I must be feeling better today considering the fact I'm devoting a great deal of my concentration to Simounsian biology...

I really should get back to watching that anime.

A small cacophony emanates from behind my laptop monitor. The cheap speakers muffle the sound of some song by The Dillinger Escape Plan. I try to ignore it, but that only seems to magnify the noise. Noise in front of me, noise within me, I think wryly.

Over the last week I have bee devouring reading material. I suspect it isn't so much that I've become a voracious reader, but that my material has been shorter and easier to snack upon.

I'm not one of these people who posts reviews often. Mostly I've come to keep my opinions about consumable media quiet. I think part of this is that I had very few allies who liked the same things that I did. Everyone else seemed quick to make fun of me for this reason. When I first got into anime, I always had to explain it to people that "Yes, it is animated, but it's not a cartoon. It's not something for kids just because it's drawn rather than acted." Roughly the same time I was big into electronica, and was mocked for my "videogame music". After a while, I just stopped trying.

While I had watched anime prior to 1999, no particular series grabbed me so completely as Serial Experiments Lain. It was Christmas vacation, and my friend Grant (from bakacafe) and I were wondering through a Suncoast Motion Picture Company store. Today the chain is all but gone, but at the time, it was the only place in Minnesota where you could get the newest anime.

Ayanami Rei is my favorite character from the series. Back when I was working on City of Light: InterLock, I decided to borrow her character design for my character of Tera Rogue. Bluish-grey hair and red eyes have evolved into an anime archetype. InterLock never got anywhere, of course. The story is still somewhere in my notes, but I haven't a clue what to do with it, if anything.