The title may have prematurely given it away, but… can you identify the people in the below photograph?

They appear to be a Japanese visual kei group, right? Like Malice Mizer or Dir en grey? Right???

Ummmm… no.

他們都是中國人。

Yes… may I have the honor of presenting to you 銀色灰塵, or Silver Ash, the first-ever Chinese visual kei rock band.

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(Suitable prologues to this post: my reviews for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and New Moon. The current subject is Eclipse, third installment in the series.)

Hands down, this is perhaps the worst book I’ve ever read.

Excerpt from back cover:

In the dead silence, all the details suddenly fell into place for me with a burst of intuition.
Something Edward didn’t want me to know.
Something that Jacob wouldn’t have kept from me.
Something that had the Cullens and the wolves both in the woods, moving in hazardous proximity to each other…

Something I’d been waiting for anyway.

Something I knew would happen again, as much as I might wish it never would.

It was never going to end, was it?

Indeed. When will it ever end?

And referring back to the post title, here is the reason I thought Eclipse was “inappropriately” titled, in the most acute sense of the word:

to eclipse

1. (transitive) Of atronomical bodies, to cause an eclipse.
   The Moon eclipsed the Sun.
2. (transitive) To overshadow; to be better or more noticeable than.
   The student’s skills soon eclipsed those of his teacher.

Um, excuse me? This miserable excuse for a novel is incapable of overshadowing anything, unless you count that talking-hooded-monkey-assassin short story that my brother wrote more than a year ago.

…

Oh, wait, now that I consider it… nope, even talking assassin monkeys are 500 times more entertaining and better-characterized than this load of shit.

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Wow. Do mine eyes deceive me? Or is this another ultra-impersonal review?

依然范特西 (Still Fantasy) is Taiwanese superstar Jay Chou’s (周杰倫) seventh studio album, officially released September 5, 2006. Because I absolutely insisted on purchasing the CD+DVD version from YesAsia.com by mail order, the CD arrived just two days ago, about three weeks after I initially made the order.

Hahaha… you just gotta love the U.S. Postal Service…

At any rate, sorry for the lateness. Just humor me and allow me to ramble on a while longer.

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Bwehhh… I’m running out of worthwhile subjects to blog about. My personal life’s still as stubbornly miserable and hopeless as ever, so I suppose it’s time for another review!

The American rock band, Evanescence (their official U.S. Web site, by the way, is simply beautiful), released their second studio album, The Open Door, on October 3, 2006. My brother purchased the album for me last Christmas (the first present I’ve received from him in a decade, it seems), and now I shall endeavor to spread the joy.

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I visited the public library today with the intention of checking my email, when lo and behold, I discovered IE7 was installed on each computer on the second floor. Since IE7 officially can’t be installed on my home computer (it can only run on versions of Windows XP with SP2), I seized the opportunity for a quick post.

Note: This entry is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the new Web browser Internet Explorer 7, but rather my first reactions and initial complaints.

My friend S-chan once told me that IE7 was “a bastardized version of Mozilla Firefox.” Somewhat true, although the graphical user interface forcibly reminded me of Opera 9.

Promising new features:

• Improved security
• RSS support
• Browser tabs (finally!)
• ClearType — smooths the appearance of text on the screen, eliminating pixellated font
• 1px dotted borders, instead of erroneous dashed borders
• Support for transparent PNGs
• Support for max-width, min-width, etc.
• Improved CSS support overall, apparently (including corrected bugs that plagued previous versions of IE)

Some caveats:

• IE7 cannot be installed on Windows XP operating systems without the Service Pack 2
• IE7 “fixed” some common CSS hacks, including the Tan Hack (* html). This’ll definitely complicate my existence as a simple Web designer…
• The ClearType font, although easier on the eyes, is a little disconcerting…
• IE7 messes up this blog’s layout (the current Orange Jellies theme) because of my dependence on the Tan Hack.

Other than that, I now agree with S-chan’s “bastardized” comment. IE7 doesn’t score much points on originality, since much of the touted “new features” were already implemented long ago among its competitors. And the new IE logo is just a twist on the old one, which frankly looks a bit cheesy.