So today I had to update my passwords and re-sign all of my security agreements to retain access to the ODU computer system, access to which is required for most classes.

It included a training course.

The first bit is just normal IT security stuff and of no interest at all.  However, the last part is mildly amusing for two reasons.

1: Privacy and Security don't mean what they think it does.
2: Remember, all students are required to know and comply with ODU's IT Security Related Standards with penalties for non-compliance being up-to and including expulsion.



Anyway, the last part is below the fold.

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Girls Und Panzer ended the season unfinished, so caption this.

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One of the Brickmuppets Crack Team of Science Babes has asked that we respond to mysterious commenter "JT" who seems to need information about Three Mile Island. 

Three Mile Island is a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania that suffered a partial meltdown in one of its reactors in 1979 due to a confluence of failures, both human and mechanical.. Though widely touted as an unmitigated catastrophe, the areas radiation detectors detected very low levels of radiation released, about 1/1000th that needed to cause immediate heath effects. A subsequent Columbia university study was done in 1991 to measure long term effects. It measured the cancer frequency of the local population to the US as a whole over the 10 years since the accident and found a very small increase in some cancers (and a lower rate than the norm for Leukemia). Because the measured increases were so low (between 0.4 and 1.17%) and the distribution did not correlate to the actual contaminated area (as described by wind patterns and dosimeter reports) the Columbia study actually suggested that stress was as a possible cause of the increase...and with all the hype the people of the area had certainly been subjected to stress. A more recent study points out that the area along the Susquehanna river near Three Mile Island happens to have one of the highest radon levels in the USA. This might invalidate all attempts to tie cancers to the reactor accident. Not mentioned in either study is the likelihood that residents around Three Mile Island were screened for cancers at a higher rate than the average US population which likely further skewed the number of cancer discoveries and thus the overall numbers.

Thus it is pretty darned clear that, while initial concern regards the incident was good and proper the subsequent hype and hysteria was both irresponsible and grossly misleading. Furthermore, the effects of the breathless and sensational coverage included the virtual death of the nuclear plant construction in the USA, which was a far greater catastrophe for the nation than the accident itself.

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Recently Pete Zaitcev won the "Why is the blog infested with Lamias?" contest and as a prize got to pick a post topic and chose to ask what my favorite manga is and why I like it better than others.

I must confess that I've been exceedingly busy and haven't read much manga at all for the last 18 or so months...with one exception.  While my to-read pile has gotten quite large, I've stuck with reading Yotsuba&! all that time.

Yotsuba; the titular character of this charming book, is a precocious child who has been adopted by her father from some far away place in the developing world. To her naive eyes everything in Japan from sunflowers to doorbells is fascinating and a potential springboard to adventure...or mischief.There is no real plot, though there is a bit of continuity.  The series consists of sketch comedy and is greatly assisted by Azuma Kiyohiko's outstanding comedic timing in the comic medium as well as his amazing ability to see the world with a child-like sense of wonder. This, the expressive art, memorable secondary characters and refreshing innocence make this outstanding series a rare gem. I highly recommend it to anyone.

However, EVERYONE likes Yotsuba&! (except bad people). I don't think I have ever seen a bad review. Furthermore, since I haven't been reading other manga for over a year I can't give the comparative review Pete asked for or the book deserves.

Finally, it is obvious from his request that Pete's request for a review was not at all what he really wanted, but a fallback position.

It seems that Pete is, in reality, uninterested in such refreshing innocence and actually wanted something entirely "other" but felt it was a bridge too far. Well we here at Brickmuppet Blog aim to please, so gird you loins as we cross that bridge...The Bridge Over the River Kowai.

Good people should not look below the fold, for that way lies depravity.

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1 Thanks a lot!

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Fri Jan 4 00:28:14 2013 (RqRa5)

2 I feel better now that I know I'm not the only person who thought that manga was charming, in an off-kilter way.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Fri Jan 4 00:31:17 2013 (pWQz4)

3 It was, but Slime killed it for me.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Fri Jan 4 01:26:03 2013 (RqRa5)

4 It didn't quite kill it for me, but it kicked it in the kneecaps (along with the other bits I mentioned). I'm going to see if they regain their footing, but I'm not optimistic.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Fri Jan 4 01:53:04 2013 (vp6an)

5 I liked the originals better, mostly because each brother was focused on his relationship with one monster girl. If I were adapting it, I think I'd have gone with a boarding-school setting, with a mixed-gender Kaiju Social Integration Club having to deal with each new monster as she arrives and creates her unique brand of trouble.

Still a familiar formula, and all the current stories would transfer over with little change, but I think it would hold up a lot longer. The problem with making it a harem is that he can't tell in-depth stories about just one girl; for instance, I can't see him successfully doing something like the two Dullahan strips from the original.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Fri Jan 4 11:59:43 2013 (2XtN5)

6 I actually agree that the little strips were more satisfying . However, I've tended to attribute that to one of my own sick personal fantasist kinks....



 The charm of the strips and the early issues here was that they characters were IN LOVE and were working to make their relationships work despite hurdles like different backgrounds and really sharp claws. The current harem dynamic ruins that because there really ought not to be any hesitation in his choice...he might be constricted but he ought not to be conflicted, otherwise he's a heel.

Now, he has inadvertently, legally, betrothed himself to the Centaur, and she will be ruined and there will be political ramifications  if he doesn't choose not to divorce her..that adds dramatic (albeit silly) tension especially since she's a likeable loon. But beyond that the show will quickly loose the intimacy that initially made it charming.

Counter-intuitively, this current set-up could be salvaged if they'd add more...guys. Just have him do some more carpentry and turn happy hellspawn house into a Maison. Then have the strip focus on the misadventures of Monstergrrls of the month and boyfriend. This would allow a closer focus on the creaturettes,  a wider variety of "audience identification characters" and it gets back to the idea of two people trying to make things work despite considerable engineering challenges.

Pitch it as Boys Be...but with twenty/thirty somethings and tentacles.



Oh..

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Fri Jan 4 18:14:09 2013 (vp6an)

7 TMI, Brick.  TMI.

Posted by: JT at Fri Jan 4 21:54:09 2013 (DY79H)

8 Well.... I agree, it's slipping.  Now they've added a mer-girl.  Who was obviously that from the start, in the wheelchair. 

And to amp the raciness, we got to see what happens when Slime gets dehydrated.  Suffice to say, she'll go after moisture...anywhere she can find it. It was a very hot day for the girls.

Posted by: ubu at Mon Jan 7 09:35:14 2013 (SlLGE)

9 Wait...was EVERYBODY but me following this before Pete asked for a review of it?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Jan 7 15:57:19 2013 (vp6an)

10 I merely thought Miia was the best Lamia. But this was quite a preference cascare, I have to admit.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Jan 7 19:12:40 2013 (RqRa5)

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 As I type this I just got in from work and am checking my E-mail and noting something unexpected.

Inquiries.

Some are just expressing curiosity and others are very deeply concerned about the reason that two of the recent posts included pictures of lamias. I thought this would be obvious to most of my readership.

So, to the first person to correctly guess from the context why there were pics of lamias in those two posts, I'll do one post on a topic of your choice.

Difficulty: Because I responded to one inquiry, you are disqualified from participating if your name ends in the suffix "duck".

_{Note: This picture is posted for reasons not directly related to the two others. It's here because I had to slog through a hell of a lot of Lamia pics to find a few worksafe ones (wtf!?) and because I just thought it was cute.}

^{Doting lamia and daughter drawn by Nanashin (Link NSFW)}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:29 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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1 I assumed the answer was "Well, why the hell not?" Not everything has to have a reason.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wed Jan 2 10:38:58 2013 (+rSRq)

2 Year of the Snake DUH

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Jan 2 13:23:59 2013 (RqRa5)

3 If you go into Pixiv and enter "ラビア", you can find a number of worksafe ones. The raw search will throw up a lot of junk, so the usual trick is to add one to bookmarks first, and then follow bookmark suggestions.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Jan 2 13:29:16 2013 (RqRa5)

4 Pete Strikes a blow for Slavic superiority!
 
^{"Go Pete!"}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Jan 2 16:10:14 2013 (vp6an)

5 Oh...Pick a topic.

Also:

If you go into Pixiv and enter "ラビア", you can find a number of worksafe ones. The raw search will throw up a lot of junk, so the usual trick is to add one to bookmarks first, and then follow bookmark suggestions.

Thanks!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Jan 2 16:42:53 2013 (vp6an)

6 How about what's your favourite manga and what you like about it. Thought about making you write a review of Monster Musume at first, but that seems a bit much.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Jan 2 17:22:40 2013 (RqRa5)

7 I think you've got you anime memes mixed up.  It's supposed to be "attractive females versus tentacles", not "attractive females who are tentacles"...

Posted by: Siergen at Wed Jan 2 18:47:48 2013 (Ao4Kw)

8 Ooh!  Ooh!  I know, I know!  It's...

Difficulty: Because I responded to one inquiry, you are disqualified from participating if your name ends in the suffix "duck".

Darn it.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wed Jan 2 19:58:10 2013 (cymHZ)

9 Pete, I meant to ask you: When these Japanese seiyuu are singing that song in Russian, how terrible are their accents? Is it at least understandable?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wed Jan 2 20:16:18 2013 (+rSRq)

10 It sounds understandable, but I'm not sure if this is because I know the lyrics. We used to sing Katyusha in kindergarten, and corrupted the words on purpose. For example, in our version Katyusha came to the sheer bluff as usual, but instead of "starting the song about the grey prarie eagle" she "threw/shot sousage with great precision". We imagined that teachers could not tell what we were doing, with all the loud music and other kids singing in perfect cacophony, but now I'm not so sure. Anyway, with a baggage like that I cannot be sure I truly understand what seiyuu are singing. When they insert English, I often cannot tell what they are saying, but it becomes obvious in retrospect.

AKB0048 used fully fluent Russian speakers when the crew visited Tundrastar, which was quite a surprise!

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Jan 2 22:39:40 2013 (RqRa5)

11 And let me say again how happy we all are that you ARE standing.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Jan 3 16:38:09 2013 (vp6an)

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...that we closed down Charleston, Staten Island and Roosevelt Roads so that we can have 9 carriers in one spot for an ice-cream social?

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1 I second that argument.  What would happen if an LNG tanker made a wrong turn?

Posted by: jcarlton at Tue Jan 1 23:28:35 2013 (i0RQw)

2 Funny, the first thing that came into my mind when I saw that picture was not Look at all 'em carriers! but It's so flat!  I have more elevation from my front yard to the back than that photo shows from coastline to horizon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thu Jan 3 02:16:57 2013 (PiXy!)

3 Well, the horizon is actually the Chesapeake Bay. The pic is looking east over a spit of land separating the Elizabeth River from the bay. This area is really flat but that tounge of land is unusually so.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Jan 3 03:28:23 2013 (C3KwS)

4 Also remember that this whole area was ground flat by glaciers during the last ice age.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thu Jan 3 07:17:59 2013 (+rSRq)

5 ???  Maybe during a previous ice age, Steven, but the last glacation, the Wisconsin, didn't get further than the terminal morraines - from Nantucket to the Ohio to the upper Midwest.

My understanding is that the southern Chesapeake Bay is largely sedimentary, not glacial in origin.  They were indirectly created by glaciation, but mostly because of runoff from distant upstream glacial masses, not the actual glaciers themselves.

Posted by: Mitch H. at Thu Jan 3 10:40:53 2013 (jwKxK)

6 Actually the farthest south they got on the eastern seabosard was Pennsylvania.



The area in the picture is just silt deposited by the rivers that join in the Roads and sand deposited by the ocean. It's like a delta but the main channels are very wide and don't move around.

During the ice age the James, Elizabeth and Pagan rivers merged in what is now the roads and went down rapids into the Potomac which was at the bottom of the then steep valley/canyon that eroded its way through the meteor crater we now call the Chesapeake Bay. That gorge went almost to the then coast (near the continental shelf). This area used to be very hilly on the edge of a canyon but it is all silted up now because of rising sea levels resulting from GLOBAL WARMING which in addidtion to making Al Gore rich causes boring landscapes.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Jan 3 11:01:06 2013 (vp6an)

7 Oops. Mitch beat me to it while I was looking for a map.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Jan 3 11:02:36 2013 (vp6an)

8 I stand corrected.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thu Jan 3 11:19:06 2013 (+rSRq)

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Looks acary...and potentially monstrous.

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It's a Smart Car...that someone is trying to enter into the Dakar Rally

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I hope 2013 brings all of you health and prosperity. We here a Brickmuppet Blog sincerely hope that the new yea...
...
...
...WHAT?

^{Lamia by Bubuzuke}

  ...Nothing.

Happy new year everybody!

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The creator of Fireball XL5. Thunderbirds, UFO, Stingray, Space: 1999,  and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons died today after a battle with Alzheimer's.

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Back on the 15th I mentioned that I'd lost a few classes in getting transferred to the new catalog. One of these was English 110...freshman English, which I had taken many years ago at a community college, only to have it not be honored now by ODU. Well...imagine my surprise the other day when I attempted to register for the course online and was told that I don't have the prerequisites.
I'm a senior...I'm working towards (besides my actual major and minor) a TESOL certificate..more to the point ENG 110 is THE LOWEST LEVEL ENGLISH COURSE.

Can someone explain this?

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And for the ladies...

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One of the Brickmuppet's crack team of science babes has just rolled in with some space related news, both historical and current. She looks quite...um...we're just going to go with 'pleased'.

First comes some follow up on a previous post here, namely that the Horizons newsletter of AIAA Houston has completed the second and third installments of their fully restored (and annotated), high res reprints of the iconic Colliers series on space travel from the 1950's. The series, Man Will Conquer Space Soon was an extremely important work in that it brought to the public the realization that space travel was possible in the near term. The two most recent installments focus on lunar exploration and while they diverge greatly in both architecture and scale from the Apollo program, the expedition envisioned in the articles are still largely sound from an engineering standpoint (though the procedure for setting up the shelter is not entirely practical).  Von Braun and Ley worked out their endeavor in minute detail and provided sufficient weight margins for incorporating additional equipment should they be deemed necessary by subsequent discoveries. The Horizons team has provided high resolution versions which is especially important given that the articles were illustrated by Fred Freeman and Chelsey Bonnestell.

To wit...

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With the series coming up on a long hiatus it's time to step back and examine the dark underbelly of Girls und Panzer.

I'm not talking about the very strong implication that fatalities in the sport are not at all unheard of.

I'm not talking about the fact that Miho was disowned due to the fact that she lost a match as a result of....not letting a teammate die.

I'm talking about the the stuffed animal gallery in Miho's apartment.

What the hell?

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If one's .png won't re-size or otherwise breaks the image editor, simply convert it to a .jpg. Then the MINX image editor will work fine.

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Wonderduck has brought back his Saturday night tunage feature with a holiday theme...

Me, I got nuthin'...here are two of the girls from Steins Gate.

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Running for 44 episodes from 1976-77 Gaiking was one of the less typical Super Robot shows of the '70s and in some ways predated the later mech shows. Gaiking was one of several captured alien superweapons carried in a huge (Dinosaur shaped) mother ship that were being used to defend earth against an invading alien force (The Dark Horror Army) . Unlike many other super robot shows they did not fight the enemies right outside Tokyo, but engaged them all over the world and in space. The various robot weapons were crewed by misfits, nerds and in the case of Gaiking, a washed up baseball player because the original crew picked to figure out the alien technology was mostly assasinated by the invaders in episode one.
It wasn't a huge hit but it was quirky enough that it is remembered fondly and it's somewhat iconic. In the mid '90s video game Super Robot Wars Gaiking kit was a particularly awesome asset to acquire  particularly the big carrier.

And so that was it for Gaiking except for a brief flurry of interest around a rumored movie that went nowhere about 3 years ago...

...but wait.

August Ragone reports that the film is a GO and Toei, has hired GALE ANNE HURD to produce the show. Danny Choo's ANEW is involved as well. Gale Anne Hurd is currently best known for The Wallking Dead, but she was the producer who produced all the good James Cameron movies. There seems to be a 1-1 correlation between a James Cameron movie not being a 2 dimensional over produced piece of hippie excrement and Gale Anne Hurd's presence on the production staff. (T1 T2 Aliens) She's done some other gems as well, like Tremors.

This is true sign of the end times...a Giant Robot movie one might actually look forward to!

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When last we left our hero he was riding a bike all out... at night...in a snowstorm...trying to get to the hospital to check on his beloved.

As the episode begins, Kazuto is haunted by two visions, one of Asuna warmly greeting him,... the other of her glassy eyed corpse lying in bed, her brain fried by the log out kill switch which Sugo might have re-instated as a safeguard...

Arriving at the hospital he ditches his bike at the gate, gingerly makes his way across the icy parking lot, nearly collides with another pedestrian, almost falling over in the process, regains his balance,  bleeds profusely as he approaches the steps and....wait.....what?

^{Hemophilia perhaps?}

Oh...that lone pedestrian.

His name is Nobuyuki Sugo.
Perhaps you remember him. He's the villain who just got killed in the virtual world with the pain blockers set to zero. He hurt a LOT. He's not happy and he's not in the virtual world anymore. This is reality, and in the real world he's not actually a fairy king. He's the number two man in a major zaibatsu. He has people who will lie for him and a staff of people willing to carry out Block 10 type experiments on people minds for him. Whatever setback he may have had in a dippy VR game, there are only two things that stand between him and total victory right now. Those two things are Asuna Yuki and Kazuto and he aims to rid the world of them. Asuna,  being in a hospital room will take some finesse, but Kazuto is a nobody, a gamer, sad little out of shape teenager who hid from the world in a VR game and who now stands before Sugo armed with nothing but his own clotting blood and his shattered delusions of adequacy.

^{It's Mad Doctor Stabby!}

Sugo is armed with big ass diving knife (which is illegal BTW). Kazuto is a law abiding citizen in a weapons free zone. It SUCKS to be Kazuto. Kazuto tries "dodge" but it is ineffective. Kazuto slips on the ice and hurts himself.  He gets a nasty knife cut to his face and Sugo uses  "kicks the living crap out of Kazuto". It's super effective.
All those years of video games didn't actually prepare Kazuto for this.

^{"This boss-fight is serious business!"}

Of course Sugo is not running at 100%. His painful virtual death burst a blood vessel in his right eye and his depth perception is shot. This causes him to miss his killing blow by a wide margin. Kazuto is not completely helpless either, he HAS been practicing ken-do all this time and as Sugo lunges again he forces the fiend to loose his footing on the ice. Kazuto finally gets the knife to Sugo's throat.... there is a quick flashback to Sugo molesting Asuna in the hospital bed, in the virtual world, of the pain he inflicted on Kazuto, of the sadism Kazuto and Asuna endured and.....the knife dances across Sugo's throat...

...but only just.
Kazuto, with great effort, refrains from killing the bastard, who visibly wets himself and collapses.

Kazuto staggers into the hospital only to find it empty. The receptionists, the nursing station, security....gone. No doubt Sugo has ordered them away...Sugo was already here.
He goes to the twelfth floor and stands outside Asuna's room in terror. He then hears the voice of Y.U.I. telling him to go in...he does of course and...

^Yay!

Well that was a nice ending. We...wait what? 12 more minutes?
....
....

What follows is some perfunctory narration and a few character bits as we learn the following:

*Sugo went to jail because one of his employees ratted on him.
*The whole virtual reality online gaming industry collapsed as a result of the ensuing scandal.
*The 300 "test subjects" awoke with no memory of their ordeal.
*All those in Japan who were in school at the time they were trapped in SAO, are indeed now in a special school just for them.
*Asuna and Kazuto are still dating.
*A few friends from SAO (the cast from the first cour) gather at Sigils bar from time to time to reminisce.
*Oh...and that world seed Kazuto received from Kayaba?
its a starting program for virtual worlds. Sigil and Kazuto put it online as freeware and now the web is full of many versions of VRMMORPGs run by small groups, tiny companies and even individuals. All are cross compatible and based on the world designs of a homicidal maniac using the same interface devices proven to have a nearly perfected mind control capability. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG!?

The last scene of the show is all the surviving cast gathering in Alfheim (which has been migrated to a private server ) for a momentous event. Someone has rebooted Aincard...the world of Sword Art Online and brought it into Alfheim to replace the rather empty world tree.

...and well....It looks like Kazuto and Asuna really want to LIVE THAT NIGHTMARE AGAIN. They ask "Leaf" to come along just to add a bit of squicky awkwardness to the proceedings. Then they all fly off thumbing their virtual noses at any thoughts of adjusting to life in the real world.

^{Asuna as a Fairy inviting "Leaf" on their quest, to clear all 100 levels This time fer sure!}

So...while the first half of the episode was superb, it ends up being an uneven and rather forced ending to a very uneven series.

The second cour saw Asuna largely wasted (though she quite explicitly never gave up). It must be said that it had some really compelling moments too. The self reflection of Kirito as he contemplated the vast gulf between his online persona and his actual power occurred in a couple of episodes including this one and was neat. The fact that the heroes often got by by being clever was enjoyable too. There were some REALLY cool concepts touched on in the second cour as well, but none of them were really explored well. In particular the epilogue just seems waaay too pat and appears to have overlooked a major plot point of the series.


Yes the various Zaibatsu don't control the VR worlds anymore, (Yay small developers! Stick it too the man!) but these vr worlds are more widespread than ever...and all use the same architecture as SAO.  If anything, there is more likelihood that some of these worlds are actually set up to perfect mind control tech...and all the players potential guinea pigs and slaves.

The show in many ways had a "corporate ending" with everything sort of reset and fan favorite characters re-introduced and no real development other than giving everyone the in game ability to fly. This will allow games, light novels, CDs and perhaps a sequel, but the show which wowed so many of us with it's character development largely tosses that development out the window with the ending of the finale. In the end the virtual world becomes not a reflection of the real world, but an escape from it...Now that could be a cautionary tale itself, but it is not presented as such here.

The show was at its best when it was playing against type.

The first cour (episodes 1-14) was remarkably unpredictable. It was particularly interesting as it became an adventure/romance with a hero and heroine who were smart, dynamic, awesome and yet believable...and who complemented and completed each other in an unusually exciting but perfectly healthy relationship

...and that is how I'll want to remember this show.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:44 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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1 [side note; the unclosed spoiler tag ended up taking out the entry trailer, including the comment button]

Yeah, I was afraid this was how it was going to end, based on what I read about the novels; they weren't willing to go for an original ending, and they should have. Worse, it seems the author doesn't really know what to do with the cast after getting them back together; there are two side stories that take place in Alfheim (one of which is centered on Asuna), but the rest of the novels have Our Hero going off into other virtual worlds alone. And, yes, the author has written a story in which all the girls gang up to marry Tenchi Kirito in an accelerated-time VR, although that one may no longer be canon.

In fairness to The Seed, it's established that only people wearing first-gen VR helmets are vulnerable to Sugou's mind control; in fact, the impossibility of truly harming someone through the second-gen helmets is pretty much the plot hook for the next arc. (and, no, it doesn't make sense that they'd have added exactly the right safeties to prevent abuses that hadn't been invented yet, especially with Sugou on the team, but...)

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Sun Dec 23 03:46:40 2012 (2XtN5)

2  [side note; the unclosed spoiler tag ended up taking out the entry trailer, including the comment button]

Yeah...we're intrigued by that bug and we're working on it.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Dec 23 12:08:39 2012 (vp6an)

3

While I haven't seen the anime yet, I've read translations of some of  the light novels.  I'd agree that ALO is very much a low point in the series and I almost dropped at that point  It does get better afterwards.

Two of the major side stories are pretty good.  The Gale Gun Online (GGO) one introduces Shinon, another strong female character.  Unfortunately it also raises Kirito's Marty Stu-ness to new heights.  Mother's Rosario, however, gives Kirito the "more deban" sign to Asuna's lead.  Both are setup to the Alicilization arc.

The Alicilization arc turns things around with Kirito being the one trapped in a virtual world and Asuna having to do the Real World (tm) leg work to get him back.  Though Kirito still maintains a bit too much of his Marty Stu-ness, unfortunately.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Sun Dec 23 16:07:31 2012 (5YSpE)

4 As an MMO gamer myself, I found the first cour to particularly satisfying.  All of the player types and behaviors in SAO are seen in any popular MMO, but of course with much lesser consequences.

If I'd found myself stuck in SAO, and known that dying was fatal in real life, I'd probably try to lock myself in an inn - I die far too frequently in games to risk "leveling up" and beating the game...

Posted by: Siergen at Sun Dec 23 22:15:27 2012 (Ao4Kw)

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Did I miss it?

How was YOUR apocalypse?

UPDATE: We seem to have gotten a most unexpected apocalyptic request from Suburban Banshee.
Well, we aim to please....     Unveiled Yukari Akiyama rendered by Rasukaru

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:24 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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1 Hey, if you survived, it couldn't have been much of an apocalypse.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Fri Dec 21 17:33:07 2012 (2XtN5)

2 I thought the apocalypse was tonight...did I misconfigure my doomsday clock?

Posted by: Siergen at Fri Dec 21 17:59:37 2012 (Ao4Kw)

3 Apocalypse means "unveiling."

I'm disappointed that anime bloggers don't take advantage of this.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Fri Dec 21 20:46:00 2012 (cvXSV)

4 "No Boom today.  Boom Tomorrow, there's always a boom tomorrow."

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Dec 22 04:07:48 2012 (cZPoz)

5 That's one of the quotes in rotation on my blog.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sat Dec 22 11:02:38 2012 (PiXy!)

6 You have restored my faith in animefan nature. In the words of Warren G. Harding, a "return to normalcy."

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Sun Dec 23 19:00:41 2012 (cvXSV)

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