Animedragon

Mono Rail

Yes, Eru Chitanda is a great character. Born into a prestigious family she has a refined, dignified and very 'proper' demeanour, until something piques her interest then she becomes a nosy hyper-active person who just HAS to know the answers.

I finished watching Hyouka this evening, it's a series about four friends in their high school classic lit club who spend their time investigating and solving mysteries. The mysteries aren't anything major, mostly just the little odd occurrences that happen and arouse the curiosity of the club members and make them want to solve them. The mysteries themselves are quite well presented and thought out. The members of the club all have different personalities and are well drawn and animated, as are the backgrounds. The sound track is interesting because a lot of it is in a soft classical style and at lot of it sounds very much like pieces of music that I know, but before I could identify them they change very slightly and become something else. Overall I found this to be an interesting and enjoyable series to watch.

This morning I woke up to find that it snowed overnight. Not a lot of snow, but it's still snow!

It looks like the weather has gone into reverse! It's now nearly as cold as it was in January and February. The high temperature today is forecast to be 4c and tomorrow doesn't look like it will be any better.

My choice of anime genre has slowly changed over the years and my favourite now is Slice of Life, that's not to say that I don't enjoy the occasional action or sci-fi series. I'm not interested in isekai series, despite Fushigi Yugi and Magic Knight Rayeath being among my favourite series but both of those are quite old now and come from a time before such series were called isekai and before the proliferation of isekai series that we have now. I'm also not a great fan of sports anime, especially if they're about football or baseball. I definitely do not like horror series.

My canon is quite good. The printers I've really had problems with are HP, my father and I both had HP printers at one time and we found they had this annoying habit of uninstalling their driver software at regular intervals.

Welcome to AF LauraSimon, I hope you enjoy your time with us.

My top three anime of all time... Now that's a tough question to answer because I've got so many favourites. My number one favourite is easy to choose: 1. Clannad. (I regard Clannad and Clannad After Story as one series) Numbers two and three are more tricky. But after a lot of thought I'll go with: 2. Fushigi Yugi. 3. Cardcaptor Sakura.

I think the BBFC's original purpose was to rate cinema movies so that people had a guide as to the content and make their own minds up based on that if they wanted to watch a particular movie. Cinemas would usually bar those who were under-age for a movie's rating. When VHS came out and people could buy movies on VHS the cinema ratings were included on the packaging and it became the norm for any VHS release to have to get approval by the BBFC. The UK had, and still has, a powerful child protection lobby, which is not of itself a bad thing, and this I think is where the legal restrictions on who shops could sell to came from. (there's quite a few age-restricted products in the UK). The BBFC rating thing has had some interesting unexpected consequences. When the Hunger Games films were made the producers had to be careful with the dialogue and visual effects so as to keep the film's rating from being so high that it prevented fans of the books, who were mostly under 15 from seeing it. And when anime started being released in the UK one distributor decided that their target audience was older teens who wouldn't be see dead buying anything with less than an '18' certificate because it would wreck their street cred. So the the distro added lots of swearing and other bad language to the dub dialogue, that wasn't in the original, just to force the BBFC to give their release an '18' rating. Initially it worked, but it backfired when knowledgable anime fans called them out over the practise and the distro ended up with a rather bad reputation.

Mine's an MFC-L2700DN and excellent piece of kit, like yours it's got a network port so it's attached to my router so all my PCs can access it. It wasn't that expensive to buy and is cheap to run. For any colour printing I've got a Canon iP7250 inkjet which only has USB, my router has a USB port and the it's instruction book says I can connect a USB printed to it, but despite several attempts the PCs won't recognise the Canon when it's connected to the router. It's not a big issue though because I rarely need to print in colour.

My current scanner is Brother MFD* which acts as both a scanner and a laser printer. It can also send and receive faxes, but I've never used that feature. *Multi Function Device.

I can go along with that. When I buy DVDs or Blu-Rays I make sure it's a series I really want to watch before I buy it. CR is very useful in that respect.

Yes, PAL is the TV standard for the UK, but the PAL/NTSC thing doesn't matter so much with DVDs as it did with VHS. Back in the days of VHS I bought a VHS player that could play NTSC tapes on a PAL TV. Fun fact: In the UK you can only buy USA DVDs and Blu-Rays mail order because it's illegal for shops to sell DVDs or Blu-Rays that have not been passed by the BBFC and given an age rating.

It hasn't changed much. It's still cloudy, dry, reasonably bright and a bit chilly. March is an improvement on January & February, but not by much.

You can't by multi-region DVD players in shops here either, mine came from Amazon. Officially there's no multi-region Blu-Ray players because there is no Blu-ray equivalent to the DVD region 0, any Blu-Rays that claim to be multi-region have been hacked with a software patch, and as some buyers have found out, the patch can come off! There are, of course, Blu-Ray disks that are coded for multiple regions.

Most Blu-Ray players will also play DVDs. I only play Bru-Rays on my BR player as I have a separate DVD player which is multi-region. This is important because the UK is region 2 and while we now have quite a decent range of region 2 DVDs in the early days all the really good anime was released in the USA which is region 1, hence the need for a multi-region player.

Coat Buttons

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@efaardvark - Today I tried again and the little gear icon did what it's supposed to do and let me watch Hyouka subtitled . CR's server must have just been having a bad day yesterday. So thank you for your helpful suggestions. So far I'm enjoying watching Hyouka.

Anime download sites are a progression from the VHS fansub distros of an earlier time. Both have always been a grey area, but generally getting a fansub either on VHS or via a download site was viewed by many fans as being OK providing that you purchased the commercial DVD release when it came out, and most reputable distros would withdraw a fansub from their lists when the commercial release was announced. In the early days the anime studios didn't usually take much notice of the activities of fansubbers, but they started to take more notice when they realised that selling the rights to their series to Western distribution companies could bring them extra revenue. The widespread availability of fast Internet connections and the belief among some groups that everything on the Internet was free led to people downloading anime series with no intention of ever supporting the producers by purchasing the commercial releases. This in turn led to downloading anime moving from being a grey area to being regarded as an illegal pirate activity in the same way that downloading Hollywood films is, and some uploaders and downloaders have been arrested and fined large amounts of money. Personally, I'll stick with legal streaming sites like CR and DVD/Blu-Rays.

It's cloudy, but reasonably bright and still cold.

Back Door

Thank you. Yes, I'm using the web interface and have my audio set to Japanese and Subtitles/CC set to English in my profile, I also tried using the gear icon to set the audio to Japanese with English subtitles but when I did that CR displayed "Something went wrong, try again later" error message. So perhaps yesterday was just a bad hair day for their server, I'll see what happens today. Oh, and thank you for confirming that the 'gear icon' does what I thought it did.. Since December last year when I joined CR my list has had 18 anime titles some of which had more than one season, so that could be said to be 23 titles. I've three left to watch, hopefully. Now you might think that by watching that much anime in three months I've been doing a lot of binge-watching, but I usually watch two episodes mid-day while I eat my lunch and another two while I have my evening meal, so that's four episodes a day, and at an average of 24 minutes each that means I spend just over an hour and a half a day watching anime, which I think is a reasonable amount. When I clear the list I'll have watched 18 new series, well new to me, so I think I may take a bit of time off from new stuff and re-watch some of my old favourites from my DVD/Blu-Ray collection.