Our friend and host Pixy lives in Sydney, and it's a damned good thing. At the rate things seem to be going, Melbourne is going to burn to the ground.

I exaggerate, but only apparently a little. Victoria State is having some terrible fires, and at least a hundred people have died there already.

Inevitably someone has blamed it on global warming, or at least tried to imply that it might be related, but there's no evidence of that. That part of Australia is like southern California: fire is a natural part of the ecology.

They had terrible fires in that part of Australia a few years ago, too; I remember blogging about it. It's something that happens periodically in that kind of arid ecological system.

Grasses and annual bushes use it as a competitive strategy. They're less affected by fire than perennial bushes and trees, so a good devastating fire every few years clears out the competitors, and fertilizes the ground for the annuals. Grasses have been doing that in dry areas of the planet for millions of years.

None of which is any consolation for the families of the dead, or those whose houses have been obliterated. Huge fires are always terrifying, in a way that no other natural disaster really can be, because they're slow but inexorable.

The San Diego area had a couple of big fires while I was living there, and one really immense one since I left. In that last one, the area where I used to live had to be evacuated, though it didn't end up burning.

So why does it seem that these fires are a lot more destructive now? It's because more people are living in those areas which are fundamentally dangerous places.

Look, you build your house in the flood plain of a major river, sometimes you're going to get wet. You build your house in the middle of sage and grass in a semi-desert, sometimes you're going to burn down. Those fires have been happening since the end of the last ice age, but it's only recently that those areas have had lots of houses in them, and that's why the costs, in money and in lives, have gone up.

Another reason is perverse: we're too good at fighting fires, most of them. Lots of small fires was the norm historically, but now we rush in and put those out. That means that brush builds up in a lot of areas because small fires no longer clear it out, and once that catches on fire, nothing can put it out.

In the long run it's the same: everything burns, eventually. But if it's longer between fires, then when the fires happen they're going to be huge and especially destructive.

Anyway, I couldn't remember which of the two cities Pixy lived in, so I hit his archives and did some searching. It's Sydney. (Whew!) No reports of fires near Sydney, and a big mountain range for protection between Sydney and the area that's burning.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 05:18 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I'm being patriotic and doing my part for the economic recover. Which is to say, I just put in another order for anime:

Ouran High School Host Club (first half season)
Yu Yu Hakusho (season 1)
DBZ (season 8)
Negime?! (first half season)
Negima OVA
...and a Haruhi figurine

I can see that this figurine business is going to be a problem. But I'm trying to limit myself to figurines where the girl is sitting down, so that "broken foot tabs" don't ruin the figures for me, like happened with my first Hakufu figurine. (It won't stand up anymore, and there's no reasonable pose for it otherwise.)

I'm going to be curious to see just how huge it is. It's 1/4 scale, and even though she's sitting down I expect that what with the bunny ears she's going to really tower. "Bow down and worship." Or something like that. (Sure, I'll worship a gorgeous baanigaaru...)

UPDATE: I used to be able to sit like that when I was a kid. If I tried it now, I think my hips would break.

UPDATE: By the way, when I was putting in this order, I noticed that Bob has a shipping special. Ordinarily I would have used UPS ground, which is a flat rate of $13. But now it seems that Fedex 2nd Day is a flat rate of $17, and that I can't pass up.

UPDATE: And, as always, Bob's people shipped my order next business day.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 04:40 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
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From our discussion here a couple of days ago about Strike Witches and how well it's sold, I've been thinking about just why that might have been. What is different about SW compared to some other Gonzo series that haven't done as well?

"Doing well" as far as the Japanese studios are concerned means how many DVDs they sell in Japan. As I understand it, they don't break even on broadcast. The networks don't pay them as much as their production costs. And R1 sales, if a series get licensed here, is so late as to not really figure very much in their economic calculation. (Plus the fact that American fans are cheap, and the market here isn't all that large, means that it isn't really all that much money.)

So the Strike Witches DVDs have been selling at a rate of maybe 12,000 each for their first weeks, which doesn't set any records for the industry, but which makes it Gonzo's best selling title ever.

ANN doesn't list the totals for many DVDs in their rankings, and they only started doing that a few months ago anyway, so I don't have much data here to work with. But consider:

The most obvious reason is the fan service, and the fact that the DVDs are uncensored. But SW is far from being the only title that's been done for. Sekirei did, too, but it hasn't sold as well.

I wish I could compare it to other recent series which are similar (e.g. Goshushou-sama Ninomiya-kun, or Rosario to Vampire) but I can't come up with any sales data for them.

Anyhoo, it's at least obvious that it's selling a lot better than Sekirei, which has to have at least as much fan service and girls fighting as SW does.

So what is it that's special about Strike Witches?

Here's where we get out of the objective and into the subjective. I'll tell you what it is that makes it work for me.

First, I really like the music. That may be surprising to hear, but there's something about martial music, and the general style of music that they chose for this series, which stirs the blood.

And I like the period. It's one I'm interested in, even though they're taking massive liberties with it.

The magic is neat. The variety of magic, and the way the magic is presented. The Striker Units are wonderful; stupid, but wonderful.

But the real reason the show works for me is the characterization. All the girls are good, but the characters of Miyafuji and Sakamoto make the show. They're both really interesting, and the interaction between them is also really interesting.

Sakamoto is the real prize character in the series. The fact that she's an extremely experienced pilot. The way her eye glows when she lifts her eye patch. Her strange laugh, and the way she keeps hitting Miyafuji on the shoulder. Her gung-ho attitude.

And the somewhat tragic story that gets told about her. There are several different intertwined stories being told here, but in the end I think that the series is really about Sakamoto, and the way she has to face the fact that at age 20 she's over the hill.

Sakamoto is a nerd. Her social skills are terrible, yet deep down she's a good person, an amazingly good senior officer, a skilled warrior, and...

...and a flying fool. She loves to fly. She loves being in the air. And she can't let go of that, even when flying will get her killed.

So is the series selling well because of characters, or because of fan service? Sales of the 6th and final DVD will tell the story. That'll be episodes 11 and 12, and they have the least amount of fan service in the entire series. If the Japanese are buying for the nudity, then that DVD won't sell as well as the others. But if it's really the story and characters, then it'll sell just as well as the others.

And that's what I expect. And that's why it's outselling Sekirei: that one doesn't have any equivalently riveting characters.

UPDATE: And just after I wrote this, I saw that Pete had posted about ep 8, which he just purchased from Crunchyroll. He's right; that episode is a particularly good one.

The furball in it is one of the best combat sequences in the series, and they animated it very well. That was the first time we got to see Perrine use her magical attack, which was cool. And I think it was the first battle we saw where Miyafuji was treated as a full member of the team, and did her job and did it well. In particular, her gunnery was excellent.

But seeing Wilcke in that evening gown was also nice, and hearing her singing "Lili Marleen" was good too. (That was the perfect choice for a song for her to sing, by the way.)

UPDATE: Pete responds. He explains why he preferred Sekirei to Strike Witches. (He doesn't explain why Strike Witches sold better.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:50 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Chizumatic friend Sixten has had his blog hacked by someone who claims to be a "palisenian". Presumably our brave freedom fighter counts this as a major victory in his war against the Juice.

Why, exactly, Sixten should be a victim in this war isn't clear. Last time I checked, Sixten was of Korean descent and lived in Seattle. (Did he secretly enlist in the Juice Defense Fierces?)

But, I guess, brave Palisenians must take their victories where they can find them, the dumbasses. They sure are brave, ain't they?

UPDATE: In comments, J points out that visiting Sixten's site while its content is under hostile control is probably not very safe. For the moment it doesn't seem to do anything bad, but those who broke in before could do so again and make it try to do nasty things.

UPDATE: 20090207.2300 and he seems to be trying to fix it. That's good to see.

UPDATE 20090208.0745: I just heard from him. Looks like it's a total loss, and he's created a new blog from scratch. That's really unfortunate. (I recommended that he talk to his hosting service to see if they can restore his site from backups.)

He also says he's from the Philippines, not from Korea. (My mistake.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 03:03 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Based on the scan: Taeko seems to have an uncanny ability to hold her liquor. Tina had a bottle of everclear (I assume it was) and gave a glass of it to Taeko who drank it all and didn't seem affected by it. Then Tina pressured Kaoru into trying some, and just one mouthful put him out cold. There have been other cases where Taeko has been drinking and hasn't passed out.

Talk about a dusty trope: "male lead works part time jobs to make the money for a gift for the main girl love interest, who mistakes his busyness and thinks it means he's got another girl." This show? Yes, but also the Ah! My Goddess! OVA, from waaaaay back in 1993.

Aoi in a modern white dress is nearly unrecognizable.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So how much progress am I making on an update to the top rotation? Not very much, sadly. The problem is that most of the stuff I've bought in the last year doesn't offer much I can use. So far I've got:

Aika R16 -- 15
Blue Dragon -- 5
Dokkoida -- 27
Familiar of Zero -- 28
Nanoha -- 33
Nanoha A's -- 67
Please Twins -- 11
Puniechan -- 32
Rocket Girls -- 19

for a total of 237. And I won't even be able to use all those; that's just the count of the raw frame grabs, and I always end up tossing a few. Since I shoot for somewhere in the range of 750 images total, that wouldn't even be a third new. Not enough.

Then, today, it hit me: I never scanned Ai Yori Aoshi for frame grabs. I bought the whole series, 8 DVDs, and only watched the first one,but I can grab images from all of them, and should be able to come up with 100 without too much eye fatigue.

And I've never taken frame grabs from Kaleido Stage. For that matter, if I'm just looking for eye candy, Daphne in the Brilliant Blue has a lot of it. (But it might be too ecchi, as in NSFW for all you people who visit me when you should be working. So maybe I can't use that one.)

Anyway, I'm going to start scanning Ai Yori Aoshi this evening.

UPDATE: Whoops! I missed the 70 frames I took from the first Aria series. That brings me up to 307, which is still not enough after all this time.

UPDATE:

Yeah, I think I can use this. I only got about four grabs from the first DVD, but it'll pick up once more of the girls from the harem enter the show.

UPDATE: OK, about 30 from the first three DVDs. That's more like it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 08:34 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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No one will accuse Ah! My Buddha! of being great art, but it is a pleasant fan-service show, and it has one virtue: the original mangaka seems to have learned how to draw girls from the same source as the mangaka responsible for Ninja Nonsense.

The girls are all round. (Even the little undeveloped one has reasonable curves everywhere else.) This is what anime girls should look like. They shouldn't look like they're made of sticks. (See Maria-sama ga miteru, or rather, don't see it.)

UPDATE: Borderline NSFW below the fold. (Better safe than sorry.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 07:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Murray is crazy. We're all crazy, too, of course, but Murray's craziness is cooler than ours.

Where we're all crazy about anime, Murray's craziness is siege engines. If anyone ever builds a castle in New Zealand, they're gonna be in big trouble once Murray finds out.

He's built quite a few siege engines over the last few years. There were several he was commissioned to build for a local museum, but he doesn't just want to look at them. He wants them to work.

He's built all kinds of different ones, of different sizes, and they all work. But the big gun of medieval siege artillery is the trebuchet. And that's his latest creation.

He named it Sir Isaac. His ammunition is balls of concrete (brilliant, I say; using concrete for that is absolutely brilliant) and Sir Isaac can hit a 6*6 foot target consistently from a range of 300 feet. He's got the pictures to prove it. (The repeatability is really outstanding for an indirect-fire weapon.)

UPDATE: I just noticed that James also linked to this lot. Different web site, though, but it's the same group of crazies.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 06:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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ANN says that the fifth DVD of Strike Witches just came out in Japan, and the series is continuing to sell at the healthy rate of the previous disks, if not even better: almost 12,000 copies.

It's widely believed that this series saved Gonzo as a studio. Had it not been a success, the rumor is that the owners would probably have cut way back and started producing hentai. As it is, they cut back but not waaay back, and they're continuing to produce anime. (There are those who think this is not such a good thing, and poop to them.)

I think it's highly likely this series will eventually get licensed for R1, but I'm not expecting an announcement anytime soon. If we see an announcement during 2009 I'll be very surprised.

One thing on that chart that confuses me, though: it says that the release is by Kadokawa. I don't understand the business interrelationships in this industry. The series was done by Gonzo, so how does Kadokawa figure in it?

If they own the release rights (maybe that's what's going on?) then that's interesting, because they've been releasing titles in R1 under their own imprint (see "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya") and maybe, just maybe, they might do the same with this series. And maybe, just maybe, that means we might see it sooner than late 2010, which is my best guess right now.

I can dream, can't I?

On the other hand, Strike Witches isn't anything like the phenomenon that Haruhi was, so maybe it's not seen as so urgent. (Also, the market has changed a lot since then.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:06 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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The other day when I was visiting the Asian food store to replenish my supply of Pocky, I saw something else that looked interesting. It was being sold in single-serving boxes and in 10-packs, so I bought a single-serving box of each of the two flavors. They're little filled cookies, and the brand name is "Hello, Panda":

I was out again today and decided to drop by the store and buy more of them, and this time I got the 10-packs, as you can see. They're quite tasty and make a good snack.

What I don't understand is why Sanrio hasn't taken off after this lot with spiked baseball bats and lawyers. According to the package, it's from Singapore and maybe the trademark laws are different there.

The company making it is "Meiji Seika (S) Pte. Ltd." and it may be the only manufacturing company in the free world at this point which doesn't have a corporate web site.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 09:16 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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