So, among other things I missed last month, there will be a second season of Infinite Stratos sometime soon. Air date hasn’t been announced, but most of the original cast and staff are returning, and 8-Bit is doing the animation again, which guarantees spectacular battle scenes.
This series was slammed as formulaic, by the numbers, and stale, but I never bought into the anti-hype. Ichika is the weakest point, being the oblivious center of the harem, but the world design and slowly unfolding backstory mark this as a cut above the usual harem garbage. For once, there’s a reason all these girls are chasing the “super loser” guy — he’s the only male in the world that can operate the special women-only mechs, known as Infinite Stratos. Two childhood friends and the top candidate students from Japan, Germany, France, and UK are all chasing him, and doing their level best to stop each other (and anyone else) from getting close to Ichika.
Rom-com, or Mecha series? Few agree on what this hybrid beast is, but the eye candy from season 1 is nice. It will be on my “definite” list in whatever season it appears.
If anyone else has tried to post besides Brickmuppet & Dr. Heinous, apologies for your post not appearing. I’ve been getting hammered by a Russian (Lithuanian, Chinese, Canadian, whatever) spambot, and having to mass delete messages. I may have caught and deleted more than just the Muppet’s.
In other news, the neurosurgeon has scheduled me for surgery on the 31st to fix a major nerve pinch in the spinal column. To echo Brick’s earlier complaint about chiropracters, mine was worrying about the nerve branches, whereas the neurosurgeon pointed out (with benefit of the actual MRI, instead of just a report) that the main spinal nerve is badly pinched through about four vertebrae. He advised me to stop therapy until after the surgery.
Edit: the surgery is to the neck, not lower spine. The problem has been centered around the C5-T1 vertebrae, heavily affecting the left shoulder and arm. No effect on the right at all.
Well, I’ve had a lot of time to watch anime this season, for reasons I’ll go into later. Not that I’ve taken major advantage of it; this season is definitely sub par. Does it still reek? I’d have to say that overall, yes, it does. Still, there’s two shows worth watching, that I’ve found.
Of course, the first is Railgun S. I know most of the story from the manga, and anyone who watched Index knows how it ended. Doesn’t matter; this is the story I’ve been wanting to see animated since I read it in the manga, if not earlier. What I’m curious about are the battle scenes in the OP. If they’re to be believed (and I don’t think they are) then both Kuruko and Touma are involved in the fight much earlier than they should be. Canon in the manga and three series so far is that Kuroko never finds out the full story, and Touma only gets involved at the end, but in the OP we see them
Background Speculation: This also goes to show just how wrong the researchers are. They claim to have deduced from examinations of the various L5’s that only one of them, “Accelerator”. has the potential to reach Level 6. But we already know from the first Railgun series, that Mikoto is more powerful than she lets on. I doubt very seriously that the tests include some of her more hazardous tricks, like running on walls, building insta-cover out of steel rebar and concrete against attacks, shooting helicopters while falling through the sky, bouncing off concrete walls unscathed, hacking secure databases, etc. We know that her capacity to learn and work ethic are high; she made L5 through “hard work”, evidently at a very early age. (Oh, no. I just conceived of a series about extra-kawaii Mikoto and Kuroko at age six, learning about their powers and getting into trouble. Moe-moe-squeeeee! Please God let it not happen….) Anyway, my thinking is that they should have drafted Mikoto into Judgement or even Anti-Skill, then thrown her into every hazardous situation they could find. She’d be L6 in no time.
The other good series is Gargantia. Ostensibly a giant robot series, it is (so far) really a fish-out-of-water story (with an edge) involving a no-nonsense warrior who finds himself in an alien, but not entirely peaceful, environment. Chances of rescue seem slim, so he has to learn how to deal with the people he has fallen in with. This show distinguished itself in the first fifteen minutes, which included a desperate space battle against an overwhelming foe. The battle was anything but a confusing montage of missile and beam spam in which you wonder who’s doing what to whom. Furthermore, the show did the very difficult task of explaining without lecturing, resulting in a very comprehensible fight in which it was easy to get involved, follow the ebb and flow, and root for one side. I’ve also not mentioned the other major element of the story; the AI in the mecha. Its personality is even more no-nonsense than its pilot, yet human enough to be distinct and engaging in its own way. And lets face it, the eye candy as the show goes on just keeps getting better and better.
Just for the record, I spent a few hours catching up on Samurai Bride last night. It is not one of the good series, so I’m still trying to figure out how to properly serve penance for that. And wondering what the presumably uncensored series will cost at retail. I’d already decided to just pretend it was a different series with the same characters — then they turned a monkey into a master samurai. Not the bottom, yet: Gisen showed up and joined the group. Yeah, ok, completely different series.
So why am I having so much time to watch such crappy anime? Why have I blogged so little in the last few months? Well, because I’ve not been to work in a month, and was having severe problems before that from a pinched nerve. It started around the beginning of the year, though I didn’t realize what it was, and I didn’t feel like typing much, after doing it all day. Around the beginning of March, it got serious, with constant pain in my neck and radiating down to my left shoulder. I thought of it as being due to poor posture at work, so I rearranged my workplace, to no avail. By early April, it was extremely difficult to work (or sleep or anything else) due to the pain, and I realized it had to be a nerve. A couple of visits to a chiropractor and my primary doctor confirmed I had some vertebrae out of line, and I was in need of therapy — which I couldn’t get. The chiropractor was concerned about the after-effects of my stroke and wanted clearance from a heart doctor that I could take the full course or even surgery if necessary. That took another three weeks to obtain. During this time, my daily schedule was basically:
Literally, regardless of day or night, that was my schedule for about 3 weeks, during which I saw the cardiologist (clean bill of health) and got an MRI (bad news — the problems were worse than we thought). About the beginning of May, I got to visit a pain clinic and a series of steroid injections gave some relief, allowing a more normal day-night schedule to re-assert itself. Well, diurnal anyway. Normal might be pushing it. Also, just this week, the chiropractor began a full therapy schedule, instead of the limited one I’d been on. This has helped; I can sometimes skip the painkillers for a few hours, but that doesn’t mean things are getting better. My left arm is constantly tingling and numb, and is losing strength. Any physical activity involving either shoulder can start it hurting enough to require a painkiller. Surgery is a distinct likelihood, but I won’t know more until I see a neurosurgeon during the coming week.
I haven’t wanted to talk about it online because in all the pain I was, I figured it would come out whiny, and I hate whiny. I’m doing a little better now, but I’m still . A good decision, as it happens, once I read about Brickmuppet’s travails! At least I’m not pulling medical devices out of my wang and peeing blood. Damn.
I am, however, reaching the limits of my endurance typing (the above took me two hours), so I’m going to bail now. Maybe post pics later. Maybe not.
Edit: Not. Overdid it.
When one is loopy on painkillers and getting sleep in short bursts of 1-2 hours, viewing graphic and gritty anime such as Attack on Titan is a bad idea. It is not a show for the faint of heart; I’d say it’s the most brutal thing I’ve seen since the Vampire Twins arc in Black Lagoon 2. But yeah, not a good watch when your mind and reality are only mildly acquainted.
This belongs at Houblog, but it’s currently broken and I’m not going to fix it right now.
Boston Marathon bombing, Chechen brothers, yadda, yadda, yadda
What’s interesting about this is the stark difference between “home-grown” terrorists and the terrorists of the rest of the world. While these brothers recently obtained American citizenship, it’s fairly obvious that they’d not assimilated. Thus their act of terrorism, both in presumed motive and execution, doesn’t fit with the peculiar strain of American Terrorism, which is different from that practiced anywhere else.
Non-American terrorists invariably attack people who have nothing to do with the cause they espouse. The closest they come to a rationalization of their targets is a sort of “collective guilt” argument. Whether it’s the IRA, Al-Queda, the Red Front, religious nuts with sarin gas in Tokyo subways, the sole point seems to be “how much terror can we cause?” American terrorists, have as a central tenet of their actions, a desire to punish the perpetrators of whatever it is they oppose. Going all the way back to the sixties, whether it was radical left or right, American terrorists attacked specific targets attached to their political opponents. Banks, the military, abortion clinics; even the Unabomber’s targets were in IT or academia related to IT.
The only exception I can think of on the spur of the moment is the Y2K Atlanta bombs, and no reason was ever established for those. Lone individuals may shoot up a school or theater, but they have no cause or motive beyond their own deranged urges.
Or is the whole thing a figment of the media’s spin and imagination? Were the theater killings a political protest against academia? Columbine against school bullying? Newtown against parental/teacher authority? Just because “the cause” isn’t espoused by a large formal group doesn’t mean it isn’t terrorism — but hey, everyone knows terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to play with guns, so it’s not an effective argument for gun control, like “random idiot with guns kills people” would be. So is the media playing down certain angles on acts of mass murder in the US, in support of a political agenda? I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t trust them. Case in point, a CNN reporter I heard yammering on TV while in the doctor’s office today listed several mass murder incidents: “Columbine, Newtown, Oklahoma City, Waco…”
One hopes he meant the Luby’s cafeteria incident…otherwise, one of these things is not like the other.
