Working!!
A 4koma anime that feels like a 4koma anime, produced by A-1 Pictures channeling J.C. Staff. It has some nice character ideas, but the execution is a bit too straightforward, so it’s a little boring – still watchable, but I don’t love it. I wish it was by SHAFT somehow, even though I was very bored with Arakawa (dropped at 2 episodes).
The opening doesn’t really know what it’s doing – half of it is new and interesting, and half of it seems to be shots copied from Azumanga Daioh. My notes say “ed is stupid”, but I can’t remember anything about it, so let’s leave it at that.
I hear the later episodes are more solid and that there’s a new character with hime cut. Watching.

Giant Killing
A soccer anime by Studio DEEN with actual money. I thought it was really interesting that a DEEN show with a budget has better drawings and movement, but still has horrible washed-out coloring choices for everything. Actually, I thought that was more interesting than the show – I’ve never seen a sports anime before, so it’s kind of cool, but the early part is just the coach making up magic quirky strategies for everything instead of something more realistic.
I’ll have to look ahead and see if it goes anywhere, otherwise dropped at 3 episodes.

Sarai-ya Goyou / House of Five Leaves
A samurai show made by manglobe that’s REALLY BORING!
Nothing has happened in 3 episodes except for one swordfight, so it doesn’t matter how good the art is (it’s good). Dropped.

Senkou no Night Raid
Psychic superpower action series by A-1 Pictures channeling Bones. I’m watching this untranslated, and the fake Chinese politics sort of goes over my head, so without that it’s just a watchable but slow action drama – a lot of things happen, but not in a really interesting way. I’d rather finish Darker than Black, really. I’ve heard some other people say it was “awful”, but I can’t really tell what’s annoying them. Watching halfheartedly.

The OP is a really complicated animation that looks cool and doesn’t match the actual show at all.

They make it sound like the psychics are an important national secret, but then in episode 3 they’re teleporting bombs out of buildings all over the place. Won’t someone notice?

Now that I think about it, the only things I’ve seen in the last few weeks were Angel Beats! and K-ON!!. More about that later.

I decided at the last minute to go to Anime Boston after I realized I’d scheduled myself out of Otakon. Not having been there before, I had no idea if it was any good, but thought I’d heard positive things about it… or maybe that’s just because Anime Hell was on the schedule.

It actually turned out to be kind of boring. Not as much as MomoCon, of course, since there were ~17,000 people, but I never really saw most of them – they all seemed to spend their time sitting in the hallways and not going to the same panels as me. The con organizers had one of the traditional con bad ideas and decided that their “theme” was “mad science”, which (as usual for con themes) is something that doesn’t really exist in anime and is kind of hard to work with. AWO, who were doing all the “featured panels”, gave it their best by playing important scientific anime Baoh and some Sailor Moon villain clips, but it didn’t quite work.

Some things which did actually happen:

I got there just in time to see the end of wah’s Shinbo panel, which consisted of him playing five different clips of Bakemonogatari and reading random translated jokes from his Uncyclopedia article, which nobody got. It sounded pretty unfocused and his presentation skills aren’t really up there, but I guess that’s what you’d expect from a first-time panel. We stayed in his apartment for the weekend, and it was truly an otaku_room.

I went to one of Alex Leavitt‘s eight million panels, this one about pilgrimages to the sites of your favorite anime background paintings. He spent the first half talking about his attempt at the actual Shikoku pilgrimage, to the point where I thought he was just going to talk about that the entire time, but came back at the end and we all found out where the the anime pilgrimage wiki was.
(I just remembered that I went to see Emma’s house in London in 2006, but it’s a bit too late to write that one up now.)

Vertical’s Ed Chavez had a discussion people where he asked various Internet manga-knowing-about people questions about the state of manga and the industry. In keeping with the philosophy of this blog, he didn’t introduce any of them and you were just expected to know who all of them were. One of them was kransom, contributing his knowledge of “having actually been to Comic Market” and his skill at beating down evil. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten most of the panel content, but you can hear it all here!

We went into the Touhou panel long enough to take this picture and leave. Nobody seems to know what the audience for those things is supposed to be – this one started off by explaining that Touhou is a shooting game “like DoDonPachi”, which would just confuse anyone who didn’t know what it was, and then they just started playing one of the slower stages from PCB, which would just bore everyone else. They could just talk about pixiv memes the entire time, that’d be pretty good.

I tried to play Sonic 3 but couldn’t figure out how to control the swing bar and got stuck in a pit. The game room, despite being in a huge badly lit garage-looking room, is somehow still not as depressing as Otakon’s. I guess that’s something!

Photos here – I didn’t take many, but I think one of them is interesting, so try to figure out which one that was. Maybe I should get one of those photo website accounts.

Facts about Yamakan:

• He is cool
• He composed the Haruhi dance in his apartment while standing on his bed
• He recommends Summer Wars by possibly-acclaimed director Mamoru Hosoda
• He doesn’t actually hate slightly-more-acclaimed director Akiyuki Shinbo
• He probably shouldn’t have made three dancing anime in a row
• “If I said I didn’t like any other directors, people would yell at me on the Internet again”

Highlights of his panels included an Asian guy, possibly from a mysterious land known as “#denpa”, dancing the Kannagi OP.

Facts about Kikuko Inoue:

• She was a fish in a previous life.
• She “knows this”.
• She spent half of her panel asking Hidenori Matsubara to let her be in the next Eva movie. (He offered to let her be Pen-Pen)
• People in the audience thought Maikaze and games were recorded differently from anime, but they weren’t.
• She can remember how to sing the Ah My Goddess opening, but not Cruel Angel’s Thesis. But she did her best!
• Only girls can join her 17-year-old club, because it’s more bittersweet.

Tomorrow I’m going to do something other than sitting in guest Q&A panels, I hope. Like sitting in Surat’s panels.

• moe main character getting released from jail (possibly moe jail) and changing into a school uniform (there are no schools)
• M.M.C. running away from her education on how to become the leader of her city’s government/moe mafia/eco-terrorist group
• a secret organization whose members include C.C. and a few hundred identical men wearing sweater vests
• a child princess who gets carried on her sedan chair to watch a live fire sniper rifle test
• 5 minutes straight of nonsense conversation (featuring a child hacker with a teddy bear named Pudding) about how carbon credits are a scam exploiting the poor
• military officers who send out expeditions entirely so they can shoot random civilians
• a crossdresser who fights by flirting with men so they immediately drop their weapons and run away in fear

All that and I still can’t figure out if it’s a joke or not.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff confusing the issue here. For one thing, it’s made by Studio GONZO, who somehow managed to make a great-looking show with one of their worst plots yet in the middle of collapsing. Except for a few shows they constantly do stupid completely serious sci-fi and mess it up; there’s no reason to have any faith in them.

The other problem is that it’s a political show, and I don’t think anything about anime politics ever makes sense. Even ignoring regular stuff like how slavery is legal (why didn’t Hisui or Kanon ever go to school aaaargh), I can still read possibly reputable people (even if they did like Index) saying they look forward to Ride-Back’s political themes, and then find out that the plot involves college students fighting against the GLOBAL GOVERNMENT PLAN. Who are terrorists who took over the world. Using motorcycles that can punch people. And I didn’t even bother with Library War, which features two opposing military forces who get their budgets from the same people.

Wait, I forgot what my point was. Anyway, I think I’m going to retreat and rewatch Gunbuster, where the men were men and the script occasionally referenced things from other cultures. Those scenes where they did push-ups in their giant robots were totally serious, OK.

<> the shangri-la girl is in moe prison
<> her prison uniform is a seifuku
< Nakar> "You've been sentenced for crimes against good characterization. How do you plead?" "uguu~" "LOCK HER UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY."
<> this is even more gonzo than linebarrels
<> next they'll make another season of glass fleet

What was not announced was that the Reitaisai organizers also rented the East 3 hall, for the purpose of line control. Yes, they rented a 3.5 million yen/day hall for the purpose of making the event less of a living hell by lining up the first x thousand people to show up inside the event hall. Upon discovering this hall, I felt a little less bad about having to spend $19 on an only-event catalog. I took it somewhat easy, getting up at around 6 and arriving at the hall at a little past 7, and just barely made it in the nice climate controlled room where many thousands of other Touhou fans were, many of whom probably were hanging around the Big Sight all night.

As at all doujin events, there is a page in the Reitaisai catalog and all related materials that states that you SHOULD NOT line up overnight, or even get there really early in the morning, suggesting that you instead arrive at an hour when normal people will be awake, in other words, when you won’t bother them. Of course, a lot of people don’t actually follow this rule, creating tensions between the rule-breaking overnighters (徹夜組), the on-the-fence first trainers (始発組), and the rest of us plebes who more or less follow the rules and wish grave harm upon the first group and mild harm to the second.

Most conventions state that there will be some sort of vague penalties for showing up early. I’m fairly sure Comiket isn’t actually able to follow through with this threat, and they’re already pretty well equipped to deal with the crowd. Reitaisai last year, on the other hand, didn’t hand out any penalties, and the event was pretty chaotic. Sunshine Creation was fairly well known for actually dealing these out, moving some people to the back of the line, or I believe in one case making the overnight folks shovel snow if they wanted to keep their place in line. Of course, this can always backfire, as apparently at last Comic1, the 100 or so nerds who were cordoned off as a penalty by 5 staff members decided that their collective inertia could not be stopped by these 5 staff members if they all moved together, and basically just plowed into the event hall. tsk tsk.

Back to Retaisai, though. Like I said, I just barely made it in east-3, and I could hear people around me mumuring about penalties and whatnot, some calling the building we were in a ペナルティほいほい, “Penalty Hoihoi”, a play on the Japanese for “roach motel”, “Gokiburi hoihoi.”

Well, it turns out they were right! At 9:45, 15 minutes before the event started, the periodic announcement by the cheerful female announcer reminding us to please buy a catalog if we hadn’t yet was replaced by another announcer, this one male, and much less cheerful. He informed us folks in the hall that we all probably knew that lining up early was expressly forbidden. In classic Japanese chewing-out style, he let us know how much of an annoyance we must have been, partying outside all night when there’s a hospital with a giant cancer ward just next door, and that we should probably feel bad about ourselves. Oh, and there would be some changes made to the line.

Without even a “have a nice day”, the PA clicked, and everyone went from being dead silent to excitedly talking to their friends. The guys around me seemed half-scared but half-thrilled, because we sort of followed the rules by showing up after the first train, and even if we did get hit by a penalty, we had already showed up late enough that it wouldn’t reaaally make much of a difference.

At 9:55, our line, 6 wide and 90 deep, and only our line, started to move. We all started freaking out, wondering if we actually were going to be the first regular attendees in. They lined us up right in front of the entryway to the event, and held us there for a little bit, telling us that we shouldn’t run under any circumstances, that we should have our catalogs out, and that we should have our shoelaces tied. When 10 came around, everyone started clapping, as you normally do at these events.

Oh, except for the people who had stayed overnight at the Big Sight. Apparently they weren’t too thrilled about the entry order to the event of East 3 being completely reversed.

as they say on 2ch, 徹夜ざまあ wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Anyway, I ought to go now. Need to install my Seirensen demo!

Higurashi’s character designs were always a little weird — exactly what kind of dress is Rena supposed to be wearing? — but I’ve just started Umineko on some guy‘s recommendation and it’s getting way far out there. Kyrie on the right there is wearing some kind of goth tie, a trenchcoat, and a tie clip. I’m pretty sure I met her at DragonCon once. Well, at least the men just have strangely colored suits.

The Rena clone/moe girl Maria’s design is so weird I assume he’s going to explain it – she seems to carry around a huge purse all day and she’s wearing a black crown(????) at a jaunty angle – but she’s also suffering from a new kind of anime age, where she’s claimed to be 9 but is actually written as a retarded 5 year old. She’s only said one complete sentence so far, and it was repeating someone else.

Well, at least the story seems interesting, though it also looks like it’s going to get unhealthily meta later on. And he only repeats everything twice, which I think puts him near the top of visual novel writing.

edit: And he thinks absinthe is bad for you or something? I thought everyone had gotten over that in the 90s?