I’ve been running this blog for a long time now, such as it is, and have essentially come to the point that I want a fresh start without any existing baggage. As such, I won’t be maintaining this site any more. Instead, I will be working on a fresh site.
You’ll find a slightly more detailed explanation there too.
I will probably archive my vectors somewhere in a better environment than the current hacked-together gallery pages so that I can close this down for good. In the mean time I’m keeping everything up. There’s always Vectorbooru too, though it looks to be almost as dead as this site now. 
In an attempt to force myself to actually put content up on this blog more than once or twice a year, I’ve decided to start actually writing a bit about anime that I finish. This is sort of continuing along the same theme that I started when talking about Slayers Next about a year ago. This is actually the third one of these I’ve started, but this time I’m finishing the bastard off.
I’m not interested really in summarising what I’m talking about or anything, since it’s not like there aren’t dozens of blogs who post summaries and have much better (and less lazy) writers. Not to mention that summary info can generally be found on ANN or Wikipedia or the like. I’ve also got no intention of holding off on spoilers. I assume if you’re bothering to read my long-winded bullshit then you’re actually familiar with the anime at hand, or if not, you don’t care.
Continue reading ‘Closing Thoughts: Kaze no Stigma’
I’ve had this entry half-written sitting around in my drafts for months now. I actually went straight on and finished Umineko episode 3 after writing my thoughts on the second one, but never got around to finishing this entry off. Now that Witch-Hunt have released the full patch for episode 4 I thought I’d dig this entry up and complete it prior to commencing play through the next installment.
Continue reading ‘Umineko no Naku Koro Ni Episode 3 - Thoughts’
I really want to support initiatives like Crunchyroll and stuff, especially with the way their lineup has been expanding lately, but I find that I just really, really hate watching stuff streamed. It seems frightfully inconvenient and annoying to me, and I’d much rather have local copies. Partially this is because of Australia having anal data usage caps, and decent quality streamed anime chews that up quite quickly, especially if you accidentally navigate away from the page etc and it’s got to start over. I also like to be able to tinker, extract specific frames, etc. While it’s easy enough to save the CR video stream to disk, they make it annoyingly difficult (requiring reverse engineering some DRM) to get hold of the subs they stream which makes it pretty much hopeless. Worse, it often seems like I’m the only person on the planet who really dislikes watching anime in a browser window. I feel like I’ve been left behind and this is one of those generational gap things and I’m one of those angry old dudes yelling at the damn kids to get off his lawn.
It’s amusing to go back to what I wrote a few weeks ago after playing the first episode, and see just how completely wrong I was. Since I’ve now finished episode 2, I thought I’d continue where I left off, with a ton of comments and speculation. And a hell of a lot of unresolved questions. Episode 2, as expected, asks more questions than it answers - and the answers it did give I’m not sure about, either. Anyway, same as last time - episode 2 spoilers within, and I haven’t read through episode 3 yet so please don’t spoil me.
Continue reading ‘Umineko no Naku Koro Ni Episode 2 - Thoughts’