2008 was a memorable year, unfortunately it was mostly of the want-to-forget-but-can’t kind. I kind of saw it coming, but it’s one of those things where you can’t start drinking fast enough, because it only seems to get nastier.

I know, this has absolutely nothing related to what this site ought to be about. Hopefully this is a crisis that is totally irrelevant to you. That’s all I want to say about 2008 in particular.

On to brighter things.

Some take the holidays to change their site banner, or theme, or otherwise retool. I suppose that you could say that I do those things, but they tend to be more drastic in nature. 2008 will be no different.

The layout is austere, but don’t read too much into that.

For my feed subscribers, the feed that brought you to this post is going to transition to a shortened feed containing blurbs that I embed in the images on the front page (mouse hover titles) and use for archives. They don’t appear anywhere else, but they’re kind of lame, so it’s up to you whether you want to keep subscribing to it.

In its place, I’ve created a new full feed.

That’s all. Best wishes for 2009, and I’ll see you on the other side.

I’m not here to order people to click them (do what you want), nor to solicit feedback (this is a site service announcement after all). Some only serve to punctuate a statement, and these can usually be seen by looking at the destination address. The rest are generally background reading, which one might have no interest or time for and I understand that.

I just want to let everyone know that links do exist just in case, and at the risk of insulting your intelligence, they’re the ones highlighted blocks that get underlined on mouseover.

With that off my chest, the next order of business is to highlight a misuse of jargon. Synchronous doesn’t imply anything beyond running on a common clock. If anyone has fiddled around with S/PDIF coaxial back in the day, you’ve seen a synchronous standard.

It’s also serial. It presents data one bit at a time. So bits are coming in at a standard rate with fairly low deviation. Industry likes to call such a standard an SSI, short for synchronous serial interface.

The only thing one can surmise by the claim that arcs are being presented synchronously is that presentation is organized based on a fixed time slot. Things start at the beginning and, say, 3 episodes later, everything is wrapped up. It could be one character (serial), it could be many characters (parallel/concurrent), but the concept of a time slot implies neither.

So synchronous shouldn’t be confused with concurrent, or simply parallel. The way KimiKiss is described, it’s best to replace “synchronous” with a more recognizable “simultaneous” and leave it at that. Indeed, clocks are rather stodgy things that seem to be at loggerheads with organic development in general. A lot of things happen in the brain at the same time, but people will look at you funny if you were to claim that everyone’s brain ran on a clock.

Describing Clannad as hyper-threaded, or even multi-threaded, might be fair given the WRR / interleaved progression of events in Kanon 2006, but I haven’t progressed very far into the series so I can’t consider it at the moment.