1 Apparently I had a title collision with a previous post. I've deleted and reposted in order to get an unambiguous URL. (It's a known problem with Minx which Pixy hasn't gotten around to fixing yet.)

2 I heard about DearS on a panel at Otakumex a week ago. The "expert" panelist said that the main story was how "you work extremely hard to become someone's bitch". Maybe I should check it out... I seem to remember that it was discussed at Chizumatic before and always in contrast with some other series, the name of which I cannot recall now. It was just like DearS, but worse (or better?).

3 The old site search facility at the decrepit Cobalt still works. Apparently I was thinking about Girls Bravo.

4

That search package is something I found online, for free, a couple of weeks after I got the server waaaaay back in 2001. And it works surprisingly well, considering what a tiny, slow processor is in this thing (300 MHZ AMD K6-2). It spends about 20 minutes every morning churning through the entire web director and creates a database, and all searches that day are made using the database which is why it's so fast.

And it still gets used, too. There's a log file maintained of all searches, so I can see that it's being used anything from 15-30 times per day. (It varies enormously as a function of current events, but by far the most common thing for people to be looking for is search terms related to alternate energy. Moan. Which is not what I wanted to be remembered for.)

J Greely wrote a post about both Girls Bravo and DearS and said that he thought DearS was better. I haven't seen it, myself, but it would be hard to be worse than Girls Bravo. Much though I love her voice, Kawasumi Ayako sure has been involved in some reekingly-bad series, and this is one of them. (On the second DVD there's an attempted lesbian rape of a schoolgirl, at gunpoint. It's played as comedy.)

Now that I think of it, I did buy the first DVD of DearS, but I never opened it. Maybe I should go try to find the damned thing.

5 I still like DearS, and it's because I remember the way the characters interact and change (Miu's my favorite). I lost track of the manga at some point, as the cast grew, so I don't know how well they resolved the big story.

-j