12 Months of Blogging!

I can’t believe that it’s been 12 months since I started this blog. I decided to start writing after I had the suggestion of a friend that it would be an activity that would be fun, boost my writing skills, and work on self-expression. I wasn’t really sure how long I’d be writing for and if I’d take to the activity, but after a year, I’m still here!

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Finding A Tasty Adventure in The Snack World

I’ve been enjoying watching The Snack World recently. It’s a show made for children which ties in with Level-5’s (makers of Yokai Watch) latest franchise for Japan. It’s not been licensed by anyone for an English-speaking market, and I don’t believe that there are any plans to do so at present. This is the sort of series I enjoy and so I was watching without subtitles. It has recently been picked up by a fansub group though, and at the time of writing, there are subs for 2 episodes. As it’s now available to a larger audience, I thought I may give a bit of an overview of the series.

Series Review – Kochinpa!

Kochinpa! is possibly one of the more unusual ‘anime’ I have watched owing to its exceedingly short episode length. It’s a series of 15 second episode shorts which has now had 2 seasons. The two seasons are pretty similar, so I’ll be talking about both seasons together. It’s hard to give a detailed analysis of something like this, but I thought that I’d still highlight this show as I found it quirky and fun.

Firstly, here’s my review of the series typed in 15 seconds for you.

Kochinpa is very short and while it is ostensibly about idols it is really advertising slot machines.

Experiments With Deinterlacing PAL Anime DVDs For Linux

I imagine that this topic is probably a bit technical and oddly specific for most of my readers, but I was frustrated at the lack of information available on the topic when I faced the issue, so I’m attempting to document my problems and findings. I do try and write and subjects which interest me and I enjoy, so I thought that I’d share what I found out in the hopes that perhaps there may be someone else who may be able to stumble across the information when they need it.

I recently decided that I’d like to watch some of my older anime DVDs on my computer (notably Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), a personal favourite of mine), and I discovered that the visuals were unwatchable owing to the fact that they were in an interlaced format.

This is definitely not easy on the eyes – interlaced video without any alterations

Series Review – Dance With Devils

Firstly my apologies to my readers. My health continues to be poor, and the most important thing for me is to keep my stress levels low by not placing high expectations on myself regarding things like writing blog posts, but I do still plan to post when I am able, I just have no idea what sort of frequency that will be.

Dance With Devils is a series which follows the experiences of Tachibana Ritsuka, whose life is thrown into disarray when supernatural beings, both devils and vampires start pursuing her as they believe she has knowledge of a powerful magical tool, the forbidden grimoire. As a reverse harem story, incidentally all the supernatural beings pursuing her are attractive males. The thing which makes this series unique from others of its genre is the fact that it is a musical, with each episode having one or two musical numbers which contribute to the storytelling. While there are musical stage shows of certain anime, this is the first anime series which I have encountered which is a musical (if there are others, I’d love to know).

I heard this series mentioned by Shoujo Thoughts as a series with musical elements which was unintentionally funny. If there’s something which I love almost as much as a good musical, it’s a bad musical, which was my motivation for checking out the series. In this regard, it didn’t disappoint.

Love and Loss in One Room

Edit: This was my 1st April post. Probably don’t watch One Room.

Some of my readers may have been aware of the series of shorts One Room which recently finished airing. What you may be unaware of is that the synopsis of you being the protagonist is misleading; the protagonist is in fact dead, and it is a spirit, not your body, which is spending time together with these girls. In fact One Room is a touching series about three young women coming to grips with the loss of someone who they really cared about.

Series Review- Kemono Friends

Kemono Friends is an anime which follows the adventures of a human child named Kaban (bag/backpack in English) as she travels through Japari Park, a land filled with various ‘Friends’; anthropomorphic versions of animals, in an attempt to find out about her identity. Along the way, Kaban together with different Friends, especially her self-appointed chaperone Serval work together to overcome both personal and environmental difficulties in their quest for knowledge.

Series Review – Long Riders!

Long Riders! (hereafter referred to without the exclamation point) is a series which follows first year university student Kurata Ami as she becomes interested in cycling and embarks on a number of cycling-related activities with her friends. I wrote up episodic posts for the series which you can find here, so you can see my views on the series in more detail if you were interested.

As the typical ‘protagonist who has no hobbies or strong passions prior to the commencement of the series’, Ami sees someone riding a cute folding bike one day and decides to take up cycling. Together with her childhood friend Aoi, and new friends Hinako, Yayoi, and Saki, she transforms from a beginner into an experienced cyclist, participating in different activities and also building friendships. Long Riders is packed with cute cycling and cute food, two things which I find enjoyable.

Romance, Love, and Understanding

Happy Valentines Day to all my lovely readers! It’s technically not Valentines day in Australia still, but it is Valentines Day somewhere, and I think that counts! I thought I’d take this opportunity to speak about relationships in my favourite romantic* anime, I Can’t Understand What My Husband Is Saying.

*All the romantic anime I like are romantic comedies which are heavy on the comedy. These probably barely count, but I’m not a romantic by any stretch of the imagination.

Piacevole 05 – Sangria

Hello everyone and sorry for the lack of posts last week. We’ve been having a run of extremely hot weather, which makes me feel really ill and exhausted and makes it hard to write. I’m going to have to see if I can be a bit more proactive about scheduling posts if I want to keep up a reasonable rate of content on my blog until summer is over (and as it’s Australia, sometimes very hot weather can run well into March). I’m hoping to get some thoughts on the final episodes of Long Riders as well as some overall thoughts on the series posted this week, although this is a bit dependent on the weather.

This episode is a continuation of the events of the previous episode, where Sara talks about how much she dislikes Italian food. Morina asks about the differences between Italian and Japanese food and is told that both types of cuisines were developed using the different locally available ingredients in order for people to have a healthy lifestyle. I think that this is slightly odd because as an Australian we barely use natively available ingredients at all, but I also think it rings true. While it’s fairly easy these days to get all kinds of different foods, regional cuisine was just meals made with the sorts of ingredients that were available to people locally.