“It was very difficult to get the Irish girls to expose their breasts.”
— Insightful commentary from John Boorman, director of ZardozDear Savinelli,
Please hire someone to clean up the hilariously bad computer-generated translations on your US web site. Trust me, there are plenty of recently-graduated liberal-arts majors eager to work with prose more complicated than “do you want fries with that?”.
When the pipe is running, you are holding in your hands every now and slowly count to six. If you succeed you can safely continue to smoke a pipe, otherwise you must stop until the pipe cools. Long waits are not necessary: it takes typically a few seconds of interruption and in most cases not even need to turn on the pipe. however, if the pipe were to be shut down, never mind: you again. Many burns are caused by smoking because they fear that the pipe goes out and then suck up too often.
And this is why we can't have nice things
From the Denver Post:
A Colorado teen is recovering from serious burns he suffered when the fireworks he was attempting to mix in a coffee grinder exploded. ... the teen had read online about how larger fireworks could be made from smaller ones
Perhaps he should have stuck to online tutorials about how to smoke at home without getting busted?
Wait, someone needed instructions for this?
Tip for the day: if you’re an underage cigarette smoker, and you need to search a wiki for instructions on how to sneak a smoke at home without getting busted, consider getting out more. This also applies to the entry on how to bum a smoke…
The true villain of Daimaou
Clearly, the oracular bird at the school lied to conceal the identity of the demon king.
Goofy, but what would you call it?
Pete has shared the good news that Asobi ni Iku Yo! has been licensed for a US release. Also the bad news that it will appear under the title Cat Planet Cuties. This is not necessarily more accurate than the title Crunchyroll chose to stream it under, Bombshells from the Sky, but it’s definitely not worse.
Given how little is left of the R1 market for anime, I’m surprised they didn’t just go with the original title, though. Cat Planet Cuties has a certain pulp SF sound to it, perhaps leaning a bit more towards Leather Goddesses of Phobos than Flash Gordon, but I don’t see it drawing in more potential customers than the original. Perhaps the best solution would be to use both.
Could be worse, given the history of anime in the US; we could have ended up with Fur-st Contact! or Tails From Outer Space!
[At the moment, Funimation’s site is just a cast picture, with a release date that suggests a dubbed box set, hopefully including the OVA]
AsoIku book five quick take
Every school festival should include clever little robots, sinister secret agents, heavily-armed maids, crazed cat-ear lovers, surprisingly-capable friendly strangers, and several dozen flying catgirls.
Lots of little bits of character development, mostly in the supporting cast. Jens, Muttley, 6-chan, Sada-yan, Kuune, Chaika, and Director Kawasaki all get some very interesting moments, and Team Ichika is building up into a major mystery. Jack shows up but doesn’t do much; in fact, Aoi’s old handler Endo has more of a part than she does.
There’s no obvious organized opposition in this volume, just the inevitable consequences of having A Real Live Alien at a high school festival. Plenty of build-up for the next one, though.
The Demon King in the Editing Room
As part of my spring cleaning this year, I decided it was finally time to clean out the mess of obsolete AV gear in the family room. Two 200-disc CD changers? Gone! Laserdisc player? Gone! Original Xbox, DXS, Slink-E, 100 Mb/s switch, DishPlayer, S-VHS player? Gone, gone, gone! 32-inch, 185-pound television set and bulky stand? Oh, that is so gone (and carried out of the house by someone else). Actual television service was gone several years ago, when Dish Network stopped supporting the WebTV DishPlayer, and I really hadn’t missed it.
But now that things have settled down in HD-land (apart from the 3-D nonsense that I want no part of), I decided I could safely buy a decent LED-backlit HD TV and Blu-ray player, and find the least-outrageously-overpriced TV service to subscribe to that included TV Japan (which turned out to be Dish Network again).
But of course I needed something to watch in HD. My Blu-ray collection is small, and the expensive but poor selection at Amazon Japan suggests it will remain so for some time, but there’s still some anime getting released in the US, so in addition to the AsoIku OVA, I now own a copy of Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou.
It’s not bad at all, and I certainly don’t regret the purchase, but my primary reaction to it was “I’d love to see the story this highlight reel is based on”. Compared to AsoIku, it feels incredibly rushed: the relationships, the escalating situation, the development of the supporting cast. It just rips through the material at a breakneck pace, leaving very little time for the viewer to connect with any of it.
Both series are based on roughly the same amount of original text. Daimaou is, as far as I can tell, based on the first five novels in the series. AsoIku is based on the first four novels, plus the end of the sixth and a standalone story pulled from the ninth, and some scenes that appear to be completely original. Light novels are short, episodic, and dialog-heavy, making it reasonable to convert one book into 2-3 episodes without losing too much, so why is one so much more coherent than the other?
Focus. In AsoIku, they trimmed and consolidated the cast to focus attention on a small band of heroes facing a single villain; there are some dangling plot threads and mystery characters, but they round out the world without distracting from the core story. In Daimaou, not so much. I lost count of the factions, and couldn’t tell you who fought who for what reason. Or, really, when and why Junko fell for Akuto. Honestly, unless I’m in the mood to take notes, I think my primary motive for rewatching it will be Peterhausen.
Well, that and the fan-service.
[I am sufficiently intrigued that I’d consider reading the novels, but I’d have to do the OCR and proofreading myself, since all I’ve found are scans. If I’m going to do that much work, I’d rather do it for a story I’ve already spent some time on, like Rune Soldier. After I finish with AsoIku, of course, which is now in unexplored territory; among other things, book five appears to be building up the tie-in to the author’s first novel.]
Dear AsoIku Production Team,
If you are blessed with the opportunity to make a sequel, please include the following scene from book 5, chapter 4:
Chaika is house-sitting while Kio and the gang are off at the school festival's opening parade. Ichika comes over to hang out with her pal 6-chan, but he and all the other assistoroids are helping with the festival, and won't be back until late. Easy-going Ichika pulls out a bag from the local convenience store and suggests they share the contents. Which includes beer...
When the gang gets home, they find two dead-drunk loli catgirls surrounded by empty beer cans and snack wrappers, singing "That's The Way" by KC & The Sunshine Band. Blues-style.
