RWBY will resume in July.
There will be a premire at RTX (July 4-6) and it will be released online shortly after that.

Volume 2 will reportedly be 12 episodes of around 12 minutes which is a good thing as the wildly varying 4-15 minute length last season was non-conducive to pacing. Though resuming after an 8 month hiatus, this second volume is apparently considered to be the second half of season one.

For all this show's quirks, I find myself looking forward to this. They're doing some interesting things with the nigh nonexistent budget I am genuinely curious where it will go from here.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:25 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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From episode 7 of Log Horizon, which, in addition to the definition, provides a more in depth examination of the of financial, logistical and personnel requirements for the successful execution of such an endeavor and touches on the vital importance of being able to identify and get in on the ground floor of promising business opportunities.  The potential pitfalls of trade secret infringement are touched upon as well, but are not yet being examined to any great degree.

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I've never really groked Touhou. Then I blundered across this primer which explains everything...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:27 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Mazinger-Z, Great Mazinger, and UFO Robot Grendaizer are no longer particularly well known in the USA but the trilogy was the groundbreaking triumvirate of the super-robot genre. The three series were hugely influential. Grendaizer, in particular, the last and best of the series, was, under the name Golderack, a phenomenal hit in Europe and Canada.

Now 42 years later, they've remade all 3!

As the world has gone mad and nothing is sacred, they've remade the trilogy as a magical girl show.

Meet our Villains, Antagonists, audience identification characters. These young ladies work for the temp agency from hell....



....which is kind of a sketchy outfit and is involved in some dubious activities...



...like supervillany.

But the girls got all kinds of cybernetic implants out of the deal and they do seem to enjoy their work...



...until they don't.

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....in part by the very act of continuing. I hadn't read up on the show and expected episode 13 to be a battle royale wrapping everything up.

However, #13 is not the last episode. Instead there was plot development,  introspection and almost no softcore pr0n mixed in with the usual manic energy. With one exception, they are all pretty surprising....

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:14 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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While I was initially impressed with its characterizations and how well this show handled its ridiculous fanboy affirmation premise, after the unmitigated disaster that was episode 5, I had thrown in the towel. However, a couple of weeks later, I did watch the next episode and it was substantially better, much more in keeping with the tone of the earlier episodes. In it, our hero, who follows sports manga but not actual sports decided that the best way to defuse the growing racial and ethnic tensions between the elves and the dwarves in his class was to have them have a soccer tournament against each other...It goes about as well as one would expect.

After that, the show continued its uneven shuffle towards the end, never quite gelling but every episode had at least some intriguing or at least amusing tangents.




For a show that is supposed to revolve around evangelizing fandom, it can be pretty straightforward in its exploration of that cultures pathologies and dysfunctions.

This, of course, is the gambit of a faction in the Japanese government.. Introduce Akiba culture to rot Eldant's society from within, thereby increasing internal strife, destroying their societies traditional values and sowing discord, which will allow exploitation of the regions rich mineral resources. Generating a literate cadre of consumers for Japanese visual culture is icing on the cake...but lucrative icing indeed. They'll be paying for their manga in Eldant currency....gold and silver coins.  Shinichi was chosen not for his knowledge of trivia, but because he can be disposed of without  notice.

The show takes a rather different tack in the last two episodes and while it had been telegraphed for quite a while it still feels rather jarring. The ending only partially resolves the various plot threads but I found it more satisfying than it normally would be due to the fact that there was some genuine character development in a couple of characters over the course of the series.

Wildly uneven, Outbreak Company is never great, and the occasional idiocy of the protagonists can be infuriating, but it is often cute, funny and even interesting. It seems to be set up for a second season, and in the unlikely event that transpires, I'll probably at least give it a try.

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Gloriously so.

More importantly it seems to have considerable potential to be fun...and possibly even good.

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We need to ponder some important matters...
Who are the villainous vehicular vixens we are looking at here in this frame grab?


We've got Baron Ashler, Garada K-7, Doubilus M2...and that, um, scissorheaded thing that sinks boats...Any ideas on the others?

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Well the RWBY DVD arrived yesterday and it's pretty decent, with a fair number of extras.

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1 I have never before been glad I could not understand Japanese...

Posted by: Siergen at Wed Nov 6 17:31:03 2013 (c2+vA)

2 What on earth did I just watch?

And why is the most common ad I get from youtube "Meet Chinese Lady"?

Posted by: Mauser at Thu Nov 7 07:57:27 2013 (TJ7ih)

3 The Venn overlap of those who are fans of both AoT and Nichijou is probably quite small. So the full effect is lost on most.

OH! One other thing...
(scarcely worth mentioning)
If you are in that category and have been having a persistent nightmare since watching it,  you may want to be directly responsible for having someone look at this video sometime in the next week (well six days  at this point).

Just sayin'...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Nov 7 17:34:02 2013 (DnAJl)

4 I dunno if I'd describe myself as a fan of either - Nichijou is a little bit too random for the funny it delivers, and Attack on Titan is well-done but kind of predictable...

...but that was gloriously wrong!

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Fri Nov 8 14:20:38 2013 (GJQTS)

5 Now all we need is Lucky Star OP with Attack on Titan characters.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Nov 11 20:12:39 2013 (RqRa5)

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...in the latest episode of RWBY.  For one thing, we now know that at least one of the promo trailers is canon.
'...and then the bastards robbed our train!'
Of course the big reveal regards Blake (yes...she is a catgirl)  came as no great surprise... they'd hinted at it in episode 8.

..though the way it was revealed (via an accidental WHAM line) was rather unexpected.

The episode also revealed that she'd been a member of the terrorist organization White Fang, and that was what was going on in the 'Black' trailer.

Of course the episode poses more questions than it answers...like what the HELL is going on with "Penny"?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:19 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1: Don't screw with the band.



2: Kill la Kill continues to surprise.

The show has been consistently fun. What's surprising is not just the twists of the story. It's that despite being over the top, vulgar and silly, Kill La Kill is turning out to be somewhat thoughtful.

  On top of that the transcendentally bad-ass band provides the show with an awesome score.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:51 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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These helpful phrases come via this weeks episode of the educational series Outbreak Company which also discussed such useful everyday terms as Pitching, Catching, Furry, Oppai, BL and how to properly set flags.

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9 new Dr. Who Episodes were discovered earlier this year in Nigeria. The remastered versions were screened recently and they will be available for sale this week on iTunes.

Amongst them are Web of Fear

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:36 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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J. Greely over at Dot Clue is reading the Miniskirt Pirates light novels examining the differences between them and the Bodacious Space Pirates anime as he goes.

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The latest installment is the cute girls doing cute things genre is a gentle, methodically paced tale that  follows a charming but haunted young lady who transfers into a new high-school where she knows no one. She struggles to fit in and find friendship by joining an after-school club populated with wacky misfits.

Please be advised that this is NOT a review of that show.

The show being reviewed here does involve a female transfer student which may have contributed to some confusion. However, if you're looking for a review of that show then you probably don't want to scroll any further. In fact you should probably move along because that show sounds boring and I'm not likely to review it this season.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:49 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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...this did not happen.

Jeaune has been something of an enigma. He's physically brave, but seems utterly out of his depth, both in combat skill and knowledge. He doesn't seem stupid (he can think on his feet ) but he is bonecrushingly ignorant. While his need to have even the most basic aspects of how magic and such works explained to him in small words has certainly helped to bring the audience up to speed on the show's fantasy physics, it rather beggared belief that this fellow actually got into an elite university that specializes in the very things he is most ignorant of.

Well...all that is explained by the fact that he got in via forged transcripts. It seems that (for whatever reason) he never made it into any of the fighting schools from which beacon selects its recruits.

It gets worse...

We find this out because he confess it to Pyrrha as she is explaining that she's got confidence in him because "anyone who made it into Beacon is worthy by definition".

This means that not only has he lied on his application (no doubt grounds for dismissal), he's also made Pyrrha party to his lie. Pyrrha has been assisting him with a saint-like helpfulness that frankly approaches co-dependancy...and now, well, given that she seems inclined to keep his secret (she offers to help him get up to speed) It follows that he's set her (and potentially his entire team) up for disgrace too.

But wait...there's more!

By the end of the episode, he's also being blackmailed.

I don't see how he gets to stay in the opening credits at this point.

 ^{"Yeah, I may have chosen...poorly. "}

All in all there was much better writing and character development than the rather perfunctory resolution to the Weiss/Ruby issue in episode 10. 

Of course since the episode was 7 minutes long, you probably spent more time reading the  post than it would have taken to watch the show so I have serious doubts regards the utility of the review.


 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:27 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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In amongst his closing thoughts on Gatchaman Crowds Don makes an interesting point I'd missed.

Shifting attitudes toward information technologies can be followed in anime. In 1998′s Serial Experiments Lain, the "wired” is weird, scary and dangerous. In 2007′s Dennou Coil, evolved Google Glass is a lot of fun, though occasionally still dangerous. In Gatchaman Crowds, smart phones and conscious artificial intelligence are taken for granted and are generally benign. 

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...This podcast is sufficiently well done that I will have to catch up shortly (when I won't fear further distraction from my current assignments....or sleep deprivation due to nightmares).



It starts here.

Via Don...whose helicopters are properly sorted.
more...

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