I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to decide how I should write this up and have come to the conclusion that I shouldn't. It's the last episode of the anime, and they constructed it out of chapters 39 and 44 of the manga.

I was hoping for another onsen episode, perv that I am, but they were right. Chapter 44 was an outstanding choice for ending the series.

It's common in comedy series for them to try to find a touching story to end it, and to temporarily turn off the comedy tap, and usually it doesn't work. It did work this time. The final story made Hane cry, and it gave me tears, too. Watching Hane running down the street pretending she was riding a motorcycle was heart breaking. And then Lime appeared.

This is a huge spoiler. DON'T READ IT UNTIL AFTER YOU'VE WATCHED THE EPISODE! Lime came across from the other timeline and took Hane back. If we needed any more evidence that she's a kami, this was it.

And then we got a happy ending.

It was an excellent way to end the series. If you have fallen for the girls in this series, you'll love this episode! The second part won't make you laugh but it will make you smile.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:41 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Even though I enjoyed watching it during the original broadcast I couldn't really let myself go because I was certain that Kyoani was setting us up for a particularly dreadful Gainax ending.

Well, it turned out I was wrong. The ending is a good one, and it turns out that this series is one I like rewatching, at least parts of.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This sounds like something from a "Far Side" cartoon:

Early morning commuters in New Jersey saw heavy delays on Friday after a truck carrying deli meat collided with another truck hauling bread on Interstate 287.

You mean there wasn't a third truck, carrying mayonnaise?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 08:53 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Today's search term is "out of frame censoring" and what that means is that the picture stops too soon. You want to scroll more but can't because there's nothing more to see.

Chizumatic is not responsible for keyboard damage caused by pounding on the scroll key. (Also, pretty much everything below the fold is NSFW; just not as NSFW as it could have been if only the artist had added another couple hundred pixels at the bottom.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 03:50 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Used to be that the default "joke" job was "flipping burgers at McDonalds".

Nowadays it's "being a barista at Starbucks".

I suppose that change means something but damned if I know what.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:43 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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I just ran into a new term I had never seen before: "Toxic Masculinity". I'm not even sure what it means, but I suspect it means "Men who refuse to act like women."

Apparently it's important because it was one of the things that was responsible for the Orlando slaughter, at least according to this poster on Metafilter.

There are lots of reasons why this individual was radicalized and chose his victims and why he was able to do so much harm before being stopped.

Guns
Homophobia
Radicalization
Toxic Masculinity
Etc

All of these probably contributed to this event and all of them will continue to be massive issues once the headlines fade.

I have to believe that things will get better that tolerance will eventually win out or we will get tired of innocent people getting killed but I have to say I am getting really tired of people using violence as a way of lashing out at the world for whatever grievances they have real or imagined.

I am sick of young men because most of the time it's young men perpetrating these types of crimes feeling that they have the right to kill people because they are so mad at the world for whatever reason.

I understand being angry and mad but I am sick of this culture of entitlement that seemingly encourages young men to take out their rage on innocent people just trying to live their lives. I know that there are often various reasons these young men lash out but I have to believe that the constant cycle of violence is indicative of something deeply wrong in our society that is telling people that this sort of violence is somehow okay.

Our society. Our society. No indication here that the guy who shot up that bar was from a different society, nor what society it was.

How the hell are we supposed to win a war when we're not even permitted to name the enemy in the war? This isn't just a Democrat thing, either. Bush started it with his constant claim that "Islam is a religion of peace" and other aphorisms just as stupid. It's a leadership problem, leadership on both sides of the aisle.

The leadership doesn't trust the population. They fear us more than they fear the enemy, because they think we're stupid and uninformed. They feel nothing but contempt for us.

And that's why off-the-wall candidates have done so well this year. The population knows how the leadership feels and it's responding in kind. This backlash was long in coming, but I really hope it's now unstoppable.

It's our country. We are not slaves or serfs.

UPDATE: Google is our friend.

Toxic masculinity is one of the ways in which Patriarchy is harmful to men. It refers to the socially-constructed attitudes that describe the masculine gender role as violent, unemotional, sexually aggressive, and so forth.

I might have known...

UPDATE: So Toxic Masculinity refers to all men who are not metrosexuals. Great.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Rants at 05:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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When I was a kid there were advertisements in my comic books for X-ray glasses, which -- they claimed -- allowed you to see through women's clothing. Only $5! Wow! (and lots of other exclamation points!)

And I always wondered. You know, it would be pretty cool, wouldn't it? And it isn't all that much money; it seems improbable that it would work, but maybe, just maybe...

I never ordered anything like that. For one thing, in second grade I wasn't actually all that interested in girls. For another, my allowance was only 25 cents a week, so even $5 was pretty steep. (And anyway, I always spent it on candy at George's Store.) But I've always wondered.

Well, we have the magic of Japanese fan artists to let us know. Today's search term is "x-ray_glasses", and it won't even cost you $5.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 05:50 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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There have been a couple of families of goosies around, though they haven't shown up very often. This is what they looked like on June 3.

And this is what the smaller family looked like today. They're starting to fledge already, and the young 'uns have put on a lot of weight.

What I find a bit disturbing is that I haven't seen any ducklings. Usually there are two or three duck hens with baby duckies hanging around here but not this year. I would think the geese chased them away except that today is the first time since June 3 that the geese have been around.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 03:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Last night I dreamed that Team Anko appeared in the middle of... something... I had been dreaming about, and it turned out they were phantoms. Eventually Maho showed up in her Tiger, too.

I think I've been watching too much anime...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 05:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I think this was the funniest episode yet, and for this series that's really saying something.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 12:26 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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