Joe Jackson's Live 1980-86 has three different versions of "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" — one by the original band, one acoustic, and one a capella — explained in the liner notes by saying Jackson couldn't pick one to leave out. They're all suitably different that hearing the same song three times across a…

Pardon the jazz, but let's add Holly Cole's "Blame It On My Youth", which appeared not on Blame It On My Youth but its follow-up Don't Smoke In Bed

Relative to a lot of Filmation's work from that time, Mission: Magic! is fairly decent. But of course, ultra-cheap US TV animation isn't going to compare to Yellow Submarine at all.

I think what I'm ultimately most impressed by is Luke's training with Yoda in TESB. It's slow, it takes a while to get anywhere, Luke is a total dick the whole time… and it sets up everything good to follow in the series (including that super fun first reel of ROTJ, as you say).

1. In the original Star Wars trilogy, of course The Empire Strikes Back is on top, but I put Return of the Jedi above A New Hope, because I find the moral struggle between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor compelling enough to look past the B-plot Ewok hijinks, and I just don't think that ANH has anything comparable to dig…

Infamous for Julie Andrews' brief topless scene, IIRC. For a time, was something of a fixture on late night pay cable.

His autobiography has an entire chapter on "practical conservatism". I don't think he fits any political label particularly neatly.

Sometimes I can wrap Windows CD installers in Wineskin to get them to run on the Mac semi-natively, but I've only done with this with visual novels, which don't push the system very hard.

I've been a Mac user since the 80s, and I remember in the 90s when the joke was that the only way Apple could improve its standing with gamers would be to bundle a PlayStation with every Mac. Not that it's much of a gaming system now, but with Parallels/VMWare/Bootcamp, I suppose it doesn't really have to be either.

Played some Muv-Luv Alternative, in anticipation of the upcoming Kickstarter for a legal English version. The geopolitics of this visual novel (I'm currently in the "coup d'êtat arc") are very much a product of their time (2006, i.e., the second George W. Bush administration), in that they're strongly critical of…

The Mac and Linux ports of KOTOR made for a hell of a surprise, didn't they?

I was told that White Album 2 is as close as we are likely to get to a spiritual successor to Rumbling Hearts, which is less of a tear-jerker and more of a gut-punch. 11 episodes into WA2, I can see the similarity.

The rest of my Summer season is Charlotte (because Jun Maeda, obviously), and the silly short subject Miss Monochrome 2. ATM, though, what I'm most into is a romantic drama I missed from a few seasons back, White Album 2. (all of these are on Crunchyroll)

OK, you guys, we need to talk about the anime School-Live!

How has YouTube ContentID not annihilated this video yet? Why is the Warner legal department letting thoughtful interlopers bolster the value of the WB back catalog, when they could be sending out sternly-worded cease-and-desists?

I hope anthologies take off. I've been collecting the manga anthology Dengeki Daioh this year, and it's an embarrassment of riches: 900 pages (featuring 35+ ongoing series) for ¥680 (usually about $9 after exchange rates and Kinokuniya's markup). I can only read the simplest stuff (the childs-eye-view Yotsuba! is…

Back at Anime Central in May, I went to a great concert by Scandal. The Japanese all-female hard rock band, not the two-hit wonder from the 1980s. Adding the still-active band to my Pandora likes was a mistake, as I got served a bunch of early MTV-era songs, and not a whiff of Japanese punk or J-rock.

I keep waiting for some sketch comedy show to do as a bit, the idea of Olbermann trying out on the only cable networks that have not fired him yet. Like an Olbermann HGTV show where he goes off on rants about decoupage, or a Nick Jr show where he tells off Dora.

If KLK made you cry… hoo boy, stay away from anytihng by Key (Clannad, Angel Beats!, etc.). Also the ending of Cowboy Bebop. And anohana, Your Lie In April, A Lull in the Sea… yeah, maybe just stay away from anime period. It's heavy with the feels.

Mostly keeping up with all the news out of Anime Expo in LA, biggest of which for me is that the Muv-Luv series of "visual novels" (interactive PC novels… basically "Choose Your Own Adventure" with nude scenes) is launching a Kickstarter to fund a proper English-language release.