Animedragon

Remember, remember the 5th of November. Gunpowder treason and plot !
So goes the well known rhyme, and today being the 5th of November we English people light bonfires and set off fireworks to mark the day the plot devised by Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators, some 400 years ago, to blow up the House of Lords and thus kill King James I and as many of the Lords as they could was discovered before it could be carried out.
It has now become a tradition for the Yeomen of the Guard to search the cellars under the Houses of Parliament before the State Opening of Parliament, although these days there are more serious anti-terrorist precautions in place.

When I pack my bags to go on holiday I carefully pack every thing in the correct bag so that when I arrive everything can be unpacked in a logical way. But when I pack my bags to come back home I just stuff everything into the nearest bag, which means it takes ages to unpack and put stuff away because I don't know which bag it's in!

I really must stop doing that!

OK, so summer time end this weekend and the clocks go back one hour at 2am on Sunday morning.
This leaves me with 3 choices at bedtime tonight:

1. Put the clocks back one hour and go to bed as usual and get an extra hour in bed.

2. Put the clocks back one hour and have an extra hour to do stuff before going to bed.

3. Put the clocks back one hour and split the difference, do and extra half an hour's stuff and have an extra half hour in bed.

Decisions, decisions.

I've been seeing a lot more anime related content on my Facebook feed recently, I suppose it's really all my fault for liking and commenting on a couple of anime postings. On the plus side it has made FB a lot more interesting.

So, here's my comments and thoughts about the new series I watched in 2023.

Insomniacs After School For me this is the best series of the year. An interesting and enjoyable series about a couple of high school students who both decide independently of each other to use their school's abandoned observatory to catch up on the sleep they can't get at night. This leads on to them restarting the school's astronomy club and going out at night to take photographs of the night sky with a lot of help from a former student. I liked the way the relationship between the two main characters developed, although this did mean that the focus shifted more towards their activities with the astronomy club but that I think was a good thing.

The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten. In anime when a series has a title like that you're never quite sure what you're going to get! But in this case the "angel" is just an ordinary girl-next-door who has acquired the nick-name "Angel", which she hates, at school. The story is another Slice of Life romance, but the way the story unfolds with the growing friendship between the two main characters and their relationships with their families and friends along with the excellent artwork and animation are what really lifts this series above the rest.

Kaina of the Great Snow Sea is a Sci-Fi series with an amazing and imaginative piece of world building. In a world where a small number of people live high up in the canopy of the great trees while the rest live on the surface on islands separated by a sea of snow and are at war with each other a girl from the surface and a boy from the canopy meet and embark on a mission to change the world. The series sort of stops short leaving the story hanging. However, the story continues in the movie which is impressive and action filled with a well paced story that provides a good ending to the series.

BanG Dream! It's My Go. The latest release from BanG Dream, the huge multi-media franchise about high school girls forming bands and doing concerts. Earlier series featured friends getting together and overcoming difficulties and forming their bands. What sets "It's My Go" apart is that it centres on a group of girls who were members of a band that broke up when one of their members left. Some of them want to form a new band, others want to re-form their old band and others want nothing to do with bands any more. This leads to quite a bit of conflict between the girls  which creates an interesting and engrossing storyline which to my mind lifts the series above the usual "girls form a band" series. What I liked about this series is that the interactions between the main characters is more at the centre of the story than the band, the band side of the story is still there, but much more in the background. The series also has what I think is the best song of 2023 "Haru Hikage" ("Spring Sunlight") the lyrics of which hit home on so many levels.

The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses. The trailers for this series promised so much, but the series delivered so little! The titular girl who forgot her glasses was an interesting character, but sadly the guy who liked her was a wishy-washy non-entity who had no character development throughout the series. With a stronger male MC there could have been a much better interaction between the two main characters and been quite a decent and interesting series.

16bit Sensation Another Layer. This one had an intriguing storyline involving time travel, but it wasn't the usual time travel storyline as it had an interesting twist to it. I thought the story started well, but as it progressed more and more complexities were added and towards the end some those were unbelievable which I felt dragged the story down with the result that it tried to pull everything together in a rush in the final episode which resulted in something that had been presented as an important plot point being forgotten. I think that if the events of the final episode had been spread over two episodes the series would have had a much better ending.

MF Ghost.This is a story about a half English half Japanese guy who arrives in Japan to find his family roots and take part in the MFG street race. As this is a motor-sport themed series the car racing takes up a large percentage of each episode, and it's certainly packed full of dramatic action race scenes. There is a story somewhere in there but it's rather left in the pit lane, hopefully it will become more prominent in series 2. Yes, there will be a series 2 it was announced at the end of the final episode, which ended on a cliffhanger. The only issue I have with the series is the amount of fan-service, the MFG Angels, grid girls, are clad in bikinis and I do wonder just how many close-up shots of their backsides are really needed.

Shy. From what I'd seen in the trailers I wasn't expecting much from this series. With a main character who is nervous, introverted, lacking in confidence and seriously shy I thought that it didn't really have a lot going for it, but I was wrong. With the aid of her friends our shy heroine's character starts to develop into someone much more capable, although still not quite sure of herself but still able to rise to the occasion and do what is needed. In the series she's referred to as a "Hero", but I think she has all the requirements to be a "Magical Girl", she has a magic item with which to transform into her "Hero" outfit, she has a Special Attack and she even has a mascot creature. However, as the series progresses the visuals and storyline are more along the lines of Madoka Magica than Sailor Moon. Much to my surprise I quite enjoyed watching this series, which has quite decent artwork and animation quality and an intriguing storyline. The final episode ends with a cliffhanger and a second series is apparently coming.

This post turned out to be a lot longer than I intended, and well done for making it to the end, but I wanted to say more about each series than just "I liked this" or "I didn't like this".

I wish everyone on here on the forum a very Happy Christmas.

So, December has come around again. But what makes this December special is that is it marks the first anniversary of my subscription to Crunchyroll and a having a broadband service fast enough to stream video without buffering every few minutes.

One of the big pluses is being able to watch series a few weeks after it aired rather than a few years after it aired, always assuming it even got a UK DVD/Blu-ray release which quite a few series don't get.

Over the past 12 months I've watched a huge amount of new anime, some of it very new and some of it rather old but new to me. Quite a lot of the series I've watched I'd never even heard of before I subscribed to CR. The series I watched were a fairly mixed bag, some I thought weren't bad but weren't all that good either, some were quite decent, and others were so good I wanted to watch them again (and I already have for some). But out of all the new series I've watched this year the ones that really stood out for me were, in no particular order:

Yurucamp.
A Place Further Than the Universe.
Chihayafuru.
Hyouka.
The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten.

I don't like this time of year. Not only is it cold but the bright low sun angle is blinding when I'm out in my car because it's below the sun visors and it shows up all the dust on my shelves and such like in my house. Dust is very annoying because no matter how often you remove it, it comes back!!!!

Crunchyroll here in the UK seems to be having a bit of a 'bad hair day'.  I get just over three quarters of the way through an episode then bang! the screen goes black with a little message that says "Oops, something went wrong, tray again", this has happened several times over the last two days.

There's a few series in my personal DVD collection that I'd like to watch again, so I think this gives me an opportunity to watch them.

Hopefully the "something that went wrong" will have been sorted out by the time I've seen the DVDs I want to watch.

I spent a huge chunk of today watching the TV coverage of the coronation of King Charles III at Westminster Abbey, the traditional place for coronations since 1066. The procession after the service was amazing and even though I've seen royal processions before I'm always impressed by the Household Cavalry in their traditional uniforms.

Happy Easter everyone.

(and however you do, or don't celebrate Easter, try not to eat too many Easter eggs.)

Trains feature in quite a lot of anime series, which suits me just fine as a railway enthusiast.
On Saturday I visited, fairly local, heritage railway centre to see four of the former Great Western Railway's magnificent Castle class locomotives gathered together in one place which is not a common sight any more. Three of them were in steam and moving around the site during the day.
It was a great day out, but today my old legs are suffering from the effects of a lot walking and standing around in the cold weather.

The four Castles outside the loco shed, and a very small part of the huge crowd that came to see them.

This morning was bright and sunny and the low winter sun was streaming in through my windows, how nice I thought.

The I noticed that the nice bright low sun was also showing up all the dust on my tables, mirrors and such like.

Dust is an annoying thing, as fast as I remove it, it comes back!!

The long cold January is finally over. Only February to get through now.

Did I mention that January and February are my least favourite months?

I've just noticed that I won the day yesterday, which takes my total of 'days won' to 50, which I think is quite impressive.

It also quite possibly means that I spend far too much time on AF !

Winning the Day on January 1st is a good way to start the New Year.

I wish everyone here on AF a Very Happy New Year.

I've got an earworm!

"Song for Friends", the closing song from episodes 3,8 & 9 of Little Busters Refrain keeps playing in my head.  It's a nice song so I don't really mind it being an earworm.

There's two things I really don't like about this time of year.

1: Is the cold weather.

2: The low bright winter sun that's always below my car's sun visor so that I have trouble seeing where I'm going.

Last week I upgraded my Internet service to something a good deal faster so streaming is now a practical proposition.

As a result I've now taken out a subscription to Crunchyroll. Which means I can now watch those series that are not available on DVD/Blue-ray or are too expensive to buy.

Look what the postman delivered this morning.

I'm going to re-watch the TV series then watch the movie.

I had an e-mail this morning to tell me that the Violet Evergarden Movie that I pre-ordered months ago has been dispatched.

The birds in my area are obviously hungry. I looked out through the window into the back garden this morning and saw that both my bird feeders are almost empty, and I filled them up this time last week!

When there's a break in the rain I'll go out and replenish them and do my bit to help the local wildlife.

Aarrgghhh!!!!!!!!

I've just discovered that mice, or some similar rodent, has been eating the top of my car's screen wash bottle! 

I've installed a new graphics card in my PC, but this time I didn't follow the instructions that came with it and go to the manufacturers website to download the drivers I did that last time and driver install messed up the screen resolution and scattered all my icons randomly around the screen. It took ages to sort the mess out.

This time I just told the PC to update the drivers and it went to Microsoft Update found and installed the correct driver with no messing about.