{"id":3482,"date":"2013-01-27T22:14:18","date_gmt":"2013-01-27T21:14:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=3482"},"modified":"2020-10-11T21:05:47","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T20:05:47","slug":"random-wafflage-state-of-the-season-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/?p=3482","title":{"rendered":"Random Wafflage: State of the Season Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Because I&#8217;ve not done one of these for a while &#8211; infact, I seem to have forgotten to click the &#8220;publish&#8221; version on the last one of these posts &#8211; and I figure I should at least strive to maintain a two-post-a-week minimum. Not that I really have much to discuss to pad out a full one of these posts with.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nMy viewlist for the season is settling down somewhat, though it&#8217;s largely panning out to be the shows I was expecting to watch. The thing I was probably most surprised by was probably <i>Vividred Operation<\/i>, mostly because it manages not to take it&#8217;s still plentiful male-gaze to the kind of Strike Witches levels that I find myself allergic to. It is one of the couple of shows this season that feel perhaps a little <i>too<\/i> perfect &#8211; conceptualized within an inch of it&#8217;s life for maximum nerd-appeal &#8211; but it&#8217;s not quite crossing that line where it&#8217;d start to feel like a parent trying to be &#8220;down with&#8221; the kids, if you get what I mean. It&#8217;s pandering to almost an excess, borrowing liberally from other popular titles, but at least it&#8217;s being produced by people who actually seem to understand why those things were popular in the first place, as opposed to mimicking them on a purely superficial level. The Aniplex logo on the Crunchy stream is annoying &#8211; I guess you US-types get it on Magi as well, though it&#8217;s missing on the AoD stream of that we get over here.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m already writing about <i>Love Live!<\/i> on a weekly basis, which is the other show that comes across as being somewhat over-engineered, and somehow feels more-so than Vividred. Which probably shouldn&#8217;t be surprising given it&#8217;s background, I guess. I dunno, I probably come across as being incredibly negative on it every week, but I do actually enjoy it a great deal. Honest, guv&#8217;nor!<\/p>\n<p><I>AKB0048<\/i> was pretty much a given, given that I loved the first season. The follow-up hasn&#8217;t disappointed. Makoto, against all odds, is still my favourite, though her election poster was pretty terrible. Space Ninja Takamina kind of set a high comparative bar, though.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m still watching <i>The UNLIMITED<\/i> for some reason. I guess The Children are turning up next week, though I&#8217;ve actually seen precious little of the original work. I think I&#8217;ve got the first US volume of the anime lying around here somewhere, so I guess I should at least watch a couple of episodes in order to get a slightly better grasp of what is going on. Maybe, though franchise content that old is probably irrelevant by this point. The show itself is pretty OK, I suppose &#8211; it&#8217;s all rather predictable and well-trodden stuff, but the execution is decent enough.<\/p>\n<p>I would say that <i>Sasami@Ganbaranai<\/i> is hilariously behind on Anime-on-Demand at this point, except it seriously hampers my ability to watch it in a legal fashion. Only God knows what&#8217;s going on with their stream of <i>Mondaiji<\/i> (didn&#8217;t the US just get episode 3 this week?). At least they&#8217;re being relatively prompt with <i>Tamako Market<\/i>, which continues to be great.<\/p>\n<p>I think that&#8217;s pretty much it in terms of new pick-ups, unless I&#8217;m forgetting something. Let me know if there&#8217;s anything that I should absolutely be watching and maybe I&#8217;ll endeavour to check it out, but I would kind of like to spend at least some time in the next few months catching up on the pile of unwatched physical media I&#8217;ve had piling up for a while. <i>Ni no Kuni<\/i> may end up eating a considerable amount of time, though.<\/p>\n<p>As for other things going on this season, whilst I wasn&#8217;t going to go to the Glasgow Youth Film Festivals anime screenings, being that I&#8217;ve already seen <i>From Up On Poppy Hill<\/i> and <i>Wolf Children<\/i>, the lure of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.glasgowfilm.org\/theatre\/whats_on\/4552_surprise_anime_film_cosplay_parade\">The Fushigi Mi~~strii~~~ movie<\/a> has proved too tempting. As such, I&#8217;ll be heading up to Scotland in a couple of weeks &#8211; if anyone sees me hanging around, feel free to say &#8220;hi&#8221; or something. If the movie actually proves to be something interesting, I&#8217;ll report back.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of events, I&#8217;ll <i>probably<\/i> be heading to the &#8216;States for Otakon this year, which I thought I&#8217;d mentioned publicly previously, but maybe not given the surprise an offhand comment generated on Twitter. There&#8217;s still a few things I need to sort out in regards to confirming that, and the fact that I&#8217;m already locked into heading to the final <i>Ayacon<\/i> over here the weekend afterwards may well result in me dying from exhaustion before the end of August.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not really sure what other events I&#8217;ll be hitting this year. Scotland Loves Anime, in October, is pretty much a given, as per every year. Hyper Japan, not sure much &#8211; they&#8217;ve went and stuck the event the usually hold in February slap-bang in the middle of the year, pulling it a little too close to Otakon and Ayacon and the like. I guess it makes sense given their new end-of-year Christmas show in November, but even that itself is a little too close to MCM Expo (which, Japanese junk-food aside, is somewhat better for nerd-shopping if nothing else).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because I&#8217;ve not done one of these for a while &#8211; infact, I seem to have forgotten to click the &#8220;publish&#8221; version on the last one of these posts &#8211; and I figure I should at least strive to maintain a two-post-a-week minimum. Not that I really have much to discuss to pad out a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3482"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6288,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3482\/revisions\/6288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}