I am not yet this far gone
I am not yet this far gone
I am not yet this far gone
I....
I wonder if they will be coming out with a Yuki Nagato in the fut....
I am not yet this far gone
I am not yet this far gone
I am not yet this far gone
^{Link via}

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An interesting example of living archeology.
A 13 year old tries to survive using the primitive technology of his anscestors..

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Be advised that despite being an odd numbered Star Trek film, this movie kicks rather than sucks ass.

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 I still haven't seen K-ON! yet, but this series went on my to-watch list when I first heard about it.
Pixie has had the credits up for two weeks and has some thoughts (including a very considerate earworm warning for the opening). I just now got around to watching them....

damn....

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Nomnomnomnom.....

Not that I'll be able to see it for a while but I blundered into these 3 .gifs from K-ON! this evening. Not having seen the series, I lack any context but they seem to show one of the protagonists enthusiastically enjoying, respectively, a waffle, a chair, and some acid. The animation and art seem to be to Kyo-Ani's usual standards. I'm still looking forward to this.

If anyone has a review feel free to link to it in the comments.

UPDATE: Avatar has thoughts on this and several other recent shows. He seems upbeat overall.

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1 If anything, the art's significantly below KyoAni's normal standard - the character animation is loose as hell. The best is quite good, but the average isn't nearly as high as usual.

Basic plot is that spacy protagonist gets lured into the "light music" club (thus, "kei-on"), which has three musicians looking to form a band. They need a guitarist, but Yui's never touched a guitar in her life. She's also got the attention span of a gnat who's been mainlining speed and Red Bull. Hilarity, as they say, ensues.

I'll do a post on it, just got to decide when...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Thu Apr 23 14:56:22 2009 (pWQz4)

2

...a waffle, a chair, and some acid...

Not so far off, actually.  It's not a waffle, though.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Thu Apr 23 17:50:33 2009 (Duio9)

3 Spacey but she has a "whim of iron." The episode in which she acquires her first guitar is hilarious, since I've know the same thing to happen with a budding teen musician, "bright, shiny, pretty!"

Posted by: toadold at Mon Apr 27 00:35:06 2009 (zcbXo)

4 Nice try "Stephanie" Or should I say Vladimir Spamkovik. Pretending to be a girl on the internet was your first mistake. Pretending to be a girl that's actually interested in ME was so laughably improbable that you couldn't have gotten Charles Fort to believe it. You're a bad spammer and a bad person and will never amount to being anything other than a punch line or a swear word. Quit now, wash your hands of this failure and go find work where you are not a living embodiment of the Peter Principle.

This imaginary young lady has something to say to you as well.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Mon Nov 5 05:15:33 2012 (e9h6K)

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1 Panty raids are never a good idea.

2 It's never too late to back out of a bad decision ...until it is.

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THAT Anime Blog has a roundup of most of the upcoming season. It makes an interesting comparison with this prediction I recently received via E-Mail.

As your brains may grudgingly recall, this time last year I predicted some of the anime trends we'd be seeing soon. For those of you whom
time has been a balm to soothe the mind, let me rub raw some
old wounds: remember Hobos, Hairdressers, Veterinarians, and Mushrooms.

I confidently measure my predictive powers against the track records of
such luminous benchmarks as Nostradamus, any economist (other than Adam
Smith), and the Christian Bible. As we venture forward further, the
producers of Japanese manga and anime have begun to make their intentions
known. I predict 2010 shall be the year of:

1) Demolition Derbys (a.k.a Banger Racing in Europe)
2) Reptiles/Dinosaurs (listed separately because there are too many people
on this list who know the difference).
3) Gardening
4) Belgians

As usual, at first the new elements will be introduced into fairly safe
territory:

Thumb Green : A heartfelt series about an orphan, Tanazaki, who is adopted
into a family of estate gardeners. Mom works in topiaries and Dad prefers
tea roses, but the adopted son follows in bonsai-enthusiast grandfather's
steps. When the last Japanese heir to the estate dies and the manor falls
to the young Belgian heiress, can Tanazaki learn to forgive her shameful
secret and teach her to live in harmony with the back lawn? And will
Tanazaki's new sister, who may feel more than sisterly-affection for
Tanazaki, ever perfect her compost pile? Look for the hidden symbolism of
the koi pond as it reflects the state of romance between the heiress, the
orphan, and the possibly-insane sister.

Crash 1911 :  A truly anachronistic and jingoistic offering, Crash 1911 is
set in 1914(!) in a Miyazakiburgstein (one of those generic
Western-Central European with steampunk touches) setting. "Crash 1911" 
refers to the undefeated reign of driver Josef Tildeff's and his 1911
season winning twelve-competitor collision. Now in 1914, most of the
participants of that epic season have returned with even more-outlandish
cars and unlikely proteges, including a deaf Mongolian, a Cajun
zydeco-playing grandmother, and Tildeff's own protege who is (you guessed
it) a Japanese orphan. How will each of the competitor's life experiences
aid them in the upcoming derby? And why is it every non-Asian character
except the son of the Belgian calvary officer painted in such a negative
light?  Still, all the mechanical designs will look like "the Secret of
Blue Water" meet "Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bag" to the point that the only fan
disappointment will be that none of the cars actually fly.

Sensai Crocogator-san's Class Trip : Middle-school Crocogator takes his
students on a different class trip each week, visiting factories, places
of historical interest, zoos, etc. Students from different walks of life
(dirt poor, privileged rich, brains, jocks, and just-average-losers) all
learn important lessons each week while they face the challenges of
growing up Japanese. Each week at least one student will be eaten by this
pedagoguish member of Osteolaemus holtzus (common name:  the Too-Clever
Crocodile), but never fear - they tend to reappear in the middle of the
episode with no apparent ill-effect. The series will impart a love of
history. Season highlights will include the hilarious Alligator-wrestling
episode and the tour of the Diet building.


Later, as fallow ground goes further a-weed, we will see:

Caimen Maid Crisis! : This rather pedestrian tale will be a complete
ripoff of last season's 'Matic-Panic Stylist Yuki, except the
cybernetic-valet will be replaced with an alien Crocodilian Princess and
the original threatening alien invasion will be replaced by Atlantean
golems. There will be no plot-twists that couldn't be predicted by
hyper-active ten year-olds. Sales of the figurines of the Caimen Maid will
convince the producers to put out 19 OVAs, each of which feature her in a
different provocative outfit that can be lucratively merchandised.

Pumpkin Road-rage: It's the future, and a growing segment of the
transportation market features mutated, semi-intelligent vegetables. The
smartest of these appears to be Pumpkin Buggy, an orange sports-car with a
seed-spitting cannon. When rogue cars from the Belgian-based Zucchini
Biotechnical begin causing traffic havoc, Pumpkin Buggy and his owner are
drafted into the Tokyo Police Department to fight these street-racing,
squash-smashing renegades. It's "Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors" meets
"Speed Buggy" with a hint of "Riding Bean" and "ADP Police."

(Name Witheld For His Protection)

The story about four high school girls that try to sustain their school’s popular music club despite being unable to read music or play instruments.

Oh be still my beating childhood!
Wow...Sad case of arrested development that I am, I fear I am going to have to watch this. I mean what could be cooler?

Oh yeah....that.

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Wonderduck has started a conversation about what sort of geekery geeks should grok.

I'm not one to really ask about this as video games are a big part of the geek culture that long since passed me by and...well...I don't play many video games. I can count the ones I have played over the last 5 years on 1 hand.

 Avatar however, has picked up the baton and run with it.

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Amongst the 37 songs I've thus far hunted down and put  in the Blogradio rotation is one I blundered into quite unexpectedly: The radio edit of Hoshi no DejaVu,  the OP song from Southern Cross.



I've been told that the song, (rather unlike the show) was fairly popular in Japan, topping the charts in 1984 at one point. It's an oddball find and it sort of blends with the other stuff too...

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It was perfect.

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Perhaps not...

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Christmas kept me away from most entertainment so this week I determined to  had been considering seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still, however the reviews were not good and amongst my messages from an Email list I'm on were these lucid comments on the film by those less fortunate than I.

Save your money for the cheap show, or PPV.

 

"Just saw a movie that happened to have a title card that read "Day the Earth Stood Still""...

...been lurking around for many years, but  I felt  I had to say
something ...and this new disaster makes me feel like somebody threw  a
ton of raw, fresh excrement onto me, in IMAX format, yet...what kind of
Hollywood dumbass wrote this thing?

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Good lord! The sun...It's up...It's like Noon!
 This game is more cracklike than the most cracktacular crack to have ever cracked out of a crackpipe!

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1 What game?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sun Dec 28 20:09:49 2008 (+rSRq)

2

Looks like Fallout 3 to me.

Having had no experience with the previous iterations, I'm hesitant to jump in at this stage. I feel like I'd be lacking the requisite experience to angrily mock it as "not really a Fallout game" with all the other alpha nerds.

Posted by: Will at Mon Dec 29 16:49:13 2008 (WnBa/)

3 It is indeed Fallout 3.
Regards the "not really Fallout" griping, I'm not sure where that comes from. It is real time rather than turn based but it is remarkably true to the spirit of the 2 previous games. The freedom of movement in particular is astonishing. I am very impressed with this thing. It is one of the best I have ever seen.

I guess I'm just a Beta geek....

My only quibble is that there is no multiplayer option, but that would probably be exceedingly hard to pull off with the level of detail and freedom this game has, which is as great as some of the MMPORGs.

Posted by: Brickmuppet at Mon Dec 29 19:36:32 2008 (V5zw/)

4 Well, I forgot to open my tag when I wrote that. Everything I've heard about the game is that it's Oblivion but better. Now, Oblivion is a game that sucked up many hours of my time (still not as much as Morrowind). That comparison speaks well of it to me, but I'm really not inclined to spend any money on a game that isn't likely to run well on either of my PCs. I also don't want to support their dependence on overbearing DRM.

It's the same reason I haven't gone out and dumped money on Red Alert 3, even though I desperately want to do so. EA has shown no regard for its paying customers (I'm speaking specifically of the continued unfixed bugs in games like Kane's Wrath) while turning the game into a long-term rental with limited activations and only hollow promises that they might someday maybe deactivate that requirement. I expect they'll go out of business and brick all those games first.

Posted by: Will at Mon Dec 29 22:46:02 2008 (oj5wx)

5 Now that's just plain weird. Last night when I left that comment, the first line said "I forgot to open my "sarc" tag", but I'd actually used < and > in place of ". It showed up just fine on the other machine where I wrote it. Now I'm on my other PC a few hours later and it's gone.

Posted by: Will at Tue Dec 30 09:44:03 2008 (oj5wx)

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All the cool kids are doing it....

• What anime are you watching now?
Bleach, Lucky Star

• What is your favourite time to watch?
The middle of the night.

• And your favorite place?
Within line of sight of the monitor (duh!)

• Who is your favourite auteur?
Satoshi Kohn

• Your favourite OST?
3 actually, Space Cruiser Yamato, Grendaizer, Ghost in the Shell

• What is the most difficult anime you’ve ever watched?
Serial Experiments Lain...but it was worth it


• What was the first anime you remember watching?
Marine Boy or Speed Racer in '74

• Do you have a comfort show that you re-watch?
I watch Arivadercci Yamato every Christmas. I also re-watch select episodes Starblazers, Mazinger series robot shows and VanDread from time to time.
.

• What is the most erotic anime you’ve watched?
As an American I am protected by the 5th amendment to the United States Constitution...

• Which classic should you have watched?
Doraemon.

• Which series did you never want to end?
Bleach....despite its Shonen Jump tropes, the characters are superbly realized and the story is engaging.

• What is your most overrated anime?
Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Which character could you have an affair with?
LOL whut?


• Who is your favourite character?
Ichigo from Bleach...closely followed by Meia Gisbourne from VanDread

^{Other runners up that spring to mind immediately..
Vash from Trigun
Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist
Lady Eboshi from Princess Mononoke}



• Which character do you most dislike?
Probably Shinji from Evangelion

• Which character do you identify with most?
Linna Inverse from Slayers....which is probably a sign of deep seated emotional problems.

• Which anime changed your life?
Starblazers

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...prevents me from posting much, so in place of content, here is Chii.

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Many of you have seen this bootleg vid of the trailer for the new Star Trek Movie....

There has been some grumbling from fans as there always will be. To me it looks seriously kewel despite the unspockular Spock. However John C. Wright has obtained the opinion of the only person who's opinion we care about...

 

Oh Well....
Still gonna see it.....

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Rocket Girls has been mentioned here in passing (mostly via pictures in science posts) a couple of times. Having been quite taken with the first few episodes that I saw at a party a while back,  I eagerly looked forward to the US release.

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Black Lagoon is a fairly dark show. Rather darker than I ordinarily like.
 The improbable story of 3 Americans and a Japanese Salaryman operating as a band of more or less ruthless modern day pirates out of northern Borneo is not happy or lighthearted in any way. It has, however been a perversely fun show, heavy on the action, snark, and over the top situations.

Volumes one and two of the second series had fallen into a pattern of one or two gruesome shows followed by a sad episode and then one or two shows very satisfyingly stocked with violence sarcasm, and girls in hotpants committing all manner of improbably spectacular theoretically reproducible violence while shouting obscenities.  In other words "win".

Volume two in particular had this delightfully gratuitous bit of dreadfulness...

....Sawyer, the local corpse disposal expert who sidelines as an assasin is an implacable, mute, chainsaw wielding  goth chick delivering her sinister one liners through an ultravoice.

I mean really....THAT is quality entertainment boys and girls!

When volume 3 came out I picked it up at once.  I headed over to Allans house, we broke out the popcorn and popped the dvd in. Our reactions can be accurately summed up via the following illustration.

Holy hell that was merciless! We have finally discovered the point of diminishing returns in pathos, gratuity, and gutpunchery. Yikes!

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For the last 2 years, there has been one show that has exceeded all others in hype, discussion and adoration. It's alleged to be one of those "important" shows that in some ways marked a sort demarcation point in the history of fandom. Most distressingly, it is a show I had seen but one random episode of.

   Well, last night, I finally watched episodes zero, one and two of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumia.

 The buzz surrounding this show was actually a bit offputting,  with some  fans of the show giving the sort of coercive and evangelical salesmanship that leads one to believe that a negative response will be met by violence.
It is by all accounts an interesting show, and I had been looking forward to seeing it.
One of the reasons for my delay is that I was informed that it was exceedingly important to watch the show in broadcast order as opposed to actual episodic order.
The show was initially broadcast deliberately out of order and that is said to be important to the pacing of the story. Of course the broadcast order set is the delux set...and is expensive.

Last night my friend Allan announced that he'd watched it, enjoyed it and offered to show it to me...so I said "Screw it!" and we watched the show beginning with episode zero.....

My first impression was..."Lord what awful voice acting!" This is one of the worst dubs ever! Switch the audio!  

(Then I got the joke that is episode 0.)

Episode zero aside, three episodes in, the English dub is actually quite good. Wendee Lee  gives a great performance as the manic and bombastic Haruhi.

The show has unusually high production values. It is also unusual in other ways.

Haruhi Suzumia is bored...completely...utterly...bored. She despairs of her banal existence and wants desperately to do interesting and unusual things and by golly she is going to try to make said things happen!
This is, on the surface, a really cool character trait and certainly should be an excellent start for anything.
Unfortunately, Haruhi is not a particularly good person, in fact she is a borderline sociopath.

Haruhi is, you see, one of those obnoxious, pushy, psychobitch fangirls many of us have had the misfortune of encountering over the years, the manipulative narcissistic female bully to whom all people she encounters are nothing but disposable red-shirt bit players in the glorious Mary Sue story that she believes her life must be.  Unfettered with any ethical inhibitions and adept at avoiding any serious sanctions for her increasingly bizarre actions, Haruhi collects a likable but hapless band of  bit players through intimidation and kidnapping to join her highschool club ( the SOS Brigade) and help her achieve a state of not-boredom......

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