アニ・ノート

As reported by Rob Coppinger the JAXA’s spaceship is a transformer: it dramatically reconfigures itself after the launch.

Unbelievable. Clearly someone watched too many Macross series.

UPDATE: Dr. Antonio Elias of OSC says:

That way the crew module can have an itsy bitsy hatch to go to the (pressurized) cargo module which, itself, attached to ISS via a CBM. Clever, really clever (it’s Apollo/LM without the docking dynamics) but (Gulp!) I hate to think of the weight of that mechanism, never mind its failure modes…

Interesting dispersion, with counts falling sharply off the top. And the counts are higher than I expected.

Obviously, the correlation with the strength of the track is approximate. I’m pretty sure 1st Priority benefited from a proximity to tracks of Stellvia on the playlist, it’s not one of my all-time favourites. But still.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, all of them are self-ripped from my DVDs, with the exception of Xenoglossia and Youakena, for which I don’t have DVDs yet.

Guys? Enough with the data mining already, it’s getting creepy.

BTW, I have cookies in the browser disabled, just to combat this sort of thing.

The link goes to some kind of shitty pirate site (albeit with a nicer design than Crunchyroll).

By now everyone probably knows that Sixten’s blog suffered a significant security breach and was re-initiated as “H.C.Staff”, the blog.

Some of the old content can still be recovered, e.g. from Google, but it’s such a tedious and massive work that I expect that we’ll never see it. Sixten always was too busy with ongoing things to absorb extra load from recovery activities. Also, it is my impression that he’s not handy with scripts that would automate the work, and you wouldn’t want him copy-pasting 150+ entries, right?

I found that old images are still visible on the site; the intruder did not wipe out everything. Here’s a picture that illustrates the genesis of Jasmine (it was posted before the breakup):

In memoriam.

UPDATE: See the status update.

The “new shelf” update includes a picture so we can observe the evolution of old layout to the new one (there was a relocation inbetween).

Also:

Anyway, I figure I now have storage space to spare for many years to come. Technically, there’s room for 1000 DVDs (if you pack ‘em in). Currently, I’m at 500. Given that it took nearly 10 years to reach that point and given that I’m not buying as much as I once did, I don’t think I’ll be running out of space any time soon – if ever. DVDs in standard size keepcases are an endangered species as is.

DTO undermines the economy by putting shelfmakers out of work [1].

[1] I’m joking.

Don contrasts the anime and the book.

When you make a movie from a novel, the challenge is to see how much you can jettison and still have a story that makes sense. Making a teevee series from a novel presents the opposite problem: how do you fill thirteen or twenty-six episodes with perhaps 250 pages’ worth of material?

Samurai 7 faced a similar issue, resolved by creating 80% of the series from the whole cloth and appending it to the Kurasawa’s movie.

The post at OGIUE MAXIAX is an old news, but I meant to mark it as a perfect example of what a trained critic sees in Dennou Coil. Look at the big paragraph in the middle with “the storytelling is subtle without being excessively obtuse” and such.

Myself, I suddenly suspended it at ep.08, right after giving it accolades. Then, the watchings quietly continued at a rate of one episode in three months and crawled to the finish of ep.12, where Nanoha put an end to it. The nuclar war filler was retarded anyway, I fast-forwarded quite a bit.

This view, I guess, would bang me together with comment-polluting naysayers at OM (which is not that bad of a company, even Omo lifted a paw there), but it’s difficult to say if Dennou Coil itself was no good, or I just burned out in general. In any case, I’m not looking forward to R1 DVDs.

Did anyone notice one thing suspiciously missing from Robert’s blog post? The true tears, coincidentially available from Robert’s store, was not mentioned at all.

As it happened, I was buying nothing but Bandai for months, between Gurren Lagann, Rocket Girls, Tokikake, and Lucky Star (with one small ($20) exception of Midori Days, a Media Blasters release). The giant Funi simply does not offer anything of interest. The trend was set to continue with true tears, but now it’s not certain.

UPDATE: Reader Jopchan121 reminded that Bandai announced true tears coming in July. I was unable to find any mention of it at ANN, but Gia liveblogged it. Scott “Funi uber Alles” von Schilling twitted, “Most of Bandai’s new releases drop in July. I don’t think Bandai will even be around in July.. (>_>)”.

Dame-Dame:

Not bawling crying, mind you, but this scene always manages to bring a tear to my eyes (where Konata’s dad explains to Konata, with her mother’s ghost watching, that the one thing he was confident of was that he loved her mother more than anyone else could). A lot of the time when a series that’s mainly comedy tries to pull off drama it doesn’t work very well, but whoever directed this scene I give them a lot of credit.

Heck yes, the best episode. Ah, the memories.

Is it just me, or Kanata was really pretty? Blasted visual language of anime is always so skewed.

Steven posted a small teatrise that lauds Strike Witches and pits it against Sekirei:

But the real reason the [Strike Witches] works for me is the characterization. All the girls are good, but the characters of Miyafuji and Sakamoto make the show. They’re both really interesting, and the interaction between them is also really interesting.

[...] And that’s why it’s outselling Sekirei: that one doesn’t have any equivalently riveting characters.

I think it cannot be right. It’s a grown-up’s perspective, and very off-center for the buying demographic in Japan. We may posit equally well that it’s lesbians who sell Strike Witches: the way its cast falls into neat pairs is a shipper’s heaven, missing from Sekirei. In any case, we’ll never know unless we run some focus groups.

But I just wanted to muse, why is it that I enjoyed Sekirei more, and stuck with it to the end?

On reflection, it comes down to two things: Tsukiumi and fanservice.

Fanservice I already touched upon after 3 episodes:

[C]oming from Strike Witches, Sekirei offers extremely soft and polite fanservice by comparison. In Strike Witches, the key idea is to pound into viewers’ minds that no matter what is shown on the screen, it’s completely natural and acceptabe in the other world… so, tough it out, suckers! But Sekirei returns to standards of fanservice seen, for instance, in Ranma (actually, it is milder in the early Sekirei, but I heard it turns the nipple knob up later quite a bit).

Sadly, Sekirei degenerated in the second half; the DVD-selling steam started to pop up regularly, etc. Still, it remained way and way ahead of Strike Witches.

As far as characters go, Steven is right when the issue is considered rationally: there’s nobody in Sekirei with a well developed, “riveting” tragedy (in the first half at least). But Squirtle was too charming (and of course she’s ultimately doomed, absent some trick by the author, like a group ascension for the winning Ashikabi). I am pretty sure I crossed the bad parts only to see how she’s doing and it she’s going to last until the end of the season.