• Bungaku Shoujo
• End of the Golden Witch
• Hidamari Proof Sketch
• The Reappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya
• Heaven’s Feel
• f(Angel Beats)

Oh well.

So I’m about halfway through the campaign of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. For the most part, the story was pretty okay. I mean, the characters on the Hyperion are your typical sci-fi motley crew of guys and you’re going around freedom fighting against the Dominion. The missions themselves are pretty neat. But then Zeratul shows up and I’m all awesome, I can play as Zeratul and the Protoss, wooooo.

As I’m going through the Zeratul missions, I’m constantly reminded of that Idle Thumbs episode where they talk about Mass Effect. Basically, the complaint was that all video game plots eventually ended up being about saving the universe and it turns out there’s a prophecy and a chosen one. It’s never about being a space cop or something, it always has to be something overwrought and grandiose. And that’s exactly where Starcraft 2’s story is going.

The first Starcraft was about three races. The Terran campaign was about overthrowing the oppressive rule of the Confederacy and trying to stave off the Zerg invasion. The Zerg campaign was about the Zerg trying to assimilate the Terrans so they could eventually take on and assimilate the Protoss to become the perfect beings. The Protoss campaign was about fighting the Zerg off. After that, the Protoss had to find a new homeworld, Terrans from earth wanted to pacify the Koprulu Sector, and Kerrigan wanted to ruin everyone’s plans. There was nothing about saving the world in any of Starcraft; each player in the story had their own motivations.

Now I play Starcraft 2 and what am I getting? The Zerg aren’t so bad, you guys, the Overmind was forced to try and assimilate the Protoss! You thought Kerrigan was the villain, but she’s actually the chosen one and she’s going to save the universe!

I can already see where this is going. Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm is undoubtedly going to be about the Zerg’s fight for freedom as they seek to overcome their bloodthirsty nature and tap in to their former noble animal spirits. Finally, in Starcraft 2: Protoss Boogaloo, all three races come together to face down the Xel’Naga who are going to burn the universe down.

What the hell happened to Blizzard that the only storyline they can write now is Warcraft III’s?

Oh wait, I guess I don’t like that.

Darker than BLACK: Gemini of the Meteor

The problem with DtB was that it ended with a bunch of questions and answering very few of them. The problem with DtB2 is that it didn’t answer any of the questions from the last season and added new ones and didn’t answer those either. It also removed most of the likeable characters or the parts of characters that were likeable. So yeah, the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t need a sidestory OVA to explain things that we were waiting for you to explain.

So Ra No Wo To

A.K.A. that show that looked like K-ON! but was superficially similar. At worst, it was some slice of life in a small European town. It had quite a few moments though, from moonshining to PTSD to the revelation of a post-apocalyptic wasteland right outside the borders. Not spectacular, but definitely not bad.

Hidamari Sketch x ☆☆☆

More Hidamari, more awesome. I was dreading what might happen if we threw in two more characters, but Nazuna and Nori filled out the cast pretty well. They weren’t exactly the Yuno and Miya clones I was expecting them to be. We’ve also got new relationship dynamics now that we have all the years filled out. Another highly enjoyable wideface season.

Kobato.

Not my kind of show, but I still watched it. It was alright, I guess, and it had its moments. I did not enjoy the random LOL CLAMP moments near the end of the show though. I probably wouldn’t have missed it if I dropped it. Oh well.

Nodame Cantabile Finale

Surprisingly not bad and pretty well paced, considering this is Chiaki Kon we’re talking about. Unfortunately, she also chose to stick to the manga pretty closely and that means we still got the terrible manga ending. That said, the ending’s probably the worst part of the season, which places it well ahead of Paris Chapter.

Hanamaru Kindergarten

This was a very fun little show and it looks like Gainax put way more effort into the show than they usually do. I liked pretty much all the characters in the show except for Anzu, which is kind of unfortunate because she’s around a lot. Hiiragi is the best character on the show, with Hinagiku and her Yakuza family coming up in second.

Ookamikakushi

Ryukishi07, I am disappoint.

Baka to Test to Shoukanju

I was expecting this to be something terrible like Seitokai no Ichizon, but it actually managed to be pretty entertaining. I guess the way the jokes are written are much more appealing to me than that show I mentioned before. It also gets points for actually using the convoluted battle system premise in an interesting fashion.

Kimi ni Todoke

This went down pretty much like I expected. It’s a really faithful adaptation of the manga and paced just right to reach exactly the right spot to end on. And it was great; easily the best show from Fall 2009. I’m looking forward to a second season in between checking if the next chapter is out yet.

Eden of the East: The King of Eden

This was kind of disappointing. Even though things definitely happened, it felt like nothing was happening at all. I’m aware that it’s really setup for the next movie, but as a movie, it was really, really weak. Just about the only good thing to come out of it is school food punishment’s light prayer single.

And it’s sort of the perfect storm of things that I’m thinking about that made me much more receptive to Solanin than I otherwise would have been, even a few months beforehand. It’s just last week that I was deciding whether or not to work my ass off for a shot at grad school instead of staying the course and going into industry after graduation. And it was only a few weeks ago that I felt the mid-coop malaise that I usually get. And then there’s all of the graduation buzz for this year’s graduating class, signaling that my own graduation is only a year away.

Now, my situation is nowhere near as bad as what’s in Solanin. That’s not to say that the situation in Solanin is horrible. What makes it scary is that the things the characters go through is incredibly normal. I’m incredibly lucky to be majoring in something that I’m super interested in, that I’m relatively good at, and that won’t bankrupt me in the future. If I were studying something in which even one of those three criteria weren’t met? I’d imagine I’d be able to relate with the characters a lot more than I already am.

One of my friends joked that it seemed like I was the only one out of our posse with a future. But even then, no matter how well lined up things might seem to us, we’re still wracked with uncertainty and we’re still gazing at the sky while we’re walking, wondering what things are going to be like in a few years. Solanin’s power is in speaking to this part of us that might be buried inside of us. It draws it out and sets it in front of us for us to examine.

Solanin’s story and the reaction it got out of me reminds me of 5 Centimeters per Second. Solanin didn’t affect me emotionally anywhere near the degree that 5cm/s did, which left me in a depressed mood for a day. What 5cm/s did was set off a firestorm of reflection on how I considered relationships of all sorts, not just romantic ones, with distance thrown in. Similarly, Solanin made me think about what I was doing and where I was trying to go with the time that I had left as an undergrad.

It should go without saying that the sort of work that is able to push you to really think about what it’s presenting in the context of your own life rather than that of the characters is rare, powerful, and unnerving.

I’ve watched a few first episodes of Gundam shows in the past year and I don’t think anything comes close to how I felt while I was watching UC’s first episode. Even though it’s not until pretty recently that I started traversing through what the Universal Century had to offer me, I considered myself a Gundam fan. Even though I was only halfway through Zeta, I could still feel the significance that Unicorn carried in being the first show set in the UC in more than ten years.

I think the production really surprised me. It was way above any other Gundam show I’d seen. 00 may have had HD sparklies, but UC made even GMs in combat look impressive. I was really happy to see the UC style and aesthetic rendered with modern animation techniques and technology. And the music! I want to know why they never got this guy to do music for any other Gundam show before.

Making my way through the Universal Century, something I’ve felt was off was the pacing of the shows. It was only slightly noticeable throughout the original movies and the OVAs, but it became pretty apparent in Zeta. Something about the way events are timed and episodes are constructed really bothers me. I’m assuming it’s just the way shows were written back then, since I felt 0083 flowed more naturally out of everything I’ve seen. Of course, it could be Unicorn’s origins as a novel shining through here. Not only that, but there’s a lot more symbolism in that episode than a lot of Gundam shows that I can remember.

What’s unfortunate is its release schedule. Thinking about it some more, it doesn’t really seem all that far off from a typical OVA schedule, but it still doesn’t make the excruciating wait between episodes and the completion of the series any easier. But, it does look like we’ll have our Kara no Kyoukai equivalent to obsess over every few months for a few days whenever it lands over the next few years.

But yeah, I certainly didn’t expect to start off 2010 with the best first episode of a Gundam show while also being the most impressive thing of the year so far.

That excitement was dampened by the realization that I’d have to go through a bunch of school life stuff again. This was my least favourite part of Fate and remains my least favourite part of UBW and HF. The biggest problem I had with this was that there was about as much of it in UBW as Fate did. I’d hoped that with all of the setup that Fate had, we could get through this stuff quicker. Just like Fate, UBW gets good when we get past all of this stuff.

UBW was a very interesting experience for me because it made me realize that my assumptions of what Fate/stay night was about were off. Before playing it, I’d heard that the other routes weren’t about Saber. This was baffling to me, because I’d always thought that Fate/stay night was about Saber. Everything that I knew about F/sn indicated to me that Saber was a central character, if not the central character. After all, she’s essentially Shirou’s ticket into the Holy Grail War and the only way that he can do anything.

Now, I’ve only played a handful of visual novels, so Fate/stay night was yet another interesting take on how interesting the structure of the story for a visual novel can be. Unlike Ever17 or Umineko, where the characters’ motivations and personalities remain pretty constant, Fate/stay night takes more of an alternate universe approach, where enemies in one route become allies in another and background characters from one route are thrust into the limelight in another.

What’s really fascinating is that these alternate universes aren’t equivalent in their importance in the story. In Ever17, each route is different, but it doesn’t really matter which order you go traverse through them since they all serve the same purpose. In Fate/stay night, UBW expands on what we’ve learned from Fate, both in the mechanics of the world and the development of the characters.

UBW is the route that makes it clear that Fate/stay night is about Shirou. You could make the case that Fate was as much about Saber as it was about Shirou. I don’t think you can say the same about Rin and UBW. Yeah, she’s the main heroine of the arc, but unlike Saber, we don’t really get as much illumination or focus on Rin. Instead, it’s Archer that takes Saber’s place in smacking some sense into Shirou.

That’s not to say that Rin doesn’t do anything to help Shirou along. She does, but in a way which is much less noticeable than Archer’s head-on antagonizing Shirou for his ideals. Essentially, the role that Saber played in Fate is split between Rin and Archer. And of course, Archer’s role in Shirou’s development is much greater, given that he’s speaking, as is revealed in the game, from experience.

I can see why everyone loves this arc so much, especially compared with Fate. While Fate is fine as an introductory story with the promise of other routes to follow, I feel like UBW is just as interesting when it’s considered on its own. I hinted at it before, but for me, it was Archer who made the route, not Rin. To be honest, I don’t really like Rin all that much, at least not compared to Saber or Sakura. But I guess I’ll have to head off to HF and decide whether or not it’s better than UBW before I can say that conclusively.

So you may have noticed that there are a bunch of people in Vancouver who’ll be playing in the snow for the next two weeks. We just had a fancy ceremony to open the next two weeks and of course, the knee-jerk reaction is ‘herp derp China was better’. Which, I guess, is true. This ignores another fact that should be blatantly obvious.

Canada is not China.

I mean, it’s pretty clear. One of those countries has 1.2 billion Chinese people in it and the other has 33 million random immigrants. One stems from an ancient civilization going back thousands of years and the other is a relatively young constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. One is a burgeoning superpower and the other is a modest middle power. The opening ceremonies of an Olympics should reflect the culture of the host nation, so why are we expecting Canada’s to look like China’s?

China used their opening ceremonies to go through how awesome their history and culture is and to show to the world that it’s back. Canada is looking to present its culture, but not necessarily grandstand in it. And well, there is the fact that China has a much larger pool of cool things to draw from. This is why China had 2008 drummers in absolutely perfect coordination and Canada had punk tapdancers with shoes on fire.

Then there’s the cynical side of things. China is an authoritarian state and Canada is a parliamentary democracy. China has the authority and the will to trample over peoples’ rights and sink ridiculous amounts of money into showing the world how great they’ve become. Canada is beholden to the public and its actions are under constant scrutiny and there are always people displeased with what’s going on who have the right to make a fuss about it.

The intent of China’s show was much more clear as it was a show of force designed to awe the world. As a result, they did whatever it took, at any cost, to pull it off. And for the most part, they succeeded in making an amazing spectacle. Canada’s show is completely different in intent, which was more of a ‘hey guys, we’ve got some pretty neat stuff to show you’ sort of thing. This worked out because it meant that the scale and cost and execution didn’t need to be as grand. It was interesting and fun and pretty neat and that was all I was really asking for.

Now let’s see some frigging medals, Canada.

The thing that magnifies everything I hate about these groups is their policy of not allowing any of their scans on any online viewing sites. Normally, this would not be a problem. I happily grab stuff from ZSS whenever it shows up in my feedreader or whenever their bots get updated. But there’s really no reason to keep people from distributing the stuff. Well, there’s no good reason.

The justification tends to be that the group wants you to view it in the highest quality possible and there’s some sort of mythical compression that ruins their beautiful scans or something. This is retarded, because you’re trying to read a scan of a piece of paper. This isn’t something like digitally ripping a broadcast stream or Blu-ray. You’re scanning paper; it starts out with artifacts.

Of course, I suspect that there’s a lot more wankery and self-aggrandizing crap going on. I remember one group who forced people into their IRC channel to download their stuff so they’d have a huge number of people in the channel. Groups who whine about compression think that compression degrades their amazing work, since they ended up using fancy fonts that would have been unreadable in print and need to be viewed at 1080p.

But the part that is the worst about forcing people to go to their site is that their sites are often an awful Invisionfree board that’s been mangled and skinned for whatever stupid series they’re translating. They don’t have the decency to use Wordpress or Blogger or something that has an RSS feed so I don’t need to visit their labyrinthine forums every day to see if they’ve stopped whining long enough to release something.

Yeah, fansubbers are stupid, but most of them don’t actively try to stop you from watching whatever awful shows they decide to translate poorly. Fansubbers have nothing on scanlators in terms of irritating crap they pull.

I’d been fairly charitable throughout most of the anime’s run. I mean, there’s absolutely no way that any studio can adapt Umineko and have everyone be satisfied with the result. It just isn’t possible. So I was willing to give Deen a little slack. Okay, so it has bad animation, but Umineko isn’t known for great art. Okay, so some things aren’t paced well or got cut. I understand, it’s a challenge given the time constraints. Okay, so they remixed awesome tracks for the anime OST but never use them. Wait a second.

Episode 4 was terrible. Unlike the other arcs, there was not one scene throughout the entire Episode that was done well. Episode 1 had its tea party, Episode 2 had its tea party, and Episode 3 had Beatroll.

The weakest parts of every arc have been October 4 and 5, 1986. The problems with the pacing are because they decided to slow down only as much as necessary and to blaze through whatever could have been rushed. So all the mundane, important parts got the time that they needed, while the awesome parts got cut or rushed. And so, a lot of the emotional connection that Umineko has is lost.

The problem is magnified in EP4, where a lot of the story is introducing and fleshing out who Ange is. Ange’s parts of the story are comparable to the very first airport scenes. That is, they’re long, not very exciting, but pretty necessary. With that making up the bulk of the anime’s EP4 and the decision to do it mostly in one shot, the last part of the anime seemed worse than usual.

And what happens when you take all of the character and emotion out of Umineko? It’s just a bunch of tl;dr. It’s not even a coherent mystery that you can solve because there are quite a few things missing from the anime.

The final blow to the Umineko anime is that Deen just isn’t very good. Yeah, the animation is some improvement over Higurashi, but that’s not saying much. The music, even with the zts tracks that people were worried wouldn’t make it in, ended up being a travesty. And, as all Umineko fans are aware, the music of Umineko is a very integral part of the experience.

It’s really disappointing because I was really, really hoping that it’d at least be decent. At least now I know to preemptively be in despair whenever I see Chiaki Kon in the director’s seat (pretty sure Nodame Finale is going to be terribad).

I went to Urbana with the promise that I’d come away from it with a better understanding of what my role would be in God’s global mission. And I did. Did God give me a specific calling? Nope. Did I have a firm enough idea of what I’d be doing that I’d be able to make a commitment via decision card? Nope. What Urbana did do for me was that it reaffirmed a lot of the stuff that I’d been hearing about over the last few years and a lot of my own suspicions about what I think I should be doing and how things should be.

I’ll be honest. I was (pleasantly) surprised at the big topics that they focused on in the evening sessions. I was expecting a huge emphasis specifically on evangelism (focus on people groups or specific issues). What we got was migrants and displaced peoples, money, environment, and divisions between peoples. Beyond those particular sessions, I felt that instead of just focusing solely on evangelism, the big issue was social justice.

The theme was “He dwelled among us” and the focus was on John 1-4. Essentially, the incarnation of Christ is the model that we’re supposed to follow in missions. This is interesting, because it’s something that my pastor at my home church has talked about before. Why did it seem like our faith really grew and we could see God moving when we went away to university but nothing happened back at home? The answer is in being incarnational: living in the community you’re trying to serve and becoming a part of it.

Most of the seminars I went to were on advocacy: a lot of stuff on how to advocate on behalf of the poor, both urban and third-world, or the oppressed. Essentially, it was about how to use our incredibly privileged positions as well-educated citizens of a first-world democracy to change things around for those who can’t escape poverty or oppression. This is the kind of stuff that I’m looking for in an answer when I ask how I should put my degree in computer science and mathematics to use. I’ve always felt that the things we study and our occupations should and can be used to further God’s kingdom beyond the standard cop-out answer, that we’ve been placed in our workplaces so we can evangelize to our co-workers bla bla bla bla zzzzzzzzz.

I think this speaks to how much we don’t understand how blessed we are. We have so much influence and so much opportunity within our grasp and the only way we can advance the Kingdom is by sharing your faith with your coworkers? Really? We have exponentially more talents than the majority of the world, but so much of the time, we’re using less than or equal to those who have much, much less, using one or two here and there and burying the rest into the ground.

We’re very familiar with the concept that sharing the Gospel isn’t just shouting the book of John at a random guy. We’ve come up with clever and creative ways to present it and we know that different aspects appeal to different people. This is exactly the same with combating poverty and oppression. You don’t need to go and hand food to the poor to help them. Like I said before, where we’ve been placed in society gives us unique ways to do stuff like advocate for the poor and the oppressed.

Something that stuck with me about missions was from my short term missions trip a long time ago. Essentially, our purpose is not missions, but worship. Why is this? Missions is temporary. There will come a point in time when Christ returns and missions will no longer be necessary. In the same way that Christ told us to go and make disciples of all nations, he told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and to visit those in prison. Like missions, all of these things are temporary, because, well, there aren’t really going to be any oppressed after Christ returns, are there?

And I think that something that’s been keeping us from thinking bigger and about the world is our inability to use our gifts in a way that isn’t obvious. One of the things that really made me think about what’s going on in other parts of the world are the accounts and stories of the church in other parts of the world. They’re facing incredible challenges that we can’t even imagine and they’re still able to do what we can barely do here, in our comfort and wealth. And those are just those who are oppressed and know Christ. Imagine living in slavery or poverty and not knowing Christ!

Something that Urbana does very well is remind us that there is a world beyond our immediate vision. Being forced to worship in a different style and language is a very easy way to get across the point that God and his church is much, much bigger than we often realize. And once we notice that there’s an entire world out there and we’re overwhelmed with the enormity of this realization, Urbana is ready with resources to guide us towards taking creative and daring, but realistic and manageable steps to impact not just the people around us, but the world.

So where does that leave me? Well, I have a much greater awareness and understanding of the kinds of things I want and need to be doing. At this point though, I’m still unsure what it is exactly what I’ll be doing. If you know me, then you’ll know that I love theory but hate application. I guess that’ll be the struggle I’ll be facing in the next couple of months while I continue to digest the things I brought back with me from Urbana.

It goes without saying that the production is still spot on and beautiful. Even better is the fact that Seventh Heaven is essentially the vocal version of the main motif that you hear when Shiki goes into fight mode.

This chapter was a really fitting end for the entire series. We finally get our answers to just what happened four years ago. Araya really is the central villain of the series, throwing in one more roadblock for Shiki and Kokutou to overcome before they’re allowed to be happy. And Shiki and Kokutou are finally forced to confront Shiki’s murderous nature and their relationship.

It’s definitely not as epic or action packed as Paradox Spiral. This movie is much more personal than that one. Paradox Spiral was all about taking down the last boss. Murder Speculation Part 2 is about tying up all the loose ends.

One of the revelations that we’re treated to is that we’ve been following Shiki’s adventures under the assumption that she’s a murderer, when it turns out she hasn’t actually killed anyone. Her kills that we see include a bunch of ghosts, zombies, and Araya. And so, it’s really interesting to see that after all of Kokutou’s pleas for her not to kill and in the face of her own reluctance to kill, the series ends with Shiki being driven to murder someone.

Summer Wars was on my list of things to look out for. The first promo pictures were intriguing, with Natsuki standing in front of her family. And then the first trailers came out and that shot my anticipation up by about 2000%. In hit theatres in August and sadly, there still hasn’t been any news of a DVD/BRD release. Luckily enough, a terrible Korean-hardsubbed raw showed up on the Internets. I debated for a while whether or not to wait it out, but impatience and people going crazy over this movie won me over.

Let’s start out with the first and coolest thing we’re introduced to: OZ. OZ is essentially a much, much cooler Second Life that is actually useful beyond flying around. Every possible thing that you could think of is tied to OZ: GPS systems, utilities, emergency services, commerce, entertainment, everything. As someone who understands software design, this super-centralized system is frightening.

Now, Natsuki mentions that she’s born in 1992 and she’s 18, which sets Summer Wars in next year. I guess that’s why we’re seeing Windows 7 and DSes connect to OZ. Again, I find it frightening that someone imagined that every aspect of our lives would be intricately tied to Second Life by next year. The movie’s main plot thread starts when OZ’s security (which is apparently a 2056 digit number) is broken and an AI starts taking over. Obviously, because everything is tied to OZ, the real world is essentially thrown into chaos.

So who do we have to save the day? Mild-mannered math nerd Koiso Kenji. How does he get roped into saving the world? By getting conned by his crush, Shinohara Natsuki. Basically, she wants him to pretend to be her fiancee at her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, where her entire extended family will be gathered.

Being the unconfident guy that he is, Kenji doesn’t really do much saving at first. Much of that glory falls to Grandma, who might be the most awesome character in the movie. She demonstrates her power and her sense of responsibility, using her vast connections in the midst of the OZ crisis and by not taking any crap from one of her kids. At the same time, she’s not crazy like the head of the Sonozaki family. Her priority is her family and she’s the central figure to that family.

That family is pleasantly diverse. Unlike your standard powerful anime families, this family has members everywhere. They’re civil servants or rescue workers or businessmen or fishermen. They’ve got housewives, kids, and young adults. And what’s great about the movie is that the interactions between the family and with Kenji feel very real. Yeah, those are those annoying aunts and those cousins that you meet up with every year.

Now, honestly, Kenji doesn’t really do that much saving. I mean, he’s good at math, but the only useful thing that seems to come out of that is only factoring 2056 digit numbers on paper. He really doesn’t even do much in OZ. What he is able to do indirectly is move the rest of the family into action. He starts off very unconfident of himself, but grows through his time with this rambunctious family to the point where he’s able to take a stand for fighting this thing and by the end, does end up saving the day through math.

There’s a ton of good stuff that’s explored here. We’ve got the whole technology angle with OZ. We’ve got all of the family stuff going on. We’ve got a bunch of characters that are unsure of themselves who grow throughout the movie. And of course, there’s a budding romance that needs some growing.

One of the things that I really liked from this movie was the fact that it had so much stuff that happened in it. Usually, I prefer TV series because I find they have more time to develop their characters and carry out more elaborate plots. Summer Wars was able to have a lot of discrete events and still have it paced really naturally. I’m surprisingly satisfied with how much the movie covered.

And the visuals! Madhouse is a pretty amazing studio. Most of the movie looks like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time stuff, which is to be expected. And those parts look great. But the real eye candy is in the OZ scenes. That stuff is worth watching in Blu-ray. OZ is ridiculously detailed. There are a ridiculous number of objects in OZ and they all look great.

I’m pretty sure there’s a ton of stuff I missed out while throwing this post together, but basically, tl;dr: Summer Wars is probably the best animated work of this year.

So obviously, with so many people talking about Fs/n and so many opinions about it, it was hard to get into this thing and give it a fair shake. We’ve got the whole Fate/stay in the kitchen thing, CG dragons and mana transfer, and the impression that Fate is the worst route and is terrible and is an abortion. I mean, I’d intentionally avoided the anime because I’d heard Bad Things, and so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to suffer through Fate before getting to the really good stuff.

To my surprise, Fate was actually fairly interesting. I’m actually sort of baffled by the GRAAAAGH WORST ROUTE stuff I’d heard. I mean, I guess it’s vacuously true in that it is the least good of the three routes, but I’m not sure why it inspires the sort of impassioned fury and disgust that I’ve seen. Maybe the anime really was that bad?

I’d heard beforehand that Saber was actually King Arthur and I’d expected this to be a random, thoughtless twist on something that we were familiar with. And it turns out that this twist is the thing that we spend pretty much the entire route exploring. The complications that would arise if it turned out our hero was secretly a girl, if you thought about it hard enough, are actually really interesting. And I’m really glad that the implications that arise from this premise are a pretty big part of Saber’s character.

Here, we have a heroic figure who, through her amazing powers, saved her country at the cost of her own life, both metaphorically and literally. And then we have Shirou, who wants nothing more than to have and do everything that Saber had and did. And when he finally has her power at his disposal what does he do with it? Well, nothing, because she’s a girl.

It turns out the two of them are exactly like each other. Both of them desire to save everyone at any cost, even their own lives. Shirou tells Saber to stop doing that because she’s a girl. Saber tells Shirou to stop doing that because he’s a scrub who can’t do anything. Both of them refuse because it’s the only thing they could do. Saber felt indebted to her country after she pulled the sword out of the stone. Shirou felt indebted to everyone after he alone was saved by Kiritsugu. It took the two of them watching each other act in a blaze of self-destructive glory to realize that they were actually the person they were watching.

So, Fate/stay night started off pretty well for me. Well, by the end of the first route at least. Much like Umineko, I found the introductory stuff really tedious to get through. But again, much to my pleasant surprise, when things got rolling, the payoff in the interesting parts was worth it. But I have to wonder just how bad the anime is to cause such loathing for this arc. I can’t really imagine Fs/n without it.

Basically, the entire thing is an excuse to watch monstrous blobs do weird things and fight each other. Not that that’s not entertaining. It’s pretty awesome seeing Cenco turn into various things like a car or a giant staple gun and have him just stare at the characters for a bit. The reason that that’s all the movie boiled down to was because it was just too short.

I mean, there’s tons of stuff that was really interesting that could have been expanded upon. The whole antenna-ahoge controlling the monsters and the mechanics of the monsters, some more about the characters, and tons of other stuff that weren’t explained are all fertile ground for more stuff we could have seen.

Since it’s only thirty minutes, it’s worth taking the time to see. Again, it’s pretty neat and I’d be surprised if someone who didn’t know about it would be disappointed by it. The worst thing about it really is that there isn’t any more.

So we know that Count von Count (colloquially known as The Count) loves counting. According to Wikipedia, he will count anything and everything, regardless of size, amount, or annoyance he causes everyone else. The logical question would be, what happens when we present The Count with an uncountable set like the set of real numbers, ℝ (unless you are a crazy person)? Can he count it?

The answer is of course he can, he’s the goddamn Count.

What are the implications? Basically, The Count can enumerate any set, whether it’s uncountable or not. This means that to The Count, every set is recursively enumerable. This means that for every set S, S and its complement S’ are recursively enumerable. But this means that every set S is recursive.

So, now we consider the halting set H = { (P, w) : program P halts on input w ∈ Σ* }. From above, we have that H is recursive (since H’ is recursively enumerable). But this means that H is decidable. This means that The Count can decide the Halting Problem, and thus, can decide any undecidable problem.

What we conclude is that The Count’s power isn’t to count, but is, in fact, to break logic.

I remember looking at the season chart for GA and going MORE LIKE HIDAMARI SKETCH HURR and didn’t look at it for a few weeks. After all, I had a ton of other stuff to watch. I did give it a shot after a fairly positive reception from PA forumers.

The thing about GA is that its pace, direction, and style is a lot like Hidamari: quick, really SD and cute, and tons of SHAFT-like cuts and backgrounds. There weren’t any weird photos or text, though, which was a nice change. On the other hand, the content of the gags was more like Moyashimon in that they were grounded in the topic.

Both of Hidamari and GA are about a bunch of high school girls in a specialized art school. Where they differ is that Hidamari is about school life and the relationships between the main characters, while GA is entirely about art. We’ve got art history, art techniques, art tools, art design philosophy, and more. And since I’m interested in design, it was pretty neat seeing jokes about composition and colour theory.

The flipside to this is that I can’t remember the names of most of the characters. There are a lot of them and the time that they do spend time on characters is spent on exploring that particular character’s quirk. So there’s emotionless girl who likes black, hyper active girl, hyper cutesy girl, shy girl who likes cat, and the most normal out of the five girl.

I wouldn’t say that this is what would immediately come to mind if someone asks for a recommendation for this genre. That’s not to say this is anywhere near bad. It’s really good and fun and enjoyable. This can definitely get another season, and maybe next time they will talk about typography, please. ◔ ◡ ◔

Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

So if it wasn’t clear enough from EP2, EP3 will definitely convince you that Umineko is a completely different beast from Higurashi. We begin with a look into the past with the revelation of the existence of Kuwadorian and someone who’s actually named Beatrice as well as Rosa’s confirmation of this fact. We also take a look inside Eva’s ambitions and how this plays a part in 1986 Rokkenjima.

The exciting parts of this episode during the actual twilights were decent. Both Beato vs. Virgilia and Rudolf/Kyrie vs. Stakes were a bit short. All of the important good parts were kept, of course, but the extra stuff that really sealed the deal was absent. The depiction of Evatrice’s carrying out of the second twilight was one of the more disappointing parts of EP3. The visual novel was able to render it much more nightmarish than in the anime. The anime’s offering was also a lot weaker than what we all imagined. When they said sea of jelly and mountain of cake, I think that was what we were expecting to see.

But the most important part of the Episode was the ending. How well did it do on that front?

I felt like the ambiguity of who died and who survived shouldn’t have been there (yes, Eva was the only who survived). The buildup from the beginning of the episode was fairly well done. From the looks of my feed reader, Beatrice did her job and masterfully trolled everyone. Ange’s introduction was pretty good, although it could have been foreshadowed better (like mentioned once in a while over the last three Episodes rather than have a flashback the episode before). I’m not sure about the choice of forgoing more EP3 Tea Party stuff for going straight into EP4 material. I suspect that they wanted to clear up who died and who the mysterious girl was, but from the discussions I’ve read, it seemed to make little difference.

The main problem with the adaptation is that it hasn’t managed to convey the depth and richness of the visual novel’s storytelling. This is for two reasons. The first is that there simply isn’t enough time. At the moment, I think that they’re doing the best that they can, leaving in all of the important stuff. That’s good, but it’s all of the small details that get paved over that really makes Umineko fantastic and I think that another twelve or thirteen episodes would have given enough time for the studio to include even small, incidental stuff. I’m not saying that it needs to be one-to-one, but the selection of material to adapt can definitely improve.

The other thing is that I just don’t think DEEN is good enough to render an adaptation that matches up to what we see in our heads when we read the VN. All of the awesome parts of the visual novel so far have been good in spite of the adaptation. However, for every single one of these moments, there’s always something lacking in the execution.

Act I: Analysis

I’d already mentioned before that Complex Analysis was a crazy roadblock that put me on to the road to proposed and much easier plan requirements. This was clearly because I was insufficiently prepared for the material. Even though the lecture material made sense as we went through it and the textbook was pretty much the same thing, it was determined that I didn’t have the adequate foundational knowledge in analysis and the intuition that comes with solving those sorts of problems.

So, this was for the best, it seemed. After all, dropping one course wouldn’t be too bad.

Act II: First-Order Logic

Now this, this is failure. This is where we learn that the Rudy 08 strategy does not work when applied to coursework. After not having gotten a passing mark on any assignment, I decided to seek the advice of the TA before the midterm. It boiled down to understanding the solutions to the problems, which I felt like I had a pretty good handle on, especially after relearning everything.

As it turns out, it wasn’t good enough and I failed the midterm. I decided that the chances of my passing were very slim at this point and decided to abandon ship.

This course was a very interesting experience for me. Unlike Complex Analysis, where I was insufficiently prepared, this course should have been cake. I did well in my first logic course and I enjoyed computability theory in the CS context. It turns out that that would be my downfall, because it seems that that was some sort of mental block that made it impossible for me to solve the problems in such a way that it would satisfy the subject in a pure mathematical context.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a course baffle me like that before. I’d go do an assignment, feeling confident that I’d solved the problems fairly competently and find that I was doing it wrong. I’d look at the solutions and try and see what went wrong, internalized the mistakes, and took a stab at the next assignment and, again, felt confident. The cycle would repeat all the way to the midterm.

Epilogue

I walked away from this entire debacle understanding just where my interests in mathematics lie. The things that attracted me to pure math wasn’t exactly the purity and the theory. It was exactly the things in math that I found cool (algebra and number theory) and pure math was the only way I could study those things. And as much as I might want to think otherwise, I’m still much more of a computer scientist than any other kind of mathematician.