Update on Current Events for me

Well I am going to be taking a break from anime this spring break, maybe I will watch a few episodes here and there at night but for the most part I will be playing World of Warcraft. Yes I am one of THOSE people who sits at home in a dark room staring at a screen paying money to play a game. Well guess what I have the money to do so, but also I have many friends who play. I have a few accounts around level 60 so I will be trying to get those to level 90 as soon as possible.

Most likely the next review will be of Black Bullet as that is the show I am currently watching. Overall the show has ups and downs and likes to stay in the "meh its good for a rainy day" bin for the most part. It is not amazing, it doesn't have amazing characters and for the most part is just meh. I enjoyed the first villain though he was killed off pretty quick, no long fight scene that keeps you on edge, no power struggle. Just booped the masked dudes nose and he died, its like one of those freak accidents in a wrestling match, you throw a play punch and suddenly the guy is dead because his nose fractured and pierced his brain when he fell. Now you have a law suit and will never be hired again in the same field because you have been labeled a horrible murderer and are too violent for the ring. So you live a life of depression and drinking as well as some drugs thrown in there until one day someone picks a fight with you and you end up bashing his skull in and cement yourself as a murderer. At which point the police come and take you to reiker prison and you become the leader of the prison gangs before you stage a riot and claim glory. See how much more interesting this is than the plot of Black Bullet? Watch it and you will see.

Heck at this rate I might as well go watch The Gemini Meteor arc of Darker Than Black, Hei is homeless dude and even though I have heard it was bade might be better than Black Bullet. By no means is Black Bullet bad it is just a meh fest with blood thrown in to be edgy and tons of badass loli characters. Guess what I love loli's in anime but that is not all there has to be for me to like it. The show needs to have a good atmosphere, story, and pacing. Black Bullet has a generic atmosphere and a very slightly original concept for the story which is handled in a meh way. And the Pacing is nonexistent, it is too fast for most scenes and you don't get to absorb what is really going on. I sit down for an episode and before I know it, its over and i'm sitting there looking at the screen going "that's it, really I would think it accomplish more with how fast paced it is". So let's just say that Black Bullet will be getting around a 6 if it doesn't step up to what it could be. It is possible that I was spoiled by amazing anime recently or my eyes have been opened by these anime.  Maybe I have become pretentious though if that were the case I probably wouldn't even give the anime the score that I give them now.

So march has been a good month for this blog with many posts coming, usually multiple posts a week, so I am hoping for the same in April and I am hoping to be able to work through a lot of my backlog of over 200 anime. So i think sometime in April I will try a challenge where I have to watch as much anime as humanly possible during a week where I have school. This will be to make up for the failed stay up until monogatari is finished thing. I have a goal of over the course of the next few years training my body to be able to stay up for as long as I need it to, the reason I failed last time was due to stomach pain. When you are tired you need more and more food to be able to stay awake because you are using more energy just to function. Though I will watch shonen during this time as if you have seen the Bakemonogatari review it is not good to stay awake and then try to review. Your brain starts to not remember near as much because sleep is the time where you recall all the events of the previous day so if you have not slept then your body will start to forget more and more and you will eventually get to the point where you lose basic functions and begin hallucinating. I want to use a long running shonen like bleach or naruto because I have already watched both series all the way through. (naruto i'm on my 3rd watch through around episode 99, I use long running shounen to fill in gaps where I don't know what to watch). The reason why one piece isn't on there is because I am still watching it for the first time and i'm around episode 4. So for a challenge of endurance watching something that will keep your attention but not require a ton of thinking is required, as too much time thinking means that you will fall behind. This is what happened to me during the monogatari trials I got sidetracked a ton and ended up not watching bakemonogatari for the most part and was instead watching videos on youtube because I would think about a ton of things. If I am watching a show I have already seen I should be fine, I might even pull out some box sets though my TV is crap in that regard.

If I do this challenge I will be making a twitch account and streaming it with a webcam, I don't have one currently but I can buy one for this. I have a twitch account but I made a typo in the name so I will delete it and make a new one. I am tired right now which I find funny due to wanting to do a sleepless challenge, that is mainly because every night I end up staying up till midnight and then have to get up at around 6, that is 6 hours of sleep if I go to sleep right away though that rarely happens. It is also because I am in school and school is draining when not with friends, I am sitting here in ISS on a laptop which is not mine typing this, because I still haven't gotten my laptop back. It has 100 gigs of anime on it, but I have 120 on my home computer. I am going to need to buy an external hard drive soon though, I only have 300 gigs available on my terabyte hard drive and it is depressing. If I get one it will be a 3tb Seagate one, they make good external hard drives. Though I will also back everything up on discs, I have already done that to my torrented movies just in case. For the anime I am going to have to have an entire stack of DVDs, hopefully I can find DVD 9's which are 9 gig DVD's instead of the more common 5 gigabyte ones. If my pc had a blu ray encoder I could put it on two of those because they can hold 50 gigs. Oh the joys of being a pirate, though the anime isn't even a DVD rip, it is from the website kissanime.com they have a huge selection and are sponsored by a ton of people. From what I have been able to tell the site isn't illegal, though I have been downloading the videos for the sake of having access to the anime. The only series that I have put on discs is all but 2 episodes of Spice and Wolf. The reason for this is that I have to download it at 1080p which takes forever and the DVD encoding for one disc which holds 3-4 episodes takes around an hour. That is too long to have a series that I can watch on a big TV when I am content with having smaller 360p videos that I can watch on a laptop or my phone. Also the Spice and Wolf ending theme is stuck in my head now.

I can see that this post is getting very long but I am venting a bit, not to anyone in particular just venting frustration about life the universe and everything. I am also just stalling until school lets out for spring break. I have done all my work and I have a few Dance in the Vampire bund manga to read but I just want to be able to listen to music from my drive while I sit here typing this out. This is probably the closest to my thought document that I have gotten on this blog, though my thought document is similar to a diary and shouldn't be read by anyone. This is a post which I will be sending to the masses.

I will do some more research on streaming because I would like to be able to save the stream and be able to do highlights. A bit of an issue is ensuring that my fan won't interfere too much, if it does I will figure out something. I don't want to do this unless I think that I can get the best quality for those that watch it. So yeah I will get back to you guys once I am done with that and I decide how I will manage this, it is possible that I won't do this challenge until a few months later when I can get a better mic, if so it will be a blue snowball.

Ghost in The Shell Review: RoboCop Tit Upgrade Enabled

My Adventure with:

Ghost in the Shell

So I got sent to ISS, which if you little kiddies or oldies out there don't know that is in school suspension. Why was I sent there you ask? well I will tell you my fine chap. I was perusing the interwebs as I often do and found a funny picture which I decided to show my hardcore otaku friend. He promptly chuckled and went to work searching for something to gross me out. What was this you ask? Well that was tons of cartoon network character hentai which got me flagged. Side note I am a denizen of the internet and wasn't grossed out in the slightest, the things I have seen would make a Vietnam vet want back on the battlefield so they can run into some chemical orange and maybe blind themselves. I digress though, the point is this caused my school laptop to be flagged and then the attendance/diciplinary officer called me down and confiscated it so he could search it. Hope he enjoys 100gb of anime. Now the only thing I had on there that I was iffy on was the Ghost in the Shell movie, so I decided to watch it while in ISS to pass the time.

In ISS you are essentially in a permit test cubby where you can't see except if you turn around, so i thought it was perfect for watching considering the privacy. I begin watching and the titillage begins, I kid though the movie was very serious and touched down on many philosophical topics. There just happened to be a lot of tit scenes tossed in there, with the majors thermoptic camo only working when naked save for a belt. The technology is another thing worth mentioning, it is so diverse and you are told nothing except that people have different augmentations that help them with every day life.

This movie had something that I don't see in many shows today, subtlety the show knows how to toss all these scenes and dialog at you that don't make sense to you at the time but are known by the characters. The dialog seems natural and not forced in any way, you don't have long exposition dumps as many modern anime do. For instance an anime which I have been watching is Black Bullet, the show is good, with great action scenes and dialog from the villian but the rest of the characters have seemingly forced dialog, many shows have this issue especially when first explaining something. Some it is justified like in the case of Death Note where Light knows nothing about the shinigami powers and how the notebook works, so it is logical for things to have to be explained. In many shows they state things which should already be known by the characters and it feels unnatural. Ghost in the Shell has many things that it states but doesn't explain, they mention ghosts a lot and you come to realize throughout the film that a ghost is the augmented brain, later you they talk about a shell but you aren't sure what they mean for a while until you figure out that it is the body. The dialog is different from normal speech to us but is normal to them so they don't have to explain it, you just realize it through repition similar to learning a language by exposure.

The movie has multiple scenes which go on between others that further elude to what will happen next, the show seems to have mastered the environment and that is by far the best part of the movie. The cyberpunk dystopian future where everyone is augmented but it leads to further complications. It brings up many points like what makes a human special, what if a soul is a simple algorithm, things like that. Things which a cyborg would go through, especially when confronted by a construct that was artificially created but as sentient as a human. These partial machines feel more human than almost anything I have seen from animation and I loved it. I sat through the whole movie in awe of the cinematography and had to remind myself that this movie came out in 1995 because it looked better than most shows that I have watched.

The soundtrack was something that had no real outstanding tracks but as a whole it immersed you into the universe that was being illustrated, I felt enthralled by the bewitching soundtrack that conveyed a sense of lapsing reality in some scenes but could switch to a fast paced scene as well without feeling jarring. The whole soundtrack flowed well with the movie and helped to cement it into my mind as something to think about.

Something I catch myself thinking about are all the media which seem to have taken inspiration from this movie, from the style, to the setting, to the philosophy of indisinguishable man and machine. This is a topic which has been addressed over and over again from characters that are partially machine fighting with the urge to go full machine and sacrifice their humanity (alla teen titans), to AI wanting humanity (alla a metric shit ton of space movies, with an honorable mention going to AI rampancy in the Halo universe), to just the struggle of man and machine (terminator). It is something that seems to have predicted the future as people become more and more engrained with technology, before we know it we will begin augmenting ourselves more than we already do and you will start seeing cyborgs in every day life. Though this is only speculation as we could just go the Star Trek route but then you have the Borg. More man and machine conflict.

Overall Ghost in the Shell was a highly enjoyable experience, it can't even be described as a movie, but an experience. One has to watch it for themselves because it is filled to the brim with amazing animation and subtle hints at how the universe actually functions. So I sugjest that you go watch this masterpiece of a movie.

Animation: 10 (still holds up amazingly today)
Characters: 8 (the focus was more on the environment than any individual character)
Sound: 10 (had me entranced the whole way through
Enjoyment: 10 (I loved every minute of this movie, I went into this expecting the matrix due to the matrix being heavily influenced by this movie but got something so much better)
-------------------
Overall: 9.5

Nisemonogatari Review: Supernatural Little Sisters

Well I finished Nisemonogatari, taking it much slower than I did Bakemonogatari and I think I liked it more. This may be due to my love for shows like Oreimo and other shows having to do with little sisters, but I liked it a decent amount. So here is the review of Nisemonogatari:

This season focuses on three characters which got essentially no screen time in the fist season:
Karen:

Tsukihi:

Shinobu:

Now personally I loved all these characters with Shinobu being my favorite, followed by Karen, then Tsukihi. I was predisposed to Shinobu though because she is the whole reason I even watched this show, though I am seeing more and more that I am Araragi though not with such a sense of justice. 

The show begins with the Karen Bee arc and pretty much goes around seeing what all the other girls from Bakemonogatari are up to, and then doesn't address Sengoku or Kanbaru for the rest of the show, with the others having some roles to play. Eventually it finally brings the focus to Karen and then Shinobu, this is where the season really kicks off and gets into the funny over the top scenes lined with beautiful set pieces. All the characters focused on in this season were addressed in the first season but not developed. Karen and Tsukihi were just pushing Araragi at the end of every arc in Bakemonogatari and Shinobu didn't say a word.

Karen is a strong character who constantly tries to better herself similar to Rock Lee from Naruto (speaking of doing too many hand stands). She can at points be tsundere but for the most part is happy go lucky and whimsical in nature. Later in the Tsukihi Pheonix arc is where she really shines as her conflict has been resolved and she is allowed to be herself. She has this fun attitude and just makes me laugh and smile. Though i have noticed a trend throughout this series that characters seem to become so much better once their issues have been addressed, its like your waiting for their issue to be fixed so you can see if you truly like them.

Shinobu is the next character I will address as she is the next to be developed, she is just what I was wanting out of her. A character which knows that they have fallen from grace but refuses to accept this and still exudes power and superiority. She does not want to admit she wants to help a human and thus demands that Arraragi command her to do what he wants so that she feels she has no choice and doesn't have to acknowledge that she has fallen to his level. She is a cute tsundere character that admits to being tsundere as most characters in the show do. Her voice actor is great and it fits that role of a vastly superior yet young person. I loved every moment that she was once screen.

Tsukihi is the last character I will address, she is funny in the way that she is psychotic in many ways, when she walks in to find Araragi and Shinobu in a bath together she comes back with a knife ready to murder Shinobu and Araragi, when the infamous toothbrush scene comes up she asks what they are doing in a demented way before going to the store to buy an Awl. She is a character that though quite tsundere and just as psycho bitch as Senjougahara still loves Araragi as a brother. Tsukihi was the only character so far that actually was fleshed out as her character really is before and during her arc, save for Hanekawa though she had her issue addressed before the show began.

This show had a large amount of fan service in it, though in my opinion it was fine because it matched the overall tone of this season. It was happy, awkward, and just plain weird at points

But that is how the show is, there aren't many other shows where in one episode you can get a philosophical talk, loli fanservice, imouto fanservice, beautiful artwork, amazing fight scenes, and hilarious visuals. There just aren't many out there. Whereas the first season was something you really should sit back and watch to admire the set pieces and the conversations, this season focused much more on fanservice, and hilarious visuals. Which made it a fun ride all the way through.

Also up for mentioning is the Karen bee opening which I loved on a visual level and an auditory level, to the point that I downloaded the song to my phone and put in my ever growing anime song playlist. 

This show really should be watched, especially if you enjoyed the first season.

Ratings:

Animation: 9 (not as abstract as season one, more grounded)

Characters: 10 (in my opinion the characters were better though I just love these more this go round)

Sound: 8 (Just as good as the first season with the only standout track being the Karen bee opening)

Enjoyment: 10 (this honestly barely missed going into my top five favorites)

-----------------

Overall: 9.25

I failed Sadly

The challenge i set out to do was failed due to a ton of stomach pain set on by sleep deprivation. I will train my body to handle this so that i can stay up as late as i want in the future. I was up for 35 hours when the pain set in and i decided to go to sleep. I was working out that whole time to keep blood flowing. All in all i did about 500 reps with a barbell, because i was increasing the rep size after each episode. I still have more to watch so i will be exercising more. I took yesterday off from doing anything and simply watched documentaries all day before spending 5 hours talking to a group of friends. Today my left arm is killing me due to being punched in it, which i promptly punched the other person back with enough strength i nearly broke a bone. So yeah lifting may happen and episodes may resume but i most likely will just sleep and try to finish the rest in one similar marathon. Until then i will see you guys later (the one viewer currently subbed other than me)

Bakemonogatari Review: Art, loli's, and worplay

Well i just finished Bakemonogatari and it was great, it literally took me from 10am to 4am the next day, but that is due to me spending multiple hours doing other things such as watching documentaries. The show is very artsy and is a treat to the eyes, each scene feels like it is an abstract painting. Though because of this style the show often feels quite lonely with you not seeing any conversations save for the cast of characters which is extremely varied. The show for the most part focuses on conversations and uses a large amount of wordplay. It may be because i watched pulp fiction before watching this but i can see correlations between the two at least with the witty dialog and wordplay. The show makes a ton of references to other anime/manga and breaks the fourth wall fairly often (a couple times an episode). So there is a nice balance between philosophical talk and comedy in this show. I could go into more but this is a quick review as I am attempting to watch the entire series in one go and i have already lost a ton of time.

Animation: 10 *absolutely beautiful*
Characters: 9 (this show is driven by dialog so the characters had to be strong)
Sound: 8 (the overall ambience sticks to the style of the scene with the ending being wonderful and the opening changing each character arc, and it conveys their personality well)
Enjoyment: 9 ( I highly enjoyed this and found it to be a treat to watch)
------------------
Total: 9 *Watch this show if you want a beautiful show that can make you do some philosophical thinking, like Mushishi, though that show is more relaxing in nature*

I Am Challenging Myself

Well I am Going to be doing a challenge

Though it is a challenge more like this

Staying up for at least 2 days straight and watching a whole series

So the series I will be watching is the Monogatari series, my friend who often stays up for 5 days straight says I can't do it but i beg to differ. I will watch the whole series. Now he was thinking that at the seasons had 26 episodes which is not correct these are the episode counts:

Bakemonogatari: 15 episodes

Nisemonogatari: 11 Episodes

Monogatari Second Season: 26 Episodes

Tsukimonogatari: 4 Episodes

Hanamonogatari: 5 Episodes

So yeah my goal is to watch the whole monogatari series with no sleep. This is all to decide wether or not i want to buy this Shinobu figure which is coming out in June.


It is very pretty and cute, it features a vampire loli which i always love so yeah. I will sleep until i get home, then get up and not go to sleep until i am done with it. I will be sure to review each series as i watch it so be expecting it. I know there is more but this is the main series so i am just sticking with it. If i really can't sleep i might toss in katanagatari in there due to it being from the same author.

The series equates to 20hrs of anime, so i am starting right now. See you at the end of bakemonogatari.