So despite being a pretty terrible and inconsistent blogger all year, I decided to participate in Reverse Thieves’ Secret Santa project. My choices of assignments were Gunslinger Girl, Tatami Galaxy, and The Place Promised in Our Early Days. I have been casually recommended Gunslinger Girl before, but had never been terribly interested in it. I have seen the first episode of Tatami Galaxy and had meant to watch it the season it aired, but that season I got behind on everything, and I never did get around to catching up ever. And Place Promised has been on my to-watch list for years.
Originally, I was on the over-ambitious bandwagon and planned on watching and reviewing all three of their possible choices in time for Christmas. Obviously this didn’t happen. I ended up going with Place Promised mostly because it was the shortest. I still kind of intend to watch the rest of Tatami Galaxy eventually, but the longer I wait the more I feel indifferent to it. I’m not sure that I’m ever going to get around to Gunslinger Girl unless someone gives a particularly passionate recommendation.
But here is the review for Place Promised. And here is the MAL mirror.
Merry Christmas!
So I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I, and I am pleased to say that I was, in fact, not the most annoying person in the theatre! There was a girl three or four seats to our right that chattered through most of it. Meanwhile, I managed to get through the movie with very little hushed whispering and only a few instances of flailing silently while mouthing angry, unintelligible things at the screen. :D In lieu of a real review, this is just going to be a follow-up to the previous purist expectation post wherein I’ll ramble about …a lot of things.
(This post contains spoilers for pretty much everything.)
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Now that I think about it, I haven’t seen a majority of Disney’s (non-Pixar) 3D animated films. …So maybe it was weird that I looked forward to Tangled as much as I did. Maybe it’s because Rapunzel is Disney’s first 3D princess. Disney puts so much effort and emphasis on its princesses; after all, Tiana’s role as their first black princess garnered far more attention than the fact that the Princess and the Frog was supposed to be a callback to Disney’s traditional roots. So Rapunzel’s “first” factor probably gives it more weight to it than say, 2009’s A Christmas Carol and 2008’s Bolt, neither of which I’ve seen. The fact that Tangled’s early tidbits and concept art were all very charming also helped, of course.
(this review does not contain spoilers)
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I haven’t seen Deathly Hallows PT1 yet. I’ll be seeing it Wednesday night.
The corresponding book has been sitting on my desk for about two weeks, but I think I’ve decided to not reread it before I see the movie, as has been my habit. I’ve only read Deathly Hallows twice, most recently last summer, and listened to it on audiobook once, sometime in January, I think. It won’t be as sharp as if I had reread it yesterday, but I probably still have a good recollection of all the specific events in the 759-page book. So I will probably still spend most of the two and a half hours hissing complaints and disappointments under my breath like an asshole. Yes, I will be That Guy. I don’t really don’t want to be, but Half-Blood Prince proved that I can’t bloody help myself. It was during the last twenty minutes of that movie that, for the first time, someone turned around and told me to shut up.
I hope it doesn’t happen again. I will try to hiss more quietly this time. :(
(This post contains spoilers for the Deathly Hallows book and the movies up to the sixth.)
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I have been meaning to watch this movie for years, ever since I saw Moon Child. It is HYDE’s only other film, and though his acting in the aforementioned is pretty decent, I was pretty sure that Last Quarter (originally Kagen no Tsuki) wouldn’t be any good. But I wanted to watch it anyway.
The DVD was licensed for R1 distribution by Geneon and released in 2006. I’m awful about getting around to things on my massive to-watch list, but despite being out of print, the DVD’s price has been steadily declining on Amazon for ages (an indication of suckage?). So finally, at less than five bucks, I figured, oh, why the hell not. (And even then, after it arrived, it sat on my desk for three weeks until I got around to it.)
(this review contains minor spoilers)
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So… this is actually a pretty all right show. So far.
I didn’t write anything about the first episode mostly because not enough happened for me to have much more than a neutral impression. With the second episode, the mood for the series has been better established, and I can more or less see where it’s going from here. And really, it doesn’t seem too terrible.
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Dude. This show is awesome.
As usual, I didn’t pay much attention pre-season and barely remember seeing this show on the preview charts. With Fall gradually starting, I skimmed a few blogs reacting to its apparent insanity, but I wasn’t really interested until I saw someone describe it as Powerpuff Girls x Gurren Lagann x Dexter’s Lab x Sailor Moon x FLCL.
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October 2nd was this year’s 24 Hour Comic Day, a day where comic artists everywhere break their backs and their wrists by attempting to produce, in its entirety, a 24-page, standalone comic in twenty-four consecutive hours. And, by amazing coincidence, it was also the debut of the highly anticipated, at least on my part, Bakuman anime — the animated adaptation of a manga about some kids drawing manga.
The Bakuman manga, licensed by VIZ Media, recently made its US debut. I picked up the first volume and intended to write some kind of review, but at this point it probably isn’t going to happen. However, with the first volume relatively fresh on my mind, I approached the anime with every bit of my usual neurotic purist caution. I was psyched about the anime, but I have a tendency to be disappointed by adaptations, even when I try my hardest not to be. Surely the anime would lose something on the meta level, now as an anime about manga, rather than a manga about manga.
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All standard Pokemon games come in pairs. But while the reasons were often superficial, I have never had a problem choosing one over the other. Red over Blue. Silver over Gold. Sapphire over Ruby. Pearl over Diamond.
But now this… Black or White? I am very torn. Very, very torn.
I got Red over Blue because I like the color red better, and because Charizard is more awesome than Blastoise… even though I started with Bulbasaur. Unfortunately, I have neither FireRed nor LeafGreen, but given that choice, it would have been LeafGreen. The version differences between the earlier generation games were pretty basic — just a handful of Pokemon exclusives, and for Red VS Blue, I didn’t really pay that much attention. In retrospect, I kinda wish I hadn’t missed out on Sandslash, Meowth, and Ninetales, but I’ve long since figured out that none of them were going to make my team anyway.
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The release of Pokemon Black and White last week knocked a few more type combinations off the list of the unused, including Bug/Electric, Grass/Normal, Dark/Steel, and a handful of others. It also introduced the first pure-type Flying Pokemon (#641, right), so finally, after five generations, we have a pure-type Pokemon for every type.
Still, there are a whopping 44 type combinations that still haven’t been used, which is ridiculous considering there are only 153 possible combinations of the 17 types (136 two-type combinations + 17 single types). This number can be reduced to 32 if we take out all the missing half-Normal types, like Normal/Dark, Normal/Electric, etc., but that’s still a big percentage.
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