Animedragon

Distend

819

By the time I was 7 or 8 I had a fairly good suspicion that Santa didn't really exist. What confirmed my suspicion was one Christmas Day when the whole family was at my grand parent's house and my father said he had to go out somewhere* and about half an hour later Santa arrived on the doorstep. The red suit and plastic facemask didn't fool me for a moment, my two younger cousins were fooled though. * this was so obviously false, back then nothing, absolutely nothing, was open on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, so there was nowhere for my father to go.

ERK!! That's about 43C Last year we had temperatures that high for a couple of days and a Red Warning for heat was issued and people were advised to stay indoors and not make unnecessary journeys. I think some railway stations broke out their emergency supplies and were handing out free bottles of water.

Cold in the morning, pleasantly warm mid-day then cold again in the evening.

814

Heart Beat

I watched the Bang Dream Live Movie today, it made a nice ending to the three series. There isn't really a story to the movie, it's an outdoor concert where five of the bands from the series give live performances and each band performs three songs, which thankfully are subtitled. While I wouldn't say any of the songs were particularly memorable they're all quite nice songs and some have really good lyrics. Bang Dream is a massive multi-media franchise covering anime, manga, visual novels, video games and CDs Overall I found the series engaging and enjoyable to watch and rather different to the usual "high school girls get together and form a band" series, yes, it starts like that but the other bands soon enter the story and it becomes much more about the progress of each band and their interactions with each other. None of the bands are high school club bands they're all independent of the school, I suspect that the school element is only there as a link between the bands as several of the members of each band attend the same school. This is certainly a series I would be happy to watch a second time at some point.

It's bright, sunny and a warm 24C

I'm pleased this is getting a second series, I quite enjoyed the first series.

Common Room

When there's a choice of two and you can't decide which to get, buying both is a good plan because if you only buy one a bit later on you'll wish you'd got the other one, by which time it will be out of stock and no longer available.

Region coding only works in the minds of the producing studio's board members. In the real world it's irrelevant, multi-region or region free DVD and Blu-ray players are fairly easy to obtain. For computers there's that well known free media player VLC which can play any media format and has an option that allows you to change the region code of the drive you're using. I know it works for region 1 & 2 DVDs, but I've not actually tried it with Blu-ray disks because I don't have any region A disks but I've no reason to think that it wouldn't work. To use VLC to play Blu-ray disks you need to add a couple of files, but they're freely available and easy to instal.

811

Structural Examination

Nature

Physical Exercise

Notoriety

Excessive Force

Today I finished series 3 of Bang Dream. For this series they shake the storyline up by having most of the various bands compete in the same competition, this is actually quite a good change because it allows each band to have a decent amount of screen time and give us the opportunity to learn more about the members of the other bands. One of the good things about this series is that while the various bands are in competition with each other there is a good deal of friendship shared between the members the bands and they meet each other socially and take part in joint activities. The artwork and animation quality remains high, the one thing I was disappointed with was the fact that the song subtitles were not consistent, some songs were subtitled others were not. I would have liked to know the lyrics of the final four songs. But that niggle apart I enjoyed watching the series.

Space anime. Macross or Gundam?

Ossified

Explosion

A large mug of hot chocolate. Just the thing for a chilly morning.

Wild Animals