Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:11 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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JK Meshi turned out to be total crap so I'm not going to make any attempt to follow it. All of the episodes I've looked at have been the same, with dreadful art, and no other redeeming features.

So first on our menu is Ani Tore EX, the exercise show without Hinako. Ep 5 is aerobics, while wearing animal ears.

Ep 6 introduces our last girl, who is shy and wears glasses. Her thing is leg lifts.

Ep 7 is about doing pushups and clapping your hands each time you rise. Or so they say. It's actually about the flat one groping one of the others.

And ep 8 is more aerobics while wearing animal ears. (The one with purple hair is the crazy one.)

Hakone-chan continues to be a travelog. In ep 6 someone built a new hotel/spa/waterpark right next to the traditional one, and it turned out to be another hot springs spirit who is a long time rival of Hakone. She challenges Hakone to a duel which turns out to be a real let down. But Hakone gets really big (ahem) in preparation for it.

Ep 7, the competing hot springs spirit Miya apologizes and invites everyone over for a swimsuit episode. Hakone has shrunk again and has... interesting... taste in swimwear. Ends up with Miya and Hakone fighting again, except that they get interrupted and chased by monkeys.

In ep 8 we ride a cable car to a different hot springs in the mountain. Hakone gets scared because she thinks there are demons there.

And in ep 9 we take a bus to Otamagaike, where there is a commemorative stone about something that happened 300 years ago. Something called the "Hakone Checkpoint". A woman tried to sneak by it and was killed by the Samurai guarding the place.

And her ghost remains there. Hakone is scared, until it turns out they know each other. What the ghost really wants most is a bath, and Hakone creates a hot springs there and she and Miya and the ghost all bathe together.

And the ghost is freed and goes to the afterlife.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:15 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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We've got another spiffy mass shooting going on down in California.

Everyone wants to know what's going on, of course, And no one really knows for sure. About the only thing that's certain is, Shots Fired, Some People Were Hit.

Aside from that, everything is really hazy and foggy. The best advice is to forget the whole thing for at least 24 hours, unless you live in the area, in which case get and load your gun and be prepared to defend yourself in case some hostile tries to take cover from pursuing police in your home.

UPDATE: Of course, another reason to wait is because there's always misreporting driven by The Narrative. Here's a prime example:

A senior federal official who is monitoring the case said investigators believe one of the shooters left the party after getting into an argument and returned with one or two armed companions.

Yeah, right. It's just a spontaneous attack caused by an argument that led to three attackers wearing masks and body armor and armed with rifles. I believe that.

What horseshit.

UPDATE: Anyway, the story is beginning to settle down. Current best guess: there were three attackers who moved into the building, fired a bunch and slaughtered a lot of people, then left the building and drove away in a black SUV. The police finally found it and cornered them and there was a big gunfight, in which two of them were hit. One may be dead. The third one is reported to have escaped and he's on foot in a San Bernardino neighborhood. If you live there, at this point you definitely want your gun loaded and ready and close at hand. And don't open your door for anyone wearing body armor and carrying a rifle! (Or anyone else you don't know.)

UPDATE: And I can't follow my own advice. 24 hours? I didn't even last two.

UPDATE: The two who were shot in the SUV both died. One was a woman. There are some (Arab) names floating around which are claimed to be those of the attackers, but I'm not going to take those kinds of rumors seriously until they're confirmed by authorities.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 02:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I just learned that there's a TV comedy called "Portlandia" which is about funny people living in Portland OR. It's not a situation comedy; apparently it's a series of sketches. And they must be doing something right because it's in its seventh season.

I assume it isn't actually being taped here, and they occasionally slip in an iconic image of the city just to place it here. And that got me thinking.

What would I consider to be the iconic image of this city? And the answer was easy: Being at the Rose Test Garden in Washington Park, looking over the city on a clear day, with Mount Hood visible in the distance. Most of the year you can't see it for the clouds, but you can see it during the summer, and it's really a spectacular sight. Photographs don't do it justice.

Number two? Waterfront park, looking north, showing the Hawthorne bridge and the Morrison bridge. There are a lot of bridges across the Willamette, in case you didn't know. It cuts the city in half so there's a hell of a lot of traffic between the two sides. All the bridges north of the Sellwood bridge are drawbridges of various kinds, or else they're really, really high so that ships can fit underneath. The Hawthorne bridge is a steel truss bridge with a lift section in the middle. The Morrison bridge is something called a "bascule bridge".

Number 3? I suppose it would be a scenic street scene in Old Town, but I never went there in the old days, and I never go anywhere these days.

I guess the problem is, Portland is a very nice city, but it isn't really a distinctive city. No particularly noteworthy buildings or landmarks that are known outside the area.

I wonder what kind of establishing shots they do use. I also wonder what it is about people in Portland that made it possible for others to laugh at us for seven seasons.

UPDATE: I'm trying to think of any city I consider to be inherently funny. All I can come up with is Brooklyn.

UPDATE: Actually, Berkeley is inherently funny, too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 08:01 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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One of the villains in Hyperdimension Neptune is named "Magiquone" in Japanese. In English they call her "Arfoire" (i.e. "R4").

There's some punning going on here. In Japan, a device which allows you to cheat at a console game is called a "magic computer" マジコン i.e. "majikon" and that's where "Magiquone" comes from. For the English translation they named her after the R4 flash memory card for the Nintendo DS.

As to the punning, Neptune gets her name wrong. In English instead of "Arfoire" Neptune calls her "Bar Whore".

That seems to be an attempt to replicate what's happening in Japanese. Her name is "Magiquone" and Neptune calls her something that sounds to me like "Madagonguu". You can hear it clearly in ep 13 at time offset 18:24.

Magiquone gets mad when Neptune says that, so I assume it's something that sounds like an insult, probably racy considering the pun they used in English. But I've listened to that at least 20 times and I cannot exactly parse what Neptune is saying. Anyone care to help me out?

UPDATE: Sorry, my mistake. It's episode 12, not episode 13. (13 is the OVA.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:57 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Oh shit oh shit oh shit!!!

UPDATE: I wonder if 4chan is the actual public face of the Discordians?

UPDATE: By the way, they told me at the last meeting that I should tell you that there are no Discordians. Fnord

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 04:51 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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My copy doesn't arrive until tomorrow morning but a rip showed up on the torrents, so of course I downloaded it. Spoilers below the fold.

UPDATE: Someone rushed through a sub, and now that I understand the dialogue, I can say that it's even more stupid than I originally thought.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I just receved the shipping notice for the ep 1 Strike the Blood OVA BD. I paid for overnight, but I assume Fedex doesn't deliver on Thanksgiving, so I guess I'll get it Friday.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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UPDATE: How about a quiz? One of these pictures actually presages a BigBad's death. Do you know which one?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 02:06 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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I hadn't been watching this, but the 20th episode came out and I got curious. So I downloaded all 20 eps and watched it in one sitting. The first 15 episodes tell approximately the same story as the first recent movie "Battle of the Gods".

In brief, there is a new character named Beerus (or Bills, depending on how you romanize it). He's the God of Destruction and he spend most of his time sleeping, for decades at a time. But once in a while he wakes up, and then he goes out and destroys a few or a lot of planets, for no obvious reason except that it's his job, or his role. He has a servant named Whis, and they both are millions of years old, if not older than that. Beerus is reputed to be the strongest person in the universe, and he terrifies the Supreme Kai, not to mention North Kai.

Anyway, during his last sleep he had a dream about a "super saiyajin God", who was able to give him a good fight. The Oracle Fish (one of his servants) confirmed that there was going to be a very strong opponent for him at this time, which is why he set his alarms to wake up.

So Whis informs him that nearly all the Saiyajin died when Frieza blew up their planet, but a handful survive on Earth. Goku is on North Kai's planet training, and Whis and Beerus show up there, and it ends up with Goku begging Beerus for a match. Beerus creams Goku.

Eventually, back on Earth, they summon Shenlong and he tells them the story about the Super Saiyajin God. It requires five saiyajin of good temper to push their power into a sixth -- which is a problem because there are only five: Goku, Gohan, Goten, Vegita, and Trunks. Well, actually there is a sixth: Videl is pregnant (with Pan). So they try it with Videl and it works. Goku becomes a super saiyajin God, and he fights Beerus and doesn't win.

But he gives Beerus a credible fight, and Beerus decides not to destroy the earth. End of story.

In the movie, that's about an hour and a half. In DBSuper it takes 14 episodes. DBS inherits the feature of DBZ of dragging out the fights to an insufferable degree.

In the movie, the process of making Goku a super saiyajin God takes two minutes. In episode 9 of DBS it takes 6 minutes. It just goes on and on and on. I thought the shorter version worked better.

Goku's fight with Beerus takes 15 minutes in the movie and takes fully five episodes in DBS. They took a 15 minute movie battle and stretched it to an hour and a half in the TV series. It drags. I started skipping.

I've noticed before that movies are often far better than original series. The Nanoha A's movie was a lot better than the A's TV series, for instance. Not that the TV series was bad, of course, but the movie was drastically better. (For one thing, they completely eliminated the "masked men" subplot, and the story was better for it.) And in this case the "Battle of the Gods" movie was a lot better than the DBS retelling of the same story.

And I thought the first Nanoha movie was better than the first TV series. (That movie was also a retelling.)

Of course, a movie has a larger budget per minute, and it doesn't have as rushed a schedule, and they can spend more time in preproduction doing planning and plotting and script writing, and all those things show.

It was interesting that the Mouretsu Pirates movie deliberately changed some of the continuity. In particular, they redesigned the bridge of the Benten Maru. The original bridge really didn't make sense; the new one is drastically better. But you can also see the advantages of more money, more time, and more care as well. It just looks cleaner and better, and the story telling is tight.

There's a Girls und Panzer movie. (It hit the theaters in Japan last weekend.) It isn't a retelling; what we've heard is that it happens two years after the TV series. Which means all the members of Anko team will have graduated from Hakuo Academy. They've taken their time with it, again, and I assume it has a bigger budget. I wonder what story they're telling? Has anyone seen anything about it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:27 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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