This may be the last installment of this feature for a few weeks. I’m not sure whether I should pursue a policy of continuing this in the spring as normal, or if I should do the typical thing done by aniblogs with a readership in 2 figures and write on each first episode. My most popular post (with 0 comments until I mentioned 18 months later) was from writing this way, and it also allowed me to briefly have the top Google search for a term. Damn you ABC News, damn you.
I’m not going to humor you much with tales of how my week went. Needless to say, this post will go up on St. Patrick’s Day. Most of you will know what kind of activity typically happens on that day. I will undoubtedly be engaging in a much sadder version of that, without people. That’s what I would normally say but for the fact that I’m actually feeling a bit under the weather. Sober St. Pat’s for me. In the meantime, I can still pass the time playing Pokemon LeafGreen while doing the Nuzlocke Challenge. Eleven hours in, and I’ve only killed one of the anibloggers I’m using as names for different roosters in Japanese Legal Video Game Cockfighting.
As for the anime this week, the season is beginning to wind down. Or in the case of the Noitamina block, it just comes to an end which feels like the series director was only told they had 22 episodes last week. The terribad viewing actually did happen this week as the group finally decided that hard drive space needed to be cleared after watching Anno attempt to direct real actors. And as a side note, I’m out of town attending a small gaming convention, so won’t be doing a recap. I’ll try to throw something up on next week’s conclusion of Robotics;Notes in 2 weeks.
I never thought this recap series would make it to 30 installments. I was due for a week of shows so bad that I would be embarrassed to write about it and then I would eventually stop as it would seem like I hated anime. This was very nearly that week.
So what exactly set the stage for this. First, Maoyuu didn’t air a new episode this week, just some recap special episode 9.5 or something like that. It’s probably a compilation of Female Knight and Demon King in various states of undress trying to seduce Hero. Second, there was epic bed-shitting when it came to shows that were even mildly okay. Third, the prospect of watching live-action Anno-directed terribad was so bad that the time was spent talking about the silliness of societies based entirely around one staple food, deconstructing deconstruction and some sort of music quiz. On the plus side, you get a new show cracking my top 5 this week for the first time. I hadn’t even written more than a comment on it prior to now.
The mundane is something that I’ve had to deal with a lot recently. It has reached the point where late night grocery shopping can now be considered adventurous. I don’t really live in an area where that would truly be the case though, although I could give one of those places near work a shot. At least with it being near the start of baseball season, it means that spring is just around the corner.
This week there was not a wide spread of episodes. There was an epic monologue, romantic comedy centering around films and a swimsuit episode that never ventured outside among other things. As for terribad, it had as catastrophic an ending as any in recent memory.
So I find myself with a little bit more spare time this week. Unfortunately, I happen to live in a place that is little more than a frozen wasteland which basically means I get to sit inside for most of the time. At least winter seems to be coming close to an end since the days are getting noticeably longer now. Or to some it up briefly, it’s cold outside, I want it to be warmer.
This week, there’s not much in the groundbreaking animation front. It’s about as midseason a week as there possibly can be. Though I would not be surprised if there was a magnificent episode of a show I’m not watching. But that thought happens every week.
I was doing some cleaning this week post-Valentine’s Day and all, when I came across one of them myself. I can’t say it was entirely meaningless, but rather it ends up feeling more like a sign that I still haven’t paid this person back. That’s probably a personality flaw on my part that I keep a running tally on debts or favors owed even if the other person was not expecting anything back. I also found some other strange items along the way, but the most tragic were the Canadian pennies. RIP.
As is typical of this time of year, it was a completely uneventful sort of week. There was a bit of snow around here, but it wasn’t anything like feet of snow. I also made another one of my absurd twitter promises during the week in a desperate attempt to take my mind off of certain things this coming Thursday. At least this one won’t cost me a bunch of money like one of them last year. Although, that one did end up being a pretty nice experience.
So what do we have on store for this week’s recap post? Space Bros begins to revert back to the mean, there’s several holiday-themed episodes and an historically bad terribad anime from the team behind Ice. That one got licensed and dubbed, so that screams quality, doesn’t it?
After last week, I have to admit the knee is feeling a bit better. Not well enough to do anything strenuous on it, but I’m no longer like certain immobile Welshmen. Elsewhere, I’ve also been watching that new Netflix remake of House of Cards. Kevin Spacey is a delight to watch when he is playing asshole characters, and a member of the US House of Representatives would definitely fulfill that role. I just wish the writers would have put some thought into having the policy positions of the respective parties make sense unlike the comical mess they seem to be in that series. However, I digress in taking away from the usual Japanese animation that this blog takes up.
If I’m perfectly honest, it was a fairly tedious week, but it wasn’t entirely uneventful. Psycho-Pass finally drove me over the edge in the first minutes this week, so it will no longer merit a place in these recaps. I can only take so much hack writing before it becomes entirely without merit after all.
Lately I’ve been struggling with a couple of things. The first is this little injury to one of my knees. Well, it probably wasn’t little as I couldn’t extend it for about a week. However, it’s effectively killed one of my non-anime hobbies for at least a few more weeks. Then to top all things off, there is no terribad here this week as a 2 hour project at work turned to a 10 hour failure with all of the addressing failure that will come with in in the next few days. At least I’d get a couple of life-affirming episodes from this week. Also, next week will see the return of the average chart, that I’m going to try to make a bit more accurate.
If I were to describe this week in a single word, it would be bland. I think it’s just the very nature of life in this part of the world having to stay indoors most of the time because of the weather conditions. It’s not the oppressively hot conditions of Australia though. After the two weeks of trimming the waste from my winter watching schedule, I should have been able to have some proper enjoyment, right?
The 2nd week of the new season pretty much finished off most of what new shows were airing this season. The last one remaining is next month’s start to the new PreCure series, but I defer to others in hyping that one up. It was also another week where I happened to continue to pull the trigger on some shows too quickly. It’s become a little cliche out in the community to say that this season is terrible, but for whatever reason it does seem like it’s a little worse. At least there was a returning group of shows to make everything seem better, right?
A new year has arrived and with that the start of the winter season. Also, as is my usual custom, I end up dropping a ton of shows that end up being popular. Prepare to be amazed at my disappointing taste in shows I keep around. There was also a bit of a dead period early in the week where I actually caught up on some of my backlog. This will be a long post indeed. Continue reading The Return of the Recap 21
I’ll be perfectly honest and admit I’ve done no research on what shows are airing in the winter. In that spirit, I’ll try to preview them anyway based entirely on the title. Most of these shows have the plot in the title now, right?
After ghostlightning once again set the agenda over at the creatively named THAT Anime Blog, and with followups from Rakuen at Borderline Hikikomori and Caraniel’s…Ramblings, I thought I may as well have a go at something like this too. Categorization of the characters in these posts have broken down into words like admirable, complex, entertaining and relatable. I would also think there are other ways to have favorite characters, which could even be in reaction to the favorites of others; positively or negatively. One could even have characters that are favorites for irony.
Valentine’s Day in anime is usually portrayed in about four different ways. I’d would call these apprehension or aggression on the female side and hope or fatigue on the male side. There are variations on these of course, but they generally go within this framework on the decision on type of chocolate the girl gives to a boy or whether the boy gets anything at all. White Day, on the other hand, may as well not exist.
Unlike yesterday’s post, there’s a large number of things I did watch in this season. There’s a wide range consisting of things like cynical marketing ploys, a poor man’s School Days, several visual novel adaptations and yes, more Minami-ke. Continue reading 40 Seasons in 40 Days: Fall 2007
It’s time to head back to the beginning of this year (and late last year to be honest) and take a look at the minuscule number of things I did watch out of the dozens I could have. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was worst winter ever type material, but it wasn’t very good. In addition, I’ve kind of stretched the definition of winter starts just to have more than two. Continue reading 40 Seasons in 40 Days: Winter 2009
The 14th entry in this series goes back 2 winters ago. Like yesterday’s installment, there was a lot I covered, and not a whole lot I missed out on. That said, I would struggle to call this a great season by any means.
The 5th edition of this series takes us to the recent past, where some series are currently airing. Fortunately, nothing I did not drop is currently airing, so I won’t have to make any changes to the format here. The best way I can think of this summer is that is wasn’t a terrible summer, nor was it absolutely fantastic.
Yes I crammed a bunch of this in on Wednesday night when I normally write this (though it’s always Thursday for my UK and Philippines-based readers), but at least I can offer a bit more from my weekly recap than normal. Continue reading The Week That Was March 11-18
After last week, I was always going to watch more this time around. However, I may actually have a bit less to say than I did last week. Blame Norman Cook for it if you want.
The sixth week of the year went by and I watched a bit more than last week. Overall, I’d put it at merely average, though, my opinion may actually over the course of this little recap.
The second week of the year 2009 in my anime viewing will probably not be remembered over the long haul. There was a sign of recovery in one show I slagged off last week, while another’s animation budget plummeted like the value of an Icelandic bank. Overall, it could probably be considered a mediocre week. Continue reading The Week That Was January 8-14
Lower Mid-Table 