Monty Python, never before have you ever been so right.

Thank you ngram.googlelabs.com.

-maserbeam

“Prehensile hair activate!”

Oh yes, how I have longed for the lovely invasion squid. My body is ready!

Aside from my silly over-excited self enjoying the first episode of the season season, it was a pleasure to listen to the voices again. I’m not so sure if I followed another series with Hisako Kanemoto as a main lately. The last I remembered of her is her character Tomonori in Is This a Zombie?/Kore wa Zombie desu ka?. It’s also good to be listening to Rie Tanaka’s voice. I can never get enough of that sultry voice. Oh right, Ayumi is there, too. (lol)

The teaser preview for the 2nd episode looks like it’s already going to show off it’s animation prowess with another sports segment. Baseball got it’s chance in the first season, and now we’ve got soccer. That kick shown in the preview alone kind of surprised me; the kid had good form and the animation itself felt great despite it only being 8 frames. As far as I can tell, none of them felt like in-betweens. I’m such a sucker for small details like that. Some people would agree with me that a well done action animation with a believable center of gravity just cements the desire to watch it more. It happened to me with Ookiku Furikabutte — I don’t normally watch sport anime, but that was an exception. Nary a failed nor awkward bat swing or pitch.

As bad as it might seem, I don’t care if anime — in general — gets sequel-itis. It’s such a prominent complaint for any series that gathers a significant following while still having plenty of material to work off… and then just ends. Gotta have them sequels. I’ll take this time to mention that I’m super excited to see the new Last Exile this coming season.

***

Concerning details about the site here, I’m feeling rather sad that I haven’t mustered up the forces required to have another podcast. I don’t even know if people listen to it. No one’s said anything about it. Then again, no one’s sent me angry emails about it either. For those who’ve actually been to this site, I’m curious as to what anime you watch. If you’d rather lurk around and not respond, that’s fine too. A silent listener is fine too.

I’ll use this space to redirect you to Chartfag and Randomc. Plenty of info there on the upcoming season. The three anime I’d most likely be posting about, it’s these three: Last Exile, Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, and Mirai Nikki. I’ve got plenty of reasons to be so decided in following these. It’ll be interesting to find out whether or not it was smart dooming myself to finish these whether I like it or not. Randomc.net has decided to do episodic entries on those exact three as well. I don’t feel like competing with such a juggernaut of the anime blogosphere, so I’ll have to try and say different things for the sake of difference, unfortunately.

I nearly broke my guitar in excitement when I learned Last Exile was getting a sequel. True story.

-maserbeam

Oh Haruka, why are you next to jelly?

I did not like episode 9 of Idolmaster. It focused on the twins Ami & Mami. I thought I was fine with having such characters around. But when the Merry-go-round of Character Focused Episodes rotates far enough, there’s a high chance of experiencing a character focused episode on the character(s) you’ll learn to hate even more. Is it just me? I honestly found myself skipping throughout most of the episode. Couldn’t bear to watch such a pointless episode. Didn’t even feel like a generic filler episode, that usually is supposed to have some kind of vague point, or some character development in it. What did I learn about Ami & Mami in this episode?

They’re fucking annoying.

I don’t think I’ve ever come to the point of blogging an episode because it really got on my nerves (in a bad way), but this really did it. It was the combination of their voices, and the meaningless plot of “Let’s act detective-like because of nothing” pushed right up in my grill that really got to me. If I’m lucky, this will be the highest concentration of (M)Ami I’ll ever see in any episode.

Ugh. Now that I’m done watching and talking about this horrid episode, I’m off to kick jellies in Vindictus for a silly +2 boost to willpower.

-maserbeam

I was hungry and decided to celebrate this with a song. Both music and art done by one of my favorite artists, Nagian. A cute song that will either make you hungry, d’awww at Miku, or be angry for some absurd and irrational reason.

I’ll have to go hunting for roasted sweet potato someday.

Because we all know they roam the grassy plains of where ever they are, waiting to be impaled with throwing spears.

-maserbeam

After noticing a new piece of text being added to files — hi10p — I decided to look up info on it. There’s quite a bit of stuff being encoded in this new.. thing. I decided to install the latest, greatest, and correct filter/codec I could find to properly play these new files. Why the sudden upgrade? Anyone who’s been watching their anime in 720 and up certainly don’t complain that often, provided that their method of watching works. But I don’t touch 1080 files yet simply because I don’t have terabytes of space laying around.

So, I downloaded a 10-bit anime episode. Holy crap, I didn’t expect such a significant difference in file size. It is also rightly stated and observed that it has effectively removed banding from gradients. I especially appreciate this since there seems to be a growing trend for animation studios to use gradients instead of the traditional three tone shading I got so used to. This can really inflate a single episode’s file size. I could show off a screenshot, but what’s more important is the overall effect of moving to 10-bit.  The primary reason to move to 10-bit is for the higher achievable quality and potentially lower file sizes. It does eat more CPU cycles, and at this point only CPU cycles since most video cards do not have 10-bit hardware support. This is mostly a non-issue for me, since I have a quad core. (And soon to upgrade to hexa core. Mwahaha.)

I have obtained a 10-bit encoder to find out for myself what exactly is the butter zone for 1080 files, film or anime. Too bad I’m flying blind here. Having done zero encoding, the only thing I can do at the moment is read the full command list and keep breaking it until something produces a result.

-maserbeam