Onigiri is not about rice balls, though it would be more enlightening if it were. It's based on a current? or forthcoming? MMORP phone game, in which the player is a guy and he manages to recruit a swarm of NPC companions, all of whom are cute girls, including one catgirl and one loli.

We've seen this before. And there's only two ways to approach it: take it completely seriously, even if you know it's stupid, or start laughing, and make fun of it all. This does the latter. Part of the reason is that episodes are 3:30 and you can't really be serious when you have so little time.

So they break the fourth wall constantly. For instance, the one guy doesn't have a voice. Everyone else does, but when he has something to say it shows up in a dialogue box.

In the first episode the team is just about to win a fight, and they waste time bickering about who gets to put in the killing blow so as to earn the experience points. This gives the enemy time to revive and blow them all over the countryside, miles away and separated from each other, but otherwise unhurt. Then we follow two of the girls who landed together.

Hmmm... looks like a random encounter to me! So let's strike a heroic pose, and then go to work!

Bows are fine, but you'll do better with a gun. MORE DAKKA!

Or a minigun (but I couldn't get a clean image of it). And let's finish this with a nuke!

Oops, looks like Shizuka was caught cheating.

This will be worth plundering (the way Bikini Warriors was) but it won't be worth watching (the way Bikini Warriors wasn't). Dropped.

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Euro-Disney just had a freak accident. An employee was found dead in the Haunted House attraction. Reportedly he was working on lighting and got electrocuted.

Will this make customers begin to think that the "Haunted House" is really haunted?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 07:30 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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"Chalk and Awe"! I wish I'd thought of that!

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That's Rin. As you might imagine, her main job in the series is gainaxing.

This show is comedy edging towards farce. But it's mainly fan service. Lots of bike fan service as well as paraphenalia fan service. There are corporate logos all over the place, real ones, and lots of pictures of motorcycles. Plus the girls, all but one of whom are nicely built.

So let's introduce some characters.

Hane, on the left, seems to be the audience viewpoint character. She's a bit of a ditz. Onsa, with the black hair, is snide and flat chested. She seems to enjoy baiting Rin, whom you've already met. I think it's only a matter of time before Rin starts making fun of Onsa's chest in retaliation.

Lime is the Motorcycle Club president. She never speaks and never takes her helmet off, at least so far. The one time she had something substantive to say, she held up a sign. The series web site doesn't list a seiyuu for her.

Hijiri is a rich girl, as yet too young to get a driver's license.

So as to what they ride? Hane rides a Honda, Onsa rides a Yamaha trail bike, Lime has a Kawasaki, Rin rides Suzuki, and Hijiri has a Ducati. Her butler drives it and she rides in a side car.

There's a lot of silliness and quite a lot of mild fan service (of several kinds) and a ridiculous amount of product placement. I bet the show is already profitable due to corporate sponsorship payments from 50+ companies.

It will unquestionably be worth plundering when it's finished but I'm not sure I'll be able to watch it as its rolling out. Having said that, I did enjoy the first episode and I'll watch the next one.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 12:01 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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1  Well, "no socially redeemable value" isn't the same thing as "not worth watching," so, sure.

Posted by: ubu at April 04, 2016 01:43 PM (SlLGE)

2 I wanted to include a flash of Rin gainaxing but I couldn't make it work. If you're curious, here it is.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 04, 2016 02:03 PM (+rSRq)

3 I demand airplanes.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 04, 2016 09:23 PM (XOPVE)

4 There probably is such a show, but this isn't it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 04, 2016 10:18 PM (+rSRq)

5 What's that on her back? Some sort of matching backpack?

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at April 05, 2016 01:34 AM (l55xw)

6 It's just part of her racing suit. It makes a smoother aerodynamic shape with her helmet, and might be an airbag in case of a crash.

Posted by: Mikeski at April 05, 2016 04:59 AM (BKBr8)

7 My thought was "counterweight".

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 05, 2016 06:39 AM (+rSRq)

8 ...that too.  

Posted by: Mikeski at April 05, 2016 09:48 AM (BKBr8)

9 I'm surprised that nobody here picked it up yet, but isn't Lime a Stig's highschool cousin? Supposedly, then Rin is Hammond, Onsa is Clarkson, and Hane is James May.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at April 05, 2016 12:50 PM (XOPVE)

10 "My thought was "counterweight"."

That thought had passed through my mind, too. I wonder if anybody actually does that, seems like it ought to work. No, a search says it just results in the bra straps putting twice the pressure on the shoulders...

Doing a google search, it looks just like the airbag, so I guess that's it.

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at April 05, 2016 04:15 PM (l55xw)

11

And we have a winner! Our first Rin fan-art!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 05, 2016 05:20 PM (+rSRq)

12 "a search says it just results in the bra straps putting twice the pressure on the shoulders..."  

...and some very awkward looks.  And confused drunken fondling.  And hard-to-reach clasps.  (Guess they'd be front-hooks.)

Nothing stopping the counterweight being a separate garment that sits on the hips, though, like a framed hiking backpack.

Wait, that's about where the biological counterweight sits... this "evolution" guy knows what he's doing.  As soon as we're done learning how to walk on our hind legs...

Posted by: Mikeski at April 05, 2016 05:31 PM (BKBr8)

13 Pete, that'd work, except Top Gear was interesting and funny.

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 05, 2016 07:11 PM (KiM/Y)

14 I liked the suggestion of having the old Top Gear crew do the dub.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 05, 2016 07:51 PM (PiXy!)

15 Even more than Top Gear, it's K-On! with motorcycles instead of  music. The audience viewpoint character even has a more level-headed younger sister.

Posted by: muon at April 05, 2016 08:17 PM (IUHrD)

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The stuff we're doing in high tech has been rendering revolutions, and the side effects of those revolutions will reverberate for centuries.

For 500 years, printing presses were uncommon, and thus the power of communications they enabled were limited to a few people. But that all changed about 20 years ago; and now nearly anyone can publish and distribute their thoughts, electronically, at negligible cost. That revolution has already wrought substantial changes and it's only going to get worse (or better, depending on your point of view).

One consequence of that is that the business model of dozens of corporations who relied on ownership of physical printing presses is rapidly becoming non-viable. Some of them have gone out of business already and the rest are trying to find ways to survive, even though most of them will not.

But it also means that the self-selected "gate keepers" of public discourse have totally lost control over the gate. Public discourse is no longer controlled by any kind of elite. And as a result, we live in interesting times.

And now for something completely different. A hundred years ago, aircraft because a significant weapon of war. By WWII the importance of aircraft became overwhelming. But building and operating a substantial air force was extremely expensive, involving huge capital investment and large numbers of men, all of which cost a great deal to maintain.

And maybe that's about to change, too. ISIS is reported to be developing an airforce based on drones, which are cheap, and readily available, and don't require a mammoth support infrastructure. Even if this report is not true, it's going to happen somewhere, by someone, and not necessarily just by a large terrorist organization.

It's possible that in ten years it will be just as cheap and common for private citizens to have their own airforce equivalents, the way we have the equivalent of printing presses now. How, for instance, do you maintain security over major buildings like the US Capitol when any crank can put a pipe bomb on a drone and send it in?

And not just major political targets. Will "pro-life" cranks start using drones to bomb abortion clinics? Will "gun control" advocates start making airstrikes against large gun stores and shooting ranges? When will we see a public official who is giving a speech get attacked by a drone? How do you fend that off? (Even if all it does is to disrupt the speech and panic the crowd, that may be enough for some attackers.)

How do you protect a big natgas storage facility against drones that don't care about barbed-wire fences?

And if it's a drone with a decent radio range, which is carrying a camera in addition to a bomb, then the attacker could be anywhere. How do you find them?

And how many will there be? This kind of attack could be launched for under $1000 by anyone with a grievance. (And there are a lot of grievances out there!)

I don't think this is going to cause as much change, or as widespread of change, as the internet did, but it's going to change a lot of things. For instance, it may become the norm for heads of state to make speeches by TV instead of in person. And just as the internet has changed the way campaigns are run, the fear of drone attack will change them too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:17 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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The Pen is mightier than the Sword, but Chalk defeats them both!

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Turns out that "Bread of Peace" is 3 minute episodes. It's "cute girls doing cute things with bread dough", and as such a waste of time. The only worthwhile thing in the show was:

Red half-rim glasses. That ain't enough.

Dropped.

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Pete has started watching GATE, probably in part because of my enthusiasm for the series.

As nearly always, we have a "how do you romanize that name" issue with character names. In this series in some ways it's worse than usual. Often the problem is that the original name was a western word or phrase, converted to kata kana, and then we have to figure out what it was originally. It doesn't help that often the original western term was chosen as a joke.

That was nearly at its worst in "Dog Days", where almost all the female characters were named after European desserts. For instance, Gaul's bodyguard is made up of three girls who are known as Genoise. They are Vert Far Breton, Jaune Clafoutis, and Noir Vinocacao.

So just one from GATE: The red-haired princess of the Empire is Piña Colada. Most of us don't bother with the circumflex because it's a pain, so we write her name "Pina".

As to anti-Americanism, that peaks in episodes 9 and 10 of the first series.

There's a murder mystery by Rex Stout called "The League of Frightened Men" which contains a man who nurses murderous hatred of a number of other men. He turns out to be a successful novelist, and to gain revenge he puts those men in his novels as characters and kills those characters brutally.

GATE contains a number of fictional paybacks like that, mostly in the first series: against the Diet, against Americans, and against gutless politicians in the government. In the second series he gets revenge against the Press too. All of these things relieve grudges the author has apparently been nursing since he was in the army decades ago. It's the biggest flaw in the series. Fortunately, it doesn't pollute the entire thing, just three episodes in the first series and one in the second.

But that's still too many. And even if the director had wanted to remove that, it would have left a monstrous hole in the plot and reduced the entire story to incoherence.

UPDATE: By the way, there's going to be a GATE phone game:

(Or for all I know it's already out.)

UPDATE: Magical Girl Love Warrior Rory Mercury?  ??  ???

UPDATE: JList also presents, "Mail Order Waifu Service"... heh

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Let's go to the onsen!

Need I say that it's NSFW below the fold?

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The Stanford Review has gone where no one has gone before. (I'm linking to Powerline's copy because it's nearly certain Stanford Review will be forced to delete the original.)

Ultimately, the only effective counterattack against SJW foolishness is the horselaugh. This is the first substantial shot I've heard of. Here's hoping it won't be the last.

It would have been better if written in chalk on Stanford sidewalks, of course, but you can't have everything.

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