I find that the stuff I like to watch is different than what everyone else likes to watch. Are you watching Lost? Guess what, I’m not. I only know that Ben turned the wheel twice (a pirate wheel even) and the island disappeared. Still watching Heroes? Not interested. Here’s some of the cool shit I’m watching and you should check out if you want something different.

Death Note. I guess by now it’s fairly old. It was on Adult Swim a few years back, but it’s all on Hulu.com now (all 37 episodes) and free to watch. It’s subtitled and in 480p and free, and the show is damn excellent. If you’ve heard all the stuff in the news about kids emulating the “Death Note” and think it’s some gothy-emo thing, I feel that does this show a disservice.

The show is about a boy named Light Yagami who finds a Death Note dropped by a Shinigami named Ryuk. The Death Note is like a very nice composition book you might by at Hot Topic, except when you write someone’s name in their they die in 40 seconds — it’s the notebook of the grim reaper after all. Light wants to rid the world of crime and begins to kill criminals to create a utopian society. A brilliant and idiosyncratic detective that goes by the alias ‘L’ hunts him down. L is to Sherlock Holmes as Light is to Moriarty. The show is largely about Light manipulating the rules of the Death Note’s usage to throw L off his scent and L one-upping him with brilliant logical deductions. I feel that sometimes the show takes a leap of faith, but its damn engrossing and some scenarios in the show are flat-out awesome.

K-ON! This is a slice-of-life anime about the four girls — Ritsu, Mio, Tsumogi, and Yui — in the Light Music Club. They start a band together and dream of playing in front of a live audience. Yui the show’s main character and she knows jack about music. The girls rope her into playing the guitar, and she seems to pick it up like some kind of idiot savant. A lot of the show has a lot of fan service and moe moments and within the 12 epsiode arc it does start to repeat itself towards the end, but thankfully its short. The best part had to be Yui’s transformation from a complete slacker to someone with a passion for something. I also particularly love the opening and ending credit sequences. School girls with guitars looks cool, but Haruhi proved that. BTW, this anime also reminds me of LindaLindaLinda, which is worth watching too.

Maria-sama ga Miteru (seasons 1-4). How do I begin to describe this anime? Well, it’s a yuri (girl-girl) anime. An even better question: how do I explain why I enjoyed watching it so much?

The anime’s set at the Lillian’s Academy for Girls and focuses around the Yamayurikai or “Mountain Lily Council.” Even the student council name as the word “yuri” embedded into it, so you know what you’re in for. The school has this “sister” system where an upperclassman takes an underclassman as a “sister” — which after watching the show and reading the bits of manga online, seems to be more akin of a marriage proposal and creates this artificial generational lineage of girls, which I find somewhat interesting. The story focuses around Yumi, a freshman, who’s taken as the younger sister to Sachiko. I think a lot of the Marimite fans think Yumi’s a bit of an idiot, which she is at times, but I figured her redeeming trait was that she was somewhat perceptive of other people’s feelings and thoughts. As much as this show is about Yumi and Sachiko, all of the other characters in the show have their moment to shine and I can always pick out something new and interesting about each of them — my favorites being Yoshino, Sei, Youko, Eriko, and Shimako. The best moments by far are the ones with Sato Sei and Shimako.

Some episodes in seasons 1 and 2 are a bit overly melodramatic, but what do you expect it’s a shoujo.

Kimi ni Todoke. Yet another shoujo anime, but it struck a chord with me. I immediately understood the main character Sawako “Sadako” Kuronuma. She’s a loner but she means well and tries to make friends and do good deeds. I feel like, in some respect, I have a lot in common with her. Her nickname’s Sadako after the character from the Ring, The show has a lot to do with inner monologues and trying to understand one another’s feelings. I don’t really know what else to say about this one, except that it made me happy that it exists.

Densha Otoko. Or “The Train Man.” This is the j-Drama not the movie. The plot is a somewhat legendary tale from Japan, I suppose. Cute girl on train gets harassed by drunkard. Otaku stands up to him. Girl sends Otaku a thank you gift. Otaku goes onto 2ch and tries to deal with this new experience. Otaku changes his life. They fall in love. The show itself is painful to watch since the Otaku, code-named Densha Otoko, literally grovels and begs forgiveness every time he’s with his girl or talking to the people online. The best part of this show are the forum posters. They’ve all got wonderfully outrageous personalities and obsessions.

Produce wo Nobuta. It’s My Fair Lady or Pigmalion set in a Japanese high school. The idea is that two boys (this show is apparently some vehicle for their boy band, I think) come together and help the new, unpopular girl become likable. They will produce her like Disney produces Hannah Montana. So the idea is that they teach her how to become popular. They change her look, only slightly. They try to make her more adorable and confident. What I loved about the show was the role reversal — they showed her how to be popular, but Kotani teaches them a lesson in humility.

First Squad: The Moment of Truth. Its set during World War II. The SS are using occultism to raise the dead to fight the Soviets and a girl named Nadia has to stop them. The whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking, that anime is branching out. Here is a gem lying in the midst of all the moe and fan service animes. It’s loaded with cool and interesting ideas. It’s nicely animated and definitely something unique to watch. I think it stands above the traditional anime fair.

Summer Wars. A kid gets a math problem on his cell phone and he solves it without realizing that in doing so he breaks the encryption on a vast social networking site and allows an AI hacking bot to corrupt it. The social network is called Oz and you can think of it like facebook but more. It’s not just a social network it’s the social network. Everything is on it: water works, fire departments, video games, news media, everything. When the AI goes crazy and starts to steal people’s accounts it gains knowledge about businesses, government, and military. The other aspect of this movie is that it’s about family. The movie takes place at a large Japanese estate where the entire extended family is together to celebrate their mother’s 90th birthday. As soon as the AI wrecks havoc all over the city, it’s mom to the rescue and they all come together to save the day. This flick is filled with cool visuals and extraordinary attention to details (including real world objects). The issue I have with this movie is the computer hacking. Hollywood tends to make computer hacking silly looking (anyone remember Jurassic Park or Swordfish — they were still cool movies, but come on). I’ve got a computer science degree and I’m pretty damn sure if you wanted to write a computer virus, it would not be the same as Hugh Jackman forming a cube. Summer Wars falls a bit into this territory — and for the sake of art, it’s amazing looking. I will say this, they did show a guy coding to help save the day towards the end, so it’s doing a serviceable job to those who code.

That’s a boat load of stuff I’ve watched in the last few weeks and I hope it gives you some new and unique things to watch. Watching stuff hasn’t been the only thing I’ve been doing. I’m writing a novel and its an ongoing project that is soon nearing its completion — for a first draft. I even participated in National November Writing Month this year.

Oh, and Uncharted 2. The PS3 just found its killer app. It’s the sole reason that console even exists.