So I just watched Sword of the Stranger on blu-ray today(only $23 at Best Buy this week). My jaw hit the ground by the end of the opening credits. I really enjoyed the movie and highly recommend it. Spend the extra couple of dollars on the Blu-Ray, too.
DTB was terrible. I even thought the characters were terrible. Also one of the worst stories ever. I can’t believe that was a Bones series. But I guess I can sort of believe it after they made the hilariously terrible Skull Man.
OMFG no! What happened to boxtorrents?!
edit: Oh, shit.
Has there been a single good Ishinomori-based animation since the man’s death? Even the last version of Cyborg 009 was kind of crap and Kikaider was practically a slideshow.
The Boxtorrents situation is why I always have a hard time donating money to “keep your favorite web thing online!” initiatives. (And the one time I did, the community went all to crap a few years later.)
I’m actually in the middle of watching Gilgamesh right now. Not sure I’d say it’s good, but it’s got the right mix of conspiracies, psychic powers, rival factions, and manipulative bastards to appeal to me. Unfortunately, the animation is, umm, not up to the plot’s ambition; and it’s rather slooooow-paced when I think it wants to be subdued and subtle.
I also kinda liked 009-1: hardly the best production values, either, but I’m a sucker for retro spy-fi and I liked the main voice actress (Yumiko Shaku). Not nearly enough cool, mature, professional female characters in anime.
Also: nipple-guns.
I can kind of understand the boxtorrents situation. A while back I used to run an anime site called AnimeIndex (animeindex.net). It had a single text google ad in the top right corner and nothing more. That little ad made me about $100 a month, and server costs etc were probably around $30/mo. The extra $70 I basically took as money to upgrade the server every once in a while, buy backup servers, etc. However, after a few months of operation, the ad was making me $300 a month. I never made the site for profit; in fact its only goal was to provide an index of all anime ever released from as far back as I could find them, in an easily-searchable database with a minimalist interface.
So I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to take the extra $200 a month as “price” for my labor on the site, because it was a hobby that I enjoyed, not a job. But as fate had it, the webhost I used was hacked into and every one of their servers, even the backup servers that had all my torrent databases, were nuked. I still have the site code backed up on various HD’s to this day, but losing the database defeated the entire purpose of the index. I never had the heart to start it up again.
The wayback machine link there was from one of the earlier months. By August I had approximately half a million unique visitors per day. I originally had a donation link, but I took it down later once the ad starting paying for everything. It’s a difficult situation, and I don’t know the details of the boxtorrents fiasco, but I can see where the gray area comes into play once the site’s income becomes more than it needs to be. At the time the AnimeIndex database was nuked, it was #2 on google’s search term for “anime.”
I miss those days. I miss the site. But I don’t think I would want to deal (again) with the moral dilemma that I ended up with in regards to the money.
Hmm, in the case of money generated by Google ads, I would have had no problem with you keeping the money and spending it on whatever. Nobody has to click on the ad and there’s no misrepresentation of how much money you have involved. Also, indexing information is damned hard work that entitles someone to a reward.
With boxtorrents the allegations are more serious: that the guy was misrepresenting cash flow to the community to get people to keep donating funds he was keeping for himself instead of using for their intended purpose. That involves lying to lots of people and abusing their goodwill in a way that’s very different from ad profit, at least to my personal sense of ethics.
linger
1708
I thought some of the powers were pretty neat, uncommon. The story was really “emoish” though. Which sucked.
Gilgamesh was a pretty interesting series with a very… unique ending (I won’t say i consider it satisfying, but i am glad i finished it). I’d for sure finish it to see what happens, but not one of the best and easily shadowed by others. Some of the character interactions (particularly where certain characters sometimes act like they’d die for each other and other times act like they don’t care at all for each other, seemingly at random) pisses me off to no end too.
Would someone care to answer why I should continue watching Turn A Gundam past episode 12? I’ve done a bit of wikipedia searching and found that Turn A was intended as a message of hope, or a kind of self-redemption, from the original creator, who 5 years earlier did the spectacular Victory Gundam. This is the only Gundam series I have never watched. So, is it worth it? V Gundam spoiled me quite a bit, as well as a lot of other Gundam series (weren’t they all about hope? So confoozed). But anyway, I’m now at ep12 and I’m starting to feel kinda jaded. It’s a full 50ep Gundam series, but after Zeta, 0079, Seed, 00, and all the really good ones, this is a really, really, fucking weird Gundam series. Yes, even Gundam X didn’t weird me out as much.
So what’s the anime groupthink? Abort, retry, or fail? No spoilers past what I’ve watched please, but I’d appreciate your evaluations. And yes, I’ve even watched the more horrible Gundams, like G Gundam, and I’m just praying it’s better than that. Halp!
HRose
1711
What about Gundam MS team? That looks rather good.
I thought that the 3 OVA series i watched were great : 08th MS team, 0080:War in the Pocket and 0083:Stardust Memory.
I don’t think you actually read my question. I’ve watched every single Gundam series except Turn A. OVAs included. Every Gundam movie too, etc, etc. What I’m asking is if Turn A is actually going to pick up and get good, or if it stays kinda stale throughout the show.
Turn-A has some really interesting mechanical animation sequences if you can slog through the unpromising early parts of the show to the bits with Turn-X. That’s the main thing Turn-A has going for it.
On the whole, no, Turn-A isn’t worth it. Vast stretches of the show are incompetently written by any reasonable standard. I’ll qualify this by saying you’ve already sat through a lot of Gundam series I would consider even less worth it, so you may want to slog through for the sake of completing Gundam or find Turn-A more interesting than I did.
Otherwise, Turn-A is far better compared to Tomino’s post-Evangelion work than Gundam as a whole. As far as that goes, anything Turn-A does remotely well was handled much better in Overman King Gainer, which is both shorter, more original, and better executed.
Well, based on the recommendations upthread, I watched Disc 1 of Starship Operators. So far I quite like it – although the jaded producer is a bit too monodimensional. My biggest complaint is that the crew of the Amaterasu aren’t very distinct. Granted, it’s an ensemble cast, but plenty of movies (Ratatouille and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, to name just two that I watched recently) managed to make minor NPC coworkers memorable by giving each of them a punchy introduction. This pastry chef claims to have ‘run guns for the Resistance’ in his younger days; that sailor always has a pessimistic remark at hand. The localisation is also awkward at best – couldn’t they have come up with an alternative to “space submarine”? Still, I was disappointed to see that my rental service only has the one disc.
Starship Operators gets much better when they dig a bit deeper into each of the crew’s motivations. I really enjoyed the show toward the middle-end, and would definitely recommend finishing it. It was a nice departure from usual space opera fare, and I did really like the fact that they go into quite a bit of detail about each little operation in their skirmishes, including miscalculations in firing trajectory and each crewman’s individual contribution.
rossm
1717
I’ve been watching Princess Tutu with my girlfriend. It’s terribly boring. That is all.
rei
1718
For those of you who liked The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (that should be all of you) there’s a new movie from the same people: Summer Wars
Awesome! What a wonderfully bizarre premise. Behold, the power of math!
