Trivia that matter
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.
If yesterday was November, today is March. It’s still chilly, but the sun is out, making all the icy trees glitter.
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.
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 ….
I took a look at some of the new shows on Crunchyroll.
… 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.
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.
Marc-André Hamelin takes extravagant mechanical revenge on an idiot tune.
… to do macro photography with a 50mm lens and an extension tube, and without a tripod?
Just barely.
More pictures from today’s trip to the botanical garden below the fold.
The ponies got a shiny, bouncy new opening for their Japanese debut.
I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about it, but it is more palatable than the original.
To clear the treacle out of your ear, here’s “My Little Baccano.” ((Here’s the original Baccano opening, in case anyone still hasn’t seen it.))
For fans of Genesis and Steve Hackett:
The third Girls und Panzer OVA gave us a panoramic view of the school ship. (To see the full-size image, right-click to open the link in a new window.) In terms of Kansas cities, it looks larger than Haysville but smaller than Emporia.
Update: The more I look at this picture, the spookier it becomes. Where is everybody?
*****
You all had a narrow escape, by the way. I had a few posts in mind for tomorrow which I planned to type up this afternoon. However, my neighbors decided at 1 a.m. this morning that I didn’t need to sleep. (Curiously, when I called on them later they did not come to the door, even though the door was wide open and the teevee was on.) Instead of writing, I spent the afternoon dozing in bed.
Weeds are flourishing. Soon lawns will be purple with henbit.
… until the first tornado warning, but spring is almost here. Trees are still leafless, but daffodils and small bulbs are in full bloom. I visited the botanical garden yesterday and found the pink okame cherry in bloom. The white yoshino cherry is lagging about a week behind. (The very double kwanzan cherry, I am not happy to note, has been cut down.) There are more Botanica pictures beneath the fold.
Jonathan says that Shin Sekai Yori is “… the best science fiction TV show that I have ever seen, animated or otherwise.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but it definitely is in a class with Serial Experiments Lain and Dennou Coil. It’s the best show of any kind I’ve seen since at least Madoka Magica. The ending did not disappoint — not that I was worried; it was obvious early on that the creators knew exactly what they were doing.
It’s absolutely not for children, and even for adults I can’t give it an unreserved recommendation. It’s partly a horror story, with monsters and worse than monsters, all the more chilling for what isn’t shown. But if you have the stomach for it and are willing to think about aggression, social control and human nature, Shin Sekai Yori is worth your time.
*****
I can give Girls und Panzer an unreserved recommendation for all ages. The premise is silly — teams of high-school girls compete in tank battles — but the staff played it straight and made it work, and did so without panty shots. The last episode was exhilarating and satisfying. If you watch it with friends, you’ll likely cheer aloud as Miho and her comrades fight their desperate battle.
… when the first thing you notice in this picture is the old film SLR camera (and also how ugly the tattoos are).
Yeah, right.
So the Japanese are going to get their own dub of My Little Pony ~Tomodachi wa Mahou~. Good for them; the first season, at least, (which is all I’ve seen) is often clever, rarely cloying, and probably better than nearly all other contemporary shows on western teevee.
Most of the actresses announced so far are new to me, but there are a few familiar voices. The Queen of Tears, Kikuko Inoue, is Princess Celestia. Fortunately, Celestia isn’t a weepy sort, and Inoue is a good actress when she isn’t bawling her eyes out. Rozen Maiden‘s Shinku is Twilight Sparkle, and Cardcaptor Sakura‘s Li Shaoran is Spike.
The surprise is the voice of the sweet, bashful Fluttershy: Emiri Kato. Kato earlier was the cute, cuddly and evil Kyubey. I have difficulty imagining Fluttershy with that voice. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
*****
Dusty Sage found a “State of the Herd” survey of Bronies. One of the findings is astonishing if it’s accurate: more than a quarter of all MLP:FIM fans are INTJs like me. I knew that thoughtful introverts are far more common on the internet than offline, but this is bizarre.
… so here is St. Patrick evangelizing the Irish, with a cameo by Voltron.
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day might look familiar to fans of Mouretsu Pirates.
It looked like spring would arrive early this year, but that was before 22 inches of global warming fell. The snow is finally gone, but Wichita is still mostly brown. I figure that it will be another week or two before trees leaf out. I went to the botanical garden yesterday and found very little color aside from pansies and daffodils. The lenten rose, above, was the highlight of the trip. The Corylus avellana was in full bloom; look closely to spot the female flowers.
The most colorful item there was the gateway to the children’s garden, below.
Children's garden entrance in Wichita
The okame cherry was showing some pink in its buds. There might be a few flowers opening during the coming week and perhaps more than a few next Saturday. (It’s already cherry blossom season in Japan. Here’s the blooming forecast, should you be planning a trip there soon. (Via J. Greely.))
Update: the panorama works particularly well as a “little planet.”
… of the breadth of your culture:
If this makes you smile, you pass.
Update: A variation on the theme.