It’s hard to believe that the summer season is pretty much halfway over… what’s almost as hard to believe is that I’m all but caught up on almost all of the summer season shows I wanted to be actively watching. I figure I’ve gotten a good enough impression of all of them by this point, so here they are in rough order of my ranking of them.
Read the rest of this entry »
1-cour series shouldn’t take nearly a full year to finish… but that was the case for Bakemonogatari thanks to near-endless delays on SHAFT’s part in finishing up and releasing the final episode, and my eventually deciding to say ‘the heck with it’ and wait for the BRDs to be released to watch it in high-quality instead of the lousy streamed version. So, I sat down tonight with the full 1080p BRD-rip version and finished up the series. Read the rest of this entry »
Courtesy CR’s handy iPhone app, I checked out what will likely be the last of the new shows from this season that I’ll be looking at- Asobi ni Ikuyo!, titled by CR as ‘Bombshells from the Sky’. Somehow my limited knowledge of Japanese doesn’t quite think that the Japanese title and the one CR gave it match up, but somehow I think I’ll survive.
Asobi no Ikuyo starts out with a bang- specifically, a gunfight on the high seas between a power-armor clad girl and a ship of gunrunners which goes South when an unidentified object streaks by and results in the gunrunners blowing up their ship with the girl still onboard. The show then changes gears fast as we meet the male lead Kakazu- who so far looks to be your standard, average bespecled hapless male harem show lead as well as Eris, a cat alien who nobody at the funeral celebration for one of Kakazu’s relatives seems to find in any way out of the ordinary (beyond potentially accused of smuggling large melons down the front of her space-jumpsuit). She of course ends up in his bed- though breaking from tradition, simply because she’d a cat and it seemed a comfy place to sleep- and runs into both his apparent osana-najimi neighbor and schoolteacher, and eventually proves to them that she is indeed an alien. Later, Kakazu heads off to school for a bit and runs into a cute meganeko friend that he discusses DVDs with before she gets picked up for a ride home.
Sounds like pretty standard harem anime with an alien girl fare… except for the fact that pretty much every other girl around the lead except said alien is in some way involved in a secret organization/government conspiricy. The neighbor friend appears to be a trainee operative for the CIA or some other Western-based organization; his teacher is part of an organization dedicated to ‘Glorious First Contact’ with aliens and appears to think that Eris is just too absurd to actually be said First Contact. And the DVD-loaning meganeko? She’s the girl in power armor from the very beginning who apparently beyond her shy front in front of Kakazu is fairly coldblooded and ruthless… but still conflicted that she’s just been ordered to kill both Eris and the one looking after her: Kakazu. She’s also voiced by Hanazawa Kana, who is obviously perfectly suited for the role. Throw in an opening by relatively new seiyuu-supergroup Sphere (who also did the OP for Ichiban Ushiro no Daimao, which was definitely one of the better parts of that show…) and you’ve got a show that definitely surprised me as being a lot more interesting and having a lot more depth than I expected. I’m also a bit surprised to see Inoue Kikuko on the cast list- I forget that she’s still halfway in the business, even if not quite as much in central roles as she used to be…
It’s not one up as high as some like SW2 and Occult Academy, but I’d put it higher on my list than most of the others and solidly higher than where I expected it to be: in the ‘drop’ pile.
So, with Mako operational and largely stable, Hotaru behaving and… well, putting off dealing with Lark until after Otakon and most other halfway important things out of the way- and my largely needing a day to halfway RELAX, I sat down and watched through at least the first episode of the few shows that started nearly a month ago that looked or sounded at least halfway interesting.
Since I’ve finally largely got things finished up on Makoto (OK, yeah there’s still stuff to do- but it’s not crucial), I finally decided to take a bit of time to actually clean her up and attacked the stainless with Barkeeper’s Friend and a Scotch-Brite pad during a rainstorm last Saturday (the rain made rinsing it off a lot easier) followed by a coating of Glass Magic to protect against fingerprint smudging. The results were nothing short of breathtaking- I’d heard that BKF did an incredible job of cleaning up the stainless, but I was really shocked by just how incredibly good Makoto looked after just the half hour it took to go over all of the stainless. Up until that point I’d never seen my own car actually cleaned and shined up- I’d seen plenty of immaculate DeLoreans at DCS a month ago, but there was never the time to worry about something as superfluous as washing the car with everything else that needed to be done.
The following day, I stopped out at the parking lot for the closed-down mall near my house with my camera and took a bunch of pictures of the newly cleaned-up & interior-completed Makoto. I uploaded the pictures to a MobileMe photo album up online: http://gallery.me.com/rbabcock/100128
About halfway through the Spring Anime Season, I basically stopped having the time to watch anime altogether due to putting all of the time and energy I could toward getting Makoto finished up in time for DCS2010. Even with having Makoto running fairly well there has still been a lot to be done and I’ve had a hard time re-starting my anime-watching to begin to get caught up with the shows that ended several weeks ago, much less the ones that are continuing on or have started up as part of the Summer season. I’ve finally managed to finish the two that were at the ‘head of the class’ for me- Working!! and Angel Beats! though, leaving just the secondary 1-cour shows and the shows that are two-cour and have continued on to catch up on and one 2-cour that ended with the Spring season (Durararara!). I should probably finish up Duararara! next…
So, when Bioshock 2 came out this spring, I resolved to not even open the package on my copy until I had Makoto running and on the road. Once DCS was done and this was accomplished, I opened it up and started playing through it, and finally stayed up a bit late last night to plow through the last stretch and finish up the game.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m unfortunately WAY too tired to make a truly complete and as extensive of a report on the last few days since the DeLorean Car Show 2010 started. Honestly, at this point I have my concerns about it even being coherent. Hopefully a more complete post will follow in the next day or two. But for now- I had a fantastic time. I met a lot of interesting, fun, and often very helpful people and will be doing my best to make it to the next DCS in 2 years in Orlando, Florida.
I took a modest number of pictures (far less than I should have, unfortunately…)- but in spite of its not being as good as it could have been due to the lighting, this one is probably still my favorite:
That is Makoto, parked under the entryway to the Marriott Griffon Gate hotel where the car show was held this evening.
Accomplished:
Reinstalled instrument panel/binnacle
Changed rear seal on engine
Reinstalled flywheel & torqued attach bolts to spec
Largely worked out what the problems are with the wiring- but they require new parts I don’t have
Picked up food for the cookout at my place where the others will help install the transmission
To Do:
install driver’s seat & seat belt
Install rear-view mirror
Make wiring mod to rear marker lights
Clean up rear board connections as best as possible (one of my ground problems)
Install new engine cover hinges and locate all hardware to install engine cover & louvers
Notes:
By the time this gets actually posted, it’ll be the first day of DCS- though it won’t really start until 3:30pm. There’s still a modest bit to be done on the car before it’s ready to roll, but the primary things remaining are relatively small comparatively. The main things that needed to be done are done, and I’m confident I’ll have everything done before the ‘tech session’ at my house on Friday- but even if I don’t, there’ll be plenty of others there that will be helping out and knock them out in no time flat. There’s still the possibility that we’ll get everything together and it still won’t work- but at this point, there’s nothing to be gained by worrying about that.