NewsFlash! This Season Reeks!

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Ubu Roi

So, I actually spent some time watching anime Sunday. I thought last season was bad. I only thought this season looked worse. Dear Kami-sama, what the hell is Japan doing?

Samurai Girls 2 (Samurai Bride): I was skipping by ten minutes into it. By 15 I was retching. They took all the best parts of the original mediocre show…. and locked them away. An 8th-grader could do better than this. And the annoying spots are even worse.

Mushi-Bug-whatever Didn’t make it out of the OP. “Bleach with bugs.”

some Majestic Prince-thingy I actually watched the whole thing. Well, except for the parts I didn’t. This was supposed to be comedy? Can’t tell the characters apart, shallow, logic to the winds, and a crew chief I’d love to see on screen more. Except I’d have to watch this show.

Nyarko-san 2: Not even massive breaches of the 4th wall could save this. Another one where the best parts of the original mediocre show were locked away.

Back to Minecraft for another three months.

Posted in Snap Reviews | 7 Comments

My Take on Frances I

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Ubu Roi

We interrupt this lack of anime posting with a decidedly non-anime subject. This afternoon, I and a coworker watched the announcement of the new Pope. In the run-up to his name being announced, my co-worker was willing to bet money that it would be another Italian elected, after a succession of non-Italians. He was hoping for a reformer. I acknowledged the possibility, but felt that another Italian would be a terrible idea at this juncture. They needed a Latin/South American. What did we get? An Italian Argentinean (There is a substantial number of Italians who emigrated to Argentina — more than in the US, I’ve heard).

What I consider interesting is that he was considered the dark horse, the third-likeliest candidate to be elected. In view of his advanced age, I don’t see any other way to call this: Pope Frances I is a placekeeper. The infighting was serious enough that the cardinals decided to postpone the real succession fight for a couple of years, and to do so, they threw a bone to the Latinos (and Jesuits). In a few years, we’ll be right back here again; in the meantime, the new Pope will have little support to aggressively deal with the church’s problems.

In this, they remind me of nothing so much as the Soviet Politburo picking new leaders of the Soviet Union in the post-Kruchev days.

Posted in Life, etc., The Real World | 1 Comment

OMFG, part deux

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Ubu Roi

It’s back online. NSFW in the extreme!

One of these days, I’m going to write an actual article. I need to get caught up discussing Campione! and Ah! My Goddess. And I need to get caught up watching anime… I mean, nothing is really appealing to me. I’ve watched a few episodes of The Unlimited, but I’m not really trying to keep up with anything. Even Magic The Gathering is boring me. Well, more like I suck at it too much to really keep at it. Work’s frustrating me; I just don’t feel like I’m getting much accomplished. I have to believe that I’m making things better, not just marking time, or I’m dissatisfied and grouchy. But it’s budget season, which means that I’m spinning my wheels waiting on managers to finish all that and get back to the longer-term stuff I work on.

Posted in Magic:The Gathering, Manga, The Real World | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

OMFG!

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Ubu Roi

No, seriously. If you thought Brickmuppet’s foray into Monstergirls was perhaps a bit risque, then DON’T follow this link to Mangahere. ABSOLUTELY NOT SAFE FOR WORK, not to mention your wife, girlfriend, or mom. That was a bit more than I expected from MH (although it’s not the first time, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised).

At least Haru, the male in the middle, isn’t a non-sexual blob of stupidity, and knows what he likes.

Wait, isn't he the object of your affection?

Yes, that’s a chainsaw for an arm. She’s a mad scientist cyborg. Her rival is a mad science biochemist, who managed to cross herself with her pet dog, and ended up with huge breasts. Lactating breasts. It goes downhill from there folks. (Picture below the fold. NSFW – you haf bin varned.)

Yowza.

Well, the cyborg chick thinks better of chopping the guy into mincemeat (of course they’re all childhood friends), and then the girls decide to compete for him by finding his missing key. The doggie girl releases a squad of mice to search, while the cyborg girl unleashes her backpack of hands/grapples/tentacles. Of course, you know where this is going, right? Malfunctions and misdirected mice make Haru happy. And that’s where it gets really NSFW. (Why did she have those little milking thimbles on a couple of her tentacles? And that mouse went where???)

Sheesh. This thing belonged on Fakku. And if I interpret the titles and color pages correctly, there’s at least one more girl coming, with maybe 2-3 after that! So now we’ve got airplane girls, monstergirls, cyborg/doggirls (that’s almost normal — which is scary)… have we missed any other fetish girls?

UPDATE: Apparently Mangahere agreed with me about it belonging elsewhere. The upload’s been deleted.

Posted in Manga | Tagged | 2 Comments

Grrrrrrr. Of Fairy Tail and aggravating glitches

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Ubu Roi

So I was going to reply to this comment over at SDB’s:

So I just finished the Laxus arc (ep 48), and what I’m beginning to realize is that the battles in this show are kind of like the ones in DBZ, in that they seem to last forever.

And after I typed the short message below, I was informed that I was banned from the website. Again.

Your comment about DBZ was spot on. Apparently they realized it was popular enough that they’d be able to continue to the point that they’d catch up with the manga. The battles start taking longer and longer. At least they don’t spend entire episodes staring at each other and reminiscing.

This year, they caught up to the manga, show

and had to start doing anime-originals, at which point I lost interest in both the manga and the series. Not even Lucy and Erza could keep me watching shounen fare indefinitely..

Now, I know that I’m not being banned at random by various mee-nuvians; it’s a glitch that keeps cropping up. But it’s cropping up more and more at random. Hours before, I’d successfully posted a comment, and now I can’t. To be fair, Pixy asked for my help in fixing the problem, and I didn’t provide it. I rarely know what my IP is, because could be any of those supplied by AT&T or the City of Houston (when I’m being a bad civil servant by taking a break and checking out the latest on F1 or anime, or just whatever folks feel like writing about).

Oh well, I guess I should go obsess over something else for a bit…and then complain about it.

Posted in Bitching, Snap Reviews | Tagged , | 3 Comments

MOM Problems

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Ubu Roi

So I got an itch to play Masters of Magic yesterday. Unfortunately, it’s not working. A few months ago, with Windows 8 on the way, I finally broke down and installed Win 7. Of the programs I’ve installed, most have been all right, but that one hasn’t been. I re-downloaded it, but the graphics won’t cooperate no matter what settings I change in DOSbox or the shortcut. I’ve tried emulating XP, on which it ran like a charm before, but no joy.

The…
graphics…
are…
just..
excruciatingly…
.
.
.
unplayably…
.
.
.
.
.
.
……………………………………………………………………………………………….slow.

Sigh.

Posted in Bitching, Gaming | Tagged | 3 Comments

That’s Enough of That!

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Ubu Roi

We’ve all seen it before. The tired, overused, please-God-not-another-cliche-story. It uses the same old trope as the last 400 anime and mangas, and there’s only 30 or 40 of them this season alone. Or it seems like you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one, anyway.

What am I talking about? Overused series concepts. Crunchyroll reports on crap that Japanese fans are tired of watching, and the results look like… well, the last several seasons and the next one too. But there’s some fun to be had in the list, all the same…
Continue reading →

Posted in Art and Craft, Tropes and Such | Tagged | 7 Comments