Stella Women's Academy  High School Division Class C3 episode twelve scared me for a moment.

I was afraid there was going to be much angsty dialog, but instead the episode is a very long, frequently escalating and occasionally quite cartoonish airsoft duel...where everybody has a grand old time.

At one point bat thevend of the battle Yura alters reality again, this time for everybody. Everyone except Kirishima is weirded out. After a moment of confusion and fear Sonora looks at Yura and says "YOU did this>" Well OK then." as if that makes it all completely understandable...and they proceed to have the time of their lives until, exhausted, they find themselves back in reality.  It seems that Sonora is aware of what is going on and that it involves the shrine.


There's nothing deep here. Yura has gone from one extreme to another and found them both unpleasant. Now she's stopped being an asshat and is enjoying a hobby she has become quite good at....a hobby she now wants to share with other people.



To my utter astonishment this was a perfectly pleasant episode.

It did nothing to explain the metaphysical weirdness we've seen from time to time in the show, but it did establish that Yura has found her path and is happy as she learns where it leads her.

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The viewers who resisted the urge to get all cutty with a straight razor after last weeks episode are rewarded with a look at what the well adjusted characters are doing.



They've received some bad news...but they are determined to make the best of the situation.

Then we go to Yura...who is putting on a brave face, despite being beset by guilt, despair and zombies...



...shortly after this things begin to get weird.

Kirishima has a perfectly reasonable,  fleeting moment of bitchiness which ultimately leads to this unexpected visual...

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Blake's bow...

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The Message behind Stella Women's Acadamy High School Division...I'm sorry...where was I?
Oh yes. I think I've figured out the theme behind this show.

We at Gainax hate you.
Our childhoods were miserable because we were a bunch of geeky, socially inept otaku who grew to hate our hobby (which we blame for all our lost opportunities).  Nothing makes us sicker than seeing those who watch and enjoy anime for they remind us of our selves and our many personal failures. We hereby dedicate our lives to making you hate the medium as much as us, for we are transgressive and enlightened hipsters who understand the nihilistic futility of everything...Well...everything except the cruel pleasure we derive from getting you gullible fools to first enjoy something we create and then watch helplessly and despair as we dismember it without anesthesia before you. That is the greatest joy in all creation.That we are paid to do this is icing on the cake. It's an ephemeral joy though. Your innocence thus defiled, you can bring us little amusement from this point on, but there are always others that follow the likes of you. Now get thee along, Aokigahara beckons you.

I could be a bit off there, but there's a better than even case to be made for that theory at this point.

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..is one of those songs where it's important to know know what the lyrics actually mean, because having this just pop up on ones playlist in earshot of a native Japanese speaker could be awkward...

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An exceedingly epic example of a Ruby Rose cosplay by Adellexe. Photographed/edited by Lee Hong Zhu.




more...

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She has abilities other than stalking!

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In my review of episode 8, I said the following...

I expect that the NEXT episode will be the nadir (emotionally...dramatically it might be quite compelling)

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"I've started watching Attack on Titan again. Watching a giant bite the head off somebody, then pull them apart and eat them is so much less disturbing than watching that poor girl in Watamote humiliate herself. "

^{Full disclosure: Actual monsters in Attack on Titan are considerably less cute than this .gif implies.}

In other news: We can now re-size .gifs in Minx. Wo0t!

All hail the lathe of the maker!

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..as events currently suck.

Instead here are two of the Yuru Yuri girls and an air guitar.

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This polysyllabically titled show airs on Crunchyroll a week late, so despite my judicious attempt at avoiding spoilers I'd heard considerable chatter about this episode being just wretched and 'worse than the last one'.

Given that the last episode was about our poorly socialized protagonist getting tunnel vision and missing the point of her hobby, I fully expected this episode to be a bit of a downer with Yura's Ahab complex causing issues.

Boy howdy.

One of the overriding themes of this show is sportsmanship. This episode also focuses on the importance of not becoming what one despises and how easy it is to fall into that trap, especially if one feels strongly that one's cause is noble.

The other major point of the show is that the raison d'etre' of a hobby is to enjoy oneself. This is not to say that winning is not important, but the enjoyment is the goal. If lives are not at stake and what you are doing  is unpleasant and wearying without an enjoyable payoff...then one needs to stop doing it or start collecting a paycheck for it.

  As expected, Yura drives her team hard to the point of misery, at one point disregarding a fairly severe leg injury incurred by Kirishima. The kicker is that at the last minute Yura fires the winning shot....a split second after being hit.
By the rules this means Yuras winning shot was illegal but it's undetected by anyone except her opponent, the malevolent Haruna.....who smiles knowingly, informs Yura that she now respects her because she'll do anything to win and walks away.

The episode ends a tad ambiguously. Yura has the opportunity to make this right, but she's feeling a profound obligation to her teammates who she ran into the ground to get this victory....what does she do? Well we'll know for sure next week.

Of course most people reading this know that there is only one correct answer, but Yura doesn't. Her backstory is that she's never had friends. She hasn't learned about sportsmanship and she's carrying the shock of the earlier lesson about fighting to the end...for which she is seriously overcompensating.

I expect that the NEXT episode will be the nadir (emotionally...dramatically it might be quite compelling)



This is the antithesis of a shonen manga. Japanese society puts a VERY high value on giving your all and going all out whatever the cost. Shonen manga and sports manga tend to do the same with the former focusing on crushing the villain utterly.

This show, is about remembering to step back, breathe, and keep things in perspective...and how easy it is to fail to do that.

Yura is not an idiot, she's young and ignorant. She's learning, like we all do, as she goes and she's making mistakes. There is actual character development here. I'm still liking this show quite a bit though I think I may actually be the only one now.


So...for those of you who've been watching...any bets on whether or not she just flat out shaves her head this time?

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Well after dwelling on dark matters for a bit I was damned happy to see Tuesday roll around because that means StellaWALLOFTEXTc³ is finally up on Crunchyroll.

In this episode we learn that the KGB club is even more co-ed than we thought.

^{This despite the fact that one of their members today has chosen to be strapping and not trapping.}

Oh my... 


The series takes a surprisingly dark turn in the first 45 seconds.

Someone, quite likely a competitor, is playing for keeps. They're using an illegally overpressurised air-gun and start sniping at the girls.
Now Sonora is in the hospital with a concussion and Yura blames herself.

Although the other teamates decide to sit out the much anticipated 24 hour tournament, Yura somewhat rashly decides to sign them up, to honor Sonora with a win.
And the wallflower takes control...

As an aside, I think this is the first episode where Yura hasn't had a vision.

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There's not much to add except that having watched it again, Crunchyroll can handle the load in the exact same way that that RoosterTeeth's server's can't. (I tried to show it to a friend last night and it was all out of synch). It stays in sych at high rez too.

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...but she would. She's in it. By the way, what DOES she see in that guy?

The latest installment of RWBY is only four minutes long. Well acted and nicely paced with even better music than previous episodes it...well it ends after four minutes which SUCKS cause I've gotta wait a whole WEEK to see what happens!

It's a cute show, plus it's always nice to see people who genuinely enjoy their work.

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...that while this banner does make for admirable honesty on their part,  such a high visibility release of this information is potentially counterproductive from a marketing standpoint.

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It's the school festival episode of Stella [REDACTED] Club C Cubed and I learned all sorts of stuff today.

The survival club is out of money. They're going to be hard pressed to pay the entry fee to get into a much anticipated '24 hour tournament'. They decide to go for broke and try to raise enough money at the festival.

I learned a new Japanese word.
In Japan a commercial shooting stall with electric target retriever is called a "massine'.



It may SOUND like they're saying 'machine' but it's a brand new and distinct word meaning 'shooting stall with electric target retriever'. I know this because the subtitle-ers spell it that way. Every. Single. Time.

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The ad for the last installment of Yamato 2199 is by orders of magnitude far the shortest of them all.

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^{Art...indisputable art by Tomioka Jiro}

I have a friend who does art. He used to be a professional animator and he's done a bit of small press work in comics. He's been doing art in various capacities for 30 odd years and has a wide range of interests.

He also haets himself some Miku Miku Dance.

I mean anything involving MMD or Poser will get under his skin and if applied for more than a few minutes will send him into a white hot rage rage. It's rather bizarre, its like his IQ drops 35 points and until the offending media is removed all he can say is "Duuhh..I hate dat stufff..." Now this is not a rational response and would seem to be a matter of personal preference and pig-headedness but he recently made an interesting argument when I pointed out that he'd seemed to like The Incredibles.

Well he does like Pixar films...mostly. His argument is that the MMD videos and such aren't actually art because unlike the big studio productions they're just using someone else's creativity.  The person doing an MMD video on YouTube in his eyes isn't doing much more than posting a paint by numbers painting and calling it his. The programer has done all the art.

Now, as it happens, I'm tinkering with MMD right now, but I'm not making much progress because, I'm not artistically inclined and doing that on a Mac is clunky. With MMD one is manipulating these wire frame models and even at the most basic level choosing ones choreography. However the facial expressions in particular ARE all built into the program and were put there by the programers as are (I'm told) some basic movements). It's my understanding though, that MMD can be used to produce things like this....

I'm unsure of the provenance of these .gifs (which I nicked from 4-Chan) except that they seem to be from some Touhou fanfic. I understand that one can download Touhou "skins" for MMD wireframes now (fans made those available some years ago) However, even if the creators of this did use off the shelf " paper dolls" for their character designs there is the matter of the choreography and the subtitles which imply writing a script. Of course this is Touhou so it's fanfic anyway. However the potential seems to be there and is certainly present in the professional versions of Poser to apply ones own skins to the products frames. Such additions would require artistic ability (and being 3d would be akin to rendering a sculpture), but the objection of my friend is that those using this medium are using someone else's art.

My feeling is that this is akin to using Legos or perhaps a paintbrush. I'm of the opinion that even MMD can teach aspiring animators about computer animation, choreography and editing, which in the computer age are quite different skills from what they used to be. However, I don't do art, my figure drawing makes Randall Munro* look like Da Vinci so this is most definitely a layman's perspective. I'm really not sure how much ones brush needs to stray outside the numbers before ones effort becomes art.

I'm pretty sure that this piece done with Poser qualifies though

...but at what point on the spectrum between that piece of magic and simply having Lady Hatsune make a leek face it stops being analogous to stickers on ones Trapper Keeper...well I'm not qualified to answer that.

_{*Of course his humor certainly IS art.}

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1

The person doing an MMD video on YouTube in his eyes isn't doing much more than posting a paint by numbers painting and calling it his. The programer has done all the art.

The same way Fender and Gibson did all the art and Mark Knopfler just played notes that were already there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Fri Aug 9 06:51:17 2013 (PiXy!)

2 If you produce fine, handcrafted, heirloom-quality furniture, you probably have a low opinion of Ikea. But for a lot of people, Ikea is the difference between nothing and making do with milk cartons.

Or, if we're going to talk about paintbrushes... I use a Kolinsky sable brush from W&N, because it's a really good brush (quite a bit better than the painter, if I'm going to be honest), and the few extra bucks it costs isn't going to break my bank. It's nice having a brush that can hold a point that well. There are also artificial fiber paintbrushes made for the three-for-a-dollar crowd. There are people who get fantastic results with the former, to be sure - but there are also people who can take the three-for-a-dollar paintbrushes and do amazing things with them, because the tool isn't the talent, and it isn't the vision.

Sure, if you're a professional-level animator, you're not going to like tools that let people bodge together their own animation. Professional sound guys scoffed at software that let you do your own mixes on a home PC... and it turned out that a lot of people were pretty good at mixing without being a "professional" sound guy. Heck, for that matter, I'm sure that plenty of vocalists aren't too fond of Vocaloid.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Fri Aug 9 21:39:20 2013 (pWQz4)

3 At around 1:55 in the video, she appears to be firing the gun by cycling the charging lever on the bolt.  Reminds me of a gunslinger firing a revolver by fanning the hammer, although I've never heard of a rifle fired via the bolt lever.

Posted by: RickC at Fri Aug 9 22:28:04 2013 (WQ6Vb)

4 @Avatar comment#2:
I think Vocaloid is a better argument for my friends point of view than MMD. The tone, pitch, and everything else is actually done by someone (or something) else. That being said, editing and songwriting are each definitely arts in their own right.

One thing that (I think) set my friend off is the ease of tracing with the computer. He was in awe of how much better some people were on the computer than on paper. I suspect that this generally has two causes.
1: the person is just much more comfortable in the computer medium (I'd wager that this is very common today given the amount of time people spend on it).

2: They're doing vectors.

This latter has turned out to be the case quite often in his recent experience.

As for MMD, given the sheer ammount of stuff pre-programmed into even the most basic version, I think my friends argument is not without some merit at the most basic levels of competency. I tend to think that his argument breaks down rapidly once one moves out of the orientation phase.

Of course some of this is just crumudgeonism on his part. but given the complexities of the tech, asking at what point a work becomes art and particularly ones own art strikes me as not entirely unreasonable. However, while I'm inclined toward your and Pixy's point of view on this, not being an artist at all makes me wonder. I mean look at the amount of clip art, embedded videos and such I use here.....though of course no one would call the blog "art".

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 10 00:17:21 2013 (F7DdT)

5 @ Rick C comment#3:
I'm unfamiliar with bolt actions in practice, however one can do something similar with a pump action weapon if one cycles it very hard and holds down the trigger. Note too that it has been mentioned in the series that she built the weapon herself so chambering a round and closing the bolt might automatically fire it.

Also:

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Aug 10 00:25:40 2013 (F7DdT)

6 I've been curious about playing with MMD, but at the time, it seems like people had to patch it to get english or something.  Of course, at one point I was going to dabble with Daz 3d (don't bother).  And I used to futz around with POV-Ray, but nothing ever came close to some of the amazing images out there.

I just don't really have the commitment to achieve skill with these things, which kind of shoots down the idea that skill isn't required.  (Although DAZ probably does, since it's basically a paper-doll system where more talented artists sell content for you to add to the program.  It can't really create its own.)

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Aug 10 04:04:20 2013 (TJ7ih)

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As I post this, it's a bit more than an hour before episode 5 of Stella-Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch airs on Crunchyroll. I note this is almost a WEEK after most all the cool kids  have seen it.

I've been judiciously avoiding spoilers, but here's not much point in blogging this one.

UPDATE: OK. For those of you who've already seen this.....

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