life ends at 27
Wrong manga to latch onto
There is only one phrase to describe this series…….MOSTLY HARMLESS(tm). There is zero orginality here, the jokes elicit a dry chuckle at best, but it’s not offensively bad like some other Jump material I could mention. If you’re below 12, this is generally wholesome animation you could spend your afternoon on. If you don’t belong to that age group, you should have bigger fish to fry.
SUGOI SINGER DESU!~
SPOILERS ABOUND
*OK, so my abacus is broken, sue me.
This. is. really. amazing. to watch. We’re witnessing someone with very low levels of morality going about his business. Amongst the many, MANY fake items in his portfolio is the claim that he actually worked on Calvin and Hobbes. Not only is this the most laughable lie ever, the sheer chutzpah of that claim, considering that C&H has a far larger fanbase than most comics and most fans are familiar with Watterson’s rather unique views towards artistic merchandising, is breathtaking in its audacity. There is a lot of divided opinion on whether he’s clever (for pulling the scam successfully for this long) or stupid (for having the scam being so utterly dependent on the credulity, ignorance and sheer apathy of his victims), but my personal opinion is that the mentality of the small-time shyster/gambler is responsible, because once something bold works, you’re inclined to repeat it and perhaps even escalate it many times once you become increasingly convinced of your invulnerability and/or cleverness. The psychology of crowds also plays a part, because it’s far more likely a solitary person witnessing an accident will call the police, as opposed to a crowd of 20-30 gawkers. And the crowd doesn’t get bigger than at a convention.
Now that the gig is up, his Deviantart page has been closed after being mercilessly swamped by unforgiving trollage. His personal site is also down for the count. It’s probably for the better, since the quality of his commision items is really hard to reconcile with his claimed body of work. I think someone said it best that Granito would have gone without any fear of comeuppance if he haunted Etsy instead, considering the rather blasé attitude that site has towards mass producers and out and out design-stealing fraudsters, like Regretsy has repeatedly shown. But it’s probably beyond his meagre artistic skills to manage more than a tracing, considering most of the craft peddled on Etsy is of the 3D variant.
UPDATE: Hey hey, someone mirrored his site.
KIRABOSHI☆! We shall never see its like again, for good or ill.
And so all falls back to shounen shouting, the one gimmick (or cliche) that never fails. All in all, the show has generally been disappointing if you consider it end to end, not least because it’s clearly 13 eps of content dumped into a 25 ep time block. Basically, Bones sold out and compromised its vision, and what’s worse, the 25 episodes allowed for a lackadaisical pacing with the episodic filler fights that made it far too late to rectify the gaping problems with the plot when the team realized the problem, if they ever did. As much as I love episode 24’s incredible setting of mood, if the price was having 25 being a nearly plot-free mess that depended almost entirely on flash (and low budget flash at that, it’s clear most of the animation time went into the last 5 min, which served as a great Macross Plus homage) while badly handling the bulk of the characters and then dropping the bag completely, I think the price is way too high. Still, it’s fair to say this is a very average show that had some positively awesome and/or fabulous moments, and the sheer paucity of good execution doesn’t detract from the memories of those priceless bits. In the end, we have to be content with that.
More loony musing with spoilers in another post.
P.S: Wako is the most colorless female lead I’ve seen in ages. And to compound things, her gadawful monologue ruined half the climax of the show. Thanks a lot, you silly self-absorbed woman.
Unca Al-Fayed has unveiled his masterpiece, surely to the BOUNDLESS delight of the Fulham fans. I wonder if Sparky is regretting what he said already.
Ah, the wonders of fundamentalist Christian conservatism in Africa. But what happened to the vaguely commie talk Gbagbo is fond of sporting, good senator? What kind of delightful cognitive dissonance is at work? Could it be that Ouattara being a Muslim really is the simple answer? I guess when push comes to shove, we see what set of internalized propaganda really is strongest in the conservative States.
Which is not to say that Ouattara isn’t in a pickle in a political sense. He seems to have done a Faustian alliance here. As is typical of the sub-Sahara, there’s plenty of bloodshed to go around.
Another day, another fiasco. Now, some might accuse detractors of excessive snark, but it’s hard not to when stuff like this happens. Even if you ignore that factoid about 4x the wasted ammunition as being unreliable, there’s plenty of stuff that makes one smack the face:
But in the characteristically fanciful version of events provided by the Shabaab, a spokesman claimed it was all part of a cunning regime plot. According to Mustafa Ali Omar: “Some of Gaddafi’s forces sneaked in among the rebels and fired anti-aircraft guns in the air. After that, Nato came and bombed them.”
Captain Rahim Mohammed Fatousi, an army officer who defected to the revolution, shrugged “It is very difficult with the Shabaab: they were told many times to leave because we knew the coalition was going to carry out air attacks. But these people have support from some of the political factions in Benghazi who want to use their influence through them. We shall continue to try and have some discipline into this operation.”
and..
By yesterday, however, this had frayed. The Shabaab, as well as unarmed civilians, were allowed access to the front line and the result was seen in the retreat from the scene of the “friendly fire” when the Shabaab began to shoot in panic at their own side — rebel military moving along the desert — and even others fleeing behind them. Later, another retreat followed when a “volunteer”, a 17-year-old who had decided to observe the fighting while his school remains shut, mistook some local farmers for undercover Gaddafi troops.
At some point the Shabaab needs to ask themselves whether they’re tagging along for a photoshoot jaunt or they’re actually serious about overthrowing Gaddafi. All the impartial observer is seeing are disaffected youths letting off testosterone-fueled steam. Lives are at stake here, most of the time not theirs, as evident in the witch-hunt roadblocks they run in friendly cities and the lynchings of black migrant workers from the sub-Sahara.
Also, in other reports:
Despite reported ambiguity on Barack Obama’s part over the issue of arming and training the rebels, Gates made clear that the Pentagon firmly opposed it. Repeating that it was a “certainty” that no US ground troops would be authorised by Obama, he laid into the rebels’ capabilities, describing the opposition as a faction-ridden and disparate “misnomer” whose forces lacked “command and control and organisation”. If the opposition needed training and weapons, he said, “someone else” would have to provide it, a declaration that would seem to slam the door on the rebels’ hopes of being armed by the West.
The rebels better hope for a ceasefire, because that’s the best they can achieve out of this pointless stalemate as Gaddafi will be adverse to moving far out of Ras Lanuf and Bin Jawad, knowing he can starve the east out of oil revenue if he holds those towns. All this hooha about the Benghazi Bravado(tm) also ignores the real problem of Misurata, where the civilian deaths (that pesky issue that Resolution 1973 was actually SUPPOSED to be about) continues with merciless shelling by Gaddafi forces. Now, with the US withdrawing their gunships, these people have been effectively left to their fate.
GONNA TRAINZ 4 BANKAI IN THREE DAYS HOURS
So Infinite Stratos is finally over, and boy, that finale summed up the show to a T. Full of nonsense and asspulls all the way down, all the Bleach-isms with the inner world stuff, 2nd level random powers up the wazoo and Ichika doing his best Shounen Jump impression when Houki wakes up just exacerbates the problems I.S has been having all season. The camera work also suffered as compared to ep11, and it degnerated into the unimaginative wide angle shots of two blobs ramming each other as Gundam is wont to. Good tracking shots were far and few in between. Also, considering they have one fast brawler and many ranged speciality I.Ses attacking a solitary target, they did a pretty poor job of pinning the opponent down with multiple fields of fire. They just tended to stagger their attacks neatly, which didn’t work at all against a much faster target.
We do get some interesting background on what Houki’s near-psychopathic (at least anywhere in the real world, that is) kawaiiko sister has been up to, which would act as a hook for the 2nd season if there is one (and supposedly there seems to be enough material in the light novels to do so). Now I haven’t read any of the LNs, and I can’t be sure if the show is suffering from Adaptation Decay, but in any case, I don’t have any hopes any additional material would be better in quality.
Taken as a whole, the final episode serves as a microcosm of the series in itself. That groan-worthy final scene just sums it up…..this is a show of two halves and the combat focus suffers from having to share airtime with the harem inanities. The action scenes are decently set up and animated, but the material (or the production team, or both) just doesn’t have the imagination to allow the fights to wind down in a logical fashion. Almost every one of them has to be concluded by an improbable plot development, which is really painfully obvious when the show doesn’t have the escalating duel format of a standard shounen series. Tactics also tend to get thrown out of the window in terms of winning fights, which is all the more unforgivable given that they’re paid attention to for most of the encounters. All in all, Infinite Stratos is a show where you watch if you’re an obsessive follower of the Strike Witches/Gundam formula, otherwise one should only try it if you have absolutely nothing going on.
