Download tenchi muyo ryo ohki blu ray rip torrent

"Fahrenheit 451" is an dystopia written by Ray Bradbury about a future of book burning. At the end, the protagonist finds an underground of people dedicated to preserving books without using paper, by memorizing them. He ends up becoming the apprentice of the person who learned "Alice in Wonderland".

I commented recently that torrents are not really a universal anime library, and lamented the fact that the torrents I found on Tokyo Toshokan tended to decay to uselessness in just weeks, if not even sooner. In response, a reader suggested the site BoxTorrents. It has something of the feel of that society at the end of Fahrenheit 451. It's a group of people dedicated to maintaining useful torrents for full series, and keeping them current for years.

So I decided to give it a try. Right now I'm downloading Moetan, just for the hell of it. It's 2.42G and there are 9 peers and fully 31 seeds, of which I'm talking to 13. And as a result I've been maintaining a download rate of about 250 KB/s. Which is pretty damned amazing considering that the torrent was created in October of 2008. Any torrent that old on Tokyo Toshokan would be stone dead by now.

Apparently there's a core group of several hundred (or even more) people who have promised to be seeds and to keep their torrent channels open pretty much indefinitely.

So what else am I going to get from them? I've got a list of bookmarks, but I think the next thing will be the uncensored version of Goshuushou-sama Ninomiya-kun. And I'm also tempted by the Powerpuff Girls anime; I might get an episode or two of that just because I'm curious.

Box Torrents seems to be run by someone who is... odd. The site emphasizes really strongly that you can only have one membership per lifetime. And after you join you have to wait 6 days before you can access any torrent posted in the most recent 6 months. There's no obvious reason for such a limitation. It's not like they're waiting for a check to clear; membership is free.

But, well, we take things as they come.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:24 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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1 They don't want MediaDefender drones.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 15, 2009 04:02 PM (/ppBw)

2 What is "MediaDefender"?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 15, 2009 04:12 PM (+rSRq)

3 MediaDefender is a grey-hat company mostly notorious for cyberattacks against those MPAA doesn't like

http://revision3.com/blog/2008/05/29/inside-the-attack-that-crippled-revision3/

However, I meant rather generally agents of media, who would for instance poison feeds with fake uploads etc. There's a whole bunch of them.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 15, 2009 04:24 PM (/ppBw)

4 OK, that would make sense, especially of the "one account per IP" principle that I suspect they're following.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 15, 2009 04:41 PM (+rSRq)

5I'm also tempted by the Powerpuff Girls anime...

NOOOOOOOO!  That way leads to hate and the darkness!  Take all the fun of the PPGs, then suck it out until all that's left is a lifeless, rotting husk.  That, my friends, is the PPG anime.

Posted by: Wonderduck at May 15, 2009 05:56 PM (hlGBx)

6 The problem for torrents isn't so much fake uploads (it's hard for that to work) as it is for someone to join a torrent, start writing down IPs, and spam out a bunch of C&Ds. There was a spate of those getting sent out by a company that had been hired by Odex...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at May 15, 2009 06:40 PM (pWQz4)

7

The Cowboy Bebop movie just finished downloading, just 4 days after I started it! Sheesh...

And I had an up-to-down ratio of more than 7 before it was finished.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 15, 2009 07:38 PM (+rSRq)

8 The Cowboy Bebop movie in high def is a win.  Four days worth of win?  That I'm not sure about.

Posted by: Arson55 at May 15, 2009 08:59 PM (1DNya)

9 BoxTorrent is a great resource for old unlicensed shows.  And because they give benefits to seeders (early access to new torrents, for example), almost every torrent on the site is still seeded, going back years.

The site admins have their personal quirks, but it's still a great place for rare finds.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 16, 2009 03:11 AM (PiXy!)

10

I'm also tempted by the Powerpuff Girls anime...

You mean "Powerpuff Girls Z?" Don't bother, I've seen a few episodes. You know how the original Power Puff Girls would pretend to be a totally straight-up Saturday morning cartoon show plot, but then cross things up by actually showing how badly that kind of stuff would work in the sort-of real world? PPGZ basically makes it look like they're about to do that, but then plays it totally straight.

It's much less funny than it sounds.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at May 16, 2009 09:33 AM (4njWT)

11 I signed up, didn't read the fine print. I found Automatic Maid, and downloaded the whole 12 episodes of one season in less than two hours. I then read the FAQs and found out that I wasn't supposed to be able to do that??

Posted by: toadold at May 16, 2009 04:47 PM (wG77R)

12 I wouldn't know. I downloaded two full series just after signing up. Maybe we'll both end up in the banhammer bin.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 16, 2009 06:06 PM (+rSRq)

13 I just looked at the FAQs and I might well be in trouble. Have to see just how nasty they are about it.

After I stopped downloading, I cut off my participation with a lousy upload ratio, but the reason was because no one was asking me for data, and there were a lot more seeds than leeches.

Next time I do any download, though, I guess I'll have to leave it going until I get a reasonable ratio, no matter how long it takes.

A couple of possibilities. First, they may be more trigger-happy about that kind of thing on busy swarms. Second, it may be a volume thing.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 16, 2009 06:13 PM (+rSRq)

14 Durniski, I didn't think about a delayed banning. I hope they'll consider that I didn't leech but kept the Bitorrent open for uploads while I viewed the series after I downloaded them. I've got Ichigo 100% downloading right now.(Who me chase down fan service?)

Posted by: toadold at May 16, 2009 06:13 PM (wG77R)

15

I had an idea and decided to try it out. If you put the file(s) you downloaded back in the directory they were downloaded into, and reopen the torrent, then uTorrent checks all the files, determines that they're all good, and then opens up as a seed.

Which I just did with the two series I downloaded yesterday. But it's going to be hard for me to get any kind of decent ratio. Right now Moetan has 25 seeds (including me) and zero peers. Goshuusou-sama Ninomiya-kun has 84 seeds and 4 peers.

I wondered how there could be so damned many seeds. Now I think I know: they're other users desperately waiting for enough upload traffic to avoid being banned.

I would hope that BT's heuristic would take into account whether a given swarm was low traffic, but it's anyone's guess. Or take into account that someone left a seed open for a long time and didn't get any takers.

Anyway, I'll leave it running for a few days, if need be, and see what becomes of it. But if I run 3 days and do no uploading at all, then I'll quit. And if that is a banning offense, then to hell with them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 16, 2009 07:33 PM (+rSRq)

16 They don't ban you, but if your ratio is too low you can't download until you bring it back up.  Which is hard to do on a torrent which only has other seeders.

But at least they don't expect everyone to maintain better than 1:1.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 16, 2009 08:16 PM (PiXy!)

17 I've managed to upload a whole 4 megabytes on the Ninomiya-kun torrent. The other one is a graveyard.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 16, 2009 08:32 PM (+rSRq)

18

Maybe there is hope after all. Someone just decided to download Moetan and out of 25 seeds seems to have picked me, possibly because I have a fast link. 470 MB so far, and data going out at my capped bandwidth of 240 KB/s.

So before it's all over I should have enough upstream to not kick in their heuristic. We'll see how it goes, though.

(Actually, the reason is because it's someone here in Portland using Verizon FIOS. Or maybe not; a tracert says that our traffic is going through a gateway in Seattle between Level3 and Alternet. Total of 15 hops, but still only 43 milliseconds. Anyway, he's downloading at 800 KB/s and getting a quarter of that from me.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 16, 2009 10:15 PM (+rSRq)

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I downloaded the first Tenchi Muyo movie yesterday. It was a Blu-Ray rip, 1080p, but it was made in 1996 so I was curious about just how good it would look. Zoom Player locked up twice (in different places) with floating point errors when I was trying to watch it full screen, so I tried watching a bit more of it in half-screen.

The movie title is "Tenchi in Love" but the movie starts with some sort of super-powerful being escaping from a GP prison satellite, utterly trashing the place. He then heads straight for Earth.

And then we get establishing shots. Mihoshi and Kiyone are teachers at a high school. Ryoko and Ayeka are students there. Tenchi presumably is, too, but I didn't get that far because I gave up. That's too stupid to believe.

I know the movie is part of the "Tenchi Universe" continuity, which is different from the "Ryo-Ohki" continuity that I know best. (The OVAs establish that continuity, and TM:GXP is part of it.) I had to stop watching before I saw what kind of horror they inflicted on Sasami.

I downloaded the second movie, too, but I probably won't bother with it. ANN says the second movie is "related to Ryo-Ohki" but based on the description of it, it's a loser. And between the two of them they're 11G and I have better uses for disk space than that.

Meanwhile, the Cowboy Bebop movie is at 93%. Maybe another day and I'll have that one. I wonder if that will make Zoom Player crash, too? That would be a bummer.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:26 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I rewatched Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha A's again today. It really is an amazingly good series. It's also an interesting mix of genres, because deep down it's a shounen series. It's got more in common with DBZ than anything else I can think of. Except, of course, instead of muscular men doing the fighting it's cute little girls. And DBZ doesn't have any lolicon henshin decks. (If you're new around here and don't know what that means, hit the glossary.)

One of my heuristics is that "Great power must be challenged by great adversity in contention for great stakes." And that's one of the reasons this series works: Nanoha and Fate are immensely powerful, but so is their opposition, and the danger they hope to avert is truly terrible. The worst case was the destruction of the Earth. The second worst case was the utter destruction of Nanoha's home town, as collateral damage from use of the Arc en Ciel.

By the way, did you know that there is a Japanese rock group called L'Arc-en-Ciel? Formed in 1991? I wonder if this is a reference? If so, it's kind of a rude one. Probably not, though. It means "rainbow" in French, and I'm sure that's where the writers got it.

Anyway, another reason the series works is because the characters are engaging. I've said before, that Vita is the test. If, by the end of ep 6, after watching Vita on the desert world, a viewer doesn't love Vita then the series has totally failed for him and he should give up watching. Or she.

Another reason is that A's has a pretty solid full-series story to tell. The original series feels disjoint. For a while it's kind of a rehash of Card Captor Sakura, and then suddenly it takes a left turn (though not at Albuquerque) and becomes something else entirely. And the story starts really slowly.

A's doesn't suffer from that. It kicks right in with the action almost immediately, and the pace keeps up right through the end of the series.

And I like the end. I do. Because it isn't perfectly happy. It's mostly happy, but in terms of the story it cannot be perfectly happy, and the writers don't pull a contrivance out of a bodily orifice at the last minute to prevent the reckoning. They set up the logic for their story, and stayed true to it. It led to a very dramatic scene, which was well written and well acted.

It still amazes me that Mizuki Nana did the voice of Fate. I mean, listening to it, I guess it really is her voice, but Fate is just not the kind of character I associate with that seiyuu. For me, Mizuki Nana will forever be Shinobu from Ninja Nonsense, and that's just about as different a character as it can be from Fate. Yet she did an awesome job with Fate, and I guess that shows why she's one of the most popular seiyuu in the business today. She's sure high on my list, I'll tell you that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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UPDATE: In case you're wondering, I used the word "snarf" in yesterday's post. And I got curious to see what the dictionary said the word meant, and found out that it wasn't in Encarta Dictionary. I've noticed that a lot of words are missing from there.

So I looked it up on dictionary.reference.com. And Google Ad-words popped up a link for it.

It isn't doing so now, though, as I check it again.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:48 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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1

Other than in certain cartoons, I can't remember seeing the term used much. 

I was going to say that the other place I primarily remember seeing it was in the rules to the TORG role-playing game. Players earned cards which gave them bonuses to certain actions.  If they got a card they didn't want, or someone else could use better, they could trade with other players. But then my memory cleared, and I recalled the rule was "When the players engage in a trading session, it is important to remember that the gamemaster's primary role is to sit back and scarf the nacho chips."

Scarf, not snarf.  Jokes are ruined by the tiniest of details....

Fun game, though.

 

Posted by: ubu at May 14, 2009 12:00 PM (i7ZAU)

2 In my experience, half the time its the GM's job to just sit back and watch *anyway*. . . but the group I play and GM with online will, when given a chance, spend entire sessions entirely on intra-party character interaction.  So, probably not indicative.

And also, I'm watching Nanoha, and really enjoying it.  *desperate flailing for on-topicness* 

Posted by: metaphysician at May 14, 2009 12:19 PM (WPSw+)

3 Thunder.

Thunder.

THUNDERCATS!

Posted by: Wonderduck at May 14, 2009 08:05 PM (hlGBx)

4 Interesting you should say that. There was also an adword for Thundercats. I don't know about that series; does the word "snarf" have something to do with it?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 14, 2009 08:17 PM (+rSRq)

5 Its the name of the incredibly irritation, er, animal sidekick in the show.

Posted by: metaphysician at May 14, 2009 08:21 PM (WPSw+)

6 I was repelled by the Freudian imagery in that show. The hero stands up and holds up a sword, with a little bitty blade, and shouts that phrase, and the blade of the sword becomes long and wide and hard and I said, Uh huh, right.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 14, 2009 08:51 PM (+rSRq)

7Escaflowne -- the movie, at least, is not for you then.  That scene is seared, seared into my memory, I tell you.  /shudder

Posted by: ubu at May 14, 2009 09:53 PM (GaTsU)

8 The movie is so-so anyway. I think Aziz was a fan and said that TV series is miles better. Same thing as with most series-based movies actually. I think the only time I thought a movie was ok related to Naruto movie 1 (Clash in the Land of Snow).

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 14, 2009 09:57 PM (/ppBw)

9 I think the Cowboy Bebop movie is better than the series. And since the Shakugan no Shana movie is based on the best parts of the first six episodes of the series, it's also supposed to be better than the series overall. (The first six episodes were the best part of SNS.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 14, 2009 10:21 PM (+rSRq)

10 I've never been tempted by Escaflowne anyway.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at May 14, 2009 10:23 PM (+rSRq)

11 I heard good things about Bebop but passed on mentioning it since I've not seen it.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at May 14, 2009 11:38 PM (/ppBw)

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It's overcast and raining. Days like this suck the energy out of me. (Not that I have a lot of energy even on the best of days.)

Nothing exciting coming by on the torrents, either. Monday night I did notice something cool, though. I own the Cowboy Bebop movie, and it's the only part of the series I can stand to rewatch. And I saw a torrent for a Blu-ray rip of the movie, HD. At least that's what I think it was. The file is 2.64G. So I started it running.

A day and a half later, I've managed to download 1.07G of it. I've also uploaded 8.44G of it. See, there's 3 seeds (I'm hooked to 1) and 184 leeches (I'm connected to 56).

Every once in a while a new person joins the network, and discovers that I have a lot of the file and have a fast link, so my link saturates for several minutes as they get all I've got. Meanwhile, every once in a while I get a really brief spike of moderaly slow download, but mostly nothing at all. At the rate I'm getting data this sucker's gonna take until Sunday to complete.

...at which point I'll discover that it isn't HD after all. Just you wait.

Maybe not. It's H.264, and a 480p movie shouldn't take that much space in that codec unless the encoding settings were really strange. (MKV is turning out to be my favorite format. It's soft-sub, and I really like how the H.264 codec looks.)

The Cowboy Bebop movie is one I've long wanted to see in high definition. The backdrops in that movie are mostly gorgeous, for one thing. But in particular I've really wanted to watch the section where Edward hacks someone's computer system. In HD. I've wanted to watch that part in HD.

I'm learning that torrents aren't the Universal Anime Library. In practice it only really works well for recent stuff. After a while a given torrent decays to uselessness, or dies outright. After two months from when one is announced, there's little point in trying to use it.

So it's useful to keep an eye on Tokyo Toshokan, once or twice a day. (Sometimes more often than that, when I'm bored.

Man, I am thoroughly compromised at this point, you know? So much for virtue, or the pretense of it.

It's hard to resist. One reason is because a lot of torrents are HD, and I've found that for a lot of shows there really is a huge difference between 480p and 720p. Torrents are not only free, and timely, but in practice now they also deliver a better product than DVDs do. So I can download a 720p torrent of a program two days after it's broadcast in Japan, for free, or I can wait eighteen months if not longer for that title to be licensed and released in R1, if it does get licensed, and then pay $5 per episode for 480p video. Small wonder I've gone over to the dark side.

I'll still buy DVDs, when DVDs come out that I want, but the future in that regard is bleak. A couple are coming out in June, but there's not damned much in our future except rereleases. For instance, Ikki Tousen was just rereleased. So was Azumanga Daioh. But I already own those.

The licensing drought in 2008 is manifesting as a release drought in 2009. It'll be several more months before Funimation has completed digesting all the ADV and Geneon licenses they snarfed last year, and in the mean time 2009 is also a licensing drought, so 2010 is going to suck for new releases too. Sob.

Meanwhile there's all this wonderful cool stuff being offered for free as long as I can ignore my guilty conscience. I held out for years, but now I've given in.

And once you've given in to the dark side, forever will it rule your path and so on and so forth. A hike you should take, Yoda. A sock you should stick in it.

UPDATE: If a HD version of the Cowboy Bebop movie was offered for sale here in R1, I would buy a Blu-ray drive so that I could play it. I bet I could find such a thing on Amazon, but it would be a Chinese bootleg. There isn't any official release here, except for the low res version that I already own a copy of.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 12:55 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
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When I try a new kind of toy, what I usually do is buy a cheap bottom-of-the-line example of it and give it a try. And then see if it ends up being something I use.

If so, and if I find myself being frustrated with the original, I can buy a better one. But if not, then I've saved myself a lot of money.

I did that a year ago when I bought a graphics tablet. I wasn't sure whether it would be useful, so I bought one that was on sale, that cost me just $100. And, as it turned out, it wasn't very useful. If I'd spent $600 on a fancy one I'd be feeling bad about it, but I didn't so it's not a problem.

On the other hand, last year I bought a cheap camera, and it's turned out that I do use it quite a lot, as you've seen. And indeed I'm not totally satisfied with it. It's a Nikon L-18, and I just now put in an order at NewEgg to get a Nikon S630, plus a 4G SDHC flash memory for it. (I can't believe it; the 4G flash card cost $14.)

The main difference is that the new one has a hell of a lot better lens (7x optical zoom instead of 3x). It's also got a bigger CCD (12 megapixels instead of 8). They also claim that the LCD on the back of the new one is a touch panel, and it'll be interesting to see what they do with that, if it's true.

I didn't pay NewEgg the $3 process-me-faster bribe, so we'll see how long it takes to ship. Given the current zeitgeist I expect it to ship soon anyway.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 05:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Karmaburn says:

I dropped Saki after two episodes because I don't know crap about mahjong so it confused the Bejeesus out of me. Also, too much pandering to fans of lesbianism. I'm okay with pandering under proper circumstances (see Hatsukoi Limited, for example), but I'm really tired of lesbians.

I don't really understand Mahjongg either, but I at least understand the concepts involved. The way I think of it is this: Shogi is to Chess as Mahjongg is to Gin Rummy.

Like Gin, Mahjongg is about collecting two-three-four of a kind and straight flushes, and suchlike. When you can fill your entire hand with those things, you can score out, and the race is to see who does it first.

Compared to Gin, the rules of Mahjongg are arcane and baroque, and I sure as hell don't understand it at that level, but I've been able to enjoy it based on that limited degree of understanding of what's going on.

As to the yuri, it's all a tease. And it's been declining. There wasn't any of it in ep 6, for example.

Besides, what's wrong with yuri? (He says.)

UPDATE: In response to Karmaburn's post, Pete says:

Now he knows how I feel about baseball shows. Only I get it worse, because there are lots of them. A game without discernable rules or purpose; I deduced that teams compete to collect points, but those are awarded arbitrarily, so the formal objective does nothing to add any sense to the proceedings.

I'm speechless.

UPDATE: Zyl says, "The Yuri Power is strong in this one."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:48 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Every time I download an episode of this series, I say to myself that it's going to be the last. And every time I end up wanting more. But I think that this is the kind of series that wouldn't work if I tried to mainline it. One episode per week works really well.

We're deep enough into the series now to be sure that Gonzo is telling a sports story. No bait-and-switch here, the way there was with the godawful Princess Nine. No romantic entanglements, no real angst so far, and concentration on kids engaging in sports because they want to improve themselves and want to win.

Our team (Kiyosumi) is the unknown and underestimated outsider which is stronger than anyone realizes; and that's exactly what you want from a sports story. That it's about girls, and some of them are cute, is just an added bonus.

Ep 6 is the opening round of the tournament; the game is on.

Nodoka's figure is turning out to be a plot point. Between being the middle school champion the previous year, and being a bijin she gets a lot of attention from the visiting press (and their photographers). And having the kind of stellar figure she's got, there's a lot of catty comments about her from members of other teams, all more or less along the lines "the bigger the tits, the smaller the brain". Nodoka overhears some of it, but it doesn't seem to affect her composure much.

They're trying to humanize Saki by showing that she isn't super-girl. She gets separated from the others and is lost for a while at the venue. She even trips and falls. Eventually she reconnects with the others.

The team tournament is played with 4 teams at a time. One player from each team plays at a time, a certain number of hands (plus bonus hands as they come up according to the rules). Each team starts with 100,000 points, and the team with the highest score at the end advances. The other three are eliminated.

Hisa decides to put Yuuki first. Then Mako, then Hisa herself, then Nodoka. Saki will be last.

Yuuki goes in, totally fired up, and does her common thing of scoring huge at the beginning as East. That ends up psyching her opponents who get conservative and settle for low scoring hands out of fear. As a result, when Yuuki's round ends, Kiyosumi's score is 149,600. Yuuki often starts strong and fades later, but because of the team play she's replaced before she fades.

Mako increases the score to 168,500, Hisa raises it to 183,000. The episode ends just as Nodoka enters the room carrying her penguin.

Some of the other players don't fall for the "big-tits==small-brain" fallacy and wonder whether Nodoka really will be formidable. They speculate that she might be a legendary online player named Nodocchi:

Who, it is claimed, never makes mistakes. What the traditional sports story requires is that when Saki starts to play, she'll be badly behind and will come back to save the day. That suggests that Nodoka is about to get creamed -- which will, in turn, lead to drama afterwards because she'll be the only member of the team who was negative in points. (And Saki will cheer her up and help her regain her confidence and her fighting spirit.) So that's what I'm expecting from the next episode, but we'll have to wait to see. (UPDATE: I've changed my mind on this. See below.)

In ep 4, when the pro entered the restaurant, Saki felt the pro's aura and was intimidated by it. (Interestingly, Nodoka didn't feel it.) That sensitivity seems somewhat common among powerful players. When Saki was separated from the others, she walked by four members of one of the top teams, and all four of them were rocked by what they felt from her. Seems like she's got that kind of ki herself.

They comment amongst themselves that her aura feels like Koromo's. That's the fifth member of their team, who's late. Presumably this is foreshadowing for a later round, when that team plays Kiyosumi, and I would guess that Saki and Koromo end up in the same round together. Should be interesting.

By the way, I didn't mention it last week, but there's a very interesting line in ep 5. At the training camp, Hisa assigns Saki to play online. And Saki doesn't do as well online. Hisa suspects that one of Saki's edges is her uncanny ability to read her opponents, but I think there may be more to it than that. Saki doesn't do very well online, and she says, "It's no use. I can usually see more of the tiles than this, but here I can't see them at all."

That's because there are no tiles; there are just icons on a computer display. But she's seeing all the icons that she's entitled to see under the rules. Why would that seem fewer to her than when she plays with a real set?

Could it be that Saki is clairvoyant, and that part of her ability to play the way she does is due to an ability to predict what kinds of tiles will be drawn, and the ability to "see" the hands of the other players before they're exposed?

UPDATE: They're setting up that blonde in that group as a "boss" for Nodoka. There's a symbolic image of the two of them fighting (as magical girls) in the OP. And presumably their missing fifth member, their strongest player, is a boss for Saki.

Seems like they've paced the series well. It's 13 eps, and my guess is that 6-8 will be the preliminary round. Ep 9 will be another training camp. Eps 10-13 will be the finals, with the last part of ep 13 involving resolution of character stories.

And we've already been warned about a big boss, who beat the pro, and who Saki will presumably meet in the finals.

Will this series be another ace for Gonzo? Another company saver, like Strike Witches? Ultimately that comes down whether the DVDs sell well, which in turn probably depends a lot on just how uncensored the DVDs are. My guess at this point is "Yes", and "Very", but we won't know for several months.

UPDATE: I've got a little wager going with myself about this series. It's this: When will Saki use Nodoka's given name for the first time? Saki always refers to Nodoka as "Haramura-san".

My bet is that it's going to be next episode. Nodoka is going to get hammered, and come out in tears and be a wreck. Saki will try to get her attention and won't be able to, and she'll say "NODOKA-CHAN!" and that will shock everyone, especially Nodoka, and get her to listen. Then Saki will give her a pep talk ("Didn't we promise we were going to go to the nationals together?"), and promise to win it for her, and then go into the room and do so.

UPDATE: Next day, and I find the arguments of others convincing. I don't think that Nodoka will lose after all. I agree that Nodoka will do well, and then in the final round Saki will put it away by running someone down to 0. Their point, with which I now agree, is that she's going to do it so fast, in such a spectacular fashion, as to leave people wondering whether she's an extremely powerful player, or just ridiculously lucky on that single occasion.

That will set up her eventual meeting with Koromo, who presumably will underestimate her.

And this means I no longer have any idea when Saki will eventually call Nodoka by her given name.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:08 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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It's May, so it's spending most of its time raining here in Silicon Rain Forest. (Or so it used to be known as. Intel world headquarters is about five miles from here.)

But the rain lifted this weekend, so I took the opportunity for a trip to the grocery store. It's been an adventure shopping there for the last couple of months; they're remodeling the entire place, but without outright closing the store, which means they're doing it a piece at a time. In the grocery section, that means they keep rearranging the products, so trying to find everything you want to buy is like a treasure hunt. On this trip the most difficult treasure I had to find was sugar and cinnamon, and the reason it was tough is that they'd moved it all the way over to the other side of the store, into an area where they used to sell women's clothes.

I took a shopping list with me, not so much to limit what I buy as to remember everything I need. But I do sometimes impulse-buy things, and I saw something today.

Mother's Cookies was an old-line brand. They made the world's best animal cookies, frosted and covered with what New Englanders call "Jimmies". And they went out of business last year and closed their bakery down in California.

Well, they're back now. In the cookie section there was a cardboard stand full of bags of their products, all proudly proclaiming "Your favorites are back!" That's what their web site says, too.

I wouldn't go that far, but I was glad to see them. I bought a bag of "Iced Lemonade" cookies, which means frosted lemon cookies, and they're really yummy.

So what happened? I'm not totally sure, but according to the package, they now belong to Kellogg.

So three cheers for the cereal company for white knighting an American institution.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 07:37 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 318 words, total size 2 kb.