Anime

Sounan desu ka?


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?”).

If you like Piña Co Lada...


…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.

Itami Hoihoi!


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.

If I made an AMV... (2)


(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”.

The Grooming Of The Raccoon Waifu


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…

Dear Souji Okita,


This is a block. Not a great block, since it’s a little low, and too close to your head, but an incoming strike will at least hit the blade before it hits your head:

This is not a block. Honestly, you’re about five seconds away from re-enacting Ben Kenobi’s final scene in Star Wars:

Run away!


Unrelated, my shins, calves, and ankles are still complaining about the stairs to the top of Himeji Castle…

Hey, at least she's got a cat


“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”