Is it really spring now?

Peony

I suppose I should explain why I’ve dropped every show of the spring season and have instead been re-watching Shingu and reading Alan Coren, but I think I’ll just post a few more pictures instead.

Update: A climatological footnote from this morning’s forecast.

… Coldest April since 1997 across the area…

Wichita… the average April temperature was 51.3 degrees… which was
the 7th coolest April on record since 1889. The normal April average
is 56.1 degrees.

It might snow tomorrow.

Continue reading “Is it really spring now?”

Hmmm

Discovered while browsing in Wikipedia:

[Graham] Greene’s film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old Shirley Temple, cost the [Night and Day] magazine a lost libel lawsuit. Greene’s review stated that Temple displayed “a dubious coquetry” which appealed to “middle-aged men and clergymen”.[16] It is now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.

It may be just as well that he didn’t live to see moe-licious anime.

Bulletin

Etna

Etna is doing her thing right now (10 p.m. CDT). You can watch the fireworks here. Also here (you might need to manually refresh the view periodically) and here.

Update: The show’s over for now. There’s a spectacular video taken close to the vent here. There’s also this snapshot of a less familiar sort of volcanic activity.

Which equinox was that?

Frosted crab apple

Unlike most places in temperate regions, in Kansas the seasons don’t follow a simple spring-summer-fall-winter sequence. This year, for instance, we had a few weeks of spring back in February, followed by heavy winter snows. Today I woke up to find that it was November outside. I wonder if we’ll see any more spring here, or if we’ll go directly from winter to summer.

Continue reading “Which equinox was that?”

Quote of the week

Anthony Sacramone:

Nothing can compensate for a crap script. Not irony, not flamboyant camera movement, not stars, nuthin’. On the other hand, a great script can survive a mediocre director, dull music, uninteresting production design, and even less-than-stellar performances. But you always need a story, and characters you want to see get what they want, or be denied what they want, or discover what they want or where they should go ….

First look, last look

I took a look at some of the new shows on Crunchyroll.

Never mind

… and that’s when I stopped watching Arata the Legend.

Blasé boy meets annoying girl in Muromi-san. The gimmick is that the girl is a mermaid. I made it all the way through the first episode. Some of it is is funny, but the humor is rather low-brow. I doubt that I’ll watch more.

Devil Survivor 2 is based on an RPG. Usually that’s a bad sign but, surprisingly, I survived the entire first episode. A trio of adolescents download demons on their smartphones to fight monsters while the earth faces some sort of apocalypse. I expect that next week is the big infodump, and after that the show will go to hell, but it could surprise me.

Not Texas

For a moment I thought we were in Texas during bluebonnet season, but no such luck. Majestic Prince features annoying kids piloting mecha, and I lost interest within five minutes.

Boy meets girl again in The Severing Crime Edge. This time, the boy is obsessed with cutting girls’ hair, and the girl has very long hair that cannot be cut. Perhaps there’s a story there, but it felt creepy in the wrong way. It was another I dropped in five minutes.

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet is the least unpromising of the bunch, even if the protagonist is a mecha pilot. This might be connected to the fact that the staff includes a certain Gen Urobuchi, who not long ago wrote a story about a girl named Madoka.

*****

If the spring anime season isn’t dreary enough for you, there’s summer. When the only series that catches my eye is a remake of Sailor Moon, something is wrong.