This summer has been such a sucky season, that I’ve been waiting on the Fall previews for some time now. Fortunately, Sea Slug and Tenka Seiha have come through, as usual. Unfortunately, it looks like there’s going to be yet another mediocre season of dreck on the way. Maybe a few bright spots, though, as I’ve seen some intriguing stuff.
Back when Sekirei came out, I noted that it seemed to have an unusual amount of plot for a fanservice vehicle; that it was delivering what Goyshusho-sama Ninimiya-kun did not in that area. Well, since Season 2 of the animé will be coming up soon, I decided to read through the manga, to see if I could pick up anything more. Um, being bored enough to go look it up helped…. For my troubles, I got two small surprises.
Some thoughts about the manga, but it involves MAJOR spoilers, so it’s below the fold and behind tags. RSS does not recognize the spoiler tags so STOP READING NOW if you don’t want to see this!!!
A long rambling post in which I discuss things related to the Negima?! TV series…
A year or so ago, during TJ Han’s Animé Demotivational Poster Contest, someone suggested that the appropriate picture would be Negi’s entire class, and the caption “Negima?!: When a 30-girl harem just isn’t enough.” Yes, that’s right — the show has one guy, and thirty-one girls. Actually, the total is 33 girls, as his older sister and childhood friend occasionally appear. Obviously, the manga-ka (Ken Akamatsu, the guy who did Love Hina) set out to create a harem with every possible stereotype in it, and then some new ones. (Although, if they’re new, I guess they’re not stereotypes, but we’ll just overlook that little detail for now.) Naturally, the best way to ensure 31 girls are all in one place to become a harem is to place them in a school, and the best way to insert the guy is to make him the teacher! But hey, a hentai lolicon fantasy might not make it even on Japanese TV, so the teacher had to be younger than the students.
Enter Negi Springfield, genius 10-year old English teacher at a Japanese school. Somehow, this doesn’t seem to be an improvement, when you stop to think about it — reverse the sexes, and make it a 10 year old girl with a class full of 9th grade guys, and it’s almost hentai in concept. But it’s “shotacon” instead of “lolicon” so that’s ok. (Deshou? Deshou?) Unsurprisingly, each of the 31 girls is just a little weird — one’s a vampire, one’s a ninja, one’s a ghost, one’s an android, one’s a hacker/internet diva, one sits in class polishing her firearms, one has ki powers and is a fanatically loyal bodyguard to yet another….and these are the straightforward ones! You get the idea.
Steven goes on about his super share ratio at Baka BT… sheesh, give a guy a big HD and a commercial connection, and he goes berserk.
Meanwhile, I still haven’t broken 1.0 share ratio, although that’s partially because I downloaded about 1G more. (To add new bonus files. I have 11 points now. Whoopee.) No matter what, I can’t go over ~30 kb/s on the upload. I should have a limit of ten times that. (Yes, I enabled port forwarding. No difference). I get 150 kb/s down; it kills my browsing and I should have 1.5 mb/s. Is AT&T advertising bits and I’m reading bytes? Wouldn’t that be an 8x difference, not 10x? Sigh. “Pro” level DSL sucks. There’s two higher tiers, up to 4x faster, but I’m apparenlty too far from the station to get a higher grade of DSL. That doesn’t stop them from harassing me to buy U-verse. (Or is it a trick?) I refuse to go with Comcast for net access.
I remember thinking an older (high-school) classmate’s TRS-III was just the shiznit. Now I whine that I can’t upload more than 2x its memory capacity every second, and that I don’t make enough to justify adding internet browsing to my “Star Trek communicator.”
So. Ain’t technology wonderful?
Such as:
“When someone with an incompatible ideology or belief resorts to the usage of power against us, there is already no longer any room left for things such as discussion. It is basic to respond to power with either the same usage of power, or negotiation with power as a support. That certainly is the truth of this world.”
Yue, genius and mage, Mahou Sensei Negima
Sometimes, manga really surprises me…
Wonderduck’s mother passed over the weekend. Please stop by his place and leave your condolences.