Category Archives: Animu

Masako is a more likable character than Ringo (and day 5)

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I want to say sardonically, "Simpsons did it" but the irony is that it wasn't nearly this funny or absurd when they did; it was actually one of the most heartfelt and serious episodes in the series.

I like stalker characters quite a bit and really enjoyed all of Ringo’s episodes pursuing Tabuki. I also enjoyed learning about Momoka and watching her strained relationship with Shouma develop in the wake of the actions of the Takakura parents. It’s all very fun and the idea of being stalked by a high school girl never really loses it’s appeal, but I’ve decided that Masako is, nonetheless, a more endearing character. Her charm is how mysterious she is. The viewer is scared of what she’s capable of and, until episode 16, knows very little about her, which lets the viewer’s imagination run wild.

As for the table, it would get unreasonably long if I kept including all previous days. I don’t know how long I’m going to keep this experiment up, but, at the very least, I shouldn’t give up until I’ve recorded at least 10 days. At the end of 10 days I suppose I’ll make a table of all the results.

Abstract here
 

Day #Offences for male students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for male students (inclusive)
5 4 4
Day #Offences for female students (within 5 minutes of start of class) #Total offences for female students (inclusive)
5 4 7
Day #Total offences(Male + Female) %Offenders [%Offenders(adjusted)]
5 11 22% [36.667%]

I’m bored this season so I’m going to try to watch all of Sailor Moon

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I will fail, but it’s worth a try. I never watched it when I was a little kid because my room looked like this and I was already mistaken for a girl frequently enough.

I will now marathon through my reasons for being underwhelmed this season:

There’s barely anything I think I can bear to watch this season. Perhaps there are some good shows, but I have profoundly deep-seated genre biases: I don’t like mecha or battle shows. Horizon is a school battle trainwreck that interests me even less than Karutamon. Gundam is mecha, Majikoi is a school battle erotic trainwreck, Mirai Nikki looks like it’ll be a boring battle to the death scenario I’ve seen countless times before, Phi Brain is shounen puzzle bullshit, Tamayura is pleasant and heart-warming but slow as watching paint dry, Persona is based on a game too erudite and long for me to appreciate or even play, Busou Shinki is based on a series of action figures, Maken-ki is basically the poor man’s version of Ladies versus Butlers! and I haven’t yet seen Un-Go.

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I’ll watch Ika-musume because it’s wholesome and the protagonist is adorable. I’ll watch Haganai because it will inevitably be the most popular, if not best, of the season and if I don’t watch it, I’ll feel out of the loop later on. I’ve heard Kimi to Boku referred to as K-ON! with boys. K-ON! is too good to be compared to Kimi to Boku; a more apt analogy would be to say that it’s like A Channel with boys. I found A Channel about as mediocre as anything could possibly be. There was nothing overwhelmingly wrong with it, but it didn’t do anything to stand out from other similar shows of the same genre that I’ve seen. That’s what Kimi to Boku feels like. My feelings for it may change if it gets significantly angstier or if a shota enters the cast. As for C^3, I’ve only watched the first episode so far but the sudden girlfriend appearance premise never gets old and I like clumsy girls from other dimensions/planets/planes of existence who aren’t familiar with the ways of us earthlings, just like Ika-musume. I’ll try watching Mashiroiro Symphony but I may drop it if it’s disappointing like Yosuga no Sora. I’ll watch Working`!! because I’ve grown to like it.

I just watched the first episode of Guilty Crown without, as usual, knowing what it was about beforehand. I am disappointed by the prevalence of explosions and robots. Those are demerits according to my genre biases. On the other hand, there are skintight powersuits, neat character designs, and Sephiroth, all of which mean I will at least try a few more episodes before giving up.

Though I say that few of these shows pique my interest, if I have the time, I’ll inevitably end up watching some of them. Nonetheless, iDOLM@STER and Penguindrum will be getting the lion’s share of my attention this season, just as they did last season.

Himariiiiiiiiii!111!

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I told you stupid writers that I couldn't take it if you did this to Himari again!

This episode was too psychedelic and metaphorical and I’m too illiterate to say anything about it. Even if I had waited for English subtitles to watch it I wouldn’t have understood shit. At least there was a bright red glowing orb that looked like incest.

Working!! isn’t as boring as I thought when I initially tried to watch it

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I tried watching the show when it aired originally but then I got distracted by something and dropped it. I kept current with the show back then for only about two or three episodes and then dropped it. I didn’t pick it back up again until now because I was under the impression that I had found it boring the first time I had tried watching it.

Since the BDs are out though and the second season is airing soon I figured I’d try watching it again. Everyone seemed to like it quite a bit so I thought perhaps something was wrong with me. My opinion of it has improved now that I’ve watched the whole series. It’s still not one of my favourites, but it’s not so boring that I have to read email or watch torrent RSS feeds or write a sub-par essay for school while watching it to keep from killing myself out of boredom. That may not sound like high praise, but I’ve been bored enough to feel the need to multitask even during shows that I like quite a bit, like Star Driver. It’s not rare at all for me to enjoy something and even find it pretty captivating but, nonetheless, still have my System Idle Process at about 50%. To reduce this number I browse eBay for good deals on things I don’t need or stare at progress bars, IP addresses, and hostnames in my torrent client until it’s down to about 10 to 20%.

Working!! is fast-paced enough so that my System Idle Process is at about 25% just by watching it. While it’s not quite ideal — there are still plenty of moments when I feel that a joke has dragged on for long enough — it’s not tedious enough so that I absolutely must multitask to make watching it bearable.

No matter how many times I see it, her haircut is irksome.

Taneshima is probably my favourite character, as I’m sure she’s designed to be. Her CV, Asumi Kana, sure does get that squeaky little girl quality in the voice right. My biggest complaint about the show though are those two thin strips of Taneshima’s hair that hang forward over her ears in a really unnatural and ridiculous way. This bothers me way more than it should, but I can’t help it. Hair just doesn’t do that in the real world! It’s as though she uses the same hair mousse as Goku but only in those two narrow strips of hair, which makes it even more annoying than when the entire haircut a character is consistently unrealistic or gravity-defying. That it’s just one small feature of her haircut that’s ridiculous is what makes it so aggravating.

An imouto in whose sewa the protagonist is habitually in is always a plus.

There are, of course, a couple of features of the show that automatically garner it points, such as crossdressing. Whether it’s men dressing as women or women dressing as men, this always improves the point ranking of a show in my scorebook, no matter how well or poorly the scene or scenes containing the crossdressing are executed. In this particular case, however, it should be noted that I thought the crossdressing was pretty well done, at least on the cuteness and humour metrics.


The show also receives points for the presence of a cute elementary school imouto who is responsible and caring beyond her years and cossets the protagonist like a child. Every protagonist should have one of these.

Androphobia also earns any work some automatic points. In this case, however, the androphobia is inextricably linked to the protagonist getting beaten to a pulp, which is frightening and detracts points. Though humourous to the extent that violence and injury are always funny, the viewer more or less identifies with Souta as the “normal” human male so it causes me to wince every time he gets beaten up. No harm no foul on this one.

But oh, look: RSS tells me that Hansaet beat the Japanese encoders again and episodes 12 of Penguins is out. Now to quit wasting time writing about this average show and watch that fabulous show. FTTH sure has made me impatient.

Kamisama no Memochou made me yearn for that OSX86 setup I once perfected

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The only thing I can say now that I’ve finished watching this show is that it made me really want to buy a Macbook Pro, a Mac Mini, an iMac, an iPhone, and an iPad.

It’s always been more or less hit-and-miss installing OS X on AMD hardware. You’d think that, being the compulsive buyer that I am, I’d have a Core 2 Duo system around here somewhere but, for some reason, I don’t. I’m glad I documented everything I did to get it working on my A8N5X since I’m hopelessly out of the loop now. The HDD that had my working OS X installation on it exploded one day along with several hundred gigabytes of stuff I was seeding, so if I want OS X now I’m going to have to start from zero. That’s what I get, I suppose, for using for bittorrent a partition on a disk that had an OS on it. It’s just not the safest thing in the world.

Now I’m waiting for an HDD to arrive so I can see if I can install Lion. That would be very, very satisfying if possible, but, from what I understand, there’s not yet a modified Lion kernel available that works on AMD processors. If that’s the case, I’ll try Snow Leopard. I have a retail Snow Leopard installation disc anyway and there is more information available about it.

I’m so totally buying an Intel processor next time I revolutionise my setup here. I hate how all of the nice things you can do on a computer are Intel-only. It’s not just OS X; I have to use real PS2 hardware to play PS2 games because, regardless of how much RAM I have, which video card I have installed, or how many cores my processor has, PCSX2 performs poorly on AMD systems.

Poor Shouma

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You silly duck; that's not how you eat pudding!

He didn’t ask to be involved in this mess with Ringo, penguins, and kidnappers. I’m not very smart or observant, so I don’t have any criticism of this episode, but it was fun and I’ve now developed a feeling of obligation to take amusing screenshots every week while watching the episode and make obvious and inane comments about them, even when I didn’t pay much attention to the episode. Now we know who that orange-haired girl is. Well, we still don’t know who she is exactly, but she and her penguin are up to no good at least.

I also feel bad for Ringo now. She’s not a villain. Yes, she did cause Shouma to get hit by a car,　and she is more or less to blame for his life being put in danger, his getting kidnapped and having this and that done to him, but now that we know her sob story about rejection and Momoka and her daddy issues, I feel bad for her. She doesn’t need to go through all this.

I’d also like to know what the hell kind of hospital Shouma is in. It looks like a printed circuit board. Or the inside of Manhattan Mini Storage!

As Kanba progresses from one storage unit to another, descending the stairs into deeper and deeper levels of his memory, as it were, I was reminded of Kaiba, which I just watched for the first time this week. It reminded me of how Warp uses that gun thing to open what looks like a thought balloon above the head of a person　whose thoughts he wants to enter.

I still don’t remember the name of that orange-haired Pigeon Blood lady. I don’t even remember if we ever learned her name and I’m too lazy and important to go check. I think she’s called Masako, but I’m not sure. Is she just another of Kanba’s many ex-girlfriends? One thing is for sure: it seems she went to medical school with Dr. Irabu:

The last episode of that penguin show looked just like Bakemonogatari

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…with all these panoramic shots of big landscapes, repeating geometric backgrounds with lots of straight lines, right angles, and characters tilting their heads to the side with their faces half-covered in late afternoon shadow.

Sora no Ana…I saw that movie. It took place in Hokkaido and was pretty mellow as I recall.

I had one of those sliding puzzle things when I was a kid. Coincidentally, instead of numbers, it had a picture of a penguin that you were supposed to construct by sliding the pieces around. It was pretty aggravating until I figured out that I could pick the pieces off the board using my fingernail and then reattach them in the proper positions.

Looking like Bakemonogatari is a good thing though. The whole episode was just such a pleasure to look at. Although I kept thinking of Bakemonogatari throughout the entire episode, it still had some of the familiar theatrical elements in it that have been present throughout the series, such as spotlights and other lighting effects that make scenes look as though they’re on a stage before an audience.

Unfortunately, also like Bakemonogatari, this bara — I mean unmei — no hanayome stuff makes it clear this show will now be denounced by those pesky foreign feminists as guilty of sexualizing children. Maybe Antonin Scalia will solidify his place as the Justice about whom I have the most conflicted feelings and defend media like this as he’s done when it comes to similar concerns with video games. It feels so peculiar liking that guy.

Mawaru Penguin Drum: I need to pay more attention to plot details

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Tee-hee: those things look like boobies!

I’ve watched episodes 07 and 08 and now I’m more confused than ever. Part of the problem is because I’m used to watching simple-minded school comedy shows and overwrought shoujo bullshit that demand little attention to be paid. This show is a big transition from those genres for me. I’ve actually watched one or two episodes twice now, but I still keep forgetting which characters are which and how they’re related. This really demonstrates the scanty limits of my attention span because there are neither very many characters thus far nor are the relationships particularly complex.

See? I can't even remember the name of this one, despite the fact that she's obviously a pretty important character

That said, the fact that I’m too feeble-minded to remember even the most prominent elements of the plot doesn’t stop me from looking forward to every episode. I mean, what the hell are these red ping pong ball things that the light-haired character is shooting at people? Is she like, turning them into zombies or something?

Zombies would actually be pretty cool. The last show with zombies that I watched was High School of the Dead, and that was less than completely satisfying. I just watched a show on the History Channel about Haitian zombies in which some self-styled “scientists” concluded that zombies are not only real, but they’re created by a very simple process of first feeding a normal person some tetrodotoxin that priests extract from a local type of fugu fish. If done properly, the person then becomes completely paralyzed, so much so that even western doctors can mistake the patient for a corpse. You then bury the person and, later, when the victim recovers, he or she will rise from the dead and be a zombie. Of course, the fact that the amount of tetrodotoxin that would kill a human, according to Wikipedia is a mere 8 micrograms, it seems rather unlikely that there will be any zombie survivors of this process knocking at my door demanding my scrumptious brains any time soon. But you can never be too careful, so I’ll still be sure to cover all my belongings, self, and home with zombie repellent.

The segments about Ringo make me hungry because she's always reminding me of the "Happy Family" dish with shrimp, chicken and beef from the Chinese restaurant here.

I liked all the new revelations recently, such as how Ringo is adopting for herself and fulfilling Momoka’s fate in her stead. The way in which these, by all counts, extremely dramatic, even sombre moments are recalled in flashback with a high degree of absurdity and even some inexplicable humour are really are out there, like the scene about remembering Momoka on Ringo’s birthday in which the mother is a kappa and the father is some kind of teddy bear. Then the house is suddenly underwater and the two get attacked by an eel that reminded me of the big scary eel in the Jolly Roger Bay stage in Super Mario 64 that I was scared of when I was younger.

This also goes to further explain her delusions about — or rather fascination with — Tabuki and “Project M”, which, in light of recent events, we’re lead to believe stands for “maternity”.

Ringo Oginome is really one of the more interesting characters in any anime in recent memory.

It was funny that what Ringo took for an invitation to a date actually had her end up going to watch the Curry Lady perform in her frilly Frenchy fairy tale story which Tabuki, of course, is profoundly moved by. Ringo’s imagination is as wild as ever. I like her imagining Curry Lady as a killer whale.

Stupid Curry Lady had to go and invite Ringo and Shouma to her frilly hoity-toity actor snob party.　Poor Shouma gets ordered around by Ringo even at the party. What a cruel-hearted, malevolent, sadist of a whale she is, inviting Ringo to the party just to announce her stupid engagement in front of her. What are you trying to do, Curry Lady? Drive her to kidnap Tabuki? She’s liable to do it.

It does, by the way, look like I was correct about the Men in Black. They are up to something sneaky with those ping pong balls. Either that or the long hiatus has forced Don Draper to venture into the world of cartoons.

But the thing that really keeps me watching this show, besides the penguins, is the sheer weirdness of it all. There are very few shows in which miracle frogs are used to make love potion number 9 in a sauna.

gero gero

Then what’s up with that ending? Is Ringo no longer just your run-of-the-mill stalker but an actual rapist? That’s a pretty appealing thought, but it’s more in line　with an eroge than a mainstream TV anime so I doubt things will play out like I started imagining them in my head…which is a bit unfortunate.