23 33 confirmed dead in arson attack at Kyoto Animation’s studios. Many more seriously injured.

Thoughts and prayers.

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Japan Times says at least 33 dead, but there’s no link to details. Sentai Filmworks has a GoFundMe page that’s already raised nearly $700,000.

BBC agrees with the 33 number.

ANN has details with links to sources.

Rune Soldier.

The loosely-related Record of Lodoss War series is collected on Bluray and available for streaming from Funimation, but I doubt RS will ever get a re-release.

Fortunately I have the DVDs, although I suppose I should rip them to avoid eventual bit-rot (and load them onto my iPad for the next trip to Japan…).

(OP video after the jump, because Youtube embeds just keep getting heavier and more intrusive, and I haven’t had time to set up a “click static thumbnail to load video” wrapper).

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One of the more entertaining random quotes in the DanMemo game:

In related news, the movie is coming to (some) theaters on July 23, and the second season debuts July 12th.

In an idle moment, I checked out the glass-half-empty that is the current anime season on Crunchyroll, and found a series where the weak pun in the title is being mistranslated as Are You Lost? (more sensibly, “Are We Shipwrecked?”).

The first 15-minute episode sets up the scenario quite simply: four busty high school girls are washed up on a deserted island after their student cruise goes wrong, and must survive with their convenient array of tropes. I watched it only a few hours ago, and already I can’t remember anything but their defining clichés and their bustlines.

I think the second season of DanMachi starts in two weeks; maybe that will suck less than the Sword Oratorio side series (aka “Is It Wrong To Make A Deranged Lesbian Fangirl The Protagonist In A Spinoff?”).

…there was a spinoff manga featuring her adventures before the gate opened.

…at a generously-drawn age 14.

File under peculiar the fact that while Amazon is swimming in a sea of rapidly-translated dumpster-fire light novels, Gate is nowhere to be found. If you want to read it in English, there’s a mostly-complete fan translation of the first novel series, but not the eight-volume side stories or the new “season 2” series, because the only group that’s interested can’t find a Chinese translation to work from.

Someone briefly licensed the manga, but abandoned it after releasing the first volume.

Fear the cute ones!

Besides the sheer cuteness, this picture is notable for including an amusing conceptual tag, 伊丹ホイホイ = “Itami (Our Hero) trap”, from the popular “Gokiburi Hoi-hoi” cockroach trap.

This is the only acceptable kind of trap in anime.

(previously…)

…it would set scenes of Rory Mercury to Biyuden’s Jajauma Paradise:

The lyrics translation is iffy (particularly handling attributive verbs and te-form), but it should suffice to know that, in context, jajauma means “spirited filly”.

I’m finally caught up on 狸の幼妻の育ち上がり, er, “The Rising of the Shield Hero”. I like it, but it helped that I went into it with fair warning about the infodumps and enough episodes out that I could watch two at a time. And that I ignored the fan-wanking about how it was just awful compared to the manga and the light novels and the web novels, etc, etc.

(original image by yodane, here; titling by me; click for full-sized image upscaled with (appropriately) waifu2x)

Hopefully it will do well enough for a second season, because they can’t possibly wrap up even a highly-condensed adaption of the main story, currently spread across 20+ novels and not yet finished. Unless they blitz through the waves to a Type 1 Tenchi Solution in the last few episodes. 😁

Now all I have to do is come up with something else to watch while on the elliptical…