....that if Joss Wheadon did pr0n, the result would probably be much like Kill-La-Kill.

^{Of which this is a rather non-representative excerpt.}

I'm hard pressed to think of any show I have felt so guilty about enjoying.

The fact that I'm enjoying it a great deal only adds to my nagging guilt.

However, I'm able to somewhat assuage my conscience as I am now pretty sure that this show is not actually pr0n. I base this assessment on the fact that I don't think the audience is supposed to stand up and cheer while watching pr0n.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 100 words, total size 1 kb.

Log Horizon has been fairly surprising all along and its ending was more so. It is not at all the sort of climax one would expect from a fantasy adventure show that has been steadily escalating, being instead something of a denouement to the epic tale that was the first 22 episodes.


This series of character vignettes is the final installment of the three episode cour that began with the cake episode (which can now be seen in a completely different light).The various guilds are having a festival to celebrate their victory as well as the treaties of friendship with the Free Cities of Estal. However, what seemed like little background annoyances the characters navigated in the cake episode turn out to be part of an escalating pattern of disruptions, with a real risk of blowing up everything they've worked for.

Instead of a climactic hack and slash battle, the situation is resolved by Shiroe, Crusty and Minori using their skills and wits and diffusing the situation without major incident.

There's also a brief conversation with the first real villain we've seen since they escaped that Demikas bastard in Suskino, and she is a piece of work. Exhibiting a venal but extremely dangerous sort of evil, it seems that she is what is behind the weirdness in MInami and the disruptions of the festival. It looks like she will be a major antagonist moving forward.

(UPDATE: OH! She was the "bard" telling the alarmingly accurate story to the children in the castle in Estal.)

 

There are quite a few major revelations not the least of which is that there will definitely be a season two in the fall.

This has been a very good series and I highly recommend it. As an added bonus, it has remained  quite kid friendly and as I said in an earlier post, if I had kids this is the sort of show I'd be wanting them to watch. It's a show about a bunch of decent people who display great courage, ethics, hope and even a decent sense of  civics. It portrays a world where intelligence is admirable, ones principles are important and experience (and study habits) really do matter.

It's also been fun.

The fall season is going to have at least one show to look forward to.
more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:22 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 207 words, total size 3 kb.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:37 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 9 words, total size 1 kb.

This is pretty cool.

..however, the first one can be yours for $34.95 whereas the second can't actually be purchased as such and certainly requires considerable social skills, a sense of humor, good looks, similar interests, compatible belief systems, patience, integrity, discipline and a great deal of personal responsibility.

The choice is obvious...in part because we have no idea who the awesome cosplayer is and wouldn't ruin her life by posting contact info if we did.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:44 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 85 words, total size 1 kb.

I guess this show does have potential.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:01 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 47 words, total size 1 kb.

The erudite humor, subtle social commentary and deep philosophizing of Space Dandy are expertly weaved via its multi-layered storytelling into a tapestry brilliantly designed to stimulate the intellect of the most sophisticated viewers while still conveying (with somewhat less success) entertainment on the squalid, unimaginative and vulgar  level of storytelling accessible to the gauche masses.

Regrettably, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, my artistic appreciation is such that I'm really only comprehending the last part.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:46 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 95 words, total size 1 kb.

Saturday mornings...
In my youth this meant sitting down with grotesquely unhealthy cereal and watching Saturday morning cartoons, which was the programming block for kids back in the days when there were only 3 TV networks. These were almost always billed as exciting adventure shows. However, due to a malevolent confluence of progressive hysteria, lawyers and network departments of standards and practices, theses shows were almost uniformly a profound disappointment. While kids everywhere else in the world got to watch various iterations of Grendaizer, we poor American children were being tormented by The Funky Phantom, Devlin and Jabberjaw.

This morning, I decided to have revenge upon the programing directors who ruined my childhood. I got up, pulled a Go-Cup of Fruit Loops out of the hurricane box, sat down in front of the computer and went to Crunchyroll which airs new episodes of Log Horizon at 07:30 on Saturdays. I just thought it would be amusing to go through those motions of yesteryear but actually see something really good.

Just like they had with Clue Club, the gum-numbing dregs of the Fruit Loops served to exquisitely accentuate the disappointment.

Heretofore, every single episode, of Log Horizon has not only been good, its been better than the last. This episode continues the shows habit of surprising its audience by abruptly reversing that self improvement trend.

^{Yes boys if you get to level 90 in W.O.W. you too can have an adoring underage harem.}

 
It seems that Minori is deeply in love with Shiroe.
Just a reminder, she's 13.
This puts her in direct competition with Akatsuki...which only serves to remind us that Akatsuki really doesn't look 25...which may be part of the reason that Shiroe has been so oblivious to her pining.

That and he's been dismissing her somewhat off-putting 'loyal minion' antics as just roleplaying in the game setting.

In any event there is a fierce cake feeding duel...



...and the public service educational message of today's Saturday morning cartoon, is that cakes...like Fruit Loops...are bad for you.

It was made plain after much high calorie drama and numerous misunderstandings that Minori is not in the running for her mentor's afections.  That wacky hijinks are required to inform a 13 year old that a 24 year old is not actually her soul-mate probably says something dreadful about the times we live in.

Of course she seems to still be carrying a torch....

Shiroe also seems to be avoiding any signs of exhibiting even the tentative beginnings of a hint of a clue regards Akatsuki's feelings...and this after she gats the courage to be quite obvious about it....so nothing is actually moved forward by this episode.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 402 words, total size 6 kb.

1 Now now, the Funky Phantom wasn't bad....

... it was execrable.

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Mar 1 21:19:06 2014 (TJ7ih)

2

Some people noted that the whole cake story seems to be an apology for not doing more with Akatsuki during the light novels. But apparently there's also a faction who thinks it's wildly funny. Um. Anyway, they left out the stupidest part, which is a restaurant staff thinking that Shiroe is a pedophile and doing nothing about it except leaving offensive messages in the decoration of the cakes. (What??)

Having people think Shiroe is a suspicious character can be done better, and I don't know why it wasn't. I guess because the writer likes Shiroe and can't bring himself to write plausibly suspicious gamers.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Tue Mar 4 15:01:59 2014 (nh8FR)

3 Hmm.
It was a cute enough episode
One of the things that I'd LIKED about the show is the perfectly reasonable suspicion of Shiroe. I was thinking after the episode before this that his somewhat heavyhanded machinations were starting to backfire, because people don't react well to being manipulated. I'm guessing now that that is not the case.

Shiroe has a totalitarian streak that's not really in keeping with the organization, let alone the attitudes of the round table. Exploring that would have been nice. One of the things that I've liked about the show is that after the first few episodes it has focused more on the other characters like Minori's team and that business with Lanessia and Crusty...which is awesome. I know nothing of the LNs but the show is doing a good job of conveying the idea that the Princess is rather more savvy than she lets on.

The smile when she "fainted" after basically saving the world is priceless...




The ensemble cast is actually working much better than these things usually do, in part because the cast is pretty intelligent.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Mar 4 18:59:23 2014 (DnAJl)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 12:25 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 6 words, total size 1 kb.

Log Horizon has been discussed here before.
Since then it has continued to surpass expectations despite its unspectacular animation and dubious concept. The show has all the tropes one would expect from a fantasy adventure series, plus a great many in-jokes and references to online RPGs, however it uses them in very clever ways and is surprisingly intelligent.

21 episides in they still have 5 episodes to wreck it, but I'm going out on a limb recomending this one strongly. I started to do a regular review but this is a show spoilers will completely spoil, so here is a deliberately vague overview of  what sorts of characters are involved in the three to four distinct but interlocking plots that stem from a mishap with a Massively Muliplayer Online Virtual Reality Role Playing Game that traps thousands of players in the game with no way to log out.

In Ring One:

We have our designated hero. He's overall a decent guy and goes to great lengths to do the right thing. He's not a frontline action hero however, and he tends to gets by on smarts, using game theory as well as working feverishly to develop political/interpersonal skills he'd never really had to (nor wanted to) pursue until just recently. His lack of patience for such things causes him to resort to downright Machiavellian, even totalitarian  methods to achieve his fairly noble ends....methods which seem to be coming back to haunt him.

We have a thoroughly conventional would-be love interest/side-kick. Well, not quite: She's so utterly smitten and so thoroughly into the "serving her noble master" roleplay that she's a little creepy and stalky. However she's really good at her job (which involves kicking ass, and cutting throats). She's also quite smart and her perceptiveness and different perspective on things is actually crucial to everyone's survival.
Also: It's always nice to find a DFC' in anime who is non-neurotic, utterly awesome and at ease with themselves.

There is one annoying, token lunkhead: He may have Tourettes as he frequently makes sexist comments despite the fact that they immediately result in great pain and temporary physical disability (see above).

We have an older gentleman who is intellectually curious enough to, on a lark, try something completely new (and apparently pointless) just to see what will happen. In the process, he changes the world.
In a complete break with convention, the old guy is not a perv and in fact prides himself in being a gentleman...in the very best sense of the word. He's an all round cool cat, whose urbane, almost aristocratic mannerisms belie an exemplary ethical  compass plus great moral and physical courage.

In Ring Two:

We've got five teenagers who find a mixture of idealism, inexperience  and bravado has subsequently landed them in a dire situation, far from help with the fate of thousands on their shoulders.  Remarkably, all four young adults are striving to actually be adults...how's that for novel? Of course, as they're young, they're learning and everything they punch at is well above their weight. This is an action flick so everything can punch back....hard

The group includes a crackerjack young lady who, due to her levelheadedness and self discipline becomes their leader via acclaim.  She's learning as she goes about the ins and outs of command and leadership, and doing everything she can to improve herself so that she can better keep her outmatched little party alive.

Her brother is a good man and physically brave, but, he's terribly inexperienced and it often seems that he has more balls than sense. He is however, indomitable in his determination and can think on his feet.

  There is also a girl who has been through a special hell recently and is still somewhat traumatized from the experience. She's striving to confront her demons, improve herself and save her friends...all the while coming to terms with the sheer gravity of what she's lost.

An idealistic but grounded young woman who has sufficient grasp of her own limitations that she can use her limited talents to surprising effect. Her modesty belies her remarkable effectiveness in combat which acts as a nice foil to her polar opposite in the group...

...A dapper young man of 19 years who seems to be trying to somehow weaponize the Dunning-Kruger Effect. His boastfulness seems to be in direct proportion to his failings, of which there are many...physical courage, it should be noted, is not amongst them.

In Ring Three:

"Flyover Country" is actually much more important to the well being of us all than many who live in certain hip cities want to acknowledge.

_{I swear this is on topic.}



The greatest test of ones character is when one finds that doing what is right requires one to make a sacrifice or take a great risk while simply walking away carries no negative judgement or cost.

Also in this ring: You magnificent bastard! You found a keeper!

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:22 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 249 words, total size 9 kb.

Despite that...last bit, this is not a bad film. It is rather strange though.

A brief narration gives a decent overview of the political situation in 18th century Japan and the fact that this film is based on a historical event...shortly before introducing the audience to some really impressive supernatural weirdness. This is a Japan where the Tengu and other Yokai are real and can be quite dangerous. Thanks in part to the supernatural element, Reeves's character is not entirely egregious and his incongruous presence actually serves to establish the decency of the Lord Asano character ( Min Tanaka).  In spite of a somewhat dubious romantic subplot between him and Ko Shibasaki, Reeves is, at best a deutoragonist and, in fact Hirouki Sanada as Oishi emerges in his historical role as the lead. This is actually a fairly straightforward retelling of the story....Well....aside from a much grander scale, the occasional supernatural horror, and Pirates of the Caribbean homages. This is all done with an astonishing amount of what appears to be...sincerity.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:51 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 346 words, total size 4 kb.

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
Post contains 115 words, total size 1 kb.

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.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:23 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 82 words, total size 1 kb.

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
Post contains 89 words, total size 1 kb.

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.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:16 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 471 words, total size 4 kb.

....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
Post contains 78 words, total size 1 kb.

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.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 08:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 290 words, total size 3 kb.

Gloriously so.

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

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:27 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 104 words, total size 1 kb.

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?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 43 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:55 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 34 words, total size 1 kb.

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

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 839 words, total size 6 kb.