Animedragon

Suddenly 6 Celsius doesn't seem so bad. The winds still a bit chilly though.

When it first appeared in the late 1990's this series was very popular, mostly I think, due to its stylish and almost surreal artwork. I watched the first series but have to admit that I didn't really understand the storyline and I was left thinking it a case of style over substance and as a result the series didn't hold my interest.

While I'd not want to suggest that My Hime was one of the worst anime series made, and it's not by a long shot. It has an interesting and serious premise and storyline, but in my view it suffers from having far too many pointless filler episodes and a silly feral cat-girl both of which drag the story down. This storyline of this series had a good concept behind it, it took a good shot at the target, but sadly missed the bullseye by quite a margin which is a shame because it had so much going for it.

I found this rather nice English cover of "Michishirube" the Violet Evergarden TV ED.

I'm currently watching Maria Watches Over Us. On the face of it this series appears to have very little to commend it, it's about a group of girls at a private catholic high school. There's no real overall storyline, just the day to day interactions of the various characters. But it's those interactions which make the series worth watching, each character has her own unique and believable personality and there is a fairly complex set of relationships between them. It's an enjoyable, if quite slow moving and mostly serious series, but there is a fair bit of humour in it in both from the dialogue and visuals.

It's a good series up until the last two episodes. Which they completely botched, I've never quite made up my mind if this was due to running out of money, running out of time or just not knowing how to end the story, or perhaps it was a combination of all of them. Definitely not a series I plan on watching again.

It wasn't their fault!!

While I've not seen Love is War I share your concern for studios who keep releasing new seasons of series. I think it's often far better to end a series while it's still on a high rather than keep making sequels and run the risk of over-milking the franchise. Sometimes a 2nd or 3rd season works well, other other times it doesn't I can think of a couple where it would have been better if they'd not been made. I also think this applies to non-anime films and books.

I've now finished Violet Evergarden and found it to be one of the most interesting and original series I've seen for a long time. While many of the episodes were self-contained one-off stories they didn't appear that way and the series retained it's continuing overall storyline. It was interesting to watch Violet's character slowly change from an ex-soldier who couldn't do anything with being given orders to a confident young lady who could make her own decisions and follow them through and in doing so helping so many other people through the letters she wrote. This anime is definitely going to the top of my rewatch list.

I've just started watching Violet Evergarden from what I'd seen on-line I wasn't sure what to expect from this series. I'm up to episode 6 so far and finding to be really good. I'll be back with some more comments when I've finished watching it.

My favourite anime song tends to change over time. But here's three of my current favourites: The Palm of a Tiny Hand. (Clannad) On The Earth. (Starship Operators) End of the World. (Stellvia)

Computer mags in the 80's were great fun, if "fun" is the correct word, as they included pages of type-in program listings. So we all spent hours typing these listings into our machines only to find that they didn't run! So we then spent even more hours comparing what we'd typed in with the mag's listing before just giving up, and anyway by then the next month's mag was out with another type-in to waste our time on! Then the 16 bit computer arrived and the type-in listings were replaced with cover disks, which were usually full of "useful" programs that often weren't useful at all. The floppy disks could at least be re-used, the later CDs were only good as drinks coasters or frizzbes.

Some people do still buy and read magazines, I have a couple of friends who do so regularly, for myself the only magazines I read are the ones from the various clubs and societies I belong to. Years ago I used to regularly buy photographic and computer magazines, but the cover prices kept going up and they had a lot of adverts. I often wondered who the photo mags were aimed at because on the one hand the equipment they reviewed and tested was so expensive that only a top professional photographer would have the money to even think about buying it, while on the other hand the instructional or "how to" articles were so basic that anyone who had been taking photos for more than a few months would gain no new knowledge. The computer magazines fell into a different trap, they tended to assume that all their readers were game players so all the reviews of computers were slanted to how well they performed as games platforms. Add to this the fact that almost all the software they reviewed was games so, as a non-games player, I rather lost interest in the mags. So for these reasons I no longer buy or read magazines.

Welcome aboard. I hope you'll enjoy your time here.

I find that many of the old school series I much better than the current stuff. I wonder how many of today's series will still be watched in 20 or 30 years time.

True Tears is good little anime, but not all that memorable. Starship Operators is a Sci-Fi series with an unusual, different and interesting storyline. In it we see not only the space battles but also the political battles that are going on behind the scenes. It's also got a good soundtrack and a rather haunting ending song.

Yes, I think Facebook caused the demise of a lot of old forums.

No idea. But a Google image search results in a lot of hits for the picture, nearly all of them being people's profile pictures on what appear to be on-line game sites.

I've just finished True Tears. An interesting little series with lots of mixed up relationships between the main characters, but everyone seems to have got their lives sorted out in the end. I feel like a change of pace for my next series, so I'm going to start on Starship Operators.

If we're talking non-anime series, one of my top favourites is "The Prisoner". I've visited Portmeirion, the village in North Wales where the series was filmed, a couple of times.

I found school depressing most of the time. As Douglas Adams put it "the hours were good, but the individual minutes were pretty bad". I never liked maths either, actually, it wasn't so much as case of not liking maths it was more a case of just not being able to get my head round numbers and understand how they worked. Thankfully I had a job where maths didn't really matter.

I think that technically Please Twins is spin-off or side story not a second season of Please Teacher, but who's worrying about such details. (did you guess correctly which was the twin before it was revealed?) The EF series, ef: A Tale of Memories and ef: A tale of Melodies is one of my favourites and has some great characters and character interactions, but be warned, that Melodies has some slightly disturbing plot lines and is quite tear-jerkingly sad in places. Both series have a rather avant-garde presentation style, which works rather well.

Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions: Take On Me.

Alice 19th is an interesting story by Yu Watase. It's a curious story with romance, action and mysticism all rolled into one. Alice, the main character, is a shy girl who learns that words have power, and that there's a special set of words that are very powerful indeed and she has the ability to learn how to use them. But Alice learns, the hard way, that power comes with a price and that that price can be very high. I found this to be a good story, I've read this twice now and would happily read it again.

Crying at the end, or even in the middle, of an anime series isn't all that unusual some anime have a habit of sneaking a tear-jerker scene in when you least expect it. The Chobits manga is a good read and not too different to the anime. Having finished Fushigi Yugi I thought something a little less serious was needed, so I've started watching Please Twins.