This is one of those series that never gets old for me, and I can’t quite put my finger on it!  After all, there’s nothing particularly amazing about it.  Animation is typical BONES, which is to say the animation framing is perpetually gorgeous, the colors are vibrant, and the characters are always on-design.  Character designs are cute for the most part, and the mechanical designs (or monster designs, if you prefer to think of them as such, since this is a “fantasy” series) are for the most part good.  The music is not particularly memorable, with a few exceptions – I can still find myself humming the end theme at random moments.  The action sequences are few and far between, but when they come they’re usually well-choreographed.  (Is that even the right term to use, as an aside?  Live action fights are choreographed – what is animation?  Keyframed?  Storyboarded?)

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised I find the character designs so agreeable.  I’m not generally one for the doe-eyed, large breasted, absurdly over-complicated fantasy clothing type of character designs.  However, the translation of illustrator Mougdan Nakayohi’s (a somewhat well-known adult doujin artist in Japan, I gather, and also responsible for the character designs in a Hentai strategy game called Brave Soul) character designs into Anime form seems to have done everything right in making them enchanting to me rather than irritating.  Though I still could have done without the shoulder-pads.  God damn shoulder pads.

If there’s one problem I have with this series, it’s that characters that I really was interested in, such as the entire Obstinate Arrow team, never really was fleshed out.  24 episodes was too short, IMO, and much of the second half of the series was taken up with Pacifica’s amnesia plot.  As far as I know the book series is still running; I’d like to read them at some time, though I probably would regret buying them – light novels are just too short and simple to hold my interest.  Maybe there will be an omnibus release of some sort!  I know the first couple of volumes have been translated to english.

If you haven’t seen Scrapped Princess yet, I’d recommend it.  It’s not BONES’ best work, and in fact it was mostly eclipsed even for me during its original broadcast by GONZO’s production, Last Exile, but I heartily enjoyed it when it was first released and still do.  Hikaru Nanase’s music complements the action excellently, except for a few sojourns into accordion music that I could have done without; honestly, I can’t think of a single reason not to want to watch it, unless you don’t like fantasy at all.

I’ve rated it before, but Scrapped Princess still gets 4 out of 5 obsessive-compulsive cat princesses from me.

The coolest part of a Choppa is the savage orc aesthetic they’ve got going in low levels, before they get a lot of armor.  All body paint and stuff.  Why didn’t mythic replace our armor with body paint?  I’d much rather have an orc running around in a loincloth and two swords, bellowing “WAAAGH!” as magical fingerpaints imbue him with protection.  You could have steadily more fancy paints, and maybe have the upper tier armor sets also include more actual armor pieces.  Alas, my Choppa will forever be rank 4, because I don’t want to progress to where I need to wear armor, and I also don’t have the option to toggle all my armor invisible so I look awesome and still get armor bonuses from it..

Maybe one day!

Hypothesis: Cloud Cult’s Feel Good Ghosts is one of the best albums of 2008.

I’m pretty sure I’ve posted something along these lines before.

I play Warhammer Online.

My main used to be a Disciple of Khaine, until I realized that Magi were more fun.  After all, Magi are awesome, and while DoKs are also awesome, they are also not particularly fun to operate in the endgame, because of problems that everyone knows about already.  We are a melee healing class, however our strongest tree is in fact the long-range healing & survivability tree, Dark Rites.  the tree that most closely adheres to our states class dynamic, Sacrifice, works only as a support and mediocre DPS tree. The class in general is loads of fun to play in a good group, however it is easier – and more rewarding – as a Disciple of Khaine to play as a ranged healer, not only because this allows you to enhance personal survivability, but because of the current state of game mechanics allowing a Disciple of Khaine to act as a main / group healer better than other classes.  As a Dark Rites disciple I have a 1.5 second cast + 1.5 second cooldown group heal that can crit for upwards of 2800 on a willpower-stacking DoK.

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I am, unfortunately, one of those people who gets most of his news from other people telling me about it.  This is not true in the case of the Iranian election, though!  I’ve been following this pretty carefully.

I am by turns amazed and appalled.  Amazed that the Iranian people are so willing to stand up for their rights, and challenge their government over this election.  Appalled that the media – particularly conservative pundits – in America has been so eager to twist this into something about us.  I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw Pete Hoekstra’s by now infamous tweet, “Iranian twitter activity similar to what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House” (see it in its natural environment here!).  I was horrified, sickened, and depressed by the videos of Neda’s death.  I was left scratching my head over the eagerness of conservatives to decry Obama’s lack of involvement, and ask if he “was doing enough.”

Actually, yes.  American intervention – or even American public support for one side or the other – is exactly what Ahmedinejad needs in order to further solidify his power base.  If he has official statements by the American government expressing anything more concrete than those already released, he will be able to use this an excuse for further crack-downs.  After all, if America is involved this is no longer a series of popular protests in his mind – it is a CIA-run uprising against a legitimate government.  (I don’t think it is legitimate, by the way – too many voting irregularities.  There needs to be a new election, or a full recount – but I also don’t believe either of these things will happen).

Obama is doing all he should do, and all he can do, as the president of the United States.

The question is, what can we, as private citizens do?  In this case, we have more latitude to act than our government.

At the moment, I feel like all I can do is follow the news, and hope for the right outcome.

Though we should be clear; Moussavi may be a more liberal man than Ahmedinejad, but if he is in power we will see incremental shifts at best; Moussavi is still an intensely conservative cleric, even if he is less militaristic and confrontational than his opponent.

Buy a week’s worth of groceries with $35.00.  This will be easier than you think! (hint: i already have 2-3 pounds of rice and enough chicken to have it for dinner every night for 4 days!)  The real problem is going to be lunch, though i have enough cornstarch to do something like biscuits every day for a week.

I’ve been watching Macross Seven lately, because having finally finished Macross Plus I was struck by a desire to watch more shows about transforming robots in space.  Having finished Macross Frontier too recently, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it again – and honestly Frontier was kind of underwhelming.  I would have much rather had a series that didn’t have such godawful CG, and the problem with pretty much all Macross after Do You Remember Love? is that the transforming battleships have lost their cool.  I mean, they’re just big robots now!  Their stupid “carrying their main cannon as an enormous battroid gunpod” thing kind of wears thin too.  And of course the other mecha designs were amazing, but they’re all basically recycled from older Macross anyways.

The point of this article is really that if you have considered watching Macross Seven, and you enjoyed the original series, Plus, and/or Macross Zero, don’t even both watching Seven.  It’s…. just not very good.  Mecha designs are disappointing, spaceship designs are lame (except for the stuff they recycled from Macross, Macross Plus, and DYRL!), animation quality ranges from “recycled a single scene 2-3 times in a single episode” to “bad,” and honestly the music is anywhere from mediocre to awful.  I know, I know, I’m spoiled by Zero and Plus/Frontier, with their soundtracks being done by Kuniaki Haishima and Yoko Kanno, two of my favorite composers.  I got about twenty-seven episodes in, and I’ll probably finish it at some point out of sheer boredom…  But it has dropped way down in my list of priorities, and now sits somewhere between “do the dishes” and “level my sorcerer in Warhammer Online.”

Ultimately, Seven just doesn’t have enough interesting things to make up for the sheer idiocy that is sound energy and Anima Spiritia, and mediocre rock music.  There have been a few stellar moments, but they’ve all been dragged down by the setting.  The worst part is that this Sound Energy and Anima Spiritia bullshit is canon, which means the idiots who dreamed all this nonsense up are probably going to do another series all about it.  By comparison, the fold quartz &c of Frontier was practically brilliant.  (and the old Dude Who is Probably Britai?  fuck yes!  He totally beats out Exedol being part of Battle Seven’s bridge.)

I guess if you want to watch Macross, just watch Frontier again instead of Seven - it’s better in every way, even with the CG factored in (and I know that a lot of people liked the CG, and it was occasionally impressive, but not enough of the time for me.  I was hoping for the sort of high-caliber CGI / cel merging like you see in the (frankly gorgeous) Macross Zero, where sometimes it’s honestly hard to tell if the images are cels or just amazing CGI. Instead we got pretty standard satellight fare, and, well, that just wasn’t good enough.

Even better yet, just watch the original!  The original Super Dimensional Fortress Macross has better characters, plot, worldbuilding, and animation than Macross Seven, and the music is way better!  (I love Mari Iijima [ima anata no koe ga kikoeru...]!)  Or Macross II: Lovers Again, which is very eighties but also pretty good.

My wish list for a new Macross series or OVA is as follows:

• High quality animation, at least equal to that of Macross Frontier’s good episodes.  Let’s try to keep those characters on model, folks!
• CG that is at the very least not offensive, and at best is at least as stellar as the stuff you see in Macross Zero’s best moments.  Please only use it for things where you can honestly tell yourself that regular cel animation wouldn’t be as effective – I’m looking at you, terrible CGI models for Macross Quarter & Battle Frontier in robot mode!  you could have been so much cooler if you had just been cel-animated.
• Space ship designs that don’t suck!  I will also settle for rehashes of original series stuff.  Please no stupid generic CGI monsters a la the Vajra.
• Why don’t you do a series about the Macross II, Megaroad?  I don’t give a shit about this fancy 2058 stuff, let’s see why Hikaru & Misa went missing!
• Music by someone who doesn’t suck. I’m easy on this.  Just please make sure they don’t suck.
• If you’re going to make voice actors / actresses suck, please make sure they are people who can sing!  Macross Frontier did this well, probably because Yoko Kanno helped.  Macross Seven?  Not so much.
• A story that isn’t completely retarded.  Parallel dimensions?  a-ok!  Anima Spiritia?  Stupid, and I’m pretending it’s not part of canon.  Robots with speakers for weapons?  Uh, no thanks.

I would rate Macross Seven, based on what I have watched, 2.5 orgasming soul-stealing alien chicks out of five.

Every time I try to start blogging regularly, I realize what a chore it is.  This is a shame because I, of course, like writing.  I want to write  My ideal situation is something along the lines of being a stay-at-home dad who writes on the side.  Yet, when I sit down to write a blog post, I fizzle.  It goes un-updated for months at a time (the last post on this blog was back when school was in session!), or my posts kind of run out in the middle of whatever it is I want to say.

Once again, I’m going to try to start updating again.  We shall see how it goes.