Sorry for the slight delay in the post, I was waiting for Mochi, as they've started subbing Tegami Bachi. However, they have yet to release episode three (I assume they're tired from catching up on the first two) so I'll be using HorribleSubs for posting screencaps this week. In the future, if Mochi releases the episode within a day or so, I'll use them. But for the time being, hey, at least I have subbed screencaps this week!

( Read More )

Gauche- not really a family man.

I love Tegami Bachi simply because it airs on Saturday- it makes it a lot easier to blog in a timely fashion (unlike Umineko, which airs during the week). However, this means I end up using the raw for making screencaps, when I know I should really use subs. Oh well, bear with me for this post, I'll see if I can work something out by next week.

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Oh, and while you're waiting for the next episode, you can watch my new Tegami Bachi AMV!

Tegami Bachi (aka Letter Bee) has been my most anticipated series of the season, on par with my obsessions with Umineko and Pandora Hearts in the weeks before they came out. We all know how different those turned out to be. I was very anxious to see if Tegami Bachi would live up to my expectations. Did it? Let's find out.

( Read More )

*spoilers*
So I've just finished another Code Geass AMV, and one of the last clips I use is the scene where poor Lelouch's life is flashing before his eyes after he gets stabbed. TT_TT But while I was fitting it in, I noticed a couple scenes I wouldn't have expected from someone near death replaying the most vivid and important parts of their time on the earthly plane.

So, because it's a Friday and I have nothing better to do, here are, in order of appearance, what Lelouch apparently considered to be the highlights of his life.

- Shirley eating an unidentified red thing
- Diethard dying
- Pwning Schniezel
- Getting trolled by Nunnally
- Kissing Kallen
- Dear old dad turns into Rocketmoto!
- Trolling dear old dad
- Rolo confessing his love dying
- Suzaku nuking Tokyo
- Suzaku kicking his face into the ground TT_TT
- Lolis taking over the world
- Playing Metal Gear Getting trolled by C.C.
- Shirley's coffin
- Shirley dying
- Wearing a silly hat
- Shaking hands with the generic, long-haired Chinese dude
- Playing no-rules chess with Schniezel
- Creating his clone army
- Getting ready to do some Refrain
- Flying backwards screaming "NUNNALLYYYYYYYY!"
- Kallen in a giant gopher outfit
- Bullet time!
- Rolo going all rabu over his locket
- Cooking in a silly apron
- Being mindraped by dear old dad
- Random Roman statues?
- C.C. beckoning him to the dark side, where they have cookies
- Lies of being a shoutacon
- Being shot at by Suzaku
- Being kissed by C.C.
- Random tapestry?
- Being (accidentally) mindraped by C.C.
- Killing off the pink one
- Gore! Dead bodies!
- Being hit on the head with a Sana-mallet by Cecile
- Pwning everyone in the Gawain
- Stuck on an island with the pink one
- Screaming "NOOOOOOOO!"
- Exchanging a secret handshake with C.C.
- Being trolled by Mao
- Being kissed by Shirley
- Hearing C.C.'s name (UNLIKE THE REST OF US, DAMMIT)
- Being forcibly dressed up as a cat
- Introducing his new performance troupe, The Black Knights
- Watching pay-per-view in the Black Knights trailer
- Threatening suicide (thus gaining +16 EmoPoints)
- As a shouta, being yelled at by dear old dad
- Tripping over a bush
- Watching the love of his life Suzaku walk away after he saved his sorry ass
- Preforming his first large-scale troll as Zero
- Being a siscon
- Scaring the shit out of Clovis
- His first evil grin (this goes in the baby book)
- C.C. getting shot
- Loli(er) Nunnally
- Shouta Suzaku
- Shouta self

Notes:
-This is just my rough, first pass of translation, just seeing how many words I could get down.
-I left most of the particles untranslated because particles are COMPLETELY INSANE I don't know that much about their different uses.
-Untranslated words are ones that either didn't appear in the online dictionary I was using or had too many meanings for me to know which one to put down.
-I haven't attempted to translate the Italian parts yet, I'm more focused on the Japanese.

( VII )

Hey, so did you hear there's this anime called Umineko? And it's, like, really awesome? You did? On this very blog? Oh, right, I remember now, I spent my whole last post singing its praises. In that case, allow me to elaborate on one of the reasons I know Umineko is awesome: I spend a week waiting for each episode.

( A Necessary Boring )

Okay, the title of this post is very misleading. This post won't be like my last update where I ranked all the new shows I was watching and gave recommendations for each. I can't really do that this time because I only ended up picking two new shows from the summer line-up, Umineko and Element Hunters, and one of those I take much less seriously than the other. So really, there is nothing to rank. But I will give you my impressions of the one that really matters, at least.



Umineko no Naku Koro ni
Umineko was the only show I knew from the start that I would watch. I was so excited for it, I ended up being unable to wait for a subbing group to release it and had to go search for a raw episode- despite the fact that my Japanese is abysmal and I would understand one word in ten if I was lucky. I did this with Pandora Hearts when it came out as well, but the quality of the animation was a bit of a disappointment, and afterwards I've waited for the subbed episodes to come out.

This was different, though, because the animation quality in Umineko was (and is, as of the latest episode) superb. I have yet to see it fall below "Fair" and most of the time it is quite excellent, and there haven't been any of the "budget-saving" episodes that happen despairingly often in Pandora Hearts. I have continued to collect the raw episodes (I know from experience how hard it can be to find them after a show has ended) and if i get bored waiting for the subs, I feel quite comfortable watching the raws. I'm not saying that a show has to have an enormous animation budget to be considered "good", but it does make watching it a bit more enjoyable, and is a much larger factor if you watch it raw, as you can focus more of your attention on details.

It also has an EPIC Opening song.


But don't think for a second that Umineko will be a show like Gundam 00, wonderful animation but a little light on plot (Umineko has no giant mech). It has a very dark and intriguing story that is very reminiscent of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (no surprise, they were made by the same people) which means three things:
1) There will be time loops.
2) There will be evil laughter. (A definite plus in my book)
3) There will be gorn. Lots and lots of it.

Number three is quite important to note if you haven't seen Higurashi and/or you have a weak stomach. The fact that in some arcs, no one makes it out alive just serves to underscore this point.

Verdict: If you can handle some gore and like anything related to mysteries or magic, you will want to watch this series. You will not be disappointed.

Important Notice: The information that follows may be vary dangerous to procrastinators and could cause a decrease in free time. Read on at your own peril.

Hey, have you heard of a site called TV Tropes?

NO, NO! WAIT! LISTEN TO ME FOR A SECOND! DON'T CLICK ON IT YET!!!

Damn it, I've probably already lost some of you.

For those of you still reading (and by now no doubt wondering what the hell is behind that link) hear me out. If you hadn't heard of TV Tropes before today, I shall tell you what it is. It is one of the most addictive websites on the known internet.

More specifically, TV Tropes is a wiki for, well, tropes. In other words, themes, plot devices, etc. that are used in works of fiction. And by fiction, I don't just mean that novel on your bookshelf with a dragon on the cover and characters whose names use more apostrophes than is really necessary. TV Tropes covers anime, TV shows, literature, video games, web comics, you name it. In short, anything written by someone who considers themselves creative, you will find it here.

Their motto is "TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life."

Okay, so what makes this site so addicting? The major culprit is also what makes Wikipedia so hard to tear away from at times: Hyperlinks.

Hyperlinks are evil. You can click on them and choose to open a new window, letting you continue reading and clicking in your current article. If your internet browser allows you to use tabs, they are even more dangerous, because it is harder for you to notice the number of to-read pages piling up because they don't take up any space. It certainly helps (or does not help, depending on whether you view this as a positive thing or not) that TV Tropes is written, in its own words, "a buttload more informal[ly]" than its cousin Wikipedia, which makes it easier to read in many cases. I have known the site for a while now and I still can't visit it without ending up with literally dozens of tabs, sometimes across multiple windows.

So, Internet, I have a challenge for you.

1. Set aside a chunk of time. Fifteen minutes, say, or a half-hour if you can swing it.
2. Go to TV Tropes via one of the links provided at the bottom of this post.
3. Start reading, click on whatever looks interesting.
4. At the end of your chunk of time, count how many windows and/or tabs you have accumulated. Bonus points if you end up going past your planned stopping time.
5. Comment on this entry (with your LJ or anonymously if you don't have one) and report your results.

This is just for fun, I'm just curious to see how other people react to the site.

For Step #2: You can just go to the home page and begin reading there, or click the "Random Item" button until you see something interesting. If you want to start with something more specific, you can try an anime like Code Geass, a TV show like Dr. Who, (yes, I know my readership) or any number of specific tropes.

Have fun!

I discovered something odd today. One of the surest ways to find out why you fanatically obsess over something is to try and explain it to someone who is completely disinterested.

You may remember I used to run a fansite for the manga series +Anima. I still do, but I'm not as interested in it as I once was, and thus the site had been neglected for many years. Well, recently, a fellow fan of the series contacted me to see if I could display some fanart they'd made. This prompted a brief amount of attention to the site before we both lost interest and the whole thing was forgotten.

We have, however, been chatting via email about various other anime interests, and in one exchange I mentioned Code Geass, how it was an awesome series, and how depressing it was that it was treated so poorly by its company. Not being as big a fan as I was, my interlocutor dismissed this and was ready to move on to another topic. I probably should have followed example, but for some reason I just wasn't ready to let this issue go until I had made it clear just how big a deal this was, and in attempting to do so, I had to think about why it is I love Geass so much.

I think Code Geass is so important to me because it made a much bigger impact on my life than other shows I've liked have. I'm not saying it was life-changing, it's way to early to tell that yet, but it did leave its mark. Geass was a major factor behind my decision to join my school's anime club, where I ended up making a bunch of new friends. It was how I was able to bond with my host-sister when I visited Japan despite the language barrier (she was a fan too- I remember us playing with sparklers and naming them "Lelouch", "Suzaku" and other anime characters so we could cheer them on). It got me started making AMVs after a long creative lapse. And it led me to discover the anime blogging community, which has inspired me to take a course in Creative Writing this upcoming year, so that I can someday make my own blog as witty as Atarashii Prelude or DarkMirage.

So maybe that's why I just can't seem to accept the fact that Geass could end without anyone ever knowing if it was supposed to be different or not. Because it really means a lot to me, and I just want it to get the respect I think it deserves. That's all.

This requires a bit of exposition, so stay with me here.

I have recently become mildly obsessed with a j-rock band called Stereopony. They've done an opening theme for Gundam 00 (Namida no Mukou) and a song I believe was used in Bleach (Hitohira no Hanabira) both of which are awesome songs.

On the Namida no Mukou single, there was also a song called Stereopony no Tabi wa Tsuzuku (Stereopony's Journey Continues) which I really liked and thought would make a nice AMV once I finally get those raw episodes (THEY ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND!) So I went to look for a translation to better plan it out.

No such luck. Namida no Mukou and Hitohira no Hanibira both have translations available, but both of them have been used in popular anime, so that makes sense. I guess Stereopony no Tabi wa Tsuzuku isn't popular enough to merit being translated yet. (Heck, it doesn't even have its own Youtube video yet)

In a fit of optimism, I tried google translator. Well, you can guess how that turned out. Half the words didn't even get translated, and what was translated made no sense whatsoever.

That's when I had the thought "Why don't I take a stab at translating it? I've spent most of my life watching anime, I know a sizable number of nouns and a handful of verbs. Okay, maybe I don't know how to conjugate said verbs, and I have little to no knowledge of the grammatical system, but this'll be a good chance for me to learn. How hard can it be to do just a rough translation?"

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon going back and forth between the lyrics, an online japanese-english dictionary, and the Wikipedia article on Japanese particles (the size of the contents box alone should have sent up a red flag) all to find out that I am not a whole lot better than google translator.

( Pictures of my translation trainwreck )

Yeah. That was obviously the very roughest version, but I don't think cleaning it up would make it any better.
-_-' Does anyone know a better version?