Anime: New Season

These blog had not been updated for too long.. but so does my facebook; especially those farm and mafia of mine... On the good side, this season starts with several new animes but the best of them are definitely Kobato, Fairy Tail and Kimi ni Todoke. 

And so will we, Kobato!!...

Kobato (above) are the latest from Clamp and ever since I saw it featuring in "Clamp in Wonderland 2" music video, I honestly fell in love with it. I started with collecting Kobato manga, followed with wallpapers and eventually Maaya Sakamoto songs. To my complete satisfaction, they eventually produce a tv series. As for the genre, I must say this is basically a shoujo but includes lots of laughter and heart warming moments. Once again, a combination of nice, naive and spontaneous girl wins, although I do like the type of clever and interesting girl in Bakemonogatari but those type are getting stale, so back to basic.

Best scene of episode 2

Kimi ni Todoke has a good romance feel to it without making it boring (my main grumble of romance anime), besides the art are perfect for this sort anime and the characters interesting. Potential troubles are just starting to boil - see the hints of jealousy in the above pic.

As for Fairy Tail, I don't think it needs introducing, above is the promo. I bet the anime will run at least 50 episodes. The anime is quite nice and the action scenes are among the better animated ones I've seen this season. If you like ecchi stuff, go watch Sora no Otoshimono and Kanokon (upcoming). For lots of unnecessary panty shot until you puke watch 11 eyes. That's all for this season anime review and as extra I include links to several Kobato wallpapers (If the link is dead please notify me, so I can upload new links).

Wallpaper 1 (rapidshare link - might be dead anytime)

Wallpaper 2 (rapidshare link - might be dead anytime)

AviDemux: Video Editor

The ED theme song for Bakemonogatari are so good but the album will only be available on 13 August 2009. Exacerbating it more is the fact that gendou has a new restrictions of allowing only donators to download new songs. Yeah, I know I'm leeching but for goodness sake it's only some clip they've taken from the anime. So I thought I'll just make my own. I have always wanted to try video editing in Linux itself. Well, saying it in Linux is not very correct since I've never tried video editing before in any platform apart from converting files to different formats. In other words, I'm just a complete n00b trying to review this software.Thus, you don't have to take my words for it.

AviDemux Video Editor

Using AviDemux I wanted to cut the portion of video where the ED theme song resides. The first step is definitely to open your target video. If the video is too large for comfortable editing, select view and zoom to appropriate size. In my monitor, zoom 1:2 is fine. Select the frame/time you wanted to start copying by selecting Edit and then set marker A on the selected frame/time (drag the progress bar, using the controls or just select Go and select Go to frame/time to jump). Then, select the time to stop copying by selecting Edit and set marker B on that frame/time. Afterwards, select Calculator to choose format of either Avi, Omg... oops not OGM or MPEG. Unless you're creating a video for VCD or DVD, set the Medium to Custom. To make sure, check the resulting bitrate and video size. If it looks wierd, change it to other format (but keep the medium at custom) first and then revert it back to the original settings. With that done, we can now Save. Then, the encoding will start and the output saved at the location of your choosing. Because the video is only a minute plus, the encoding took less time then what it takes to write this sentence. Overall, I think for such simple procedure, the software is quite simple. For you professionals out there, explore for yourself for anything fancier.

The installation is cake, just install from Add/Remove... and search for avidemux. All the necessary dependencies will be enabled unless you have some codecs missing. I also like to add, that avidemux can be your video to psp converter. I will cover both the extra dependencies and psp converter much much later if I can drag myself to do it.

With the clip done, I can upload it to youtube but first convert it to flv format by selecting Auto and then click on FLV. Here's that video clip I've done:



Not bad for a n00b/sedentarian and quite nice eh...

Bakemonogatari Initial Review

The ultimate benefits sedentarians have compared to most people is that we have so much time watching animes, mangas, playing otaku, cosplay even opening your own blog. Among the more recent animes that caught my attention is Bakemonogatari. You can find the anime detail at anidb.net. As you may notice the anime title are obtained by doing a superposition of the word "Bakemono" and "Monogatari" means literally ghost story, which the anime subbers (gg/raiz) flaunts at the beginning of its OP starting from the second episode. Bakemono meaning ghost and monogatari is a transliteration meaning story or tales.

Sorry for the small picture, I was lazy to edit it. As our policy dictates, laziness is prime.

As you watch the first episode, you are greeted with one second slow-mo panty shot of the girl you saw at this image whose name is Hanekawa Tsubasa (wings wrapped in feathers??? I really couldn't figure what her name means..).

kyaa...

Afterwards, there seems to be some random action scenes going which makes very little sense until very much at the end of first episode. I will comment on it later!! The most annoying is the eye shot (shots of Aararagi eyes - our protagonist) which came up quite often, but regardless Shaft (the studio) did manage to do an excellent job at cinematography which had matured and seems to absorbed more of the styles found in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Nevertheless I still miss the ambiance of Ef tales of Memories.

Eeriee...

After those rush of images, and things start to settle, only then do the protagonist encounters the weightless girl described in anidb summary. Although, the protagonist describe it as a mistake, he's one lucky guy to catch such shoujo dropping from the sky. That shoujo is our second protagonist Senjougahara Hitagi.

stunning bijin desu...

After that scene, the story again jumps to another scene with Hanekawa and Aararagi discussing cultural festival which inevitably leads to Senjougahara topic again and we get to know her background. This will later lead to an attack by Senjougahara on Aararagi, but after some pretty words by Aararagi, he managed to convince her to follow him meet Oshin to re-obtain her weight. On their way meeting Oshin, Aararagi told Hitagi his part of the story. That story had actually been depicted much earlier in the episode... Remember that blur of images after that panty shot. That's the whole story in compressed form.

From that point on, the agenda was to remove the curse on Hitagi with Oshin help. We will get to know Hitagi much better especially her background, the solution to their crisis however are continued into the second episode. Since this is just a review, I kindly ask all sedentarians reading this to imagine the continuation for themselves. Or you can wait for the anime to come from japan to your tv next year or purchase its DVD much later on. Good luck on those efforts. For me, I prefer fanwork I can download either from bittorrent, Irc or other p2p channels that I can watch now. As of this review, 3 episodes have already been aired.