Guess what? We're all going to live together! Six girls plus the viewer, presumed to be a guy. In the first episode we're all moving in and cleaning up the place.

This is the house in which we're all living together. That chick on the Segway is the new character and she hardly appears in the episode. But this one sure does!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:58 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Samsung's latest phone, the "Galaxy Note 7", has a small problem: the batteries are exploding. Or catching fire. Or going up in smoke.

I am AMAZED that Samsung Q/A didn't notice this during the design process. It makes me wonder just what in hell QA was doing. Or has Samsung cut QA to the bone as a cost-saving measure? Talk about false economy!

At Qualcomm I think we had as many QA engineers as design engineers, and they put our phones through the wringer (not literally). Plus all the senior design engineers were given prototype phones with the bills paid by Qualcomm, and told to use them heavily. I myself found a hardware bug that way.

Actually, it was already known but they couldn't make it happen reliably. My contribution was that my phone and my charger would do it reliably enough so they could use it to chase down the problem. So they took them away and gave me another one.

In consumer products, poor quality is unforgiveable. You can destroy your brand reputation with one huge mistake, and customers aren't forgiving. It may take Samsung 10 years to live this one down, if they ever do.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 05:12 PM | Comments (23) | Add Comment
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AKA "Soushin Shoujo Matoi". I think this could end up being pretty good. There are demons who come to Earth and possess people, turning them demonic. Ordinary weapons are useless against them, and the first one we see is defeated by a young woman that the British Army calls "fatima". For her it's easy. She seems to have a power they call "Divine Union".

And then we leave the UK and go to Japan where we meet our main characters, most of whom are difficult to take seriously. The show appears to not be massively serious; it isn't horror though some of the images we see in the first episode could have come from a horror series. The main character is a middle-school girl named Matoi whose interesting wish is to be ordinary. She doesn't want to be special.

Her mother is dead and she lives with her father, Shingo, who is an odd one. Their relationship is a bit strange anyway because she calls him "Shingo-kun". He's a police officer and gets called away all the time to investigate bizarre crimes.

Matoi's best friend is Yuma, who is daughter of the high priest of a shrine who is a clown. Anyway, with one thing and another there is a demonic appearance at that location and it defeats everyone who tries to fight it. Yuma found an ancient scroll which describes how to do exorcisms and is all excited to give it a try, and it works, sort of. Only when the divine power comes down out of the sky it doesn't go to Yuma; it goes to Matoi. And she transforms into the spitting image of her mother, with a fancy costume, and easily defeats the demon.

It looks like Matoi has the ability to summon some sort of goddess and to join with her, gaining tremendous powers. (Or maybe it's Yuma who does the summoning.) Matoi doesn't want this, and it looks like part of this show is "reluctant hero".

Good news: one of the main characters is voiced by Ayako Kawasumi. It's been too long since we've heard her in a show. Unfortunately, her character is rather deadpan, so at least so far it isn't much of an opportunity to act.

Bad news: Horriblesubs is stealing it from Anime Network, and it's hard subbed. I hope there's a raw source somewhere and some circle picks it up.

UPDATE: Ohys has posted a raw, so I think it likely someone will post a soft-sub.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:00 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I've been having bad luck with web-based purchases this year.

A few months ago I put in an order to NewEgg for a couple of 256G flash drives, about $500 worth. Well, they shipped (they say) and Fedex delivered (they say) and I never saw them. So I put in a complaint and it was "investigated" and in the end NewEgg kept my money and Fedex said that they were sure it was delivered, and I ended up with nothing.

There are three likely possibilities here. First, Fedex delivered to the wrong address. Second, they did deliver here and one of my neighbors took it. (The package was shipped without "signature required".) Third, from their point of view: I actually did receive the package and am trying to rip them off.

That last one is wrong, but I'm sure it's happened other times, probably quite a lot.

So I'd like to get more of those flash drives but NewEgg is off my list now.

There are certain OTC pharmaceuticals I use pretty regularly, and I've been getting them from drugstore.com. Once in a while I put in a huge order, and when I get low weeks or months later I put in another one. Like last Thursday.

Well, like a lot of places like that they have multiple warehouses and it turned out one of the things I wanted shipped from Nevada and the rest shipped from Illinois. All of them shipped Friday afternoon by Fedex overnight. Or so they said. I got tracking numbers and everything.

Well, the one from Illinois was delivered today, right on schedule. ("Overnight" means "over a weekend" if one gets in the way.) The Fedex status for the other one suggests that they did the computer stuff with Fedex to get a delivery number, but Fedex never received it. And neither did I.

So back on the web to file a complaint. But not gonna happen. Turns out that drugstore.com got acquired and last Friday was its last day in business. The web site redirects to Walgreen's now, and my login doesn't work on the Walgreen's web site.

I'm a victim of short-timer syndrome, I suspect. Last day of work forever for an employee in Nevada, who said, "Fuck it" and didn't finish the order to ship it. Probably closing time came and the manager said, "No overtime!" and chased everyone out even though there were still orders to finish.

I've been buying stuff through the web for 20 years and this is the first (and second) time I've ever had problems. This second time wasn't as expensive; the order that didn't ship was about $30. All I can do is sit here and seethe. Fortunately, the stuff I needed most was in the box that did ship which I did receive.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 06:13 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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At first I didn't think that this was even in the same timeline as Nanoha Vivid, but after I finished the first episode I came to the conclusion that it's the same timeline but two or three years later.

And the story is about a befriending that needs to happen. Of course. (The motto of this canon is "Friendship through superior firepower".)

Filling in some gaps, I think what's going on is that Team Nakajima in the course of two or three world tournaments has become a major name and gained lots of fans and attention, because of the outstanding performance of Vivio, Einhart, Rio, and Corona. Lots of people coming to them trying to join, and so Nove has opened a gym, "Nakajima Gym", which includes basic exercise equipment but also has martial arts training. Nove runs the place, and her star martial arts team is Corona, Vivio, Einhart, Rio, and Miura. And Yumina Enclave, who isn't a fighter, seems involved too.

(Miura moving over makes sense. As good as she's gotten she probably can't really train with the other students studying with Vita and Zafira. In Team Nakajima there are several who are at her level that she can reasonably train with.)

The main character is a girl named Fuuka. She's had a hard life, living in an orphanage and living in the lower strata of society. She's learned to fight out of self preservation. In the orphanage she had a friend named Rinne.

Rinne got adopted by a rich family, and she changed. She became cold and dark, and no longer acted as if Fuka was her friend. Fuka, meanwhile, has grown up and is trying to survive but is having a hard time doing so because she keeps getting into fights, and keeps losing her jobs. In the most recent incident she seems to have been fighting to save a couple of co-workers, and she got hurt pretty badly.

Einhart is out running and finds her. Being mostly out of it, Fuka tries to hit Einhart with a magically enhanced punch. Einhart blocks it but is impressed by the power of the blow. Then Fuka passes out. One hospital scene later, and Fuka being fired from her latest job, and the doctor gives her a note from Einhart telling her to come visit the Nakajima gym.

So we get some angst (not much) and some back story, and some fighting, and Fuka gets hired to work in the gym, in exchange for food and board and a bit of pocket money. And her job is to be a sparring partner.

Rinne, meanwhile, has gotten extraordinarily good at martial arts and has a record of 157 wins out of 158 matches. Her only loss was to Vivio in the most recent tournament, and Einhart won the under 15 world championship. (There's some confusion about this in the translation I watched. Both Einhart and Rinne are described as the under-15 champion. I suspect that Rinne was the champion but lost that title to Einhart in the most recent tournament.)

The series story is obvious: Fuka has to become strong enough to defeat Rinne, and in so doing will revive their friendship. She's going to do that by studying the Hegemon-stye with Einhart, evidently the first student Einhart has taken in. And then she'll enter the world tournament and fight her way up the ranks far enough to meet Rinne in the ring. (Or, maybe, fighting in the street in their old neighborhood. The ED is ambiguous about that; it shows them fighting in the street but it also shows them fighting in a ring.)

The ED has flashes of characters we know from Vivid: Victoria, Hallie, Sieg, Els, Chantez, and Ixpellia, who is awake again and full-sized.

Based on the first episode I think it's going to be pretty good, at least for a fan of the canon. No world crisis, nothing like that. But ultimately the real story of every series in the canon is about befriending, and this one will be true to that.

UPDATE: Also...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Entertainment at 01:47 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Metanorn

Karmaburn

Tenka Seiha

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 01:43 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Glenn Reynolds is off the hook, free and clear, fancy free, acquitted of all charges. He may continue to live his life as he sees fit, and say what he wants, until the next time he offends the SJWs at which time he'll be back on the fire again.

To achieve this, he had to bend knee, abase himself, and submit to ritual flogging. Unlike Henry II, he doesn't have to do it every year; once will suffice. He just has to acknowledge that the SJWs are right and he is an evil heartless son-of-a-bitch. And a racist (and never mind his sister-in-law). And so on and so forth.

It would have been rather difficult for the university to actually terminate him because he has tenure and he holds an endowed seat, but only a fool would underestimate the resourcefulness of SJWs with their teeth in it, and there were a lot of punishments short of that which could have been imposed, so I'm glad it came out alright.

This witch hunt shouldn't have happened at all. The Dean talks about talking to all kinds of people, for and against, and gives lip service to "due process", but the only due process that should have taken place is to tell the SJWs to stick their complaints where the sun doesn't shine.

If Glenn hadn't been as famous and influential as he is, it might not have come out the same way. And if this had happened before Mizzou, likewise. We've raised a generation of perpetually-aggrieved who think that the First Amendment doesn't protect speech when it causes some listeners, any listeners, to feel uncomfortable. Which, if actually the law, would totally gut that clause of the First Amendment.

There is no exception in the First Amendment for hurt feelings. You do not have a right to never be offended. Offensive speech is definitely protected by the First Amendment. I learned that in school, but apparently they aren't taught that any longer. I saw a picture of a student holding a sign that said, "Free speech doesn't include Offensive speech" and it was a head-desk moment for me.

Anyway, certain universities have learned the hard way the cost of giving in to the perpetually aggrieved. There are people who carry signs and parade all over the place and make demands, and there are people who don't do those things but do vote with their feet and their wallets. There are a lot more of those, and they have long memories. That's why the University of Missouri is facing horrible economic problems right now: it's not an organized boycott, it's just lots of students deciding they'd rather go to school somewhere else.

And as a result income is not what was expected and they're having to cut staff.

Others are starting to realize that the cost of giving in can be extremely high.

If Glenn had actually faced any kind of punishment beyond what he did, University of Tennessee would have had its name blackened the same way as Mizzou did -- because it would have been front-page news all over the country, and certainly in Tennessee.

So two cheers for the dean. But not three; it shouldn't have gone even as far as it did.

UPDATE: Glenn says it wasn't all that bad. Of course, he wants to limit the damage to his university and I can't blame him for that. But I'll take him at his word.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This is a neat Pixiv site: He's created large size versions of all kinds of logos from anime. He started with doing all the team logos for Girls und Panzer and then did all the squadron logos for Strike Witches, and then did a bunch of things I didn't recognize.

I did spot the Bentenmaru logo, and there are a bunch of logos for the Fleet of Fog which I think he created. They're all gorgeous and huge.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 04:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Below the fold, a one-page gag from Bakuon.
more...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:40 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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One of these is the bottom of the Pacific Ocean (Haifuri) and the other is the bottom of hyperspace (Bodacious Space Pirates movie). Interesting how similar they look, isn't it?

Maybe there's an access point to hyperspace at the bottom of the Pacific! (Bermuda triangle, poop.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:35 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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