Have been watching, will be watching

Now that I've gotten pretty far with tweaking my new HTPC to the point that it's watchable, I've starting watching stuff out of my collection instead of just fansubs. It's about time.

Friday night started it off with, predictably, the last disc of Noir. My friends had just finished the 6th disc, watching one ep at a time, and I recommended they take a break and watch the whole last disc, which they invited me over for. My theory that Noir makes a good "crossover" for folks who wouldn't otherwise like much of the anime out there is reinforced. It's got really solid fundamentals.

Saturday, I cracked open the Shogun box set; for a cheesy 1980 TV miniseries, it's really quite an excellently re-mastered disc and a fun story. I'm up to disc 4 (out of 7, I believe). Later that evening, I started watching Ikiru, but it turns out I was a lot more tired than I thought, and wound up dozing off pretty quickly. I seem to remember doing that way back when TCM had the "Month of Kurosawa" too. I'll have to try again another time.

I've just signed up with Greencine (finally!), and my first batch of discs arrived today. .hack//sign disc 1, and the first 2 discs of Serial Experiments: Lain.

"Wait, Lain?", you would probably ask if you remembered my earlier squeamishness about what Gunslinger Girls did with being so emotionally manipulative. Well, I've still got to check it out and make the judgement for myself, and rental seems to be the best way to do it. .hack//sign is the series Mashimo did right after Noir (with huge videogame tie-ins and whatnot) that I was hesitant to attempt for other, more vain reasons. So now I've got both of them. I've also got a ton of anime in my queue (mostly series done by Mashimo, but other "notables" as well), and have only just started adding the "normal" art films that I originally had my sights set on Greencine for in the first place.

I'm going to mix up the priorities a bit in hopes that I can have a mix of programming to keep me from sliding further into the abyss.