was so arduous was because, using the POP3 server, I’d been downloading copies of my e-mail to my harddrive, and then just blasting the copies on the server, since we were given such an abysmally small amount of storage. Now GMail comes strutting in, telling me I have 2.7 gigs of space, or something absurd like that.

Around this time, I also found out I’d be sans desktop for my time in Boston. I needed a solution to my e-mail problem fast. When the changeover day came, I began the slow process of pushing three YEARS worth of e-mail from my hard drive, back to the server, where there was now ample room. This took a long, long time, and suffered several restarts and slowdowns. The reason for this is I didn’t want to go the POP3 route anymore. I didn’t like that my primary e-mail machine was constantly at odds and out of sync with the server.

IMAP solves all this nicely. Thunderbird essentially transforms into a faceplate for accessing mail on the server-side. Any changes I make in GMail, for example, the numerous messages I’ve received and sent since coming to Boston, will be immediately and automatically reflected in my Thunderbird inbox when I return home. The setup works really nice, except Thunderbird is a lot slower now that it’s manipulating data server-side rather than locally on my harddisk. Mrh.

To compensate for that, I wanted to centralize my information more than I already had. I used to, for a while, use the open-source stand-alone calendar client, Sunbird. I’ve since fallen off using that tool, simply because I fail at keeping a decent calendar. I get lazy and stop adding things, game over. Last fall, Cody Sumter, god bless him, told me that you could get Google Calendar set up to send text-message reminders via SMS to your phone!

Having just become the proud-but-reluctant owner of an unlimited text-messaging plan, I figured this was the most dignified way to utilize it for the powers of good. Thus, began my foray into the land of Google Stuff, as opposed to just their search. Those reminders saved my ass countless times in keeping up with the battery of meetings and events I had to contend with last semester, and boy and I ever thankful! Recently I was able to integrate that Google Calendar pretty seamlessly into Mozilla’s Thunderbird-Extension Calendar application called ‘Lightning’. They sync well, and now I have got myself down to a single application again for both e-mail and calendar, and RSS.

However, after syndicating my RSS feeds through Thunderbird for almost a year though, I’ve run off with another woman. I made it maybe two weeks in Boston without my feeds. While IMAP ensures that my e-mail situation stays simple and synced, it is entirely ignorant of the RSS Feeds component of things. The only thing I could think to do was link Google Reader into the account with the rest of my Google Stuff, and get my information that way. Let me just say, it’s awesome.

As dumb of a complaint as it is, to handle each and every feed item as if it were a tiny e-mail is a really silly way to go about keeping tabs on a zillion things going on on the internet. Google reader just dumps them nicely in one giant pile, and there’s no clicking. You scroll; find something interesting? Stop. If you’re bored, or want to skip stuff, just keep scrolling. You can tag items, and then browse just by folder and all that, it’s fantastic: I’m a believer.

-Actual Discussion-
On the heels of that though, imagine my surprise when I see that labs is working on Snowl, an in-browser feed syndication app! I thought this was my chance to redeem myself, come crawling back to Mozilla, a crying, sobbing mess, promising to never leave her for Google and her short skirt ever again. This was… not the case.

Snowl, in a pre-release state, is rough as hell. The interface is awkward, it’s hard to actually manage subscriptions, many configurations are inoperative, and I simply can’t fathom the pedagogical differences in the List/Stream/River organizational schemes. I’m not being flippant, I just actually do not get it. There is also the idea that eventually you’ll route all your e-mail, RSS and social networking stuff to the same place… OK?

Immediately I think of the word “clusterf-” oh whatever. You get the idea. I feel bad, the poor little thing doesn’t seem to have a sense of direction… and yet… it has, in the course of two days, become indispensable to me. Huh?! “But Tom, it’s so crappy, you said!” Yeah, Snowl is for sure in the pre-release stage, and so it’s supposed to be rough. Even when it gets further along, I’m not sure I buy that it’s the silver-bullet for getting all you messaging needs in one place.

But it did outstrip Google Reader in one category, and that’s gotta count for something, right? I’ve always had trouble aggregating news-oriented feeds. My Thunderbird solution was to route the domestic news of the New York Times into a folder with the international news of the BBC. Daily, this folder would stack up 30-50 new news items. Burdensome as this was, I set a limiter on the folder that only the most recent 25 items should be kept, and throw everything else out. That way, when I wanted to check news, I only had to content with the recent updates.

Little by little though, isolating these updates in their own folder, and with as busy as I get, I quickly stopped reading them. Bad as I felt, there just wasn’t time to put up the daily struggle with making sure I had kept up with all that information. Even in Google Reader, this problem persists. Even with Google’s super-fast skim-and-it’s-marked-as-read technique, perfect for the 5-7 webcomics that I read per day, that’s not easy enough to get through 50 news items a day.

Snowl has this mode called “Stream,” which I’m absolutely smitten with. It’s a pane that pops up on the left side of the browser, and it is a list of the source and headline of every item in your collective news feeds, in aggregate. This irritated me at first, making it hard to find all my comics in the monsoon of news. Then, it dawned on me. The big-list-of-headlines is perfect as a sortof customized news ticker… and Google Reader’s very clean, image-friendly interface is perfect for comics!

And the rest was history. I deleted all my news from Reader, and all my comics from Snowl, and never the two shall meet again. While I’m typing an e-mail, or watching Gundam stuff on YouTube, or blogging, my eyes constantly flit to the left, seeing if there’s anything interesting. Already, this has served me incredibly well. I sat down after lunch, and saw, a mere hour or two after it happened, that Sarah Palin had resigned! Normally, I wouldn’t've heard that for a few days, or until I manually pulled up one of the news sites.

Now, I basically have the ultimate feed aggregation system. If Snowl could be configured such that the news pane would function more like a ticker, I might just wet myself with joy, because that’s what I’m really going for here.

That said, this post ballooned into way more than I intended for it. Sorry for the big ol’ history on my technology situation. I’m just really particular about this stuff, and even if none of you care, it’ll be fun for me to read this in 10 years when kids haven’t even heard of “Facebook” or “RSS”.