Archive for January, 2008
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei
How would a studio approach a manga known for its wordplay and focusing on a depressively suicidal teacher, a manga that was notoriously (even infamously) claimed to be untranslatable? Surely even SHAFT, known for their off-the-wall adaptations of other, more straightforward manga such as Pani Poni and Negima, could manage such a feat? They did, and with such reckless disregard for obstacles such as plot, continuity and sanity; Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is bizarre, satirical, cynical and rambunctious and solidifies SHAFT as a skilled and confident studio. (more…)
Deconstruction 2: JUDGEMENT DAY
Attacking those “random” files a couple of days ago provided enough of a challenge to keep me interested for a few hours, especially as it seemed like I was treading new ground in terms of spec’ing out previously unexplored file formats. It turned out that the files had already been mapped and successfully decompressed and the only thing left to do was build an unpacker which was in the pipeline. It seemed my work wasn’t exactly fruitless but other, probably smarter people had everything under control. I wasn’t about to let that stop me though. (more…)
Minami-ke
Having a character in a series attempt to win an argument using squirrels seems like it would go down well around these parts; thankfully squirrel related tomfoolery is not all Minami-ke has to offer as it manages to break out of its well trodden, all-girl-school-comedy premise and develop into a raucous look at the life of a family of oddities and the selection of characters which get pulled into their orbit. (more…)
Deconstruction
Out of curiosity and a favour to someone, I decided to take a look at some random .dat files that were ripe for the translating; what ensued was a morning of head scratching, hex scrying and using some of the lesser used PHP functions. (more…)
ef - a tale of memories
Given such an auspicious and confusing opening three episodes, it would have been easy for ef to fall into obscurity and abstraction with deep symbolism and obscured plot; thankfully this is not the case and the series manages to make the absurdly stylistic symbolism part of itself while still a sometimes unique, not wholly original story which ends well at a petite twelve episodes. (more…)
Day 14 - King, Kidnap and Keen
With no death dreams that night I woke up refreshed and ready for the 9am breakfast in which the flies from yesterday had informed their kin which made it very tedious trying to eat. Showering and getting dressed, Matt was suffering from lack of sleep (possibly still catching up with him from Trinidad) so we hung about in the microclimate of the room while we planned out the day. Finding out that there was actually very little interesting to do in Havana, we decided to head towards the Plaza Vieja which, according to the Lonely Planet guide, had some neat curios hidden away. (more…)
