Today's search term is "boat".

I just discovered something useful about Gelbooru: you can include a dash just before a search term and it means "exclude this". From now on, my searches will include the following -1boy -multiple_boys -male_focus -penis -testicles -vore -rape -loli and it's going to be a lot less painful to do these posts. It isn't perfect because some pictures don't get exhaustively tagged, but it'll be a hell of a lot better than it was.

Anyway, on with the boats!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 05:25 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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It's another 3:30 show (I seem to be sampling a lot of those this year) and it's a waste of time. In the first episode, the air conditioner in the student council room is broken and everyone is dying from the heat.

So obviously the solution is for everyone to take their clothes off!

Yeesh. That was the gag for this episode. It's obvious there isn't going to be any story here, and no characterization to speak of. They gave us some cheesecake shots but I don't feel like putting them together right now (maybe later).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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If I hadn't already named this site, I think I'd go with zen ryoku zenkai (全力全開)

It means "full power, full throttle", which is pretty awesome. It's an idiom that means "going all out".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 08:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Slysoft was forced out of business in February. They're the folks that sold "AnyDVD" and "AnyDVD HD" all these years that allowed us to defeat region codes and encryption.

They were based in Antigua, and someone managed to get them fined $11,000 by the government.

BUT...

They aren't dead. They've reformed, in Belize, under the name Redfox. And they're still selling the products from before.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 05:30 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Today's search term is "motorcycle".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 04:05 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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This was a pleasant surprise. The series concept is two girls who attend a maritime academy hoping to become "Blue Mermaids". We've seen that before, haven't we?

Well, no. It wasn't at all what I thought it would be. For one thing, the MC "Mike" (pronounced mee-keh) seems initially to be a ditz but turns out not to be. I think it was an attempt to avoid making Mike a Mary-Sue, actually.

She and her friend Moka pledged to each other when they were in grade school that they'd both attend the academy, and after a time skip they both enter in the same class. The first thing that happens to new cadets is that they're assigned to operate ships -- and there isn't anyone else on the ship besides cadets.

This is Mike (lower right corner) and her crew.

Moka and Mike both get assigned as ship captains. Moka gets the Musashi, and Mike gets command of the destroyer Harekaze, which historically never existed. There was, however, a Harukaze built in the 1920's. But this isn't it; for one thing its engines are turbines. For another thing, it's got radar.

So it's kind of a mishmash. The fleet, consisting of a battleship and eight destroyers, sets off and are supposed to meet at a certain island.

Harekaze is late because the helm made a mistake and they steamed in the wrong direction for quite a long time. Mike radios about the mistake and apologizes.

And then they start taking fire, with live shells. Which isn't supposed to happen. A modern warship, with the instructor in command, is firing on them with a modern gun and making near misses. Mike tries three or four ways of communicating and gets ignored.

So she decides to return fire. And then it gets exciting.

I have no idea what's going on. The instructor is a complete enigma. Does she hate Mike for some reason? Or is it the exact opposite? Trial by fire to bring out Mike's best capability?

Mike actually comes off as pretty impressive in this. She doesn't freak. She takes her position as captain seriously. She is thinking. She issues orders, even when it's hard. Given that she just took her very first command a few hours ago, it's pretty good stuff.

But things are going to get worse in the next episode. I'm not sure whether it'll be possible to easily straighten out this mess. The ED suggests that they're going to have more "adventures" before it's over.

Girls on ships are big now, and clearly this is trying to cash in on that. But they're not doing the mecha-musume fetish, or some sort of fantasy setting. They're real girls on a plausible ship using realistic weapons. And the show isn't trying sell ship-porn. There's a lot of that but the concentration is on the girls. Also, it's not fan service (except one very brief scene).

I can see myself getting hooked on this show.

UPDATE: I think the short way to describe this show is "Girls und Destroyers."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 11:52 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Isn't it interesting that we have common words for the two parts of our legs (thigh, shin) but don't have for the two sections of our arms? We have to refer to them as upper arm and lower arm.

We could use humerus for the upper arm, but there are two bones in the lower arm so we can't really use either radius or ulna.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 02:12 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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It's another comedy anime about online fantasy RP gamers, except that this time they're trying to tell a story, in full length episodes.

I got about two thirds of the way through the first episode and realized I just didn't care. The basic story is that Our Hero, a guy, plays a guy character in a very popular MMORPG and he eventually became enraptured with a catgirl in the game and confessed his love to her.

And she was grateful but she admitted that the human behind the character was a middle-aged man. Our Hero was traumatized by this.

Flash forward a couple of years and he's part of a gaming guild with two other guys and one girl (as characters) and eventually one of them suggests they should meet IRL. So they do, and it turns out that the other two guys are actually girls, too. And they all attend the same high school.

One of them is the student body president. One is a flat-chested blonde with twintails who isn't a tsundere because she never makes it to dere. And the team's girl is also a girl, who is playing under her real name "Ako".

There's supposed to be a story about Ako not having very good social skills IRL and the other three trying to help her, but...

I just don't give a damn. There's a fair amount of eye candy and it'll be worth plundering in about 3 months, but it ain't worth watching.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:19 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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The recent story line in the manga had a one year jump between chapters 417 and 418. The anime reached chapter 417 in the second series at episode 90, and they tossed in "Fairy Tail Zero" (which is anime original) beginning with episode 91.

Well, that ran ten episodes, and episode 101 picks back up again with manga chapter 418. And just to get us back in the rhythm of the series, they gave us some Lucy fan service.

Even when she's wearing street clothes, Lucy is nice to look at. One thing I like about Lucy as a character is that she's beautiful, she knows she's beautiful, and she likes being beautiful. She knows how she affects men and likes it, and she's not above using it to manipulate them.

But being beautiful isn't the core of her ego. What she likes most about herself is that she's a powerful and competent mage with a substantial record of accomplishments already to her credit, even though she's only about 18. She doesn't expect to make it through life by marrying a rich man and being a trophy wife, though she could have done exactly that. She wants to work and make it on her own, and she does so. She also knows she has room to improve, and during this one-year skip she trains constantly and gets a lot more powerful.

Her mother died when Lucy was small, and her father has also died, and he managed to squander the family fortune through risky investments and didn't leave her anything -- so she's on her own. She grew up a rich girl and thus got an excellent education, and in addition to being beautiful she's also very intelligent. Jason at Weekly Sorceror scouted her to be a regular underwear model (second picture up there) during the recent one-year skip, and she did it, and she's good at it. But she also talks him into hiring her as an assistant reporter and writer, and she works hard at it and gets pretty good.

And her knowledge of magic, which hugely surpasses anything Jason knows, turns out to be an asset to him. By episode 101 she's become very useful to him, and not just because he appreciates spending time with a world-class beauty. She's making her way, earning her living, and doing it well.

And that should make her a feminist icon, but of course it doesn't.

All the women in Fairy Tail are like that. They're all gorgeous but they're also all accomplished, equal to the men in Fairy Tail in all ways that are important. (No one tells Erza "Make me a sandwich" because she'd filet them.)

There's no glass ceiling. Erza is S-class, and there are only two others in the guild. At one point Makarov is missing and Erza gets selected to be the new guildmaster. (And the guild was founded by Mavis, who was the first guildmaster.) Fairy Tail is what SJW's say they want in life and in fiction (and games), but I'm sure that if an SJW looked at Fairy Tail, all they'd see was boobs. And then the reeling and writhing and fainting in coils would begin.

UPDATE: I need to learn to count. There are four total S-Class mages in Fairy Tail: Erza, Mirajane, Laxus, and Gildarts. So it's two women and two men.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 01:52 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The Times of London sez:

Communities in northern Japan are being overwhelmed by radioactive wild boars which are rampaging across the countryside after being contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

The animals' numbers are increasing as the boar breed unhindered in the exclusion zone around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant, and they are causing damage to farms well beyond the area poisoned by radiation. Hunters are shooting the boars as fast as they can, but local cities are running out of burial space and incinerator capacity to dispose of their corpses.

Obviously the solution is... high school girls with big jugs wearing powered exoskeletons and skimpy bikinis! (And hair color never found in nature!) Armed with anti-matter beams that annihilate the boar carcasses the girls have killed! And then they discover that it's a plot by an American multi-national to develop super-boars for some nefarious reason! And one of the girls gets captured! And she's confined in a dungeon along with a mutant boar with tentacles! And the other girls stage a heroic rescue!

Man, I can see it now! BD sales will set an all-time record!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:34 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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