As I've mentioned before, I wasn't exactly the most outgoing or interesting person in the class back in high school (equivalent). I didn't stand out at all, and I didn't really make much effort to do so. This wasn't to say that I was completely apathetic of my lack of presence, since I wanted to be Unique and Known and Popular, but I think that made me even more normal, since every teenager, sooner or later and for varying periods of time, wanted the same. In any case, I think I was already aware, back then, of how futile it would be to try to stand out in a positive way, to have an Interesting School Life.

Maybe if I had chosen a different seat, though, the fates would have aligned and I'd have discovered a secret book hidden in the deepest recesses of the library (gods knew I spent more than enough time in there; the librarian specifically informed me that over the course of a year, I borrowed over eight hundred books, albeit some of them repeats) with easy-to-understand step-by-step instructions on how to WIELD ZE POWAH OF MAGIC or something. How To Fire Eye-Beams For Dummies, maybe.

Research into various school days anime seems to show an intriguing correlation between seating position in class and the probability of Main Character status. Now, note that it appears to only increase the probability, rather than turn it into a certainty, and it seems to affect only Main Character status, rather than Side Character. It helps if you're seated near the Main Character in order to achieve Significant Side Character rank, if only due to increased proximity, but this is not always a given.

So, which is the best seat to choose if one wishes to have a greater chance at an Interesting School Life?

Read the rest of this entry »

It's been a busy past few days, and it's likely to get even busier. I've rather messed up my sleep schedule, and that's not even with gaming or whatever. Everything is due to obligations to other people, although to be fair I could technically turn down some of them, since they're not really that essential, and might be classified under "hobby activities". But still.

But I'll still be doing two posts a week at minimum. Well, it's not as though it's a very strenuous goal to reach.

I've been trying to pace myself out a bit, so that I don't burn out of anime blogging quickly and irretrievably. Apparently one commonly-accepted test to see whether an anime blog will survive for the near future is whether it lasts beyond a month. I don't personally foresee any problems with this, but it's not like I can see the future with any clarity. Or at all, for that matter.

In any case, this is nothing more than an excuse to post something. Anime Blogging has never really been something I've thought of as What I Do, but rather What Other People Do. I'm trying to identify myself as an anime blogger, rather than just someone who thinks of something and posts that with no consideration of inadvertantly spamming the post aggregators with useless and trivial words that don't even deserve to be called "thoughts". They're like Thoughts Lite. Diet Thinking, maybe, with eighty percent less substance.

Or maybe I'm thinking about this too much. I've been told it's a character flaw.

Also, apparently Mei codes in hexadecimal.

In lieu of an actual post with, yanno, substance, I'll just mention that I'd like to see Venus Vanguard actually keep up its front as a store, selling various trinkets and clothes (probably vastly overpriced) to people who manage to find its relatively unfriendly location under the bridge. Come to think of it, how does Lucia support her lifestyle, anyway? The store seems almost designed to keep customers away, and I don't think monster-hunting is really all that profitable.

I'm not even sure Sumire's being paid. Lola probably isn't, or it'll all contravene some child labour laws somewhere.

I've forgotten the exact first time I watched my first episode of Card Captor Sakura. Fuzzy memory places it at sometime around the time I was first discovering what anime actually was, watching Ranma 1/2. Or maybe it was later, whether I didn't recognize the television listing as anime at first, or if I had casually dismissed it out of hand.

I do know that I first realized how deeply I was entrenched in my love for CCS sometime in late 2003. I had definitely seen at least some of it before then, since I distinctly remember it as "going back to the anime I watched before". And so I watched it, and it remains my favourite anime of all time to this day.

Card Captor Sakura is a fairly long series, at seventy TV episodes and two movies (and a few other short extras). The number of cards Sakura has to capture grew from nineteen in the twelve-volume manga to fifty-three in the anime. Some plot points were changed, others remained largely the same, but the anime and manga are largely seen to be more or less equal in quality, or at least popularity. There's also the panned Nelvana dubbing into Cardcaptors, but that's the last I'll mention it. The debates are ancient by Internet standards, if not prehistoric.

Most people I know who don't have a visceral hatred of all things magical girl don't have anything bad to say about CCS, or at least nothing seriously bad. It's a charming show, a tad bit more mature than it would appear to be, but never losing sight of its brightness or good cheer. It's sugary sweet, but seldom saccharine, and it's the sort of cute that can be bottled and weaponized.

It's the embodiment of moe. And it's one of the main reasons why I started this blog in the first place.

I'll be blogging all seventy episodes and two movies of Card Captor Sakura, which will last me for quite a while. I'm not going to be focusing exclusively on it to the exception of all else, of course, but if there comes a time when I need to post an entry and I'm blanking on anything more current to blog about, out comes the CCS entry.

The format will likely be as much Episode Summary as I can stomach, with a heavy emphasis towards ramblings and thoughts. I've watched CCS so many times that it cannot remotely qualify as "new", and nothing in it can surprise me, but I'll never turn down any reason to rewatch it once again.

I'm blogging CCS because I want to, and it's the best way I can think of to show my love of the anime. If anyone wishes to join me, they're more than welcome to.

An episode centering around Mei and Mika this time. Considering how much focus Mei has had, I'd say that she's right up there with Mika and Manabi when it comes to character importance. She does have the most obvious character hooks, what with her very tsundere feel: a very harsh and humourless exterior, with an insecure and shy base personality, and either innately competent in studies, or highly motivated (driven, perhaps) to be competent.

As for Mikan (as Mika's friends call her), she's probably our Viewpoint Character, in much the same way Kyon was in Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, except that the viewpoint is not so strictly limited to only our designated Viewpoint Character and nothing else. And Manabi is, of course, our title character, with all that entails.

Manabi Straight isn't really the sort of show that lends itself well to episode summaries and thoughts. Things happen, and about the best I can come up with in the end are "well, things happened". It might technically be considered slice-of-life: yes, it occurs in a future with hover-skateboards and PDAs for every high school student and declining birth rates turning into a problem for schools, and the characters have rather pronounced personality traits, but it's still just about them going through their high school life with these circumstances as best as they can together. There's usually not a lot one can say about slice-of-life anime except "things happened".

But I need to write an entry for today, and I suppose this is it.

No, this isn't going to be an episode summary as such. (Unless one really stretches the definition of "episode summary".) My loathing of taking and arranging screenshots has not abated, even with IrfanView and its handy batch-conversion/resize feature; what irritates me the most about doing screenshots is the need to decide which scene to screencap, and which to discard. After I tried taking some objectively interesting screencaps of the episode, I slowly grew more and more irritable, until I finally gave up, and decided to just use the screencaps that I personally liked, and had something to ramble on about.

Not an episode summary; not quite episode thoughts and impressions, since it assumes that you're already familiar with what happened in the episode, and I'm not so much talking about the episode as talking in general, and just using the episode as a backdrop. It's like my Livejournal, except with a thin veneer of anime.

Yes, I do like to hear the sound of my own keyboard.

Read the rest of this entry »

After I started to seriously watch anime, going from "hey, nice art and story style" to "okay, this character is definitely a tsundere archetype, and that one fits more into gothloli", I quickly picked up an essential lesson, which is that I should, never, ever, on pain of intense and unending depression, watch any anime while hungry. This is because I tend to watch anime at night, when all the stores are closed, and I tend to eat a lot at one go (with my strangely high metabolism even with a sedentary lifestyle, I've not yet gotten remotely plump; in fact, I'm downright skinny). This usually means that when the part where the characters start chowing down on some tasty-looking food happens, I start feeling a bit peckish, and raid the fridge, but find out that I'm out of snacks and other midnight meals, and it is too late to buy any more. Too tired to cook, too poor to order in, and I end up trying to sleep with my stomach not really that empty, but my brain drooling at visions of huge bento sets, made with a smile.

Now, I'm not sure why food seems to be a prominent feature in anime. I might guess that it may have something to do with culture, and one's innate pride in it. To showcase a culture, I would, in my ignorance about how such things are really done, first look at the language, followed by the mode of dress, any observances (religious or secular), and quite importantly, the cuisine. And it's not just what the food is, but also how it is presented and prepared. It's the difference between scrambled eggs and tamagoyaki, between spaghetti and ramen, between pizza and okonomiyaki.

Or I could be wrong, and it's all just some very common form of Dischism. The animators were hungry, and so they drew lots of food.

The preparation and consumption of food is fairly well-represented in many anime, especially harem comedies. Keeping that in mind (ie no pointing out some random MANLY ANIME that has the characters EAT MANLY THINGS like snakes and rats and light bulbs), we'll have a look at the various types of food that seem to pop up time and time again in anime.

Read the rest of this entry »

"What is the capital of Assyria?"

It's fairly well-known among my friends, both online and whatever Real Life anime fans I've managed to locate, that my tastes in anime are somewhat skewed, shall we say, towards the more moe part of the anime spectrum. In fact, it's become something of a running joke: if it features female characters who look cute and a little on the young side, it immediately becomes "the sort of anime DK likes". And yes, "stay away from the loli" jokes abound.

I play along, of course. It's what friends do.

Several people have attempted to sway my tastes over to other genres. "Watch this," they say. "If you don't like it, there's something wrong with you." "This", in far, far too many cases, usually turns out to be something I don't, in fact, like. So, is there something wrong with me? How would one define "something wrong"?

Read the rest of this entry »

I'm (currently) a member of the University of Michigan Japanese Animation Society, or Animania. Basically, what we do is hold an anime screening once a month (on Saturdays), with a special Extra-Large screening near the end of the year, usually in early November or late October, called Con Ja Nai (lit: "not a con"). We show fansubs, specifically shows that haven't been licenced in the US yet (or if their licencing announcement occurs less than a week before the screening).

Directions to get to the screening are in the website, even if I can't begin to help decipher them, since I know absolutely nothing about the roads of USA. Admission is free, and the club supports itself by selling raffle tickets at one dollar each.

So what does this have to do with this anime blog (apart from the obvious membership thing)? Well, I figured that I may as well give a quick run-through of the anime we'll be showing at our next screening. The views espoused here are entirely mine; I do not, in any way, officially represent the club. In fact, my opinions are usually in the tiny minority of the club's.

Our next screening is on the 10th of February, 2007, from 1600h to 2359h. (Further screenings are on the 10th of March and 7th of April.)

Read the rest of this entry »

One problem with starting an anime blog with a marked dislike of going through an episode taking and formatting screenshots is that I don't actually have a ready-made source of blog post inspiration with the Brand New anime season, only obtainable through raws, or some such. There's been a few waves of introspection among other anime bloggers (before the merest hint of a twinkle of the existence of this blog, full disclosure requires me to admit) about the very large number of anime blogs doing episode summaries, and the relatively scarce number of blogs doing primarily editorials and thoughts. The problem with doing editorials for me, though, is that I don't exactly have a lot to say about a great many things. Sooner or later, I'm going to run out of opinions, and be reduced to "um, it's nice" or "um, it's not that nice".

But I don't like to do episode summaries. The thought of going through an entire episode and picking which screencaps are good to use and actually screencapping the exact moment for best framing and resizing everything and renaming everything and uploading everything and placing them strategically throughout the post and thinking up of good ALT and TITLE attribute captions and making sure that the entire thing retains a modicum of user readability and doing this all with only a basic understanding of Notepad++ and GIMP because I'm a cheap bastard… it all begins to sap my will to blog. I want to just get on with it and be able to get straight to "OMG anime is so cool" and "moe! hanyaa~n" and all that.

Therefore, full episode summaries only when absolutely necessary. I really respect those who take the trouble to screencap everything, and I can never understand the occasional lament that "everyone's doing episode summaries". For me, episode summaries are hard; random ramblings that can be passed off as "editorials" are easy.

To compound this difficulty, this anime season, I haven't really found a lot of shows that not only catch my interest, but that I can also find things to talk about. For the most part, I end up with Thoughts And Impressions that pretty much read "stuff happened, was interesting". I don't have the same passion for the current season's shows that I had for The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya or Zero no Tsukaima or Card Captor Sakura.

This isn't to say that I have burnout on new anime or something, or a call for "the good old days". If anything, I love the current trend towards moe shows (obviously) and harem comedies, and I like many of the newer shows compared to older ones. And it's not that I dislike the current season of shows, as much as I simply can't think of anything to say about them, from episode to episode. I'm watching them, but I may not be blogging them.

I still haven't decided whether I want to blog any of the new season or not on a consistent basis. While I'm trying to decide, I'll just give a very quick run-through of my initial impressions of a few of the shows.

Read the rest of this entry »