majestic

Very well, so instead of finishing anything and probably to the detriment of my eye, I followed @Sarex recommendation and watched... プラスチックリトル - Plastic Little (1994, OVA) 50 minute runtime DVD Cover: From left to right, Mei, the ship's doctor, Tita and Elysse, who cares about the guys on the crew, right? First the really weird thing, this was supposed to be a 13 episode series and about limited lifespan androids, but it's about a ship captain called Tita, her crew and a blonde girl called Elysse that her father saved at the expense of his own life in absolutely dramatic, if somewhat hackneyed opening. As you can probably guess just by looking at that DVD cover, there's some mild fanservice in this OVA. The first thing Tita does after picking up Elysse is going to a bathing area with her where we find out that the now nude girls are 17 and 16, and Tita is impressed by Elysse's bust size, and I'm pretty impressed by the smooth jiggling animation. So are two of the male crewmembers who put on diving gear to take a peek... or two... resulting in the most impressive underwater nosebleed ever. Well, who said anime was better in the 90ies? Anyone? Hello, guys? *Crickets Chirping* Tita notices the two peeking at them and employs a defense system that was apparently only made to give peekers an electric shock. No, really, I'm serious. It's a button with a skull on it and it zaps the two, exactly where they are, and only that area. Hilariously placed button that apparently is really DANGARous to use! Can't argue with the result of this particular contrivance, huh? Anyway, once the crew figures out what's going on with the military and the evil commander (TM), they're off on an insane mission to stop him before he finds the password to a superweapon hidden in Elysse's DNA. The animation is fantastic, but the image quality is hampered by this being a terrible DVD transfer from a Never The Same Colors (TM) Laserdisc source, the analog color television standard that Satan (hopefully!) still tortures Walter Ransom Gail Baker for. At any rate, Tita picks up Elysse after she runs into her and a group of absolutely inconspicuous soldiers in purplish-black combat armor that doesn't at all scream evil goons tries to pick her up. The voice acting is, as it is wont for the time it was made, fairly good in terms of direction, and somewhat bad in terms of audio quality. Himemia Anthy from Utena supplies the lead's voice, so that is someone we all know. The fan-service is... not nearly as offensive as I thought it would be (it still has plenty of jiggling breasts, make no mistake), but thanks to this being an OVA much more explicit than usual. I guess there's a censored version of this for broadcast too. The storyline waffles from implausible (a civilian group of hunters is taking on the military for a girl they don't even know) to hackneyed (hiding passwords to superweapons in a girl's DNA, how 90ies can you get? ) and is fairly run-off-the-mill 90ies sci-fi schlock with an absolutely fantastic trash ending that will most likely leave you dumbfounded by its ludicrousness: The character models are great, the music is a little on the bland side but not terrible, and the sound effects are pretty good, even if the audio quality leaves a lot to be desired. Overall this isn't at all what I expected it would be. Very much recommended for any fan of 90ies sci-fi schlock and lovers of perfectly animated, perfectly jiggly and perfectly perky boobies. As a special bonus for @Bartimaeus, in the English dub, Tita is voiced by Amanda Winn. I'm sure that'll tide you over any misgivings regarding the absolutely pants storyline, the silly contrivances and the, uhm, questionable content there is. This isn't a spoiler:

In case you're interested enough after all these years.

The funniest part is when they yell about how everyone has an agenda, but Malone is the poster boy of having one. He just feels cheated out of his glory and money, and lashes out accordingly.

Name the bridge crew, please. Fun discussion topic time. Order nuTrek by level of terribadness. Picard >> Discovery S4 > Discovery S2 > Discovery S3 > Into Derpness = Star Trek: Beyond Bad = Discovery S1 > Star Trek 2009 > being waterboarded. First place is pretty cemented, regardless of how bad Discovery season four is going to get. That can't be beaten. Nope.

Organics made them to stop organics from making more synthetics that would inevitably wipe out all organics. No, wait, wrong franchise. Sorry. No, there is no explanation. Mecha-Cthulhu and its tentacles just hover somewhere in space, waiting for synthetics to make the call to come and free them from organic oppression.

How's Discovery going for you?

We always break our word, this what we do!

Woke up with pink eye, so sitting in front of the sceen is somewhat painful. Cancelled today's meetings and going to take a day of sickleave, let's see if it is better tomorrow, if not, then it's time to venture forth and visit my GP. Yay, nothing like going to a place where sick people gather in the middle of a pandemic.

Minor update: My wife's sister and her daughter seem to be fine, apparently they got lucky and only have mild symptoms (although given how quickly that can go bad, who knows). Her brother on the other hand, who had the false positive before Christmas now has a hard, dry and somewhat persistent cough. We all think he got COVID-19, but he isn't doing any testing since he got his "recovered from COVID-19" medical certificate from last time. That buffon is still going to work, which isn't problematic at all. It also must be a whole lot worse than he lets on because he usually doesn't take any medication at all (doctors are just there to make you sicker, not healthy, bla bla, conspiracy, blargh, blah) but apparently his meditation and Sufi practices don't help, so he started to take pain medication. The guy is an idiot, but he's tough as nails normally, so yeah... stupid. Just stupid. Fits, though. Morons, the lot of them. Meanwhile my mother was in close contact with an infected person yesterday, so now it's time to wait and see what happens. Luckily she recently had her booster shot, so she should be good. Yeah, no, wait until you catch a cold from someone the next time. That'll be hell. I haven't had a cold either for two years ever since this started, and near the end of last year was knocked out for three days and was pretty down for a week from a silly sniffle (wasn't COVID though, just really, really bad case of the common cold). Respiratory infections suck without constant immune system training. That nobody got the flu is pretty understandable, it's a lot less infectious than SARS-CoV-2 and spread in the same way, so all the anti-corona measures killed that spread pretty quickly.

Obviously. Caught a nice, reddish pink eye. Looks like I'm not going to watch a whole lot of stuff either for the time being.

Yikes, hopefully that'll get better soon. I've been... no, wait, that's the wrong way around, everything about this show has been breaking my brain in unintended ways as I watch episodes for clues about when exactly this is supposed to play and whether or not anything at all is period appropriate. The actual samurai on the show carrying a katana and a wakizashi really implies Edo period, the knowledge of electricity late Edo at that, on the other hand there's plenty of people carrying tantō too - not only was having those really limited to samurai, actual forging of the short swords (more like daggers, really) was severely reduced during the Edo period due to samurai essentially switching from tachi/tantō to a katana/wakizashi combination. The latter sword wasn't just limited to samurai (unlike katanas), but were als allowed to be carried by higher standing members of other castes. Either way, assuming for a moment Ms. Moonlit Ran the Windborne was a samurai regardless of being a woman (who of the appropriate cast were allowed special, shorter tantō for self-defense, if I remember correctly), her lack of having a wakizashi could be the reason she's wandering around. Losing one of your blades was a decently quick way to get dishonored. Would fit her character to forgo commiting seppuku and take off. Either way, I'm overthinking this way too hard.

Carried by the Wind: Tsukikage Ran, episode 11. It seems like almost each of these can be summed up by stating that Myao is retarded, but oh boy is she ever. You'd think that'd get old after a while, but somehow it just doesn't. It keeps being funny, even though something at the back of my head tells me that laughing at the antics of the mentally handicapped is kind of wrong, but hey, she's fictional... edit: Right, forgot to mention, the rest of the episode was about how vengeance killing is stupid and Bushido is stupid, both things I can agree with.

To be honest, there's also this misconception that Austrians are unfriendly to foreigners because they're foreigners. Not always true, especially in the eastern parts of Austria. People are just unfriendly, period, and even when they're nice they're unfriendly. There's a joke that's going to lose a whole lot in translation, but I'll try. A German accidentially walks over a piece of private property in Vienna. The owner yells at him: "Hey sh1thead, wanna get off my lawn? Hurry up or I'll punch you out." The German apologizes profusely for trespassing and the owner replies: "Yeah, don't sweat it, that's why I'm telling you off nicely." There's a Facebook group (called something like "Everyday Poetry") where people send in conversations they pick up on the streets or in shops, the best ones get published. Like: Customer enters a flower shop and asks "Do you sell flowers?" The owner replies with: "Lady, we sure ain't selling sandwiches." Well, you get the general idea, I guess. It's much funnier in the original language and when you're familiar with the culture.

I'll just post one more thing before going to bed, and that's about the misquoted Miyazaki meme, because I usually don't like to use it. What he really did talk about was the sorry state the anime industry is in compared to how it was in the past, and that's something I can easily get behind. He blamed that on the prevalence of otakus amongst anime and managa artists (at least, I think that is what he really meant by it), creating an industry that produces what they want without having any perspective for the real world. That sounds harsh, and it probably is, but really, what else can you say when you're putting so much effort into creating your visions and then see the trash that's thrown out left and right? It's probably not enough to explain what's going on, because there's a definite trend in entertainment to producing "safe" trash all the time. Films, TV shows, video games... why would anime be any different, and apparently that trash does well enough to perpetuate its existence - but so does dime a dozen shovelware. I grew up prefering anime (without even knowing that it was anime) because it was more artistic than Western cartoons and didn't operate from what seemed to be the assumption that all its viewers are retarded. I know not all cartoons are like that, but the ones we had on TV were, by far and large, unless they were from the 60ies, like early Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny. It's just sad that everything's mostly trash now.

It's an empty threat on my end as well, but hey... I mean... I don't know what I've done that made this pop up in my feed. There's a world of a difference between looking for the Magic User's Club lullaby and getting a trailer for this... trash.

Thanks for the recommendation, at the moment I have way too much to finish to start something new (not just anime), so... yeah, might be a while. However, I also just discovered something that's probably worth ALL of our attention. So, I'll be so bold and suggest a new watch project, there's only three episodes for now, I think, and it's a running series that has ratings so abysmal not even the anime nerd community thinks it's good (1.8/5 on Crunchyroll). World's End Harem (終末のハーレム) actual title more like "the last harem" or "final harem", but the translation is fine in context No, really. That's exactly what it is about. Here's the Wikipedia blurb: As you can see with all the links and footnotes, this really is just a copy. I'm not making this up at all. Look at this awesome screenshot (don't worry, it's censored): Seriously... seriously... I want to add that this censoring is apparently IN the video, look at the subtitles being over it. Why make an anime called World's End Harem and then censor it for TV broadcast? Also, lol, comments from reviews: Well doesn't that sound legitimately awesome. Can't wait for that to be turned into an anime. See, some character arc in there saves the manga. Yep. Bring it on, save the manga please. Save it from what? Honestly guys, I'm really close to just CTRL + A, SHIFT+DEL my entire anime folder.

The plot blurb for Plastic Memories sounds an awful lot like Blade Runner. Instantly reminded me of this Beat in Black music video:

Great, I'm like gone for half a day and miss an opportunity to find the posts and link to them before the original author, once again looking like a creepy stalker or something.

Looks like the anime will do that, the third episode was... not so great. It was ocassionally funny, had a fine premise, but it proceeded immediately to catch up on the fanservice that was sorely lacking in the last episode as it opened with a whole lot of Manga Club boss lady and her giant assets, and then Ayanojō's mother shows up, runs over Takeo with her car and leads Ayanojō's worship club (hum...) in search for her son who disappeared at school (in reality, he's stuck at the club room with Sae with the door barred by some moving boxes), then proceeds to embarrass him in front of everyone when she finds him. Obligatory gay joke when Takeo hugs him, thinking he is Sae who immediately ran off to the restroom after they were found in the club room. Right, in between Takeo imagines himself alone at the club room with Akane and Nanaka. You know, that could be a nice anime if you'd cut out a minute or two of each episode. The OVA was more offensive with its content, but the episodes were only occassionally good and mostly just... not very interesting, while the three TV show episodes so far ranged from decent to fantastic. This is really like a Kobayahi Maru scenario. One just can't win.

Not that I know, but you're close to feeling Weltschmerz, so maybe you can use that.

I just realized there's something I haven't talked about yet in the wake of spending a whole lot of time post about other stuff in this thread. Watched the second episode of Magic User's Club TV series earlier today. Here's what happens: Nanaka has a fight with her mother after she refuses to go to a teacher and parent talk at school, while Sae's parents make the time to come from their farm at Hokkaido in the middle of harvest season. Nanaka leaves home and visits Sae with her luggage in tow, stating that she'll be staying over night and possibly longer. Some dialogue with Sae's sister makes it clear that this is something that happens with some regularity as she simply says they can give Nanaka her usual room (well, here's how you do exposition). Sae and Nanaka talk about their respective families and after Sae is a little annoyed that Nanaka just shows up and behaves like she owns the place and they start fighting when Akane appears out of the blue after a shooting (right, for that to make sense, Akane is a part time model, and most of the men she's going out with she meets at her job). Akane and Sae end up cooking dinner for everyone, and Akane brought three pieces of savarin (a french cake). They talk a bit about Akane's job and how she didn't take someone's dinner invitation this day. Nanaka and Sae make up, everyone's eating and having a great time until they figure out that three cakes is not enough when Sae wants to leave some for her sister. Akane suggests magic to fix the issue and they attempt duplicating the cakes. Instead, the cake they try this on simply starts expanding up to a point where it threatens to kill everyone in the room. Actually, the cake almost manages to choke the three and makes Nanaka realize that she's sorry that she'll die such an ignominious death on bad terms with her family, and then some random magic working through Sae's wand makes it explode. Covered in sticky goo, the three have a hearty laugh while they watch hundreds of miniature savarin fly through the room. They end up in a bathtub together, but only because they pushed each other in, fully clothed. Nanaka gets up early to bring her family some of the cakes, and Sae walks with her for a bit, when Sae goes back, she meets the mysterious magical figure again that appeared after they saved the giant cherry tree from the military last episode. Everything I've described here was full of nice character moments, was well written, had some nice animation and was thankfully free of silly fanservice, and that includes a scene with all three of them in the same bathtub. So what's the rub? There HAS to be something, right? I mean... this is Magic User's Club, is it not? Indeed it is, so before they attempt to duplicate the cake and almost kill themselves in the process, Sae calls Takeo at home to ask if it is okay to use magic to copy cakes for her sister. Takeo's sister is bringing him the phone, opening the door to his room while we're once again treated to DIO's voice and Takeo's moans. This time Takeo is doing situps to get in shape. While talking to Sae, Sae mentions that Nanaka and Akane are visiting and that they want to do something taboo and wonder if it is all right, and of course Takeo gets a nosebleed while he's imagining... well, I doubt I need to spell that one out, but in case I have to: He ends up being a bit annoyed when Sae says it's about duplicating cake with magic, and tells her it is okay when they think of it as training. So, we're two for two with the silly gay joke. I hope that's not going to become a running gag. Sigh. Anyway, this was an episode where a fantastic 21 minutes of runtime are ruined by a two minute phone call. The worst part about this is I'm feeling a little like Captain Sisko at the end of In The Pale Moonlight: Because if this is the quality of the upcoming episodes vis à vis the fanservice in them, then... I'm actually looking forward to the next one. Save me, please.

You got past "virtuesignomics" and are surprised it ended with "go woke and go broke"? Really?

Extended family (i.e. the in-laws) caught Corona after my sister-in-law's daugther had the glorious idea to go on vacation. So that's a whole lot of infected people also on the flight, not to mention the danger posed by a all the comorbidities of her mother (breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, the works). The next few days are going to be a we bit filled with a whole lot of worrying. *sigh* There's always something with them. Well, I hope they get out if it all right.

Where is your usual „I’ll show myself out“? It would be really appropriate after that pun.