Chapter 9 of the manga tells Raimu's story, which was the last part of ep 3. Chapter 12 of the manga is titled "Onsen!" and...

That was inevitable. I wonder if we'll get a school festival episode?

Also, it seems like Hijiri is buying her Ducatis a dozen at a time. By chapter 12 she's already ruined four of them, if I'm counting correctly.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 01:07 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 70 words, total size 1 kb.

This is turning out to be a lot of fun, and ep 3 has several laugh-out-loud moments. (At least I laughed. There are few things as subjective as humor.)

The show is slowly rolling out character backgrounds, and ep 2 gave us Rin's and explained why she's so hooked on Suzuki. Ep 3 gives us a load of background on Onsa. Neither of them are really monstrously tragic or anything like that, but they both explain the characters a lot.

When Rin was little, her father was in love with the Suzuki Katana (full sized version) but had trouble getting his license because he didn't want to shell out for a school. He was out riding, with Rin on the back, and piled up the bike. She came out safely but he was badly injured and for a while I was afraid he had died, but he ended up OK. Anyway, that brings up to the present. He got his license and he has a full-size Katana. She wanted a Katana, too, and he got her a mini-version (400cc) which is what she rides.

In ep 3, Hane gets her license and so the girls are off to a used motorcycle shop so she can buy one. Hane rides with Raimu, holding onto Raimu's boobs as usual. And the one they end up in turns out to be Onsa's family business. And it is... seedy. Like almost illegal.

They sell their bikes for cheap because they're crap. They seem to have low mileage because Onsa (herself!) rewinds the odometers. Raimu seems to have an uncanny ability to diagnose a bike just by looking at it and she says one of the ones on the show floor has a dead cylinder, one has a crooked frame, and all of them have odometer resets.

Onsa's own bike was built out of parts from two identical scrapped bikes. And it keeps going on like that. Onsa doesn't want Hane to buy from them because... well, it's obvious. But before she gets to that point, Hane has found the Super Four of her dreams (it's pink). Raimu tells her it was painted, but Hane doesn't care.

They haven't revealed it yet but it's obvious that it's the bike she trained on, which talked to her. At the end of ep 2 the school got a new load of bikes in and got rid of the old ones, including the one Hane trained on. I haven't got the slightest doubt that the one she buys in this episode was that one. But we'll find out when her bike starts talking to her.

Rin is the source of a lot of the comedy in this series, not to mention being the main purveyor of fan service. Her schtick is "I wouldn't join even if you asked me." To which Onsa usually responds, "We didn't ask you."

When Hane has her bike, the next issue is the bike club itself. Seems there isn't really one. There was one 20 years ago, but after a tragic accident it was disbanded. So our girls apply to create a new one. To create a club you have to have four members, and Rin gets to play her "Well, I'll do you a favor" card, only to find that she isn't needed. They have four without her.

And then there's a big reveal about Raimu. It's a spoiler so I'm putting it below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:39 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 919 words, total size 5 kb.

This is getting stupider and stupider. The real problem with it is that it's completely contrived.

In ep 2 we learn that the ship they hit with the practice torpedo later sank. It was a warship, and even though the torpedo had no warhead, it holed the hull, and the ship must not have had water-tight doors below or they were open. The crew safely evacuated before the ship went down, and the teacher who started this all is conveniently unconscious and thus isn't available to explain why she opened fire first, or anything else.

We also learn that we took a real hit in that battle. A shell hit the rear deck and didn't do as much damage as I would expect.

Oh, and that practice torpedo was the only torp we're carrying. From now on if we fight we have to use gunnery.

In ep 2, we're attacked by a German cruiser Admiral Spee which is visiting the academy, or something. Its guns are larger and have longer range and starts firing when it's out of our range. So by clever maneuvering or something we get in range and then fire one round from one turret and hit the rear and cause it to lose power, like maybe one of the engine rooms was taken out, and the cruiser slows and we can outrun it.

But part way through that battle, a girl from the cruiser is on a motorboat and tries to move through the waters inbetween to reach us, and she takes a near miss from a round from the cruiser and her boat is destroyed. She doesn't get a scratch, of course. And she was far enough away from our destroyer so it looks like the cruiser was actively shooting at her. So our Captain takes her water-motorcycle out and rescues the girl in the middle of the battle, leaving "I'm so unlucky" in command and it's her that actually orders the battery to fire, though that was the captain's plan.

So the german girl is brought back on board but she's conveniently unconscious so we don't know what her story is.

And then at the end of the episode they receive an emergency call from Musashi, the battleship commanded by Captain's best friend, asking for help. No details, and it reeks of "trap" but that's next episode.

Lots of people have come to the same conclusion I have: this is a ripoff of Girls und Panzer. GuP was a fantasy but they never pretended otherwise, and they sold the fantasy very well. This series isn't even trying.

"We want a show about schoolgirls on a destroyer fighting other ships. But we don't want to do mechamusume because Kancolle already did that. So it's gotta be real schoolgirls. Now how can we get them into that situation? Hey, Satoshi, pull down that storage box full of deus ex machinas and let's see what's in it!"

One of the main reasons I hate mecha shows is that too many directors think that if they include a neat mecha they don't need to bother with things like story and logic and characterization.

And it seems like this show is the same thing. If we can get schoolgirls firing the main guns of a destroyer against an apparent enemy by the end of the first episode, the audience will cheer and swoon and won't care about how contrived the situation was that led to it.

Pfui.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:17 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 586 words, total size 3 kb.

So it's been quite a while since I aded material to the top rotation, and it's about time for another installment. I'm in the collecting phase right now.

I got 124 candidates from Musaigen no Phantom World, and 51 from GATE II. I'm going through the second season of Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu Ka, and I have 28 from the last five episodes (I go through them backwards).

That one is a disappointment so far. The only image of Rize with a gun I've collected so far is from the OP, and there hasn't been a swimsuit episode yet. (The first season had a really good one.)

I wanted to plunder Dagashi Kashi but the version I downloaded was hardsubbed. This evening I downloaded raws for the whole series, so that comes after Gochuumon etc.

I'm also going to make a try at the second and third To Love Ru series plus its OVA, but I'm not promising anything.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 10:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 162 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm no automotive engineer. (These days I'm not really much of an engineer of any kind.) But I had a strange thought last night: how would an F1 car do if it was four-wheel-drive?

Right off the top, I came up with this:

-- It would be less reliable. Every component of a machine has a failure rate, and the more components, the greater the chance that something will fail. However, the increase in the failure rate might not be enough to matter.

-- It would make the car heavier, and thus it would not accelerate as well on straights.

-- It would corner better. If the front wheels are turned and are pulling the car, it's going to be possible to go faster through a turn. That's not so much a question of picking up time, it means the car would corner like softs when it was wearing intermediate tires. So you could get away with fewer pitstops because you spend most of your time on tires which last better.

-- And finally, there's probably a rule against it, or there soon would be. Every time anyone comes up with an interesting feature (like the six-wheel car and the vacuum cleaner car) the spoilsports at F1 outlaw it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:35 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 211 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm not watching this any more but I just noticed something from RandomC's writeup of ep 2.

I remember seeing a comment once (when I was a kid) to the effect that there was no longer any article of men's clothing that women could not also wear, because fashion. Well, this episode proves that wrong.

One of the girls, who was playing a male character in the game, decided to change her avatars to female without bothering to change the character's clothing. This is what she looks like IRL:

And this is what her character looked like, as a guy:

A bit odd, but not really scandalous... for a guy. But...

If she went out in public like this, she's be arrested.

UPDATE: It reminds me of this, from Seikoku no Dragonar:

She goes out in public like that, so maybe I'm wrong.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:40 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 125 words, total size 1 kb.

Dragon Ball Super has been pretty silly, not really living up to DBZ in most regards. It's a sequel, picking up shortly after the Majin Buu arc, so Trunks and Goten are still little kids.

And for the most part it's been pretty dumb. We're in the third plot arc now. The first arc introduced Beerus, God of Destruction, and gave Goku his latest powerup, the "Super Saiyajin God" level. It corresponds to the first recent movie, but tells the story slower and at greater length.

The second movie is about the revival of Freeza and his death again. And it also kills off all the minions he had remaining, so I think it's the last time. And that became the second arc in DBSuper, again told at greater length. The main contribution it made to the canon was to show that Goku had gained complete control over the Super Saiyajin God level, which changed from red to blue. Also, Vegita had gotten it, too.

The third and current arc introduced Champa. There are twelve universes and up to now we've spent all our time in universe 7, where Beerus is the God of Destruction. Champa is the twin brother of Beerus and is the God of Destruction of universe 6, and through some plot machinations which aren't worth going into the two of them have decided to have a tournament, where each brings a small team consisting of the strongest fighters in their respective universes.

The two universes are very similar, though not identical. There was an Earth in U6 but it's gone now because its inhabitants blew it up. There are Saiyajin in U6, and it seems they're good guys. They never suffered genocide. And some other stuff like that.

Anyway, in episode 37, Vegita fights against Kyaba, who is a saiyajin from U6. And it's awesome. Easily the best episode in the series so far. For one thing, it showed us a side of Vegita we don't get to see very often.

Another thing that was cool is that I picked out Kyaba's seiyuu without looking at the credits. He also voices Loki in Fairy Tail.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 363 words, total size 2 kb.

So it turns out there's a "red-framed glasses" tag and there's an "under-rim glasses" tag, and when you use them both you get...

RED HALF-RIM GLASSES!

And the crowd goes wild with anticipation. We had to bring in some armed guards to keep control.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 05:42 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 47 words, total size 1 kb.

I was just rewatching part of Mouretsu Pirates and saw a computer display that included the word "overdrive". It made me wonder how many young people today know where that term came from?

No, it doesn't refer to an electric guitar saturating its amplifier, or anything to do with electronics. That usage came later.

I remember it being used by James Blish a couple of times to refer to FTL travel, and that's how it was used in Mouretsu Pirates. But it had a real meaning in the 1940's and 1950's and it didn't have anything to do with space flight, or electric guitars.

And if you know what it was, I think that means you're old, like I am...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 01:06 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 126 words, total size 1 kb.

Pete complained that there wasn't any pr0n of Idolmaster. Well, he didn't actually complain, but I'm taking his comment as license to post some. It's all his fault! Don't blame me!

Anyway, that's as may be. I am not sure everything I'm including here is actually Idolmaster. I have a directory named "idols" where I stash images about... idols, but it isn't just Idolmaster. It's also Wake Up, Girls, Love Live, Kancolle, Hatsune Miku, K-On, Sailor Moon, and some stuff that looked to me like idols but which probably wasn't. So I went through that to find these images, and it won't surprise me if I've included something that isn't Idolmaster. It also won't surprise me if I included a picture I've posted here before. If so I apologize for the redundancy.

Anyway, they're all NSFW (because FFN) so I'm not putting them inline. If you want to see them, click the links. Also, they're bigger than usual, and a few of them are immense simply because they would be impossible to see if they were reduced much more. (One of them has 50 girls on it.) Um, not hardcore, though, and no icky boys.

09297 09298 09299 09300 09301 09302 09303 09304 09305
09306 09307 09308 09309 09310 09311 09312 09313 09314

And now I am going to post one SFW picture inline because I have a question about her. I gather that her name is "Shibuya Rin" and what's interesting about her is that all the other idols are usually shown wearing bikinis or fancy costumes or nothing at all in fanart, but Rin usually is shown in her school uniform. Is that a character trait from whatever show she's in? Or is she older than the others?

She also gets cheesecake shots, of course, but not nearly as many as the other girls. So what's the deal with her?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 08:19 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 314 words, total size 3 kb.