August 21, 2016
Haifuri ending
This is a discussion of the last major event in "High School Fleet"
AKA Haifuri, which happens while the credits are rolling at the end of the last
episode.
Obviously it's a spoiler, so it's below the fold.
Oh, and this show has really hooked me, and I've rewatched it a bunch of
times now.
more...
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
09:37 PM
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August 20, 2016
Attack of the Ice Giants
And my ice was again delivered early, much to my happiness. Both yesterday and today I signed up for a delivery window of 10-12, and both days they showed up at 9:45. Which was FINE with me.
They did run out of block ice, so per my instructions I got bags of cubes instead. It was still 10 units, though, so it meant I got 70 pounds of ice instead of 100. But it looks like that will be enough to get me through.
I wasn't sure whether I should open the bags or leave them closed. I decided to try it closed to begin with, and it's worked fine. Again I'm very comfortable, not sweaty at all, even though it's above 95 out.
And tomorrow the prediction is 80, so looks like I'm clear. This is probably the last ridiculously hot weather we'll get this summer.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at
02:53 PM
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Robot Octopus
I tell you, the script writes itself, don't it? Just add high school girls!
Designed by a genius nerd high school boy, who loses control over it when it starts attacking the girls at his high school... We got a winner here!
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
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August 18, 2016
Think ice
Well, "Think snow" didn't have any effect, but "Think 100 pounds of ice" has worked beautifully. I don't have a thermometer but I was very comfortable all day and never broke a sweat at all. It's about 9PM now and there's about 10 pounds of ice left, so I kind of got too much.
Of course, too much is better than not enough. So I've got an order in for another 100 pounds (about 45 kilograms) for tomorrow morning.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at
07:59 PM
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1
Surprisingly, we never really came close to 100° this summer. Oh, there were three or four days in a row of 95, but five degrees is five degrees.
The problem was, of course, the humidity. We saw heat indices pushing 110° or above those days, and it's been a long time since I've felt that miserable. No wind, either... just a great boiling fetid swamp engulfing Duckford.
And then the storms came and I huddled in the hallway of Pond Central, wondering if there were going to be flying monkeys or not.
On the whole? I don't recommend either place's weather.
Posted by: Wonderduck at August 18, 2016 10:08 PM (vZvpB)
2
The prediction was 100 F and the high temp of record was exactly 100.
One of the nice things about heat waves here is that they are never combined with high humidity. Our air blows off the Pacific and it has a lot of water in it when it hits the shore. But it's also quite cold. If it heats up for a heat wave, the relative humidity declines considerably. So even if you're exposed to the heat, sweating does a good job of cooling you.
The prediction for tomorrow is 102, which is why I put in another order for 100 pounds of ice instead of cutting it back.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 18, 2016 10:19 PM (+rSRq)
3
How much does 100 lbs of ice cost from the supplier?
Purchase an ice-making machine, maybe add a controller to make it programmable, take advantage of low ambient temperature and off-peak
hours that are seasonally 1/3 to 1/10 the cost per kw/h. But even at 15
cents per kw/h, a scratch estimate yields ~2 cents per kg of ice (less
than $1 for 100 lbs). Get your fellow residents involved
with ice-storage cooling, ask them to supply a bin while you provide the
ice at a discount, and they'll be paying to keep Steven a happy Polar Bear every year.
Profit.
Personally, I prefer my inefficient central HVAC.
Posted by: Rykehaven at August 19, 2016 03:48 AM (BSgMR)
4
Rykehaven, you seem to be
going out of your way to make yourself personna non grata in these parts. Did you notice this on the comment entry form?
I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 19, 2016 06:10 AM (+rSRq)
5
The ice is working fine today, too. But I may be SOL tomorrow. I tried putting in yet another order with Safeway and the credit card charge bounced. I suspect that BankOfAmerica's credit card fraud detector decided I couldn't possibly have wanted to buy from Safeway three days in a row.
I'll try it again this evening.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 19, 2016 02:34 PM (+rSRq)
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And... I just tried it again and it worked fine. I wonder what kind of problem BoA had?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 19, 2016 06:12 PM (+rSRq)
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I wonder if it was a 24-hour timeout? By which I mean BoA wouldn't let me make another charge with Safeway until at least 24 hours after the previous one?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 19, 2016 06:12 PM (+rSRq)
Posted by: cxt217 at August 19, 2016 06:47 PM (Kdt2H)
9
The receipts they give me each delivery have a running count on them. Today was #203.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 19, 2016 07:44 PM (+rSRq)
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August 17, 2016
Summer 2016 review
Ubu Roi has one of his very
rare posts, this one being a review of all the stuff he's watched this season. It provides additional evidence, if it were needed, that I'm not missing anything by not following any show this season.
I'm collecting
Ange Vierge but not really watching it regularly, and
Dragon Ball Super is "watch when I feel like it", which isn't very often because the current "Black Goku" arc is really phenomenally stupid. It rivals the "Majin Bu" arc in DBZ for brain damage.
DBZ took the power-inflation curve up to absurd levels, and Dragon Ball Super begins where DBZ left off and has hyped the power levels up
even further.
Anyway, there isn't anything else.
UPDATE: Don also has
a list of shows he's not watching.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at
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1
His selection is just... special. No
ReLIFE, no
Saiki, no
Planetarian. No
Love Live Sunshine, no
Amanchuu. Not even
Sweetness and Lightning. It's as if he selected everything worst and rejected everything best on purpose. Granted,
re:Zero received a critical acclaim, so there's a bit of intersect. If one wants a decent snapshot of a season, people like Chris Siebenman do a better job with a more comprehensive list.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 17, 2016 06:15 PM (XOPVE)
2
No
Mari Waka to 8-nin no Kagakusha-tachi!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 17, 2016 07:51 PM (PiXy!)
3
Pete, I think he said he had also watched some other shows and was going to make another post.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 17, 2016 08:10 PM (+rSRq)
4
No I didn't. I said I might look at Beserk, and Dr. Heinous was enjoying Mob Psycho.
This is a classic case of "what you like is what you like, what I like is what I like." I don't care about a guy that gets to re-live his high-school days. I hated mine, so why should I? Sweetness and Lightning sounds like I'd puke from saccharine. Ditto for most of Pete's list.
I'm the other curmudgeonly old man 'round here, so get offa my lawn.
Posted by: ubu at August 18, 2016 08:40 AM (SlLGE)
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I take it back!
Yowch!
UPDATE: Think Snow!
(Somehow I don't think this will work.)
UPDATE: I ordered 100 pounds of ice to be delivered tomorrow morning. That will probably work a lot better.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at
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Posted by: Brett Bellmore at August 17, 2016 02:07 PM (l55xw)
2
Meanwhile here we've got a whole week of rainy weather with the high below 90. Maybe we got your weather and you got ours by mistake?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at August 17, 2016 06:19 PM (/lg1c)
3
Nah, this usually happens for a few days in August. It's not like other places (Texas) where it goes on for weeks; usually it's 2-5 days, once or maybe twice each summer.
It's rare enough so that it isn't worth it to get air conditioning, even if there were anywhere in this apartment to mount it, which there isn't. A hundred pounds of ice delivered is about $35; I can afford it. The only reason it's a hassle is that Safeway has a $49 minimum for orders, so I ordered a couple of other things to bring it up to that. (And the delivery fee this time is $13. )
I'm probably going to do the same for the other two days before the heat breaks.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 17, 2016 08:09 PM (+rSRq)
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August 14, 2016
New Game
So our heroine, Aoba, has graduated from high school and gotten a job as an
artist at a game company. That's our story.
We've seen it before: "The people creating your entertainment are a
bunch of fruitcakes". It turns out that all of Aoba's coworkers are nuts in
one way or another, at least based on the first half of the first episode, which
was all I could stand. Then I gave up.
These kind of "industry insider" shows seem a bit masturbatory for
the people creating them. First one I ran into was "Animation Runner
Kuromi" which really, really reeked IMHO. That cured me of being interested
in the genre.
There was one last season or the season before it about seiyuus trying to
break in. I don't remember the name, and I didn't watch any of it.
And I probably wouldn't have watched any of this one either, except that
Fapservice decided it was worth a post. (NSFW)
I suppose I should have picked up on the fact that they only managed to get one
post out of four episodes. Still, it gets points for not being about high school
girls. (Variety is the spice of life, and life doesn't end in third year of high
school.)
But in the end I found it tedious and uninteresting. Thumbs down.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
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1
Let's imagine, just for the sake of an argument, that someone made an anime in "the genre", that was very good - easily in top-10 of all time, across all genres. Would not it be a great shame for you to miss it just because of preconceptions about "the genre"?
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 14, 2016 10:52 PM (XOPVE)
2
Heh, technically, Gate is in that genre, approximately. Remember Risa's job.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore at August 15, 2016 01:30 AM (l55xw)
3
Risa is a side character and what's most important about her in story terms is her relationship with Itami.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 15, 2016 09:00 AM (+rSRq)
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I've always had similar feelings about that kind of show - anime about making anime, or manga about making manga, is a bit cheap.
I don't know if that applies to New Game inasmuch as it's anime about game design, and doubly because it's not -really- about game design per se; yeah, that's what they're doing, but if they were engineering well-heads it wouldn't fundamentally change anything in the show. It's a low-key moe Dilbert rather than Shirobako. But it doesn't have enough Dilbert humor, really...
Good enough to have on while I do other stuff, but if it had a lot of competition I'd drop it. Fortunately for it, it's available Monday and before Sweetness and Lightning, so it's "put it on while I do morning-ish stuff" here.
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at August 16, 2016 02:10 PM (/lg1c)
5
I'm more concerned that NG turns into an aimless blob, covered with the fig leaf of "SoL".
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 16, 2016 03:54 PM (XOPVE)
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August 12, 2016
Autumn 2016 preview
Neregate has
done its chart already; it's probably not absolutely complete but it's
pretty large, so let's see what horrors await us.
As usual I'm not going to comment on everything, just on things that caught
my attention.
AniTore EX is getting a
sequel. Which is really strange; it was a 5-minute show about girls doing
exercises, so what's to sequel? One of the girls was stunning. She was also rich
and had her own indoor swimming pool
And she had a ferret that liked to crawl into her cleavage.
So at the very least we'll get more of her.
Gakuen Handsome has
the sharpest pointy chins you've ever seen on the guys. They look life
threatening!
Hibiki Euphonium is coming back
for a sequel. I didn't watch the first series but I know some of you did.
Watashi ga Motete
Dousunda is... well... this deserves to be quoted because I can't do it
justice:
Kae Serinuma was an overweight fujoshi until one of her favorite
characters died and she lost weight from the shock. When she returns to school,
four attractive boys ask her out, but all Kae wants is to see them kiss each
other.
I am NOT going to say anything about fat yaoi fangirls. I'm not!
Nazotokine doesn't have a plot
summary yet. All we know is that the main character has the figure we like.
Aside from that it's anybody's guess what's going on.
Vivid Strike might be
set in the Nanohaverse but it doesn't appear to be part of the "Nanoha
Vivid" continuity.
Soushin Shoujo Matoi is
about miko-magic, and miko-magic is always a good thing.
Keijo is this season's
total-pander series. (There's always at least one.) You can tell just from the
intro video on the web site. LOTS of T&A; lots of gainaxing. And a thoroughly stupid series concept which justifies the fact that the girls spend a lot of time in bikinis bumping each other with their butts.
Brave Witches is part of the Strike
Witches canon, but this story is about the 502 "Brave Witches". Who
are also known as the "Suomus Misfit Squadron". If you've seen the
Strike Witches movie, the 502 is where Sanya and Eila were assigned, and where
one of their squad mates got hit by lightning while flying in. Well, she's in
this show.
Other stuff: Bikini Warriors is getting an OVA, God knows why. Musaigen
no Phantom World is getting an OVA and I'm looking forward to that. Tenchi
Muyou RyouOuki has been dug out of its grave, cleaned up, and is getting a
4th season. Kancolle is getting a movie.
As usual there's a lot of stuff I haven't got the slightest interest in, like
the 97th Gundam show, and half a dozen shows about idols, but overall it looks more promising than usual. Sure as
hell better than this summer, I tell you.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at
07:26 PM
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1
Summer is great here. More shows than time to watch. ReLIFE alone makes it a memorable season. Add to it LLS, Planetarian, S&L, Saiki, and a bunch of others in my Crunchy queue, and it becomes memorable indeed. Or it would become, except I do not track seasons closely.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at August 12, 2016 07:40 PM (XOPVE)
2
Everyone has different tastes.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 12, 2016 08:53 PM (+rSRq)
3
I might be wrong about "Vivid Strike". ANN has a cast list, and Vivio, Einhart, Corono and Rio are listed as characters. Also Nove and Yumina. Yumina isn't introduced in the manga until the school festival arc, which happens after Ixy wakes up and after Vivio and Einhart's fourth match. So it looks like this is the continuation of Nanoha Vivid -- which is a good thing.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 12, 2016 10:35 PM (+rSRq)
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I'm pretty sure you know why Bikini Warriors is getting an OAV.
Tenchi Muyou is back? Cool, it was one of my old favorites.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore at August 14, 2016 11:22 AM (l55xw)
5
There are three new statuettes in the Bikini Warriors line (Cleric, Hunter, Valkyrie) and they want to pimp them.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 14, 2016 11:57 AM (+rSRq)
6
Well, those are new characters. There are now
9 statuettes total and three of them are being introduced with this new series, but two of them are repeats. Hunter, Cleric, and Valkyrie are new characters in the line, but there isn't a Cleric statuette yet. On the other hand, there are two of the Valkyrie and two of the Magic User.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 14, 2016 01:47 PM (+rSRq)
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August 10, 2016
Chooser version 70
Added 175 from the Girls und Panzer Movie and 172 from HaiFuri. Total now is 7686 grabs. (Which, if you'll pardon me for saying so, is completely ridiculous.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at
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Your ridiculosity is appreciated!
Posted by: Mikeski at August 12, 2016 02:31 PM (vBu7I)
2
Thank you, that's good to know.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 12, 2016 02:48 PM (+rSRq)
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Rule #1: treat every gun as if it is loaded.
Some people are
too stupid to get out of bed.
Mary Knowlton died Tuesday night after being shot during a role-playing exercise conducted by the Punta Gorda Police Department. OfficerLee Coel, playing a "bad guy,"shot Knowlton with live rounds from a gun all thought contained blanks.
All together, now: TREAT EVERY GUN AS IF IT IS LOADED.
Someone should face criminal charges for this.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at
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I vote manslaughter charges for the shooter and a juicy civil suit for the department, for setting up such an incredibly dangerous "training" stunt. Interesting note from the
CNN coverage is that the shooter was using a revolver rather than his duty pistol, and the department was "unaware" there was any live ammo for it. Actually, can the whole gang be charged with aiding and abetting?
-j
Posted by: J Greely at August 10, 2016 10:24 PM (ZlYZd)
2
The bad guy's "gun" should have been a toy squirt gun, and firing it should have been him shouting "Bang! Bang!". There was no good reason for him to be using a real pistol, let alone for it to be loaded with
anything.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at August 11, 2016 05:52 AM (+rSRq)
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_integrated_laser_engagement_system
I've used it and it uses blanks in the normal rifle that you'd be carrying anyways. Of course, we double and triple checked stuff that people were using and you most certainly were not allowed to bring a privately owned weapon to MILES training.
Maybe the cops weren't using something like MILES. I haven't fully thought about the ramifications of them doing so; it isn't all positive.
Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at August 11, 2016 05:23 PM (ATlQg)
4
The dead woman was playing the "officer" role, so they handed her
something to "shoot" with. I haven't seen a story that included that detail, but I'm betting it wasn't a real gun with alleged blanks.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at August 11, 2016 06:15 PM (CLiR9)
5
I have no issue with bringing the hammer down on the people that allowed live rounds to be fired in the training.
That would have happened to
me if I or my NCOs allowed that to happen on a training exercise.
My point was that it isn't true that one should not use real weapons during training.
(Honestly, my father's teaching was to consider any weapon to be loaded and able to kill. I still fill with anger if I see someone waving a weapon around as if it were a toy, so I see Steven's point and see the value in it. One wishes that your local police aren't a set of Barney Fife clones.)
Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at August 11, 2016 06:50 PM (ATlQg)
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