The World Cup is rolling. So is Neymar

Animelog: Wotaku Ni Koi Wa Muzukashii

Easily the best anime of the spring season — relaxing, calm and about adults. Love is Hard for Otaku represents that part of life many of use would like to have, an opportunity to share your addiction with a person you love and with friends. Drinking together after work discussing your first 2D love (no one but Asuka!), playing games on weekends, visiting manga stores to buy new books. Let’s just say no to outdoors activities and those stupid movie theatres!

In addition to all that adult otaku romantics WotaKoi contains tons of jokes and references. And many, many awkward situations, this is an anime about love after all. Wouldn’t say that the romance is the strongest selling point of this show but it’s okay I guess. A little too innocent, a little too pointless — but who knows, maybe that aimlessness was meant to show that life is about small things? (Who am I trying to convince?)

This anime wasn’t all roses, unicorns and other beautiful things, for sure. The plot line with a shy girl who was befriended by Hirotaka’s brother was slightly off. To be honest, pretty much all scenes with Nao-chan weren’t necessary — every time “I looked into his big dumb eyes” (c) I couldn’t get rid of a feeling that I want to fast-forward to the next part.

Anyway, I looked forward to watching WotaKoi and it lived up to my expectations. A super-nice daily life story about otaku, that kind of says that “yeah guys, even if all these Japanese cartoons are trash it’s a cool trash and, more importantly, it’s a cool trash that you like, so keep on!” Need to buy a new Asuka figure.

Animelog: Aggretsuko

This anime is a prove that not everything Netflix blessed with its touch turns into something unwatchable.

Aggretsuko is a very funny but sometimes painful to watch anime about a red panda, Retsuko, whose life consists of going to work; struggling there for 8, 9, 10 hours listening what a terrible worker she is; going back home just to get some sleep. She is an accountant and her life is full of fun many office workers know about — Great Air Conditioners Wars, shitty bosses, gossiping, using everything to get promoted, etc. The only way to express Retsuko’s rage is to growl metal songs in karaoke.

Original Aggretsuko is a show consisting of at least one hundred 1 minute-long episodes (“gotta be reddy for tomorrow!”, it was omega cute!) but the Netflix’ remake is more like a “normal” anime, with some of kind of plot, longer episodes and so on. And it’s really, really good — yeah, I’m shocked myself. We observe how Retsuko is moving to her another inevitable fuck up, whether it’s the idea of quitting the job or an attempt to build romantic relationships (to become a stay-at-home wife and eventually quit the job — yeah, she really doesn’t like it), we see how she tries to be nice and reliable, we feel for her, hate her colleagues — this is a rare anime that made we want to support its character, laughing at her miseries at the same time.

P.S. In addition to Fenneko’s amazing laugh Aggretsuko can offer a couple of catch phrases, like “Ton-bucho sugoooooi!” or “Protein!”

Incredibles 2

One more prove that Disney’s internal no-names studios make better movies than Pixar. Incredibles 2 is an absolutely gorgeous visually and amazingly forgettable movie. After Big Hero 6 the quality of materials and lighting made a huuuge leap and all next movies are becoming only more impressive. Incredibles 2 isn’t an exception.

I’m going to reveal a secret that I haven’t seen the first movie but it wasn’t difficult to get what’s going on the screen. A joke, then an action scene, another joke, a family moment, another action scene. Rinse, repeat. It’s fun to watch but at the same time it definitely wasn’t something I’m going to miss and want more. Something like Big Hero 6 (but with more “alive” characters).

P.S. For the first time here we saw the full (or almost full) cinema’s auditorium.

Turned out that NHL draft becomes more intriguing when players you saw live are participating. Very excited about Evan Bouchard picked by the Oilers in the first round. He stood out among other Knights’ players (together with Alex Formenton) and I hope that it won’t take long for him to start playing in the top league. We’ll see though, for a defenseman the transition from a junior league may be more complicated than for a forward. Last season I watched a few dozens of Oilers’ games, one more reason to follow them again next year (a terrible reason, actually, I know =( )

Animelog: Mahou Shoujo Ore

One of the main (and pleasant) surprises of this spring season. Despite its ordinary description (a girl became a magical girl that looks like a boy and there’s actually no reason to call him a magical girl but all this doesn’t matter because Super Power Of Love) Magical Girl Ore is a very funny show where authors made an attempt to create something new in the established genre dedicated to a bunch of girls fighting big evil. Oh, and two main heroines are idols (we should be trendy, shouldn’t we?) and the guy whom Saki loves, all of a sudden is very gentle towards her but when she’s a magical, khm, girl and the monsters in this show suspiciously resemble Puchu and bloody fights are actually bloody and Kokoro-chan looks and acts like a yakuza and so on, and so forth — I don’t know how to describe all that madness, honestly.

The anime is not as insane as Pani Poni Dash but it did the most important job it had — it managed to keep the necessary degree of craziness during all 12 episodes. Neither mahou shoujo shows could escape some questionable parodies, nor comedies (running in the morning with ramen, anyone?) — but to be fair Mahou Shoujo Ore wasn’t serious about itself as well. No one is forgotten.

Random Sunday photo

This may be the most useless pedestrian traffic light I’ve ever seen. Road’s width in that place is literally 1m and, moreover, the roadway is blocked.

Turned out that the new CFL season started yesterday and lazily watching the least probably interesting game I could’ve found (Montreal @ BC) I started wondering what CFL attendance is. For some teams that situations is doubtlessly fine (stadiums in Ottawa, Regina, Edmonton are almost full all the time) but in Vancouver they close upper sectors for football games and even on the lower ones there are a lot of bald spots. However, this site claims that even for the Lions, Alouettes and Argonauts everything is not that bad as it seems. People just bought tickets and don’t go to the games?

On a tangent note — OHL announced the 2018-2019 schedule and our Knights are playing two first games at home, so going to try to get tickets for both (against Windsor and Sault Ste. Mary — the second name is almost impossible for me for pronounce but their team was very good last season, want to see them live).

The Sacrifice is out. Kind of like this art =)

E3 2018

I wasn’t very excited about E3 this year but there were 3 games I definitely look forward to playing to.

Ghost of Tsushima is a “Shut up and take my money” game — I’m in love with its aesthetics and (fingers crossed) it will be a lot of fun to play. Even though it resembles a Japanese version of The Witcher 3 (without humour probably but the main hero even has a horse, Nobu) Ghost looks like something fresh.

The Last of Us 2 is simply beautiful visually. This reason is enough for me to play.

Cyberpunk 2077 offers another fresh and unbeaten setting and I do believe that CD Project RED can make a perfect cyberpunk RPG… but will I still be alive when it’s finally released? It was announced in 2012 and we haven’t seen a single gameplay scene yet.