Zen­ryoku Zenkai!!!

“Mad Sci­en­tists + Rag­ing Les­bian Super­heroes”, that’s what I call To Aru Kagaku no Rail­gun in five words. Frankly, I enjoyed this show immensely, high­lighted by the fact its one of the few series I kept up to date with despite hav­ing my atten­tion con­sumed by the release of FF13; yet on the other hand, I had a great deal of trou­ble pin­ning down just what I liked about it. For starters, this show is all over the place, and “incon­sis­tent” hardly begins to describe it. Most of the episodes are dom­i­nated by slice-of-life com­edy and seinen yuri/moe shenani­gans. Yes, Rail­gun does an excel­lent job of tying filler episodes together and weav­ing a main sto­ry­line out of them, build­ing up the sus­pense while still tast­ing the sweet crepes. But while it does a good job at chain­ing together details, it also has one of the most incon­sis­tent mood and logic pac­ing ever. The atmos­phere rou­tinely changes with com­pletely abrupt­ness, ruin­ing what oth­er­wise could have been a dra­matic buildup. Author Kazuma Kamachi also shows that he’s too obvi­ously a very ama­teur­ish fantasy/scifi writer: despite hav­ing the name of A Cer­tain Sci­en­tific Rail­gun, any­one who took basic elec­tro­mag­netic physics can eas­ily pin­point all the far­fetched BS in the series’ mechan­ics that com­pletely con­tra­dict sci­en­tific laws.

But despite its many flaws and overused cliches, Rail­gun never tried to be over-dramatic or deep. Instead it pre­sented its ama­teur bak­ing skills with a glit­ter­ing layer of icing, rang­ing from action-packed eye-candy to Kuroko’s hilar­i­ous antics and expres­sions. It may not pass the test of any cake anime con­nois­seur look­ing for the next gem, but it sure tasted good for some­thing you just want to enjoy on a shal­low, sur­face level.

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It’s the first sea­son after my post-graduation life setup. With­out an engi­neer­ing ‘double’-major I find a lot of time at my hands and tries to allo­cate a good chunk of it towards anime. Well that was a poor choice, as Japan sees fit to send me the most dis­ap­point­ing anime sea­son of my life.

Onee-sama is not amused

Well, let me try going through a list of all the things I watched wasted time on… I’ll save Rail­gun and Todoke for last as they’re the only two that really man­aged to save me from bang­ing my head against the wall repeatedly.

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My gods J.C.Staff, you cer­tainly never run out of ways to enter­tain us. As if Rail­gun episode 10 wasn’t explo­sive enough, you have to raise this flag to pull my atten­tion in with this amaz­ing amalgamation:

Uni­ver­sal OS Macin­dows EXP with a sig­na­ture Outel Out­side marker! In a world when Macs were com­pat­i­ble with every­thing and not over­loaded with pre-programmed set­tings, and when Win­dows actu­ally have good processor/RAM uti­liza­tion.  On that note, I won­der what Macin­dows BST is a ref­er­ence of?

Sorry Ubunchu, but the pen­guin had been hand­ily given the boot. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m still decid­ing on my anime blog­ging style. Def­i­nitely not the episodic type, but I fig­ure I’ll try to get four in per sea­son: pre-season expec­ta­tions, ini­tial insights (1~2eps), mid-season impres­sions (6~8eps), and end­ing reviews.

I’m happy and I meant it~

Other than Rail­gun which I’ve already read, most of the 2009 fall anime sea­son has been Meh for me… or so I thought, until I caught up to the stun­ning first cli­max of Kimi ni Todoke, which is quickly becom­ing a mas­ter­piece in my book. I did end up drop­ping two series, but they were ones I never expected to watch in the first place.

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Over the past two weeks my life’s free time had been almost entirely con­sumed by pho­to­shop, as the Tarot Project is finally com­ing together. I only have three things to say on the mat­ter — I’ve never taken pho­to­shop to be such seri­ous busi­ness before; I can finally say I’m more than just a noob to pho­to­shop thanks to the picto-editing skills I’ve acquired; and I haven’t felt so proud of my goods for a long time.

Before any­one asks “why all girls?”, it’s to cut down on the com­pe­ti­tion between char­ac­ter and more con­sis­tency in art style. Not to men­tion — the deck is cuter this way.

I might think about mak­ing a bishie/GAR deck later, maybe, if I feel like throw­ing away another week+ of free time.

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This sea­son is a bit of a slow start for me (again) since none of the series are quite blaz­ing at me in explod­ing neon signs, either that or because I still haven’t recov­ered from being utterly dis­ap­pointed in last two sea­sons, espe­cially by Valkyria Chron­i­cles and Asura Cryin’. But nev­er­the­less, prospects looks… ade­quate for a sea­son. At least if noth­ing else, Rail­gun already promises not to dis­ap­point. In a ways I guess that’s good, since it means I’ll have more time to catch up on every­thing still piled up from col­lege (I just blitzed most of Saki this Sat­ur­day — awe­some Mahjong yuri)

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