Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 01:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm tired of looking at Tigre, so here's a goddess.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 09:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This is the most fan-servicey shot in the show:

This is probably the second:

By the way, I've just harvested 57 candidates for the top rotation from the first 11 episodes of the show.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 11:47 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Diane is definitely the most awesome thing in Nanatsu no Taizai.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 03:12 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 I like the big green piggy.  We don't see enough of her(?).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 18, 2014 04:13 PM (PiXy!)

2 "Vast... tracts of land!"

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at December 18, 2014 05:03 PM (zJsIy)

3 I'm curious: Does she ever have any expression besides that flat stare?

Posted by: Brett Bellmore at December 19, 2014 03:24 AM (L5yWw)

4 Sure. In that scene she's ensorcelled by an enemy. But she has a very good range of emotions ordinarily.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 19, 2014 05:32 AM (+rSRq)

5

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 19, 2014 05:34 AM (+rSRq)

6

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 19, 2014 11:35 AM (+rSRq)

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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 03:49 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 I thought you'd like it.

Posted by: sqa at December 17, 2014 03:58 PM (IH26v)

2

It's finals week in college, isn't it? Seems like the sub circles are even less up-to-date now than they have been for most of this season.

What I most want for Chrismas is for someone to sub the Bodacious Space Pirates movie. It's been out for more than a month now. I've watched it four times already without subtitles; it's that good. But I really wish I knew what they were saying!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 17, 2014 06:43 PM (+rSRq)

3 It's finals week in college, isn't it?

Duck U's fall semester ended last Friday.  The U of Chicago went on break the week before that... but both have a history of being early with that sort of thing, too.

Posted by: Wonderduck at December 17, 2014 07:14 PM (jGQR+)

4 Gerald Ford was president the last time I was in college, so I lose track. Anyway, sub circles tend to be dominated by college students (I tell myself) so we have to expect an occasional skipped week because of exams (I keep telling myself...).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 17, 2014 10:24 PM (+rSRq)

5 I had only seen the first couple of episodes, so when I saw that picture I was, wait, what?  Now I understand.  And for an oh-god-they're-doing-the-tournament-episodes episode, there was a good amount of both plot and character advancement.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 18, 2014 08:36 AM (PiXy!)

6 If you only watched the first two episodes, then you didn't meet Diane. No wonder you underestimated the show.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 18, 2014 11:17 AM (+rSRq)

7 I quite liked the first two episodes, I just hadn't had time to watch more.  But you do see Diane in the credits and the next episode trailer even that early, so I knew this picture wasn't quite right somehow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 18, 2014 04:16 PM (PiXy!)

8 I'm about four years behind on my anime at this point.  I caught up on Nanatsu no Taizai yesterday, and that's more than I've watched in months.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at December 18, 2014 04:18 PM (PiXy!)

9 Not a bad choice for catching up on, except that there's no telling how much more of it there will be, and you could get hooked.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at December 18, 2014 05:19 PM (+rSRq)

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It turned out there was less than I remembered. NSFW below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 04:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm rewatching the first Railgun series for the first time in a long time.

I'd forgotten this was in it. Ah, Konori-sempai...

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 10:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 09:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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After rummaging something like 18 series over the summer, I thought I'd run out of candidates, but today I remembered Super Sonico, so I just downloaded the whole thing and I'm going through it looking for top rotation grabs.

Sonico's drummer, on the left, is even more top heavy than Sonico herself. Her name is Fuuri, and according to TVTropes, she's actually a tanuki who can shapeshift to pretty much any form. I wonder if Sonico knows it?

Do I actually care? Nope. There's probably some excuse for a story, but that's not what the show is really about. (And it ain't what I'm interested in.)

The 12th episode was pretty useless because it's mostly outdoors in winter, so everyone is bundled up. 11 will be better, and there are at least two beach episodes, not to mention the bikini-zombie episode I watched before. This show is blatant fan service in any case, so I'm sure it won't let me down.

UPDATE: Episode 8 bluescreened my computer.

UPDATE: This happens occasionally. Not often enough to be annoying; maybe twice or three times a year. It's gotta be the display driver. In theory the answer is "Update the display driver" but it's nVidia, and their quality control is legendarily poor. The last time Microsoft told me there was a new one, I downloaded it and it made things a lot worse, so I retreated to the previous version.

I won't update the driver unless the status quo is intolerably bad, and it isn't. I can live with things the way they are now.

Anyway, small loss. Episode 8 was terrible.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

It's in the rules: if you have a big-breasted heroine and are doing a beach episode, there must be an assault by a giant squid or octopus.

UPDATE: Why does Sonico's manager wear a demon mask?

If it's a mask, that is...

UPDATE: Actually, the story isn't offensive, and there really is one having to do with Sonico's ambition to be in a successful rock band.

But what the show is really about is to present Sonico as a pretty ordinary girl-next-door, who is nice and not pretentious. She was really shy when she was in middle school (flashback episode) and has mostly grown out of it but she's still a bit shy. She blushes easily.

Looking like she does you'd expect her to get hit on constantly at college, but we don't get shown anything like that.

She sure isn't full of herself just because she's a successful model, nor because she has big breasts. She has friends and loves them, and they love her back. No sign of a boy friend. (Of course!) She keeps five cats. She works part time in her grandmother's restaurant. She's 18 and she's a first year college student studying oceanography.

I think the point of it all is to puncture preconceptions about her and make her feel approachable. And I think it works, too. Except she ought to melt any camera pointed at her.

She's just a girl-next-door -- except my girl next door didn't look like this. Not even close.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 02:53 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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I just realized today that I never plundered the second Maken Ki series, so that's what I spent this evening on.

It's a really tasteless series, in nearly every way. No one would accuse the first season of being a good show, but at least they tried. There was a canon, and a fairly large amount of back story that explained why all the powers came in only a small number of flavors (with a couple notable exceptions: Takeru and Kodama). And there was a genuine story being told, and real character development. Plus absurd amounts of fan service and a lot of harem hijinks.

Yeah, it pandered, but it was also trying to tell a story. It was a really crappy story, but at least it was there.

The second series was done by a different studio. They kept the character designs and the art for the school, plus certain details about the main characters (i.e. their powers), and completely discarded everything else. They also redesigned Takeru, the male lead. His power is reliable and not noteworthy, and he no longer wears glasses. But the whole rationale for how there were a limited number of kinds of powers went out the window and they started tossing in a whole pile of new ones. Plus there isn't any long term story; it's all pretty much villain-of-the-week, with even more ridiculous amounts of fan service.

I used a BD rip, and there were a few images I wanted to use but just couldn't allow myself to. Even so I wanted to post them, so NSFW below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Cheesecake at 09:53 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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