Here we go. Even the bird chick couldn’t decide who to flatten first.

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In this episode, Rukia rocks out. Seriously. There’s a little wimpiness to start, but she really closes the deal. Good stuff.

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Here we go, I figure that the first ep of Samurai Champloo is probably the best way to start this anime blog experiment.

So what is there to say? Samura Champloo is incredible. The music is great, the animation is incredible, the characters rock, and finally: wow. I’m speechless. There are quite a few “A rank” shows that I’m watching right now, but this may actually cause me to need to drag in video game cliches and start an “S rank.”

The plot goes like this: Mugen and Jin meet up in a town headed by a corrupt governor. Jin kills the governer’s Yaguu bodyguards and Mugen takes out the governor’s asshole son’s cadre. The two of them then proceed to start a duel of their own in Fuu’s guardian’s restraunt (she’s an orphan). The restraunt burns down due to random arson and the two are arrested. Seems the governer’s son died in the fire (no big loss. The governor was abusing his power and the son was abusing waitresses). Fuu springs the two and extracts a promice to chase down a samurai who smells of sunflowers. If she can keep the two of them from continuing their duel.

Sounds like standard samurai stuff right? Well this is Shinichiro Watanabe, late of Bebop. Lord but the style here practically drips off the screen. I mean I rarely watch shows that I want to re-watch right after finishing them. Finding these screenshots was an exercise in not actually just watching the episode over and over.

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This whole ramble is a little spoilery. Just get over yourself and read the damn thing. I won’t give away endings or character deaths, I promice.

Yeah, I was apparently under the influence of painkillers when I spoke ill of Gantz, and I hope that it will forgive me. Apparently we are on the outs though, because it refuses to play on several of my machines. It will work on the server though, but no sound because it is a server and not built for sound. Yeah, a good several episodes, and I finally got the translations for the manga from Omanga. It just took a while to find working links, I was getting 403’s on most of the older chapters.

Yeah, last weekend was hella manga weekend. Five volumes of Gantz, two and a half of Drifting Classroom, and twenty-fucking-seven volumes of Naruto. No, I didn’t read all that ninja action, but I did download it. I love the Gantz manga. Even with the incredibly dark violence-ridden action sequences, they manage to inject odd (bizzare as the alien-hunting) bits of humor.

Here’s an example: the main female character (who Gantz calls “Titz” when handing out points) finds out that the original her isn’t dead. See, when people end up in the apartment Gantz uses for a base of operations, their real bodies are dead. The people in the apartment who go out and hunt aliens are actually copies of dead people. So Kei finds out that the original Kei is still alive, and that she is an exact duplicate. Because her suicide attempt happens in the shower she appeared in the apartment naked. Kurono gave her his clothing because he had the “Cosplay Suit” (Gantz’s crazy stat-boosting wetsuit) on at the end of the mission. Kei finds his student handbook in the pocket of his jacket and tracks him down. She then asks the poor bastard if he can keep pets in his apartment because well, she’s not a registered citizen (only a copy of one) and would like a place to crash.

When he tries to put the moves on her, she responds “You wouldn’t have sex with your pets, would you?” He says “Well, I did use to make out with my dog.”

And apparently Gantz manages to pick up Sadako from “The Ring.” Girl in a white dress with black hair over her face that is always hovering just outside of the field of vision.

Wild stuff.

“Drifting Classroom” is another “Lord of the Flies” basically. The main premise is that an entire elementary school complete with students and faculty is randomly transported foreward through time to a nuclear waseland. The nearly 500 people in this building then have to cope with reality as they see it. Most of the adults then promptly go insane and start either trying to or actually killing each other. Suddent explosions of violence lurking in the hearts of the mild mannered seems to be a commonly used plot device.

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There. Done with manga-babbing. Ok, Jason? If Bubba Ho-tep is to happen it would have to happen tomorrow at seven. Then you would promptly have to go back to Florence. I’m tired as fuck and I have to work this Saturday (we have to make up the snow days from that week we had off). The fact that it is at the Nick means it will be released pretty damn quick. A quick check of Amazon reveals a release date of May 25, so it is actually appearing faster than I though. My plan then is to order it (along with the next Pratchett, a Tiffany novel also coming out on the 25th), then we will watch it at my house. I’ll get a DVD player for the living room shortly, and we won’t have to cope with the Nickelodeon’s hard-ass wooden seats. And the inevitable Art House Wanker croud. See, some people are lucky, and probably have more than one local theatre carrying odd movies. We down south have but the one, and all the Cafe Depresso croud go to it.

So I cleaned my entire house yesterday. Well, I cleaned my room, the living room/den/dining room, hallway, and my bathroom. The Third Bedroom and Kitchen are waiting for another day to be cleaned. Probably today. I feel a warm glow of accomplishment and the whole place smells of Fabreeze. If Patrick knew I was linking to his webpage from ‘98 then he’d probably get rid of the damned thing. Next on the agenda? The Kitchen and Third Bedroom, then folding laundry and moving the server’s data drive over to the removable rack I just bought. Then possibly mowing the lawn tomorrow or Thursday.

Oh, I can’t do Ho-Tep Thursday because of Kung Fu. I’ll be taking a lengthy Kung Fu Hiatus for the next few months to make room in my life for Calculus so there will be intense training for this week.

Anyway, is that a good plan? The buying-the-dvd thing, I’ll handle the cleaning myself.

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So yeah, a little site-work a few anime thoughts and a download mainly for Jason, but my other friends should like it too.

Well, If you look the “Newest Article” thing isn’t there anymore. “Where is it?” You ask. I’m glad you did, because if you didn’t I would have to nervously glance aside and change the thread of conversation. See, I am now using Mark Paschal’s CatEntries plugin. Now I can define an MTEntries tag that respects limiting to certain categories and number of entries and number of days. So now the “Newest Entries” thing is the last one entry in the “cat-features” category within the last fourteen days. Rockin’ I’m pretty proud of myself.

I don’t know about Gantz. It was incredible for the first ep, but the next two have been really poorly animated and rediculously slow. I still like the idea and will hunt down the manga relentlessly. I will also watch the show, but it is now a second rank show. It can still get back into the saddle, but it will have to get off its ass.

La Pucelle is coming tomorrow, despite what EB’s own webpage says. Bastards.

So now for something for my friends. A radio dramatization of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Horror Within. Next time you guys come down I have a whole CD of these. Not Lovecraft, but various horror and detective-based radio dramas. The one with Zombies is incredible. There’s a whole hell of a lot of news on this one. Just wait through all the news about Cambodia and Nixon. George Bush Sr. makes an appearance though.

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So I’ve been watching a boatload of Witch Hunter Robin recently, and i have a few things to say about it. I’m not a huge fan of the opening theme. Its got a K.D. Lang-ness to it that I’m not a big fan of. Of course this comes sandwiched between episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Inner Universe is currently queuing up to be added to a CD once i get bored enough.

My theme will be songs about and by robots. I think that’ll be fun enough.

Speaking of robots, I’ve now gotten both the Mindstorms Expansion set (”Giving you things we should have put in the base set since last week!”) and all my Basic Stamp stuff that i had on order. The plan in a nutshell is to make a test platform out of Mindstorms and see if i can get the thing behaving somewhat like it knows what it is doing, then expand it to the “real life” platform of the Basic Stamp. Also i may end up seeing what can be accomplished with the Jornada. If it can support a telnet connection, and if i can use that to drive the thing around over the WiFi. And if i can you can better believe that it will be time for an outdoor antenna.

While I’m on the WiFi tangent I’m still working on my brother’s room, and there is still that damn ghetto-style cable spanning the hallway. I had the perfect PCMCIA to ISA adapter card then it turns out he doesn’t have any ISA slots at all. Damned Gateway.

We also rearranged the Family Room and moved all those damn boxes out of it. If anybody wants to come over they can actually have a place to sit that isn’t my bed. This was inapplicable when my girlfriend was the only visitor, but when you guys came down the lack of seating was not a good thing. I also got a better shower head, but that will interest nobody but people who shower in my house. Namely me. That’s about all I’ve got to say about that.

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So i was checking out Production I.G.’s website when i came across the page for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex i thought nothing of it, except that it may very well be cool, but that i wouldn’t see it for atleast a year or more. Then a few days ago i remembered that i’ve downloaded quite a bit of anime recently via WinMX, and SAC may be already fansubbed.

It turns out that it has been subbed and a few (six to be exact) episodes are available for download. And download them i did. I waited for a few days to actually get into the queues, but then when i did get them, i managed to download nearly all six eps in eight hours or thereabouts.

I watched the six and i have to say that they are really nice, tight little stories that manage to paint a remarkably detailed picture of Shirow’s Ghost-world (not to be confused with the comic or movie actually called Ghostworld). More detailed, in fact, than the movie version of Ghost in the Shell. I really did like the manga, and the movie didn’t really live up to it in any area except readiculously high production values.

Starting from the kickass openning theme (which i will provide for download at the end of this article) to the really bright, well drawn animation the whole thing reeks of quality. The action and the double-double crosses are vintage Ghost, and are almost of the complexity of the ending to Steven Brust’s Yendi.

That Yendi thing won’t mean much to the garden variety reader, but suffice to say that the ending to said book involves a triple-triple cross. I think. I can’t quite be certain.

Ah well, the visuals are great, the storytelling is great, and if you are going to hit WinMX to download your own, be sure to get the AonE versions, their subs are of rediculously high quality (actually exceeding some professional subtitling i’ve seen) and they bother to sub the openning theme in cyrillic russian, anglo-alphabet russian, and the english translation. Or you could always buy the actual DVD’s from CDJapan good news is that they are releasing the OST this month.

• Ghost in the Shell SAC - 06 - Inner Universe.mp3

And of course, its Yoko Kanno. Does she do everything nowadays?

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So yeah, don’t you just hate it when you are just barely ahead of the curve in certain ways? For instance, i discovered Haibane Renmei just a little bit ahead of everyone. I was fine and happy, downloading episodes from WinMX and then came the Queue Apocalypse. You see, Fred from Megatokyo mentioned HR in his newspost, and then a nice [Queued 20 35 65] suddenly becomes [Queued 95 101 110]. Sigh.

And then apparently the garden variety MT fan has trouble reading, because everybody then tries to download the same files i’m pulling, at the same time. Great job guys, i’m sure that the “10% complete” that was next to the file wasn’t enough of a tipoff, but if i’ve got five of you people trying to download a file that my connection is being used to DL at about 5k/sec, then the download rate goes down even further. Just to let you guys know.

However the show itself is what you’ve come to expect from ABe. Really well-developed characters animated in an incredible fashion, with a really hearty and well-rounded story behind them. Of course i haven’t managed to get very far what with 50 people trying to steal my bandwidth, but what i’ve seen has more than a story, it has a pervasive feeling a flavour that stays with you after you finish watching the episodes.

It is a tentative querilous sort of thing that really pervades the whole production. Something like NieA_7’s reserved solumn happiness. I have no idea how the man manages to do this, but he’s got me damn impressed. I mean that’s a gift right there. Something akin to actual artistry, and a thing that we very rarely see these days with all of the sentai knockoffs that purvade the market these days.

Well, it is certainly something, and i will have to buy the DVD’s when it is finally imported. That is more than i can say for Hellsing, which is cool, but not really that cool.

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