A couple of timely poems by Kobyashi Issa, via another Steven:
New Year’s Day
New Year’s Day–
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
**
New Year’s Morning
New Year’s morning:
the ducks on the pond
quack and quack.
If you need New Year’s resolutions, Dr. Boli has some for you. (Years ago I resolved to make no more New Year’s resolutions. It’s the only one I ever kept.)
*****
I haven’t watched enough anime this year to warrant a year’s end summary. Instead, I’ll refer you to DiGiKerot’s. (I fully concur with his award for Katanagatari. Learn to use spoiler tags, folks, and don’t describe plot twists in the first few sentences of your posts.)
Grades for the 2010 shows that I watched more than two episodes of:
Asobi ni Iku Yo — C+ (B+ for the story and characters, minus a letter-grade for excessive fanservice.)
Katanagari — A
Kuragehime — Incomplete (A, if the second season that had better be in the works is as good as the first; otherwise, B, for too many dangling threads)
Summer Wars — A
The Tatami Galaxy — A
There’s much else I watched part of an episode of, but I have less and less patience for drivel, no matter how popular.
*****
It’s about time: Steven reports that all of Master of Epic has finally been subtitled, nearly four years after it first aired. I’ve watched the first ten episodes so far (and just downloaded the eleventh). It’s yet another anime adapted from an RPG, but instead of inventing twelve or twenty-six episodes worth of plot and characaters, the makers instead made a sketch comedy out of it, something like a fantasy Saturday Night Live. The skits often fall flat or run on too long, but enough of it works to have sustained my interest over the years.
Update: I finished Master of Epic. It’s not “terrible,” but aside from the “Waragecha Five” segments, too much of it is too lame to recommend. It’s a pity; with better writing, Master of Epic could have been a effective treatment for overexposure to MMORPGs and fantasy worlds.
*****
Here’s a quick little number puzzle for the new year. What is the next number in the sequence? It’s not 71. What does this sequence represent?
23
27
31
39
43
47
55
59
63
I posted a similar puzzle on my other website a year ago. When is the next time this sort of puzzle will be timely?