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Animethemes has it: Odoru Akachan Ningen

I think back when I first watched Welcome to the NHK that song may be what made me realize that the Japanese had also adopted a planet/weekday naming convention e.g. 火星/火曜日 == Mars / Tuesday (Tiw/Tyr’s day == Mars’s day; more obvious in e.g. French “Mardi”, etc.); 土星/土曜日 = Saturn / Saturday; etc.

• Sora wa Takaku Kaze wa Utau from Fate/Zero (2nd cour) – it’s a powerful song, and I think I listened to this one all the way through in every episode. Definitely one of my all time favorites.
• Taiyou - Denpa-Teki na Kanojo. (This OVA is pretty obscure, I think.) Another powerful song. No visuals for most of the ending (just text credits scrolling) – although 神戸守 (Mamoru Kanbe) listed as the director (監督) jumped out at me! No Klimt this time, but funny that I’m talking about something he worked on again already. Maybe I should go track down his other works more systematically…
• Kesenai Tsumi - FMA 2003 – I have a lot of nostalgia for this song and listened to it way too much as a teenager after my friends started introducing me to anime. The version on animethemes is a bit different from what I remember visually but the song is the same.
• Wareta Ringo - Shin Sekai Yori – I was actually thinking about posting an animepic clipped from this the other day since it popped back into my mind…
• Hibari - Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note (the Fate/Zero spin-off series) – I like both the song and the visuals (with the seasons changing)
• My Pace – Bleach ED6; I didn’t much care for the filler seasons of Bleach, but the synth from this ED and the dancing characters got stuck in my head for a while.
• X Jigen e Youkoso - Space Dandy. This one is memorable to me both for the “Hey, Everett…”/「ねぇ、エヴェレット」bit specifically and the general subject of the song.
• Zzz - Nichijou – both the art and song are great. There’s a couple versions, but I like this first one the best.

Edit: corrected the link to the Space Dandy ED

Sorry if addressed in the link (I’m not willing to visit Twitter) – but, like, actually McDonald’s themed? Or are they just sponsoring a show (like P&G, etc. have done for ages)?

If the former, I guess there’s some precedence with the KFC visual novel and Isekai Izakaya and such, but that still sounds pretty weird…

Edit: I went back and checked and it looks like McDonald’s was also a sponsor on the show I remember P&G from (i.e. season 1 of Bleach), so there’s precedence for them sponsoring Studio Pierrot’s shows too – I just don’t usually pay that much attention to it, I guess.

Huh. So… it finally occurred to me to check this. Elfen Lied and Sora no Woto share the same director – Mamoru Kanbe / 神戸守. I probably should’ve figured that out sooner given that Sora no Woto’s OP also references Klimt’s paintings heavily, but I had no idea.

I mentioned in a past comment a while back that I made a catalog of my anime. One of the observations I found while making it is that everything except for one movie had an entry on the English language Wikipedia already. That movie is Gundress from 1999. According to my personal journal, I watched this once back in 2014, apparently, but I remembered nothing about it, so I loaded it up recently and rewatched it.

The movie has that “sort of hard to follow if you don’t already know the source material” kind of feel – although I think this is the original work? I checked the Japanese Wikipedia entry about it after watching it. Sticking the article through a translator, there’s a description of a seriously screwed up initial showing and mismanagement of production with the film being finished after it aired in theaters initially. The version I have is finished, of course; if half the movie wasn’t colored in I’d definitely have remembered that!

The DVD menu prominently credits it as “Masamune Shirow’s Gundress”, but I’m not sure what his role in the production actually was. He’s listed in the opening credits for 設定協力 which got translated to English as “Characters Designed by” – but different people are credited with character and mech design in the end credits. A literal translation is something like “setting cooperation”.

There’s definitely a number of familiar elements with some buildings reminiscent of Dominion Tank Police, mech suits that reminded me of designs in GitS:SAC, as well as thermoptic camouflage, cable-based cyborg communication (jacked into the neck), cyberdiving, etc. coming up during the story.

Unusually, this anime features a Little Arabia enclave within the Japanese “Bayside City” the story is set in and one of the main characters is Muslim. I think this may be the only time I’ve seen Arabic script in anime – although I don’t know what it says.

I clipped some screenshots and stacked them up so you can see what it looks like, if you’re curious: https://files.catbox.moe/qtsa0d.png (~8MB)

Yep. It’s Garden of Words. I just skimmed through my copy and this image is from about 18 minutes in.

I had somewhat limited time this past week, but wanted to keep working through my backlog of unfinished shows, so I pulled up the short (6 episode) series Looking Up At The Half-Moon and watched that. I think I dropped this after episode 2 the first time I tried it, but finished it this time.

The show is a hospital drama + romance, which seems unusual for anime. I don’t think I’ve watched any other anime set almost entirely in a hospital before – scenes, yes, but not the whole show. I’m not generally into medical drama so I haven’t really gone looking though; this is one I went into blind originally.

Guess which novel shows up again! Yup, it’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. I feel like I’m seeing this book everywhere now, and this show quotes from it directly; one of the characters has pretty much memorized it. Something I noticed from the quotes is that one of the characters (in the novel) is named Campanella – which should ring bells for anyone who’s played the Trails series… No idea if there’s actually a connection there, but I thought it was interesting.

The show strained my suspension of disbelief with how a number of characters acted, but did some things I found interesting as well. The doctor’s characterization did not go in quite the direction I expected, and there were a number of other surprises throughout. Episode 5 in particularly really went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. I kind of feel like I should write more about that… but it would all be spoilers.

Between kbin’s issues around the holidays and some of my own issues this month I haven’t been very active lately, but I’m still here.

I finally managed to finish watching Penguindrum! That show was weird. I really don’t have the words to properly express just how weird it was. Did you know that Penguindrum and Utena share a director? I didn’t realize that going into it, but after finishing Penguindrum I felt like giving Utena another try – and realized that fact after looking up some details about it. It was very much an “ohhhh…” kind of moment. I’m not deeply familiar with the details of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack, Night on the Galactic Railroad, etc. that were sources of inspiration for the show; so, a lot of it probably went over my head. I still have a few screenshots left that I never got around to posting – here’s a suitably weird one.

Since the last time I commented on here, I’ve also gone back and cataloged all the anime I have. I looked up the starting air date for every show and movie, and then sorted them oldest to newest. That was a bit more involved than I expected it to be and I wasn’t sure how I should handle some entries (e.g. Index/Railgun, Fate/<whatever>, FMA, …) where there’s multiple works that are related in a complex fashion. For movies there were often multiple dates associated with a work so I went with public release dates (in Japan) even if they were shown a few months earlier at a film festival or whatever.

The oldest anime movie I’ve watched is The Castle of Cagliostro from 1979 (which is older than I thought it was), and the oldest series I’ve watched through (if you count it) is The Mysterious Cities of Gold from 1982. (The oldest series I have is the first season of Lupin III from 1971, but I’ve only watched a few episodes and the pilot.) It turns out that the year with the most entries I’ve got in my collection is 2013 with 2012 as a close second; I did a lot of DVD collecting around 2015-ish when I had terrible internet at home, so I suppose that makes sense.

I also realized recently after seeing a post about a nihonga featuring a tiger and a dragon and wondering if it was referenced in ToraDora (didn’t see it in the first episode) that Taiga’s English voice actor (Cassandra Lee Morris) is the same person who voiced Fie in Trails of Cold Steel, Morgana in Persona 5, Ritsu in K-On, etc. That was a bit trippy.

Stein’s Gate’s OP with the song Hacking to the Gate is probably my favorite overall including both visuals and the song itself.

Prior to watching Stein’s Gate my favorite was Shakugan no Shana’s first OP with the song Scarlet Color Sky.

I also really liked the OP for Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (Someday’s Dreamer) with the song Kaze no Hana which was my favorite OP before that.

Honorable mention to Honey and Clover for having the most WTF OP out of all the anime I have ever seen.

If you’re looking for something else to listen to, basically any OP by Yoko Kanno or performed by Kalafina is good. e.g.:

• Hikari no Senritsu from Sora no Woto
• Tank! from Cowboy Bebob
• to the beginning from Fate/Zero (EDIT: I originally said “both OPs” but I got mixed up with one of the EDs – the other OP is oath sign performed by LiSA)
• the Ghost in the Shell SAC OPs – particularly Rise fron 2nd Gig

A few others that I enjoyed are:

• Asterisk – Bleach’s first OP
• Only My Railgun – A Certain Scientific Railgun
• Choir Jail – Dusk Maiden of Amnesia

but there are way too many to list, so I’m going to stop there before I write a novel.

Edit: Added links. Thanks @Davel23 – I’ve been trying to stay off of YouTube lately and didn’t know about that site until you posted your comment!

I hope you feel better soon!

Thanks for sharing!

I stopped by my local donut shop and couldn’t find any of the jelly donuts like they eat in Pokemon. Any recommendations?

Shinobu Horror Story

I haven’t really been watching much anime lately, but I am still going through Penguindrum – just, very slowly.

Most of my free time’s gone into working on my art tools. I hunkered down this weekend and pretty much completely rewrote my image stitcher; it can now handle graphs of correspondences (solved one pair at a time) and I used it to stitch this image from Penguindrum. I have some more details about it in the thread I posted, if you’re curious.

This is the third anime I’ve encountered Klimt’s paintings in. Sora no Woto and Elfen Lied’s OPs are the others. Yes, that’s where the butts came from – Klimt’s Goldfish – thank you to whoever explained that on reddit years ago; you introduced me to Klimt and I recognized this one was a Klimt parody (of The Kiss) because of that. Caution for anyone not familiar: lots of nudity in his art.

That’s an interesting idea to switch from sub to dub. I might have to try that sometime.

I especially recommend it for comedies. I sometimes rewatch old shows with the dub instead for variety as well. It can be amusing to find recognizable voices from games and things. e.g. I rewatched Scrapped Princess earlier this year and when one particular character showed up, I was like “That’s Welkin!” (from Valkyria Chronicles) – Dave Wittenberg voiced them both in the English version.

I stayed at a ryokan in Ikebukuro and right down the street was a bar that had live penguins in the bar. So, it was like an aquarium mixed with a bar. I didn’t actually stop by and try anything, but thought it was really random. Here, I found an article about it!

Thanks for the link! I’m not quite sure what to make of that. I guess it’s kind of like a cat cafe, but more… out there?

What are you trying to do that is so uncommon that you have to build a custom tool?

It’s not so much that I have to as that I’m annoyed enough at all the paper cuts that I’m finally trying to solve them, at least for my own needs – though, there are some things that are less common (like image alignment) that would be nice to have in the same tool.

Some of the things I want in my tool:

• Easy split screen image manipulation (both linked and unlinked) with trivial pan, zoom, and rotation.
• Manual point correspondence selection for image alignment
• Mixed raster and vector layers (with primary emphasis on vector)
• Measurement of shapes that I can easily fit models to (e.g. curves, ellipses) and then manipulate as vector objects (e.g. affine transform)
• Easier polygon and bezier curve editing (the path editor in the GIMP makes me want to tear my hair out every time I have to use it and I already wrote a bezier curve editor years ago that is – while still imperfect – much closer to what I want)
• Easier management of stencils. I like being able to draw within a selection in the GIMP – it’s useful – but I keep losing my selection accidentally, can’t manipulate parts of it in ways that make sense to me, and get bad behavior at the edges of things due to issues with the way the GIMP handles anti-aliasing that are hard to notice while doing it and really, really annoying to try to fix after the fact. (This is the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.)

There’s other stuff like text manipulation that I’d like to have a better way of dealing with, but is probably not worth the effort of implementing vs just firing up the GIMP for now. (I have written a rich text editor from scratch before – ASCII only, but capable of supporting multiple fonts with colors, bold/italic, kerning, multi-line text, etc. – it really fucking sucked to implement, and I don’t particularly want to revisit it right now, but maybe someday… I know I can do it…)

For things like split screen and point correspondence, I already wrote that a couple weeks ago in a basic form for the Mew composite. (e.g. here’s a screenshot of one point correspondence on a blade of grass – zoomed out a bit so you can see the images are different) I had a pretty good idea of the numerical model needed to solve the alignment; I thought it was just translation and zooming – and I was correct. Picking a few corners at sub-pixel resolution and computing a least squares solution for scale, and x/y translation gave a perfect alignment of the image; I thought I’d have to do some clean up of the edges afterwards or get creative with blending, but no – it was spot on exact with 9 points. Trying to do that in The GIMP manually was a nightmare – and yes, I tried that first. (There are other tools that can do that already – e.g. panorama editors – but most of them either cost money or are annoying to use for other reasons; so, I wrote my own.)

For vector manipulation, it’s probably possible to get Inkscape to do a lot of what I want, but I have bounced off that program about two dozen times already.

KolourPaint is basically an MS Paint clone plus or minus a few features. It’s great for trivial editing (way simpler than the GIMP) but it doesn’t do things like layers, and as soon as I want to do anything moderately complex I either need something more powerful or I will be spending all day doing really, really, really, tedious things over and over. (I did the first pass of Sock Trek in KolourPaint and the mistake with the edge of the shadow on the planet is due to me switching over to the GIMP and being unable to get a perfect alignment of the selection. Likewise the mistake with the pink aurora/cloud on the bottom right is due to KolourPaint not handling curves well at the edges of images and me having to try to patch it up pixel by pixel after I’d finished the overall image and realizing it looked bad there. The whole piece should’ve taken ~5 minutes but it took more like 2 hours to make. For Sox Headroom, I tried to do the shadows in GIMP but fucked up with the anti-aliasing on the edges and trying to recover from that was such a pain that honestly I should’ve just started over from scratch.)

I have seen Krita before and I think I tried an old version a few years ago, but I don’t currently have it installed. It’s neat, but being a digital painting / raster program, it’s geared to doing stuff that’s different from what I want to do.

I really want something that I can do 2D vector art with.

I’ve slowed down in posting a bit lately, but I’m still here!

Started watching Penguindrum (輪るピングドラム) after seeing @cacheson’s post over in !anime_irl a few days ago. I watched a lot of it a few years back, but never finished it. Trying this time with the dub; sometimes if I have trouble making it through a show switching from sub to dub (or vice versa) helps. (e.g. Space Dandy and B-Gata H-Kei worked way better for me with the dub). I think a lot of the show is still going to go over my head though given it’s connection to certain events from 1995 (apparently), references to Japanese literature, etc. that I am not super familiar with since I am not Japanese. The show does have a lot of strange and amusing imagery including many gags of penguins doing very silly things though – which I enjoy! I’m grabbing screenshots and will probably post a few in the coming days.

I had some time off recently and used a good chunk of it to work on a custom art tool. I finally got fed up enough with KolourPaint and The GIMP while trying to make some images for the (non-anime) !sockpuppetsociety community to try to write something that’s better suited to my own needs. I think it might help me make some anime fan art too eventually. I’ve got an idea in my head for a really silly bit of fan art that’s motivating my choice of what tools to implement. I’ll share the resulting image with you all – if I can figure out how to make it; I’m not particularly great at drawing, so may take me a while, even with computer assistance…

Speaking of fan art, I posted my composite of Mew from Wolf’s Rain over in !animepics a while back, but I don’t think I linked it here yet. Improving my workflow for making custom composites like that is one of the other things motivating my tool design.

I also noticed yesterday that @MentalEdge made some new “moe” communities including !officemoe. I tossed in a Shirobako office party screenshot to help kick it off. Curious to see what others will post!

One other thing bouncing around my head right now – people seem to be in a bit of a Sailor Moon parody kick over in the AI gen communities lately. These Sailor Moon Pickle and Sailor Moon/Cthulhu Romance images were the two I found most striking (so far), but there are a bunch more in a variety of styles over in !imageai if you are curious.

Ah, Escaflowne. I should probably rewatch that at some point. I’ve got both the movie and the series DVDs around, so it’s more a matter of when than if… I remember the movie being rather different from the series but it’s been such a long time since I’ve seen either that I don’t really remember the details.

Going back to different eras of anime can be neat. I’ve only got a couple shows and movies from the 80s and 90s though. The oldest I have access to right now is Lupin III (the first season from 1971, I think, plus the pilot from the late 60s) since it got a DVD release a few years ago. (I saw some reruns of Speed Racer and Hakushon Daimao on TV when I was kid but I don’t have a copy.) Maybe I should sort my shows by age and try looking at the progression of styles over time. Hmm…

This does not work on kbin.social, unfortunately.

I’ve been digging through my collection of old anime over the last few weeks – particularly looking for fun lines, screenshots, etc. to post over at !animepics (and sometimes !fangmoe or [email protected]) – and I’m paying a lot more attention to the actual art in anime as a result. I recently watched Ghost Stories (with it’s famously unfaithful dub), for example, and there’s a lot of just fun images if you’re paying attention to the artwork itself. I mean, that probably sounds like it should be obvious – it’s anime! it’s visual art, right?! – but before I started this I was usually watching shows and movies for the story and characters primarily and just taking in the art as an aid to enhance the storytelling rather than really paying attention to it in its own right. This slightly more active viewing approach has been a fun alternative to just riding along with the plot.

As part of that, I’ve just finished watching Wolf’s Rain a few hours ago. I’ve had the DVDs for years but never got around to watching it – so I finally did. I knew of it from an old friend I used to talk to on AIM (yes, from waaaaay back) who really liked the ED. I didn’t actually know much of anything about the show going into it besides that one song, so, that was interesting… The one sentence summary, if you haven’t heard of it, is basically: a group of wolves that can alternate between wolf and human appearance go on a journey in search of Paradise in a bleak, frozen, post-apocalyptic dark fantasy-with-tech setting.

Does anyone know WTF happened during production? There were FOUR back-to-back recap episodes in the middle of it – plus four OVA episodes to make up for that, I guess.

I’ve got a few screenshots from the show that I’ll be posting in the coming days – as well as a composite of a panning shot of a character that I thought would be fun to try to edit back together. I ended up writing some custom software – and refreshed myself on a numerical technique I haven’t used in a long time – in addition to using my image editor to make it.