The owner of this apartment complex invests in trying to keep it nice. Every year they spend some money on fixing or upgrading something -- which is really nice.
One thing they've been doing is repaving the driveways, and today it's my turn. They're going to repave the parking lot outside my apartment. (Not that it will make any difference to me, since I don't have a car.)
Or at least that's the plan. They were over here about two hours ago, going over the whole thing to lift the moss out of all the cracks and to blow away all the dust and debris. And now it's started sprinkling rain. The weather forecase is for a 30% chance of showers this morning, including possible thunderstorms.
If it rains, really rains, it's game over. They'll have to come back and do it on a different day. You can't lay asphalt onto a wet substrate; it won't bind, and you'll get cracks and pieces coming off.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 20, 2012 09:59 AM (5OBKC)
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BTW, I may be angling to kill the thread, but I know of a great example of construction malpractice. Back in 1937 Moscow subway, the best of the world, yada yada yada, was going to span Moscow river. It was an architectural marvel, using the landscape to its advantage. The design had a single large arch from reinforced concrete. Well, long story short, it was completed on time despite the weather conditions. 50 years later it became very apparent that workers added salt to concrete in order to make it set in Russian winter. Someone came up with rather fancy reconstruction plan, which has succeeed (won't go into that). The fun part is, many Russians point at Stalin's time and basically fall to the "Mussolini made trains run on time" fallacy by claiming that everyone was done great under Stalin and who didn't work well was executed. Guess what... They added that salt even though if the story got out, someone was probably getting a firing squad. I'm pretty sure the contractors laying the asphalt in Oregon aren't going to be executed if it fails to bind to substrate.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 20, 2012 10:19 AM (5OBKC)
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Well, it only sprinkled a little. Alex, our apartment handyman, always supervises these things as they're happening, so he won't let them do it if it's going to go bad.
Well, it's 3PM local time and they never did it. I looked again at the warning the complex left for us, and they were originally supposed to do the paving on Wednesday. Today was supposed to be painting the lines.
I think that when it started raining this morning, Alex probably called it off.
Amazingly enough, I feel like writing about politics. But this ain't good enough for Hot Air, so it just goes here.
Things are beginning to fall apart for Assad in Syria. There was a suicide assassination bombing which managed to kill a large number of Assad's key lieutenants. (Over the last ten years, the vast majority of suicide attacks have been nearly worthless, but there have been a few which have been extremely effective. The Spanish railway bombings, for one thing. And this particular assassination was very significant.)
The rebels are now operating in Damascus, and apparently doing pretty well there. Reports are that government troops are less and less apparent, and there's the sound of fighting pretty much all the time. And the rebels just seized several important border crossings at the national frontier. All of which means that Assad is losing his grip.
This kind of cascading failure tends to accelerate. My guess is that it's all going to be over within a week. But that's just a SWAG; I have no other basis for it.
Which made me start thinking: If Assad decides to bag it and run, where does he run to? Turkey certainly is no friend of his, and the Jordanians hate him. There's no safety in Lebanon. The Iraqis don't like him. The idea of him fleeing to Israel made me grin.
For the time being, Russia and China seem to be supporting him -- but that's because he's the Syrian head of state and they want access. If he's out, there's no longer any win for them in helping him. So where does he run?
His best escape would be to run to Iran, but either that means an unauthorized flight across northern Iraq, or it means a very strange and circuitous escape over open water starting with the Med and going, well, damned if I know. This doesn't seem very likely at all. Iran is like Russia; they've been his friend beause he ran Syria. Once he's out, they no longer want to know him.
Ghaddaffi and Mubarek went down with the ship. My bet is that Assad does the same. He won't run; he'll stay and he'll be captured. And either he'll be hung, or he'll face a firing squad.
UPDATE: Of course, there's another possibility: the French might take him.
I suppose this makes the second episode more interesting than the first (the only one I've watched so far). Although if class is based on caliber, these girls are never going to graduate.
I imagine the Barrett and Denil KTW will be in college.
Posted by: Mauser at July 18, 2012 12:50 PM (cZPoz)
I'm going to be interested to see if we run into anything that uses .50 BMG. My guess is that if so, it'll be a husky male gym teacher in the high school, not a student.
I've never seen one in person but I've seen film of people holding .50 BMG rounds, and those suckers are immense.
3
I have a few empties that I found in Blackrock desert. In the 50s, the Navy used Blackrock Point as a target for practice strafing. In places, you can still find cases and chain links. We also climbed the Point and found a .50 bullet where it struck the rock.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 18, 2012 03:09 PM (5OBKC)
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Dummy 50BMG rounds are a common gun-show keychain. Hard to lose, hard to carry in a pocket, hard to explain...
-j
Posted by: J Greely at July 18, 2012 03:10 PM (fpXGN)
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BTW, Russians accepted a machine-gun into inventory that fires 12.7x103. It is not only man-portable, but can be used by a 2-man team and fired by one. It's is the only practical "lightweight heavy maching gun" in existence. As you can see, progress occurs since Soviet times
Sadly, we're not going to see a Russian girl who never washes in this anime. Sorry.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 18, 2012 03:14 PM (5OBKC)
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As for the firing live ammunition at each other, it's going to be handwaved explicitly in ep.5 or so. Not going to spoil it under the tag, not worth it. You'll see it soon enough.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 18, 2012 03:19 PM (5OBKC)
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Excellent episode review! I actually liked this episode more than the first, despite the stupidity of using live rounds to shoot balloons. As Pete says, the handwave is not worth the spoiler, and there'll be more handwaves toward the end of the series. Which also suck.
You're pretty sophisticated to avoid a joke using "pole" in regard to FNC "penetrating" the high school boys changing room to capture the flag. A better man than I, you are.
You also gave me a hankerin' to play another Telltale Games series with your Sam & Max reference. Not that I wish to derail anything (but I will do so anyway), anyone played Hector: Badge of Carnage?
Posted by: wahsatchmo at July 18, 2012 06:07 PM (gY5xe)
Sato has done a lot of hinting in this series, as a way of avoiding unnecessary exposition. For instance:
When the Hakuoh Pirates raided the Princess Apricot, the captain of the cruise liner made a joke about the Bentenmaru's crew being in quarantine. How did he know that?
Well, later, his first officer delivered a bag full of goodies to Marika and mentioned that Show, the insurance agent, had asked them to do it. Why would Show have them do that? As part of a briefing to the captain of Princess Apricot to let him know that Bentenmaru's raid that day wasn't going to be normal.
Likewise, in ep 25 we see the captains all sharing the special desert together. That was a callback to Marika telling the cook back home she wanted to do that. But the lady captain's last question about who should command the mission makes clear that it had been a working dinner. Marika had spent a lot of time laying out ideas for how to fight, and how they could win. We didn't see any of that, but we can infer that it took place.
Sato doesn't think he needs to paint everything on the wall.
3
They probably should have called it out directly, but at the same time, they were a little pressed for time there at the end.
It does fit all of the information we have, though, quite nicely.
Posted by: sqa at July 17, 2012 10:39 PM (5/dUV)
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Also, some of the exposition may have been lost in translation. I've noticed a few times where the name of a ship is spoken by the character, but does not appear in the subtitles. I assume this is necessary in cases where the original spoken Japanese took less than time than the translators thought the corresponding English text could be read by the audience. Thus some of what Steven has deduced may have been mentioned in the Japanese version.
It's almost enough to make me start taking Japanese lessons, just so I don't miss anything...almost.
Posted by: Siergen at July 18, 2012 11:13 AM (PuIGa)
You can't do a literal translation. There are all kinds of ways in which that doesn't work.
For one thing, idioms. You can't translate idioms literally; they don't make sense.
Another problem, when it comes to Japanese, is that Japanese grammar doesn't require you to make complete sentences. You can leave out parts of speech if they can be filled in by the listener. But sometimes the translator makes a mistake in filling in the missing pieces. There's one in Strike Witches 2 like that which bugs me every time I watch it. At one point Yeager is trying to distract a neuroi to make it ignore Lucchini and Miyafuji. Suddenly the neuroi turns and starts shooting at them. Yeager says something that would literally translate as "spotted!"
The translator made it "They spotted me!" But she was already known. It should have been "Spotted them!" referring to Lucchini and Miyafuji.
There are also cultural things which don't translate, and lots of other issues. Translation is as much art as science.
Hello, boys and (girls? probably not, I would think) other boys. Today we're going to learn something, and have fun doing it!
Yes, Upotte is edyukayshunnal. It's also funny and ecchi. As to which of those is the real point of the series? Well, only time will tell.
Fact is, I don't know. When this originally broadcast I only watched the first two episodes, and then recoiled in squick. But fate has called upon me to review this piece of exploitative trash wonderful work of art, and who am I to deny fate?
Besides, I deserve it. I forced Wonderduck to review High School of the Dead, and I tried to stick him with this one, too. What goes around comes around.
Every post in this series, however long it goes (I may not last to the end) will contain spoilers and NSFW frame grabs.
By the way, the second episode contains an extended exposition about the L85A1's history and its problems. I gather that it has a reputation as a distinctly second-rate firearm.
2
Yeah, full auto is gone from the M-16A4 in US service; there are export variants that still have it, though.
See, since a skeleton stock is pretty... um... revealing, it's equated to a thong. I can only assume that the old full wood stock on the AK-47 would end up being like what Railgun wore under her skirt.
See? This episodic review stuff ain't easy, and it's doubly hard when you've got crepe-all like Upotte!! to work with. You have NO idea how happy I was to see that Ben-To won...
Posted by: Wonderduck at July 16, 2012 09:14 PM (Kv7m+)
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Actually, the hardest part was keeping track of and uploading all the images.
4
Den Beste takes one for the team! As well as for the unaffiliated populace at large who use search terms incorporating "guns" and "upskirts" and "disappointing."
I managed to get through the whole series (spoilers: I deleted it off my hard drive) and it was somewhat set up like The Idolmaster in that Producer-san (Sensei) was prominent in the first episode, but not really the focus of the series.
You all watched The Idolmaster, right? Like all grown men would? Right?
Posted by: wahsatchmo at July 16, 2012 10:44 PM (gY5xe)
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How does it work that when anthropomorphic rifles go to the shooting range, they shoot rifles themselves, instead of turning into rifles and getting shot with?
Posted by: Jordi Vermeulen at July 17, 2012 12:56 AM (AJZdn)
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It's more like they can summon themselves at any and all times. Even if they're still the guns themselves.
The weird thing about this series is that it's beyond "gun porn". It'll give you a really good background in the history of the weapons and some of the wackier tricks they use with them.
So there's this really weird situation where this is one of the most explicitly "real world history" educational animes you'll run around. I kid you not. It was an interesting watch (and I've watched a LOT worse) It's also only 10 episodes.
Posted by: sqa at July 17, 2012 02:39 AM (5/dUV)
7Actually, the hardest part was keeping track of and uploading all the images.
I used to upload and put the pics in the post before I wrote anything... that's how I did all of Ga-Rei Zero, for example. Sometime during Rio Rainbow Gate!, I switched to watching the episode while I blogged... videoplayer open, stop, take a screenshot, upload, write whatever, then continuing on. I did the whole of HSotD like that, and I found it works really well for my writing style. Your mileage may vary.
Posted by: Wonderduck at July 17, 2012 05:25 AM (cx8j7)
It's not quite completely opaque how these girls can be guns. Remember, Shinto is an animist religion, so the idea of inanimate objects being somehow alive, occupied by a minor kami, isn't really foreign to them.
In Omamori Himari there's a character who runs a tea shop. She's the spirit of an ancient tea cup, and the tea cup is there too and sometimes she's shown carrying it around. I'm assuming that this series is somewhat the same kind of thing.
10
I wish they explained when "jyuu" is used, and when "teppou" is appropriate. The only time I heard "teppou" was in Strike Witches 01, when Yoshika delivers a spare machine gun to Mrs. Sakamoto. Otherwise it's quite rare. Perhaps it is supposed to mean a military weapon, when "jyuu" is just any kind of gun.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 17, 2012 07:35 AM (5OBKC)
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My wildassed guess is that teppou is more archaic, an older word, and jyuu is more modern, more recent.
12
I suspect you're both right. Teppou is é‰„ç ² = "iron cannon", while juu is 銃 = "gun"; words using ç ² tend to involve big weapons (anti-aircraft, broadside, artillery, ballista, etc), words with 銃 tend to involve small arms (carbine, revolver, shotgun, matchlock, gun control, etc).
-j
Posted by: J Greely at July 17, 2012 10:06 AM (2XtN5)
Posted by: tellu541 at July 17, 2012 11:01 AM (Nu03Y)
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I tend to write the review first, then take a bunch of screenshots (WAY too many) to try and illustrate the points I raised, then I cull the screenshots, resize, rename and upload, sometimes one by one, sometimes 10 or so at a time, depending on the layout.
I REALLY wish there were a bulk upload screen, or drag and drop, or even FTP. (and if there is, please tell me!).
I also wish there were a way to preview showing the BBCode images before making a post public, so I can catch errors, like forgetting to "size=640x" my embiggenable images.
(Still working on MGX 13, but I've been transferred to a new section with lots of overtime.)
Posted by: Mauser at July 18, 2012 01:58 AM (cZPoz)
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There is a bulk upload method coming (using Javascript). Also the ZIP file support is working in the new release, and I may be able to back-port that to the current version
Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 18, 2012 04:36 AM (PiXy!)
There were eight shows I originally intended to give a try. Here's how it came out:
Binbougami ga -- dropped. The emotional whipsaw was too much for me, and madcap farce just isn't my thing.
Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate -- dropped. The first episode was great, but the second episode might as well have been from an entirely different show. I didn't even get halfway through it.
Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai -- dropped like a hot rock. Watching the first episode made me feel soiled. I wanted to shoot the protagonist. This show is utter trash.
Hagure Yuusha -- continuing. There's too much fan service. (Ever think you'd read that here?) But the basic story is interesting, and there's potential. It looks like Myuu is the audience viewpoint character, not Akatsuki. He's an enigma, and it looks like the story is us finding out his true character. (Just in passing, I think this show will get a whole lot more interesting if Akatsuki gets the shit kicked out of him one time. Right now he's too full of himself.)
Campione -- continuing, but on the bubble. It really depends on whether the main character develops, and keeps, a backbone. If Erica keeps pushing him around, I'm through.
Dog Days -- is just as good as I hoped it would be. Better, even. I now suspect that Becky is going to be the main character in the series, though there's also going to be story about Shinku and Nanami.
Sword Art Online -- never started. I had intended to watch this, and I even downloaded the first episode. But once I had it, I found I didn't give a damn.
Oda Nobunaga -- and same with this one.
So I've got three shows continuing, and they all happen on Friday or Saturday. I wonder what I'll find to post about the rest of the time?
3
I really enjoy your reviews. Any previous series you'd intended to review but hadn't gotten around to? (See -- that was a question, not a suggestion.)
Posted by: Dave Young at July 16, 2012 08:19 AM (6ffrc)
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No, not really. When Dog Days 2 finishes, I'll certainly do a review of it.
Sword Art Online really is dotHack, but so far it's less about the mysteries in the game than it is about being trapped in the game and having to survive. So, not as interesting as dotHack/Sign.
Oda Nobuna (yes, they renamed the character) is not quite as insulting to the Sengoku era as Sengoku Collection, as there are little tidbits of history sprinkled throughout, but the main character alternates between being a lech and then some sort of retainer of the gods. Plus Nobunaga as a young woman. It's as stupid as you'd expect.
Posted by: wahsatchmo at July 16, 2012 04:09 PM (r4uXE)
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Yeah, I probably didn't mean to damn with faint praise, but I also found .Hack/Sign to be a bit of a chore to get through, even though I liked the idea of it. I've tried watching the other sequels and I can't get through them.
Sword Art looks good, but I feel like I'm watching a dramatization of World of Warcraft. When the only twist is that it's a MMORPG with real life consequences, I feel like there's not much there.
Posted by: wahsatchmo at July 16, 2012 06:20 PM (gY5xe)
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And they DID compress the entire .hack/sign storyline into three episodes with .hack/Quantum.
There was only one plot point in .hack/sign that I liked. When Lady Subaru got her ass kicked by a character with a similar avatar because she spent all her time politicking rather than leveling up. She looked pretty cute all disheveled too.
And the music was good.
I haven't downloaded anything this season yet. Although I'll probably start on Dog Days 2, since I downloaded the first season, but haven't watched it yet.
I've only watched about 30% of everything I've torrented.
Posted by: Mauser at July 17, 2012 02:17 AM (cZPoz)
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On Sword Art Online/ .hack//Sign and associated works:
I'm a big BeeTrain fan and have always liked their works, but the thing about .hack//Sign that people forget is that it's really not got much of a story. It's got a lot of good ideas that don't necessarily work together, but it *still* has one of the best OSTs put to an anime and it's super, super pretty. They spend a whole lot of time just sitting and looking at the background art while talking.
The series works to its strengths (visual & audio presentation, likeable characters, interesting world) and doesn't insult you with the story. That pretty much little happens for the entire series is its major flaw.
SAO doesn't have that luck in production and it's really not that type of series. .hack//Sign was completely original, so it could do what it wanted to do. SAO is a Light Novel conversion, so it's going to be stuck in convention a bit more.
On what I'm watching this season, at current:
- Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita
- Tari Tari
- Joshiraku
- Muv-Luv
- Eureka 7 AO (carry over)
- Dog Days 2
- Rinne no Lagrange 2
- Binbogami ga!
- Campione!
- Natsuyuki Rendezvous
- Kono Naka ni Hitori, Imouto ga Iru!
- Moyashimon Returns
- Accel World (carry over)
- Hyouka (carry over)
- Horizon
- Koi to Senkyou to Chocolate
Now, unless a series really doesn't catch me at all or insults my intelligence badly, I'll generally give it 3-5 episodes. I more tend to drop stuff around ep 6, if I watch ep 2.
In other news, I have a high capacity to watch mediocre series, haha. (And a lot of free time at the moment)
Posted by: sqa at July 17, 2012 06:56 PM (5/dUV)
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Since I am into MMORPGs (though not as much as I used to be), I was initially intrigued by .hack//Sign, especially how they referred to different play-styles, the overlap of player's real-lives with their game time, etc However, although they raised some interesting plot threads, they never resolved them.
Posted by: Siergen at July 18, 2012 03:27 PM (PuIGa)
Yeah, it's a harem. (Imagine our surprise.) Our Hero is Godou. The blonde in the red dress is Erica. She's a magic knight associated with a group of Illuminati in Italy. The miko (bottom, in green?) is Mariya. She works for a group in the Japanese government which tries to manage people with magic to prevent catastrophe.
The one with white hair is Liliana. We don't know much about her yet. We haven't met the last one. But there are images in the OP that suggest that eventually all four will work with him as part of a team.
But we did meet a strange girl with elf ears, who identified herself as Pandora, and who seems to have mediated his transformation from ordinary kid to god-killer. She may be some sort of meta-deity.
It looks like he got all ten of Verethragna's avatars along with the sword, and can use every one of them at will. However, he can only use each once per day, a pretty severe limitation. They're all tremendously powerful, though.
The rumor was that with all of this he was still going to turn out to be a rug for all the girls. At least in ep 2, that doesn't seem to be the case. Erica has been manipulating him, and he finally stood up to her. So there's hope.
I don't intend to drop this one yet.
(By the way, I think it's stupid to include punctuation marks in a show title, and I'm not going to play along with it. Just thought I'd mention that.)
"youkarou"?
In the second episode of Dog Days 2, at 03:30, Leo says something that sounds to me like youkarou. It means "alright, yes, I accept". What is the word or phrase? I can't find it in the dictionary.
1
No idea on etimology of it, but I'm pretty sure that "yo" is short in "yokaro". I thought it was a cousin of "-daro".
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 15, 2012 10:27 AM (5OBKC)
2
Yokarou, a variation of "yoi darou"; "(we) might as well" is used as a translation in the Tanaka corpus, which sounds better than the literal "I suppose it's good".
-j
Posted by: J Greely at July 15, 2012 10:40 AM (2XtN5)
3
I just remembered another place I'd encountered that. It was at the beginning of DBZ, when Goku and Piccolo are about to fight Raditz. And Raditz says it. J, your meaning makes sense in that case, too.
Nanami seems pretty carefree. And she'd already seen the Genoise getting MCSA'ed, and in their case they were completely nekkid afterwards.
Leo seems to have done a rapid but thorough briefing after Nanami agreed to wear the ring. Among other things, Leo showed her how to do the monshouhou, and she may have mentioned the fact that cute girls often lose some or all of their clothing.
Anyway, it's long been noted that a girl will get scandalized if someone sees them in bra-and-panties but won't be in a bikini, which exposes exactly the same skin if not even more. This may have been a joke about that, given Nanami saying "It's OK because it isn't my underwear."
About everyone being easy going, that's another aspect of the fact that this battle is "normal" and all the other ones we saw were not. This is how it's supposed to be.
The battles in the first series each had a prize associated with it, amounting to territorial advances by the winner. Had the campaign gone to its logical conclusion (before Shinku showed up) Galette would have conquered Biscotti.
But in this battle there isn't anything on the line except bragging rights.
What WAS that transformation sequence? I think it referenced about a dozen other ones. There was at least 4 different art styles and a tentacle attack, as well. Though that thing between her thighs was the initial formation of the broom.
It was both awesome and "okay, what am I watching at the moment?" and "is this a copy of the opening scene of Ghost in the Shell?" and a few other thoughts.
Nanami's posing was great. And we got our first Godwin sighting. There will be more scenery chewing ahead!
3
The scene could have been hand animated, but it was definitely CG colored to look like 3D. Though she really wasn't moving with the rigidity you normally see in that animation style.
Still, it was awesome and, at the same time, you're wondering if you should be watching this. They definitely have upped the fanservicey aspects a bit for this go around. Then again, they got Milli naked and in a bath multiple times last time. So we can't complain too much, haha. (And after Shinku finally learned to read the local language...)
Posted by: sqa at July 14, 2012 07:06 PM (5/dUV)
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One thing I do really hope for this time around:
I really want a full fight between Bernard & Roland. I've always liked this two and they're so unique in this type of series. They're honorable, noble and competent adult males. That's like anathema in anime, haha.
Even in a series with a bunch of 13 year old protagonists, they add such a nice dimension to the series. So, I really want to see them shine for 3 minutes fighting each other. They're so evenly matched it obviously would end in a tie, but I'd still love to see it. They've teased it 3 times (?) between the two seasons, so far. I expect a few more teases as well.
I should probably throw Godwin into this point as well, but we got to see him fight (and that was pretty awesome), but he's mostly there for scenery chewing awesomeness. "Can he roll that "ka" for 15s straight? Find out next time!" Hehe
I might go and watch Season 1 again, even though I did that just a few weeks ago, haha. I've been enjoying this series too much. Really big thanks for the recommendation some months back.
