1

That's an awesome find.

I think Diane is just the cutest thing; no idea why, as she's drawn, she's not my "type" at all... something about her face, though.

And, echoing earlier comments, hope you get better!

2 Also works as a pun.

3 Here's a little ditty / about attacking Diane...

1 Does this post mean that the UPS building is no longer full?

1 Which one was $79? They're not NORMALLY that high.

(Japan typically only does one production run for models, and if you don't get one from that, you can expect to pay above MSRP from anyone who still has one for sale, so maybe it was a situation like that?)

2 It was Yukari from GuP, wasn't it?

3 If it was, go here instead... it's about $20 cheaper.

4 Your reasons for watching anime sound a lot like my reasons (and you're still younger than I am...)

5 Crunchy has English rights to Twintails internationally except U.S., so that Hulu carries it here. At least such is the theory. We could ask Mr. Pixy to check down under if they actually stream it there.

6 "I found Dr. Who to be decidedly sub par"
I actually--mostly--liked the new doctor best of the new series so far.  They've tamped down on the over-the-top camp and silliness, and been a little less "save the universe of the week".

7 I actually like Capaldi, and I enjoyed most of the season, but the bit with the unbridled hatred of servicemen being presented as virtue...well not so much. I thought the season was working up to a refutation of that notion, but the finale not only doubled down on it but threw in a dollop of America hating as well. The finale also pushed the idea that soldiers are tolerable mainly if they are dead. 

8

Ah.  Yeah, I agreed with that, but perversely, it annoys me less than a number of things that don't come to mind right at the moment.  Oh, like the fundamental unseriousness of the new show in general, particularly 10 and 11s dilettantishness, and so on.

Yeah, yeah, Moffat hates guns and soldiers, blah blah blah, know what I mean?

9 So, it's a vehicle for Moffat's hates, just like before it was a vehicle for Davies' er, loves....

10 The season finale could have been amazing, but it failed to be audacious enough.  Or at all, really.  In the end, it was just okay.

11 Pixy--which show, DW or RWBY?  Either way, what you said is accurate.
Mauser:  I find that with the exception of the almost frothingly-rabid soldier-hatred, I can cope with Moffat's hates better than Davies' loves, apparently.
Most of the rest of the stuff I tend to chalk up to "it's like that in all the handful of modern British TV I watch" and mostly ignore it.

12 If they hadn't promoted it so heavily as a Bold New Thing, this season would have passed as a baggage-clearing introduction to a new Doctor, with "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" character-building.  The other big mistake was structuring it around Missy.

-j

13

Ugh.  I could completely have done without her, although tbh I thought she worked very well in the mold of the original-series Master.  I never liked the new character--too much of a buffoon for my tastes.

14 Well, I could have done without the "leaps tall buildings in a single bound super-cannibal" aspect of The End of Time, but otherwise I thought John Simm worked well against Tennant's Doctor. Admittedly, I was looking forward to seeing Derek Jacobi's take on the role until they pulled the surprise regeneration, but they clearly wanted someone with a more contemporary feel.

-j

Well, THAT'S on my 'to get' list. 

There's more at the link.

The first two Yamato series were absolutely excellent and I consider Yamato 2199 one of the best series of the last decade. One of the bigger disappointments in recent years was that the big international release (Star Blazers in the US and some Commonwealth countries, Space Patrol in Brazil) was cancelled. This is a show that deserved a good dub. It probably could have been a success on TV here.  

1 TWOK would make an awesome opera. And this skit was totally in my wheelhouse. The unusual feature would be that there's really not much emotion in the soprano part (the logical soprano part would be Saavik), but the alto or mezzo Dottora Carolina Marcus would make up for it.

Of course, they left out the super-awesome bagpipe/opera chorus, "Incredibile Grazia," because its sheer awesome would have destroyed the screen.

1 Re: the dog.  This must be the year of the Corgi or something, because the tenth anniversary of WoW, going on now, gives every character who logs in[1] a Molten Corgi battle pet[2].
[1] that was possibly a bit excessive.  I have about 6 characters I play semi-regularly, and you can only have 3 of each unique type of pet, so I can't even use all of those Corgis.
[2] Basically, it's Pokemon-very-lite.

2 Also--I can see in retrospect how that was a season-ender, but I did not know that until I read this post, which I missed somehow the first time around, until you referenced it with in a more-recent one.

3 You didn't actually miss it. It languished in draft form for 2 weeks.  There is no "bump" function and cutting and pasting it into a new post has caused formatting strangeness of late.  I think the blog is actually haunted. 

4 They draw a dog much like Ein on Cowboy Bebop, and they name him Zwei? What, is Ruby an anime fan?

5 Unlikely, but I'll go way out on a limb and speculate that Monty Oum is. Canonically, I suspect that he is simply their second dog. 

1 And even more scary is that the spammers are back!

2 Blake as a cat!  That's Speciesist typecasting!

And I'm all for it.

3 I'd like to point out that my prediction sure looks good after this episode...

4 I must need more caffeine this morning.  Exactly what in the latest episode supports your theory, Wonderduck?  (kewl that it may be)

5 Siergen, did you watch the tag?  AFTER the four minutes of credits?

6 Thanks for the heads up - I usually don't watch through all the credits.

7 I'll have to watch again, I guess, I usually stop when it kicks into the promo for some other upcoming cartoon.

1 One other possible source of her insecurity:  She has mentioned several times that she has never completed a "raid" in the game.  That means that she does not have access to the most powerful weapons and armor, and also lacks other items such as the flying griffin mounts that her friends have. 

In many MMOs, raid-level equipment can allow a player to dominate a higher-skilled player who lacks the raid-level gear.  With no raid-level gear of her own, she will always be "second rate" in the world.

2 Ken, I lost your e-mail (if I ever had it), but have a look at the Antares launch visibility map. Norfolk is within the 20 degree inclination zone.

3 Yeah, she's having a professional crisis, more than a personal one. (We're not used to thinking of "am I any good at this game" as a professional crisis, but that's what it is.)

Akatsuki is a classic RP player. She's more interested in her characterization than her character stats. Because of her particular role, she doesn't join up with others easily. A bit of plot contrivance and a sense of obligation that dovetailed perfectly with her RPing got her a spot in the Shiroe-party, and she's established a comfort zone there, and she's REALLY not comfortable outside of it.

To be blunt, aside from a bit of PVP, Shiroe did not get up to any great shakes in combat in the first season. They cleared a relatively low-level dungeon without a healer, they killed some mook goblins low-level enough that the Newbie Party could fight 'em, and... that's it, more or less.

Akatsuki has gotten the impression that raiding is the epitome of character advancement, and in a few ways that's true. She does not have the best equipment. She's got a serviceable set of weapons. But in another sense, she's completely wrong; the best players are NOT raid players. Anyone who's ever run a raid will tell you, you're going to have some really good and dedicated players along, and you're going to have some Demi-demi types who have the skills but not the brains, and... you've got a few slots filled with people who are just skilled enough to Not Stand In The Fire, if you're lucky. (Oh, sure, there's a handful of guilds who can field a good-sized raid full of "pro" players. But most everyone else makes do with what they can get!)

The biggest raid skill is to follow instructions properly and not get yourself killed. Don't Stand In The Fire. It's not topping the DPS chart (in fact, that's kind of a newbie mistake - it's more important to stay within the limits of aggro and, if you're lucky, sustain. The better your gear is, the easier the latter can be.)

It's in a small party that you have to know your stuff, because there's just fewer people to carry you. If there's twenty-five people and one of them Stands In The Fire, oh well, you can probably soldier on (especially if they're one of your newbies, contributing less than the average for their role anyway.) If there's only five and you lose one, it takes a GOOD set of four to keep things up.

The thing is, is Akatsuki worried about being good as a player? Not really - she's worried about not being good at her -character-, which is another thing entirely. And I'd be shocked if this arc doesn't hammer home the difference in a way that gets her over her funk. She's someone who spends a lot of time being a shinobi... which, recall, is not actually her character class, just her conception on how to play her mix of job and subjob. She's definitely using her skills in non-combat situations more than the rest of the cast combined. And if the script calls for someone who can hunt down and slay a crazed swordsman in the shadows of a snowy town, well... that should make for a good dose of self-actualization.

4 1. Given the importance of Shiroe and his guild to Akiba, given Akatsuki's personal and professional importance to Shiroe, and given Shiroe's notoriously encyclopedic knowledge of game mechanics, one must ask why the heck Shiroe wasn't making sure that Akatsuki got some raid experience/goodies (maybe partied up with some of their Crescent Moon or other guild friends). I mean, yeah, they're busy and it's only been a few months, but sheesh. Also, yes, money is tight, but they could have lent/paid Akatsuki money for a new sword. Sheesh. It's a lord's duty to equip his bodyguard, right?

2. Shiroe is apparently not talking to Akatsuki much while away, and actually he seems to have spent a lot less time talking to her ever since he finally realized she was interested in him. This coincided closely with his taking Minori as an apprentice and spending a lot more time talking with her. So yeah, rationally you could say, "Shiroe is just being a little shy with Akatsuki while he works out his own feelings, and he's busy with Minori but may not even notice that Minori has a crush on him, and certainly doesn't take it seriously if he does." But lack of talking and contact would make Akatsuki bound to be a prey to paranoia, romantic depression, and overthinking, unless she were an extremely secure and cheerful  person. Which she's not.

3. Actually, in Japan it's historically been pretty rational to worry about a nearly-middle-aged man deciding to romance a teenager (and of course many fannish Japanese guys at least say they want a schoolgirl). That used to be one of the main marriage patterns, for those who could afford it. Akatsuki has probably read ALL of the first Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji (where Prince Genji's true love is a girl he raised from childhood and marries at puberty, IIRC) , and she knows that there are way too many men and women drooling over her own schoolgirl-age appearance in the game. So while she is probably sure that Shiroe isn't after an underage girl, she can't be absolutely sure; and Minori's mind is as good as anybody's. (And rationally, there are a lot of underage girls who have been known to try seduction in moments of puberty madness, which is the other reason why chaperones are a thing.)

4. Akatsuki is a loner, and therefore probably has either little romantic experience or too much of the bad kind. Akatsuki is also a woman, and frankly, most of us are experts at being insecure and   territorial. You can grow out of one and get more graceful at the other, but Akatsuki doesn't have any female friends or relatives in this world who are close enough to her to be able to talk her down at the moment. (I hope Lenessia takes on this role.)

5. If Akatsuki is almost out of college, she's almost on the verge of becoming "day-old Christmas cake," too old to marry according to society. The way Japanese marriage patterns go, she has a few more years yet, but it's more like three or five, rather than ten. Of course, any friend would tell her that her ageless looks will make age not so important, but it is a rational consideration. Depending on her family, she may have to deal with arranged dates/marriage mixers if she doesn't find a husband herself, and a sensitive soul like Akatsuki would probably die of the embarrassment.

5 In Shiroe's defense, he's clearly working on the gear thing, just as a surprise (and a top-quality, raid-class katana with unique flavor text is obviously the perfect gift for her right now!) Just bad timing that he has to be out of town, etc.

Also, it looks like Shiroe and Naotsugu are in kind of a "been there and done that" situation for raiding, if Naotsugu slots into the main tank role when he's a visiting member for the raid. (In a lot of ways, that's an enormous professional compliment. Main tank is the one job you absolutely cannot finesse or carry - that guy has to have the best possible gear and absolutely has to have the skills too. You don't let someone you don't know main tank unless they're completely, obviously the better option; for a raid guild to let Naotsugu take that role means he is either geared within an inch of the best possible gear, or that he has a near-legendary reputation. Or we found a plot hole...)

And Shiroe's running strategy, not just as "okay, here's what we need to do to bust this boss", but as if he's run progression content before. It's one thing to say "okay, we have installed Deadly Boss Mods and it will show us where the fire will be so we can avoid standing in it" and another thing to say "okay, we need to learn where the fire will be so we can avoid standing in it, and also to get that info to the guys who make Deadly Boss Mods." MOST raiding guilds aren't the kind to soak up the casualties to learn that stuff.

All this might indicate a hole in Shiroe's thinking, though. If he's an ex-raider, he probably has very different opinions on raiding compared to Akatsuki, who's a non-raider. And, well... it's not beyond expectation that the topic just never came up, given that they're both quiet and somewhat unsociable. But if Shiroe thinks "she's already very awesome at what she does," it might not have even occurred to him that she has anything to be insecure about, much less that she actually might be insecure about it.

1 Also, just who is that bad-ass looking woman who saved Yang?  After sputtering "Who the hell is that?" several times, my gut instinct says Yang & Ruby's missing mom, but I'm fighting a bug this week (not Ebola), and might not be thinking clearly...

I agree that it is better than last season, and eagerly await the next episode!

2 That person almost certainly is or is associated with Yang's mom. ( ISTR that Ruby's mom is pretty much confirmed dead. ) I note too that the individual in question is wearing an outfit and weaponry very reminiscent of Adam (Blake's mentor from the BLACK trailer. ) Neopolitan seemed to know who she was and appeared just as confused by her actions as she was unenthusiastic about sparring with the individual.  
I didn't think last season was all that bad, but it drug in places and the animation was wildly uneven. This season has been consistently decent, though some of the backstory digressions were understandably off-putting to some people. This last couple of episodes have been really good. The fights in this one carried a genuine sense of danger. It was particularly interesting to see that  The villains are smart. Yang was established as pretty much invincible earlier in the series and yet Neo brings comes within a hairs breadth of actually killing her by refusing to play to her strengths. All were outmatched except Blake, who had gotten an unexpected power up from Weiss that the villains had not accounted for.  Yang and Weiss, arguably the teams heavy hitters got defeated and were both seconds away from death at one point...now they're all exhausted and must deal with the pandemonium they failed to prevent.   
This was at best a draw tactically and much a rout for the good guys strategically . 
I also found it interesting that when Ruby tried to call for help, she was calling JNPR. I suspect that Jaune is actually doing a decent job despite his "issues". 

3 It's Ruby... from the future!

4 I (rolls dice) disbelieve. 

5 Haven't watched the latest yet, but at a wild guess:
Faunus don't normally live in the human cities, they must have settlements (Ghettos) of their own, so killing the human population and destroying their cities won't necessarily hurt them, it might even leave the cities habitable and the Faunus could take them over.

6 The Flaming Corgi?  I'm really surprised you didn't recognize The Corgi-mite Maneuver.

7 @Mauser, well played sir, well played...

8 Rule of Cool, invoked.

1 This footage is from a BBC production called "The Great Martian War" that I found to be nigh-on brilliant.  It was on BBCAmerica a month or two ago, and I watched it in one sitting, it got me so hard.

Here's a promo for it.

This is starting out slow, but it remains clever. Oh Noes! Without usury, the economy is screwed!

 it's still available on Crunchyroll and I recommend it highly, hell in a week or so you can be caught up!

1 Test 

1 You actually compose your posts on the live website?  I had expected that you were doing the bulk of the writing on your local PC, and only doing final edits and formatting on the site itself...

2 I tried to write my posts in Word for a while and then copy/paste and add pics and links but that led to formatting peculiarities as well as youtube videos that didn't work. Instead I try to save as often as possible, but in this case I utterly derped. 
Instead of switching from DRAFT to PUBLISH and hitting SAVE,  when I edited the post it was already published so I switched it from PUBLISH to DELETE and hit SAVE, after which I experienced a period of regret.
I believe the technical term is PEBKAC.
 

3 Huh.
Paragraph breaks don't exist in comments anymore? 

4 Oh... Double-spacing doesn't exist in comments anymore.

5

If you're using Firefox, hitting "enter" creates a break, which is a single line feed. The entire comment created by Firefox is one paragraph.

If you're using IE, hitting enter closes the paragraph and opens a new one, which is a double line feed.

Getting a single line feed in IE is "shift Enter", which creates a break. Getting a double linefeed in Firefox is just hitting the enter key twice.

6 I'm using Epic, which is a Chrome based browser. It's been pretty good, but the last two updates have made it a tad twitchy with Minx. This paragraph thing is very new.  Thanks for pointing that out. I really need to once again check Opera, Safari, and on my Windows partition Midori and IE for Minx compatibility as upgrades have changed things.  

7

IE compatibility is really pretty poor. If you try to use the "link" gizmo to add a link to your comment, it puts the URL right at the beginning of the comment.

Or at least it does for me when I try to add links to my comments here and at Wonderduck's place. Oddly enough it works fine for me in comments on my own blog.

Anyway, it's been like this for a couple of years. So when I need to write a comment with a link in it, I compose it using FrontPage and copy/paste -- which works.

8 The editor in general has always been a little, shall we say, non-standard.  Pasting over a selection, for example, inserts the pasted text but does not delete the selection. (And for me, it also scrolls the page up to home.)

9 So I tend to watch this on Sundays (I put the RoosterTeeth link in my Weekly Comics bookmark folder.)

After watching the fight against the "wolves" I came to the startling conclusion - all of the girls are Bisect-uals.

Kids...My lawn...Off it...GET!

Then the other day, it occurred to me.

This is just The Chipmunks for today.  

This genre is not without its merits though. It's perky, you can dance to it and after listening to that for an hour and a half, I find myself so disillusioned with humanity that I'm not really all that concerned about Ebola anymore.

1 I can stand "God is a Girl" and "Angel with a Shotgun" and not much else from that genre.

2 If you think Vocaloid sounds odd, you should try UTAU. Took me some 30 runs of Uta-hime and Tripple Baka to realize suddenly that there are words... and they make complete sense!

1

It's true that the middle ages suffered from a lack of liquidity, but that's because they used silver and gold as money, so the money supply was limited by available metal.

But then there was a huge silver strike in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, resulting in flooding Europe with "Thalers", 1 ounce silver coins minted in Joachimsthal.

At about the same time, the Spanish began bringing in huge amounts of gold and silver looted from the New World.

The effect overall was inflation, because now there was too much money.

2 Some people have argued that the D&D universe is already in the grip of runaway inflation, considering that some magic items sell for upwards of 100,000 gold pieces. If you figure each gold piece at one troy ounce (which would make them really small, given how dense gold is) and with a troy ounce at 31.1 grams, then that would be 3.1 metric tonnes of gold.

3 Magic screws up everything.

-Spell components take a tremendous amount of value directly out of the economy. Resurrecting requires what, 5k gold pieces' worth of diamond dust? Even a lot of lesser spells take 10 or 20 or 100 GP worth of materials. Some of these effects can create economic value worth the price, but not nearly all of them do.

-Brain drain. What do people with high INT scores do? They become wizards, because why swing a sword or make shoes for a living when phenomenal cosmic power awaits? But like the current educational system in the US, this means that you end up with a lot of people who have got their Wizard Degree but find that their school isn't in high demand (especially the illusionists and necromancers...) They've got enough education to be unemployable in the regular labor market but not necessarily useful skills.

-Rolling from the same idea, this means that by and large, "fix it with magic" is going to be the go-to answer for any problems you run into. Crop failures? Forget introducing the three-field system, just bless those fields! You don't need firearms to arm your militia against encroaching bugbears, apply fireballs until well done! Epidemic make you wish you'd invented the germ theory of disease? Nah, just get the divine casters on the job. Basically, since your educated class is heavily invested in being able to Fix Things With Magic, that's going to be what they do when they run into a problem. This means you don't get a lot of social progression, as wizards don't have an incentive to provide scaling solutions (and in fact have lots of good reasons to prevent things like the spread of firearm technology - they actually did a Forgotten Realms story about that, if I recall correctly.)

-Want to be a blacksmith? Better pray a wizard doesn't set up with the Fabricate spell and drive you out of business...

-Of course, a lot of the Bad Things in the world are there precisely because some wizard created them back in the day. Or because some wizard opened a portal and they came through it.

-They have a nasty habit of not dying, not only meaning that their wealth doesn't go back into the economy, but then you get things like liches making life worse for everyone else.

-On top of that, there's a lot of direct wealth destruction going on. Dragons don't just hoard gold, they raze villages. Necromantic hordes roll over the border areas, leaving nothing alive behind them, and even if they lose the pivotal battle, the land is still fallow for lack of farmers and livestock. Eventually demihumans take advantage of the open space and civilization retreats just a little further...

Of course, if you have to live in a world with magic, you want magic on your side too - otherwise you have to live with most of the downsides of living in a magic world but without any of the good stuff that results. So it's not like one side is going to unilaterally fire all its wizards and clerics... not if it doesn't want to become a "former side" anyway.

But you're not likely to find a Renaissance in D&D, simply because the wizards have massive incentives to wizard, not to spread the power they've accumulated through the populace as a whole... and anyone smart enough to advance society will benefit personally much more from being a wizard, when the other choice is being a philosopher. (And even if you get a few altruistic ones, they get murdered by other wizards who don't want their rice bowl overturned...)