Missed this when it came out last year.

One thing that’s always bugged me about the opening credits of Vividbutt Observation is Wakaba-chan’s kendo scene.

She’s swinging her bokken more or less horizontally, which means she’s hitting with the flat of the blade (foreshortening distorts it, but at best it’s at 45° to the target). Much, much worse, the curvature of the blade says she’s holding it the normal way, but the edge is up, and she doesn’t look anything like Rurouni Kenshin (fortunately).

I’ve been out sick the past few days, with my head a bit foggy, so in my more lucid moments I’ve just been playing Death Road To Canada (on Windows; I got sick of the crashes in the Mac version) and watching anime. For reasons involving low-braincell-count, I just rewatched the first season of Haruhi in broadcast order.

I hadn’t seen it in quite a few years, and I still haven’t seen any of the newer stuff (‘Endless Eight’ sounded so immensely tedious that I didn’t even try). One of the many things I’d forgotten since it originally aired was how annoying Mikuru’s voice is. Other than that, it was decent enough.

Maybe if my brain unfogs, I’ll watch something new this weekend…

The previously-linked adorable I-8 cosplayer is Pingky aka Momo aka Shimon.

Apparently there was an OVA followup to the series, released with a limited edition of manga volume 9. I don’t see a sub, but the 480p raw is available. It seems something’s amiss with Hayakawa…

What’s the headquarters for all Strike Witch forces?

The Asobi Ni Iku Yo novels ended at 20 (I haven’t gone back to see how/if he wrapped it up). Cattail Output (the spinoff featuring an undercover Melwin) only ran for 4. He had another long series Hashire, Ute that was up to 12 books, but I don’t know much about it, apart from the loli cover girls.

It looks like his current series are mutants and yet another boy-goes-to-fantasy-world story. And this:

NSFW

At least I hope it’s a series. “Machinegun with Elf and Bikini” has clear potential.

Songs written specifically for the credits of an anime series tend to be so carefully designed for a 1:30 runtime that it’s difficult to expand them to full-length songs, or to come up with a fitting live video featuring the performer. Two notable successes are the OP songs from Kannagi (which I can only find in a low-res version on an obscure Chinese video site…) and Bakuon, both of which make full use of their quite appealing singers.

The folks responsible for the My Hero Academia ED song Dakara Hitori Ja Nai, however, clearly had no idea how to seamlessly expand 1:30 to 4:20, and the video director wasn’t content to rely on the appeal of the five pretty young women who make up Little Glee Monster. The result is… interesting. I count at least three kitchen sinks.

more...