Plus, they give Fancy Lala (a wonderful series) four stars, and FLCL (which sucks) two. (Well, they did scrounge up someone who liked it for a second opinion, but hey.) And five stars to Full Moon wo Sagashite. Hmm. And one star to Fushigi Yuugi: Eikoden, which not only sucks but retroactively made the original series suck too.

These people seem to have their heads screwed on right.

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If he doesn't end up messily dead by the end of the series, there's no justice.

Update: Well, yes, a ten-foot blade through the chest should do nicely.

On the one hand, Narutaru seems to have gotten some really bad reviews. On the other hand, the worst of those were clearly written by idiots, and even the others seem to be of the "I don't understand it therefore it's bad" pattern. We'll see.

Update: On the third hand, this review, which is the only one I've seen that makes the Khmer Rouge link, gives it 4 stars.

* Not by name, but "A simpler society is better. There's no need for electrical or water services. Return to the original agricultural civilisation. I'll kill all medical eggheads, wealthy people and cultured people." doesn't leave much room for discussion.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:58 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Midori no Hibi is about... About as silly a concept as I've ever seen.

The premises for shows these days seem to get more and more out there, but I'm wondering if they're starting to reach the limit of how ridiculous I can think they are. After all, I can't think of too many things more ridiculous than a girl suddenly becoming the right hand of a guy that she likes...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The only fansubbed series I'm following closely right now is Aishiteru ze Baby, which I've mentioned here before. It's a charming series, but it's not terribly dramatic or exciting. Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien is well-crafted but ultimately deeply unsatisfying. Kyou Kara Maou has some good moments, but seems to be a basically silly adventure story. Pretty Cure has a great opening theme, but the magical companions of the two girls are possibly the most irritating things I have ever seen in anime.

Full Moon wo Sagashite hasn't been licensed yet, but it's a 52-episode series, and good as it is, it's not fun all the way. (We know from the start that the heroine only has a short time to live.) Pita Ten and Da Capo both put me to sleep. Hmm. Ultra Maniac is kind of fun, but there's a reason I haven't bothered watching the whole thing yet.

Still, AnimeSuki lists 265 unlicensed series available for download, so there's gotta be some good stuff in there. Anyone have any recommendations for recommendations? (By comparison, 88 shows have been licensed so far this year. If that sounds like a lot, that's becaus it is.)

Oh, good grief, ADV have licensed Yumeria. Either they got a two-for-one deal (apparently not uncommon), or there really isn't anything good left unlicensed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:33 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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There he is hailed as the lost king...

Of demons. Oops.

And the opening theme is truly hideous.

* By being flushed down a toilet, which is a first.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:29 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien. I wonder what will happen in episode 3?

...

Ah, three years of guilt compressed into flashbacks and nightmares. Ick. I should have paid more attention to the reviews.

...

And then, in episode 4, extra added guilt! Who wrote this thing? I'm starting to think it was my grandmother...

...

But the omake after epsiode 4, the little extra sequence at the end, where they're playing whack-a-mole with Coma Girl, is downright odd.

...

Finished watching it. Yick. Not recommended. If you want something along these lines - youthful romance and head injuries - watch Nanaka 6/17 instead.

* And they narrowly avoid getting caught at it by the parents.

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x - 7 = 19 + x

Well.

Apart from that the show wasn't particularly impressive..

And irritating trick of the month goes to Aishiteruze Baby... Which puts an extra minute of story after the closing credits, something I didn't discover until episode 12.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And the observation of the five-year-old's mind - the logic of why, if Yuzuyu loses her crayons or has to change her school uniform, her world comes apart - is spot on. (Though if you're hiring a voice actress to play a little girl, you should make sure she can cry properly. Otherwise you get the tired-and-upset whine when you should be getting the heart-broken choked sobs.)

(More information here)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:12 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The music, by the way, the Don't touch Junky Boy song, is the closing theme from Maze***. I always liked it, and I'm glad to see it being put to such good use.

* The term ecchi comes from the Japanese pronounciation of the first letter of the romanisation of the Japanese word hentai, which means pervert or perverted. Clear? Anyway, ecchi is a softer term, and its meaning is closer to, say, naughty - though the context is still sexual. The video clip is work-safe, anyway.

** If you like this one, follow the link and you can download a file containing this and another 31 other clips by the same group. They're called Anime Music Videos, or AMVs, and they consist of, well, anime videos set to music.

*** Maze himherself appears in the clip a couple of times too. He's**** the guy who doesn't get clobbered by the girl he tries to kiss. The first time, anyway.

**** Technically speaking, the previous footnote should have read as follows:

Maze herhimself appears in the clip a couple of times too. Shehe's the girlguy who...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:16 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Now, I'm a shallow sort of guy, and I read Shirow's work mainly for the hot anime chicks, but in GitS (as it is known) he does raise some important questions. In a not so distant future where people are often part machine and part computer, what does it mean to be human?

And beyond that, what does it mean to be a thinking being, and what does it mean to be alive? As a mechanistic atheist engineer, Den Beste finds these questions important, and difficult, and troubling.

I'm also a mechanistic atheist engineer* and I also find these questions important - but not difficult or troubling. That's because I've worked out what the answers are. And that's because I've argued the point with a number of people who aren't mechanistic atheist engineers. Of course, they think I'm wrong, and I think they're crazy, but that's not the main point here.

Den Beste asks, Is a virus alive?, and confesses he doesn't know. To me there is one obvious, clear, simple, and comprehensive answer, and it is sort of.

A virus is sort of alive. For any useful definition of life, salt, for example, pure sodium chloride, or, say, hydrogen gas in its ground state, are not alive. For any useful definition of life, people, cows, cats** and fish are alive.

I'm quite comfortable with saying that amoebas are alive, and bacteria too. Individual isolated proteins aren't alive, not really. And viruses are sort of alive.

It's the argument from utility really; as Den Beste himself has put it, It is what it does. Does a virus act like life? Well, it does, sort of. So it is sort of alive.

Some people don't like this; they want a yes/no answer, a knife-edge division between life and unlife. To them, I say: Tough. Neither life nor the Universe owes you an easy answer. Why should life be a binary property, any more than, for example, intelligence, or complexity?

The same argument also solves*** the even trickier questions of the conscious mind. Is there actually an identifiable self with continuity of existence which is typing these words? asks the engineer. Well, yes, there is. In the same sense that the surface of this table is solid, Steven Den Beste is a real, identifiable, continuous entity.

Of course, at an atomic and subatomic scale the table is mostly empty space. And at a low enough level, consciousness is just Physics. But that doesn't matter, because it still works. This keyboard is not going to fall through the table, and the fact that it is a big blob of atoms doing the thinking in my head does not contradict Descartes' Cogito ergo sum.

* Well, more or less. I'm a computer programmer, so I have aspirations towards engineering, and try to apply the principles of engineering to my craft.
** Most cats. Not Schroedinger's, and not dead ones.
*** For a sufficiently small value of "solves".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:39 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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