The keyword is "card (medium)". What are these (NSFW) from? One of those smartphone games, maybe?
A bunch of them are from High School DxD, but I've also seen Senran Kagura (NSFW) and some idol as a loli maybe? And idolmaster and Madoka? And I've seen a bunch from IkkiTousen, too.
But are they from a collectible card game? Or something else? The HSDxD cards for particular characters all have exactly the same text and markings but different art; what are they for?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 17, 2015 11:55 PM (+rSRq)
4
The cards in the first link are from an assortment of unrelated games. I actively play only one - Cinderella Girls.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 18, 2015 07:08 AM (XOPVE)
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I noticed something that looks like script running across the border tapes on DxD cards, but it appears fake. The only real script is the Japanese inscription with the name at the bottom.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 18, 2015 07:10 AM (XOPVE)
6
Those cards came from Negima, where they are called "pactio" and used to do magic or something (never watched that one).
The ones with random anime characters on them are fanmade. It was kind a of a meme a few years ago on imageboards (the latin text is supposed to relate the character's traits, but is mostly google-translated, so there are a lot of errors and nonsense).
Posted by: mearendil at November 21, 2015 08:06 AM (1C29M)
7
The newer ones seem to be from some web-based card game or something, or it's just that the meme is still around. Although there is one licensed collectible card game (as in real, physical cards) called Weiss Schwartz that mish-mashes characters from a lot of different series and puts them to battle, like Pokemon with anime girls.
Posted by: mearendil at November 21, 2015 08:20 AM (1C29M)
I plundered the first Shinmai Maou no Testament series, which I expected to be a total pander akin to High School DxD, which really royally sucked. Such story as it had was merely a skeleton on which to hang fan service, and I assumed this series would be the same way.
So as is my habit in such cases, I turned off the volume, turned off the subtitles, and went through the series backwards, beginning with the last episode, in order to plunder it.
But yesterday I was looking for something to post about, and since I've dropped the two series I was posting about (sorry for not telling you, but they both suck) I thought it might be interesting to see just how BURST was.
Before checking it out, though, I actually watched the first series, in order, with sound on and subtitles active, and you know what?
It is pretty good. Not spectacular, but it is telling an interesting story, and the characters are not charicatures, and though there's a lot of fan service (especially in the BD rip, which is what I was watching), and it's a bit excessive at times (you never thought I'd ever say that, did you?) it actually fits into the story. During the rather extensive fondling sequences I just skipped ahead, and as to the rest, it's nicely drawn.
Having finished it, I downloaded BURST up to ep 6 (the most recent one) and started watching it this afternoon. It picks up right where the previous series ended, and I mean right where, like seconds later in the same scene. And for the first three episodes it is mainly concerned with story. It introduces a lot of new characters and gives us a big reveal about one from the first series, and has lots of action. Then in ep 4 it stalled, and I was afraid they had lost their pace. But it picks back up with eps 5 and 6, and ep 7 should be pretty amazing.
There's still ridiculous groping scenes, which I am still skipping. I could do without the magic spell that requires that. But since it was magic cast by a succubus, I guess it's in character.
Another thing I like about this show is that a lot of the characters are ambiguous. They may be enemies, they may be allies, they may be indifferent. And they may change sides, or have hidden agendas. Not every ally is fully trustworthy; not every enemy will remain so. For instance, the nominal enemy in the second series actually seems rather honorable and respectable. I'm not so sure it would be a good thing for Basara and his team to defeat that one.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 14, 2015 10:19 PM (+rSRq)
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I've found myself skimming through these, with both the plot and the service boring. And Basara seems to be a little too comfortable with Kurumi being mind-controlled; she hasn't consented to a contract, she just keeps getting sex-slave spells cast on her.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at November 15, 2015 02:46 PM (ZlYZd)
Episode 1 introduced Hakone-chan, the kami of hot water in the Hakone region of Japan. She has been dormant for a-real-long-time and revives when Touya accidentally drops a steamed bun into the water around her shrine. And we also met Haruna-nee, the girl Touya is sweet on. (As far as her, he seems to be in the friend zone.) Which was about as much as you could reasonably pack into three minutes.
So what's been going on? It's up to ep 4, and it's turning into a travellogue for the Hakone spa area.
Haruna's family runs a fancy resort hotel which features hot spring baths. She decides that Hakone, Haruna herself, and Haruna's kid sister Aki should take a bath together.
Aki doesn't believe Hakone is really the hot spring spirit, so Hakone barfs out a bunch of special water.
And Haruna is amazed that it's glowing, and that it makes her skin feel so smooth.
That, by the way, is about the most fan-service shot in the first four episodes. It isn't much.
Haruna decides to let Hakone stay at her hotel, and that's episode 2.
Episode 3: Haruna is supposed to attend a meeting of the Neighborhood Association, which is being held in an outdoor kiosk, the next stop on our tour. Hakone decides to accompany her.
Hakone gets bored and almost falls asleep, so Haruna points out Hakoneko, the town mascot.
Hakone thinks it's a bakemono, so she attacks it.
And then she demonstrates her power by turning a fountain into a geyser, incidentally soaking Touya.
And in episode 4, she's been chosen to be a greeter at Hakoneyumoto train station, and not much important happens except that we get to see the place.
Can I have a collective snore?
To the extent that there is any kind of story here, it's "Hot Spring Spirit from Mars". She's been unconscious for a long time, and that gives us (them, the director) an excuse for touring the town. What it reminds me of is the Monty Python sketch about Icelandic sagas which gets hijacked into a tour of some town in England.
At least until Horriblesubs started routinely plundering Funimation and Crunchyroll, our hobby depended on a slender thread.
All the shows we watch(ed) were originally captured off broadcast by Japanese hobbyists who then posted their grabs onto Japanese torrents.
Next step in the pipeline was Americans who knew enough Japanese to be able to navigate the Japanese torrents, and repost them to English-language trackers. (Like LeopardRaws.)
And then various sub groups did translation and subbing. But ultimately it all began with those anonymous (I hope!) Japanese dudes who grabbed the stuff in the first place.
Or... bought BDs when they came out, took them home and ripped them, and then sold them back (at a discount) to the store. I gather a lot of that has happened.
Every once in a while we hear that the Japanese police have pounced on one such guy and he ends up in prison, but it keeps going without him.
But not always. Dog Days 3 is out now completely on BD, but only the first one ever showed up here even as a raw, let alone as a translation. That's disturbing.
Even more disturbing, to me, is that Nanoha Vivid never came out on BD at all. I wonder why?
(Perhaps it's also disturbing how comfortable I've become with being a pirate.)
1
Ha! That chain is positively robust compared to the old old model. At that point you were relying on people to buy expensive laserdiscs in person in Japan (if you were lucky) or to make VHS copies from someone else's LDs (if you were less lucky) or to make VHS copies of someone else's VHS copies... then to time them using a genlock and a couple of VCRs, then to actually GET them you put some VHS tapes in the mail and, if your luck held out, months later you'd get an n-th generation copy translated by someone whose first language was, quite often, neither English nor Japanese.
The shift to digital massively reduced the amount of individual effort involved for everyone in the chain save the translator (helped them out too, but not so much).
I hear you on the pirate thing. Had a different opinion back in the day when the shoe was on the other foot, and I still certainly don't MIND paying for things (I subscribe to both Crunchy and Funi). But I don't mind hopping onto the torrents when the streaming doesn't provide, and while I'll go back and pick up discs later on, I don't do it a whole lot (of course I don't need to torrent much and most of that doesn't hit here anyway...) But in the absence of that, it's not like I'd be spending more...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 08, 2015 01:25 AM (v29Tn)
Neregate has started working on their guide for the upcoming Winter 2015 season. It's far from complete, but there are a lot of entries already. So what surprises do we have in store for us?
Never let it be said that they don't imitate as well as Hollywood does. Since a show about baritones (Euphonia? I never heard that word until just recently) was a success, now we're going to get one about flutes.
The unkillable yellow blob of a teacher is getting another series.
Mukashi mukashi there was a horror series called "SoulTaker". One of the characters in it was a cute girl named Komugi, and they ended up producing a comedy OVA about her called "Nurse Witch Komugi" which was mostly fan service. After which another OVA was produced. Now they're going to make a full cour series about her. Presumably it's still going to be cute-girls-doing-fan-service. (Reminds me of Triangle Heart and the Nanoha canon, but I doubt it will be that good.)
And... we get another GATE series. This is the only thing I saw that actively excited me, even though I know the story it's going to tell (from the manga).
"Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm": there's a double-talk invention of shoes you can wear that permit you to fly. It spawns a sport where people compete. In addition to Our Hero the cast includes four cute girls with nice figures and short flouncy skirts, all of whom have flying shoes. So... how many panty shots will the series give us?
As I write this, the "characters" section of that web site has the four main girls but doesn't have Our Hero, so he can't be very important. Will we have an attack of Magic Skirts?
This could be the fan-service jackpot of the season or it could be a complete waste of time.
Magic skirts don't automatically ruin a series (see e.g. Mouretsu Pirates) but it means you can't rely on fan service to carry the show so you need excellent characterization and superb story telling (see e.g. Mouretsu Pirates). It isn't likely that this one will be that good (few series are), so if they also have magic skirts I probably won't watch more than one episode.
So, let's check in on the doings of our girls-who-are-not-Hinako, shall we? Exercise girl #4 is named Shion, and her thing is yoga.
Her thing is also being batshit crazy. She pretends she is a fallen angel, sent to destroy the planet, and her yoga poses are actions involved in hunting and destroying evil, or something like that.
One of the ways we know she's a fallen angel is that she has heterochromia. Except...
She doesn't, really. She likes to think that her left eye is blue, but if you look again at the first picture you'll notice that it's actually green. Turns out it's a colored contact lense and she was wearing the wrong one. Once she notices she quickly ducks off screen and when she comes back it's blue. And then we get more weirdness about how she was sent to destroy the planet but she's actually saving it.
This is the strangest one so far, and it makes me wonder what #5 (the last one) is going to be like.
According to the series web site, #5 is a meganekko, which could mean anything.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 03, 2015 05:32 PM (+rSRq)
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No, that's something entirely different from a meganekko.
Posted by: Wonderduck at November 03, 2015 06:43 PM (a12rG)
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Ah, chuuni... I'll pass on the yoga, though, thanks all the same. I'd say "I'm not that flexible anymore" but I'm not sure I was to start with!
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at November 03, 2015 08:16 PM (/lg1c)
5
I used to be. Of course, now I'm at the part of my life where I get to enjoy the reason they call "hypermobility syndrome" a "syndrome". (Yum, naproxin!)
On the bright side, you get a CCW permit here in SC, you can carry a sword cane legally!
More plot than Hinanko, but I think they kind of lost track of the point of it.
Posted by: Brett Bellmore at November 04, 2015 02:35 AM (l55xw)
6
I don't think there was ever a time when I could do this, but if I tried it now (since my stroke) I'd probably die.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 04, 2015 01:10 PM (+rSRq)
So they've announced the Mage figurine from the Bikini Warriors series. It will be available in January, in two versions. For about 13,000 yen is a regular version and for about 15,000 yen is a special limited edition, but I can't tell what the difference is between them; they both use exactly the same publicity shots.
I always thought the Mage was the cutest, and the figurine hasn't let me down. And, as expected, it's a castoff:
...next time: more zombies! (sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Hey!
Posted by: Wonderduck at October 29, 2015 10:24 AM (a12rG)
2
Why does Itami's grenade seem to possess the same load of high explosives as a 81 mm mortar round? Or did his grenade set off the zombies' stash of explosives?
Posted by: cxt217 at October 29, 2015 07:55 PM (k1iQ0)
3
I'm more impressed that the grenade fuze smokes, that's a detail seldom seen in old war movies, only ones I remember are Audie Murphy's autobiographical To Hell and Back (wrote the book, stared as himself in the movie, seems to have made sure the details were correct) and a B&W Battle of the Budge movie, although there might be more.
Posted by: hga at November 02, 2015 06:05 AM (5cTEf)
Once in a while, a line of dialog goes by which is extremely profound. This is the latest example I've noticed. Because it's exactly right (if you treat services as a form of product). It's amazing how many people don't realize that it is true.
The JSDF have taken in a number of refugees and are taking care of them. But it's obvious to them (the refugees) that it can't continue like that forever, and that they will eventually need to become self-sufficient. Tuka is afraid she'll have to become a prostitute.
Lelei is also concerned about it, but it's not her way to sit around and mope. Instead, she looks for a solution, and finds one. During the two attempts by the natives to attack the JSDF at Arnus, a huge number of flying dragons were shot down and killed. It turns out that dragon scales are quite valuable (for who knows what reason) and Itami tells Lelei that the JSDF doesn't want them and the refugees can have them. So the plan is to collect scales off the corpses and sell them. Sage Cato tells Lelei about a merchant he knows in Italica, and after the refugees collect 200 scales Lelei convinces Itami to order Recon 3 to to take the three women (Lelei, Rory, and Tuka) along with their dragon scales to Italica.
Well, it's not that simple. Just before they arrived, Italica was attacked by a large group of brigands made up of stragglers from the armies which were defeated at Arnus. Which means they were well armed and disciplined. Italica's main military force was expended in the attempt to invade Tokyo through the Gate, and so they don't really have an adequate guard.
Princess Pina happens to show up there (with three of her subordinates) and since the reigning countess is only 11 years old, Pina decides to command the defense of the city. The brigands are beaten off in their first attack, and while they're preparing to come again, Recon 3 shows up.
Itami ends up helping defend the city, which includes calling in an air strike (air cavalry, about 15 helicopters of various kinds playing Wagner while they fight) and Rory ends up joining the fun. Between the choppers and Rory and Kuribayashi and Tomita and Itami himself the entire brigand force is annihilated.
After which, the commander of the Air Cav negotiates a treaty with Italica (Pina again, on behalf of Countess Myui) which begins what amounts to a beautiful friendship between Italica and Arnus, to the great benefit of both sides. But that's later.
The Air Cav leaves, and finally it's possible for the three women to do what they came there to do: visit Lloyd, the merchant Cato told Lelei about.
The nominal fair price for the 200 scales Lelei brought would be 200 gold pieces and 4,000 silver pieces. But despite his gratitude for having his city defended, he's a businessman and dickers Lelei down. So she gets 200 gold and 1000 silver immediately, and a warrant for an additional 2,000, and she knocks the last 1,000 off the price.
BUT... for doing that she tells him she wants information on product prices and general patterns of trade. It catches him a bit by surprise, but since she's effectively paying him 1,000 silver for it, then since it has a price, it's a product.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 05, 2015 07:34 PM (+rSRq)
The trade in dragon scales means that the refugees now have the means to provide for themselves. But they need help in establishing a lifeline to somewhere local, so the JSDF helps by setting up a relatively primitive PX in the refugee's village. Eventually the village becomes known as the "Arnus Collective" and that's how I'm going to refer to it from now on.
Some of the goods in the PX are from Japan. The Rose Knights are there to study the Japanese language (by Pina's orders) and they notice some of the awesome stuff in the PX, and word spreads. Native merchants show up and see the things, and with one thing and another, the amount of trade between the Arnus Collective and everywhere else explodes, because there is monstrous demand elsewhere for Japanese goods. Things like silk, satin, pearls, brandy, exotic spices, women's makeup, and a whole lot of other stuff; and part of the reason for the demand is snob appeal among the wealthy and powerful in the Empire. (The demand for Japanese silk and satin is driven pretty much exclusively by snob appeal.)
The eventual result is that Lelei trades local silver and gold to Yanagida in exchange for Yen, which she uses to purchase trade goods in Japan which are shipped to her through the Gate, for sale locally. The Arnus Collective ends up as a very thriving village of several hundred people who directly or indirectly support the trade going on. There are eventually 8 trade caravans which make regular trips to Italica. Merchants who come to Arnus, and buy goods from Lelei, can pay to have the stuff carried by the caravans, under guard, to Italica, from which existing trade mechanisms can be used to distribute the stuff all over. Italica is a regional trade hub already because it's on a navigable river and at the intersection of two major highways; it only gets better when the trade with Arnus is added.
When the caravans return from Italica, they bring back local food to feed the people in the Arnus Collective. Lelei also buys foodstuffs from Japan, like beer, but the staples are local sourced. (Unless you consider beer a staple.)
As part of the peace treaty negotiated by the CO of the Air Cav, Arnus Collective doesn't pay taxes on trade goods sent to Italica. (Almost certainly it was Lelei who got the JSDF to insert that clause in the treaty.) But Countess Myui surely can tax goods leaving Italica, and in any case there are secondary effects from all that trade which must result economic benefits for the city, and taxes for Myui. Members of the JSDF visit regularly and are always welcome, and everyone benefits. Italica becomes very, very prosperous, even more than it was already. (And though there is no mutual-defense clause in that treaty, as a practical matter if Italica ends up in peril again, the JSDF almost certainly will respond to defend it. They can have air assets there in minutes, and ground forces there in a couple of hours.)
As to the local currency which Yanagida is buying from Lelei, that is very valuable to the JSDF. I'm sure he's giving Lelei a favorable exchange rate. He wants the Arnus Collective to be a success, so that it can be a regular and reliable source of local currency for the JSDF, who have many things they can do with it. Like bribery. And paying locals to become spies. And renting buildings in the capital of the Empire. Lots of things; currency has always been a formidable weapon in war.
Meanwhile, the original handful of refugees who haven't found other jobs are still working to collect dragon scales, which they send to Italica on the caravans. The vast quantity they are producing is probably depressing the price, but since they are very cheap for the refugees to produce (small amounts of labor, mostly by kids, since the scales are there waiting to be collected), that ultimately doesn't matter. The scales will eventually run out but it's going to be a while; there were dozens of dead dragons and each one may be good for 50 or 100.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 05, 2015 08:14 PM (+rSRq)
