Bridgebunnies went down this week

And I'm surprised nobody else has commented.  Anyone know what happened?

Posted by: Mauser at 06:22 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Space Battleship Yamato 2199

So I just powered through the 26 episodes that I downloaded in 2012.... There's a lot like that on the drive.

There's a lot more character and refinement then in the "Star Blazers" of my youth, and a lot more fan service. And for the purposes of this, they expanded the distaff portion of the crew so as to improve on the Smurf Village demographics the old series had.

But when I talk about fan service... Christ, I've joked about "Perineum-Cam", and "vacuum-sealed for freshness" flight suits, but the combination.... added to the artistically included seams and zippers in said catflightsuits, only the coloration avoids looking like something much less seemly.

In fact, it seems to be a trend in mecha and space shows to design women's uniforms and spacesuits with suggestive outlines. Even the innocent Moretsu Space Pirates featured space suits with an outline emphasizing a certain area. and the men's suits did not feature similar "relief ports."

Watch this space, I'm gonna collect some screencaps. Purely for research purposes, I promise.

Posted by: Mauser at 05:42 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The Eagles of Death Metal

These are the guys who were in the theater in France that got attacked.

The name is ironic, the story I heard was that one of the guys was criticizing some bad, weak Death Metal, and described them as "The "Eagles" of Death Metal", and thought it would be a great band name.

And this stuff twigs the same neuron in my brain that says "Devo is cool".

And the video totally takes the piss on over-stylized artsy crap.

Posted by: Mauser at 06:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Kill la Kill Cosplay

Professional Russian cosplayers are some of the best I've seen.

Posted by: Mauser at 02:37 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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SpeedGirls

So this year at the Reno Air Races I discovered that the anime-styled banners for several of the airplanes were not created by the teams, but were gifts from an artistically talented Japanese fan.

To recap, here are the ones from last September's post.

Posted by: Mauser at 02:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Fall season

So, browsing through the Neregate chart, I'm not seeing a lot to pique my interest. There's the new Lupin series, a continuation of Testament (which I never finished) the final Monogatari series (Still working on the first one, but wishing I could have seen the movie first).

Worst of all, not a single catgirl in sight.

Anyone interested in my pictures from the Reno Air Races?

Actually, there's a funny story related to that. If you recall my pics from last year about the Anime-styled banners for some of the planes, this year there were more. But the thing is, the race teams didn't do them -  apparently a race fan from Japan has been doing the banners on his own and giving them to the teams. Not only that, but this year he had a storybook (and a sticker) about the planes as mecha musume, going to a "School in the middle of the desert" that looks exactly like the home pylon at the races. It was cute.

Posted by: Mauser at 07:23 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Monster Girls Episode 9

I had to force myself to get through this over the course of the week. It was just... bad. Contrived, Stupid, Dull, those are all good words. One of the worst plots in Harem Anime is Team Jealousy. Where the Hero meets some other woman (in this case Agent Smith, whom the girls KNOW he's not interested in) and they gang up to spy on him, and hilarity ensues.

Only it didn't. Somewhere the writer got the idea that Suu, being a goo girl who can poorly imitate anything, can become clothes/disguises for the purpose of the plot, and of course fail at an inconvenient moment. The single worst example of this is where she becomes boobs and arms for Papi (The harpy), and she drops the phone, which sinks into her cleavage, literally, and Papi ends up wrestling with her "boobs" in an attempt to get the phone to come out, in the middle of an arcade, with dozens of nosebleeding guys watching and snapping pictures, unconscious of what she's doing.

Dumb. Seriously. I know she's supposed to be bird-brained, but I couldn't watch that.

I won't go into the details of the plot, such as it was. If the episode was saved by anything, it was this one shot:

Posted by: Mauser at 01:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Rokka - Braves of the Six Flowers, Everyday Life with Monster Girls, God Eater

So, finally getting caught up on the torrents (Horrible Subs, alas), this sure took a left turn. You expected typical RPG-like slash-'em-up? How about a locked room mystery, where there turn out to be SEVEN chosen braves instead of the requisite six? And of course, our Hero is set up to look like the fake. Unfortunately for him, his claim is to be the strongest man in the world, not the smartest, because anyone without a firm grip on the idiot ball could see the one hole in the narrative that could exonerate him. Episode 7 is incoming, so we shall see.

The Albino-nut-girl has an unexpected backstory. But it also explains why our hero being all heroic to her isn't doing her, or him, any good. Alas, the reveal about what's under her headdress and eyepatch does serious damage to her hotness quotient.

As for the Monster Girls, I had the misfortune of following Chihiro, who seems to have stalled after four episodes. I'm getting the next two from *sigh* HorribleSubs, since nobody else seems to be doing it, other than those who re-parasite off of HS.  But sometimes you do need a little mindless Harem Comedy with an interesting angle.

God Eater though, has lost me after three episodes. It shares the same dopey variety of mindless monsters who act in concert that you got with the execrable Muv-Luv Alternative -Total Eclipse, and characters that are too cool for military discipline, but lacks the vacuum-sealed-for-freshness flight-suits (I recently looked at the un-posted write up I did for that, and I can't even make sense of it any more.  Maybe I should just post the .zip file of all the screenshots for the rubber suit fetishists, just ask.).  But the highest level of dumb that really lost it for me was three of them running and jumping around on top of a cargo plane IN FLIGHT fighting off airborne monsters with swords (well, and blasters), and then, the way too cool leader manages to keep smoking the ENTIRE FIGHT.

It's a shame, because it's obvious they spent some money on the animation, but there isn't really a single likable character on the show, unless you're really into the whole rebellious badass fighter thing. Just once I'd like to see one of these new enlistees who disobeys orders and ends up in the brig actually end up in front of the firing squad, rather than getting excused for being special.

Posted by: Mauser at 12:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Uh-oh

DotClue is down. Correction: Was.

---

One problem in the Himawari rebuild was re-installing uTorrent. I had actually already had a problem because I tried moving the torrent files to the other drive where I kept the actual downloads (since they lived on a D: partition on the failing Seagate drive). uTorrent keeps its own data SOMEWHERE that I couldn't locate, and there was no way to edit it, so it could no longer associate the torrents with their data. You could click to play, and click to open the file location, but it wasn't happy with things, even when you changed the Directory preferences.

But I was able to fix it with a new install. Basically I had to re-add all the torrents I'd built up, after turning off preallocate files, and set the active and completed directories to the same (the Completed directory) then drop all the torrent files into the autoload folder to get them into the database, then force recheck on them. Then I could change the directories back to the normal setup.

Well, not entirely. I had about 50 or so problem children. A lot of files had somehow gotten a ".1" added into the file name before the .torrent extension. So I got some odd status error messages saying that uTorrent couldn't open the .Torrent file it had just loaded, showing the path and name without the .1. That was fixed by editing the file name and rechecking again. Then briefly letting them queue up for seeding so that uTorrent would move them to the completed directory. There were some other cases that were the reverse. A few torrents that wouldn't move from active to completed. A few where I had renamed the file within uTorrent (to regularize the order of some episodes or change periods to spaces) had reverted and also lost track of the associations, and now I'm left with about 8 that are unhappy because I had left out all those annoying text file and sample attachments, and now uTorrent thinks a partial block is missing from the meat of the file. Some of those are very old and the trackers are history, so while a couple amazingly were still running and repaired themselves, those last 8 are dead torrents that used to think they were complete, but don't any more.

Of course, I also lost all my labels, and completion dates, and ratios. This is a bit of a problem because I use the list and the labels to keep track of what I've actually managed to watch, as well as where it came from.

Posted by: Mauser at 05:03 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Rokka - Braves of the Six Flowers

So, while torrenting is down, I checked out CrunchyRoll, and ended up watching the first two episodes of Rokka - Braves of the Six Flowers because it looked like it had a bunny girl.

There are worse reasons for watching an anime.

Actually, for the typical Pseudo-medieval fantasy, where god-chosen warriors must unite to fight an ancient evil, it's managing to stick in a few unexpected twists, or at least interesting variants. The bunny princess is actually an extremely capable fighter, although not terribly experienced (and I can't tell for sure if the ears are part of her headdress, they probably are.). The roguish guy has been training almost all his life to be worthy of being chosen, and another warrior is known to the princess - he's one of her vassals who nearly bested her in the annual tournament. You see, this ancient evil keeps a reasonably consistent schedule, and with it being 300 years since the last attack, they're due. So they're not all strangers, and the choosing isn't a total surprise.

But the real surprise comes up in the second episode, and so this is a spoiler. One of the chosen is a warrior who has a rifle, and the power she manifests, as opposed to all the flying light blade powers everyone else has so far, is she can spontaneously make gunpowder, creating paper-wrapped cartridges around her supply of iron balls. She also an Albino, and keeps one eye covered. But where it really gets interesting is that she's a misanthrope, and apparently she's been going around the country murdering those who potentially might have been chosen. Rogeish Guy doesn't know that, and he's the first one to find her.

Clearly this is going to change, since this is only the second episode, but still, imagine if Sailor Mars was beating the crap out of her classmates just to keep them out of the running from maybe becoming one of the scouts. You gotta wonder whose side she's on.

So yeah, Albino Nutgirl, only not as fun-crazy as Shiro.

Posted by: Mauser at 03:40 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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