アニ・ノート

I may boycott lezbanime even when made by J.C.Staff, but never fear, the animeblogosphere is diverse enough to have all your perversions covered. Here’s a what Andy has to say:

Finally got round to watching the last 3 episodes tonight, really wasn’t worth it. The pacing in this show was seriously off, the last episode seemed very rushed (Toradora was like this too, seems to be a reoccurring problem at JC Staff).

Hah! Another one to fall into the usual pit. Not for nothing I wrote about Toradora:

People who complained that events of the finale were sudden missed the 20+ episodes of build-up. But I cannot look down at them too much. I wasn’t that blind, but still did not pay enough attention.

And it would’ve been a great ending anyway, even if not deeply rooted in the previous 22 episoes.

With that out of the way, Andy has better complaints:

Another problem was the art style. While the watercolor-esque backgrounds were pretty, anything that involved movement seemed a but off or baldy CGI’d. Trains were a glaring example, but also whenever characters were in a car the rolling backdrop seemed really obvious.

Ouch, J.C.Staff pulled a GONZO. What Will Sixten Say?

Worst omission was that despite the teaser in the title sequence the relationship between Fumi and Akira never went anywhere. Instead there was far far far too much wangst between Fumi, Yasuko and Kyoko. While I do like yuri, I guess its only fun when is tongue in cheek or for laughs (a la Strawberry Panic).

Shanderfreudesque.

John reports that Crunchyroll began showing Sketchbook (however, no DTO again: bad Crunchy, bad rights owner, no cookie!). My own experience with it wasn’t good, but I can see a few people liking it and Crunchy is probably the perfect dumping ground for low-rating anime these days.

UPDATE: Damien comments by a picture and references Wonderduck’s comment. Like I said, a few people liked it. In fact, now that it’s easily and legally available, I may give it another go at a random episode.

Robert, the R in RACS, reports from the retail front:

Just a quick post to let everyone know that since about the 3rd week of August the flow of Anime trade in’s to arrive here at the warehouse has picked up from their regular flow to pretty much a total avalanche, and we’ve been struggling a bit to keep up. Seriously, I’ve never seen anything like it!

But the Feds told us that the recession was over!

I considered sending a few DVDs to Robert, in particular various duplicates that occured when companies switched to thinpacks and sets became impossible to complete. I’m pretty sure I have scattered volumes of Stratos 4 and Dai-Guard as well as thinpacks. But the trade-in conditions are too disadvantageous to bother getting my butt to nearest shipping store. I’m not complaining, it’s how the conditions must be, because I’m sure that people send a lot of nasty garbage that’s impossible to resell. Just stating the facts. Note that I’m a frequent shopper at RACS and can use essentially any kind of store credit.

He posted an annotated blogroll, the kind people usually have in a separate page, to main blog at Epic Win. The witty run-down would be pretty amusing, but for this:

That said, he has a very successful sort of meta-blogging site in which he highlights various interesting posts and discussions from around the anime blogosphere. His commentary is usually quite interesting, as are the articles he links, even if the blatant lack of an easy feedback mechanism is endlessly frustrating.

What can be easier than throwing a post? Failing that, wring an e-mail? The feedback address is in every post, for crying out loud.

UPDATE: Blogrolls do not “damage” PageRank. For one thing it’s impossible to “hemorrage” to begin with. We know that Google applies certain modifiers to the calculated PageRank postfactum, and some of them discourage link farms. However, there are also ad-hoc modifiers for dealing with blogs. Oh and by the way: if you’re afraid of blogroll, shouldn’t you be more afraid of comments? Each one has a header that points elsewhere, and if you subscribe to the [bogus] theory of hemorraging…

UPDATE: Orion replies and continues to maintain, that:

1. PageRank across the internet is a zero sum game at its core. For one site’s PageRank to rise, it necessarily comes at the expense of another.

He never explains where he got this idea, except that “in my experience in the industry this understanding of PageRank and linking in SEO is very common”. I suspect (but without Orion confirming it, I cannot know), that the origin of this legend may be the Definion 1 of the Brin/Page/Winograd/Motwani paper, which deals with maximizing the eigenvalue c by corresponding deductions to R (the eigenvector based rank).

The fallacy here is, while c is maximized, the R is not (it’s not even a scalar), and R is used to rank pages, not c. In other words, at worst your outgoing links can dillute the rankings for the whole web, but so what? The relative order is still the same.

The real danger is that Google seens E to deter link farming. That is the SEO scumbag’s worst nightmare. But I don’t think a mere blogroll can trigger the reprisals. Look at thousands and thousands of links that SEO jerks use. Heck the punishment function is probably not even linear. All this, though, has everything to do with SEO being crooks and nothing with PageRank aiming for a “zero sum game”.

UPDATE: Mellow has trackback metadata commented out, yet Ryan managed to post one.

Trackbacks are a touchy part. In theory, they make a comment-like structure from the linking blogs, so that bloggers do not have to rely on search engines, which are always unreliable and controlled by outside entities. In practice trackbacks were essentially derailed by spam. Trackbacks do not carry as much information as e-mail messages, so content filters do not have much to go on.

Meanwhile, DS tries the same blogroll scan, without crediting Orion for prompting it. An extraordinary coincidence or bad etiquette?

I dropped each of Hidamari, Sketchbook, Hidamari x365, but GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class is so engrossing that frustrated with Ayako’s slow pace I watch it raw — which, by the way, far exceeds my Japanese abilities.

Usually my approach is to select a favourite in the cast, but characters in GA:GADC are remarkably balanced. I love them all, even Tomokane. OK, maybe Miyabi more than others, but still.

According to Hashi-hime’s preview, Rie Kugimiya partakes in five productions of Autumn 2009: Fairy Tail, Hidamari x365 OVA and *** (Hoshimitsu), Shana S, an extension of QB, and sequel to Nogizaka. I remember times when Rie Tanaka doing two roles in one season (Chii and Yomi) was remarkable. I wonder if it’s a rat race these days.

UPDATE: Just noticed that Ami Koshimizu is in four series (at least) this season: Umineko, Manimani, Saki (as Nodoka, still running), GA:GADC (as Mizubuchi). When did this shift to multitasking happen?

UPDATE: JPMeyer reminds that Rie Kugimiya is also in FMA Brotherhood. I think it continues into the Autumn.

UPDATE: Sagematt says Umineko continues into the Autumn as well. So, seven roles now?!

The always reliable and encyclopedic Hahi-hime speaks (by quoting the standard press blurb in the first paragraph, but read on):

Based on the Russian “national character” Cheburashka. From Eduard Uspensky’s story about a mysterious creature who gets accidentally transported to Russia in a box of oranges.

The second production — after Princess Lover — for new studio GoHands.

Star Oohashi Nozomi is only ten years old. She made her debut at the age of three starring in a drama. At eight, she sang the title theme to Ghibli’s Ponyo.

Director Kudou Susumu did the underrated ecchi comedy KimiAru. Writer Shimada Michiru did Shugo Chara and Konnichiwa Anne. Good staff gives this show possibilities.

That answers my question about GoHands, then.

I don’t know if this little OVA (3 31-minute episodes) deserves a review, but since I don’t write reviews, only reflections, it’s ok. The executive summary is: surprisingly enjoyable. It needs to be said very clearly though: Indian Summer is not a surprising delight like Midori Days, suprisingly well directed/acted like Toradora, or offers surprisingly deep story like Manabi. At best, it’s surprisingly inoffensive. I just expected so much worse.

Ahead of time, some bloggers[1] scared me with stories of robot girls made to cry by bad masters, and I don’t approve (fortunately, it turned out to be tantamount to cartoon violence: not a big deal). At one place, there was some seriously eye-rolling tit oscillation. But the little elephant was even a bit humorous. And overall the trashiness of the show was just a part of the setup, which I may even prefer to straight-faced seriouseness of Chobits. A perfect example of not getting too carried away with SRS BZNS is the scene where Yui detaches her own head (nice use for the uncanny valley). Stuff like that carried the show for me.

Characters helped too. Nobody was terribly annoying in any way. Kuon was an enigma at first. I was sure that she’s harboring some secret agenda or other, but it turned out that she’s too lazy for that. Lovely kotatsu manuever as well.

Liked: Surprisingly
Rewatch: Not likely, but who knows

[1] After a quick search, I think I was confused by a preview at Chizumatic:

The bad news? From the description, I’m getting “Hand Maid Mei” vibes, which was a vague ripoff of the original HMM (and not very similar). In that one the guy was cruel to the robot girls, and they cry. I haven’t seen it and have not the slightest urge to do so.

In that one the bastard guy in the middle uses his robot girls to make porn. In Indian Summer he apparently uses his robot maid to enter cosplay contests, which ain’t quite as cruel, but still bothers me. I don’t like cruelty.

In reality, entering the maid contest was Kuon’s idea, Steven was mistaken.

Seen at Anime Nation with a reference to Variety:

Japanese DVD distributor Visionare has introduced its first anime DVD offering pay-per-view access. Consumers can now purchase Ashita no Joe DVDs from Visionare for 525 yen ($5.83) each, then unlock the ability to watch individual episodes on the discs for a period of one week for 105 yen ($1.12) per episode. The DVDs are targeted at Japanese consumers who only periodically watch DVDs and want to own inexpensive permanent, non-rental DVDs.

I don’t know if many Japanese are dumb enough to buy into this scheme. On one hand, such schemes were failures in the past, but on the other hand the gaming industry managed to steamroll customers into online activation schemes fairly successfuly, so perhaps times change. The question, however, is: why sell these fake “DVDs” at all? Just let customers download the same “individual episodes” for 105 Yen.

Otou quotes:

kritik: I actually think when well done, shoujo is the most powerful of anime genres. What’s more powerful than the emotions of a teenage girl? rage, love, envy…
otou-san: you mean what’s more histrionic and melodramatic?
kritik: melodramatic, yes, overboard, yes. I like that in anime.
otou-san: I can’t argue that anime is a medium that does melodrama well.
kritik: What you do is you take all that emotion, which usually an outsider would think is plain silly, and make it the key to saving the universe or something of that sort.

The rest of the post is some Utena tl;dr, but this was an amusing lead-in. Conversely, remove the actual accomplishments and what’s left? Marimite.