Burrowowl

Look out, world, the airwaves across the big pond are being flooded with a variety of new series, many of which are bishoujo-intensive. Now, it must be said that those with an aversion to cutesy cartoon-girls will never be able to get into anime, but sometimes things go too far.

This summer we’re seeing the return of Galaxy Angels for a fourth season, yet another remake of Cutey Honey (the original “magical girl”), Girls Bravo, and some more swill by M.O.E. Galaxy Angels will almost certainly be fansubbed shortly, I’ve already seen Girls Bravo available through mirkx.com, and what can I say about the new elf-ear-girl series from M.O.E.? The less, the better, I’d wager.

Our buddies at Google are at it again with a beta service that allows for subject-specific searching on partner sites. I decided to give it a whirl by looking for the four major topics of this website: Cartoons, Computers, D&D, and Webnazism. I didn’t really expect for there to be a “webnazi” category available, but just about everything else was at least loosely covered by their friendly interface at www.google.com/services/siteflavored.html.

The code they produced yields the following:

Problem: It generated sub-standard code. By which I mean multiple values for tag attributes were not enclosed in quotes, the <img> and <br> tags were unclosed, it uses a table, and has presentational markup such as a “bgcolor” attribute for the table and even a <font> tag. I’m mortified. It also, oddly enough, includes an empty <span> with an if of “hm” assigned to it. The little chuck of Javascript makes use of it, but egads, folks!

All told, it took several minutes of savage beatings to rework the Google-provided code to produce something that displays properly on my otherwise standards-compliant website.

We’ve known that Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas is coming. This has been public knowledge for a while now, but at long last it looks like Rockstar Games has decided to shed the tiny scrap of political sensitivity it had in this long-standing crime-spree videogame series; the protagonist isn’t white. To be fair, the first two installments of the GTA series featured not a “white guy,” but rather a little dot that ran around in a strictly 2-D environment. The new hero, CJ, suffers from no shortage of melanin:

CJ is expected to be on a quest to clear his personal reputation and protect his street gang in a city that is based upon Los Angeles and San Francisco in the same way that GTA3′s Liberty City was based on Chicago and New York City. For a long time it has been perfectly acceptable for video games to revolve around soldiers, plumbers, and italian mafiosos. Finally we get a video game about a black gang member. That isn’t why I’m going to buy the game; I will be getting this due to the great many hours of enjoyment I’ve gotten from GTA2, GTA3, and GTA Vice City. I just wish we had a little more info about changes in the game engine itself… I look forward to riding a BMX around with my boxers showing, though.